“Go ahead.’’
I don’t exactly know what I expected. Posters and photos on the walls, some sort of pennants. Or medals, cups, and badges brought home from innumerable contests, hung up or displayed on shelves for all to see.
Nothing of the sort.
I’m confused, because the room immediately conjures up a feeling of familiarity in me. The walls are white, and yet they don’t seem to reflect the light entering both windows. It looks as if the room itself radiates light, fed from some invisible source, projecting it outward. There is one single shelf halfway up the wall. Below the window is a small desk with a flat electric typewriter on it. Heaped up on all sides are notes and papers, jotters, pads, and different colored pencils. In the center of the room, accessible from all sides like the supporting columns of a temple roof, are four showcases divided into open compartments.
And suddenly I know what this room reminds me of—the old school cellar that I explored with Wolf. Suddenly I feel myself catapulted back in time and see the dusty conglomeration of outworn useless and forgotten items—the tattered books and atlases, the glass containers with dissected rats and frogs, the stuffed animals with their gleaming dead button eyes that haunted me in my dreams. Here, despite all the light filling the room and despite the absence of dust and decay, a similar atmosphere prevails. The same aura of oblivion pervades everything. It emanates from the strange objects on the shelf and from the contents of the four glass cabinets.
“This isn’t your real room, is it?” I ask Nicholas.
“No, but this is where I stay almost all the time.”
“What is it?”
“My museum.” He laughs softly, almost embarrassed. “At least that’s what I called it when I started collecting all these things.”
“When was that?”
“When I was nine or ten. I sent a lot of stuff back home from boarding school.”
Nicholas hasn’t shifted from the spot since he ushered me into the room. He has closed the door behind him and follows each of my movements. I crouch in front of one of the cabinets and look at the contents of the compartments, stand up again and inspect the shelf.
“Have your parents ever been in here?”
“They’re not interested. My father considers it kids’ nonsense, my mother thinks it’s strange. I guess she’s worried about my mental health.” Nicholas pulls a face. “Probably since she’s discovered how quickly you can lose it.”
“And what do you do with the stuff? D’you look at the things every day, or what? Like someone who collects stamps?”
“I invent stories about them.”
“Stories? About things like this?”
An entire shelf is awash with countless buttons, all colors and sizes, that look like seashells washed up on the beach. There’s a whole army of keys in all shapes and sizes and metals, dozens of combs made of tortoiseshell, metal, or plastic, their teeth cleaned, partly broken, and an enormous collection of writing instruments—wax crayons, lead pencils, colored pencils, ballpoint pens. I discover at least five fountain pens among them—no cheap varieties such as schoolkids use, but items that were obviously expensive. Two of them are gilded.
Nicholas reaches for one of the gilded pens. “To start with, you ask yourself what sort of person uses a pen like this. Did he buy it himself? Is it a present or maybe an heirloom? Was it stolen? Why is it gold, not silver, and when and where”— he points to a tiny cracked place on the cap—“did the lacquer come away?”
His enthusiasm is muted, perceptible rather than visible. He’d be shattered if I was to laugh now or show I was amused. Nicholas points to the four cabinets. Each of them has nine compartments. Each compartment contains a single object. Thirty-six compartments, linked to three dozen stories. “But it’s only the individual pieces that are really interesting,” he explains. “I know that a button possibly has a more exciting story to tell than something like this”—his fingers glide over a faded blue and red little boat, a mini-steamer made of plastic—“but everyday objects are just less attractive.”
“Some people would disagree with you about that.”
“And you?”
“You don’t need to take things so seriously, do you?”
I look at the little plastic boat and ask myself whether Nicholas replaces old objects with new, more interesting ones, and what he then does with the older pieces. Maybe nothing. Maybe he just gets a new showcase. There’s an old vinyl record with three small crosses scratched on it. A single ice skate, scratched and covered in rust, with torn red laces. A small simply framed picture of a butterfly with colored iridescent wings. A beautiful pocket watch on a gold chain, without its cover. The face is made of white enamel with the numbers painted in delicate thin brush strokes, and it has just one strangely curling hand pointing to half past twelve. Honey-colored horn-rimmed glasses with one arm secured at some time with a Band-aid. A small pocketknife fanned out with three different-sized blades and a mother-of-pearl handle. A red scarf of fine, soft wool that looks freshly washed. A heavy silver cigarette lighter with a monogram engraved on the case, half worn away with frequent use and now no longer legible.
I crouch down again. In the bottom compartment of the second cabinet stands a small box made of thick nut-brown wood, about half the size of a shoe box. The hinged lid is covered with tiny mother-of-pearl inlay work.
“Who could lose a box like this?” I say to Nicholas. “It’s quite big.”
“Don’t know.”
“Was it empty when you found it, or is there still something inside? Does it have a story?”
“Of course.”
My gaze wanders across to the typewriter. “Are the stories in your head, or d’you write them down?”
“I write most of them down.”
It’s the second time he reveals his uncertainty to me. This consists of nothing more than a barely perceptible narrowing of the eyes and a rapid movement wiping his lightly perspiring hand on his jeans. “You don’t think it … crazy, do you?” “Well, there certainly are less exotic hobbies.” There are also less weird hobbies. The objects in the showcases make me uneasy, and I don’t know why. It’s almost as if they’re asking—commanding—to be touched, “But how did you hit on the idea?”
“Pity.”
“Pity for a few things?”
Nicholas shrugs.
“D’you remember Handel saying the other day than if you want to appreciate the beauty of what man has created, you must look up? That all beauty strives upward, because that way it comes nearest to God?” He grins. “Even if that doesn’t apply to Handel in person.”
“Sure. Cathedrals, pyramids, and the tops of skyscrapers, the crowns of kings and popes, and all that.”
“Well, I thought about it,” says Nicholas. “Handel’s right. What I find is lost or thrown away. All very far removed from God, if you like. There are psychologists who maintain that you don’t lose things unintentionally, or at least not subconsciously. In one way or another everything you see here is a symbol of neglect. Things that are no longer wanted, for whatever reason.”
“But you didn’t know or think that when you started collecting.”
Nicholas shakes his head.
“And what you think up about these things …”
“They’re just any old stories.”
I look at him intently. He can’t possibly think I believe him. “Would you show me one?”
“Which one?”
I reach into one of the compartments at random and take out the lovely pocket watch with the missing cover.
“What about this?”
The watch is heavier in my hand than I expected. But it doesn’t send out any sparks and doesn’t come to life magically between my fingers. It wouldn’t have surprised me. Meanwhile I feel like Hansel and Gretel must have felt deep in the dark forest when they realized their trail of breadcrumbs had disappeared.
“Does it still work?” I ask Nicholas. “Can you wind it up?”
“That’s part of the story. Wait.”
He rummages among the papers on the desk, pulls out three sheets of paper, and hands them to me. I sense his eyes on me as I start to read.
SHOWCASE 2
4TH COMPARTMENT FROM TOP
THE WATCHMAKER WHO GOT LOST IN TIME
A watchmaker once lived in a small kingdom. The king had ruled over the land as long as people could remember, and would continue to do so when the world didn’t need people anymore. So the regent ordered the watchmaker to make him a watch—a pocket watch, to measure eternity.
So the watchmaker sat at his workbench, where escape wheel, barrel bridge, sweep hand, jewel bearing, and set-hands arbor formed a glittering assembly, and his nimble fingers fitted one piece to another. He worked for days and nights on end without a break, and then the work was complete. It shone and ticked, to the satisfaction of the watchmaker. All he had left to do was to fasten a glass cover to the body of the watch, but by now the watchmaker was tired; his eyes closed with exhaustion, and so he fell asleep.
When he woke up, he found himself on a white expanse, flat as a mirror, stretching in all directions as far as the eye could see. And in the way when you’re dreaming you know that the place you’re in can’t possibly exist but you still accept it without question, it didn’t bother the watchmaker that it was the enamel face of the watch where he’d ended up. See, there was a watch hand turning toward him already, ticking to its own time and quickly moving on.
And just as every dream conveys its own necessity to the person sleeping, so the watchmaker too knew what his task was—to follow the hand of the watch.
Immediately the watchmaker started out. But hardly had he taken his first steps when he had a terrible fright. For he was finding it absolutely impossible to make out where he was in relation to the watch hand! No matter whether he placed himself in front or behind the watch hand, it was less a matter of physical distance than of chronological definition. When the watch hand was immediately behind the watchmaker, then the watchmaker might be one or more circuits behind it in time, and the watch hand that he was trying to catch up with was actually in front of him. However, if the watchmaker was ahead, then the watch hand would straighten out, knowing it had to catch up, and consequently would place itself behind him.
All this was highly confusing. Also, since the watch hand was constantly on the move, making it necessary for the watchmaker to either pursue it or run ahead of it, the watchmaker never got a chance to think about the problem, as he was in a constant hurry. And as if to mock him, the watch would even swing round and come toward him, so that the position of the watch hand made no more sense.
So there was nothing that the watchmaker could do but to keep up by rushing around the watch face, sometimes in this direction and then in a circle, just like a terrified rabbit running away from a fox. The spot where the least movement took place, the watchmaker reflected at some point, when he could hardly bear the exhaustion and dizziness any longer, was probably at the center of the watch face, at the axis of the relentlessly rotating hand. Yes, that was where he would set out for right away; there he would be able to rest.
Imagine the watchmakers surprise when, having reached his target at the axis of the watch hand, he found a small piece of paper, and what was more, with writing on it! There were six words on it, six words in writing so tiny it was hard to imagine where in the world such a thin pen existed that could write that way. Well, could it be that the author of the words had used not a pen but a hair to write with? But then again, did a creature with such fine, thin hair exist?
The watchmaker screwed up his eyes and read.
THAT’S NOT PART OF THE DEAL
But scarcely had he deciphered the last letter and read the six words when the mechanism of the watch stopped working. The hand came to a halt, and the watchmaker felt himself swept away by a fierce wind as the last fraction of the last passing second swallowed him up. No one knows what became of him, for he disappeared forever in time and was never seen again.
And the king waited in vain for his wish to be fulfilled.
Nicholas smiles as I hand him back the sheets of paper, maybe because I still don’t manage to get rid of the furrows that have crept over my forehead as I was reading. “It’s good,” I say hesitantly. “I mean, it’s well written, but … well, to be honest, I don’t understand a word of it.”
“There’s nothing to understand.”
He places the sheets back on the heap of papers stacked high on the desk.
“Are the other stories also so …”I’m about to say “complicated” but stop myself, although by now it doesn’t really matter. I must have long since seemed like an idiot.
“You hit on the most abstract one of the lot. Most of them are more like fairy tales.”
“Sorry if—”
Nicholas stops me with a wave of his hand. With that brief movement the light in the room seems to dim, as if a cloud had passed across the sun. He doesn’t take his eyes off me as he slowly unbuttons his shirt. I follow his movements as his hands move downward.
And so the autumn passes. Nicholas keeps his job at the library long after Mrs. Hebeler’s holiday is over, having offered to sort out and catalog the library stock two afternoons a week. That’s only a part of the time lost to us. Nicholas spends even more time running on the deserted sports field or doing cross-country. I’d love to have more time with him.
One day he drives up to Visible in a red sports car, on loan from his father.
He waves and opens the passenger door for me. I jump in laughing and pull back the top, and Nicholas grins and lights a cigarette, the one and only time I ever see him smoking. We go and pick Kat up from her house, leave the town behind, and race along remote country roads through the late autumn landscape, dissolving in flaming orange and heavenly blue. It’s one of those days when the world seems to be taking a last deep warm breath before handing itself over to winter. We cover mile after mile; the air is filled with the rich hum of the engine, the blaring of the radio, and the whirring of the tires on the asphalt. Kat’s wearing a brightly colored head scarf that flaps in the wind, and outsize sunglasses. She puts her arms round me and Nicholas in turn from behind, and she’s constantly laughing and squealing, especially when Nicholas takes one hand off the steering wheel along a straight stretch of road. In the rearview mirror, or when we turn round to her, we see her crooked incisors, and when we get home, music from a single roaring in our ears, we name the brilliant, drunken, exhausting day the Gap-Tooth Day.
At school, Nicholas takes care not to spend more time with Kat and me than with his many admirers. When the three of us are together, he pays as much attention to Kat as to me. It’s as if every time he talks to us, when we laugh or talk about everything under the sun, he makes a hole in an internal punch card that he is constantly checking in order to be fair to each of us. Nicholas and Kat get on famously. It’s only when we are alone together that he touches me. Meanwhile it’s become a trademark of hers to put her arms around him and kiss him in front of everybody.
Tereza and Pascal are going off to Holland together for a few weeks. Tereza didn’t take time for a summer vacation, and now she’s making up for it. She sends us a postcard from the coast, where she and Pascal are hiding out in a comfortable little guesthouse. Between autumn and winter they go for long walks along deserted beaches, defying ice-cold rain, storms, and coastal fog. The food is good and Pascal is getting fat, writes Tereza. I’m going to frame her and sell her as a three-dimensional multimedia artwork à la Rubens.
Michael stays at Visible so often now that I hardly notice, whereas I get almost nervous when he’s not there. The lawsuit he was involved in has been settled in his favor. Michael’s always saying how impressed he is with Visible’s architecture— if it was his house, he wouldn’t change it by one iota. He goes on long exploratory walks and discovers nooks and crannies that even I didn’t know about, and gets as excited as a little boy when Glass surprises hi
m one day with the design plans for the house, which she’s found in the cellar in one of the millions of cardboard boxes stacked away down there. I find it barely comprehensible how much Michael loves Visible, and wait with curiosity for the winter, when Glass will make him chop wood by the ton in order to heat the drafty rooms. I like his calm, reflective manner. He is passionately fond of chess and tries to get me interested. I like the look of the hand-carved, stern chess figures, the symmetrical contrast of black and white, but the game itself is beyond me. I’m incapable of planning more than two moves ahead, and we soon give up the effort, more to Michael’s regret than mine.
Glass blooms visibly under the strange magic that I still believe Michael works on her. It is a calm bloom that glows, perceptible just by looking at her out of the corner of your eye or without focusing sharply. Sometimes she moves through the house humming softly, and unexpectedly breaks into the occasional little dance step. Then again, on one of the rare evenings she now passes without Michael she’ll sit wrapped in a blanket on the far too cold veranda and smile for no apparent reason at the world at large. The nervous energy given off in restlessness or frenetic babbling that has been part of her for as long as I can remember is now dropping away day by day. Glass has less and less time for her clients, whom I can never think of without seeing Gables horrific scar before me. Poor Rosella with her missing ear and crooked grin is getting covered in an ever thicker layer of dust. The rainy day for which Glass was saving for years seems to have retreated into the remote distance.
The Center of the World Page 24
