Forty Rooms (2 page)

I am about to tiptoe out when the mermaid looks up and beckons me toward her.

“Do you want me to show you?” she asks.

Her voice is like my mother’s, but her eyes are not: they too are green, but their shifting depths lack the familiar misty softness; they glitter instead with joyous, hard brilliance, just like the brilliance I can already see trapped inside the jewelry box.

Now and then there are strange creatures to be stumbled upon in my mother’s bedroom—it is my parents’ bedroom, really, but I have always thought of it as my mother’s alone—yet the mermaid makes me uneasy. She seems almost dangerous, more unpredictable than any of the others, not in the least like the kindly plump woman in the oval painting above the armchair who rambles about Brussels lace and satin slippers at teatime, or the two yellow-winged fairies who every spring morning slide down the sunbeams onto the dresser to splash in my mother’s perfume bottles, or the man smiling with bright white teeth under a wiry mustache who used to pay afternoon calls the summer I was five. (I liked him best of all, because once or twice, just before he gently pushed
me out into the hallway and locked the door behind me, he gave me a chocolate bar in a crinkly wrapper with unfamiliar letters on the side, and also because he possessed magic powers and was invisible to everyone but me. “That child has such a wild imagination,” my mother said, laughing gaily, after I mentioned the visitor with the mustache one night at supper, and my father laughed too, though not as gaily, and ruffled my hair. I felt offended at not being believed, but more than that, I regretted letting go of something that had been mine and mine alone: I found that I liked having secrets all my own. After that, I never said anything to anyone about the things I saw in my mother’s bedroom.)

The mermaid has already forgotten about me. She is staring into the box, moving her fingers over the velvet insides, as if remembering some tune she once played on a piano. I sit down on the edge of the bed, elated but wary. The mermaid begins to speak, but she is not speaking to me; she caresses this or that ring, this or that pendant, and tells long, winding tales I cannot follow.

“These cupid earrings,” she says, “have been in the family for four generations. Your great-grandmother received them as a sign of special favor from the tsar’s youngest uncle. He had them presented to her the night she premiered as Dulcinea. She had gifts from many men, of course, but this was the only thing she held on to when forced to sell off all her possessions in the civil war. One wonders why she kept them. She struggled so to feed her children, and the earrings would have brought in bread enough to last a month. But women in this family have always had their mysteries . . .” She pauses to take a sip from a nearly empty glass of dark red liquid on my mother’s nightstand. “Of course, it was well
after her Dulcinea days that she married your great-grandfather and had your grandfather and the twins. But could there have been more to the Grand Duke anecdote? No one to ask about it now—all that’s left are two enamel cupids, half a rumor, and maybe, just maybe, a thimble of royal blood.”

“Is this my great-grandmother the ballet dancer?” I ask, confused. “And who is Dulcinea? And why is there blood in a thimble?” But she does not answer, only lightly trails her fingers over the golden fire imprisoned in the box, and goes on talking.

“And see this ring? See how the emerald is uncut, rough and enormous, like some green, misshapen bird’s egg? This came from an ancient icon, from one of those priceless frames set with precious stones big as rocks. So many were vandalized in the revolution, hacked apart, hidden by drunks in rotting village coffers. Your grandfather got the emerald at the end of the war, traded it from another soldier for a length of smoked sausage and a box of German sweets, then kept it for years in an empty saltshaker. Eventually he had it set for Elena, your grandmother—a simple pewter setting, he could afford nothing more.”

“What does ‘vandalized’ mean?” I ask. “When was the revolution?”

In the circle of soft yellow lamplight the jewels inside their dark nests shift with hidden, treacherous fire. The mermaid takes another sip of the red liquid, tipping the glass into her mouth so abruptly that some drops spill onto the blanket. In profile she seems just like my mother, but every time she moves, every time she speaks, every time she looks past me, not hearing my questions, I am filled anew with the knowledge that she is not.

“And this bracelet I’ve had since I was a child. It reminds me of all the mornings spent searching for bits of amber in the sand after the tide.”

I am pleased to hear something I understand at last. My mother’s family came from the Baltics; she grew up spending summers on the Latvian coast. It must have been there that she met the mermaid. I was wrong to ever find the mermaid dangerous, I think with relief. As I shift closer to her gleaming gray flanks, I am startled into pity by a sudden thought. “But isn’t the Baltic Sea too cold in winter? What do you do if it turns to ice?”

She drops the bracelet back into the box and glances down at me, her metallic green gaze slipping over my face with a swift, cold touch I can almost feel on my skin.

“But that’s enough, you are too little to care about the past,” she says, and while her tone seems light, the chill of the faraway sea is there, underneath.

My pity abandons me, as does my relief. Once again I am nervous.

She stands up, balancing the box in one hand and the glass in the other.

“Come to the mirror with me.”

Together we leave the reassuring circle of light and move into the graying dusk. The oval mirror over the dresser is curly and gilded. On evenings such as this, wintry and still, I like to come and look at my mother’s room nestled into its quiet pool. The mirror room is smaller than the real one and has no angles, filled instead with a fuzzy, muted, familiar warmth, so much like my mother’s soft presence. But now the two of us are reflected in it,
me in my short white nightgown with green parrots, the mermaid a slim undulation of shadow behind my shoulder, and the mirror room seems different, cold and sharp-edged and mysterious, exciting in a new way, like something marvelous yet harmful, something forbidden, like—like a lollipop I once stole from the kitchen and devoured in crunching, glistening half licks, half bites in bed at night, under the covers, without brushing my teeth afterward.

“Here, let’s try this on you, this was your father’s gift when you were born, it will be yours someday,” the mermaid says as she sets the jewelry box on the dresser and picks up a chain from which dangles a prim little cross of delicate pearls. But I have just spied something else—something I like so much more. Reaching out, I close my fingers on a necklace of small round stones, each kernel of blood-red glow in its own frame of darkness.

“This,” I say. “I want this.”

Something harsh and hurt flashes in the mermaid’s eyes, and when she takes the necklace out of my hand, her movement is not gentle: she rips the strand through my fingers, scratching my palm, surprising me into a little cry. I expect her to throw the necklace back into the box, and slam it shut, and push me away; but a flush grows in her face instead, and suddenly she smiles—the first smile I see, not a kind smile, but oh, so beautiful. She smiles her strange smile, at once brittle and hard, and lays the necklace against the parrots on my gown. In the shadows of the mirror it glints stark and red, like a gash I got on my knee when I was four and fell, running, on a piece of glass.

“A friend gave it to me,” the mermaid says in a defiant voice, as if challenging someone. “A long time ago.”

We are silent then, both of us looking at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the lady in the oval painting purse her lips and turn away with disapproval, but I continue to stare at my reflection, and after a while I too begin to seem different, as if the silvery, dangerous, shimmering sea were rising within my being. Around us the evening deepens, the lamp by the bed glows brilliant and distant, and slowly the room is transformed into an immense jewelry box, the blue velvet of the night enveloping us tightly, and the mermaid’s deceiving eyes are emeralds now, and the congealed drop at the bottom of her glass a ruby, and on the dresser, just between the tray of portly perfume bottles and the clock that always shows the wrong time, there rests a treasure bright and dark, an unfamiliar, thrilling treasure filled to the brim with stories I do not yet understand, stories of guilty gifts, impoverished dancers, ruined churches, wars and revolutions, the grown-up, momentous things of pain and beauty and time.

From behind the door a sound bursts out, mechanical and persistent, like the tap-tap-tap of a woodpecker, and I swing around, startled, then realize what it is. When I turn back, the mermaid is gone, just like that, and my mother is fastening her old gray robe around her waist. “Your father is working, we must be quiet,” she says in a near whisper as she leans over me and fumbles with the clasp of the necklace under my hair. Stupidly I watch while she neatens up the earrings and bracelets in their plush compartments, closes the lid with care, slides the box back into the drawer. “And it’s time for you to go to bed.”

I want to tell her about the mermaid, to ask her a question, but something stops me—whether the flat intonation of her
strangely loosened voice, or else the memory of the secret, gemlike place where things seemed at once more wondrous and more frightening than in real life. I walk to the door in silence. From the threshold I glance back at the room, and it is as always, warm and cozy and small, full of pillows and blankets and smiling ladies in oval frames, on both sides of the oval mirror. I am comforted to think that the sinister treasure is once again only a wooden box of pretty trinkets under the woolen stockings in the dresser, comforted to see my mother moving her tender, steady hands over the covers of the bed, smoothing them in a gesture I have seen hundreds of times.

I prefer things this way, I tell myself. Really, I do.

“Go to sleep, my love,” says my mother, looking up briefly, not meeting my eyes. “Your father will be wanting his tea now.”

As I walk into the chill of the hallway, I think: But maybe I don’t.

3. Father’s Study

The Ideal City

It is just after dinner on Thursday, time for our weekly Culture Hour. My father and I are seated at his desk, he in his old armchair of cherry-colored leather, cracked along the middle, I by his side, kneeling on a stool I have lugged in from the kitchen.

On the radio, turned down low, a concerto is playing.

“Vivaldi,
La Follia
,” my father says after listening for a moment. “Appropriate in view of today’s subject.”

He reaches for the stack of books beside his typewriter and selects a volume on Italian Renaissance painting, which he opens to a marked page; like so many books in his study, it is bristling with slivers of green, blue, and pink paper. My father makes the bookmarks himself by neatly cutting multicolored index cards into narrow strips, perfectly straight, though he never uses a ruler (he has an uncanny ability to draw straight lines), then jots down a heading or a quotation along the strip in his meticulous,
minuscule hand. The colors are not chosen by accident, either; they follow some complicated scheme of his, whose principles always escape me. As he pulls the volume closer and carefully sets the blue bookmark down on his immaculate desk, next to the framed photograph of my mother, I tilt my head sideways until I can read the words written along it: “Ideal city.”

“This evening,” says my father, “we will talk about the Renaissance concept of the ‘ideal city.’ The concept itself did not originate in the Renaissance. The first man to study it in depth was the Greek philosopher Plato—you remember, we discussed him last month. Now Plato, in his
Republic
—”

For the first minute or two, I do nothing but luxuriate in the smell of the study. It is my favorite smell in the world, a noble smell that I like to imagine as deep, quiet, burgundy-hued, though in fact it is not one smell but a mixture of smells, all equally marvelous: the sharp smell of shiny art volumes, a bit like wet autumn leaves; the softer, more complex smell of thick treatises on history and philosophy whose desiccated leather spines crowd the shelves and between whose pages reside entire flocks of shy dust sprites that come out to play at dusk—I used to watch them for hours when I was younger—the metallic, oily, inky smell of my father’s mechanical typewriter, which, even when given a rare hour of rest, seems to radiate the heat of its passionate staccatos; the sweet ghostly smell of my father’s aromatic tobacco, which a friend brought from somewhere far away and which he smokes only on special occasions; I know he keeps the dwindling pouch in the middle drawer of his desk, just above the drawer with a fascinating wealth of compartmentalized pens, erasers, and paper clips, just below the drawer that is always locked . . .

My thoughts return from their wanderings, and I study the book opened before me. There is one large reproduction on the page to the left, and three smaller ones on the page to the right, with thin rivulets of text snaking between them. They are views of various cities—or perhaps it is all one city, for, while the painted vistas are different, all four are united by a certain sameness, a kind of stiff geometrical precision, beautiful and cold. The skies are flat, distant, and pale, devoid of clouds and winds; there are no curving streets, no cozy nooks, only vast, many-arched, many-columned expanses of architectural perfection in the full glare of brilliant noonday, with not a shadow, not a blade of grass, not a flower to be seen anywhere, the ground itself an intricate pattern of pastel-tinted marble diamonds and ovals in majestic perspective. The orderly chessboards of empty spaces, the magnificent heights of deserted staircases, the sleek façades all seem unsettling, even vaguely threatening, as if something roaring and monstrous is just poised to erupt into the sunlit silence from somewhere below the horizon.

I wait until my father finishes his explanation.