Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“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.

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.