The tap of hard leather soles advanced along the marble floor of the outer corridor. The door opened and the director, Peter Ganz, the palest man that Helen had ever seen, stepped into the office. As he passed through, the secretary gestured towards Helen. Ganz turned around and with an easy naturalness shook her hand and invited her into his office. He took off his coat, apologizing for his tardiness, and excused himself while shuffling his messages. This gave Helen, who was seated on the opposite side of his desk, an opportunity to study him.
For a start, Peter Ganz couldn’t have been more different from von Ehrlach, if he had been born on another planet. He was relatively young, probably in his early forties, although his blue-black hair and mustache made him seem younger still. He was stylishly dressed in a tailored three-piece suit and his groomed body looked as well-tended as his clothing. This care and expense made the pallor of his skin even more of a surprise. She perversely compared him with his collection, although most of those figures had acquired a tanned and mellow patina resulting from their lengthy life spans. Again the urge to reach out and touch came over her. She blinked and swallowed and then sat on her hands, looking around at the disorderly bookshelves and the art on the walls.
The telephone rang several times while she waited. While focusing on the cracked spines of a well-thumbed set of encyclopedias, she strained to follow the brief conversations about mundane issues such as lack of janitors and missing budget reports. His voice was like his complexion— smooth and colorless. Just as Helen decided that she’d rather wait in the outer office, Ganz picked up the phone one last time and asked the secretary not to put through any more calls. Then he looked at her directly and asked her in English what she expected from him.
“I haven’t heard from my husband, Martin Evans, for close to three months. He had an appointment with you in early December and I’m hoping that you’ll be able to tell me why he visited you.”
Ganz flipped through his appointment book, muttered in frustration, then called the secretary to come in. They had a rapid conversation, ending with the secretary pointing to a file on his desk. Ganz, while scanning the file, motioned for the secretary to remain.
She continued speaking, filling the silence. “I’m an art historian, Herr Ganz, in fact my area of study is medical art, but I haven’t got the faintest idea why someone would steal such art.”
“If I am not mistaken, your husband is doing a story on art forgeries in central and eastern Europe,” Ganz said, looking up. Herlsberg at the newspaper had said thefts, thefts in western and central Europe. These seemed like important distinctions.
“Not thefts?” she asked.
“Thefts?” Ganz repeated. “No. Forgeries. Forgeries of medical art. We had several long interviews during which I gave him a great deal of information about the subject. He has a fine command of the German language,” Ganz continued admiringly. “But I would expect that the article has already appeared. As you know, these interviews took place several months ago.” He looked expectantly at Helen, who shook her head.
“I spoke with the editor of his paper and they presumed it would run at the start of this month, but they received nothing, not even a draft, and he hasn’t been in touch with them at all.”
“Have you called the police?” Ganz asked.
“Not yet,” said Helen. “He’s often away for long stretches at a time. We usually don’t worry about him.”
“We?”
“Me, his parents, his newspaper, you know.”
Ganz rubbed his cheek with the flat of his hand, leaving an unreasonably red welt on the white skin. He fired off an indecipherable comment to his secretary, who sat poker straight, his hands bound around one slightly raised knee. The secretary inclined his head slightly, let a smile slide across his face, and shrugged fatalistically.
“I was just saying that it would be sorrow to be missing for three months and not to be wanted,” said Ganz.
Helen protested, claiming that wasn’t the exact situation, but left off in defeat. She knew it was true, and also knew that her own absence would provoke even less attention. Both her parents were long dead; she had no brothers or sisters. And as for Martin’s parents, time had little meaning. No matter how long it had been since she got in touch with them, they would just assume that she was away somewhere, for some reason. Perhaps at some point his mother would wonder what she was doing, would look up from some magazine or television program and say, “Whatever could Helen be up to?” Sending them her letters to Martin was beginning to make sense.
“I don’t remember the specifics of our two interviews, but I do remember that he questioned me at some length about the subject of the Vesalius woodblocks from Munich. I must tell you that before I developed an interest in anatomical art I was a curator at the Munich University Library and had met a gentleman who had worked at the library before it was destroyed in the bombing during World War II. He told me about a set of woodblocks, not prints, but original blocks, that had been housed in the library since sometime after 1826. These were the original woodblocks that had been used to illustrate an anatomical treatise by the Belgian physician, or anatomist, I should say, Andreas Vesalius. You’re familiar with him?” He waited for her nod then continued. “Before 1826, their history went back to 1542 in Venice when they were first struck. I was amazed to hear that they had been lost and found and moved many times, and it was only after they were rediscovered during this century that they were destroyed during the bombing I just mentioned. This story intrigued me, so having found out about these woodblocks, I set out to find out about the work. They were extraordinary for their time, the interpretation being attributed to an artist called Jan Stefan van Kalkar, based, naturally, on the anatomical findings of Vesalius.” He stopped, sensing Helen’s impatience.
“Please don’t pay attention to me. Go ahead, continue,” she said. “But I must remember to show you something before I leave.”
“I haven’t much more to add. This subject seemed to be your husband’s area of concentration. I asked him if he was interested in any of Vesalius’s contemporaries, Eustachius or Fallopius, or with any of the other anatomists from other epochs, Galen, da Vinci, William Harvey. I talked about the improbability of forgery. I’m not an expert. You understand?”
She nodded.
“I’m only an interested amateur. However, it seems to me that to counterfeit, after all, that is what we are talking about here, are we not, counterfeiting? To counterfeit a print is a waste of time. What do prints sell for in general? A few hundred schillings up to a few thousand? This is not a fortune. So, we’re not speaking of Dürer—perhaps a rare Dürer print would sell for a great deal of money—we’re speaking of Vesalius. Scarce but not rare. Respected but not venerated. And the time involved to make the paper, to print, to find a buyer. Furthermore, any self-respecting purchaser of prints would take one look at the paper, hold it up to the light, run the fingers along the surface, and would be able to tell immediately that it was contemporary.”
“But what if it was printed on old paper? I’m sure there are means of finding old papers, even today.”
“Okay. Yes. This is possible. But it still would not be financially rewarding. Also, I am simply not aware of any Vesalius forgeries.” He paused, reflecting. “It would be possible; there have been so many editions.” They sat in silence. “No,” he finally said, “I just do not see the point of it. One could simply not make enough money. However, I suggested to your husband that if he must persist, that he go to Munich, to the library.”
“Do you know if he followed your advice?”
Ganz shrugged. “He said he would. I can’t think of a more appropriate starting point. Of course there are the other medical museums such as the Wellcome in London, the Semmelweis in Budapest, to name a few. Paris, Berlin, Bologna, Florence—really there are museums all over. I did suggest the Semmelweis, specifically. They just bought a Vesalius.”
“Who else would buy these prints?”
&n
bsp; “It is a very specialized field of collecting, I’ll admit that. Most of the connoisseurs are doctors, or retired doctors, or they are large companies such as the pharmaceuticals. And of course there are the museums. And then there are people like me who run the museums and galleries and who have a personal love for this form of art.
“You can see just from my own poor showing on these walls,” he gestured to the framed engravings that Helen had noticed earlier, “that the art spans many styles and has several layers of appeal. Of course, through your own studies you will understand the scope of this specialty.” He paused. “You said you had something to show me.”
She pulled the box out and displayed it on the table. Opening it and extracting the woodcut, she held it so Ganz could see it properly. He took the piece of paper circumspectly, went over to the window, and held it to the light. When he came back he looked at her with curiosity. “So you too are a collector?” He set the paper down onto the desk.
“A strange woman, a stranger on the train, that is, gave me that, along with these other things.” She pushed the box over to him. He picked the objects out one by one, much as von Ehrlach had done that morning.
“How did you say you met this woman?”
“On the train coming to Vienna.”
“Why did she give you this box?” He had just noticed the drawing on the outside and was turning the box around in awe.
“I have no idea. I have no idea why all of these things are coinciding like this.”
“Well,” said Ganz, looking once more at the woodcut, “it could be an original Vesalius, but I doubt it. You should be careful with it, just in case. If you don’t mind I’d like to have this authenticated. Would you leave it with me?” She picked up the woodcut and held it tightly, possessively. His contradictions did not inspire confidence.
Ganz coaxed the paper back into his waiting hands. He may have been skeptical, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t interested.
SIGHT
CHAPTER 6
ROSA
Helen woke up wearing someone else’s eyes. Eyes that shattered her orbs into a thousand piercing splinters, that shook her balance off its pivot and flung her headlong into a mercurial fog.
Darkness is immobility, yet here she was in a room as black as the other side of the moon, shooting through the air at a million miles an hour with confetti whipping her eyeballs. She managed to find the bedside lamp and turn it on; the sudden light bringing the terrifying plunge to an excruciating stop.
Helen lay on her back, gasping, shuttered and blotted—hands gripped to either side of the bed as if nailed in place—urging her eyes to open. Then the bed began to tip, first this way then the other; she held her breath, willing the motion to cease. Flickering light from the lamp added to the sense of dislocation, but more than that, everything seemed much further away, as if she were looking at the room through the wrong side of a pair of binoculars. She got out of the bed and groped helplessly at the chair, the wall, the air, making her way to the bathroom. With each step the floor gave way to a paralyzing chasm; with each step she felt her heart rip through her, her skin denounce her, her breath deflate her. Nearly senseless with nausea and fright, she switched on the bathroom light and tried to confront herself in the mirror. There were two of her staring back. She looked closer; there were dozens of her staring back.
Aghast, she clamped her hands into fists and stuck them into each eye. Slowly spreading her fingers back out she peered through them to the mirror. Still multiples. She then noticed that the two end doors of the three-way mirror were angled open—shutting them returned the room to normal.
“But I had someone else’s eyes in my head,” she moaned, now clutching her abdomen in the hope that the support of her hands would suppress the pervading inner upheaval. Eyes incapable of vision, eyes in motion, eyes in chaos. She pressed her hands tighter against her gut, feeling the ridges of the abdominal muscles straining against the pressure of her hands but no longer straining to rebel. “I must be sicker than I thought. I should go see a doctor.” She looked in the mirror and saw herself, a stranger, laughing hysterically. What’s so funny? Go see a doctor. How about Dr von Ehrlach? She joined the laughing reflection.
She turned on the taps and splashed her face. Letting the water stream down her forehead and cheeks and chin, she crept back into the room. She picked up her watch, holding its face close to her own, her cavernous irises marking the jerking spasms of the second hand, then focusing on the time—it was 4:30 in the morning—and suddenly noticing wisps of smoke coming from a cigarette butt in the ashtray beside the bed. She wiped her face with a brush of her sleeve and quietly pivoted around to inspect the room.
“It’s a terrible habit, one that I should eliminate as soon as possible,” said a familiar woman’s voice from a dark corner of the room. Thick spectacles caught the light and threw it back into Helen’s battered eyes.
Helen thought to herself, “Rosa.” It was the woman who had been on the train.
Questions charged through Helen’s brain, “What are you doing here?” “How did you get in here?” But all she asked was, “Were those your eyes?”
“Please sit down, my dear,” begged Rosa. “Seeing people standing about in what they call their sleeping gear makes me uneasy. Get back into bed, if you like. Don’t mind me,” she added. “My, this chair is uncomfortable.” She waited for Helen to sit back on the bed, and when Helen drew the covers over herself she visibly relaxed. “Yes, those were my eyes just as those breasts were my breasts. My vision was much clearer, like yours.” She removed her glasses and offered them to Helen, who ignored the gesture with a deliberate stare to an unseeable remote point. Rosa let them dangle in the air for a moment, then slapped them back in place. “Ah, you were so happy a minute ago. I do like jolly company; it does help to pass the time.” Rosa glanced down to her wrist, automatically checking the time, but her watch was deeply buried in the folds of flesh, capable only of informing a serious inquiry. She yawned, flattening her features back against the curve of her skull. “But I’d like you to meet the owner of a much worse pair of eyes. He is a gentleman with an impressive collection of optical studies. In fact, you could say that his collection has drained him of that which is most precious to him, his eyesight.” Now that Helen’s own eyes were becoming more accustomed to the dim light of the room, she could see that Rosa had opened the purse that perched on her ample lap.
While Helen watched her rifle through the pages of a well-worn notebook, licking her finger with each turn of the page, Rosa chattered away. “You must be wondering how I got into your room. I’m not a ghost, you know.” She set aside the notebook for a minute and searched in her bag again. Not finding what she was looking for she raised herself up slightly from the chair and produced, from the pockets of the voluminous cape that she wore, a long wire hook and a set of keys. “The hook is to lift the chain once the door is unlocked. Very useful. You should get one.” This confused Helen even more, as there was no chain on the door. Rosa picked the notebook up again. “Here,” she announced, “is the address,” and with a flourish ripped the page out of the book, folding it into a paper plane and aiming it at Helen, letting it fly with effortless accuracy. “Delightful,” she said, “I haven’t lost my touch. Excuse me for not getting up, by the way; I’m committed to saving energy.”
Helen picked the paper out of the undulating folds of the rumpled quilt and spread it open, surmising, from the lovely script that had graced its twin, that it was from the same book as the page she had found in the box. An appointment was listed for that same day at 11:15 at the home of Herr F. Anselm.
“I’m sorry,” said Helen, “I have appointments lined up already. I can’t just change my plans to suit you.” She felt suitably rude. Rosa’s presence demanded bad behavior, and Helen, her hackles up, was ready to deliver it.
“Oh, but you’ll appreciate meeting Herr Anselm. Friedrich and I go back a long way.”
“Why do I need you to tell me who
my appointments are with when I am quite capable of making my own? And who was Dr von Ehrlach and why was he convinced that I was you? Who are you anyway?”
Rosa was beside herself with laughter. “He mistook you for me?” she chortled. “That man is such a nincompoop, an old friend, but really! Did you see his collection?” she asked more seriously.
“No,” said Helen, “he spent most of the time looking through the box you gave me. He seemed to be quite familiar with it.”
“Ah, he looked through the box. That must mean that he gave you something. What was it?”
Helen slid down to the end of the bed and handed the box over to Rosa, who flicked the reading lamp on beside her, giving Helen a better opportunity to study her. Rosa wasn’t just overweight; she was huge in a grand manner, and her clothing and hair reinforced this. More startling than the fat were the angles. Rosa had more angles than anybody Helen had ever known—the 450 of the elbow, the 9o0 of the chin, the isometric projection of one eyebrow, the axonometric projection of the other. She was a veritable obese polygon grappling with flowing clothing, selfdeforming both within and without. Helen yearned to coax the angles into round soft surfaces so that Rosa would conform to her idea of fat.
The long, gold satin cape fell in deep flounces from a white ruffled collar. The luxurious material straddled the pointed corners of her shoulders and flowed along the ridges of her knobby arms and looked as though, at any time, it would be sliced into ribbons by the sharp edges. Her hair (this was an altogether different wig to that which Helen had first seen her wearing and different as well to the one that had been in the hat box) was a deep amber color and leapt out in many hazardous directions. Her upright posture, combined with the formality of the chair, evoked an imposing nobility; her robust mustache commanded respect and was impossible to miss, especially as Rosa moved her mouth in silent motion as she talked to herself.
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