Angelica's Grotto

3 The Meissen Girl, The Paxos Stone

When Klein got home he poured himself a Glenfiddich, sat down at his desk, and looked across it to the mantelpiece and the Meissen figure of a girl about to bowl a golden ball. Leaning forward with her knees bent and her right arm extended she stood thirteen and a half inches high on a round gilt-bordered base one and three-quarter inches high. Her feet were bare and she wore a classical pale-green gown that was tied with a pink ribbon below the breasts and left her right breast and shoulder bare. She was made in 1890 and the sculptor, Schott, had signed the base.

Every part of her was beautiful and shapely: her body and her limbs, her hands and feet, each individual finger and toe. Her long blonde hair framed the exquisite oval of her face. Full of sweetness, her face was, her rose-petal mouth all virginal, her eyes entranced and dreamy.

Her face was the face of the beloved who takes no notice, the beloved who passes by, chatting with her friends, with never a glance, never a thought for the one whose heart lies at her feet. Had Schott intended that face or was it that the very clay under his hands had refused him the response he craved?

Klein had bought that figure in Hannelore’s home town, Celle in Lower Saxony. ‘She looks like you,’ he said to her.

‘No, she doesn’t,’ said Hannelore. ‘I was never that young, never that pretty.’

‘Yes, you were, and the youth and prettiness are still there.’

‘You wish.’

‘I wish,’ said Klein twenty years later as the girl, intent on her bowling, passed him by with never a glance.

The objects in his workroom, apart from their relationship with him, had relationships with one another: some harmless, some not. From a long-ago trip to Paxos with Hannelore, Klein, an inveterate collector of beach pebbles, had brought home one that he thought big enough to be called a stone. It appeared to be some kind of conglomerate, a pale warm grey, smoothly rounded, ovoid, weighed eighteen ounces, and felt good in the hand. On it Klein had written in black ink, in Greek letters, KINESIS/ANAPAUSIS: MOTION/REST.

Holding this stone in his hand, he saw the beach and the large mystical rocks shaped by the sea, heard the lapping of the tide and saw, magnified by the clear water, a polychaete worm, black and many-legged, like a warning to the curious. He saw the road to the villa and the olive trees on either side that flashed silver in the warm wind. There was a particular olive tree, ancient and wrinkled and still bearing fruit: in its hollow trunk was an opening that looked as if a naked goddess, Persephone perhaps, had emerged from it into the green-lit grove. Klein tried to remember the moment of balance when he had written those words on the stone, caught only the scent of Hannelore’s sun-warm hair.

Sated with ANAPAUSIS, the Paxos stone longed for KINESIS. Klein had once placed it on the mantelpiece near the Meissen girl, then quickly removed it before it could jump up and smash her to bits. From then on he kept it on his desk, handling it as he would a dangerous pet.