The Ringmaster's Daughter Part 16

'Once,' I said.

Clearly she couldn't decipher that I was a foreigner. She pointed to a waterfall fifty metres ahead. Then she said: 'Shall we bathe?'

This line alone was sufficient to convince me that I'd met the woman of my life. We'd never seen each other before, she was wearing white sandals and was dressed in nothing but a thin summer frock. It was sweltering hot, neither of us looked particularly prim, but suggesting we should bathe together was very uninhibited.

Shall we bathe? The three words were pregnant with sub- text. She both did and did not mean that we should jump into the waterfall together. She was saying that the sun was hot. She'd pointed to the waterfall and called it refres.h.i.+ng and beautiful: it was tempting. She had posed the brief question to see how I'd react. She was saying that she liked me. Now she wanted to see how I responded. She wanted to watch me disport myself. She was setting the tone, the three words were a tuning fork. The woman in the yellow dress had said that she was willing to walk with me, but that she would rather not have any heavy conversation. She was saying we had nothing to be ashamed of.

I remembered Luigi's admonition and said: 'Perhaps we could do that tomorrow.'

She had inclined her head slightly. She had been testing me and I'd given the best answer she could hope for. It was a Solomonic answer. Had I immediately ripped off my s.h.i.+rt and begun loosening my belt, I'd have made a fool of myself.

The invitation wasn't that literal. It was a rebus. If I'd said that I never bathed in waterfalls with women I didn't know, I would again have failed the tests she'd set me. Hiding behind such general norms would have been over-starchy, it would have been a rebuff.

She proffered her hand. 'Well, tomorrow then,' she said.

She laughed. 'Come on!' she said. And we began walking.

She walked a pace ahead of me on the path.

Her name was Beate and she came from Munich. She'd been a week in Amalfi too, but she mentioned she was staying all summer. She painted watercolours, had rented a bed-sit from an affable widow, and was due to hold a big exhibition in Munich at the end of September. I'd have to come to Munich then, she told me. I promised - I couldn't really do otherwise. The previous year she'd had a small exhibition of scenes from Prague after spending a couple of months in the Czechoslovakian capital.

We had switched to German. It was easier for me to speak German than for Beate to struggle on in Italian. I could hear that she hadn't been born in Bavaria and thought there had to be a reason why she didn't say where she came from. I don't know where I got the notion that her parents might be Sudeten-Germans, but it was probably due to her mention of Prague.

I didn't tell her exactly what I was called, but I used a suitable pseudonym. I looked her right in the eyes as I said it.

I needed to test her out. She gave not the least reaction to the pseudonym.

I wasn't a fool. Perhaps even now I was in love, but I wasn't irresponsible. I couldn't shut out Luigi's warning.

She didn't ask my surname, but I told her I was Danish and lived in Copenhagen. She didn't react to that either. I told her I was the editor-in-chief of a Danish publis.h.i.+ng com- pany, which was quite plausible. I'd brought a laptop and some work to Amalfi, I explained. I needed to get away for a while. I thought it sounded reasonable. But I'd under- estimated her.

'Work?' she queried.

'Some editorial work,' I said.

'I don't believe a word of it,' she said. 'No one travels from Denmark to southern Italy just to concentrate on "editorial work". I think you're writing a novel.'

I couldn't lie to her, she was much too clever.

'All right,' I said. 'I'm writing a novel.' Then I added: 'I like it when you see through me.'

She shrugged her shoulders. 'What is your novel about?'

I shook my head and said I'd promised myself not to talk about what I was writing until it was finished.

She accepted my answer, but I still wasn't sure she believed me. Was it possible that she knew who I was? If Luigi's hint at an intrigue had been a joke, I'd never forgive him.

We pa.s.sed the moss-covered ruins of several paper mills.

Beate pointed out flowers and trees and said what they were called. We spoke about the Jena Romantics' fascination with ruins and the traditional countryside. We talked about Goethe and Novalis, Nietzsche and Rilke. We talked about everything. Beate was a fairy tale, she was a whole anthology of fairy tales. She was no straightforward type, she had a multiple personality. I felt she was like me.

It's not often I'm captivated by a woman, but on the rare occasions when I do meet a woman I fall for, it doesn't take me long to get to know her. It is those you don't like that take the longest time to know.

After we'd pa.s.sed the ruins of an ancient mill called Cartiera Milano, a path turned off to the right. Beate asked me if I'd been to Pontone. I knew it was the name of a small town that lay on the saddle of hills above Amalfi, but I hadn't been up there. 'Come on!' she said and beckoned me to follow. She had a map and told me that the path was called Via Pestrofa. My inability to work out any etymology behind the name irritated me.

We put the valley behind us and joined a stone-paved cart track with high kerbstones on either side of it. We halted several times and looked down into the valley. We could still hear the deep roar of the waterfall we were going to bathe in next day, but soon its sound subsided and merged into the gentle chatter of the river that still reached us from the depths of the Valle dei Mulini.

We were short of breath by the time we got up to Pontone an hour later. We had talked continuously and we were already well enough acquainted for each to know that the other had a secret in life. I was afraid to let her know my intimacies, and she seemed just as anxious that I shouldn't begin digging into hers.

Beate had mentioned that she'd lost her mother quite recently, and that they had always been very close. She'd died quite unexpectedly. It had actually happened on her birthday, while she was at the Bayerischer Hof Hotel cele- brating the occasion with some friends. Her mother had been in sparkling form, but then, just as she'd been about to go to the table with a gla.s.s of champagne in her hand, she'd suddenly collapsed. A doctor was present amongst the guests, but it proved impossible to save her life. She hadn't died of heart failure, or any other demonstrable condition, she'd simply vacated this world. 'And your father?' I asked.

'I'd rather not talk about him,' she replied rather brusquely.

Then she repented and said in a milder tone: 'It can wait until tomorrow.' She looked up at me and laughed. Perhaps she was thinking about the waterfall.

Occasionally her sandals forced her to take my arm where the path was rough or steep, but as we went through the town gates of Pontone, she linked her arm through mine and like this, as if we were man and wife, we walked into the Piazzetta di Pontone. It was so easy, it was like an amusing game, it was as if we were playing a trick on the entire world. Some people take years to get to know one another, but we were in a totally different league. We had already discovered many subtle short-cuts to each other. But we respected each other's little secrets, too.

After we'd taken a look at the view, we went to a bar and stood drinking a cup of coffee. Beate ordered a limoncello as well, and so I had a brandy. We hardly spoke now. Beate smoked a cigarette - I had s.n.a.t.c.hed the matches out of her hand and lit it for her. We leant on the counter looking provocatively into one another's eyes. She was smiling, it was as if she was smiling about several different things at once. I said she was nuts. 'I know that,' she said. I said I was much older than her. 'A bit older,' she said. Neither of us had revealed our age.

The way down from Pontone to Amalfi was a steep, narrow path with more than a thousand steps. At one point we pa.s.sed a man leading a mule. We had to squeeze up against the rock face, and this also forced us close together. She smelt of plums and cherries. And earth.

We sat down on a bench to rest our legs. A few moments later Metre Man came along and climbed up on to an adjacent kerbstone. But first he glanced up at me and with his bamboo cane asked if it was all right to sit down. I couldn't be bothered to argue as I knew he'd do exactly what he wanted anyway. 'Metre Man is Master' was a catch- phrase he'd used constantly when I was little. I could hardly speak sternly to him while I was in Beate's company. If I'd admonished him verbally or just waved him away, she might have been scared, she would certainly have begun to doubt my sanity. I decided instead to tell Beate a fairy tale, indirectly addressing it to the little man as well. The bones of it went as follows:

Long, long ago in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, there lived a small boy called Jiri Kubelik. He lived in a poky little flat with his mother. He didn't have a father, but when he was about three years old, he began to have frequent vivid dreams about a little man with a green felt hat and a reedy bamboo walking-stick. In his dreams, the little man was exactly the same height as Jiri, but otherwise he looked the same as any other man. He was just much shorter and far more glib-tongued than most.

In these dreams the little man tried to convince Jiri that it was he who dictated everything the little boy did and said, and not only at night when he slept, but during the day as well. When Jiri sometimes did things that his mother had forbidden him, he imagined that it must be the little man who'd made him do it. It happened more and more often that Jiri used adult words and expressions and his mother couldn't work out where he'd picked them up. He could also rattle off the strangest stories to her, small fragments or long narratives which the little man had told Jiri as he slept.

His dreams about the little man were always lively and amusing.

And so Jiri generally awoke with a smile on his lips, and never protested when his mother said that it was bedtime. His problems began one morning when the little man failed to disappear with his dream, for whenjiri opened his eyes that sunny summer's morning, he could plainly see the man with the green felt hat in his room standing by the bed, and the next second the miniature man had slipped out of the open door into the hall and from there, into the living-room. Jiri hurriedly got out of bed and, very naturally, rushed into the living-room too. Sure enough, there was the little man, pacing to and fro amongst the furniture brandis.h.i.+ng his cane. He was very much alive and full of vigour.

When Jiri's mother emerged from her bedroom a bit later, her son was eager to point out the little man who just then was standing in a corner of the living-room prodding one of the books in the bookcase with his cane. But his mother had honestly to confess that she was quite unable to see him. This surprised Jiri, because for him, the little man with the stick was anything but a vague or shadowy apparition. He was as clear-cut as the big vase on the floor or the old piano, which his mother had recently painted green because the original white colour had begun to go yellow.

However, certain aspects of the little man's behaviour were quite different from when he'd appeared in the dreams. Occasionally he still turned to say a few words to Jiri, but that was the exception now. This was a major s.h.i.+ft in their relations.h.i.+p, for while the little man had been in Jiri's dreams, he'd played with words almost continuously. It was as if, from this time on, he had renounced almost all use of language and speech in favour of young Jiri. In the dreams he had also loved picking plums and cherries which he'd put straight into his mouth and eaten with great relish, or sometimes he'd take Jiri to a secret stockpile of fizzy drinks he kept in the cellar, there to open bottle after bottle of pop which he put to his mouth and emptied before even asking the boy if he'd like to quench his thirst as well. In the real world, on the other hand, he never picked up any objects in the room - apart from his own hat and cane which, as if by way of compensation, he twirled and flourished almost ceaselessly. He didn't eat or drink anything, either. In the world of reality he remained a mere shadow of himself compared with the vitality and friskiness he'd demonstrated in Jiri's im- agination. Perhaps it was the price the little dream man had had to pay for advancing from dream to reality; after all, it was a considerable leap.

jiri got bigger, and the little man continued to scamper around him almost everywhere he went, but without growing by as much as a millimetre. By the time Jiri was seven he was already almost a head taller than the little man, and from that time on he began to call him Metre Man, as he was only a metre tall.

As soon as Metre Man entered reality and appeared in Jiri's flat for the first time, Jiri never dreamt about him again. He was sure, therefore, that he'd either escaped from the dream world of his own volition, or that he'd accidentally got separated from the fairy-tale land he came from and could no longer find his way back. Jiri thought it must be his fault that the dream man had got lost, and so he never gave up hope that one day Metre Man would succeed in getting back to the world he came from. That was where he belonged after all, and we must all be very careful not to stray too far away from the reality of our roots. Gradually, as Jiri got older, having the little man around him all the time often made him tired and irritable.

All through Jiri's life Metre Man followed him like a shadow. It might look as if he was Jiri's sidekick, but the little man always maintained that it was the other way round, that he was the one pus.h.i.+ng the boy, and that it was he who made all the decisions in Jiri's life. There must have been something in this, becauseJiri could never control when or where he'd find Metre Man. It was always the little man who decided when he would appear. And so he could pop up at the most inconvenient moments in Jiri's life.

No one apart from Jiri could ever catch so much as a glimpse of Metre Man, whether at home in the flat he still lived in or out on the streets of Prague. This never ceased to amaze Jiri.

One day, when he'd grown to manhood, he met the great love of his life. Her name was Jarka and as Jiri wanted her to share his life and soul, he tried to point out Metre Man on a couple of occasions when he materialised in the room, so that his love could also catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of the tiny wonder. But to Jarka this looked as if Jiri was in the process of losing his wits, and she held herself aloof from him a little. Then, finally, she left him for a young engineer, because she felt that Jiri was living more in his own fantasy than in the real world with other people.

Jiri lived out his life in loneliness and isolation, and it was only when he died that an extraordinary change occurred. From the day Jiri was released from time - by that I mean our world - rumours began to abound in Prague that people had seen a homunculus strolling alone down by the banks of the River Vltava in the evenings. Some claimed they'd seen the same manikin strutting around and excitedly swinging his little bamboo cane about him in the market-place of the old town as well. And last but not least, the little man was observed at irregular intervals sitting on a gravestone in the churchyard. He always sat on the same grave, and on the stone was carved JIRI KUBELIK.

An old woman would sometimes sit on a white bench and give the little man a friendly wave on the rare occasions he took up position on Jiri's gravestone. It was Jarka who, all those years before, had turned down Jiri's hand because she thought he'd lost his reason.

Gossip had it that the old lady was probably Kubelik's widow.

Maybe that was because she was always sitting on the white bench in the churchyard staring atJiri'sgravestone, and then again, maybe not.

I spent almost an hour over the story of Jiri and Jarka and, by the time I'd finished, the little man was no longer sitting on the kerbstone keeping an eye on us. Perhaps I'd frightened him off.

Beate was looking a bit pensive. 'Was that a Czechoslo- vakian fairy tale?' she enquired.

I nodded. I felt no desire to tell her I'd made it up myself.