THE LODGE
Catherine developed a passion for mirrors, but not when she was a toddler; it happened somewhat later.
Here sits Kitty on the carpet in the vast living room, on the eve of her seventh birthday. The carpet looks like a Persian masterpiece, at least a couple of hundred years old, only it is not Persian. It is a Byzantine carpet- found in a lost Venetian treasure room and carefully restored by a team of experts.
The carpet is thin, therefore Kitty no longer sits on it, but is reclining upon a few of the velvet cushions scattered on the floor. The cushions are violet in colour and velvet as a drape; whereas the stockings that cover the thin, spindle-like legs of the girl are light blue. Above them Kitty wears a black dress. The cut is simple enough, and might look a little retro but in fact is so trendy that a regular 21st century princess would be proud to wear this dress.
Kitty doesn’t have a long black tail; if she had one, she would thump with it on the carpet, irritably. The observation is made by her father. His lean body is reclined reciprocally to his daughter’s and is dressed in a classically conservative black suit.
Kitty's father knows, there is a lot of him in his daughter, but there is a lot of her in him too. No matter how little and inexperienced Kitty is, a substantial part of the world her father sees is through her adorable green eyes.
What does she see now?
There is almost an equal number of boy’s toys and girl’s toys exhibited on the floor before little Kitty. For example, there is a miniature model of a steam locomotive. But there is a lovely doll too. The gender balance in the choice of the toys means that Kitty’s father is a liberal. He wouldn’t like to push his daughter this way or that. Let her choose her own playthings. It doesn’t matter if the locomotive is hanging in the air by one of its buffers like a mouse would hang from the paw of the cat. One of the little wheels of the tiny black machine is already chopped off, but Kitty is not reproached for that. One is allowed a modicum of carelessness towards one’s own toys. That’s what her father thinks.
The black dress is gender-unambiguous on her slender little body, and Kitty’s hair is done in a girl’s fashion. She has straw-blond hair with copper- red nuances, and at the moment her hair is organised in two pigtails on either side of her head. Everything changes, however. Her father is not sure if in a few years Kitty would wear her hair cut low almost to the roots, as a boy would like. The future can only be seen obscure, in a glass, darkly.
At this thought of the father, Kitty and her father see what is missing from the pile of birthday presents. To get even, the following week he buys her a mirror from an auction house in London.
It is an ancient portable mirror. The form is ellipsoid, it has silver rims, blue enamelled back and a mahogany handle. Kitty grabs it and stares into it.
Within a year nothing less than a miracle happens. Her intractable hair with hairs as thick as straws, softens, loses its red streaks, and turns into a luscious auburn mane. Kitty likes to put the mirror, face up, somewhere on the floor, make a few jumps to the side, then crawl slowly towards the reflective glass. Her palms and knees may hurt a little, but the exercise is worth the effort.
Face over the mirror, Kitty cocks her head to one side - a Botticellian gesture - and stares at her face. Of course, there have been mirrors in the house before her seventh birthday, but they have always been somewhat impersonal. This one - the present from her father is her own private door to self-hypnosis - the sweetest gift of life.
On her next birthday, Father gives her another mirror - a larger one - to be placed on Kitty’s homework desk. Two years later the daughter is furnished with a whole toilet table surrounded with mirrors. The documents that go with the toilet table say that it once belonged to Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, from the times when she was still happy.
Besides her father’s mirrors, Kitty also grows up with her father’s voice. She has developed a thing for his voice before her thing with the looking glass; even from the times when she was a toddler. Au pairs and baby sitters still tell tales about how she reacted to her father’s voice on the television, even before she was able to speak.
Here Kitty is - crawling on all fours, mouth drooling, her mouth mumbling some pre-intelligible gibberish while a muffled TV set murmurs something, somewhere in the background. Baby Kitty does not react to the faint sound at all. Everything changes when her father appears on the screen and starts a press conference. Baby Kitty lifts her head up and drivels excitedly, and smiles. Another miracle! Deus ex Machina!
A figure, no less important than God, her father actually is; for thousands of people living on all habitable continents. He is the CEO of an international corporation.
At sixteen Kitty is old enough to grasp what the ultimate mission of the corporation is: it is to heal and feed the world.
At that moment Kitty stands surrounded by a three-winged mirror that reflects from three different perspectives the entire naked opulence of her body. Kitty is entirely pleased with it. The brief sparkles of problematic relations with her body are long snuffed out.
They happened three years ago, when Anika - her best friend, and - along with Kitty - the most beautiful teen in her class peered into the three-winged mirror.
“Hm,” Anika chimed. “You’ve started grooming curves.”
Holy Father of the world! Curves! Was that good? Are curves OK nowadays?
“There comes a time when a daddy can no longer hold his princess on his lap,“ her father announces benevolently, a little after the curves-shock-day.
Is he implying that she is fat!? Daddy looks at her, his eyes glittering. He winks a very special wink.
“You are gorgeous,” he says.
Curves are beautiful. That is what Kitty’s mirrors whisper to her from that day on.
Kitty likes to study her curves when she is half-naked and stark naked before the mirrors. She likes to see herself doing things which, if not entirely forbidden, are somewhat disagreeable. Things like smoking a cigar before the mirror, lifting one of her heavy breasts with her right hand, holding a glass of wine. Kitty likes wine. She likes the way it paints the lips.
“No! No! No!” Her father strongly protests.
It is just one more of these tedious moments, when a TV host introduces him as the man responsible for healing and feeding the world.
Of course, Father explains, it is quite possible to achieve this grandiose goal, namely to feed the still starving world and heal it of its maladies. Everything is possible with the help of modern biotechnology. To carry on this sacred mission, however, the efforts of a single corporation won’t suffice. Nay, the effort of the world as such is needed.
“In order to act globally, we have to groom in ourselves a modicum of liberal submissiveness.”
Kitty’s father faces the cameras in a TV studio, a thousand kilometres from Kitty.
He is seldom present around her. Father is a Deus absconditus. A creator who has made something big and wonderful, and then has gone to do wonders somewhere else. She didn’t mind that. When he is away, Kitty spends only half of her time in front of the mirrors. The rest is secret. In order to become a good girl, you need to cross a universe of wildness. This is Kitty’s motto.
“My relationships with God are complex indeed,” her father begins, standing at the head of a banquet table. He is cheered into delivering a speech.
“Most assuredly, something so wonderful and so enormous like Nature must have had a Designer. It is our mission, dear colleagues, dear sponsors, dear trustees, to move in ways even more mysterious than this Designer goes; modulating Nature to serve an even higher purpose.”
“Am I right to speak so?” Father asks Kitty after the banquet. “Was it neutral and diplomatic enough? The Europeans and those men with the white head covers are supposed to be creationists by default, aren’t they? I have not offended any of them, most assuredly. But what about the Japs? Are Japs creationists too? Only the Japanese devil knows. ”
Her father sighs.
“We have done a lot of work, my dear. If we don’t take a short rest, we are about to lose our confidence in our world. ”
That is how father and daughter come to take their rest in a villa, built on a steep hill. This mansion is in the southernmost part of a southern country.
Kitty notices that here the carpets are not spread on the floor, they hang on the walls. Tapestries, Kitty knows the name. They are from Brussels and mark the golden age of Flemish tapestry art. They are somewhat younger than the carpet from Constantinople sprawled on the floor of one of the many places Kitty calls home. Most of the colours are faded; it doesn’t matter because the faces of tapestry knights should be pale and pious by default. So pale that one asks oneself: do these knights eat meat at all? Maybe they are anaemic only when they are at home. Away from home they are full-blooded murderers, rapists and travellers. They can sail all the way down to Constantinople, topple the cross off the dome of Hagia Sofia and steal the emperor’s carpet.
“Sadly, the days of my escape are gone.“ Kitty’s father wistfully remarks, as he rattles the ice cubes in his orange coloured highball. “Tomorrow I’ll have to take a ride to the big city and join the race once again.”
The big city in question is in the northern part of the same country where the villa is. He has headquarters in the nicest countries of the habitable world.
“The villa is all yours now, Kitty. Enjoy it as much as you like. Only, never set foot in the lodge at the end of the tree garden. It is in a terrible condition. The repair construction firm issued a very strict ban about it.
And the next day he is gone.
Kitty wakes up late and walks out to meet the sun of a southern summer day. When she stands on the top terrace, in the skimpy shadow of the house, she has a great view to the valley below. It is a big valley. Here and there, cuddled inside trees and vineyards, other houses appear, not one of them larger than her house on top of the hill. The valley opens up like a gift-giving palm before the ancient lord of the villa. Once he must have been a very powerful man, reasons Kitty and smiles.
The sun climbs to its zenith in the sky and everything glistens in its vertical light: the vineyards, the green crowns of the trees, the rocks with the miniature specks of metal inside them; everything. For about an hour the whole landscape around Kitty is a giant mirror.
Kitty is pleased. Although the villa is densely surrounded by gardens and vineyards, nature is not very conspicuous here. The discreet presence of nature is a small miracle of gardening and exterior design. Kitty has inherited, or rather adopted, Father’s complex attitude towards nature.
Inconspicuously, the villa is heavily guarded. A broad-shouldered black suit can be seen flitting among the trees as Kitty roams through the gardens during the day. A broad-shouldered shadow glides past her as she sips from the red sunset poured in a large wine glass. The sense that you are guarded grows even more boring at dusk. It implies that the night will not bring many possibilities. Kitty tries to remember what her Father said about the prospect of her inviting a few friends here for a couple of days.
The next morning she faces the lodge. By all means it is hard to face something that is girdled from all sides by shrubbery, thick as a fortress’s wall and much higher than the height of Kitty. She can catch some glimpses from the ochre-coloured walls of the house and that is all. No roof can be seen; perhaps the roof is fallen in and that is why the place is so dangerous. The walls look intact, though.
In one place only, the thorny and brambly living wall around the lodge is cut to make a perfect entrance; a car cannot pass, but a man or a woman, or a couple, could. When Kitty sets foot into the passage, a man in a black suit and a head - ellipsoid and bold as an egg, springs from behind the shrubbery. The egg smiles a discouraging broad-mouthed smile at Kitty. While she backs off, she wonders what the word lodge actually stands for, and who is supposed to live in a lodge.
On the next morning she lies in the garden in wait for a gap in the black suit’s timetable. When the moment presents itself, Kitty trespasses over the shrubbery wall.
The house floats coquettishly in a pool of well-mown green glass. It has a rectangular front wall painted in ochre. The colour looks very ancient. Nobody has used this colour in the last two thousand years. The wall is solid except for a bronze door. It is unlocked.
Kitty finds herself on a spacious patio. She can now see that the lodge has two floors - the outer edges of the second floor rest on short columns, thus forming three shady galleries on three sides of the rectangular patio. Three doors open onto these columnated galleries: a red, a blue and a yellow one. The doors are shut.
Kitty has an amateur knowledge of architecture; she can grasp that the current structure is a renovated ancient building. The division lines where the old stones and masonry mingle with the new ones are visible. Metal bars painted in red, to match the ochre of the walls, provide additional support.
Even with these modern extras, the house might get fragile when exposed to the winter winds. However, Kitty remembers, winter winds never visit this blessed southern part of the country. The lodge looks perfectly habitable, and she senses that it is inhabited at this very moment. Freshly worn clothes are scattered beside the shallow rectangular pool, carved in the middle of the patio.
Kitty’s career in love making has started fairly recently. She is instinctively able to tell what this place is. It is a love nest. It is a treasure box where someone would hide an object of their lust and spend one’s love molecules liberally, time and again.
A person comes out the blue door, startles, shrieks, scurries towards the red door and plunges inside the house.
Kitty bites the back of her thumb to stifle her own shriek.
Kitty runs. She jumps in her car. She doesn’t remember having started the engine. She doesn’t hear the gravel erupting from under the tyres, the little splinters of rock producing sparks of fire as they collide into each other along the driveway.
The car swerves dangerously on the curves of the asphalt road leading out of the valley. It doesn’t matter; Kitty has to run in order to save her sanity.
All through the five hour drive to the big city, Kitty’s mind is still there - in the lodge.
She continues to see the girl coming out of the blue door on the ground floor: her milk white body, her generous curves. Kitty has seen the girl for a split second, yet it has not escaped her attention how intensely and unevenly red her lips were. For a moment they looked exactly like her own, i.e. Kitty’s lips after sipping a few drops of red wine. However, that colour was much more intense than wine. The source of the pigmentation revealed itself immediately. Just as that girl banged the red door behind her back, a small vessel continued to hang in the air for a second, and then it clattered on the terracotta floor.
It was a gold bowl full of purple raspberries.
Kitty reaches her mother’s condominium after midnight. Mother doesn’t live in the luxury that Kitty and father live in. After all, mother has cut off the bloodline with her father by divorcing him a while ago. Still, she has a quite a cute little flat in a decent part of the big city where she now ushers in a trembling Kitty.
She settles her daughter on the sofa and pours herself a large dose of cognac.
It is embarrassing to watch how a generally hysterical woman tries to convince a momentarily hysterical girl till the early hours of the morning, that, no, Kitty doesn’t have a twin sister.
The headquarters of Father’s corporation are situated in the bombastic billionaires’ heart of downtown. The taxi creeps to the skyscraper bearing Father’s logo on its head and spits out a spiteful and determined Kitty. She has not slept even for a second last night.
With the help of her ID card, bearing Father’s family name on it and tragedy pouring out of her eyes, she manages to convince the nervous secretary at the reception desk that the matter is of utmost urgency. The fifty floor ride in the lift in the direction of the sky seems eternal to Kitty. When the secretary ushers her into an authoritatively furnished room, the clock strikes half past nine. Kitty’s alarm had wrenched Father from a conference at the corporation’s summit. The other participants in the conference can be seen through semi-transparent glass. But Father is not looking at them, he is looking at the morning city sprawled in his feet. He presents his lean, fine profile to Kitty.
“Welcome, my dear!” He says pleasantly. “Take a seat.”
“I know everything!” Kitty slumps on a chair trying to fix his face fully across the table, wanting to reduce him to ashes with the green fire of her terrible eyes.
“Ah, don’t say that, my dear. At your age. You simply cannot know enough. ”
“I have seen the girl!” Kitty screams. “Who is she?!”
Father claps his hands slightly.
“Embarrassing, isn’t it? I should have told you the story of Bluebeard at an earlier stage of your life, shouldn’t I?”
Kitty stutters.
“And - I finally see what you meant - saying going to the villa, you said. You didn’t mean that glitzy, nouveau riche chateau you stuck me in. I don’t know when, but sometimes, sometime ago you discovered a real Roman residence, where you put her… that creature with whom you - “
Her father chuckles, pleased.
“I have never doubted your deductive abilities, my dear. Although you don’t pay much attention to your studies, lately , do you? It is not just a Roman residence. It is the palace of a Roman provincial governor.”
Kitty thumps her fist on the table.
“Don’t digress! Who is she!?”
“A minute ago, when you said, ‘that creature’“, father explains composedly, “you were intuitively much closer to the truth, dearest. She is nobody. She’s a clone.”
Kitty’s eyes open wide with fear and disgust.
“But she, but she looks like me!”
“It has to be someone’s clone, you know. We are not yet able to create a prototype. We have to steal God’s original version for that part of the process!“
Kitty senses icicles growing upwards from the seat of the chair and piercing her body: her bottom, her thighs, her vagina, her heart.
“Daddy,” she whispers, “I believed you were the one to save the world. And you turned out to be a monster!”
There is a quiet penitence on Father’s face.
“I’m sorry, my little girl. But before you send me to hell, think twice. It was not my idea. I am not even a scientist, you know. I am an accountant. This might turn out to be quite profitable. After resolving some issues, we could move over to mass production. When they tossed me the project, I just agreed to become part of the experimental sample. I was feeling very lonely… after Mother left us. I stuck my nose in the numbers ten hours per day, ten days per week. I had to have some compensation for my wretched life.”
But she is not feeling sorry for him. She cocks her head to one side as she used to do when she was a child.
“Daddy, isn’t it unethical to use the genetic material of your own daughter?”
He coughs matter-of-factly.
“Ah, we are coming to the point now. We have discussed such issues many times in the course of the project. Namely, whose material it is least unethical to use?”
“One can pick up a hair from the coat of a woman one sees in the tube. And use it. Won’t that be a violation of rules? A total stranger? You have to always ask for consent nowadays. You cannot give consent on behalf of somebody else. The times of slavery are long gone.”
“Of course, I could have used my own cells, you know. But, besides being somewhat bizarre, the idea is unacceptable because I am not homosexual. I am not homophobic, I have never said that, mind you.“
“Then what is left but the children. We, the research sample, took a difficult decision. One is a substantial cause of their children’ existence, is he not? Besides, in the so much overrated ancient Greek world, the father had every right to kill his daughter whenever she opposed his world. Here is the historical, or the cultural justification of the matter if you prefer.”
With every word her father is gaining confidence. She has to use sarcasm.
“Very well,” says Kitty with a hollow voice. “When can I meet my step-sister? Or my step-mother, to be more precise.“
Father rolled his eyes.
“Oh, Kitty. Don’t be absurd!”
“But doesn’t that girl have feelings! Is she not suffering!”
She tries to stay in contact with a person she thought she knew so well.
“For God’s sake, Kitty! That… thing… it may look like a nineteen year old girl, but her intellectual and emotional development corresponds with that of a… Anyway! There are no grounds for correlation whatsoever.‘
Kitty takes a deep breath.
“Daddy. I have to leave. Forever.”
There is a quiet desperation on her father’s face.
“Whatever you decide, my dearest,” he says solemnly.
Kitty feels like the eternal city of Rome being sacked by the barbarians. Marauding hordes tying the statues of gods and emperors, and toppling them to the ground. During the rape of the city people of religion surely lost their faith by the hour.
Kitty is losing her faith too. Look at that man! From a Father he has turned into a perv. With a small “p”. Where can Kitty find a new faith? After all, isn’t faith only a measurement of our ability to act?
Kitty takes another deep breath and acts.
Two years later, Catherine celebrates her college prom night in the college canteen. The surroundings are not very festive except for the cheap garland on the wall. The cups with champagne are plastic. The canteen owner promised to put white covers on the high tables, but managed only half of the tables.
Catherine is happy because her friends are here.
“I have developed an aversion to mirrors.” She declares before her friends. “I have to start therapy.”
“Don’t you dare!” Anika says. “Now that you are a little less obsessed with your mirrors, you will have more time for me.” And she kisses Catherine on the cheek.
Catherine laughs then she steals a side look at her friend. She has become even more beautiful during the last two years.
But Anika is her best friend.
Catherine sighs.
“I have to go, dear.” Her father says. “Excellent party!”
A few more folks remember they should leave as well. In the general commotion that follows Catherine has eyes only for one thing. Father sneaks to the place where Anika has just sat.
With his handkerchief he takes the chewing gum stuck on the coffee cup.
He puts the handkerchief in his pocket.
Edited by Tom Phillips