The Fig Eater

by Jody Sheilds

  Tell him to take contemplation over action, the tarot reader counsels.

  Wally has demanded that the nurse stay in the room with her. She grips the woman’s wrist. Erszébet is outside in the reception room, searching for the files a second time.

  As Wally lies uneasily on the examining table, she intercepts a silent exchange between the nurse and Dr. Last: Hysterical girl. The nurse frees herself from Wally’s hand. The doctor readies the equipment, untangling the limber silver coils. With the smallest movement of his finger against the machine, electricity suddenly becomes a presence, its aura blossoming into the room like the sharp smell of a flower. He picks up the small black device at the end of the coil. She remembers it from her first treatment. The nurse smoothes Wally’s hair back from her forehead. She closes her eyes, pretending the woman wishes her well.

  The doctor’s jacket brushes the side of the table, and then his damp hand, radiating pinpricks of electricity, hovers over her face. The warmth moves down her neck and past her shoulders. She frowns and puts her hands over her breasts. He mutters something to the nurse. She takes Wally’s arm and gently lays it alongside her body, palm side up. Suddenly, there’s intense pressure on the inside of her elbow; Wally opens her eyes as her arm magically jerks up, jackknifes, and falls down across her chest, as if it were no longer attached. For a moment she can’t move, shocked by her body’s betrayal.

  “Now I will use just my hand because I can control the current better. Don’t think of it as my hand. It’s simply a tool.”

  Something warm is laid on her bare stomach, and then electricity contracts her skin, her flesh suddenly light and flexible as cloth. Her intestines churn and gurgle in waves. There is no pain. When her breath comes back and her eyes open, she struggles to remember Erszébet. Her stomach is wobbly, as if she’s been sick.

  Towering over her in his white jacket, the doctor looks as solid as a pillar. He asks how she feels. As if from a distance, she hears his words, but to answer him the space is much greater. She feels her mouth open.

  A cloth is laid over Wally’s face, and there’s a bittersweet smell. After a moment, it is removed and she’s dimly aware of their faces above her, watching. The nurse leans over and holds Wally’s wrists down on the table.

  “I have one more contact point for the electricity. This will finish the treatment. It will be better if you close your eyes. Nurse?”

  Wally tries to twist away, but the odor has slowed her movement. Once when she fainted, it was preceded by burning white circles at the outer corner of each eye, which grew larger and larger until they passed out of her conscious observation. Now the red color of the room is fading to white as she watches the doctor lift her robe. Her abdomen jumps at the touch of his hand, and then she feels another slow movement she doesn’t recognize. Then her head jerks back, her mouth shapes itself into strange convulsions. She rides her body, then she’s strangely thrown free, lost.

  There’s moaning, and she dully realizes it is her own voice that she hears.

  CHAPTER 11

  The inspector has been overwhelmed by work. For days at a time, he’s only spoken to Franz in passing. A forgery remains stubbornly unprovable. Horse thieves have struck several stables, daringly even those of the Princess of Auersperg, famous for her four handsome horses and postilions. And Dora’s case lingers. He knows his wife attributes his ill luck to mana, an impersonal supernatural power.

  To clear his head, some afternoons he vanishes without leaving his itinerary with his assistant. He can be found walking purposefully along Wipplinger Strasse, through the Hoher Markt and into the Stephansdom, where he climbs the tower. He’s a familiar visitor, and the sacristan admits him without charging the forty-heller entrance fee. The Inspector incorrectly assumes that his clandestine practice is unknown to his office. However, Franz once tailed him to the Stephansdom door, his face a blushing red beacon.

  When he was courting Erszébet, she brought him here to see the remarkable pulpit of pale carved sandstone. The decoration is a display of the artist’s dreams, she told him, pointing out the salamanders and toads chasing each other along the handrail, symbolizing the pursuit of good and evil. Sharp stalactites, flames, and writhing foliage ornament the pulpit. He remarked that the artist had carved away almost everything that would physically support the pulpit. It looked like a filigree of bones.

  Because the church nave has no upper lights, it is a perpetual twilight inside. Even on the sunniest days, the fractured shapes of color cast by the stained-glass windows next to the high altar don’t dispel the somber dimness. Franz, he thinks, would be unnerved by the silence here.

  He walks into the sexton’s lodge and looks straight up into the immense height of the tower. The light through the narrow windows transforms the space into an illuminated column, so that the tower glows like a candle in a stone case. The staircase is widest here on the ground floor, spiraling upward to the left and growing steadily narrower for five hundred and thirty-three steps. As he climbs, he brushes his hand against the wall, a habit for luck.

  He’s breathing heavily and his coat is unbuttoned by the time he reaches a tiny balcony, level with the rooftops of the neighboring buildings. Below him, the irregular lines of the streets are laid out for his surveillance, square cobblestones imposed over ancient cart tracks.

  Here the steps end and a ladder leads to the next level. He climbs until his head rises out of the floor into the belfry, a small space made even smaller by the oppressive bronze bells hanging in bunches from the beams. They appear frozen, incapable of movement, their huge clappers thicker than his arm. The walls and ceilings are crisscrossed with massive beams, slabs so rough and rocklike they give the impression of having been thrust into place by some ancient geological shifting of the earth. The beams are bolted with ornamental serpents’ heads. He likes to imagine he is the only one to notice this strange, hidden detail.

  He clambers up the primitive ladder in the corner — going slowly, for the thing is shaky — counting fifty steps before emerging into a dazzling square room filled with light and air. Two uniformed men nod at him without interrupting their pacing in front of the windows. They’re fire-watchers, stationed in the spire, the highest point of the city.

  It’s his habit to check the view from the northeast windows first, where the plains of Hungary and Galicia are backed by the darker blur of the Carpathian Mountains. The next window shows the Danube, marked with a long white streak, the airy scar of a steamboat’s passage. When he looks straight down, his forehead against the window, the cathedral’s roof is visible, with its thousands of polychrome tiles, a dizzy geometric pattern. The frail, displaced noise of voices and carriages floats up from the street.

  He admires the huge telescope set up in the center of the space, a device invented by a professor of astronomy specifically for the fire-watchers. Once he was in the spire when a fire was spotted in the city below. Shouts and frantic activity filled the small room, and he retreated to a corner, fearful the spire would capsize, like a boat on stormy water. The fire-watchers focused the telescope on the building below the rising thread of smoke, which locked a dial on a number corresponding to a house and street registry of Vienna. The number was telegraphed to the Feuerwehrzentrale, the cavernous central fire station, and a procession of uniformed men raced to the fire.

  One of the fire-watchers told him that before the telescope was installed, they would shout the approximate location of the fire into a huge speaking trumpet, startling anyone standing below. Then a boy would run — or a fiaker gallop — to the Feuerwehrzentrale.

  He admires the telescope’s precision, the certainty of the city as a procession of numbers, the streets and buildings flattened into a graph, the location of a fire passing invisibly through the air.

  He asks permission to use the telescope. They’ve indulged him before when things were quiet, and now he fiddles with the elaborate mechanism, sharpening the focus. The glass eye flies across the city, swifter than a bird,
finding a toy-sized boy pulling a cart on a street, the head of Hercules on the Michaelertor, the flash of wheels — perhaps a motor cab — on the Seilerstätte.

  Doodling, dancing in the air, an acrobat, he idly trains the telescope on the area where Herr Zellenka’s house is located. He skims the lens to Dora’s rooftop, a route that might reveal a telltale clue, like smoke from a fire. Even here he brings his work with him.

  Since her last visit to the doctor, Wally has been uncomfortable under Erszébet’s eyes. She never told her exactly what happened, feeling strangely shamed by the experience. She’s unwilling to ask for comfort.

  Erszébet recognizes the girl’s retreat. She isn’t unsympathetic, but she knows Wally will speak to her when she’s ready. They have evidence now. Better to get on with their work. She senses there is little time left.

  A frazzled waiter brings their Kapuziner and plates of caramel-glazed Doboschnitten. As he sets a glass of water on the table, some of it spills. The women are silently patient while he dabs a cloth around their cups.

  Erszébet holds the thick file stolen from Dr. Last on her lap. She discovered it under Philipp’s name, and has waited to open it in front of Wally. She takes out a photograph of a young nude woman seated in a chair, her face obliterated with lines of black ink, as if it had been slashed. It’s a Krankengeschichte, a photograph taken as a record of medical treatment.

  She puts the photograph facedown on the table. Her eyes meet Wally’s.

  Dora.

  “Are you certain you want to continue?”

  Wally nods. The next photograph shows the woman’s buttocks. The photographer knew exactly where to place his light, because the sinister pattern of puckers and scars over her skin is perfectly visible. They study the pictures in silence.

  Erszébet slides another photograph from the file. It shows the tender area from the woman’s waist to the cleft between her legs; the skin is a hideous mass of dark patches and welts, like marks made by an angry animal. It takes them a moment to realize what’s missing. The woman has no pubic hair. Her face is blanked out in all the photographs.

  There are several other pictures of the same woman, taken from different angles. At the top of one photograph, several lines of handwriting have been blackened with the same heavy pen strokes that cover her face. Erszébet turns it over. Fräulein X is written on the back.

  After the pictures have been put away, Wally begins to cry.

  “Why would the doctor have those pictures of Dora? Did he do this to her?”

  For a moment, Erszébet stares at Wally’s flushed face without reacting. Her mind is filled with the photographs. She tries to expand what she sees, to visualize the entire room where the woman stood before a camera and a powerful explosion of light.

  “The pictures were filed under Philipp’s name,” she says slowly. “He must have had something to do with them.”

  “Did he kill Dora because of the pictures? So she wouldn’t tell anyone?”

  Erszébet puts her hand on the girl’s arm and closes her eyes. Why was Dora disfigured? How did it happen? She’s suddenly fatigued, wondering why she brought this girl with her. What is the periphery she inches toward?

  “What do we do now? Tell me. Who do we talk to?”

  Erszébet brings herself back into their conversation. Listen carefully, she says. “You may not understand everything I tell you. This story of Dora’s begins to remind me of something. There’s an apparition Gypsies call the mullo, the living dead who come back to haunt this world. The Magyar have another name for them. Sometimes a mullo will have intercourse with a woman, and she is the only one able to see him. If she talks about the mullo, or describes him to anyone, she and her family will die. No matter how repulsed or frightened the woman is, she can only scream during her intimate encounters with the mullo. That is the only time it is safe. The scream is the only thing that makes the mullo exist for her. Do you see?”

  Wally is conscious of some half-buried memory. She ignores it and stares at the cup in her hands while the older woman continues to talk.

  We must be careful. We are becoming like the woman who can only react in the presence of the enemy, the mullo.

  Erszébet passes into some knot within herself, hoping to bind her rage. She thinks of Dora, haunted by her constant illnesses, her craving for attention. Her suicide attempt. Her frequent attacks of laryngitis and the loss of her voice. A woman who can’t scream, can’t tell. The father as mullo.

  Erszébet has never discussed her deepest fear with Wally. What if you keep evil at arm’s length not because you’re afraid of being harmed, but from fear it may provoke recognition, some answering tug, a welcome?

  When she leaves the restaurant, Wally takes the photographs of Fräulein X with her. There’s no reason for Erszébet to paint copies of the stolen pictures because they won’t be returned.

  Wally hides the photographs in the back of her armoire. She doesn’t look at them again, but she is aware of their malefic presence, which works on her like an unpleasant memory.

  Erszébet tells the driver to stop the fiaker. He remains in the front of the carriage, lazily smoking a cigar, until she orders him to go and see if the snow on the walk in front of a certain house has been disturbed. It’s very early in the morning, a weekday.

  The driver clambers back into his seat. No, the snow is just as the clouds left it last night.

  Good. She doesn’t take her eyes away from the house, her fingers blindly busy with needlepoint.

  After a time, when the door opens and a man steps out, she’s disappointed. Bowler hat, walking stick, loose dark coat, the uniform of a successful Viennese, ein angesehener Mann. Dora’s father. Her needle is forgotten in her hand.

  She felt nothing. She’d hoped for a vision, a man with something alien in his appearance. A physical sign of his monstrous character. Like the csordásfarkas, a man changed into a beast. Like the French botanist pursued by the peasants, who were convinced he was a wolfman, a shape-shifter.

  Now she’s no longer convinced the botanist was as innocent as his terrified face made her believe when she was a child. Now she wouldn’t believe a face.

  Erszébet and her husband have dinner in the fine restaurant at the Sacher, in celebration of an intimate anniversary recognized only by themselves. She wears her mother’s diamond necklace and a new dress made at Drecoll for the occasion. Diamond earrings — her husband’s gift — glitter at her ears. She touches his leg under the table. Both of them are slightly drunk.

  When he looks across the room, who or what he sees there makes him slowly set down his glass. All the expression leaves his face.

  “What’s the matter?” she asks, nervously steadying his arm with her hand.

  He doesn’t answer, so she turns around, to see a tall man stand up behind a table. As Erszébet watches, he makes a barely perceptible gesture, just slightly inclines his head, his eyes never leaving her face. She reads a significance there she is unable to understand. The man quickly exits the room.

  “Who is he?”

  “Someone I worked with once on a case,” he says. His voice is thoughtful.

  She knows her husband well enough that his reply doesn’t ring true.

  “Did he help solve a crime? What did he do?”

  He comes back to himself and folds her hands in his. “He proved to be of very little use. It was a case of murder.”

  Guntramsdorfer is a coffee-and-milk room on Weihburggasse. Late every afternoon, the marble tables are crowded with children and their caretakers, impatiently waiting for their sweets, hot chocolate and Schlagobers.

  Wally and Erszébet sit in the back, away from the clamor.

  The photographs of Dora are still hidden behind Wally’s armoire. Erszébet is uneasy about the presence of these talismans and watches for signs the photographs might be working some misfortune on the girl.

  “I’m not certain you should keep the photographs in your room. It’s not safe.”

  Wally
shakes her head. Everything is fine, she says, crumbling a Kaiserschmarren on her plate.

  “Dora’s photographs have affected you, I’m sure of it. I have a sense of these things. You dream about the pictures.”

  Wally smiles. “If that’s my only misfortune, I can bear it.”

  “Wait and see what happens next.”

  “I’m English. I don’t really believe pictures can harm me.”

  Erszébet’s wisdom about these matters is instinctive. She’s glimpsed a veil of stubbornness in Wally and puts aside her questions. She proposes they confront Dora’s father with his daughter’s photographs.

  “Why, do you think he’ll blurt out the truth when he sees the pictures?”

  “It’s possible. Truth is spoken when the mind is occupied with something else.”

  Erzsébet believes words can break a disguise. Her grandmother told her how a váltott gyermek, a changeling child, was tricked into assuming his true shape. A woman carefully poured milk into an eggshell and put it to heat on the stove while the ugly váltott gyermek watched. The changeling was so astonished by his mother’s nonsense that he forgot himself and impetuous words flew from his mouth. He instantly reassumed his human body. Words transformed him.

  “Isn’t there someone else who can tell us about Dora’s photographs?”

  Erszébet suggests they find the photographer who took the Krankengeschichte pictures. “Perhaps there’s a way to ask Dr. Last who takes pictures of his patients without arousing his suspicion?”

  No. I won’t go there again. Wally feels stained by what happened in the doctor’s office, as if something had seeped into her body along with the electricity. She looks away, wanting to be disassociated from her refusal. She’s afraid of Erszébet’s reaction and waits for her to loose her temper, to spill the coffee.