“Poor boy,” she said, keeping up the illusion that he spoke of someone else. “I wish I had had him in my schoolroom.”
“You were five years old at the time,” he said. “All new pupils in a boys’ school are vulnerable to bullying. It is not even frowned upon. It is considered part of a boy’s education. School is meant to toughen him, to bring out the brute in him so that he will be able to survive and thrive in a man’s world. Bullying is something boys take from above and give below. It is a system that works beautifully well. Our society is founded upon it. The strong rise to the top and rule our world. The weaker find a useful place in the middle. The weakest are destroyed, but they were useless anyway. The child of my story was the very weakest. He was a timid, puny, pretty, frightened little boy.”
Anna leaned slightly forward and began to reach out one hand toward him, but she returned it to her lap to clasp the other. His story was only partly told.
“I refused to be destroyed,” he said. “I discovered a stubbornness in myself even while everything I tried—boxing, fencing, rowing, running—resulted only in failure and ridicule. I tried harder—and harder. And I survived. Perhaps I would have clawed my way up into the lower part of that middle group by the time I left boyhood behind. I was the heir to a wealthy dukedom, after all, and that would command some respect. But then something happened. A life changer. When I was walking back to school alone one day during my second to last year, I saw an elderly Chinese gentleman in a bleak and barren empty space between two buildings. He was dressed as I am now, even down to the bare feet.”
She raised her eyebrows while he paused and smiled, a distant look in his eyes.
“I stood and watched him for . . . oh, perhaps half an hour,” he said. “He must have known I was there, but he gave no sign, and I was unaware of anyone or anything except him. I cannot really describe it to you, Anna. I can only show you. Shall I?”
“Yes.” She slid along the bench to set one shoulder against the wall beside the window, and hugged her elbows with her hands while he got to his feet and went to stand in the middle of the floor. He pressed his palms together prayer-fashion and closed his eyes. She watched him breathe slowly for perhaps a whole minute, and she knew that he was somehow going away from her and into himself. He moved his neck in slow circles, first in one direction, then in the other.
She was afraid, Anna realized, though that was not quite the right word. It was more awe that she felt. She was in the presence of the unknown, of something strange and exotic, and it was embodied in the man she had married less than a month ago. It occurred to her that he was perhaps forever beyond her understanding. Yet she yearned toward him with a love that was almost physical pain.
And he moved—in ways so totally beyond anything she had ever experienced that all she could do was watch and hug her elbows.
He used the whole of the floor area. But the movements were slow, exaggerated, stylized. At first she thought they were simple moves, imposing no great demands upon his body. But then she could see that they made great demands indeed, for no body could be naturally as supple, as graceful, as precise in its movements without a great deal of practice and pain. She could see the stretch of arms and legs and body, the impossible arch of spine, the unwavering balance. His feet never once left the floor at the same time, but he could twist his body, extend the sole of each foot in turn toward the ceiling, his legs a straight line with only a small bend in the knee of the lower one. But in truth she did not observe verbally. It would have been impossible to capture in words the grace, the control, the power, the athleticism, the strength, the sheer beauty of what she watched for endless minutes.
It was lovelier, more moving than any dance she had ever watched, including the waltz. But it was not a dance. The movements were far too slow, and they were performed to a melody that was all his own—or to a silence that sang with an unbearable sweetness.
It was not a performance she watched. He was unaware of her presence.
And then he stopped as he had begun, and after a few moments he came back across the room toward her, moved his cushion, and sat cross-legged before her again, his knees touching the floor.