The Fig Eater

by Jody Sheilds

  He apologizes again for the necessity of his visit and begins the interview.

  No, she says in answer to his first question, she didn’t know Dora had left the house the last night of her life. Why would she have gone out? No, she didn’t know whom she would meet at that hour. Dora had never done it before, yes, she is certain of it.

  She is still angry at her daughter, as if she had run away. He knows her anger is a negotiation, a way of making their separation less bitter.

  “But this is unbelievable. You’re certain the body is . . . she is my daughter? There’s no mistake?”

  “Your husband positively identified her, yes.”

  “He told me it was Dora. He didn’t explain to me how she died. She didn’t suffer?” She clenches her handkerchief.

  The Inspector speaks very slowly, giving her time. “He didn’t tell you? Then I can reassure you, she died quickly. She looked peaceful when we found her.” He hands her the isinglass envelope containing Dora’s pearl earrings.

  When the woman cries, her anger leaks out. Her shoulders sag, and her black necklace slips farther down on her bodice. She presses a handkerchief over her closed eyes and holds it there with her fingertips. The peaceful death is his customary falsehood, and he is never comfortable using this lie in front of Franz or another officer. But it relieves her enough to continue. He gently asks her who else lives in the house.

  “My husband, Philipp. You met my boy, Otto. He’s thirteen.”

  “I’d like to speak with him later.”

  She frowns. “There’s nothing he can tell you. He’s only a child.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s police routine.”

  “You’ll have to return another day. He’s just gone to his tutor.”

  He strains at the impression her voice made on him, certain it had an edge of triumph. When he conducts an interview, he habitually strips down the person’s answers, their accounts of events, to reveal a structure. This woman is somehow pleased her son has eluded him.

  “I’ll speak with Otto another time. Please tell me who works here in the house.”

  “We have a cook, Mizzi. She’s been with us for years. She was visiting relatives in Bischofshofen that evening. We also have a maid, Nini Teleky, but she doesn’t live in. She leaves in the afternoon. I don’t understand why you would need to talk to them. They didn’t know Dora. My daughter had no secrets from me.”

  The Inspector writes down their names in a small notebook. “It’s not that Dora had secrets from you. They might have noticed something unusual. Or heard something.”

  “Dora was an obedient daughter. She did errands for me but she was always accompanied by her promeneuse, Rosza. She went out alone occasionally. She would attend lectures at the Akademische Gymnasium or the Museum of Art and Industry.”

  “Does the boy have a governess?”

  She hesitates. “Fräulein Rosza also took care of Otto, since Dora was getting older. But she left us suddenly in March or February. It was not the best of circumstances.”

  He’s careful not to show too much interest. He takes a slow breath, so his voice is easy when he asks about her disagreement with the governess.

  “There was no disagreement. Fräulein Rosza was a meddler. She didn’t know her place in this family.”

  “What did she do that made you so unhappy?”

  “I’d had enough of her, that’s all.” Anger burns through her grief. The expression on her face doesn’t change, but she gives herself away by picking at her handkerchief. “I’m not certain where you can find the woman.”

  He tries again, closing his book and leaning toward her. “Was Fräulein Rosza friendly with other governesses?”

  “I wouldn’t know about her friends.”

  “And do you know the names of Dora’s friends?”

  “Perhaps Dora had friends at the gymnasium, but I don’t know their names. No one came to the house. Dora stopped going to school.”

  “Are there any relatives Dora spent time with? Perhaps a cousin?”

  “Two cousins live in Merano, but we haven’t seen them in years.”

  Although the woman responds to his questions, her resistance is strong. Her words are flat. Her recollections are weighed down by anger and grief, which prevents any true memory picture from emerging. Still, this can change over time.

  “Any friends of the family?”

  “Dora was close to Herr Zellenka and his wife. She took care of their children from time to time.”

  “You can put me in touch with them?”

  She nods and looks down at her lap, reluctant to involve anyone outside of the family in the shame of her daughter’s death.

  “Dora had no admirers?”

  “No. I certainly would have met any beaux. I was a good mother to her. I don’t know anything else that could help you, Inspector.” She quietly starts to cry.

  This is the Inspector’s situation, the recognition of a paradox. How can this woman give him information she cannot bear to know? It is a familiar stopping point in an interview. He gazes down at his notebook, giving her time to calm herself, use her handkerchief, pretend he’s only a guest in her house.

  Her voice shaking, she begins to talk quickly, as if to move ahead of her own thoughts.

  “My husband was at home that night. I remember it very clearly. Dora did nothing unusual. She seemed happy. We had dinner together, as we always do.”

  “Did you notice if Dora ate her dinner that night?”

  “She never had much of an appetite. She was very thin.”

  He has a sudden memory of the girl’s naked body, her skin slack over the sharp bones of her shoulders as the muscles decomposed. He blinks the image away.

  “What did you serve for dinner?”

  “I don’t know. What does it matter?” She pinches her lips and frowns down at her handkerchief. “I believe we had Butternockerln and boiled beef with chive sauce.”

  He makes a careful note of her answer.

  “After dinner, did your husband or Otto notice Dora leave the house?”

  “No. I told you, she never went out alone at night. But as you see, this is a big house. She could have walked through this room to the side or the back doors.”

  He imagines Dora passing them, ghostly, silent, intent on her unknown rendezvous in the Volksgarten. He remembers her white canvas boots, discolored with dirt and grass stains when he found her.

  “Who wanted to harm your daughter?”

  She’s motionless for a moment, then her face twists when she understands his words. In a moment, her cheeks are polished with tears. She bends over her lap, hiding her eyes. Some stranger. A foreigner, she whispers. No one we know would hurt Dora. It isn’t possible. Without sitting up, she blindly grabs his hand.

  “Don’t tell anyone what Dora looked like when you found her. Please.”

  Ashamed, he nods. She didn’t believe his lie about her daughter’s peaceful death. After she’s composed herself, he asks if he may search Dora’s room. He makes the request as gently as he can.

  She stares at him, uncomprehending.

  “There might be something she kept in her room that can help us. I must look for it, don’t you see?”

  “But her room is untidy. It hasn’t been cleaned.”

  She’s closed off her daughter’s room, an intact but now unimaginable space.

  Reluctantly, she takes him upstairs. He enters the girl’s bedroom and firmly shuts the door behind him. He can hear her pacing in the hallway outside.

  He’ll return later with his assistant and his equipment; for now, he’ll just look around. Following his ritual method, he begins his search at the left side of the door and moves clockwise around the room. It’s a chaste bedroom, almost masculine in its simplicity, with none of the frills or colors he’d expected in a girl’s room. The bed is neat, the curtains closed. Nothing seems to have been touched. He wonders why she said it was untidy.

  One of the men he trained with, a Slav, confessed
he often thought of another woman when he made love to his wife. With practice, the Inspector found he could use the same transposition in his work. He tries it now.

  Conjuring up the image of the dead girl, animating her stiff limbs, is easy. He’s memorized her body, even though he’s never seen it in motion. His memory is as intent and focused as a lover’s as he imagines Dora here, standing before him, walking to the vanity, to the window.

  Most clearly, he sees her lying on the bed, in the same abandoned posture she had in the Volksgarten.

  Two policemen bring two Gypsies into the station for questioning. The men aren’t charged with any particular crime; they had simply been loitering on the Opernring near the Hofgarten at a late hour. Gypsies have been persecuted for lesser infractions.

  First they search the men. It is well known that Gypsies habitually conceal slips of paper inscribed with coded spells in their clothing. The hem of a sleeve or the heel of a boot may also conceal a crumb of sacramental bread, which protects the bearer from the police. Franz and Móricz, the youngest assistant, use scissors and tweezers to take apart their trousers and jackets, snipping open the seams, collars, waistbands, and pockets. Even the bands and the linings are carefully cut from their felt hats. Franz uses his scissors reluctantly, afraid of the clothing and its secrets. Móricz bends over the table, examining the fabric with a magnifying glass, looking for suspicious threads or hairs. He reminds Franz that the Gypsies steal children, especially Bolo hameshro, those with flame-colored hair, which they believe brings good luck. Dora had light-colored hair, blond almost red.

  Franz tosses the two men coarse new clothing, since their own garments were ruined when they were cut apart. The dilko, the small bright scarves the men customarily wear around their necks, aren’t replaced.

  The Inspector is secretly drawn to the Gypsies and he always watches for them on the street. They appear fantastical, mocking, improper. Once in broad daylight, he saw a Gypsy man wearing a ragged cloak over a jacket with silver buttons and a pair of scarlet embroidered breeches. His scarf was a scrap of lace. Even in Vienna, all the Gypsy children and some of the men are barefoot. They always walk together in a group, talking loudly, the color of their clothing and their dark skin intensified by the gray buildings. The proper Bürger nervously move out of their way, afraid of the evil eye.

  An outsider has no chance of deciphering their beliefs or customs. Even their language, Romany, is a mystery. Erszébet is slightly familiar with the Gypsies and she helps her husband read through an old Romany grammar book that was written in Hungarian — her first language — by the Archduke Josef. The Gypsies have a long and conflicted history with the Magyars, who at one time sold them as slaves. There is a proverb, Give a Magyar a glass of water and a Gypsy and you’ll see him drunk. Gypsies are called Cigány in Hungarian, or Fáraó népek, pharaoh’s people, as it was believed the Gypsies originally came from Egypt.

  The first time the Inspector interviewed Gypsies about some matter, he was astonished to discover that they were congenital liars. This confirmed tales he’d heard as a child. They lied constantly and flamboyantly. They lied even when it wasn’t necessary. None of their answers were ever direct. This was their manner of treating gaje, everyone outside their circle. It was reported that Gypsies would claim to be converted Catholics to please a Catholic, and Protestant to please Protestants. He was familiar with the old saying, The Gypsies’ church was built of bacon, and the dogs ate it.

  The Inspector interrogates the two Gypsy men in a bare room down the hall from his office. He moves behind Franz and asks the men to stand; perhaps he means to tire them. They shift their feet in their poor boots.

  He asks the older man for his name.

  He shrugs, “My true name is unknown.”

  “Your age?”

  “Only my mother knows the hour of my birth.”

  “Why were you in the Hofgarten?”

  “I’m a poor Gypsy, passing the time.”

  When the Inspector takes a step near him, or even takes his hand from his pocket, the man blinks and cringes. At other times, he looks at him with an exaggerated, imploring expression, almost pantomiming. The younger man glares at him without speaking or moving, his mouth a grim line in his brown face.

  The Inspector becomes hugely patient. Even his speech slows down.

  “Can you recollect where you spent Wednesday evening one week ago?”

  “How would a poor Gypsy know the day?”

  The interrogation is so long and tedious that Franz stops writing notes and rests his hand on the table. His expression is impatient and superior, until the Inspector catches his eye.

  After nearly two hours of questioning, neither of the men has told them anything of importance.

  In the morning, after the men were locked up overnight, Franz hands each of them a shallow enamel pan. Embarrassed, his face turning red, he haltingly answers the men’s bewildered looks, instructing them to defecate in the pans.

  Later, Franz covers the pans with a cloth and wheels them on a cart down to the laboratory. Slowly, so the soft piles don’t shift.

  He waits as Dr. Pollen compares the contents of the pans to the photographs of the excrement found next to Dora’s body. There is nothing similar about their color or shape. The pans are placed in the refrigerator cabinet so the evidence can be measured and photographed when it is frozen, stable and odorless.

  Egon photographs the Gypsies’ excrement in the morgue. He fits a narrow metric scale, Bertillon’s measuring device, inside the back of the camera. He explains to the officer assisting him that when the picture is printed, the scale across the bottom will show the exact size of the object. Otherwise, you can’t tell the dimensions. It would look as if I’d photographed a mountain without the land around it, he says. They both laugh, self-conscious about their peculiar task.

  Afterward, the Gypsies are released without an apology or a handshake.

  Foreigners entering Vienna are required to pay a fee of four kreuzers for the upkeep of the paving stones in the streets. It is a city of pedestrians. From ten o’clock in the morning until midday, and from six to eight in the evening, the Viennese promenade in front of the grand hotels by the Staatsoper, along the Ring, and under the double rows of horse chestnut trees in the Prater. The upper classes do not walk on Sunday, when the streets are filled with workers on their day off.

  In the heart of the city, the streets echo with the rattle of carriages and the shouts of their drivers, who pride themselves on the speed of their vehicles. Hearing the driver’s loud warning ho ho, pedestrians quickly move off the street to the narrow sidewalks. Thick stone posts capped with iron line the sidewalks on the busiest streets to protect the buildings from the wheels of the fiakers.

  It is the Inspector’s habit to dismiss his fiaker and then take a tortuous route home from different points in the city. Sometimes he ducks into a narrow Durchhaus beneath a building, as if he were being followed. His wife never knows at what hour to expect him. They’re accustomed to this rhythm, the uncertainty about his arrival, and neither of them wishes to change it. Although they have one of the few telephones in Vienna, it is rarely used. When it does ring, the noise is startling, an intruder in their home.

  One evening, Erszébet hears the front door close. Then there’s silence, and she knows her husband is setting his bowler hat and walking stick on the stand in the hallway.

  What he does is put down his hat and then swing a small vial up to the light on the wall, as if it were a conjuror’s prop, a glass wand. He shakes it, and the opaque, gray-brown material inside whirlwinds in the liquid. The vial contains a piece of one of the figs found in Dora’s stomach.

  Because of the undigested condition of the evidence, he calculated she probably ate the figs immediately before she died. Ate them ravenously, for large pieces of the fruit were intact in her guts. The remainder of her last meal was sludge, squeezed out of the slippery tube of her intestines into a white basin.

  He c
onsiders the fig an oddity. He keeps the vial on his desk and picks it up from time to time, as some men toy with a paperweight.

  When he hears Erszébet enter the hallway, he quickly slips the vial into his pocket before handing her his folded gloves.

  In the first few days the vial with the fig was in the house, Erszébet twice asked her husband if he was certain the fruit had been fresh when the girl ate it. Yes, he answered, that’s what the doctor’s report said, do you want to read it? It’s not very pleasant.

  “Was the fig the last thing she ate?”

  “It isn’t definite. But I don’t think the fig is significant. The girl wasn’t poisoned.” He shrugs. “Besides, Dora clearly had dinner at home.”

  Erszébet doesn’t pursue the subject with him. She faultlessly meets his eyes, already conscious she’s hidden her decision from him. She knows she can divine something from this evidence, this fruit he’s discarded. She believes that what was left in Dora’s body is a powerful talisman. If the fruit had just been picked, the tree is growing somewhere in the city. Who gave her the figs?

  Later, she learns that some scholars believe the fig — not the apple — was the original fruit of knowledge. Another gift.

  She doesn’t tell her husband how greedy she is. Erszébet follows him into his investigation of Dora’s murder as if it were a labyrinth. Her pursuit is shared only with Wally.

  Erszébet believes painting is similar to divination by cards. When the tarot is read, each newly drawn card alters the interpretation of the one before it. Just as her hand will choose a color guided by some mysterious precedent.