by Arthur Japin
If I were just a bit more courageous, she told herself, if only I dared to jump onto that merry-go-round one more time, then I’d get back in control of the words again. But more and more often, they slipped out of her hands, running circles around all those strange ideas inside her head.
• • •
Just as furiously, the market’s big clock spun back and forth. The hand shot over the dial that formed the heart of the flower auction as the auctioneer, just as quickly, called out each lot number and the bids for the different consignments of flowers that passed by unrelentingly. The buyers sat, two by two, on a steep stand opposite the auction clock. There were Dutch farmers with faces as round as cheeses, but also dealers from the Middle East, some in turbans and others with black velvet skullcaps. You saw Chinese, and a black man in a blue djellaba was just visible through the thick cigar smoke of two Cubans in army uniforms in the row below him. A place of honor was reserved for the Vatican envoy, who came once a week to purchase flowers for all the altars of the Catholic world and today had set his mind on calla lilies and bargain-priced snow-white petunias. The squat Mediterranean priest had to share his seat with a gigantic Scandinavian woman who leapt up every time something that appealed to her came by, bending forward dangerously to bellow at the auctioneer.
“I want it all,” she yelled, “all of it, the whole lot!” The other bidders looked up in annoyance and forgot about the telephones they had held pressed to their ears all morning to ask their mothers back home which scent they wanted to fill the country’s bedrooms and living rooms that evening.
At the very top of the stand, behind the last row of bidders, a guide explained the system to Jan, his daughter, and his guest. The lower the price of a consignment fell, the more people wanted it.
Gala wasn’t listening. The rhythm of the clock and the calling of the prices formed a cadence in her head and gave her thoughts something to latch onto. In the falling price of carnations she recognized a Catullian meter: “Passer mortuus est meae puellae,”* she began, and took a few steps away from the others to try to concentrate. Passer mortuus est … dancing sounds that meant nothing more to her than little gifts to please her father.
To avoid any distractions, she stared down at the floor, where, from her child’s perspective, she discovered something peculiar that the adults didn’t seem to have noticed. Beneath the benches ran a gutter, as steep as the stand itself. The men and women sat above it on iron grills, through which they dropped all the things they no longer had any use for. From left and right, spilled coffee trickled down along with brown cigarette butts, disposable cups and balls of paper, pieces of stale bread and bits of eel skin. Everything fell into the broad groove and descended to the depths. Who knows, maybe the men and women were so scared of wasting their valuable time that they even defecated there, like cows in a cowshed. There was a whole battery of these sewers, one under each column of seats, and water flowing down them carried away all the rubbish. They were tall slides that you couldn’t see the end of. Water was constantly gurgling down the steep gutters, water with its own tempo, gushing water with its own rhythm, interrupted by the splash of falling trash. This wasn’t like any meter Catullus ever wrote, and Gala got stuck in the middle of the third line of the second stanza.
It was as if she could feel the blood squeezing through the veins in her temples. No wonder the words have let me down, she thought. There are too many of them, and now there’s a blockage. She could feel them jostling even trying to get through first.
“It’s just a game,” Gala repeated the words her mother had used to comfort her after the pastor and his wife left. “Daddy plays his games, and he’s a worse loser than any kid I know.”
Jan had forbidden Gala from going to the evening performance of the circus, especially after hearing why she was so keen.
“Of course,” he growled, “a clown is all this household needs. Your mother trains the dogs and the monkeys, but I’m the ringmaster. I’d rather be in charge of something with a little more class, but it’s my cross and I’ll bear it as elegantly as I can. When I step into the cage, I will be obeyed, and anyone who thinks otherwise will feel the whip.” Hearing himself rage like this cheered him up so much that the smile returned to his lips. “That’s how a lion gets the best out of its cubs, by biting them in the scruff of the neck and shaking them till they squeal. A godforsaken circus, that’s what it is, dammit, and the next time someone comes to visit, I’m going to charge admission.”
In bed Gala heard the distant, festive music. Her mother lay down next to her to read to her, but stayed there for a while after she had finished.
“I usually let Jan win,” she said suddenly to her daughter, calling her husband by his first name as if discussing him with a friend. “And when he struts around with a big smile because he thinks he’s the best, that he’s got the sweetest wife and the smartest kids, I see that as my reward. The winner isn’t the little boy with the trophy, but the person who gets to present it. It’s like that with the poems in your head too. They’re the prizes in a big game. They’re yours. Daddy would love to have them, but he has to earn them first. When you feel like it, you can hand them out, but remember, you can keep them back as well. And the circus, ah, sweetheart … It’ll come back next year.”
Finally her father came to say goodnight as well. With his back to her, he looked out of the window, listening to the music in the distance.
“I’ll have to get them to explain that to me in the hereafter,” he said pensively, “how people can laugh at bloody clowns.”
Something went badly wrong inside Gala’s head. She felt it happening while the big auction clock showed the flowers diminishing in value second by second. She listened to the water in the gutters. The words flowed together meaninglessly. They swirled around, then suddenly disappeared into the depths as if being sucked down a plug hole. She had no time to try to recapture the poems her father had drilled into her; it was all she could do to keep her own language under control.
Just then Jan beckoned her. The tour went on, but he and Professor Dogberry hung back, as if expecting something from her. It was time for him to show her off. He wouldn’t be able to; Gala felt that clearly enough. She ran up to him and grabbed his hand. The men smiled. Jan lifted her up for a moment, the way he always did. Gala didn’t play along. She tugged at his arm and opened her mouth to warn him, but the words on the tip of her tongue made no sense. She immediately let go again. She stood quiet and hunched over to avoid attracting any attention and, as soon as Jan had stepped onto the catwalk with Dogberry, she ran back to the stand.
She had no prizes left to hand out. The only thing she could do for her father now was spare him her defeat. But not a second later and her father was following her.
“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” he called out, worried. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”
In a panic, Gala ducked under the stand and crawled farther away under the benches when she saw his legs approaching. He bent down and looked for her in the shadows under the iron grills. She didn’t know how she would ever be able to explain her strange behavior to him. She would rather die than have to tell him about the chaos inside her head. She crawled away farther until one of the refuse gutters blocked her path.
“All of it,” she heard the gigantic blonde call out to the auctioneer. “I’m up for everything. I want it all!!!”
When Gala sat down on the slide, she felt the cold water soak up through her clothes. With a shiver, she let herself go. Passing beneath the feet of the bidders, she slid toward darkness. She dropped quickly at first, but soon the gutters curved and headed off to the left and the right. With gentle curves, they seemed to carry Gala crisscross through the market, where the magnificent flowers were lit by the flickering light of flashing cameras. In the middle of the big shed, she shot over the shunting yard between the little trains, touching the bulging cargo with her face and hands and releasing all the smells. Green and yellow, magenta, purple, scarlet
and blue petals wafted up into the air. More and more petals dislodged from their stems and mingled with buds and blossoms to form patterns of such intensity that the girl was forced to close her eyes. At that moment, it was as if she’d gone flying off the end of the slide and burst through everything she knew, while all the words in her brain exploded together with the flowers.
“Ahhhhh!” the girl screamed with relief. “That’s how they fly all across the world!”
And through that whirlwind of color, Gala Vandemberg entered my dreams for the first time.
She lay motionless in the hospital bed. There were small bald spots in her thick black hair where electrodes had been attached to record her brain activity on a long sheet of paper that kept rolling out of a machine.
According to the doctors, cerebrovascular accidents were very rare in children her age and usually caused either by a congenital weakness in a capillary or a small clot in the bloodstream. The stroke had taken place in the left side of Gala’s brain and might have been brought on by an epileptic fit. Until Gala regained consciousness and was able to tell them exactly what she had felt, there was little more they could say about it.
The first day her father and mother sat by her bed holding hands, too tense to cry. They were silent, afraid that even one word of superficial solace would reveal the depth of their despair. After Gala had made it through the first night without complications—long hours in which Jan and Anna were obsessed by the demented scratching of the EEG recording the uncontrolled activity in Gala’s temporal lobe—Jan managed to convince his wife to go home: the other two girls needed her love as well. But he himself refused to leave Gala alone for even a moment. For two days he sat up straight next to her bed without closing his eyes. He ran every meter of paper that came out of the machine through his hands in the hope of gaining some insight into what his child was thinking. When he suddenly stood up on the morning of the third day, the printout was up to his knees. He left the room and took the bus into town, where he strode into a party shop. Just over an hour later he astonished the nursing staff by reappearing in the neurology department with an enormous, bright yellow flower and a red clown’s nose.
“Surely you don’t think,” he announced, “that Lazarus would have changed his mind if Jesus hadn’t convinced him that were still some laughs to be had somewhere.” Whereupon he reentered Gala’s room, kissed her gently on the forehead, and whispered in her ear that she should hurry up because Auguste the Clown was waiting for her. Less than two minutes later, he fell asleep on the chair for the first time in fifty-six hours, feeling calm and snoring loudly under his clown nose.
For another three long days he stayed by her side, as doleful and lost as a comedian without an audience. Despite his wife’s and the doctors’ entreaties, he refused to take off the clown nose, even in the presence of visitors he would normally bend over backward to impress. Finally, when Obadiah Dogberry arrived with the head of Jan’s faculty to say a polite goodbye on the eve of his return to Yale, the two men discovered the professor of art history at his daughter’s bedside, deep in conversation with her favorite bear, which waved a cheerful paw at the two men in three-piece suits. Jan ignored all their questions, even when his boss snapped that he should show some respect for his position and get ahold of himself. When the visitors were about to leave, however, he did say his goodbyes, in the form of three big squirts from the yellow flower on his lapel.
Soon after, the most erratic lines on the EEG calmed. Gala’s breathing grew stronger and the specialists assured her parents that she had survived the critical stage and would definitely recover, provided she had absolute rest. Both parents, but Jan in particular, were strongly advised against staying in her room, and, when that proved insufficient, their presence was simply forbidden. In the end Jan nodded, removed the nose, and shuffled off, leaning on his wife’s arm so heavily that the porter took him for a patient and refused to call a taxi without authorization from the ward sister.
The next morning Gala opened her eyes. She had been unconscious for almost a week, but it felt like no more than twenty seconds. The first thing she noticed was something black in the corner of the room. The sun was shining on the closed curtains so brightly that, to her sensitive eyes, it looked like a white glow emanating from the fabric, and yet there, a little to the right of the middle, was a spot as black as ink. When she was able to move her eyes, the spot moved with them, and when she was finally able to move her head again, she discovered that it remained in the same place in her field of vision no matter where she looked, always off to one side, so that the edges were always a little vague. At first, it seemed to be moving, undulating, as if the defect were still fluid, but eventually it calmed down and solidified as a rectangle, a small black window that was constantly hiding part of whatever Gala happened to be looking at.
Oh no, she thought, when she began to suspect what had happened, how terrible for Daddy!
Taking Gala in her arms—her daughter still unable to move a single muscle from the neck down—her mother was overcome by emotion. She smothered her with kisses and was reluctant to loosen her grip when Jan wanted to hug his little girl as well. He squeezed her tight, fiercely, without saying a word, and, when he finally let go, it was only to grab her again, briefly, as if he had forgotten something. Then he laid her back on the pillows. He carefully arranged her limp arms by her sides, but was still at a loss for words. Even after they’d sat down and her mother had told her how they’d got through the last few days, Jan remained silent with one hand in his pocket, fingering the flower and the nose, the nose and the flower, unsure whether or not to pull them out. The flower. The nose. He didn’t do it. When the duty nurse came half an hour later to tell them they had to leave, he bent over Gala.
“So, little lady, congratulations,” he said in a strict voice, “you’ve outdone yourself once again. You’ve let me down so many times, I didn’t think you could possibly come up with a new way to disappoint me.”
It earned him a poke in the side from his wife and, a little later, in the corridor, an indignant remark from the nurse, but in her room Gala was beaming. She realized that it was only a matter of time before everything would be back to normal.
One fine day a professor doing his rounds with a group of female students came up to her bed. The students bemoaned the fate of the pretty little girl being kept in semidarkness and took turns at testing her reflexes, some of them pinching her hand or cheek in encouragement while doing so. The professor raised her eyelid and shone a penlight into her pupil. In long, well-turned sentences, he reassured the young women. When they heard that Gala would probably make a complete recovery, apart from a minor impairment of her vision, several of them sighed so deeply that the top buttons of their well-fitted white coats popped open.
Gala remained like that, motionless in bed, for weeks, for months on end, alone in the bare room. And always that dark window was floating in a corner of her consciousness. There were times when she was scared of it. Scared perhaps that it might get bigger, but also scared that creatures of the night might unlock it and crawl through it to sit down on her bed, knowing she was powerless to defend herself.
But the longer she lay there and the clearer it became that she was not going to regain any more of her eyesight, the more curious she grew about what was actually behind that window. As long as you don’t know what something is, thought Gala, it could be anything. On sunny days, for example, when the nurses had cranked up her bed to give her a better view of the outside world, Gala virtually ignored the activity outside on the street corner. Instead she was all the more fascinated by the part of the panorama hidden behind her blind spot. On gray days, she imagined that there, where she couldn’t look, the water of a sunny pond glittered, and when she missed her mother or wanted to play with one of her sisters, she simply fantasized that they were there with her, but playing hide-and-seek in the one place she could never find them.
In this way, Gala was seldom alone when confined to
bed during the long months of her convalescence. Whenever she wanted to leave her prison, she escaped through her secret hatch to wherever she wanted to go. The things that hid from her there almost always seemed more beautiful and more exciting than anything in her field of vision. And, eventually, just thinking of what she couldn’t see was enough to console her for the things she could.
This story is light.
In the telling it must be full of the effects to which Gala’s eyes are so sensitive. Our dreams are composed of nothing else. From the radiance of a candle to hallucinogenic halogen: light sets images on fire. Each ray casts a magic glow and is a source of wonder, adding or erasing, enriching or diminishing, emphasizing or dissolving. It makes fantasy plausible, renders the grayest reality translucent, and shimmers like a mirage on the horizon. Light is the tool I have used to create worlds and my own life. Who wouldn’t seek to postpone its dying?
* Spirits do exist; death does not end all things. (Propertius)
† Parrots make a different sound from quails. (Erasmus)
* Give when the time or situation demands. (Cato the Elder)
* Children are children, and do childish things.
* My mistress’s sparrow is dead.
1976