The Water Mirror (5 page)

“It's all so . . . blurry,” Junipa
whispered miserably.

Blurry?
Merle thought in astonishment.

“That will improve soon,” said the mirror maker. “Just
wait—early tomorrow, by daylight, everything will look very different. You must
only trust me. Come just a little closer.”

Junipa's steps were more confident now. Her careful progress was not
because she couldn't see. Quite the contrary.

“What do you recognize?” asked Arcimboldo.
“What exactly?”

“I don't know. Something is moving.”

“Those are only shadows. Don't be afraid.”

Merle couldn't believe her ears. Was it possible, was it actually
possible that Arcimboldo had given Junipa sight?

“I've never seen before,” said Junipa, baffled. “I
was always blind.”

“Is the light that you see red?” the mirror maker wanted to
know.

“I don't know how light looks,” she replied uncertainly.
“And I don't know any colors.”

Arcimboldo grimaced, annoyed with himself. “Stupid of me. I should
have thought of that.” He stopped and waited until he could grasp Junipa's
outstretched hands. “You'll have a lot to learn in the next weeks and
months.”

“But that's why I came here.”

“Your life will change, now that you can see.”

Merle could no longer stay in her hiding place. Unmindful of all
consequences, she leaped from the shadows into the light.

“What have you done to her?”

Startled, Arcimboldo looked over at her. And Junipa blinked. She strained
to make anything out. “Merle?” she asked.

“I'm here.” Merle walked up to Junipa and touched her
gently on the arm.

“Ah, our second new pupil.” Arcimboldo had
quickly recovered from his surprise. “A quite curious pupil, it seems to me. But
that doesn't matter. You would have found out early tomorrow morning in any case.
So you are Merle.”

She nodded. “And you are Arcimboldo.”

“Indeed, indeed.”

Merle looked from the old mirror maker back to Junipa. The realization of
what he'd done found her unprepared. At first glance and in the weak light the
change hadn't caught her attention, but now she asked herself how she could have
overlooked
that
. It felt as though an ice-cold hand were
running its fingers up her back.

“But . . . how . . . ?”

Arcimboldo smiled proudly. “Remarkable, isn't it?”

Merle couldn't speak a syllable. Dumbly she stared at Junipa.

Into her face.

At her eyes.

Junipa's white eyeballs had vanished. Instead of them, silvery
mirrors glittered under her lids, set into her eye sockets. Not rounded like eyeballs,
but flat. Arcimboldo had replaced Junipa's eyes with the splinters of a crystal
mirror.

“What have you—”

Arcimboldo gently interrupted her. “Done to her?
Nothing, my child. She can see, at least a little. But that will improve from day
to day.”

“She has mirrors in her eyes!”

“That is so.”

“But . . . but
that's . . .”

“Magic?” Arcimboldo shrugged his shoulders. “Some might
call it so. I call it science. Besides humans and animals there is only one other thing
in the world that is able to see. Look in a mirror, and it will look back at you. That
is the first lesson in my workshop, Merle. Mark it well. Mirrors can see.”

“He's right, Merle,” Junipa agreed. “I actually
can see something. And I have the feeling that with every minute it's getting to
be a little more.”

Arcimboldo nodded delightedly. “That's wonderful!” He
grabbed Junipa's hand and did a little dance of joy with her, just carefully
enough not to pull her off her feet. The last remnants of the smoke flew up around them.
“Say it yourself, isn't it fantastic?”

Merle stared at the two of them and couldn't quite believe what was
taking place before her eyes. Junipa, who'd been blind since she was born, could
see. Thirteen years of darkness had ended. And for that she had to thank Arcimboldo,
this little wisp of a man with the disheveled hair.

“Help your friend to your room,” said the mirror maker, after
he'd let go of Junipa. “You have a strenuous
day ahead
of you tomorrow. Every day is strenuous in my workshop. But I think it will please you.
Oh, yes, I really think so.”

He held out his hand to Merle and added, “Welcome to
Arcimboldo's house.”

A little dazed, she remembered what they'd hammered into her in the
orphanage. “Many thanks for having us here,” she said politely. But in her
confusion she hardly heard what she was saying. She looked after the gleeful old man as
he hastened back into his workshop with dancing steps and pulled the door closed behind
him.

Merle shyly took Junipa's hand and helped her up the stairs to the
fourth floor, anxiously asking every few steps whether the pain was really not too bad.
Whenever Junipa turned toward her, Merle shivered a little. She wasn't seeing her
friend in the mirror eyes but only herself, reflected twice and slightly distorted. She
reassured herself with the thought that it was certainly only a matter of getting used
to Junipa's appearance until it looked completely normal to her.

But still, a slight doubt remained. Before, Junipa's eyes had been
milky and unseeing. Now they were as cold as polished steel.

“I can see, Merle. I can really see.”

Junipa kept murmuring the words to herself long after they were back in
their own beds again.

Once, hours later, Merle awakened from tangled
dreams
when she again heard the grating of the well cover, deep in the courtyard and very, very
far away.

The first few days in Arcimboldo's mirror workshop were tiring,
for Merle and Junipa were left to do all those jobs that the three older apprentices,
boys, didn't want to do. So, many times a day Merle had to sweep up the fine
mirror crystals that were deposited on the workshop floor like the desert sand that in
some summers was driven across the sea as far as Venice.

As Arcimboldo had promised, Junipa's vision improved from day to
day. She still perceived hardly more than ghostly images, but she was already able to
differentiate one from another, and it was important to her to find her way around the
unfamiliar workshop without help. However, they gave her easier jobs than Merle's,
even if not much pleasanter ones. She was allowed no real recuperation after the
stresses of that first night, and she had to weigh out endless quantities of quartz sand
from sacks and put it into measures. What exactly Arcimboldo did with it remained a
puzzle to the girls for the time being.

Actually, the mirror workshop under Arcimboldo appeared to have little to
do with that long-standing tradition of which people in Venice had been proud since time
out of mind. Earlier, in the sixteenth century, only the select were initiated into the
art of mirror making. They all lived under strict watch on the glassblowing island of
Murano. There they lived in luxury, lacking for
nothing—except freedom. For as soon as they had begun their training, they might
never again leave the island. And for those who tried anyway, it was death. The agents
of La Serenissima hunted down renegade mirror makers throughout Europe and killed the
traitors before they could pass on the secret of mirror production to outsiders.
Murano's mirrors were the only ones to adorn all the great houses of the nobility
of Europe, for only in Venice was this art understood. As for the city, the secret could
not be weighed in gold—well, except in the individual instances. Finally some
mirror makers did succeed in fleeing from Murano and selling their secret art to the
French, who then repaid them by killing them. Soon afterward the French opened their own
workshops and robbed Venice of its monopoly. Mirrors were soon produced in many lands,
and the prohibitions and punishments for Murano's mirror makers receded into
oblivion.

Arcimboldo's mirrors, however, had as much to do with alchemy as
with the art of glass making. After only the first few days, Merle sensed that it might
be years before he would initiate her into his secrets. It was the same with the three
boys. The eldest, Dario, though he'd already lived in the house for more than two
years, had not the slightest glimmer of how Arcimboldo's art worked. Certainly
they observed, even eavesdropped and spied, but they did not know the true secret.

Slim, black-haired Dario was the leader of
Arcimboldo's apprentices. When the master was present, he always displayed very
good behavior, but on his own he was still the same lout he'd been when he came
from the orphanage two years before. During their short free periods he was a braggart,
and sometimes domineering, too, though the two other boys had to suffer more from that
than Merle and Junipa did. In fact, to a large extent he preferred to ignore the girls.
It displeased him that Arcimboldo had taken girls on as apprentices, probably also
because his behavior toward Eft left much to be desired. He seemed to be afraid that
Merle and Junipa would take the housekeeper's side in arguments or might betray
some of his little secrets to her—such as the fact that he regularly sampled
Arcimboldo's good red wine, which Eft kept under lock and key in the kitchen. She
didn't know that Dario had laboriously made himself a copy of the key to the
cupboard. Merle had discovered Dario's thieving by accident on the third night,
when she'd met him with a pitcher of wine in the dark in the passageway. It never
occurred to her to use this observation to her own advantage, but obviously that was
exactly what Dario feared. From that moment he had treated her even more coolly, with
downright hostility, even if he didn't dare start an overt quarrel with her. Most
of the time he gave her the cold shoulder—which, to be precise, was more
notice than he bestowed on Junipa. She seemed not to exist at all
for him.

Secretly Merle asked herself just why Arcimboldo had taken the rebellious
Dario into his house. But that also raised the uncomfortable question of what he had
found in
her,
and to that no answer had occurred to her as
yet. Junipa might be an ideal subject for his experiment with the mirror
shards—the girls had learned that he'd never dared anything like that
before—but what was it that had prompted him to rescue Merle from the orphanage?
He'd never met her and must have relied entirely on what the attendants could
report about her—and Merle doubted that Arcimboldo had heard too much good about
her from them. In the home they had considered her uncooperative and cheeky—words
that in the vocabulary of the attendants stood for intellectually curious and
self-confident.

As for the other two apprentices, they were only a year older than Merle.
One was a pale-skinned, red-haired boy, whose name was Tiziano. The other—smaller
and with a slight harelip—was named Boro. The two seemed to enjoy finally not
being the youngest any longer and being able to boss Merle around, although their
behavior never deteriorated into meanness. When they saw that the delegated work was
getting to be too much, they readily helped, without being asked to. Junipa, on the
other hand, they seemed to find uncanny, and Boro, especially, preferred to give her a
wide berth. The boys accepted Dario as their
leader. They
didn't have the doglike devotion to him that Merle had sometimes seen with gangs
in the orphanage, but they clearly looked up to him. Anyway, he'd been apprenticed
to Arcimboldo a year longer than the two of them had.

After about a week and a half, shortly before midnight, Merle saw Eft
climbing down into the well a second time. She briefly considered waking Junipa but then
decided against it. She stood motionless at the window for a while, staring at the well
cover, then uneasily lay down in her bed again.

She'd already told Junipa of her discovery on one of their first
evenings in the house.

“And she really climbed into the well?” Junipa had asked.

“I just told you so!”

“Maybe the rope had come off the water bucket.”

“Would you climb down into a pitch-black well in the middle of the
night just because some rope was broken? If it really had been that, she could have done
it in the daytime. Besides, then she would have sent one of us.” Merle shook her
head decidedly. “She didn't even have a lamp with her.”

Junipa's mirror eyes reflected the moonlight that was shining in
through their window that night. It looked as though they were glowing in the white, icy
light. As so often, Merle had to repress a shudder. Sometimes at such
moments she had the feeling that Junipa saw more with her new eyes than just the
surface of people and things—almost as if she could look directly into
Merle's innermost thoughts.