Kyra Read online

  I made my way through the dancers and stood just below David, his burly frame hunched over the drums. He looked quizzically in my direction and I lifted my mask for a second. He played a flourish, his face absorbed, turning inward into the rhythm that flowed through his body, downward and out through his arms, into the sticks, onto the hide of the drums, through the skins of animals, into the stone floor, and underneath, the earth.

  My friend David, my pal, my anchor of sanity in this university. We were the outposts, urban design and landscape design, in the world of the monumental. No one in the architecture school had taken my design ideas seriously until Richard Livingston entered the picture, and then nobody took him seriously, except for the fact that he was paying for the construction. Whatever they thought about the new city project, the money was substantial.

  “Did Sarah come?” I mouthed the question. David nodded, and I turned to look for her.

  A child was standing by my side, staring up at the band.

  “Do you want to see the drums?” I asked, bending down to speak to him so he could hear me under the music.

  He drew back instinctively, and I remembered my mask.

  “Here,” I said, pulling it down so he could see my face. His face clouded, then cleared, curiosity trumping shyness.

  “Would you like me to lift you up?”

  He nodded. He was about five.

  David, pushing his hat back on his head, took his sticks, hit the cymbal and handed one to the child.

  “Go on, hit it,” he said, holding the other ready.

  The child was wearing a costume of sorts—high boots, a sword attached to his belt. He was getting heavy. After he had struck the cymbal a few times and tried one of the drums, I put him down. He reached back, I held out my hands, and we turned in a circle, spinning faster as the music picked up. Soon others came over and joined us. When the song ended, the band rose to take a break. I noticed an elderly man with a kind face standing against the wall, beaming at the child, who darted over to him.

  I was heading out to the lobby to get a drink when I saw Peter Maas, my theater producer friend, coming toward me, and I realized I had forgotten to replace my mask.

  “I was looking for you,” he said. “But now I’ve lost the chance to show you that I know you through any disguise.” I liked Peter’s quirky, offbeat manner, his late-night phone calls. You just jumped into my mind, he would say, wanting to talk, assuming that everyone slept until noon.

  I started to pull up my mask.

  “Too late,” he said. “I need to ask you a favor and you can’t escape me.” I owed him a hundred favors.

  “I want you to meet a friend—actually you know him.” He gave me his most winning look, the one I recognized as the look he reserved for donors and for the officials who granted the permits he needed for his theater. I picked up a glass of punch and followed him to the far corner. Andreas was standing next to a pillar.

  “You’re here,” I said, the words sounding childish and hopeful. Heat rose through my body and settled in my face.

  He started to say something but the boy came running over to him. My stomach lurched. The pieces fell into place, the expression on his face that day on Nashawena when I told him I couldn’t be involved. Obviously he couldn’t either.

  I stepped back.

  He looked at me steadily. “This is Jesse, my son. And this is my father, Abraham,” he said, turning to the man who had joined us. He smiled. “And this is Kyra Levin, the one with the island.”

  “It’s not mine exactly,” I said, and laughed to cover the sensation of feeling foolish.

  “We really do need your help,” Peter said. “We’re going to do Tosca in the Counterpoint Theater. The space is small. We want you to help us with the design.”

  “I don’t know anything about theater,” I said, my voice sounding stilted. “But,” I added, “there’s someone here who might be able to help.” I looked around for Sarah. I wanted to leave.

  “I was at your lecture,” Peter persisted. “That gave me the idea of asking you. What you said about inner and outer worlds is what we’re looking for. The opera is set in Rome, the city is essential to the story. But it’s a psychological drama, a love story, and what we’re hoping to achieve is…”

  But now it was impossible to hear, the band had resumed. Jesse tugged at my hand. “Follow me,” he said, pulling me in the direction of the drums.

  “We really must go now,” Andreas said, taking Jesse’s hand from mine, “but I’ll phone you tomorrow at the university. May I?” He looked at me, a light in his eyes. I put the mask back on my face and nodded.

  He called on Monday, late in the afternoon. I was in the middle of office hours.

  “Look,” I said, “I can’t talk now,” as if he could see that this was impossible, one student sitting in front of me, a line snaking down the hall. “I’ll call you back later.” I fished a pencil out from the mound on my desk.

  “It’s not possible,” he said, a formality in his voice. I wondered who was with him. “I’m in the middle of auditions, we’re just on break. But why don’t we set up a time for later this week. Or,” he paused, his voice shifting, “why don’t we have dinner tonight, if you’re free? I have to be in Cambridge later. I could meet you at eight, wherever you suggest.”

  The student was trying to look like a person not listening. I reached for my book. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the Harvest in Harvard Square.”

  I turned back to the student, a new animation in my voice as I picked up our conversation, our discussion of her studio project.

  Through the window of the café, I saw him sitting in one of the booths, a score open on the table in front of him, a glass of red wine to one side. I stood for a moment, noting his absorption. He was like a continent entire to himself. He looked up. I wrapped my coat around me and went in, sliding into the bench across from him. The restaurant was crowded, the café and bar off to one side.

  The warmth of his greeting disarmed me. “I’m so pleased this worked out. It makes me happy to see you.” His face lightened.

  “Red or white?” he asked, signaling for the waiter. “White,” I said. He closed the score and placed it on the bench beside him.

  “Thank you for being kind to my son,” he said. “My father told me.”

  “He’s a beautiful child,” I said. “I love the openness of his face.”

  “He’s had a hard time, losing his mother,” Andreas said. He paused to watch the waiter walk by. “But my father,” he said, the look on his face suddenly unguarded, “he would talk with him when I couldn’t speak about it, play with him when I couldn’t bring myself to play.”

  That night on the beach, when his face had opened, this was the sadness I had seen. I had a sense now of why he had come with me to the island. Loss was something we had in common, like animals picking up a scent.

  The waiter brought the wine, and Andreas lifted his glass. “To you,” he said. “To life.”

  He drank, put the glass down, and looked at me.

  “There’s something I want to tell you,” he said, “but it’s not easy for me to talk about it. I usually can’t talk about it. Which has made it hard for me. With Jesse. But when you told me that night that your husband had been killed, I started to tell you then, and then I thought to myself, we’d just met, why should I burden you with more sorrow. I don’t know if I can tell you this without…” He glanced away. “But I think you will understand.”

  He paused, closed his eyes for a moment. I moved my glass to one side and leaned on my elbow, my fingers cold against the side of my face.

  “My wife, Irina, she was a singer, a soprano. Beautiful voice. I fell in love with her voice, and then with her. She was the soloist in a concert I was conducting. At the time I was touring Hungary with a small orchestra.”

  He picked up his spoon and twirled it, the metal reflecting the light.

  “It was the 1970s. Things in Hungary had loosened up. I had the
idea of starting a small opera company. We would do the standard repertory. I also wanted to do something more daring—Menotti’s The Consul. Irina would sing Magda, a simple, good woman who married a freedom fighter. In many ways, it was like us.”

  He put the spoon down.

  “What happened was that after one performance, the officials shut us down. They saw what the opera was about. ‘My name is a number, my story’s a case,’ Magda sings. It was about what was going on, the lies, the indifference. Irina was enraged on my behalf. ‘Is there nothing they won’t touch?’ she asked.”

  Anger sharpened his face.

  “She believed in the sanctity of art, she wanted me to be able to do my work. She joined the dissidents who were regrouping at the time. I thought she would be safe. My mother, a painter, had been active in the resistance to the Nazis during the war. My father always said she was a goddess, and as a child I had believed him. I thought she would protect us, and she had, then.”

  He stopped abruptly.

  “Why am I telling you this?” It was a question for himself.

  I looked out the window. A scatter of people walking along the passageway next to the restaurant, seemingly oblivious to this history. Or maybe not.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked. “We can order.”

  I shook my head. “Later.”

  “Then let’s have another glass of wine.” He held up his glass for the waiter, who came over, looked disapprovingly at the unopened menus. “Soon,” Andreas said.

  “When you told me about your husband,” he said, “I felt I could understand you, your feelings, what you were doing with your life. I…” He looked away and then back. “There’s something about you, about being with you. When I came here tonight, I wasn’t planning to talk about this. But I look at you, and I want you to understand me. Why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

  I did not take my eyes away.

  “The day it happened, Jesse was with my mother. I was to meet Irina at the conservatory at five. She didn’t show up. I went to my parents’ house and told my father, who was alarmed. He said we had to leave at once. With Jesse, we couldn’t take a chance. I went out to look for Irina, but I couldn’t find her. Nobody knew anything. My mother said she would stay and wait in case Irina came. She had contacts in the resistance, she would find out what happened and then join us. I knew Irina would want me to go with Jesse, not let him out of my sight. So I went.”

  He picked up the candle in the small glass on the table and stared into the flame. When he continued, his voice was hollow.

  “We left,” he said. “My father, Jesse, and I. We went back to the farm family that had hidden us in ’44. The farmer was old, his sons had taken over. We waited. A few days. Then my mother sent us a message. Irina had been arrested, the Russians were involved. It was too dangerous now for us to go back or to stay in Hungary. One of the sons led us across the border.”

  He looked at me.

  Forlorn. To be bereft, to walk around with a hole in your heart. An odd word—forlorn. A clutch in the chest. Before—forewarned. And then after, forlonged, forlonging, longing without end.

  I looked at his hands, his fingers long, elegant, the hands of a conductor. They had commanded attention, power, and yet they had been utterly useless. “To leave without her, without knowing…” I said, my eyes blurring with tears.

  He said he really didn’t know what had happened to Irina. Everyone assumed—he assumed—she was dead.

  We were silent for a while.

  “With Simon,” I said, “I saw it.”

  “You saw it?” he said, his face alert.

  I found myself telling the part of the story I never tell, thinking it was too much, yet something impelled me to tell him. How that night, we were having supper at my parents’ house. Anton must have known Simon would be there. Tensions had been building on Cyprus, there were kidnappings and assassinations. Our neighbor had been shot one morning on the way to the bank. It was right before the coup. But this was our family. I knew Anton was jealous of Simon, angry at my father. Still, I didn’t think Anton would betray us, or not in this way. Then I saw the coldness in his eyes, the look of uncertainty gone from his face. Inside me, everything stopped.

  Andreas leaned toward me, his eyes on my face. And maybe for both of us it was a relief, finding ourselves no longer alone in something that had left such a shocking sense of aloneness. Now the words were coming back, words I didn’t think I could ever bring myself to say, the scene happening again, as if right before my eyes.

  “I assumed at first that Anton was after the money. It was what my father thought. He said, ‘Anton, put down the gun. If it’s money you want…’ Anton laughed. ‘There’s nothing I want from you now.’ He turned to Simon. ‘It’s you we’ve come for.’ We? There were others? It was surreal. This couldn’t be happening. I looked at Simon and saw him panic. I’d never seen him panic before. I looked at my mother, her face ghost-white. I looked at my father, his whole face had gone slack. Then I heard myself say, ‘Someone do something.’ As if there were anything any of us could do.

  “I must have screamed,” I said, “because Anton turned to me. ‘Stop screaming,’ he said, speaking to me as though I were a stranger. Simon made a grab for Anton’s gun. At the sound of the scuffle, the others came in, Greek army officers, all of them armed. It was hopeless.”

  I looked at Andreas. That night after Felicia’s party, when we were at Casablanca and the noise from the kitchen made me jump, he didn’t know why. It had sounded like a shot.

  “It happened just outside the house,” I said. “We saw it through the window.”

  I picked up the knife, put it back on the table. I had wanted to do something, there was nothing I could do. He had wanted to do something, he couldn’t do anything. It was a powerlessness we both understood.

  Andreas reached for my hand, enclosing it in his. “It’s a nightmare,” he said.

  The waiter brought fresh glasses of wine, and we ordered the special, some kind of fish.

  I told him that when I met Simon, he was an architecture student, interested in psychology like my sister, but he said you had to start at the foundation. To change the structure of people’s inner lives, you had to change the outer structures as well. It was a bold vision. “I don’t think you can fall in love with a man unless you fall in love with his work.”

  Andreas looked thoughtful.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “About what you said. I don’t know that I’d ever thought about it like that, but it would be hard for me to love someone who didn’t have a passion in life. With Irina, it was singing.”

  He took a deep breath, exhaling slowly.

  “Music was my life,” he said. “It has become my refuge. I want to do Tosca now because in that opera, you can see what was coming. The history of Europe in the twentieth century. Fascism. Secret police. Tosca is a singer. Her lover, Cavaradossi, is a painter. Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore, I lived for art, I lived for love, Tosca sings. But the fact is she cannot live once her lover is shot. He is executed, a victim of jealousy and political terror.”

  Like Simon, I thought.

  “Do you know the opening of the second act?” he asked, and I shook my head. I knew almost nothing about opera.

  “It’s set in the Farnese Palace. Scarpia, the chief of police, is waiting for Tosca. A table is set for supper. Tosca is to sing a concert at the queen’s apartment below. Afterward, Scarpia is planning to seduce her. He is impatient for her to come. He orders his assistant to open the window to hear if the concert has begun. Music comes into the room. The orchestra is playing a gavotte. The tune simple, exquisite, a dance rhythm. Music from another time. Suddenly there is beauty in the midst of such terror. For a moment, we hold our breath. In this instant, everything could change. And then the window is shut.

  “In a very quiet way, it’s the most emotional moment in the opera. For a minute, we have hope. Otherwise it’s all about fear and be
trayal, the defeat of art and love and freedom. But in the midst of it, there’s a beautiful, complicated love story, impassioned arias, which is why people come to this opera. I want them to hear the whole story, the love and also what destroys it. I want them to see into the emotional heart of terror. You can do that with opera. You have the words, and you have the music.”

  The fish came, and we ate quickly.

  “When I called you,” he said, putting his plate to one side, “I wanted to ask you if you would come and look at the space in Peter’s theater with me. The sets are a problem. I was hoping you might help me think about them. I know you haven’t worked in the theater, but in this case that’s beside the point because there isn’t room for sets in the usual sense. I believe you will see what I am looking for. What you said that day on the island about the mix of transparency and enclosure is precisely what I’m after. There’s an emotional porosity, the psychology is completely exposed, and then there’s a sense in which everyone in the opera is trapped. We’ll bring in someone to deal with the technical specifications. It’s your sensibility I want, your understanding of space.” He paused, and then with a sense of gathering up the entire conversation, he said, “And I would like to work with you.”

  The thought crossed my mind, maybe we could become partners, not lovers. I smiled to myself. I said I would come.

  The waiter brought coffee, and Andreas asked for the check.

  I had wanted him to look at the amphitheater with me. I would look at Peter’s theater with him. I told myself it was a simple request.

  The next afternoon he was waiting for me in the lobby of the Design School. It was four o’clock, and he was holding a cup of coffee and a pear and smiling. Like my mother with food, I thought. She would always bring something when she met me, chicken livers wrapped in waxed paper, thick slices of Turkish delight, the rounds of apricot paste studded with walnuts or pistachios, coated with a skin of powdered sugar. It was not something I associated with men, not something my friend David would have thought of, or Randy, kind and thoughtful though they both were. I had just taught my last class, and I took the coffee, grateful for the caffeine. “I thought you’d be tired,” he said. He checked his watch. It would be nine o’clock now in London, darkness trailing him across the ocean on this, the solstice, the shortest day of the year. We stood out on the steps while I finished the coffee, students filing out of the building. “Have a good break, Professor Levin.” “Happy solstice,” they called over their shoulders, students heading home. I bit into the pear, unripe but crisp, the way I liked it. We walked into the Square and got into a taxi.