CHAPTER ONE How I was born, how I was taken care of by elves, how nobody believed I would live, of the miraculous mirror my mother received as a gift from my father, and how my mother died shortly afterwards.
.../...
I was born near a river named The Schelde,
which was the border between here and over there. Over there was the city
of Antwerp in the dukedom of Brabant. Here was Flanders. For many years
Flanders was nothing to me but the dense forest behind me, home only to
ghosts, swamps and will-o'-the-wisps. It wasn't important to us, our eyes
were turned eastwards, to the river where the Hanseatic cogs sailed. In
the morning we saw the sun rise above a serrated skyline - the Church
of Our Lady, the Fish Monger's Tower and the Baker's Tower. Further south
were St Michael's Abbey and the Calous Hills, towards the north the mills
on the Stuivenberg. The city wasn't just separated from us by water, but
also by a wall with seven gates and various entrances for waterways. When
I was a child, the sight of the chaotic, alien city made me repeat the
quick prayers I'd heard my mother murmur when there were strong winds
or thunder.
My father first saw me when I was several weeks old. He'd returned from
a nerve-wrecking trade mission to England, where he'd haggled over the
prices of lead, tin, wheat and wool. Shortly before his arrival, my mother
rubbed me with a rough cloth and dipped me in a bucket of cold water to
make the blood in my veins run faster, making me look red rather than
transparent.
'A girl,' he said with the same resignation as my mother's. He'd never
expected a son. My arrival reassured him because it confirmed his destiny.
As he bent over the crib, I immediately noticed the brown birth mark in
his face. He was marked. Later I would learn that the birthmark on his
face was nothing compared to the one on his left shoulder. According to
my mother, that one was as large as a child's hand. I never saw it because
my forever solitary father did everything to hide his stigma from the
outside world. Due to those two marks (the modest one in his face, the
large and malignant one under his clothes), he behaved like one fated.
He hadn't been able to discover whether it was a mark of God or the devil
and because he could not be sure, he played safe and became the most righteous
man walking our forests, fields and towns.
He'd been in the port recently, where he'd traded the newly bought bales
of wool for reasonable prices and had them transported by carriers who
took home a respectable sum at the end of the day. In his endeavour to
be virtuous, he not only brought a present for my mother and two sisters,
but also one for me, the child he could only have suspected born and alive.
It was a small hand-mirror. Its handle was set with cut glass, the back
painted with elegant birds. Holding the mirror in front of me, he made
soft throaty sounds and repeated, 'Look, look at the baby.' I didn't have
time to wonder whether I'd heard his voice before. It was the first time
I'd seen myself and I was so shocked by the almost blue face whose skull
showed in a smirking grimace that I burst into tears and regurgitated
all the milk I had in my little stomach.
It was my father's large hands that lifted me from the wisps of sheep
wool. I presented him with a large problem. He could easily see that I
was to die soon. I had hardly any blood, my skin was greenish, and my
frame was as frail as a bird's. He knew he could never give me what he
gave his other children - for the simple reason that he would not get
the time for it. He found this so unfair that it physically hurt him.
He thought of the long row of porcelain dolls and gilt boxes he'd given
my sisters over the years and promised me in a soothing voice that if
I were to die, he would buy me an expensive, aspen coffin finished with
gilt fittings and a bed of duck down and silk, to make up for everything
I would never have during my life.
When my mother noticed he was whispering in my ear instead of wiping away
the sour milk that trickled down my neck onto the swaddling clothes, she
took me from his lap. He watched her change me in silence, studying my
face and small swollen eyes, which opened wide from time to time, then
closed resignedly. He touched my cheek with his broad finger and said
hoarsely, 'She could have been so beautiful, this little glass girl.'
I grew up in times of poverty and hunger. I hardly noticed it, but it
was said people in Antwerp ate rats. My father was a businessman who wasn't
badly off. Every few weeks he took the ferry and sometimes stayed away
for months. He bought goods unavailable here - spices and wines, but mostly
expensive fabrics and sometimes jewellery. Then he looked for a ship to
bring it here, negotiated with the ship's captain, sent it off and came
home with a present for each of us in his horse's broad saddle bag.
Three years after my birth my mother got a mirror which was so large she
could see her entire face in it. My mother was a beautiful woman but didn't
know it. This present was an attempt by my father to show her. The mirror-maker
put incredible effort into fashioning the frame. It was cut from hard
wood with a deep glow. It shone so naturally it seemed as if not only
the reflection, but the frame itself was alive and moving.
For Richenel he brought a expertly-ground looking-glass that made everything
look much larger than it really was. She screamed with fear when she pointed
it at passing insects. Idelies received a porcelain box within a box with
such a fine flower decoration painted on it that it seemed the painter
used a brush with a single hair. I myself received three silver bells
of a different size. Although I was still very young, I immediately understood
why there were three. If I died, my father wouldn't have any difficulty
distributing what I left behind fairly. Each member of the family would
inherit a bell, my mother the largest one.
My sisters didn't understand my father's reason. When we were on our own,
they pulled my hair and said, 'You with the ugly, transparent face, you
got more.' They hauled me to my mother's bedroom to show me what I looked
like in her mirror. But I wasn't shocked by what I saw anymore. Thanks
to the small hand-mirror I'd been given at birth, I was used to my strange,
glassy face. To protect myself from their petty harassment, I'd learned
to look through the mirror. They forced me to sit down on my mother's
low dressing chair and held my face in their hands so I had no choice
but to look. For several moments I saw myself, my sunken eyes and thin
lips, and my grinning sisters on either side of me, but that image soon
vanished. What I saw instead, inside the elegant frame, was a wood full
of tall, leafy, waving trees with a muddy path running through it. For
days, I didn't know what the image meant, until I sat in front of the
mirror again one evening and saw a man on a horse appear at the end of
the path. I sat motionless and waited until he came closer. It was dusk
and misty, so the apparition seemed a shadow rather than a living creature.
It was cold and the man was wearing a wide cloak that fell over the flanks
of his horse. Only when he was close and filled the entire mirror did
I see the birthmark on his cheek.
'Father,' I mumbled. My sisters pushed me off the chair, sneering. They
chased me away, hurling the shells of nuts at my head. I withdrew to a
corner of the kitchen where I stayed like a bird resting. The twinkling
eyes of the tile elves told me they knew what I had seen in the mirror.
I told no-one what happened. After several unsuccessful attempts, I managed
to open the door to my mother's bedroom unaided and climb onto the dressing
chair. Sometimes my mother found me there at night, my head lolling and
my arms limp on either side of my body. I had fallen asleep watching the
slow images of my father's journey far away. I saw him cross ditches and
fields, I saw the wisps-o'-the willow beckon in the reeds, I heard the
conversations of tree spirits who inhabit the ash and chestnut trees.
I saw dusk fall and fell asleep when I knew my father had found an inn
with a straw bed and a tub of water on the washstand. My mother carried
me to where I should have been - the short bed in the attic, between my
two sisters to keep me warm and keep me from falling out of the bed.
'Father's coming home,' I told my mother one morning as she stirred my
porridge to cool it. 'He couldn't find the captain he was looking for.'
She stroked my hair with a callused finger and gave me a wooden spoon.
'Be quiet and eat,' she said, 'so that you'll grow nice and plump.' But
I didn't eat, as usual. I coughed and my knees buckled when I had to go
out to collect fire wood, something my mother couldn't understand, because
judging by the holes in her teeth, I'd taken plenty of calcium from her.
My father returned that same night, empty-handed, many days earlier than
expected.
I followed him on his distant journeys thereafter. 'How vain she is!'
my sisters cried when they found me in front of the mirror again.
'That's because she wants to see that she's still alive,' my mother said,
her voice thick with emotion. She thought I'd be gone soon. Lucretia had
said my liver didn't produce enough blood, which spared me the blood lettings
my sisters screamed through whenever they had a children's ailment. 'It's
not fair,' they said. They envied me because of the weekly washes intended
to make me look fresher. When they only weakened me, Lucretia decided
to leave her enema syringe at home and leave my body in the hands of nature.
I was so skinny, so fragile, that my mother hardly dared to touch me.
She would bend over Richenel in the middle of the night to check whether
I was still alive. She wasn't kissing me anymore, she was already bidding
me farewell.
My sisters said they had seen the goblin-owl again. Apparently, it perched
on the trees around our house regularly. They were suddenly very worried,
asked whether I wanted their liquorice and lay close to me at night to
keep me warm. But I didn't die, it was my mother who died. It was she
who got the aspen coffin with the gold, down and silk my father had promised
me at my birth. Lucretia had come when she vomited blood. I was there
when she undressed my delirious mother and applied cold compresses. She
prepared extracts of herbs in the kitchen and left them to cool in the
basement. Although younger than my mother, she walked like an old woman,
feeling her way and shuffling up the stairs with difficulty, her eyes
already affected by the abscess that would make her blind. The elves on
the floor sat purposely in her way but, feeling guilty, jumped away at
the last minute.
I stayed at my mother's bedside until the end. Behind her naked body hung
the mirror reflecting her pain-stricken image. I looked at her breasts,
and particularly her navel, the spot where she had been connected with
her mother the way I had been connected to her. Her death-struggle lasted
several days. In the end, she could no longer tolerate light, lost the
ability to speak, and couldn't feel her limbs. She was unable to feel
the sharp objects Lucretia pressed on her skin. Her hands and feet were
already cold before she stopped breathing.
After her death, she was never far from me. From a very early age I learned
that life and death are the two legs the world moves on. People around
me still treated me as if I would not live much longer, and bad omens
no longer threatened me. I moved in the grey area in which the living
speak with the dead the way young children talk to madmen and dogs to
horses. I was not surprised, therefore, when she was there the day after
she was buried, dressed in grey, her voice inaudible. I walked through
her and placed candles in her stomach. She was patient with me. Now that
she was dead, the noise I made didn't seem to bother her anymore. She
did what I had seen her do every day of my life - moved chairs, swept
floors, sliced bread. The elves gave her a place to rest when she needed,
but she didn't use it. Just as when she was still alive, she was always
busy, even when everybody else in the house was already asleep.
Translation by Susan Ridder