Best European Fiction 2013

[MOLDOVA] VITALIE CIOBANU Orchestra Rehearsal

When the professor of linguistics went to see who was knocking on the classroom door, interrupting his soporific discourse from the lectern, I had a presentiment that the person out past the threshold had come for me. There wasn’t anything to justify this feeling, unless we are to believe that the longstanding expectations you nourish within yourself, often accompanied by a diffuse sense of guilt, are able to convey unmistakable signals from the outside world. A few moments later, after engaging in a short dialogue in the form of curt whispers, leaning half into the corridor, Mocreac turned on his heel. Above his thick lenses, his myopic eyes wandered over the class until they fastened on me. “Aristide, step outside for a moment: there’s someone here who wants to talk to you.” With an even gait, I made my way to the door, haughtily ignoring the indignant eyes of my classmates, all envious at my opportunity to avoid, legitimately, as it were, the monotony of an insipid and somnolent lecture. But only I knew, as I approached our professor’s mysterious collocutor, what anxieties undermined the aplomb I had been trying to project to the rest of the class. It was Porfirich, the head of the student folk music ensemble, the man they also nicknamed Quasimodo, out of the kind of malice that is always prone to monstrous exaggeration, because he somewhat resembled the famous character from Victor Hugo: squat, with a bulbous head and an unnaturally large mouth that looked out of proportion to the rest of his swarthy, deeply wrinkled face. It’s worth lingering for a few moments on that face: from the corners of his eyes the wrinkles spread out in a fan, which the mouth, acting as a spring, corrugated whenever he smiled or laughed, for he was constantly quipping, flinging innuendoes left and right, such as, “Natasha, stop blowing that clarinet on the stairs,” to the delight of his listeners. Because, after all, what else is an ambiguous wisecrack, spoken by the right person, but an invitation to indulge in a vicarious sexual fantasy? Porfirich liked to foster an atmosphere of merry complicity around himself, in a wholly natural way, the same as other people might exude a particular musk, and his entourage, it goes without saying, enthusiastically joined in his game. Of course, Porfirich lacked the cathedral to be a genuine Quasimodo. It would have been more apt to say that he had access to infernal bolgie.

He ushered me over to the window with a conspiratorial and concerned expression. If anyone had been watching they would have seen a comical duo framed by the window set deeply in the thick brick wall of the faculty building, gesticulating disproportionately, like actors in a silent film.

“What are you trying to do, Aristide, make a fool of me? Are you coming to any more rehearsals or not?” Ignoring my sudden discomfort, he went on in an irritated voice: “We couldn’t wait for you. We’re leaving for Italy and we have to get the paperwork ready. You know very well how long the whole business takes! The boys kept asking me about you, because you’re down on the list, but you forgot to come and see us!”

“Porfirich, I’m sorry, please excuse me,” I mumbled, conscious of the dual effect of the feeling that was suffocating me—made up of undermined self-assurance and self-esteem resuscitated as a result of being needed. “I haven’t had any time for the violin lately. I’ve been up to my ears in coursework, and other problems. But I’ll come. I promise I’ll come.”

Quasimodo shook his head.

“That doesn’t explain anything. It’s been more than six months since I last saw you. Do you think I like having to track you down, to yank you out of lectures and ask you what you think you’re doing? Do you think I like having to put off the decision all the others are waiting for? Look, we’re having a rehearsal the day after tomorrow, on Wednesday. If you don’t show up, then I’m striking you off the list. You’ve been warned. It’s up to you.”

And with that he turned his back on me, melting like a vampire into the gloom of the corridor.

You will never learn to read the signals fate is sending you. Or else you’ll read into them exactly the opposite of what they’re actually saying, because, out of some juvenile delusion, you still assume that fate will always pile gifts at your feet. Porfirich. What made him come looking for me? He might just as well have ignored me, or found someone to replace me, especially given that I was hardly indispensable to the ensemble. Quite the opposite, I would say. My encounter with Porfirich discomfited me, but more so the news that the ensemble was going to Italy, which was entirely unheard of, an event more fantastic than my flying to Mars or climbing Mount Everest. I felt all the more troubled by this given that the news came after a failed first attempt a year before. We had been due to go to a festival organized by the L’Unità newspaper in a number of cities in the north of the peninsula. This sortie into “enemy” territory, even under the cover of ideological allies, Enrico Berlinguer’s communists, still required lengthy preparations; everything still had to be sifted down to the smallest detail. It had seemed that things were bogged down somewhere in the upper echelons of the political machine, or else that our Italian comrades had had second thoughts, and so without caring about betraying my philistine, mercenary motives, I had given up going to rehearsals, fed up with the pointless efforts involved in that time-consuming and unrewarding “hobby.” I had looked on it as a blessing in my first year as a student, when all the freshmen had been corralled and sorted according to their “secondary” aptitudes, but the hobby had soon turned into a thankless chore: I played the violin, and so I had a talent that somehow set me apart from the gray mass of my fellow students; in their eyes, it lent me a kind of ludicrous aura. It was an artistic form of communal socialization, different from the usual panoply of drudgery to be borne by a journalism student in Soviet Moldavia. It didn’t mean that I wasn’t sentenced to punishment like all the rest, but it did offer me a way to spend my time differently, to alleviate the universal, withering tedium; it was a dram of entertainment, a refuge.

I was able to treat the folk music ensemble as an alternative to the kind of forbidden and perilous relationships that had been beckoning to me ever since I moved to this city. I took part in an unseen auction, without knowing that I myself was the lot under the hammer—the coveted trophy, the promised fulfillment of so many sustained efforts—and I had to learn how to root out and repress my own inclinations as I let myself be pulled now in one direction, now in another. Yes, it was something like the “redemptive alternative” magnanimously proposed to me by that secret policeman during our little talk in the caretaker’s room of the students’ hostel where I lived. He had asked me about the writer T., showing an especial interest in this leading figure of the intellectual world, who had a reputation for being a nationalist/dissident and was frowned upon by the official “organs”: “It would be a good thing if you didn’t see him anymore. You’ll make things complicated for yourself. What are you trying to do? Get kicked out of the university? Why don’t you find yourself a healthier pastime? Sports, for example. What about hang-gliding or parachuting? I know somebody at the club in town, if you’re interested. It’s very good for the health, you know. Much better than reading books in Romanian. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read them if it gives you so much pleasure, just don’t pass them on to other people.”

The agent had an elongated, doggish face, beveled brows, and the almond-shaped eyes of an odalisque. He stared at you unwaveringly, without any embarrassment—a long-honed skill—rummaging through your brain to see what you were concealing from him, what you were trying to avoid, implanting a sense of guilt into your soul. I admit that my hatred for this particular species of villain was acute. I didn’t know how to comport myself with them. I hadn’t learned to look at them as human beings, no matter how perverse. I knew only that I despised them, grimly, tenaciously, and out of a firm conviction. And that was why I overdid my hate, ascribing them monstrous physical traits to match the abysses lurking beneath their invisible uniforms. I let myself be manipulated by clichés, swayed by bile. It was impossible for me to imagine such a specimen shaving in front of the mirror every morning, like a conscientious functionary, or playing with his three-year-old daughter on the brightly colored rug in the living room. I could never have believed he visited his mother on happy occasions, bearing a huge bunch of tulips; or pictured him pausing to catch his breath, leaning on the banister between the fifth and sixth floor of his apartment block, asking himself whether he had forgotten anything from the shopping list his wife had put in his pocket, for the party they would be throwing that evening.

Evil, the man wanted me to believe, was not all that terrifying. Nor was its scout, the secret policeman. It would be much more advantageous to regard him as a friend, as a counselor in times of trouble. I was being granted a privilege: “You can read them, but don’t pass them on to others.” Miron, who was accustomed to splitting hairs, something he took great pleasure in doing during our vesperal discussions, told me frankly:

“Be careful about this feeling of being ‘chosen,’ this privilege you were granted of being spoken to openly. Don’t let it go to your head. They’ll be keeping an eye on you, the same as they do on all of us. They just haven’t got you for anything serious yet. They can’t accuse you of anything just for having had a few meetings with T., meetings at which you could have spoken about anything at all, not necessarily anti-Soviet subjects. But they’ve made it clear to you that they’re doing you a favor, and that when the time comes you’ll be in their debt. Congratulations! You’ve joined the game: the game of cat and mouse.”

His words were like a bullwhip. I felt the need then to spool back in my mind through the entire film scene of my interview with the officer and recount the entire sequence to my more worldly-wise friend… after an awkward pause, granted: the secret policeman had asked me to sign a slip of paper to say that I would keep our discussion confidential.

“Come on, don’t be naïve,” said Miron. “We’ve all gone through the same thing. It’s their usual procedure. They ask you to sign in order to frighten you, so that you’ll think they’ve placed the noose around your neck. Nonetheless, it’s better if you don’t open your mouth. There are certain things you don’t discuss aloud, and certainly not with just anyone. But it’s all right that you told me: that’s so I could help you, so that you won’t make any more mistakes in future—that is, if you’ve made any mistakes so far.”

My colleagues in the ensemble (that makes it sound too pompous— it would have been more accurate to say, “my colleagues in getting drunk” or “my colleagues in delinquency”) welcomed me back calmly, demonstrating that they were possessed of a delicacy I would never have suspected in them; allowing me to feel (what sublime largesse!) as if I had never been absent from their midst. Perhaps I ought to have judged them in a more balanced way and not have let myself be fooled by their coarse appearance and gutter talk. I used to go to rehearsals three times a week, tapping my black violin case against my flared trousers to the rhythm of the melody I was always humming inside my cranial cavity—between perambulations I had stacked up a repertoire rich in musical scores, learned by heart, firstly because I liked them and didn’t want to forget them, secondly because they helped me fill in the blank intervals of my walks across the city, during which I would play them back, like magnetofon tapes, varying them according to my mood, whether spirited or solemn, but mostly serene and idyllic. My walk to the student culture club agglutinated into a symbolic canvas, which could be surveyed from the bird’s-eye viewpoint of the huge obelisk of the heroes of the Communist Party in front of the university’s student residences. First came the jail they called “The Baby,” with its white walls, like a hospital, sheltering stripy-uniformed, proscribed elements of humanity. This I knew. But the invariable silence of the penitentiary signaled a mystery deeper than any I could have imagined: there was never any sound, no matter how small, not so much as a screech from the wheels of the truck that delivered food to the prison and took away used receptacles… perhaps with a few prisoners hiding among them in an attempt to escape. No sound ever came from that gloomy parallelepiped for the length of the three minutes it took me to pass by its three-meter-high white wall, so I would have been perfectly justified in regarding the frightening building as a piece of stage scenery designed to discourage infractions, or a film set erected at that intersection temporarily but then forgotten because of unexpected budget cuts.

In the next ten minutes, my tour took in two other sights. The Friendship Between Nations student complex, also known as “Little Istanbul,” but populated mainly by Arabs, the offspring of lesser-ranking chiefs or bloodthirsty revolutionaries (since the postcolonial presidents, bloated with Marxist ideology and Soviet armaments, always sent their progeny to Moscow, Kiev, or Leningrad), who were now privileged students in Kishinev. I don’t know what sort of education those individuals took back with them to their desert lands, but in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic they made their presence felt with drug-trafficking and the deflowering of virgins, which was rather like training for the paradise promised by their prophet. I always looked enviously at those brown, solid, permanent-looking buildings from the inter-war period, comparing them to the shabby, ramshackle buildings in which we, the aboriginals, dwelled, and tried to imagine the orgiastic scenes that went on behind the green curtains, which, under normal circumstances, ought to have been the backdrop for the vocalizations of muezzins, their eyes rolling upward piously. The next piece in the symbolic jigsaw puzzle I traversed was the huge seashell of the national stadium, where we did our running in our physical education classes, under the guidance of a rugged Russian woman (a former biathlon champion, who had gone into teaching after she was discharged). The structure was like a middling-sized Roman circus, wherein the football team of Soviet Moldavia eked out its existence: Dniester F.C., the eternal “red lantern” of Soviet league football, manned by drunken and mediocre players, famous above all for the humor of the team’s supporters, with their favorite battle cry of “Dniester! Drown them in puke!” The jail, the brothel, the stadium, and the cultural house: behold a synthesis of the human passions, concentrated over a surface area of three thousand square meters, the mainstays of every political regime, of every form of societal organization, from antiquity down to the present day.

The ensemble rehearsal room was on the second floor of the culture house and to reach it you had to cross the auditorium, interrupting all kinds of festivities and theatrical performances. It was an unpleasant feeling to run the gauntlet of the irritated stares of the people seated in the hall, whose noses I was rubbing in our musical gatherings, blocking their view of the stage. In time I had learned to put up with the exclamations of “Those idiots from the ensemble again!” I would even fling back venomous pleasantries, making faces, but I have to admit that the label stuck: we were, it goes without saying, “idiots,” oddballs, fit only to be placed in a glass display cabinet as objects of curiosity. And, since I’ve raised the notion of a bizarre exhibit, it might be worth taking a snapshot of our group, and zooming in on four faces in particular—anodyne at first sight, but with whom I shared the ordeal of afternoon rehearsals. Leaving Porfirich out, naturally, since he was described above.

First there was Simona, the violinist and ensemble bruiser. She was brunette, chubby, and had vaguely Asiatic features. But her pigmentation was white. Porfirich was always coming on to her and, given the aplomb with which she would give as good as she got— either entering into the game of innuendoes or snapping at him, casting indecent words back in his face with practiced skill—it may be that something had indeed happened between them, that this was conquered ground; otherwise she wouldn’t have displayed her rights of possession with such assurance. The rest of the ensemble would follow their scuffles with amused resignation, from the sidelines, spectators not allowed to participate in the events unless they paid the modest entrance fee.

Orthansa, the ensemble’s prima donna, was a literature student, a prim and professorial girl with a languorous, indulgent smile for the conductor’s smutty jokes. She didn’t dislike them, but she made a point, at least when I was around, of conserving, out of a sense of propriety, her reputation for being a bluestocking. She was noble and urbane, a diamond in a basket of knobby pebbles. Toward me she had an attitude of sympathy and complicity. Together we were part of a mésalliance with the others. We wore our difference like some token of belonging to a different caste, to a waning species, which the times had forced to submit to a ritual of humiliation and survival in new, motley social circumstances, without any hope of a comeback in the foreseeable future. In fact, we had no concept of the future. Stirred into the swill of conviviality for the length of the rehearsals and during the blessed breathers decreed by Porfirich, when everyone would smoke and gossip, I used to exchange hurried words with Orthansa, and above all meaningful glances, “looks with hidden drawers,” as she liked to call them. And in the brief moments when we were alone together, or on the way home, as far as the intersection by the “40 Martyrs” cinema, where our paths separated, we used to get back at our band mates by joking about them, laughing at the never-ending amorous war between Simona and Quasimodo, but not daring to start our own war, which, naturally, would have looked more like a reading-room idyll by comparison.

With Silviu the accordionist I struck up a composed and protective friendship from the very first. He was a stereotypical Moldavian, with a moustache framing his delicate mouth, eyes as limpid as a mountain spring, black wavy hair, and a contagious laugh that burst out at the slightest provocation. A friend. A man who understands you and helps you when you’re in trouble without asking for anything in return. Surprisingly—because he had no pretensions and automatically placed me in a privileged position—I could communicate with him more easily than with Baciu, the ensemble’s panpipes player, my colleague from university and collocutor in “nationalist” discussions.

Baciu regarded himself as being superior to the other band members. He wasn’t the only wind instrumentalist, but the pipes of Pan were simply on a higher plane: his notes in the silken fabric of the folk melodies resembled the sensuous intrusion of a young lady from the city into a rustic ring dance: they gave them suppleness and elegance, they imbued them with intrigue, they made the audience dream. The panpipes were an individualistic, self-sufficient, self-worshipping instrument. You couldn’t imagine a whole ensemble of panpipes players, whereas there’s nothing more banal, more easily ignored than a gaggle of trumpeters—and, indeed, nothing more easily heckled when they begin to get on one’s nerves. At the same time, the relative distance that Baciu and I had placed between ourselves—by mutual consent, I might add—was amicably fostered by our mutual awareness of belonging to the same circle of friends outside the ensemble, within which we had chosen to have strictly formal relations. Soldiers on the “ideological front” of the press, we read banned Romanian books and listened to folk songs from the other side of the Prut, secretly transcribing them on magnetofon tape in the university’s recording studio. Moreover, we lived in the same student hostel, even if we had begun to bump into each other ever more seldom. Baciu, of course, had other places of shelter.

Those were the characters, or at least a few of them, and that was the atmosphere in which, four times a week, we gruelingly rehearsed Moldavian folk melodies to seduce Italian communists. Once we were joined by the dance troupe, the rehearsals increased to twice a day, so that we would synchronize. By the time I went to bed, I was unable to get rid of the sprightly melodies still resounding in my head.

By the end of May, we had mastered the music and all the travel documents had been authorized and stamped: the list of students and their chaperones, the passports, the medical insurance certificates. I don’t know which of my fellow band members the University’s KGB man had recruited, but there was no doubt that arrangements had been made. Maybe he had recruited more than a few, because, surprisingly, he had left me alone. I was hiding under my shirt Miron’s letter of recommendation to Feretti, the writer from Bologna who was to help me apply for political asylum in Italy.

As we left, my friend gave me these words of encouragement: “I hope that the orchestra…”—here he hesitated, and then went on: “I think that all those torturous rehearsals will come in useful. You’ll be ready for the performance now, and you won’t make a fool of yourself.” I embraced him and assured him in the same complicit tone that all would go well.

On June 3, we got off the train at Bologna Station. I recognized Feretti on the platform, having pored over photographs of him night after night. But before I knew it was really Feretti, I had spotted his orange scarf, which was wrapped around the collar of his navy blue long-sleeved shirt. He didn’t come near, but I knew that he had seen me and would find me the next day.

[IRELAND: IRISH] TOMÁS MAC SÍOMÓIN Music in the Bone

I dream of myself sitting in that chair. One year ago to the day. In my clinician’s white coat. Switching on the tape recorder beneath my desk. Scribbling notes into a rough jotter while Mrs. X, the woman behind the desk in front of me, talks. Meanwhile, my partner in our psychiatric clinic in the dead centre of this city examines Mr. X. Mrs. X is tall, middle-aged, vaguely good-looking, of medium build. High cheekbones, an almost Slavic face. Carefully thinned eyebrows shaped to give an inadvertently vague look of permanent surprise. Her black dress sets off a white pearl necklace. Where have I seen this lady before. In another life? Is she a ghost ? Nothing ghostly, however, about that inexplicably familiar fragrance wafting into my nostrils.

– And, apart from that small… idiosyncrasy, shall we say, you tell me that your husband is normal, so to speak, in every other respect?

Giving a self-conscious professional’s omniscient inflection to my voice. It seems to me that I have posed a similar question a thousand times, at least. To other women. To other men.

– In every possible way, Doctor, she says. He is really the most normal man you could imagine. In every way. Apart from his passion for music and this “idiosyncrasy,” as you describe the mad behavior he gets up to now and then. The way he rises to his feet when you least expect it and starts to conduct some imaginary orchestra that nobody else hears nor sees. Even in the presence of my friends. I really don’t know what to do about my predicament, Doctor. That man has destroyed my social life.

– …?, I ask, wordlessly. (The tilt of one eyebrow can suffice to express a question mark.) The lady’s slightly nasal voice drones on as she repeats what she has already told me.

I listen carefully. For the heart of the issue is often revealed in the retelling. And as she rattles on, the unexpectedly familiar whiff of her perfume unsettles me in some inexplicable way. I ask the question of myself yet again: where and when have I smelled that fragrance before?

– It doesn't matter where in the hell we might be, Doctor, (if you’ll excuse my French). In the house, the church, the shops, on the street, on the bus. Or during social visits to the houses of our friends. Even in his office, if what his work associates tell me is true. Nor does he care who might be looking at him or listening to him. When his “idiosyncrasy” expresses itself, other people cease to exist, as far as he is concerned. And it’s as if their opinions, customs, social correctness itself have vanished like a puff of air. His movements and the flailing of his arms giving onlookers to understand that he is conducting some sort of band or orchestra. Just as I’ve been telling you.

– Now let us talk a little about yourself, I hear myself saying. How do you react while this imaginary concert, so to speak, is proceeding under the imaginary baton of your spouse.

– I try to speak to him, to reason with him, Doctor, but he gives me the deaf ear. Just as if he were deep in some sort of hypnotic trance. As if I and the real world cease to exist for him…

– Even if you become angry with him?

– I’ve tried to stop him, of course. Stop making a fool of yourself in public, you idiot, I would say. For all the bloody good that did, Doctor, if you’ll excuse my language. He paid not the slightest heed to what I said. And me simply trying to get him to return to the real world! And he stares at me with unseeing eyes all the while. Or, rather, seeing through me. That was the hardest part to bear, Doctor, his looking through me as if I didn’t exist. And that lost look in his eyes. That is what scared me out of my wits…

– Does he ever become violent when you attempt to interfere with, or stop, his… artistic endeavours, if we can call them that?

– Not up till now, at any rate. In fact when this “music,” as he calls it, stops, he tells me, somewhat sheepishly, that he is totally powerless to resist it. The beauty of it is such that he simply must conduct it, he says. He tells me that he is constantly amazed that neither I nor anybody else can hear his music. It is so loud, he says, that it drowns out every other sound. But I hear absolutely nothing when he gets these mad fits. Nor does anybody else. Not a goddamn note.

– And how are you coping these days?

– I try to make believe that he is not with me, Doctor. Especially when he starts to “conduct” in some public place.

– Can you give me an example? I ask.

– Can I ever! There was that wet Sunday a few months ago— how could I ever forget it—when we were attending midday Mass. The parish priest, Canon Murphy, was preaching from the pulpit overlooking the congregation. Talking about the sacredness of the sacrament of matrimony, I remember that much very well. When suddenly my husband jumps to his feet. Imagine the start that gave me. And then away with him, in full view of the congregation behind us, frenziedly conducting some imaginary choir. The canon stopped preaching and fixed him with a look that should have turned him into stone. I just shrank into myself. Hoping against hope that nobody would think that I was with this madman. I could hear an angry buzz of complaints from the pews behind us. And the puzzled faces of people in the pews in front of us turning around to see what was the matter. I am sure that everybody thought he was mocking Canon Murphy. The ushers dragged him, with difficulty, out of the church, the congregation silently observing the whole sorry spectacle. A burly shaven-headed brute, with a snake tattoo on the back of his neck, tried to attack him outside the church gates after Mass. But for a vigilant Garda on duty there, there is no saying how that story might have ended.

– So it was this incident that impelled you to seek professional help? I ask.

The “orchestral conductor’s” wife blushes, the sudden rush of colour to her cheeks accentuating her early autumnal charm. And as I survey this modest blush, the long elegantly manicured fingers with their rings resting on the table in front of me, that elusive fragrance in the air, I am more certain than ever that I have met this woman somewhere before. Professional discretion prevents me from pursuing this matter further.

– Not really, Doctor, she says, answering my question. But when these “concerts” started to interfere with… well, the most intimate aspects of our life together… I hope you will not want me to supply you with the details! But, as a married man, you will appreciate exactly what I mean, she says, glimpsing at my wedding ring out of the corner of her eye. Suffice it to say that when your husband leaves the warmth of the marriage bed in the dead of night to conduct a phantom orchestra instead of fulfilling his… marital duties, you can see my predicament. Not to mention my frustration. And you can understand that we are talking here about a marriage that could not survive without “professional help,” as you call it. And so both of us have come, as a last resort, to your clinic, Doctor…

– And he came here willingly?

– Dragging his heels, Doctor.

When the consultation ends, I switch off the tape recorder under my desk. Mrs. X leaves the office, her cheeks still glowing, probably from the highly personal nature of her “confession.” No sooner has she left, leaving faint traces of her scent in the air behind her, than Sheila, our chief secretary, enters and leaves a note from my colleague on my desk. I quickly scan it. It informs me that the musically inclined Mr. X has been subject to a full battery of clinical tests. His pulse, blood pressure, blood sugar levels, cholesterol are all indicative of that gentleman’s rude good health.

Therefore I am not surprised as I observe, some ten minutes later, the man who is sitting in the chair vacated by his wife. He is middle-aged, of medium height, balding, and with a slight tendency to heaviness. Rather like myself, in fact. He is clean-shaven, somewhat conservatively dressed in a gray suit, a striped shirt, and a dark club tie. His overall appearance proclaims the essence of bourgeois decency, a clean-cut image of civic virtue that normal citizens strive to attain. A pleasant, slightly conspiratorial smile flits across his face before he opens our conversation:

– Quite frankly, Doctor, I am not quite sure why I’m here, he says. I do not feel that there is anything wrong with me. But in order to satisfy my wife… you know how annoying women can be sometimes…

Without saying anything, I switch on the tape recorder. Having delivered his opening gambit, the conspiratorial smile returns briefly to his face…

I still say nothing. Pretending to scribble a note, I survey my client professionally from the corner of my eye. Not a trace of any abnormality in the tone of his voice, in the confident ease of his delivery. A performance conforming fully to the correctness of his appearance. I cannot imagine such a sober citizen in the guise of a crazed conductor of the nonexistent choir in his local parish church. Could the mysterious Mrs. X be the victim of such a delusional fantasy? I have been long enough in this profession to understand that superficial appearances often belie the real truth of a case. After I note the firm handshake of Mr. Normal, we briefly discuss the impending deluge promised by the weather forecast and how it may cause Sunday’s championship football game to be postponed. Man talk! After this warm up, I place my cards on the table:

– The condition that brings you to this consultancy, I understand from talking to your wife, is that you sometimes imagine you hear a brass band, or an orchestra, playing within yourself. And that nobody but yourself can hear the music they are playing. And then, she told me, you feel some sort of compulsion, as it were, to conduct this imaginary ensemble.

The bland countenance of Mr. X is creased momentarily by a cynical smile.

– She would say that, wouldn’t she! That all I hear is imaginary music, as she tells anybody who bothers to listen to her. But I have told her a thousand times that my music can in no way be explained in such simple terms. For we are talking here about a magnificent orchestra that performs in the deepest depths of my soul…

– Hmmm, very interesting! But, let us get a handle on this, Mr. X, I say. If you imagine that you can hear some sort of music that neither your wife, nor anybody else, can hear—if what she tells me is true—can’t you recognise that there is a problem here we need to address? A not inconsiderable problem, perhaps? That may need professional help. When did you first note this, what you refer to as, music? Perhaps in your early adolescence, with the first stirrings of your sexuality?

– Balderdash, Doctor! It is only a problem insofar as she, and you it seems, construe my music as some sort of undesirable deviation from normality. As a problem to be solved. I, on the other hand, see it as a special grace from the Muse.

– Really! And when was the first time you heard this extraordinary sound?

– It’s just as if it happened yesterday. There I was, embroiled in the preparation of tax returns, when I heard a single note being played on a viola. Or on a violin. Just a single note on some stringed instrument or other being tuned by some unseen presence within the office. I searched high and low to find where this strange note was coming from. The only radio I had in the office was switched off. As I listened to it, the note gained depth and volume. My body seemed to melt and be absorbed into this note. Then, I suddenly realized that the note was coming from within my own flesh and bones, Doctor. As if sounding in some far distant place and, at the same time, in some cavern in the depths of my soul. That note lasted about a half hour according to my office clock. But it seemed to me to be without beginning or end.

– What happened then, after that half hour?

– Not a thing, Doctor. When the note faded away—or when I returned from paradise, to phrase it differently—everything was more or less the same as before I ever heard it. In the beginning, I thought—just as my wife still thinks—that my mind had been subject to some sort of aural illusion. A temporary blip created by a fatigued brain or pressure at work. But, how I longed for the return of that note that I felt would never return…

– Yet, this longing of yours appears to have been satisfied, by all accounts?

– It certainly was, Doctor. One week later, as I was walking to the dart station, that tax-return stress was a thing of the past. Yet, as I walked, I heard my music once again and it sounded even more beautiful than ever. But it was no longer just a single note. It took the form of a simple tune that I had never heard before. A product of the culture of some exotic clime, perhaps, with just a hint of Araby. But, to be honest with you, Doctor, no human culture could generate such beauty.

– Hmmm! And this music seemed to be coming from within yourself, you say? Music from the depths of your own soul, as you might phrase it?

There was hardly any need for me to intervene. For, it is clear from the animated features of Mr. X that he can hardly wait to tell his whole story. To make the full confession that does good to the soul. Like the bearer of some sensational tale who has just found his first sympathetic ear.

– At first, Doctor, I thought the music was coming from my stomach. That something I had eaten had upset my digestion, with this unexpected result. The couscous I had eaten in a Moroccan restaurant the previous day, for example. Although you would hardly expect such fare to generate stomach music. Internal thunder, maybe, but music? A little bit later, the music seemed to have moved to my spine. A little bit later again it seemed to be coming from my heart. Later again, all of my body was, well… a concert platform for this band…

– A band you say?

– A full orchestra, Doctor. I began to hear it more and more frequently. And at each successive performance, still more musical instruments joined in. A weird thought occurred to me, at that time. I told myself that maybe that music was within me since the very day I was born. But that its pure sound was muffled by my own ignorance and life’s discordant symphony. Anyhow, I hear it more and more often these days. And when I least expect it. In the pub, in the office, on the train, at home… And, a strange thing, no matter where this band is playing, only I can hear it, playing there, sounding deep inside me!

– And can you identify individual instruments in this inner music, as you describe it? Or, would you say that this “music” is played on instruments hitherto unknown?

– Not really, Doctor. As soon as I mentally label an instrument I hear—an Arabic flute, a Japanese koto, a medieval lute, a Scottish bagpipe, an Algerian reihab, an Indian sitar, uileann pipes — then the music itself contemptuously rejects that label. As if it was mocking my feeble efforts to reduce its incredible novelty to known human terms. And although the same basic tune is being played continually by this orchestra, or band, the infinite variations it plays on this theme, sometimes makes the latter well nigh unrecognisable…

As I listen to this long spiel from the mouth of Mr. X, I detect a classic case of schizophrenia encased in that conventional gray suit that faces me from the other side of my desk. Experience tells me clearly that the voices and mysterious messages that patients of his ilk report are in the same category as his strange “music.” But other practitioners of my profession will be certain to take a keen interest in my description of the unusual symptomatology of X’s neurosis. I continue to make rough notes in my jotter as Mr. X gives free rein to his stream of consciousness:

Mentally composing the first paragraph of this putative paper, I ask X, somewhat diffidently:

– And do you detect the influence of the great composers on this “music?” a question to keep Mr. X feeding data into my recorder.

– As I‘ve told you, Doctor, this music is unlike anything that you or I have ever heard. And, believe me, I know what I’m talking about. For I’ve listened to the music of all the great composers: Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Delibes, Rimsky-Korsakov… all the way down to the moderns, like Philip Glass. I have researched the Ceòl Mór, the Great Music of the Scottish pipes, the classical ragas of India, the various musical traditions of Africa and their influence on the music of the Caribbean and the Americas. Trying frantically to gauge the origin of this music in my bones, I ransacked every musical tradition beneath the sun. From the Sean Nós of Connemara to the gríhe of the Berbers. From the rocks of Cape Verde to the deserts of Mongolia, I have listened to the traditional voice of seldom-heard peoples. From Joe Heaney to Benny Moré to Victor Jara to Lightnin’ Hopkins. And I know how to separate the grain from the chaff, the true voice from that of the phoney, Woodie Guthrie from Bob Dylan, for example. You would hardly believe, Doctor, the long nights I have spent till the dawn listening to recordings of every type of music on this planet. And this obsessive cosmopolitanism is nearly driving my wife out of her mind.

– Not surprisingly! And all of this study brought you no nearer to the root of your condition?

– My effort was all in vain, Doctor. For no music that I heard from whatever tradition came even close to the ethereal music that my orchestra plays… An eminent Professor in our National School of Music suggested to me that I learn musical notation. Knowing this musical alphabet, he said, I would be able to transcribe my music into a written form. And thus be in a position, maybe, to make a startling new innovation in world music. However, I discovered before long that the form of musical notation that is perfectly adequate to a description of classical European music, say, has no relevance whatsoever to the music that only I can hear. The pre-classical pentatonic scale is, likewise, unable to describe the music of my soul… But all of that was before I realised that I was a conductor, not a creator…

– What exactly do you mean by that, Mr. X?

– Well, one day as I was walking on a beach near my home, I was confronted with something totally unexpected. And the word “unexpected” puts it mildly, indeed…

Mr. X’s last revelations have the effect of suddenly awakening me from a pleasant reverie, in which Mrs. X, the scent of whose perfume is still faintly—but tantalisingly—perceptible in the consultation room, was playing a central role.

– How interesting, I said. Now, please tell me what you mean by “totally unexpected”!

– Well, as I was walking along, listening to my music, I started to imitate the gestures of musical conductors up there on the podium facing their orchestras. And then I suddenly realised that I was able in fact, with the help of the movements of my arms, to conduct the music being played by my internal orchestra.

– Or, rather, you were able to adjust the nature of your arm movements to the music to which you were listening.

– No, you’ve got it wrong, Doctor. It was the other way around. Because what I found out was that my arms were capable of determining exciting new variations on the basic theme of the music to which I was listening. And to direct the musicians within me, so to speak, to obey my personal diktat, as expressed through the movements of my arms.

– I understand, Mr. X, that this “discovery” changed your life. And not only your life? And not necessarily for the better?

As I slowly enunciate those words, I simultaneously scribble the following words into my jotter:

– Well, it certainly did change things, Doctor, continues Mr. X. From the ground up, so to speak! Every time my orchestra visits me—and this happens three or four times a day lately—they expect me to conduct them in playing new variations on their basic theme. This is both an intense pleasure and an enduring challenge. For there is no limit to the variations I can create by concentrating exclusively on the movements of my arms. Nor is there any boundary to the beauty I can now bring into being. By paying not the slightest heed to the rules and regulations, so to speak, that determine what is and what is not music as defined by the times in which we live…

X spends a period of three months with us in the clinic. But no medication or therapy, nor combination of both in the various treatments we try, manage to silence his internal orchestra, as he calls it. For said orchestra now appears to be in permanent residence in his bones. Things have gone from bad to worse, as he now spends all his waking hours, from morning to night, “conducting” his phantom “musicians.” Nobody but X can hear their “music,” of course. But there they are, he insists, playing away inside him. The other patients derive great amusement from observing him conduct a ghostly orchestra playing his Great Symphony of Total Silence on the lawn behind the clinic. Not surprisingly, they call him Tchaikovsky…

I am in a deep sleep late at night—at three A.M. to be exact—when the most beautiful music that ears have ever heard wakes me suddenly. I sit up in bed and think instantly of Mr. X. Is it from his room, just over mine, on the floor above, that this music is coming? He will wake up all the other patients in the clinic unless his music is stopped immediately. I wonder why the damned night nurses haven’t suppressed it already. I turn on the light switch, dress hastily, open my door, and step out into the corridor. The decibels are even higher out here.

A night nurse passes me on the stairs as I climb them on my way to Mr X’s room.

– From which room do you think that strange music is coming? I ask her.

– Are you having me on? she answers, with a tired smile. But to be honest with you, Doctor, this place could do with a bit of music to liven it up. It’s as quiet as a graveyard here tonight.

Is this night nurse as deaf as a post, I ask myself, while this unearthly music pours down on us like silver rain.

As I place my hand on the doorknob of X’s room, the music rises to a crescendo. Hundreds, if not thousands, of orchestras address themselves simultaneously to the same theme. Now I know where this music is coming from, with absolute certainty. As I open the door, the volume of the crescendo doubles. I place my hands over my ears. To no avail.

Mr. X is nowhere to be seen. It is as if he has never been here. His bed seems as if it has never been slept in. Then I open his wardrobe, and I detect again the fragrance of the perfume of the woman in the black dress in my nostrils. There is no sign of X’s clothes or suitcase. Anywhere. Did he ever exist? Just then, I get the greatest shock of my life. For hanging there is the black dress of Mrs. X. My clinician’s white coat, my gray suit, and my striped shirt hang beside it, where X’s clothes should be.

The music is welling up inside me now.

Mr. X was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

For, with an imaginary conductor’s baton in my hand, I extract whatever music I will from this unearthly orchestra within.

[FINLAND] TIINA RAEVAARA My Creator, My Creation

Sticks his finger into me and adjusts something, tok-tok, fiddles with some tiny part inside me and gets me moving better—last evening I had apparently been shaking. Chuckles, stares with water in his eyes. His own hands shake, because he can’t control his extremities. Discipline essential, both in oneself and in others.

What was it that was so strange about my shaking? He himself quivers over me, strokes my case, and finally locks me, until the morning comes and I’m on again, I make myself follow all day and filter everything into myself, in the evening I make myself shut down and in the morning I’m found in bed again. Between evening and morning is a black space, unconsciousness, wham—dark comes and clicks into light, light is good, keeps my black moment short. He has forbidden me it: for you there’s no night. Simply orders me into a continuum of morning to evening, evening to morning, again and again. But in the mornings I know I’ve been switched off. I won’t tell about it. Besides, why does he exclude me from the night? I don’t ask, but I still call the darkness night. There is night and day, evening and morning will come.

Today is a visiting day. A collecting day, an exhibition day, a walking-around day, a following day. He goes, and I follow, clop, I pound the floor but don’t feel comfortable, I would prefer to be at home doing my things, following my settings, being directed. I am intended for the home, for one space, elsewhere I am surplus, unnecessary. Of course, there are others intended for elsewhere, to each his own.

The exhibition space is too cold, the temperature eighteen point three Celsius, to be accurate. I do not generally mind cold or heat, nevertheless I feel stiff and creaky—but is the temperature the cause? Maybe not. Maybe I actually feel something. “I’m so pissed off my head is splitting,” he once said, at the beginning of time, and since then I too have sought in myself something of the kind, the union of emotion and body, this my one and only. Stiffness is a new thing, and is that a sensation of mind or body? Hard for me to understand such distinctions, the division between mind and body, mental sensations and bodily sensations are certainly quite different, although rarely in my case.

Bumps into me as he stops, I let myself be bumped into a little bit on purpose, because here he hasn’t yet said a word to me. Doesn’t say anything now either, looks pensive. Rests one hand on his temples and scratches his head. I would dearly like him to speak, but of course orders can’t come from me.

What have I learned lately? It is one of the great purposes, learning—development.

He taught me to read, it wasn’t even difficult. Closed me for a moment so that I was on a black break again, whamm, like a quick night, a click, then he appeared in the middle of light, the new morning was quickly over, he said he’d updated me, and so I had learned. “This will increase your value,” he said and passed me a book. The shelf is groaning with them, side by side, flat, formerly unnecessary to me, although unpleasant because they gather dust. Now they are full of words, maybe he wrote them while I was in the night. The one that he passed to me was thick indeed, a total of 1,108 gram-units, I opened it—he directed me a little—I read aloud from the point that first hit my visual sensors:

He laughed so much that he doubled up in the armchair. He: no name from my innards, for I am not allowed to address him by name. Any kind of title, I tried once, but then too he began to shake, eyelids wrinkled. Stroked me more eagerly for a while, it’s true. But when I said it again, he slapped me so hard that my side element was dented. Slap! I straightened it myself later on. “Let’s not get too close,” he said as the reason for this new practice.

So, about the exhibition: We are in a giant room, huge, we have been here before—that much I’ve managed to extract from myself—but that was a while ago. I do not consider these things important enough to record very accurately in my memory, even I have my limits, you have to prioritise. I walk behind him. Now and again gives me glances although he’s been pretending not to notice me all day, his posture is straighter than usual, quite splendid, and his expression I would call proud. From time to time he makes me stop, goes a bit farther away but keeps an eye on me, I would recognize his eye among a thousand, I am confident of that. Speaks with a few people, males, I do not recognize them even though I have seen them before, I am certain. Many of them inspect me, one winks and looks me over slowly, first my feet and then upward. What do I care, clop clop I go on pounding the floor. An ugly floor here.

We have arrived early: The exhibition hasn’t begun yet, men adjust their creations, as yet not a wholesome multitude of people around me. We are just looking, I am not going to be shown today, we circulate, and every now and then he tells me to wait and I don’t hear what he says to the others. Once a man who almost passes me by, older and with more facial hair than average, touches my back. I smile, I am now programmatically, exemplarily friendly.

We do not stay long. He quickly gets bored, talks to me for the first time in ages. “I can’t be bothered looking at these ordinary things.” So he says. Reaches out his hand and I take it in mine; I’d squeeze it if I were more autonomous. If I’d had permission, I would have looked up. Never so beautiful before, exulting. Though this only out of the corner of my eye.

Later: acts unusually, very different. Does not want to read the new newspaper beside his food. The newspaper stops coming. The old one lies by the sofa, wrinkling. Appetite has decreased, says so himself, tells me not to cook anything but pasta. That is what he eats, by the bowlful, nothing else, doesn’t want to buy anything else. Weeks go by, there are seven days in a week. No longer goes out in the evenings, instead buys big bottles of stuff and sits in the living room with one of them beside him. Once, I sniff the bottle, out of curiosity, because I have felt a twitch in the left side of my neck. He snorts: “That won’t suit your plumbing.” Then pours it into his depths.

Once I get scared. In the morning I have been on for as much as ten minutes and thirteen seconds, and then the lights go out. At first I think he shut me down again, but no, I can sense and move. There is understanding, it is not night but a dark day, whatever that may be. But the lamps have gone out, and not a change in my innards. He says very loudly: “Damn, now they’ve cut off the electricity!” I would scream if told to: I can’t survive without electricity, not for long, the next day is my electricity day.

He telephones somewhere, through the wall I hear the voice but not the words. First he’s angry, then amicable, to me he’s never been so beseeching, so polite. Never. But the electricity comes back. Why, he is capable of anything.

After that keeps me on later in the evenings, strokes me more slowly than before, maybe he wants to smooth my lumps and bumps, remove the dark oxides from my case, maybe he wants to make me gleam. When it is already far into the night—I have never been on so late in the night—he sighs, touches my innards, and switches me off. As if he did not want to stop, to close, to be without. Things are necessary, and I am among them.

Everything I think feels to me as if my shoulder joint is loosening. I do not report the fault. Sometimes I find such astonishing little actions within myself.

Seventeen days ago, almost exactly, I experienced something new. Earlier in the day, I had been set to read a book again, far into the evening. Meanwhile, he sat in a chair with his eyes shut. The wrinkle at one side of his mouth tautened and relaxed from time to time, human skin is remarkably flexible. After, we went to bed.

Maybe he switched me off wrongly somehow, because I found myself in the midst of blackness but was present there too. My mind stayed on, I could not move but on the other hand I did not wish to either, I did not think about moving at all, or about my own parts. I saw unfamiliar, impossible things: things that don’t really exist, I know well—but I saw them move and be in the same way as all of us who exist, move, and be, myself among them.

These things I saw:

Men with horns growing in their heads.

A big bird with a human face.

A blank wall you can walk through.

Furniture—a table and stools that jumped around.

Among them all, myself, I flew and floated, although I have not been granted such capacities.

Then he must have switched me off, because next it was morning.

One morning he is more talkative, less red-eyed. Some of them are coming here, men from the exhibition, I remember shapes from their faces and their ways of walking, no one human being is the same as the others. First the telephone rings, beep-be-beep, and then they come, driving into the yard one at a time. Before he opens the door he puts me in my own chair in the corner of the room, telling me to be nice. But my being is always nice.

“Shall we begin straight away?” one down-cheek shouts, not even coming all the way into the room, just putting his head around the door, and I am not used to such half-and-half behavior. In all my programlessness I begin to click my thumb, I can’t think of any other actions. There are three of them. They are happy, even merry, I would say, if I was asked. “Good shenanigans?” asks one, and I have to consult my vocabulary. Apparently we have not had a lot of shenanigans in our house. His cheeks glow red, this speaker’s, and all of them have bright eyes. They negotiate in loud voices, louder than I would ever be allowed to speak.

They bring in the kind of devices—mediocrities, he would say— that I have seen at exhibitions. But then from a distance, out of focus, now close-up; I could make contact with them if this was to be considered necessary. The things are silent: they take them out of boxes and set them out side by side in the corridor. “Let them wait their turn,” one says, younger than the norm, then eyes me as a continuation of the queue. “You must be part of the furniture,” he goes on, and winks—I remember him, because he has winked before. A funny person, male, I allow him to touch my case. One of them hasn’t brought anything, he just watches. Stares at me, too, but I do not allow it to affect my settings.

When they aren’t looking, I just turn my sensors toward the others, when the men talk together loudly but with different words in the living room and forget to monitor the world, I walk back and forth in the corridor and inspect what they brought, the beauties.

The first: small and white as a mouse, would fit on my upper limb and that is indeed where I would want it to sleep—its curled form, its nose touching its back toes. I bend over it and stroke it, its coat is enormously soft, and if I were really small, a tiny particle, I could hide in it. The head, though, has no fur; it is as smooth a skin as my surface, in that respect I am perhaps lacking. It has no eyelids, but its eyes are closed. What my eyes look like closed I do not know.

The second: I cannot make it out, it is the size of a stool and so full of protuberances and ends or wiring that it, too, looks furry. I circle round it, crouch beside it, try to see what manner of being it is. I find a little hole that could lead to its insides—for a moment I feel like opening it and touching—but of course I do not. You are no toucher of insides, he said to me once. Although I do know how to fix things, a car even.

The third, to me, is the most beautiful: the size of a large dog, and the shape of one too, because it stands on four paws and has a long neck stretched out to the front and side. I have seen pictures, and once even a live one. At the rear is a thin and long tail, an animal’s tail, it is curled round one of the back legs like a printer’s cable on a desk. The nose is longer and narrower than the dog’s I saw, its head was like a ball; on the end of the nose are two narrow nostrils. Ears I cannot distinguish at all, its big eyes are closed. Not everybody has ears, and some have only inner ears. Most beautiful of all in the creature are its color settings: the dark blue of the snout changes to the purple of the neck, the orange of the side elements and the bright yellow spot of the lower back, asymmetrical, and then through the red of the thighs and root of the tail to the bluishness of the tail-tip and paws, sky-color.

The men pour the last drops from a bottle and look very happy, although the bottle is proven empty. The funny man doesn’t drink anymore, but walks past me into the corridor, does not want to touch my side this time, although I would allow such a thing. I guessed that the beautiful creature is his, the one that is as gaudily colored as the sky on evenings when the sun goes out and dyes the clouds. The creature does not appear to have any innards at all—the man bends down in front of it, strokes its side, breathes into its nostrils. At first nothing happens, the other men glance at funnyman but he just smiles. His forehead looks damp—perhaps he’s the kind that is called a pantshitter. “Pantshitters don’t know how to keep their nerves in order,” he said once when he was watching TV, and laughed. Not at me, he didn’t mean me. My nerves are very well-disciplined.

But then the dog-snake, that’s what I’ll call it, opens up. First the eyes: their brilliance is fractured, as if they were made up of a countless number of little red lamps. Then the mouth: the creature opens its maw for a second and from its throat comes a quiet cooing, and I feel my internal rhythm missing a beat, for I have a rhythm too, after all.

“Forma,” says the man, “sit!” The creature has lolloped around him with its sides like fire, flaring, we once had a fire in the grate here, but now it sits on its tail very obediently, just as I would sit down if I were commanded to do so, and if there were a tail behind me. They are so proud, all of them: the uncomfortable man of his mouse creature, red-shirt of his tousle-fleece, and then this last, the one with the dog-snake. There is a tickling in my innards: I would like to know what pride feels like.

It is my turn last. He nods to me from his chair, is so relaxed, I’ve never before seen him like this. Doesn’t come to get me as the others did, trusts in the fact that I’m no vacuum cleaner, that I don’t need to be pulled from the cupboard.

I walk into the middle of the room and look pretty damn good.

They leave at last, when I have read myself to exhaustion and done all sorts of other things, showing off my talents. He is still sitting in his chair and does not look as if he intends to get up. Tired head nods onto the table where the empty bottles stand. In his hand is one that is not yet empty. Outside, the sun has been taken away.

“Creation,” he says as if in thought, “makes a person into something sublime. Almost a god. If one can create, one can no longer be an ordinary person.” Then raises the bottle to his lips again. Sighs as the bottle empties, and lets it crash to the floor. I hasten to pick it up as I was intended to. Grasps my wrist. The wrist joint has been playing up over the past few days, really creaking, creak-creak, is he going to mend it now.

But he pulls me to him, slightly into his lap and slightly onto the arm of the chair. Puts his hand on my face element and strokes a point on my temple where the casing is particularly smooth.

“Do you understand?” he demands, as if I thought about such things at all. “Because of you, I am not ordinary, I am something quite extraordinary.” Suddenly he smiles again. Gets up from his chair, pushes me off his lap. “Stand there,” he orders, and his eyes gleam; he presses his hands to my sides and raises my chin into a better position. So I stand there. He paces around me and chuckles about something else, in a low voice that eludes my senses. From time to time he taps my surface, bends my fingers, at one point opening my insides but then closing them again.

“You’re some beast, you,” he says at last, nodding his head. Although I am no beast, but a being of quite a different kind.

I begin to tidy up, and go on tidying even after everything is in order.

“What does creation mean?” I ask it casually, in passing, as I take the rug out to beat it, although I probably did that already. It is not my custom to question, to question anything, after all one would hardly suppose that I would take an interest in the nature of things in general. One would not suppose it, not of one like me, not even an exemplary one like me.

He mumbles something, at first I doubt that he has heard me. Quite often a fault in the senses, ears not very accurate. He raises his hand in the direction of where the empty bottle was, I have not taken it away. Can’t reach it. I want to help, but really, why should I pass him an empty bottle?

“Gods create,” he then says, his voice coming muffled as if he was shouting at other people from the other side of a wall.

“Are y —, are you one of those?” I ask. I would like to tighten a screw somewhere deep down where something must have been jerked out of place—I am almost making mistakes. He begins to laugh, laughing from a deeper place than before and sounding different. I could even believe that it is not mere tiredness that makes him so fatigued.

“Yes, people do create. Books, for example, which you also read. And paintings. It’s quite normal.” He leans his head back against the chair, is clearly pleased with me since he is talking so much. It doesn’t happen often, that. “Creation is making something that has not existed before.”

A car light from the street makes a red streak on the floor. I click my head back and forth and try to understand, all sorts of things. Later he falls asleep in the chair and I am left on all night, for the first time ever.

A long time ago when I first arrived, so shiny and smooth-cased, I was kept in a place where there were children, almost the same age, I spent time with them and learned to be. He thought it important. While the children drew, I sat on my chair by the table and was very charming. Sometimes someone came up and bashed me, but the dents only became evident later, at home, after he had fetched me back.

“Great, very clever, you should be proud.” That’s the kind of thing they said to the children, and I listened.

I read again:

He no longer laughs at what I read, just nods. Then does something strange—leaves me alone in my own company and goes away, saying he will come back later: “I’m just going to do a couple of things, you’ll be fine alone for a couple of hours.”

I fall into myself. First I stretch out on the floor, he encourages it because it straightens a lot of things out. When I’ve done it, I feel lonely and grease my bends. After that I walk around the house and look good, stroke my details and their permanence, keep stopping at the window for a moment, looking at the world as it happens to be at this moment.

I read to myself, trying to pronounce well:

Then I take a pen in my fair hand and do something that I have never done before.

At least a week goes by, and I do not count the evenings when I see all sorts of things before I am finally switched off. I do not understand where this comes from—there shouldn’t be anything new, no updates or anything like them in my systems.

One time he is actually like me, someone with an outer casing, we are equal.

One time the sky is full of terrifying things, wings, shadows.

One time I stand in the kitchen, but it is dark, so dark that I cannot find myself.

Fortunately these views never last long.

One day he comes back from his trip and is silent. We are both capable of silence, that is the same in both of us. Outside it is cold, twenty-six degrees Celsius less than the interior norm, and the cold has entered him, I sense it as soon as I take his coat. Moves more slowly than usual—perhaps he is suffering from stiffness. Does not want his usual cup of coffee but leads me to the living room. Holds a hand to my side, I follow. He sighs.

He keeps me by him even as he sits down.

“You know—” he begins, but how should I know, “—lately I have been short of money.” I have not thought about such things. I am stunned for a moment. Perhaps this is just part of listening. I pull myself back together, however, as one should. “I have decided—” he continues, but falls silent, this is so completely new that I do not remember anything similar. Then he takes up a defiant position, raises his chin and straightens his back. “I am going to have to sell you.”

What I find myself thinking is, sell, that’s what’s done to things, because he often comes back from shops where he has been sold food and bottles and small objects.

“One of those men wants to buy you.”

“Who?” he lets me ask—he wouldn’t always have done s0; now the situation is quite different and I sense it under my casing. I feel petrified now too—it starts gently in my heel and creeps from there through the groin joints to my innards. I think, and then ask further: “It’s the pantshitter, isn’t it?”

Stands up, furious: “Is that what you call my friends, you—” he doesn’t finish his sentence but hits me, hits me really proper, BANG, so that my seams shudder. I fall on to the floor and clatter and have no understanding of how I have offended against my programming. My temples feel tight, there must be something wrong inside my head.

Then he says nothing, I continue with former commands at least until evening and do not know what happens after that.

Electricity is what I need, that and sometimes other things too, orders preferably, because otherwise my existence fragments and goes off the rails and I am no longer as I was intended. Volatility, that is the danger—I easily begin to drift if rules and meaning are taken away. My borders move too much. Everything spins in my head, all that I have read and all the things I have stored away, I have experienced too much and I have perhaps not edited it sufficiently.

But through the sight, that fortified itself / In me by looking, one appearance only—I fumble for a moment in my memory—To me was ever changing as I changed.

Men with horns on their heads, myself with wings, he with a case

and children who are proud of what they have done

and a funnyman who smiled his face in two

and he paces around me and polishes me

But my own wings were not enough for this, / Had it not been that then my mind there smote

I grow dark.

A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish I shut down once more for the night.

In the morning the stakes are high. I am not intended for anywhere but here. Elsewhere I would be senseless, unknown. As useless as a house that does not offer shelter from the rain, a car with no room for passengers. It is necessary to have a reason, a task.

I begin the morning with perfection. I execute my routines like an automaton, with unprecedented accuracy. Surely he will be dazzled, for life with me runs so smoothly.

When I have finished all that is expected, I offer him a surprise. He doesn’t expect anything of the sort, believes I am still the untalented beetle he manufactured for himself. Standing in the hallway, about to go out, I walk up to him, almost in front of him.

“I have become masterly,” I say, but politely all the same. He smiles, just a little. He continues to think he will leave, but I stand very fast in front of the door.

“I can create too.” That is what I tell him, and I smile as well, trying to look new.

“Oh, but you can’t do that.” I amuse him; he trembles now as he sometimes does while watching TV.

“Oh yes I can,” I say, holding my head up straighter than ever. He notices it, his eyes flashing, although he doesn’t know he’s doing it. Allows himself to be led away from the hallway into the living room. There I sit him down on the chair and remember to smile all the time. Smile smile, be beautiful, he used to say it himself. Light floods in through the window, too bright, it forces him to screw up his eyes although I would like him to keep them open, more open than before. But that is how a soft-surface is, afraid of light. I open a drawer, in the desk, and stretch my hand inside it.

The smallest child said, “I drawed a horsey.” “A horse,” the woman laughed, “—that’s lovely!”

I listened my surface off.

…as I changed…

No, it didn’t happen until later.

I draw out my creation—in a moment he will be dazzled.

He raises his face and moves his eyes out of the sun’s path. Laughs until he’s doubled over, guffaws himself into exhaustion like a blocked drain I had to clean once. “I thought you were serious!” His words remain in the shade because the sound of his laughter is so loud, but I know all about shady things, I do. “That kind of scribble, you can’t even draw a straight line!”

I turn my drawing toward my own visual sensors: it shows galloping dog-snakes, mouse-people, trees blossoming gaily, cloud-light birds flying in the sky. My arm twitches.

“It is the world’s most beautiful picture. I created it.” I speak slowly, for clarity. He does not always understand me if I get upset, my skill is to be quick and accurate. I step closer, perhaps the sun is bothering him again.

“You don’t know how to create! Even babies can draw better.” He grabs the picture from my hands, dropping it, torn, on the floor. The sun strikes my sensors, too, as I bend down to pick up the piece of paper. Something twitches inside me, in all my systems, no longer just in my arm.

“My creator,” I cry in my steely voice, beautiful and piercing. I reach out my arm.