by Arthur Japin
“Ah, movement,” she said. “Twirling round and round, what a delight! Can you imagine a greater torture than remaining motionless, like a rock, year upon year?”
Life composes the facts more brazenly than fiction would ever dare. Later, when this story is coming to an end, Maxim will find it hard to believe that these really were the first words he ever heard Gala speak. One day he will look it up in a well-thumbed script and discover that it was like this:
Gala was sitting still. She spoke slowly and carefully, as if she had been forced to keep silent for months and her lips were still unaccustomed to words. It wasn’t until later that afternoon that he realized that this lethargy infused all her movements.
“To be free! To flit from place to place! I would give my life for a night like this. To move!” Keeping her elbows on the arms of the chair, she raised her left forearm as if it were heavy and looked on with astonishment as her own drooping hand began moving in relaxed circles and came to life. “I cannot imagine that this night will ever pass,” she said. “The mere thought is enough to drive me mad!”
The first reading of Bal Manekinów was held in the home of a famous elderly actress who was going to direct the play for Amsterdam’s student theater. Her name had drawn quite a crowd. Maxim, always insecure in groups, felt a growing sense of panic as he looked at the other first-year students sitting in a circle in the living room. He didn’t know any of them. They were all so busy saying and doing things to make an impression that any urge Maxim may have felt to do the same immediately vanished. What most confused him in social situations was that he always saw people doing one thing while clearly thinking another. He wondered whether he was the only one who noticed this, or if others did too and then pretended they hadn’t. In company he felt like a traveler in a foreign country, curious about the customs and annoyed by his own inability to fathom them. At the same time, there was something safe about Maxim’s aloofness. He had time to gauge people’s intentions calmly, before they did anything. Even when sitting opposite someone, he still felt as though he were observing from the sidelines, half-hidden, and in fact most people were so busy talking about themselves that they didn’t really notice Maxim.
He had an unerring eye for which students had enrolled for the summer project to escape their cramped student housing and which had genuine acting ambitions. The latter did everything they could to make an impression on the great actress. She herself was most interested in her huskies, who never stopped barking and pissing on everything close to the ground. Now and then the old woman stopped abruptly in front of someone to stare at them silently with her big childish eyes, until she had just as suddenly had enough, whereupon she resumed pacing and called out from the hall a little later which part he or she should have. In the middle of the room, her assistant took notes. She had a lazy eye and wore a fur draped over her shoulders.
“Ven I vas little, I vas Polish Shirley Temple,” the assistant repeated every time someone came in, and then added, sighing deeply, as if all were now lost, “Und das Universitätstheatrum is already booked for ze end of September.” It was early May.
Gala showed up thirty minutes late. She appeared in the doorway in a long purple skirt with three flounces and a T-shirt with a conspicuously low neckline. Instead of apologizing, she smiled. That smile alone would have been enough to forgive her for a double murder. One of the coolest guys there surrendered his chair for her and sat down on the floor. The Pole gave a speech about the playwright and his significance to futurism and socialism in the 1920s. Then she handed out the scripts, and the elderly actress, who had gone outside to do some gardening, called through the open doors that the newcomer should read the lead.
“Yes, her in purple, that tasty, voluptuous one!”
Gala turned to the first page. She scrunched up her eyes, as if blinded by the paper. She had a strange face. Her cheekbones were broad rather than high and her face would have looked flat except for the small upturned nose that gave it a classic touch. As if the others weren’t sitting there waiting for her, she calmly read through the lines that opened the play. At last her lips parted. They were full and her lipstick was flaming red and the corners of her mouth had a natural tendency to curl.
“Ah, movement,” she said languidly.
The play was a dated satire of the bourgeoisie’s contempt for the masses: on the eve of Mardi Gras the mannequins of a Parisian fashion house come to life. When a congressman stumbles upon them, they behead him. One of their number puts the human head on his shoulders and goes to the ball of the industrialist Monsieur Arnaux, where he wreaks havoc amid the intrigues of Parisian high society. In the end, he prefers his own wooden head to a human head that is constantly scheming. He gives up his freedom and becomes a mannequin again. In other words, the whole story could have been told as a five-minute sketch. The reading took two and a half hours, interrupted once for a coffee break and once because one of the huskies pissed on the student who had give up his seat for Gala. Even before the unfortunate had dried off, he was informed that, on second thought, instead of the lead role that had been allocated to him at first, Monsieur Arnaux, he would now be playing Mannequin 2, a supporting part.
“Make Arnaux the tall one with that head!” shouted the elderly actress, who was taking the opportunity to clear out a built-in cupboard full of manuscripts from her glory days.
“Which head?” The Pole scanned the circle.
“That one,” the actress answered, pointing at Maxim, “leaning back like that, as if he’s looking down on everything.”
Finally someone came by to show sketches of the set, or what had to pass as one, given the budget of 450 guilders. In the doorway the famous actress announced in a quavering voice that, as an old woman, she had reconsidered, not feeling strong enough for a project with youngsters and therefore delegating the direction to the Polish child star, whereupon everyone said a dazed goodbye and fanned out over the enormous square.
In the passage that cuts under the Rijksmuseum, Maxim was overtaken by a cyclist. It was Gala. Just as she was passing, she turned toward him and called: “See you Tuesday!” She saw Maxim inadvertently look around to see whether she was talking to someone else and, since she didn’t know his name, added, “À bientôt, Monsieur Arnaux!”
“Oh,” he called back, casting about for something smart to say. “Yes, yes, Tuesday!” But Gala had already left him behind. Never before had Maxim seen someone wiggling her hips on a bicycle. He quickened his pace to prolong his study of the way Gala’s full buttocks slid slowly from left to right over her bicycle seat. He was eighteen, so in his thoughts he was already sitting naked on her carrier with his hands on that flesh.
That Tuesday evening Maxim arrived three-quarters of an hour early. The rehearsals were being held in a sterile lecture hall on the university island. He waited between the rows of seats, which sloped up like an amphitheater. The small stage backed onto tall windows through which the monumental facade of a diamond factory was visible on the other side of a broad canal. An advertising boat shaped like an enormous diamond had just pulled in to dock. On it you could read the factory’s slogan in glittering letters: THE MANY FACETS OF AMSTERDAM.
At home, Maxim had thought up a complete arsenal of witty replies to anything Gala might possibly say to him, but she wasn’t there. Gala never arrived early anywhere. She never even arrived on time. The standard fifteen minutes between classes at the university was never enough leeway for her, and, as a result, all lectures, rehearsals, and other gatherings fell silent just after they’d started, because she’d come in. She never said or did anything disruptive, but it was still impossible to avoid being distracted by the sight of her making her way to a seat. Boys and men stared at her with their tongues between their teeth, much to the annoyance of most of the women, who scowled at each other, convinced it was deliberate. It really was hard to believe that the beautiful young woman could be completely unaware of the impression she made. For minutes after she took her seat,
a trail of something yearning, misunderstood, and disturbingly feminine lingered where she had walked. Only in old movies do people make entrances to such effect, but then it’s more emphatic, slowly descending a long staircase or being drawn in by a team of naked slaves. With Gala, you had to see it to believe it. And the only person who didn’t see it was Gala herself. It was as if the black spot that had always remained in her field of vision prevented her from ever seeing herself. That probably attracted more attention than anything else: how naturally she evaded any semblance of posing. Disrupting things by arriving late annoyed her, but she was simply so indifferent to time that she found it impossible to take account of it.
“Everyone is constantly making things run smoothly,” she would say, “so there’s absolutely no reason for me to worry about it.” And whoever got to know Gala had to admit that, despite all her delays, she never missed anything important. Schedules and timetables, diaries and agendas, all seemed to arrange themselves to suit her, instead of the other way round.
“Ah,” she laughed when someone mentioned it, “rules are only a problem for people who follow them.”
They ran through a couple of scenes that evening, spending most of their time on the choreography at the start of the play, when the mannequins first realize they can move. All the students were allocated a place and a movement to rehearse while saying their lines. Oddly enough, their wooden acting did not make them more plausible as dummies.
It was only in the last fifteen minutes that it was the turn of Gala and Maxim, who had to seduce her. He had never seduced anyone before and it would have taken him years to pluck up the courage, but now he could hide behind someone else’s words. He held them in his left hand while wrapping his other arm around Gala’s waist and pulling her up against him. She didn’t seem surprised to find her lover standing behind her and offered no resistance, laying one hand on his. She slumped back, turning her face to rest against his chest. Her hair brushed his cheek and her buttocks pressed against him. Maxim’s breathing quickened as if it were really happening, though the thought that he was only playing a role nudged him on. He pushed his hips forward and felt his stage lover react. He glanced at his script, then spoke his next lines while bowing forward to kiss her on the throat.
“You checking a turkey at ze butcher’s?” the Pole interrupted, then spent the last minutes of the rehearsal on a cursing, sighing, and mocking attempt to stimulate the two young actors to show a little more intimacy.
After rehearsal, the whole company adjourned to the bar in a cinema across the road. Gala even got held up crossing the street, and Maxim, who had been the first to enter, thought for a moment that she wasn’t coming, but in the end the Pole ordered everyone to move up so that Gala could sit next to her.
Maxim never went to bars on his own account, and he found it hard to understand what others saw in them. He saw people laughing, moderately or effusively, but saw even more clearly that they weren’t enjoying themselves and were desperately trying to avoid admitting it. If they didn’t come for their own enjoyment, what was the point? Maxim heard them fill entire evenings prattling about themselves, who they were, what they did, what they thought, but he had never felt any urge to do the same. If someone so much as asked him how things were going, he was usually surprised and lost for words, as if he had never given a thought to something so futile. In fact, he just didn’t want to talk about it. He had always thought that this was because he didn’t consider himself and his thoughts important enough, but since finishing school he had felt stronger. Now he had started to believe that his thoughts might actually be too precious to expose to strangers. Just look at the way they treated them! Unlike most people’s, Maxim’s ideas and dreams had not been sculpted through interaction with others, but arduously constructed in isolation. He judged them too fragile to withstand the verbal violence that erupted in social situations. After all, most people hogged the stage by vocally hacking away at the words of others, with loud blows and not really listening, whereas they themselves had a great need to be heard. That was why they were so often delighted with someone who didn’t strive to contribute an opinion. In company, Maxim seemed like the ideal listener. By always looking people in the eye and nodding his head at appropriate intervals, he encouraged others to dissect their own souls.
He now noticed that Gala was a listener too. She was being monopolized by the Pole, who was capitalizing on the attention of the young men who had slid their chairs up toward them. She provoked them with sexual innuendos and asked Gala insinuating questions as well, hoping she’d play along and turn the men on even more. But Gala’s almost invariable reaction was an enigmatic smile that could be meaningless just as well as it could be meaningful. When finally forced to say something, she never said more than a couple of short sentences that promptly brought everything back down to earth and elicited smiles from the men, who were anxious to show that they had joined the table for her and not the middle-aged Shirley Temple.
Maxim had made sure to sit far enough away to avoid being drawn into the conversation, but no less than three times he thought he noticed Gala looking at him. Twice their eyes met after one of her quips, as if she were trying to reassure herself that he had heard it. The third time was around eleven thirty. The bar filled up with people who had seen the second showing of the film, and the theater club was crushed into a corner. Some of them thought it was time to leave, but a small group stayed behind and ordered a bottle of wine. Maxim watched Gala give two guys the brush-off, firmly, almost bluntly, but strangely enough with a smile that seemed almost to promise the opposite, so that they slinked off hopeful rather than disappointed.
Maxim had a train to catch. He had stood up and was waiting for a lull in the conversation to say goodbye, when Gala caught his eye for the third time. Her mood seemed to have changed completely from one moment to the next. Deeply sorrowful, she sought his support, as if no one else would understand. “How far we are from all this, you and I,” Maxim read in her eyes, and although he told himself at the same time that he was deluding himself, he hung his coat up again, slid his chair closer, and poured another glass of wine.
Gala wasn’t the main reason he decided to miss his train. While hanging around in the bar, toward midnight, he felt a rising sense of freedom. If this was what people sought in places like this, maybe he could understand it after all. As long as he could remember, Maxim had cherished the idea of a grander life to come. As a child, he would lie in bed listening to sounds and voices, imagining a party in full swing somewhere in the big house. He didn’t go out and look for it, because the idea that he was expected there was enough of an adventure. This disquieting expectation had sustained him throughout his childhood. Whenever his character and circumstances prevented him from participating in real life, snatches of consolation from everything that was still possible reached him like distant music through an open window. It had always been an abstract passion, formless, without a name and without an end, but tonight, for the first time, he felt he had recognized someone who had also been invited to that future celebration. In Gala he saw something he had probably known forever: how exciting it could be to feel alone when gaiety was all around.
When he was shown the door at closing time, Maxim was completely plastered. While the rest of the group said goodbye, he tried to read his watch.
“Ten minutes ago, and I would have made the night bus,” he mumbled to no one in particular, and the next thing he was sitting, without knowing exactly how he got there, on the back of Gala’s bicycle, seasick from the view and feeling somewhat unsure about how fast he seemed to be catching up on life.
He tried to find something to hold on to, but didn’t quite dare to seize the flesh bobbing up and down in front of him. Earlier that evening, he had simply pulled those same buttocks up against him, as if he did it every day. Obviously it didn’t matter how you acted something, he thought, as long as you were convincing, and he clamped his fingers around the steel frame.
; “Sometimes,” Gala said, “people bore me so much with all their talk that I can no longer restrain myself.”
“I can always restrain myself,” Maxim replied. “Yes, if you have anything that needs restraining, I’m the one.”
“There’s no reason for all that … Don’t you know that? People are so full of themselves they can’t possibly believe you’re not interested in them.”
“What most surprises me is how heavy their words are. The lighter they are, the more they weigh me down.”
“It’s like they make you dirty, as if their stupidity sticks to you.”
“But you still stayed till the very end.”
“It only looked like that. I was miles away.”
There were potholes in the road and Gala was too heavily laden to dodge them. Maxim had to grab on to her waist. It wasn’t as soft as it had been earlier. Under his hands he felt her flanks harden and relax in turn, as she strained against the pedals.
“Shut up, I shout, when their lips just keep chattering, shut up, you’re driving me up the wall, but they don’t even notice. Sometimes I imagine slapping them in the face. You should try it, it’s such a relief.”
“And what if they keep going?”
“Then I scratch out their eyes.” Gala clawed the air with one hand. “I have to. If I don’t follow my whims, they’ll explode. In the end I see them babbling away with their skin hanging in shreds from their bloody faces.” Gala laughed. Just to be on the safe side, Maxim decided not to say another word.
The last bus was still waiting at the bus station, late for no reason, but just as they rode up, the driver started the engine and took off at full speed. Gala didn’t hesitate for a moment, turning her bike crossways and forcing the driver to stop.
“It never needs to get boring,” she sighed as the doors slammed between them, and then louder, “The possibilities are endless.”
When Maxim raised his hand, he thought he saw her pursing her lips to blow him a kiss, but he couldn’t be sure because he could see his own reflection in the window as well, and, when the bus drove off, he immediately lost his balance and flew backward down the aisle.
