What I Share With Lohengrin

I had only just, with some effort, turned my eyes toward the light scattered across the lake when the hand I’d rested on the ground began to itch. A single white butterfly had settled on the back of it, spotless and pure white, unafraid of people, its wings folding quietly still.

“Herman.”

Softly, I’d called his name, tipping my chin toward the butterfly, and Herman’s gaze came trailing slowly after. In that same instant the butterfly flitted off into the pale sky, and I watched the little thing’s wavering flight, vacant.

Without thinking, I turned my eyes back to the spot on my hand where it had rested.

“…”

There, where the butterfly had been, his own hand now lay over mine, as quiet and secret as the soundless beating of its wings. Every nerve in me gathered into that one hand, and I could have sworn I felt a pulse ticking in the back of it.

My heart’s beating far too fast.

I wriggled my fingers, trying to slip my hand free from under his.

“Herman.”
“Mm.”
“I’d rather like to read my book…”

Herman raised an eyebrow, silently asking what was wrong.

“The book I bought earlier. I told you, I mean to read it.”
“Read it, then, all you like. I never said you couldn’t.”
“And how am I supposed to read a book with one hand?”
“I’ll hold the other page for you.”
“What an absurd notion. When I could simply hold it and read on my own.”
“You want to let go of my hand that badly?”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
“Because it’s uncomfortable, of course.”

Whether it was my hand, pinned and unable to move, that felt uncomfortable, or whether it was my own heart, I couldn’t have said…

Either way, it’s uncomfortable.

I tried to shake his hand off mine, but against a Herman this stubborn, this childish, it was hopeless. Unable to shake his hand free or make him budge, I pouted, and Herman, as though bestowing some great favor, laid out his condition.

“Read to me, and I’ll let go of your hand.”

He was no child, and yet here he was, asking to be read to.

“Where’s the sense in that. Just let go.”
“‘Just letting go’ isn’t one of the options. Either I hold your hand, or you read to me.”

Herman shook his head firmly, side to side, making it emphatically clear the matter was out of the question. Then, after a short silence, he was even good enough to explain his reasoning.

“This is the very reason I brought you all the way out here, you see.”
“…”
“So do cooperate, if you’d be so good.”

His hair, swept neatly back, stirred with the motion. A few loosened strands bared their black elegance to the wind, and for some reason my eyes kept drifting to them.

What scent it might carry on the breeze. How it would feel wound around my fingers. What expression Herman wore just then. A strange curiosity of that sort welled up in me.

Wouldn’t it feel just like this, to come face to face with the Ring of the Nibelung from the opera we’d seen that day? The kind of thing that never lets you go once your eyes have fallen on it, that stirs some strange longing to life.

“…I’ll read to you.”
“Hm?”
“The book. I said I’ll read it to you.”

Which was my way of telling him he could let go of my hand now.

Herman stared at me a while, then, with a look of open reluctance, drew the hardbound volume from the basket and held it out. I took it at once and spread the pages wide, as though I meant to bury my face in them.

I tried to keep my eyes on the book, but the letters rippled like waves. The lake lay so perfectly calm; I couldn’t fathom why my own head was in such a whirl. For no good reason I skimmed the cover once, Lohengrin, the Knight of the Swan, then turned to the story itself.

“Elsa, the young Lady of Brabant, stood weeping alone as she gazed at the mist drawn low over the lake. Ever since her father’s death, her half-brother Friedrich had branded her a witch, seeking to seize the throne for himself.”

I wondered whether my voice was even coming out properly. It was the first time I’d read aloud, I think, since I was seven, and somehow it felt like a punishment, or perhaps like schoolwork. Either way, it was hardly a thing I could manage unruffled in front of Herman Ernst.

The whole situation embarrassed me no end, and Herman went on staring at me, fixed and unblinking.

It’s only a few words read aloud — so why?

I knew it well enough. I was doing nothing so strange, only reading a book aloud. And yet to have my voice brim into that hushed space was almost more than I could bear, all the more so because its only listener was Herman Ernst.

Even so, I read on without stopping. How much time slipped by that way, I couldn’t say. At some point I found my attention pouring into the people of the book rather than into Herman.

“Elsa sought a knight who would fight to prove her innocence, but not one came forward. Not a soul would believe she was innocent.”

And only after reading that passage did I understand why the book had drawn me in so deeply.

Because I know all too well what it is to have no one believe you.

Held fast by that one line a while, I steadied my voice and read on. I had seen the opera before and knew the story well enough, yet here and there the words snagged in my throat like a fishbone.

Before the despairing Elsa, a knight in silver armor appeared, and swearing to fight for her, he laid down a single condition.

“Do not ask my name, nor who I am. That is the one condition on which we may be together.”

Reading the knight’s line just as it was written, I glanced at Herman without thinking. He lay stretched at an angle across the white cloth, one arm propped beneath his head; I hadn’t noticed, but he had likely been watching me that way the whole while.

“…”
“…”

In those woods, with not a soul about, there were only the two of us, he and I. With a soft rush the wind rose and turned a page, and Herman watched it a moment, then set the page back the way it had been.

“Keep reading.”
“…”
“It’s nice to hear.”

His throat stirred slowly, and with it came that low voice, hushed and still and unhurried. My eyes had chased the movement on instinct; I pulled them away in a hurry and hunted out the passage I’d been reading a moment before.

In what voice I read after that, I have no memory.

The mysterious knight who went out to duel for Elsa won his victory in the end, and she pledged him her eternal love. What came after, I knew well.

As time passed, Elsa grew to doubt the man who would tell her nothing at all. Swayed by the whispers of her sister-in-law Ortrud, who had come to the wedding, she asked him at last for his true name. And the man, revealing himself as Lohengrin, vanished all at once, the price of a promise she had failed to keep.

“After the man she loved had gone, Elsa walked the lakeshore each day, searching for the shadow of a swan. But never again could she meet him.”

By the time I read that last line, I found I had somewhere along the way sunk into a mournful, lingering ache. So much so that I couldn’t even bring myself to close the book, and lingered helplessly on that final page.

“Tsk. I don’t care for it.”

Herman’s voice broke in abruptly, ringing close at my ear.

“What?”
“No — I simply can’t make sense of it.”

He snatched the book from my hands and tapped the last line I’d read, as though that were the very part he couldn’t abide.

“Surely a woman may ask the name of the man she’s to marry before the wedding. What’s so momentous in that, that he goes vanishing off like mist.”
“…”
“Did this man even love Elsa to begin with?”

Herman held forth with heat, as though thoroughly caught up in the book. And there was not a thing wrong in what he said.

And yet I can’t quite bring myself to agree with him.

To one person, that condition might be nothing more than a name easily given, a standing one could hold up anywhere without shame. To another, it might be the one thing that could never, ever be spoken, and this, now, I understood all too well.

“Better off, if anything. If a man would leave over nothing more than being asked who he is, then it’s better never to have begun at all.”
“I can’t deny it. But still…”
“But still.”
“There are things in this world that come to you no matter how you try to bar the door against them.”
“Such as?”
“Spring. Tears. Partings. Love. Things of that sort.”

In an instant Herman’s eyes narrowed, and one corner of his mouth tugged faintly upward. Having spent a fair while at his side these past months, I had come to know that expression well enough.

That face all but said, “Well, well, look at that.” It was the look he wore when he’d been dumbfounded, or caught off guard, or left without a comeback, or simply amused.

There it is again.

Once again the man had come a step closer. For whenever Herman Ernst wore that look, the distance between us shrank by a single stride.

“Um, we—”

I turned my head away in a hurry, then pointed toward the lakeshore, and Herman shifted his gaze, following the tip of my finger. Somewhere a bird cried out, and certain I had to say something, anything, at once, I cast my eyes about and blurted the first thing that came to me.

“Shall we go hunt for the treasure?”