The Quiet Girl (14 page)

She looked straight at him. It was a look that went through everything, his skull, his brain, the trailer. Her sound changed, and reality began to slip away; his hair stood on end. And then it was over; everything was the same as always.

"I'm hungry," she said.

* * *

He prepared food for her.

He had learned that from Stina. He had been sitting on the chair where KlaraMaria now sat and Stina had been standing by the stove; they had known each other for fourteen days, and then she told him:

"You have to learn."

He hadn't understood what she meant.

"You've never really moved away from home," she said. "You've been living in a trailer; you've found women to cook for you. Again and again you've raised your mother from the grave to stand by a hot stove. This time, it's not going to be that way."

He had leaped to his feet and taken a step toward her. She put both hands on the handle of the large sauté pan she had brought over on one of her first visits. Eleven pounds of cast iron plus a pound of vegetables in nearly four-hundred-degree oil. He stepped back, turned around, got as far away from her as he could; it was less than twenty feet. In a minute he would have packed a suitcase and been on his way to the airport, but suddenly everything grew dark before his eyes. He began to pray. That the ground would open and swallow her; that SheAlmighty would write her out of the libretto. But nothing happened. When he tried to make prayer function that way he was never successful.

The darkness lifted. He stood with his nose against the bookcase; before his eyes were Kierkegaard's collected works, a fugue on the theme that none of us wants to listen to the sound within us because it's so hellish.

He had turned around and looked at her. Kierkegaard would never have dared to go closer than these twenty feet. But since his time, progress has been made. Even if only a little.

He had gone back to the table and stood beside her. She had placed a handful of Jerusalem artichokes in front of him. And a stiff brush.

* * *

For KlaraMaria he sliced vegetables--carrots, celery, and leeks--and then added a touch of bouillon and some herbs. He and Stina had prepared food in silence. Stina had understood that he didn't have extra reserves of energy; he had enough to contend with already. The discomfort of feeling like a pupil at a time when one thought one was finished with school. The fear that his public would see him like this, wearing an apron. Kasper Krone, the only artist who couldn't find a woman who prepared his food and served it to him.

Now and then she said something anyway. Succinct. Basic sentences he had remembered ever since.

"The richness," she said, "in taste and smell comes only if the herbs are fresh."

The next day he had placed a plastic tray on top of the Fazioli and filled herb pots with coriander, green and purple sweet basil, Greek thyme, curly and flat-leaf parsley, dill, chives, lemongrass, marjoram. It had looked as if the piano had a big green wig, and still did now,  an eternity after she left. He had continued to keep the refrigerator filled. It was like a mantra, buying the things she had bought. For other people it would have been compulsive behavior. For him it had been a form of prayer, a way toward her image.

He filled his hands with herbs and buried his face in them for a moment.

The little girl on the chair watched him constantly.

"The lady," she said, "the woman, did she do that too?"

He nodded. Stina had always wanted to experience the scent of everything. She had wanted to touch everything with her lips. Herbs, textiles, his skin, his hair, flowers. She had even held the sheet music up to her face.

He added a dash of butter to the pasta, set the table, poured water into a carafe. He took an airtight glass jar out of the refrigerator; on top were three eggs, and under them, uncooked rice. Three large white truffles were buried in the rice. Stina had loved truffles.

"The problem is their aroma," she had said. "It's so very fleeting, like the most volatile hydrocarbons. If you store them in a jar like this, in a few days their scent will saturate the rice and penetrate the eggshells. And you preserve their fresh flavor."

While she had talked she had filled the jar; he had followed the movement of her hands, delicate, absolutely precise. And at the same time they had an artisan's strength and sureness. As when a carpenter handles wood, or a toolmaker touches metal. Richter at the keyboard.

He tore up a small piece of the truffle over the pasta.

"What do you want with me?" asked the girl. "Why did you look for me?"

He sat down at the table. She sat down across from him. They began their meal. She concentrated entirely on eating; he could hear her body's growth processes, tissue building up, the future reprogramming of her hormonal system--still a few years away, but nevertheless begun. Her plate was empty. She licked the fork, licked the knife, used the last piece of bread to wipe her plate; it was white and shiny, ready to put away with the clean dishes.

"People make noise," he said. "Their bodies make noise. But so do their thoughts, their feelings. We all make noise. I hear very well,  sort of like an animal, and it's been that way ever since I was a child. It isn't always fun; you can't shut it out. It's easiest when people are asleep. So I'm often awake at night. That's when the world is most quiet. But the noise never goes away completely; I've often listened to people who were asleep."

"To the lady?"

"Also to her. When people sleep there's a sound that may come from their dreams; it sounds as if you've taken away the whole orchestra and only the thin notes of a flute remain. Can you imagine what that's like?"

She nodded.

"Even death makes noise," he said. "I've been with at least ten people when they died. Even when they had taken their last breath, it wasn't quiet; their sound continued. You don't die when you die."

He listened into her as he spoke. There was no change when he mentioned death.

He scanned the nearby surroundings. The blustery weather outside, the slight friction of the rubber tires against the trailer's ground sheet. The wind in the tarpaulin around the Lotus Elise. He still had not paid the vehicle registration fee; you could tell that by the sound, the metallic clang of the temporary license plates. He heard the wall panels shifting. The crackling of the hornbeam log as it carbonized in the potbellied stove.

Behind it all was a homey sound. The aria from the
Goldberg Variations
.

He had always regarded families differently from the way most other people did; what he heard was their balanced intensity. It had never been music to fall asleep to, like the Goldberg Variations. The real opportunity in family life was not the security, not the monotony, not the predictability. The real opportunity lay in the fact that sometimes there were no pretenses, no masks, no reservations; suddenly everybody took out his earplugs, it was quiet, and one could hear the others as they really were. That was why Bach had hurried to get a wife and enough children to furnish a chamber choir.

Perhaps it was a joke on the part of SheAlmighty that Kasper was the one who could hear this. Kasper, who had never succeeded in having a family.

"The noise doesn't stop for a second as long as people live," he said. "But your system is different. Once in a while there's a pause. Once in a while you're absolutely quiet. I'd really like to know why. And how. I've been searching for that silence. All my life."

Her face became expressionless. Perhaps he was mistaken about her. She had empty eyes. Pigtails. Knock knees. She was just like every other nine-year-old girl.

"What about earplugs?" she asked.

He forced himself to answer.

"There would still be noise. The noise from my body, the noise from what people are thinking. What 1 myself am thinking. The silence I'm looking for is another kind. It's the silence behind all noise. The silence that existed before SheAlmighty put in the first CD."

Her expression was more blank than blank.

"Is it over?" she asked.

"Is what over?"

"The dinner."

He dished up more food.

"It's too bad," she said, "that you can't meet the Blue Lady."

* * *

He drove her home in the Elise. He recognized Skodsborg Road only by the street signs; the landscape was unfamiliar. The woods along the edge of the road were quiet, white and frozen. Spring had hidden a Siberian night up its sleeve.

"I fit nicely in a sports car," she said.

The car was warm inside. The climate control sounded like the fire in the potbellied stove; the motor played the Goldberg Variations. He didn't want to let her get out; he wanted to keep driving for hours and hours, with her beside him. For the first time in his life he understood something of what it must feel like to have a child.

"You really like to drive," she said.

"No telephones. Silence. Nobody can get hold of me. I can drive wherever I want to. No borders. To the end of the world. Shall we do that?"

"That's just your imagination," she said. "You're dreaming. You can't drive away from your contracts, from the money. You're stuck in  the money. And from the people you like a lot. There aren't many. The lady. Your father. Maybe one or two more. Not many. For somebody as old as you. But anyway."

For a moment he was afraid of having an accident. He hadn't told her about Maximillian. He hadn't invited such crudeness. From a child. He prayed. For strength not to give her a good whack.

His prayer was heard; his anger disappeared. But the music was gone.

"I'm testing you," she said. "To see what you can stand."

* * *

He parked where the fire road turned off. Already the ground frost was so thick he could feel the cold through the soles of his shoes. The girl must have a different metabolism from him; in her thin sweater she seemed to be carrying summer around with her.

The property was dark; even the outdoor lighting was turned off. The only light in the building was in two gable windows.

"The gate is locked now," she said. "Give me a boost."

"Who is the Blue Lady?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"You probably won't see me again either. This was to say goodbye."

He could hardly breathe. She stepped onto his interlocked hands and took off. She weighed nothing; she flew into the air like a butterfly and landed weightlessly on the other side of the wire fence.

He knelt down. Their faces were close to each other. But on separate sides of the fence.

"Did you see me fly?" she asked.

He nodded.

"In a way, I'd like to take you along. Flying. Out in space. Can you help me become an astronaut?"

"Easy as a snap of my fingers."

They stared at each other. Then her face expanded. Her smile started around her mouth, spread to her face, then to her whole head, then to the rest of her body.

"You couldn't even help yourself get over this fence," she said. She was serious again.

"It's strange," she said. "That you're so close. She's sitting there behind the windows. Where there's light. She's the only one awake at this hour. It's her room. So close by. And still you'll never meet her."

She reached her fingers through the wire mesh and touched his face.

"Sleep well," she said. "And sweet dreams."

Then she was gone.

* * *

He stood there by the fence. The night had been quiet. In freezing temperatures everything becomes stiff and silent. Stina had explained the reason to him; all the surfaces that reflect sound become both hard and elastic, like ice and glass. Hence the frost-night koan: Everything can be heard and there is not a sound.

He prayed for a sign. It did not come. Perhaps the same was true with SheAlmighty as with cell phones. The range is not always the best.

He took hold of the wire fence. And leaped. Like a gibbon.
 

6

He did not meet any opposition. The door he tried was not locked; the hall inside was lighted. He passed an industrial kitchen. A quiet elevator asleep in a glass shaft. The hallway on the top floor had track lights, but they were turned off; light came from candles burning in niches a few feet apart.

The corridor ended in a dark door. He opened it without knocking. He entered the attic room. At a desk by the dark windows sat the head nurse. She had come directly from the operating room, and was still wearing blue scrubs and a white bonnet covering her hair.

"I'm reading the reports right now," she said. "You'll get at least three years in prison. No matter how you look at it. You haven't fallen between two chairs. You've fallen into an abyss."

She was in B-minor.

Bach had chosen B-minor for his great mass. Beethoven too. For the last part of Missa Solemnis. Somewhere he had written that each time he encountered Goethe he had heard him in D-major, the parallel key. B-minor was deep. Dramatic, introverted, spiritual. Bluish to the point of being black. The woman in front of him was bluish-black. Not just her clothing, but her being. The same color as deep water. He had never seen her before.

"Spain will never be Europe," she said. "Europe stops at the Pyrenees. Spain is the Middle East. The tax laws are based on the fifth book of Genesis. Anything over five million pesetas is gross tax evasion, and will get you two years. To that we add your withdrawal of all the funds in your offshore companies in Gibraltar. Our attorneys say that probably you have already been reported to the police and summoned to the investigative tribunal in Torremolinos."

"Where am I?" he asked.

"At the Rabia Institute. A convent. We are the Praying Sisters Order. Our head convent is in Audebo. The mother convent is in Egypt. Alexandria."

In Kasper's mind, nuns belonged in southern Europe. From Munich's Maria Church, across from Varieté Plön, and farther south. Where religion was a circus. High ceilings, the public dressed to the nines, smoke, stage lighting, a ringmaster in white and gold, sold out every evening. The Danish church was an attic filled with stage scenery.