Little

by Edward Carey

  A deafening roar outside: the girl from the corridor had been taken down.

  Beside the body stood a tall curly-headed man with a sketchbook. He put his pencil down and turned toward us. I’d thought him very beautiful at first, but when he turned I saw his left cheek: a swollen, twisted thing, a bit like the widow’s, that stretched the left side of his mouth into a gash. He spoke in strange, stammering words.

  “Whaa-whoooo?” he asked.

  “We are from Curtius’,” I said. “We have been trained. I’ve done heads before, dead ones, living ones. Edmond Picot does the bodies.”

  “Currrrtiasss?”

  “Could not come.”

  “Mussht make the whole b-bady in wacks.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “We can do that.”

  “And kwuck!”

  “Yes, sir, right away.”

  “It phades, the bady. It is ratting.”

  “Yes, indeed, it has certainly begun to decompose.”

  “And I musht pain it.”

  “Paint it, sir?”

  “Pain the mardured heerow fah the Cunnnvunshan.”

  “You are a painter, sir?”

  “I yam Daffeeeeed.”

  He was. Jacques-Louis David. The painter.

  “Oh yes, sir?” I had never heard of him. “And who, if I may ask, is the unfortunate victim?”

  “MARRAAAAHHHH!”

  He was Doctor Jean-Paul Marat. Seething Doctor Marat, who daily called for more people to be guillotined so that the country might be saved. Rabid Doctor Marat, who called himself the Rage of the People. Ailing Doctor Marat—his illness no doubt increasing his temper—who, while sitting in his slipper bath to cool his infected skin, had had a bread knife put through his left lung, his aorta, and into his left ventricle.

  We must be quick, we must be careful, we must preserve the horrible body.

  We were the first at Marat, first of many. We took casts, Edmond and I, busy together. Only the head and a portion of the chest; the rest was too delicate. Marat’s face was caving in, his eyes as murky as oyster flesh. When we had our casts, other men opened the body up; they threw some pieces out, but were more careful with others, wrapping them in dampened cloths. It was their job, these men with their vinegar and arsenic and mercurial salt, with their needles and thread, to prepare the body for a state funeral. They took his heart, his real heart, and put it in a porphyry urn. We took his head, its plaster cast, and brought it home, with orders to bring the death mask to David at once.

  “We’ll do this together, Edmond,” I said as we hurried home. “Everything together. I shall need your help.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I know that.”

  First we swept the floor of the large workshop. Then we scrubbed the table and polished the instruments. We laid everything out: measures, plaster dust, soft soap. Only when all was neat and ready did we bring the plaster mold onto the table.

  Curtius came down. “What is this?”

  “It’s a head,” I said.

  “Business?” he asked, shocked. “Is it business?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, “a little business.”

  “No, no more. The shop is shut.”

  “We must, sir. We have been ordered.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Someone has been murdered.”

  “No more death. Just life now. I want everyone living. Mustn’t touch death. Might spread.” With shaking hands he gave me the key to the wax cupboard. “Take it. I’m done with it. I must go back. Don’t wake Charlotte, she’s sleeping. I must go back.”

  Our first casting of the plaster death mask was placed in the window of Marat’s apartment, looking down on the street for all the hundreds of mourners.

  “Yasssh! Yassh!” said David when I delivered it. “Grayed paytreeottt!”

  Great patriot, he called me.

  In two days we were able to substitute the death mask for a bust of the murdered man. David instructed us to make a full body in wax of Marat for public display. The actual body was rapidly decomposing in the summer heat and the huge funeral preparations were not yet ready.

  “Hish hall baddyyy, harry, do pleeesh harry!”

  We went back home, and to work, the two of us. The wax Marat came in twelve different sections. Where it had been impossible for us to take a cast of his actual flesh—chest, shoulders, back of the neck and head—we had had to reconstruct a replica of clay, relying on my notes and Edmond’s measurements taken at the source. We must fit the death mask onto the clay body and then make fresh molds of the whole; from those new molds would come the wax figure. We added the dyes to the Chinese wax, carefully turning it in a water bath, heating it to the right temperature, and pouring it slowly into the molds. Then we freed the wax and joined all together, then painted the sores, adding small flakes of wax for the broken scabs.

  “You’re making too much noise,” Curtius said.

  But we barely spoke a word, Edmond and I. Locked in our work.

  On the third day of Marat’s death, the fifteenth of July, when I came to David to report on our progress, the corpus Marat had turned green. On the fifth day, the heavy exhausting weather broke, rain fell, and the girl who had murdered him was executed. On the sixth day, the body of Doctor Jean-Paul Marat was at last removed from his home and taken to the Church of Cordeliers to lie in state. The fatal wound was on show. People got up close so that they might look in, and the body was constantly sprayed with perfumes. All was venerated. On the seventh day, our wax Marat was ready and was taken to the Convention itself. Our Marat in his death-breath, the figure in the slipper bath with a knife in his breast, in an agony of frozen movement. You could put your hands out and touch him. Marat not smelling, not decomposing, fresh and shining slightly. It would remain there until David finished a vast painting of the man dead in his bath, a martyr, a saint, a god.

  “Thennk yoooou, cittttissunns,” David said, tears running down that twisted cheek.

  People longed for souvenirs of the murdered man. Where could such things be got? They saw the death mask in the window. Where could one of those be had?

  Without exactly meaning to, we had become the principal source of Marat.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  A new business.

  In those weeks, in those months, we found we had stumbled into a most successful cottage industry. We made plaster heads of the radical Marat: in the morning Marat, throughout the day only Marat, into the night just Marat. We put a message beneath the words IN and OUT:

  FOR MARAT

  PLEASE CALL AROUND BACK

  “Now, Edmond,” I said, “it is for us to manage this business.”

  “We are the ones?”

  “Only us. Curtius devotes himself to the widow. It’s for us to do it.”

  “How we come on, Marie, you and I!”

  We heaved the ticket desk around the back, and Edmond and I sat there together taking the money: seventy assignats per Marat head. In those days I discovered what it was to be totally with another person, to share days and space and bodies, to sit tight together at a bench, hands touching under the desk. We were a shop frozen in time, paused, hovering for months, above the thirteenth of July, 1793, the day of Marat’s death.

  “Just one head?” asked Doctor Curtius. “Only one?”

  “Yes, sir, just one.”

  “But can it be right? One head. What if it’s the wrong one?”

  “I don’t understand it either, sir. It does seem strange. But we have always been a Monkey House filled with the most popular of people, and today they come for Marat.”

  The cloth Edmond was larger now than he had ever been, wound round with brilliant colors, threads of turquoise and vermilion and magenta, small patches of lavender and indigo and sienna, all plucked from his mother’s abandoned workshop. The cloth Edmond was
as bold and brilliant and handsome as the flesh Edmond was formerly reserved and aloof and plain.

  “I measured your Marta,” he said.

  “Go on, Edmond,” I said.

  “I remember that.”

  “What else?”

  “I visited you at night. I’ve thought of it so often.”

  “Yes, oh yes.”

  It might have been the unaccustomed sound of Edmond talking so much. It might have been the people calling for Marat heads. Or perhaps it was the constant presence of Curtius about the bed, his adoration and attention, his thousand tales of the human body. Whatever the cause, something began to stir inside the remainder of the Widow Picot.

  Doctor Curtius said she was making more noises, that he’d seen her looking at the walls and not the ceiling. Poor Doctor Curtius, we said to each other, poor man, she looks just the same, he’s so fond. But one morning when Edmond went in to see her, her eyes moved from the ceiling to the wall, and then—he swore it—they fixed upon him, and once they were on him they did not leave him. He went to one side of the room, they followed. He went to the other, they followed. Edmond screamed. We came running.

  “Look! Look!”

  By the time we had arrived, she was asleep again. But the next day, when I came in, Curtius was talking to her, and her sounds had some new intelligence to them.

  “Wuuuuuuur,” she said.

  Come again.

  “Wuuuuuuuuurrrrr,” she said.

  “Oh, yes we were, we were indeed,” he said, “but not any longer.”

  “Work, Widow Picot?” I asked. “Do you mean work?”

  “Wuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” she said.

  I brought her some old clothes, some old staff uniforms, and she struggled to hold on to them. When I pressed the old material to her cheek, she started crying. The widow was trying to come back—perhaps not all of her, but a part. We heaved her out of the bed. We put her in a barrow and pushed her around the upstairs rooms. We gave her things to play with; often she threw them to the floor, as if for the pleasure of watching us fetch them back. One morning Doctor Curtius leaned over her and, with a quick swipe of scalpel, severed the cord of her cap. The cap fell away, but the hair did not. A smell was instantly in the room. There was too much privacy in that smell. A vast hair knot of brown and gray and white, not pleasant colors, but colors of neglect. The widow’s hair had grown solid, it had turned almost into bone. Curtius hummed, hovering above it with an ivory comb, not knowing where to strike first. He tried here and there, put the teeth in, pulled a little, and the widow’s whole head went back. Edmond watched in trauma. Next Curtius took up a pair of long-necked clamps with two forked heads, designed for surgery of the uterus; with this he managed to puzzle out some of the hair, to unravel some of those old plaits. Some of the hair then fell away of its own accord. How Curtius trembled when he held the widow’s terrible tangled, thick, matted, strangled, bumpy, fettered, time-gnawed, rat-tailed, stale, and lifeless hair in his hands. While her cap was off, all her love was out again, and how strange the love had grown; what a feeble, rickety, odd person that love was. Curtius attempted to straighten it all out.

  She bit him.

  He stood in front of her aghast. And then he clapped. “How you come on, Charlotte, how you come on! Bite again. Bite now!”

  She had indeed come back. But she was not her former self. She suffered Curtius to pick at her hair, sometimes let him trim it; he carefully, lovingly, pruned her. Edmond showed her the old account books; she, using her working hand, ripped some pages out. We carried her down into the great hall, but it was so broken now, full of empty seats where wax people had once sat, empty plinths. We passed her in front of the remaining wax people, but she gave no sign of caring. I showed her the new work, the many shelves of Marat in plaster, but she couldn’t be made to understand. I showed her the money we had made, but it was the new money, the assignat, and each time we placed it in her hand she let it fall. Then Edmond grasped her under her armpits, my master and I each cradled a leg, and we carried her back upstairs. She preferred, I think, to be in her room.

  It was Edmond who brought up the dummy of Henri Picot, very drab now, bottomed out after Martin Millot—and any fellow thieves—had had at him, a very shrunken chest.

  “I want you, Mother, to remember Father and to remember me. I am Edmond, your son. It may be that I look different from how I once was, that may well be, and you might struggle to recognize me. But I want you to know me as I truly am. Your son, grown strong at last.”

  Curtius chewed on his knuckle, doubled up, looking away. Edmond set his deflated father in front of his mother, and she looked at it, and she looked at it, and she looked at it, but she saw nothing there.

  “Father,” remembered Edmond, “spoke in a very quiet voice, a whisper almost.”

  Curtius ducked, terrified of the widow remembering her husband.

  The widow looked at the ceiling.

  “Father,” remembered Edmond, “sometimes nodded when he talked.”

  Curtius nodded repeatedly, furious at himself. He had got so used to mimicking the faces he modeled—trying so hard to understand them—that it had become a habit with him. And now, as Edmond recalled his father, my master involuntarily imitated him.

  The widow looked at the ceiling.

  “Father,” remembered Edmond in triumph, “would sing hymns as he worked.”

  “No! He didn’t!” whispered Curtius, but he hummed a very little.

  The widow looked at the ceiling.

  “Father,” shouted Edmond, my Edmond so strong, “was pigeon-toed!”

  “Oh, God!” said Curtius, turning his toes inward.

  And the widow looked at the ceiling, but frowned.

  “Father . . .” yelled Edmond. “Father’s ears stuck out.”

  “Help! Help! Help!” screamed Curtius, cupping his own ears.

  But the widow had fallen asleep.

  Back at our small business, each time I opened the mold, I wondered if it would be someone else this time, if someone different might be lurking within, but it was only ever Marat. Sometimes, when I opened the mold, I could not help myself: I was sick.

  “It’s the head,” I said. “It’s only the head. I feel better when I look away.”

  So far had we come along in this domestic life that the following mundane, everyday conversation could be had, containing the sort of information that might occur in other houses where ordinary people went about their lives.

  “No,” said Edmond, looking very serious. “I do believe I’ve worked it out. It’s not the head, Marie.”

  “Is it not?”

  “No. No. You’re pregnant.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Edmond keeps company.

  On August twenty-third, a declaration called the Levée en Masse was made. The male population was required for military duty. Men were rounded up and marched off. Young men about their daily business were seized in the streets.

  In the Monkey House, Edmond began to exist only behind closed shutters. Then even that was not enough. He must return to the attic.

  “No, Marie. I’ll not go back up there again.”

  “For your safety you must.”

  “I hate it there.”

  “But it is safest.”

  “Is it? How can you say that? Have you stayed up there? That place has a terrible hold on a person. It dominates so.”

  “No,” I said. “Not anymore, not now. Not who you are now.”

  I went up to see him whenever I could, but he must stay hidden. If anyone should catch a glimpse of him, if anyone should hear him, he would be taken away and all would be lost. Edmond stayed upstairs, and downstairs no one called for him yet. In the meantime, the visitors purchasing Marats told me everything.

  “Mercier has been arrested—did you not hear?”


  “Poor Monsieur Mercier! I hadn’t heard,” I said.

  “Then you don’t know who it was that arrested him?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It was Jacques Beauvisage.”

  “Have you seen Jacques? Do you know where he is?”

  “It’s what I was told. I was only told it was him.”

  Edmond resigned himself to the top, with the wooden doll of me and his cloth people. He put all the shop dolls in one room, all in a grouping. Sometimes he would stand himself among them, as if they had all been convened for a meeting of a guild of mannequins. We stored dried food up there, just in case we were taken away. So that in our absence he could ration himself.

  With Edmond upstairs, Doctor Curtius hastened the disintegration of Henri Picot. When no one was looking, he nonchalantly tugged upon the seams; he snipped off pieces; he used little patches of Henri Picot to block a hole in a wall. One day I saw that the former tailor’s dummy had now shrunk to no more than a pitiful rag which he kept in his pocket and occasionally used to wipe the widow’s brow. “Who’s this, who’s this now?” he asked her, holding up the rag, but she could not say and he nodded at that.

  Another time, Curtius said to me, “I know anatomy. I’m acquainted with the human form. There were parts of mothers brought to me with puerperal exhaustion. I have seen heavy torsos come in. One I remember very well, she had not been so busied with as the others. I opened it up”—his voice now a whisper—“little person inside. What, Little, what, Marie, have you got there?”

  “Baby,” I said.

  “A real one?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I hope so.”

  “How did it get in there?”

  “The usual way.”

  He looked very confused. I pointed up at the ceiling.

  “Oh!” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”