‘That woman, that unfortunate . . .’ Eyes wide open in the night Friedrich, suddenly exhausted, raised his hands towards the ceiling and spread his fingers. ‘Poor monstrosity.’
During the night, which was cloudy, nothing could be seen of the circus except one or two intermittent lights. Van Aalsen and his dogs had gone to bed long before. ‘Tomorrow I shall go and see Fuchs.’ This reassuring thought kept him company till morning. At one time he saw his friend’s face appear on the ceiling, his eyes bright and tender; at another he was in a conversation constantly renewed on the road which ran beside the river, a walk the two friends had often taken when they first met. But the memory of Fuchs lost force in the course of the night. In the end Friedrich saw him in the dark galleries of the World Beyond Belief, and from behind. He stood before the window of the Child of Evil Stars, his arms spread wide and his shoulders shaking under the influence of evil laughter. At last in a mood of deep bitterness Friedrich fell asleep.
He had this dream. His wife was stretched out on the grass in the shadow of a tree the flowers of which were being gradually blown away by the wind. On her stomach she held a creature that she tenderly called ‘my baby’ but in which Friedrich, horrified, could see only a sort of huge worm totally covered with fur, and equipped at one end with the rudiments of two eyes and a mouth.
This monster had not been exhibited at the World Beyond Belief.
The following day Friedrich went dispiritedly across the fairground. The circus people had lit a fire near the ticket office for the gallery and were making coffee. It was now late in October, and at the end of the month, Friedrich seemed to remember, the gypsies would depart. His heart began to thump. He shut his eyes and the white throat of a frog appeared on the black and green inside of his eyelids. He quickened his step to get away from the merriment he envied in the little troop.
Fuchs lived in a seedy block of flats on the square for the flower market, which had not been held for twenty years. An old woman was swilling down the pavement. Friedrich had hardly rung the bell before she set down her bucket and raised her hands towards the sky. ‘Is it Dr Fuchs that you’re coming to see? He left this morning for Goerres. He said his mother had just died.’
A long slender blade pierced Friedrich’s side. ‘My God! My God! My poor friend!’ But was his sorrow genuine sympathy, or selfish chagrin because he could not confide to Fuchs his new obsession, in the course of a walk along the river outside the town?
The old woman let him in. Perhaps the doctor would like to speak to the woman in charge? Friedrich did not know about that. But he liked the ill cleaned flat of his friend and its dissection room, in which he remained for a while sitting and smoking a small disintegrating cigar that was left lying on Fuchs’ desk. The woman referred to never showed up. Friedrich, his gaze absent, made a tour of the little tanks, examining the batrachians his friend was rearing. He remembered how as a child he had secretly kept in his room a salamander which he had found in the garden. It died of hunger when he was staying with his aunt in Salzburg; full of the joy of city life he had forgotten it. On his return he found the animal’s little corpse in the box where it had lived. On its back there had grown up vertically a forest of spectral mould.
Before his hasty departure Fuchs had drawn on his writing paper several grotesque faces, among which Friedrich recognised a woman patient and the wolf girl. He took up the pencil, sharpened it with his penknife, and added a hat with flowers to the portrait of the patient. The lead of the pencil broke, and Friedrich mechanically slipped it into his pocket. It was time to get back to the road and the bright sky of a deceitful autumn. Fondling the pencil in his pocket Friedrich went with bent head through the town. In front of the hospital two men were fighting under the muzzle of a horse. About to cross the road, Friedrich saw one of them carry his hands to his eyes, which were gushing tears of blood. His yelps could still be heard from the porch.
Friedrich occupied a modest office on the first floor of the wing for pulmonary diseases, between the library and the examination room. It often happened, on days when he was on duty, that he fell asleep in one of the large armchairs in the library. There was no leisure for that this morning. Van Aalsen, without his dogs, was awaiting him in his office. He had his back to the window, his arms folded, and a sombre expression.
‘Yes?’
‘I am van Aalsen, from Gluck’s Circus,’ said the man.
‘I know.’ Friedrich felt a qualm of nausea. ‘Please sit down, Mr van Aalsen.’
‘I have come,’ said the Dutchman, ‘on behalf of one of my people. It is a difficult case. They tell me you are a lung specialist; is that right? Would you be able to come and see the person at our place? You see, she isn’t able . . . she wouldn’t be able to leave us.’
Van Aalsen gazed over Friedrich’s shoulder, his eyes open wide.
‘Sickness where for all the world there is nothing but gaiety and song—it is strange. Will you come to the circus, doctor?’
It is the Child of Evil Stars: the ill-starred child is dying.
‘Certainly I will come, Mr van Aalsen. I’ll come with you now, if you wish.’
‘But have you not sick people to visit, and appointments? They told me at the reception that you were very busy, doctor.’
‘Let’s go now,’ said Friedrich. Van Aalsen’s hesitations and his gloomy liquid gaze were delaying the moment when he should meet up again with the Child of Evil Stars.
Two big circus dogs were couched on the seats of van Aalsen’s gig. They raised their heads at their master’s return, jumped down silently from their seats and trotted behind the gig on the way to the fairground. Van Aalsen led his two dogs without speaking, and Friedrich counted off the minutes with a terrible joy. The sun was shining low in the sky through clouds; two bright points appeared on either side of it. The gig passed in front of the World Beyond Belief and came to a stop beside the big top.
‘It’s at the end of the month that you leave for Vienna?’
‘Yes,’ said the circus master in a low solemn voice. ‘We always spend the Christmas season in the capital. Every year the Archduke comes to see us.’
One of the Indians from the World Beyond Belief, clad in a bronze green tunic, was waiting for them near the big wagons. Van Aalsen passed him the reins. The man looked at Friedrich and smiled.
‘Doctor,’ asked the Dutchman, ‘are you familiar with our ways? Have you visited our . . . our galleries?’
Friedrich nodded. The nearness of happiness rendered him dumb. The Indian, with the gesture he had used before among the showcases, placed a hand on his arm and pushed him gently towards the door of the caravan.
The sick girl had been laid in the brass bed of van Aalsen, which his dogs had vacated. With her head enclosed in a bag of white silk she was sleeping a tormented sleep, arms and legs thrashing beneath the bedclothes with convulsions. Van Aalsen took a position at the bedside and the Indian, the circus infirmarian, Friedrich realised, placed his two hands under the foot of the bed, his eyes shining with tears. ‘It is he,’ thought Friedrich ‘who has sent for me, and it is indeed the Child of Evil Stars.’
Van Aalsen looked away all the while that Friedrich, feeling devastated, was examining the patient. He found her deeply consumptive and feverish, at death’s door. The Indian had raised her delicately to a sitting position, taking care that her white silk hood should not slide off. ‘Why do you hide her from me?’ Friedrich wanted to say. ‘You know perfectly well that I have seen her in her naked misery.’ At each breath taken by the child of misfortune, the material clung to the strange shape of her face. Under Friedrich's hand the weak muscles quivered, the skin contracted, bathed in an acid sweat. In a corner of the little room van Aalsen lit an incense-burning brazier.
‘It is a case of tuberculosis, and I am afraid very advanced,’ said Friedrich at last, while the Indian tenderly settled the sick girl back in the bed. ‘What happened that made you call me?’
‘Yesterday evening she star
ted to vomit blood.’
‘But before that?’
Van Aalsen shook his head. Friedrich saw the prisoner, her two hands on the glass of her cage, and then the film of blood on the glass.
‘Doctor, one could never know what she was thinking. She was dumb, on top of all her other misfortunes. What must be done, doctor—Doctor Friedrich?
‘She must go to hospital, of course,’ said Friedrich. ‘This young woman is very seriously ill; her condition requires constant attention, if she is to be saved.’
‘Go to hospital?’
Van Aalsen slowly nodded, and the Indian lowered his eyes.
‘I understand your fears,’ said Friedrich. ‘I shall take care that she is protected from having people stare at her. But your quarters, with the animals and the damp from the river. . . .’
‘Oh, yes, yes. . . .’
She shivered incessantly under the blanket, but without a murmur. Friedrich, after a last futile examination, stood up, his head swimming from the reek of her skin.
‘Tomorrow morning, gentlemen, I shall send one of our ambulances.’
‘Do you think, doctor, that she could go with us to Vienna?
‘I very much doubt it,’ replied Friedrich. ‘And if she could, it must be understood that there could be no question of exhibiting her.’
‘Naturally, naturally,’ babbled van Aalsen, he eyes starting from his head under the influence of a sudden terror. What was he seeing? What hideous monster-hunt was he remembering? The Indian accompanied Friedrich as far as the exit from the fairground. Night was falling. A sound of happy voices floated from the big top, interrupted by pants of ecstasy. In Friedrich’s house all the lights were out, and he remembered that his wife and daughters were at the opera, where a work was being performed he did not like. He entered by the door onto the garden, passed through the kitchen, and mounted to his study without meeting anyone. ‘Still, the servants. . . . What’s become of them?’ The maids, probably, were in their room, and Hermann, the manservant, was asleep in the library, awaiting the return of his master and mistress. ‘Or perhaps he’s with the women.’ As he climbed the stairs he was conscious at each step of the weight and weariness of his body. The muscles of his thighs were stiff. Several times he had to stop and catch his breath before he reached his study. The oil-lamp he carried weighed more than his heavy instrument case; its wavering light threw shapeless shadows on the corners of the stairs. Arrived at last in his study Friedrich thought he saw a little whitish animal, a lamb, perhaps, with big shining eyes that reminded him of Fuchs, running out of the room and keeping by the wall.
‘Idiot that I am. It’s our terrier, the puppy Ulrich gave us.’
Seated pensively at his desk he smoked a cigar, and then gave up waiting. ‘Ah, but of course.’ He crushed out his cigar in a mortar. ‘My angel,’ he wrote hastily on the second sheet of his note-paper—the brown stain of a cup of coffee rendered the first unusable—‘I must leave you this evening in a hurry for Goerres, where poor Fuchs is waiting for me. I’ll write from there. Your H., who loves you above all.’
Having written this black lie he saw gleaming once again, under damp hair, a hesitant eye.
He took off his shoes, went to put the letter under his wife’s night-cap, and laid on it the pencil appropriated from Fuchs, a pencil closely resembling, he now noticed, those used by Mme Friedrich to annotate her scores. Hastily he did some light packing. He went down again to his study, his shoes in one hand and his bag in the other. The clock in the hall struck, then that in the dining room; one or two seconds later he heard the bells of the town. On the threshold into the garden Friedrich resumed his shoes and went off to the fairground. The sky was overcast, the ground black. Once beyond the lamp posts of Leopoldgasse it was hard to see one’s way. Friedrich walked with arms outstretched, fearing a sudden encounter with van Aalsen and his dogs. In this way he cleared the copse between the town and the fairground. Then, before him was the open field where the circus people camped among the cages of their animals.
How to find her?
Van Aalsen had received her into his caravan with its walls of hide. Didn’t his dogs sleep at the bottom of the steps? Friedrich prudently skirted the black mass of the World Beyond Belief; in the seams of its canvas there gleamed small low-burning lights. Friedrich’s eyes were accustomed to the dark. He recognised, a few metres from the big tent, the massive form of van Aalsen’s caravan. Its windows and door were all equally dark. He approached, uncertain. But the dogs were not there. No doubt their master was sleeping elsewhere. Happiness poured itself through all his limbs like a white star radiating out to infinity. He climbed the caravan steps, opened the door, which was not locked—honest, trusting people, these! Marvellous Child of Evil Stars! She was there, she was waiting for him in the dark. He strained his ears. She was breathing slowly, and each of her breaths finished with a painful whistle. When at last, groping, he found a lamp he could light, she emitted a little cry. And in the trembling circle of light from the lamp he held at arm’s length she appeared without her hood, her black hair stuck to her temples. Friedrich laid himself down against her. His busy tongue forced itself between the lips of the Child of Evil Stars. She groaned. ‘My love, my one and only love!’ And Friedrich, forgetful of everything, Friedrich on fire, slid himself under the blanket of the dying ill-starred child.
***
Dr Friedrich died that night, to all appearances in the wreck of the little ferry boat which every hour crossed the Grodden on the way to Goerres. His body was not found, any more than those of sixteen other passengers; but the inspector recalled having made him pay for his ticket, and having joked with him about the imminence of the storm. The doctor had smiled and watched for the next lightning flash. It was a storm of extreme violence and drove the ferry against the far bank a few metres from the jetty. Of the travellers who were waiting on the other side two were drowned after throwing themselves into the water to save the victims of the shipwreck.
***
The cyclops-girl, the prisoner of the World Beyond Belief, died several days later of a sudden haemorrhage. In the space of an hour she brought up all her blood. It fell to the lot of Doctor Lehner, Director of the hospital and chief legal expert, to perform the autopsy. He was assisted by Professor Meczlaw, an anatomist whose wax models were on sale as far away as San Francisco, and Dr Fuchs, whose curiosity had been brought into the open by the double death. Was it not of her, this girl-monster, that Friedrich’s last words had been spoken?
He had her under his eyes the whole time of the autopsy. The cyclops-girl did in fact have only one eye, almost central in her face, the other, never having been well formed, being hidden under a fold of skin. Lehner found she had only one kidney, and her lungs were almost entirely eaten away by tuberculosis. ‘We have here an extreme case of. . . .’ muttered Lehner. Meczlaw made a drawing and Fuchs held his peace. The poor girl’s stomach was full of black blood which she had been unable to stop swallowing. But in the bloodless lining of her uterus, where the haemorrhage had been triggered, Lehner found, almost by chance, a round, shiny object which he placed on the rim of one of his dishes, beside the dead girl’s liver. Meczlaw raised his eyebrows, and Fuchs, whose cheek still preserved the memory, sweet, burning and bitter, of the lips of Friedrich’s widow, pressed against him for too brief a moment, Fuchs, thunderstruck, recognised the wedding ring of his friend.
I
LOST GIRLS
FOX INTO LADY
I
KEIKO is lying in the grass of the narrow garden, her head against the cement wall, her mind a blank, when she is seized again in the pit of her stomach, in the place where, she imagines, her ovaries are located, or perhaps her Fallopian tubes, she doesn’t know which, by incomprehensible pangs of pain. They come and go, and have been twisting in this part of her body, soft and defenceless, since the small hours of the morning. Feeling her abdomen with both hands Keiko detects a growth the size of an apricot which rolls beneath her fingers a
nd which appears half an hour later (she has fallen asleep again and reawakened) palpably larger.
She goes back into the house. The passage from light to shade makes her heart falter. Everything is green within and the interior of the house seems to her tapestried in a huge net. She thrusts her finger into the net, chokes with disgust, then pulls herself together. These specks moving before her eyes, these trembling limbs, they are nothing. Once in the bathroom she has already recovered her spirits—low as they are at this end of a summer in which the wind has never ceased, or the bad news. She is leaning on the rim of the bathtub when another sharp pain catches her. She sits on the floor panting. An iron tube is passing through her pelvis, from the labia to the uterus. A sudden spurt from this scorching passage of hot black blood, clots that the tormented girl could almost squeeze in her fingers to break them open; then in the thickness of the discharge there is formed something with a head and limbs. ‘Lick it, lick it,’ says an instinct which Keiko in her terror cannot hear; ‘it is the fruit of your belly.’
Keiko washes it clean in the hand-basin. It is a little animal with brown fur, the size of a mole, and its eyes are not yet open. Pensively she washes the private parts between her legs while the little creature mews in the basin. What is she to do? What to make of this blood-smeared apparition? Keiko opens the bath taps, fills the tub to the brim with water that is rather tepid than hot, and lies down in it. At the end of an hour of lassitude she finds the misshaped birth still alive at the bottom of the basin, and trying to escape from it by means of paws with transparent claws. Before her sister can return—the two girls are sharing the house, which had been the home of their dead parents—Keiko has time to find in the downstairs lumber-room a box in which to shut the animal away; her idea is to let it die of hunger. Then she waits for her sister, sitting in the drawing room with the television switched off, and sees in her mind’s eye the animal’s tiny mouth, its eyes protruding beneath lids still gummed together, its soft ears. The sun enters through the top of the window and falls slanting on the floor-boards. When it reaches the foot of the wall her sister returns and wakes Keiko who has fallen asleep, her back to the television, and has dreamed fitful disturbing dreams of landscapes with towering rocks that scraped the low-flying hunting aeroplanes.
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