Night of the Aurochs

by Dalton Trumbo

  Herr Blobel’s display rooms fronted on the Wilhelmstrasse across from the Rathaus. Here, through black velvet-draped plate-glass windows, he displayed four rows of coffins to the public, the upper half of each coffin propped open to reveal the comforts available within. Artificial wreaths of roses and lilies hung from the walls between gleaming, gold-framed, oval porcelains of the Madonna and somber-hued crucifixion scenes with halos which began waist-high and continued, through whole flights of bugle-blowing cherubim, to the intensely blue vault of heaven and the angry rays of a newly risen sun.

  Because it was Herr Blobel’s hope that Gunther one day would take charge of the business as his own, it pleased him to give both Gunther and me full run of the place. Thus it was not at all unusual for us to see some of the most prominent citizens of Forchheim lying quite naked on the table to which Herr Blobel had assigned them to “drain” on while Herr Blobel chipped away outside at his gravestones.

  The tables themselves had been devised and installed eleven years earlier by Herr Blobel himself when he purchased the establishment after its original owner was sentenced to prison for gutting his clients, stuffing them with old newspapers, sewing them up again, and selling their accumulated entrails to a few favored peasants as pig feed. It was considered one of the worst scandals in Germany until shortly after the war—1922, I think it was—when a butcher was arrested for slaughtering and rendering nineteen young German boys into sausages. There were, however, certain differences. Thanks to the Allied Occupation, Germany was starving to death in 1922, and the murderer was not Bavarian but Silesian.

  Nonetheless, as Herr Blobel used to say, “Dead meat attracts rats,” and it was quite impossible to keep the embalming room entirely clear of decaying flesh fragments. Herr Blobel therefore kept a large half-starved female cat named Frija locked in the embalming room all night long. He gave her nothing to eat or drink aside from a bowl of water, and she repaid him with scores of dead rats, mice, lost birds, and an occasional squirrel. Each time she littered, Gunther and I stuffed her kittens into a burlap bag and drowned them in a drainage ditch less than a kilometer from town.

  Most of the coffins in Herr Blobel’s showroom were of wood, the cheapest being gray, fabric-covered pine. The better ones were made from carved walnut or mahogany with polished brass handles and the deceased’s monogram carved to order. The finest of them all, which Herr Blobel always referred to as a “casket” rather than a “coffin,” was of solid bronze with a trio of Corinthian pillars at each corner, heavy loops of purple silk velvet swinging from handle to handle, and seals which provided a “fifty-year guarantee against seepage of any kind.”

  Opposite the coffins, mahogany doors concealed the wardrobe department, which, in terms of profits, stood second only to the coffin division. The Germans being a thrifty race, one would have thought them too canny to buy new clothes in which to be buried, but Herr Blobel had a flair for selling shrouds which amounted almost to genius: The deceased’s present wardrobe was far too fine to be shut away for all time. It had a sentimental value that, were it disposed of in the moment’s wild grief, could later result in bitter regrets. Tailored of the finest wool and lined with material of a quality almost impossible to be obtained in these later days, its gift to St. Boniface as a charity would bring down innumerable blessings upon the head of its donor.

  In view of the fact that not only the deceased’s nearest and dearest would be present to view the remains, one should remember that present and former business associates as well as current creditors, if any, would also wish to pay tribute to one who had led so exemplary a life. In view of all this might it not be wiser if the deceased’s clothing were disposed of later, thus allowing time for thought unsullied by emotion and calculations uninterrupted by the moment’s immediate demands? Might it not, in short, be the better part of wisdom, as well as a last and most graceful tribute, to clothe the deceased in a tailored shroud, handmade throughout (as confirmed by the Royal Coat of Arms on the inside cuff of each garment) by the firm which performed the same sacred service for the House of Wittelsbach? Who but a Prussian could refuse?

  Or—and here the gears shifted very cunningly—the material had turned a bit shiny over the years, didn’t one think? The slight fraying of the left jacket cuff could, of course, be concealed, but what was one to do about that portion—small, to be sure, but nonetheless there—of the lapel which apparently had been slightly burned, from the dottle of a pipe no doubt, and then rewoven?

  Once begrudging and sometimes even grateful consent had been obtained, Herr Blobel flung the wardrobe cabinet doors open and launched into a complicated discourse on the advantages of what he called the “unitary shroud” to those who had “entered the dreamless land of eternal sleep.”

  Shrouds for the men consisted of a necktie, waistcoat, jacket, and trousers to the knee, tailored as a unit so that all one had to do was thrust the deceased’s arms into the sleeves, slip the cadaver onto its belly, and achieve a perfect fit by the use of safety pins or, occasionally, a needle and thread. Underwear was considered unnecessary, although socks and stockings sometimes completed the ensemble. For gentlemen there were, in addition to a bountiful selection of military uniforms, business suits of varying quality: black morning coats with discreet gray cravats, dinner jackets with white pocket-handkerchiefs, and even what could have been considered white tie and tail ensembles, were the tails not so short.

  Voluminous white silk evening gowns trimmed with lace and touched up here and there with artificial baby rosebuds or sprigs of edelweiss dominated the ladies’ wardrobe section. Lavender was the favorite color after white, followed by melancholy grays and dismal blues. No female underclothing of any kind was visible except for white stockings and gloves. Here again safety pins made it possible for the basic “unity shroud” to fit any female cadaver from the truly mastodonic to those withered gaunt by age or underdeveloped for lack of it.

  The remarkable thing about Herr Blobel’s way of showing his shrouds for either sex was his ability to display the garment from every possible angle without permitting his customer so much as a glimpse of the safety pins and hooks and clamps and cords and laces which constituted the “unitary shroud” and ultimately caused their manufacturer to take over the name as a trade title.

  A beautifully carved door with a “Please Do Not Enter” sign in gold leaf led one to the working heart of the establishment: the embalming room itself with four slanted glass tables (each with its own water faucet), shelves of bottles, rows of buckets, racks of cutlery, cans and cups and bowls, small suction and large injection pumps, sewing equipment and, in one corner, a makeup department with tables containing dyes, waxes, creams, acids, blemish removers, small scalpels, cotton wigs, malleable skin hardeners, new eyelashes, rows of gleaming white front teeth, nose and ear plugs, crosses for folded hands, and the like.

  The embalming room gave onto an open work area at the rear of the property, where Herr Blobel added to his already substantial income by carving gravestones. He made no pretension to sculpture, but if you wanted your name and dates and a scriptural quotation of reasonable length—no virgins, no cherubim, no crucifixes—Herr Blobel could give you a legible job at a legitimate price.

  The embalming room was rarely full, but neither was it often completely empty. Thus, through an incredible piece of good luck, Gunther and I chanced to be in it on the day old Count Firsky unwillingly surrendered his fortune to a mad nephew, who had been confined to an asylum for over two decades, and his soul to God.

  When the word came through, Herr Blobel was in such a lather of excitement that if one were not privy to the almost inhuman efficiency with which he not only confronted but overwhelmed any form of crisis, one would have thought him quite mad. He dispatched Kapitzan, his man of all work, to the desolate ruin called Schloss Vauden, which Firsky had inherited from his niece who was related in some irresponsible way to the last grand duke of Cassel, with orders to seize the count’s remains and transport them
to Forchheim before a swarm of notaries, grand ducal tax snoops, and starving creditors (of whom the count was reported to have an incredible number) had a chance to sink their incisors into what remained (if any) of the old man’s assets.

  After Kapitzan had hitched a team, tossed a stretcher onto a canvas-covered flat-back wagon, and set off at a gallop, Herr Blobel turned to me. “And you, Ludwig!” I jumped as if I’d been shot. “You run across to Herr Brinkerhoff’s shop. Tell him to come at once. I want every sealing device on that bronze casket checked out. I don’t guarantee against leakage for fifty years without making certain everything is in order.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  As I started out of the embalming room, Herr Blobel turned to Gunther. “Gunther, you go find your mama. Tell her she must come here at once. Tell her that Count Firsky, God rest his soul, is dead and on his way this moment to the embalming rooms! Tell her I’ve been holding that bronze waterproof casket with Firsky in mind for eleven years—no, no, don’t bother her with that, she knows it already. Tell her as briefly as you can that Firsky is no longer with us, and the lining of his casket needs cleaning. Including the pillows, whose stuffing I’m sure she realizes is sixteen percent pure eiderdown! While she cleans the fabric, you two will polish. Wheel it back here so idlers can’t watch you at your work, supply yourselves with all the rags and fluid you need, and polish. When you’re through I want that casket so slick and shiny that a bull blowfly can’t land on it without sliding off the other side. Am I clear?”

  When Gunther and I returned, Herr Kapitzan’s lathered horses were just backing the rear of the wagon up to the embalming room door. Herr Blobel strode to the wagon before it came to full halt and threw back the canvas cover beneath which Count Firsky lay strapped to an army cot. After the most cursory inspection, as if to make certain he’d got what he’d bargained for, he thrust both count and cot under his right arm and strode with his booty through the open garden of headstones into the embalming room.

  Once inside, Herr Blobel swiftly untied the count from his cot, tossed the cot aside, and addressed his attention to the deceased, whose nightshirt had hiked well above his navel, leaving exposed a knobbed arthritic complex of meatless bones crouched into the vaguely defensive foetal position of a beleaguered infant.

  Clearly the first problem was to straighten the body from its triangular position to one more suggestive of peaceful rest after a task well and faithfully performed. To accomplish this, Herr Blobel with one hand held the count on his back, as one would an obstreperous child, while the other swung a 5-liter bottle of distilled water from the floor at the head of the table, as effortlessly as if it were a teacup, and deposited it firmly in the hollow of the count’s sunken belly.

  With his client thus immobilized, Herr Blobel then addressed himself to the task of straightening the twisted corpse into the general shape of a human being. Over the years the count’s arms had almost fused to his rib case, with the result that it required considerable effort even for Herr Blobel to separate the arms and secure them by stout cord to the sides of the table, thus exposing a pair of hairless hollows which once had been armpits.

  Next, with the precision of a man who not only knows his work but actively enjoys it, he moved to the foot of the table where, with considerably less effort, he spread the ancient legs as far as the crotch would permit, thus removing from the inner thighs their only protection. Once the old man’s ankles were secured by cord to the sides of the table, Count Firsky’s posture was cadet-straight and so slimmed by attenuation (his breast bones cast shadows) that he looked like some extremely well-preserved specimen from an archeological dig.

  Rolling a special apparatus to the head of the bed, Herr Blobel removed the 5-liter bottle from the count’s belly, suspended it from the apparatus directly above his client’s head, and plugged it with a stopper from which extended a rubber tube equipped with a clamp valve for volume control.

  From this time forward I began to detect in Herr Blobel a subtle change which affected every movement he made, and yet of which I think he himself was not at all aware. It would have been quite wrong to call him possessed as he approached the climax of his task, but it would have been equally wrong to describe his attitude as no more unusual than that of an efficient workman calmly fulfilling the conventional requirements of an ordinary job.

  I first noticed it when, without being immediately aware of the change, I realized that the tempo of his work was turning imperceptibly faster. Then, bit by bit, his eyes grew brighter; the play of his long fingers turned more delicate and yet somehow stronger; the certainty of his movements became almost choreographed; the set of his lips grew stern with concentration; his cheeks fairly glowed with the satisfaction of a man who has set for himself an impossible task and is handling it on even terms. During the entire period he spoke not a single word to Frau Blobel, who was working on the coffin’s luxurious slumber arrangements, nor to Gunther nor to me, who were half-dissolved in sweat and cleaning acids.

  He then rushed to a jar filled with water or disinfectant in which half a dozen scalpels of varying sizes stood soaking, handles up. Rejecting four of them as unfit for his purpose, he seized a fifth, tested its blade against the horny hide of his thumb, grunted with satisfaction, and set to work.

  Two deep right and left slashes on each side of the groin started a flow of blood which he observed critically for a moment before swooping to the head of the table where the addition of two four-centimeter slashes—one under each armpit—added substantially to the flow he desired.

  Then, in a gesture that would have done credit to a prestidigitator, his scalpel struck the carotid artery like a cobra, splitting it open for at least three centimeters. Into this slot he inserted perhaps two centimeters of rubber tubing from the bottle suspended overhead, released the snap valve, and turned the water faucet at the head of the table to a moderate flow.

  In an instant, water-thinned blood began almost melodiously to trickle through glass gutters on each side of the table into the sewer opening at its lower end. Old Count Firsky’s body seemed visibly to shrink while his hones grew larger and the transparent skin he had brought with him turned a dirty-cotton gray.

  Thus began the process which would transform a ninety-three-year-old gnome into a uniformed courtier of the Grand Duchy of Cassel, painted down to sixty-five and capable of leading the march by of a full regiment at dress attention.

  “They say he hasn’t eaten for five days, thank God,” said Herr Blobel to his wife, “so a thorough flushing will do the job.”

  “Poor man,” said Frau Blobel, digging into the lower end of the bronze casket for the last of its accoutrements.

  “Well, we all must go sometime,” said Herr Blobel. “When I bought that casket the doctors gave him six months. Instead he has kept my capital tied up for eleven years. When you’re finished there, mix up four liters of Hauptmeyer’s Gum Paste Number Four, and see if you can’t…”

  At this point Frau Blobel gave a violent start and snatched her hand from the coffin as if it had touched a live wire. “Oh my God,” she cried, “it’s Frija!”

  Herr Blobel whirled on her. “What do you mean, ‘Oh my God, it’s Frija’?” he demanded.

  “She’s littered again,” quavered Frau Blobel, almost in tears. “She’s littered at the foot end of Count Firsky’s casket!”

  “Oh my God!” Herr Blobel rushed to the casket, bent down, and peered inside. “It’s too dark,” he said, “I can’t see.” Then, as he rose, “Of all the caskets she could have hit on…”

  “It s the quality,” Frau Blobel suggested somewhat timidly.

  “The casket’s been here eleven years,” shouted Herr Blobel, “why should she begin to prefer quality now? Oh well.” He turned toward the rear door and the gravestones beyond it. “Clean the mess up and sprinkle it with toilet water. Soak it in the stuff. You there!” he was talking to Gunther and me now, “you boys sack the kittens when you’ve finished polishing and get rid of th
em. We’d better feed the cat for a day or two until she gets back her strength. Otherwise we’ll be overrun with rats.”

  Thoroughly enraged, he overdoused his wife’s arm with a solution so powerful that it brought tears to her eyes, after which he bound it with cheesecloth tied in a double-bow knot.

  “It’s too tight,” said Frau Blobel, “it hurts.”

  “Tight at first,” he said calmly, returning to his work, “and looser afterwards. Half of the tightness now is imaginary because it’s the first time you’ve worn such a bandage. Don’t forget to wet the inside of that casket with rose water. By morning the whole place will smell like roses.”

  “Lilies,” corrected Frau Blobel.

  “Roses!” repeated Herr Blobel, raising his voice.

  While they argued about scents, I confined the squirming kittens to the small soiled pillow on which they had been delivered. Gunther, pinioning Frija’s forelegs, held her snarling mouth and bared teeth close to one of the glass gutters that started Count Firsky’s water-thinned blood on its long journey to the sewer system.

  Without even a precautionary sniff, Frija dipped her tongue into the last blood of the last Firsky and lapped it up as fast as it came, pausing only to catch her breath and try for a nip at the old man’s throat which, she smartly concluded, was the source of such exotic fare. After we felt she’d had as much as time would permit, we thrust her and her offspring into a small wooden packing box with plenty of air holes and hid it outside behind a slab of gray limestone while Frau Blobel, thoroughly out of patience, continued the argument with her husband.

  “I tell you we do not have any rose water,” she said firmly. “We have only essence of lilies. We used all of the rose water when Fräulein Grossfeld threw up while that photographer was trying to raise her head high enough in the coffin to get her pearl choker into the picture.”