Die Lorelei

Die Lorelei is evoked in a sleeping passage that gathers the songs heard across Argus into a shared, ever-flowing inheritance. Its opening words appear among voices carried by the wind, linking a German song to a chorus in which no single note is lost and no song is wholly new.

Appearance in the Passage

From beneath a crazy quilt, Step-and-a-Half hears singing outside: women keening and men moving up and down the scales. The passage names the opening of Die Lorelei, “Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten,” within a sequence that also includes French, Cree, and German phrases. The song is not presented in isolation or explained; it is one recognizable strand in a many-voiced soundscape.

The wind carries that music through Argus, over rooftops, down chimneys, and into alleys. The list moves among ballads, anthems, German sailors’ songs, voyageurs’ paddling songs, American patriotic songs, Cree lullabies, ghost-dance songs, counting rhymes, and hymns. Die Lorelei’s presence in this catalogue makes it part of a communal repertoire that crosses linguistic and cultural boundaries without erasing their differences.

Song, Memory, and the Dead

The passage’s surrounding reflection gives song a particular relation to memory. Step-and-a-Half has kept a fragment of a ghost shirt since the massacre: yellowed muslin with a faded crow and a horned white moon. She understands the dancers’ belief in the shirts not as foolishness, but as knowledge that the dead remain near. The cloth, she believes, let its wearer visit the dead and draw comfort from their singing.

That understanding makes the songs in the night more than background noise. Step-and-a-Half remembers soldiers singing before the guns sounded, and the lullaby a mother sang to her baby; the dead and the living remain connected through melodies that persist beyond their original moment. Die Lorelei is one note in that wider continuity, not a separate emblem with a meaning the passage settles once and for all.

A Shared and Unfinished Inheritance

As Step-and-a-Half hums in her sleep, the narration describes songs as coming from the same place and returning to a time when only stones howled. Its final image—a jumble of courting verses, hunters’ wisdom, itinerants’ words, and phrases drawn from grass, cloud, or a pig’s knuckle—treats song as an inheritance continually gathered and remade. The reference to Die Lorelei participates in this open collection: a German song heard amid many traditions, carried by the wind and folded into the novel’s larger meditation on how the living sing with the dead.