Dagmars Daughter (19 page)

W
hat time is it? yawned Nyssa.

I am your clock and your season, teased Donal, laying down his tray on the bed.

If you are my clock and season, then I am only a month old and the season is spring. But look out the window, it’s cruel ice everywhere.

The better to keep you here wrapped in my arms. She said, And why would you keep me with ice when you could set me free to fly back to you with love?

Nyssa dumped whisky into her tea and drank it down. She reached for her music pad and wrote in it playfully, then passed it with the pen over to Donal who blew on his coffee.

Dear Mr. Donal Dob,

I am looking for a future. But all I am interested in are sounds you say are not music. If I can find a future with you, please meet me in five minutes on the south side of the bed. Of course, I will need to know the time!

Yours sincerely,
Nyssa Nolan

RSVP (here!)

Donal willingly took the pad. A new game. He picked up the pen and wrote back:

Miss Nyssa,

By what miracle would you be attracted to hoary old me? Reponse: oui. In your monochord there is no melody. What do you see in that awful droning and plinking?

Yrs.,
Donal

P.S. You carry all songs under your tongue.

He handed her the book and pen, slid to the bottom of the bed and Nyssa stood up and shuffle-stepped toward him over the blankets and sheets, hair wild from the night, writing in large loops that filled up the page:

Dear Donal,

You didn’t tell me the time. I arrived on the losing of the moon. The sky is dark again. May the angels protect you. Has your mind ever hummed with the twangling of the earth? Why do you find it awful?

Fiddlingly,
Nyssa

She tossed the notebook down beside him. He tried to reach for her ankles but she shook her head, pointing to the pen, a stern finger on her closed lips. Reluctantly he picked up the pad, read and wrote again:

Dear N,

Harmony in the balance and order of the generations. Can that be exhausted by such as us?

Angelically,
Donal

Nyssa squatted beside him, reading upside down, and grabbed the pen out of his hand as he finished his signature. Then she took the notebook far away to the pillows at the top of the bed, turned the book right side up and read what he wrote. She wrote back:

Dear Angelic (Good? Bad?) Donal,

Even an angel is burdened with wings. You lack valour. I’m tired of never being alone. I am weighed down by musty counterpoint. And I’m tired of you wanting to be always right. And safe.

N.

Solemnly she handed back the book and he looked up as if to speak. Again she raised her finger to her lips and pointed. Donal knew the fruit of strict obedience to the rules of her games and silently he wrote:

Dear Nyssa,

I will love you for all eternity. I cannot account for you playing with equal exquisiteness all that I give you. I cannot account for you wanting both me and solitude. I cannot account for your restlessness or your talent or your taste.

Dear Donal,

But you can prevent me from achieving what I want.

Dear Nyssa,

Let us perform our “Passacaglia.” The world will listen. In time you will feel differently.

Dear Donal,

You talk of performing when I talk of being alone. You talk of counterpoint when I think about bone on metal. Is this what love becomes?

H
ow sinewy her body had grown. How strange she had become even to herself. Nyssa closed her door and laid empty staves out on the floor and tried to write. Note after note after note. She crawled, squatted, sat cross-legged, leaning over her paper, back cramped, hands sliding the paper from one side to the next. Only one line of music on each piece of paper. She played them and threw them aside dissatisfied, was strangled by the five lines and four spaces of the staves, boxed in by the bars, by the treble clefs, weighed down beneath what she knew had been written before. She wrote from memory. She drew a long score for a prepared piano and crumpled it up. She hummed her Millstone Nether tunes. She worked from the high technique of choice, wilfully limiting herself, wilfully eliminating all that was not hers.

Bewildered and searching she copied out the wordless songs she’d heard her grandmother singing in the cairn. She listened to the melody moving in its narrow range, series of tiny motives growing attached like crystals of ice and building exquisite shapes. Ancient and honoured, melismatic or plain. But even that wasn’t what she wanted.

The walls could not hold what she had to say and neither could her old fiddle. Something was consuming her and stopping her from the straightened flame of the hearth. She was driven to write what bullied her insides. Her womb ached. Pain throbbed through her and she pressed her skin against the cold glass of the window.

She wrapped herself up and walked outside along the edge of the rocky cliffs overlooking the sea. She crouched on the frozen ground and chipped a little depression into it. She listened to the winds and the ice and heard inside her all the sounds of Millstone Nether. She forbade Donal to come into her room that night as she played over and over all the harmonics her little fiddle could find. She played them in rhythms like the sound of ice under water. Sound without tune or tradition, thinly awaiting density. In these notes she wished to elaborate pattern, structure, energy, surprise, joy. In these notes she wished to find pitches no one had heard before, waiting like baby spiders to be born. She wanted this. More than home. More than love. She was fed up with Donal’s tiny rooms, his tired music, his plan to perform. She wanted her rhythms that sounded from the darkness and the bottom of the sea. She had to go back.

In the other room she heard Donal running his finger up and down his long strings, changing the pitch on his natural harmonics in a way that she could not on her fiddle. His practice said through the wall, I can do anything.

Donal knocked on her door and pleaded with her, You can’t not play with me. We no longer exist apart. Without me, no bass. Without you, no soaring.

She said, That means nothing to me.

Impatiently he dropped his hands and said, There were times on Millstone Nether before the spring of the barrels of instruments when the people were so poor they had no fiddles. I’ve heard stories of the first kitchen parties where an old man took a piece of board and some string, took sap straight from the trees for rosin and played it. Look at your fiddle. And you don’t want to play it?

She mocked him, saying, What a cruel sad story. Scattered few would believe that one.

He laughed then, and he bowed the opening bars of “Narcissus” and she could not prevent her body quickening and she let him pull her to him one last time. But as soon as he was making love with her,
con expressione di patimento,
she became distracted and her mind fingered over a tale her nana used to tell her about the beginning of the world.

A sister and a brother lived together in darkness until one night a stranger lay beside the girl and made love to her. The sister fell asleep and when she awoke the stranger was gone. Next night, again he came, and again he lifted her up, and again, when she awoke, he was gone. Finally she blackened her hands with burned sticks from the fire and when he came in the darkness, she held his face between her palms. Eagerly she went out in the morning hoping to see some sign. But there squatting by the fire was her brother, long finger marks streaking his face. She screamed at him, It is you who had me in darkness. She tore off her breasts and hurled them at him, then picked up a large burning fire stick from the fire and ran away. He picked up a smaller fire stick and ran after her. They ran so fast that they rose up into the sky and caught fire. She became the sun and he the moon chasing over a world newly lit by the sorrow in the darkness.

Donal lifted her hips to his, his eyes closed and lips apart, breathing hard. She watched his face and waited, her mind turning over the story. Donal stroked her lovely linea alba and she looked away, her nana’s bodewords chilling: Forget the spirit and it dies.

W
hen a cycle ends there is an emptying. The old pleasures go lacklustre. The old desires dry up. The cycle sometimes ends with a death, a loss. But sometimes it just ends. There is a call to be somewhere else. That is the truest explanation for the end of one thing and the urge toward another. One thing done, another ready to begin.

He could not stop her. Nyssa had plunged into the sea that silenced minor streams. She was out of sorts and restless, her music a practice for death. She wanted only to search out the unsounded experience. She wandered from wall to wall of her little room. The hours stretched endlessly around her. All sound flat against these wooden walls, webbed in by notes worn out, she baulked and began again the stripping-down. He said when she played that she could make ring all of heaven and earth. But she wanted still another realm. She wanted to reveal what lay hidden below. Nyssa Nolan had leapt fully formed. She wasn’t the sort to wither.

Donal brought his double bass into her room and said, Let’s play.

No.

Donal slammed his hand on the wall. Where had their sweet love gone? Was silence all? Their love extinct?

Play with me, he said.

Nyssa said, The face is yours. The spirit has fled.

What are you talking about? Listen to reason. The lifelovingest part of him would no longer lie beside him or play with him.

She looked at him and saw a stranger who would not listen to her. Gently she placed her beloved fiddle on the ground, and raising her brocade boot above it, she stomped down hard. The fine old wood cracked in useless splinters, the tailpiece popped off and the strings sprang tangled and slack. One of the pegs popped out and landed away from the smashed wood like a chopped-off finger. Chipped varnish and silent sheepgut lay murdered between them.

His eyes searched hers and he tried
sotto voce
, Let’s stop all this. I’ll get you another fiddle. If you love me I will always love you. It doesn’t matter what you do.

In an instant’s compass her heart closed to him.

She said, There is no
if
in love.

She walked past him and her dead fiddle toward the door.

Nyssa scrambled down the shore and untied the dory. The glow of ice-loom across open water. Swish-ice clinked like chains in thousands of little chunks along the shore. Farther out in the strait were deadly ice floes. She thought, He closes the door and my heart sneaks out the window. He closes the window and it sneaks out the chimney. My bearings and balance are not inside those rooms but out beyond.

She saw wrapped round a tree by the shore a scrap of her own face, the paper torn and blown. Across the chin scribbled in her mother’s hand was the word
Missing
. Her face torn in two, part of her fiddle tucked under her chin, the rest blown away. The storm was pitching up again in the north. She wanted to get across. She slipped into the middle seat and broke the ice frozen over the oarlocks. She lifted the heavy oars. The old wood was rubbed smooth with the pull of hands and covered in a sheaf of ice. She swung the two long blades against the chunks of ice in the water. The oars sounded like straw thrashed with a stick as they moved heavily through the ice. Facing the direction from which she came, the nose of her boat taking her blindly toward Millstone Nether, she rowed. She was afraid of the swells and of the banquese ice, broken floes drifting down from the north. She tried to make out the stars to keep straight. Night clouds curtained the sky and ocean winds swung her boat around. She pulled and pulled until her own torn face on the shore was a speck. For a long time she pulled, trying to keep the wind at the same angle on her cheek. By midstream, the stars invisible and winds whipping her bow around, she cried out, afraid of the fearsome frozen floes, but the sound reached no ear. She rowed now only to keep her boat from tossing over. I have small chance, she thought. Minutes hours and hours minutes, the time it takes to tend the dying, shrouded with freezing rains she kept pulling only because there was nothing else to do.

After a long time, she felt an opening in the ice floes and the pull of a current as if there were a vessel ahead. She pulled in behind and waked it. She had to trust its pull through the invisible leads and channels. She could make out a dory and in it a figure long-limbed and bony like a shadow puppet moved by thin sticks behind a screen. It pulled her ahead through the darkness. She felt thick shore ice, and she looked over her shoulder and saw the cliffs of Millstone Nether and heard the cracking of tree limbs through the frozen stillness of an island out in the gulf of that great freezing river.

She looked around for the boat she had waked and saw nothing but ice and darkness. She drifted aporetic near the shore, unable to land her dory caught between two icebergs. She brought in her oars and leaned over them, her shoulders aching, and rested her forehead down against the frozen wood. She shed her heavy oilskin. She wanted to lie down and sleep yet roused herself. You can’t sleep in this cold, she thought, unless you want to sleep to death. Her strong mind grasped that and clung to it, benumbed in the frozen darkness.

O
nly one stilt house in the settlement did not suffer greatly in the storm. Madeleine and Everett were accustomed to cold and darkness and thin rations. They endured these things because they had their secure store of paint and tobacco. Madeleine’s rocker feet were useless against the ice and Everett took over the cows during the storm. This left her inside. In the first days she painted what she could see from her window: the ice-locked harbour, a branch wrapped in a sleeve of ice, Everett milking a purple cow. She painted the insides of their rooms as she thought of them: an empty chair beside a window, a cat curled up on a brightly squared counterpane, a pot hanging above a hot stove. She painted in the pot’s shiny reflection her own chin pulled down into her neck and her webbed elbows. She smiled. She turned to a fresh paper and painted the only self-portrait she ever made. In the middle she outlined a door like any other on Millstone Nether, but in bright reds and blues and without a doorknob. Outside she drew herself, half turned away, her crabbed hand reaching up, unable to open the door but ready to enter. It had to be opened from the other side.

Madeleine put down her paintbrush and blew on her cold hands. She spent the rest of the morning mixing the brightest golds and yellows she could make, and then on the other side of the door she painted Moll.

N
yssa collapsed, slumped and curled up in the bottom of the dory, pellets of ice tangled into her hair, eye-brows thick with ice, her skin beginning to swell grotesquely under the beating wind. Breath slow, heart stumbling, she was in the region of what some think of as death. But she heard her name being called, Nyssa, by the one who did not give up searching. From a remote core in her mind’s dark recess she heard, and still she hung between death and what is commonly called consciousness.

She thought she was in a dream. She thought she was lying in a bed and felt no cold, no pain. She rolled to her side and got her eyes open and distinguished with confusion the ribs of the boat. But it did not rock or sway or in any way move or smell like a boat. She lay staring and saw nothing from her right eye and only the boat’s skeleton with her left. She roused herself up painfully on her elbows and fixed on a single idea, Do something.

She saw her coat frozen in the stern. She pulled at it and when it wouldn’t move, she struggled up again and grasped the gunwhale and rolled herself over the edge of the boat, hoping the ice would hold and it did, and on her hands and knees she grimped her way to shore. Winter wind northwest, she thought ponderously and faced her cheek into it to keep from getting lost, fingers without feeling, feet without feeling.

I
nside the rooms all silence. Donal could not play. He looked out over the gulf and wondered why she ran off like that and when she’d come back. There were no lights along the shore. He was thinking, I’ll need to book a concert hall, get our pictures taken, print the programs. We’ll need to set a date. When the storm’s over. I believe it’s subsiding.

The next morning he slipped along the shore and saw that the dory was gone. He put his head down against the pelting. Ice balls formed across his thick eyebrows. Drops fell along the hairs in his nose and froze, caked his chin and hair. He pulled up the collar on his coat and tried to turn his face from the battering wind but whatever direction he turned he could not escape it. Stinging ice crystals gashed at his cheeks like tiny pickaxes. A storm accepts no offerings. He tried to go over the repertoire in his mind. He walked back along the trail behind the house to take in some more firewood. He fell, cracking his wrist hard, and without a stick of kindling he turned and struggled toward home. He thought, If I wait she’ll come back to me. I have to take care of things here. I don’t smash fiddles and run out into storms. I can’t just throw it all up like that. She’ll come back—we always come back. We’ll play.

When the small boys scavenging the shore after the ice storm found him, he was still alive, but they couldn’t budge the tree that had cracked under the weight of its icy limbs and fallen and crushed his right leg. They put their ears to his lips and felt his breath. Some call it destiny, some call it fate. Donal lay trapped under that tree two nights and two days and thought about certain things. He knew that one act leads to another and that he could only act on what had happened before. In the judgement of others he had many choices, but he did not. He could only choose as he did, the web wrapped more and more tightly around him. Since the first time he heard her play there was no choice. And then she wouldn’t play with him any more. And she left him. But all his meaning was now tied up with her and with playing with her. He believed that she had delivered him to himself and he was responsible to his own music. The difference was that his music was now their music, and yet he could not bring himself to go looking for her. And because of this, he might die or he might live, but if he lived it would only be by leaving his right leg pinned under a tree fallen randomly in an ice storm.