Kyra Read online

  A sadness came over me. It wasn’t the sun or the sea, Poebus’s cart or Neptune’s salt wash, but the fullness of his response to my project. I thought about Simon. We had met at university when we were students in London, intent on creating a radical, restorative architecture. Simon had believed in the power of theater to bring people together. The Greeks were right, he said, theater is essential to the life of a city, revealing the conflicts and passions that drive human action. I looked at Andreas. Theater, he had said, had become his passion. Whatever second thoughts I had about bringing him to the island vanished.

  I needed to talk with Kevin one last time. Andreas moved off to one side to give us space, sparing us from having to explain. Then Kevin and Frank returned to their measurements, and Andreas and I headed out to the cliffs.

  The wind was blowing, cleaning the sky until it was all blue. We stood at the edge, looking out past Cuttyhunk to where the Sound flows into the ocean, the Texas tower in the distance, the land falling away at our feet.

  “Do you like edges?” I asked him.

  “Always,” he said.

  And that’s how it was, that winter and spring. We lived like seabirds nesting high on a cliff, swooping down into our work, I into the new city project, he into his production of Tosca, which eventually became part of my project. When the long light of summer took over, it was as if we had deciphered the language of light, taking flight from a past that had become our winter haven. At night we left our clothes on the beach and swam in a cove, entrusting ourselves to the buoyancy of the sea, water falling from his body as we climbed back over the rocks and onto the sand, finding each other, each time with a sense of discovery, because the openness was so startling. I felt seen in a way I hadn’t experienced before. He felt it too, he told me, his voice quiet. He touched my shoulder. I held my breath. “I hadn’t imagined being joined so completely,” he said. It was dark. I couldn’t see his eyes.

  I’m trying to brush away the ending, to remember how it was that summer, in the beginning, when the sky was clear as it was on that day when I first brought him to the island, and you could see for miles. Or when the tide goes out and you can walk seemingly forever over flats of wet sand.

  A path led down from the cliffs, tufts of grass holding the dunes and the Rosa rugosa, the wild roses. The bay spread out leisurely on our left, the beach below a perfect half circle. The tide was going out, the waves tentative, entreating, retreating, each time a little more. Terns on stick legs chased the tide.

  Andreas picked up a stone and threw it out across the water. It skipped once, twice, three times before it sank in a burst of rings.

  “Here,” he said, handing me a stone. I threw it out, and it sank right away. “Like this,” he said, guiding my wrist, the stone skimming horizontally, a rolling stone. But I loved moss, the intensity of its green, its star-studded softness like a secret.

  We were walking quickly now, falling into a rhythm, the wind behind us. I deliberately broke step. “I can’t get involved,” I said, turning to face him.

  His eyes fell on the gold band on the chain around my throat. He looked at me, then off into the distance. The path had narrowed, bushes encroaching on either side, yellow changing to brown as we descended to the marsh.

  A space had opened between us. I glanced at his face, his expression guarded, his mouth firm. I hesitated a moment, reluctant to say more. I was taking him into my world.

  Two arms of land like crab claws reached into the bay, surrounding a body of water, which became a salt marsh washed twice daily by the tide. The sand was black, like silt from an antediluvian time, when carbon covered the earth. Exposed by the outgoing tide, it held the rhythm of the ocean, a faint recording of water moving, swaying around green, reedy anchors of eel grass. Shimmering blades of green-white light, vertical lines in this world of the horizontal.

  For Andreas, it was the unexpected release from airports and meetings, a suddenly free day. For me, it was coming back to what had become my home. My sister, Anna, and I had lived at the edge of this marsh for seven years. Facing west, away from Cyprus, from memory, I could forget that the opposite of losing can also be winning, and that a stone without moss can signify freedom.

  “Come,” I said, “we have to hurry if we want to get oysters.” The tide, I had noticed, was almost out.

  He stood in the center of the living room taking in the house, his gaze lingering on the beams we had collected from the beach, washed up from ships, then following the rise of the ceiling where the house lifted, breathed. “The light here,” he said, his voice hushed. The low sun bathed the room in November gold. The warmth was deceptive; it would be cold now out on the marsh. I checked the receding tide and heated water for tea. We would just have time before the tide turned.

  A red Moroccan rug lay across the sofa. Andreas picked up the dark blue pillow with the red design, noticing everything, wanting to know.

  “Where is it from?” he asked.

  It was from home, one of the few things I had taken with me from Cyprus.

  “My mother found it in a market,” I said. “She loved the design, said it was ancient, like someone whispering in Aramaic. I always wondered what it was saying.”

  He looked at it steadily, then smiled.

  “It’s saying it loves this house.”

  I placed two cups on the table in front of the sofa. Outside, a pink glow hung over the marsh. The lines of the table ran back and forth between us—oak, the color of wheat. Our eyes met briefly, then moved away.

  I went to change my clothes, putting on wet pants and boots to go into the places where the water pooled. I resisted the old questions: Did you take your, did you see my, where is the—the what? The ring, the talisman, the chalice, the clue, the opening.

  We had built the house ourselves, my sister, Anna, and I. When we first came to Boston from London, where we had gone after Simon was killed, we stayed with Felicia in her house on Francis Avenue. She was a friend of Richard Livingston, whose family owned the islands. One night, we went with Felicia to Richard’s home on Beacon Hill. It must have been around Christmas because there was a tree. I had admired the house, and after supper, Richard offered to show me around. We stood in the library, walls lined with books on history and nature. He knew about Cyprus. An English cousin had been stationed there during the war, had fought in the British army against the Germans. Like my father, I said. He was a refugee from Hamburg, fleeing Hitler, and like many Cypriots he fought along with the British. I told him that my parents had met on Cyprus, my mother also a refugee, from Vienna. They had married at the end of the war. It was after the war that the trouble on Cyprus began, constant strife, armed insurrection, first over independence from Britain, then over the question of union with Athens.

  We had been talking about the coup against the archbishop, Makarios, then president of the republic, the civil war followed by the Turkish invasion, when Richard said, “Felicia told me your husband was killed in the conflict.”

  He added another log to the fire, and we settled into the worn armchairs.

  “It wasn’t really the political conflict,” I said. “I mean, ostensibly it was, but that was a cover for jealousy and hatred. Simon, my husband, was loved by my father in a way that Anton, my half brother, was not, could not let himself be. Our mother had rejected Anton’s father, the man whose name he bore, and maybe it was out of loyalty to him that he held himself apart. Bringing Simon into the family was like introducing a spark. Anton joined the radical EOKA B party, a right-wing terrorist group fighting for union with Athens. Simon and my father were on the left, working to create avenues of cooperation between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. The night Anton turned up in uniform, he accused Simon of being a traitor to the nationalist cause. There were men in Greek army officers’ uniforms waiting outside. They took Simon out and shot him.”

  Richard’s eyes clouded. He had lost his wife to cancer the previous year. He knew sadness, he had lost his lifetime companion, but they ha
d lived miles away from anything like this.

  I was fighting back tears. Richard got up to stir the fire.

  “When did you leave Cyprus?” he asked quietly.

  “The night Simon was killed, our parents insisted we go. Anna and I. They said they would join us. But then the Turkish army invaded the island, and they ‘disappeared.’”

  Richard turned to me, his blue eyes steady on my face. For a moment, neither of us said anything. Then, in a voice so understated that at first I didn’t grasp what he was saying, he invited me to build a house on Nashawena for Anna and me. It was a gesture I will never forget: this quiet New Englander, an observer of nature, seeing that the only way forward was to build something new, after so much had been destroyed.

  I picked up the silver barrette my mother had given me when I turned thirteen. On the night we left Cyprus, after Simon was murdered, I had vowed to live as if it hadn’t happened. I would live for us both, as if he were still here. It was the only way I could make up for what my brother had done. I would carry on for both of us and work to realize the vision of the future we had shared. It would be dishonorable to let that go, disloyal to his spirit, to us, to myself. It was ten years now, and I had kept the vow.

  I pulled back my hair, clasping it in the barrette. The blue of the bedspread caught my eye—sea blue, the blue of water in summer.

  Andreas was talking on the phone. Standing by the counter, his thick hair darkening in the lowering angle of light, he looked like someone I had known for years. He drew idly with a pencil. No, he was not going to Chicago, no, he could not get there in time, all the planes had been grounded, there was no point now, the board would meet again in the spring, yes, he had spoken with the people at the Lyric Opera, yes, he would be back in Boston late tonight or tomorrow morning, yes, noon would be perfect, yes, thanks, “till soon then, ciao.”

  The sand in the window glass bent the light coming in, fracturing it, filtering it, removing impurity. I had gone with my sister to see a film about a pastor who loses his faith, white light piercing, streaming through the side window of the church. Winter Light, the film was called. In winter, the light on the marsh hung suspended, clear and cold but containing life and color, reds and blues. Winter light, the light of winter that holds in light the promise of summer.

  The lamp on the counter spread yellow light across the clay tiles, the light spilled onto the wide pine boards of the floor. In the window behind the counter, there were twelve panes, rectangles within rectangles.

  We went out onto the marsh, the black sand making sucking noises under our feet. In the beginning, Anna and I had lived by the tide. We would wait each day for the low water and then search for the oysters that lay clustered in their ragged shells at the base of the eel grass. Washing away the black sand, we found the opening in the shell where you could insert a knife and then, by twisting, overcome the muscle that held the shell, concealing and protecting the oyster. Which is better, Anna would say, her dark hair glistening: to live forever closed up in darkness or to come into the light suddenly exposed?

  Andreas stood on an edge of sand in the boots I had found for him, peering into the channel where the water was still rushing out to sea. “Where do you find them?” he asked, seeing nothing. The tines of my rake scraped a shell. I picked up the oyster and handed it to him, lifting one foot after the other, black muck dripping from my boots as I made my way farther into the stream, which was suddenly deepening as the tide turned.

  The rhythm of the marshland had become familiar: filling, emptying, over and over, lunar rhythms, the lunacy of eternal return. To those who seek progress or direction, this life on the marsh makes no sense, its endless repetitions. Missing the edges of slight variation, they don’t see that this year the birds have nested in different grasses and the oysters have mysteriously shifted their beds. Or notice that the water has turned a sudden emerald green.

  We went back to the house, the oysters swaying in the net bag. It was almost dark. Trees spread their fingers against the deep red of the sky. I lit the lamp—marsh grasses on the table, the glass vase, the brass candleholders responded. We would have supper. I turned on the radio. They were playing Bach. Onions hung from a string above the counter, braided. An alto on the radio was singing an aria from the St. John Passion. Andreas joined in, “Es ist vollbracht,” his voice lifting, the melody suspended.

  I stood quietly taking it in. It is over, it is finished, he said, translating the German to say what I had been feeling: it was as if we’d come to the end of a long journey, and had known each other for a long time.

  Anna said that when she came back that evening and saw the note we had left on the table, the wineglasses in the sink, the shells resting against the lip of the colander, she knew. Even before we came back from the beach.

  She had spent Thanksgiving on Nashawena, going over to Naushon to join Richard Livingston and his children for dinner, as we both had done the previous year. Then we had celebrated the start of what Richard had named the Carthage Project, after the ancient city devoted to the arts and to commerce, the name itself meaning new city.

  After our supper of oysters and wine, Andreas and I retraced our steps, walking quickly, the moon lighting the path, the night surprisingly still. The tide coming in made a soft slapping sound, slap, roll, slap, roll, kneading land and sea together until you could no longer say for certain here is the land, here the sea. We climbed the hill and walked to the site, the plot invisible, orange flags swallowed by darkness. We sat on a rock at the center of the site, the place where the design pattern would begin. I told him about the Akha people in the mountains of Thailand, how they carved their spirit world into the design of their villages.

  On the way back to the house, we stopped on the beach. I drew the plan of the city in the sand, the lines all fluid, a theme branching out. I told him that Richard had called it the Carthage Project, to symbolize an alternative to Rome and what it stood for: empire and war.

  Andreas thought for a moment. He understood the need for fortification, he said, the wish to pay homage to those who had fallen, to find safety. “But, you know, Roma spelled backwards is amor,” he said. The words spun in my mind. He picked up a stick and wrote them in the sand. “Think about it,” he said.

  I would think about it often, after what happened. Amor turning into Roma, or that’s how it seemed to me at the time.

  That night on the beach, I told him that Simon, my husband, had been killed.

  He started to say something, and then stopped.

  The moon edged behind a cloud. Had he also seen how the shadow of the ending can eclipse the beginning?

  “Why did you come here?” I asked suddenly. “Today.”

  Why? Why really? Tag question of this psychological age. Why really, really why? The question lay like a mantle around him.

  “Let’s go back,” he said. “I can’t tell you now, here, but I will tell you. Really.” His face opened suddenly, like a camera. For a moment, I saw the sadness inside.

  We left early the next morning. I had given him my room, I had slept with my sister. The day before had been a snow day, the world now reassembling. We took our boat over to Naushon and caught the small ferry to Wood’s Hole. My sister, a psychotherapist, was going to see patients in Cambridge. Andreas was having lunch with Peter Maas, the person he had called on the phone. I knew Peter, he had started a small theater in Boston’s South End. My design studio met at two, after that a faculty meeting. A morning stillness settled into the car.

  I dropped Anna at her office, on Broadway near Central Square, and parked the car in the Everett Street garage. “It’s been…” Andreas said, taking his briefcase, slinging his bag over his shoulder. We laughed. He put his hand on my arm. “Thank you,” he said, the color of his eyes deepening. “It’s been a gift, this time with you.” He was leaving for London that night.

  Anna is shorter than me, but I always forget this since she is older. Standing in the kitchen of our small Cambridge
apartment, unpacking the vegetable drop from the co-op, she exuded an air of authority. She took the kale over to the sink and turned on the water. I dropped my things on the table and went to change. Out of deference to my colleagues, I had worn slacks and heels to the faculty meeting, to match their jackets and ties. Only David, my best friend on the faculty, a landscape architect whose work everyone admired, could get away with jeans. We taught a seminar together called Inside/Outside.

  Anna was slicing the kale into shreds. I filled a pot of water for pasta.

  “So what’s happening?” she said, meaning with Andreas.

  I put the pot on the stove and got out a board to chop the garlic.

  “Isn’t that a therapist’s opening?” I said, cutting the garlic cloves into rough pieces. “I thought you were leaving all that behind.”

  She had said that she was closing her practice. The day she saw herself walking by the musicians in Harvard Square without stopping had clinched it. It was a long time since I’d heard her play her guitar.

  She put the kale in the wire basket and swung it, showering me.

  “Actually I am, but just for the record, the orthodox therapist says nothing and waits to see what the patient brings up.”

  I dipped my fingers in the pot and sprinkled water back at her.

  “If you want to know what I would bring up, it’s that lecture on architecture and psychology we agreed to give.” Some students had organized a series of talks on crossing disciplinary boundaries. They had approached us last April, convinced us to do one together. We had chosen the slot in December. At that time, it had seemed a long time away.

  Anna brought the kale to the stove, put olive oil in the pan, and turned on the heat. I threw in the garlic.

  “Look,” she said. “Let’s make a deal. I won’t ask you about Andreas if you won’t talk about the lecture.”