Forty Rooms Read online

  “Here, let’s try this on you, this was your father’s gift when you were born, it will be yours someday,” the mermaid says as she sets the jewelry box on the dresser and picks up a chain from which dangles a prim little cross of delicate pearls. But I have just spied something else—something I like so much more. Reaching out, I close my fingers on a necklace of small round stones, each kernel of blood-red glow in its own frame of darkness.

  “This,” I say. “I want this.”

  Something harsh and hurt flashes in the mermaid’s eyes, and when she takes the necklace out of my hand, her movement is not gentle: she rips the strand through my fingers, scratching my palm, surprising me into a little cry. I expect her to throw the necklace back into the box, and slam it shut, and push me away; but a flush grows in her face instead, and suddenly she smiles—the first smile I see, not a kind smile, but oh, so beautiful. She smiles her strange smile, at once brittle and hard, and lays the necklace against the parrots on my gown. In the shadows of the mirror it glints stark and red, like a gash I got on my knee when I was four and fell, running, on a piece of glass.

  “A friend gave it to me,” the mermaid says in a defiant voice, as if challenging someone. “A long time ago.”

  We are silent then, both of us looking at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the lady in the oval painting purse her lips and turn away with disapproval, but I continue to stare at my reflection, and after a while I too begin to seem different, as if the silvery, dangerous, shimmering sea were rising within my being. Around us the evening deepens, the lamp by the bed glows brilliant and distant, and slowly the room is transformed into an immense jewelry box, the blue velvet of the night enveloping us tightly, and the mermaid’s deceiving eyes are emeralds now, and the congealed drop at the bottom of her glass a ruby, and on the dresser, just between the tray of portly perfume bottles and the clock that always shows the wrong time, there rests a treasure bright and dark, an unfamiliar, thrilling treasure filled to the brim with stories I do not yet understand, stories of guilty gifts, impoverished dancers, ruined churches, wars and revolutions, the grown-up, momentous things of pain and beauty and time.

  From behind the door a sound bursts out, mechanical and persistent, like the tap-tap-tap of a woodpecker, and I swing around, startled, then realize what it is. When I turn back, the mermaid is gone, just like that, and my mother is fastening her old gray robe around her waist. “Your father is working, we must be quiet,” she says in a near whisper as she leans over me and fumbles with the clasp of the necklace under my hair. Stupidly I watch while she neatens up the earrings and bracelets in their plush compartments, closes the lid with care, slides the box back into the drawer. “And it’s time for you to go to bed.”

  I want to tell her about the mermaid, to ask her a question, but something stops me—whether the flat intonation of her strangely loosened voice, or else the memory of the secret, gemlike place where things seemed at once more wondrous and more frightening than in real life. I walk to the door in silence. From the threshold I glance back at the room, and it is as always, warm and cozy and small, full of pillows and blankets and smiling ladies in oval frames, on both sides of the oval mirror. I am comforted to think that the sinister treasure is once again only a wooden box of pretty trinkets under the woolen stockings in the dresser, comforted to see my mother moving her tender, steady hands over the covers of the bed, smoothing them in a gesture I have seen hundreds of times.

  I prefer things this way, I tell myself. Really, I do.

  “Go to sleep, my love,” says my mother, looking up briefly, not meeting my eyes. “Your father will be wanting his tea now.”

  As I walk into the chill of the hallway, I think: But maybe I don’t.

  3. Father’s Study

  The Ideal City

  It is just after dinner on Thursday, time for our weekly Culture Hour. My father and I are seated at his desk, he in his old armchair of cherry-colored leather, cracked along the middle, I by his side, kneeling on a stool I have lugged in from the kitchen.

  On the radio, turned down low, a concerto is playing.

  “Vivaldi, La Follia,” my father says after listening for a moment. “Appropriate in view of today’s subject.”

  He reaches for the stack of books beside his typewriter and selects a volume on Italian Renaissance painting, which he opens to a marked page; like so many books in his study, it is bristling with slivers of green, blue, and pink paper. My father makes the bookmarks himself by neatly cutting multicolored index cards into narrow strips, perfectly straight, though he never uses a ruler (he has an uncanny ability to draw straight lines), then jots down a heading or a quotation along the strip in his meticulous, minuscule hand. The colors are not chosen by accident, either; they follow some complicated scheme of his, whose principles always escape me. As he pulls the volume closer and carefully sets the blue bookmark down on his immaculate desk, next to the framed photograph of my mother, I tilt my head sideways until I can read the words written along it: “Ideal city.”

  “This evening,” says my father, “we will talk about the Renaissance concept of the ‘ideal city.’ The concept itself did not originate in the Renaissance. The first man to study it in depth was the Greek philosopher Plato—you remember, we discussed him last month. Now Plato, in his Republic—”

  For the first minute or two, I do nothing but luxuriate in the smell of the study. It is my favorite smell in the world, a noble smell that I like to imagine as deep, quiet, burgundy-hued, though in fact it is not one smell but a mixture of smells, all equally marvelous: the sharp smell of shiny art volumes, a bit like wet autumn leaves; the softer, more complex smell of thick treatises on history and philosophy whose desiccated leather spines crowd the shelves and between whose pages reside entire flocks of shy dust sprites that come out to play at dusk—I used to watch them for hours when I was younger—the metallic, oily, inky smell of my father’s mechanical typewriter, which, even when given a rare hour of rest, seems to radiate the heat of its passionate staccatos; the sweet ghostly smell of my father’s aromatic tobacco, which a friend brought from somewhere far away and which he smokes only on special occasions; I know he keeps the dwindling pouch in the middle drawer of his desk, just above the drawer with a fascinating wealth of compartmentalized pens, erasers, and paper clips, just below the drawer that is always locked . . .

  My thoughts return from their wanderings, and I study the book opened before me. There is one large reproduction on the page to the left, and three smaller ones on the page to the right, with thin rivulets of text snaking between them. They are views of various cities—or perhaps it is all one city, for, while the painted vistas are different, all four are united by a certain sameness, a kind of stiff geometrical precision, beautiful and cold. The skies are flat, distant, and pale, devoid of clouds and winds; there are no curving streets, no cozy nooks, only vast, many-arched, many-columned expanses of architectural perfection in the full glare of brilliant noonday, with not a shadow, not a blade of grass, not a flower to be seen anywhere, the ground itself an intricate pattern of pastel-tinted marble diamonds and ovals in majestic perspective. The orderly chessboards of empty spaces, the magnificent heights of deserted staircases, the sleek façades all seem unsettling, even vaguely threatening, as if something roaring and monstrous is just poised to erupt into the sunlit silence from somewhere below the horizon.

  I wait until my father finishes his explanation.

  “So, if this city is so ideal,” I say, “then where are all the people?”

  My father thoughtfully chews on his beard, then puts on his reading glasses, and makes a careful inspection of the paintings.

  “There are some people here,” he says at last, pointing.

  “No, those are statues. Or if they aren’t, they are the size of ants and have no faces, so they don’t count. There is a dot moving here, which looks like a girl my age wearing pajamas, but at this
distance I can’t tell for sure—it may just be a smudge.”

  “Well,” my father says, “perhaps all the people are inside. They are sitting around drinking wine—moderate quantities of well-diluted wine, mind you—and discussing philosophy or creating masterpieces or whatnot. This is a perfect city, after all, so they are content wherever they are, indoors or outdoors, see?”

  I look again; but the evenly spaced windows are dark and dead, and the doorways gape blindly. A while back I discovered a delightful secret—some paintings possess a deeper layer of life below their still surface: if I concentrate, then glance away quickly, I can often catch things moving out of the corner of my eye, women powdering their noses above the stiff lacy collars, cherubs tickling each other, cardinals relaxing their glum faces to yawn or sneeze.

  I am certain that there is no hidden life lurking here.

  “There aren’t any people,” I say stubbornly. “There aren’t even any cats or dogs. And look, there are no doors anywhere, just these open passageways. People wouldn’t live in houses that have no doors.”

  “Ah, but that’s where you are wrong,” he says, smiling. “If you listened to me with more attention, you would see that everyone in the ideal city is kind and honest, and there is no need for locks and chains.” He takes off his glasses, pulls out a folded square of suede always ready in his pocket, and begins to wipe the thick lenses, thoroughly, with deliberation, as he does everything, before putting the glasses back in their velveteen case. “But perhaps you are right and there are no people there,” he adds, no longer smiling. “Perhaps that is really the point. Ideals are all very fine until you start applying them to real life, you see. Just let people into your perfect city, just wait until they make themselves comfortable, and before you know it, well—”

  Vivaldi has just stopped playing, and beyond the crackling of the radio void, I can suddenly hear the ticking of the clock on the desk. My father rubs the bridge of his nose in a gesture I know so well, then glances toward the window; I see an odd, stark look cross his face, a look of not quite anger, not quite grief. In the spare darkness of the early-spring night, the enormous construction site across the road is abbreviated to mere grayish hints of fences and sketchy gallows of cranes in the sky, but I know it is there all the same, as it has been throughout the ten years of my life. The rising edifice itself is only a shapeless bulk blotting out the stars. None of us has any idea what it will be when it is completed. “Temple of the People,” my father used to say when I was four or five and pestered him with endless queries.

  My father pulls the curtains closed before turning back to me.

  “Never mind,” he says briskly, “I’m not afraid to admit a mistake. Perhaps this was not the most fruitful subject for tonight’s discussion. Since you seem to miss people and dogs so much, how about some Fra Angelico? Here, let me show you.”

  Once more he leafs through the Renaissance volume. This time the bookmark is pink, and so, I see, are the predominant colors of these new paintings, in which roses bloom, ladies blush, and saints are ruddy with health, all against a background of pink cliffs, red roofs, and churches aglow with sunrises. I am charmed. My father has already begun to speak when, against our custom, I plunge into his steady stream of dates and names with a breathless, out-of-turn question.

  “Papa, are houses in Italy really so pink?”

  “I suppose it is possible,” he says. “I’m glad you like these. But to continue, in 1436, Fra Angelico moved to Florence, to the new friary of San Marco, and there—”

  And there are tiny yellow flowers in the swaying meadows and tiny blue flowers on the hems of the girls’ dresses, and tiny monsters bare their pointy little teeth in the soft swell of harbors, and bells ring, and birds chirp, and everyone, everyone, has a golden halo. A few chubby monks have clumsily dropped a slab of stone onto a writhing blue imp and now stand around with guilty downcast eyes, debating how best to rescue him. A mother sits encumbered by a fat baby in her lap, and as her gaze follows the flights of some great white birds soaring toward the sun on rainbow-colored wings, her sad face brightens with the desire to leave the baby behind and fly away with them. These paintings are like fairy tales, and while the stories do not all have happy endings—I notice a number of heads freshly detached from their bodies, floating in puddles of what looks like my mother’s strawberry preserves—they make me giddy with the premonition that somewhere, somewhere out there, a place so vivid, so alive, really exists.

  “Haven’t you been to Italy?” I interrupt again, too excited to listen.

  My father coughs shortly.

  “No,” he says.

  I tear my eyes away from the book. “You haven’t been to Italy?”

  “No.”

  “But you’ve been to Greece.”

  “No, not to Greece either,” he says.

  “To France, then? And England?”

  “No.”

  “But—to Egypt? China? India?”

  Silent now, he shakes his head. I stare past him, at the lacquered spines of the art volumes lined up in their neat alphabetical rows on the shelves, as I struggle to find the right words for the enormity of my disappointment.

  “But . . . but you’ve told me about all these places. I thought . . . Haven’t you ever wanted to go there?”

  “Well now, you see,” he begins, then clears his throat, and again says, “Well, you see,” and falls silent. The telephone rings in the hallway. We listen to the rush of my mother’s slippers slapping toward the sound, the lilt of her muffled voice. In the next moment the door of the study is cracked open.

  My mother does not come in.

  “Sorry to interrupt, it’s Orlov,” she says from the corridor. She is cupping her hand over the receiver, the cord stretched as far as it will go. “He wants to discuss tomorrow’s seminar, but I’ve told him you’re busy and will call him back in—what shall I say, half an hour?”

  “No need, I’ll take it, we are finished,” my father answers, as he closes the book and rises from his armchair. “We must do better on our choice of subject next week. Perhaps Andrei Rublev?” He speaks the last words already past the threshold, picking up the telephone. “Yes, hello?”

  Stunned, I look at the clock on his desk. There are still twenty minutes left of the Culture Hour. He has never done this before. All at once I am certain it’s because I interrupted him so much, and I feel chastened.

  4. Kitchen

  Immortality

  I fall asleep to bursts of laughter behind the wall to my right and wake up, hours later, with the laughter, louder and looser, behind the wall to my left; the guests have moved from the study to the kitchen. I lie dozing for a few minutes, half traversing an arched bridge between the misty shores of some dream, half listening to the hubbub of blurred voices. The loudest of them, which I recognize as Orlov’s, appears to be propounding something, while two or three others burble up in the background whenever Orlov pauses for breath. The women, though, are still in the study: when I roll over in bed and press my ear to the wall, I hear a snippet of my mother’s exclamation, a saxophone wail from the record player turned down low.

  The men must have gone to the kitchen to refill their glasses.

  The dream bridge recedes farther into the fog as I realize I am terribly thirsty; this evening my mother let me stay up with the guests until well past my bedtime, snacking on pickled mushrooms and cheese with garlic. My thirst makes me more and more awake, until, giving up on sleep altogether, I toss off the blanket, lower my feet to the floor, and wait without turning on the light, hoping that the men will leave the kitchen at last.

  It must be very late, for the street is quiet, and the ceiling, undisturbed by the flares of passing headlights, lies indistinct in a pool of shadow. On nights when I cannot sleep I stare at it for what seems like hours, populating it with the geometry of imaginary constellations, with meandering trajectori
es of grotesque creatures born in the deeper pockets of darkness and fleshed out by dribbles of streetlamp illumination. But I am too thirsty to imagine anything at present, and the voices continue to crisscross one another in the kitchen, until my throat feels so dry it is painful to swallow. After another minute I hunt down my slippers, nudge open my door, and walk into the corridor.

  The kitchen is flooded with light. I see the men’s backs—my father’s, Orlov’s, Borodinsky’s, two or three others’; they are crowded around Orlov, looking over his shoulder as he speaks. I am about to march over the threshold, making straight for the teakettle, when Orlov’s weighty tone, with none of his usual clowning, makes me pause. He has begun to declaim a poem, as he often does at my parents’ gatherings, but it is not one of his own humorous ditties with glib little rhymes—this poem has a measure so solemn, so stark, that after a moment’s listening I feel with absolute certainty: These words are not meant for my ears. No one has noticed me yet, so I take a stealthy step back, slip into the unlit bathroom, push my father’s robe out of the way, and stand straining my hearing, one eye glued to the crack in the door, my heart beating wildly as if I am in the presence of something vastly more important than myself.

  The kitchen is now so hushed that I can hear Orlov’s voice with clarity, as I would if he were whispering in my ear, though he is reading quietly, under his breath—he seems almost embarrassed to be saying the words aloud.

  “That was when the ones who smiled

  Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

  And like a useless appendage, Leningrad

  Swung from its prisons . . .”

  He shuffles the pages. “And this,” he says.

  “Magdalene thrashed and wept,

  The favored disciple turned to stone,

  But no one dared to cast a glance

  To where his mother in silence stood . . .”