by Kai Meyer
3
“AND WHAT, PRAY, AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH YOU NOW?”
The master’s voice sounded more disappointed than angry. Arcimboldo was sitting behind his study desk in the library. The walls of the room were covered with leather book spines. Merle wondered whether he’d actually read all those books.
“The damage the weaver’s apprentices have caused with their paint is hardly worth mentioning, in light of what the two of you have done,” Arcimboldo continued, letting his eyes travel from Dario to Merle and back again. The two were standing in front of the desk and looking sheepishly at the floor. Their anger at each other was in no way cooled, but even Dario seemed to understand that it was appropriate to restrain himself.
“You have kindled strife among the students. And you have led others to take sides. If Eft hadn’t intervened, Junipa, Boro, and Tiziano would have had to choose for one of you.” An angry spark appeared in the old man’s eyes, so that he now seemed stern and unapproachable. “I cannot allow my apprentices to be divided. What I insist on is cooperation and avoidance of all unnecessary conflicts. Magic mirrors require a certain harmony in order to mature into what they are. In an atmosphere of hostility a shadow is laid over the glass that will make it grow blind.”
Merle had the feeling that he was making it up. He wanted to talk them into feeling guilty. It would have suited that purpose better if he hadn’t referred so plainly to “unnecessary conflicts”: After all, it had been the childish quarrel between him and Umberto in the first place that caused this whole upset.
Sooner or later it would have come to a break between her and Dario anyhow, she’d felt that on the very first day. She surmised that Arcimboldo had foreseen it too. Did he regret taking her from the orphanage? Would she have to go back to the dirt and the poverty now?
Despite her fears, no feelings of guilt troubled her. Dario was a whining coward, as he’d just demonstrated twice: once when he went for Serafin with the knife, and the second time when he’d taken cover behind the defenseless Junipa. He’d richly deserved his box on the ear and, if it had been up to her, a good beating right afterward.
Clearly Arcimboldo saw it very similarly. “Dario,” he said, “for your unworthy and unrestrained behavior you will clean the workshop by yourself. I don’t want to find one single spot of paint tomorrow morning early. Understand?”
“And what about her?” Dario growled, pointing angrily at Merle.
“Did you understand me?” Arcimboldo asked once more, his bushy eyebrows drawing together like two thunderclouds.
Dario lowered his head, though Merle did not miss the hateful look he sent her secretly. “Yes, Master.”
“Dario will need a quantity of water. Therefore, you, Merle, will get ten pails full from the well, carry them upstairs, and take them to the workshop. That will be your punishment.”
“But Master—,” Dario flared.
Arcimboldo cut him short. “You have shamed us all by your behavior, Dario. I know you are rash and hot-tempered, but you are also my best student, and therefore I intend to let it go at this. As far as Merle is concerned, she has only been here for two weeks and must first get used to the fact that here, unlike the orphanage, a dispute is not settled with fists. Have I expressed myself clearly enough?”
Both bowed and said in unison, “Yes, Master.”
“Any objections?”
“No, Master.”
“So be it.” With a wave, he indicated that they could go.
Outside the door of the library Merle and Dario exchanged black looks, then each turned to the appointed task. While Dario prepared to remove the residues of the paint attack in the workshop, Merle ran down into the courtyard. Beside the back door a dozen wooden pails sat lined up. She snatched up the first one and went to the well.
Strange creatures were carved in the stone of the wall around the well, fantastic creatures with cat’s eyes, Medusa heads, and reptilian tails. They were strung out in a stiff procession around the well. At their head went a creature, half human, half shark, with arms whose elbows pointed in the wrong direction; in its hands it carried a human head.
The metal lid was heavy. Merle succeeded in opening it only with groaning and straining. Below, there was nothing but blackness. Way deep, deep down, she saw a shimmer of light, the reflection of the sky over the courtyard.
She turned around and looked up. The view was only a little different from the one inside of the well: The walls of the old houses rose up around the courtyard like the stone wall of the well. Perhaps the water wasn’t so far down as she’d thought. The reflection of the courtyard added that much more height, and so the well shaft seemed to be more than double its actual length. It would be less trouble to climb down to the surface than Merle had thought—at least now she could see metal handholds going down the inside of the well into the abyss. What could it be that Eft kept doing down there?
Merle tied the bucket to the long rope lying ready beside the well and let it down. The wood scraped against the stone of the wall as it went. The sound reverberated in the depths and rose up distorted into the daylight. Except for Merle there was no one else in the courtyard. The scraping of the bucket was thrown back by the facades of the surrounding houses, and now it almost sounded like whispers murmuring down from the gaping windows of the buildings. The voices of all those who no longer lived here. Ghost whispers.
Merle couldn’t see when the bucket reached the surface. It was too dark down there. But she did see that suddenly the reflection of the sky in the depths was set in motion; the bucket was probably just now dipping into the water. Only it was strange that she felt no slackening of the pull and also that the scraping of the bucket on the stone wall sounded unchanged. If it wasn’t the bucket that stirred the surface of the water, what was it?
She’d scarcely framed the question when something appeared down there. A head. It was much too far away for her to be able to make out the details, and yet she was certain that dark eyes were looking up at her.
In her fright Merle let go of the rope and took a step backward. The rope whizzed over the well wall into the depths. It would have been lost, together with the bucket, had not a hand unexpectedly grabbed it.
Eft’s hand.
Merle hadn’t noticed the housekeeper walking up to her in the courtyard. Eft had grabbed the end of the rope just in time and was now pulling the bucket up into the daylight.
“Thank you,” Merle stammered. “That was clumsy of me.”
“What did you see?” asked Eft behind her half mask.
“Nothing.”
“Please don’t lie to me.”
Merle hesitated. Eft was still busy pulling up the bucket. Instinctively Merle had a fleeting impulse to turn around and run away. She would have done that a few weeks ago in the orphanage. Here, however, she was reluctant to demean herself. She had done nothing wrong or forbidden.
“There was something down there.”
“Oh?”
“A face.”
The housekeeper pulled the full bucket over the edge and placed it on the wall. Water sloshed over the edge and ran down on the grimacing faces of the stone reliefs.
“So, a face. And you are quite sure?” With a sigh Eft answered her own question. “Of course you are.”
“I saw it.” Merle didn’t quite know how she should behave. The housekeeper seemed uncanny to her, but she felt no real fear of her. Rather, a kind of uneasiness at the way she looked over the edge of her mask and seemed to read Merle’s thoughts from each movement, each tiny hesitation.
“You’ve already seen something before, haven’t you?” Eft was leaning against the rim of the well. “The other night, for example.”
There was no point in lying. “I heard the sound of the cover. And then I saw you climbing into the well.”
“Did you tell anyone about it?”
“No,” she lied, in order not to draw Junipa into it.
Eft ran her hand through her hair and sighed deeply
. “Merle, I have to explain some things to you.”
“If you want to.”
“You aren’t like the other apprentices,” said the housekeeper. Was that a smile in her eyes? “Not like Dario. You can handle the truth.”
Merle stepped closer to Eft, until she would only have needed to stretch out her hand to touch the mask with the red lips. “You want to trust me with a secret?”
“If you are ready for it.”
“But you don’t know me at all.”
“Perhaps better than you think.”
Merle didn’t understand what Eft meant by that. Her curiosity was awakened now, and she wondered if that wasn’t precisely what Eft intended. The more interested Merle was, the more deeply she would be drawn into the business, and the more Eft could trust her.
“Come with me,” the housekeeper said, and she went from the well to the back door of an empty house. The entrance wasn’t locked, and after Eft had pushed the door open, they came into a small hallway. Apparently it was the former servants’ entrance to the palazzo.
They went past an abandoned kitchen and an empty storeroom, until they came to a short flight of stairs going down—unusual in a city whose houses were built on pilings and only rarely had cellars under them.
A little later Merle realized that Eft had led her to an underground boat landing. A walkway ran alongside a water channel, which disappeared into semicircular tunnels on both sides. At one time goods were loaded onto boats here. It smelled brackish, the air tasted of algae and mold.
“Why don’t you go into the water this way?” Merle asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You climb into the well because you want to get somewhere through it. Of course, there could be a secret passageway branching off the well shaft, but I don’t believe that. I think that it’s the water itself that draws you.” She paused briefly and then added, “You’re a mermaid, aren’t you?”
If Eft was surprised, she didn’t show it. Merle understood very well what she was saying—and also how unreasonable it was, basically. Eft had legs, well-shaped human legs, utterly in contrast to all known mermaids, whose hips transmuted into a broad fish tail.
Eft reached both hands behind her head and carefully took down the mask that covered the lower half of her face day and night.
“You aren’t afraid of me, are you?” she asked with her broad mouth, whose corners ended a finger’s breadth in front of her ears. She had no lips, but when she spoke the folds of skin pulled back and exposed a mouth of several rows of small, sharp teeth.
“No,” Merle replied, and it was the truth.
“That’s good.”
“Will you tell me?”
“What would you like to know?”
“Why you don’t take this way here, if you go at night to meet with other mermaids. Why do you run the risk of someone seeing you when you climb into the well?”
Eft’s eyes narrowed, which in a human had the effect of an unspoken threat, but with her it was only an expression of distaste. “Because the water is polluted. It’s the same in all the canals of the city. It’s poisonous, it kills us. That’s why so few of us come willingly to Venice. The water of the canals kills us, stealthily, but with absolute certainty.”
“The mermaids pulling the boats—”
“Will die. Any of us caught by you humans and caged or misused for your races will die. The poison in the water first corrodes the skin and then the mind. Not even the Flowing Queen can protect us from it.”
Merle stood silent with horror. All the people who kept mermaids for fun, like house pets, were murderers. Some might even know what the imprisonment in the canals did to the mermaids.
Ashamed, she looked Eft in the eye. She had trouble bringing out any sound at all. “I’ve never caught a mermaid.”
Eft smiled, showing her needle-sharp teeth. “I know that. I can feel it. You have been touched by the Flowing Queen.”
“I?”
“Didn’t they fish you out of the water when you were a newborn?”
“You were listening to me and Junipa that first night in our room.” With anyone else she would have been indignant, but in Eft’s case it didn’t seem important.
“I listened,” the mermaid admitted. “And because I know your secret, I will reveal mine to you. That’s only fair. And so, as I will talk to no one about your secret, you will keep silent about mine.”
Merle nodded. “How did you mean that before—that the Flowing Queen has touched me?”
“You were set out on the canals. That happens to many children. But extremely few survive. Most drown. But you were found. The current carried you. That can only mean that the Flowing Queen adopted you.”
To Merle’s ears it sounded as though Eft had been there, so strong was the conviction resonating in her words. It was obvious that the mermaids revered the Flowing Queen as a goddess. Merle spun the thought further and got goose bumps: What if the Flowing Queen wasn’t protecting the people of the lagoon at all? After all, the mermaids were creatures of the water, and if you were to believe some theories, the queen was the water. An incomprehensible power of the sea.
“What is the Flowing Queen?” She had no real hope that Eft knew the answer to this question.
“If it was ever known, it’s long forgotten,” replied the mermaid softly. “The way you and I and the Queen herself will one day be forgotten.”
“But the Flowing Queen is revered by all. Everyone in Venice loves her. She has saved us all. No one can ever forget that.”
Eft left it with a silent shrug of her shoulders, but Merle was very much aware that she was of a different opinion. The mermaid pointed to a slender gondola lying moored on the black water. It looked as if it were floating in nothing, so smooth and dark was the surface around it.
“Down into that?” Merle asked.
Eft nodded.
“And then?”
“I want to show you something.”
“Will we be gone long?”
“An hour at most.”
“Arcimboldo will punish me. He told me to take the buckets—”
“Already done.” Eft smiled. “He told me what he had in mind for you. I’ve already put ten full buckets in the workshop.”
Merle wasn’t convinced. “And Dario?”
“Won’t say a word about it. Otherwise Arcimboldo will find out who’s swiping his wine at night.”
“Then you know about that?”
“Nothing happens in that house without my knowing about it.”
Merle hesitated no longer and followed Eft into the gondola. The mermaid loosed the rope, placed herself in the stern of the boat, and steered it with the long oar to one of the two tunnel openings. It became pitch-black around them.
“Don’t worry,” Eft said, “there’s a torch in front of you and there are flints next to it.”
It wasn’t long before Merle had the pitch of the torch lit. Yellow and flickering, the firelight flitted over an arching tile ceiling.
“May I ask you something else?”
“You want to know why I have legs and no kalimar.”
“Kali—what?”
“Kalimar. That’s what we call the fish tail in our language.”
“Will you tell me?”
Eft let the gondola glide deeper into the darkness of the tunnel. Sheets of moss had loosened from the ceiling and hung down like tattered curtains. It smelled of decaying seaweed and corruption.
“It’s a sad story,” Eft said finally, “so I’ll make it short.”
“I like sad stories.”
“It could be that you will be the heroine in one yourself.” Merle turned to the mermaid and looked at her.
“Why do you say such a thing?” Merle demanded.
“You have been touched by the Flowing Queen,” Eft replied, as if that were explanation enough. “Once, a mermaid was washed onto the shore of an island by a storm. She was so weak that she remained lying there, helpless among the rushes. The c
louds parted, the sun burned down from the heavens, and the body of the mermaid became dry and brittle and began to die. But then a young man appeared, the son of a trader, whose father had given him the thankless task of trying to trade with the handful of fisherfolk who lived on the island. He’d passed the entire day with the poor families, who’d shared water and fish with him, but they bought nothing, for they had no money and nothing for which it would have paid to trade. Late in the day the merchant’s young son was on the way back to his boat, but he didn’t dare to face his father after this lack of success. He was afraid of a tongue-lashing, for it wasn’t the first time that he’d returned to Venice without success, and even more he feared for his inheritance. His father was a stern, hard-hearted man, who had no understanding of the poverty of the people on the outer islands—really he had no understanding of anything in the world, except making money.
“The young man was now sauntering along the shore of the harbor to put off his return home. As he wandered lost in thought through the reeds and high grass, he stumbled on the stranded mermaid. He knelt down beside her, looked into her eyes, and fell in love with her on the spot. He didn’t see the fish tail below her hips, nor did he see the teeth that would have inspired fear in anyone else. He only looked into her eyes, which looked back at him helplessly, and he made up his mind at once: This was the woman he loved and would marry. He carried her back into the water, and while she gradually regained her strength in the billows of the waves, he spoke to her of his love.
The longer she listened to him, the more she liked him. From liking grew affection, and from affection grew more. They swore to see each other again, and so on the next day they met on the shore of another island, and on the day after that on another, and so it went.
“After several weeks the young man pulled all his courage together and asked if she would follow him to the city. But she knew how it went for mermaids in the city, and so she said no. He promised to make her his wife so that she could live at his side like a human. ‘Look at me,’ she said, ‘I will never be like a human.’ And so they were both very sad, and the young man saw that his plan had been nothing but a beautiful dream.
