Fraulein Frankenstein

by Stephen Woodworth

  It was a word I could not remember teaching him. He understood it all too well, though, for he pounded on the glass. The leaded panes fractured into starbursts of cracks beneath his fists.

  “No, Raphael!” I grabbed his arms, but all my superhuman strength was nothing compared to his. So, rather than restrain his hands, I kissed them instead. “Please . . . stay. Stay with me.”

  The coiled tension in his muscles eased, but he did not lower his hands. When I bowed my head to kiss them again, he grabbed my hair and pulled my face up, forcing my lips to mold to his in ferocious passion. The kiss was so brutal my mouth felt bruised, yet I didn’t stop him. Didn’t want to stop him.

  When he had satisfied himself, he released me and smiled. Those lunar eyes of his shone with new luster, for he had learned the power he had over me.

  That night, I had Minna lock Raphael and I together in the cellar. It would do little good, I knew, if he wanted to get out, but it calmed me enough so that I could sleep a few hours.

  #

  Raphael made such rapid progress that it amazed and unnerved me. He learned to speak more quickly than I had, as if he merely had to pull stored-up words from the brain of the dead miner whose head he wore. His observation was so keen that he could use almost any device, tool, or utensil after seeing it demonstrated only once. I made sure to have Ernst and the servants hide the keys to the house, as well as any obvious weapons or implements Raphael might employ to escape. A futile gesture, perhaps, given his strength and cunning, but I hoped such measures would prevent him from leaving before I’d prepared him for the world of humanity.

  As fast as he matured in some ways, Raphael remained stubbornly infantile in others. Matters of personal grooming were the worst. He couldn’t seem to see the point in such activities as shaving or bathing, so he refused to do them. Yet he also mistrusted me to do them for him. It took an hour of cooing and cajoling to get near him with a straight razor the first time I tried to shave him, but the instant I grazed the tender skin of his Adam’s apple with the blade, he shoved me away. The razor left a shallow, oozing red nick just above the faint ring of scar tissue around Raphael’s neck. The bleeding stopped within minutes, but Raphael wouldn’t let me near him with a blade in my hand for days afterward. He soon grew a thicket of stubble, which gave a manly, untamed cast to his lean face.

  Perhaps this change in his appearance led me to think him more mature than he was, or perhaps my own impatience was to blame for what happened next.

  Raphael’s aversion to bathing had become intolerable, so I instructed Minna to heat a cauldron of water in the kitchen. Oskar and Gert, the grooms from the stable, carried the steaming water down to the cellar in oaken buckets, complaining all the way.

  “No one ever took so much trouble to give me a hot bath!” Oskar grumbled, sloshing water on the stairs.

  “Wish they would,” Gert muttered, wrinkling his bulbous nose as he trudged downwind of his partner.

  They emptied the buckets into the large, round wooden tub I’d had the servants bring from the upstairs laboratory. It was the same tub in which I’d preserved the body parts I’d used to make Raphael.

  He watched the workmen pour the steaming liquid into the vat with the skittish curiosity of a cat. I deliberately requested that the water be nearly scalding so it would stay hot during the hour or more it took to prepare the bath. I then needed to add several buckets of cold water brought directly from the nearby cistern to lower the temperature to a comfortable level. Oskar moaned that he’d never be able to stand up straight again after toting those heavy pails, so I gave him and Gert each a handful of pfennigs and sent them on their way.

  With the workmen gone, I beckoned Raphael to the bath. “Come. It won’t hurt you.”

  I laved my hands in the tub’s warm water to prove the point.

  He shied back and shook his head.

  I sighed. As with everything else, I would have to show him by example.

  I pushed the sleeves of my dress off my shoulders and let it slip to the floor. Then I pulled my shift off over my head, shivering in the dank cellar as I stood naked before him.

  “Like this.” I stepped over the rim of the tub and lowered myself into the bath, both to ward off the chill and to hide my body from the twin moons of those staring eyes.

  Raphael padded forward and bent to study the bathwater. He dabbed the fingertips of one hand below the surface and held them there, apparently waiting to see if the water did anything to him. When it didn’t, he stepped in and lowered himself beside me, gazing at me expectantly.

  I picked up a cake of lye soap I’d balanced on the tub’s rim and lathered it against my palm in the water. Raphael shrank from my hand as I reached to rub the soap’s sheen on him.

  I laughed. “It’s all right. It feels good. See?”

  I spread the foam over my left shoulder, smiling, then refreshed the lather on my hand. This time, Raphael let me glide the soap over the swell of his chest. Taut over the bunched muscle and slick to the touch, his skin had the delicious smoothness of polished marble.

  My breaths grew heavier as I washed the rest of his chest and arms. Though I avoided looking at his face, I could feel that silver-white gaze boring into me. I didn’t know how I was going to wash the lower half of his body without touching him . . . down there.

  “There! You see how easy it is. Try it.” I held the cake of soap out to him, hoping he would finish the task.

  Raphael took the soap and rubbed it in his hands as he’d seen me do. Instead of washing himself, though, he reached toward me.

  Startled, I splashed backward to the far rim of the tub. He moved forward, pinning me against the wood. Before I could wriggle away, he stroked soap over my left breast. I gasped as his hand glided over my skin, then cupped and gently kneaded the flesh. My nipple stiffened in the gap between his fingers, and he lightly pinched the aureole to pucker it even more, studying the effect his caress had on me.

  “Love,” he said.

  Despite the water’s warmth, I shivered. He had never spoken that word before. Yet he clearly remembered how I had taught it to him the day he was born—how I had touched him just as he touched me now. Total and unquestioning adoration illuminated his features, and I believed that here at last was the hidden face from my dreams, the visage I’d craved to see.

  Pent-up hope and longing spilled from my heart. I pressed his hand into the cleft between my breasts so he could feel the pounding in my chest. “Yes,” I breathed. “Love!”

  He pulled me against him . . . or I wrapped myself around him . . . I didn’t know which, and didn’t care. The space between us closed, and we were like twins in the womb, our bodies folded against each other while the water swaddled us in warmth. His hands glided over the contours of my body with almost frictionless ease, tracing the curve of my spine to the small of my back, then grasping the fullness of my hips to widen the spread of my thighs. He instinctively rubbed my sex against his firming manhood but did not know what to do next. Hungrily, I reached down and fed him into the opening chasm within me, kissing him deeply as I did so. I entered him with my tongue, he entered me with his shaft, and in that moment we felt inseparable.

  Straddling his lap, I lifted and lowered myself upon him, gently at first, then faster and more forcefully, swallowing him further and further. My inner walls pulsed with his arousal, as though his heart itself had been stuffed inside me. Pressure swelled up through my stomach, my chest, my throat, my brain, until it wanted to burst from my mouth in a scream. I clamped my jaw to keep it in, digging my hands into Raphael’s mane of hair to hold back the eruption—a vain, greedy attempt to hoard his passion in my body forever.

  “Love!” Raphael’s husky voice cracked, quavered on the verge of sobbing. “Love!”

  I threw my head back, shrieked in triumph. “Yes, my angel! Yes!”

  Prickling fire exploded from my loins to every part of my body, until my toes and nipples and scalp tingled with fever-heat. No, no, I coul
d not hold it back a second longer. I groaned in almost painful ecstasy and sagged against Raphael in a narcotic delirium.

  But Raphael still bucked beneath me, the two of us bobbing so violently that the bathwater washed over onto the basement floor. “Love!” he cried, shuddering in climax. “Nana! Nana!”

  I ground my teeth. That name—a baby’s babble.

  Why can’t he say it right?

  I suddenly felt sick. It all seemed wrong now. To have him sagging inside me, like an indigestible meal . . .

  “No! Not ‘Nana’!” I stood, water drooling off my body. “My name is An-na. Anna!”

  I bumbled out of the tub and wrapped myself, still damp, in a dressing gown. Raphael just sat there in pitiful confusion. My nausea increased. I had done a terrible thing, and knew terrible consequences were sure to come.

  I bolted and barred the cellar door as I left. Behind me, I could hear Raphael bleating “Nana! Nana! Nana!”

  I ran upstairs, dripping bathwater on the polished teak floor all the way. So distracted was I that I bumped into Ernst when he stepped from his study into the hallway.

  “Anna?” He stood back and looked at me. “What is it? Are you all right?”

  The gentility and concern he displayed made me feel worse yet.

  What would he think if he knew what I’ve done?

  I rushed off without answering him. I dashed into the bedchamber that used to be mine and slammed the door. Alone, I sank to the floor and covered my face, as though the whole world stared at me.

  CHAPTER 21

  BROKEN COMMANDMENTS

  After that, I resumed drugging Raphael’s food every evening. Guilt stabbed me each time we took dinner together, as he waggled his head, woozy and perplexed, before slumping into a bovine doze. But I knew that it was less of a sin than if I permitted myself to go on making love with him. So, once he was deep in slumber, I locked him in the cellar and went up to sleep alone in my bedchamber.

  I’d put my selfish lust ahead of Raphael’s well-being. I would not do so again. As his creator, I had an obligation to be his mentor and protector, to prepare him to thrive in the life I’d given him. To make good my pledge, I resolved to school him in the morals of the human race he would one day join.

  With the month Ernst had allotted me for Raphael’s preparation slipping away, I drilled my pupil around the clock. He slouched at the desk in the library and fidgeted while I taught him his letters. At first, I would stand beside his chair and indicate the text I’d given him to read, but he inevitably tried to plant kisses on my cheek and neck every time I bent near him. To keep us both from temptation, I took to standing on the opposite side of the desk and tapping on the open book with a wooden pointer that I borrowed from Ernst’s classroom at the university.

  Despite being an unruly, inattentive student, Raphael quickly became fluent in both spoken and written German. As soon as he was able to read, I gave him passages from the Bible to recite aloud, as both Birgit and Fräu Hauptmann had done with me. I particularly stressed the Ten Commandments. With me, Fräu Hauptmann had harped on “Thou shalt not commit adultery”; with Raphael, I insisted that he repeat “Thou shalt not kill” over and over in hopes that he might escape my brother’s fate.

  One day near the end of our month of instruction, after hours of such tedious lessons, Raphael lost patience.

  “Who is this God?” He brushed a hand at the page of Scripture in derision. “Why should I follow his rules?”

  I gave the answer I had been taught. “He is our Creator. He rules the universe, and we must obey Him.”

  “Then who are this father and mother I am supposed to honor?”

  I was not prepared for Raphael to ask about his parentage. Should I invent some comforting lie? Tell him that he was an orphan, that he lost his memory in some terrible accident? But those were the same sort of lies that Fräu Hauptmann had told me. I could not deceive him that way, for I knew how devastating it would be when he ultimately learned the truth.

  “You are . . . different from other people,” I said. “Someday, you will understand—”

  “Then I see no need to bother with this.” He flung the Bible off the desk. It landed on the floor facedown, like a dead bird, the wings of its brown covers splayed over a heap of onionskin feathers.

  I inhaled deeply. “Very well. You deserve the truth.”

  I crossed the library and took Victor Frankenstein’s notebook down from the shelf. I drew another chair up close to Raphael and sat with the leather-bound volume propped upright on my lap, facing him.

  “You have seen this, haven’t you?” I pulled off my scarf and touched the scar around my neck. “And there is one like it here . . .” I turned back one lapel of his loose-fitting, ruffled shirt and grazed the faint line across his throat with my fingernail. The stubble on his throat pricked up at my touch. His angel-white eyes lost their defiance, quivered between fear and fascination.

  “You and I—we were not born. We were made.” I opened Frankenstein’s journal to his schematic drawing of my brother. “The man who wrote this book put me together from pieces of other people. I made you the same way.”

  “You . . . made me,” Raphael repeated, as if to make sure he’d understood me correctly. “Why?”

  The question struck me mute. Should I confess how I had manufactured him simply to be my lover, so I would not be alone in the world? I recognized now how little thought I’d given to Raphael’s own happiness as a free and independent being.

  When I failed to answer, he batted Frankenstein’s book out of my hands and yanked me from the chair, gripping my head in his huge hands to force my lips to his. I wriggled in his grasp even as I reveled in the savagery of his kiss.

  I pushed to break loose from him, but his constricting embrace only tightened. A growing fright welled within me as I pushed harder and harder, a scream corked in my mouth by his relentless, questing tongue.

  Finally, I rammed his chest with all the strength I’d used to knock doors off their hinges. The blow would have sent an ordinary man careening into the wall, but it barely tipped Raphael off balance.

  He let go of me and staggered backward a step. Then he wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

  “That’s enough for today’s lesson.”

  He swaggered over to the nearest window and gazed out over the countryside with the air of a prince surveying his future kingdom. I was already losing control of him, and I didn’t know what to do.

  #

  That night, I put twice the usual dose of sleeping draught in his food—I knew I was dangerously close to poisoning him. But I needed at least a few hours to myself so I could think.

  Raphael’s breath was shallow, almost imperceptible, when I locked him in the cellar and trudged upstairs to the library to sulk by the fire. I’d hoped for nothing more than solitude and a glass of cognac to tranquilize my panic. Instead, I had barely slumped in the chair by the hearth when Ernst entered, nonchalant and relaxed in his satin evening robe.

  “Allow me.” He took the decanter of brandy from my hand and poured some into the snifter I held, then helped himself to a glass. “So . . . only a few days left in the month. I trust you shall have Raphael quite ready to make his way in the world?”

  He made a mock toast and took a languorous sip of the liquor.

  I gulped mine in one burning swallow and cupped the glass in my palms. “If you came here to gloat, you needn’t bother. I’m miserable enough.”

  He sank into the chair opposite mine, and his expression softened. “I know how hard you’ve been working . . .”

  “And for what?” I stood and flailed a hand toward the basement where I’d imprisoned Raphael. “I tried to teach him to be a decent human, and all I’ve done is make him a brute.”

  Ernst contemplated the liquor in his glass. “Perhaps that’s all he can be.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I created him. The responsibility is mine. And I failed. I’m no better than Frankenstein.”

&n
bsp; “Raphael is a thinking being,” Ernst said, his tone stern but not unkind. “He makes his own choices, just as you did. And you didn’t become a monster, did you?”

  “I don’t know.” The eyes I’d inherited from Katarina von Kemp quivered with tears as I remembered the slickness of Stefan’s blood on my breasts, the weight of his severed head in my hands.

  Ernst rose and quietly refilled my cognac. Then, to my astonishment, he undid the sash of his heavy robe, shrugged it off his shoulders, and spread it on the floor in front of the hearth. “Here, sit close to the fire.”

  I couldn’t guess what he had in mind—possibly some special humiliation—but at that moment, I felt like I deserved whatever he had in store for me. As instructed, I sat on the padded satin spread of his robe and gazed into the coal-fed flames. I hadn’t realized how cold I was until the fire’s warmth salved my skin.

  Now clad only in a nightshirt, Ernst crossed to one of the bookshelves and selected a small, thin volume with a shiny new leather cover. “I know your fondness for the recent English poets. I think you’ll like this fellow Shelley. A friend of Byron’s, I believe.”

  He plumped down beside me, paged through the book.

  I sniffed and sipped brandy. “Fiddling while Rome burns.”

  “Shush! Now listen.”

  Propping himself on one arm, he leaned close to recite the verse in my ear, as soft and gentle as a sigh.

  “And said I that all hope was fled,

  That sorrow and despair were mine,

  That each enthusiast wish was dead,

  Had sank beneath pale Misery’s shrine.—”

  His voice lulled me again, the way it had after those long nights we’d spent stitching together Raphael’s body. I was tired, so very tired, and I reclined against his firm shoulder and closed my eyes, shutting out everything in the world but that soothing voice.

  “Seest thou the sunbeam’s yellow glow,

  That robes with liquid streams of light;