Читать книгу Prayer for the Living - Ben Okri - Страница 12

A Sinister Perfection

She had always wanted a doll’s house. As soon as she was old enough, Hyacinth asked her parents for one. Her mother was doubtful; she thought it would distract her daughter from real life. Her father felt it could provide a useful education in running a house. He was so taken with this notion that he had a doll’s house commissioned at once.

He wanted it to be gigantic and the exact replica of their own house on Baker Street. His precise instructions required a fiendish architect. When it was delivered, he found its replication perfect in scale and detail. Hyacinth was so fascinated that she spent hours comparing it with the original.

She spent most of her time making the doll’s house as like their real house as possible. She filled it with her imagination. She slept and woke in one of its rooms. In another of its rooms lived Mum and Dad. The kitchen below, the servants’ room at the back, were all living places in her mind.

It occurred to her that what happened in the doll’s house had a magical effect on what happened in the real house. When she wished someone to be ill in the doll’s house, someone fell ill in the real one.

She continued in this game till one day she imagined a stranger paying a visit to their house. She imagined him a peddler of stones and magic lamps that she had read of in books. Then a week later such a stranger, just like the one she had imagined, knocked on their door. He stood in the gaslight, a peddler of blue stones. The servants were about to send him away, but Hyacinth begged her father to let him in. He had piercing eyes and wore a red turban. He was from Kazakhstan and had walked the Silk Road. When he stepped into the living room and saw the doll’s house, he said: “It is just as I dreamed it.”

“What on earth do you mean?” her father said.

“I had a dream of such a house.”

“Do you mean the doll’s house?”

“Yes. Your daughter summoned me here. I have come. What do you want of me?”

“Can you make the little house come alive?” Hyacinth asked.

The stranger turned his fierce blue eyes on her. “The little house lives!” he said, placing a blue stone in Hyacinth’s palm.

Before the father could protest, the stranger was gone.

***

From then on the doll’s house teemed with invisible activity. Little beings lived and fretted in there within its lighted windows. Hyacinth listened to the whispers in the little house till her eyes grew red with exhaustion. At night when everyone was asleep she would steal downstairs and pay keen attention to the muted activity in the house. Often she would be found asleep in front of it and would be carried back to bed without waking. She began walking in her sleep, stealing downstairs to where the real life was, in the doll’s house.

In her dreams, she was the mistress of the house. She gave orders to an army of servants. In one dream her father was in jail. In another her mother was banished to the country. She would wake up horrified. Not long afterward bailiffs came to the house and arrested her father on charges of financial irregularity. Her mother fell on a riding trip in the country, broke her ankle, and was confined to bed for several weeks.

Hyacinth had the big house to herself. She didn’t think for a moment that the doll’s house had anything to do with these unhappy incidents. Now that she was mistress of the house, she succumbed to its power and her character changed. She became imperious.

One night the invisible beings invaded the real house. She saw them filing out of the little house and she screamed. No one believed her. She grew hysterical and the servants locked her up in her room till they could get the doctor out to look at her.

During that time the invisible creatures occupied the big house. They roamed about in the pantry. They clambered about in the living room. At night Hyacinth could hear them whispering about fire.

“With a divine fire,” she heard one of them say, “we’ll burn down this house.”

“And in three days it will be rebuilt again.”

“By the Architect.”

“With his runes.”

“Which he studies while the world burns.”

“Out of the ashes the great house will rise.”

“And the young girl will have learned her lesson.”

“Yes, the lesson of perfection.”

That was when it occurred to her that their house had become the doll’s house, and that their lives were in peril. She called out to the servants, she tried to warn them, but they would not listen. She heard them whispering in the corridor. She could have sworn they were drunk.

That night something caught fire in the pantry. The blaze spread. There is no need to say that the house was burned down, and that they were ruined. There is no need to state either that when the house burned down only the doll’s house, in its sinister perfection, remained miraculously intact. No one knows what became of it.

Her father was released from jail. The charges against him were found to be ridiculous. Many suspect the charges were trumped up by rivals who envied his success.

They moved to a small house in the country. Her mother sold off all her horses and never rode again. Her father learned to read and interpret runes. Day after day, Hyacinth waited for the stranger to return, so she could give him back his blue stone.