How I was born…

They say I am the most beautiful woman in the world. I have ruby lips, a snow-white skin and hands like precious shells. In the Church of Our Lady stand images of saints created in my image. People say I resemble the Virgin Mary, but the truth is the Holy Virgin resembles me - the sculptors came to me with tears in their eyes and confessed as much. I was not born beautiful. My beauty came gradually as I grew older. It is the work of the elves. They fed me and took me into their care. Because my beauty comes from them, I cannot escape it, it encases me like a suit of armour. Once I was ugly and incomplete - but undamaged. Now I am complete but damaged. And I cannot return to my original state. The first woman to see me was my mother, not the midwife Lucretia, unlike at the birth of my two sisters. Lucretia had fled the room as soon as my head appeared. Guilt-ridden, she had paced up and down in the front garden, and every time she'd stuck her head around the bedroom door, my mother had sent her back. There was nobody else in the house. My sisters had been sent to the river and there were never many servants in my mother's household. Although she could not see me yet, my mother knew there was something wrong. Lucretia, whom she knew, was grateful to, and considered a good friend, had to stay away from her as much as possible - a misshapen child would have meant a flogging, a seriously misshapen child could mean imprisonment and the end of her career as a midwife. The baby couldn't be fully formed. It still had weeks to go inside her body. My mother wasn't too worried, therefore, to let it slip out from between her legs onto the tile floor. It was the elves - sitting on the tiles as usual, heads hunched between their shoulders, smiling - who caught me. For some reason or other I was born with a heart full of anxiety. As soon as the elves touched me, I knew why: some day my gifts would turn against me. Feeling their sticky little fingers on my skin, I immediately burst into inconsolable tears. Not because I had been frightened by my fall, but because of the pain that was yet to come. With her last strength, my mother raised herself up to look at me. Lucretia's herb-drenched compresses fell from her nipples, but she didn't put them back because she was certain that this time she would have no need for milk. To her surprise, however, she saw that I had been born with everything necessary - like every child, I had arms, legs, a torso and a head. My head was round and complete. I had ears, eyes, a nose and a mouth. Her strength flooded back and, making little sucking noises, she wrenched me from the grasp of the tile elves with the resolve of a mother. The elves gazed at their empty hands, crouched and began to chuckle. 'A girl,' my mother said. She already had two and didn't need a third. I wasn't finished, of course. It was only when she'd wiped the blood from my face and body with the end of her undergarment, that she saw what was wrong. Still, she didn't drop me in horror - on the contrary, she bent over me to take a closer look. She found me interesting. The elves on the floor craned their necks to see too. 'Lucretia!' she called. The good woman came in, trembling like a leaf, carrying an earthenware bowl of water from the River Schelde to baptise me before it was too late. Her wrists were still smeared with the blood of Orlinde, the neighbour who had given birth that same morning to a healthy bastard girl. As if afraid of some infection, she kept her distance from me. However, as with my mother, her curiosity soon got the better of her and she approached to touch me and see whether I was real. Although not yet fully formed, tiny and light as a bird, I was moving and bawled the first air into my minuscule lungs. I was as real as could be - only I was transparent. When my mother held me up to the sunlight, it was as if its rays passed right through me, turning my body milky white. Where my bones were, you saw dark shadows. Lucretia had noticed this abnormality when my tiny head was just beginning to emerge - she could see my skull and had thought I would be born without skin. I had red, swollen eyelids and little grey eyes that my mother immediately recognised as those of the First Woman, the Font of Life. I recognised her voice. In the depths of her belly, I had heard her talk and sing and scold my elder sisters. I was familiar with the lisp of her s's and her low, almost undefined vowels. When my sisters were called in a little later, they bent over me with pursed mouths and wide eyes. I recognised both the shrill voice of Idelies and the more lilting, somewhat older, voice of Richenel. Their faces, however, were as strange to me as that of any other city child. Later I would see they had my father's face. I heard them both shouting with excitement, and it took a while before I realised that this was not in excitement over my arrival but because they had seen the shadow of a goblin-owl in the crown of the oak beside the path. My mother picked me up, made the sign of the cross and looked out the window. High in the crown she could indeed just about see the almost invisible brown bird that had landed there. It sat perfectly still, as if intending to stay a while. 'Has it come to take her?' Richenel asked, jumping up and down. 'I don't know,' my mother said. 'Perhaps it won't find her.' She put me in the walnut casket in which she kept her jewellery, arranged some loose tufts of sheep's wool around me and placed the casket on the warm stones in front of the fire. I had no sucking reflex. I refused her breasts. She fed me by dipping the corner of a linen cloth in milk and wringing it over my gaping mouth. But it wasn't those few drops that kept me alive, it was the pig's milk the elves dribbled from their mouths into mine at night. A few days later news came that our neighbour Orlinde's baby had died. The goblin-owl in the oak had disappeared. translation by Susan Ridder