‘Are you happy?’ she asked.
He slid his open palm down the sheet metal of the table and went up to the desk, which still offered up some printouts with a graph of some curve.
‘I haven’t touched anything,’ she said encouragingly, as though she were the owner of a home put up for sale. ‘I just threw out the unfinished specimens, because they were starting to go bad.’
He felt her hand on his back and cast a startled glance at her, then immediately lowered his eyes. She moved closer to him, standing so that her breasts were touching his shirt. He felt a panicked rush of adrenaline and just managed to prevent his body from jerking back against his will. But he found a pretext; the table, which he bumped into, swayed, and some small glass ampoules almost rolled onto the floor. He caught them at the last moment; thus he freed himself from that uncomfortable closeness of their bodies. He was certain it had happened naturally enough, as though she’d accidentally leaned on him. At the same time, he felt like a little boy, and suddenly the difference in their ages loomed so large.
She lost a bit of her interest in showing and explaining the details to him; she took out her phone and called someone. She was discussing some rental fee, making plans for Saturday. While this was going on he looked around voraciously, examined every detail and called upon himself to remember all of it. Record in his mind on a map all the equipment in the lab, every little bottle, the location of each of the tools.
After lunch, during which she talked to him about Mole, his daily schedule and little eccentricities (he listened attentively, sensing he was receiving an extraordinary privilege), she talked Blau into swimming in the sea. He wasn’t happy, he would have preferred to sit quietly in the library and examine the cat and the room itself once more. But he didn’t have the courage to say no to her. He made a last vague attempt to get out of it by pointing out he didn’t have a bathing suit.
‘Oh, come on,’ she said, not accepting the excuse. ‘It’s my private beach, there won’t be anyone. You can swim naked.’
But she was still going in a swimming costume. So Dr Blau took off his boxers underneath his towel and got into the water as quickly as he could. The cold of it took his breath away. He wasn’t a good swimmer – he’d somehow never had an opportunity to learn. In general he didn’t like exercise, being in motion. He uncertainly hopped around in the water, taking care to be able to feel the bottom under his feet. Meanwhile she swam out to sea in a beautiful crawl and then returned. She splashed water on him. Blau, surprised, shut his eyes.
‘Well, what are you waiting for, swim!’ she cried.
He readied himself for a moment for the plunge into the cold water, ultimately doing it in desperation, submissively, like a child not wanting to disappoint a parent. He swam a little distance and turned back. Then she slapped her hand against the surface of the water, hard, and kept going by herself.
He waited for her on the shore, shivering. As she walked towards him, dripping, he looked down.
‘Why didn’t you swim?’ she asked, in a high-pitched, amused voice.
‘Cold,’ was all he said.
She burst out laughing, throwing back her head and shamelessly exposing her palate.
In his room he dozed off briefly, before taking some meticulous notes. He even sketched the layout of Mole’s lab, feeling a little bit like James Bond. With relief he washed off the salt water, shaved and put on a clean shirt. When he went downstairs, she was nowhere to be seen. The door to the library was closed, and the key in the door had been turned, so he wasn’t brave enough to go in… He went out in front of the house and played with the cat until the cat ignored him. Finally he heard some sounds coming from the kitchen and went towards it from the yard.
Mrs Mole was standing by the counter and going through green lettuce leaves.
‘Salad with croutons and some cheeses. What do you think?’
He nodded eagerly, although he wasn’t at all convinced that would fill him up. She poured him a glass of white wine and, without conviction, he brought it to his lips.
She told him in detail about the accident, about the search for the body in the sea, which lasted for a long time, several days, and finally about how it had looked when they had finally found it. He lost all desire to eat. She said that she had been able to preserve a piece of the least destroyed tissue. She was wearing a long, airy grey dress with slits down the sides, with a deep-cut neckline that revealed her freckled body. Again he thought she might cry.
The salad and the cheeses they ate almost in silence. Then she took his hand, and he froze.
He put his arm around her, clevely hiding from her. She kissed his neck.
‘Not like this,’ he blurted.
She didn’t understand. ‘How, then? What do you want me to do?’
But he had slipped out of her embrace, stood up from the sofa and, red in the face, was looking helplessly around the room.
‘How do you want it to happen? Tell me.’
In despair, he realized he couldn’t pretend anymore, that he didn’t have the strength, that there were too many things going on at once, and turning his back to her, he whispered: ‘I can’t. It’s too soon for me.’
‘It’s because I’m older than you, right?’ she murmured, standing up.
He protested uncertainly. He wanted her to comfort him but without touching him.
‘It’s not like there’s a massive difference in our ages,’ he said, as he listened to her clear the table. ‘I’m with someone,’ he lied.
In a certain sense this was true, and truth is always true in a certain sense; he was with someone. He had already been wedded, married, connected by blood. With the Glasmensch and the wax woman with the open stomach, with Soliman, Fragonard, Vesalius, von Hagens and Mole, for God’s sake, who else could there be? Why should he bore into this living, ageing warm body, drill into it with his? With what aim? He felt like he would have to leave, maybe even right away. He ran his hand through his hair and buttoned up his shirt.
She sighed deeply.
‘So?’ she asked.
He didn’t know what to say.
A quarter of an hour later he was standing with his suitcase in the living room, ready to go.
‘Can I call a taxi?’
She was sitting on the couch. Reading.
‘But of course,’ she said. She removed her glasses and pointed to the phone, and then returned to her reading.
But since he didn’t know the number, he thought it would be better if he just went on foot to the bus stop; there had to be one somewhere nearby.
And so he arrived at the conference sooner than he’d planned. After a long debate with hotel reception he managed to finagle a room. He spent the whole evening in the bar. He drank a bottle of wine at the hotel restaurant, and then in bed he began to cry like a little child.
Over the next few days he heard lots of papers and gave his: ‘The Preservation of Pathology Specimens Through Silicone Plastination: An Innovative Supplement to the Teaching of Pathological Anatomy’ – an excerpt from his dissertation.
His talk was enthusiastically received. On the final evening of the conference at the banquet he met a nice, handsome teratologist from Hungary who confided in him that he was about to go to Mrs Mole’s house, at her invitation.
‘To her seaside home,’ – he emphasized the word ‘seaside’. ‘I figured I’d combine the two trips, it’s not really very far from here,’ he said. ‘Everything her husband left is in her hands now. If I managed to get a glimpse of his laboratory… You know, I have my theory as to the chemical composition. Apparently she is in talks with some museum in the States, sooner or later she’ll give all of it away, along with all the documentation. But if I could get access to his papers here and now…’ he went on dreamily. ‘My habilitation would be guaranteed, perhaps even my professorship.’
Fuckwit, thought Blau. This man would be the last person to whom he would admit he’d got there first. And then he looked at him with her eyes,
for just a second. He saw his dark hair, gleaming with some sort of gel, and the little sweat stains under his arms on the blue material of his shirt. His already slightly protruding but still slim belly, his narrow hips, his fresh pale skin with the shadow of dense facial hair. His eyes already blurring from the wine and shining with the glory of impending triumph.
PLANE OF PROFLIGATES
Reddened northern faces surprised by sudden sun. Faded by salt water, and that hair after several hours daily at the beach. Bags filled with dirty, sweated-in clothes. In their carry-ons last-minute purchases from the airport: souvenirs for loved ones, bottles of strong alcohol from the duty-free shop. Just men; they occupy the same part of the plane now in a sort of tacit pact. They settle into their seats, buckle their seatbelts – they will sleep. They will make up for those nights without sleep. Their skin still gives off a smell of alcohol, their bodies have not yet managed to fully digest that two-week dosage – after several hours in the air this smell will have saturated the whole plane. In addition to a stench of sweat mixed with remnants of arousal. A good criminologist would uncover more evidence – a single long dark hair snagged on the button of a shirt; trace amounts of organic matter under index and middle fingernails – human, someone else’s DNA; in the cotton fibres of their underwear, microscopic skin flakes; in navels, microquantities of sperm.
Before take-off they get in a word or two with neighbours to their left and right. Reservedly they express their satisfaction with their recent stay – it wouldn’t do to say more, and in any case, it’s understood. Just a few, those most incorrigible, ask last questions about the prices and the range of services, and then – content – they doze off. It all turned out to be so cheap.
PILGRIM’S MAKE-UP
An old friend of mine once told me how he hated travelling alone. His gripe was: when he sees something out of the ordinary, something new and beautiful, he so wants to share it with someone that he becomes deeply unhappy if there’s no one around.
I doubt he would make a good pilgrim.
JOSEFINE SOLIMAN’S SECOND LETTER TO FRANCIS I, EMPEROR OF AUSTRIA
Since I have not received any response to my letter, I will ask to be allowed to write to Your Majesty once more, this time in terms much bolder, though I would not wish them to be taken as excessive familiarity: Dear Brother. Because has not God, whomever He may be, made us to be brothers and sisters? Has he not divided diligently among us our obligations so that we would carry them all out always with dignity and devotion, tending to His works. He entrusted to us the lands and the seas, and to some He gave industry, and to some He gave governance. Some He made highborn, healthy, and attractive, while others He made of lower birth and of lesser physical blessings. With our human limitations, we cannot explain why. All that remains us is to trust that there is His wisdom within it, and that in this way we all form a part of His complex architecture, parts whose purpose we are incapable of divining, but – we must believe this – without which this world’s great mechanism would simply stop working.
Just a few weeks ago, I gave birth to a baby boy, whom my husband and I named Edward. My great maternal joy is marred, however, by the fact that my little son’s grandfather has not yet attained his final resting place. That his unburied body has been exhibited by Your Majesty to curious onlookers at the Prince’s Wunderkammer.
We have been so fortunate as to have been born in an age of reason, in an exceptional era that has been able to clearly express to what extent the mind is the most perfect of God’s gifts. The power of the mind is such that it may cleanse the world now of superstitions and injustices and make all the world’s inhabitants rejoice. My father was fully dedicated to that idea. It was his deeply held belief that human reason is the greatest power we as people can achieve and wield. And I, brought up in all my father’s love, believe that, too: reason is the very best thing God could have given us.
In my father’s papers, which I put in order after his death, there is a letter from His Majesty the Emperor Joseph, Your Majesty’s predecessor and uncle, a letter written in His Majesty’s own hand and containing the following passage, which I shall permit myself to repeat here: ‘All people are equal at birth. From our parents we inherit only animal life, and in this – we know well – there is not the slightest difference between king, prince, merchant, or peasant. There is no law in existence, divine or natural, that could counter that equality.’
How am I to believe this passage now?
I am no longer asking but imploring Your Majesty for the return to my family of my father’s body, which has been stripped of all honour and all dignity, chemically treated and stuffed, and exhibited to human curiosity in the proximity of dead wild animals. I write to you, too, on behalf of the other stuffed human beings contained within that Cabinet of Natural Curiosities of His Royal Highness, since, as far as I know, they have no one of their own to stand up for them, not even family – here I refer to that anonymous little girl, and to one Joseph Hammer and to Pietro Michaele Angiola. I don’t even know who these people are, and I would not be able to tell even the most abbreviated version of the stories of their unhappy lives, but nonetheless I feel it is my duty to them as the daughter of Angel Soliman to perform this Christian deed of asking. It is my duty, too, as of now, as the mother of a human being.
Josefine Soliman von Feuchtersleben
SARIRA
A beautiful bald-headed nun in robes the colour of bone bends over a tiny reliquary where, on a little satin cushion, there rests what is left of the burned body of an enlightened being. I stand beside her, both of us just looking at that speck. We are aided in this endeavour by the magnifying glass that is a permanent fixture of the room. That whole enlightened essence takes the form of this tiny crystal, a little bitty stone barely bigger than a grain of sand. The body of this nun, no doubt, will also be transformed into a grain of sand, in some years; mine – no, mine will be lost: I was never practising.
But none of this should make me sad, given the number of sandy deserts and beaches in the world. What if they’re entirely made up of the posthumous essences of the bodies of enlightened beings?
THE BODHI TREE
I met a person from China. He was telling me about the first time he flew to India on business; he had lots and lots of important individual and group meetings. His company produced quite complicated electronic devices allowing blood to be conserved longer-term, and allowing organs to be safely transported, and now he was negotiating to open up new markets and start some Indian subsidiaries.
On his final evening there he mentioned to his Indian contractor that he had dreamed since childhood of seeing the tree under which the Buddha had attained enlightenment – the Bodhi tree. He came from a Buddhist family, although at that time there could be no public mention of religion in the People’s China. But later, once they could avow whatever faith they wished, his parents unexpectedly converted to Christianity, a Far Eastern variety of Protestantism. They felt that the Christian God might come in handier to His followers, that He would be, let’s be honest, more effective, and it would be easier with Him to get some money and get set up. But this man did not share that view and kept the Buddhist faith of his ancestors.
The Indian contractor understood the man’s desire. He nodded and topped off his Chinese colleague’s drink. In the end they all got pleasantly inebriated, getting out all the tension of signing contracts and negotiations. With the last of their strength, wobbling on swaying legs, they went into the hotel sauna to sober up since in the morning they still had work to do.
The following morning a message was delivered to his room – a little note with just one word: ‘Surprise.’ Clipped to it the business card of his contractor. In front of the hotel stood a taxi, which now conveyed him to a waiting helicopter. After a flight of less than an hour the man found himself in the sacred spot where, beneath a great fig tree, the Buddha had attained enlightenment.
His elegant suit and white shirt vanished into the crowd
of pilgrims. His body still preserved the bitter memory of alcohol, the heat of the sauna and a rustle of papers signed in silence on the glass surface of the modern table. A scraping of a pen that left behind his name. Here, however, he felt lost, and helpless as a child. Women who came up to his shoulder, colourful as parrots, pushed past him in the direction this wide human stream was flowing. Suddenly the man was frightened by the thing that he repeated as a Buddhist several times a day, when he had time – the vow. That he would try to bring with his prayers and actions all sentient beings to enlightenment. Suddenly this struck him as utterly hopeless.
When he saw the tree, he was – to tell the truth – disappointed. He had not a thought in his head, nor any prayers. He paid the place its due homage, kneeling many times, making substantial offerings, and about two hours later, he returned to the helicopter. By afternoon he was back in his hotel.
Under a stream of water in the shower that washed from his body the sweat, dust and strange sweetish smell of the crowd, the stalls, the bodies, the ubiquitous incense and the curry people ate with their hands off paper trays, it occurred to him that every day he was witness to what had shaken Prince Gautama so: illness, old age, death. And it was no big deal. It produced no change in him; by now, to tell the truth, he’d grown inured to it. And then, drying himself off with a fluffy white towel, he thought that he wasn’t even sure he truly wished to be enlightened. If he really wanted to see, in one split second, the whole truth. To peer inside the world as though by X-ray, to glimpse in it the skeletal structure of a void.
But of course – as he assured his generous friend that same evening – he was extremely grateful for this present. Then from the pocket of his suit coat he carefully extracted a crumbled leaf, which both men inclined over in rapt, pious attention.
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