Read When We Danced on Water for Free Online

existence, and he craves the keen and precise observations Margot makes of her quiet, contained world. He is certain he would recognize Sister Beatrice by her triple chins, Sister Agnes by her winking left eye, Sister Anne by the way her ears turn red when she is angry. And the convent cats, as quiet and contained as their surroundings. And the caretakers, first Josep and then Josep Junior, one family of Polish peasants maintaining the convent for nearly seventy years. How little that world has changed from year to year, from season to season.
    There was once a break in the letters, a rupture swallowed up by time, by the envelopes that began to reach him again sometime later. He looks for the gap in the orderly piles of letters, guesses it must be somewhere in the second stack, but of course there is no evidence. It came after a brief reunion in Warsaw in the early 1980s. Both Teo and Margot were out of their element, the elegant hotel at which they met felt natural to neither of them, and their conversation was awkward and distant. Without ever mentioning it, each resolved never to meet again, preferring instead their glorious epistolary relationship. Several times Teo has mentioned the possibility of publishing their correspondence, that scholars and even the general public would find their letters engaging and perhaps important on several levels, but his sister, in her calm, powerful manner, much like a subtle force of nature—a persistent wind that bends trees, rushing water that carves holes in rocks—was adamant about this: not now, not after their deaths, not ever; it would be unseemly and improper, and it was the one thing that could cause her, with enormous sadness and regret, to refrain from communicating with him ever again. So since neither of them could bear this possibility, the idea has always, after being mentioned, been dropped immediately.
    Teo keeps copies of his own side of their correspondence in satchels bound with ribbon stashed on a high shelf in his bedroom. They are less accessible to him than Margot’s letters, but he feels the need to revisit them far less often. Still, lately he has been drawn more and more to both sides of their correspondence, their combined half century of letters: to the elegant, prewar Polish by which they stand loyally, to the chunk of history to which they give witness, to the sheer volume of it all; and to their ability, so lost in the world now, to suggest so much, to tuck meanings into words, to crouch emotions behind mellifluous phrasing, to crunch a mountain of feelings into a mound of pure gold, without ever using an explicit, naked word. They are masters of inference, experts of the long, sly wink.
    There were letters from his side, he remembers, that described and detailed the dances he was creating better than he had done anywhere else, letters from which choreographers and dancers alike would profit greatly. There were letters from her side on the role of the convent in modern life that would serve the Church and its adherents brilliantly, if only one Church scholar were given permission to read them. World events march through their letters as if their correspondence were an immense stage in a theater with only two seats. Teo and Margot observe, they comment. Sometimes they rage, sometimes they weep; occasionally they disagree, but always courteously. On the rare occasion they are in open conflict, both are miserable and seek to resolve their differences quickly.
    More than anything, they are respectful of one another. Although they held forth on theological issues in the mid–1950s and again thirty-five years later, Teo has never questioned Margot’s abandonment of Judaism in favor of Catholicism and life in a convent. Margot has never asked her brother about the war. She has noted, with wry amusement, that their collective contribution to populating the world has been abysmal, “and we should both be chided for that,” but nothing