by Nina Allan
It was strange to think of it circling round and round inside the postal system for all that time. I’m miles behind with Dr. Leslie’s files now, as well.
We had a concert here on Tuesday. Dr. Leslie likes to organize outside entertainment for us sometimes, especially around Christmas or Easter. Last Christmas we had a conjuror. I wasn’t well then, either. I remember lying in bed listening to the radio, when Jackie suddenly started screaming. The conjuror had asked if he could borrow her scarf ring, apparently – he wanted to make it disappear. Jackie went into a panic, so Diz said it was all right, the conjuror could have his Parker pen instead. That frightened Jackie almost as much as the idea of losing her scarf ring, although Diz soon got his pen back and that calmed her down.
My cold was getting better by Tuesday so I was able to go downstairs for the concert. It was held in the visitors’ lounge. Diz helped Sylvia clear all the board games and old newspapers off the top of the piano, which they then wheeled to the center of the room. There was a flute player and a pianist. The flute player wore skinny black jeans and a red velvet jacket. His hair was so blond it looked white under the lights, like some kind of precious metal. The pianist was Chinese. She had long dark hair in a plait and gold stilettos.
I’ve never really cared much for music. I prefer natural sounds, like the calling of birds or the chirping of crickets. The sound of the flute was so much louder than I imagined it would be, hard and bright, almost like a trumpet. The flute player seemed to dance a little as he played, swaying in time with the music in his black leather pumps. The pianist kept her body upright, and very still, her fingers scurrying swiftly about the keyboard like spiders, or mice.
About ten minutes into the music, Michael Round began to cry. His whole face was wet with tears, as if it were melting like one of the waxworks in Madam Tussaud’s. Looking at him reminded me of my mother, though I never saw her cry, not ever.
Ewa Chaplin’s mother Serena was a flute player, did you know that? Her teachers said she was a brilliant musician, and everyone believed she would go on to have a great career, but then one of her hands became injured in a fire. The fire started on the second floor of the Chaplins’ apartment block, a few months after they were married. Serena’s husband Jonas wasn’t at home, and Serena was visiting friends in the flat above. She managed to climb out on to the fire escape, but the sash cord holding up the window burned through, bringing the heavy frame crashing down on top of her hands. She suffered five separate bone fractures, and the tendons in her right wrist were permanently damaged.
She recovered the use of her hands fairly quickly, considering, but her confidence was shattered. She said the feeling in her fingertips had been affected, that she would never play in public again, and she never did.
Ewa was born soon afterwards. People whispered that it was a miracle that Serena’s pregnancy had survived, almost as if there had been a trade-off: her child for her music.
It snowed in the night, and Sylvia is in a foul mood because the bus was delayed. The only person who seems excited by the snow is Jackie.
Sylvia is in charge of putting up the Christmas decorations, but she always lets Jackie do the tree. My mother used to dress our Christmas tree beautifully. I remember how one year, Mrs. Porter from down the road asked her if she’d ever been a professional window dresser.
“You have a marvelous eye, Elizabeth,” she said. “You’re very artistic.”
My mother smiled and thanked Mrs. Porter for the compliment but I could see she was annoyed, that she didn’t like the idea of Mrs. Porter thinking she had once made her living by working in a shop, when she had studied at the Royal Academy of Music, in London.
A couple of days later my father accidentally let the back door slam shut when he was coming inside. Two of my mother’s crystal sherry glasses fell over on the draining board and smashed.
“It’s my fault,” my mother said at once. “I didn’t stack them properly. The old bat obviously didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.” She pulled the dustpan and brush from under the sink and swept up the pieces. Her mouth was set in a hard line, as if she was trying to keep herself from screaming, or from bursting into tears.
The glasses had been a wedding present from the woman who gave me my first doll, Catherine Sharpe.
Dr. Leslie wears a wedding ring, but he isn’t married, at least not anymore. That’s what Sylvia told me, anyway. Goodness knows how she finds out these things.
“He wears the ring to stop women from pestering him,” she said. “Women are always falling for doctors.”
When Sylvia is annoyed about something you can hear her Cornish accent but whenever she speaks to Dr. Leslie she sounds like one of the program announcers on Radio Four. Jennifer Rockleaze calls her the Countess. I once saw Sylvia push past Jennie on the stairs and nearly knock her over. She usually avoids Jennie completely if she can.
“She thinks I’m out to steal her boyfriend,” Jennie said, when I asked her about it. A grin spread across her face. She looked like a mischievous child.
“You don’t mean Dr. Leslie?” I said.
“Who else? The Countess has had the hots for him for years.”
Sylvia wears neatly tailored skirts and plain tops in pastel colors, a fresh one every day but they all look the same. Her shoes are amazing though. She must have a hundred pairs at least and she keeps them immaculate. Jackie can’t keep her eyes off Sylvia’s shoes – you can almost see her mouth watering – but I’ve never noticed Dr. Leslie so much as glance at them. I occasionally catch Sylvia looking at Dr. Leslie’s wedding ring, and then I can’t help wondering if it’s true, what she says, that Dr. Leslie wears it to keep women away.
“Do you think his real wife died?” I once asked Jennie.
“He might have murdered her, you never know,” Jennie answered. “They say it’s always the quiet ones.”
Trust Jennie to come out with something like that. I couldn’t help laughing, though I found it difficult to imagine Dr. Leslie becoming close enough to anyone to want to murder them. He’s good with his patients but he finds it hard to deal with their relatives, you can tell. He doesn’t know how to talk to them. He’s become so wrapped up in his work he’s forgotten how to live in the everyday world.
With love,
Bramber
THE ELEPHANT GIRL
by Ewa Chaplin
translated from the Polish by Erwin Blacher 2008
Zhanna Mauriac arrived in late May, on the morning Mila learned she was once again pregnant. Mila wondered later if that was what started it, if all her reactions that day were a little off-kilter. She had already been told about the new girl, who was brought along and introduced to the class by the headmistress. Mila smiled her best hello-I’m-your-new-teacher smile; Zhanna stared stolidly back at her with unfathomable mud-colored eyes.
What an ugly child, Mila thought. She’s like the bad fairy at a christening.
She tried to banish the thought but it wouldn’t go. She’d never taken an irrational dislike to a child before but Zhanna Mauriac gave her the creeps and as the morning wore on she found the girl’s presence in her classroom increasingly distracting. If her behavior had been disruptive she would have known how to cope. As it was, Zhanna sat meekly in the place she had been allocated, her mouth hanging slightly ajar, her features so immobile there were moments when Mila caught herself wondering what would happen if she went up and slapped her.
She’s like a horrible plastic doll, Mila thought. The kind you get given for Christmas when you’re ten and never play with.
When Mila tried asking Zhanna a question, the child’s eyes rolled blankly in her head like stone marbles.
Zhanna Mauriac had a pudgy moon face and mousy hair cropped in a straight line across her forehead. She was eight years old, a full year younger than most of the other children in Mila’s class, but Mila had been forced to take her beca
use apparently she was ahead in most of her subjects. She was a misfit in other ways too. It was true she’d had a tricky start – joining a class midway through term was something even the most confident child would find difficult – but that was far from being the sum of her problems. On the Friday of her first week in school, Mila found herself staring at Zhanna and thinking how old she looked, a peculiar shrunken old woman with nasty lumpen features and a secretive soul. A witch who would slap a curse on you the moment you crossed her.
That was ridiculous of course, she was just a child.
The other children called her the Elephant Girl. Zhanna Mauriac wasn’t fat exactly but she moved as if she was, stiffly upright as a plump little penguin and with her arms projecting just a fraction to either side. She wore heavy black shoes with square buckles, the kind of shoes that might just as well have had “cripple” stamped in capital letters on the lid of the box.
It was difficult to stop the other children from teasing her and, on those days when she was particularly tired, Mila found herself pretending not to notice what was going on. One lunch hour when she was on playground duty she came outside to find a dozen or so of the rowdier youngsters standing in a circle around Zhanna Mauriac and pelting her with gravel. The stones bounced off her stomach and thighs in a way that reminded Mila of the wooden Aunt Sally at the county goose fair you could pay to throw steel quoits at and win a prize. Zhanna made no attempt to escape or defend herself. Mila forced her way through the circle and grabbed her roughly by the hand.
“For goodness’ sake, stop it,” she said. She marched the girl briskly inside. She felt taut with anger, not so much with the other children as with Zhanna. It was as if she set out to be bullied, as if she had deliberately brought the whole thing on herself.
Mila could not get rid of the feeling that Zhanna Mauriac was a bad omen, and as the term progressed the idea began to root itself more firmly inside her head. She supposed it was the result of the hormones flooding her system. Everyone said it was normal to feel off-balance during pregnancy, that many women fell prey to irrational thoughts. With the anxiety caused by her two previous miscarriages Mila guessed she would be particularly susceptible.
It was frightening though, nonetheless; it felt a little like madness.
The worst thing was her certainty that Zhanna was pretending idiocy to conceal her true nature. In the original Charles Perrault tale of The Sleeping Beauty, the bad fairy came to the christening disguised as a peasant. She blamed the queen for leaving her off the guest list, even though the queen claimed that not inviting her had been a simple oversight.
There must have been a reason though, Mila told herself. You don’t just forget people.
In the version of the story her class loved best, all the fairies at the christening were named after saints, and the gifts they handed out to the newborn princess were qualities of attraction and magical powers. Sophia brought the gift of wisdom, Agatha granted the power of levitation and so on. Margaret kept a dragon trained to her side like a Rottweiler and promised the princess protection against demonic powers. Cecilia blessed her with the gift of music and divination.
The bad fairy had no name, and she had been excluded from the celebrations because she was ugly and senile and the only gift she had to offer was her preternatural talent for talking with ghosts. No one wanted to be reminded that the infant princess would eventually grow old and go crazy. It was said that the royal family was rife with craziness, that the queen herself was already beginning to show the signs.
The bad fairy was not really bad, Mila saw. She was just an unwelcome reminder of what was true.
* * *
—
Zhanna Mauriac couldn’t speak or at least she wouldn’t. Varvara Pilnyak, who taught the infants’ class and who happened to live in the same street as the Mauriacs, told Mila that Zhanna’s communication problems had worsened considerably since starting school.
“She does tend to get picked on, rather,” Varvara said. “I suppose it’s inevitable.”
When Mila asked her what was actually wrong with Zhanna, Varvara shrugged and said it was probably a form of autism.
“She’s supposed to be very clever, but then children like that often are. I’ve been told she plays the piano very well.”
Mila listened to what Varvara was saying but found it hard to believe. When she was six years old Mila had been taken to a concert featuring the great Austrian pianist Vladimir de Pachmann, who had terrified her with his black cloak and peculiar manner of addressing the audience in mid-performance, and who yet at the same time had enchanted her so completely with the music he made that she had pestered her parents nonstop for piano lessons until they finally gave in and sent her for private tuition with a Madame Cluny. Mila began to nurture secret dreams of becoming a concert pianist. The first big disappointment of her life came with the realization that she didn’t have the talent to make her dream a reality. By her late teens she had given up music altogether.
The idea that Zhanna had what she lacked was somehow grotesque. When the school closed for the summer vacation, Mila clung to the irrational hope that when the children returned in September the Elephant Girl would not be among them. But on the first day of term there Zhanna was, stumbling across the playground in her hideous shoes. She gazed at Mila without seeming to recognize her, but Mila felt convinced she was pretending.
Her anxieties about the baby had eased off a little over the summer, but with her first sight of Zhanna Mauriac they returned in a rush. Less than a week into term, Mila asked the headmistress if she might request a meeting with Zhanna’s parents. The headmistress seemed to think this was a good idea.
“The child still doesn’t seem to be settling the way she should. Perhaps a chat with Mum and Dad might move things forward.”
Both the Mauriacs held down professional careers and the meeting took some arranging but finally the three of them were together in one room.
“We’re worried about Zhanna’s progress,” Mila said. “Is she normally this quiet at home?”
“Zhanna doesn’t talk much even with us, if that’s what you’re getting at,” replied Dunia Mauriac. “She prefers to practice her piano.” Zhanna’s mother was anaemically pale, with thin, almost colorless hair. Her voice seemed unnaturally loud, as if she was trying to make herself heard in a crowded room.
“I understand that Zhanna is musically gifted,” Mila said. “Have you ever considered sending her to a specialist school? Somewhere better suited to her needs?”
“A special school?” boomed Etienne Mauriac. “Are you trying to imply that Zhanna is retarded?” Etienne Mauriac was some sort of scientist, a large man with a florid complexion and heavy jowls. He looked to Mila as if he was heading straight for a heart attack. He hovered a few inches behind his scrawny wife as if he was trying to use her as a human shield.
“Of course not,” Mila said. “In fact, she’s ahead of her class.” She fought the urge to hiccup. She had come to recognize her hiccups as a sign of approaching nausea and another bout of the morning sickness that continued to plague her, even though common wisdom insisted it should be starting to ease off by now. When she made tentative inquiries about who looked after Zhanna when they were at work the wife barked out the name of a foreign au pair. The au pair had already been mentioned several times by both parents but Mila seemed incapable of remembering her name for more than five seconds. Her memory felt increasingly unreliable since the end of summer. She had heard pregnant women described as being “away with the fairies.” She supposed this haziness with facts was one of the symptoms.
She was beginning to sweat. She dug her fingernails into her palms and tried not to think about the slice and a half of rye bread she had eaten for breakfast, the butter oozing yellowly, like pus.
“Would you excuse me for a moment?” she said, and hurried out of the room. She reached the ladies’ lavatory just i
n time. She sank to her knees beside the toilet bowl; the close odor of spent urine brought her stomach contents rushing upwards in a hot pale stream. She stifled a sob. The Mauriacs were strange people, almost as strange as Zhanna herself, and she didn’t like them. She had been stupid to expect their sympathy. The thought of them waiting for her just along the corridor made her heart flutter inside her chest like a panicked bird.
She stood at the basin and rinsed out her mouth, splashing water on her burning face. When she returned to the classroom she found the Mauriacs standing exactly as she had left them. It was as if they had gone into suspended animation as soon as her back was turned, snapping back into life only when she was actually present to see them. She realized that Zhanna resembled both of them and neither, combining their least attractive features in a puddingy amalgam of the monstrous. She wondered if her parents loved their daughter, if it was possible to love a child who seemed as unaware of herself as she was of others.
She wondered if they ever wished she didn’t exist.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said. The two Mauriacs stared back at her expectantly. “As I was saying, it’s not that Zhanna can’t do her lessons. It’s more that she doesn’t mix much with the other children.” She folded her arms across her belly and gripped her sides. She wondered what would happen if she fainted.
“Why would Zhanna want to mix with the other children?” said Dunia Mauriac. Her voice seemed loaded with a sour disdain. “Zhanna isn’t like other children, or hadn’t you noticed? Other children bore her stupid. She prefers to discuss her music with Marielena.”
