The Spectator Bird (28 page)

Where the drive turned in, the cypresses were black, distinct in shape but blurred in outline. While I stared at them trying to focus them into clarity they melted into the gray of the beechwoods beyond the road. From horizon to zenith the sky was almost too pale for stars. Off in the west a humpbacked moon lay stranded, colorless as a jellyfish. The air, utterly still, carried a fragrance of wood smoke mixed with the sweetness of mown grass that rose from the lawn.

Walking softly, I went around the cottage to the grassy terrace from which we had watched the celebration at midnight. The big fire that had leaped from the beach below had burned down to a red core, and off on the Swedish coast opposite, north and south of the overtaken lights of Hälsingborg, other coals glowed dully. Not a sound. No cheep of a wakeful bird, no stir in the ivy or thatch, no slightest sigh of moving air. The yelling of the pagan rites of midnight, when hundreds of Danes and Swedes drunk on beer and summer and love had thrown their witch effigies onto the flames and sent the malignant spirits howling back to their home in the Harz, might never have been. Successful exorcism. The countess had made us listen, where we sat on blankets on the grass. She said you could hear the rushing in the air.

“Aren't you afraid?” I said. “You claim to be a witch.”

“Yes, I am afraid,” she said, “but not of burning. I am not witch enough. They do not burn you for curing warts.”

In the dusk I could not read her expression, but it seemed to me there was something like self-contempt in her voice, and it troubled me.

Now, two hours later, I stood in the wet grass, sleepless, restless, obscurely distressed, caught between a day that would not properly die and one that was not ready to be born. The whole world, and I with it, hung at the very peak of summer, holding its breath before starting down. I shivered, more with the sense of something ending than with chill. It was a time for departures. Our own was only a week away, and I didn't want to go. Ruth did. Now that I was feeling better, she said, there was no reason to stay. But I understood, and was resentful. More than once, as she went about making the arrangements and reservations, I had wanted to shout at her, Don't push me!

I was full of cobwebs, sad with the late hour, depressed. I needed to walk it off. So I went soft-footed around the cottage again, and out across the lawn to the gate between the cypresses. There I stopped to look back at the cottage on its dark lawn-medieval and picturesque, historical and false, survival not only of the ancient northern village culture but of a time when Astrid Rødding was a rich titled girl who could afford to play peasant, and whose father indulged her with a crofter's house to play in.

While I was looking, the door opened quickly and closed again, and she stood on the doorstone.

At that distance she was only a shape. It was her way of moving that told me who it was. From under the cypresses I watched her, and it seemed to me that a hundred feet away she might hear the beating of my heart. I thought she bent her head, listening as I had listened. I thought she looked up at the sky. Then she was coming toward me across the grass.

To prevent her running into me in the dusk and being frightened, I stepped out into the open and said,
“God morgen.”

“Oh! Who is it?”

She stopped, and true to my nature when my emotions are involved, I played the horse's ass. The buried adolescent in me, as uncertain as the dusk I stood in. I dropped my voice to sepulchral depths and said,
“Jeg er en hekse. Jeg har mistet min vej. Kan De siger mig vejen til Harz?”

“Mr. Allston, is it you?”

“Who else?” I said, already disgusted with myself. My heart was still pounding. She wore a kerchief on her smooth head, and a sweater like a shawl around her shoulders. She looked like an illustration from a folk tale, some shawled human creature caught east of the sun and west of the moon.

“You startled me,” she said with a laugh.

“I'm sorry.”

She moved close. I could smell the faintly musty smell of her sweater, stored a long time without airing in the unused cottage. “Couldn't you sleep either?”

“No.”

“It is never a good night for sleeping, Midsummer Night. Things are abroad.”

“Like us.”

“Yes, like us. Where were you going?”

“I don't know. Just for a walk.”

“Is Ruth asleep?”

“Yes. She doesn't lie awake the way some people do.”

A pause. Her face lifted to look at me, a shadow face with only the faint flash of eyes. “There is a path around the lake,” she said. “That is where I was going.”

“May I come along?”

“I would like that, if ...”

I knew she was thinking of Ruth. So was I.

Across the road she darted her flashlight ahead until it found a path between the beechwoods and a field where hay had been piled on racks to dry. “Do you need the light?” she said. “Can you see? Shall I leave it on?”

“Let's do without it.”

The shapes of hay, vaguely luminescent, enlarged by the diffused shadows thrown by the moon, watched us as we passed between them and the woods. “It's like a field of schmoos,” I said. Then I had to explain what schmoos were. She said they belonged in Scandinavian folklore along with trolls and dwarves and other shapeless shapes of mist and darkness. Her mood was somber, she walked beside me withdrawn into herself.

When she stumbled, I took her by the arm above the elbow.

Touch. Her arm was both firm and soft. Having taken hold of it, I did not let go. I couldn't have felt that contact more if her arm had been the handle of a funhouse shock machine. In one tingling flash she was less tall, more feminine, more accessible. I remembered the time when she had shed her tweed uniform and frolicked like a suddenly physical Valkyrie in the sound. The things that had maintained formality between us—my poor-boy's sense of her title and caste, the awkwardness of her family history, the defensive playfulness, the too bright smile—were all forgotten. Walking her down that dark path was like dancing, the sort of dancing that was orthodox when I was young, the kind the modern young have deprived themselves of, the kind that authorizes, to music, a physical contact otherwise taboo. It was as if she had taken down her hair. Without a word spoken we groped along the dark edge of the woods, as different from the two people who had just paused as ozone is different from oxygen.

After a little distance she said, “Do you remember the day when you turned your car and drove us back through the young beechwood, the day we went to Karen Blixen?”

“Yes.”

“I think it was that day when I began to know you.”

I had her by the arm, I felt the blood pulsing in her elbow.

The path curved away from the woods along a fence, where it was lighter, and then back again through the woods along what seemed to be a cart road. “This was once all my father's, and then mine,” she said. “They took it away, all but my little cottage, when Erik was tried.”

“You told us. It's too bad.”

Ahead, the darkness of overhanging trees lightened as if we were coming to a clearing. There was a mossy smell. The countess stopped, holding me back, and shot her flashlight ahead and down. It gleamed off dark water, a tarn straight out of Poe. When she shut off the light again, the water still lay there, darkly burnished, reflecting no stars. It graded so gradually off from the land that I might have walked right into it We stood listening. Not a sound.

“It's like death,” the countess said. “Or resignation, hopeless resignation. Do you know that poem of Goethe's that we were all made to memorize?
Über allen Gipfeln?”

“Yes. Say it.”

“Perhaps I can't remember after all.” She hesitated, and her face turned toward me, still and almost featureless in the twilight, with its glint of eyes. She laughed as if embarrassed. “If I had not seen you go through the beechwoods a second time, I would not dare speak poetry to you in such a place. You are not to laugh.”

“I won't laugh.”

She cleared her throat like a child reciting.
“Hør Du, nu.”

“You Du me.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do. If I didn't I could not speak this sad poem to you. It is a poem made all of whispers.”

She said it in whispers.

I felt her shiver. “I do not like Midsummer Night,” she said. “For many people it is a time of celebration and happiness, the freedom of summer. For me it is always sad. It makes me feel that I am dead but have not yet left the body, and do not want to leave, but cling to it whimpering and crying. Tonight is the worst. Do you know why I could not sleep?”

“Why?” I was still holding her by the arm.

“Because you are soon leaving. The only dear friends I have had for many years.”

“I'm glad you don't want us to go.”

“How could I? I was dead, and you taught me what it would be to be alive again. I understand why you must go, but it makes me very sad.”

“Must we go?” I said. “Why must we?”

“Because you have obligations,” she said promptly. “You have work to do.”

“What obligations? What work? I could give all that up tomorrow.”

She started moving again down the grassy track along the shore. “You are not the kind who shirks things,” she said, as if she knew. Her left hand came over and pulled at my fingers around her arm until I let go. I must have been gripping her painfully hard.

We passed out from under the trees crowding close to the shore, and there was more light, a wider sky. The obscure became the faintly visible. Dry rushes crackled underfoot, and the low edge of the sky was scratched with bending lines of tules. The path ended at a narrow dock that jutted out into the water. As I followed her out onto the old felty planks, the colorless moon reappeared doubled, pale in the sky, pale in the black water. At the end of the dock a rowboat sat absolutely motionless on its shadow.

For the first time since she had come out her cottage door I saw her eyes clearly, the glint of the moon in them as she stooped to fumble for the boat's painter, tied to the dock post. She squatted there, looking up at me. “Can you row, or shall I?”

“I'll row. Where are we going?”

“I want to pay a little visit. Will you mind coming?”

“Of course not. But visit who, at this hour?”

She didn't reply. Pulling on the rope, I felt that the boat was half full of water. It took some straining to haul it onto the dock and tip it. The wooden knockings, the dark sound of pouring, went back into the stillness as if into blotting paper.

When I had the boat back in the water I stood to help the countess down, hoping to re-establish the tingle of touching flesh, but she used my arm as impersonally as she would have used a groom's.

She shot the flashlight beam past me, moved it around to get her bearings, and then gave me directions from the stern, steering by some dark landmark. I was clumsy at the oars, which seemed to have been whittled out of tree limbs. The boat was water-logged, the left oar kept slipping out of its worn notch so that we lurched in zigzags where the adolescent in me would have liked to skim that old hulk across the pond like a skipping stone. Concentrating, I held the lame oar to its job, carefully dipping it into the moon's reflection, carefully pulling, carefully swinging it back over its skitter of pale drops until it bit again into the moon.

“We are close,” the countess said. “Slowly, it is hard to see exactly.” The light shot past me, probed a moment, and went out. “A little on the right oar,” she said. “Now pull, both, hard!”

The prow grounded in mud. Before I could ship the oars or stand up, she had squeezed tippily past me and jumped ashore. The boat surged another two feet up the bank as she hauled on the painter. I stepped ashore into mud to my shoe tops and followed her up a brambly bank onto the level.

Her light darted ahead across a clearing overgrown with high grass and vines. “Come.” Her hand groped and found mine. Touch again: her hand was cold and smooth. In the middle of the clearing she stopped, holding the light at her feet Quickly she crouched and brushed the grass away from a square stone as she might have brushed hair back from a face. I read the inscription : Landgreve Aage
Rødding,
1874-1938.

“This is where he is buried,” the countess said. “This is where he came to shoot himself.”

“Was that before or after your mother?”

“After.”

“Was he insane, you think?”

“Perhaps. Not at the end.”

“You've had hard things to bear.”

“Ah!” As if my sympathy bothered her, she tried to pull her hand away from mine. I held on, and after a tug or two she let it lie quiet.

“And still have,” I said. “What are you going to do? How will you live? Will you have to rent the apartment again?”

“I will hate it, after you, but I have no other thing to do. My designs pay me too little.”

I asked the question that had not been far out of my mind since the day her quisling delivered her at the door after her stay at Ørebyslot. “What about your husband?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know? It's none of my business, but surely you're not going to take him back.”

“I don't think so. No, of course not, I will not. And yet, you know, he is so miserable, an outcast.”