“I know her name,” Helen announced quietly.
“What is it? How is that possible?” asked Günther.
“Her name is Rosa. This is her passport.” She held it up in her left hand. “She gave me this box. Perhaps she’s somewhere on this train; she seems, it seems, that is, that she’s so often nearby.”
Günther grabbed the passport and ran out of the compartment.
Helen was left with the conductor and the second official, neither of whom showed the slightest inclination to move.
“Aren’t you going to follow him?” asked Helen hopefully. “Don’t you have to finish checking passports?”
“Oh, we have time,” said the official, easing a bottle of amber liquid out of his breast pocket. “My name, by the way, is Franz Ressel. This,” he said, pointing to the conductor, “is Andreas Kölderer.” He twisted the cap off and took a swig, then pulled a none-too-clean-looking cloth out of his trouser pocket, wiped off the rim and passed the bottle to Helen. Helen took a dainty sip of what turned out to be nothing more than apple juice and passed the bottle to the conductor.
“Pleased to meet both of you,” said Helen, shaking their hands. The three of them still sat on the edge of the seat, staring straight ahead. To break the pause, Helen said, “I’m doing some research about a man named Andreas, among others.”
“Andreas who?” asked the conductor.
“Andreas Vesalius. Have you ever heard of him?” she said.
“Hmm, Andreas Vesalius,” mused the conductor. “I’ve heard of him.”
“I haven’t,” said the official.
“Here, look at this book.” Helen pulled the Vesalius book out of her bag and passed it to the conductor. The official called Ressel looked at it over the conductor’s shoulder.
“He didn’t draw these pictures,” the conductor flatly stated.
“Probably not. Probably a man named Kalkar. But no one knows for sure,” Helen replied.
“Then why study Vesalius? Seems to me that it’s the pictures that count.” The conductor was frowning.
“But I’m not just studying Vesalius, I’m studying the whole subject. Vesalius is just an easy way to show people what I’m doing.”
“I see,” said the conductor. He turned his head to look at the official who had started dozing and was now leaning on the conductor’s shoulder. “You should go to Padua.”
“As a matter of fact, I considered it. What do you know about Padua?”
“Everyone knows about Padua. The medical school there is one of the oldest in Europe, founded in 1222. Vesalius himself taught there in 1537. It was at Padua that he gained the experience to write the Fabrwa.”
Helen was dumbfounded. “How do you know this?”
“You are talking to an Austrian. The chances of running into an Austrian who hasn’t studied medicine are very slim. Surely, you have already discovered this? Franz here,” he pointed to the official, “in flat contradiction to what I have just said, is also Austrian but hasn’t had the benefit of studying medicine. He was training to be an architect and got caught in High Baroque. Nothing can kill an architect’s career faster than Baroque. Isn’t that right, Franz?” He punched Franz gently and looked at him.
Franz nodded grimly without moving his head from the conductor’s shoulder, and then closed his eyes again.
“What about you? What made you stop studying medicine?” asked Helen.
“Nothing at all. I completed my studies and became a doctor; in fact, you can call me Herr Doktor Andreas Kölderer. I practiced medicine— I was a family physician—for twenty years. And then one day I was traveling to Vienna from Budapest, it was on this very train, and the conductor fell down stone dead at my feet from a heart attack. As a doctor I could do nothing, the man was already dead. But as a human being I found I could help by carrying out his work until the end of the journey. You don’t actually need to be well trained in anything to perform the functions of a conductor, you know.” He winked. “Train officials were waiting to retrieve the dead man’s body at Vienna. When they saw my efficiency,” tears came to his eyes, “they hired me on the spot. I’ve been on this train ever since.
“Well,” he said, nudging Franz awake, “time to get going. Thank you for the conversation. This is the first time in many years that I have had a chance to reminisce like that.” He shook Helen’s hand again and pulled the still dozy official up off the seat. “There is less than one hour until we reach Vienna. Sorry to have interrupted your sleep.”
Helen stood for a few minutes with her head out the window, clearing her brain. The cold and the wind made her nose run. The scenery flashed past, spectacular really, she supposed, but not inviting. The grey skies and snow-dusted fields made her yearn for sunshine and warmth. “I’m not a northern person,” she announced to herself. “I only work hard because somehow, somewhere, someone put a small chunk of ice in my veins.”
She had no idea what had happened to the official, Günther, when he left her compartment, nor did she see Rosa get off the train in Vienna, even though she waited on the platform until the train departed, back to Budapest.
CHAPTER 16
ROSA’s WEDDING
The wheels and gears ground and screeched interminably, stretching the last few miles into an agonizing hour. Helen, at odds with her book and trammeled by her agitation, pulled out her map and traced the route with the tip of her finger. The names Ingolstadt, just north of Munich, then Augsburg, just to the west, caught her eye. These were two of the cities where the woodblocks had reposed. “What was the name of the other one?” She scratched her eyelid, then opened up her notebook and looked at her scribbled notes from her research in Anselm’s library. Basel, Augsburg, Leipzig—Leipzig was further north—Ingolstadt, Landshut, that was it. Where was Landshut? There it was, barely a finger width from Ingolstadt, a mere detour from Munich. The blocks had moved from Ingolstadt to Landshut in 1800. What was it about Landshut that kept them safe from the French? Her useless guidebook said nothing of interest about the place, implying that the last episode of note occurred in 1592. It had little more to add on the subject of Ingolstadt either. The French invasion had apparently been a non-event in the eyes of tourism.
According to Vesalius himself, Milanese merchants—the agency Danoni—had brought the woodblocks, their proofs, and the letterpress plates for each figure over the Alps from Venice to Basel. When Helen first read this she had thought this seemed like paltry cargo, in light of all else they’d be transporting: oils, spices, cloth, wines. But further readings revealed that the blocks were each about 42 centimeters long and 28 centimeters wide, which made them just over 16 by 9 inches. Each probably weighed several pounds. Two hundred of them would make at least 400 pounds. Not a second-rate undertaking after all. In Vesalius’s letter to the printer Oporinus he mentioned that he and a Nicolaus Stopius, the manager of the Bomberg firm and a friend apparently, took extra special pains to pack the cargo carefully. But what did the Bomberg firm do? Vesalius assumed that Oporinus would know them.
The missing details were further confused by more recent disputes. One scholar claimed that since the Danoni Agency was from Milan, it followed that the blocks would have been transported through the Alps via the Splügen Pass then on to Zurich and Basel; another asserted that they must have gone through the St Gothard pass. And how about from Basel to Augsburg, and so on? Some fifty were missing by the time the library ended up with them. Did blocks slip away on each consecutive journey, somehow just not making it? Helen pictured tired porters abandoning blocks at road-side inns, greedy innkeepers selling them for a few pfennigs, or worse yet, ignorant ones chopping them up for firewood or building them into the walls of their barns.
The detail about Nicholas Stopius being a friend reminded Helen that Stefan Arany had referred to Vesalius’s wife Anna. Why were details of this sort—friendships, marriages—so lacking in this history? The historians concentrated on animosities, accusations, and tragedies. Where had Anna come from? How
had they met? Why didn’t she go with him to Jerusalem? Was she with him when he died? Did his daughter ever marry and have children—more Annas, perhaps? Vesalius’s Anna reminded her of her Anna with the dog. Her Anna who was convinced that Vesalius sold books in Munich. No wonder she hadn’t thought much about that conversation—it was just too crazy.
Sleet was falling heavily when she arrived in Munich. The skies were dark, and the station was jammed with crowds of people.
She made her way immediately to a hotel that a colleague had recommended. “It’s cheap and kind of grotty,” he had told her, “but it’s clean, safe, and close to the train station. And that’s all you can ask for in Munich. Prices are unbelievable.”
The hotel, housed in a modest-sized modern building, was rather grim. Compared to its exterior and the exteriors of the neighboring buildings, the lobby was quite inviting—marble floors, aspidistras, over-stuffed easy chairs, impressively contemporary check-in counter with three clocks announcing the time in different parts of the world. After checking in, sadly without looking at the room first, she realized with a sinking feeling that the clocks showed different times because none of them worked, and that the easy chairs were home to single men, all of them silently staring at her. The clerk showed no surprise at the arrival of a lone female traveler; Helen took solace in this fact and decided to tough the night out and move the next morning. Her room was on the second floor, a laborious climb up narrow stairs, necessitated by an out-of-order elevator. The dilapidated room, at the end of a long hall, had an ill-fitting door, was furnished minimally, and yet was still crammed. The inventory included two sorrowful beds, each covered with—Helen counted them—six thin moth-eaten blankets, one rickety painted wooden chair, one matching table with oilcloth glued in patches to the surface, one side table between the two beds, and a free-standing radiator heater, also between the two beds. There was a cracked, stained sink and a tarnished mirror, a towel rack with a single hand towel next to the sink, and under the sink was a pink plastic waste pail molded to look like a woven basket. The floor was covered in a bilious linoleum— the pattern worn away at the entrance to the room—and the walls were painted a hospital green. A framed photograph of Lake Maligne hung crookedly on the wall above the table. She straightened it, but, uncovering a border of grime, restored it to its original jaunty angle. Redecorating the room was not her responsibility.
In addition to the single bare light bulb suspended from the ceiling, there were two shaded reading lamps above each bed and a powerful fluorescent lamp above the mirror over the sink that hummed and crackled noisily when turned on. Only one of the reading lights worked. She flopped onto one bed and then onto the other, picking the one that sagged the least. Having chosen, she whipped the blankets back, hoping to take any bedbugs by surprise. The sheets were worn but clean, and there were no traces of bugs. The blankets were a disappointment; she had come to expect the fluffy quilts that had covered the beds in Vienna and Budapest.
The tap dripped slightly, resisting Helen’s efforts to make it stop. She tried to figure out how the heater operated, for the room was awfully damp and cold. The radiator, as stone cold as the stagnant air in the room, stood mute and unresponsive to her twists of the rusty, uncooperative valves.
The drapes hid a set of dusty Venetian blinds, which Helen raised to see the street below and the buildings across the street. The entire block seemed to have been built in the same style, modern on the surface but shoddy in technique. Rather unsettled, she shut the blinds, closed the windows, and then went looking for the bathroom down the hall. The toilet was in a separate room from the shower and seemed clean enough. The hotel on the whole was very clean—Helen couldn’t fault that—it was just so cold and depressing.
Back in her room, she turned on the hot water tap, letting it run while she dumped the contents of her bag onto the bed. Testing and retesting the temperature, finally giving up when it seemed that the water could get no colder, she proceeded to put on every article of clothing she possessed, tights under trousers, skirt over trousers, socks over tights, shirt over blouse, sweater over shirt. “I am determined to be warm,” she muttered out loud, “no matter how ridiculous I look.” With one last look out the window, she locked her door and headed towards the stairs. It was just after seven.
“Is there no hot water?” she asked the clerk.
“Eight o’clock,” he replied without looking up. She dropped the key on the counter, automatically checking her watch against the dysfunctional clocks, and strolled past the lounging men who had decided that she was of no interest at all.
The sleet had stopped but water was still dripping off of the awnings. Traffic splashing through the puddles constantly threatened passersby with showers of heavy wet snow. She hadn’t taken the time to study the map while still in the hotel, and now found herself lost and disoriented. Not even sure of the direction back to the train station.
Food. Got to eat. Hunger always makes things seem worse than they are. A good meal and the room will look like a suite in the Ritz. She passed hotel after hotel and was struck by the similarity between these and the one she was in—the fancy lobby, in each instance, no doubt masked uninspiring rooms. She was also struck by the sheer quantity of men hanging around. Where were the women? Didn’t women travel, too?
Her room, by the time she returned, was suffocatingly hot. Someone had either come in during the evening and had opened the heater, or it was controlled from a central source. Helen could now smell the warm dust molecules dancing faster and faster as the temperature increased. Just as she had tried to turn it on earlier in the day she now tried, even more fervently, to turn it off. Giving up, she threw open one of the windows, leaned out and breathed deeply, savoring the aroma of the city, surveying the now abandoned street below her.
Helen woke up wearing her bones on the outside of her body. “Oh God,” she groaned, “now what’s happening?” She ran her hands up and down her arms and then along her hips to her thighs, hearing the clacking of bone against bone, feeling the skeletal structure straining against her body underneath. “God,” she sobbed, “why me?” and her mind flew immediately to the hallucinating heat of the radiator.
“Helen, Helen, wake up,” a voice came from the end of the bed, and her eyes leapt open.
The fluorescent light was on, its harsh glare illuminating every corner of the room. She sat up, first looking down at herself, startled to find the light on, shocked to see skin, not bone, and alarmed, as she raised her head to look around the room, to see Rosa sitting at the foot of the bed. Behind her, sitting at the table, picking at the oilcloth, smoking a cigarette, was Günther, the customs official.
Rosa was wearing a voluminous white wedding dress, the satin stretching dangerously across the mass of her bosom, the tulle of the veil sprouting wildly from her head, cascading about her body. The hair of her wig was done in tight curls, and her face was made-up into the mask of a young bride.
Helen eased her back against the wall and pulled her knees up close to her chest, putting her arms around them, trying to comfort herself. “Rosa, go away,” she cried. The wedding dress was the last straw. Rosa turned to Günther who crushed his cigarette onto the table top, walked over to Helen, and knelt by the side of her bed.
Helen looked over at him. “What do you want?” she snapped. He lifted up his hand to pat her knee consolingly, but she drew away, alarmed.
“We just want to thank you,” he said, sadness crumpling his face. “We didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Thank me for what?” she asked suspiciously.
“For bringing us together again. Without you we both would have spent the rest of our lives alone. We got married. You can see that.” He looked over at Rosa, his eyes glowing. “Isn’t she beautiful in her lovely dress? I’ve always dreamed of this moment.”
Helen squinted at Rosa, trying to block out some of the fluorescent glare. The spectacle of the old woman in the virginal dress was too much. Helen brushed aside G�
�nther’s pacifying hand and slid down to the end of the bed to get a better look. She felt cruel, seeing these two decrepit, pathetic beings so happy and so pleased with themselves. But she felt frightened as well; the impression of the unforgiving bones still lingering upon her skin. She rubbed her arms, anxious to dispel the sensation.
Helen put her face close to Rosa’s—much as Rosa had done to her the last time they had met—inspecting minutely the fissures in the caked make-up on her jowls and chins. Flakes from the heavy mascara around her eyes had tumbled, resting like fruit flies here and there on her cheek. Crusted sleep mixed in with the deep indigo of her eye shadow, nestling in the corners of each eye. Powder clung to the long hairs that grew along her jaw line and on her upper lip. If Helen blew a puff of air, no matter how lightly, the whole room would be aswirl in floury clouds.
Lipstick smeared the far reaches of Rosa’s mouth, and as Helen continued her intense survey, Rosa rubbed the plump, waxen lips, smearing the color even more. She looked absently at the tips of her fingers and unconsciously wiped them off on the folds of her dress. Patches of magenta accumulated on the satin near her right thigh. To top it off her hair was tightly curled because she had neglected to take the pins out of the wig. While Helen was studying her Rosa began to chuckle and shake nervously.
“What do you see?” she asked.
Helen frowned. Mean as she felt, she couldn’t bring herself to tell Rosa that she was a miserable mockery.
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