Director's Cut (2 page)

Her father scooped her up with one arm, cursing with fright, and didn't put her down again until the entrance of the visitors' center, where he dropped her with a thud.

“What did I do,” he snapped, “to deserve a girl like you?”

“Don't ask me,” Gala replied, “but it must have been truly awful in God's eyes,” and these words of hers were rewarded with an upward curl in the corners of his mouth as the hint of sarcasm that always lingered there briefly moved aside for a genuine smile.

An atmosphere of mutual scorn hung over their family. Gala's father—named Jan, like all Dutch men—always seemed bent on annoying everyone else, on provoking. Fearing that his daughters might not be sufficiently armed against the world, he was anxious to make them as independent as possible, almost rebellious. It was as if he wouldn't rest until they bettered him, and every time they failed to do so his disappointment
was renewed. The more tenderly he felt about one of the three girls, or even their mother, the more caustic his rebukes became. And Gala was lucky enough to be his favorite. She loved his cutting words, sure at least he cared about her when he was lashing out. He wanted to get the best out of her, simply because he saw the best in her. All he really did was tease her in the hope of being paid back in kind, but it was a coldhearted game that brought the winner no more joy than the loser.

Before Gala could give her father the flowers she had gathered for him, he snatched them away, and when, looking disgusted, he hurled them, they left motor oil on his fingers.

“Apparently, there are parents who actually enjoy their children.”

It was only six thirty, but two busloads of Japanese tourists were already disembarking in front of the visitors' center. Gala's father walked past the waiting crowd.

“Jan Vandemberg,” he told the receptionist. “I have an appointment with Professor Dogberry of Yale.”

The man they had come to meet was an art historian, like Gala's father, and an authority on the early Siennese Renaissance. Several months earlier, Jan had invited Dogberry to participate in a symposium at the Rijksmuseum, and the better he planned the visit, the more nervous he grew about everything that could go wrong. He had always nurtured a deep respect for Obadiah Dogberry, whose paper on two small panels in New Haven by the virtually unknown Maestro dell'Osservanza had led Jan to a lifelong passion that had defined his career. This respect had suffered a severe blow on the day the man arrived, when he scarcely deigned to look at Jan's meticulous program and informed him that he had set his heart on visiting the tulip fields of the Keukenhof and the Aalsmeer flower auction. It was beyond Jan's comprehension that his plans could be aborted for something so nonsensical.

Jan Vandemberg had taken Gala along with him as if to prove that not everyone can fritter away his time with trifles. Getting up early had put him in an even worse mood, and having to wait for the great authority now did the rest.

“Must have lost his clogs at the windmill.”

•  •  •

Gala wondered whether she had ever gone anywhere this early with her father before. Maybe leaving on holiday sometimes in the car, but then her mother and two sisters would have been there too. Going somewhere alone with her father was unusual.

During the week, Jan took the train into the city to teach and didn't return until late at night. He spent most of the rest of his time upstairs in his study. Children were not allowed, and any who dared venture there would be eaten.

“Every last scrap,” Gala's father warned his three little girls regularly, adding credibility to his threats by baring his teeth and growling ferociously. Mara, the youngest, retreated to the corner of her playpen, while Francisca invariably burst into inconsolable tears. Gala was the only one to defy him by brazenly trying to stare him down. She was no less scared than her younger sisters, and yet she loved it when the dangerous man showed his fangs and slowly crept closer and closer until finally their noses were touching. She squealed with fright and fought to resist her terror. It was like climbing out of a roller coaster that had just had you screaming and sick to your stomach with fear and immediately wanting to get back in line for another ride. The tension Gala felt in these moments was addictive, and when her father backed off, forgoing the horrors he had just been threatening, she was more angry than relieved. As soon as he turned around and forgot to be dangerous, Gala felt slighted, as if he were convinced that she wouldn't overdo it and considered her too inconsequential to bother with. She couldn't bear for him to think that she wasn't a worthy adversary. Enraged, she would grab whatever happened to be within reach and hurl it at his head. It could be a colored pencil or a napkin, but it might just as well be a book or a plate of hot food. Sometimes he simply threw it back, and if he hit her he would cheer as other fathers do at a football match. More often, though, he deemed her unworthy of his attention. He left the business of punishing their daughters to his wife—who, like all women in low countries, was named Anna. At moments like these, Gala felt a strong desire to provoke him even more the next time, to actually hurt him, and to keep it up until he finally did more than just show his teeth.

To push him over the edge, she marched into his study one afternoon when she was sure he was concentrating on his work. Without looking up, he asked her again to leave, which only made her more
determined. First she crawled under his desk, then behind it, then climbed up on top of it, pushing aside a pile of essays to make room. He swung at her the way you swat at a fly, but after missing, he ignored her, forcing Gala to take it one step further. As soon as he had finished adding his comments to a page of the essay he was reading and had placed it on the pile of work he had already marked, she took it off again and assumed her version of a reedy, affected voice to read out the things he had just written in red pencil. Then she deliberately put the page back: upside down on top of the unread pile.

The first time he acted as if he didn't care, returned the sheet of paper to the correct pile, and kept working. The second time he responded in exactly the same way, but when Gala picked up a green felt-tip pen and started to draw a little man on the third page, he slid his work aside and watched carefully until she'd finished. She took her time, giving the figure a moustache, a briefcase, and wings, and finally adding a hat with a flower with a center like a shining sun.

“Fine,” Jan said, taking the piece of paper from her and calmly studying it, “here we go.” He put the essays away in a drawer, then slammed it shut with tremendous force. The mocking expression disappeared from his face in that same instant.

“Just remember, you brought this on yourself.” For a few seconds he stared at her, making Gala tremble somewhere deep inside, a trembling she had never known before. She was angry with him for trying to impose his authority and happy that in the whole world there was nothing else vying for his attention. When she heard him growl, she did not know what she longed for most intensely, to bite or to be bitten.

This was no longer a game, she felt that. It was quite possible that it might forever change everything she had ever known. Maybe she had set off something that was more dangerous than she suspected, but if it destroyed her, she would take him with her. She was no longer a fly to be shooed away with a wave of the hand.

Suddenly he leapt, throwing himself atop her like a ravenous animal. The girl disappeared almost completely beneath him and his weight bore down on her so heavily that she felt it crushing her chest. She tried to escape his grip, screaming, but he squeezed his nails into her arm and refused to let go. She fought back but couldn't breathe and felt
his fingers deep in her muscles. She planted her feet in his groin and pushed him away. His nails scraped along her arm until he was only holding her by her dress. It tore when she scrambled up onto her feet and suddenly shot free, hitting her shoulder hard on the jamb. She ran out onto the landing but saw the way downstairs blocked by her mother, who was coming to see what was going on. Behind her, in his study, her father jumped up now as well. Gala ran upstairs with the grown man following close behind. In the attic she leapt over boxes and old furniture—obstacles he cleared with considerably less ease—and reached the dormer, where she took cover behind a rafter. The sunlight shining in through the window scattered on the dust billowing up from the old bags and crates that Jan kicked out of the way one after the next. Gala saw the man approaching slowly through these shining clouds. Her breathing was shallow and the whole scene reeled before her eyes. When he was almost upon her, with just the rafter between them, she saw his lips quivering, and every quiver pushed more blood up out of a split in the corner of his mouth. It was as if his injury calmed her. As she imagined his pain, her tension drained away. She wanted to tell him she was sorry and that she loved him, but something in his eyes told her that it might be too late.

In the same instant the man recognized his own blind fury in the girl. Was he really willing to hurt her to make her invulnerable? Suddenly afraid, his eyes made a small movement toward the window. Was he directing her thoughts or were her thoughts directing him? Almost at once Gala was up on the window seat, and two or three desperate kicks later the rotted window was out of its groove. The glass broke and a shard cut her leg as she stepped into the gutter. Her pursuer didn't hesitate for a moment and followed her out. Gala heard her mother shriek and run downstairs, and a little later saw the woman running around in the garden with her arms stretched out as if to catch her. The gutter only ran to the corner of the house, where Gala had to choose between leaping to the flat roof of the pantry or clambering up even higher. Behind her she heard the dull sound of her father's footsteps on the tin roof. She put a foot on the first tile—it wobbled but held—a foot on the second, until she felt the whole row slipping. She grabbed hold of a tile above her, but her weight made it tilt, just as she felt an iron grasp
around her ankles. She lost her balance, smacked into the tiles chin first, and fell. She fell with her full weight upon her father, who wrapped his body around hers, and together they landed two meters below on the gravel of the pantry roof.

Gala lay there in her father's grip. Screaming with laughter, just as he was, she knew that he had distinguished himself forever from all the rest of the world's fathers. His hands, broad, strong yet still soft, were holding her tight. A shudder passed through his whole body, and when she looked at him, she didn't know whether his eyes were moist from relief or anger.

“That's what you get,” he sighed, before his voice had time to properly gather itself, “when someone loves you.”

A powerful smell wafted out over Gala when her father opened the door to the flower auction. She could smell millions of flowers and tried to imagine the hundreds of thousands of bunches arranged in vases all over the world by nightfall.

Along the entire length of the complex, some two kilometers long, a catwalk was suspended above the market floor to allow visitors to look down on what most resembled a moving sea of flowers. The American professor was already there, looking out over the activity below. When he saw Gala and her father, he raised a hand and, even before the girl had a chance to say hello, took a photo of her with one of three cameras dangling against his enormous belly. The flash hurt her eyes and, as if the light had become sound, reverberated inside her skull like the striking of a gong.

The American was friendliness itself, and Gala couldn't understand why her father, so much stronger and better looking, had been nervous about his encounter with this gnome. He had urged her several times in the last few days to make a good impression on Obadiah Dogberry. That was something he always did when he was afraid that he himself would fall short. Gala knew what was expected of her: it was time for her to do her tricks again.

They walked over a field of sunflowers that was passing under the catwalk like a small train on its way to the auction sheds. The girl leaned out with the rail against her waist to watch the rattling carts curving over the points. To the rhythm of the wheels, Gala mentally rehearsed
the proverbs she would soon be asked to rattle off for her father's guest. To astonish him. In Latin.

Sunt aliquid manes, letum non omnia finit.
^*
Alia voce psittacus, alia coturnix loquitur.
^†
To her they were nothing but sound, and she memorized them the way she memorized foreign songs at school—
Hava nagila, hava magila. Kalinka kalinka kalinka moya—
by melody and rhythm alone, but the effect they had on her father's acquaintances was always the same.

“A child of eight. Incredible! Jan, your daughter is a prodigy!”

She had been performing this trick since she was five, and in that time her father had expanded the arsenal with Greek proverbs, poems by Catullus, and passages from the
Odyssey
. Sometimes she got bored with it and hid when her parents were hosting yet another dinner party, but generally she let her father have his fun: when the reactions were enthusiastic he positively beamed. It was only when she made mistakes—and she really did do her best not to, but still, sometimes, especially with people she didn't know—then …

At that moment the sunflowers stopped to let a procession of pink gerberas cross their path. Like the silenced wheels, the sounds in Gala's head jolted to a halt in the middle of a poem by Martial.

She tried to pick it up from the last line, but without the help of the rhythm she stumbled again. She went back to the start of the poem, just as she sometimes repeated it to herself at night in bed before falling asleep, but she already feared the worst. She tried to shut out all the unfamiliar noises around her to follow the conversation the two men were having behind her in English so that she could work out how much time she had left before her father wanted to show her off. She could not disappoint him.