Kyra

by Carol Gilligan

  “I’ve started to reread Crime and Punishment,” he said, his voice retreating into himself. “And what the beginning of the book seems to be about is the terror of having absolutely no place to turn.”

  He swallowed, then picked up his spoon and turned it in the light. A gesture I remembered from a long time ago in Cambridge. It was the beginning then. Reflected light, like watching the moon.

  “I’ve thought about my inability to have opened up all of the horror to you and cry it out, wondering what it would have been like if I could have, and even now it seems wrong that you should have to bear that.”

  He put down the spoon and searched my face.

  “By now it will be clear to you how fragmented I feel. I’m saying nothing but whirling words. I will stop.”

  He looked around. No waiter in sight. David or the pianist had paid the check.

  I started to get up.

  He reached out and touched my arm. My gut registered danger.

  “One more thing,” he said. I sat. “I don’t know what this could possibly mean to you now, but I love you, Kyra. I think the vision we have seen I will not see elsewhere, that the richness of the life we could have is not given lightly or often.”

  A crack, a spine responding to an adjustment, vertebrae aligning, falling back into place.

  I bowed my head. When I looked up, he was standing.

  In the cab on the way back to the hotel, he said, “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to come tomorrow and hear your talk.” My mind went blank. I turned, his face somber in profile, staring straight ahead.

  I turned to look ahead. “It’s fine,” I said.

  During the night, the rain turned to snow, falling steadily now, buildings blurred, the city muffled. Before leaving the hotel, I checked my bag one last time—my paper nestled in its folder, the box of slides—and glanced at my reflection in the lobby mirror. For a moment I didn’t recognize myself. The face was too naked, like a nearsighted person without glasses who stared back at me, dazed. Tendrils of hair curled around my face.

  I turned up my coat collar and went outside.

  Trolley bells punctuated the stillness. I would walk, focus my concentration. Still, the images sped through my head, the bar, his face, I love you, Kyra.

  The light turned red. I was in front of the café where David and I had eaten the first night. I shook out my hair and went inside. A rack of newspapers, all in German, stood beside the glass case filled with morning pastries. The cheese strudel caught my eye. I found a table by the window, ordered the strudel, chose mélange from the list of coffees, and added fresh orange juice. If I did meditation or prayer, this would be the moment. I closed my eyes. Words from an architect’s manifesto I had come across and copied that summer into the front of my journal: I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky. I cannot know your name, nor can you know mine. Tomorrow we begin together the construction of a city.

  I opened my eyes. The mirror on the far wall reflected the gray light, underneath a row of heads bent over newspapers and coffee. A face disentangled itself, rose, came toward my table, arched eyebrows, cleft chin, unmistakable smile. Sid, my architect friend from New York.

  “Do you need quiet or do you need a friend?” His eyebrows arched higher. “It’s a real question.”

  I thought for a moment.

  “Both,” I said, removing my coat from the empty chair.

  He took the coat, found a hook on the wall, retrieved his coffee, and sat down. “Hello, you.” He reached out his hands for mine and squeezed them. “It’s been a long time.”

  I smiled, my face tight.

  “Nervous about your talk?”

  “A little. Seeing you helps.”

  “It was basheert, meant to be. I looked for you last night at the drinks party, but you’d vanished. Have you ordered?”

  I nodded. He released my hands.

  The waiter arrived with my breakfast and proceeded to rearrange the table.

  “I’ll have one of those,” Sid said, pointing to the strudel.

  The waiter hovered, thin face solemn.

  Sid tried in German. The waiter interrupted.

  “Would you like also the juice?”

  He nodded. The waiter left.

  “So catch me up,” Sid said, extending his legs into the narrow space alongside the table. “The last time I saw you, you took me to an opera rehearsal. How’s your friend the conductor?”

  I steadied the strudel on my fork.

  “Actually, he’s here. He’s coming to the talk.”

  He waited.

  I said nothing.

  His strudel arrived, flakes of pastry dotting the plate, falling onto the table.

  “So, did you go to Thailand?” he said, swallowing a mouthful.

  “Did you have your baby?”

  We laughed. “She’s almost two.”

  I opened a packet of sugar, poured it into my coffee.

  “We’ve moved to Brooklyn. The only thing we don’t have is a dog. Otherwise, it’s much the same. Still fighting the city, working on projects. And you?”

  “Still working on the island project. But you don’t want to hear about it twice.”

  “You’ll be brilliant.” He cleaned his teeth with his tongue, finished his coffee. “They’ll love you. They always do.”

  “You too,” I said.

  “You see, we would’ve made a great team,” he said, his eyes playful, teasing. “You should’ve come to New York with me. Besides, you’d love the city.”

  “Look at my hair. It’s wild in this moisture.” I raked it back with my hands.

  “It’s European hair, a little blond for Vienna. Still, you look great.” He stared for a moment, narrowed his eyes. “Something has changed, it’s in your face.”

  “Maybe it’s Vienna,” I said, reading his watch across the table.

  “No, it’s more inside.”

  We left a generous tip, “for having to clear two tables now,” Sid said, helping me on with my coat.

  The hall was filled, students draped over the balustrades. The first talk of the day, Changing Architecture, was a call to arms: “Architecture carries the potential to create peace and force war.” Yet Vienna with its Enlightenment buildings had welcomed the Anschluss. Grüss Gott, the Viennese greeting, had turned into Heil Hitler.

  I rifled through my paper, the pages in order. I would go back to the beginnings, the fundamentals of space and housing, places remote from this history, a coastal island, the mountain villages of the Akha. The first speaker was reaching his conclusion, his face flushed. He removed his glasses, blue eyes fixing the crowd. He wound up: “Changes in architecture directly affect society. We live now in an epoch of extinguished utopias; the age of conquest, it seems, has finally come to an end. We must envision a new way of thinking, contrasting with the old.”

  After I was introduced, I rose and went to the podium. I stood for a moment, taking in faces—David in front, Richard beside him, a woman with a lively face in the fifth row. I would not look for him. I put the paper aside and spoke. “The city has been called the belly of civilization, inextricable from the history of culture and war. As architects, we are conscious of the physical environment, less attentive to what is unconscious or hidden. I start from the premise that the spaces we live in shape our inner worlds.”

  A glass of water stood on the podium beside me. I took a sip, scanned the audience. So far they were with me. I clicked the button for the first slide.

  Nashawena appeared on the screen behind me, a stretch of green surrounded by blue. The indoor lights dimmed, the snowy day a blessing. The colors intensified, the audience settled.

  “My project is set on this island, thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts. Virtually uninhabited, it was a blank slate, a tabula rasa, an opportunity for an experiment in design, a settlement which, if promising, could be taken to a larger scale.”


  Slides of the cliffs, the harbor, Quicks Hole, hills dotted with sheep, the project site. The mood in the room became quieter. I pushed back my hair.

  “I was inspired by the Akha, a hill tribe living in northern Thailand, who believe, like the builders of the Gothic cathedrals, that the spiritual world infuses the material world. For the Akha, everything is porous, permeable, not only the walls of the buildings, the transit of light from outside to inside, but every aspect of life. There are no boundaries between inside and outside, no concept of what we call the individual. The soul resides not in the body but somewhere in the vicinity of the body.”

  A series of slides showing Bear Mountain village, the Akha houses, each with its center pole, the repeating patterns, everything organized around the relation of center and periphery. “When a baby is born, the umbilicus is buried at the center pole of the house, and when someone dies, their soul is called back to reside there.” The weathered face of a priest, calling back the souls of the dead.

  “You could say this is a tribal people living in a hilly setting, but inscribing their spirit world into the design of their villages, they have resisted the topography, the divisions between higher and lower, inside and outside, that have led to various forms of repression and alienation.”

  A momentum was building, faces intent.

  “My question was, could this approach to design inspire a new model for cities, responsive to the kinds of dislocation that have plagued the modern world? I am thinking of the contrasts between neighborhood and ghetto, houses built under expressways, people cut off in various ways. As Peter Eisenman has said, the ‘supposedly happy home has become unhomely, it is exactly where terror is alive—in the repression of the unconscious.’

  “On Nashawena, my intention was to create opportunities for something new to happen. I conceived the settlement as a weave, like a fabric thrown across the island, the roofscape irregular in silhouette, evocative of its shallow, broken contours. I began with an open grid of structure from which to hang or attach the enclosing elements, some fixed, others mobile.”

  Slides of the buildings in various stages of construction, the amphitheater a cascade of surfaces for sitting and viewing. “I envisioned pools of solitude as well as continuities of public and private, a fluidity of inner and outer rhythms where the architecture would resist the patterns of living that have led repeatedly to war, such as the setting off of higher from lower, or sharp demarcations between inside and out. I wanted spaces that would encourage people’s aspirations without linking ambition to being at the top. Structures and materials that would challenge conventions of control and authority by evoking an experience of life as fluid, flowing from one person to another, one activity to another.”

  I ended with a slide of Carthage, a model of the ancient city reconstructed, the name itself, “new city,” carrying a vision of possibility. It was the road not taken—history followed the Roman way, the path of conquest and empire. It was also a nod to Richard, a look of appreciation on his face.

  “My hope has been to convey a possibility, on a small scale, of changing the frame. The city I envision is not on a hill but on water, not towering but fluid, like life a place of renewal and exchange.”

  It was over. I rubbed the back of my calf with my boot, standing on one leg, like a crane. The word crane danced wildly in my head—a bird, and also a machine for building, the natural world, the material world coming together in a single vision.

  Georg Naumann was standing beside me; he waited for the applause to subside. “We are open now for questions,” he said.

  I scanned the room and saw him. He was standing near the front, off to one side, leaning against a column. The look on his face was one I remembered from the Tosca rehearsals when a singer exceeded his expectation. “I love it,” he had said, then.

  The small of my back released. I placed my foot on the ground.

  “Thank you for this wonderful talk.” It was the woman with the so-alive face, her accent Viennese. “I’m intrigued by your project. Would you tell us where you are now with this experiment?” It was the part I had forgotten. I filled it in. The fishermen and the artists moving in, the question pending as to whether the design of the spaces would invite the openness and the civic culture needed for democracy to flourish. That would take time. “I’m trying to have patience, it’s not my forte.”

  “This I understand,” she said, flashing a smile.

  Technical questions followed: the materials used, zoning restrictions, elevations, wetlands, water supply. People wanted to know more about the Akha, what it meant for the soul to be located not in the body but in its vicinity. “Think of permeability,” I said, “transit across what we perceive as fixed boundaries, freeing the soul to wander without getting lost. It doesn’t mean losing oneself but having a more fluid experience of one’s existence. What we would call a self is to them more a river than a fortress.”

  A gray-haired man rose, an architect from Toronto. “In listening to your talk, I found myself wondering what you wanted to ask from the world.”

  The room was silent.

  My mind flooded, went blank.

  He continued. “You remind us that terror is alive in the repression of the unconscious and suggest that perhaps there is an architectural position that might clear the air. I remember feeling that way, but at this time in my life, it’s simpler. I chose to be an architect because I wanted to build. You clearly have a similar motivation. You found inspiration in the Akha, but it seems fair to say that they can only exist where they are, in this remote place hanging off these mountains. Their simple way of living allows them to understand their spirits. You are trying to translate this, or perhaps use it as a metaphor, but in order to build it becomes necessary at some point to work within our social system. It’s nice to work on an island but…I won’t finish the sentence.”

  I took a drink of water.

  “I know what you’re saying, but you have to start somewhere. The island was a gift. A place to experiment. And I guess I believe that if you can show a possibility concretely through building and people can see it, it has a chance of making its way into their imaginations, so they begin to see differently. Like with a painting. Before they tell you why it can’t work, they see how it could work. And then it can, potentially, enter the realm of social consciousness.”

  There was a stillness in the room, then a flurry of hands.

  “I’m afraid that will have to be the last question,” Georg said, “if we do not want to miss our lunch. Thank you, Professor Levin, for a most stimulating presentation. You have provoked us to think about space in a new way. The Akhazang will stay with me, along with the spirit of your project. We resume at two.”

  People rising, approaching the podium. I gathered my things.

  “Kyra.”

  I turned.

  He waited for me to focus.

  “I loved it,” he said, his voice gentle, sure.

  I swallowed, met his eyes.

  He looked at me, head tilted to one side, and smiled.

  “Let me take you to lunch. I’ll tell you all the reasons why.”

  Sensé, my mother would say: He has wisdom about how to do things.

  “I just need…”

  I turned to the people in front of me, David standing off to one side, watching. He would understand.

  I turned back to Andreas.

  He nodded. “I’ll wait,” he said.

  “Let’s walk,” I said. “I need air.” I wrapped my scarf around my neck, letting the snow fall on my hair.

  We crossed the Ringstrasse, his hand light on my shoulder.

  This was too easy, the rhythm too familiar. My shoulder stiffened. I shifted my bag.

  At the entrance to the Stadtpark, the flower-stall woman braved the snow, shielding her roses and long-stemmed tulips. “Later,” he said to her. He wanted to buy me flowers, he said, but we were heading now into the park.

  The path led down beside a pond, frozen at one
end. Ducks swam in the open water. Statues of composers sat on stone seats, heads capped with snow. “It was riveting,” he said. “My attention never wandered, and the slides were just right. The talk was beautifully crafted.” He looked at me and smiled.

  The conference receded, adrenaline drained from my body, leaving me light-headed. Beyond the pond, a bridge crossed the shunt of the Danube that ran through the park, thin metal railings, the patina pale green. We stood in the middle, watching the channel, water flowing between crusts of ice and snow, stone walls containing the river, beside it a path, carved balustrades, steps leading down. I looked at Andreas, his face solemn now. I steadied myself.

  A muscle in his cheek twitched.

  “I had to go back,” he said quietly, the words dispersing. “I’m sorry.” In the distance, a tall white building, modern, a bland rectangle. Behind it, roofs of the city, a church tower, the silhouette of a crane.

  “Maybe later I’ll understand more why I did it in the way that I did, without talking it over with you.” He picked up a stone, threw it hard into the river.

  A man walking a dog looked up, then disappeared under the bridge.

  “There is this I want to say.”

  He paused, looking into the distance.

  “My soul lives in the vicinity of you.”

  My vision blurred, I swallowed hard.

  He turned to face me.

  “I realized this listening to you this morning. You gave me the words.”

  “It’s from the Akha,” I said. An image of the priest calling back the souls of the dead.

  “Yes,” he said, brushing the snow from my hair. “Kyra.”

  He took off his gloves, a shower of snow.

  “There’s one more thing, here in the park where no one can see us.”

  He kissed the top of my head, took my face in his hands, pressed his lips against my forehead, raised my chin, searching my eyes. “It’s okay if I do this?”

  He kissed me, softly at first, his fingers reading, distant signals, the sound of a buoy, safe channel, I opened my mouth, tongues exploring. A surge of feelings, and then we were floating. We turned our faces up to the snow.