Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,55

fiddle could find. She played them in rhythms like the sound of ice under water. Sound without tune or tradition, thinly awaiting density. In these notes she wished to elaborate pattern, structure, energy, surprise, joy. In these notes she wished to find pitches no one had heard before, waiting like baby spiders to be born. She wanted this. More than home. More than love. She was fed up with Donal’s tiny rooms, his tired music, his plan to perform. She wanted her rhythms that sounded from the darkness and the bottom of the sea. She had to go back.

In the other room she heard Donal running his finger up and down his long strings, changing the pitch on his natural harmonics in a way that she could not on her fiddle. His practice said through the wall, I can do anything.

Donal knocked on her door and pleaded with her, You can’t not play with me. We no longer exist apart. Without me, no bass. Without you, no soaring.

She said, That means nothing to me.

Impatiently he dropped his hands and said, There were times on Millstone Nether before the spring of the barrels of instruments when the people were so poor they had no fiddles. I’ve heard stories of the first kitchen parties where an old man took a piece of board and some string, took sap straight from the trees for rosin and played it. Look at your fiddle. And you don’t want to play it?

She mocked him, saying, What a cruel sad story. Scattered few would believe that one.

He laughed then, and he bowed the opening bars of “Narcissus” and she could not prevent her body quickening and she let him pull her to him one last time. But as soon as he was making love with her, con expressione di patimento, she became distracted and her mind fingered over a tale her nana used to tell her about the beginning of the world.

A sister and a brother lived together in darkness until one night a stranger lay beside the girl and made love to her. The sister fell asleep and when she awoke the stranger was gone. Next night, again he came, and again he lifted her up, and again, when she awoke, he was gone. Finally she blackened her hands with burned sticks from the fire and when he came in the darkness, she held his face between her palms. Eagerly she went out in the morning hoping to see some sign. But there squatting by the fire was her brother, long finger marks streaking his face. She screamed at him, It is you who had me in darkness. She tore off her breasts and hurled them at him, then picked up a large burning fire stick from the fire and ran away. He picked up a smaller fire stick and ran after her. They ran so fast that they rose up into the sky and caught fire. She became the sun and he the moon chasing over a world newly lit by the sorrow in the darkness.

Donal lifted her hips to his, his eyes closed and lips apart, breathing hard. She watched his face and waited, her mind turning over the story. Donal stroked her lovely linea alba and she looked away, her nana’s bodewords chilling: Forget the spirit and it dies.

When a cycle ends there is an emptying. The old pleasures go lacklustre. The old desires dry up. The cycle sometimes ends with a death, a loss. But sometimes it just ends. There is a call to be somewhere else. That is the truest explanation for the end of one thing and the urge toward another. One thing done, another ready to begin.

He could not stop her. Nyssa had plunged into the sea that silenced minor streams. She was out of sorts and restless, her music a practice for death. She wanted only to search out the unsounded experience. She wandered from wall to wall of her little room. The hours stretched endlessly around her. All sound flat against these wooden walls, webbed in by notes worn out, she baulked and began again the stripping-down. He said when she played that she could make ring all of heaven and earth. But she wanted still another realm. She wanted to reveal what lay hidden below. Nyssa Nolan had leapt fully formed. She wasn’t the sort to wither.

Donal brought his double bass into her room and said, Let’s play.

No.

Donal slammed his hand on the wall. Where had