Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,54
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?
How 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