The Vanishing Act Read online

  ‘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.

  ‘All philosophers walk,’ Papa explained, ‘Kierkegaard, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, all of them. They walk along empty beaches with cold hands and windblown faces, searching their minds for the truth.’

  I liked the beach early in the morning. The horizon would appear suddenly, as if someone had decided, said Mama, to paint two bold strokes on the night sky. And the beach changed overnight. There was much to be found along the water’s edge. Sometimes I forgot to think philosophical thoughts and stopped to collect raven bones and shiny shells among the rocks. If I were lucky I would find a whole raven skeleton. They were beautiful, with black beaks and bones the colour of sand. Their skulls were the size of Boxman’s juggling balls, round and smooth with deep indentations where their eyes had been. Their necks looked like knots on a thick string of wool and their wings were still adorned with feathers. I had three of them in the tower in my collection of bones.

  Papa never waved if we met on the beach on our solitary morning walks. He just stared into the sand and dark rocks and I tried to do the same. But if I happened to meet Mama I would stop and talk to her. She liked finding things, too, and had collected a rusty bike
with bent wheels that Boxman unsuccessfully tried to fix for me, and half a violin with two strings that Mama thought looked like an unusual boat, in which you could go to unusual places.

  Kant, Papa told me, took the same walk every day. He left his house at half past three every afternoon, timing his departure with such precision that neighbours, shopkeepers, the shoeshine man on the corner, and whoever else saw him adjusted their watches as he passed. He walked down the same streets, through the same park, passing the same shops and, just before turning the last corner into his street, he would admire the same large chestnut tree.

  But one day the chestnut was gone. In its place were blue sky and a straight view to Madam Trapp’s laundry. On the footpath sat neat stacks of firewood. Kant went to bed with the heaviest of hearts and had no philosophical thoughts whatsoever for three weeks.

  The worst thing about it all, said Papa, was that Kant began to sleep soundly at night.

  ‘But isn’t it good to sleep at night, Papa?’ I asked.

  ‘No, Minou, a philosopher should never sleep soundly.’

  ‘But why?’ I thought that sounded terrible. ‘Don’t you sleep, Papa?’

  ‘My girl, that is my greatest sorrow, I drink coffee every night and yet I sleep like a bear in hibernation.’ Papa’s cheeks flushed. ‘As if there was nothing to work out, no problems at all.’

  I thought of my nights awake in the lighthouse and all the scarves I had knitted after Mama disappeared, and I wondered if staying up at night had made me a better philosopher.

  Papa claimed the first word I said was ‘Hegel’. Mama said that I had just eaten my first enormous portion of stewed apples and had the hiccups.

  But Papa insisted. ‘You had such an intelligent look in your eyes, Minou. You looked straight at me and said “Hegel”, loud and clear. And,’ he lowered his voice, ‘I read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to you when you were still in your mama’s womb. She thinks his sentences are too long, Minou, but I read to you while she was asleep. So you see, it’s perfectly plausible that your first word would be “Hegel”.’

  I read Descartes’ Meditations when I was ten, and tried to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, but couldn’t make anything of it. Then I read Galileo and Freud. Freud, Papa explained, wasn’t really a philosopher, but still part of modern thinking.

  ‘You have to know what is out there,’ he said. ‘The more you know, Minou, the more equipped you are to find the truth.’

  But Descartes wasn’t just a great philosopher, said Papa. He was also our ancestor and it was therefore especially important to know his philosophy well.

  Papa told me that Descartes’ first name was René and that he was born in France on a cold day in March 1596.

  Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ He argued that it is only through thinking that we can know something to be true.

  I wasn’t sure I completely understood, and asked Papa, ‘You mean, we can’t even know the ocean exists just by seeing it?’

  ‘That’s true Minou, we can’t, although—,’ he glanced through the window at the dark ever-changing sea, ‘—it makes for such a convincing argument that I am almost tempted to make an exception.’

  ‘And me, Papa?’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Do I exist?’

  ‘You definitely exist, can’t you hear yourself think?’

  ‘Yes, but you can’t.’

  Papa looked worried. ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ he said, and patted my head as if to make quite sure I was really there.

  A philosopher, Papa explained, spends most of his time searching the dark room of his mind for the absolute truth; the one he has no reason whatsoever to doubt. Grandfather once said to Papa, ‘When you find the absolute truth it’s like finding the beginning. It’s like a string. You pull and pull and pull some more. And then it all falls into place.’

  Papa hadn’t found the beginning yet. But he had found smaller truths, and taught me how to write them down:

  Truth:

  Theodora had great stamina.

  Evidence:

  1) She built the houses and the church on the island.

  2) She lived on the island with only a goat for company.

  3) She read Aristotle every day.

  Deduction:

  Reason conquers all.

  Papa often said that if only he had been as smart as Grandfather then he would have found the absolute truth a long time ago.

  Kant still lay next to my pile of blankets in the lighthouse, and some nights I tried to decipher a sentence by torchlight. But all I could make out were odd shapes in the hollow spaces between the words: birds, lions, and the curve of Mama’s rowboat that had lain near the fishing spot since the day she arrived.

  It was the twenty-seventh scarf that I had knitted. Descartes too had a hobby. He loved parades and would travel far and wide to attend one. Papa said it was entirely possible that Descartes’ hobby had contributed favourably to his reasoning. He encouraged me to keep knitting, so that I too could strengthen my philosophical faculties.

  I glanced at the four portraits of Descartes on the big bulb. It was the same portrait, but in different sizes. I could barely make out his profile in the darkness, but I knew he looked both serious and brooding, as though he was pondering a very tricky philosophical question. Papa said I resembled Descartes quite a bit. I couldn’t really see it; instead his sharp nose and his dark eyes reminded me of Peacock.

  Papa was still talking downstairs. A hoarse cry from a raven cut through the night. Snow whirled and danced on every side of the lighthouse and Boxman had moved on to a slow tune on the accordion. I stopped knitting and measured the scarf. It reached from one end of the mattress to the other. It was almost finished.

  Mama liked birds. She liked the blue-black feathers of the ravens and their strong beaks, and she had done many drawings of them. But the bird she liked more than any other was Peacock.

  When Mama arrived she opened her red suitcase and unpacked five dresses, eight jars of paint, two brushes and a white enamel clock that didn’t work. She left the golden bowl outside the house, wherein Peacock immediately settled. Mama warned Papa that Peacock had seen things during the war that no bird should see. He had become sensitive and was known to nip without rhyme or reason. Papa didn’t know much about birds, but he knew how to repair clocks, and asked if Mama wanted hers fixed. But she didn’t, she liked time standing perfectly still.

  Peacock lay in the golden bowl for hours each day, head resting lazily on the edge, but when he died years later, the golden bowl got filled with rain and snow, and over time it lost its shine. Mama didn’t like the bowl without Peacock in it. She even kicked it one day, because it reminded her that he had died. The bowl rolled onto its side where it lay, grey and neglected. But that didn’t stop the boatmen wanting to buy it.

  The boatmen came with our weekly deliveries. We would all be on the beach, Papa and me, Boxman, Mama and Priest, when their ship arrived out past the reef. We would watch the boatmen lower a dinghy into the chaotic sea and hear them swear across the waves. They didn’t like coming to the island. Our deliveries often consisted of packages in strange shapes and if they saw a box on the beach next to Boxman, packed and ready to go, then their swearing grew louder.

  With every delivery the boatmen got a new shopping list. Mama used to add a list to Papa’s weekly order:

  Flowers, red (if not possible, then yellow)

  Ink, black

  Three boxes of Zackerburg’s Ginger Treats (make sure it’s not Tennille’s Delights, they are too chewy)

  Three tubes of oil paint: cerulean blue

  A stuffed bird, white, to put in hair, not too big

  Green ribbon

  A pair of reading glasses. Same as the previous pair

  A box of oranges, the finest you can get

  A paintbrush, 15mm, horsehair only

  Four rolls of violet yarn and another pair of knitting needles for Minou

  The boatmen
had lined faces and thin mouths, and their eyes were watery blue. They lived on the ship and whenever they had to step onto the beach they looked uncomfortable and wobbly, as if the sea moved inside them.

  Once their dinghy capsized as it was leaving the island with one of Boxman’s wrapped boxes. Boxman shouted, the boatmen got wet and the box was lost. The sea was very deep. A few metres out the sand abruptly gave way to an oceanic grave, six hundred and fifty metres deep. The box for Ludwig von Bundig, Master of Card and Magic Tricks, sank to the bottom. I hoped it had lost its lid on the way down. It would make an extravagant home for fish and the kind of one-eyed creatures that live in the darkest places of the sea.

  But, a few weeks later, Boxman’s loss was made up for in the unexpected form of No Name. The boatmen had no idea they had a dog on board. It was only when they lowered their dinghy into the sea that No Name appeared, jumping in one daring leap to sit between them. As they reached the shore, and before any of us knew what was happening, No Name scrambled onto the sand and ran straight past us, up the path.

  When Boxman arrived home, No Name was sitting in the lilac interior of a spare box. Boxman wasn’t happy; he had never wanted a dog and certainly not a dog in one of his boxes. But later I found them: No Name asleep in the box, little dream-feet moving against the satin, and next to him Boxman, tenderly watching.

  Papa was asleep when the boatmen stumbled across the golden bowl. He had spent all night having nightmares about the cellar, and the boatmen had agreed to help Mama and me up the path with the deliveries. When they saw the bowl, abandoned and dirty in front of the house, they wanted to buy it.

  Mama wanted nothing of their proposals, not even when they offered her a special blue paint from France. And when they kept insisting she got angry.

  ‘Go back to your boat and find yourself some manners,’ she said.

  I stood next to Mama, keeping an eye on the boatmen, as they wobbled down the hill past Theodora’s gates.

  ‘But Mama, you don’t really like that bowl,’ I said, as we watched them get back in their dinghy and leave the island.