The Invention of Ana Read online

  Sweetheart, what do you want?

  Nothing, she said.

  Alright, then stop knocking.

  But Dad, you promised to play the game with the dots. We always do that at Christmas.

  He gazed at her.

  Ana, he said, do we really do that?

  Yes, we always do.

  Well, okay. Let’s give it a try.

  Then he slouched back into the office and collapsed on a chair, and Ana grabbed the stool, she found the pad and pen, and she closed her eyes and let the pen drop onto the paper. A dot here and a dot there, more and more dots, until she was satisfied and put the pen down.

  What do you think? she asked her father. What do you think it looks like?

  But he couldn’t have heard her, because he stared at the pen without any expression, so Ana held the paper in front of the lamp and examined the dots.

  See, that looks like an apple tree, she said, and that there, that looks like a little crab. And that one, that’s a whale. A whale at the bottom of the ocean, don’t you see it? A little crab and a whale, and there’s an apple tree too.

  Her father drained his coffee cup, put it on the table and swallowed the last sip.

  Humbug, he whispered.

  What?

  Humbug, humbug.

  What is? said Ana, and she looked at him, and for a moment he caught her eye and lifted his fingers, nodding slightly, as though he meant the drawing or Ana, the family in the living room, the window or the rain that beat against it, the water puddling in the streets, the tanks rolling down the avenues, or the snipers on the rooftops, lying drenched and vigilant above the whole godforsaken city.

  Three weeks later, Ana started school again. After her last class, walking home among the tower blocks, she couldn’t see much sign of revolution. The kiosk looked its normal self, the drunks sat on the same benches as always, the grocer still complained about the power cuts, and she continued across the parking lot and up the staircase. A heavy silence lay over the block, gray light falling through the frosted panes of glass, and when she let herself into the dark apartment there was nothing to be heard but her shoes dragging across the floor. In the kitchen she lit a candle and walked down the hall to the living room. A faint scent of something burnt; and, through the glimmer of the candlelight, the shadow of a piece of paper taped to the office door. A step closer, and she saw the words: The door is locked, call the police. Just that one sentence, and instantly she took a step back and turned toward the kitchen. The note was taped to the door, it was definitely her father’s handwriting, and the instruction was simple enough. The door was locked. She should call the police. Yet after two steps she knew she couldn’t do it. There was something behind that door, and with a single glance at the note, the whole world had changed. The door was no longer a door. It was a gateway to a future or a nightmare, to the nightmare that lives in the imagination of all children: a life without parents, at an orphanage. No father. No mother. Nothing. A moment earlier she’d been looking forward to her homework, but now she stood in the kitchen and gasped for air, more afraid than she’d ever been.

  She peered down the corridor. She couldn’t see the note. Maybe it was all something she’d imagined, a dream and nothing more, and she turned on the tap and got the washing-up bowl and bar of soap. Last night’s dirty dishes were still in the sink, plates and cutlery and frying pans, and as long as there were chores to do she didn’t need to think about the note. She had to do the washing up. Scour plates and rinse pans and wipe glasses. She doesn’t remember how long she stood bent over the sink, but when her mother appeared in the doorway her fingers were pruney and pale, and the frying pans gleamed like new.

  Ana, is that you? said her mother. Are you standing here in the dark?

  Ana looked toward the door down the hall, shivering.

  Oh, hey, sweetheart, what’s wrong?

  Her mother took two steps toward the office. For a second she paused, then turned her head slightly to the left, as though speaking to the wall.

  Ana, go to your room.

  Ana sobbed and put away the sponge. She went in and sat on the bed, and over the next hour she heard neither the officers nor the sound of the door being kicked in, not the hubbub of the paramedics or the relatives clattering up and down the stairs. She heeded none of it, sitting on her pink bedclothes, with her eyes shut and her fingers so far into her ears that she heard nothing but the slenderest little whine.

  What happened, when she finally heard it, and who told her, she doesn’t remember. She remembers only these facts:

  That he was hanging from a cord tied to the curtain hook.

  That he’d burned his thesis and his diaries in a stockpot.

  That he’d been kind enough to put a towel over his head.

  II

  When I got home from Woodside that evening, when I opened the door to the apartment and found a postcard from Lærke on the mat, when I opened the window, looked across at the apartment on the other side of the street, and watched a woman do the dishes in her kitchen: that was when I realized I’d been thinking about Ana’s story all week. From our midnight snack at the diner, when she’d explained about her appendix, through tales of sculpted dunes and her father’s suicide, Ana had been trying to tell me something, and although I didn’t understand why she had chosen to talk to a shadow of a man like me, I knew there was something at stake.

  That evening I scribbled down the story about Ana’s father in a notebook, and as I lay between the sheets I thought about his final hours, about the minutes before he hanged himself, the panic or serenity that seized his body as the cord tightened around his neck, and I tossed and turned until the last light was put out across the street. Then I gave up and untangled myself from the sheets, grabbed the computer and called Lærke.

  She was sitting on a bus headed out of the city, a bottle of rosé in her bag, which she was planning to drink at a friend’s allotment cabin. They’d painted it pink last weekend, she said, and while they were giving the side wall a final coat her friend had told a story about a colleague’s housemate, a yoga instructor in her late twenties who copied all the colleague’s purchases with OCD-like precision, buying the same shampoo, the same white wine, the same tub of butter. I could hear in Lærke’s voice that she was smiling, and I couldn’t help grinning either, but there was more, because one day the yoga instructor had apparently forgotten to buy a birthday present for her boyfriend—she’d spent all her cash on pot, or on a birthday present for her pot dealer; either way she was flat broke—but luckily she’d heard you could get a gift voucher if you let them biopsy your groin at the Panum Institute. So that’s what she did, and her boyfriend was pleased with the gift voucher, only now she’d lost her job at the gym or yoga studio or whatever it was, because ever since the biopsy she’d had trouble balancing on her left leg and walked with a limp. What that had to do with the cabin I never figured out, because at that moment Lærke laughed and asked why I was calling her so early in the morning.

  I couldn’t sleep, I said, and explained about my evening with Ana, about the story or riddle of her father’s suicide. It made no sense, I said. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t imagine what had made her father so desperate, how he could have abandoned his daughter like that. For a second Lærke’s voice disappeared as though she’d hung up the phone, and when I heard it again it was like the frequency had altered or the distance widened.

  Don’t you think it’s kind of weird she’s telling you stuff like that?

  In what way? I asked. Weird how?

  Lærke was silent again; for a second or two there was only the crackling of the line or the muttering of the passengers, or maybe the doors of the bus grunting open and closed.

  It’s just so personal, she said. I’ve not got a surprise in store for me, have I?

  What do you mean?

  I mean, this story. Isn’t it more the kind of thing you’d tell boyfriends or lovers or someone like that? Is she trying to get into your pan
ts?

  I laughed. Of course she isn’t.

  Not even a teeny-weeny little bit?

  No, not even a teeny-weeny little bit.

  Okay. But then promise me there’s nothing between you.

  You’re serious?

  Dead serious, said Lærke, and made me promise there was nothing romantic going on, made me swear I’d never leave her for Ana or any other artist or performer or Eastern European more generally, and then she got off the bus and I said I missed her, and she said she loved me, and there were only eleven sleeps before we’d see each other again.

  Over the next few days, Ana’s story rattled around in my head. In the daytime at the gallery, I pictured the last time Ana had spoken to her father, wondering what he might have meant by humbug, and at my desk at night I made up excuses to see Ana again. I wanted to ask her why he’d hanged himself, what had driven him to that point, but each time I started an email I realized it was impossible. Ana was several years older than me, a promising artist with exhibitions all over Europe, and although she’d treated me like an equal, I couldn’t crowd her with my prying questions.

  Then, one morning, she called me. Four days after our evening in Woodside, while I was stuffing envelopes at the gallery, I picked up the phone and heard Ana’s voice, and beneath her voice a touch of disappointment or pique, or disappointment disguised as pique.

  I was going to invite you to a party, she said. But you never call, so I guess you don’t want to see me.

  No, no, I do, I said. I’ve actually been thinking about calling for a couple of days.

  It’s fine, you don’t have to call if you don’t want to.

  But I do want to.

  Are you sure?

  Yes, I’m sure. I thought we could get a drink sometime?

  That’s actually why I’m calling. Remember when I told you about my friend Monica?

  Yeah, the editor.

  It’s her birthday tonight. Just a little get-together at a bar, but you can come and say hello if you like?

  I’d love to.

  Drop by my studio at six, and we’ll have a drink before we head to the party.

  Sounds good.

  Oh, and bring a few examples of your writing. I’m sure Monica would like to see them.

  She gave me the address and we said goodbye, and I was left holding the warm phone in my hand, scarcely able to believe my luck. I was going to meet an editor, and for the next few hours I basked in my own fantasies as I stuffed envelopes and went to the post office. Conceited, childish fantasies about the tales Ana had told me, about the short stories that would grow out of them and wax into collections or novels, and about the editor who’d one day take them on. I considered too what I should give Monica. A birthday present that made an impression, showed respect and gratitude, but wasn’t too presumptuous. I couldn’t think of anything like that, so after I’d mailed the letters I found my brother in his office and asked what kind of gift would make an impression on a woman you didn’t know.

  A notebook, he said. Always a nice notebook and a bottle of spumante.

  A notebook, I said. Isn’t that a bit much?

  No, people love that shit. You’re appealing to her self-image. Here’s a woman who’s sophisticated. Here’s a woman who’s full of original thoughts.

  I laughed, but my brother wagged his index finger and said an empty notebook was like a mirror, and if there was one thing people liked it was their own lovely mug. He’d given scores of notebooks over the years, and out of them had sprung hours of conversation, exhibitions great and small, sweaty nights in studios squashed under roofs, in bedrooms tucked under courtyards, in open kitchens perched high above Brooklyn Heights. It worked every time, and if you were really bold you could write some pithy observation or a line of poetry on the flyleaf, preferably in Danish, because Americans loved that sort of thing.

  Who is it you want to impress? he asked.

  An editor, I said, and told him about the friend Ana was going to introduce me to, an editor who might be interested in reading my work, and then my brother got up and pushed his letters and papers aside.

  I’ll come and buy it with you, he said. I’ve got a studio visit anyway.

  It was a warm afternoon turning into a brittle spring evening with white cauliflower clouds, the fruity scent of floor cleaner in the air and gusts of wind that followed us eastward through the borough. At the bookstore on Court Street we’d chosen a leather-bound book with unlined pages, and now I was striding through Cobble Hill like some hotshot with a bottle of sparkling wine in my hand and a bundle of stories meant for an editor. My brother led the way through the silent streets mottled with magnolia petals, talking about the abandoned factories and warehouses that once had filled the whole city, from Newtown Creek to the Gowanus Canal, the scruffy buildings, ex-playgrounds of Trisha Brown and Laurie Anderson, Walter De Maria and Gordon Matta-Clark, and I smiled and felt enchanted; to think I was actually here, to think I was walking through a city where people cut holes in buildings, danced on rooftops, and filled a whole apartment with earth just because they could, and because the world was so beautiful, the city so glitteringly full of secrets, that it almost made you weep.

  When we reached Graham Avenue, I said goodbye to my brother and biked the last mile to the Bushwick address Ana had given me. The street lay in an industrial area not far from the Jefferson L stop, and I biked around the warehouses and ex-factories for ages looking for the entrance, but there were no doors or gates. The buildings had their backs turned to the street, putting their minds to practical purposes: storing goods and repacking cases. It was a part of town for the dead and the finished, not a tree in sight, no workshops or factories that hummed with life. Now and then a truck roared by, but otherwise I saw not a single person. How Ana could make art in these surroundings I didn’t understand, but I’d heard my brother tell me before: Real artists don’t need inspiration, or something along those lines; inspiration was for amateurs.

  By six thirty I still hadn’t found the studio, and as I walked up and down the side streets I grew more and more convinced that Ana had given me a fictitious address. Finally I entered a wholesale store and asked the way. The man who worked there looked at me like I was speaking some unknown language, and when I repeated the question he waved his hand, escorted me out onto the street and up some stairs, and plonked me into an elevator without a word. It must have been at least sixty or seventy years old, grunting and groaning its way up through the building, and when it stopped with a judder I pulled the door aside and was struck by the aroma of fresh-cut wood. A narrow corridor opened in front of me, a mannequin stuck one leg into the air out of a dumpster, and for a moment I stood still and listened. Two voices in animated discussion. A whistle. A drill, whirring somewhere far away.

  Farther down the corridor I found Ana’s door. The chipboard was painted entirely white, apart from the number written in pencil, and I took a few seconds to silently screw up my courage. I knocked three times, but no one answered. I tried knocking harder, and this time I heard Ana’s voice through the door.

  Come in, she yelled. The door’s open, just come in.

  I don’t think I’ll ever forget that studio. Light poured in through an enormous bank of windows, ivy crept through a shattered pane, spreading tendrils down the wall, and a furrow ran clear across the concrete floor, where dust and metal shavings lay like sediment from several decades’ work. In one corner stood a workbench and the plastic cast of an Afghan hound, in the second was a shelf full of cardboard tubes and video tapes, and in the third I saw Ana. She was sprawled on the sofa, and I caught myself waving. I jerked my hand back instantly, but luckily she hadn’t noticed.

  Oh, it’s so early, she said, struggling upright. Much too early for me right now.

  She rubbed her eyes and explained she’d slept over at the studio, only waking when I knocked. She was going to have a wash, she told me, and then we could sit on the roof, watch the sunset, and have a drink. That sounds fine
, I said, and so she picked up her clothes and towel and disappeared into the corridor.

  While Ana was in the bathroom, I sat down at her desk and did a little rummaging through her stuff. On top lay a notebook full of timetables and almanacs, and underneath a sheaf of articles about a French speleologist, a caver whose name I’d never heard of. At the very bottom, beneath all the other papers, I found a folder full of pictures and curatorial statements and descriptions of her work, which must have been Ana’s portfolio, and I opened it and skimmed the pages. Most of the texts and photographs came from Ana’s exhibitions, but there were also some drawings and notes, and in a plastic folder I found a crumpled text in strangely broken English. It was a kind of story, but one difficult to read. The verb conjugations were a mess, there were no paragraphs, and the commas were scattered almost haphazardly on the page. I returned to the first line; there was something I didn’t quite understand. It couldn’t be right, I thought, and as I thumbed through the pages I felt a childlike wonder, turning my mind to the infinity of the universe or remembering that dust was dead skin. And yet. This was my own short story I was holding in my hands, the only one I’d published in Denmark, evidently fed through a translation program.