by Carol Birch
The night in Leipzig, when she was so upset—he’d felt something. He reddened. God knows what. He couldn’t remember well. At the time it was just a fleeting thing he’d pushed down, horrified, as it raised its head. Till now, he’d hardly acknowledged it. But he thought that for a second he’d nearly kissed her. He’d felt sorry for her. A moment, you just want to give something a squeeze. People kiss their dogs. You see that. The moment came back to him with nervous stirrings in his loins, and then he thought of her mouth, the bulbous upper lip, the other receding, closed firmly but with a gentleness that gave her a certain serenity in repose. He pushed his mind. Suppose I’d done it? Suppose I did, suppose I kissed her? What are you thinking? No. And even if I did…no. She wouldn’t expect it. What would she expect? Not that it would make much difference in practical terms. They were almost living together anyway.
He shook himself out of it and finished his drink.
Walking back, steeling himself for any encounter (whatever it was it would not be easy), he followed trails in his mind, all of them running out in fog. A pair of young girls, arms linked, scuttled past him, each casting a glance. He could get a woman anywhere; it was just a matter of paying. That didn’t bother him. There’d been girls when he was in his twenties, a couple in particular, but nothing apart from passing encounters for the past eight years. It didn’t matter. Women always wanted to make him do things he didn’t want to do, like stay in one place or stop drinking or get up early in the morning. Julia didn’t. She was a sweet girl. They’d be like, I don’t know, he thought, like, not brother and sister exactly, not that, not…oh, I don’t know. Couldn’t leave him then, could she? Don’t care how much you offer, you don’t take the wife from a man.
But then—
May I introduce my wife?
My wife.
They’d say he did, even if he didn’t. He could hear them. Christ, he does it with that. What is he?
When he returned he knocked on her door. She was playing her guitar. “Come in,” she called. My God, he must have been drunker than he’d thought. Stupid, stupid drinking so early. Now all he wanted was to go back to bed and lie down. But he went in and sat down.
“That’s a pretty tune,” he said.
“It’s an old one.”
She looked nice, with her long hair uncurled, hanging straight to her shoulders. A wave of sympathy swept him.
“Julia,” he said, “I’m afraid.”
He didn’t know where that came from. His head spun, steadily, stupidly.
She stopped playing. He’s showing me his weakness, she thought, relief and euphoria dancing inside. It’s going to be all right. “Why, Theo?” she asked calmly.
“I don’t know.” He slouched down, scowling.
“Are you all right, Theo?”
“I’m sorry about last night,” he said.
“What was all that?”
“I kissed her. I’m so sorry.”
She looked blank. “What’s that got to do with me?”
“Last night brought me to my senses,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you want to come over here, Julia?”
She didn’t move.
“I think we should get married,” he said.
She laughed but looked horrified. “Why are you saying that?”
“Why?” he said “Why does anyone say it?”
“All sorts of reasons.”
“Oh God,” he said, strode across and sat down next to her, but she pulled back and her eyes were scared. “You fascinate me,” he said. “You fascinate me more than any other person I’ve ever met. And I’ve never had a friend like you.” She got up at once and stood with her back to him, looking out of the window at the farrier’s wall. From the back with her long black hair hanging, she was just a girl.
What have I done, he thought.
“It’s not love though, is it?” she said. “Not like it is with other people. Real humans.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, turning. “It’s not like loving a human, is it? You’d be lying if you said it was.”
“Don’t put me through the mincer,” he said, “you know I’m bad with words.”
“You’re not,” she said.
“Of course I love you, Julia,” he said, desperately awkward, standing up and going close to her. She turned her head. Her black eyes were unreadable. “Why now? Why suddenly?” she said finally.
“Why?” He sighed. “Because you’re going to run away and leave me. And I don’t want to lose you.”
She stared at him for a while, then said, “That’s not enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have to ask? I want what other people want when they get married.”
“Julia,” he said, “I wouldn’t know who I was if you went away.”
Still she just looked at him. Oh hell, he thought, and kissed her on the side of the mouth, amazed, aroused and horrified.
Rose, bare, small-breasted, sat smoking on the red sofa while Adam sketched her. He was having trouble with her feet. Feet were harder than hands. He was tempted to leave them off. She was telling this story about the dolls’ island as if it were interesting. Not that it wasn’t but not in the way she meant, numinous and full of corny significance. To him it was interesting as a piece of accidental art, but for her it was a ghost story. A long time ago a hermit, once a farmer with a wife and family, lived on an island in the canals near Mexico City. A little girl had once drowned off the island. One day a doll came floating down the canal and he fished it out. Then came another, and another, then more, till he thought it was a sign that the little girl wanted dolls. He hung the dolls in the trees for her. But still more came washing up on the island, as if they wanted to be there. When word got around, people started bringing him their old dolls too, and in the end he had hundreds, then thousands.
He lived alone with the dolls for fifty years. They talked to him and sang him to sleep, he said. And after fifty years he was planting pumpkins with his nephew, and when they’d finished they went fishing off the island. He started singing. His nephew went to fetch something and when he returned the old man was floating facedown, dead. Drowned in the exact same place where the little girl died.
“Please try and keep still, love,” Adam said.
“Can you imagine that sound?” Rose closed her eyes. “Hundreds of old broken dolls singing in the middle of the night on an island. And you the only one there to hear them!”
“Yes,” said Adam, as if he were talking about an ingrown toenail, “I can see that it might drive you mad.”
“We should go,” she said.
“To the island?”
“Yes. Just go.”
“Keep still.”
“Mexico,” she said. “Signs and wonders. We pull a paper from a doll, it says Mexico.”
“OK,” he said, “borrow some money from your rich family, and I’ll sell the amp and the bike and go laboring for a few months. We’ll go.”
“I haven’t got a rich family.”
“Well, compared to mine.” He smudged the shadows on the page of his sketchbook. “It’s not a ghost story though,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Rose opened her eyes. “I think it sort of is.”
Not since the Baltimore ball had she taken part in a real social occasion where she didn’t have to wear her veil. In the old days, at home in the Sanchez house, she’d not gone veiled—or only now and then, if there were particular visitors. And here she was, with these important clever people, sitting up just as she was with the best of them. A fire burned high in the grand fireplace. Lovely rooms, lovely mirrors, silver, chandeliers, all these delicacies she was scared to touch because everyone looked at her covertly while she ate, as if she were a mythical beast who’d appeared at the table.
The crystal sparkled. And impossibly, there sat her husband, Theo, smiling with his cigar and his dark pomaded hair. My husband
, mine.
Friederike smiled at her. Her eyebrows were two perfect black curves. “Julia,” she said, “have you tried one of these little bonbons?”
“They look delicious,” Julia said, “thank you so much, but I really can’t eat another thing.”
Friederike took one herself, raising her eyebrows as she popped it in her mouth. Every move she made was graceful. Next to her an Italian acrobat, thick-lipped and handsome, sucked sugar from his fingers. Hermann Otto, humorous, his large, heavily bracketed lips smiling automatically every few seconds, was locked in animated debate with an old professor. The conversation was a mishmash of French and English, harder for Theo, who was missing the ease of those drunken nights in Prague. From what he gathered, the professor, an Englishman and longtime resident in Vienna, thought they were spending too much on this new statue for the great composer. “A lot of poor people in this city,” the professor said. “Where’s the sense in grand statues when they’re dropping of cholera in the slums?”
“What are you talking about?” Massimo, the acrobat, was following the conversation with some difficulty.
“Spend money on the living,” said Theo, “not the dead.”
“We should respect a great man,” said Massimo indignantly, “dead or no.”
“Of course we should,” the professor agreed, lifting his glass tipsily. He was a red-faced, portly man with a well-fed air. “I’m only saying—”
“Have you been out to the country yet, Julia?” Friederike asked.
“Oh, no, we haven’t had time.”
“We must take a jaunt out one day.” She dabbed the corners of her mouth with a white napkin. “When it’s a bit warmer. Oh, I’m so pleased you’ll be staying a little while in Vienna.”
“Grand funerals,” the professor said, “and fancy coffins, and fortunes spent on simpering whey-faced angels. If there was one thing the old emperor got right, that was it. Don’t see what was wrong with the old way. Tip ’em in and cover them over. Don’t matter to them, does it? Should have left it as it was.”
Theo had drunk a lot and lolled easily with one arm hooked around the back of his chair. “Absolutely,” he said, “spend it on the living.” His eyes were sleepy.
“Man cannot live by bread alone,” said Hermann.
“Helps though,” said Theo. He knew what they were all thinking. And he’s married her! Can you believe? Really? The unspoken question: Do they actually, I mean does he, do you think they really, what can it be like?
“I’m not talking about the living,” the professor said. “Mozart’s dead. He couldn’t care less about a statue.”
“You’re one of these smash-’em-up people,” Hermann said. “What about posterity?”
“Oh, posterity looks after itself whatever we do.”
Something was bothering the Italian. “Are you saying,” he began slowly, “that we should not honor the dead?”
“Of course we should. But why do we have to put money into it? Granted that resources are limited, I say the money’s better spent on the poor.”
“Always with us, as the Bible says,” said Theo, and laughed.
He’d had too much. Julia watched him refilling his glass, trying to catch his eye.
“No monuments. No churches, no cathedrals. No frescoes, no palaces, no towers, no…” Hermann smiled benevolently at Julia from the far end of the table. “What a world of tedium. Don’t you think so, Julia?”
“I think the rich should give to the poor,” she said. “Jenny Lind gives ever such a lot to charity. That’s what you should do if you have lots.”
“Hear hear.”
“Well, of course,” said Theo, “but that’s a different matter. It’s all right for you to say it would be dull, Hermann, but what if all the blood and money that went into raising those stupendous structures had been spent on the living?”
“They were,” said Hermann. “We’re the living. We enjoy them.”
“Oh, tosh!” said Theo, and she was glad he hadn’t said anything stronger.
Massimo was with Hermann. “You should respect a great man,” he said solemnly, “and you should bury the dead with respect.”
“Depends on what you call respect.”
“Once a fellow’s dead, he’s dead. So why fork out…once he’s gone, his body doesn’t matter a jot.”
“It may not matter to its owner,” Friederike said, “but it matters to others. It’s nice to have a grave for people to visit.”
“Acknowledged,” said Theo, “all I’m saying is a plain wooden cross in the ground would do as well as a monument.”
“Tell me,” Friederike asked him, “is your mother alive?”
“Indeed she is not.”
“And where is she laid to rest?”
Theo accepted a cigar from the professor. “In a cemetery,” he replied, smiling, “what did you imagine?”
“Do you visit her?”
“Never.” He accepted a light. “It wouldn’t occur to me. My mother’s been dead for many years, and I never got to know her.”
“Your poor mother.”
“Why poor?” He blew out a cloud of smoke.
“You should take her some flowers,” Friederike said, leaning across and tapping his arm. “She’s your mother.”
“I’m with you, Lent.” The professor was still chewing. “Now, here’s a thing.” He leaned forward and twisted all his thick red fingers together as if he were torturing them. “Here’s the state of things in my country. Medical science needs cadavers. Can’t progress without them. But they can’t get them. People don’t want their bodies messed with.” He pulled his fingers apart and reached for a macaroon. “So you have a ridiculous situation, people slinking about in graveyards at night, everyone forced to break the law so the doctors can get on with their work. Look at old Jeremy Bentham! What a man! Left his body to science.” He popped the macaroon in his mouth and sucked. “Soon as he died,” he said indistinctly, “had himself dissected for the students. Put it in his will. Got himself preserved, and there he sits this moment with his head between his feet. Now, there’s a sense of humor.”
“Can we change the subject please?” Friederike pulled a face.
“You’re a dualist, Herr Lent?” asked the professor.
“I’m a realist. Now my wife,” he said, smiling at her, “still has her old doll from when she was very small, and she loves it as if it was a child. Do you see? The doll is a piece of wood. Just the same with a body. Any meaning we attach to it, we put there ourselves.”
“I know what you mean, Theo,” Julia said, taking it in good part, “I know Yatzi’s not really real. But I don’t care.”
“I think that’s beautiful,” Friederike said, reached across the table and gripped Julia’s hand. But then she speaks, Hermann had said that day in Leipzig, and she’s just a girl. Like you, he’d said. About the same age too. She smiled quiveringly, holding Julia’s gaze, hoping to convey some message of fellowship.
“I don’t give a damn what they do with me when I go,” Theo said cheerfully, “they can put me on a hillside for the crows to pick at, for all I care.”
“Oh, but you’d want your friends to come to your funeral,” Julia said. “You’d want the proper thing. The singing, the candles, the wake.”
“Respect for the dead is important,” the Italian said, inaptly serious.
“For their memory,” Theo conceded, “absolutely. But not for the clay. That doesn’t matter at all.”
“I want all my loved ones standing ’round tossing handfuls of earth and weeping,” Otto said. “And the finest coffin available.”
“Me too,” agreed Friederike.
“You can have everything,” Theo said. “But you won’t know about it.”
“How do you know?” asked Julia.
“I suppose I can see what you mean,” Friederike said. “What’s the point of a grand state funeral if no one likes you? Better a wooden cross and a cheap casket and people standing around who love you. Bu
t I do like to think I’d get a good send-off myself.”
“I’m sure you will,” said the professor, “the streets will be lined. But all the same…”
“Now,” the Italian said, suddenly leaning forward, animated, “shall I tell you a story?”
“Oh, do!” said Friederike.
Massimo took a long drink of red wine, cleared his throat. “When the Medici ruled Florence…” he began.
Otto beamed. “Ah, a history lesson!”
The Italian paused and glared at him.
“Please, carry on.”
“When the Medici ruled Florence,” he continued, speaking precisely, in heavily accented English, “there is a conspiracy to kill these brothers, these Medici. But it goes badly. And of course these men, these conspirators, of course they meet terrible ends. But there is one man. One old man. A conspirator. Him, they torture.” He spoke fiercely, glaring ’round the table at each of them in turn but avoiding Julia’s eyes. He had not been able to make eye contact all evening. “He is dead. They hang him from the window. They dig a grave and put him in. He is buried.”
He paused for effect, “So,” he said, “what do you think happens next?” Without waiting for an answer he continued, his voice hard and disgusted. “The people in the streets dig him up. Take him home. You understand, they take him to his house, through the streets, like an old sack through the streets. They come to his own house and knock on the door with his head. They shout: ‘Open up! Your master knocks!’ That is their fun. Then they throw his body in the river and away he goes but down the river there are children, who pull him out. ‘What more can we do,’ they say. So they hang him up in a tree and thrash him till they grow bored.”
“Massimo,” Friederike said, “what is this for?”
“Friederike, I am sorry. That is the end. They are bored. They throw him back in the river and off he goes to sea. The end.”
“That’s a hideous story!” she cried.
“Yes, it is. And every word is true.” Massimo sat back, folding his arms. “And that man’s name was Jacopo de’ Pazzi.”
