by Jody Sheilds
But Erszébet says nothing. She simply moves her spoon in a slow circle inside her cup.
There is something I don’t understand, Wally says hesitantly, her mind still on her visit to the doctor. How do you get rid of a baby?
Erszébet gives Wally a sharp glance.
“There are ways. I know women who secretly consult Gypsies for an abortifacient. They prepare a bitter herbal brew from ground ginger, nutmeg, mint, cloves, sage, borrage, rue, wood aloes, and goosegrass. It is boiled for three hours while the Lord’s Prayer is recited. White wine is added, and then the liquid is strained for three days through an apron that the pregnant woman has worn.”
“How does it taste?”
“Like death.”
Erszébet tells her there is a place you can go if you are a man to see women’s bodies, then smiles at Wally’s expression. No, no, she says. Only men are allowed to visit the Josephinum. Wally isn’t familiar with the place. It’s a museum with wax figures of men and women, the anatomica plastica, Erszébet says. One thousand models were created in the eighteenth century by a Florentine, Paolo Mascagni, for the pleasure of Emperor Joseph II. Enough figures to make an army.
Without resolving their strategy for Dora’s photographs, they leave each other outside the café. Erszébet walks home, following a meandering route along the Hofgarten. It’s snowing steadily. The snowflakes’ determined acrobatics become visible as they spin into the gauzy aura of light around the street lamps.
A rabbit darts across the road in front of her, an unlucky sign. May the mar sara, the spirit of Tuesday evening, carry you off, Erszébet mutters. It is November thirtieth, the feast day of Saint Andrew, the patron saint of wolves. It is believed that on this day the just can see heaven and animals can speak. At this time of year, witches and the spirits of the dead reach the height of their powers.
Wally pulls Dora’s photographs from their hiding place behind the armoire. On each picture, the embossed name of the photographer’s studio has been scraped out with a sharp instrument. She tilts the photographs toward the lamp, hoping the letters will be legible, pulled from oblivion by the light. She wets a finger and rubs it over the cardboard. Nothing. All she can make out is Strasse, or perhaps her eyes have just read what she expected to see.
The Inspector is sidetracked by an unhappy development. If it weren’t such a pointless and unpleasant exercise, he’d almost welcome the distraction from his other investigations. It had been weeks since he’d sent the medical examiner the unidentified black hairs found on the servant girl accused of an illicit sexual act with a dog. He never recontacted the office for the results of the tests on the hairs. When the report finally arrived, it sat untouched on his desk. He caught Franz staring at it several times, wondering why he hadn’t read it immediately. It wasn’t like him.
One afternoon, he reluctantly reads the report. The black hairs discovered on her genitals had been boiled in a 5 percent solution of sodium hydroxide. After ten minutes, the hairs dissolved, which proved they were from an animal — a black dog — not from her skirt, as the girl had claimed.
It is his unfortunate job to show the girl the vial, which contains only a clear liquid, and explain the terrible consequences of her unnatural act. Protesting her innocence, she bursts into tears and throws herself on the floor. Franz and Móricz gently pick her up and carry her out of the room.
The Inspector realizes he delayed the examiner’s report because he hoped the girl would leave Vienna. Now he wishes he’d made that suggestion more strongly to her.
The Josephinum is an immense dark stone building on Währingerstrasse, modeled after the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris. It houses the Anatomical and Pathological Museum, and only men are admitted. Soldiers from the nearby barracks and the Military Infirmary at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus occasionally visit, the slam of their polished boots echoing in the hallways.
The uniformed Herrenportier at the door of the Josephinum is dwarfed by the carved stone gateposts that stand twenty feet high, each topped with an urn.
Wally passes the guard’s scrutiny and proceeds through the gates, feeling safe in her men’s clothing. She tries to widen her steps — to walk like a man — since her narrow skirts have given her the habit of a short stride. Inside the building, she gives a few bronze coins to the ticket taker, but doesn’t ask for directions since her voice will give her away. Upstairs, a sign indicates the anatomica plastica are available for viewing from eleven A.M. to one P.M.
When she wanders into the room, the first thing she notices is the strange effect of the light on the figures, life-size models of nude men and women upright on stands. Although muted by its passage through the tall curtained windows, the sun warms the figures’ wax limbs, turning the thinnest parts of their bodies translucent, as if they burned from inside. Wally cautiously approaches a female figure, half expecting the woman to break her enchantment and suddenly yawn and blink. She touches her finger to the wax fingertips; the color and texture are identical. Only the temperature of the spellbound hand is inaccurate.
She peers into a cabinet against the wall. Inside, mounted on elaborate gold stands, is a wax ear, half a face with grimacing lips, a single glazed eye wide open in astonishment. The surrounding skin is gracefully peeled back, curled like paper. Larger cabinets hold legs, arms, heads, and torsos.
The next room is filled with écorché figures standing in heroic poses or reclining on yellowed cushions, their bodies stripped of skin as if they’d been flayed. Their exposed sinews are eerie orange and red, twined with darker tentacles of blood vessels. One skinless male lies on his back, his muscles bound with a tracery of blue veins so fine it seems that the surface of his body is cracked. His inner organs glow through his wax muscles like a cupped hand held to a candle.
A wax woman, a nude Venus, is ecstatically sprawled on a fringed cushion. Her head is tilted back, eyes half closed in permanent rapture, as withdrawn as Saint Theresa. Wally touches the cushion. It’s silk. The Venus has a string of pearls around her neck, and her long pale hair is arranged over her shoulders. A deep line is cut around the top of her body, circling from the base of her throat down to her pubes. Wally suddenly realizes the figure’s breasts, stomach, and abdomen can be lifted up in one piece. The body of this Venus is a casket.
In the glass cases behind the Venus there are partial sections of pregnant women’s bodies. Their wax legs are spread apart and cut off at midthigh so neat circles of bone are visible in the center of the red muscles, like a beautiful ham. Single hairs, short and curly, are punched into the pubic areas. Cloth is draped over the women’s huge stomachs, a peculiar modesty since their genitals are completely exposed. The creases and folds of flesh in the slit between their legs are unfamiliar. She recognizes the texture and the color, a wrinkled brown violet, like a fig. There’s a secret knowledge here, some skin memory she turns away from.
If Wally had Erszébet’s skill, she’d sit in front of the wax bodies and copy them with paints in order to possess their images. Her father once explained that after you trace a pencil through the map of a maze, you can never become lost walking through it again.
She isn’t conscious of anyone else in the room until she hears a man laugh. He’s near the door, a soldier in a green jacket and tight white breeches looking up at a male nude on a pedestal. He stares at the thighs wrapped with veins, the yellow orange genitals with the weight and tenderness of an egg yolk. The soldier laughs again. He’s uneasy; she recognizes the sound.
She blushes and moves away from the glass case, swept by a feeling of shame.
The soldier sees a tall young man in a suit and cap turn and walk out of the room.
Snow continues to descend on Vienna, a white shadow spread over the streets and roofs, remaining a presence even through the warm afternoon.
Erszébet stands inside the four glass walls of the Palmenhaus watching as the topiaries — elements of the Hofgarten’s formal design — are slowly changed into softer white shapes, equally artificia
l. A few men, and women accompanied by men, carefully move between the topiaries, dark umbrellas open over their heads.
Inside the Palmenhaus, the air is swollen with the scent of lilies of the valley. In a few weeks, the greenhouse will be completely stripped of flowers, which will reappear the same evening as bouquets on five hundred tables at the elegant Hof Ball.
On the way back through the city streets, Erszébet’s fiaker passes laughing Schusterbuben, cobbler’s apprentices, tossing snowballs at each other, still wearing their work aprons.
The driver waits on Rotgasse near the synagogue while she shops in the Hoher Markt. The square is almost empty of customers because of the poor weather. Canvas has been secured over the makeshift wooden stalls, and snow has resurfaced the rough, uncovered pyramids of root vegetables and firewood.
Erszébet decides to prepare felvidéki finom nyárileves for dinner, and hurries to a table heaped with dead game. An immense woman, a kerchief over her head, fans the display with a whisk as if brushing off flies, not snowflakes. Can you show me a nice hare? Erszébet asks. The woman seizes a skinned hare by its ears, the fur still attached to its hind legs, and proudly revolves the red thing before Erszébet’s critical eyes. Although the snow is coming down fiercely, Erszébet doesn’t have the heart to bargain down the price. She turns to search in her satchel for coins, and the woman, misunderstanding her gesture, tosses the hare down and begins to praise it. Killed this morning, she says. Fresh as fresh. The dog will eat it if you don’t. See him? She jerks her head over one shoulder, where a large muzzled dog is tied to a cart.
Erszébet catches something in the woman’s voice. She smiles in recognition and shifts into the same dialect, a crosshatch of words emphasized on the first syllable. The game seller chatters back, energetically offering her half a dozen hares, partridge, even tiny császármadár, grouse. She purses her lips when Erszébet presses money into her hand.
“Kérem. I beg you.”
The woman reluctantly drops the coins in her apron pocket, then produces a small heavy sack.
“The finest Hungarian flour. The famous double zero. Made for the monarchy. Here, it is yours.”
She scoops some fine white powder out of the sack, holds it out in her cupped hand.
Erszébet is startled when the woman’s hand — disembodied by the thickly falling snow — comes toward her. Time falls away, and she again witnesses the mummified hand of Saint Stephen, glimpsed years ago in a ceremony in Buda Pest. Her vision is obscured with tears.
Wally makes her way along the Tiefer Graben to stand on the Hoher Brücke, a metal bridge built over the street. Darkness falls at such an early hour now that street lamps are lit just after midday.
She leans over to watch a pair of Hussars strut past, identically uniformed in pale blue jackets and pink trousers. The limp black lines leading from their eyes to their jacket pockets are the only visible evidence of their monocles. Behind them, a woman in a thick fur coat and felt boots drags a struggling child by one hand.
Wally has decided not to tell Erszébet what she saw at the Josephinum. She hides her information like a coin. The dark slit of flesh between the wax women’s legs is her secret, concealed like Dora’s blacked-out face in the photographs. She remembers the dim room in the museum as if it were a dream and she’d walked among standing figures of the dead, waiting for resurrection to reclothe them with flesh.
Erszébet told her about the lidérc, an unclean spirit, the devil’s familiar, which can assume human shape and pass among men. The lidérc is simultaneously man, animal, and light. Erszébet heard of a woman whose husband left town, and she allowed herself to be comforted by this spirit, disguised as a handsome soldier. The neighbors became suspicious and convinced the woman to set a trap for her lover. She spread ashes on the floor, and the next morning, in the powdery grayness, she saw the lidérc’s misshapen footprint. He had a single webbed foot that he’d kept hidden from her.
Wally wondered what unimaginable pleasures the lidérc had given this woman. A demon lover. Was she reluctant to uncover his true identity and give him up? Was she afraid, even while she embraced him? Had she been suspicious? How is this possible?
She is unable to ask Erszébet these questions. And Erszébet would have been unable to explain it in a way Wally would understand. She is too young to imagine how it is possible to live with duplicity. How it might also have pleasure attached to it.
Erszébet waves from the other end of the Hoher Brücke. Wally carelessly stubs out her cigarette and drops it to the street below. She picks up the portfolio leaning against the wall.
“My husband said Dora’s mother has left the sanatorium. She’s returned to Vienna. You should go and see her.”
What was a familiar landscape has suddenly changed.
They continue talking over cups of Türkischer and rich Powidltascherin in the Central Café. Wally feels secure here; the ceiling of the Kaffeehaus is arched into accommodating parabolas above their heads. She’s glad of the crowd, the thick, soothing pattern of voices.
Erszébet encourages Wally to give Dora’s mother the Krankengeschichte pictures. “Perhaps she can identify the photographer. And explain Dora’s accident.”
Her face anxious, Wally leans toward Erszébet. “I’m not certain she should see them. She’s in frail health. It might affect her badly.”
“If showing her the photographs might reveal who killed Dora, why spare her feelings? You don’t make sense. Don’t you want to find out what happened?”
“Why is everything done according to your plans? I went into the garden. I had to see the doctor.” Wally begins to cry.
Erszébet decides the Krankengeschichte pictures must be having a malign influence on the girl. It would be better if they were stored in a neutral place. When there’s time, she’ll consult someone about Wally’s distress. She grew up with wise women who placed peas, stones, and nose dirt on the road to cast a spell.
Erszébet gently touches Wally’s shoulder.
The girl won’t look at her. “I haven’t seen you in a week. Why are you avoiding me?”
Erszébet is shocked to realize she is the source of Wally’s unhappiness. As if she owed the girl something. Now her head is clear. She takes off her coral necklace and loops it around Wally’s wrist. This will keep you safe, she says. But not from me or what I bring, is her silent thought.
Wally hopes Erszébet will be distracted and forget her angry outburst. She is ashamed of her tears, but her behavior won an acknowledgment. Erszébet was forced to give way. She gave Wally a charm.
Suddenly Egon appears next to their table, and she’s jealous, wondering if Erszébet told him to meet her here. Why would she need to talk to him? Wally tries to catch her eye, but Erszébet is rummaging in her satchel. Without glancing up, she asks Egon to join them in a game of tarok.
Erszébet deals, sending cards around the table with deft movements. Wally imagines her in a kitchen, preparing food with the same motions. They each have sixteen cards; six cards go to the chien.
“The Magyar have a variation of this game called paskiewitsch. In Vienna, it is königsrufen, ‘call the king.’ A trick-taking game. Wally might recognize it as similar to the English game of whist.”
More coffee is brought to the table. Wally goes into the game, relieved they won’t be able to discuss the photographs with Egon present. He doesn’t seem to notice the tension between them and sets down his cards with confidence. He’s winning.
During a quiet period between hands, he points at the package on the empty chair. “A portfolio of your work? May I see it?”
Distracted by the sight of his hands—–she had forgotten his mutilated fingers — Wally quickly looks back at her cards. “No. There’s nothing I want you to see. Just some photographs that have been ruined by water.”
“Perhaps I could help repair them. I sometimes retouch photographs. My clients tell me I have some skill.”
“I’m afraid Wally’s pictures are beyond h
elp.”
Though she smiles at him, Erszébet spoke very sharply. Wally doesn’t say anything, not wanting to embarrass him. However, when she checks his face, he is studying his cards as if nothing has happened. She notices he’s holding them at a slant, so his missing fingers are less visible. A courtesy, she supposes.
Erszébet wins the game. Wally says she’s going to leave instead of staying for another round. When Erszébet doesn’t protest, Wally gives her a cursory farewell. As she hurries across the Kaffeehaus, she has a pang of pleasure, a transcript of the hurt that she’s certain her rudeness has caused Erszébet.
The café is crowded, and she edges past a newspaper seller with damp, freshly printed sheets folded over his arm. Behind her, a man takes an envelope over to Erszébet and Egon. He asks if they’re interested in photographs, and before they can answer, he quickly produces pictures of actresses.
One slow morning the Inspector leaves the office alone and finds his way to the Zellenkas’ house. Without disturbing the occupants, he slips around to the back. Everything is quiet. He’s prepared for this furtive excursion by wearing a fur coat and his warmest boots. They’re thick and embroidered, fashioned from several layers of pressed-fur felt.
He’s returned to the stable on a hunch, remembering there was snow outside when Jószef’s room had originally been searched. There have been a few sunny days since then. The grounds should be thoroughly checked again. Something might have been overlooked. An error in the landscape.
Thus the zealous Inspecting Officer will note on his walks the footprints found on the dust of the highway; he will observe the tracks of animals, of the wheels of carriages, the marks of pressure on the grass where someone has sat or lain down, or perhaps deposited a burden. He will examine little pieces of paper that have been thrown away, marks or injuries on trees, displaced stones, broken glass or pottery, doors and windows open or shut in an unusual manner. Everything will afford an opportunity for drawing conclusions and explaining what must have previously taken place.