The Coast (2)

 3.

That afternoon, I drove my Renault to the school in the nearby town to pick up my daughter Sofia. There used to be a school in our village, but as farms and fisheries closed, forcing people to the capital to work, schools and banks and markets were disappearing across the island.  

I waited in the gravel turnaround outside the old wood building, watching the students emerge. Sofia appeared, with her backpack and ponytail and serious mien, separating out from the others. Sometimes she opened the car door and flounced in without a word, punching on the radio as her backpack slumped to the floor. Other times, as today, I got a civil greeting, even a smile. 

Music flooded the car, some clamorous pop hit. Sofia rolled her eyes and pushed the button to the island’s only other music station, which proffered more of the same. She was already deep into alternative stuff, and we joked mercilessly about the local stations’ hokey deejays and cliched playlists. Still, music was a constant with her, and so the radio had to be on. For her fourteenth birthday I’d bought her a ukulele she already played well, and for her fifteenth she knew it would be a guitar. 

We sped up the winding coast road, sun sparkling on the water, the windows down for the first time this year. 

“Paul, is it too cold to swim yet?”

“You’d freeze your butt off.”

 “Lotte swims all year round.”

“I know. I never understood that kind of thing.” Lotte was her German teacher. 

“She invited me to swim with her in December.”

“But you didn’t.”

She grinned. “But I might next winter.” 

“Isn’t there enough pain and suffering in the world without jumping into the icy Baltic when you don’t have to?”

Sofia had come to live with me six years earlier. It had taken a while, but we’d found ways to be comfortable together. On school vacations we’d traveled to Oslo, Barcelona, Cyprus. Sometimes we bicycled around the island together.

I slowed for the turnoff to the narrow road that led through forest to the farmhouse. “Your aunt Margit is coming Saturday,” I said.

“I know. She wrote me.”

Filtered sunlight flashed through the thick trees. Rihanna crooned on the radio. 

A deer emerged, from our left, thirty feet in front of the car, bounding across the road. I slammed on the brakes and veered into the empty oncoming lane, just missing it. Then a second deer, smaller, trailing the first, appeared and smacked the left front fender of the car. I heard the thud. Sofia screamed. 

I came to a halt, a sickening feeling flooding my stomach. 

I always worried about this. It happened constantly on the island. There was little defense but to drive carefully and stay alert, which wasn’t enough.

We turned and looked back down the road. The deer had dropped to its knees. “Noooooo!”, Sofia keened. 

Slowly the deer clambered back up, wobbly-legged. It stood still for a moment, then ambled on across the road and disappeared into the woods. 

“I think it’s okay,” I whispered. 

Sofia turned off the radio. For the rest of the drive home, she stared stonily out the window.

I pulled the car into the unpaved driveway of the farmhouse. Getting out, I saw that the fender was buckled where the deer had collided with it. 

As we reached the door, Sofia muttered, “I’ve got math.” 

“Okay. I’ll get some food together in a while.”

Still shaken, I walked out to the old barn that housed my studio. 

I’d come to the island eight years earlier for what safety it might afford me. At the time I’d felt I had strong reasons to make myself hard to find. This had to do with my connection to Russell, as had so many things in my life. I’d entered the EU through France, then arrived here by way of a ferry from Poland. 

In fact it was Russell who’d first told me about this island. Wildly beautiful, she’d said. She had spent several weeks here when she was young, part of a prisoner exchange that had brought her father and his six-year-old daughter from Hungary to the West. 

The West, as they used to call it. 

The handoff, she said the Americans had called  it. 

The island was as she’d described, with rolling fields, dense forests and crashing coastlines. I’d come upon the farmhouse the year after I’d arrived. A half-abandoned structure of wood and straw and stone, it lay a half mile off the main road to the village and the sea. It was cheap and isolated, and I went for it. It took half a year’s work to make it habitable and to convert the barn into a studio. When Sofia arrived, I installed central heating in the house, though I still relied upon a pot bellied stove in my studio. The farmland I leased to a neighbor who grew sorghum he mowed down every August, as fall arrives early here. It brought in enough to pay for the repairs and the taxes on the place. The rest I took care of with commissions and royalties from my earlier work as a composer and lyricist. 

I opened the door to the old barn, rousting a pair of doves from the eaves. Light from tall north-facing windows illuminated the stove, a day bed, a few chairs, and a desk with a laptop and a printer. A Yamaha electric piano with a full keyboard stood against one wall, a bank of mixing equipment beside it among a tangle of power strips. In the corner, a bookshelf overflowed with mostly used volumes and folders filled with sheet music. A poster for a film I’d written music for long ago leaned against the wall. Propped on a shelf above it stood my lone Grammy, for a song I’d co-written. 

The windows provided a view beyond the sorghum field of a round, chalk-white church, a style native to the island, whose bells broke the silence every Sunday morning. 

At the desk, I opened an email from Sofia’s aunt Margit, confirming her flight arrival on Saturday. Margit, a social worker in Budapest, came for a month every spring to help out. Then I opened and downloaded my latest ASCAP royalty statement for album sales and airplay, a steadily diminishing figure since I’d left California.

Out of curiosity, I opened a travel site and began to look at flights leaving the following week. There was one direct to LA from the capital city, two that connected through Amsterdam or London. 

I shut the laptop and went to the house to start dinner. 

I hadn’t done much cooking here until Sofia arrived. There were a few restaurants and cafes on our end of the island, fewer still that stayed open in winter. But with the local farms mutating into suppliers for the capital’s trendy restaurants, fresh vegetables, meats, pastas, breads, and catch from the ocean made cooking worth the effort. Sometimes Sofia helped me. The previous winter we’d taught ourselves how to make an impressive variety of pizzas. 

While she labored at math homework, or whatever she was doing in her room, I worked up a pasta primavera. She was vegetarian, though she’d recently ventured cautiously into the world of fish. When food was ready, I called out to her, twice. Finally she slid into her chair at the round kitchen table and dug into her plate.

“How is it?” I asked.

“I’ve had worse.” 

“Thanks a lot.”

We tore off thick clumps of dark bread from the village bakery. 

“How would you feel if I was gone for a couple of weeks while Margit is here?” 

“Where to?”

“California.” 

“Look.” She turned her IPhone to me to show a selfie of her with pasta sauce on her face. 

“Lovely,” I said. 

She was quiet for a while. 

“It’s just a possibility,” I said. “I don’t know yet.”

“Why go?”

“Somebody I knew died.”

“A funeral?”

“A ceremony.”

She would have known who it was if I mentioned her name, for they were related. But I saw no reason to disclose the news, at least not yet. Sofia might have encountered Russell as an infant at most, but she wouldn’t remember. 

“Will you be back for my birthday?”

“Of course.” 

I cut two slices of a carrot cake and ladled whipped cream on hers. 

“I could maybe shop for a guitar while I was there,” I said.

That evening, sunset erupted on the horizon in a riot of hues. Seagulls and crows wheeled past each other over the field like patterns in an Escher drawing. 

“Sofia, come!” I called. 

She came outside and we stood together watching the drama.  

“You think that deer is okay?” she said.

I put my arm around her. “Yeah.”

She nodded emphatically, as if willing it to be so.

I was Sofia’s father in biological fact. But I hadn’t been expected to be involved in raising her. Her mother, a cousin of Russell’s, had taught Slavic languages at Berkeley. Lena was in her late thirties and had wanted a child to raise by herself without the involvement of a man. I was to provide the necessary means. It was decided we should try and do it the old-fashioned way, which wasn’t difficult, as Lena was lovely. Candles, a bottle of wine, a rented hotel room, and it transpired effortlessly. When Sofia was six, Lena was diagnosed with leukemia. After she died, Sofia was sent to Budapest to live with her aunt Margit and her husband. It didn’t work out well, and one summer Sofia came to visit me here. She never left.

Odd, the turns that life takes. I didn’t mind in some ways. It lent purpose to my self-exile, if I could call it that. It was also burdensome and tiring. On occasions we quarreled. Other times I felt overmatched by her burgeoning teenage femininity and its mysteries. Yet in the end, we managed. She chose to call me Paul rather than Dad, perhaps as a way of honoring her mother’s original intent, though I had no idea what she knew about that. 

She was an American kid, which had been part of the problem in Budapest. Now she spoke the language of people here better than I did, with a slight regional accent, I was told. And English, and Hungarian. And she was studying German in school.  

At some point we were standing in total darkness. Sofia lifted my hand from her shoulder and hurried back into the house. 

4.

That Saturday, I drove to the airport to pick up Margit. Sofia didn’t want to come. Still skittish from the collision with the deer, I took the coast road that circled the forest to the little air terminal at the west end of the island. 

The idea of California was growing on me. The stretch of coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco was where most of my life had happened. May was beautiful there too, the time of the wildflowers. Or was that April? I couldn’t remember. 

Surely the trouble that had driven me away eight years earlier had faded by now. I imagined renting a car, doing some things in LA. See my music publisher, a few old colleagues. Usually when you show your face, some work shakes loose. I’d look up my best friend from youth, a painter who lived north of the city. Then I’d continue on up the coast, visit some old haunts. Maybe skip the “intimate farewell gathering” in the end, commune with Russell in my own way.

If I left the island later the coming week, it would give me time. But I still didn’t know if Margit would be willing to take care of Sofia alone.

Russell’s real name was Jazmin Kis. A fabulous moniker.  

But she wanted to be Russell.

Not long after we’d met, we were at the San Francisco Art Institute for a group photography show she was in with other students. We were unimaginably young: she twenty-one, I five years older. Afterwards we went to City Lights and poked around downstairs among the discount titles. We ended up in a booth at a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown. 

“Why Russell?”

“Bertrand Russell. Leon Russell. Russell sprouts.”

“You mean brussel sprouts.”

“That’s the joke, Paul.” She laughed and shook her head. “When we first came here and I was learning English, I thought it was russell sprouts.”

“It’s a man’s name.”

“Well, I like men. Some, anyway. You.” 

She pulled back the sleeve of her jean jacket and poured us both tea.

“We can be other than what we are given to begin with,” she said, setting the teapot down and staring at it. “Sometimes it’s the only choice.”

Afterwards we walked up the steep hill to her apartment on Vallejo, holding hands as the stars came out.

Now the obituary claimed she was dead. 

I had to do something.

Approaching the one-story island airport, I could see the little twin-engine commuter plane rocking low over the ocean, hear the clatter of the propellers.

At the arrivals gate, Margit appeared, rolling her suitcase. Round face, solid frame, no-nonsense stride. 

She smiled and offered her hand.

“Paul.”