The Water Mirror

by Kai Meyer

  As Arcimboldo had promised, Junipa’s vision improved from day to day. She still perceived hardly more than ghostly images, but she was already able to differentiate one from another, and it was important to her to find her way around the unfamiliar workshop without help. However, they gave her easier jobs than Merle’s, even if not much pleasanter ones. She was allowed no real recuperation after the stresses of that first night, and she had to weigh out endless quantities of quartz sand from sacks and put it into measures. What exactly Arcimboldo did with it remained a puzzle to the girls for the time being.

  Actually, the mirror workshop under Arcimboldo appeared to have little to do with that long-standing tradition of which people in Venice had been proud since time out of mind. Earlier, in the sixteenth century, only the select were initiated into the art of mirror making. They all lived under strict watch on the glassblowing island of Murano. There they lived in luxury, lacking for nothing—except freedom. For as soon as they had begun their training, they might never again leave the island. And for those who tried anyway, it was death. The agents of La Serenissima hunted down renegade mirror makers throughout Europe and killed the traitors before they could pass on the secret of mirror production to outsiders. Murano’s mirrors were the only ones to adorn all the great houses of the nobility of Europe, for only in Venice was this art understood. As for the city, the secret could not be weighed in gold—well, except in the individual instances. Finally some mirror makers did succeed in fleeing from Murano and selling their secret art to the French, who then repaid them by killing them. Soon afterward the French opened their own workshops and robbed Venice of its monopoly. Mirrors were soon produced in many lands, and the prohibitions and punishments for Murano’s mirror makers receded into oblivion.

  Arcimboldo’s mirrors, however, had as much to do with alchemy as with the art of glass making. After only the first few days, Merle sensed that it might be years before he would initiate her into his secrets. It was the same with the three boys. The eldest, Dario, though he’d already lived in the house for more than two years, had not the slightest glimmer of how Arcimboldo’s art worked. Certainly they observed, even eavesdropped and spied, but they did not know the true secret.

  Slim, black-haired Dario was the leader of Arcimboldo’s apprentices. When the master was present, he always displayed very good behavior, but on his own he was still the same lout he’d been when he came from the orphanage two years before. During their short free periods he was a braggart, and sometimes domineering, too, though the two other boys had to suffer more from that than Merle and Junipa did. In fact, to a large extent he preferred to ignore the girls. It displeased him that Arcimboldo had taken girls on as apprentices, probably also because his behavior toward Eft left much to be desired. He seemed to be afraid that Merle and Junipa would take the housekeeper’s side in arguments or might betray some of his little secrets to her—such as the fact that he regularly sampled Arcimboldo’s good red wine, which Eft kept under lock and key in the kitchen. She didn’t know that Dario had laboriously made himself a copy of the key to the cupboard. Merle had discovered Dario’s thieving by accident on the third night, when she’d met him with a pitcher of wine in the dark in the passageway. It never occurred to her to use this observation to her own advantage, but obviously that was exactly what Dario feared. From that moment he had treated her even more coolly, with downright hostility, even if he didn’t dare start an overt quarrel with her. Most of the time he gave her the cold shoulder—which, to be precise, was more notice than he bestowed on Junipa. She seemed not to exist at all for him.

  Secretly Merle asked herself just why Arcimboldo had taken the rebellious Dario into his house. But that also raised the uncomfortable question of what he had found in her, and to that no answer had occurred to her as yet. Junipa might be an ideal subject for his experiment with the mirror shards—the girls had learned that he’d never dared anything like that before—but what was it that had prompted him to rescue Merle from the orphanage? He’d never met her and must have relied entirely on what the attendants could report about her—and Merle doubted that Arcimboldo had heard too much good about her from them. In the home they had considered her uncooperative and cheeky—words that in the vocabulary of the attendants stood for intellectually curious and self-confident.

  As for the other two apprentices, they were only a year older than Merle. One was a pale-skinned, red-haired boy, whose name was Tiziano. The other—smaller and with a slight harelip—was named Boro. The two seemed to enjoy finally not being the youngest any longer and being able to boss Merle around, although their behavior never deteriorated into meanness. When they saw that the delegated work was getting to be too much, they readily helped, without being asked to. Junipa, on the other hand, they seemed to find uncanny, and Boro, especially, preferred to give her a wide berth. The boys accepted Dario as their leader. They didn’t have the doglike devotion to him that Merle had sometimes seen with gangs in the orphanage, but they clearly looked up to him. Anyway, he’d been apprenticed to Arcimboldo a year longer than the two of them had.

  After about a week and a half, shortly before midnight, Merle saw Eft climbing down into the well a second time. She briefly considered waking Junipa but then decided against it. She stood motionless at the window for a while, staring at the well cover, then uneasily lay down in her bed again.

  She’d already told Junipa of her discovery on one of their first evenings in the house.

  “And she really climbed into the well?” Junipa had asked.

  “I just told you so!”

  “Maybe the rope had come off the water bucket.”

  “Would you climb down into a pitch-black well in the middle of the night just because some rope was broken? If it really had been that, she could have done it in the daytime. Besides, then she would have sent one of us.” Merle shook her head decidedly. “She didn’t even have a lamp with her.”

  Junipa’s mirror eyes reflected the moonlight that was shining in through their window that night. It looked as though they were glowing in the white, icy light. As so often, Merle had to repress a shudder. Sometimes at such moments she had the feeling that Junipa saw more with her new eyes than just the surface of people and things—almost as if she could look directly into Merle’s innermost thoughts.

  “Are you afraid of Eft?” Junipa asked.

  Merle thought about it briefly. “No. But you must admit that she’s strange.”

  “Perhaps we all would be, if we had to wear a mask.”

  “And why does she wear it, anyhow? No one except Arcimboldo seems to know. I even asked Dario.”

  “Maybe you should just ask her sometime.”

  “That wouldn’t be polite, if it really is an illness.”

  “What else would it be?”

  Merle said nothing. She’d been asking herself these questions. She had a suspicion, only a very vague one; since it had come into her mind, she couldn’t get it out of her head. Nevertheless, she thought it was better not to tell Junipa about it.

  Merle and Junipa hadn’t spoken about Eft again since that evening. There were so many other things to talk about, so many new impressions, discoveries, challenges. Every day was a new adventure, especially for Junipa, whose vision was fast improving. Merle envied her a little for how easily she became enthusiastic about the smallest things; but at the same time she rejoiced with her over the unexpected cure.

  The morning after Merle saw Eft climb down into the well the second time, something happened that once again turned her thoughts from the housekeeper’s secret activities: the first meeting with the apprentices on the other bank of the canal, the apprentices of Master Weaver Umberto.

  Merle had almost forgotten about the weaving workshop during the eleven days that she’d been living in the mirror maker’s house. There’d been no trace of the well-known quarrel between the two masters, which had once been the talk of all Venice. Merle hadn’t left the house at all during this period. Her entire day
was spent mainly in the workshop, the adjoining storerooms, the dining room, and her room. Now and again one of the apprentices had to accompany Eft when she went to the vegetable market on Rio San Barnaba, but so far the housekeeper’s choice had always fallen on one of the boys; they were bigger and could carry the heavy crates without any difficulty.

  So Merle was caught completely unprepared when the students from the other side brought the quarrel forcefully to mind. As she later learned, it had been a tradition for years among the apprentices of both houses to play tricks on each other, which not infrequently ended with broken glass, cursing masters, bruises, and abrasions. The last of these attacks had been three weeks before and was credited to Dario, Boro, and Tiziano. The weaver boys’ retaliation was long overdue after that.

  Merle didn’t find out why they’d chosen this morning, and she was also not sure how they’d succeeded in getting inside the house—although later it was suspected they’d laid a board across the canal from one balcony railing to the other and so had balanced their way to the mirror maker’s side. That they did all this in broad daylight, and during working hours, was a sign that it had been done with Umberto’s blessing, just as earlier trespasses by Dario and the others had taken place with Arcimboldo’s agreement.

  Merle was just about to begin gluing the wooden frame of a mirror when there was a clatter at the entrance to the workshop. Alarmed, she looked up. She was afraid Junipa had stumbled over a tool.

  But it wasn’t Junipa. A small figure had slipped on a screwdriver and was staggering, fighting for balance. Its face was hidden behind a bear mask of enameled paper. With one hand it flailed wildly in the air, while the bag of paint it had held in the other burst on the tiles in a blue star.

  “Weavers!” Tiziano bellowed, dropping his work and jumping up.

  “Weavers! Weavers!” Boro, in another corner of the workshop, took up his friend’s cry, and soon Dario also thundered in.

  Merle got up from her place in irritation. Her eyes traveled uncertainly around the room. She didn’t understand what was going on, ignorant of the competition among the apprentices.

  The masked boy at the entrance slipped on his own paint and crashed on the seat of his pants. Before Dario and the others could laugh at him or even go for him, three other boys appeared in the corridor, all wearing colorful paper masks. One in particular caught Merle’s eye: It was the visage of a splendid fabulous beast, half man, half bird. The long, curving beak was lacquered golden, and tiny glass gems glittered in the painted eyebrows.

  Merle didn’t have a chance to look at the other masks, for already a whole squadron of paint bags was flying in her direction. One burst at her feet and sprayed sticky red, another hit her shoulder and bounced off without bursting. It rolled away, over to Junipa, who’d been standing there with a gigantic broom in her hand, not quite knowing what was happening all around her. But now she grasped the situation and quickly bent, grabbed the paint bag, and flung it back at the invaders. The boy with the bear mask sprang to one side, and the missile hit the bird face behind him. The bag burst on the point of the bill and covered its owner with green paint.

  Dario cheered, and Tiziano thumped Junipa encouragingly on the shoulder. Then the second wave of attacks followed. This time they didn’t get off so lightly. Boro, Tiziano, and Merle were hit and spotted over and over with paint. Out of the corner of her eye, Merle saw Arcimboldo, cursing, close the door of the mirror storeroom and bar it from inside. His students might break heads, so long as the finished mirrors remained unharmed.

  The apprentices were left to their own devices. Four against four. Really even five against four, if you counted Junipa—after all, in spite of her weak eyes, she’d scored the first hit for the mirror makers.

  “It’s the student weavers from the other bank,” Boro called to Merle as he grabbed a broom, wielding it like a sword with both hands. “No matter what happens, we have to defend the workshop.”

  Typical boy, thought Merle, as she patted a little helplessly at the paint on her dress. But why did they constantly have to prove themselves with such nonsense?

  She looked up—and was hit on the forehead with another paint bag. Viscous yellow poured over her face and her shoulders.

  That did it! With an angry cry she grabbed up the glue bottle, whose contents she’d been using to glue the mirror frame, and hurled herself at the first available weaver boy. It was the one with the bear mask. He saw her coming and tried to grab another paint bag from his shoulder bag. Too late! Merle was already there. She hurled him over backward with a blow, fell on him with her knees on his chest, and shoved the narrow end of the glue bottle into the left eye opening.

  “Close your eyes!” she warned and pumped a strong jet of glue under the mask. The boy swore, then his words were lost in a blubber, followed by a long drawn-out “Aaaaaaaahhhhhhh!”

  She saw that her opponent was out of action for the moment, pushed herself off him, and leaped back up. She now was holding the glue bottle like a pistol, even if it didn’t make much sense, for most of the contents had been sprayed out. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Boro and Tiziano scuffling with two weaver boys, a wild fight. The mask of one of the boys was already demolished. Instead of joining in, however, Merle ran over to Junipa, grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her behind one of the workbenches.

  “Don’t move from that spot,” she whispered to her.

  Junipa protested. “I’m not as helpless as you think.”

  “No, certainly not.” Merle glanced at the boy with the bird mask. His upper body was green from Junipa’s paint bag. “Nevertheless, better stay under cover. This can’t last much longer.”

  As she sprang up, she saw that her triumph had been too early. Tiziano’s opponent had gained the upper hand again. And there was no sign of Dario anywhere. Merle first discovered him when suddenly he was standing in the doorway. In his hand gleamed one of the knives Arcimboldo used to trim the whisper-thin silver sheets for the backs of the mirrors. The blade wasn’t long, but it was razor sharp.

  “Serafin!” called Dario to the boy with the bird mask. “Come on, if you dare.”

  The weaver’s boy saw the knife in Dario’s hand and took up the challenge. His three companions retreated to the entrance. Boro helped Tiziano to his feet and then pushed Merle to the edge of the workshop.

  “Have they gone crazy?” she gasped breathlessly. “They’re going to kill each other.”

  Boro’s frown betrayed that he shared her concern. “Dario and Serafin have hated each other since they first laid eyes on each other. Serafin’s the leader of the weavers. He cooked up this whole thing.”

  “That’s no reason to go at him with a knife.”

  While they were speaking, Dario and Serafin had met in the center of the room. Merle noticed that Serafin moved with light feet, like a dancer. He skillfully avoided the clumsy attacks of Dario, whose knife cut silvery traces in the air. Before Dario realized it, the weaver boy had extracted the knife from his fingers. With a cry of fury, Dario rushed at his opponent and landed a treacherous punch on his Adam’s apple. The yellow bird face flew to one side and revealed Serafin’s face. His cheekbones were finely cut, a few freckles sprinkled the bridge of his nose. He had blond hair, not so light as Junipa’s; the green paint had clumped it into strings.

  The weaver’s bright blue eyes were squinting angrily. Before Dario could avoid it, Serafin landed a punch that flung the student mirror maker against the workbench behind which Junipa had taken shelter. Dario made one leap over the bench to put it between himself and his opponent. Junipa moved back a step in fear. But Serafin followed Dario around the bench and was about to grab him again. Dario’s nose was bleeding; the last blow had weakened him. Instead of facing his antagonist, he whirled around, grabbed the surprised Junipa by the shoulders with both hands, pulled her roughly in front of him, and gave her a powerful push, which sent her stumbling in Serafin’s direction.

  Merle uttered a scream of rage. “That
coward!”

  The weaver boy saw Junipa flying toward him and saw Dario as well, just behind her, ready to use his chance. Serafin had a choice: He could catch Junipa to keep her from plunging into a rack of glass bottles—or he could sidestep her and attack his archfoe.

  Serafin made a quick grab. He caught Junipa and held her for a moment in an embrace that was intended to protect her as well as to reassure her. “It’s all right,” he whispered to her, “nothing happened to you.”

  He’d scarcely spoken the words when Dario rammed his fist over Junipa’s shoulder into Serafin’s face.

  “No!” bellowed Merle furiously. She leaped past Boro and Tiziano, ran to the workbench, and pulled Dario away from Junipa and Serafin.

  “What are you doing?” yelped the older boy, but she’d already pulled him over backward to the floor.

  Very briefly she caught Serafin’s look as he carefully pushed Junipa to one side. He smiled through green paint and blood, then hurried back to his friends at the entrance.

  “We’re clearing out,” he said, and a moment later the weavers were gone.

  Merle paid no attention to Dario but turned to Junipa, who was standing, dazed, in front of the bottle rack.

  “Everything all right?”

  Junipa nodded. “Yes . . . thanks. All right.”

  Behind Merle’s back Dario began to curse and scold; she could sense that he was approaching her threateningly. She abruptly whirled around, looked deep into his small eyes, and gave him a box on the ear as hard as she could.

  Before Dario could rush at her, Eft was suddenly between them. Merle felt the powerful grip when the housekeeper grasped her by the shoulder and pulled her away from Dario. But she didn’t hear what Eft said, didn’t hear the crude raging of Dario, which couldn’t touch her. She was looking pensively out into the corridor into which Serafin had vanished with his friends.