“The curtain opened slowly and the white contours of the marble took shape in the shimmering light of the candles. The king sighed. ‘You’ve outdone yourself, old man,’ he said. He nodded for some time. ‘It’s almost as if it is alive.’ He closed his eyes, stretched out his left hand in the direction of the statue, and murmured something in a strange tongue. The curtains at the windows started to move, as if a sudden gust of wind had entered the room, and the fabric that hung on both sides of the statue tugged at the cord. The king pressed the fingers of his right hand against his temples and kept uttering unrecognizable words. The statue shivered, and a soft moan seemed to escape from the marble.
“The studio was in a turmoil now: chisels moved across the floor, pieces of cloth billowed, flames roared above their candles. The king braced himself in his chair and shouted a word.
“Suddenly there was stillness in the air. The statue looked about and bowed its head. ‘Where is my master?’ it said, after a while. ‘Here!’ the king cried. ‘I am your master.’ The statue shook its head. ‘I am your master!’ the king roared.
“The sculptor stepped out of the shadows. His son stood next to him, holding a rope that seemed to disappear in shadows overhead. The statue turned to the old man and held out its arms. ‘What is this?’ the king cried. ‘What have you done to my statue, you impostor?’ The sculptor smiled. ‘I have let you do something to my statue, lord. Please, stay seated, and don’t call for your servants. My son could let go of this rope and something might drop.’ The king looked up and saw a sharply pointed sword over his head. He hissed angrily. The sculptor and his son went to the statue, stood in front of it, and were grabbed by two marble arms. Then they were lifted up. The king, who involuntarily looked up, saw the sword move. The statue stepped forward and only now the king saw what the curtains had covered: on the back of the marble figure were two wings, so tall that they brushed the floor. ‘Take us home,’ said the sculptor. The statue nodded gravely. It lifted the old man and his son little higher, the sword dropped a few feet, and the statue proceeded toward one of the windows. The king rushed out of his chair. He heard a noise, like a gust of wind, and suddenly couldn’t move anymore. The curtains in front of the windows parted and the image, carrying her creator and his son, stepped out. When the king looked back, he saw that the sword had fallen and nailed his robes to the chair. He yelled for his guard, tore himself loose, and ran to the window. An angel soared high above the bay, clutching two men against her breast.”
After the silence come the questions. “What was the son called? Where did they go? What did they do with the statue?” I just shake my head and raise my hand like a thoughtful stationmaster. “Fairy tales aren’t meant to answer questions. Time to go, anyway. Look what we’ve done. Or, rather, what we didn’t do. Next week, we’ll finish building these kites and if the weather’s good, we’ll fly them. We’ll go to the seashore and if the winds are favorable we will let them go and think they’re angels. Time to clean up now. All of you.” (A short glance at Abdel, who still sits with the sphere in his hand and, eyes soft with yearning, looks at the minuscule airplane inside, fighting its way through a blizzard.)
Five o’clock, and the children leave. Nur sees them to the door and waves, she says something in a strange language, and they all laugh, they run-tumble-tug around the corner and dissolve into the crowd in the street. I clean up the shop, flip the sign behind the glass in the door, and sweep clean the workbench. Nur leans against the chest that holds the blueprints and smokes.
“Shall we eat?”
“Later,” she says. She stubs out her cigarette and unbuttons her coat. The red of her blouse blushes like a peony. I carry an armful of bits and pieces of cut-up kite fabric and am a man in love. “Come,” I say. “Let’s go and have a drink on the veranda. The weather’s fine.” And I think: Even after two years of being together I’m still to shy to say, let me lay you down, here, on the table, and kiss your breasts.
I am a reluctant man when it comes to women. If it had been up to me, it would have taken at least ten years before we ever started something.
She was researching small businesses in the city and came around to ask questions. I’d burst out laughing when she explained the purpose of her visit, but I invited her in and made tea. We’d sat in the workshop, at a table that was littered with scissors, knives, countless pieces of string and snippets of nylon. It soon was clear that I’d hardly be “relevant research material.” But she stayed nevertheless, and drank tea for two hours, and my eyes rested longer and longer on her eyes in the course of those two hours, they rested on the curve of her cheekbone, the pencil-drawn contour of her mouth, her heavy black hair.
“How does someone become a kite builder?” she had asked.
“I was a doll doctor to start with,” I said.
“Why does a doll doctor take up kite building?”
“I hated dolls.”
She’d sighed and blown her hair out of her face. She had opened her shiny black briefcase, taken out her cigarettes, and checked her mobile.
“How does someone get to be a pollster?” I asked.
“I’m not a pollster. I studied law. I’m doing a…”
“Okay, okay.”
We didn’t speak for a while. Then I said: “If we go for dinner, we could explain why we are what we do.”
She had looked at me with a deep frown in the elegant curves above her eyes and my stomach felt dizzy.
And we went out and had dinner in one of those hip new restaurants she knew, where the entrée was a small layered structure and the main course had to be eaten clockwise, or the other way around, and one week later she entered the shop at five o’clock, carrying a bag filled to the brim with groceries, and said she was going to cook for me. That night, sprawled on the couch, watching the video she’d brought and drinking a New Zealand Riesling, she said: “I’ve thought it over and I will do it.”
“What?” I said. “What will you do?”
She wrapped her right leg around me, lowered herself on my lap, and said: “I am going to love you.”
That was two years ago.
“How come,” I’d asked her, “a young thirty-year-old woman fancies a forty-year-old Jewish doll doctor?”
“Turkish young woman,” she said.
“Turkish young woman. Jewish doll doctor.”
“Kite builder.”
“Why!”
“Because you’re a strange man.”
I could only nod.
“Because you let me lead my own life, not because you’re afraid to lose me, but because you believe in it.”
“I’m a wonderful man.”
“You’re a jerk, but you’re my jerk.”
“Never heard a better reason.”
Nur, I gathered, could show me the way. And she did.
And now, with our bottle of white wine, on the veranda, staring at the houses on the other side of the little park and the boys and girls playing football, now she says: “You never told me where you got that sphere that Abdel is always playing with.”
“You never asked me.”
“Do you think you’ll tell me?”
“My father and I played a game, whenever we sat here. We would look at the windows, over there, and we’d try to guess what they’d be doing, those people in their little lamplit boxes on the other side of the park. But you weren’t allowed to just say it. You had to act.”
She smiles, tilts her head back slightly, and closes her eyes. I dip a finger in the wine and touch her lips with it. She briefly opens them and licks.
“My father,” I tell her, “had quit his job. It was summer and he and the doll doctor, who had his shop downstairs, sat on the balcony, drinking beer. The doll doctor sold model airplanes too, probably because deep down he hated dolls.”
A couple of houses away the loud wailing of Chinese karaoke starts in the restaurant where, earlier today, wedding guests from all over Europe arrived. The smell of lamb cutlets and thyme escap
es from the kitchen of the illegal joint next door.
“He used to get boys in his shop who’d ask if they could have a ready-made model. That’s what they were talking about, the doll doctor and my father, when I had an idea. Actually, it was a plan. It was the plan that would save us.”
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Mendel
The Great Longing
In Babylon
Copyright
This book was originally published in Holland in 2000 by J. M. Meulenhoff, bv.
THE DREAM ROOM. Copyright © 2000 by Marcel Möring. English translation copyright © 2002 by Stacey Knecht. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
EPub Edition © June 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-200863-3
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