The first time he acted as if he didn’t care, returned the sheet of paper to the correct pile, and kept working. The second time he responded in exactly the same way, but when Gala picked up a green felt-tip pen and started to draw a little man on the third page, he slid his work aside and watched carefully until she’d finished. She took her time, giving the figure a moustache, a briefcase, and wings, and finally adding a hat with a flower with a center like a shining sun.
“Fine,” Jan said, taking the piece of paper from her and calmly studying it, “here we go.” He put the essays away in a drawer, then slammed it shut with tremendous force. The mocking expression disappeared from his face in that same instant.
“Just remember, you brought this on yourself.” For a few seconds he stared at her, making Gala tremble somewhere deep inside, a trembling she had never known before. She was angry with him for trying to impose his authority and happy that in the whole world there was nothing else vying for his attention. When she heard him growl, she did not know what she longed for most intensely, to bite or to be bitten.
This was no longer a game, she felt that. It was quite possible that it might forever change everything she had ever known. Maybe she had set off something that was more dangerous than she suspected, but if it destroyed her, she would take him with her. She was no longer a fly to be shooed away with a wave of the hand.
Suddenly he leapt, throwing himself atop her like a ravenous animal. The girl disappeared almost completely beneath him and his weight bore down on her so heavily that she felt it crushing her chest. She tried to escape his grip, screaming, but he squeezed his nails into her arm and refused to let go. She fought back but couldn’t breathe and felt his fingers deep in her muscles. She planted her feet in his groin and pushed him away. His nails scraped along her arm until he was only holding her by her dress. It tore when she scrambled up onto her feet and suddenly shot free, hitting her shoulder hard on the jamb. She ran out onto the landing but saw the way downstairs blocked by her mother, who was coming to see what was going on. Behind her, in his study, her father jumped up now as well. Gala ran upstairs with the grown man following close behind. In the attic she leapt over boxes and old furniture—obstacles he cleared with considerably less ease—and reached the dormer, where she took cover behind a rafter. The sunlight shining in through the window scattered on the dust billowing up from the old bags and crates that Jan kicked out of the way one after the next. Gala saw the man approaching slowly through these shining clouds. Her breathing was shallow and the whole scene reeled before her eyes. When he was almost upon her, with just the rafter between them, she saw his lips quivering, and every quiver pushed more blood up out of a split in the corner of his mouth. It was as if his injury calmed her. As she imagined his pain, her tension drained away. She wanted to tell him she was sorry and that she loved him, but something in his eyes told her that it might be too late.
In the same instant the man recognized his own blind fury in the girl. Was he really willing to hurt her to make her invulnerable? Suddenly afraid, his eyes made a small movement toward the window. Was he directing her thoughts or were her thoughts directing him? Almost at once Gala was up on the window seat, and two or three desperate kicks later the rotted window was out of its groove. The glass broke and a shard cut her leg as she stepped into the gutter. Her pursuer didn’t hesitate for a moment and followed her out. Gala heard her mother shriek and run downstairs, and a little later saw the woman running around in the garden with her arms stretched out as if to catch her. The gutter only ran to the corner of the house, where Gala had to choose between leaping to the flat roof of the pantry or clambering up even higher. Behind her she heard the dull sound of her father’s footsteps on the tin roof. She put a foot on the first tile—it wobbled but held—a foot on the second, until she felt the whole row slipping. She grabbed hold of a tile above her, but her weight made it tilt, just as she felt an iron grasp around her ankles. She lost her balance, smacked into the tiles chin first, and fell. She fell with her full weight upon her father, who wrapped his body around hers, and together they landed two meters below on the gravel of the pantry roof.
Gala lay there in her father’s grip. Screaming with laughter, just as he was, she knew that he had distinguished himself forever from all the rest of the world’s fathers. His hands, broad, strong yet still soft, were holding her tight. A shudder passed through his whole body, and when she looked at him, she didn’t know whether his eyes were moist from relief or anger.
“That’s what you get,” he sighed, before his voice had time to properly gather itself, “when someone loves you.”
A powerful smell wafted out over Gala when her father opened the door to the flower auction. She could smell millions of flowers and tried to imagine the hundreds of thousands of bunches arranged in vases all over the world by nightfall.
Along the entire length of the complex, some two kilometers long, a catwalk was suspended above the market floor to allow visitors to look down on what most resembled a moving sea of flowers. The American professor was already there, looking out over the activity below. When he saw Gala and her father, he raised a hand and, even before the girl had a chance to say hello, took a photo of her with one of three cameras dangling against his enormous belly. The flash hurt her eyes and, as if the light had become sound, reverberated inside her skull like the striking of a gong.
The American was friendliness itself, and Gala couldn’t understand why her father, so much stronger and better looking, had been nervous about his encounter with this gnome. He had urged her several times in the last few days to make a good impression on Obadiah Dogberry. That was something he always did when he was afraid that he himself would fall short. Gala knew what was expected of her: it was time for her to do her tricks again.
They walked over a field of sunflowers that was passing under the catwalk like a small train on its way to the auction sheds. The girl leaned out with the rail against her waist to watch the rattling carts curving over the points. To the rhythm of the wheels, Gala mentally rehearsed the proverbs she would soon be asked to rattle off for her father’s guest. To astonish him. In Latin.
Sunt aliquid manes, letum non omnia finit.* Alia voce psittacus, alia coturnix loquitur.† To her they were nothing but sound, and she memorized them the way she memorized foreign songs at school—Hava nagila, hava magila. Kalinka kalinka kalinka moya—by melody and rhythm alone, but the effect they had on her father’s acquaintances was always the same.
“A child of eight. Incredible! Jan, your daughter is a prodigy!”
She had been performing this trick since she was five, and in that time her father had expanded the arsenal with Greek proverbs, poems by Catullus, and passages from the Odyssey. Sometimes she got bored with it and hid when her parents were hosting yet another dinner party, but generally she let her father have his fun: when the reactions were enthusiastic he positively beamed. It was only when she made mistakes—and she really did do her best not to, but still, sometimes, especially with people she didn’t know—then …
At that moment the sunflowers stopped to let a procession of pink gerberas cross their path. Like the silenced wheels, the sounds in Gala’s head jolted to a halt in the middle of a poem by Martial.
She tried to pick it up from the last line, but without the help of the rhythm she stumbled again. She went back to the start of the poem, just as she sometimes repeated it to herself at night in bed before falling asleep, but she already feared the worst. She tried to shut out all the unfamiliar noises around her to follow the conversation the two men were having behind her in English so that she could work out how much time she had left before her father wanted to show her off. She could not disappoint him.
The previous autumn a circus had appeared before Gala’s house, materializing out of the ether on the field at the bottom of the hill. Like a colorful hot-air balloon that had chosen to land on her favorite playground. Coming home from ballet the evening before, there hadn’t been
any sign of it, but the next morning she woke to the sound of trumpeting elephants and a trombonist who was practicing a bass line. She threw her curtains open with surprise and saw cheerful lights twinkling through the bare trees at the end of the street.
On the way to school she got off her bike at the fence to watch the horses in the outside ring. They were trotting in opposite directions, circling a young woman who was standing straight-backed in the middle ground. She held her head so high that her chin was pointing up in the air. She barked out commands that made the animals stop, rear, and turn on the spot, but, just to make sure they obeyed, she was holding a whip behind her back. Now and then, when one of the grays was about to come up with ideas of his own, she cracked the whip, not to hit him: just to remind.
Gala was late getting to school and had to stay after, but on her way back home she stopped at Circus Rinzi again. This time it was much livelier. Inside the tent, the matinee was in full swing. A band was playing. Acrobats in glittering costumes were walking around outside and a tightrope walker was practicing splits on a steel cable strung over a caravan. Gala gasped with admiration, but the woman, whose eyes were fixed firmly on a point in the distance, didn’t even wobble. Through a hole in the rhododendrons, which the girl knew about from having played there so often, she was able to get into the circus enclosure. She was behind the caravans looking for wild animals when the shining lights around the mirror of a makeup table attracted her attention.
A clown was putting on his face. He had already smeared his cheeks with red grease and drawn a mousy little black mouth in the middle of his lips. Now he started doing big eyes. One was radiant, with eyelashes like a sunburst. No longer young, he needed to spread his skin smooth with the other hand to draw straight lines. The second eye was completely different. It wasn’t really an eye at all, just a vertical stripe that bisected his eyebrow and went down over his eyelid to the middle of his cheek. Then he practiced a look of resignation in the mirror, slowly raising his shoulders, eyebrows, and the corners of his mouth—all at the same time. When the call came for his first number, he pulled an enormous coat on over his suspenders and ran off in outsized, baggy trousers, disappearing through an opening in the side of the tent.
Gala followed him. Peering through that same opening, she could just make out part of the ring. She saw the man standing next to the stands, unnoticed by the audience until the spotlight touched him and drew him into the middle of the tent. He stumbled over the sawdust. He fell. He was beaten by an arrogant white clown, who began by asking him to do the impossible, then ridiculed him when it proved too much for him. He looked miserable, wretched—an outcast. He reminded Gala of cartoon characters who get trampled by crowds until they are as flat as a pancake but always haul themselves up again, hammer out the dents, and walk on, crumpled but unbroken. This clown was exposed to ridicule, blows, and contempt, but he took it all in good cheer, amused and amusing. Over and over again, he gave that apologetic grin, with his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth raised and his shoulders up to his ears. And each time, the audience had no choice but to forgive him for whatever he’d done. If only I could just touch him, thought Gala, who had never imagined that such extraordinary creatures could exist. This man was stupid yet invincible.
Suddenly someone grabbed Gala hard by the scruff of the neck and dragged her away from the tent. A plump woman with long blond hair had her in a tight grip. A fat snake was wrapped around the woman’s neck, resting its head on her ample bosom.
“No ticket, huh?” she snarled, and when Gala shook her head, the woman pretended she was going to kick her in the pants. “Come back tonight with money, and you can watch as much as you like. Now beat it.” She took the snake off her shoulders like a scarf and held it in front of Gala’s face. “Otherwise I’ll feed you to Ennio.”
Gala ran home nonstop through the rain without once remembering that she’d left her bike at the circus with her schoolbag on the carrier.
When she rushed, panting, into the living room, she found herself standing eye to eye with the Reformed pastor, who was visiting her parents with his wife.
“Hello, child.” The man had a high voice, probably because his tight white collar was strangling him.
“We were just talking about you,” Jan said, while the pastor’s wife took Gala by the wrist and pulled her onto her lap.
“We were getting worried,” she said, the girl bouncing on her knees like a rodeo rider.
Gala’s father shot her a look that said that all would be forgiven if she acquitted herself well in the next twenty minutes. The Vandembergs were descended from a long line of clergymen, and, although Jan delivered most of his lectures as if from a pulpit, his decision not to follow in his father’s and grandfathers’ footsteps had always been resented. He just hadn’t dared, he was too much of a doubter himself, and the awe he felt for pastors was not motivated by piety but from the way they could, by choosing their words, either put the fear of God into a whole congregation or choose to comfort them or burden them with guilt. These old-fashioned shepherds possessed the power of the word: a treasure that seemed so valuable to Jan that he had spent his whole life searching for it. Secretly he hoped to refine Gala’s verbal skills so much that one day, in this changing world, he might see her standing in the pulpit, with him in the front pew, quaking at her fire and brimstone.
“Your father tells me that you possess the miraculous gift of the word.”
“Miracles,” said Gala, still bobbing up and down on the knees of the pastor’s wife, “seem more like your line of business.”
The pastor clapped his hands.
“Goodness, Jan, I believe you’ve sown a talent here.”
“She’s only little,” Gala’s mother tempered their enthusiasm. “Let her play now, while she still can.”
“If only she were a miracle,” said Jan. “Miracles come ready-made, but Gala has a gift. And a gift like that is an obligation. It demands a lot of hard work. But still, dandum etenim est aliquid …”
“… dum tempus postulat aut res,”* his daughter concluded. The pastor’s jaw dropped, and his incredulous mare abandoned her attempts to buck Gala.
“That’s nothing,” said Jan. “Her little sister can do that too. What I am saying, our youngest comes close to babbling Cato in her cradle. No, Gala’s latest passion is Homer, isn’t it, honey? I recite it for her at night as a bedtime story and when she gets up in the morning she just rattles it off.”
“Well, with a week or two of droning and drilling,” said Gala’s mother, who had had enough of the whole performance. She liberated her daughter from the grip of the pastor’s wife and asked her where she had been.
“Who wouldn’t forgive a father’s enthusiasm,” crowed the pastor, “when he has such an extraordinary child? It’s just …”
At that moment Gala remembered her bicycle. And her schoolbag on the carrier!
“Tell me, O Muse …,” said Jan, looking hopefully at his daughter. In just a few minutes he would ask her for her lesson book so that he could show his guests her wonderful marks, but right now it was in her saddlebag, soaking up the rain.
“Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero …,” Jan persisted, already a little impatient, “that ingenious hero who traveled far …”
“Far away …,” Gala said, “against the fence.” She wriggled out of her mother’s arms.
“Which fence?” asked the pastor’s wife expectantly, confusing Homer with a nursery rhyme. But Gala knew what she had to do.
“The circus fence. I have to go.”
“The circus!” bleated Jan, as if she had just said something ridiculous. He couldn’t understand how the pastor could find a remark like this as entertaining as the words of Cato the Elder, and when the clergyman slapped his knees and exclaimed, “Sunt pueri pueri, pueri puerilia tractant!”* Jan thought he was scoffing at him. He snapped at Gala to recite the first lines of the Odyssey in the original Greek. The girl’s hand went to the pocket in the seam of
her dress where she kept her bike key, and she realized she hadn’t even locked her bike. And her autograph album was in her bag, and so was her diary, and the sketchbook with the new Caran d’Ache pencils that smelled so good when you opened the box.
“Really, Jan,” said the pastor’s wife, while clicking open her handbag, “it doesn’t matter. Just be grateful for the sparkle in her eyes.” She bent over to Gala and slipped her a banknote. “Maybe Daddy will let you go see the elephants tonight.” But the smile fell from her face when she looked up at Jan.
“Sometimes I don’t know whether you’re being contrary or if you’re just plain stupid.” He’d gone red in the face and tears of shame welled in his eyes. “She knows it. Come on, Gala, don’t show me up like this. You know it. Andra moi ennepe Mousa polutropon hos mala polla …”
Gala heard the sounds, and they seemed familiar. They spun around inside her head, whizzing past like horses on a merry-go-round that was too fast to jump onto. When she shrugged, she did it the way she’d seen the clown do it, with her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth going up as well, in the hope that it might make the others laugh.
“What stupid children I have!” sighed Jan, just before Gala ran out of the room.
In the auction hall the carts full of flowers had started rolling again. Purple dahlias and salmon orchids rattled over the points and squeaked on the rails, but up above, Gala remained stock-still on the catwalk, searching for words. Lately she had more and more difficulty catching them. As if they were too fast for her. She pictured them the way she had that first time with the pastor, whizzing past on a merry-go-round while she stood in line waiting to get on. As long as she concentrated on a single point, she couldn’t make any sense of it, but by quickly following the direction of movement with her eyes, she was able to catch a few sounds, a few syllables at a time, but never a full sentence.
These were the first signs of the disease manifesting itself in Gala—words melting, lights shooting past, sounds bulging—but the child didn’t realize it was something to worry about, something she should warn her parents about in the hope of preventing disaster. But when the words started dancing with the shadows, Gala watched them like vivid dreams that come right before you fall asleep. At most, she chided herself for making such a fuss—there was no need for her to get nervous before she was asked to do something. When her father wanted to teach her new poems, she didn’t tell him that she couldn’t do it anymore; instead, she tried to please him by making an even greater effort to learn the sounds by heart.