The Sensualist

by Barbara Hodgson

  “Yes, of course, Martin. We have been trying to reach you. This is a complicated case, we need to talk to as many people as possible.” Hauptmann Bauer, of the Vienna homicide division sat impassively behind his desk. An aide perched on a chair beside the desk, poised to take notes. She was dying to ask him how important he was. Well, he had his own office; that was one clue.

  “Perhaps we can start with where you are living. You have left the Hotel Stadtpark and have moved to where?” He took off his jacket and arranged it on the back of his chair.

  “I moved to a private residence, the home of Herr Friedrich Anselm.” He passed her a form and watched her fill in the details, breathing audibly although not heavily, while she laboriously worked her way through the maze of questions.

  “Why did you move, and why not leave a forwarding address at your hotel? You seemed to have moved very soon after Herr Ganz’s death.” He eased his index finger under his tight collar and strained the cloth away from his neck.

  Why did even agreeable policeman seem offensive? Even relatively young ones like Bauer. Had all his hair, no potbelly, no broken veins curling around the tip of his nose. European men were sometimes hard to gauge, but Helen placed him in his late thirties. She deliberated for a moment about how to answer. She assumed cruelly that his lack of mustache indicated his reluctance to break away from the mentality of junior officers who had not yet earned the right to step out of uniform.

  “Perhaps you would feel more comfortable if we discussed this in English? I could call an interpreter.” So solicitous; he had even had tea brought to his office.

  “No, I’m quite alright, it just takes me a little longer to think of how to form my responses.” And maybe if you stopped fidgeting, she thought. She explained the series of events that led to her move, but as for leaving her new address at the hotel, she had told anyone who might need to get in touch with her where she was, and that as there wouldn’t be a telephone available to take calls, she would check in from time to time.

  “And you didn’t think that the police might have a reason to get in touch with you, that a murder investigation might be a very good reason. But perhaps being American, murder is not so important. In Austria we don’t experience this very often.”

  “I’m not American, Hauptmann Bauer, I’m Canadian.”

  He brushed her objection aside in disdain. “It’s the same thing, isn’t it, the Americas?”

  Helen let it drop. “I just didn’t think that I would be considered involved. I met Peter Ganz once, had an appointment to meet him again on the day his body was discovered, and when I arrived for that appointment, that was when I found out that he had been murdered. I can’t see how I can be of any help.”

  “What was your first meeting about?”

  Helen described her reasons for visiting Ganz, and how the discussion had moved from her husband to her woodcut.

  “And why were you to meet again?”

  “So he could return the woodcut to me.”

  While she spoke, Bauer slid a manila envelope out from his top drawer and handed it to her. Turning it over once, she then undid the clip sealing the flap and pulled out the single sheet of paper inside. It was her woodcut. She looked at the officer questioningly.

  “Do you recognize the engraving?”

  “Yes, it’s mine. It’s a woodcut. I loaned it to Herr Ganz, at his request, to have it examined. He thought that it could have possibly been an authentic woodcut from the sixteenth century.” The questions were racing through Helen’s mind. How did he get a hold of it? What has this to do with murder? Take your time, she told herself, don’t rush him. She looked at the paper again. What if it really was sixteenth century?

  “I have the examination report right here.” He rustled a sheet of paper so transparent that Helen could almost distinguish the heavilypenned characters from the other side. “It is a woodcut pulled from a block struck in 1542 for a volume of work printed in 1543 entitled De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septum by Andreas Vesalius, a Flemish anatomist. It was utilized again for the printing of a second edition in 1555.” He skimmed the report, moving his lips silently as he read. “Blah, blah, blah,” he concluded out loud, then said, “here is where we come in. They, the blocks that is, were housed in the library at the University of Munich where they were destroyed by a bomb, hmm, doesn’t say when. Neither the location of the blocks nor their destruction would be of any interest to us, except,” he paused, “this print is not from either edition and, although printed onto paper manufactured before 1600, the ink used was manufactured after the war.” He looked at Helen with an expectant and triumphant smile on his face.

  “So?” she said, “someone could easily have reproduced this by copying from one of the existing prints and then printing it onto old paper. There’s enough of it about to keep art forgers busy for decades.” She was disappointed; it wasn’t real, after all.

  “No, you don’t understand, do you? This is an authentic print, pulled from the original woodblock. Apparently, they can tell; I don’t know how. You have a print made from a supposedly destroyed block!”

  “When were they destroyed?”

  “Die Zweiter Welthrieg. The Second World War.”

  “Yes, but when? What date?”

  “I already said that the exact date is not mentioned.” Impatience oozed from his pores.

  “Were all of the blocks destroyed?” she persisted.

  “It doesn’t say, but it implies that they were.”

  “How many were at the library?”

  “I don’t know.” He softened. “It doesn’t say.”

  “Well, maybe there were others stored elsewhere. They didn’t all have to be at the library.”

  Thus began a long session of questions, more cups of tea, a break for dinner, more questions. Every minute of Helen’s stay in Vienna was examined. In detail she described meeting Anna with the dog, Frau Kehl and her pretty boy, Dr von Ehrlach, Friedrich Anselm, Herr Ganz, the editors of the newspaper, the other incidental persons who had crossed her path. She glossed over Rosa, mentioning her only briefly and not by name. Frankly, she didn’t know how to describe her without rendering the portrait of a hallucination.

  When Helen spoke of her efforts to track her husband down, Hauptmann Bauer interrupted her. “You don’t like the police?”

  “Why do you ask that?” she in turn asked.

  “Why did you not report his disappearance to us?”

  “Because he’s not really missing; he’s avoiding me. I’m not going to bother police over a petty domestic issue.”

  “You told me that he was investigating an art theft ring?”

  “That’s what they said at the newspaper. Ganz told me that Martin had told him it was art forgeries he was investigating, not theft. I still don’t know who was right, but I think Ganz was.”

  “What more can you tell me?”

  “I’ve found remarkably little information,” she admitted. “He had interviewed Ganz, telephoned some other museums, left no notes. I have an appointment to meet with a Mr Arany, the director of the Semmelweis Museum in Budapest, in two weeks.”

  “We believe your husband was investigating the mysterious reappearance of the Vesalius woodblocks,” the officer announced with satisfaction. “We think he has vanished, not because he is giving you a merry chase, my dear, but because he has found out something he shouldn’t have. What I really want to know is, how have you become so inextricably involved, and, as you claim, so unwittingly?”

  Helen had to admit the news put her on the spot, not that she had any answers. She could tell him more about Rosa, she supposed. “Yes, do it,” suddenly her mother’s insistent voice hissed in her ear, “you’ve never lied in your life.” “That’s what you think,” she shouted silently back. “My life is a lie.” Gone, announced a faint whisp of moving air, she’s gone.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know.” A half truth.

  Bauer finally let her go. It was nine
o’clock in the evening. He offered to have her driven back to Anselm’s house, but she preferred to walk.

  “Please be available tomorrow from three o’clock,” he requested as they parted at the threshold of his door. “I will have more questions for you. I will see you here.”

  Instead of going straight back to Anselm’s, she roamed the old streets of the Innerstadt, ending up in the bar of a comfortable hotel from which she could telephone Jimmy Singleton in New York in privacy. She ordered a drink, arranged for a telephone at her table in a quiet corner, and talked to him for the next hour and a half. She told him about the woodcuts, the police and their suspicions; she told him about her worries. If Martin was missing and Ganz murdered over these woodblocks, that meant that not only she, but perhaps Anselm, and perhaps Herlsberg and the other staff at the Vienna newspaper, were also in danger. But in danger of what? Murder? For what? What did she and the others know? Singleton was pragmatic. She didn’t know a thing except what the police told her. If she kept it that way and let them finish their investigation, then there would be no reason for concern. She could leave Vienna tomorrow, well, whenever the police let her go, put Martin’s fate in their hands, leave it to them. Yes, she could. She ended the long call by agreeing with him, ringing off, and ordering another drink.

  It was very late by the time Helen let herself into the house. Instead of going to her room where she would just lie awake smothered in sheets and abstractions, she crept into the library and read about Vesalius and the woodblocks until her eyes felt as dry and fragile as the pages of the books she plied. What she knew about Vesalius, indeed any of the anatomists that had created the work that she studied, was sketchy and inadequate to say the least. That he had been born in Brussels in 1514, that he died at the age of 50 in 1564, that he had contributed an invaluable wealth of knowledge to the study of anatomy, Helen already knew. That he had been a shameful egomaniac; that he had been only 24 years old when the first of his anatomical books, the Tabulœ Anatomicœ Sex, was published; that he died on the Greek island of Zanté en route to Venice from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; these things she hadn’t known, and they helped give breath to the dusty lifeless past. And as for the woodblocks themselves, she discovered that the collection in Munich that had consisted of about 220 of the original 270 blocks had moved so many times during their lifetime that it was a miracle they had survived up to the Second World War. The history was interesting to a point, but so specialized, not like the life of someone celebrated—a Michelangelo or a Leonardo da Vinci—someone whose name had made it into everyday language.

  The woodblocks were cut following drawings probably made by a Belgian painter, Jan Stefan van Kalkar (although the snipier historians claimed this was impossible given the previous evidence of his mediocre skills in Vesalius’s earlier book, Tabulœ Anatomicœ Sex), for two elaborate and ambitious books entitled De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septum and the Epitome, both published in 1543. Helen was fascinated to read that these two books were landmarks of publishing; they crossreferenced the illustrations to the explanations, interweaving the significance of the words with the importance of the pictures. Not only had Kalkar created the artwork for the Tabulœ Sex based on Vesalius’s studies, he had apparently sponsored or financed the printing of it. So their relationship was much closer than that of employer and employee.

  De Humani Corporis Fabrica: On the Fabric of the Human Body. How marvelous to think of the body as some kind of cloth or garment. To be changed at whim. To discard or treasure. To hand down through the generations.

  Helen set the books aside and closed her eyes. She pulled her legs up onto the chair, nestled her head upon her knees, letting rounded patellas fit their perfect fit into the orbs of her eyes. The pressure from the bones—such thin skin at the knees, no padding there—pushed her eyes back into her head, creating a lively dance of blackness and explosions of, well, non-blackness. How else could it be described? There were too many whites and too many colors to enumerate. She moved her head back a fraction of an inch and raised the lids. The landscape of her knees presented itself to her—tiny, fine hairs erupted sparsely over the skin’s surface. At this distance the shallow crisscrossing lines seemed as deep as crevices, the occasional irritated hair follicles like craters. No, the crisscrossing fissures were the weft and the warp; the hair, the imperfectly spun fibers. The skin. The fabric.

  Vesalius had been in Venice; Kalkar, if he was the artist, had been in Venice; and the woodblocks had been cut in Venice, but the printing was entrusted to a printer in Basel named Oporinus. Why Basel? Wasn’t Venice at the heart of the printing craft at that time? And why the name Oporinus; wasn’t that a Latin name? Perhaps this wasn’t the name of the printer after all but the name of the firm. Call it something Latin, make it classy and literary sounding. No, thought Helen, printing houses called themselves after the owner in those days. Vesalius apparently knew the printer, this man called Oporinus. He wrote him a letter that was reprinted in one of the books. But what was Oporinus like? A taciturn, humorless craftsman with a love for the press but indifferent to the subject matter? Dissection was a dicey thing in those days—not everyone approved; perhaps it was difficult to find a printer in Venice who would undertake such a project? Was it possible he had a special interest in anatomy, perhaps having suffered from gout and dizzy spells for most of his adult life?

  She skipped to another book and found that Basel was a recognized center of printing, thanks to printers such as Oporinus, and that Oporinus was in fact Johannes Herbst, the son of a poor but influential artist. As a young man he had apprenticed as a printer and briefly studied medicine under Paracelsus, a crackpot genius of a physician and alchemist, as influential in his approach to healing as Vesalius had been in anatomy. Oporinus then had become a professor of Latin and Greek. Unable to keep up with changing regulations in the University system— Helen, thinking of her own university, nodded in recognition of a certain historical continuum—he was set up as a full-fledged printer, all of this by the time he reached the age of 32. He led a brilliant life as one of Basel’s foremost printers, not only creating beautiful books, but having the distinction of being thrown in jail for printing the first Latin version of the Koran.

  The volume that revealed so much about Oporinus drifted off to other irrelevant topics, leaving her to return to the paltry details provided by the first one. It wasn’t a big leap to understand why the blocks, upon Oporinus’s death, went to the publishing house of Johann Froben. This Basel printer, Helen had read, was also a well-respected publisher, and in fact, that’s where Oporinus had first apprenticed. But Oporinus had a medical background. What about the Frobens? Did they approve of the flayed skins, exposed organs, frayed nerves? Perhaps these things were much more natural a topic than today. Now the reactions were so predictable: clinical interest amongst professionals, disgust amongst lay people. It was rare to find informed interest in the art itself.

  Here was mention of an Ambrose Froben, Johann’s son? Grandson? Ambrose had printed a book for a Felix Plater in 1583 in which the Vesalius images appeared in reduced form. She dismissed that information; it didn’t involve the original blocks. The Frobens went bankrupt in 1603 and their successor, Ludwig König, took the woodblocks next. A common name, König, but not a disreputable one. She could find nothing about printers called König other than the inconsequent detail that they reprinted Plater’s book.

  An Augsburg printer named Andreas Maschenbauer got his hands on the woodblocks next, and in 1706 and 1723 passed them off as Titian’s work in several abridged editions for artists, reviving a rumor that the illustrations had not been done by Kalkar, as Vesalius himself implied. This wasn’t, apparently, the work of Maschenbauer’s own solitary imagination. The illustrations were so good that for years a number of authorities had claimed they could come from no other hand than that of an artist such as Titian. And it probably helped sales.

  Helen studied the reproductions of the Vesalius woodcuts in one of the books
, comparing those from the Tabulœ Sex with the later Fabrìca. The book was a badly printed little effort—the ink had filled many of the fine lines, others had disappeared—but mediocre though they were as reproductions, one could see that the art itself was highly developed. The contrast between the Vesalius woodcuts, even in Kalkar’s earlier, cruder Tabula Sex, and other anatomists’ work was indeed astonishing. Anselm had books and woodcut prints showing examples of Vesalius’s predecessors and contemporaries, names and work that Helen was long familiar with, but who demanded review with a fresh eye under the circumstances. They were a confusing cast not helped by the fact that each publication gave a different variation on the names of the players: Lorenz Fries, also known as Laurentius Phryesen, who wrote a popular anatomy in 1518 called The Looking-glass of Medicine; Giacomo Berengario da Carpi, variously known as Jacopo or James Berengar or Berenger, whose skeletons and muscle men stood in crude yet dramatic relief; Charles Estienne, or Etienne, or Carolus Stephanus as he preferred to be called, a French anatomist from the celebrated family of Parisian printers; Bartholomæus Eustachius, an Italian physician whose work, published posthumously, had a sublime graphic aesethetic that must have been ahead of its time.

  Helen scanned the walls, inspecting the complex jumble of old prints and paintings. It seemed so odd that Anselm wouldn’t have a Vesalius. She’d been through some of the drawers already, not specifically looking, but certainly keeping an eye out, but nothing had surfaced. It was such an obvious gap in his collection; he must have some examples somewhere. She returned to the inadequate book she’d been reading and studied the illustrations again, concentrating on the woodcuts of the muscle men; they’d only included a few, but perhaps hers had been one of them. The reduced size and bad printing made it difficult, if not impossible, to identify which one, but it was possible to see the progression through the layers of muscles from one woodcut to the next. The first muscle plate was one of the most poignant, with the subject’s head thrown back, his arms raised slightly away from his sides, one foot a scant step ahead of the other. The hilly countryside and the silent little town nestled in amongst the trees and contours of the background increased the intensely emotional splendor of the scene. As the views changed in the subsequent plates, the subject rotated to show the sides, the back, and the ever-deepening layers of his body’s muscles. The muscles stripped away, hanging down in pathetic shreds, the fields, orchards, and houses continuing to stand in mute testimony to this unrelenting unveiling.