Memories of the Wunderkammer I — The Curator's Record
I finished art school and got a job at this strange museum.
An ordinary art museum would not have been enough.
Here there is a great mass of intellectual curiosity, gathered as though by obsession.
So I was glad when word came.
Some two hundred years ago, this building belonged to a single collector.
The gentleman who owned the Wunderkammer moved his overflowing collection into a second house.
Even so, the collecting did not stop.
Following his curiosity wherever it led, he added rooms, extended corridors and rebuilt again and again, until the second house had itself become a strange structure, like one enormous Wunderkammer.
In time, they say, he gathered a great many engineers and set about building some vast mechanism.
A device for looking into the past, some say; a way of holding on to memory, say others.
But nothing certain remains.
He had poured his fortune into collecting, and still there was more.
Even so, he gave up on finishing it himself.
And to protect the collection he would leave behind, he arranged for this building to be preserved as a museum.
On the morning of my first day, the director took me to the storeroom.
The museum holds a treasure of the highest order, one that may never be displayed.
An automaton in the form of a young girl.
When the gentleman parted with his collection, he left one instruction, pressed again and again: this doll must never be made a spectacle.
He had taken on the wish of the old clockmaker who made her.
She was in none of the pamphlets, so I had not known she existed.
Why was something so precious kept here, among the clutter of a dim storeroom, rather than in a bright exhibition hall?
Of course, the temperature and humidity here are carefully controlled.
Only a few people are allowed in—the director, the curators.
But that is not the whole of it.
She does better, they say, with a little human presence around her than when she is shut away where no one ever comes.
“No one likes to be shut up alone, do they?”
The director said it as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
When the storeroom door opened, deep in the dim, vast space, in the pale light from a north-facing window, I could see a figure standing like a person.
“Shall we say hello to the lady?”
At the director’s prompting, I went to pay my respects.
Say hello to a doll? A lady?
There was nothing to do but follow.
As we walked, he told me about her.
She has the form of a girl of about fourteen.
Any smaller, and the mechanism inside would not have fitted.
A girl who never got to grow up.
Made from her likeness, they say, with her grown form imagined into being—an eternal girl.
The father who made her, that old clockmaker, must have wanted to see the child grow this far.
In her face there is something of someone else as well, a little older than a girl.
Now nothing is reflected in her eyes.
She will not move again.
And yet, the moment I met her, I felt it, quite certainly.
Her clothes have grown old.
In the brass of her joints, the colour of long years has settled.
Even so, she has not decayed.
She has not been polished too much. She has not been handled too much.
It is the sheen of something tended continuously, and only by the hands it needed.
There were hands that put the mechanism in order, every day.
There were hands that kept her from being a spectacle, and brushed the dust away.
There were hands that recorded and watched over her, so that she would not be damaged.
The care and the time given by the people who once loved her—that was what was reflected in mine.
And from today, my own hands join them.
Looking up from where she stands, an enormous mechanism rises to the ceiling.
Not a clock.
Not a generator.
Something the master of this house once spent decades trying to complete.
The machine fell silent long ago.
Beneath it, only the doll is still standing.
I felt beauty in this unfinished mechanism.
It seemed to me like a life whose growth had been stopped on purpose, in order to protect it.
Because it is unfinished, something in it is eternal.
One step more, and it might have been complete.
This room is the root of the museum.
Beneath this great tree, she and all the other holdings have been protected, all this time.
▷ Next Record — A Record of Naturalia
This story has a musical companion.
▼ A story connected to this world
