CONTENTS
I
Lost Girls
Child of Evil Stars
Fox into Lady
The Old Towpath
The Opening
Meannanaich
II
Crucifixions
Passing Forms
Under the Lighthouse
Pan's Children
Brunel's Invention
Shioge
III
The Story of Margaret
What the Eye Remembers
The Hand that Sees
IV
Wildlife
Hilda
Lamont
Feral
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Darkscapes
by Anne-Sylvie Salzman
translated by William Charlton
First published by Tartarus Press 2013 at
Coverley House, Carlton-in-Coverdale, Leyburn,
North Yorkshire, DL8 4AY, UK.
Darkscapes © Anne-Sylvie Salzman, 2013
Translation © William Charlton, 2013
The publishers would like to thank Jim Rockhill
for his help in the preparation of this volume.
I
LOST GIRLS
CHILD OF EVIL STARS
EVERY year in October Gluck’s Circus comes to Groddeneck and installs itself under the lime trees beside the river. Groddeneck is its last stop before the season in Vienna. The gypsies stay for a month; during the day they repaint their wagons and attend to the animals; in the evening they set up the big top. ‘Gluck’ is no more than a name. The last Gluck died of old age and his two children sold the enterprise to his manager, a former seaman called van Aalsen. He was a cold, polite man who liked nothing so much as dogs. He was never to be seen in the ring with the new Gluck; only the ostriches, the sea lions, the zebras, a black panther that always walked with a strut, the lions, and the elephant Mawarathi which its Indian mahout (whom some made out to be Hungarian) had trained to write its name with flowers—daisies—in the circus sawdust.
Van Aalsen had saved the circus from bankruptcy and from arson at the hands of unscrupulous mountebanks. The criminals had been handed over to the authorities, but at night, surrounded by his dogs (of which he had five, all sleeping under his caravan) he never failed to make the round of the encampment.
Friedrich on two successive evenings saw the former sailor passing beneath his windows, the big dogs trotting at his heels with lithe and silent tread. Friedrich lived in a villa built several years before on the edge of the fairground. Having come as a simple student from Vienna he had married a Groddeneck heiress, the daughter of the director of the Imperial and Royal Hospital. When wife, children and servants had all retired to bed Friedrich often remained in the drawing room with the lights extinguished, and watched the alley which ran beside the fairground. Even when the circus was not there, there were passers-by. It was the shortest route from the station to the brasserie Bayern. From behind his curtains Friedrich spied idly upon the working girls. Often he recognised patients, or wives or mothers of patients, from Wing B of the Imperial and Royal Hospital, the wing of which he was doctor in charge and where they treated diseases of the lungs.
On the third of October Friedrich went out by himself to dine with his friend Johann Fuchs, and returned too late to see the passage of van Aalsen and his dogs. Frau Friedrich never accompanied her husband to Fuchs’s: his flat was too ill maintained, she said, and smelt of frog. Fuchs, who nourished secret and hopeless feelings for his friend’s wife, was glad of this quarantine. The smell, which was quite real, came from two large glass tanks he kept in his study. In them lived salamanders and toads which Fuchs sometimes used for purposes of experiment. He was a neurologist; some seven years junior to Friedrich, he had the complexion of a girl and large eyes of a deep and languorous blue. That evening Friedrich found him in his dressing gown, bent over a tiny black corpse he continued skilfully dissecting with a minute scalpel, while Friedrich took off his overcoat.
It was one of the salamanders, dead from no apparent cause.
‘Old age?’ suggested Friedrich, and Fuchs shook his head.
‘I should say rather boredom, and indigestion from a surfeit of flies, since she no longer has to go hunting them.’
The woman in charge of the building went out to fetch a dish of lamb shank and turnips from a neighbour who cooked for the doctor on occasion, also a pudding with raisins and beer. The two friends ate in the sitting room, which was not so musty as the study. Friedrich smoked a cigar and Fuchs drew his friend in profile on the margin of a programme from Gluck’s Circus.
‘I didn’t know you were a fancier of girl circus riders,’ said Friedrich.
‘There aren’t any girl riders at Gluck’s, worse luck,’ said Fuchs, and just behind Friedrich’s ear appeared the smile of the beautiful Frau Friedrich.
‘The maid has taken the children there,’ said Friedrich.
‘Happy maid—happy children.’
‘How do you know that there are no girl riders?’
‘I didn’t see any in the parade,’ said Fuchs with a serious air.
The following day they visited the fairground, the animals in their cages and the gallery of monstrosities. It was the monstrosities that Fuchs desired to see, the kitchen girl having specially praised the human serpent. Fuchs had very fixed ideas about the evil the mind sometimes inflicts on the body. Van Aalsen had set up his new attraction, the great Pavilion of the World Beyond Belief, beside the river. The visitors entered in restricted numbers through a small entrance-lobby draped in green silk where two turbaned men of coppery skin stood with crossed sabres before a door of carved wood which opened and shut always in silence. The sabres separated and you entered, in a spirit of cynicism or trepidation, down a long corridor which smelt, Fuchs murmured with some surprise, of the urine of wild beasts. On either side of this passage animals and monstrosities alternated in cages shut off by sheets of glass, high and thick. Friedrich and Fuchs first saw the lion, couched against a painted landscape—a setting sun, a castle of ancient Spain. Shadows passed before the glass. There were little cries: ‘Mummy! The lion! The lion!’
In the next window a live dwarf was riding a stuffed calf, a monstrosity with two heads placed in a blue-green prairie, by the light of a painted moon. The dwarf was singing with closed eyes an unintelligible song. Friedrich had already disappeared into the darkness of the passage and Fuchs put his hand on the glass, intrigued. ‘Poor fellow, seated all day long on a dead animal that recalls to him in one way or another his own deformity; all day he sees us bloated idiots going by, no better than he is.’ The dwarf, however, had a sort of smile on his lips. A hand descended on the shoulder of the doctor.
‘Oh, Doctor Fuchs!’
By the light of the tableau vivant Fuchs recognised one of his patients; two children were hiding under her skirt.
‘Doctor, have you seen the wolves? My God, I don’t know. . . .’
Fuchs went to see the wolves. There was the sound of low laughter, a scuffle in the safety of the darkness.
In the wolf cage a girl of twelve or thirteen with hairy arms and legs, her lips twisted by a deep cleft, was sleeping between two hairless wolves. People pressed forward to look at her hare-lip.
‘But it’s ugly, all the same. What is horrific, they say, is to see her eating raw meat. . . . In Russia, it’s said, and in times gone by. . . .’
But the man Fuchs had seized by the arm was not Friedrich. He gave the doctor a light shove, pushing him against the window, and moved away with an oath.
‘Oh! My God!’
There was a crowd in front of the snake pit, and Fuchs, who was more bothered, curiously, by the smell of mammals than by tha
t of reptiles, found himself at the base of the window, forehead and hands pressed against the glass.
‘Isn’t that the monster you wanted to see?’
The circus painters had erected two weedy palm trees at the mouth of a plaster cave. The tail of a boa-constrictor, living or dead, hung down one of the trunks. Fuchs instinctively searched with his eyes the inside of the cave. Slowly there impressed themselves on his retina, and then on his brain, the contours of a shape that was vaguely human: face, neck and trunk undulated with a single motion. Two dark slits appeared in the middle of the shape, and expanded. A gleaming gaze fixed itself upon Fuchs’s eyelids, soft as a tongue. A child started to scream, and Fuchs, his stomach turned, went out at a run by the Indian vestibule.
The swords of the guards were of cardboard like everything else. Outside, a misty sun was shining through the branches of the fairground trees upon fresh faces. Fuchs went past an enclosure where two circus girls in men’s trousers were practising their acrobatics. Strong thighs, round breasts, downy faces, the girls came, they told him, from Kiev; they were sisters. Their mother was the laundress for the circus. They spoke a rather shy German.
‘Tell me, it’s new, this . . .’—and Fuchs pointed to the World Beyond Belief, on the gable end of which a wooden owl was spreading wide its wings.
‘Yes, Mr van Aalsen bought it in Holland,’ replied one of the girls. ‘We’ve had it only a year.’
‘Have you seen the dwarf?’ asked the other, ‘the dwarf on the calf? It was from him, Pedersen, that Mr van Aalsen bought the whole thing.’
They looked at one another, fingers on lips, giggling.
***
Friedrich was waiting for Fuchs near the river.
‘So where have you been?’
After they separated Friedrich had followed in the wake of a short round lady accompanied by three children—the partridge and her chicks, he told himself. It seemed to him as if the wild beasts of the World Beyond Belief looked menacingly upon this bird-woman as she passed. He observed that in the light of the windows to the exhibits she resembled rather a caricatured octopus, with her bulging forehead, protruding eyes, beaky little nose, and almost invisible mouth. As for her children, he did not even try to make out their traits. One of them having placed its small hand on the glass, it became suddenly rosy and transparent; Friedrich’s heart revived. In the crowd which was waiting for the battle between the cobra and the mongoose—it was one of the show-pieces of the tent; a young Indian seated on a cardboard rock would urge on the little gladiators—Friedrich lost sight of the octopus and her children; the current swept him into a corner. A coppery hand grasped his elbow.
‘Yes?’
‘Doctor, at the dawn of time there were human forms which evolution rejected and consigned to oblivion. They were obliterated, surviving only in myths. For us they are reborn. Come.’
The voice was clear and firm. Friedrich fancied he could detect the smell of honeysuckle.
‘Can it be that without knowing it I have a patient from the circus?’
Friedrich passed between two hangings which the steady hand parted. On the far side the air was fresher; the noise of the crowd was barely audible; there was solitude. Friedrich took a step towards the hidden cage. The décor portrayed a seaside beneath a pale sky. A woman was sitting on the shore—but was it a woman? Her long hair fell over thin shoulders. Her back was turned to Friedrich, who tapped lightly on the glass. The woman hunched her shoulders. Never had Friedrich seen skin so bloodless, even in the wing for pulmonary disorders. At last she stood up. She was clad in a tunic of Grecian cut, made of silk or white cotton. Her weak legs could hardly support her. Her downcast head and long, lustreless hair concealed her face. She took a few steps towards Friedrich.
‘Who are you?’
He tapped again on the glass, his heart beating. She raised her head and in a face which some unknown affliction had entirely demolished and reconstructed, he saw a single eye blink. He must have made a movement of alarm. The prisoner fell on her knees before the window that separated them and spread both hands flat upon the glass at the level of her face.
***
‘Do you know that they have a cyclops-woman there?’
‘I think,’ replied Fuchs, ‘that I no longer have any desire to know what they have there.’
‘You haven’t seen her?’
Friedrich heard his own voice trembling, and did not insist.
They walked in silence to the hospital where Fuchs, as he often did, passed part of the night. Friedrich was surprised to find himself envying his friend. In the quiet of the night the gaze of the cyclops-girl came back to him; and at the thought of it he saw in his mind’s eye her awkward limbs and her hair falling to her waist. He continued thinking of her the following evening throughout a party to which he had invited doctors and their wives. Everywhere he saw the prisoner’s eye gleaming. In the end he could not look at his daughters playing ball in the garden without seeing again the monstrosity on her knees. But the violence of his agitation at the vision caused it at last to disappear; he did not recall it even when he went to bed, but fell asleep at once.
On the two days that followed Friedrich managed to stop himself from going again to see the unfortunate girl. Had she a name, poor thing, or had her horrified parents cast her off without giving her anything? ‘You, Friedrich: what would you have done with such a monster?’
He saw himself on a winter evening, the baby in his arms, walking to a frozen lake, making a hole in the ice, and letting the infant slide under it to be seized at once by the cold. This picture came to him when he was examining a young patient: it arose from the sight of the little girl’s skinny back, so similar to that of the Child of Evil Stars. After the girl had been settled back in bed Friedrich went on to see Fuchs and when he could not find him either in his office or in the psychiatric wards, he set off, almost against his will, for the fairground.
A queue was already forming around the red and green entrance to the big top. Friedrich there perceived several children and the people in charge of them gesticulating and laughing loudly. The surroundings of the World Beyond Belief were no more tranquil. A dozen cavalrymen in uniform from the barracks in the town were bargaining over the entry price. ‘Hey, but, sweetie, who’s going to defend you if war breaks out?’ One of them crushed a thick cigar stub under the heel of his boot. ‘Hey, darling, is it true that inside you can see a dwarf riding a unicorn?’
Friedrich felt dizzy. His intestines grumbled. At the entry to the gallery his forces suddenly deserted him, even though he could feel springing up at the very bottom of his miserable intestines an irrepressible joy. They were all there: the dwarf on the calf, the human serpent, the human tree, the wolf girl, and Friedrich in the hope-filled darkness thought he had reached the end when one of the Indians took him gently by the arm.
‘Sir, we are about to shut.’
‘But I haven’t . . .’
‘I am very sorry, sir. When the circus opens, the gallery shuts. We are all needed in the ring.’
How could he reply to that? Friedrich followed the guard, though at the same time from the corner of his eye he could just see, in the depths of the World Beyond Belief, the bluish patch made by the light of the cage of the Child of Evil Stars, suddenly obscured by a curtain of hair.
In front of the entry to the circus there still stretched the queue of people waiting. The cavalrymen had joined it and were chaffing the barmaids. Friedrich went on his way. What vicious master was it that had made the Child of Evil Stars dance on the stage? So it was that he went home pensive, and kept his eyes upon the happy faces of his daughters and his wife. An uncle had brought the children a puppy, a terrier no bigger than two clenched fists. ‘Daddy, have you seen it, daddy?’ Friedrich duly went to see the puppy, for which the nanny had made up a little bed in the nursery. When the girls were settled for the night Friedrich went down again to the drawing room. His wife, sitting at the piano, was reading a score. She ha
d let down her hair, and was nibbling the end of a red and blue pencil.
‘Have you seen the dog?’
She had long, shining chestnut hair, her eyes were large and dreamy, her lips firm. Beneath her skin there quivered a vital directness unknown to Friedrich.
‘Your brother didn’t wish to stay for dinner?’
‘He’s gone back to Vienna,’ said Frau Friedrich, her brows knitted. ‘Tell me, how are things with your friend Fuchs? Frau D thought he looked thin. Why does he never come to see us any more?’
‘You don’t like him,’ said Friedrich, putting his hand on his wife’s hair.
‘That’s not true,’ said Frau Friedrich half closing her big sleepy eyes. ‘His flat is disgustingly dirty, I agree, but he himself, no.’
‘Then I shall ask him to dine with us this Friday,’ said Friedrich. ‘You will see that he behaves charmingly, and that your Frau D is nothing but a chatterbox.’
Frau Friedrich smiled through the shining veil of her hair, and Friedrich, stabbed in the pit of his stomach by a pang of love, stood up with a cough and went to hide his emotion at the window.
Two or three nights passed which augmented the doctor’s malaise. When evening came he no longer, as had been his custom, stayed at the window looking onto the fairground, in order to smoke a few cigarettes before going to join his wife. A desire mixed with bitterness had come back to him for the body, just the body, of his wife. But when he lay close to her and felt the contact of her skin all down his legs, there returned to him like a ridiculous punishment the vision of the ill-starred child with her halting step. ‘It is close to her that I ought to be.’ In any case Frau Friedrich did not respond to this rekindled flame. Once in bed this baffling woman always fell asleep. Two years after the birth of their second daughter she had ceased to encourage the amorous impulses of her husband. Friedrich had not taken offence, and went at least once a month to the brothel.
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