A Lady in Shadows

by Lene Kaaberbøl

“It is not possible at the moment,” I said.

  “I see. Well, then, there is only one thing to do. Could I convince you to seek admission to the Institute of Physiology instead? There I do have a lecturer who is not only willing but has specifically requested female students.”

  I had lowered my head to hide the tears that burned in the corners of my eyes. Now I looked up again.

  “Physiology?” I asked. “Including anatomical studies?”

  “That is usually a part of the curriculum,” he said with a faint smile. “You will probably have to dissect more frogs than you care to, but it is still a basic study that may be of use to you. And there is nothing to prevent you from later specializing in human physiology.”

  If I had tried to embrace him, he would no doubt have misinterpreted it. I limited myself to shaking his hand rather more warmly than at the beginning of the conversation.

  “Thank you very much,” I said.

  “Do not thank me until you are sure you have something to thank me for. Docent Althauser is not a patient lecturer, but he is a highly capable scientist. Would you like to meet him?”

  I do not know if Professor Künzli normally accompanied his new students through the hallways of the university to present them to his staff. Probably not. But I was grateful for his gallant effort, even if it did arise from the unwanted special status my sex gave me here, and even if the introduction itself consisted of a highly informal: “Adrian! She is here. Mademoiselle Karno, this is Docent Althauser. Will you be able to find your way out? Adrian, I will see you after lunch!”

  After which he continued down the hall without further ado and left me standing in the door, like a child someone had forgotten to pick up.

  The room was high ceilinged and full of light, with windows that had to be close to four meters high. The smells that reached me immediately made me feel more at home than if we had met in an office. Carbolic, methane, alcohol, formaldehyde, and a whiff of ammonia—the laboratory’s unique perfume.

  Docent Althauser looked up. He was of medium height, with heavy dark eyes under drooping eyelids, lending him an appearance somewhat reminiscent of an English bulldog. His dark hair had been combed across the crown from a side parting that looked as if it had been drawn with a ruler, and he was clean shaven except for a well-trimmed little mustache. He threw a quick glance at me, completely free of the kindness the professor had exuded. Then he turned again to the work I had interrupted.

  “Mademoiselle,” he said. “Come closer. Tell me what you see here.”

  What he was inviting me to look at was a set of organs that he had just placed on a white porcelain tray, having removed them from the glass jar in which they had been stored—that was why the smell of formaldehyde was so unusually pronounced. At first glance, it was just a pile of formless pale puce tissue, and it was difficult to determine what animal it came from, let alone which organs were on display.

  He held a pair of tweezers in one hand, and a scalpel, probe, and retractors lay ready on the white cloth next to the tray.

  “May I?” I asked.

  He handed me the tweezers and retreated from the table. I had the clear sensation that he was studying me while I studied the specimen, which was fairly distracting.

  If only it had been a human organ. There were by now not many areas in human anatomy that were foreign to me, no matter which angle I considered them from. But this . . . I tried to separate the pale membranes and excrescences in the hope of finding something I recognized. I realized fairly quickly that it had to be something to do with reproduction, but from what had to be the vagina there were two cervixes. Not only one uterine chamber but two . . . A cat? No, wait.

  “A rabbit?” I said a bit hesitantly.

  “Correct,” he said. He stood behind me now and looked over my shoulder, while still attempting to maintain a seemly distance. “But on what do you base your conclusion?”

  “The double uterus and the size.”

  “Good. You clearly have a basic knowledge of anatomy.”

  I did not know how to respond to that. I had more than “a basic knowledge” at least as far as human anatomy was concerned, but I sensed that it would be a mistake to say so.

  “Good,” he repeated at last, as if he was also having trouble figuring out what words the situation required. “You may tell the registrar that you have been admitted and be under my tuition in the upcoming semester. You will be informed of time and place.”

  The conversation was clearly over. I set aside the instruments with careful precision. Did he understand how much this meant to me? He was still barely looking at me, at least not when I was looking at him. Not once during the entire session had he met my eyes. I had no idea whether it was indifference or arrogance, or perhaps even the opposite, though he did not otherwise appear uncertain or shy.

  It did not matter, I told myself. He could look at me or not; the main thing was that he had handed me the keys to what I wished for most of all in the whole world: knowledge.

  “Good-bye, monsieur.”

  He just nodded. “From now on, mademoiselle, you should probably address me as Docent Althauser, or Monsieur le Professeur if you prefer.”

  And that was apparently that, or very nearly. Just before I reached the door, he added, “I understand that your father is a doctor?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good,” he said for the third time, with a tone that suggested that this explained a great deal. And perhaps it did.

  I was accepted. I was accepted. I was accepted!

  This amazing fact kept reverberating inside me, crowding out any attempt at concerted thought. Elise’s wild shrieks of triumph, my father’s calmer but clearly sincere congratulations, the cream gâteaux that Madame Vogler insisted were indispensable to the celebrations—this was all wonderful and imbued the intoxication with a seltzer-like fizz. But as I was lying in my bed that evening trying to sleep, it was not gâteaux or happy smiles that danced behind my closed eyelids. For some reason, I kept seeing the pale rabbit organs glistening with formaldehyde, followed, as if there was an irrational yet still strangely logical connection between the two, by Rosalba Lombardi’s lacerated abdomen.

  It finally goaded me back into full consciousness, and I sat up and relit my bedside candle.

  Where had I seen . . . Where had I read . . .

  I could not wrench myself away from this tenuous thread of a connection. Even though the exhaustion of the day’s events made my limbs leaden and unresponsive, I knew I would not be able to sleep now. I threw a shawl around my shoulders and tiptoed downstairs to the salon. I turned up the lamp by the table, fetched a pile of my father’s old copies of Médecine Aujourd’hui carefully bound by year, and began to turn the pages.

  It took me several hours, but at last I found it.

  A young Italian woman, Julia Cavallini, had contracted rickets as a child and as a result suffered from a deformation of her legs, back, and hips. In 1876, at the age of twenty-five, she was in a state of advanced pregnancy, with no chance of being able to give birth normally. Until then, the cesarean procedure had had a morbidity of nearly 100 percent for both mother and child, in the case of the mother usually because of hemorrhaging. But Julia’s doctor, Eduardo Porro, decided to perform the operation in a new way. He would prepare to take out the entire uterus, performing a full hysterectomy, before he attempted to deliver the child. In this way, he hoped to be able to stop possible bleeding.

  He succeeded.

  “At 4:51 we began to cut through the abdominal wall, layer by layer, through a twelve-centimeter-long median incision along the linea alba. Having opened the abdominal cavity in this way, we immediately began the incision of the uterus, in the same direction and of the same length as the abdominal incision. Unable to deliver the head with my right hand in the uterus, I instead extracted the right leg and right arm, the left leg and left arm, and the trunk, whereupon the head followed easily. We delivered a large female child, weighing 3300 grams, ali
ve, well formed, and healthy, and she began to cry spontaneously. After we had tied and cut the umbilical cord, we extracted the intact placenta, together with most of the umbilical sac. It was providential that we had prepared for the hysterectomy, because the profuse bleeding from the uterus could not be stopped; otherwise the patient would surely have died.”

  The article was accompanied by two pictures of Julia Cavallini during her recovery, in profile and en face, standing next to a sofa, which she seemed to need for support. She was naked, and you could see the healing scar from the cesarean clearly, as well as the deformities the rickets had given her. She was only 142 centimeters tall and looked like a child next to the bulky chesterfield, but she was the first woman in the world to survive a cesarean section and receive a living child.

  Porro’s effort was groundbreaking, and it was far from the first time I had studied the miraculous pictures of Julia Cavallini. Now I did so from a different perspective.

  The scar that ran the length of Julia’s abdomen looked dramatic, but I reminded myself that she was a very small woman. I knew from the article that the incision had been precisely twelve centimeters long, running with symmetric precision along the midline of her body.

  I carefully placed a bookmark in the article before I closed the 1876 volume and carried it with me upstairs. When I passed my father’s door, I noticed that there was light from beneath it. I knocked quietly.

  “Papa? Are you awake?”

  “What is it?” he asked, clearly not fully in Morpheus’s embrace. He had always had a tendency toward insomnia, and many years of interrupted nights and disturbed sleep patterns had not improved matters.

  I opened the door. He was sitting at the small desk by the window, dressed in a halfhearted combination of breeches and nightshirt, with bare feet in the Turkish slippers that had always seemed to me to be an aberration, far too exotic for a man of my father’s less than flamboyant temperament. Furthermore, they were now in such a state of threadbareness that they were barely functional, yet he resisted all efforts to replace them with something more suitable, probably because they had been a present from my mother.

  “Julia Cavallini,” I said. “Porro’s procedure. Papa, might someone have attempted to deliver Rosalba Lombardi by cesarean section—only with less skill than Porro?”

  June 27, 1894

  “I understand,” said Police Inspector Marot, “that Madeleine has a theory about the murder of Rosalba Lombardi.”

  I could tell that he was listening only to be polite, and that even politeness was wearing thin. There was nothing challenging or questioning in his tone of voice, and the aggressive energy that usually characterized him was noticeably absent. He slumped heavily on the café chair, and his eyes, somewhat sunken at the best of times, were red rimmed with fatigue.

  We had found him in a café not far from the coal merchant’s yard in Rue Colbert. He and his men had more or less commandeered the back room, and in the course of the short time I was there, at least eight different people came in, made hasty notations on a report sheet, placed the sheet in a tray, took a new one from another tray, and then disappeared again. I had seen at least some of them at work on the way here—they were going door-to-door on Rue Colbert and the surrounding streets, because this was not a neighborhood where the inhabitants went willingly to the police if they had seen something.

  The inspector was enthroned behind an improvised desk constructed from a door laid across two beer barrels, and judging by the number of coffee cups and the discarded dottles in the ashtray, he had been sitting there for a long time. His lack of enthusiasm no doubt stemmed from a lack of sleep, I told myself. The walrus mustache hung limp and unkempt, and the pomade shine had gone from the centrally parted hair. There was no reason to take it personally.

  “It struck me from the beginning that there was something contradictory about the body’s condition,” I explained. “There were no defensive cuts on the hands, no bruising, nothing that suggested a struggle.”

  Inspector Marot nodded heavily. “I am aware of that,” he said, in a get-to-the-point tone of voice.

  “In addition,” I continued, “one of the cuts—the first, we believe—is a very precise incision positioned so as to give access to the uterus. That is, the womb . . .”

  “Yes. I have read the autopsy report.”

  “Inspector, what if what we have here is not a murder at all? What if it is simply an operation that went wrong? A botched hysterectomy? She died of hemorrhaging in connection with the removal of the uterus, the remaining lesions were inflicted posthumously, of that we are fairly certain. Besides, there was more mucus and saliva in the oral cavity than you would normally expect, which could be explained by an anesthetic use of ether.”

  He sighed.

  “It is true that this town has its share of quacks barely worthy of the title of doctor,” he said. “And the Commissioner here can no doubt verify that their unfortunate patients do die on the operating table with disturbing frequency. However, I have yet to come across one who then proceeded to carve up the patient even further before discarding the remains in a coal merchant’s yard. Why not simply send for my honored colleague”—he performed a small ducking motion, half nod, half bow, in the direction of the Commissioner—“and have the death certificate written up in the normal fashion?”

  “Because the operation is illegal,” I suggested.

  “How so?”

  “According to Lombardi’s friend, she was pregnant. At least four months along, presumably more.”

  “And?”

  “You could argue that the operation was an unusually drastic abortion. You might be able to consider the mother’s death an accident, but not the child’s. At that point in the pregnancy, it is an inescapable consequence of the intervention.”

  “But why?” said Marot. “Why not just perform a perfectly ordinary abortion?”

  That question I could not answer.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “To abort that late involves significant risks.”

  “Right now she is dead. How is that less dangerous?”

  “Perhaps she thought that it was?”

  “Hypotheses, Madeleine. Unsubstantiated hypotheses, to boot. We have no idea what the poor girl thought and believed.”

  His last comment stung. To accuse me of drawing unscientific conclusions was almost like accusing a religiously raised child of not believing sufficiently in God. I was reminded of my father’s constant refrain when I would come to him as a child with a wealth of observations about everything from the number of stars to the reason for weevils in the flour or the peculiar behavior of the boy next door: “Is it something you think, Madeleine? Or is it something you know?” Always said in the same measured tone of voice, not a dismissal but an encouragement to explain and support my claim.

  The worst part was that Marot had hit the target even better than he knew. I actually did know a bit about Rosalba Lombardi’s beliefs: Rosalba believed with all her heart in God and Maria and a long line of saints, Fleur had said. From her perspective, abortion was not merely a crime—it was a sin.

  “And what about the murder in Bruc?” Marot continued. “No fetus was removed in that case. The poor girl was not the least bit pregnant.”

  “Is there any certainty that there is a connection between the two crimes?” I asked. “Apart from the flights of fancy scribbled by the journalists, I mean.”

  Marot extracted a portfolio from one of the piles on the “desk.”

  “You can read for yourself what we have received from Bruc,” he said. “But read it here—it was hard enough to get one copy, I do not want to have to ask for another.”

  The door to the kitchen opened, and the café owner came out, or at least I assumed it was the owner—an older, clearly hectic gentleman with a dishcloth tied around his waist, a flaming red face, and a shiny bald pate slick with sweat.

  “Is the young lady also going to have something to drink?” he asked. “And the
gentleman there?”

  It was not a polite inquiry. It was rather presented in the same tone of voice as when a hawker at a market demands the entrance fee from the audience. He was clearly not thrilled that the police had taken over a part of his establishment, but if that was the way of it, he was determined that they should at least support his business.

  “Café au lait,” I requested. The tea here would probably be undrinkable. The Commissioner sighed and ordered a cognac. The inspector had already immersed himself in the next pile of newly arrived reports and did not look up, so it was left to the Commissioner to pay the man.

  I quickly realized that the doctor who had performed the autopsy in Bruc probably did not own a copy of Lacassagne’s Vade-mecum. The presentation was neither systematic nor clear and was riddled with uncertainties like “approximately,” “about,” and “circa.” Eugénie Colombe was, for example, “between 155 and 165 centimeters tall,” which presumably described at least half of Bruc’s female population, and if it were not for the accompanying photographs (in a folder marked “MUST be returned to the police department in Bruc!!!”), the report would have permitted me to conclude very little except that the deceased was probably Eugénie Colombe, and that she had probably been killed, and that she was in any case definitely dead.

  The police department in Bruc had sent along only five photographs. One showed the place where she had been found, a shrubbery that looked as if it consisted primarily of brambles, thistles, and grass; the second the location of the murder, the adjoining field, the tall grass of which had likely been intended for haymaking. Now an area of seven or eight square meters had been trampled flat and soiled in blood. The remaining three pictures showed Eugénie Colombe herself. She had been dragged into the shrubbery—one could still see the track made by her heels—and was lying on her back among the thistles. Her lower body was completely exposed—her blood-soaked skirt and her unmentionables had been found in the grass near the place where she had been killed. The blouse and camisole—she was not wearing a corset, few factory workers did—had been slashed to ribbons, and her entire torso was smeared in blood. Her throat gaped darkly at me, and her head dangled to the left. I knew from the report that the knife that had inflicted this mortal wound had been used with such violence that the sinews on one side of her throat were sliced clean through. At least she had been dead when the rest of the abuse had occurred.