Little

by Edward Carey

  One morning, as I sat beside him, Father died. It was a very small death, even gentle. I watched very carefully. He shook a little and rattled, only a tiny bit, and then very quietly, barely noticeably, left us. The last little noise was the sound of the last Grosholtz thought in his Grosholtz head making its way out. I was still seated beside him holding his hand when the midwife came in. She knew immediately that Father was no longer to be numbered among the living. Gently she put his hand on his chest and moved the other one beside it, then took my hand and brought me to the house of her daughter. I must have slept there that night.

  A few days later, Father was buried. But the father in the box, which we were invited to throw earth on top of, was not complete. Doctor Sander had given me Father’s silver plate, which he said was worth money. It had a certain weight to it, about that of a tin mug filled with water. I could not help wondering if Father would miss it, and suspected that it might better have remained with him. I wanted to dig up his grave and slip the jawplate in. How on earth otherwise could he talk in Heaven? But then, when I thought it through, I realized: This plate was not Father’s chin, not really. It was modeled after someone else. Only I had his true chin, keeping it always with me, a little beneath Mother’s nose.

  Father had left behind his military uniform, a silver plate, a widow, a half-orphan, and penury. His army pension would not suffice. For Mother and me to survive, she would need to find work. Taking the matter in hand, Doctor Sander discovered through his medical connections news of a doctor, one Philip Curtius of Berne Hospital, who was in need of domestic help. Employment and usefulness, said Doctor Sander, would save my mother’s health.

  Mother, with unhappiness displayed throughout her shining body, sat down to write to Doctor Curtius. Doctor Curtius wrote back. When the letter arrived, motion returned to Mother—more than even before, as if she feared terribly to stop.

  “A very educated gentleman, Marie!” she exclaimed, her eyes wide. “Of the city, Marie, a doctor of the city! Not for us anymore the small, dark rooms of the countryside. We shall find instead tall places of light and air. My father, your grandfather, always said we were worthy of better places. Oh the city! Curtius of the city!”

  Shortly afterward, sometime in 1767, Mother and I found ourselves on a cart headed toward the city of Berne. I sat next to Mother in the cart, holding a corner of her dress in one hand, Father’s jawplate in the other, and Marta in my lap pocket. The Family Grosholtz was on the move. We rattled away from the village of my birth, away from the pigsties, and the church, and Father’s grave.

  We would not be coming back.

  BOOK ONE

  1767–1769

  A ONE-WAY STREET

  Until I am eight years old.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In which my mother and I are introduced to many wonderful things, some of them in rosewood cases, and I come to witness my second death.

  A Berne night consists of gloomy rising buildings, narrow and unlit streets, shadow people moving about them. Berne Hospital appeared, helpfully enough, looming above the streets. We were set down in front of the hospital, our single trunk, former possession of our priestly antecedent, placed beside us. The cart rattled away, longing for the countryside.

  At the center of Berne Hospital was a great black gate, wide enough for two carriages to pass at once, a great titan’s mouth to swallow patients into its vast and mysterious interior. It was this black gate that Mother and I approached. There was a bell. Mother rang it. The noise echoed all around the empty hospital square. From somewhere nearby came a sound of coughing and spitting. A tiny square of wood in the gate opened. A head appeared; we could barely see it.

  “No thank you,” said the head.

  “If you please—” said Mother.

  “Come back in the morning.”

  “If you please, I’ve come for Doctor Curtius. He’s expecting me.”

  “Who?”

  “Doctor Curtius. We’re to live with him, my daughter and me.”

  “Curtius? Curtius is dead. Five years since.”

  “I had this letter from him,” Mother strained to insist, “a week ago.”

  A hand stretched out, taking the letter; the hatch was closed again. We could barely hear people talking behind it before it opened once more and the head reappeared. “That Curtius! The other Curtius. No one has ever come asking for that Curtius before. He doesn’t live on the grounds, he’s off on Welserstrasse. You don’t know where that is? Country people, is it? Ernst could guide you, I suppose.” We heard another voice behind the gate, and the head responded: “You will, Ernst—yes, you will if I say. Ernst will show you. Go round the corner. You’ll find a side door. In the side door will be a lantern, waving. Beneath that waving lantern will be Ernst.”

  The hatch closed again and Ernst came out to greet us, wearing the black porter’s uniform of the hospital. Ernst had a nose that twisted in the opposite direction of his face; his nose set forth one way, his face quite another. He had clearly been in many fights during his young life. “Curtius?” asked Ernst. “Doctor Curtius,” Mother said. “Curtius,” said Ernst once more, and off we went.

  Only five minutes from the hospital was a small, mean street. This was Welserstrasse. Walking its length that night, I thought the houses seemed to be murmuring to us, Don’t stop here. Keep moving along. Out of our sight. Ernst finally halted at a house thinner and smaller than the rest, squeezed in between two bullying neighboring residences, poor and neglected.

  “House of Curtius,” said Ernst.

  “Here?” Mother asked.

  “Even here,” confirmed Ernst. “I came here once myself. Shan’t ever again. What’s inside, I won’t say, but I will say I never liked it. No, I don’t do Curtius. You’ll forgive me if I leave before you knock.” And off went Ernst and his contrary nose, quicker than before, taking the light with him.

  We put down our trunk. Mother sat on it and looked at the door, as if perfectly content to find it closed. And so it was I who stepped forward and knocked three times. Four. And finally the door opened. But no one came out into the night. It remained open, and no one came to meet us. I waited for a while with Mother, until I tugged on her hand and she at last gathered herself up and we, with our trunk, stepped inside.

  Mother quietly closed the door behind us; I took a good handful of her dress. We looked about in the shadows. Suddenly Mother gasped: Over there! Someone was lurking in the corner. It was a very thin, long man. So thin he seemed in the last terrible stages of starvation. So long his head nearly touched the ceiling. A pale, ghostly face; the meager candlelight in the room trembled about it, showing hollows in place of cheeks, showing moist eyes, showing small wisps of dark, greasy hair. We stood by our trunk, as if for protection.

  “I came for Doctor Curtius,” Mother explained.

  A long silence, and in that silence the head nodded, barely.

  “I wish to see him,” she said.

  There was a slight noise from the head. It may have been “Yes.”

  “May I see him?”

  Quietly, slowly, as if it were a coincidence, the head volunteered: “My name is Curtius.”

  “I am Anna-Maria Grosholtz,” said Mother, trying to hold on to herself.

  “Yes,” said the man.

  The introductions exhausted, another silence followed. At last the man in the corner spoke again, very slowly. “I . . . You see, I . . . I’m not so very used to people. I haven’t had much practice lately. I’m very out of . . . practice. And you need to have people around you, you need to have people to talk to . . . or you might forget, you see, how they . . . are exactly. And, in truth, what to do with them. But that’ll change now. With you here. Won’t it?”

  There was a longer silence.

  “Shall I, perhaps, if you’re ready—shall I show you the house now?”

  Mother, a great unhappy
look on her face, nodded.

  “Yes, perhaps you’d like to see it. I’m so glad you’re here. Welcome. I meant to say that before: Welcome. I meant to say that when you first arrived. I had the word ready, I was thinking of it all day. But then, ah, I forgot. I’m not used . . . you see, not used,” said the doctor, and he slowly unraveled himself from his corner. He seemed made of rods, of broom handles, tall and thin, unfolding the great length of himself as if he were a spider. We followed, keeping our distance.

  “There’s a room, at the top, just for you,” said Curtius, pointing the candle up the stairs, “for you alone. I’ll never go up there. I do so hope you’ll be happy.” Then, with more confidence: “Please, please, come this way.”

  Doctor Curtius opened a door off the hall and we stepped into a small passageway. At the end of it was another door, a little light glowing from underneath. This was surely where the doctor had been when I knocked. “This room,” said Curtius, “is where I work.” Curtius stopped in front of it, the great length of his narrow back toward us. He paused, straightened himself as much as he could, then spoke slowly and precisely: “Please to come in.”

  Ten or more shielded candles were burning inside the room, illuminating it wonderfully, showing us a place so cluttered it was impossible to understand at first. Long shelves were filled with corked bottles, inside them colors in powder. Other shorter shelves contained different, thicker bottles; these had more persuasive glass stoppers, hinting at the possibly fatal personality of the viscous liquids they contained, black or brown or transparent. There were boxes filled with hair; it looked like—wasn’t it?—human hair. Positioned across the length of a trestle table were various copper vats and several hundred small modeling tools, some with sharp tips, others curved, some minute, no larger than a pin, others the size of a butcher’s cleaver. On the center of the table, upon a wooden board, was a pale, drying-out object.

  It was difficult to identify this object precisely at first. A piece of meat? The breast of a chicken perhaps? But that wasn’t it, and yet there was something so familiar about it, something everyday about it. It was a something . . . and the name of that something was on the tip of my tongue. And that—what a jolt—was it! It was a tongue! Very like a human one, upon a trestle table. And I wondered: If it was indeed a tongue, how did it get here and where was the someone who’d lost it?

  There were other things besides tongues in this room. The most impressive part of the atelier, I saw now, was to be found in rosewood display cases, their clearly labeled shelves running up and down, left and right, till they covered most of one wall. Among the labels, inscribed in sepia by a fine calligraphic hand, were a host of words: ossa, neurocranium, columnae vertebralis, articulatio sternoclavicularis, musculus temporalis, bulbus oculi, nervus vagus, organa genitalia. Near the tongue on that table was one more sign, this reading lingua.

  I was beginning to understand: body parts. A room filled with them. There I was, a little girl, looking at all the parts of the body. We were being introduced: Bits and pieces of the human body, this is a little girl called Marie. Little girl called Marie, this is the body in pieces. I hovered behind Mother, still grasping her dress, but peered out at the spectacle.

  Curtius spoke now: “Urogenital tract. With dangling bladder. Bones. From the femur, the strongest and largest, to the lachrymal, the tiniest and most fragile of the face.” He was surveying the contents of his room. “Many muscles too, all labeled. Ten groupings of the head, from occipitofrontalis to the pterygoideus internus. Many of the ribbons of arteries, from the superior thyroid to the common carotid. Veins too: the cerebellar, the interior saphenous, the splenic and the gastric, the cardiac and the pulmonary. I have organs! Individually, resting on a bed of red velvet, or displayed with their neighbors on the wooden boards. The impressive intricacy of the ear’s osseous labyrinth. Or the long, thick clouds of intestines, both the small and the large—such long and winding ways.”

  Mother was regarding the room, looking increasingly unwell. Curtius must have noticed her horror, for he continued now very hurriedly: “I made them. I made them. My osseous labyrinth, and my gallbladder and my ventricles. I made them. They are models only, that is, replicas. I didn’t mean . . . I’m not used . . . I do apologize. What can you think of me? Don’t think them . . . real. They look real, of course. Don’t they look real? You must say yes. You know you must say yes. Oh yes, very real, but they’re not. No. Though they do look it. Yes. Because, in fact, you see, I made them.”

  We turned to look at him. We had been so surprised at the objects all about this room that we had failed at first to study the most significant object of all: Doctor Curtius, in the light. Curtius was a young man, it now appeared, at least younger than Mother. When I had seen his long shadowy form move itself about in the darkness, I had assumed him to be old, but now I saw him both long and thin, shy and passionate, and young, breathing excitedly. Six feet or more of leanness, rising far above us in the corner of his atelier, his thin nostrils flaring slightly now. He was so clearly proud of his room, watching us looking at his work. His cheeks pulled inward, never out, as he breathed; his nose stretched down his long face like a tightrope. Veins lined the sides of his forehead, thickly and thinly. Finally, the enormous slender hands of this strange man met before his narrow chest. I thought he might be about to pray but instead he began to clap. It was not a loud noise but an excited little beating, as of a small pleased child at the promise of something sweet to eat, a happy noise that sounded out of place in this room. His upper body stooped over his clapping hands as if some pale bird were trapped there, flapping before his heart, and he was anxious that it should not escape.

  “Me. I made them all. Every one. Out of wax. On my own! And many more besides, this being but a fraction. The great majority housed in the hospital, visited frequently!”

  When Doctor Curtius had finished his introductions, I turned to Mother. Her face was very pale and sweaty. She did not say anything. We three stood together in silence until Curtius, disappointed I think, wondered if we needed to sleep after our long journey.

  “Most tired indeed, sir,” she said.

  “Good night, then.”

  “Oh, excuse me, sir,” Mother said. “Our papers. I suppose you should take them.”

  “No, no, I don’t think so. Please to keep them yourselves.”

  I followed Mother as she carried our trunk upstairs, closing the door to our small room behind us. Curtius could be heard wandering about downstairs. Mother sat by the window for a long time. She kept so still, I feared her illness had returned. In the end, I helped steer her toward our bed. We did not sleep at all that first night in this new place. Mother held on to me. I, in my turn, held on to Marta. In the morning we were still holding one another. Three small women, very anxious.

  Before we went downstairs, Mother said to me, “We are bound now, you and I. Do you understand? Our every action must be to please him. If he abandons us, we are lost. So long as we remain in Doctor Curtius’ employ, so long do we persist. Be of good service, dear daughter.”

  When I took a handful of Mother’s dress, she said, quietly, sadly, “No.”

  Mother took the keys. We scrubbed floors. Mother cooked. We went to the market for food, but the market was frightening to her. The streets were filled with people, but it wasn’t just that. The objects on sale—all that meat hung on hooks, cut open, all those animals divided in fractions or whole and strung up by their feet, whole birds with lazy necks and bloody beaks, hanging like felons—all these, and the eyes of fish, and the flies, and the meat of living people’s hands, spotted with gore, all this recalled to Mother, again and again, what she’d seen in Doctor Curtius’ atelier.

  The doctor’s house, at least, was quiet. Curtius himself spent the day in his atelier and rarely came out. When he did appear, he seemed surprised to see us there: “Not used . . . not used,” he whispered, and retreated to his room. W
hen it was time for his lunch, Mother loaded the food on a tray, her Waltner nose flared in disapproval, and held the platter hovering above the kitchen table until she shuddered, causing the soup to spill a little. I led her to a chair, sat her down, then carried the food in to Doctor Curtius myself. He was bent over his table, a portrait of three tongues: the actual separated human tongue, his perfect wax duplicate, and his own tongue sticking out between his lips as he worked.

  “Soup, sir,” I said.

  He said nothing in response. I left the soup with him and closed the door. It was the same later that day, when I entered the atelier saying, “Stew, sir.” It was the same in fact throughout the first week. Twice, Curtius came into the kitchen to say to Mother, “I’m so pleased you’re here, so pleased, so glad, so . . . happy.” Twice, Mother’s hands sought her crucifix.

  During the second week, when we had, I thought, grown a little more used to one another, Mother and I were startled by a knock at the door. It was a visitor from the hospital, dressed in a black uniform like Ernst, but called Heinrich. Heinrich had an unimpressive nose and other unremarkable features; I recall nothing of them now, indeed nothing of him at all beyond his unmemorable name. “Delivery for Curtius,” Heinrich said, introducing himself. “I do the bringing. We’ll be seeing a lot of each other. What have we got today?” he said, lifting the lid of a metal box and poking at a muslin-covered object within. “Bit of a diseased gut, I reckon.”

  Mother closed her eyes and crossed herself. I stepped forward, aiming to be useful, and held out my hands. Heinrich looked uncertain.

  “Thank you,” I said, holding my hands out a little farther. “Thank you.”

  When Heinrich reluctantly passed the box to me, Mother closed the door in a hurry. She looked at me for an instant as if I were no longer recognizable, then retreated to the kitchen. I followed to ask her if I should take the object in. She nodded fiercely, waving me and the box from the room. I carried it to the atelier.