“Don’t hyperventilate on me now,” he said playfully.
I spat the invisible ball out of my mouth and was finally able to breathe.
Igor stopped in front of the Mauritshuis.
“Taking me to another museum?”
“This is where my girl works,” he said.
We climbed a flight of wooden stairs covered with a thick, red carpet. At the top of the stairs Igor turned to the left. On the wall of the first room, next to the door, hung Vermeer’s famous Girl with a Pearl Earring.
“So that’s your girl!”
“Yup,” he said in English. “That’s my chick.”
I knew the picture — I’d been to the Mauritshuis — but I didn’t let on. It took my breath away. The original looks like a pale imitation of its numerous reproductions. The first time I saw the painting, I was surprised at how light the blue of the girl’s turban and the gold of her raiment were, much lighter than in the reproductions.
“You look a bit like her,” he said cautiously.
“I’m not angry anymore. And you’ve got your A. You don’t need to flatter me.”
“You might be her elder sister. No, really. There’s something in the facial expression. It reminds me of the ‘human fish.’”
“How can you say such a thing! Did you ever see the human fish?”
“Only in a picture,” he confessed.
“Well, I did. When I was a kid, all Yugoslav elementary schools took a day trip to the caves at Postojna.”
“Well? What does it look like?”
“Like something that lives in a cave. And it’s one of a kind.”
“Now that’s what I call an exhaustive description.”
“All right, then. Proteus anquinus. The human fish. Length: between ten and twenty-five centimeters. A kind of amphibian reject. A unique case of unsuccessful metamorphosis. It breathes through its gills mainly, but can use its skin, too. It is blind, and while it does have arms and legs of sorts they seemed to have been abandoned along the way: the legs are mere stumps and the arms end in hands with three fingers. It can apparently survive several years without food, and its life expectancy is unusually long — a hundred years or more. It has no pigment, and its skin is a pale, milky white, all but transparent. You can see the slightly bloody gills, the thinnest of veins running through the body and a minuscule heart. In short, it is a failed mutant, something between lizard, fish, and human embryo. The human fish was our Yugoslav miracle. We should have put it on our flag instead of the red star. It’s our E.T.”
“Pretty impressive, Comrade,” he said in English.
“Oh, there’s something else. I believe it reproduced in the larval stage, though I can’t be certain.”
“Where did you pick all this up?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. And one more thing…”
“What?”
“The human fish is a cannibal. For some reason there are times when it eats its young.”
“Well, well,” said Igor, though his mind seemed elsewhere. “So I was right after all.”
“What do you mean?”
“My girl emerges from the cave a unique, endemic specimen.”
“Tell me more about it.”
“The thing I like most about her is the color of her skin. It’s the color of a stalactite.”
“You mean stalagmite, don’t you?”
“Get off my back!”
“But I like the way you describe her. Go on.”
“I have the feeling her skin is desiccated, yet moist to the touch. I like her expression of gentle, pliant helplessness. And the half-open mouth, the shiny, dry film over the lips and the drop of saliva at one side of them. The dewy quality of the gaze, the barely perceptible tear about to be shed. The fascinating duality of absence and constant presence in the eyes. Look at them: they seem to be following you. And the white collar cradling her slender neck. The sweet little face that can’t wait to fall into someone’s warm, protective hands — or under the guillotine…. There’s something unfinished about her. She’s like the human fish in that way, too. See? She has no eyebrows. My girl’s a beautiful larva waiting for metamorphosis.”
Igor, who had been standing behind me, took me by the shoulders and moved me slowly up to the painting.
“Now take a closer look at the earring in her ear,” he said.
“Okay….”
“And what do you see?”
“Nothing. The pearl.”
I could see our reflection in the glass protecting the picture. Igor’s hand remained on my shoulder.
“Look closer.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“That’s what I thought. Wait a second. I’ve got a magnifying glass.”
“You’ve got a magnifying glass?”
“Yes, I happen to have a magnifying glass in my pocket.”
“What else do you happen to have in your pocket?”
“None of your business,” he said. “Just have a look at the painting through it.”
“I see the pearl…”
“And in it?”
“A reflection.”
“Boy, you really are blind! Look again.”
“I don’t know. Given the genre, you might expect to see a representation of death.”
“Haven’t got a clue, have you? The pearl contains Vermeer’s face!”
He was jubilant.
“What makes you think that?”
“You mean you still don’t see it?”
“No. Come on, admit it. You’re making the whole thing up.”
“Isn’t it fantastic?”
“Even supposing it’s there, couldn’t it be a convention of the time?”
“The painter, her creator, in the pearl in her ear!”
“There are those who say that the girl in the picture is Vermeer’s daughter, Maria, in which case it could be seen as the first symbolic representation of DNA.”
“Which would make it even more fantastic! The old man becoming one with her. The first symbolic representation of piercing!”
“But there are also those who say it’s the portrait of someone completely different or a character study. Rembrandt did turban portraits too. Right here in this museum you can see…”
“The ones who say she’s his daughter are right.”
“If so, your chick is wearing her old man in her ear.”
“Tell me,” he said abruptly, “who do you wear in yours?”
“I don’t know. Just as she doesn’t know she’s wearing the image of her creator and hypothetical father. But then neither do we. It isn’t everyone who goes through life with a magnifying glass at the ready.”
“There’s Sherlock Holmes….”
I could feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder and the warm, gentle flow of his breath on the nape of my neck. Suddenly I bristled. I carefully removed the hand and turned to face him.
“And you?” I asked. “Where’s your tattoo?”
“Haven’t got one,” he answered.
“Uroš had one.”
“Uroš?”
“Well, a brand, the stigma of his father.”
“That man’s a murderer, not a father.”
“Remember the questionnaire I handed out on the first day of class?”
“Yes, I remember that stupid questionnaire,” he said, stressing the word “stupid.”
“Well, the answer Uroš gave to my question about what he expected to get out of the course was ‘To come to.’”
“Sounds a little corny to me. Though Uroš wasn’t, how shall I put it, the sharpest tool in the shed.”