Page 47 of The Phoenix Bride
I laugh, delighted. “Did we come to hear the flautist?”
“He is very good. He always plays after the Wednesday performance.”
I hum and shuffle closer to him. “Doyouplay anything, David? I never asked.”
“No, I don’t. I sang sometimes when I was a boy. But my father is a much better singer than I. He washazan—a singer—at our synagogue for a few years, when we came here.”
I filed away the wordhazan,alongsideconverso, baroccos, decoction. His English is threaded with so many extraordinary words, the vast pattern of things he has encountered; my language feels so plain by comparison.
The flautist begins. David is correct; he is very good. His playing reminds me of a songbird trilling, light and fast, fingers flying across the instrument. A number of people stop to toss coins into his cap. He doesn’t acknowledge them.
The flautist finishes a song, and we clap alongside the others in the square.
“I used to dream of that,” I say as the flautist pauses to counthis coins. “Playing for a crowd, I mean. I imagined performing at court with the king watching.”
It is only as I say this that I realize I have moved closer still to David, and our hands are brushing against each other on the bench; he doesn’t move away. He watches me with dark eyes half lidded, a hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Do you dream of it still?” he asks me.
“I’m not certain. It feels so impossible.”
“There are many things far more impossible than that,” he says. “When I was a child, I dreamed of making a golem that would do my work for me.”
“A golem?”
“It’s a…sort of servant, I suppose. You make it out of clay and use magic to make it do your bidding. I thought I could build one, and it could learn how to be a physician in my stead. Then I could live in the garden forever and spend all my time climbing the pomegranate trees.”
I laugh at this. Then—in a foolish moment of impulse—I place my hand over his. “A shame you never managed it.”
“Yes,” he says, and his fingers curl beneath mine.
I feel like a girl again, pining after the village boys who grinned at me when I walked into church: giddy with attraction, ecstatic at the slightest brush of skin. It has been so long since I last felt like this. Not since the earliest days with Will, not since we danced around the roses at our wedding. The thrill of that relationship had been brief, before we became comfortable and contented. We’d fallen so easily into domesticity, the two of us; we had no barriers in our way.
But this, David and me—it is not easy. It never can be. That is evident enough, in the agonized movement of David’s eyes toward our hands, the war I can sense in his thoughts. And with war comes wounds: It hurts us both that we have to be afraid; thatthe eyes of everyone around us feel as sharp as knives; that we cannot fall into this as two other people would, without faith and fear and obligation to prevent them. It hurts that every touch must threaten such a heavy price.
But it hurts more, I think, when David pulls his hand away.
The flautist begins to play again. I find I don’t have the patience to listen, and I stand up.
David follows me as I exit the square. “Shall we return to the townhouse?” he asks me.
“I don’t want to go back yet, we’ve hardly been out at all. Let’s go somewhere else. What’s open this time of night?”
“Nearby? Alehouses.” He seems little enthused by the idea.
“What about the park?”
“It is closed.”
“I don’t see how they could close it, really,” I say. “It is so enormous, and the fence is so low. It must be quite pretty after dark, with the sky reflected in the water. I’d like to see it.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “You want to break into Saint James’s Park?”
“Yes, why not?”
“Why not,” he mutters. “Why not.Por que não, a esta hora—”
Heistiresome sometimes. Ignoring him, I take his arm, dragging him in the correct direction.
As we approach the park, the scent of the air changes from city stink to grass and summer blooms. I take a deep breath and sigh in pleasure. David seems less impressed. He fiddles with his hair tie, saying, “We ought to return soon.”
