The Sensualist

by Barbara Hodgson

  “I can’t read it either,” she admitted. “Forget it.” She threw the screwed-up ball of paper onto the floor.

  “What happened between Anselm and Frau, Fräulein Kehl? In the end. Did they get married?”

  “You’re such an innocent, aren’t you dear?” giggled Rosa. She chucked Helen under the chin and blustered out of the room. Helen fell immediately back asleep as though drowning in the placid asphyxiation still surrounding her.

  The next morning Helen rose early, involuntarily sniffing surfaces and corners, finding no traces of the foul night, only the staleness of the newly-awakened morning. A healthy hunger cramped her insides and drove her out in search of food. The breakfast room was located just off the reception area where the still-silent television continued to flicker. Nobody was at the desk. In the breakfast room itself the smell of baking bread assailed her nostrils with its yeasty wallop; the fragrance of freshly-ground coffee woke up her various dozing parts. A plate of fruit peelings had been abandoned on one of the tables leaving the pungent rind to fill the air with its citrus scent. The freshly laundered curtains were drawn but before she sat down she walked over to the window and, after deeply inhaling the smell of cotton, borax, and soap, peeked out. She could see nothing—although it was 8 o’clock, it was still dark. She turned around from the window and looked about, trying to decide where to sit, vaguely startled that there was one other person in the room, a slight man of about sixty years with an aura of nicotine complementing his brush-cut greying hair and neatly trimmed, greying mustache. He wore polished brown brogues, brown woolen trousers, and a striped knit vest tightly buttoned over a neatly pressed white shirt. When he saw Helen looking at him he patted his mouth with his napkin, stood up and bowed. There was a moment of awkwardness that sometimes passes in hotels when two guests have no idea what language the other speaks.

  Helen spoke first. “Guten Morgen,” she said.

  The man smiled at her and said what must have been Good morning in Hungarian. She smiled back and took a place at a table nearby. She waited patiently, first of all scrabbling through her Hungarian/English lexicon frantically looking for, finding, and then forgetting the Hungarian words for Mr, good morning, good-bye, and how are you; absently and needlessly wiping the floral-patterned tablecloth with the edge of her hand, and rearranging the sugar, salt and pepper, and flower vase; then studying her train timetable for the umpteenth time, as if reassuring herself that the schedules would advise her which way to go. Rosa had told her to go to Padua, had given her a note for Padua. She frowned, suddenly, clearly recalling the night’s encounter, the hazy details of a forgotten but disturbing dream. What happened to the note? Did she read it, what did it say? Was Rosa really there? When did she leave? Then she remembered the dreadful smell and realized why she had woken up sniffing the air. She sighed inadvertently, forgetting herself in her thoughts.

  The man got up and, mumbling something, went through another door. A minute later he returned with a sturdy youngish woman who was wearing an apron and carrying a tray. Helen smiled again at him and thanked him.

  “I am so sorry,” said the woman in English, “I did not know that you were here.”

  “That’s okay,” said Helen, “I’m not in a hurry.” The woman set the table with a coffee cup and saucer, a pot of cream, forks, knives, and spoons. She left and returned carrying a pot of coffee, a basket of buns, pots of jam, and a plate of butter and cheese.

  The man asked her a question. She said to Helen, “He wants to know what you are doing in Budapest.”

  “Could you please tell him that I am traveling.”

  There was an exchange and the man asked another question. “He says that you must be doing something special, that no one travels at this time of year without a purpose.”

  “I’m looking for my husband,” said Helen while she poured herself a cup of coffee. The woman translated.

  “What kind of woman has to look for her husband?”

  “A woman who is missing her husband.” The woman laughed and thought about how she could translate the phrase. “Hmm, I don’t know how I can put that so he’ll understand.”

  “Your English is very good. Where did you learn it?”

  “In America. I lived there as a teenager,” the woman replied. She deliberated some more and then finally settled on a phrase and repeated it to the man, who began laughing.

  “He says that it must be very difficult.”

  “Is that your brother who was sitting at the reception desk last night?”

  “No, my son.”

  “Did he learn his English in the United States as well?”

  “No, he has never been there. He learns it at school, and I give him lessons from time to time. He is an enthusiastic student of slang.”

  Helen turned her attention once again to the old man who was watching them as they spoke. “I’m also here to study anatomy. Ask him if he knows anything about anatomy. It seems that everyone I talk to these days is an expert on it.” The woman asked him, then listened to his lengthy reply.

  “He says, ‘Why would I know anything about anatomy?’ He says, ‘twenty years ago I woke up to find that every bone in my body forgot its name and every day since then it has been a struggle to keep each in its rightful place.’ ”

  “Tell him,” said Helen, “that if he learned about anatomy maybe he could teach his bones a lesson or two.” The woman translated and instead of laughing as Helen had expected, the old man seriously considered what she had said. He then spoke again.

  “He asks if you could recommend a book for him to read.”

  Helen raised both of her hands in a gesture of futility. “I don’t know any Hungarian books,” she said. The woman translated and the old man pointed to the Latin Vesalius peeking out of Helen’s bag. “He asks if he could look at that book.”

  Helen passed it over to him, praying that he would wipe his hands before he opened it. He did better than that. He cleaned off the table, removed the table cloth, placing each item carefully on the spare chair, wiped his hands, and proceeded to treat the book with more respect than it had probably ever received in its life. As he flipped through the pages the woman and Helen watched him, fascinated with the attention he paid to the drawings. Then Helen noticed that he was moving his lips almost imperceptibly as his eyes moved across the pages. He and the woman carried out a desultory conversation while he perused the book. She began translating.

  “He asked me if I knew this author, this Andreas.”

  “What did you say to him?” asked Helen.

  “I said, ‘Why? Is he rich? Is he good-looking? Is he single?’ These questions are important.”

  “Why does it look like he is reading the book?”

  “You know the answer to that, I’m sure. Can you read that book?”

  “No, I can’t. It’s in Latin, and I can’t read Latin.”

  “There is your answer. He can.”

  The man shut the book and passed it back to Helen. He spoke again to the woman who said, “He says that this is all wrong, that there are many errors.” She paused, waiting for him to speak again. “He says that the liver seems to be based on that of a monkey and that there is a gland shown in the brain that grows in calves and other such animals but not in humans. He’s asking you if this is the sort of anatomy that you study? If so, Heaven help your patients!”

  Helen laughed and explained, and although the man nodded he didn’t look convinced. He got up and left the room quickly. The woman looked at Helen and smiled. She filled her tray with the remains of the man’s breakfast, leaving Helen to finish her own.

  Helen had just taken her last sip of coffee when the man shuffled back, holding out a leather-bound Latin-English dictionary. Thanking him, she flipped through it, curious about its significance. The type was minuscule but legible; here and there random words stood out like old friends. The margins were heavily annotated with spidery writing and emphatic arrows and brackets. Perhaps annotated was too formal a word
. Doodled on was more like it. It was a lovely book bound in crinkly red morocco leather, with marbled endpapers and onionskin paper, but it was just a dictionary. When Helen returned it, he studiously tore out 4 or 5 pages, which he offered back to her. She had no choice but to accept, although she was dismayed that he had ruined the book for her. She thanked him again and pulled the box out of her bag, intending to put the pages inside. He stood by the side of her table watching her, fascinated by her movements.

  When she pivoted the top open, he exclaimed appreciatively and sat down beside her, the distant hint of nicotine she had perceived earlier in reality a thick cloud. A vicarious smoke. He gestured to the box, pointing with his finger, so Helen slid the box closer to him. He read the title page, lingering over the Latin syllables, allowing them to escape one by one with deliberately chosen emphasis. The words spoken out loud made sense for the first time: Tactus, touch; Videndi, sight; Odorandi, smell; Audiendi, hearing; Gustandi, taste. A compendium of senses; a complement to the braille booklet.

  He pulled out all of the contents: the finger bone, the vials, the magnifying glass, the photograph, everything, arranging them on the table top. Helen quickly moved her breakfast dishes out of the way and brushed off crumbs. The man shifted the things about as if trying to fit together pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, now stroking the finger, now looking through the magnifying glass. He moved the box itself to the side and in doing so shut the top. He pried out the tooth lodged into the top, placing it with the other objects. Helen could now see that tears were running down his face and that each tear had a different letter reflected in it. Just as Rosa’s letter had been quickly written, these tears, as well, rolled too fast for Helen to read, and she began to cry herself, not knowing if it was because of the old man’s foolish sentimentality or because the words that oozed out of his eyes were lost forever as they dripped onto the table. These individual things could have no meaning for him, this stranger here in Budapest; they must represent something more than disparate cast-offs. Possibly a book from the past, never read but sadly missed; a collection of memories shamefully lost? Or perhaps—Helen allowed herself the vanity of the thought—it was for her he was crying, as he saw that she might never learn what it was the box had to teach her. She hoped he was wrong.

  The woman came in from the kitchen and stopped to watch the young woman and the old man crying over a table top covered with useless things.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE SEMMELWEIS

  Ignác Fulop Semmelweis, the nineteenth century “savior of mothers,” the discoverer of a cure for childbirth fever, was forever immortalized in an idiosyncratic and fitting museum to medical history The director, Stefan Arany, was, as Peter Ganz had become, a fitting, but mercifully in this instance, living, addition to the collection. His English was astounding, maniacally delivered without concern for tense; his energy bounded like ricocheting bullets. But his demeanor was deceptively frantic—Helen could see through it to a man of perception and composure. The texture of his hand gripped like sandpaper; he looked as though he were carved out of fine-grain wood; he smelled of strength.

  When Helen handed him the letter of introduction that Anselm had written for her, he scanned it rapidly, reading aloud in bursts of the dislocated vowels and convoluted consonants that Hungarian seemed to be constructed of. “I am to treat you with care,” he announced, throwing the letter onto his desk.

  To Helen’s great relief, he, like Peter Ganz, remembered Martin clearly. Martin, apparently tired of slamming into so many dead ends by the time he arrived at the Semmelweis, had donned the cloak of a prosecutor, ready to break the fingers of anyone so unwise as not to feed him all he needed to know. As Helen and Arany walked slowly through the exhibits of the unpretentious museum, Arany, joking, imitated Martin’s towering figure looming over him, Arany—a self-confessed cowardly and timid director, yet lord of all he surveyed—he waved his hands towards the displays: primitive microscopes, a trepanned skull, pestles and mortars, faience apothecary jars, and above all, the Holy Ghost Pharmacy. “What could I tell him, you ask me? He is interrogating me about something happening before I was born even! And in the worst possible Hungarian! Why pester me with your execrable Hungarian when I am speaking to you in the best possible English, I ask him! The scholars agree that Vesalius blocks are destroyed in the bomb. I know nothing to add to that. Go to the Munich University Library or to the New York Academy of Medicine, I recommend. They publish a book together using these woodblocks. Who cares anyway, they are gone! Pow, blown up! He was rude, but then he had a receding hairline. Many balding men are rude!”

  Helen assessed the director’s full head of hair. “Oh, you can’t mean that. He’s a journalist.”

  “Yes? This is his excuse?”

  They stopped in front of a cabinet displaying an incomplete torso covered with lesions. “Poor bugger. Greek,” he explained. “ ‘I’ve been to Munich,’ your husband tells me.” Helen looked at him; she hadn’t known, but she should have guessed. “You tell me,” he said, assessing her glance, “if I’m not in turn being rude. Why are you looking for your husband in this manner? Is he officially missing? Have you spoken to the police?”

  They were now standing in front of a Herbarium display of apothecary jars labeled in Latin, like her own homeopathic vials, with the names of their contents, some of them immediately translatable, others a mystery: ext.fumariœ, ext. torment rad, sanguis draconis, aqv. anethi. Arany peppered his conversation with brief explanations: “extractum digitalis, “ he pointed to one jar, “that’s from the common foxglove. We are all now familiar with it for its effect as a stimulant of hearts, but I would not imagine that many people are aware that it comes from such an ordinary plant.” Helen leaned her head lightly against the cabinet, clouding the glass with her breath. The digitalis was back, making her heart thump and crash against her ribs. A deafening thunder that she could only feel, but couldn’t imagine that he couldn’t hear. Ext. digitalis. The heart again.

  The fog on the glass spread. “Oh, pardon me,” she said, taking a doubtful paper tissue out of her pocket and wiping the glass.

  “No matter, the cleaning staff wipe off the many hand prints and nose prints every day.” He absently took her arm—the contact was electric—and led her over to a tiny ivory effigy of a pregnant woman. Helen freed herself from his light grasp; the proximity was unbearable; his warm odor choked her brain; she couldn’t concentrate. The belly of the figure was cut away, exposing the organs and fetus inside. Arany was saying, “this is a beauty we are quite proud of. The parts all come out to be useful for instructing midwives.

  “Tell me what has happened to Peter Ganz. You are coming from Vienna, so I am presuming you are aware of the incident? I have been absent and seem to be back to some very sad news.”

  “Herr Ganz was murdered.” Helen strained to think about his question and not about him—the way he looked at her, the way he had held her arm, the way he smelled.

  “Yes, I read the journals, too.” He felt none of this; it was obvious. She pulled her senses into order.

  “He was murdered and then dropped into hot wax and displayed in one of the halls of the Josephinum.” They were now walking into another room, this one, coincidentally displaying wax figurines and body parts, not unlike those of Vienna’s medical museum. A lifelike figure of a young woman reclined on a purple satin cushion. The label read FELICE FONTANA, 1730-1805. The same time period, obviously, as the Viennese collection. They both stared at the figure, her organs pitifully exposed, her fine bedding disintegrating.

  “Does this have anything to do with your missing husband?” Arany asked after a pause.

  “I thought not, at first. But, yes, they’re clearly related. I’m not a person who goes looking for extremes,” she searched her mind for the Hungarian word for Mister—an effort to establish grace, formality— then gave up, “Mr Arany. So it has been very difficult for me to even consider the idea that Martin may have run into trouble.” She walked ove
r to the opposite side of the cabinet, as far away from him as possible —an effort to establish distance. “I came here, that is, to Vienna, to confront him, to call it off for good. I mean, to break off our marriage.” Helen was conscious that she was butchering her explanation, this queer exhibit was not helping any. “It all seems to concern Andreas Vesalius in some weird sort of way. Peter Ganz’s death, Martin’s disappearance. Even my meeting Friedrich Anselm.”

  Arany gestured to her to follow him back into one of the rooms they had already walked through; she knew her distraction agitated him. Could he be more different than Martin? Her mind was wandering. She let it. She didn’t often allow people in through her conscience, least of all men. Especially after meeting Martin. After all, that’s why couples get together, isn’t it? To stop the endless parade of tempting alternatives. To eliminate the need to worry that maybe someone, maybe you, made the wrong choice. Arany strolled on, one step ahead. She wanted to reach forward and slow him down, rest her hand on his arm, his shoulder, test his humanness, open up the possibility that perhaps, somewhere along the line, she had made a mistake, and that she might now take a chance on repairing the mistake. This strong need to touch had been felt in Anselm’s presence and now here. With Anselm she had sensed that her proximity fulfilled some sort of continuum; with Arany it came down to a simple basic craving. He stopped suddenly in front of a cabinet they had somehow overlooked.

  A large, framed, yellowed engraving on the wall next to the case caught her eye. “This is what all the fuss seems to be about,” she said, regathering her wits, recalling the purpose of her visit.

  It was an intricate Vesalius woodcut of arteries and veins that she recognized from the De Humani Corporis Fabrica.

  “Oh yes, the Fabrica, or as it is translated into the English language, About the Fabrication of the Human Body. Not this one in particular?” Arany asked.