The Vanishing Princess

by Jenny Diski

  “Don’t be frightened,” the soldier said, although such an emotion had not occurred to her before he said it. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  And now she did begin to feel alarmed. She had never thought of herself as known in the outside world, and felt a strange distress at the idea of existing in someone’s mind as something to be found. The second soldier was a clever man, and noticed her reaction. Being clever, and knowing about the first soldier and the food, he knew he needed an edge. He looked carefully about the room and thought for a long time.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, as he closed the door behind him and oiled the lock. And the princess didn’t doubt it.

  When he returned he brought with him two objects: a mirror, and a calendar with all the days of the week, and the months of the year laid out for years to come. He placed the mirror on the wall in front of the princess’ bed, and nailed the calendar to the door.

  “Look,” he said, taking the princess’ hand and leading her from the bed to stand in front of the mirror. The second soldier had understood on his first visit that it was not only food the princess had lacked all her life.

  Having had no way of seeing herself, she had no precise notion that she existed at all. And having had no way to mark the passage of time, she lacked any sense of expectation. The first soldier could come and go, but she did not wait or hope that he would come soon, or this week, or tomorrow.

  She looked at her reflection in the mirror, and at first it distressed her. She hadn’t seen anything quite like it before. But the second soldier stood by her and she watched his reflection standing next to hers and telling her, “That is you.” It took some time, but very gradually she started to think. “Perhaps it is. Perhaps I am here. Perhaps, when people come into this room, they see me.” And she looked sideways, out of the corners of her narrowing eyes, at the princess in the mirror.

  “When I come to see you,” the second soldier said, “that is what I come to see. You.”

  “Me,” the princess repeated, trying to get used to the idea. It was still very disturbing, and yet, there was something about it that she found pleasant. Strange, but pleasant.

  “I will come again next week,” the second soldier said, and led her to the calendar to show her how to mark the days. “On this day, Friday, next week, I will come back to see you.” And he looked long and hard into her eyes. For this soldier too had something that gave him particular pleasure. He loved to see in women’s eyes a look of expectation, a dawning of new possibilities. And the princess had eyes that enabled this to show to an extraordinary degree. But that was not all; the look of expectation was only a part of his pleasure. To complete it he wanted to see that gleam fade to a subtler tone of disappointment.

  He returned on the appointed day and watched as the princess’ eyes began to show she had understood the nature of time. When he left he gave her another day, and came then too. But on the third occasion he did not come when he had said, but two days later, and there in her eyes was the completion of his pleasure. When he left saying he would be back on such a date, he saw the hope and anxiety mingle in a way he could never have hoped for.

  The first soldier did not make a visit during this time, and the second soldier was careful to check that the princess was alone when he arrived. But he left the calendar and the mirror in the room, and she let them remain where he had put them.

  When the first soldier came again he looked at both the objects, but said nothing. He laid the food before the princess and watched her lips as she bit off and chewed small mouthfuls. When she had finished he took up the cloth and walked over to the mirror.

  “Stand here,” he said, pointing to a spot just in front of it. He looked at her reflection for a moment and then took off a diamond ring he wore and, using the edge of one of its facets, he etched the outline of the princess’ reflection on to the glass.

  “I’ll be back when I can,” he said, glancing at the calendar, and left.

  When the second soldier returned, the princess was pleased to see him, as he came through the door, looking, as she had come to feel, at her. But immediately his gaze fell on the mirror, and the outline etched upon it. He looked first at the princess and then at the glass.

  “Stand here,” he said, pointing to a spot in front of the mirror, and when she did, he moved her slightly until her reflection exactly filled the outline. The princess looked at herself, and thought, as she always did when she caught her reflection as she passed by to return or get a book, “Here I am.”

  The second soldier eased a ring from his finger, and with the edge of a facet of the diamond, drew around the reflection of her eyes. First one, then the other. He stepped back to look at it for a moment, then filled in the lids, the pupils and the irises. At last, a pair of eyes stared out from the outline of a woman on the glass, fixed in an expression of longing and alarm so poignant that the princess gasped. She could no longer see her own eyes when she looked into the mirror.

  When the first soldier came back he spent at least as much time looking at the eyes in the glass as he did watching the princess eat. When she had finished, he had her stand in front of the mirror and drew her mouth: the lips full and open, mobile and beautiful. The princess could no longer see her lips when she looked into the glass.

  Now, on each visit, the soldiers added to the portrait in the mirror. Each soldier examined the work of the other, and then etched a new piece on to the mirror. The outline became no more than a frame, as each man added a feature according to his mood. An elbow was matched with the bridge of a nose; a wrist with a knee; a buttock curved beside an anklebone; one ear rested on a fingernail. Neither man noticed anything that had gone before the other man’s last sketch.

  Eventually the first soldier stopped bringing food, and the second soldier no longer bothered with the calendar. There came a time when the princess could no longer see herself at all in the mirror. “I’m not here,” she said to herself. “Perhaps I never was.” And she disappeared.

  No one knows exactly how it happened. It could have been that she opened the door one day, discovered that the soldiers had long since stopped locking it, and walked down the winding staircase and vanished forever in the dense, impenetrable forest that surrounded the tower. Or it may have been that, finding herself no longer there, she simply wasn’t any more. At any rate, she vanished and no one ever saw or heard of her again.

  The two soldiers hardly noticed her absence. They continued to visit the tower, turn by turn, and left their messages for each other on the mirror. The years passed, and, although they never met, their contentment and affection deepened. Eventually they grew old and died. One day the first soldier arrived and found that nothing had been added to the glass. It was not long after that he stopped coming too.

  And the mirror rusted, the silvering began to flake away, leaving only scratches on the glass that were indecipherable. When the tower began to crumble, pieces of stone fell and broke the glass itself until there was nothing left of this earliest of examples of Cubist art except rubble greened over with wild vegetation. It was to be many centuries before the form would be invented and by then no one had any notion that it had ever been done before.

  Leaper

  He phoned at completely the wrong time, my lover. “Write me a story. A man and a woman, fucking. Keep it short and dirty.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “If you want a story, speak to my agent. The going rate is £500 a thousand words. If you want a fuck, speak to me. The going rate is . . . what is the going rate?”

  “Do as you’re told,” he said, just the tiniest bit menacing.

  “Fuck you,” I said, and put the phone down.

  I’d spent the morning struggling with a never-to-be-published story and was sunk in a kind of slime of incapacity. What I lack is confidence. Much good it does to know what’s lacking. I’ve written quite a lot: short stories and articles for magazines, most of them published. Looked at from the outside, the writing’s going quite well. I
’ve made a small but significant reputation with a number of editors and it’s only a matter of time now, before I attempt The Novel that will, I hope, fulfil the promise I’ve shown.

  If that sounds like an efficient piece of PR, it is, because I know, in that place where you really know things, that I can’t write at all. That fact, that I have produced decent stuff to murmurs of quiet appreciation, doesn’t affect this knowledge I have about myself. Something to do with my childhood, I suppose. Anyway, although things turn out more or less all right in the end, it doesn’t change anything, and I face every blank piece of paper in a state of panic. This time, I know for sure, they’ll find me out.

  Things could be worse. That bone-deep knowledge of my own inability doesn’t, as it might, pervade my entire life. Not any more. At least it’s contained in the writing department, realising, I suppose, that there is where I’ve decided I can live. I see this now as part of my internal structure; just as there is a language centre in the brain, so I have a worry centre which fills with anxiety and has to find something to worry about. It used to attach itself to anything available: money, sex, shopping, the daily news, the condition of my flat. For no reason connected with anything that was happening, anxiety would erupt. Suddenly, it would occur to me that there was dry rot under the floorboards, or perhaps, since I didn’t know one from the other, it was damp rot; and the gnawing worry would infest the day. No matter what sensible things I told myself, that it probably wasn’t true, or, if it was, so what, or I could do something about it, the ache would thrum away, colouring the day with anxiety. The damp/dry rot was desperate all of a sudden, festering and rotting the fabric of my flat. I would go about my business efficiently enough, but accompanied always in some small space inside me by my fears. By the following morning, the certainty of rotting floorboards beneath my feet would have faded, but something else would take its place, filling up the worry gap before I had a chance to be relieved. A bank statement would arrive and now the money situation, unchanged from a day or a week before, would be terrifying, and I’d spend every free moment listing and relisting my income and outgoings, coming up each time with the same answer, forgetting almost what the problem was, but knowing there was some solution it was essential to arrive at. Sometimes, it made life very difficult to live.

  All the time, even in the midst of the panics, I knew it to be free-floating anxiety, its source a well of terror in me that had nothing to do with my chosen concerns. But this information wasn’t much help. And sometimes, exhausted by it all, I wanted someone around who would tell me none of it was real, and take away from me the problems that seemed, now and then, to threaten my sanity. But, in fact, I managed, and things have improved. The anxiety is contained.

  Now, as I say, since I decided that writing is the only route I’ve got through life, the worry has latched on to that, like a cattle tick, and gains sustenance from my fears.

  What I’ve learned about this is to ignore it. Most of the time, I write through a miasma of terror, and something decent comes out the other end. I don’t know how. I think of it as The Process and leave it at that. It’s like swimming in mud; not pleasant, but you get to the other side if you just keep going.

  Usually, I can live with the discomfort. Why should things be easy? But occasionally I get exhausted by it, with having to contain my insecurity and generate enough energy to just bloody well get on with it. And still, sometimes, I wish someone else were here to do it for me.

  I imagine the conversation with this paragon who will devote his energy to keeping me at it.

  “I can’t do this. I can’t write,” I wail, a formless heap.

  “Of course you can.” The voice is practical, not comforting, even a bit impatient. “What about all the things you’ve written? You did them, and they were all right. Now, do it again.”

  “I can’t,” I howl angrily. “I don’t know how those other things happened. They weren’t anything to do with me. This is the real thing, and I can’t do it.”

  “Well, you’re just going to have to try harder, aren’t you?”

  That’s what I’m after. Not soggy comfort, but a hard line. A brusque assumption that I can and will do it, that I don’t have any choice. And that, I suppose, is what I do for myself most of the time. But, as I say, sometimes it’s hard to conjure up that other voice, and I wish someone else were here to help. Which is foolish, I know, and I get over and on with it. But it doesn’t help one bit when Dan calls to play games in the mud I feel I’m drowning in. It doesn’t make me feel—I don’t know—valued.

  I decided it was a good moment to take some exercise. Sometimes I can disperse the panic by working up a physical sweat. I go to a gym just past the local underground station.

  As I approached the station, trying to contain my annoyance at Dan by promising it a monumental expenditure of energy on the work-out bench, I noticed that something was going on. Too many people on the street for a weekday afternoon; the bus queue a long, rush-hour line; and small, static groups outside the station itself, standing around in that way, signalling an event. An ambulance waited throbbing in the road, traffic building up as cars skirted carefully and curiously around it, its back doors open, red blankets folded neatly on the beds. The entrance to the station, normally a corridor of warm air, a dark gloomy cave into which travellers disappeared, was closed, heavy iron gates pulled across, and behind them, a handful of uniformed figures milled about. Two middle-aged men sat in pale silence on the stone step in front of the gates, neither of them looking as if this was their normal way of being on the street.

  I allowed myself the luxury of imagining an electrical fault, an unattended carrier bag, a heart-attack, even, while I walked through the small crowd and beyond the locked gates toward the gym. Where, no longer needing willed ignorance to get past the spot uninvolved, I gave my brain permission to interpret the signs.

  There had been a leaper. Some poor but efficient sod had jumped under a passing train.

  It’s the drivers who call them “leapers.” My ex, who likes to know this kind of technical, inside information, met an underground driver in a pub, who told him. Also, that leapers are a bit of a blessing among the lads, since any driver it happens to is given two days compassionate leave, with pay. It always sounded to me like front-line bravado, the brutality of the stomach-sick medical student, the ho-ho-ho of the intolerable. Anyway, “leaper” had stuck with us as a generic term for this particular kind of no-kidding suicide, and that was the word I thought.

  I exercised viciously on the sloping bench, jerking the pulleys with muscles that surprised me, so that the weights clanked noisily when they came to rest, and the sliding bench screeched as it rolled up and down the gradient. But no matter how hard I pushed and pumped at the weights, I couldn’t drown out the conversation. Two other women had stopped exercising and were standing at the window that looked out over the station.

  “What a terrible thing to do.”

  Right, that’s the word, “terrible,” I thought.

  “Why do you think it’s taking them so long to bring the body out?”

  Jesus Christ, think about it. Think hard.

  “You know, my sister was on a train when someone jumped in front of it. They don’t let you out. And he wasn’t killed, the bloke. Not outright. She had to sit there and listen to these awful screams. He screamed and screamed, apparently. She says she won’t ever forget it. Can you imagine?”

  Can’t blame him, can you? A voice was probably all the poor bastard had left.

  “Terrible. Terrible. Such a terrible thing to do.”

  I kept my end of the conversation silent and worked on grimly at the bench.

  But the conversation continued.

  “I suppose we shouldn’t be . . . But killing yourself like that, you’d have to really mean it. I can’t imagine what it must be like to feel so . . .”

  “No. How could anyone imagine it? The poor driver . . .”

  When I’d finished my routine I sat
in the sauna for as long as I could stand, trying to sweat it all away. Which wasn’t long, saunas being unbearable. A Swedish Protestant plot, I think, a stab at hell-on-earth, a dire warning of the discomforts to come. Unsuccessful, actually, since it makes hell-fire attractive by comparison.

  Out in the daylight, dehydrated and aching, I looked to my left, in the direction of my flat, on the far side of the underground. Small groups of people still stood outside the station, some in shock, others merely showing a passing interest, a few professionals looking as if this was all in a day’s work, some of them succeeding better than others. The ambulance still throbbed and waited. I turned right, and sat at one of the tables outside the café on the other side of the gym.

  Recuperate a bit, I decided. You don’t have to walk back through and over that drama until you’ve had a cup of coffee. Sometimes, I’m good to myself.

  The woman sat down at my table a few moments later.

  It doesn’t seem to make much sense, but there’s a difference between tables inside a café, and those on the street. Inside, unless everywhere else is taken, it’s very unlikely that anyone will ask to share a table that is already occupied. It’s a virtual act of aggression, the mark of men on the make and the mildly mad. But it’s different in the open. Even if there are empty tables elsewhere, it’s an easy, insignificant act to sit with a complete stranger. It must be that people feel they can escape more easily where there are no walls to contain them. And the bright, daylight street seems to exclude the likelihood of whatever it is we fear. Streets are everybody’s. Indoors, in the darker interior of the café, the table becomes defensible space, and the approach of another a threat.

  I mean to say that I wasn’t made uncomfortable by the woman’s approach, nor did her presence impinge until she spoke.

  She was tall, well-built and sleek, in her elegant middle age, with a face that was all bone structure, and dark, spherical glasses. Smooth, dark hair, cut to a heavy, architectural bob, and the clothes tailored (and not in England) to match her perfectly manicured fingernails. Not English. Diane, I was to learn, but think it with a Mediterranean accent: Dee-ahn.