by John Gardner
The Princess frowned. “You don’t want me to see the other boxes!”
“Oh, it isn’t that!” the picture exclaimed. But the Princess knew her own voice too well to be fooled.
“That settles it!” said the Princess. She rose quickly and crossed to the door to call a servant and send a message to her driver. The Prince, who had been standing with his hands behind his back, looking at the pictures of nobility on the walls, saw the Princess talking with her servant and came to greet her.
“Are you better, then?” he asked.
“Prince!” she said, giving him a quick, false smile. “I’ve thought of something we must do. Will you help me?”
“Anything at all, my love,” said the Prince, and shifted his eyes to some point above her head, slightly troubled by that smile.
“We must do something to help the poor box-painter,” she said. “There he is, living in abject poverty, though he may well be one of the most brilliant artists in the kingdom!” And she told him her plan.
7
A whisper went through the tavern, and the next thing Vlemk the box-painter knew, the barmaid was leaning down to him, murmuring in his ear. Though he did not quite hear what she said, he turned around and, there at the doorway, saw the man who drove the Princess’s carriage, dressed in all his finery, with the boots that shone like onyx.
Vlemk’s mind was beclouded—he’d drunk a good deal of wine—and he turned to his friends in hopes of judging by their faces what was wanted of him. The poet was asleep with his eyes rolled up; the axe-murderer was staring dully straight ahead, like a man in a trance. “He’s asking to see you,” said the ex-violinist, and jabbed his long finger in the direction of the carriage driver. Vlemk looked up at the barmaid. She nodded.
Slowly, clumsily, Vlemk felt for and found his shoes—which he’d pulled out of because of the pain they gave him—scuffed his feet into them, and struggled to get up out of his seat. The barmaid took his arm, helping him, saying in his ear, “Don’t be afraid! I think it’s something good!” and led him across the room to where the carriage driver waited, aloof and displeased by everything around him—the open mouths, warts, and blemishes of the regulars, the stink of stale whiskey, sickness, and tobacco, the barmaid’s tomcat lying over by the bar on his back, his eyes rolled sideways, waiting for someone to drop food. As Vlemk approached, the driver gave a kind of smile and a bow that were almost obsequious but constrained, full of grim reservations.
“The Princess,” said the driver, “has asked if you might possibly be willing to open your shop.”
Vlemk opened his mouth, put his hand on his chin, and thought deeply.
“She is interested in looking at your work,” said the driver.
After a time, Vlemk nodded. He felt for the top of his head, seeing if his hat was there, then nodded again. He sensed some awful trouble outside the door, but his drunkenness was unable to place it, and so, at length, he nodded again and moved with the driver toward the entrance.
Outside, four carriages were lined up, filled with people. Vlemk removed his hat. The door of the black-and-gold carriage opened, and the Princess leaned out to smile at him. “Hello, Vlemk. I’m sorry—we weren’t sure about your hours.”
Vlemk laughed, then stopped himself, thoughtfully licked his lips, then nodded. “No matter,” he tried to say, then remembered the curse and simply shrugged.
“Would you do us the honor of riding with us?” asked the Princess.
He gazed at her in dismay, looked up and down the street, then helplessly shrugged again. With his hat in his hands he moved toward the carriage and, when he reached it, raised one foot, like a blind man. The driver bent down beside him and guided the foot to the shining brass step, then gently helped him in. He could see nothing inside the carriage—he had a sense of white faces gazing at him like moons—and had no choice but to submit to their kindness as they turned him and aimed his rear end toward the seat beside the Princess. “Thank you,” said the Princess, leaning past him; and the driver closed the door.
“It’s a great honor to meet you again,” said a voice Vlemk faintly recognized. A glowing white hand hung in front of him, and after a moment he understood that he was meant to shake it. Clumsily, he did so, then wiped his hand on his trousers. The carriage smelled of flowers or perfume. Vlemk breathed very shallowly for fear of being sick.
“It’s a fortunate kingdom,” said another voice, “that has artists of such stature and renown!”
“Renown is for gargoyle hackers,” Vlemk said scornfully; but luckily no sound came out. His hands lay on his knees. The Princess’s glove came down gently on the hand to the right. He was puzzled to find it shaking like the hand of a madwoman.
The carriage swayed, soundless as a boat on the water except for the tocking of the horses’ iron shoes on the cobblestones, rhythmical as clocks. Then the sound stopped and, soon after, the swaying also stopped, and the door at Vlemk’s elbow fell open. He caught his breath, but all was well. The driver was extending his hand.
It was while he was climbing the stairs that his mind came back to him. A shock went through him, and he glanced down past his arm at the lords and ladies following him up the steps in all their finery. They were smiling like children at a party, expecting presents, and with a turn of the stomach he realized what it was they’d come for, what it was they wanted to see. Without his willing it, his feet stopped and his left hand clamped tight on the bannister as if never to be moved. The Princess, just behind him, looked up at his face inquiringly, waiting, dark circles under her eyes, and after a moment, touching his beard, wetting his lips, Vlemk continued climbing.
As he lighted the candles in his studio, the box-painter hesitated again, wondering if perhaps he might fool them by keeping the place relatively dark. But it was not to be, for the Prince with the moustache, ever eager to be useful, had found phosphor sticks and was hurrying here and there through the studio finding more candles in their old china dishes and lighting them, one after another. Soon the place was glowing like a room in the palace, and Vlemk knew that all was lost. Slowly, deliberately, he brought the little boxes from their various places—first the shoddily painted boxes with landscapes on them, then the boxes with flowers, then the boxes with cats and dogs—but he knew from the beginning that it would not be enough. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his eyes half closed, like some pot-bellied watchman asleep on his feet, and observed as they admired those shameless betrayals of his gift.
“I had heard …” said the Princess, and let the words trail off.
She seemed to Vlemk very young, very frightened, just an ordinary child, not a Princess whose father, though said to be dying, had powers like a god’s in this kingdom. The Prince with the moustache stood beside her, his hand on her arm, as childlike as the girl, in the painter’s eyes, a cocky, good-looking boy who’d never seen trouble, had no idea—unless he’d gotten it from books or the tales of old servants—that in the streets below there were axe-murderers, people who picked pockets, men who crept like rats through cloakrooms. He could say, he thought—that is, he could manage to impart to them by gestures—that he had no more boxes, that the pictures she’d heard of did not exist. But he saw that again she was shaping the question, opening her mouth to speak; and he did not have it in him, he found, to lie to her. He retained, despite his efforts, too much of that original lunatic vision, the shadowy reality peeking out from behind what she was.
Vlemk the box-painter nodded grimly, and brought out the boxes on which he’d painted all her worst potential. When he’d displayed them he turned curtly and went over to stand with his back to them, looking out the window. It occurred to him briefly that he might jump from it, but he was too old, too familiar with misery to be moved by cheap romance. He heard them whispering. No, they were not pleased.
“How tragic!” someone whispered.
Vlemk nodded grimly and smiled to himself. He had forgotten their talent for self-delusion. He put on a doltish
look, turned back to them, and opened his hands as if to ask, “What do you think?”
“Beautiful! Just beautiful!” said a lady with silver hair. “How much?”
Vlemk ignored her, watching the Princess. Her lips faintly trembled and she shot a quick look at him, something between confusion and anger. Then she looked down again. The picture on the box she was holding in her hand was one he called, privately, “The Princess Considers Revenge.” If anyone had cared to look, it was her mirror image now, the face distorted, short of breath, the lips slightly puffy, the eyes sharp and stupid as an animal’s. Eager to press the scene to its conclusion, Vlemk shrugged so broadly, with a look so unspeakably foolish, that the Princess could not help but look up at him. “What do you think?” he asked again with his hands and arms.
She stared straight at him, guessing, he suspected, that he was putting on some act.
“I don’t like it,” the Princess said. “I don’t think I look like that.”
A stillness went through them all. She had given them permission to despise him.
“It’s true,” said the lady with the silver hair, looking at the box she’d just admired, “it’s not a good likeness, really.”
They looked at each other. Vlemk went on grinning like a fool and waiting. Only the Prince in the moustache seemed not to have noticed what had happened. He was staring with interest at a small, meticulously painted little pill box on which the Princess was shown waking from a dream of terrible debauchery. He turned it slightly—it was no larger around than a coin—making the glaze of the lips catch the light. “I like this one,” he said, and held it toward the Princess, then saw her face.
“You should buy it,” she said, cold as ice.
The poor boy had no notion of what it was he’d done wrong. His hand lowered as if all strength had suddenly drained out of his arm, and he looked again, critically and sadly, at the picture. The fact, Vlemk saw, was that he did like it, that his innocent heart saw no evil in it, and rightly enough, because for him there was no evil there. “I don’t know,” he said, and his innocence was, that instant, just a little corrupted. He compressed his lips, as if he dimly understood himself what it was that was happening to him; but he was weak, without defenses, and after another quick look at the others, put the box back down on the table where he’d found it. “No,” he said, “I guess not. I don’t know.”
The Princess had turned toward the door. She stood thinking, her features completely expressionless, the look of a woman taking pains to hide her thoughts. Her small fingers picked irritably at her clothes. Vlemk the box-painter, who knew every muscle and bone in that lovely young face, was not thrown for a moment. She would turn—she turned—and would reach almost at random for a painted box, almost certainly a landscape—she reached for a landscape—and would hold it up to ask “How much?”
The Princess looked up, seemed to hesitate an instant, as if reading something in Vlemk’s eyes. “How much?” she asked.
Vlemk put on a sad, apologetic look and told her in gestures that unfortunately that one was not for sale. She moved instantly, like a chess player who knows her opponent, putting the box down and picking up another one, not even looking at it. “This one?” she asked sharply.
He must have shown surprise. He covered as quickly as possible; it was better to take her charity than to continue this dangerous game. He raised six fingers, then with one finger and his thumb made a circle the size of the coin with the King on it—an exorbitant price.
Her eyes widened in astonishment, then suddenly she laughed, and then, just as suddenly, she shot him a hard, inquiring look. That too she quickly veiled, lowering her lashes. “Very well, six crowns,” she said, and gestured to her servant, who reached with clumsy haste into his purse.
The lady with silver hair was at once struck by another of his landscapes; a gentleman in a wig found himself drawn to a picture of two dogs. The Prince in the moustache let his eyes wander over in the direction of the picture he’d been taken by, then thought better of it and began to look with studious interest at pictures of flowers. Vlemk waited until everyone was occupied, bending over landscapes, flowers, and animals, then slipped “The Dream of Debauchery” from its place, waited for his moment, slapped the Prince on the arm in the age-old pickpocket’s way, and dropped the little pill box into his pocket.
“How much?” they asked, one after another. “How much?”
Each price he quoted, holding up his fingers, was more outrageous than the last. The Princess eyed him coolly, then went over to stand at the window, lost in thought. When it was time for them to leave, the Princess smiled and said, “Good luck, Vlemk. God be with you, you poor man.”
“A touch!” said Vlemk inside his mind, taking her hand and kissing it. “A touch! I felt it right here, just under my heart!”
8
However, the Princess was not yet rid of those evil-hearted pictures her friend the box-painter had made. Studying the picture that could talk, in her room, she was more and more convinced that her father had been right. It was indeed her true likeness, much as she hoped it might not be. Might not the others, still less pleasing, be equally true to what she was? She tried to summon them up in her mind, but her memory was fuzzy, or if not, some mechanism distorted the image as soon as it came to her, burned it as an image is burned out of clarity when one looks at it in too much light.
“Why did he paint them, I wonder?” she asked aloud one day, standing at her window, talking to herself.
“I’m sure he meant no harm,” said the picture on the box, its voice no louder than the buzzing of a bee.
The Princess tipped her head, not quite turning to the box. After a moment she asked, “Does he hate me, do you think? Is that it?”
“He never spoke of you unkindly, so far as I remember,” said the picture on the box.
“You’re lying,” said the Princess, though in fact she was not sure. For some queer reason she found it harder and harder to know what the image on the box was thinking, even when the tone of voice was most distinctly her own.
“I’m not!” said the picture with a touch of indignation. “The fact is, I never heard him mention you!”
“Well, he certainly must have given me some thought,” said the Princess. “I mean, my face seems to be an obsession with him!”
“Ah!” said the picture. “So you admit that there is indeed some slight resemblance!”
“I admit nothing!” snapped the Princess. “Stop quizzing me!” Quickly, to avoid further argument, she left the room.
But her doubts would not leave her a moment’s peace. Sitting at supper, with the Prince across from her, looking gloomy because he no longer understood her and the time of his visit was nearing its end, the matter between them still entirely unresolved, the Princess, taking a small bite of her roll, would suddenly see Vlemk the box-painter’s image of her eating a piece of chicken with a look of insatiable gluttony, her eyes like a weasel’s. Or walking in the woods, wringing her hands and tossing her hair back again and again, as if to drive away fierce thoughts or deny unfounded charges made by people she had trusted implicitly, she would suddenly see in her mind’s eye, more real than the ferns and trees around her, Vlemk the box-painter’s image of her tearing at her cheeks with her fingernails, gone mad.
One night her father the King came into her room, something he had never done before. When the door was closed behind him and his servants had stepped back in the way he required of them, seeming to disappear like September mist into the curtains and walls, the King, clutching at his clothes with a kind of unconscious desperation, as if anything that touched him, any slightest physicality, gave him a scalding pain, almost more than he could bear, raised his head with great difficulty and said: “Daughter, what’s the matter with you? I’m told on good authority you’re like a woman that’s out of her wits.”
The Princess went white with fear, for like everyone in the palace she had experience of her father’s rages.
&nbs
p; “Don’t lie!” snapped her father.
“I wasn’t going to!” she snapped back, indignant.
His eyebrows lifted, and he studied her, his tiny claws pulling more fiercely at his clothes. “Good,” he said. His head snapped back suddenly, as if something invisible had struck him on the chin. And he shook all over, his hands flying out over the wheelchair arms, fluttering like wings, until the fit was over. The servants stood like monkeys, bent forward, prepared to rush to him. When he could raise his head again, sweat streaming down onto his nose and beard, he said, “Tell me what’s the matter, then. I haven’t much time left—as any damn fool can see.” When she said nothing, he said, “Well?”
“I haven’t been myself,” said the Princess, feebly. She noticed, in horror, that she was picking at the front of her dress, exactly as her father did, though not so wildly.
His head fell toward her, tilted sideways, the lips stretched wide with agony. “Don’t waste time!” he cried. “Have mercy!” Again, more violently than before, the old King’s head shot back and the trembling came over him. The servants moved toward him, and—with such strength of will that the Princess was thrown into awe of him—his fluttering hands waved them back. “No time for niceties!” he gasped. His nose began to bleed and he tried to take an angry swipe at it.
It was the box that cried out in an agony of love and sorrow, “Tell him! For the love of God tell him and be done with it!”
The King rolled his eyes toward the box, then let them fall upward again.
“Very well!” the Princess said, clutching at her dress, twisting and wrinkling it, then straightening it again. In a rush, she told him all. When she was finished, she sat staring at her knees, weeping and occasionally sniffing, jerking back her head.
The King let his head and shoulders fall forward, his eyelids sinking over his eyes as if by their weight. With what seemed his last breath, he said, “Go to the box-painter. Beg him to remove the curse. Otherwise we’re doomed.”