A case of curiosities

by Kurzweil, Allen

  Madame Page ushered the stranger to the fire, where he reacted to what is surely one of life's more enjoyable circumstances—proximity to warmth on a frigid night — with the thankless silence of a stonecrust. He stamped his boots free of snow, causing the steeple and reconstructed cloister to tumble. This put an end, once and for all, to Fidelite's architectural efforts. Only after much hesitation did the stranger accept the use of borrowed clogs. He removed his boots and lined them alongside the smaller ones, neatening up the entire row. Then, with great care and economy of motion, he pulled off two layers of clothing simultaneously, keeping the sleeves of an inner gown in the sleeves of his sober cloak.

  The Abbe and the stranger drank Madame Page's special birchwood tea but demurred on the pinecones. The Abbe interrogated his hostess about the stalks overhead, and she pointed out a beargrape diuretic and other efficacious cures. The stony stranger was not one for chitchat, and so he moved without comment to the table, where he heaved a large satchel clangor-ously onto its surface. He swept the cards to the floor with obvious disgust. Evangeline started to retrieve them but was warned away by the stranger's glare.

  With a quick clearing of the throat and nod of the head, the stranger called on Madame Page and the Abbe to join him in a quiet corner of the cottage, where they talked in hushed tones. Fidelite's large ears, it must be said, were characteristic of all three Page children, and Claude, high in his perch, was able to pick up bits of the conversation.

  ''We must end the boy's discomfort," he heard the stranger say.

  "He will object," came his mother's reply.

  "It's not his place to object," the stranger said. "He must be rid of the Devil's handiwork."

  With that, Claude's mouth went dry. The phrase declared the purpose of the visit. The mother's nodding and her gestures in the general direction of the attic intensified the boy's fears. The stranger returned to the table and started to unpack his satchel. He pulled from it a brace-and-bit, a hacksaw, a hammer, and a large wood file.

  Evangeline thought the stranger was a carpenter. She was wrong, as subsequent tools proclaimed. The table was soon crowded with cumbersome bonesetter's gear, a vaginal fumigation pump (with letters patent), blood clamps, sealing wax, and a urethral probe, which looks as terrorizing today as it did back then, perhaps more so. The surgeon—for that was the stranger's profession—inspected a box of lancets and scrapes. Sensing that the Page household did not put much stock in table linen, he unrolled a piece of green baize of the kind used by moneylenders, leaders of the Terror, and enthusiasts of the card game ombre. On it he placed dossils, tents and plasters, compresses, bandages, bands, ligatures, and strings, spacing each with obsessive precision. He pondered the shiny cutlery and then draped a hernia belt with its tentacular strapping over the back of a chair.

  Madame Page did not have much to say but did not wish to remain silent. Like many valley folk, she was susceptible to that most gnomic form of folk literature, the aphorism. At last she said, "Take care of the plow blade, and the plow blade will take care of you." This bid for conversation was not accepted by the surgeon. Madame Page looked at her son and soon after asked him to come down. Claude indicated resistance to that idea by launching a wild turnip.

  Domestic Peace had ended.

  Fidelite retrieved the missile and placed it in her mother's hand, ever the helpful child. She joined her mother in urging Claude to descend. He refused with even greater vehemence and augmented the aerial attacks. The Abbe hobbled forward in his oversized clogs and made various promises to the perch dweller. After the bribe was raised to a travel story and some sweets, Claude wrapped his feet around the uprights of the ladder and slid down, copybook clutched awkwardly under one arm.

  He focused his attention on the surgeon, and the surgeon focused his attention on him. The surgeon was granted a more pleasant view. Claude was a long-necked ten-year-old whose most notable feature was a pair of large green eyes his mother likened to basil, a plant to which she declared special allegiance. He was a handsome, unmuscular boy, free of the skin diseases that blemished so many faces in the valley. His ears, as mentioned earlier, were large, though not nearly so large as Fidelity's. He was dressed simply and inattentively, and in normal circumstances exuded a contagious sense of wonder.

  Not so Adolphe Staemphli, surgeon and citizen of Geneva. Staemphli was a man of impeccable disposition, but impeccable in the sense of Calvinist doctrine, meaning that he was free of sin. He held himself in the highest regard even if those around him did not. He was thoroughly convinced that his talents were unparalleled, and that his competence as a surgeon was proclaimed in the precision of his tools. He was a dour man given to excessive use of the imperative. "We must begin," he said.

  The two combatants met at the table of tools. Claude attempted to grab a file, but the surgeon ended his curiosity by rapping him over the knuckles with the mahogany handle of the trepan, the instrument Evangeline had mistaken for a commonplace brace-and-bit. Claude started to cry, meekly at first, then more vigorously. Madame Page tried to comfort her son with another saying: "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb." But Claude was taking no chances. He ran to a dark corner of the room.

  The surgeon said, "We must not let him bother us with his whimpering." He called for Fidelite to fetch a bucket of snow. The little weasel, who in normal circumstances wouldn't have lifted a ringer, popped out and in again faster than the cuckoo in a Black Forest wall clock. While the surgeon waited, he looked at the cards he had swept to the floor as one might look at some flyblown dung and said, "They come straight from Hell."

  Claude, trying to mask terror in defiance, called out, "No, they come from Besanc,on." (Actually, they were printed in a German canton of Switzerland, but such details would do little more than encumber the story.) Claude emerged to pick up a playing card, the Grim Reaper, and thrust it in the surgeon's face. The surgeon was not pleased by the irreverence and knocked the card to the floor. It fell faceup near the table. The surgeon screwed up his features, which were unappealing even in their relaxed state, and turned to the cottage matriarch. His jaws, moving like forceps, announced, "It must be removed today. It must be removed now."

  All that remained was to dissipate Claude's resistance. The surgeon put great store in the properties of the distilled juniper berry, a liquor named after his hometown and known today as gin. Madame Page had ideas of her own. She was not about to miss a chance to test her substantial, if provincial, repertoire. The surgeons grudgingly accepted her involvement, saying, "You may apply your remedy, but I must also apply mine."

  Madame Page first considered mixing up a linden tisane, an antidote for insomnia. But on observing her son's excited state, she switched to a valerian brew. She pulled down a stalk and began to bruise it in her apron.

  The Abbe observed intently. "An infusion?"

  "No, this will need a different process to coax out the goodness." Madame Page mixed unidentified pinches, drams, and sprigs of vegetable matter into a gallon of small ale, which she heated very slowly. After much squirming, Claude drank both liquids, but neither the gin nor his mother's decoction diminished the boy's agitation. The Abbe entered a proposal of his own: opium. This provoked an argument. The surgeon wanted nothing to do with the dark-brownish cake the Abbe took from his pocket. Madame Page was less forthright, but also expressed hesitation. She was suspicious of foreign cures. The Abbe cited the Turks, who used the drug to urge the wounded into battle. Suddenly there was an inquiry from the corner.

  "Turks from Constantinople?" Claude called out. He was inexplicably comforted. Soon after taking the bitter narcotic, Claude fell into a gin-valerian-ale-poppy-induced daze. Staemphli told the onlookers — sisters, mother, and even the Abbe— to move away. He then used the hernia belt to secure his pliant patient to the baize-covered table. The operation was at hand.

  A bit of medical history. The year Claude went under the knife, the Imperial Court of China added fourteen young eunuchs to the household staff of th
e Emperor Ch'ien-lung (1711 — 1799). One of the fourteen, a boy named Wang, was taken to an anonymous operator in the ancient trade of eunuch-making. The boy was modified in a room not far from the gates of the Forbidden City. After the excision, the operator applied a paste of peppercorns and covered the wound with paper soaked in cold water. For this service he was paid, if one believes Jamie-son, the equivalent of eight dollars and sixty-four cents. Simultaneously, in Vienna, Herr Doktor Alfred Dreilich, working in his cabinet near the Stock im Eisen, removed the testicles of Heinrich Liitz, a youth who was to become a castrato celebrated for the fioritura in his renditions of Handel's operatic arias. And closer to Tournay, also in that year, a prize goat of the Golay brothers was made a ridgeling with a swift swipe of Matthew Rochat's meat cleaver.

  Did Claude suffer similar severance? The answer is an emphatic: No!

  The surgeon Staemphli came to remove a very small growth sprouting between the middle and the ring finger of Claude's right hand. It was neither a cyst nor a carbuncle, not a canker or a cancer, though it had been called all these names, and a dozen others besides. What it was was a humble mole. In itself, this would not have attracted Adolphe Staemphli. But when the surgeon learned that the mole bore a resemblance to the face of Louis XVI, that it often turned a royal scarlet (further tribute to the reigning monarch of France), and that it displayed an almost sculptural quality — when Adolphe Staemphli learned all of this, he decided he must investigate.

  Claude had grown to appreciate the mole and did not want it removed. It was a source of special interest even in a region that had no shortage of medical oddities, and thus it carried all sorts of privileges. Whenever "the King would visit," Claude was guaranteed a plate of salted peas and a pitcher of licorice water at the Red Dog. He would squeeze his anomaly into a royal likeness and match it to the profile on a proffered coin of the realm. To boost his earnings, he told of the tremendous discomfort he endured coaxing out the King. The deception caught up with him. News of the pain traveled to the kitchens of the mansion house, whose talkative scullion, Catherine Kinderklapper, informed her master of the agony suffered by the Page boy and his royal canker. Because of the Abbe's appreciation of Madame Page's talents, he arranged for the visit from the surgeon who now observed the mole.

  Staemphli briefly considered using a raspatory—the tool that resembled a wood file—to remove the corrupted flesh, but this would have proved inelegant. He selected instead a delicate piece of specialized surgical equipment that looked like a miniature hacksaw. He shoved the hand into the snow, checked the leather bit in Claude's mouth, and bowed for momentary prayer. Removing the hand from the bucket, he immediately cut asunder, employing the methods of Sabourin, a fellow surgeon of Geneva. The movements were quick, and the hand was soon returned to the bucket, where it reddened the once-white snow. As the blood drained, the surgeon neatened things up on the table. He again pulled the hand from the bucket and wrapped it in a complicated, almost artful ball of bandaging.

  During all of this, Claude's body was motionless, his vision dulled by the brownish cake. His imagination, lively in ordinary circumstances, now raced. He observed the dried wildflow-ers and mushroom strings hanging from the rafters. They began to sway and then dance. He soon felt himself running through a multicolored field of borage, flax, and speedwell, of mint and betony, of green nettle and purple sage. He saw himself chased by the firedogs he had drawn earlier in the evening, only now they were slavering. The last thing Claude observed before falling profoundly into sleep was the surgeon holding the card that had been knocked to the floor: The Grim Reaper had a drop of blood covering his scythe.

  As any addict can tell you, the effect of opiates is difficult to gauge even in ideal circumstances. When opiates are bolstered by gin and herbal mixtures, calculating such an effect is next to impossible. Claude slept for a night and a day, and a night again. He awoke in his mother's curtained box bed to the sight of the Abbe, whose kindly disposition provided a pleasant contrast to the surgical nightmare he had carried into sleep. Claude gave his eyes full-fisted rubs with his unbandaged hand, then moaned.

  The surgeon ignored his suffering. "Good. He is awake. We must leave now."

  The Abbe would have none of it. "What we must do is wait until the boy is out of danger."

  "You have been checking him hourly."

  "And I will go on doing so." As if on cue, the chime of the Abbe's montre a sonnerie announced that it was time for another inspection. The Abbe brushed the hair out of Claude's eyes and encouraged him to talk. He was still too groggy.

  The surgeon said, "It is imperative that I return to Geneva. Obligations."

  "Your obligations are here. I might remind you that it was you who wished to perform the operation, despite the weather. You were the one who insisted it be done immediately."

  "And it has been done."

  "The weather and the boy's mien preclude departure. We will wait." The Abbe spoke with surprising insistence.

  The surgeon returned to a stiff rush chair suited to his temperament and feigned reading a medical treatise in quarto. The Abbe gave the patient a wink, as if to say, "Don't pay heed to that spiritless fool. He's an insufferable citizen of the Republic." (Perhaps the wink transmitted slightly less information, but that is the interpretation that should be applied to the conjunction of the upper and lower lid of the Abbe's twinkling eye.) He sensed Claude was cranky and so moved closer to the bed. Raising Claude's bandaged hand, he said, "Fine work. It belongs on the head of some wealthy Oriental merchant." He enhanced this attempt at good humor by providing the sweets he had promised before the operation. From a pocket he pulled a piece of demi-royal and surreptitiously gave it to Claude so that his sisters would not notice.

  Using his good hand, Claude fumbled with the violet paper.

  "Allow me." The Abbe popped the sugar into the boy's mouth. It was a treat for a child raised on roots and tubers and pinecones.

  "I see you can smile," the Abbe said. "A most noteworthy feature." He turned to Madame Page and said, "Your son's smile emanates not from the lips but from the eyes, the source of all truly great smiles."

  He looked back at Claude. "Well, that's half the bargain. I suppose I should fulfill the other half by telling you a story. What if I tell you of the sugar you seem so pleased to consume?"

  After a drink of water to slake the thirst brought on by the opiates, Claude settled under the covers, ready for a tale.

  It should be mentioned that tales were a lot more brutal then. The brothers Grimm hadn't yet tidied up the fireside accounts of rape, incest, cannibalism, and greed, nor had Per-rault's elevated courtly renderings infected the oral traditions of Tournay. The Sandman, who is now portrayed as a likable fellow, in Claude's day ripped out children's eyes. Happily, the Abbe represented this ancient and violent tradition.

  "Do you know where sugar comes from?" the storyteller queried.

  Claude shook his head. Beyond the Abbe's pockets and the Carnival stalls, he was ignorant of its origins.

  The Abbe, a man who traced the origins of all matter, expounded. "Most mambu juice (that's what it's called in certain parts of the world) is shipped from Hispaniola. It arrives here in two forms: loaves that sit like conical caps in the confectioner's window, and the rougher palm sugar wrapped in leaves that evoke the texture of the tropics. But the finest sugars—the demi-royal that now travels to your gut, and the royal I cannot afford—are furnished by the slavers of the Pompelmoose Atoll." The Abbe traced a map on Claude's stomach, with his nipples serving as Paris and London and the Pompelmoose Atoll rising out of nethermore parts. Claude giggled.

  "You will not laugh when I tell you that while wotk in Hispaniola is fatiguing, in the Pompelmoose Atoll it is death. Do you remember the criminal who was caught for bringing down an ax on the aged carter in Vornet?"

  Claude nodded.

  Madame Page said, "The carter's daughter found his nose in a bandbox under the bed."

  "And the poisoner of Pa
sserale?" the Abbe asked.

  "Six children orphaned by a wolfsbane potage," she said.

  As the docket grew to include infanticide and immolation, Fidelite and Evangeline moved to the side of the box bed, and Staemphli appeared to turn the pages of his medical treatise with diminished frequency, though he would never admit to listening.

  "These criminals all ended up" — the Abbe paused to look around the room — "in the penal colony of the Pompelmoose Atoll, where punishment is determined by the class of crime committed. I will explain. Lesser reprobates transported to the Pompelmoose are forced to work the fields, cutting long stalks into short stalks and short stalks into still shorter ones. The days are longer than long. From the cacophonic caw of the cockatoo" — the Abbe mimicked the cry of the tropical bird — "until the sun gives off its last, dusky sparkle on the waves of the surrounding sea, the prisoners are forced to harvest cane. And that, my friends, is considered a light sentence."

  "Lighter than your own," the surgeon mumbled. He was suspicious of eloquence.

  "Pickpockets and shoplifts are transported — and, actually, you can add your better grade of thief to the list—for periods of ten to fifteen years. But the harshest sentences are given to the meanest criminals, which brings us to poisoners and ax-men. They, along with rapemasters-general and souls insensitive to the beauty of things well made, are banished to the island's sugar mines. There they work their sticky picks, knocking out boulders of crystallized sugar that are hard as diamonds. In caverns where a single candle reflects off a thousand sutfaces, the criminals are forced to satisfy our Continental desires. (Among the residents of your Republic, my dear surgeon, the annual consumption is put at fourteen pounds a head.) Once brought to the surface of the sugar mine, usually by convicted highwaymen, cullies, and conny-catchers, the big crystals are shattered into smaller rock candy, the kind given on feast days to the deserving.