LINE NUMBER NINE
***
I wonder, am I a lost girl? Livia crammed the jacket into the travelling bag, packing her luggage for one more expedition. Is it why I devote myself to the birds? Boris says, I have devoted myself to unheard-of marshy areas, looming amid milky vapours, as well as to the winds being lulled in the marsh grasses… Yes, to them as well… and to those strident bird sounds amid the reverie of the marshes, the fluttering, the soaring flight in an unknown direction…
Once, she was preparing her luggage again because she was moving to another apartment; she had not met Boris yet. A few friends helped her load and transport the cardboard boxes. A big hubbub it was. And as a refrain: “Where is the cactus, take care of the cactus, we mustn’t forget the cactus.” In the end, when she sat in front, next to the driver, she of course held onto the cactus itself. Everything began smoothly at first. What exactly happened next - she didn’t remember any more; was it a crack in the asphalt, was it a sudden brake... But the cactus made a leap, and Livia, seeing it about to be shattered and crushed , without thinking, just like the way we sometimes rush to save something that kills us, clasped it tightly. Her heart turned into a pin cushion. Exotic cactus blooms loomed in her brain. She didn’t remember if she screamed or if the silence of the pain choked her. Then she bit her lips for a long time while they took out the thorns from her fingers, one by one. The cactus arrived, pruned in a strange way.
Did it realise at all that I was only trying to save it…
“Mum, are you leaving again? You’ll come back soon, right? Look, dad and I made a birdhouse!” Ria is beaming on the threshold.
***
By one of Amsterdam’s canals, on the last day of the year, a pink bicycle came across a girl with pearl earrings. She unlocked it, released it from the stand, then she put headphones in her ears (her telephone peeking out of her pocket), mounted it and started to fly. The long hems of her olive colour coat fluttered like wings. The people jumped out of her way at the very last moment. Shouts in every language resounded in the air: Crazy girl! Where is she flying to, on that pink bicycle? The slouching, 600 year-old houses silently screeched, slouched even more, grew a hundred years older in a single moment, whispering: “Lucky one! We will fall to the ground, but she will live forever.” The girl with the pearl earrings flew over Prinsengracht, turned onto Spiegelgracht, crossed Weteringschans, dashed towards Museumbrug, flew into the Rijksmuseum, swirled a round the halls looking for it, getting lost, passing through the glass dome of the atrium, pedalling wildly across the darkening, winter sky. When she saw the lights of The Hague down below, she swept down, threatening to plop into the channel, managing, however, to land on Casuariestraat; afterwards she turned onto Lange Houtstraat, then onto Doelenstraat and whizzed past the guards at Mauritshuis, just before they closed it.
She found it quickly. She flew into the painting and quickly melted down in Vermeer’s light.
In the evening, at many celebration tables, while waiting for the clock to count the hours till midnight, lots of people from different points in Amsterdam and The Hague would talk about the girl with the pink bicycle, she almost knocked me down, she flew like a whirlwind, like an olive branch swept by the wind, she was so beautiful, she was nothing to write home about, stark mad, I envied her, young people today are very irresponsible, was she running away from someone, was she chasing after something, who is she anyway, lovely, was she only a delusion?
Late in the morning on the first of January, on their traditional round before the opening of the museum, the guards were astonished to find a pink bicycle lying on the floor, near the “girl with a pearl earring” painting. Several hours later the picture of the mysterious pink bicycle in the museum went viral on social media.
Translated by Hristo Dimitrov / Edited by Tom Phillips
The Bulgarian text first appeared in ‘Line number Nine’,Janet-45 publishers, 2021
