Little

by Edward Carey

  “Bit of a gut, sir,” I said, leaving the box on the same portion of the table where I always left him his meals. This time Doctor Curtius did look up.

  Mother found it increasingly difficult to work. She often sat in the kitchen with her hands on her small crucifix. Flies in Curtius’ house, and there were always flies, caused her to panic utterly, for they could travel throughout the house, could get into the atelier and from there spread the news of the atelier everywhere about. Mother often sat still, eyes closed but perfectly awake, whilst I moved about to her instructions.

  Two days after I delivered the parcel to Doctor Curtius, I was sitting in the kitchen by the fire, with Mother reading to me from the Bible, when Doctor Curtius knocked faintly and came in.

  “Widow Grosholtz,” he said. My mother closed her eyes. “Widow Grosholtz,” he said again, “I would like, if it isn’t too much trouble, Widow Grosholtz—and I’m so happy, by the by, at how happy we are, so, um, delighted, at all this . . . company, at how we are getting on so well, at what companions we are, at this community we have—I should like, yes, a little help in my atelier. Could I? Tomorrow would be best, I think. First thing would be perfect. I should like to teach you how to handle my work, so that you don’t harm it. I should like you to get, you see, properly acquainted with it. I’m sure you shall come to love your new duties. You’ll be an expert in a trice.”

  Doctor Curtius saw Mother give a slight nod. But I was not taken in by it. Mother’s nod was, rather, a flinch misinterpreted.

  “Good night, then,” he said. “Thank you.”

  That night, back in our attic room, Mother kissed me on the forehead as she put me to bed. “Be useful, Marie. You are a very good child,” she said. “I’m sorry, I cannot. I have tried, but I cannot.”

  “You cannot what, Mother?”

  “Do be good now, quiet down. Good night, Marie.”

  “Good night.”

  Then Mother told me to close my eyes, that I must go to sleep instantly. Keep your eyes shut, she told me, your face turned to the wall. I heard her busy arranging things, pulling a sheet from the bed, moving a chair. I went to sleep.

  When I woke up, the candle was out. It was the early hours of the morning. Mother was not in the bed beside me. A faint blue light was coming into the room. I could just make out something dark suspended from the rafters. I couldn’t recall seeing such an object before. More light slowly arrived and I began to understand what this object was. It was Mother. Mother had hanged herself.

  Fretting, I took one of Mother’s feet in my hand, but that naked foot gave me little comfort, it was a cold foot after all, and in that coldness was the awful confirmation of Mother’s passing. A woman’s death is a simple enough thing perhaps, women will always be dying about the place, no doubt several women have died as I have been writing this sentence; only this one woman who concerns me now, this one woman tied up to the rafters, unlike all the others in the world—this woman was my mother. Before, I had always had Mother to hide behind; now I was exposed. Her death was not a quiet, thinking-death like Father’s had been, her death was about business, it was all hurried action, Mother had jolted herself out of life. Whose dress should I cling to now? There would be no more dress-clinging for me, not ever again. Her cold nose had swung away from me, the signpost of her rejection.

  “Mother,” I said, “Mother, Mother. Mother!” But Mother, or that hanging thing that was only partly Mother, kept herself very quiet. In my panic I flailed around for something, some solace or protection, and found only Marta.

  Doctor Curtius must have heard me crying, for he called to me from the bottom of the stairs. “Where’s your mother?” he asked. “It’s time. It’s time long since. It was agreed.”

  “She won’t come, sir.”

  “She must, she must, it was agreed after all.”

  “Please, sir. Please, Doctor.”

  “Yes?”

  “I think she is dead.”

  And so Curtius climbed the attic stairs. He opened the door, I followed behind him. Curtius knew dead bodies. He was an expert in dead bodies and their slumped faces. And here, he immediately recognized on opening our bedroom door, hanging up like a coat, was yet another example.

  {I have cast a wood pigeon to play the role of my mother.}

  “Stopped,” he said, “stopped, stopped . . . stopped.”

  He closed the door. I stood beside him at the top of the attic stairs.

  “Stopped,” he said again, bending down very close to me, whispering as if it were a secret. He walked down the stairs, then turned round to me, nodded once more and whispered, his face collapsing into a grimace of terrible sorrow, “Stopped,” and walked out of the building, closing and locking the door behind him.

  After a long time, I sat halfway down the stairs with Marta. We sat very still and waited. Mother is upstairs, I thought. Oh, Mother is upstairs and Mother is dead.

  At last, men came from the hospital. Doctor Curtius was with them. “I can’t make people work,” he said. “I can unwork them, I can take them apart, yes, I’m actually very good at that, considerably accomplished, but they’ll never work with me. They won’t. They refuse. They shut up. They stop.” The men from the hospital walked up the attic stairs, stepping around me and Marta, barely regarding us at all. The oldest of the hospital men opened the door and let everyone inside—all except Curtius, that is, who was kept outside, the door closed on him. And so we both remained outside, and both, I think, began to wonder if we had done something terribly wrong, otherwise why wouldn’t they let us in too? Doctor Curtius, very shy now, did not look at me, even though we were very close to one another, young Doctor Curtius and I. He seemed now extremely young, a child almost, his eyes fixed only upon the door.

  Finally, the door opened. The oldest of the men, very serious, spoke quietly and slowly: “Take the girl downstairs. Keep her there.”

  Curtius shook his head, then spoke in a very small, very hurt voice. “If you make me touch her, Surgeon Hoffmann, I think that she’ll die too.”

  “Nonsense. Come now, Philip. Philip Curtius, you can do this.”

  “I’m not sure. I’m really not sure.”

  “Take the child downstairs. Let us attend to matters here.”

  “But what do I do with her?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” snapped the surgeon, “just get her away from here.”

  The door was closed on us again.

  After a moment, Curtius tapped me lightly on my shoulder. “Come,” he said, “please come,” and led me down the stairs to his atelier. I put Marta in my pocket so she would be safe, then stood up and slowly followed.

  In the atelier, Curtius looked about him, as if unsure what to do with me. Then he seemed to find the answer. Taking a box of bones down from a shelf, he handed me, with great kindness, I remember, a human scapula, the right, I think.

  “It’s a good bone,” he whispered to me, “a great comforting bone. This part of the shoulder girdle is large and flat and triangular, and is excellent for stroking. Yes, a wonderful, soothing bone.”

  After a time Surgeon Hoffmann came down to find us sitting together in the atelier, I on a stool, Curtius on the floor beside me, rummaging through a box of bones.

  “And this, you see, is the temporal bone . . . And this, ah, the left parietal . . . And this, the sacrum—wonderful, isn’t it? Wonderful, aren’t they? All my old friends!”

  “It is done,” said the surgeon.

  I kept very still.

  “Now,” continued the surgeon, “what is to become of the child? Some place must be found for her.”

  “Can I keep her?” asked Doctor Curtius quickly. “The child. Can I keep her?”

  I was the subject of a discussion. I did not move.

  “Out of the question,” said the surgeon.

  “Oh, I’d like to k
eep her.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “She isn’t frightened.”

  “Why should she be?”

  “She holds bones.”

  “And what does that signify?”

  “She is quiet.”

  “And so?”

  “She may be wise, she may be stupid, I do not know. But for now, if you don’t mind, I’ll keep her.”

  “Is she useful to you?”

  “I shall train her perhaps.”

  “Well,” said the surgeon, “keep her for now, for all I care. Until something better can be thought of.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In which one becomes two.

  That first evening together, I stood in the kitchen while Curtius tried to cook. Aiming to be useful and working as Mother had shown me, I asked Doctor Curtius if I might assist him, for he was very agitated, and so I stopped the pans from burning and helped in the preparation of the food. Doctor Curtius said to me: “I’m not frightened of you. You don’t frighten me at all. You have nothing, do you? Nothing at all.” When we were finished, and it was time for bed, Curtius watched me walk up the attic stairs.

  “Good night, little child.”

  “Good night, sir.”

  “What is your name? I should know your name, you know. I’m not certain what to do with children, I’m sure to make mistakes, but it is generally understood that they have names. What do you go by?”

  “Anne Marie Grosholtz. But Mother always calls me . . . Marie.”

  “Good night, then, Marie. Go to bed.”

  “Good night, sir.”

  And so I went upstairs into the attic, harboring frail hopes that Mother would be there again, so that I might tell her about this most extraordinary day. And of course she was not there anymore. But though they had taken Mother away, they had forgotten the sheet she had hanged herself with; it remained in one corner of the room, in a heap. And I thought then that she really would not be coming back. Not tomorrow, or the next day, not by the end of the week; the city of Berne, the house of Curtius, even I myself, would have to keep moving without Mother. I wondered where they had taken her.

  I was very unsure of the attic room. When I looked away I could suddenly feel Mother still hanging from the rafters, with her bent neck and her head leaning to one side, but when I looked back she was gone. And that hanging person did not exactly seem to me to be Mother at all, but perhaps the person who had stolen Mother from me. I did not trust the room—I would rather be in any room, I thought, than the attic—and so when I felt certain that Doctor Curtius had gone to his bed I crept back down the stairs with a blanket, with Marta who Mother had given me and with the jawplate that was Father’s. I tried the kitchen, but in the kitchen I felt the hanging woman back again, I felt that twisted-necked mother sitting by the fireplace, I saw Mother’s Bible still there upon the ledge and I was frightened of it now. I would rather be in any room, I thought, than the attic or the kitchen. But as I moved from the kitchen it seemed to me that the twisted-necked mother was following me about the house, and it occurred to me that the only place she would not follow me was the atelier. In the atelier, I knew, were kept all those terrible objects, all those secrets that were best undiscovered, but outside the atelier I felt the twisted-necked mother breathing nearby, and so I went very quickly there and closed the door hurriedly behind me. I was alone in a room full of body pieces, their characters crowding about me. But I could no longer feel the twisted-necked mother, and so I carefully made a little bed for myself under the atelier table, and begging the body parts to please be kind, and closing my eyes very tight, I finally fell asleep.

  I had intended to be awake early enough to tiptoe back upstairs without Doctor Curtius hearing me, but all at once I was aware that Curtius was shaking me and that it was morning. “And there you are! Asleep here!” he said. “Come now, time to get up.” He said nothing more about my sleeping in the atelier, under his trestle table. I folded the blanket and placed it on a shelf, the remembrance of Mother’s death rushing to me. “Come on, come on,” he said. “Hurry, hurry, you must hurry.”

  Promptly at seven, my education began.

  “You must remember,” he crouched down and said to me, “I am not used to people. I know only parts of people. Not whole people. I want to understand them; I want to know them. But the influence of my models upon me is too strong. I have begun to dream of myself in a rosewood display case backed with red velvet. Yes, and the worst of it is, what really terrifies me, what I can’t get on top of, what I can’t ignore, what I cannot seem to get over, is that in my dreams I feel so comfortable there. Let me out,” Curtius said, tapping my chest lightly with his fingers. “Someone let me out. Can’t you hear me tapping on the glass? I’m in here. Who will let me out? I want to get to know people. I want to know you. Yes. Here we are. This is it. I’m not frightened of you. Not in the slightest.”

  Doctor Curtius stood up suddenly and hurriedly went to work.

  A short while later, he turned abruptly from what he was doing. “I know!” he exclaimed. “I know how to go about it! I know just the way!” He moved around the atelier collecting objects and positioning them upon the table.

  “Let us, Marie—for that is your name, you know,” said Curtius when he was satisfied with his progress, “let us, if you are ready and if you are willing, let us begin.”

  “I am quite ready, sir.”

  “These tools were once my father’s,” he said. “My father was the head anatomist at Berne Hospital, a very great man. When he died, these tools came to me.” He went over to a bin filled with plaster dust and took a measure of it, then poured this into a metal bucket and mixed it with a certain amount of water, stirring it thoroughly.

  “To show you how it all works, so that you can get an understanding, so that you may follow the process, I shall take a cast. Not of any body piece, no, not today. Today I shall cast, for your education, if you do not object, your own head.”

  “My head?”

  “Your head, yes.”

  “My head, sir?”

  “I say again: your head.”

  “If you wish it, sir.”

  “I find I do.”

  “Well then, sir, yes, my head.”

  And so we began.

  “First a very little oil”—he applied this oil to my face—“so that afterward,” he said, “the plaster can be easily removed.” He began to apply it. “Straws!” he suddenly called out. “There must be straws! I almost forgot,” he said as he cautiously placed straws of goose quill in my nose so that I might breathe. “Close your eyes. Do not open them again until I say.”

  He brought the plaster. I felt it dripping upon me in small layers, followed by more plaster dipped in strips of cloth. The strange warmth of the plaster seemed to lock into my face. All was dark and warm about my cheeks and eyelids and lips and neck, until I felt I was floating away somewhere and might even be dead already. In the darkness, once, I thought I saw Mother, but she was gone again and it was black and empty and no one was there at all.

  At last the plaster was pulled away and light returned, and I was back inside the room. Doctor Curtius hurried with the cast to the table. Next he smoothed down my hair with oil, I was repositioned, and he took another cast of the back of my head, then further casts of my ears.

  “Now,” he said, “the stove must be laid, and lit. I shall do this but one more time only. The next: your turn.” He lit the stove. “Now, watch and follow.” He moved about placing tools upon the desk. At first he ground pigments. “Madder lake,” he explained, “cinnabar, together. And crimson dye. A little blue. And green. A touch. And crush. Very little yellow. And mix. Like this. Now this,” he said, marching to a large demijohn with a tap and pouring some out into a smaller container, “turpentine oil, added all the time to the pigments. So: a mixture. So: your color.”

  He took f
rom a shelf a large copper bowl, showed it to me, made me look into it. He placed the empty bowl upon the stovetop.

  “So far: nothing. Now, there is a stool, sit down upon it. Now, I think we are ready.” Picking up a large knife, he walked over to a locked cupboard, unlocked it, and very carefully, out of my sight, cut into something. Then he locked the cupboard again and returned.

  “This,” said Curtius, holding up a slab of yellowish murky material, “what I am holding, this substance, this is everything. And yet,” he continued, moving it lovingly around in his hands, “and yet it is itself without character, without personality. In itself it is nothing, it is no one. And yet it can be friendly, it can be reserved, it can be beauty, it can be ugliness, it can be bone, it can be abdominal wall, it can be strings of arteries or of veins, it can be lymphatic nodes, it can be the brain’s hypothalamus, it can be fingernails, it can be all, from the tiny stirrup we keep in our ears to the miles of intestines we keep curled up inside us. Anything! It can be anything! It can be: YOU!”

  “But what is it, sir?” I asked.

  “It is sight, it is memory, it is history. It can be gray lungs, and brown-red like a liver, it can be anything: it can be you.”

  “Can it be Marta my doll?” I asked.

  “It can be! Yes, it can! It can adopt the surface of any object with astonishing accuracy. Rough, smooth, serrated, shiny, flat, mottled, pitted, torn, scarred, crusted, slippery. Make your choice. There is not a surface it cannot be.”

  “And can it then, can it be Mother?”

  “No, child,” he said after a moment, “this it cannot be. Nor can it be my father or mother. Dead also. It could have been. I wish that it had. But now it is too late. They have gone into the void. Can you understand? They cannot be taken out again, images of them we hold inside us, not precise images, flickers, little bits. There’s not enough for it. There’s no surface left, and it, you see, needs surface. That is its one rule. Too late for your mother.”