The Water Mirror

by Kai Meyer

  “How many mirrors are there?” asked Junipa.

  It was impossible to estimate their number, to say nothing of counting them. They reflected each other again and again in their glassy surfaces, mutually adding and multiplying themselves. Merle had a thought: Was a mirror that existed only in a mirror not just as real as its original? It fulfilled its role just as well as its counterpart—it reflected.

  Merle couldn’t think of anything else that was able to do this: to do something without itself being. For the first time, she asked herself whether all mirrors were not always magic mirrors. Mirrors can see, Arcimboldo had said. Now she believed him.

  “You are now going to make the acquaintance of a very singular kind of nuisance,” he explained. “My special friends—the mirror phantoms.”

  “Mirror phantoms? What are they?” Junipa spoke softly, almost fearfully, as though the images of what she had seen behind Merle’s water mirror still danced before her eyes and made her afraid.

  Arcimboldo stepped in front of the first mirror in the center row. It reached almost to his chin. Its frame was of plain wood, like the frames of all the mirrors from Arcimboldo’s workshop. They not only served as ornament but also prevented cut fingers during transport.

  “Just look in,” he demanded.

  The girls walked to his side and stared at the mirror. Junipa noticed it first. “There’s something in the glass.”

  It looked like shreds of mist that moved fleetingly over the mirror surface, amorphous, like ghosts. And there was no doubt that the pale outline was under the glass, inside the mirror.

  “Mirror phantoms,” said Arcimboldo matter-of-factly. “Annoying parasites who settle into my mirrors from time to time. It’s the apprentices’ job to catch them.”

  “And how are we supposed to do that?” Merle wanted to know.

  “You’ll enter the mirrors and drive out the phantoms with a little aid that I shall give you to take with you.” He laughed aloud. “My goodness, don’t look so flabbergasted! Dario and the others have done it countless times. It may seem a little unusual to you, but basically it’s not very difficult. Just tiresome. Therefore, you apprentices are allowed to experience it, while your old master puts his feet on the desk, smokes a good pipe, and doesn’t worry about a thing.”

  Merle and Junipa exchanged looks. They both felt apprehensive, but they were also determined to get through this business with dignity. After all, if Dario had already done it, they probably would be able to as well.

  Arcimboldo pulled something out of a pocket of his smock. Between thumb and forefinger he held it in front of the girls’ noses: a transparent glass ball, no bigger than Merle’s fist.

  “Quite ordinary, eh?” Arcimboldo grinned, and for the first time, Merle noticed that he was missing a tooth. “But in fact, it’s the best weapon against mirror phantoms. Unfortunately, it’s also the only one.”

  He said nothing for a moment, but neither girl asked any questions. Merle was certain that Arcimboldo would carry on with his explanation.

  After a short pause, while he gave them a chance to look at the glass ball more closely, he said, “A glassblower on Murano produced this captivating little thing according to my specifications.”

  Specifications? Merle asked herself. For a simple ball of glass?

  “When you put it next to a mirror phantom, you must just speak a certain word, and he’ll immediately be trapped inside the ball,” Arcimboldo explained. “The word is intorabiliuspeteris. You must imprint it in your minds as if it were your own name. Intorabiliuspeteris.”

  The girls repeated the strange word, becoming tongue-tangled a few times, until they were sure they could keep it in their heads.

  The master pulled out a second ball, handed one to each girl, and had them step up to the mirror. “Several mirrors are infested, but for today we’ll let it go with one.” He made a sort of bow in the direction of the mirror and spoke a word in a strange language.

  “Enter,” he said then.

  “Just like that?” Merle asked.

  Arcimboldo laughed. “Of course. Or would you rather ride in on a horse?”

  Merle ran her eye over the mirror surface. It looked smooth and solid, not yielding like her hand mirror. The memory made her briefly look over at Junipa. Whatever she’d seen this morning, it had made a deep impression on her. Now she seemed to be afraid to follow Arcimboldo’s instructions. For a moment Merle was tempted to tell the master everything and ask for understanding for Junipa to remain here and Merle to go alone.

  But then Junipa took the first step and stretched out her hand. Her fingers broke through the mirror surface like the skin on a pan of boiled milk. She quickly looked over her shoulder at Merle; then, with a strained smile, she stepped inside the mirror. Her figure was still recognizable, but now it looked flat and somehow unreal, like a figure in a painting. She waved to Merle.

  “Brave girl,” murmured Arcimboldo with satisfaction.

  Merle broke through the mirror surface with a single step. She felt a cold tickling, like a gentle breeze at midnight, then she was on the other side and looking around.

  She had once heard of a mirror labyrinth that was supposed to have been in a palazzo on the Campo Santa Maria Nova. She knew no one who had seen it with his own eyes, but the pictures that the stories had conjured up in her mind bore no comparison with what she now saw before her.

  One thing was clear at first glance: The mirror world was a kingdom of deceptions. It was the place under the double bottom of the kaleidoscope, the robbers’ cave in the Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, the palace of the gods on Olympus. It was artificial, an illusion, a dream dreamed only by those who believed in it. And yet at this moment it seemed as substantial as Merle herself. Did the figures in a painting also think they were in a real place? Prisoners who were not aware of their imprisonment?

  Before them lay a room of mirrors: not like Arcimboldo’s storeroom, much more a structure that from top to bottom, from left to right, consisted of mirrors and mirrors alone. Yet the first impression was deceptive. If you took a step forward, you bumped up against an invisible glass wall, while there, where the end of the room appeared to be, was nothing but emptiness, followed by other mirrors, invisible connecting passageways, and fresh deceptions.

  It took a moment for Merle to realize what was really troubling about this place: The mirrors reflected only each other, not the two girls who were standing in their middle. So it happened that they could walk straight up to a mirror and bump against it without being warned by their own reflection. On all sides, the mirrors reflected themselves to infinity, a world of silver and crystal.

  Merle and Junipa made several attempts to move deeper into the labyrinth, but again and again they bumped against glass.

  “This is pointless,” Merle protested and stamped her foot in anger. Mirror glass creaked under her foot without splintering.

  “They’re all around us,” Junipa whispered.

  “The phantoms?”

  Junipa nodded.

  Merle looked around. “I can’t see any.”

  “They’re afraid. My eyes scare them. They’re avoiding us.”

  Merle turned around. There was a sort of door at the place where they’d entered the mirror world. There she thought she could perceive a movement, but perhaps that was only Arcimboldo, waiting for them in the real world.

  Something whisked past her face, a pale flicker. Two arms, two legs, a head. Close up, it no longer looked like a patch of fog but rather like the blur caused by a drop of water in the eye.

  Merle raised the glass ball, feeling a little foolish. “Intorabiliuspeteris,” she cried, and immediately felt even more foolish.

  There was the sound of a soft sigh, then the phantom shot right at her. The ball sucked him to its inside, which soon flickered and grew streaky, as if it were filled with a white, oily fluid.

  “It works!” Merle gasped.

  Junipa nodded but made no attempt to use her own ba
ll. “Now they’re terribly afraid.”

  “You can really see them all around us?”

  “Very clearly.”

  It must have to do with Junipa’s eyes, with the magic of the mirror pieces. Now Merle also saw other blurs at the edge of her vision, but she couldn’t make out the phantoms as clearly as Junipa seemed to be able to.

  “If they’re afraid, that means that they’re living beings,” she said, thinking aloud.

  “Yes,” Junipa said. “But it’s as if they weren’t really here. As if they were only a part of themselves, like a shadow that’s separated from its owner.”

  “Then perhaps it’s a good thing if we get them out of here. Perhaps they’re prisoners here.”

  “Do you think in the glass ball they aren’t?”

  Of course Junipa was right. But Merle wanted to get back into the real world as fast as possible, away from this glassy labyrinth. Arcimboldo would only be satisfied when they’d caught all the phantoms. She was afraid otherwise he’d send them right back into the mirror.

  She no longer paid any attention to what Junipa was doing. Merle stretched out her arm with the ball, waved it in different directions, and called the magic word over and over: “Intorabiliuspeteris . . . intorabiliuspeteris . . . intorabiliuspeteris!”

  The hissing and whistling became louder and sharper, and at the same time the ball filled with the swirling fog until it looked as if the glass were being steamed up on the inside. Once, in the orphanage, one of the attendants had blown cigar smoke into a wine glass, and the effect had been very similar: The layers of smoke had rotated behind the glass as though there were something living inside trying to get out.

  What sort of creatures were these that infested Arcimboldo’s magic mirrors like aphids in a vegetable garden? Merle would have loved to know more.

  Junipa was grasping her ball so tightly in her fist that it suddenly cracked and shattered in her hand. Tiny splinters of glass rained onto the mirror floor, followed by dark drops of blood, as the sharp edges cut into Junipa’s fingers.

  “Junipa!” Merle stuffed her ball into her pocket, sprang to Junipa’s side, and anxiously examined her hand. “Oh, Junipa . . .” She slipped out of her sweater and wrapped it around her friend’s forearm. That made visible the upper edge of the hand mirror, stuck into her dress pocket.

  Suddenly one of the phantoms whizzed in a narrow spiral around her upper body and disappeared into the surface of the water mirror.

  “Oh, no,” Junipa said tearfully, “that’s all my fault.”

  Merle was more concerned about Junipa’s well-being than about the mirror. “I think we’ve caught all of them anyway,” she said, unable to take her eyes from the blood on the floor. Her face was mirrored in the drops, as if the blood had tiny eyes that were looking up at her. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Junipa held her back. “Are you going to tell Arcimboldo one of them went—”

  Merle interrupted her. “No, he’d just take it away from me.”

  Stricken, Junipa nodded, and Merle reassuringly laid an arm around her shoulders. “Don’t give it another thought.”

  She gently urged Junipa back to the door, a glittering rectangle not far from them. Arms tightly wrapped around one another, they walked out of the mirror into the storeroom.

  “What happened?” asked Arcimboldo, when he saw the wrapping around Junipa’s hand. Immediately he unwrapped it, discovered the cuts, and ran to the door. “Eft!” he bellowed out into the workroom. “Bring bandages. Quickly!”

  Merle also appraised the cuts. Happily, none of them seemed to be really dangerous. Most of them weren’t very deep, just red scratches on which very thin clots were already forming.

  Junipa pointed to the blood spots on Merle’s wadded-up sweater. “I’ll wash that for you.”

  “Eft can take care of that,” Arcimboldo interposed. “Instead, tell me how this happened!”

  Merle told in a few words what had occurred. Only, she kept to herself the flight of the last phantom into her hand mirror. “I caught all the phantoms,” she said, pulling the ball out of her pocket. The bright streaks in its interior were now rotating hectically.

  Arcimboldo grasped the ball and held it up to the light. What he saw seemed to please him, for he nodded in satisfaction. “You did very well,” he praised the two girls. Not a word about the broken ball.

  “Now rest,” he advised them after Eft had treated the cuts. Then he waved to Dario, Boro, and Tiziano, who’d been lurking at the storeroom door. “You three take care of the rest.”

  As Merle was leaving the workshop with Junipa, she turned once more to Arcimboldo. “What happens to them now?” She pointed to the ball in the master’s hand.

  “We throw them into the canal,” he replied with a shrug. “Let them settle into the reflections on the water.”

  Merle nodded, as if she’d expected nothing else, then led Junipa up to their room.

  The news spread around the workshop like wildfire. There was going to be a festival! Tomorrow it would be thirty-six years to the day since the army hosts of the Egyptian Empire were massed at the edges of the lagoon. Steamboats and galleys had crossed the water and sunbarks were standing ready in the skies for the attack on the helpless city. But the Flowing Queen had protected Venice, and since then this day had been celebrated throughout the entire city with festivals of rejoicing. One of them would be taking place very close by. Tiziano had heard about it that morning when he went with Eft to the fish market, and he immediately told Dario, who told Boro and, a little reluctantly, passed it on to Merle and Junipa.

  “A festival in honor of the Flowing Queen! Right around the corner! There’ll be lanterns up everywhere and beer barrels tapped and wine corks popping!”

  “Something for you children too?” Arcimboldo, who’d been listening, wore a sly smile as he spoke.

  “We aren’t children anymore!” flared Dario. Then, with a scornful sideways glance at Junipa, he added, “At least most of us.”

  Merle was about to leap to Junipa’s defense, but it wasn’t necessary. “If it’s an expression of adulthood,” Junipa said with unwonted pertness, “to pick your nose at night, scratch your behind, and do lots of other things, then you’re of course very grown-up. Right, Dario?”

  Dario turned scarlet at her words. But Merle stared at her friend in amazement. Had Junipa slipped into the boys’ room at night and observed them? Or could she, thanks to her new mirror eyes, even see through walls? This thought made Merle feel uncomfortable.

  Dario was swelling with indignation, but Arcimboldo settled the argument with a wave. “Settle down now, or none of you will go to the festival! On the other hand, if you’ve finished your jobs punctually by sundown tomorrow, I see no reason—”

  The rest of his words were lost in the cries of the apprentices. Even Junipa was beaming all over. It looked as though a shadow had lifted from her features.

  “However, one thing you should all keep in mind,” said the master. “The students from the weaving workshop will assuredly be there. I want no trouble. Bad enough that our canal has become a battlefield. I will not permit this quarrel to be carried elsewhere. We’ve already drawn enough attention to ourselves. So—no insults, no fighting, not even a crooked look.” His eyes singled out Dario from the other apprentices. “Understand?”

  Dario took a deep breath and nodded hastily. The others hastened to murmur their agreement as well. Actually, Merle was grateful for Arcimboldo’s words, for the last thing she wanted was a new scrap with the weaver boys. Junipa’s wounds had been healing well over the last three days; she needed some peace now to heal completely.

  “Now, then, all back to work,” the master said, satisfied.

  To Merle the time till the festival seemed endless. She was excited and could hardly wait to be among people again, not because she’d had enough of the workshop and its inhabitants—Dario being the one exception—but because she missed the untamed life in the streets, the chattering voic
es of the women and the transparent boastings of the men.

  Finally the evening arrived, and they all left the house together. The boys ran ahead, while Merle and Junipa followed slowly. Arcimboldo had made a pair of glasses for Junipa with dark glass that was supposed to keep anyone from noticing her mirror eyes.

  The small troop turned the corner where the Canal of the Expelled opened into the wider waterway. Even from afar they could see hundreds of lanterns on the house fronts, lights in the windows and doors. A small bridge, hardly more than a pedestrian crossing, linked their side to that place. Its railings were decorated with lanterns and candles, while the people sat on the sidewalks, some on stools and chairs they’d brought out of their houses, others on cushions or on the bare stone. In several places drinks were being sold, although Merle realized with a trace of malicious pleasure that Dario was sure to be disappointed: There was hardly any wine or beer, for this was a poor people’s festival. No one here could afford to pay fantastic sums for grapes or barley, which had to be smuggled into the city by dangerous routes. After all these years, the Pharaoh’s siege ring was just as tight as at the beginning of the war. Even though the siege was imperceptible in daily life, still no one doubted that hardly a mouse, not to mention a smugglers’ boat, could sneak past the Egyptian army camps. One could certainly find wine—as Arcimboldo did—but it was usually difficult, even dangerous. The poor people drank water ordinarily, while at festivals they had to be content with juices and various home-distilled liquors of fruits and vegetables.

  Up on the bridge, Merle saw the weaver’s apprentice who’d been the first to lose his mask. There were two other boys with him. One’s face was very red, as if he were sunburned; clearly it hadn’t been easy for him to wash off the glue Merle had sprayed under his mask.