Free Memoir From Antproof Case by Mark Helprin Page A

of Bruch's Opus 46. Father Bromeus, always a literalist, made me compare the two scores. To adapt the work for the piano she had added a great deal, subtracted much, and varied the tempo quite often, but the soul of the piece was still in it, and it was just as beautiful, or more.
    I still had not seen her, but it hardly mattered, for the way she played went straight to my heart, as if we could communicate only through the high messengers of the spirit that, one hopes, remain after death.
    But as precisely attuned as she was to the most refined apprehension of the world and to questions of purpose and ultimate disposition, she was also a girl of sixteen, and therefore, mischievous, ambitious, and charming, although I did not quite understand her youthful charm, thinking of her as an older woman.
    The first time I saw her ... and if I close my eyes I can remember the day, the hour, and the feel of Alpine sun against my face ... was in the highest meadow we had, as we were bringing in the hay, in August of nineteen hundred and nineteen.
    It was a sight to see: patients and staff, men, women, boys, and girls, two dozen nationalities and as many neuroses and psychoses, some in odd ethnic costumes, some barely able to move at the high altitude, others laboring like spiders in a windstorm. Brueghel would not have been surprised by the colors—an otherworldly blue sky, and golden sheaves thrown down all around us like the muted but sparkling armor of Achilles, shining calmly in the light of a twirling and levitated sun. Nor would he have been surprised by the expressions of the laborers, which ranged from the cockeyed to the stunned to the intensely fearful. But they were all nice people: I knew them quite well.
    At about eight in the morning a second group had joined us. I had not even noticed them, so busy was I at the work. I stepped to the back of a hay wagon, burdened with four sheaves, to show to anyone in the world who might be watching that I was strong, but I dropped three on the way. Intending to toss into the wagon the one I still held and quickly run back for the others, I threw it so high that it lingered above me for an instant that seemed to empty the air of time.
    And then I turned, because another sheaf had been thrown, and although it did not glide like mine it made a graceful arc and it, too, seemed to hesitate at the top for an unusually long moment.
    Miss Mayevska and I stood not a foot apart, our faces flushed from the early morning sun, the bracing air, and our labor. I had never seen such fine, buoyant, black hair, nor eyes so deeply blue, clearly magnified through gold-rimmed spectacles with whitened edges of ground glass. She was breathing through her mouth, which gave her an expression of expectation and surprise.
    We stood frozen in place for some time, and then she smiled. It was the most exquisite smile I have ever seen, with tiny crescents between mouth and cheek, as in nearly all beautiful women.
    I had no more control of myself than a hart struck deeply by an arrow, and I felt so much like embracing her that I had to do something to prevent my arms from seeking her by themselves, so I spoke, but without knowing what I was saying, and I said, "Oh! Moose Mishevsky. Miss Mishoovsky," and then (she told me much later) my lips moved without making a sound, as if I were a lunatic in an insane asylum.
    I worked near her for the rest of the morning, stealing glances so often that I repeatedly bumped into the hay wagon. I was ravished by the tentative, apprehensive way she moved through the hay, and I could not help but love her for her nonsensical affliction. The only thing wrong with her, the one thing in the world, was that she feared grasshoppers. I had always liked grasshoppers, and loved crickets, but I renounced them forever. Tell me why it is that they put her in an insane asylum because she grew hysterical at the sight of a grasshopper? (She could not even shell peas, because of what a wide pea