The next morning, she went off with Geoff, Rick’s partner, to drive through the fens. He wanted to show her Ely Cathedral. On the way back, they would do the shopping. With Rick’s help, we had made a list of the things we would need to take with us to Bardsey.
In the final rehearsal, the soloists held back. Something in me was holding back as well. The opera was semistaged, no costumes, no sets. The drama would be enacted against the backdrop of the chapel. It was about the power of music to alter fate. I believed in that. If not for music, I would have succumbed. Budapest dismal, buildings pockmarked with bullets.
We finished at noon. I went to the buttery, asked for a sandwich, chose the smoked salmon, and ate by myself.
The afternoon stretched before me. I liked to walk on the day of a performance. I turned down Silver Street and followed the path into the water meadow. Cyclists sped through the thin passageways at the sides of the cattle gates. A kite sailed in the wind, at the end of the long string a boy and his father. “It’s time now,” Abe had said as I was leaving. A knowing look, his brown eyes steady. There was a liver spot on the left side of his forehead. Abraham, my father. They had thought they were part of something, had trusted that they were part of something, Budapest the Paris of Eastern Europe. They didn’t think of themselves as Jews. Different for my generation. I was Jesse’s age when the war ended. The Soviets became the enemy. We took to the streets. I was in conservatory. The uprising, the revolution, we believed this was it, the Enlightenment, freedom. Ducks circled behind the dam. Moss on the sides of trees, a green cast, different latitude. Kyra had grown up on Cyprus, light and sun. Her parents were refugees from Hitler. Same story. She had fallen in love with the architecture of Europe, I with the music. The older generation knew it could happen again. At any second you could be betrayed. For us, to be Jewish meant to wander around the world, making beauty, trying to change things, and wondering what’s safe to trust.
I crossed the road. A group of boys, their voices bright, a ball thrown high in the air. The morning I left, Jesse was in the kitchen talking with Szofi. I stopped to listen, checking to see if he was okay. “Are you married?” he asked her. “What is your work?” He knew the answers, it was a game. “Are you married?” she asked him. “Yes,” he said, his voice strangely adult. “What does your wife do?” she wanted to know. And then an answer I wouldn’t have dreamed of. “She’s a hang-gliding instructor,” he said.
To stay in the air, to trust the currents. It was time now, Abe said.
The chapel was filled, a hush, like silence in music. I lifted my arm, the trumpets began. La Musica came out to deliver the prologue, Dal mio Permesso, from my beloved Permessus, amato a voi, I come to you. And then I was inside the music. The horns, the insistent drums had issued their summons. The theme entered, first in the strings, then the soprano, evoking a world so exquisite, so measured, at once wistful and majestic. How could one not want to reside in such sureness?
During the interval, nobody spoke. We had been visited by the gods. Act Three started with hope, Speranza. The soprano voice reached through the chapel. If you are still determined in your heart to set foot in cite dolente, the city of sorrow. This was the place where I had held back, but now something within me let go. With Orpheus, I would enter the underworld, persuade the boatman. Non vivo io, I am not living, for since my dear wife is deprived of life, my heart no longer remains, and without a heart, how can it be that I am alive?
This unhappy man, quell infelice. We were in Act Four. Persephone pleading with Jove for Orpheus’s release. Compassion and love triumph today in Hades, the Spirits sang. A sensation rose inside me. I lost my place. It had never happened before. The singers and instrumentalists continued on their own. I was in another world. When the noise sounded, startling Orpheus, I startled as well. Everything now was at stake. Would he lose her, just as they were approaching the light? Doubt overtakes him. Was Eurydice still behind him? A cry escaped me. It registered on the singers’ faces, but they kept their concentration. Heat rushed through my body. Don’t, don’t do it, I wanted to say to him. Don’t look back. But Orpheus had turned around. The Third Spirit sang, You have broken the law and are unworthy of mercy.
The cry was a lapse, the audience must have heard it, had it lodged high in the vaulting, been drowned out by the Sinfonia? I would know later from people’s faces. At the end, there was silence before the applause. Monteverdi, the architects who designed this chapel, the singers, the instrumentalists had worked their magic.
During the reception, some were reluctant to meet my eyes. Embarrassed for me, for themselves? I wished for a cloak of invisibility. How could I explain the lapse? It was unprofessional. I let it go. The performance had worked; the wines were flowing, King’s had opened its cellar for the occasion. The music director seemed pleased. It’s what you wanted, Kyra whispered, to feel it in the moment.
Afterward, we were giddy. We went for a walk, and standing on Queen’s Road, King’s behind us, I lifted Kyra into the air.
When we left King’s College, it was raining. I wasn’t sure we would make it, with the two of us alone in the car. Like the first time, she said, “except now there are no hedges.” She looked at me, raised her eyebrows and smiled. I turned onto Trumpington Road, and she ran her fingers across the back of my neck. A wave rose through me. I placed my hand on her knee. I wanted to stop the car. We passed the Botanic Gardens, and the light turned red. Behind the windshield wipers, we kissed. When I looked up, the light was green, the drivers behind us waiting. I collected myself. At this time of the year, the ferry ran only once a week.
We circled the roundabout and turned onto the motorway. A truck passed on the right, spraying the car. I turned up the wipers and watched the blades on the glass. “I want to know everything,” I said, my hands light on the wheel. Kyra took off her boots and put a foot on the dashboard. I glanced at her leg, admiring the long line of her calf.
“It was an odd time,” she said. Images of her in Boston, fall, the house on Nashawena. “I was doing all the things I usually do, teaching, the project.” She adjusted her foot, the angle of her knee rising. “In the mornings when I went swimming with Roya, I felt it most clearly, the sense of being unimpeded, moving effortlessly through the water. It was disconcerting. I’d catch sight of my face in a mirror and for a moment not recognize myself.”
She reached back for an orange, peeled it, and placed a section in my mouth.
The citrus tasted sweet, slightly acidic. I ran my tongue over my teeth.
“But there were also times when I thought I’d lost my mind. I was doing this again?” She sucked in her breath. “I didn’t want to talk about it. I knew what people would say. I figured Anna knew and would say something if she thought I was in trouble, but she was distracted by her pregnancy. I did talk with Greta. She said what she always said, which was ‘You know,’ so I decided I would trust that and see.”
She waited for me to say something, but I’d already said it. That from now on I would not confuse her, that my spirit, my soul, lived in the vicinity of her. Before, I had said that I loved her more than anything, and then I had abandoned her. She couldn’t make sense of it. I hadn’t seen that.
I reached over and found her hand.
We crossed into Wales, the road signs doubled. The Welsh names unpronounceable, a profusion of consonants. “Like wild-flowers,” she said, cheered by the spray of l’s and d’s, w’s and y’s. The rain settled into a drizzle.
At Aberdaron, we found a small shop with sandwiches and coffee and read the instructions: a member of the Bardsey Island Trust would meet us at the car park at Cwrt Farm and transport the luggage to the beach at Porth Meuddwy, a ten-minute walk away. Rick had lent us waterproofs, Wellingtons, kerosene lamps, flashlights, loading them into the car along with the boxes of provisions. We put on the jackets and transferred the rest into the cart.
I had imagined Bardsey as Nashawena in midsummer. The first glimpse was a shock. A desolate hump risi
ng out of a steel-gray sea. What had I gotten us in for? When I was fourteen, my mother had insisted I join the scouts. It was unlike her. She had only disdain for such things. You spend too much time indoors, she had said, her voice unconvincing. What she meant was you have to blend in. A school friend joined with me. We shared a tent, rain seeping in under the flaps, wind beating against the canvas. On the endless hikes, we made up a game: can you think of anything worse than this?
The ferry appeared and anchored offshore. We strapped on the life jackets and climbed into the inflatable dinghy. Kyra’s face was alive to the adventure. I felt my jaw tighten. The sky had darkened, the sea was choppy, the transfer to the ferry unsteady. Wooden benches lined the sides of the open boat. The crew was impatient to get under way. Spray washed over the bow.
The man on my right, glasses misted, identified himself as a member of the Bird Observatory. The spring migration has started, he said. The Manx shearwaters were returning from Argentina. They had crossed the equator, the light their signal. I looked at Kyra, her hair wet, streaming behind her. I remembered the day we stood on the cliffs at Nashawena. She had asked me if I liked edges. I had said yes, but then I had pulled back, driven by an urgency I had not questioned. My passion for her had felt like an impediment.
The boat passed under a stern wall of cliffs. Only birds. No sign of human habitation. I looked at Kyra, her face undeterred. And she was right. The boat turned south, revealing an expanse of fields, and ahead of us, a small harbor. The mountain had hidden the island’s secret from all but the hardy sixth-century pilgrims, the guidebook said, and now us, descending onto the beach. I steadied myself against the sudden stillness, alarmed by a feeling of expectation. What was I hoping for?
A sculpture greeted us. An ancient king sat in the middle of the shale, his metal crown askew. With a twist of tobacco in his hand, a rum bottle by his side, he looked content. He hadn’t had to deal with what we had to deal with. Just the sea, and the weather and the birds. We could be stranded here. I glared at the king. “How did you get away with sitting it out?” And then the humor of it all melted my gloom. Kyra came up with a shell and placed it on the old king’s lap. A simple offering.
The fields brightened beyond the small harbor. Across the narrow isthmus to the south, a red-and-white striped lighthouse marked the passage to the Irish Sea. We followed the tractor, loaded with luggage, and headed north along the single dirt track.
Nant was at the far end under the western slope of the mountain, near the ruins of the abbey tower and the island chapel. A simple farmhouse with a low stone wall in front. We opened the gate and went in.
It was life pared down to the essentials: a cottage, an outhouse in the garden, a single spigot with cold water in the kitchen, a gas cooker and fridge, and each other.
I called her name, my voice suspended in the cold, still air.
A shyness came into her face. It was easy to miss, this moment on the edge of coming forward when she would recede into herself. I loved her hesitation, the implicit questions: Can I show you, do you want to see? Her opening of herself became a gift. “Out loud,” I would say to her sometimes, wanting to hear what she was thinking. Wanting now everything. In this remote house, we were unencumbered. I drew her to me.
“Come,” she said. We climbed the narrow stairs leading to the room where we would sleep. Gray light streamed through the small window, blankets stacked on the wooden chair. On the unmade bed, we made love. “It’s something you have to make,” she once said. “It doesn’t just happen.” That wasn’t completely true. It does just happen, and then it has to be made, over and over again.
I ran my fingers through her hair, in this light the color of wheat. She closed her eyes, her fingers tracing my face. Like the blind make love. Knowing by touching. Seeing by feeling. Clara had said that to feel a feeling you need someone to feel it with you. At the time, I wasn’t sure. Yet now Kyra was leading me into something I hadn’t felt before. I closed my eyes and entered her silence. You need not to know, I would tell the singers, you will find it in the music. Now there was only the rhythm of her breathing. I touched her shoulder, marble-smooth. I ran my finger down her arm, the texture changing from bone to muscle, the knob of her elbow, then the softness of her skin.
Berber trackers can read fear in a person’s footprints. Her finger paused in the hollow at the base of my neck.
“What?” I said, opening my eyes.
“Are you afraid of this?” she asked.
“Of what?” I said. My shoulders tensed.
Don’t be afraid. I was standing on a rock at the edge of the quarry. It was the first summer after I entered conservatory. A group of us had taken the afternoon off. Someone knew of the quarry. We could swim there, he said. We climbed the fence. The water was green, completely still. I hesitated a moment, my feet absorbing the heat. Don’t look, just go. I dove in.
“Of what is between us.”
The one thing she demanded now was honesty.
“A little,” I said.
“Then let’s take it slowly,” she said, meeting my eyes, a mischievous smile on her face, “from the top.”
My body stirred, an impulse to move quickly into the passion that would sweep us past this moment.
“Okay,” I said, treading water.
“I’ll tell you something I’ve never said before. There’s always a part of me that holds back, that goes away into someplace hidden.”
“I know that,” I said, then added, “in myself.”
“Like those old Volkswagens that had a reserve tank, just in case.”
The distance between us closed. I placed my hand on the side of her breast. I stirred again, her nipples hardened.
“Not yet,” she said, propping her check in her hand. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to let that go.”
“We have a week,” I said, feeling my breath slow.
“I want to try it now, to stay with you in every moment. I’ll tell you when I move away.”
“Okay.” I said I would too.
The air in the room was still. The whitewashed walls gave off a milky light.
I lowered myself down the length of her body and kissed the soles of her feet.
“For stepping into the new.”
I can see it now as the beginning of tracking the subtlest shifts in each other’s presence. We learned to follow and not be frightened when the other moved away. But it took a long time.
That night when I placed the pillow under her hips, I entered a body so unguarded, so welcoming, our eyes holding as sluice gates opened, water rushing, filling, spilling onto the white mattress pad that lay beneath us.
“It’s true,” she said. It was known to be true. The island was a magical place.
I woke to the alarm in her voice. “The food!”
The room was pitch dark. We felt our way down the stairs and found the boxes. I reached for a flashlight and handed it to Kyra. She held it while I wrestled with the kerosene lamp. The scouting had turned out to be useful, though not in the way my mother imagined. Or maybe it was. How to find your way across a border, escape from certain destruction.
We put the perishables in the fridge.
“Are you hungry?”
She had come back from the garden, flashlight in hand.
I looked at my watch. It was twenty past twelve.
We made cheese sandwiches and opened a bottle of wine.
The loneliness I sheltered within myself, the sadness I had treasured, thinking it essential to my work or perhaps mistaking it for a kind of loyalty—would I open this now to her as well? It was something we shied away from in each other, sensing a danger of intrusion, the possibility of violating a sanctuary. But it was our lovemaking now that felt holy.
I watched Kyra’s face as she ate her sandwich, her hand lifting the thick stem of the glass. She had a rich life, I did too. Yet they had been seriously unshared.
I picked up the wine bottle and refilled our glasses. The kerosen
e lamp on the table between us gave off a spray of yellow light.
My father loved the morning. “A new day,” he would say, even in the worst of the bad times.
It was Sunday, literally a day of full sun. The fields were ripening, the sea in the distance. I opened the window to let in the air. I would make coffee and check out the garden. I pulled the covers over Kyra and retrieved my clothes from the floor.
I found watercress growing next to the stream and brought it back, thinking it would please her. I poured a cup of coffee, intending to get out the score or one of the books I had brought. Instead, I sat in the quiet kitchen and remembered the tenderness in her face as we blew out the lamp and headed up the stairs, making love again before drifting back into sleep.
A wash of sadness swirled past me, familiar in its tinge of remorse. There had been so many losses, so much to regret. My mother’s face before me, beautiful, arresting. I thought of Kyra. She was standing in the doorway. “Where did you just go?” she asked, coming over. I burrowed my face in the V of her sweater, inhaling her smell.
The watercress delighted her. We would make an omelet. She chopped the stems, reserving the leaves while I broke the eggs into a bowl, the rhythm of our lovemaking extending.
After breakfast, we set out to explore the island. There were bluffs overlooking the Irish Sea, seals on the rocks on the side opposite the harbor. Seals were Jesse’s favorite, after giraffes. Kyra had brought a sketch pad, and she settled in to draw. I wandered across the narrows to the lighthouse. A bird lay dead at its base, blinded by the light. It was so hard, this question of intention, how easily it can go astray. What I wanted now more than anything was to steer a clear path.
It was harder than I thought. In the months alone with Jesse, I had spent many evenings talking with Clara. Perhaps because she reminded me of my mother, her dark hair, the swath of orange at the bottom of her long gray skirt. It was a touch my mother would have liked. My mother’s paintings were small compared with Clara’s, yet with the same strong sense of color, often just a single bright square or circle against a dense surface of grays and black. It was pretty much the history of that time. Small moments of intense life amid horror and gloom. I was committed now to opening myself in a way that filled me with alarm. I had no idea what might come out.
Kyra Page 23