“Gute Nacht, “ she said to him in German.
“G’ night,” he replied in English, then swallowed and jabbed a light switch on the wall into action. The hallway light snapped on and Helen walked towards her room, noting that the boy was now resting his entire upper body on the counter, with his eyes about twelve inches away from the screen, his mouth hanging open.
She walked around her room for a few minutes before taking off her coat, feeling more than the hearing the televised fight reverberating through the walls, picking up a chipped china figurine of a boy and his Scottie dog that had been placed on the bedside table; lifting up one of the towels on the rack beside the sink and rubbing its scratchiness against her cheek. She ran her finger over the surface of a reproduction oil painting, then flicked the bedside table lamp on and off a couple of times in the futile hope of producing a stronger light. After brushing the memory of dinner out of her mouth, she settled down to start a new letter to Martin.
This time she avoided the touchy issue of the unread letters, finished writing several pages, popped them into an envelope, addressed it, and walked out into the dark corridor to see if the clerk could post it for her. She fumbled along, guided by the blueblack glow at the end of the hallway.
The television set was still blasting, but the program had changed. This was a talk show with three women wearing similar-looking imitation Chanel suits and two men with thick hair firmly cemented into place. They were earnestly debating, sitting in a circle on straight-back, armless plastic chairs. The two cameras alternated between orbiting dizzily around the group and panning in closely to frame each speaker’s mouth. The boy had shifted back away from the television set and was now sprawled in his chair behind the counter, his feet up, obscuring the screen from his vision, reading one of his books. Helen coughed to get his attention; he looked up at her without moving his book or lowering his feet. She showed him the letter and asked in German if he could post it for her.
“Sure thing,” he said in slangy English, taking the letter and dropping it into a drawer. Just as she was about to ask him where he had learned his English he turned back to his book without another word, so Helen returned to her room.
The poor light reminded her of Anselm’s glasses, tempting her to try them on. She walked over to the mirror above the sink and stuck them on, ready to admire the effect. The lens of the left eye was missing, the right one lightly tinted and as thick as a magnifying glass. The room careered around giddily; abandoning her as wildly as that first night in Vienna, when she’d been convinced that she had someone else’s eyes. She grabbed the edge of the sink with one hand and with the other snatched the glasses off her face. She scrunched her eyelids tight a couple of times and finally managed to bring the room into focus. “Boy, if Anselm wore these, no wonder he went blind,” she exclaimed out loud.
She discovered amongst her books the insert from the Icones Anatomka that she had intended to have photocopied. She’d walked out with it! She’d mail it back first thing with an apology. Well, maybe. It did seem like small fish compared to the proofs and the photograph she’d also swiped. By the inadequate bedside lamp, she settled down to finally read it.
The text filled in numerous gaps, particularly the identity of the 41, not 50, missing woodblocks: the illuminated letters, the portrait of Vesalius, the eighth muscle man, and various diagrams. Their fate was still unknown. The muscle man had been lost long ago; the illuminated letters, probably cut in Oporinus’s workshop, might have been lost by his heirs; no one knew where the portrait could have gone.
Also recounted was the borrowing of the woodblock of the second edition title page from the University of Louvain, the university where Vesalius had studied before moving to Paris. Louvain had acquired it from a private collector.
The insert mentioned Oporinus, but skipped past the Frobens and the Königs to the man she had previously read about named Felix Plater, who wrote that the blocks had been put up for sale in Basel in 1583. Here, as in her previous sources, the trail was lost, and picked up with Andreas Maschenbauer, in Augsburg. There apparently had been a connection between Vesalius and the city of Augsburg: he, after being appointed imperial physician to the court of Charles V, visited there in 1547 and 1550.
Dr von Woltter of Ingolstadt reappeared in this account as did the doctor H.P Leveling—Heinrich Palmaz Leveling, as it turned out—a professor at the University of Ingolstadt. The final bit of new information was the name of the librarian at the University of Munich who rediscovered the blocks in 1893, Dr Hans Schnorr von Carolsfeld. The insert ended with numerous references supporting the idea that Kalkar was indeed the artist, and concluded that there could be no doubt.
These names still meant nothing to Helen. The picture was filling out, but so slowly. Was there no one source that recounted the entire story?
SMELL
CHAPTER 13
ROSA’S HAIR
Helen woke up with an extraordinary odor clogging her nostrils. Its foulness trapped the ever-darkening shadows of her despair tight within her skull: these blackened shrouds, these gloomy hangers-on hammered at the inner walls of her temples, her palate, her sinuses. Panicked, she gasped, drawing the putrid air deep down into her lungs. The poison circulated almost immediately, coursing through her arteries and veins like infectious clots, immobilizing her muscles and her will. She rolled limply over onto her back, grabbed the pillow and smothered her nose and mouth with its rough cotton case and clumps of aging feathers. The night before it had presumably smelt of laundry soap— Helen didn’t know, she hadn’t noticed—but now it stank of a rotting fermentation. A chemical fermentation. A chemical fermentation and decay. Her nose could pick the smells out the same way her eyes could read a page from a chemistry experiment but lacked the language to decipher, to declare the result harmless or not. Acidic—searing, caustic, wrenching away the fragile membranes from the insides of her nostrils; sulfurous—vitriolic, infernal, clouding the delicate cilia with its bully’s punch; bacterial—pestilent, decomposing. She flung the wretched pillow off of her face and sat up clawing at the air, trying to free her breath from its cloying shackles. She slid off the bed and flung the door open. A cool draft rushed in from the hallway, pervaded by the same ghastly stink; Helen realized that she was growing accustomed to it. This distressed her even more. The corridor was dark except for the sputtering glow from the silent but still-illuminated television set. The hall was silent too, or nearly so, disturbed only by the hint of a restless body turning over in its bed behind one of the closed doors. How could such foulness be so quiet? Where were its bellows of pain? Alerted by the muffled patter of approaching stockinged feet, Helen, now easily breathing in the corrupted air, watched Rosa, waving a lace-edged handkerchief, materialize.
“Hello, hello,” she whispered with a wink, of which Helen wanted no part. “I’m so glad to see you up. I wouldn’t have liked to have awakened you.”
“Why are you here, Rosa?” asked Helen.
“To see you, of course,” answered Rosa. “May I come in?”
“But, how did you get in?”
“I’m a guest,” she said, tinkling her keys. “Now, may I come in?”
Without another word Helen stepped back to let Rosa pass. She turned the light on, and they both sat down on the edge of the bed.
“This isn’t so bad, is it? Of course, it’s not the Gellért. But I suppose you realize that they make blue movies at the edge of their delightful swimming pool. A crime, isn’t it? As if they couldn’t find a thousand places for their smut without polluting that gem. Makes me shudder to think of all of those innocent people swimming in that water.”
Helen nodded but was having trouble concentrating on anything else but the origin of the nauseating stench.
“That’s what death smells like, they say.” Rosa’s observation was matter-of-fact.
“What?” asked Helen, distress raising her voice several pitches above normal.
“Death—it smells like bleach, I
’m told.” Noticing the distraught look on Helen’s face, she quickly added, “it’s all to do with experience, not with actuality, if you see the difference.”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.” Bleach? Is that what she calls it? Bleach!”
“It doesn’t matter. Oh, I see. You think I’ve just told you you’re dying. No, like I said, it’s the experience. You see, when you’ve smelt death you’ve smelt everything. You aren’t dying. Feel better?”
“No, I don’t. I want you and this revolting stink to go away. I want to go back to sleep. I want peace, privacy. Why are you always around in the middle of the night?”
“Because I am a master of insomnia, that’s why. And because nighttime, like foreign languages, gives you a whole new vocabulary, one that you’d be well-advised to start studying, especially since you’re in foreign parts. I find that it is night for an inordinate amount of the time in foreign parts.
“So,” she continued, “it’s been a number of days, weeks, I might say, since we last saw each other. Did Anselm show you the secret of the box? Doesn’t that sound delicious: See-cret?” She rolled the word about, stretching and tasting it. “He could unlock the secret to a bag of flour. That man,” she sighed.
“He told me about you, Rosa,” said Helen, still not sure what the secret was and not wanting to let on.
“Yes, I know. He takes great pride in his so-called ‘powerful photography.’ He thinks that he ruined my life by taking my photograph, but he didn’t; my life began with that incident, and so did his for that matter.”
“He told me that he gave up photography and started collecting anatomical specimens at that point, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s only a small part of it, my dear. He started collecting minds when he discovered a perfect method of learning, of stepping into other’s shoes, so to speak. He wasn’t particularly bright when he was young, you know. Rather loose—some might say dissolute—and far too idiosyncratic to be a really good scholar. However, when he began making connections between his photography and the ensuing disasters, something snapped. Did he tell you that he took my picture out of revenge? No? Well, he did. He had already given up photography, it frightened him so. And then one day I did a terrible thing to him. He didn’t rebuke me or yell at me, he just asked me, rather sweetly, if I’d like my picture taken. Would you like to know what I did?”
“I’m not sure I should.” Helen feared both the subject of the photograph and the teller of the story.
“Don’t be silly. I’ll tell you whether or not you recognize that you are dying to know. I cut off that witch’s finger!” She roared with laughter, losing her balance and falling back on the bed.
“Which witch, I mean what witch?”
“That buzzard Kehl. You met her. Don’t deny it.” She raised herself up onto her elbows with some difficulty. “Help me up,” she floundered, her stout legs kicking the air. Helen got up and, grabbing her by the shoulders, pulled her immense weight forward.
“Easy dear, easy. No need to be so rough.” Rosa adjusted her wig and dusted off her sleeves.
“You mentioned Frau Kehl?”
“Frau Kehl, my ass. She’s as Frau as I am, and I can guarantee you I’m not. She’s a shriveled up old Fräulein, my young lady, and that’s why I cut her finger off.”
“Because she claimed to be married you did that to her?”
“Bah, so what claiming to be married. I’ve claimed to be the Pope, and I don’t expect anyone to bother over that. No, it was who she claimed to be married to. Friedrich Anselm.”
“Oh, so you were jealous?”
“Jealous! Me! I was the most beautiful girl in Vienna. I could have had my pick of any man in the city. They were panting outside my door,” she smiled distantly at the memory.
“Well then, why?”
“To protect the dear boy, why else?” She sighed again, sending the resulting upheaval in her mouth and face rippling down through her large torso, aftershocks. “He was hopeless in those days. But he was beautiful too.” She rested her chin on her knuckles and stared off into the distance, caught in uncharacteristic sentimental reverie. “You’re astonished of course to think that I could love someone, be loved by someone. No, don’t object,” Helen hadn’t protested; Rosa was reciting a well-rehearsed soliloquy—pauses, imperatives all pre-planned. “I can see by the expression on your face,” she continued. “Yes, such style, such daring. One had to travel far to find young men brave enough to wear cosmetics then. It rather went out of fashion with the war, you see.”
“Protect him from what?”
“From her pretending to be married to him.”
“But she didn’t call herself Frau Anselm, did she?”
“That was the next step. First the ring, then the change of status, next the change of name. He was very frail after his father died and prey to every money hungry vulture in the city. She was Queen Vulture. We called her Der Bussardprinzessin von Wien. The Buzzard Princess of Vienna.” Rosa cackled some more. She continued, “So one day I was visiting him at his parent’s house, that is to say, the house that he inherited from them, the one he’s still in, and there was company. We were sitting in the pretty courtyard—there was my sister Anna, and Louis, Friedrich, myself—and she was showing off her ring as usual. The gardener had left a pair of pruning sheers on the paving stones near to where I was sitting. I picked them up and started to play with them. Buzzard Princess couldn’t show it off well enough just sitting, so she got up and went from person to person and stuck it in their faces. When she got to me—we understood each other very well—she thrust it my face too, and I snipped her finger off. There were screams, ja, but not from Buzzard Princess. She was cold and still and stared in my eyes while she let the blood spurt onto my clothing and while the others were jumping up and down tearing their hair out.” Rosa had stopped chuckling and was recounting this part of the story seriously. “The finger had dropped into my lap, so I grabbed it, pulled the ring off of it and told her to go claim her false marriage with the devil.” She spat on the floor.
“A doctor came and took Kehl away. The police came and asked me many questions.” Rosa laughed again, “I buried the finger in the courtyard and left it underground for twenty years. Getting the earth ready to welcome the rest of the body one might say. My sister’s dog dug the bones up. The two top ones were lost—eaten, rotted, I don’t know. The one in your box was the only one I could find. Maybe the dog ate the others.” She shuddered delightedly. “If I am not mistaken you yourself have reunited ring with finger.
“But to continue with Friedrich. He put a fresh plate of film into the camera, set the camera onto the tripod, arranged me in the same courtyard, and then he smiled, asked me to smile, and he took my picture. He had never discussed his phobia about photography with anyone. I discovered afterward that he thought he could be arrested and taken away for exercising such a terrible force against people, so naturally I knew nothing of what was going through his mind when he took the picture. I was visiting a few days later, relieved that he really seemed not to have cared about what I had done, and that everything seemed to be normal. He showed me the developed print, and I asked if I could have a copy to give to my parents—those things were awfully important in those days when having a photograph taken was a real event. He gave me that print, and I took it away with the intention of mailing it to my parents in Berlin; you’ll remember, that’s where I’m from. I came to Vienna to study medicine.
“Some time passed, and I forgot to mail the print, I’d been so busy. Then one day, a university friend asked me if I was feeling all right. In fact, I hadn’t really been feeling well, I was gaining weight at an alarming rate and my clothes weren’t fitting anymore, I was tired, and my hair had started falling out. I remembered the photograph a short while later and got an envelope and a piece of paper to write a letter to my parents and to mail it. Then I pulled the print out of the drawer and got a shock. As I looked at it I happened to glance into a mir
ror and saw myself looking at a caricature of that very woman. I had mushroomed enormously in just two weeks, and with my hair falling out so fast I was indeed hideous. I had to go out and buy a wig to cover the bald patches. It never has grown in.” Rosa took her wig off.
Helen had seen bald-headed women before, but bald did not adequately describe Rosa’s state of hairlessness. She was totally denuded of hair—not one strand remained—no fuzz, no shadow, nothing. Helen couldn’t help but put her fingers out to caress the smoothness of the skin, to look closely, to examine her own face reflected in its shiny surface. The gesture created an intimacy between the two women that Helen was not at all pleased with. Rosa, seemingly oblivious to Helen’s discomfort, sighed deeply in mute and soft contentment, letting her alarming mass sink dangerously close into Helen’s own slight frame. Helen stood up before Rosa could crush her and watched her as she replaced the wig, wiggling it back and forth until she got it just right.
She then showed Rosa the photo she had swiped from Anselm’s album.
“Why, that’s the very picture,” she exclaimed. “I’d forgotten just how lovely I was.” She grabbed Helen’s hand and pulled her back down onto the bed. With her face just inches from Helen’s she stroked the younger woman’s cheek. “And isn’t it just like you? Of course, you’re a lot older than I was at the time.
“Before I forget,” she added heavily, “I have been meaning to write you a note for when you reach Padua. I may not see you for awhile.” She got a piece of paper and a pen out of her bag and sat for a minute with her pen in her mouth, visibly composing the letter. With another longing glance at her photograph, she started to write. She wrote so fast that the letters tripped over each other. She passed the piece of paper over to Helen, who looked at it quizzically.
“I can’t read this,” she said.
“You aren’t reading fast enough,” declared Rosa.
Helen tried again and then shook her head, “It’s no good, I just can’t read this. Read it out to me, please.” She handed the paper back to Rosa who took it and crumpled it into a tiny ball.
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