The Sensualist

by Barbara Hodgson

  Anselm, stubborn as a rusty lock, would not tell her what the occasion was, only saying that it was by way of an apology and leaving it at that. It wasn’t a farewell dinner; a week remained before she would leave. It wasn’t because he loved to eat; they had never shared a meal in the many days that Helen had been in the house. In fact, she’d never even seen him near food since her first arrival with the chocolates. An apology for what? For letting the police in to pry? For keeping something back, something hidden? She knew that he had so much more to say about Vesalius; what was stopping him? Helen brushed aside the questions and dug in to enjoy the meal of a lifetime, forgetting all about her intention to find out if he had a copy of the Icones Anatomicœ.

  “You realize, Helen, you have no smell,” Anselm announced between sips of wine. He had been drinking a lot and, moving quickly from mere intoxication to total drunkenness, was dragging Helen along with him. The flush of inebriation introduced a tolerant smile to her face. This is my tolerant smile, she told herself, useful for drunken old men who know their own charms. She watched him down another glass of wine. Please don’t let him become maudlin, she pleaded silently, her smile plastered on haphazardly now. He continued. “You have no smell, and you have no sounds—you’re one of the few people who can approach me without my sensing you. Do you exist? Do you smell things, hear things? Do you make noise?”

  She shrugged, serious once again. Her conversations seemed to leave so little room for levity. “What do you expect me to say? I don’t understand what you’re asking. Of course I do. I smell, I make sounds. Just like everyone else. I’m just like everyone else.” Why was he always trying to make her uncomfortable?

  “Let me rephrase my question. What do you see in the dark?”

  “I’ve had no darkness since the night I saw through Rosa’s eyes, Herr Anselm.”

  “Friedrich.”

  “Friedrich.” She sighed. An interior sigh—no outward escape of the deflation of the lungs, the expelling of air, no audible evidence of being provoked. She had wanted to giggle, to invite the wine that was rocketing through her head to an exuberant party, a jolly soiree. The frolics would have to wait. “I see so much now that Fm not sure anymore what I smell or hear. Or taste,” she added.

  “But you know what you see?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And what you feel?”

  “I must know what I feel. You know this, too. After all, you’re the one who told me I have voices in my body. If they don’t tell me what I feel, who will?” She looked at him, suddenly embarrassed. “But I don’t know what I say. I’ve had too much to drink and so have you.” She nodded to the waiter, standing in the wings. When he came over to the table she looked in Anselm’s direction. The young man, who had registered Anselm’s drunken state, helped him up and started to lead him off to his room. Anselm turned to her and asked, “What kind of woman are you, Helen? How long will it take for you to realize that it’s time to start chasing live bodies, not dead ones.”

  “But my husband…”

  He turned and left, not allowing her to finish. As she stood, ready to thank the waiter and let him out, she finished the sentence for herself. But my husband. Dead in my mind, dead in my heart. She had read somewhere that Leonardo da Vinci had asked how one could describe a heart without filling a book. All she wanted to know was how could she fill a heart. Her heart? Martin’s heart? Whose heart needed filling? There was more to that quote. What was it? Something about blindness. That was it. He had asked how to describe the heart to a blind man without filling a book. Anselm the blind man’s book of the heart, filled with blank pages that only he could read. She went back to the table and slowly circled it, picking up tidbits from the various plates and absently stuffing them in her mouth. There was still some of the powerful thick port they had been drinking with dessert. She filled her glass, emptying the bottle, and wandered into the study. With the books and pictures pressing closely in on her she sat down in the most comfortable chair in the room, a leather club chair, and dissected Anselm’s behavior. What did he mean she didn’t smell? She held the palm of her hand to her nose and took a sniff. Then smelt the tips of her fingers, the ends of her hair, the crook of her arm, her clothes; she even pulled her feet up to her nose and inhaled deeply. She smelt her fingertips again for the repositories of the day’s olfactory clues. The alternating dust and polish from stair banisters, the sweat from shaken hands, the unrinsed scum of hand soap, the accumulations from coins and bills, the savory remains of the dinner. Nothing. She dipped her fingers into the dregs of the port and slid them along the end of her nose. Nothing. What constitutes smell or smelling? She’d never thought about it, except she supposed, when something was truly fetid.

  Everyone has a smell, whether it’s the fragrance of soap and shampoo or the stink of sweat and scurf. She gathered her hair in her hands and buried her nose and mouth in the fine waves. Wisps tickled her nostrils, but there was nothing to smell. She wiped the port off of her nose with her sleeve.

  And he said she made no sounds. Everyone comes attached to noises like—. Like what? She thought hard. Like breathing. Like coughing, sneezing, gurgling, panting. Cracking bones, joints. Tapping fingers, toes. Clicking tongues, sucking teeth, scratching scalps. Laughing, chuckling, giggling; the giggling that never came. Humming. Sighing. Crying.

  She remembered once walking into the kitchen and finding her mother crying. Weeping. She had never seen her mother cry before. Not even when her grandmother died. Not even when her father. She was sitting on a stool, crying her eyes out, sobbing and snuffling, a book open on her lap. “What is it, Mum? What are you reading?” She’d never seen her mother read before either. Her mother handed her the book. She had been crying over the dedication, “With love to Charles.” Helen turned it over and looked at the cover. It was a cookbook. Her father’s name had been Charles. What could she say or do to comfort her mother?

  Their home had been sad, subdivided by thin partitions of grief; their sorrows were their own.

  The days flew by; the police hounded her at regular intervals; and Hauptmann Bauer, in a weak moment, admitted his thrill at being able to work on such a case, murder, especially an extravagant one—so rare in Austria. Ganz, it appeared, had been stabbed with his own letter opener, an ornate affair that had once belonged to the celebrated eighteenthcentury physician, Gerhard van Swieten. The weapon had been discovered under a pile of books, clearly having been discarded before the frenzied searching had begun. When Bauer expressed his reluctance to even hint about the body being dipped in wax, Helen asked him if he preferred that she learn of it from the more scandalous newspaper reports. He conceded and described the terrible blistering effect that molten wax had on human skin. He recounted the efforts that the murderer must have made to pose the body before bringing it back into the museum so that it fit in the exhibit case. Doing so afterwards would have destroyed the wax surface, which was perfectly finished. The police assumed that at least three people were involved, that one of them must have been a museum employee, and that robbery had been one of the motives. As far as Helen was concerned these details were of superficial interest; the murder had nothing to do with her.

  The Icones Anatomicœ was the last book to be printed with the Vesalius woodblocks. How could she have forgotten? Anselm had to have a copy. Squirreled away somewhere. She’d read that it had only cost $100 when it was first printed in 1934. Not a princely sum. What would it look like? Large, no doubt. Up the stairs, along the packed shelves. Spine out? Standing up? Lying flat? Back down the stairs. More shelves. Why not ask Anselm himself? Why not, except that the invitation to discuss Vesalius had still not been extended. She looked through the large flat files. It would help to know how large. A box in the bottom drawer under framed prints. A huge book. There it was, the Icones Anatomicœ, encased in a sturdy cardboard box, the original delivery slip still attached. She carefully rested it on the top of the filing cabinet and stroked the white leather binding. So fine it cou
ld be pigskin. She turned back the cover and skimmed a loose insert entitled “To the Reader.” Too long to take it all in; set it aside for photocopying later. This was exciting. Was her woodcut in here? Would she recognize it? She turned to two title pages facing each other, nearly identical except for the rendering skill. A couple of pieces of old paper stuffed in between them. She removed the loose pages and turned them over—they were poorly printed copies of one of the title pages. She replaced them, tucking them into the gutter of the book.

  This book had become so important for her, yet she fought herself from speeding through. She forced herself to examine it page by page: the heavy rag paper for the woodblock prints, deckle-edged, watermarked with Vesalius’s crest; the thinner, calendered paper for the Latin texts. The watermark looked familiar. She craned her head to better illuminate the paper. Three animals running within a crest. She’d seen this watermark before. She’d have to think.

  Almost each turn of the page revealed more loose paper, the images on each corresponding to the woodcuts shown on those pages. Some were very sloppily printed, some were exquisite; some were printed on the backs of paper already printed with unrelated texts, some were on crinkled paper that appeared to have been rescued from trash heaps; they were all like proofs pulled before the actual printing began.

  Page by page, she slowly traversed the more than two hundred renderings of the body, fresh and black as if printed days rather than decades ago, from individual organs and bones to full figures of bones, muscles, nerves, veins.

  Aha! This one was hers. It was an illustration of the muscles, one of the muscle men; she flipped the page. No, it was this one. She finally narrowed it down to three; she was positive it was one of these, one of the muscle illustrations, one of the muscle men posed against the classic Italian countryside. She closed the book and hoisted it, assessing its weight. Not a chance to take this out to get photocopied. She measured the dimensions: fifty-four centimeters high by thirty-seven and a half wide.

  The colophon stated that 615 copies had been printed, and that it took three years to do.

  A cataloguing card had been left between the pages. She read that the blocks had been found in “a Munich attic.”

  This was a new twist. First it was a “dusty corner of the library,” now “a Munich attic.” Not only was it impossible to find consensus on Vesalius’s history; even recent events were contradictory. No wonder she was confused.

  Now she had to find the very first edition, the one of 1543; even more importantly, she had to get her own woodcut back, to compare all of the versions. Time was running out and the answer was so close. She carefully replaced the book, deliberately concealing her discovery of it, then headed out to try to catch Hauptmann Bauer.

  Two hours later, still without her precious woodcut and convinced that it would never be returned, she was back in Anselm’s library. Bauer had had nothing new to tell her about Peter Ganz or her husband. The secretary, Gerstner, had been briefly under suspicion, but was now exonerated; the night-shift guard who had resigned was in hospital recovering from a botched suicide attempt; von Ehrlach had been cooperative, but since the man was close to being clinically deranged, his cooperation had amounted to little; efforts to track down Frau Kehl, Rosa Kovslovsky, and Anna with the dog had been fruitless. Even the elevator man, Wilhelm Stukmeyer, could add nothing: he had disappeared. Aside from this disturbing detail, Bauer had hit a slump.

  The day that Helen left Vienna, she made one last visit to the Sauer Coffee House. Although she had been back almost every day since meeting Herr Thüring, she had not seen him again. This time, along with her coffee and cake, the waiter handed her an envelope addressed to Frau Martin, c/o The Sauer Coffee House. She pulled a single sheet of paper out of the envelope, a copy of Thüring’s obituary of Peter Ganz. The murder had clearly caught the obituarist’s imagination. Reading painfully like a plot from a sequel to the horror film, The House of Wax, the obituary portrayed Ganz as a man mesmerized by abomination and terror, a purveyor of phobia and panic, and his end a warranted trial and deserving punishment. He quoted the waiter’s suspicions that the museum was filled with bodies obtained in the very same criminal fashion, turning this one man’s nescience into the learned opinion of the general populace. It was true that Helen had only met Ganz once, but she was personally hurt by Thüring’s lurid testimony to a man that he had never met.

  She was back in the study at Herr Anselm’s house that afternoon, reexamining the Icones Anatomicœ, noting that it was copy number 406 of the original 615. The more she learned about the history of Vesalius, the more intrigued she became. The two title pages, for example. The one on the left had been created for the very first edition, the one on the right, for the second. They were nearly identical, but not quite, the newer one being cleaned up, in her opinion, rather stiffly The scene in both was a dissection theater, jammed with onlookers. They portrayed Vesalius in the center of the theater demonstrating a dissection of a human cadaver, along with men clothed in both current garb and classical robes, a monkey, a dog, an articulated skeleton, a couple of charming putti, Vesalius’s crest; a circus of activity, no less, not all of which was concentrated on Vesalius’s learned lecture.

  The second one replaced Vesalius’s face with a copy from an existing portrait, reduced the amount of viscera evident in the cadaver, clothed a gent clinging from one of the pillars (he had been naked previously), removed the printer’s device, and handed a scythe to the skeleton. Vesalius’s crest, three weasels running on a field of black, remained. She read in another book that the weasels were a play on his name—Andreas Vesalius, that is, Andreas of Wessels, his common name. This was the crest that was repeated as a watermark throughout the book. Now she remembered where she had seen the watermark before. A portion of it was on Rosa’s card that came with the box. Why on earth were Rosa’s cards watermarked with Vesalius’s crest?

  In yet another book, she discovered that an old bearded man looking down from the balcony was supposed to be Johannes Oporinus, the printer. A tribute to a craftsman not often expressed in current times.

  If the printer attended this hectic mêlée, how about the artist? An earnest young man sat in the third row of seats, book and pencil in hand. Several scholars had assumed this was Kalkar. Trouble was, he was supposed to be in his forties at the time of the publication; this man looked too young. The cadaver was that of a law-breaking woman who had apparently lied about being pregnant to save her neck from the hangman’s noose. Vesalius’ dissection had confirmed the lie. The perspective of the corpse seemed to be the weakest element of the entire scene.

  The inserted paper she had noticed when looking at the book the first time turned out to be a proof of the first title page. She set it aside, then proceeded to remove all of the loose pages. There were nearly a hundred of them.

  She flipped through the book again, looking to see if there was any other information and then remembered the notice to the reader that she’d removed earlier. It was lying on top of the desk where she’d left it. Whoops, not a skillful snoop, after all.

  As she began to read, the telephone rang. This was a surprise—as far as she knew the phone wasn’t connected. It was such a surprise that she had no idea if she should pick it up or let it ring. She was alone in the house; Anselm had gone out for a couple of hours. She scanned the room for the telephone, never having noticed one there before. The ring had a rich, throaty purr to it, but as with most ringing phones the longer she took to find it the more shrill and persistent it became. Finally locating it on the file drawer under a pile of paper, she picked up the receiver, but the ringing continued from elsewhere in the room.

  “Hello,” said a woman’s voice on the other end of the line.

  “Excuse me,” said Helen, “could you hold the line, another telephone is ringing.” She set the receiver down on the top of the drawers and looked around again. She opened drawers in the desk, looked under the chairs, and finally opened the door to the stairs that l
ed to the upper balcony. She found a phone mounted just inside. She picked it up and said, “Hello, one moment please,” hearing the ringing continuing from another part of the room. Without waiting for a reply she let the receiver of this phone hang down, taking care not to let it sway and bang against the wall. She was beside herself; where would this next phone be? Why were all of these phones ringing at the same time? She ran to the other side of the room and began removing books from the shelves. She found it behind a large medical encyclopedia that had been displayed face out. She picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?” once more. The ringing finally stopped.

  A woman’s voice was on the other end, “Hello.”

  “Herr Anselm is out just at this moment,” said Helen. “Could I take a message?” As she spoke she looked for a piece of paper and a pencil.

  “Hello?” said the woman’s voice.

  “My German isn’t very good,” yelled Helen, “do you speak English?”

  “Hello?” repeated the voice. “Hello? Hello?”

  Helen stared down the receiver then hung up. She ran over to the first phone on the file drawer. “Hello, sorry to keep you waiting,” she said. There was only a dial tone on the other end of the line. She hung that phone up and went over to the one at the foot of the stairs. “Hello,” she said but again heard only the dial tone in reply.

  The phone calls, if that’s what they were, were so unsettling that Helen, unable to concentrate, renounced her reading and restlessly paced the room. The walls were too close—they kept pushing her back to the pile of proofs sitting on the table. She shuffled through them, unable to grasp why they had been stuck in the book, why Anselm had them at all. She stowed them in her bag and replaced the Icones in the drawer.