The Vanishing Act (2 page)

‘She was a most unexpected sight,’ said Papa. ‘So colourful.’

Mama’s red hair had shone and glinted in the bleak sunlight, and when the rowboat got closer Papa spotted Peacock sitting contentedly in a golden bowl, showing off his brilliantly blue tail feathers.

Papa gallantly helped her out of the boat and invited her in for a cup of coffee. He knew that she had come a long way when he saw the autumn leaves in her hair. They were not from an apple tree. He was certain of that. And, while Mama drank her coffee, Papa got out an old bone-comb from an otherwise empty drawer. Then slowly and patiently, as though sorting through his fishing nets, he combed her hair.

Mama had painted her arrival, filling an entire wall in the blue room. Her painting showed a
life-size rowboat with a ruffled Peacock staring confidently into the giant waves. Mama had painted herself waving and smiling, and she had painted Papa on the shore. He looked kind as he waved back, shielding his eyes from the sun.

‘I knew he was a good man as soon as he took my hand and helped me ashore,’ Mama would say and look at Papa affectionately.

Papa always said that the war was still inside him. Sometimes I thought I could feel it when I held his hand. He had spent the entire war hiding amongst onions and carrots in a small root cellar the size of a cupboard. But when I wanted to hear more about the cellar Papa would say, ‘You are far too young, my girl. Later.’

I asked Mama if she had felt the war in Papa’s hand when he had reached out and helped her safely to the shore.

‘Yes, little one,’ she answered and looked out towards the sea. ‘It runs in me as well.’

I
t was a slow walk from the beach to our house. Papa carried the dead boy. He was frozen and very heavy. One of his hands reached stiffly in front of him as though he was blind and not quite trusting Papa’s steps. I had never seen a dead person before, only the ravens and rabbits I sometimes found on the island. And Peacock, of course, when he died of old age. But the dead boy was different.

Priest was doing his Japanese morning exercises in the distance. I could see him in front of the church, stretching backwards, crying out as he always did, sounding, Papa said, like a deer on heat.

‘You have to pretend you are a warrior,’ Priest explained.

I thought he said ‘worrier’ and believed he was doing an excellent job until Papa corrected me.

When Papa later told Mama, she laughed so hard she almost cried.

As I watched the dead boy’s lifeless face move stiffly against Papa’s shoulder, I remembered how Mama looked that day. Her face had been flushed and warm from laughing.

‘Oh dear,’ she had said when I got annoyed. Then she hugged me. ‘It’s just funny little one. Don’t worry.’ And with that she started again, a low deep chuckle.

Just before the gates the dead boy lost his shoe. I picked it up. It was large, brown and waterlogged. Papa had insisted that the dead boy was going to stay at our house and not on the beach. And, shoe in hand, I reluctantly opened the gates for them.

We never used the blue room. It was Mama’s and had been hers, said Papa, from the moment she arrived on the island. It had a narrow cast-iron bed, and a rickety table crowded with paintbrushes, piles of paper and an old cookie tin filled with the flowers and feathers she used for her hair. Next to the table sat her red suitcase.

‘There is nothing to worry about, my girl,’
Papa puffed as he manoeuvred the boy onto the squeaking bed.

‘How long is he going to stay?’ I demanded from the doorway.

‘Until the delivery boat comes. Three days.’ Papa stood back from the bed and exhaled.

The dead boy was lying on his back. His leg was bent as though he was a dancer caught in an impossible jump. His bare foot was the colour of raven bones, his toenails black.

‘Don’t let the heat get in, Minou. He needs to stay frozen.’ Papa opened the window wide, then checked the temperature on the old thermometer nailed next to Mama’s mural. ‘It’s already two degrees celsius,’ he stated. ‘That’s excellent. If we keep the window open it will turn into a freezer in here.’

‘Why is his mouth like that?’ I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

‘He might have died saying something, Minou.’

‘What, Papa?’

‘He could have been talking to someone. But there is no way of knowing what he said.’

‘Where does he come from?’

‘I am not sure, my girl. I must say, this is a
rare occurrence. Most unusual.’

And while Papa attempted to put a pillow under the dead boy’s head, I realised that this was it. This was the special thing I had been searching for. There was so much we could tell Mama about the dead boy. She would want to hear everything. And she would no longer mind that Papa liked philosophy or that the water pipes froze during winter.

When the pipes froze Papa would get his tools and lay them out on the kitchen bench. Mama would look at him.

‘Don’t worry,’ he once assured her, ‘I know how to fix them. It all comes down to logic.’

‘Logic?’ Mama replied.

‘I can fix them,’ Papa repeated, looking worried. ‘It’s only ice.’

‘It’s this house,’ said Mama, her voice rising like a wave, ‘this island, don’t you see?’ And then she went out without a coat on and was gone for hours.

Mama always walked around the island when she was upset. I would see her from the lighthouse, throwing rocks into the sea at Theodora’s Plateau, looking as if she walked a tightrope between earth and sky.

But the dead boy would change all that.

‘How did he look?’ she would ask, and then, without waiting for an answer, she would turn to Papa and say, ‘And you carried him all that way!’

Papa would nod modestly and Mama would be impressed. Then she would say again and again, ‘Oh, I wish I had been there. Tell me everything, absolutely everything.’

Snowflakes whirled through the window like uninvited guests, and Papa was right, the room turned cold almost in an instant.

‘You can put his shoe next to the bed, Minou.’

I stepped closer and placed the shoe on the floor and put my hand in Papa’s.

‘He smells of oranges,’ I said.

Papa nodded. ‘Yes, even though he is frozen. It’s extraordinary. He almost smells like the orange cake your Mama used to bake. Did I ever tell you,’ he continued, not for the first time, ‘that I found twenty-seven leaves in her hair the day she arrived? In the most magnificent autumn colours. And I put them on the table, one next to the other according to size.’ Papa paused. ‘Your mama, she looked at me with a smile, took my hand and said, as if it wasn’t a question at all, “Would you like to marry me?” But
I knew, even before she reached the shore, that she was for me. So you see, Minou, all I had to do was to say, “Yes.”’

We left the dead boy in the blue room and spent the rest of that day in Papa’s study. Papa worked every day. Ever since the war he had tried to find the absolute truth, the one from which everything can be explained and understood.

Theodora, the first to settle on the island, had been a philosopher too. Her diary, kept next to the altar in the church, was full of philosophical notes, most of them on Aristotle, whom she greatly admired. Without his reasoning, she said, not a single house would have been built on the island. One of Theodora’s great mottos was ‘Reason conquers all.’ And it encouraged Papa to think that Theodora had been sitting in the same study more than two hundred years earlier, searching for the truth just like him.

There were many things to look at in Papa’s study, but the thing you noticed was the wall filled with postcards from Grandfather.

Grandfather had already found the absolute truth, but wanted Papa to find it on his own.
Truth is not worth having, and can never be fully understood, said Grandfather, unless you find it yourself. But he did try to help Papa. The last few years of his life, before he was hit by lightning and died, he sent weekly clues to Papa by postcard.

All the postcards featured a picture of the same mechanical horse. It was the invention of a seventeenth-century alchemist and was created for warfare. The horse looked mean, but Papa said it was a flight of the imagination and that the invention had never worked.

‘That horse never trotted anywhere,’ he would say.

I asked Papa if Grandfather liked horses, but Papa didn’t think so. He said that Grandfather didn’t like spending money on anything, and that it was more likely that he had got a good deal buying the postcards in bulk.

Mama would read each clue aloud with a sigh: ‘Particular existence.’ ‘The organ of happiness.’ ‘Twofold and then more.’ ‘Finite and boundless consciousness.’

Sometimes Papa got worried about the public display of Grandfather’s truth, but comforted himself with the thought that the boatmen who ran
the delivery boat weren’t philosophers and probably wouldn’t know what to do with these fragments. He stuck the postcards up in his study, one next to the other, until they filled the entire wall, and by the time Grandfather died there were two hundred and twelve cards all attached with drawing pins. Sometimes Papa would shuffle them around and study them again.

The day I found the dead boy I sat on the floor in Papa’s study and wrote in my notebook, while he worked at his desk. I wrote:

I also added that the dead boy’s eyes might be brown like mine, but that I couldn’t be sure because they were closed. Then I drew the raven that I remembered sitting on the broken pine branch over the dead boy, snow resting on its feathers like a white coat. I also drew Papa’s tin bucket, abandoned, full of fish on the beach, and described how their tails made a sad song against the side of the bucket as we walked away.

Once in a while Papa stretched, put down his pen and said, ‘Let’s go and see the dead boy, Minou.’ And together we crossed the corridor and opened the door to the blue room. On our first visit Papa went straight to the window and opened it wider.

‘Don’t be afraid, Minou,’ he said, when he saw me lingering near the door.

Then he walked over to the bed, reached out and felt the dead boy’s hand. ‘Death is a natural part of life. We all end up like this. It’s perfectly logical.’

I walked a bit closer. Then I did what Papa had done. I reached out and touched the dead boy’s hand. His skin was hard, but soft and wet at the same time. It almost felt like No Name’s nose on an icy day.

‘See,’ Papa looked at me approvingly. ‘Nothing to be scared of.’

By evening Papa seemed unusually happy. He was writing at the desk with amazing speed, muttering ‘arrival,’ ‘dead,’ ‘coincidence,’ and ‘oranges,’ as I picked out coloured pencils from a drawer, planning to draw the dead boy at first light.

Papa stopped writing, his pen poised above the paper. ‘This is what your grandfather used to talk about,’ he said, looking at me, his reading glasses perched on his nose.

‘What, Papa?’ I asked.

‘The great coincidences,’ he said. ‘They wake you up, Minou; they shake you like the wind shakes the apple tree. They point towards something you might have forgotten.’

‘But what are the great coincidences, Papa?’

‘Things that make you stop and think, Minou.’ Papa jotted something down on his pad, then looked at me again. ‘Your grandfather once came across a salmon when he was swimming in a river. It swam right up close, almost as if it wanted to tell him something. At that time your grandfather was working on a particularly difficult philosophical question and the salmon, Minou, reminded him of how fishing often remains good in one spot, even though the current constantly changes. I am still
not sure exactly how, but I know that seeing that salmon changed everything for your grandfather. His philosophy was never the same again. He even painted a salmon above the door to his house.’

I must have looked uncertain, because Papa added in a convincing voice, ‘This boy, Minou, is one of those great coincidences. He is reminding me of something. Something to do with the truth.’ Papa took off his reading glasses and stroked the bridge of his nose. ‘I might sit with him tonight, my girl. We haven’t had anyone visiting for a long time, not since your uncle. It’s nice to have company again, don’t you think?’

I wasn’t quite sure but I knew that Mama would be excited to hear about the dead boy when she came home. And the house was filled with delicious wafts of orange and it was true, it felt as if Mama was baking again.

Before I went to the lighthouse that night I opened the door to the blue room. In the darkness lay the dead boy and on the windowsill sat a raven, silent and black. I stood in the doorway feeling the cold, seeing my breath unfurl like a sea mist, and whispered, ‘I will see you in the morning.’

I
woke in the lighthouse in the middle of the night. Papa was speaking to the dead boy. His voice rose, muffled and deep, through the floorboards. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he sounded happy. For a moment I even thought I heard him laugh. I lay awake listening to him, while snow whirled and pricked the lighthouse windows.

Papa didn’t laugh very often. ‘Life is not about feeling happy,’ he would say. ‘It is about being prepared.’

‘Poor old man,’ Mama would say. ‘No truth could ever prepare you for the cellar.’

Papa would shake his head and say, ‘It’s not just about the cellar.’

‘My dear.’ Mama would look at him kindly. ‘This—’ she made a gesture towards the bookshelf and the open notebooks on his desk ‘—is all about the cellar.’

I kept listening to Papa’s voice. Tiny snowflakes seemed to fall endlessly in the dark-blue of the night. I could see the outline of the forest with its apple tree and seventeen pines, and through the forest a small path, a grey winding rope leading to Boxman’s yard. Light spilled out of Boxman’s open door, and just outside sat his dog, No Name, a dark shadow with spindly legs and floppy ears.

I sat up, wrapped the blankets around me, and reached for the scarf I was knitting. It was orange. Boxman had admired it when I showed it to him. ‘You are an expert knitter, Minou,’ he said. Then he proceeded to tell me that the scarf was the exact same colour as a circus tent he once worked in.

Mama and I liked everything to do with the circus and we would visit Boxman every day. Mama said magic tricks were one of just a few good reasons to live.

Boxman had only been on the island a year
when Mama disappeared. He wore his hair in a ponytail and was younger than both Papa and Priest. Cosmina, a French actress, had left him, and he had come to the island to mend his broken heart.

Boxman used to work in a circus, but after arriving on the island he began to make boxes for magicians. The kind in which women are sawn in half.

‘I believe in love,’ he said, ‘and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, more beautiful than a woman just rescued from a box.’

His boxes were beautiful, too; inlaid with satin, painted in bright colours with gold lettering.

Boxman never asked if I could see into his yard from the lighthouse, and I didn’t think he knew that I sometimes watched him. One night he was teaching No Name how to jump through hoops of fire. The blue flames cast strange shadows on the barn, and I could smell the petrol.

No Name didn’t like it. He did it once, burned himself, then refused to do it again. On Boxman’s naked chest was a birthmark, large and purple, right where his heart was. He had a heart on the outside.

Another time, early in the morning when I could smell Papa’s coffee and was about to go downstairs,
Boxman came out wearing his usual blue cape and a black top hat. He took off the hat in a smooth movement, paused theatrically, and then pulled out a rabbit. Its grey fur shone a brilliant silver in the morning light. I could see its dark eyes, its quivering nose, and I wondered how Boxman did it, and whether the smile he sent in my direction was intended for me.

After the episode with the hoops I made a scarf for No Name to cover the burnt patches, and reminded Boxman, who didn’t always think of these things, that under no circumstances was No Name allowed to jump through fire with the scarf on.

Boxman’s house was more like a barn. He had a cooker in the corner where he made tea and a foldout bed where he slept. And his piano accordion was always close by. One wall of Boxman’s barn was stacked with wooden boxes, ready to be painted.

The barn smelled of hay and sawdust and the green jelly-like soap that he used to clean his hands after painting. On another wall hung photographs and ‘thank you’ notes from magicians all over the world. Most of them were waving and smiling next to their newly acquired boxes, but one magician
looked serious. He stood in what appeared to be a snowstorm, next to a tiger in a cage, wearing a long brown coat, and an enormous black moustache that glinted against the white. The tiger looked at him with great interest and, I thought, something that looked like a hungry smile.

The autograph read:

Out of the thirty-three photographs on the wall, that was Mama’s favourite. She often stood for a long time in front of The Great Shine.

‘What a life,’ she sighed. ‘What an incredible life.’ Then she would shake her head in wonderment, ‘He looks like a man of the world.’

‘He is,’ said Boxman. ‘A courageous one. He went from Moscow to Siberia on a rusty bike just to learn a new trick. He had to eat potatoes all the way, and lost his left foot to frostbite. Imagine the commitment.’ Boxman looked at The Great Shine.
‘He even found the tiger on the way and tamed it. An incredible man.’

I think most of Boxman’s admiration came from the potato thing. He hated potatoes and said they tasted like sucking on a coin. But I didn’t like the sound of tigers running wild. You would have to pedal very fast, just in case, and I didn’t think it would be much fun to lose your foot either.

You couldn’t see his feet in the photograph. He was standing knee-deep in snow. But when Mama later painted a life-size mural of The Great Shine and his tiger on our living room wall, she added a shiny metal boot to his left foot.

I knitted slowly and looked out into the night. Boxman had started to play the accordion and No Name was still sitting outside the barn door, his head turned towards the sky and the falling snow.

When the wind blew in the right direction we could hear Boxman play as clearly as if he was sitting in our living room. Boxman was good at a lot of things. He built magic boxes, made things vanish with a flash of his silk handkerchief, and he was good at juggling. He could throw balls high into the air—one, two, three, four, five—and one
after the other they would move in a perfect arc between his hands, again, again. They went so fast that it was impossible to follow them. Boxman had tried to teach me, but said that I was thinking too much.

‘When you are juggling,’ he said, ‘there is only room for your hands and the balls, nothing else. You have to put your mind elsewhere.’

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘In a drawer, in a box, outside the door, it doesn’t really matter, Minou, as long as you are able to find it again.’

Mama said circus tricks reminded her that the war was over and that she could breathe once again.

‘Those monstrous people,’ she said, doing a sketch of No Name as he sat on my lap. ‘Make him sit still, Minou.’

‘Why were they monstrous, Mama?’

‘They didn’t know about magic, little one. They didn’t know what it means to have imagination.’ Mama paused, looking at her drawing, pencil pressed against her lips. ‘Even if they stood on the highest mountaintop, Minou, they still wouldn’t be able to see it. They were like dogs.’

‘Dogs?’

‘He won’t understand what I am saying, Minou. Take your hands off his ears.’

I hesitated, then uncovered No Name’s ears.

‘Dogs of war, Minou, because they were loyal to ideas and leaders without ever questioning them.’ Mama added a final line to the drawing. ‘They had forgotten to use their minds properly.’

‘No Name is not like that,’ I said, and pulled his solid, furry body a bit closer.

‘No,’ Mama smiled, ‘he is indeed an entirely different kind of dog.’

The heater in the lighthouse hummed in the corner and Boxman had started a new tune. It was fast. It jumped and hopped like a runner over a rocky beach. I thought of the morning when I had just turned ten. The sun had risen, and I was running around the entire island. Papa had timed me, hunched over in the lighthouse with his big stopwatch waving every time we could see each other. It had taken me just twenty-eight minutes to run the whole island, and my feet had felt as if they were flying. Papa had said that I had looked like a strong gazelle in flight.

I stopped knitting and looked into Boxman’s
yard again. No Name had gone back inside. He was probably curled up in the corner of the barn, sleeping against a bale of hay.

‘What’s the hay for?’ I asked Boxman one day when the wind was howling and the snow falling thick. Mama and I were sitting next to Boxman on the apothecary’s desk with its hundred and fifty-nine small drawers, each labelled in a delicate hand, with words like Screws, Magic Rope, Problems, Sugar.

We were sitting close together, keeping warm, reading some of Boxman’s magazines. Two rabbits were nibbling with furious speed on one of Boxman’s cabbages and we could see No Name through the open door, trying to catch snowflakes in the yard.

‘I might get a goat one day,’ he answered, ‘like Theodora.’

Boxman was wearing heavy boots, his cape and the dark blue scarf I had knitted him. He looked like a prince.

‘A goat would be fun, you could come and sing for it,’ he said to Mama, who smiled.

‘Do goats like music?’ I asked.

‘I am sure that they do,’ he said. ‘You could sing too.’

‘I can’t sing.’

‘I think you can,’ said Boxman.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’

‘You just have to pretend that you are the centre of the universe.’

Mama nodded and said, ‘Like a bird in a tree, with the most splendid view.’

‘Or like an elephant eating apples,’ added Boxman. ‘You can play Beethoven’s fifth right next to them and they won’t hear the slightest thing if there are apples on the menu.’

I shook my head, confused. ‘But how can I pretend to be the centre of the universe?’

Then Boxman showed us a slim microscope that was a gift from Cosmina. She was Boxman’s great love, and used to assist him in the box trick. Cosmina had curly hair, red like Mama’s, and Boxman said that she was a wonderful actress. She would lie in the box, crying out for help so urgently that his heart ached as he sawed through the wood.

Cosmina, Boxman told us, used to jump out of the box and cling to his chest, ‘Oh,’ she would cry, ‘Oh, I thought I was going to die. I truly thought I was going to die.’

But one day Cosmina no longer wanted to be rescued. Boxman suspected that it was because of
their new trick. After they had added a vanishing act to their performance, Cosmina began to talk about things she had never mentioned before. During breaks and costume changes she spoke about stars, endlessness, and the rapture of the night, and she no longer seemed happy when he rescued her from the box. It wasn’t long before she told Boxman she had found herself, and wanted to study the stars from the foothills of the Himalayas. She had read about Galileo and wanted to walk in his footsteps.

‘Did Galileo go to the Himalayas?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Boxman, ‘but he probably dreamt about it. It would be just like Cosmina to keep someone else’s dream alive, she was such a kind soul.’

The day before she left, Cosmina gave Boxman the microscope.

‘Observe,’ she told him. ‘What you see is the universe in a tiny drop. From this you will know yourself to be the centre from which everything unfolds, all colour, all movement, everything.’

Boxman unwrapped the microscope from layers of soft cloth and in the darkness of the barn I put my eye to the lens and saw tiny stars in a piece of hay, and in a scrap of newspaper I saw the Milky Way,
looking exactly as it did on a particularly clear night. I felt dizzy from the sight, but it still didn’t feel as if I was the centre of anything.

‘Do you feel dizzy when you look at the stars?’ I asked Boxman.

‘No,’ said Boxman, ‘but I think No Name does.’

And it was true, on clear nights No Name would growl at the stars and at the same time look longingly towards them, in a way that made him seem a bit crazy.

I laughed as No Name continued his frantic pirouettes around the snowflakes. ‘He doesn’t know where he is going,’ I said.

Looking at him I thought that maybe he could see the universe in the snow, and that perhaps it was all too much for him.

‘No Name knows exactly what he is doing,’ said Boxman. ‘His steps are measured, so that he can experience the delicious feeling—’

‘Of not making sense,’ finished Mama. And they both laughed.

That didn’t sound right. I liked logic and at that moment No Name looked more crazy with longing than as if he was feeling something delicious.
He looked as though he had forgotten which way was home.

Later I thought that with a proper name No Name might have a better sense of direction and wouldn’t wear himself out so much when it was snowing, and it was clear to me that neither Boxman nor Mama knew about logic the way Papa and I did.

I had tried to knit with gloves on, but it was difficult. The glass panes that made up the walls of the lighthouse were not thick enough to withstand the elements. And even though the heater was on throughout the night, the knitting needles were always cold. Every so often I put my hands under the blankets, and kept them pressed against my warm belly until I was ready to knit again.

Sometimes I wished that No Name would keep me company at night. He was always warm, no matter what. But he didn’t like the lighthouse. The one time I carried him up the wooden stairs and put him next to the big bulb, he howled so loud that Priest could hear him from the back of the church. Priest had just turned on his noisy industrial oven, about to bake his weekly supply of pretzels, and said that it must have been a howl without precedent.

‘No Name is not a dog that appreciates a good view,’ said Boxman. ‘Some dogs do, but we don’t choose our personality, Minou.’

If No Name had liked the tower I could have talked to him about Mama and about philosophy, and all the things I thought about while knitting. I could have told him about the great coincidences and Grandfather’s salmon. And how Papa, even though he didn’t want to tell me about the root cellar, shared everything philosophical with me.

Papa had realised early on, he said, that I had a talent for philosophy. One of the first signs was that I liked going for walks in the morning all by myself.