The Sensualist

by Barbara Hodgson

  Helen, now convinced that the woodblocks must still exist, described her suspicions to the librarian. Frau Löwe’s stare, in combination with her smile, gave her a somewhat vacant look, making Helen feel all the more awkward and causing her to stumble over her German. She apologized for her stammering—the composed face nodded understandingly—and explained that she couldn’t show the woodcut but could show her the pile of proofs. Frau Lowe picked up the phone and in a subdued bedside tone asked the person on the other end of the line to bring in a copy of the Icones Anatomicœ and the first edition of the Fabrica. In the intervening moments Frau Lowe informed her that she was not the first person to inquire about these matters.

  “I think I am in the rerun of a movie,” she smiled. “A man, a newspaper journalist, asked me the very same questions, maybe three months ago. Are you working with this reporter?”

  Helen, who had hoped to avoid an explanation of her search for Martin, reluctantly recounted, amidst a trickle of sympathetic murmurs, the circumstances surrounding her investigation.

  While they waited, Sophie Lowe described the background of the current library. She explained that the university had actually been founded in Ingolstadt in 1472 and had moved briefly to Landshut in 1800, during the bitter years of war between France and Austria when Napoleon had occupied southern Germany. At this time Germany was subjected to secularization resulting in the destruction of numerous monasteries and the subsequent transfer of books and manuscripts to the universities. Frau Löwe described Landshut as “waking up to a temporary importance” since the university then moved to Munich in 1826. Coming from her mouth, these city names acquired the resonance of history and significance that they had previously lacked. Her account also filled a hole that had been bothering Helen for some time: the question about why the blocks had been moved at all. They were simply following the university. When they were taken to Ingolstadt in 1781 they must have been bequeathed by Dr Leveling or Herr von Woltter, the two men she’d read about earlier, or somehow otherwise housed in the library. Then when the library moved just under twenty years later, the blocks naturally moved with it, and so on to Munich. Helen asked if there were archives about the donors although she was starting to think that this distant past was a blind, a dead end, that the real story lay closer to the present. Characters like Leveling and von Woltter were crowding the stage, making it difficult to see the real stars, or should she say villains?

  “No, sadly, if anything had existed it would have been destroyed in the bombing,” Frau Löwe answered. “However, there are numerous published essays describing the history. In 1944 we were the envy of the country. Our library had over a million books, 4300 manuscripts, and far in excess of 4500 incunabula. And we had the Vesalius blocks. We were able to save less than three quarters of the books and half of the incunabula. Thankfully, only a few manuscripts were lost. Today we’ve worked our collection back up to almost two million volumes.

  “The woodblocks were secure in the Nordkellar, the North Cellar, and escaped the first bombs that fell on the 13th of July. Part of the library was destroyed during this attack. The real destruction occurred three days later. That’s when we lost them finally. Just two years after Vesalius’s four-hundred year celebration.” She paused to thank the librarian who placed the huge books onto her desk. “But I can’t believe that the blocks could have secretly continued to survive all of this time. Their value is too extreme for them to have remained silently underground.” She tapped the surface of the Fabrica as if expecting the muted response of the leather-covered wooden boards and thick ream of text to confirm her declaration.

  “Do you know how much a first edition Fabrica would sell for today?” Helen asked.

  Frau Löwe rested the palms of both hands on the book’s cover while she glanced about the crowded bookshelves that lined the room. She then opened a deep drawer in her desk and pulled out a file crammed with pamphlets. Sorting through them carefully, she shuffled a couple to the side, then returned the others to their place in the drawer. The first one, a French bookseller’s catalogue from the 1930s, listed antiquarian books and their prices. After a moment’s scanning, Sophie Löwe turned the booklet over to Helen, pointing to a brief entry; at that time they were selling an edition, missing 2 plates, for 35 francs. She translated from the French: “Beautiful edition with many illuminated initials and a very beautiful portrait of Vesalius; a large quantity of woodcuts representing surgical subjects. This copy is incomplete.” Prices for other books listed on the page ranged from 5 to 9 francs. Thirty-five was no doubt expensive.

  “I have a more recent catalogue here,” Sophie Löwe passed the other booklet to Helen. Several editions were listed, along with a recent auction history. The prices started at a low of £6000 for an edition sold in 1989 to $125,000 for another for sale at the time the catalogue was published. “You can see that if the current price for a book alone is $125,000 then the blocks themselves would be priceless.”

  “And individual prints pulled from the blocks?”

  “Their value would be much reduced. Separated from the book itself would mean that their provenance would be disputable. Of course if they had the text on the back it would be easier to confirm where they came from, but if they were printed without the text? They could be from a later edition, from a printer’s proof, from anywhere, do you see what I mean?”

  “But why would someone start printing with the blocks and try to pass them off as originals?”

  “Again, do you mean original woodcuts from the book or proofs pulled from the original woodblocks?”

  Helen had been trying to remember if her print had text on the back. She could only conclude that it hadn’t. “Proofs,” she said, “pulled from the original woodblocks.”

  “Done in sufficient quantity they would produce an income, I suppose, but hardly sufficient to make it worthwhile. They would also disrupt the art world, for at least a brief period of time. Perhaps that would be the motivation.” Both women looked at each other in silent contemplation of the two possibilities. “Or,” continued Frau Löwe, “they could be doing it to hint at the presence of the blocks themselves, to create interest, and thus a market for them.”

  “Who was the printer of the 1934 edition?” Helen asked. She had forgotten to notice this important detail when examining the book in Anselm’s study.

  “Bremer Presse, here in Munich.” Frau Löwe had flipped to the title page. “Bremer Presse was founded by Willy Wiegand and Ludwig Wolde in around 1911. Herr Wiegand published an essay on the finding and printing of the blocks. Have you read that yet?”

  Helen shook her head. “Do you have a copy that I could borrow?” The librarian arranged for one to be hunted down and brought to the office. “I’ve asked them to look for any other relevant material.”

  “Do they still exist, the Bremer Presse?”

  “No, they were victims, I believe, of bad economic times.” She shut the book and thought for a few minutes. “We may have some records of the printing of the Icones Anatomicœ. I will go check.” She got up from her desk, straightening her narrow-fitting skirt and pulling her matching suit jacket down over her hips. “Feel free to have a look through our copy of the Fabrica. It came to us in 1803, during the secularization, from a monastery in Au, close to here, now a suburb, in fact.”

  The Fabrica. At last a chance to dive into this elusive testament. Her hands hovered above the leather-bound boards, fingers itching to storm the pages, eyes hungry to devour the surfaces already scoured by the passing of nearly 500 years, nostrils pinching out all but the reek of dust and paste and rag, ears heeding to the distinct bustle of the past: the pencils, the gouges, the presses, the exclamations of admiration, the cries of disdain, the flames of indignation. She shook her head, wrenching herself out of this flirtation with delirium, and opened the book. As she turned the pages, the thick paper moved the air, filling it with echoes of the searching eyes and possessive hands that had grasped it and cradled it through the years
. Evidence of those hands: faint notations in the margins, a misprinted title corrected. She made her way through randomly, now on page 165—Corporis Humani Ossa posteriori facie proposita—an illustration of the skeleton, a poignant pose: the skeleton’s curved back to the viewer, the knees flexed, the legs apart, the forehead resting despondently on raised, joined hands. Set against a desperate countryside: rocky, barren earth, a stump, some latent struggling growth.

  She returned to the beginning, to the title page that she’d examined in Anselm’s Icones, the very first one, the raw version. From there to pages of text in Latin, each commencing with attractive illuminated initial capital letters; her gaze at first swung past these but, suddenly arrested by a jarring detail, she looked closer. From page to page, cherubs and putti battled, collected bodies, performed dissections, robbed graves. These initials, possibly cut in Oporinus’s own establishment, had been lost. The text itself, dense and incomprehensible to the unschooled, was nevertheless graced with wide borders and subject marginalia notes, creating a most attractive page. One writer had described it as Italian or Venetian in design, rather than German—a compliment in printer’s circles. Delving further revealed the clear organization into seven books, the incorporation of the small illustrations into the text, the care and fastidiousness taken to enable the student to cross reference diagrams and legends. She turned to the last few pages and found a magnificent index, each alphabetical section headed by a decorative initial.

  Frau Löwe’s voice drifted into the room; she’d be on her way back with the archives.

  Helen skipped to Book Two, to the muscle diagrams, praying that her own woodcut would seem more familiar in the dim light of age. It was definitely the first, third, or ninth plate. Why couldn’t she remember a simple matter of whether the figure faced forward or backward? Did it matter? The introduction to the Icones stated that all of the large plates were printed from originals except for the eighth muscle plate. She turned to that one. Definitely not. A despairing skeleton, nearly all its muscle stripped and hanging uselessly from limbs and torso, stood sunken against a stone wall; its sternum and cut-away ribs at its feet. That settled it, her woodblock still existed.

  She remembered reading that the eighth block had been damaged before the 1780s, when Leveling printed his edition, so, perhaps, sometime after Maschenbauer of Augsburg got his hands on them. It had been recut badly by some hack who copied it from the printed example, resulting in a backwards impression when it was printed. She also recalled that Leveling’s edition was missing some of the smaller blocks. She twisted and strained to see if the pages were watermarked, angling the desk lamp to help her. Not a trace, not on this page, not on the next one. Perhaps the watermark was a device created in 1934 specifically for the Icones from a crest designed centuries before. Her proofs were watermarked, weren’t they? Or was it just Rosa’s notepaper? No, of course her proofs weren’t watermarked; they were printed on whatever scrap the printer happened to have on hand. It was the notecard that accompanied the box that carried the mark.

  The Semmelweis Vesalius. She’d never had a chance to compare that. Arteries and veins. On to Book Three. Plate 43 was a study of veins around the liver, gall bladder, and gut. Turn the page. There it was, no doubt about it: Plate 44, Integra Ab Omnibus, page 268, the entire vein system, the woodcut at the Semmelweis. Now, if Stefan Arany had his print authenticated, they could see whether or not it too had been printed since the war.

  Helen’s head jerked up with a snap. Sophie Lowe, her back to the room, spoke to someone from the entrance to her office; she then walked away again. A couple more seconds’ grace of privacy. Leaving the Fabrìca open to the Ninth Muscle plate, the Nona Musculorum Tabula, she turned to the same reproduction in the Icones. The 1934 edition was so rich, so black, so fresh. As if done yesterday. The first edition, faint, fulvous, fusty. A roll in ancient sheets.

  The librarian returned, waving a single sheet of paper as she peered into an open file folder. “There are no records.” She looked up from the file and peered closely at Helen. “You’ve been digging! There’s dust all over your face!” Dirt was a safe subject, unlike scars. She handed Helen a mirror and a handkerchief from her purse and, as Helen rubbed the Fabrica off of her skin, continued to talk. “Everything was destroyed, and now it would be virtually impossible to rebuild our records. You do realize, I hope,” Frau Lowe smoothed her still-exquisite hair, “that I cannot be responsible for these gaps. I was not here at that time. I didn’t start my work here until fifteen years ago. I wasn’t even born then!” They both laughed, and Helen sensed that, at last, Frau Löwe and she understood each other.

  The piece of paper that the librarian had carried into the room was a list of university employees working at the University during the War. “I doubt if this will be any help, but you asked for archives, and it’s all that we have.”

  Sophie Lowe moved Helen into a quiet corner, loading her down with the heavy books, the pamphlets, and photocopies of whatever she could lay her hands on. Her departure, long after closing time, was accompanied by the reassurance that she was welcome back the next day to continue her search.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE CUSTODIAN

  The dust on Helen’s fingers could not be washed off. It stayed encrusted to her skin, like Günther’s nicotine had layered itself upon his, a constant reminder of her obsession to find out what had happened to the woodblocks. She disdained the bed that night—what use was it anyway? Beds these days seemed only to invite chaos.

  She labored through the German articles, rifling her pocket dictionary, railing against its penchant for leaving out the most essential words. By the time exhaustion had overtaken her enthusiasm, she had concluded that even Vesalius’s recent history was confused by shreds of contradiction. The printing of the university’s 1934 Icones boiled down to a few essentials: there were 615 copies of a numbered edition produced that included Vesalius’s explanations of the drawings. It had sold for 280 Reichsmarks. A second version, without the explanations had sold for 240 Reichsmarks. It appeared that at the time of the publication of the Icones, a first edition of the 1543 Fabrica could be purchased for between 1200 and 1500 Reichsmarks, while an edition of the Epitome went for around 3400 Reichsmarks. If 280 Reichsmarks was worth about $100 in 1936, then Stefan Arany hadn’t been exaggerating when he claimed that these books were valuable. The French antiquarian bookseller, offering his Fabrica just six years earlier for 35 francs— the cost, perhaps, of a fancy dress—had been practically giving away his copy.

  In 1893, as she had read before, 159 of the woodblocks were discovered in some part of the library. These, along with a further 68, tracked down in 1932 by Willy Wiegand of the Bremer Presse, brought the total to 227, enabling the printing of the Icones. Wiegand’s search and the subsequent printing had been instigated by Dr Samuel Lambert, an American physician—Theodore Roosevelt’s own doctor—as it turned out.

  According to one of the articles, the Bremer Presse had the fine reputation alluded to by Sophie Lowe. In fact, it asserted that they had produced the finest of all the editions ever printed. The article also stated that they maintained the highest level of care for the blocks, returning them to the university in the same excellent state in which they had initially received them. Well, that answered that question. No doubt that the blocks had been sent back to the university.

  There were papers scattered over the miserly hotel desk and across the floor, plastered to the wall, stuck on with tape borrowed from a querulous desk clerk. Sentences were underlined once, twice; asterisked if significant; x’d if contradictory. Arrows pointed to pertinent addendums. A cross-referenced traffic jam: disorganized, haphazard, flailing. Personalities and their shadows were interfering with the answers. No! More than that, they were rewriting the questions. Who was in control here? Helen reasserted her authority, gathered up all the pages, and proceeded to deal them out into neat stacks: the history of the library, publication chronologies, description of the prin
ters, treatises on style, the university’s list of employees for 1936. Which pile did this go in? No, read through it again. Really too tired, go to bed. Achterberg, D., cataloguing; Addler, P., administration; Albrecht, M., custodian. A huge yawn came, then another one; they never go out alone, always in pairs, these yawns. Aulich, J.M., secretary; Baitz, A., librarian; Beham, H.S., cataloguing; Bergstresser, V., information; Bischler, M., cataloguing; Blauhorn, I., restoration; Brebner, R.T., administration; Cantafio, L., clerk (an Italian?); Dorfman, T, librarian, and so on down the list. Kehl, D.M., custodian. Her steady progress through the names, slowing through the fatigue, now lurched to a stop. Kehl. Related? Kehl. Coincidence? Sensing achievement, she fell asleep.

  Günther Mann had thoughtfully left a suicide note, so declared the terse anonymous message slipped under Helen’s door. The sharp sudden knock that accompanied the note woke Helen out of her already startled sleep. Its mere presence exonerated her of any further involvement; she was free to leave, and not a moment too soon as far as she was concerned. Too much, the collective clamor of Munich—the traffic: horns, whistles, squeals; the people: piercing, guttural, grating. This was supposed to be such a brilliant city—splendid, grand—the envy of all of Germany. But what assaulted her ears was not a tribute to loveliness, but a monument to harshness. Except Frau Löwe who Helen visited once more. The librarian, so tranquil, so placid, so quiet. To hibernate in her peaceful sanctum muffled by the palisade of dusty books. She was being unfair, and she knew it. The sensitivity and irritation resulted from constant replays of the night that had followed Günther’s death. Shop windows, neon signs, car windshields, light signals, all would burst into cacophonous fragments of glass as she walked by, yet when she turned to face the damage, everything would be intact, the damage only in her ears. Her world, except in Frau Lowe’s sanctuary, was a discordant nightmare that really had nothing to do with Munich’s well-groomed presence.