“No, I mean whose tooth?”
“I don’t know whose tooth!” Helen was exasperated.
“Let me see.”
“It’s too difficult. I’ve put it away. I don’t think the elevator is moving.” There was now no light illuminating any of the floor numbers.
“Don’t be impatient,” said Wilhelm. “This is an Aufzug, that is to say, an elevate-or, an ascenseur, it is meant to go up. We are presently taxing its talents.” He spoke to her as if she were a child. “You have plenty of time to show me the drawing,” he added quickly.
Helen gave up and pulled the box out of her bag. She flipped up the top and showed the engraving to the little man.
“Goodness,” he exclaimed. “That’s the illustration of my tooth extraction!”
“Impossible,” she said curtly, “this engraving is probably from the mid-nineteenth century.”
“Like I said, that’s my extraction,” and he pulled back his mouth with his finger, revealing a massive gap in the identical spot—the second premolar on the bottom left side.
Helen averted her eyes, embarrassed by the display. “Look,” he gurgled, his voice distorted by the contortions of his mouth. She shot him a quick glance then looked away again, agitated by the close proximity of this periodontal exhibition. “Look,” he commanded again. “Sehen Sie!” The imperative sibilants lingered and bubbled. She gave up and inspected his mouth and then the drawing. “Remarkable similarity,” she admitted, putting the engraving back into the box. “If this is an illustration of your tooth extraction, then it has been done as a copy of an earlier style. I don’t see why anyone would go to the bother.” She’d assimilated his clinical approach. “And besides, what would be so special about your tooth and your mouth?”
“It was done in the perfectly authentic style of the century, the decade even; it was the extraction of an impacted lower PM2 and was unusual for the amount of pain it caused its patient.” Wilhelm spoke with the authoritative voice of a university dental lecturer. “Part of the jaw had adhered to the root, which is why you see this incision here,” he pointed to a stitched seam indicated in the engraving, “and here,” he then pointed to a scar visible on the surface of his jaw below the gap.
“Where is your tooth now?” Helen asked, against her will.
“Why, it’s right here,” Wilhelm produced an extremely large molar from the same glove that had relinquished the business card. “I lost the bit of bone a long time ago.”
Helen automatically put out her hand to receive the tooth. “This is a wisdom tooth,” she declared. “It has four cusps. Your mouth couldn’t possibly produce a second premolar of this size.”
“Are you a dentist?”
“Well, no, but I have studied anatomy, and I know that this is not a second premolar.”
Wilhelm pursed his lips and turned his face so that Helen could see the other side. He then rolled back his lip and showed her the matching right side second premolar. It also looked like a wisdom tooth. “Satisfied?” he asked.
“How do you fit such large teeth into such a tiny jaw?” Helen asked him.
Wilhelm beamed proudly. “Good genes,” he announced. “If you studied anatomy then perhaps you could tell me what that bone is from.” She hadn’t noticed him turning the pages to the hand.
“It’s a human phalange,” she answered with certainty.
“From which finger? From which hand? Okay, so you know from the diagram!” But how old was the owner of the finger at the time of death? Male or female? How was the finger removed from the body? You haven’t studied anatomy,” he declared. “An anatomist could identify the very hand that possessed that very finger.”
“I suppose you’re going to tell me that it was your finger.” Her sarcasm was not lost on him.
“Listen to me,” said Wilhelm seriously, “we are in a city crawling with anatomists. Just be careful to whom you say you studied anatomy.
And by the way, it is the first phalange of the right hand third finger, the ring finger here, probably off of a woman of about the age of twenty to thirty, and removed with some violence.” He added tersely, “before death.”
She picked the finger bone out of the box and looked at it more closely. There were faint grooves of a sharp knife or file around the joint.
“Will you give me something from that box? In exchange for the tooth, that is,” Wilhelm asked. “And the business card,” he added, aware that Helen would be a hard bargainer.
“I don’t want your tooth, and besides, everyone is asking me to give them things from this box. What is in here that could possibly interest you?” She realized after asking the question that probably everything in the box interested him. The light indicated that they were passing the first floor. Helen tapped her foot impatiently.
Wilhelm looked at the now shut box still cradled in Helen’s arms and reached out to stroke the frame. A pearl came off in his fingers.
“This!” he shouted. Before Helen could protest he opened up his mouth and popped the pearl into the cavity left by the extracted tooth. It fit perfectly. Wilhelm was as surprised as Helen. He laughed joyfully until he caught his reflection in the polished brass panel in front of him.
“Thank you very much,” he mumbled humbly, running the tip of his tongue tentatively around the new, smooth surface, while at the same time continuing to vainly inspect his newly completed reflection.
Helen was speechless.
The elevator slid to the ground floor, stopping silently and gently. Wilhelm opened the docile door for her and then sat back onto his stool. She stepped out, then turned back to wave goodbye, but the door had already closed.
The doorman was still standing in his cubbyhole, holding the same position, elbows on the shelf, that he had held when Helen first went up. She looked at her watch and saw that it was 12:30. Somewhere between being shoved out of Dr von Ehrlach’s office and that moment, nearly two hours had passed.
Standing by the front door, she removed Wilhelm’s business card from her coat pocket. Balancing that and the tooth with the box, she managed to flip the top up and toss the card in. She closed it again, reluctant for some reason to add the tooth. At that moment she happened to look up. The doorman was standing next to her, watching her movements intently.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting something from here, as well,” she said in English.
The doorman didn’t respond but kept on looking at the box.
Helen decided to ignore him. Rolling the molar absently between her thumb and her first finger, she was about to slip it into her pocket when she felt the doorman’s gloved hand rest lightly on her arm. He gestured for the tooth, which she passed to him. He deftly snapped it into the gap left by the missing pearl. Helen smiled.
“I like your glasses,” she said.
The doorman nodded, stepped over to the door, and opened it up. Helen emerged into a blustery Vienna winter day.
CHAPTER 5
THE JOSEPHINUM
Who needs to eat? Thinking always of eating only because of the watch on her arm. One o’clock. The crowds should have gone, but here she was waiting at the door of a swamped restaurant. Helen was reminded of the jungle—the waitresses were sweating torrents, flinging themselves from table to table with arms loaded, creeping in the undergrowth of table legs and nasty boots, snatching finished plates from under tongues still searching for remaining drips and crumbs. The diners were obeying the laws of the animal kingdom—hooting, howling, croaking—to get their bread and butter.
This fierce competition among those already seated excluded the tantalized spectators, who were only allowed to watch meekly from the sidelines, a zone of safety where Helen was content to remain. The management teased the latecomers beyond their hunger by standing them parallel to the dining room, rather than snaking them perpendicularly away. Only the occasional swallow—physically impossible, after all, to resist the seductions of fragrant gravy and savory roasts—was permitted; open staring and salivating met with
clucks of disapproval from passing staff who delighted in parading their overloaded platters along the line in a salacious tasty tango. One-twenty ticked into place and the screeching harmony of dozens of chairs being pushed back sent a shuddering appetite through the motley line of tardy arrivals. The constraints of discipline were taxed as the stampede of satiated diners thundered away through the exit and those waiting resisted the urge to hurl themselves upon the abandoned cutlery, to forage for overlooked dribbles and scraps. Helen was not much of an eater—she had to be reminded of hunger—she had to be told how good tasting food could be—she was unaccustomed to the display of unfettered appetites; it confused and upset her, but it gnawed a hole in the pit of her stomach.
A weary waitress finally beckoned, seating Helen on a still warmly sagging rattan chair at a table for four where two other women were engaged in their own solitary mastications. Her presence acknowledged only by the nod of loaded mouths, she was left alone. Her own curtain dropped as she sat down; sharing a table with strangers demanded purdah. Another legacy from the matrilineal empire. They appeared at the oddest times, these long departed kinswomen. A fragment of her aunt Tessa now eased herself into the chair opposite—Helen could hear the wood squeak under her aunt’s formidable weight; her mother stood behind her, resting her languid hands on her shoulders, leaning over to whisper in her ear. Helen stared at the memory of her nodding aunt while listening to her mother’s murmurs of disapproval. In spite of the many years that had passed since their deaths, their tongues were never distant, even though her mother had rarely raised her voice above a sigh and her aunt had seldom spoken. But her mother had never really stopped talking and her aunt’s mute opposition always manifested itself at volumes louder than speech. They reviled eating with outsiders; their contempt for working was congenital; they ridiculed the manners, clothing, expressions of anyone so unwise as to appear in public; and they mourned Helen’s ignominious rejection of their teachings. They never showed up to tell her that they missed her, to tell her that they loved her; their appearances were meant to torment. Helen brushed the insinuation of her mother’s fingers away from the nape of her neck and raised the menu to block off the shadow of her aunt. They’d go away sooner or later.
Completely baffled, she ordered what she thought must be the smallest meal on the menu—what appeared to be a sandwich—and was horrified a few minutes later to see a platter arrive heaped not only with a bun of gigantic proportions along with a huge slab of thickly-cut beef, but masses of gravy-smothered french-fried potatoes as well. As the plate was put down in front of her, a blast of hot air rose up from the steaming food, and she broke out into another sweat. She looked around the restaurant and saw that the windows were fogged and that the waitresses, who were wearing thin cotton uniforms with their sleeves rolled up high, would frequently pause to wipe the moisture off their brows with the greasy aprons wrapped around their middles.
Helen shed layers of clothing, dropping scarf, sweater, vest to the floor. She called waitresses over and asked for glasses of water that she downed the instant they arrived. Still the huge plate of food stared at her; it wasn’t going to go away without her help. She speared a french fry and stuck it in her mouth. As she chewed it an overwhelming sensation flooded into her mouth and down her throat—the french fry felt incredible. She took another one and, holding it on the fork, nibbled in darting reconnaissance bites. The texture, from the crispness of its exterior where the gravy hadn’t smothered it, to the light fleshiness of the inside, astonished her. Grains of salt melted in provocating bursts upon her tongue, or hid in toothy crannies and slowly spread their briny magic, or better still, landed full square between incisors and exploded into intoxicating splinters. This was not just salt—this was spice. And the gravy, so rich and smooth, cloaking the inside of her mouth with the luxuriance of velvet, flowed down her throat and eased her soreness. And the sandwich—the crispy bun cracking between her teeth, the shards of the crust pushing pleasurably into her gums; the lacy fringe of lettuce grazing lightly against her lip, the drops of cool water sliding down from the newly-washed leaves onto her chin; the thick mustard oozing out to the corners of her mouth stinging the shallow winter cracks. She looked at the food with new respect. Since when had food felt so good?
She recalled the hundreds of meals she had shared with Martin, not remembering them one by one, of course, just their collective blandness, their unmemorableness, for Martin’s chastisement of her disinterest. “Look,” he’d say, wagging a fork capped with an exotic mushroom or yet another kind of twisted pasta, “this is food. Try this!” She’d dutifully put the new discovery in her mouth and shrug away its unimportance with a nonchalant swallow. Martin would do the cooking when he was home—steaming up the kitchen with new recipes from his travels, buying new utensils as insurance against failure, matching the meals with the appropriate music, setting the table with new dishes if need be. Helen would sit in the corner of the kitchen watching his devotion to cuisine, amused but placid, unable to taste his passion. When Martin put food into his mouth, no matter how insignificant the morsel, he would ensure that each molecule collided with his taste buds. And after he had laid waste to the meal, the gadgets would be crammed into drawers and forgotten, the discs left in the machine till the next time he returned, and the half-empty packets of bewildering ingredients—couscous, massala, wasabi—would decay in cupboards already full of rotting food.
Thinking of taste buds. For Helen, this meal was actually just as bland as any other. It was the sensation of eating that was so remarkable. She licked another drop of mustard seeping out of the bun. Again there was that incredible tangibility, but as for taste, it could have been flour and water. Helen shrugged and finished the meal, happy to get whatever she could from it.
The appointment with the medical museum’s director, Herr Ganz, was for 3:30. She arrived with just over an hour to spare. The museum was housed in a building called the Josephinum, a spare, elegant edifice, set back from the street and somewhat camouflaged by a tall iron fence and a mature garden. Compared with the buildings within Vienna’s center, the Josephinum was positively modest. Built around 1784 as a medical college, there were none of the medieval saints, baroque angels, or neo-classical caryatids that graced the more elaborate churches and museums of the inner city.
The museum’s displays were both repelling and fascinating. Surely this was something that astounded everyone. Her guidebook had been nonchalant: “A museum of the medical arts, noted for its collection of eighteenth-century anatomical wax models. Open 900 to 1500 Monday through Friday.”
The collection of wax models, called the Anatomia Plastica, had been commissioned in the late 1700s by the Emperor Joseph II from the Florentine artist Paolo Mascagni. Cast in classical poses, they were reminiscent of Greek and Roman statues, but instead of being clothed in the white marble that made nudity so acceptable, they were stripped of all covering, including their skin. This absolute nakedness—the exposition of muscle, sinew, vein—made them appear both formidable and vulnerable, repulsive and mesmerizing, more ultimately human in power and in weakness than any living being. The aged tawniness of the wax comforted the eye and magnetized the hands, pulling them in a willful and irresponsible invitation to approach, to caress, to carry away a coating of the 200-year-old wax on the tips of fingers. Helen was still so hot from her fever that she imagined the wax sizzling and melting under her touch. She could see the rivulets of wax, at first slow and tentative, then uncontrollable and torrential, running down the torsos of the figures. The heads would collapse on weakened necks, limbs would drop, pools of wax would eddy at her feet and then, as her fever subsided, would harden and lock her in, a prisoner within this intoxicating collection. The dimness of the hall protected Helen’s total absorption, but it was only the glass cases imprisoning each of the figures that protected them from her touch.
She waited for a good half hour in the director’s outer office, alternately idly flipping through a magazine, c
ontinuing her unfinished letter to Martin, and watching the secretary read through some papers in a file. Discovering Martin’s pile of unopened mail from her had not deterred her from writing, but it did force her to ask herself where to mail it to. In a fit of hubris she decided to mail it to his parents.
In the hush within the office, she was reminded of the absolute silence within their marriage. They both had realized that they were lodged firmly on the rocks the day he had teased her Walkman earphones off her head.
It was about half a year before he’d quit his full-time job at the paper and started taking on free-lance assignments. She’d become exhausted by his incessant talking and had put the earphones on as a kind of protection. For days, except during dinner, she’d been listening, she claimed, to a series of lectures, very important, couldn’t be interrupted.
Martin, who lived to talk—but only to an audience—was driven round the bend by Helen’s auditory armor. If he tried to say something she would first look startled, then yell “What?” then impatiently yank one of the earpieces away from her ear, and in mock patience ask him to repeat what he had said. He always gave up but would forget a short while later and try to engage her once again in conversation.
When he finally could endure it no longer, he snuck up behind her, grabbed the headset, and popped it onto his own head. Instead of the expected droning voice of a lecturer, there was only silence. He wrestled the cassette unit off of her belt before she had a chance to stop him and discovered that it was completely empty. She’d worn the Walkman as a devious means to block him out. In spite of her contrition, his response was to return the gesture, accomplished by ever-increasing absences. Helen told herself for the hundredth time that she hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings, but. There was always the but. His talking had been driving her crazy.
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