The Sensualist Page 3
She finally managed to focus on the page of her book, only to be wrenched away from it by an unpleasant, very deep sniff. This sniff, snort rather, had substance and reached back into the throat. Helen glared, renouncing her attempt to read but still cradling her open book; the woman’s lips smacked, rolling the sniff about her mouth rapaciously. The ring-laden hands that had been smoothing her skirt over her knees suddenly leapt to her throat as she pulled her collar tight together. Helen, peeking at the dandy in the corner, wondered what his part in all of this was. He straightened himself and cleared his throat to speak.
“Could you please change seats with Frau Kehl?” he said in English. “She dislikes riding with her back to the front of the train. You do speak English, don’t you?”
“No, I’m afraid I couldn’t,” Helen replied. Surely Frau Kehl, if that was her name, was capable of speaking for herself. As a gesture of cooperation she pointed to the free seat by the corridor on the same side of the banquette, opposite the young man.
Frau Kehl responded with a soft cough that she prolonged by once again smacking her lips as if the cough were a spoonful of caviar.
“Frau Kehl must have a window seat. The air in the trains, you understand, is quite intolerable.”
“You’ll have to find another compartment then,” said Helen with discriminate maliciousness. “Perhaps if Frau Kehl were to travel first class she would find a better selection of seats.”
The old woman motioned sharply to the young man who pulled out a ticket from his breast pocket. He studied it for a moment before handing it over to Helen. She looked at it, turned it over, shrugged, and gave it back. So what? It was the same as hers: an ordinary second-class ticket with no seat numbers or compartment reserved.
The young man became visibly distressed, his cheeks flushed, his voice rose and cracked, “Don’t you see? You really ought to change seats with Frau Kehl. I don’t think I’m making myself clear enough.”
“No, you aren’t,” Helen agreed. “Perhaps you’d like to call the conductor and explain to him what your problem is.” Appalled at her own behavior, she urged herself to give in. Another look at the woman dissuaded her. Let the old witch fight her own wars.
He got up from his seat, shook his legs to unwrinkle the already crease-free cloth of his trousers, smoothed his lapels, and vanished soundlessly, not forgetting to shut the door behind him.
Helen and the old woman, for by now Helen had decided that the woman was much older than she first seemed, were stuck in the compartment alone together. Helen gave up any pretense at reading and looked directly at her. She asked in German, “May I ask where are you traveling to?” There. A conciliatory question.
“I’ve seen you before,” came the unexpected response.
“I don’t believe so; I’ve never been to Germany or Austria.”
“Nevertheless, your face is very familiar. It does not bring me happy memories.” The old woman wrung her hands. “You ask me where I am going. I’m going to Vienna.” Her voice was strained and strangled. “It is a 4 hour and 55 minute trip. We have 4 hours and 17 minutes left, and I refuse to spend the entire trip flying backwards. I am looking forward to revisiting Vienna and I must not arrive backside first.” She pulled her leather handbag towards her, released the clasp, dug about inside, and eventually extracted a pocket mirror. Holding the mirror up to block out Helen’s face, she made motions to straighten the rigid perfection of her hair and her features, shifting the mirror about this way and that in a bird-like darting fashion. Her voice continued from behind the glass. “You, on the other hand, can have no memory of Vienna, and it can have no memory of you. Whether you arrive there forwards or backwards is immaterial. Whether you arrive there or not is immaterial, for that matter.” She inspected her nostrils, glancing first into the left and then into the right, gave them both a vicious pinch with her thumb and forefinger, and then ran the long nail of her index finger down the lines bordering each side of her mouth, as if to deepen the already cavernous furrows etched into her skin. She ended by yanking down on her chin and tossing the mirror back into her bag which she closed with a firm snap.
“Well, perhaps your grandson will find another compartment more suitable for you,” said Helen consolingly.
“My grandson!” the woman howled in a burst of carmine lipstick and badly stained, chipped teeth. Her face fell back into place, letting her vulturish demeanor rule once again.
Helen twitched and fidgeted, restless now that she was unable to stretch her legs out and regretful that she could no longer give in to her illness. In doing so she knocked her bag over, causing the box to slip partway onto the upholstered seat of the banquette. Frau Kehl’s eyes immediately fixed upon it, and she grabbed it faster than Helen could react. “How lovely!” she exclaimed but was visibly taken aback by its weight. Her expression changed when she examined the artwork. With a cry of disgust she dropped the box onto the seat next to her and pushed it away. “Revolting. What would possess you to own such a repulsive object?” But she again picked it up, held it to her ear—just as Helen herself had done—and shook it vigorously, listening to its muffled contents. Then she shook herself almost as violently and threw it down again.
Helen stuffed it back into her bag just before the door opened. The young man and a conductor appeared at the threshold. Frau Kehl stood up and said, “I refuse to stay in this compartment.” She sneered disapprovingly in Helen’s direction and turned on her heels, knocking both men out of the way.
The conductor helped the young man with the luggage; the two of them disappeared down the corridor, leaving the door wide open.
She hoped that the silence following their departure signaled the end of the parade. That Rosa woman had been bad enough, but no one deserved an encounter with Frau Kehl. They all seemed like characters out of someone’s disorganized memory: oddly out of time, vaguely alarming, definitely disorienting. Suffused by the relief of her solitude and the absolute pleasure of the unaccompanied rhythm of the train, Helen sprawled on the seat and felt her forehead yet again. Then a glitter from the corner of the seat opposite caught her eye. It was a ring caught in the crease between the back and the seat. It had a gold band with a large, rather vulgar, diamond. Helen looked at the inside of the band and found it was engraved “To Helen.” She tried it on but it was so tiny that it wouldn’t fit past the first knuckle, even on her little fingers. “Not for this Helen, not for my fingers, obviously,” she sighed. With the bag on her lap and the ring cradled in her tightly closed fist, she stretched her leg out and shut the door with the flick of her toe, then curled up on the seat and, trying to resurrect her thoughts of Martin, fell asleep.
She woke with a start a short while later, still clutching the ring, suddenly frantic with the idea that she must return it. Without thinking she slid the door open and stood in the hallway, first turning left and then right. Which direction did they go? She scampered to the right, hoping to at least run into the conductor. She glanced into each compartment she passed, then went through into the next car. The train ended three cars down without a sign of Frau Kehl, her companion, or the conductor. Helen retraced her steps, passed her own compartment heading towards the front of the train, but she stopped in her tracks halfway through the next car. She didn’t want the slightest thing to do with the voracious Frau Kehl and her pretty boy. If she gave back the ring what else would she relinquish? Helen turned and went back to her compartment. She’d give the ring to the conductor next time she saw him.
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CHAPTER 3
ANNA
Helen sat back with legs stretched out onto the seat opposite, absently popping the ring onto the tip of this finger or that, then raising the back of her hand to feel her burning forehead. The heat of her skin provided a solace in its presence and consistency—it was real, it was understandable, and in a perverse way it helped to explain the bizarre tumult exploding around her. She was sick, sick an
d demented. These people weren’t unusual; it was her. Ever since she had woken up, she had been dreaming, hallucinating, staring wildly at each poor soul who tried to sit in her compartment. God knows what they thought of her. She pulled the box over to her and held it tightly to her chest, stroking the rippling surface of the frame, running her fingers along the smooth tops of the beads, then allowing her hands to wander through the space vacated by the breasts that had intruded so shockingly. Then, giddy from the lingering smell of the perfume, she shoved the box aside and stood up to let in a quick blast of cleansing air. Turning back to sit down, she could see that the lid had opened up. The plaque on the top panel had pivoted on a pin inset at one end and had inadvertently slid to one side when she had set the box down. When the pin rotated with the movement of the plaque, it released a catch inside opening the top.
The box contained, of all things, a book. Facing the book, lining the inside of the box’s lid, was a flap of paper printed with a diagram of a human skeleton. She folded it back and revealed an engraving of the bones of the hand, labeled with italicized letters. On the back of the first flap was a document entitled “The Fabric,” showing a diagram of skin tissue and with a legend for the engraving opposite. She lifted up the second flap: below it was another flap upon which someone had drawn a crude, almost medieval, diagram of six tiny bottles surrounded by plants. The back of the flap was text presumably pertaining to the engraving.
She turned her attention to the book itself; a thick, bound stack of paper, musty and decaying, the edges deckled and fragile. The first page was a title page, remarkable not so much for what it said but for the quantity of handwriting on it, running not only over the blank, unprinted stretches of the page but over the words as well, and in turn, over itself. The title—Anatomica—clearly indicated a treatise on anatomy. She turned the pages one by one—it was all in Latin—until she came to about the 6th page and a small magnifying glass, the metal frame of which was inscribed with medical words, set into a hole carved into the pages. Looking back at the inside of the lid she could see that its placement matched that of the diagram on the flap. She tried to remove it, but finding it tightly wedged into the hole, instead estimated its depth and turned over a thick clump of pages, careful not to dislodge it. She came to a group of labeled bottles, similar to those also recorded on the flaps. They looked like medicine bottles, vials rather, but their contents were desiccated and blackened, appearing to be anything but efficacious. They were inset into what appeared to be an engraving of hearts.
Again she cautiously turned back another batch of pages to a page with a large hole carved into it. The shape suggested a hand. There was room for all the bones: carpals, metacarpals, phalanges, but it contained only a single finger bone, firmly lodged into its appropriate place. She painstakingly extracted the bone. It was thin, about two inches long, and deep brown as if it had been resting in a rich loam for eons and had taken on the color of the surrounding earth. It had been placed in the box very much like an anatomical specimen, or no, more like a religious relic. Helen, who had kept Frau Kehl’s ring stored on the tip of her left hand baby finger, slipped it onto the bone. It went on easily but was difficult to remove. Helen was pleased with the effect and left it there. She dropped the bone onto the seat beside her.
Further exploration of the book revealed two pieces of paper stuck between two of the pages. One was a sheet torn from an appointment book and the other, more immediately interesting, was an old woodcut folded in two. Carefully removing the pliant but discolored paper, she was amazed to find it was of a sturdy, well-proportioned man, stripped of his skin, exhibiting his muscles against the backdrop of a peaceful Italian countryside. She immediately recognized it as the work of the sixteenth-century anatomist Andreas Vesalius. Running the tips of her fingers along the surface of the supple, lightly foxed paper, she could feel the impression made by the pressure of the woodblock. And judging by the evidence of stitching on its left hand side and the wear and discoloration on the other edges, she suspected that it had been removed from a book, but definitely not this one; it was too large.
She’d seen an original once but at that time hadn’t had any reason to examine it closely. Specializing in later works of French and English anatomists, she had let her knowledge of Vesalius slip too far to the back of her brain. Born in Belgium, became a doctor at some incredibly young age, published a monumental work called the Fabrica in the mid 1500s, nearly displaced Galen as the father of anatomy, largely unknown outside the medical world.
She held the paper up to the light to see if a watermark was evident, but the cloudy skies and dim incandescent bulb were insufficient illumination. She flipped the box’s pages back to where the magnifying glass lay, and with great difficulty pried it out. Peering at the woodcut through the glass, first focusing on the inked surfaces, then on the laid texture of the paper, and then moving along to the woodgrain of the box and then to the hairy surface of the upholstery—no matter where she looked, the word Sohle appeared. Curious, she held the glass up to the light and examined its surface, discovering that the word had been etched right into the glass itself. Sohle means “soul,” she guessed, promising to look it up. What was even more interesting than the woodcut itself was, why was she even given it? Helen set it and the magnifying glass next to the finger.
The last item in the box was the single page neatly torn from a small date book. It was ruled with light blue ink and one side of the page was densely covered with the same style handwriting found on the note. The ink from the pen had smeared here and there but everything was legible nonetheless. The date printed at the top of the page, in German, was for Thursday the 24th—two days away. Ten o’clock had been circled and the name Dr L. von Ehrlach of Türkenstrasse in Vienna was written down.
She turned again to the vials and one by one tried prying them out. All of them were wedged in tightly and would barely move. The last one shifted promisingly, but gave in to the pressure and shattered between her thumb and finger, piercing her skin. Blood dripped from the cut, barely missing landing onto the page.
Swearing softly, she wrapped her finger with a cloth handkerchief and gingerly lifted the broken pieces out of the box. The blackened contents of the smashed vial—fortunately dried into flakes—fell onto her lap and into the book. Holding the broken pieces of glass in her hand, at a loss for what to do with them, she gave up and put them into a little pile beside her.
Helen pulled a pen and a pad of paper out of her bag and sat back with her feet balanced on the edge of the seat and her knees up like an artist’s easel. She turned back the stiff cover and read through a halffinished letter to Martin she had started the day before. Then, resting the pad on her legs, she started to describe the contents of the box and her encounters with Rosa and Frau Kehl. She wrote steadily and carefully, pausing every once in a while to pick up this object or that, or to think about the best way to describe the two strange women, taking care to phrase the characterizations as phenomena related to her state of illness. She knew that Martin would ignore the lengthy preamble about her fever and her concern for his well-being, and would delight in her descriptions of the singular appearances and behaviors of the people she’d met. She knew what Martin liked to read; his respect for the human race would barely register on any scale. Too bad her letters didn’t contain more of this sort of stuff.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Martin. Who knows how long she would have ignored his absence if it hadn’t been for a phone call from the editor of one of the New York papers he regularly contributed to. Helen had never met this editor, although she had spoken to him from time to time. She had a good idea of what he was like, mostly because Martin had enumerated his various quirks, telling her of the high pitch of his voice, the nervous disintegration of sentences before they reached their endings, and the audible clicks and shudders, almost like the language of the Kung Bushmen. She could place him as being a cautious man, not prone to speaking his mind in one emphatic sweep, but acc
ustomed to breaking and pausing, allowing other thoughts to detour the original subject. Martin said he was very slight, quite underweight, a real feather, in fact—Helen was positive that was because he would be unsure of what to eat. He was in his late forties, apparently, and was never seen without a vest no matter how hot the summers got.
“Helen! I’ve been trying to figure out if I should call you or,” the sentence had trailed.
“What can I do for you, Mr Singleton?” Everyone called him Jimmy but never to his face. She herself couldn’t call a man who always wore a vest by his first name.
“Have you heard from Martin lately?”
“No, not since his parents got a telephone message around mid-December. He told them he’d be at their place for Christmas but never showed up. Is anything the matter?” The alarm bells were ringing.
By prodding and being patient and by answering her own questions, Helen had finally grasped the fact that Martin had not submitted an article that he had promised for an early January edition. Furthermore, Jimmy Singleton had called the Vienna paper and then the hotel, the Eugen, and had discovered that Martin had left just before Christmas with the intention of returning to Canada. He’d gotten another journalist looking into Martin’s departure but that reporter had had to leave Vienna on another job before he could find anything out.
She had asked what the article had been about. The answer was a vague muttering about art thievery. Helen felt on familiar ground and questioned him further, but he really didn’t know much. They had agreed to run the article; it seemed timely if one could judge by the number of thefts reported from western and central Europe, and that was it. Martin wasn’t obliged to keep them up to date with drafts and outlines.