The Sensualist

by Barbara Hodgson

  She kept up the pretense of conversation, of interest. It was better than being locked into his odors. “But why not go to, I don’t know, Athens? Take a boat from there right to Tel Aviv?”

  “Ah, you do know your geography, after all!” His exclamation sent out a cloud of cinnamon and cavities.

  “Well?” She was inexplicably torn between finding out about his reasoning and a now-growing interest in dissecting the smells.

  He made a face. “Because of Greece,” he said.

  “What about Greece?”

  “We are not friendly, Greece and I.”

  Thinking it wise to change the topic, Helen said, “Too bad, I guess. Well, you certainly see a lot of country doing it this way. Why are you going to Tel Aviv?”

  “I’m going to move there.”

  “Ah, you’re Jewish?”

  “No!” he shouted. Then in a normal tone added, “Not that that is such a problem in these modern times. No, it is because I have dandruff.”

  “What do Israel and dandruff have to do with each other?”

  “I have heard that the Dead Sea climate is a miracle cure. I suppose you are not likewise afflicted?”

  “No, not too much,” Helen admitted.

  “You are lucky. It consumes my entire life. I wash my hair three, four times a day and still, look!” He brushed his hair forward rubbing vigorously. Little flakes fluttered down onto the map. Helen leaned even further away, tempted to brush off the sleeves of her coat, and aware that the elusive odor she had noticed had been the seborrheic scurf in his hair, so bad that it consumed any scent the shampoo might have left. But no, of course, the tar smell, that would be from his shampoo. Surprised and delighted by this new-found acuity, she forgave his brazen proximity.

  “Sorry,” the man said. “Do you plan to go to Israel?”

  “Not during this trip,” said Helen. “Maybe. Someday.” A gust of engine smoke ensnarled in the bitter wind blew in from the door at the entrance to the station, snapping her concentration. “I should go and see if my friends have shown up.” She scanned around the hall, trying to look convincing.

  “Let me write down my address. In Budapest,” he added. “I will have my mail forwarded. If you come you will be pleased to stay with me.” Helen smiled inwardly at this slip in otherwise perfect English.

  “Yes I’m sure I will be,” she said, watching him laboriously copy out his name and address. He handed it to her. “Anton Qwerty. What an unusual name. Is this a transliteration from Cyrillic, can you use a Q without a U? Why, it sounds like the name of the pianist, Anton Kuerti.”

  “Yes, it is pronounced exactly just the same.”

  “But why is it spelled differently?” He squirmed. Oh, oh, thought Helen, this is touchier than the Greece issue.

  “I am a bastard,” he announced.

  “I’m sure you aren’t that bad,” she said, taken aback by his abrupt language.

  “No, you don’t understand. I am illegitimate.”

  “But that’s no big deal, nowadays.”

  “It’s not?” he asked, brightening. “One is always afraid that it will be held against one. Well, my mother worked as a secretary for an English businessman while she was pregnant. And she needed a father’s name for her baby, that’s me.”

  “Yes, go on. You did have a father?”

  “My mother was not sure who he was.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “So, she gave me the name from your English keys that she typed on. Qwerty!”

  The train platform was quite crowded by the time the train to Vienna pulled up. As she walked through the train’s familiar corridors she noticed that the standards heading east to west were visibly lower than those coming from the west. The washrooms emitted distinctive odors, the passengers looked more motley—their baggage more abundant and far less chic. She was comfortable where she was but needed to keep her coat on against the cold.

  She shared her compartment with a morose couple who had commandeered the two window seats and a greying, furrow-faced man with his young daughter.

  The silent couple got off at Tatabánya, the man and daughter at Györ. Neither city, seen from the disadvantageous railway stations, seemed worth stopping at. She was alone again, at least for awhile.

  Helen woke up to the sound of knocking and the strong aroma of tobacco smoke drifting into the compartment. She floundered about groggily, her limbs flapping at twice the speed of her brain. She opened her eyes. She wasn’t in her room in Budapest, she was on the train, and it was broad daylight. She remembered: she was on the train to Vienna. She looked in the direction of the knocking.

  A conductor, one hand posed to knock again, was standing at the door to the compartment, his mouth fixed into an uncomfortable, authoritative smile. Two taller uniformed men stood behind him. One of them put a hand on each of the conductor’s upper arms and pivoted him out of the way. The other, the taller and broader of the two, but surprisingly old, spoke in a quavering voice, demanding in German to see Helen’s passport. He took the document and immediately passed it to his sidekick, who opened it up, minutely scrutinizing each page.

  “Is there anything the matter?” asked Helen of the man who was now straining to get into the compartment as well.

  “No, there is nothing the matter,” came the reply.

  “May I ask why you’re looking at my passport?”

  “Border.”

  “Oh, of course.” The customs officer’s eyes were rapidly twitching between her and her picture. He nudged his companion who copied him. “Is this your passport?”

  “Yes, it is,” Helen didn’t bother to look over to it.

  “What is your name, please.”

  “Helen Martin.”

  “Then why is this passport made out to Rosa Kovslovsky?”

  “It is? I don’t understand.” Helen took it back and saw that it was Rosa’s. She grabbed her bag off of the floor and started rummaging around in it. To her relief, her own was still there. She pulled it out and handed it to the official. He glanced at the name and the picture and then again passed it along to his fellow officer who examined all of it—her personal information, her visas, the stamps from a trip two years ago— with the same thoroughness with which he had examined Rosa’s.

  “Why do you travel with two passports?”

  “I don’t. That one must have been left accidentally by…” she groped for a word to describe Rosa, “ah, Rosa Kovslovsky.”

  “Who is this person? A relative?”

  “No, just an acquaintance. I suspect that she’ll be quite inconvenienced when she discovers her passport missing.”

  The official to whom she had been talking turned to the other, an inquiring frown on his face. The second man nodded, pulled a huge rubber stamp out of his pocket, stamped it ferociously, and slapped it shut, passing it back to the first man who, after flashing it open to double check the contents, handed it back to Helen.

  “Is that all?”

  “Now we must examine your luggage.”

  She felt her breath contract unreasonably at the notion of these officious men going through her bags but handed them over without a word. The conductor politely pushed past her, zipped open the larger one and motioned for her to stand aside for the officers to look. They cursorily lifted up the few garments, fingered the side pockets, tapped the outside, and then asked if she had any others. She pointed to the shoulder bag leaning desultorily against its companion. While one of the officers looked through it, the conductor tossed the other back up onto the rack. Helen, still standing, felt waves of claustrophobia sweep over her and overcompensated time and again in an effort to keep her balance in the small space available. By this time the official had found the box and was clawing at it to find a way to open it. Helen gestured to him to hand it to her. He held onto it for a few more moments, unwilling to give up, and then finally passed it to her. She opened it and gave it back to him, her mind darting about, trying to formulate a reason for carrying a human b
one around eastern Europe. Both of the customs agents craned their necks to look into the box at the same time. Their interest captivated the conductor, who stood on his tiptoes to see over their shoulders. The older, taller official flipped the pages awkwardly, his face severe until he found the bone. But he wasn’t interested in the bone itself; it was the ring that had caught his attention.

  “Is this yours?” he asked. Triumph tinged the suspicious tone.

  “Yes, it is.” Helen lied convincingly.

  “Have you declared it?”

  “No, it’s just a family heirloom,” she lied again. “I don’t think it has any value.”

  “It looks like a very precious piece of jewelry to me. Why are you carrying this around with you on a train?”

  “As I said, it’s from my family. I like to keep something with me to remind me of them.”

  The shorter official tapped the other on the arm and whispered to him. He nodded.

  “Please show me the inside of the ring,” he asked handing the finger to Helen.

  “It might be stuck here,” she said while pulling on the ring, but it came off easily. Helen frowned at it with surprise and then handed it to the official. He squinted to read the writing on the inside of the band. He gave it to his counterpart who did the same and then handed it back to Helen. She remembered with relief that it had been engraved to another Helen.

  “You must, in future, please, declare this ring when crossing borders from one country to another,” he cautioned. Helen put the bone and then the ring back into the book and was about to close the lid when the official motioned her to pass it back over. He removed the book, handing back the box, flipped through the pages once again, and then said, “May I add something to this collection?”

  “If you want,” replied Helen slowly. He consulted with the others in a whispered voice, first pointing to the box and then to Helen herself. Then, as though mimicking the conductor on the train she had first taken to Vienna, the two officials started going through their pockets, pulling out coins, bills, toothpicks, lint, nail-clippers, papers, combs— all of the detritus that one could ever expect to find in the pockets of customs officials. The one who had initially asked if he could put something in the box patted his back pocket, cried out something that sounded like “Ah, ha!” and yanked on what turned out to be a fiveinch-long tress of auburn hair, bound by a blue ribbon. He waved the tress a couple of times in the air, shaking it free of dust and lint, and then gently and ceremoniously inserted it between two pages. This lock of hair must have represented someone very special. Helen took back the box and opened it to the page where the man had inserted it. He had managed to place it into a perfectly cut oval that she had previously overlooked.

  “Why have you given me something so important?” she asked.

  “Because this box is much more fitting for it than my back pocket. I have carried this lock of hair with me for almost fifty years and for fifty years I have felt badly every time I sat down. Now I know it will be in a receptacle worthy of it. You must remember to check that the ribbon is secure, otherwise it will slip off and the hair will fly all over.”

  “May I ask where it is from?”

  “A long story,” he laughed as if embarrassed to have said such a trite phrase. “Maybe I should say, ‘Once upon a time!’“ He looked at the other official and at the conductor, both of whom immediately sat down on her coat lying along the edge of the banquette. Helen motioned them to get back up again, pulled away her coat, and then gestured for them to sit down again. This time she joined them. The official with the story stood in the corner facing them, leaning against the wall.

  He patted his pockets in the familiar gesture of one searching for cigarettes, and to Helen’s dismay he extracted a crumpled packet. She glanced around the compartment looking for a no-smoking symbol. As his eyes followed hers he shrugged as if to declare that he was governed neither by signs plastered onto walls, nor by fastidious tourists. The acrid sulphur of the match could not compete with the intense smoldering fumes that followed. As he drew deeply on the cigarette, Helen saw for the first time, the yellow, brown, ochre layers of nicotine laminating his fingers, excavatable strata of Turkish, Egyptian, Syrian, and Russian tobacco. By comparison, the old man in the Budapest pension had been a novice smoker, relying on years for his habit, rather than the quantity crammed into those years. The compartment filled with an addictive haze hinting of cloves and forgotten seductions. She no longer objected to his smoking.

  “I was a student in Vienna,” he began. “I was going to study medicine and be a doctor or, perhaps, a surgeon. I come from Sofia, in Bulgaria—I’ve changed my name,” he confided, “and had just begun my studies at the medical school. I was not doing very well. My earlier studies had been easy; I think most students find this is the case.” He looked at the conductor, who nodded solemnly in confirmation. “Plus the war was just finishing and nobody’s mind was on studying.” He looked again at the others, who nodded vigorously. “I lived in a boarding house on Liebiggasse, close to the medical school. My landlady’s name was Frau von Ehrlach, a very nice woman, who fed us… pardon, I’ll get on with the story.” The conductor had poked the official in the shin with the pointed toe of his shiny black shoe. The name von Ehrlach startled Helen into paying closer attention, but it was a common enough name, after all, wasn’t it?

  “This was a mixed house, not so unusual in Vienna in those days, as all students, men and women, were considered serious and interested in nothing but study. Now it’s not so unusual for precisely the opposite reason. Two rooms down from me lived a very beautiful young woman from Berlin; she also studied medicine. Most of the students in our house were in the medical faculty. She was two years further than me in her studies and had lived in Frau von Ehrlach’s house for several years. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Maybe you remind me of her.”

  “What was her name?” asked the conductor.

  “I have forgotten her name,” said the official sadly, pausing to remove flecks of tobacco from his tongue. “She never sat with us at the table; she took her meals at different times.”

  “How beautiful was she?” asked the other official. Both men were leaning forward, their elbows on their knees, their chins resting in their cupped palms. Helen suddenly realized that they had heard this story before, perhaps many times.

  “Her beauty had no parallel,” continued the official. “As a doctor she would have been a ministering angel, but she wanted to be a pathologist.” He frowned at the memory.

  “What color was her hair, Günther?” asked the conductor.

  “Deep gold,” he answered. “It matched the flecks of color in her hazel eyes,” his voice trailed off. Helen winced at the mawkish sentiment and looked at the dull tress coiled in the still-open book.

  Günther read her mind. “It’s lost its life,” He fell silent.

  “Continue, please, Günther,” said the second official.

  “She took up with another medical student who lived in his own house also near to the medical school. He had inherited this house and was dreadfully rich. One could see why a girl, especially a poor student, would want to be with a rich man. But he wasn’t very intelligent. He also was several years ahead of me, but his reputation was well known among all of us students—he was a cad. We often asked ourselves how he got out of the youth brigade, being a couple of years older. Sometimes she would be gone for long stretches of time, weeks. Other times she would be at the house, steadily working until very late, her light on, her pencil scratching away.”

  “How did you know? Did she leave her door open?”

  “Shhh!” This time both other listeners reacted to her question.

  Günther shot Helen a look of disapproval, but continued. “Then one day, after she had been away for almost a month, she came back to the house and resumed her normal studies. She had put a photograph of herself in her desk drawer that I would look at from time to time.”

  “You sneaked into h
er room!” Helen couldn’t help interrupting again. She stuck her knuckles in her mouth. Günther glared at her.

  “I still didn’t see her very often but this was all right because I could look at the photograph. One day, however, something happened, a little thing, but disturbing all the same. I found strands of her hair in the bathroom and on the hallway carpet. In her room she began often to leave long hairs on her pillow and at her desk. So I started to collect them. As the days passed there were more and more strands until I became quite alarmed. I saw her less and less and it was becoming quite difficult to go into her room because she was staying there more. Frau von Ehrlach’s son—he was just as infatuated, the precocious twerp— would bring her trays up to her door and leave them and then take them away when she had finished. Frau von Ehrlach would normally never do that for anyone else unless they were very ill. I would wait outside, hoping to get a chance to ask her if she were all right, but she was very cautious. I would still find hairs in the bathroom in the morning—I think she waited until late at night to leave her room. By the time I had collected all of the hairs that you have seen me put into the box I knew that she was seriously ill. A healthy person does not lose that much hair in the course of so few days.” He looked down at the nearly finished cigarette, examined the ash as if certain to find his future revealed in the delicate grey flakes, then, after lighting up a new one with the stub, pulled a rusty tin box from his pocket and dropped the butt carefully inside.

  “So I knocked on her door. She told me to go away. I told her that I knew she was ill and that I could take her to a doctor. She flung the door open and stared at me.” He paused, looking very morose.

  “What happened then, Günther?” asked the second official.

  “I was in shock. She had lost all of her hair, she was completely bald. And she was a mountain! Horribly, grotesquely colossal, as though she had been inflated like some kind of… no, as if she had been amplified into an infinite megalith. And she screamed at me. That was the worst of all. I ran down the hall and outside the house, my hands over my ears to cut out the sound of her screams. I didn’t go back until the next morning. By then she had moved out. I asked Frau von Ehrlach where she had gone, but no one knew. It had happened in the dead of night.”