June of 1914 was followed by a summer of beauty, warmth, and calm - a summer that would be mythologized all over the western world in the years to come. In Shoneval, insects attacked not one green leaf of the swiftly growing crops, animals fattened in dew-soaked pastures, parishioners attended mass regularly and confession infrequently (there being, apparently, few sins to confess). The brewery prospered, the nuns embroidered, and the Archangel Tavern developed a clientele - Eamon among them - of fine singers and fiddle and accordion players. Several new artesian wells and springs were discovered. The dissolute bell ringer at the church became surprisingly punctual. Hafeman's store extended its terms of credit. Despite the fact that almost everyone distrusted them, three telephones were installed in the district.
Klara (a sculptor and tailor) worked in the mornings on the wooden abbess and during the afternoons on the waistcoat promised to Eamon. In the evenings she walked out with him down dusty roads, or through orchards, or across the cemetery. Often he was silent, as was his nature, but now they remained physically close, hands and shoulders touching or with his arm across her shoulders, so that quietness became a connection rather than a separation. Occasionally they would sit facing each other on a log as if it were a seesaw, as if they were small children, their hands flat on the bark, their eyes locked, entranced.
Eamon was a beautiful young man. Klara loved each detail of his face, the fringe of black eyelashes and the perfectly shaped eyebrows that some might say were wasted on a boy. The unblemished jewels of his green eyes, the fine pale skin lightly dusted by freckles, the small white scar on his temple, and his full, expressive mouth. She had leaned forward once to touch his lips lightly with her fingers as if they were unusual flowers she had discovered and wanted to remember the texture of. He had taken her hand then and kissed her palm, her wrist, a gesture surprisingly mature and tender in one so young, so new to the experience of romance.
Sometimes he talked about his father's homeland, how its spirit had been broken by the English, or how his parents worried about the abandoned cabins of their childhood, knowing the thatch would be gone from them by now. "When the thatch goes," Eamon told Klara, "even stone walls begin to fall into ruin. How sad those walls must be, and so many of them. People who have to leave, they just open the door to the wind and walk away. Soon after the gales bring rain into the house."
By July it seemed that every one of Klara's senses had opened to the light of the long, long days. The scent of freshly chiselled wood in the shop, or of cloth in the sunroom, the taste of salt on new potatoes, the coolness of a damp cloth on her neck in the morning. In the church there was the smell of incense, the buttery glow of candles, blocks of geometric light richly coloured by stained glass, and the precision of white altar cloths. All this gave her joy. But, shaken by the thrill of this boy's touch, she was vulnerable now to things that in the past she might have ignored. Anything at all, a sharp word from her father, the sight of a new-born calf, even a flower wilting on a stem, could bring tears to her eyes.
In her workshop, the face of the abbess softened to such an extent that Klara's grandfather became concerned.
"This abbess," he said, "is too young. And far too cheerful. She looks as if she has spent most of her short life dreaming in a field of flowers. No man would accept advice from her. No pope would listen to her for one minute!"
Klara was stung by this criticism, but only briefly, and the tears cleared in minutes. All the rest of the day she was thinking of the moments when Eamon's arm was on her shoulder or his hands were in her hair.
Late on certain afternoons, after work, Eamon and Klara would remove shoes and stockings and step into the bed of the clear-running creek that drove the machinery of the brewery; Eamon with his pant legs rolled up and Klara carrying her skirt in front of her thighs as if it were a sheaf of wheat. They followed the path of the water into an area surrounded by thick brush and cedar, lifting their legs over fallen logs and pushing aside the branches of aspen and poplar that grew near the bank.
Eventually they would reach a series of pools, each slightly larger than the last. The final pond, which had water deep enough for swimming, was ringed by willows around its circular edge. Eamon, covered with sweat from work, would immediately throw off his clothing, then would flail with much splashing into the water. Klara, shyer, removed her own clothes on a bank behind a willow and stepped into a deep area protected by a curtain of green leaves where Eamon was unable to see her.
"I'm coming in there," Eamon would tease. Then he would dive under the surface and emerge in a fountain of water, claiming that he had glimpsed Klara's legs. She lay on her back and looked up through soft green, or she stood waist-deep in the water and floated her open hands on a dark surface covered with echoes of light. The shadows of leaves were like bruises on her skin.
There was a kind of communion in this separate baptism. Though they couldn't see each other or touch, they were connected by the pool and by laughter, by the pleasure of the chilled water on warm skin, the shadows, the breeze. Later, as a mature adult, Klara would never swim, fearing the memory of this joy. But now when they scrambled from the water and dressed in their private green worlds, it would be as if they were preparing themselves for some inevitable, profound ceremony, a reunion of partnership. Eamon would shake his head like a young animal to remove moisture from his hair and then lean down to where Klara was lying on the bank to smooth out her long yellow mane to dry on the grass.
They never knew how they had decided upon this daily ritual, but it became a necessary luxury, a significant part of their unspoken code.
On one such day as she stood in her green water hut, a startled Klara, hands held to her head to protect herself from the noise, watched between two long strands of willow as Eamon, who had just entered the pond, threw his head back and looked at the sky, his face lit by the full flood of the sun and then covered briefly by a swift, clamorous shadow that changed for the space of a breath the colour of his skin and the colour of the pond.
She continued to stare as he climbed swiftly up the bank, struggled unselfconsciously into his trousers, unknowingly permitting Klara her first full view of his oddly delicate naked self. She remained, shivering, behind the green shield, her arms crossed protectively over her breasts, having registered the places where his black tufted hair interrupted white skin and how his sex shone between his legs. Then she moved quickly toward her clothing and dressed herself as the catastrophic noise sputtered and eventually stopped altogether. A great calamity had occurred, she knew. Something fierce and dire had fallen from the sky.
Before this day only birds, clouds, the rising moon, the setting sun, shooting stars, and Eamon's kites had moved in the sky, all occupying air with dignity, discretion, amid at least a degree of silence. The racket might have been made by a bellowing Lucifer angrily approaching earth after being thrown out of heaven or the dusky flying monster from prehistory that Klara had once seen in a forbidden book about the evolution of man and nature. This was the first time in Klara's life that anything other than familiar, comforting sounds had entered her afternoons. And this was the first time in her presence that Eamon had turned his attention away from her. She was made briefly aware - though she hardly acknowledged this - that intrusions from the outside might be capable of removing him, of taking his mind and then his body permanently away from her.
When she stepped furtively out of the woods and into an open field she saw, near the opposite fence line, two men, one of whom was Eamon, standing beside a contraption apparently constructed of sticks and canvas. The stranger wore a tight-fitting helmet and stood quite still with his hands in the pockets of a leather jacket. Eamon, by comparison, was walking in busy circles around the now silent apparatus, pausing here and there to touch some part of it as if he did not quite believe it was real.
Klara called to him, wanting him to forget about this uninvited machine that had, she felt, already come strangely between them. But Eamon beckoned to her enthusiastically and, as she came nearer, shouted at her in an almost hysterical voice, "Klara, come look . . . an aeroplane!"
"An aeroplane," she repeated stupidly, quietly to herself. She knew about them, of course, but had thought they would be more seraphic, graceful. In her imagination they had been white, gliding and silent, a miracle lifted by wind. This machine looked, as she approached it, more like some ill-designed gadget from the mill or the brewery. And it smelled of grease and filth.
The pilot turned to her as she walked toward them and explained that he had run out of petrol on his way from Owen Sound to a fair at Goderich. Klara stared at his leather boots, which were cracked and covered with oily stains. She realized she had left her own boots at the pool and self-consciously covered one foot with the other.
Eamon was running his hands lovingly over the propeller. "My God," he said, "this is the most beautiful thing."
"She could use some tidying up," said the pilot as he opened one hinged part of the nose. "There's so many fairs now I hardly have the time. Can I get petrol in the village?"
"I'll show you where there's a tank by the mill." Eamon was examining the instrument panel.
"Good, and then I'll take you for a spin afterwards." The pilot looked at Klara, at her hair, her breasts, her bare feet, "and then I'll take you up."
"No," said Klara firmly. "Thank you."
"You'll take me up?" said Eamon, incredulous.
"Sure, why not?"
"Don't go, Eamon," said Klara. She didn't want him floating through the clouds, no longer anchored to their own village landscape, to the earth. She wanted to be lying on her back beside the pool with him smoothing her long hair out to dry in the sun, the familiar grass surrounding them both.
"This is a miraculous day," he was saying. "What if I hadn't been here? What if I'd been somewhere else?"
The pilot laughed. "No miracles happen without petrol," he said.
"It's just a machine," Klara bent down to seize Eamon's sleeve as he attempted to scramble under the wings. He had never paid this kind of attention to anyone, anything except for her. "It's just a machine, but for all I can tell it's dangerous. Please don't go up in it."
Several small boys had arrived on the scene, gasping with wonder and physical exertion having run across five fields after spotting the machine in the sky. Now they stood panting and chattering. One tried to shinny himself up into the cockpit.
"Get down from there," shouted the pilot, "and don't touch anything." He glared fiercely in the direction of the children, then turned to Klara. "You stay here," he said. "Don't let those little buggers anywhere near it!"
Klara was silent, shocked. She had never heard anyone use a word like "bugger" before. She watched as Eamon accompanied the leather-clad figure over the fence and down the road. She wondered what was familiar about the costume and the short, thick body of the pilot, and then remembered. He looked suspiciously like one of the demons her grandfather had carved in a Last Judgement.
The boys were laughing and crawling under the carriage.
"Get out of there," snapped Klara. "You heard what the man said. I can tell you right now you wouldn't want to make the likes of him angry."
There was nothing Klara could do to prevent Eamon from riding in the aeroplane, and so while the pilot was filling the machine with petrol, she began to walk away.
"Aren't you even going to stay and watch?" Eamon called after her, his voice high and strained in disbelief.
She didn't answer but kept striding toward the wood where she had left her boots. While she was tying her laces, she heard the machine start up. The noise shook the leaves of all the trees around her and seemed to leave visible fissures in the atmosphere, lesions that affected Klara's vision in a disturbing way, making her believe that she would never see anything whole again.
As the aeroplane brushed over the top-most branches, she crouched on the ground and bent her arms over her head. When she once again returned to the open, she watched not the aeroplane but the way the children, like metal filings, were being pulled by the magnet of the circumnavigating machine around and around the field.
Eventually the apparatus landed and set Eamon free. He was in a state of great agitation. "Wasn't that something," he kept saying to no one in particular. "Wasn't that something!"
After the beast had once again hurled itself into the air and had droned into the distance, Eamon turned to Klara and began to talk excitedly. He told her that everything looked so small from that height he could have held Shoneval in the palm of his hand. "You became so tiny," he said. "I could hardly find you!" He could see that shingles were missing from the roofs of most houses. Sheep were white dots, cows were black-and-white dots. Old Hammacher's rows of corn weren't straight. "I waved back when you waved," he said, carelessly throwing an arm over her shoulder, "but you probably couldn't see that!"
Klara had not waved, she didn't tell Eamon this, but she had not waved. He had mistaken someone else for her. She had become interchangeable. He could not see her. This adventure had nothing to do with her.
She remained silent all the way back to the farm, removed his arm from her waist, walked apart from him, thinking for the first time about the separate paths that unfolded behind them and defined their differences: varying landscapes and the dissimilar patterns of their habits, their family lives. It had occurred to her that it might take years or might be impossible altogether to fully comprehend or untangle the complexities of their unrelated pasts. Despite the briefness of their lives, the similarity of the roads they walked each day, the weather patterns they shared, his mind held thoughts she might not even be aware of, never mind interpret. And now this seductive apparatus, fully embraced by him, utterly rejected by her. She felt that if she touched his hand and spoke now, Eamon might not have been able to hear her, the remembered furious noise of the flying machine cooling the warmth of her fingers and erasing each word she would have said.
In the middle of August and after many fittings, Klara finished the waistcoat. There had been much discussion with Eamon about whether the braid trim should be black or scarlet until finally Klara was convinced by him that he had, indeed, wanted a waistcoat that was entirely scarlet.
'The evening he came to collect the garment he burst into a room tinted orange by dusk and kissed Klara, first on the neck and then on the soft skin of her inner elbow. She held the coat open for him and he manoeuvred his body into it, then solemnly buttoned the front. The setting sun shone through the window and brought out the red tints in his black hair - even his eyelashes reflected light. Klara had never seen anyone so beautiful.
He grinned at her and opened his arms, but she shook her head. "I just want to look at you," she said.
He walked back and forth across the room with his eyes locked to hers.
Vanity, she thought but this time with admiration. She had lit candles for the previous four weeks to Homobonus, the patron saint of tailors. She had wanted the waistcoat to be flawless.
"It's perfect," said Eamon, laughing, his face illuminated by the sun.
Klara felt as if she were bathing in the copper light that drenched the room, felt that each time she inhaled, her bloodstream became luminous. She was practically suffocated by radiance.
"Eamon," she said, testing his name, the shape of it in her mouth.
He did not answer but walked across the floor toward her, removed the coat, folded it carefully, and placed it on the seat of a ladder-back chair. Then he looked at her shyly, as if there were something of great importance he meant to tell her but couldn't bring himself to say. Stepping closer to Klara, who was made motionless by his nearness, Eamon for the first time tentatively moved his warm hand down the side of her neck, over her collarbone, under the cotton fabric. She was able to see his face become flushed and one vein beating at his temple.
When his fingers grazed her nipple, she gasped and drew back, frightened by the new nerve connections that were like plucked strings resonating in her belly, her inner thighs. "No," she whispered, "I can't . . ."
But his mouth stopped whatever it was she meant to say, and she became aware that he was undoing the buttons on the front of her dress, the clasps of her camisole. Then they were holding each other, locked together, staggering against the chair, which overturned so that the splendid coat lay discarded, a prone torso beside them where they fell on the floor. Klara cried out once, in pain, then felt herself sink into an unrecognizable ache of tenderness. She would remember this forever, this act they called sin, her body boneless, some new vine flowering in her veins. And then when it was over she recalled the afternoon they had skated on the ice, how they had fallen there.
They dressed quietly, avoiding each other's eyes, private in the wake of the experience. Eamon picked up the coat and smoothed it over his arm. Then he reached forward and grasped her hands.
"Is it all right, Klara?"
"Yes," she said, and then more firmly, "yes."
"We'll be married," he said. "We'll get married?"
"My father..."
"He'll live with us . . . we'll live here."
Klara said nothing.
"He'll want what makes you happy," said Eamon. "Whatever makes you happy."
Klara was thinking about the curve of Eamon's shoulders, the fine white skin there, the unfamiliar dark hair she had seen when he had clambered out of the pool toward the aeroplane, how there had been just a glimpse of it when they lay together. Then she had closed her eyes again.
"Would you want to be married to me?" he asked.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, of course." It surprised her now to realize that she'd never, even once, thought about marriage, the future, as if she would be caught in this lush, youthful summer forever. Would she confess this sin? Would Eamon? She didn't want to whisper about it in the dark of the confessional, and she didn't want Eamon whispering about it either.
"We're in love," he was saying, the first time he had used the word. A statement? An excuse?
"Yes," said Klara, moving slightly away from him, then righting chair, the scraping sound of its legs on the floor loud, intrusive. She was alarmed by the sensation of an unfamiliar liquid travelling down her thigh, that and the fact that the chair and all the other familiar objects in the room seemed altered, arbitrary, and out of place though not one thing in the physical world had changed. Then she heard the sound of her father's boots in the woodshed. And his slow, steady progress through the downstairs rooms of the house. He had returned from the neighbouring farm where he had gone to buy some eggs and was calling her name as he passed through the parlour.
"I'm up here," she called back, only then thinking that he might have returned sooner, and that if he had he likely would not have been noticed. "Eamon has come for his coat."
Eamon and Klara exchanged glances, embarrassed by an awareness of a possible discovery. Suddenly Klara was able to imagine the act as if she had been a witness rather than a participant, as if she had stood outside herself and watched the senseless awkwardness of their lovemaking. She felt that she had been ushered by Eamon into a heated adult world where men and women clutched at each other, wrestled, collapsed on the floor. Then the moment passed and they embraced, Eamon burying his face in the warmth of Klara's neck.
But the outer world was not to be ignored. "Come down," Dieter Becker was calling. "Come down and bring Silent Irish with you. There's news. War has been declared."
(c) Jane Urquhart 2001