Director's Cut Read Free Page B

market floor to allow visitors to look down on what most resembled a moving sea of flowers. The American professor was already there, looking out over the activity below. When he saw Gala and her father, he raised a hand and, even before the girl had a chance to say hello, took a photo of her with one of three cameras dangling against his enormous belly. The flash hurt her eyes and, as if the light had become sound, reverberated inside her skull like the striking of a gong.
    The American was friendliness itself, and Gala couldn’t understand why her father, so much stronger and better looking, had been nervous about his encounter with this gnome. He had urged her several times in the last few days to make a good impression on Obadiah Dogberry. That was something he always did when he was afraid that he himself would fall short. Gala knew what was expected of her: it was time for her to do her tricks again.
    They walked over a field of sunflowers that was passing under the catwalk like a small train on its way to the auction sheds. The girl leaned out with the rail against her waist to watch the rattling carts curving over the points. To the rhythm of the wheels, Gala mentally rehearsedthe proverbs she would soon be asked to rattle off for her father’s guest. To astonish him. In Latin.
    Sunt aliquid manes, letum non omnia finit.
*
Alia voce psittacus, alia coturnix loquitur.
† To her they were nothing but sound, and she memorized them the way she memorized foreign songs at school—
Hava nagila, hava magila. Kalinka kalinka kalinka moya—
by melody and rhythm alone, but the effect they had on her father’s acquaintances was always the same.
    â€œA child of eight. Incredible! Jan, your daughter is a prodigy!”
    She had been performing this trick since she was five, and in that time her father had expanded the arsenal with Greek proverbs, poems by Catullus, and passages from the
Odyssey
. Sometimes she got bored with it and hid when her parents were hosting yet another dinner party, but generally she let her father have his fun: when the reactions were enthusiastic he positively beamed. It was only when she made mistakes—and she really did do her best not to, but still, sometimes, especially with people she didn’t know—then …
    At that moment the sunflowers stopped to let a procession of pink gerberas cross their path. Like the silenced wheels, the sounds in Gala’s head jolted to a halt in the middle of a poem by Martial.
    She tried to pick it up from the last line, but without the help of the rhythm she stumbled again. She went back to the start of the poem, just as she sometimes repeated it to herself at night in bed before falling asleep, but she already feared the worst. She tried to shut out all the unfamiliar noises around her to follow the conversation the two men were having behind her in English so that she could work out how much time she had left before her father wanted to show her off. She could not disappoint him.
    The previous autumn a circus had appeared before Gala’s house, materializing out of the ether on the field at the bottom of the hill. Like a colorful hot-air balloon that had chosen to land on her favorite playground. Coming home from ballet the evening before, there hadn’t been any sign of it, but the next morning she woke to the sound of trumpeting elephants and a trombonist who was practicing a bass line. She threw her curtains open with surprise and saw cheerful lights twinkling through the bare trees at the end of the street.
    On the way to school she got off her bike at the fence to watch the horses in the outside ring. They were trotting in opposite directions, circling a young woman who was standing straight-backed in the middle ground. She held her head so high that her chin was pointing up in the air. She barked out commands that made the animals stop, rear, and turn on the spot, but, just to make sure they obeyed, she was holding