by Kathe Koja
And then I did what I know how to do, what Dusan knows, from the mud and the shit and the farm: to make a he-goat a wether, a neuter, all you need is a knife. A sharp knife, and some wine mixed with belladonna, and the job is done. If you do it swiftly and well, there is not even very much blood . . . I know you say you took his boots from him, and that his feet were not hooves, his head had no horns, but I swear to you, senhor, and to the Lieutenant, too, I saw what I saw and I did what was right. And civilized, too, senhor, I was civilized. I buried what I took from him, and I made sure to place his flute inside his coat.
THE MARBLE LILY
Honored gentlemen and judges, judge for yourselves, consider for yourselves: all the wrong I did was clasp her hand. And for this I am separated from my useful work, and my dear family, and subject to a confinement more solitary and cold than that which this poor girl, this so-called “Désirée,” or “Marble Lily of the Seine,” lay for so long unnamed and unmourned.
Nor am I mourned. My wife steadfastly refuses to admit to the merits of my case; she has gone into seclusion in Cluny, at the home of her sister, Beatrice. Beatrice has never cared for me; from the very start she opposed our marriage because, she said, I had dreams above my station, I was irreligious, with “scientific ideas.” Of course I am a student of science! It is what brought me here to Paris and the Morgue, to learn more of the great and secret marvels of the body, while employed to provide much humbler sanitary aid. My wife, were she able to listen with an open heart, would understand that what I have done was done in that hope of knowledge. All else—the hysteric crowds, the chants, the filthy accusations—oh! so filthy! The human mind, gentlemen and judges, is the greatest cesspool in the world—all of that denies the truth of what happened in this room.
Explain myself? Shall I not begin where the story itself begins, with water? The effects of water on the human body are quite wonderful and well-documented, from the wrinkling and swelling that is called “washerwoman’s skin,” to the gooseflesh we all experience from a dash of cold liquid—even the living feel so, the living are not so very different from the dead—to other, more grievous changes produced when a body floats for days, such as this girl’s had.
I have seen many such cases, gentlemen and judges; though I am but a servant, I have—I had—the confidence and approbation of my superiors, who marveled at my facility with the bodies, and how I keep the viewing glass so clean. The greasy hands and fingers of the public—! They are ravenous, those crowds who come to view the mystery of death, it is well-known that hundreds of them pass through our doors in a single day, during the sensation of the “fillettes de Suresnes” there were ten thousand here in less than one week! I had situated those bodies on draped chairs, not the slabs, so that the viewers might be able to offer better aid in the sad case of the little drowned girls. I myself affixed the identity numbers to their tunics, and as I did so I said a prayer to the Virgin, whose tender heart is surely touched by the lost children, now gone home to Paradise . . . And Beatrice calls me irreligious!
Though I admit that prayer was not my first response when I saw this girl. Still garbed in her servant’s apron, pulled from the river by a pair of fishermen and carried by them to the Morgue: a female, aged perhaps sixteen, with fair hair that, when loosed and dried from its sodden plaits, hung nearly to her hips, and the still, calm face of a marble Venus—it is what the crude fishermen called her, that and much more, and swore that they had done their utmost to revive her, though “revive” was not the word they used, those rogues!—who were bought cups of wine for their so-called heroics, their names were even printed in the newspapers . . . Her name, let it be noted in the records, is not “Désirée,” any more than it is “the Water Lily of the Seine” or “The Marble Lily,” as she came to be called once she was arrayed upon the slab; it is likely that her true name will never be discovered. So many people have passed before her, avid to gaze and remark, yet none of them could say with certainty who she was.
Yet the moment I laid eyes on her, I knew her.
I see by your expressions that this admission suggests to you something untoward, unwholesome as those fishermen were unwholesome, but may I remind you, with all deference, that my own superiors at the Morgue were always more than willing to rely upon my vision: Ask François, they all said. François has an eye for the dead! Is that not why they allowed me, a mere janitor, so often into their forensic examinations, why they allowed me to take notes—you have my notes, my copybook there on the table before you; may I read to you, read that “the case of Female Subject so-called Marble Lily was”—Yes. Yes of course. Only to demonstrate that it was science that drove me, to learn further the mechanism of death: Was she lost before or after she entered the water? Was the cause truly drowning, or was she the victim of an assailant, and her body thus introduced into the river to cover the foul crime? And how long had she been in its currents and deeps, for the normal rhythms of decomposition are disrupted when— My apologies, gentlemen and judges, I only seek to demonstrate that my interest in this young woman was entirely scientific, to begin.
But the more I looked upon that lovely, lifeless face, alone in the dawn peace before the crowds—for I am the first to enter in the mornings, I am here before the orange sellers on the avenue—the more I considered her, the more the spiritual dimension of her situation began to press upon me. One hears tales of the saints taken from their tombs still incorrupt; and to find a young woman who had been so sunk—her clothing bore the marks of it—yet remained untouched by the grosser mechanisms that must attend a death in the water . . . Even my wife was moved to remark, at first, that the girl might be “a sort of miracle.”
Do you know what a miracle is, gentlemen and judges? It is a gift from God to the brain.
And it was my brain that I put to work; it was that silent, unravaged face, that furled bud of a girl arrested forever in her blossoming, that I circled, with my thoughts and my vision, though busy always about my daily tasks. Thus it was that in those earliest mornings, I sat beside her—on the workers’ side of the glass, not the viewers’, why should I not avail myself of this proximity, as I sought the proximate cause—not of her death; of her, the girl herself, this nameless slip of flesh and pale hair, alive in the fact of the question she posed: What is Life? when death takes the animation from a body, but leaves it still so beautiful, and, when closely inspected, seemingly ready to live again? Why did we not, with her, need employ any means of preservation? for she did not decay, she lay there day after day with her eyes closed and her lips parted, as if, watching closely, one might almost see her soft breast rise and fall once more with respiration; as if she only dreamed of death, in a sleep so complete as to mimic its depths.
And yet in another sense it was as if she had never been alive at all, for though her photographic likeness was in all the newspapers, from the penny broadsheets to the Herald and The Metropolitan, and bruited from the salons to the streets—they even heard the tale in Cluny; Beatrice saved all the sheets—even thus so known, she remained unknown: without name, family, employer willing to come forward and claim her, nor even themselves to be found. A reward, yes, was offered, and what a sad farce that spawned: the woman who claimed to be her twin, and the oldster from Lyon, that antique fraud—! It began to seem as if she had drifted down the river from someplace farther than the countryside, farther even than France, from a place one can visit only in faith or desire. As the fourth week passed into the fifth, some of those who came began to leave offerings in her honor—heaps of lilies, picture postcards of the Virgin, notes, packets of sweets—those brought the rats—praying aloud, imploring her succor and aid.
Meanwhile I continued to watch, though importuned with increasing agitation by my wife, who demanded to know why I stayed, each night it seemed later, there beside her slab with my notebook, watching—for what? I cannot say. Is a mystery named before it is deciphered? I only knew that a process was at work, and that
my own diligence was essential; perhaps some witness was required to bring forth what was to come, humble and obscure though he may be? Were there not angels present at the tomb of the Resurrection, stationed there by Christ Himself? For perhaps kind hands were needed, to help Him pass back between this world and the next.
So I watched; I made my observations and my notes, I drew diagrams. And as for those curbside chants, and filthy accusations—that alone in the morgue I touched this girl improperly, impurely, made sport with her poor slim body, that they found me in positions that—oh, it is painful even to recount the slanders, one can understand my poor wife’s anguish if not her flight! But me! Whose interest was so pure— When first Monsieur le Directeur questioned me, I laughed!
No, M le Directeur did not laugh.
No. When M le Directeur heard the rumors, heard the orange sellers making sport of me outside our very doors, he summoned me into his office, and François, he said, you have been at the Morgue for nearly six years now, is that so?
It is so, sir, I said.
And your superiors say your eye is a keen one, that you notice details that others miss. Is that not so?
It is so, sir.
What do you make, then, of this “Marble Lily”? So I showed my copybook, that very copybook upon the table, and told all that I had seen in the watches of the night, I even shared my speculations that something miraculous was at work. I withheld nothing from M le Directeur! He is himself a man of science, I felt sure that he would believe and understand.
But it was he who instructed me that, for the good of the institution, for the reputation of the institution, I must no longer stare and hover about this girl, what more can be gained by that? You see it is becoming a scandal. Do you wish the Morgue to be tainted by scandal?
Of course I did not. Of course I do not! But—Yes, I disobeyed him. That is true, and I accept all blame and punishment. But when M le Directeur told me, then, that there would be no more public viewing, nor any viewing at all; that there was to be an autopsy, that that butcher Dr Grenouille was to take the girl apart, piece by piece, as a clumsy child might break a watch, to learn its mechanism—in my heart I saw her secret processes soiled, I saw her holiness destroyed, I was in such a state that I confess I did not know what to do, gentlemen and judges! To disobey one’s superior is a very serious matter. But the girl and her mystery still unborn, what other friend had she in this place but me?
Before I did what I knew I must, I did the only wrong to which I may confess: I took her hand, that cold curl of palm and fingers, and clasped it as a brother might, or—as if we were both young together, in some strange Eden, light and fragrant as the Morgue is dim with odors—as a friend, I clasped her hand and promised her my aid. And despite what the penny papers may say, that is all that I touched, and all that I did.
The rest was easy.
I have—I had—access to the bundler and the dead carts, I know every hallway and corner of this great Morgue, and I know, gentlemen and judges, that now the girl, “the Marble Lily,” named at last by me as the true daughter of Death, will never be found. For that, gentlemen and judges, that is the fact that came to birth, that is the secret that flowered for me alone, a momentous and dreadful fact whose contemplation brought me—through my vision, yes, that misses nothing, François has an eye for the dead—to a place beyond all dread, a place where death is as plain and good and necessary as flowing water, nothing to be marveled at, nothing to be feared: and she herself its emblem and ambassador, this girl whose body lay, as if on an altar, on the borderland, always dead, yet somehow still alive. She will stay so thus, she will stay that way forever, she is of both worlds and neither, and we meant to be her keepers and friends, and venerate her as one of the great mysteries given to us by God until such time as we will, by science, understand her pale unmoving animation, and use what we learn to help all who must suffer and die; which means all of mankind. If a miracle is a gift from God to the brain, then let the brain use it! Let the brain and the eyes—
Forgive me, gentlemen and judges, but what you say is as unfair as it is unkind. And may I state that whether or not my “eloquence is equal to my madness,” I am not mad, the girl is Death’s daughter, and until such time as you find it good to release me from my own morgue of death-in-life, that jail cell so dire even the rats refuse to enter, she will remain in the hiding place I chose for her, inviolate and clean, until God Himself calls her forth as he will call us all, to answer the Last Call—a day at which you, gentlemen and judges, may quail as fully as the rest of us. My wife and Beatrice, too.
And beyond that statement, gentlemen and judges, all I may say is that I ask of your mercy, the mercy of my copybook returned to me, and a pencil with a point that I may sharpen, for the lead I have now is beyond all earthly use.
• • •
[End testimony of François Undine, former janitor and servant of the Paris Morgue, found lifeless in his cell on 8 Mai 189–. The copybook was empty. Undine had never learned to read or write.]
LA REINE D’ENFER
Once, I said to Davey, I saw the Devil plain.
Go on, Davey said. Save it for your fine gentleman.
I did. A raven landed in the chimney pots, and looked straight at me, eyes all bloody red, and big as a dog, on my honor.
Honor’s not in you, Pearlie.
Davey named me that, “Pearlie,” for my fair hair and pale skin; the muvver used to say I was from the white side of the blanket. Davey had his own way of talking, and he taught me to talk as well, that is, the kind of elocution that gets a fellow somewheres in this world. The way the gentlemen like for you to talk, to pretend that what you do with them is a lark for both of you, a jolly wolly roly-poly while they’re dosing you with the Remedy and sodding themselves off. Do you relish the scent of juniper? one of them asked me once, and I hadn’t no idea what to say. Later I asked Davey, and he laughed: Juniper is that gin smell, Pearlie. Allardyce’s Remedy is just gin, with a little wormwood and a pinch of mercury for the clap.
I loathe gin, I said, and Davey laughed again, for he was the one taught me what that meant: Not just hate it, he said, hate it with your belly and your teeth, that’s loathe.
I loathe the Remedy, too, it works half as well as using nothing at all. Half the boys round here stink of it noon and night, and the girls, too, and half of them are fat as tadpoles, all swagged up with the next round of baby boys and girls. I am so perishing glad that I am not a girl . . . Davey says the only thing the girls have that we haven’t is that a gentleman might grow so fishy-dotty that he will loop her to St. Paul’s, which means to get matrimonial, and take her off the streets for good. Blinkers, that we call so because he’s got a tic could blind you if you watch it too long, Blinkers says that where he used to Maryann it, up by Crispin’s and the arboretum, was a corner girl so pretty and so fine that the second gentleman who had her wed her: You should of seen her sausage curls, says Blinkers, all ribbons and such. And she could sing!
Sing what?
Anything! It’s how she met the gentleman. She was chirpin’ at the arbo, by the gates outside, and the gentleman said “Why it must be a pretty bird.” By this part in the story Blinkers would be blinking so quick-like it was hilarity to watch. Davey said that Blinkers must have been sweet on the little crimper himself, why he was so well versed in her whole story: And what was it that she sang for the gentleman, Blinkers? Can you sing it for us now?
Stop it, Paulo would say, Paulo the dark boy who sometimes plays that he is Italian or a Spaniard, even though his name’s not Paulo any more than mine is Pearlie, he comes from Crippleton. Stop it, it’s not his fault that he—
Saint Paulo, shut your hole. Go on, Blinkers, give us a song.
And then Blinkers would sing and we would laugh fit to split, always the same tune, “The Nightingale’s Nest,” tra-la-la, by the end he would be crying and Paulo would throw down his cap
and say See what you done? Why you got to be so bleeding dark-hearted?
Shut your hole, Paulo. I knew that crimp, she had a jaw like a slopjar from suckin’. Anyway Pearlie can sing, too, can’t you, Pearlie? which was not particular true but what I can do, and Davey taught me even better, is say verse. Just like one of them parrots the sailors bring home from India, say it to me once and I know it, and can give it back to you perfect anytime.
It was how Davey took me up, in the beginning, in the tavern where I was slinging pots, my muvver’s friend’s tavern though she was no friend to anyone and for certain not to me. Davey saw me, then heard me, then said me strings of nonsense, gammon and spinach, to test what I could do. Then he took me off and bought me a new pair of breeches and taught me the names of gentlemen, read them squinting off a paper he paid for from one of the hotel slaveys: Mister P. Atherton, Esquire. Doctor Arthur Wells. Oh here’s a one, here’s a lord, Lord Kilmarry! John Adderley Walsington, Earl of Kilmarry. Got that, Pearlie?
John Adderley Walsington, Earl of Kill Mary. Later I found out it was all the one word, but that’s the beauty of it, you don’t need to know what you’re saying for the thing to work. And then he would take me round to places where those gents were known, and have me declaim, he’d call it, drop a name or two like I knew the gentleman truly personal. And in that way we would get things, lagers and such, or Trinidad tobacco, Davey was a regular fiend for the weed. Once I got a pair of fancy braces, the nicest things I have, silver-blue with a gilty kind of sewing up the sides; they are flash, those braces, I won’t put them on against a soiled shirt. There was a hat went with them but Davey took it, which made me grim, since it was my declaiming that bought it and he has three hats already and I have naught but this old cap that I wouldn’t use for a piss cup, all it’s good for is keeping off the rain and not even that.