Crescendo Read online

  She and the mare and possibly the husband walk for months, though the forest around them stays obstinately the same. The maples remain maples. If they would just turn to palms! Then the woman would know that they were moving toward something, that they were moving at all. It feels as though they have been circling the same trees a hundred times, and that this is all the rest of her life will be: a continuous circle of loss and being lost. Perhaps it is not her husband following her wherever she goes but something even vaguer, like disorientation. How utterly absurd, to have lamented a life nearly cut short and then find that it is instead far too long, a never-ending walk to nowhere.

  The mare favors its good leg and limps alongside her. It is dreaming with its eyes open, dreaming of limbs that fly. The woman watches its pain grow and feels helpless to keep it from spreading. She decides that there is no other option. They must stop this senseless wandering. They will turn around and head to where the house once stood. It may be a graveyard, but she is little more than a ghost. Even the cave would be preferable. She could collapse at the feet of the king and queen and ask them to take away her air forever. Then a reunion with her husband would be a guarantee, not a fantasy. Without legs, without bodies: it is the only way that she and the mare can run free.

  For once she moves with direction, with determination, and as she does the landscape begins to change. The maples thin and become sparser. A glade peeks through them. Purpose is like a saw, sharp and precise. It cuts through the forest of the mind and allows a clearing to emerge.

  The trees give way to wildflowers, the enduring to the ephemeral. A lake comes into view. Daisies and forget-me-nots decorate its border, while the sun sits above and threads diamonds across its fabric. At its center, an old man in red and gold robes floats on his back.

  “Here you are. Be right with you,” he calls out to the woman before descending below the surface of the water. Although he is far away, by the time his words reach her he has caught up with them. He and his gorgeous robes are completely dry, though his face swims in wrinkles. In greeting he sweeps his hand over the mare’s mane. The mare feels that he has turned it to liquid.

  The woman is confused. Has he been expecting her? How can that even be? “I’m afraid we’re a little lost,” she confesses.

  “Lost? To be lost is to exist in a time and place—or, rather, not to—and there are no such things. You can only ever be in one place: here. And here you are, exactly where you are supposed to be.”

  He speaks the same language as she, yet to her it sounds incomprehensibly foreign. “And where am I?”

  “Right here.”

  “Fine. I’m here. And once I pass through here, then I’ll be . . . ?”

  The old man laughs, delighted. “Here, of course. Where else could you be?”

  The forest may have been a labyrinth, but so is the old man’s mind. It ensnares her more than tree branches ever could. “I’ve had enough of this,” she says to him, and to the mare: “Let’s go.”

  “How can you go anywhere when you are already there?”

  After all that progress, this is what finally stops her steps. She has survived suffocation only to be felled by a riddle. She sits down where she is and rests her aching head in her hands.

  The old man kneels, lowering himself to look in the woman’s eyes. His own are as calm and deep as the lake behind him. He recognizes her disappointment. So many are disappointed upon finding themselves here, always wishing to be somewhere else.

  His voice is patient, his kindness plain. “You are at the lake of time. It’s a man-made lake, naturally, though don’t let that deter you. It’s a pleasure to experience. Come on in,” he says, taking her hand and leading her toward it. “The water’s fine.”

  Indeed it must be, for as she approaches she notices people swimming inside, pulling themselves onto its shores, resting on its banks.

  She leans forward, cautiously dips a toe. The water is neither warm nor cool. The water is a memory. It arrives in waves, it laps at her awareness, it pulls her in and out, in and out.

  My mother sits at her vanity. I sit at her knee. She is dressing up for an evening out with my father, spraying perfume on her throat. I become drunk on its scent. She dusts powder on her face, then playfully sweeps the brush across my nose. I feel as though she’s just sprinkled magic on me, the magic of being a grownup. How I long to know this secret world myself, this world of dancing and starlight. Her laughter flutters around me like butterflies. She leans down and kisses my forehead, and the smell of her is intoxicating, it is bergamot, it is woman—

  As suddenly as they have come the scene and the scent are gone, the woman not in her childhood home but in some strange lake, not with her mother but with some strange man, and she asks him, “What was that?” and he says, “That was time.”

  The old man wades into the lake, his voice and his red and gold robes trailing behind him. His head disappears below the surface, and when it reappears it is the head of a beautiful young woman dripping in gold and rubies. Once more he immerses himself, and now he is an infant, swaddled in red and gold cloth. With a last plunge he becomes the old man again, and as the wrinkles re-form on his face, so does his smile.

  The mare watches with a thirst. It too approaches the banks and places its soft muzzle in the water.

  The world a white bubble, bursting in a field of sunflowers. Shaky legs. Healthy legs. Warm bees in my ears. My mother, singing to me with her eyes.

  Startled, it raises its head, then drops it to drink in more.

  “Now your harp,” the old man tells the woman.

  “But that’s inanimate.”

  “Is it?”

  She flinches at the thought of doing what he asks. To submerge a harp in water is to kill it. Its wood will bend, its tone will warp. She has already caused so much death. She cannot be responsible for more.

  The old man nods his encouragement. This is not meant to stump her. “Isn’t it time to move past dirges and laments?”

  She has to admit that it is. Even silence would be better than another song of mourning. She shuts her eyes, holds her breath, and lowers the instrument into the lake.

  Then she peeks.

  The harp is no longer made of willow—it is the tree itself. The roots of its chords lengthen into the roots of a trunk. It weeps leaves instead of notes. It is said that a willow grows where the ghost goes, that its branches are used to sweep tombs, to summon the dead back to earth. Of course this tree became her harp. Nothing was more suited to sing her sorrow.

  Thirty-four strings once looped themselves through the instrument. Now thirty-four mulberry moths cluster around the tree and lay eggs upon its leaves. A newly hatched caterpillar looks around and cries out with dismay. I cannot find my wings. It works itself into a frenzy, desperate to transform the body it was given into the one it was promised. I’ll lock myself in a fortress, lest anyone look upon me and think me worm. The cocoon that it spins undergoes its own transformation, turning into silk, which turns into string, which turns into song.

  The song, too, must come from somewhere. Before it arises in the instrument, it arises in the musician. The drone of her daily life, the plainchant of her midnight prayers. The G major of her quiet satisfaction. The flatted fifth of goose bumps rising on her flesh. The minor scale of her sigh, its origin sadness or sound, whichever comes first.

  The old man signals for the woman to lift the harp from the lake, and instantly it resumes its shape: the willow shrunk in size, the moths a memory. Then he takes hold of Music Lessons. With a reflex she didn’t know she had, she knocks it out of his hand. The harp may be undamaged, but her faith extends only so far and not beyond the book. So few things belong to her anymore. The fire has taken most of them away. She will not let the water take the rest.

  He understands. If she would trust him to show her, then she’d have the answer to a question she’s yet to even ask. But she’d rather have the riddle, and he’s pleased to play along.

  The wo
man stoops down to pick up the book, glancing at the page to which it has fallen open.

  WATER, FIRE, EARTH, AIR: THESE ARE THE ELEMENTS OF CREATION. IN ORDER TO CREATE HARMONY, KEEP THEM IN BALANCE.

  WADE INTO THE WATERS OF TIME. FIRE IS A SOURCE OF ENLIGHTENMENT. LET IT ILLUMINATE YOUR PATH. RETURN TO THE EARTH AGAIN AND AGAIN, EACH TIME WITH THE LIGHTNESS OF A MOTH IN THE AIR.

  THIS IS HOW MUSIC IS MADE.

  She looks up from the words. A little girl is knee-deep in the water. In one hand the girl holds a willow catkin; in the other, sugar cubes for the colt beside her to nibble. She hums an old, familiar tune. It travels on air scented with bergamot perfume toward the woman. The girl waves to her. Time ripples across the lake.

  “What is this?” the woman asks. “Our childhoods?”

  “There’s much more in there than that,” the old man says. “Go deeper. You’ll see.”

  He motions to the shore, where a man stands ready to dive. They watch as he enters. He stays inside for a bit, climbs out, dries off, dives back in. The man does not change, but his dive does. First it is a belly flop, because he does not know what he is doing, or he is scared, or he simply wants to create a splash. He tries again, something more complicated; he uses different muscles, he perfects the technique. Then every dive becomes one of sublime beauty. Until then, though, what an awful mess! All that splashing around. All that fun.

  Sometimes others join him for a synchronized swim.

  Sometimes they thrash in the water, and he jumps in to bring them to safety.

  Sometimes he just floats on his back for a while, relishing the warmth of the sun on his face.

  The old man says, “That swimmer you have been watching, does he die when he gets out of the water?”

  “Hardly. He rests, or he goes back in again.”

  “Do you grieve the completion of each dive?”

  “Grieve it?” What a thought. “No, the dive begins and ends, but the swimmer does not.”

  “And would you drown yourself in guilt and sink like a stone,” he says, “if one swimmer left the water while you remained inside?”

  The woman turns to the old man. He is looking intently at her, waiting. He can wait forever. He has the time.

  The lake is thick with movement. Its banks are dotted with silvery, birdlike things, things made of light. As they glide inside the water, their light becomes cloaked in bodies, and their wings of mercury grow heavy and human.

  “These beings—they’re all dead, then? And they go in the water to come alive?” the woman asks.

  The old man shakes his head. “The soul is not dead, nor is it alive. The soul just is.”

  Her voice snags on sadness; a little piece breaks off. “What of my daughter? She was in the lake, she must have been. Did she surface too soon?”

  “She was testing the waters, but it wasn’t right.”

  “For her.”

  “For her and also for you. To leave: that was her gift to you.”

  A gift? To lose one’s child?

  “Now she reaches for you from outside the lake, rather than within,” the old man tells her. “What’s the difference?”

  The difference is time. The woman could have spent years upon years with her child in her arms. Years in which her daughter was an actuality, not an abstraction. When she was not blood spilled on the grass but blood contained in a body, a healthy, vibrant body that grew and ate and skipped through the fields and let its hair grow long and dreamed thirty thousand dreams and wept and fell in love, or fell in love and wept. A body that belonged in time, not beyond it.

  The old man knows that time is a figment, a fiction, a gossamer cloud blowing through the mind. What else could something so elusive and erratic be? The woman’s years are made of months. Elsewhere they are made of light. Her years are different from those of the ancient nomad, who, by counting moons instead of suns, discovered that he could live for centuries. Man carved time into zones, placed an imaginary line in the ocean and called it a day. What an amusing puzzle! To the old man, time is no more than the blink of a dinosaur, the shake of a lamb’s tail. But to the woman it is something far more concrete and cruel, a monster she both fears and craves; it destroys, yet there is never enough of it. Her child is not its sole victim. It steals all babies, puts adults in their stead. It tells them to leave their homes and their mothers. Then it takes away the mothers. It turns everyone it touches to an orphan, and it ravages the ones who are left, leaving its track marks all over their bodies.

  The woman’s eyes are watery like the lake, though less clear, muddled with something human. “I think I’d prefer to remain on the shore. I don’t know why I ever would’ve gone inside at all.”

  “Because you wanted to listen to the concerto of a summer storm and hear its notes on your skin. And taste the exquisite pleasure of wild blackberries as their juice trickles down your arm. And see how a lady’s slipper catches the dew and feel how a lover’s smile catches the breath. Because only in a body can you make song, and move your body to the song, and revel in the dance. How else are you to experience all the staggering beauty in this world?”

  “And all the death and the loss.”

  “And the love.”

  “And the grief and the pain.”

  “And the love.”

  She groans. She’d rather not exist; must there be such an argument about it? “My husband promised me forever, then vanished into a plume of smoke. If love is any reason to live, surely it should be stronger than fire, than flesh. Now I’m told that I cannot even look back at him. What kind of love is so slippery and shy?”

  “In a sense it is true that you cannot look back, and in a sense it is not.”

  Another riddle?

  “Go in the water,” he instructs her. “Look back that way, much farther back.”

  “Into my past?”

  “Into all the pasts you have ever had.”

  The woman regards him with astonishment, but the old man just laughs and claps her on the shoulder and says, “You think we get only one chance to dive? Now what would be the fun in that?”

  LESSON 5

  Da Capo al Coda

  My skin is like an onion, paper-thin, peeling away. After all, I have worn it for ninety years. My teeth left long ago. I don’t mind how time strips such things from me, for look at all it has given: grandchildren upon grandchildren, an anthill of a family. My sons carry my face in theirs, though they are children no more. Now they have freckles for hair. A woman brings me my evening rice. It is my wife. She is as ancient as I. When my spirit leaves my body and becomes a cloud, it is she who, rather than feel the rain on her face, follows me up the sky.

  “Look in her eyes,” the old man says from above, his voice distorted from traveling through so much water, so much time.

  I try, but her smile makes them hard to see. Open them, I ask her. As she does, the recognition knocks the wind out of me, and I am forced to swim upward, to find air. They are the eyes of my husband. The eyes I am forbidden to turn around and see. The eyes I believed I would never see again.

  The woman reaches the surface of the lake, breathless from the dive, from the discovery.

  “Go deeper,” the old man says.

  A rickety train takes me to my schoolhouse. It is morning, yet so early that it is still night. I am young, the train is old. The windows are glassless and put up no fight against the wind. I close my eyes to feel safe, but the train jerks and speeds and I cannot rest. Today will be my first day of school; I cannot rest for that reason either. At daybreak, I rise and walk down the aisles. Another schoolchild, a girl like me, wears the same blue uniform, her black hair in braids against her head. I want to ask if I can sit with her, though shyness prevents me. Which is worse, to have to ask this of a stranger or to sit by myself, alone and cold? She doesn’t need me to ask, anyhow. She simply smiles and pats the seat next to her, and I slide in with equally wordless gratitude. She takes a wool blanket from her satchel and spreads it over herself and
also over me, tucking in the corners around my shoulders so that it stays in place. For the first time I look around and see the mountains sparkling like gold. The sun lights up the blanket. It lights me up too. My head turns heavy with fatigue and falls on the girl’s shoulder. Through the fog of sleep I hear her singing a song: Little bird, blue bird, why oh why so blue? Because it ate a blue fruit.

  We will be in different classes, for she is older than I and more advanced in her studies. Our rooms will be on opposite sides of the schoolhouse. Occasionally I will see her when we break for tea and mandarins. We share smiles, never words. She will finish school, and I will marry a local merchant. We will not meet again.

  The old man’s voice echoes across the lake. “Who is the friend?”

  I go back in time, I go back on the train, I go back up the mountain. Wake up, I tell the young schoolgirl that I once was. Open your eyes.

  I open my eyes. I look at my seatmate. My seatmate looks back at me.

  My husband looks back at me.

  I am a lotus. It takes a century for my toes to reach for the ground beneath me, a century for my hands to reach for the sun. A dragonfly visits me one summer. We spend the long hours of the days together, locked in a quiet caress. They are the happiest months of my life. Through him I, anchored so tightly to the mud, come to know flight. I am his hammock and his refuge; his stained-glass wings are my church. He dies in my arms. I hold him for a thousand years.

  The night is deep and silent except for the drumming of my heart, which rattles my body with its force. I am sure the moon can hear it. I look down at my bare feet. Don’t be so afraid, I tell myself as I walk toward the elder’s hut, but my feet do not move of their own accord.