Little

by Edward Carey

  “To hand it so! As if it were a butcher’s thing!”

  That’s Doctor Curtius, I thought, there he is again! But instantly he looked appalled at himself. The widow was silent; she did not understand him, but she had heard his anger, and then, suddenly, she was in tears. At the sight of this Curtius teared too, until the room was filled with a general wailing. What sorrow on her face, what a choking up, the son immediately to her side. The tailor had been dead mere weeks, I reminded myself; it was a very fresh grief and it held her still very hard. She never showed herself again like that, but in that moment there it was: a human being, trying to survive.

  Then, as she dabbed her face with her handkerchief, the widow looked around and caught me observing her, and in that instant she knew I understood what I’d just seen. The mouth turned down a little, in a look of absolute recognition, and I knew I’d made myself a greater enemy. I’d comprehended her vulnerability.

  Afterward, the widow never handled a head with indifference. At first she just moved more carefully, but as time went on, I admit, her work began to show some tenderness. She seemed to register how Curtius cared, how concerned he was for all the chins and ears, how he sympathized with every fold of flesh. Curtius was in love with eyelids and lips; he would swoon over an eyebrow, fidget in excitement at a mole or dimple. If a subject had two or three small hairs beneath his nose missed by the barber, Curtius would ensure that they were a part of the finished head. It did not matter if the head he was making had burst corpuscles around the nose, or pores so large they could be seen several paces off; it didn’t matter if the head was wall-eyed, or the skin was so shiny that the wax must be varnished to suggest patches of sweat: whoever came to him, Curtius loved. And of all the faces it was the widow’s that he saw most, and in that familiarity grew an interest.

  All of this, the widow watched and learned.

  And as she learned, I regret to report, possessions got very muddled. Returning to the workshop whenever I could, I discovered new and terrible progressions. Her tools, for one, had joined his upon the table. To begin with they kept to one side, but later I saw those different tools, his and hers, moving closer and becoming acquainted. Once I saw the widow reach out and take a hold of Doctor Curtius’ trocar, the trocar with the straight shank, which was designed to penetrate the skin to evacuate deep abscesses, but was used very successfully by Curtius for making passages in wax ears. The widow took this object up and used it to penetrate calico. But that was not all: incredibly, Curtius sometimes borrowed the widow’s narrow buttonhole hooks and used them to draw out nostrils. And so, it will be understood, I had to take action before it was too late.

  Only I could return order to the household. Only I could help them. I was supposed to keep things in their right place; that was one of my functions. And that is what I did. I took up all those tailoring things and lined them up neatly in the tailor’s workshop, where they should always have been. And did I get thanks for my great carefulness? I did not. How they complained, both of them. How they moaned, how they protested that they could no longer find anything. I was bad, they said, very bad. The widow said I should be let go, sent back to Berne, returned to where I came from, for moving other people’s property; that I should be expelled from France, where I was neither wanted nor welcome. To whom would I be returned, I wondered. But my master would not dismiss me, though my actions must be addressed.

  I was to be punished for my sins, it was announced. I prepared myself for a beating, wondering who should beat me, Curtius or the widow. But I was not beaten. I wish I had been, for the punishment I received was worse than any beating: I was forbidden access to the workshop. I must never go in again. Life, out of bounds. I pleaded with my master, but he simply tapped me, fondly, on the top of my head, my servant’s cap, and repeated that the decision had been made. And that was a sort of good-bye. Thereafter I saw him for only a few minutes each day, and these were mostly observed by the widow.

  Curtius had shown me so many things. He had shown me such affection too. Perhaps, I thought, he should never have done it. Perhaps if he hadn’t I should have been quiet; I should have been an excellent servant; I would not have had so many thoughts. But he gave me a taste for it—for work, for thinking, for wax—and I could not get that taste out of my mouth. I clung to it. Every night, when they were sleeping upstairs, I went into the workshop and the wax heads there told me of everything that had gone on during the day. And I drew. I took out his anatomical books and I studied and I drew. How I longed to see him, but he never came into the kitchen to see me anymore; only Mercier would call in, now and then, to pinch my cheeks with his inky fingers before rushing out to wander over his city.

  And so, on that particular day, I was delighted at first when the kitchen door was knocked and my master entered.

  “Marie,” he said, but then these words followed: “The widow is missing many sheets of tailor’s patterns. Have you seen them?”

  “Tailor’s patterns, sir? I promise: I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  The widow was livid. Those yellowing sheets of paper I’d lifted: these were patterns belonging to her late husband. Now she accused me of burning them. I was called an evil foreign child who would never learn her place.

  “Marie,” Curtius said, and his eyes were wet, “you shall be beaten now.”

  “No, sir, no!”

  But then the blank son said something. Just three words, which Curtius had taught me: I and took and them. And then was silent again.

  But that was not right. He had not taken them. I had. Why should he lie? Why should he speak those words, which made all silent in the kitchen? The widow marched her son from the room.

  “She should apologize to me, sir,” I said, hardly believing my reprieve, but hoping to make the most from it. “She should apologize.”

  “Marie,” he said, “I must apologize to you. I was sure you had taken them. For that I am very sorry.” These words hardly made me feel better.

  But why had the boy lied? Why had he? I was told nothing.

  One evening, climbing the stairs to lay out Curtius’ bedclothes, I discovered a terrible thing. When I happened to peer into an open door, I noticed that the widow had removed her bonnet, revealing an incredible mass of hair. Moving around the hairy greatness went Edmond, diligent with a comb. The widow’s bug eyes were closed; she was peaceful. I kept there in the darkness, watching Edmond bother out tangles, up to his arm, it seemed to me, in his mother’s head growth. Here was all the widow’s softness, kept sealed up during the day, but pulled out and gently managed by the son in the evening. He tended to his mother’s gentleness before gathering up all that affection and plaiting it into great hair intestines, which he coiled and pinned neatly around her head before tucking them out of sight beneath a large black cloth cap. The widow herself tied the bow around her fleshy underchin, and with the hair out of sight hard-heartedness returned. The widow’s eyes opened, turned suddenly, and glimpsed me through the door. I rushed onward. All that hair recalled to me one of Mother’s people from her Bible, Mary Magdalene, out in the wilderness.

  The reward for my spying upon the widow in her bedroom—spying was her word—was that I was no longer to come upstairs in the evening. “Please, Marie, do not upset her,” Curtius pleaded. I was no longer, in fact, to clean my master’s bedroom at all; this the widow would see to herself. I had become little more than a kitchen maid. Sitting in the kitchen, how I seethed. I seethed until I could bear it no longer and went into the workshop without knocking.

  “If I am a servant, I should be paid. Apprentices don’t get paid but I’m certain servants do.”

  “Marie, what are you doing in here?”

  But Curtius spoke to the widow. I understood by their gestures that they were discussing money. I put my hand out. The widow laughed.

  “No money?” I asked.

  “Well, you see,” said my master
, “I do want to pay you. I shall pay you one day. Only now we do not have so much money. Later, there will surely be money and pay. But not yet. For now, Little, you are paid in food and lodging.”

  “I should be paid,” I said. “I’m almost sure of it.”

  “Well, yes, you may be right. I do not know the ways of Paris. All will be well.”

  “Will it?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  The widow said something. Curtius smiled weakly.

  “Ah, Marie . . . I think you should go now.”

  “Is that what you think, sir?”

  “Ah . . . yes, Marie, it is.”

  “I’ll leave then.”

  And I had nowhere else to go. Just the kitchen. If I left the house, what should happen to me? There seemed no other option but to stay there; it was my one choice at life. Otherwise I might fail, like the dead woman on the street. And besides, I could not flee my master. How could he manage without me? The widow would quite eat him up. She’d digest him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Edmonds, in the kitchen.

  I was standing on a stool in the kitchen skinning a rabbit, and I must have been concentrating very hard, for suddenly I was aware of a faint rustling sound. I was not alone. The widow’s son was beside me. He looked at me for a long time, and I looked back. “No touching,” I told him in his language. And then, after a while, “Thank you.” His ears, I saw, immediately reddened. He had, I may say this now, the most eloquent ears of anyone I have ever met. His face remained pale, he did not tremble, but his ears flushed. At last the boy nodded faintly, as if he had been considering something quite seriously and had finally reached a conclusion. He dug about in his pocket and pulled out a very scrawny doll made of cloth.

  “Edmond,” he said, indicating the doll.

  “Edmond?” I asked, pointing at the doll.

  “Edmond,” he said.

  “Edmond? Edmond and Edmond?”

  He nodded. The boy had named his doll after himself. This doll, I saw instantly, was a relative of the tailor’s dummy in the shape of the dead tailor. Here, in this grim home, family shapes were duplicated. There was the family in the flesh and then there was a second family, the family of cloth. You may not see this cloth populace at first; the cloth people mostly kept themselves to themselves, a sullen, sulky tribe; but after a time their coarse material made its presence known through their vaguely human shapes, in their almost imperceptible sighing. They took up space. Human feelings made from scraps, hoping in the half-light. Here was a representation of Edmond, a son to the tailor’s dummy. I observed the thing.

  After some silence and consideration, I washed my hands and carefully took her out. “Marta,” I said. Edmond had met her before but he did not know her name.

  I laid Marta on the table. He carefully lowered Edmond. Edmond the doll was fashioned of ten or twelve different pieces of cloth, mostly of a gray color, and had thread wrapped all around the body keeping him together. He was a mess of torn and clipped bits; I could not be exactly sure where his limbs were supposed to be. The doll had been repaired with thread, over and over it seemed, and with new pieces of material sewn on by Edmond. Miniature cloth boy, secret keeper, small person to be worried over and whispered to.

  We sat together at the kitchen table, I looking at his Edmond, he looking at my Marta, until Edmond returned Edmond to his pocket, got up, bowed, and left without another word. I understood the significance of the meeting. He’d revealed himself fully, in the only way he could: through slightly damp cloth. It was only the first time Edmond visited me in the kitchen.

  From then on, whenever his mother went out, the pale boy came in. Edmond brought buttons with him so that he had something to do, ordering them into rows on his knees. He was very quiet at first. I tried to draw him, but when I set pencil to paper, where usually I would start with a person’s nose, now I would be confused, for the nose did not seem very much of a nose, nor did the eyes really, or the mouth; only the ears were helpful when they reddened. At first I feared that the cloth representation had more personality than the true boy. The more I focused upon him, though, the more he began to appear, like a deathwatch beetle that comes out only after all others have gone to bed, and you’ve stayed up all night to keep a corpse company. Once I had found him, once I had him in pencil before me, I saw him clearly thereafter—as if he were a puzzle and I’d solved him.

  He had plump lips; green eyes; his nostrils were not quite even; he had some freckles around the bridge of his nose; there was a small mole on the back of his neck. I drew him several times, until he became quite accustomed to it. After a time, when I did not draw him, he seemed rather put out.

  In those days I existed in that foreigner’s fog, as Monsieur Mercier called it, which meant that I did not fully exist. I could comprehend little beyond the few words drummed into me by the widow. But later on, when she went out with my master, I had a tutor too. When Edmond came into the kitchen, I decided that he must do more than take out his doll and buttons. I picked up a rag—a word taught me by the widow—and showed it to him.

  “Rag,” I said. “Rag. Rag.”

  Edmond said nothing.

  I pointed to the window. “Window,” I said. I pointed to a chicken hanging in the kitchen. “Chicken,” I said, “chicken.”

  Edmond said nothing.

  I pointed to the button in his hand. I pointed to it. I pointed to it.

  At last he asked, “Button?” in his language.

  “But-ton,” I repeated, “but-ton.”

  Only after shirt and collar and hair did he understand that he was to teach me French. We went to the tailoring rooms, which, neglected by his mother, had become his province. I pointed to an object and he told me its name, and that I must remember that name, that he should test me on it next time. He was very serious. When I was wrong, the blank face shook a little, but the voice was never raised. It was always quiet and gentle.

  I learned French through the language of tailors. Just as my master had shown me his particular knowledge, so Edmond told me what he knew of the world. My first words were not cat and rat, but rather thread and scissors and bobbin. I knew gusset before I knew good night, hessian before how do you do, calico before hello, thimble before hymnal. I learned craquette and poinçon, knew my marquoir and poussoir, my mesure de colette and mesure de la veste. I was immersed in this world of words.

  Edmond’s most essential object, besides the cloth Edmond, was his tape measure, a long strip of thin leather with small and large markings drawn along its side. There were many other measures, long wooden rods with numbers down their sides, but the tape measure was Edmond’s own, tied around his waist when it was not in use. Edmond measured me. After months of our clandestine lessons, it was no longer sufficient for me to say to him “My name is Marie,” now I must say “My name is Marie, my shoulders are two and a quarter inches, my neck seven and an eighth, my arms from pit to cuff fifteen and a third, my legs sixteen and a seventh, my waist seven and a third.” By the time I had learned my figures with Edmond, I could comprehend most of what Edmond had to say.

  After a time, I demanded more from Edmond. I wanted books, primers to help me learn. I wanted to know more than just tailor’s words. With Edmond as my tutor, my language progressed. I began to catch up with my distant master and, after a while, even to overtake him, for the widow would sometimes stop me and ask, “How did you know that word? I never taught it you.”

  Standing before the tailor’s dolls in the front room, Edmond asked in his quiet, precise manner, “May I show you our shop dolls properly? We sell them to some shops on the Rue Saint-Honoré, perhaps five a year now. Some are male, some are female, here they are. They have the same faces and the same expressions, you see, all of them do, regardless of sex. They vary only inasmuch as some of them sit and some of them stand, and some have breasts and are slightly wider at the hips. There a
re more that stand than sit. They are based on me, did you not notice? Male and female, I am the general measurement for the shop dolls. It was Mother’s idea, she likes to have me up and down the Rue Saint-Honoré wearing such things. They are, I suppose, my brothers and sisters.”

  How many Edmonds were there in the world?

  “Thank you, Edmond, thank you for showing me.”

  “Welcome.”

  “You are so talkative today.”

  I thought of Edmond when he was away; he was my company. As our afternoons progressed, I learned more things. I learned the words for bits of the body, arms, legs, head, ears, eyes; that was easy. But it wasn’t enough.

  “I need to learn more,” I said. “I need to see things. I’ve such a hunger, Edmond.”

  “Do you? This is the kitchen. There is food. I’m hungry myself.”

  “It’s not that sort of hunger I have.”

  “No, Marie, you say not?”

  “No, I want to know things, I want to know everything. Even here in this house there is so much to learn. I think I have seen it all, looked in every cupboard, lifted every curtain, explored shelves from top to bottom. But then, just when I’m certain there’s nothing else, when I think at last I’ve looked everywhere there is to look, suddenly I see something else.”

  “Marie, have you been nosing around again?”

  “There’s you.”

  “There’s me?”

  “You are someone.”

  “I am, I do think so.”

  “I don’t know what you look like,” I said, “under your clothes. That’s a drawer I haven’t opened. Take off your shirt, I would like to draw you.”