The Autobiography of Mercutio Polinski by Genadiya Kortova

To the writer, with love.

    I.
    Who Am I? Who Is Mum? Who
Are Rosa and Her Father?
    Once upon a time in an old-fashioned
little house, so lovely with its fairy coziness, there lived a
great writer. In fact, he was the greatest writer of all time. Yes,
he was—at least for me, because I had never seen any other writers,
and him I knew well. As I said, he was the greatest writer of all
time. He was handsome, slender, and tall, with little silver in his
hair. I wanted to be like him so much: a handsome, slender, tall,
and thoughtful writer. But most of all, I dreamed of giving joy to
the world, just like he did. That’s what I had realized one spring
morning, when I had just woken up. I was still very young and
small, but so happy and excited that I knew immediately who I
was.
    “ I am Joy!” I cried in my
mother Margueritte’s ear, while she was trying to make me burp
after breakfast. I scared her so much that she dropped me. I
stretched my arms out in the air as I did so, landing on my back in
my little bed. Just like everyone else, I had my own little bed.
Then I started hiccupping. My mum started fussing around, as she
thought I might have hurt myself. She began examining me carefully,
but I just told her that she was beautiful. Then she knew I wasn’t
like the other guys, because she used to say that as far as looks
were concerned, she was anything but beautiful.
    “ I have big sharp teeth;
my ears are wide, and some pieces of them are missing; and my nose
is long, too long for the tiny, skinny face I’ve got.” She
criticized herself while she was looking lovingly at me.
    But what she didn’t notice, what even
the others couldn’t notice, were her beautiful blue eyes. She
passed them on to me, thank God, and I am so proud of them. I
noticed and cherished them—her loving blue eyes.
    So, to be conscious of yourself and to
know who you are from early childhood is quite a good thing. Then
it becomes quite a bit easier to do what makes you be yourself.
That is why I was so happy when I found out who I was. But
still…when I looked at the writer in our house, I couldn’t help
daydreaming, wanting to be a little more like him. To give joy, not
only to be one. And how did I know that he made people happy? To
know that, it was enough for me to see the happy face of his
daughter, Rosa, every time he read one of his books to her.
Rosa…
    Oh, what an enchanting
name for such an enchanting child, I often
thought while I was watching them both.
    Every evening I sneaked secretly
between the books on the shelves in her room and listened, holding
my breath, to the countless stories. Paul, that was the writer‘s
name, used to read to her before she went to sleep. There I stood,
hidden behind the numerous books on the broad shelf, silently
listening to their voices. Under the spell of the night’s silence,
veiled in a cloud of fairy dust, these two people were for me more
beautiful than the rainbow itself.
    When the sun set and night came, Paul
would sit in his woven straw chair near Rosa’s bed. He would open
the book to the pages he’d last read, while swaying back and forth.
Gently, with lots of care in order not to wake up all the sleeping
angels in the room, he started reading to the most wonderful angel
of all—his daughter, that beautiful morning dew. Her soft chestnut
hair was spread across the folds of her pillow, and her drowsy head
dropped quietly to one side as she listened with dreaminess in her
eyes. When her eyes were almost closed, the writer stood up and
left the room, making no noise at all. To my great regret, she fell
asleep just at the moment when the story became particularly
interesting and exciting for me. It was that one moment in the
story when all the muscles of my body were stretched tight from the
strain like a bow about to release an arrow, or when the fur on my
back bristled as if from cold. I didn’t have the will or strength
to stop listening to him. Just then, the writer closed the