Authors: Keith Korman
With long age and many owners, the cup had cracked. You drank and the blood-red drops dripped from the flaw, running in the creases of your palm. She filled it for the stranger.
He drank once more.
And let the woman lick the drops that ran down his arm.
She rose and danced for him again. Teasing. Dipping once and stepping lightly. Circling round and coming back. The weakness had gone from the old man's limbs â a lust for the Dancing One. How dare she dance for him like that? A spark flew from the fire, and the old man saw himself young again. In the flow of his fine strength, how he caught the woman in the woods and dragged her down. Clamping his hand over her mouth, holding it there to let her bite it. Wanting her to bite it as he
did her
sprawled on the ground, laboring in and out as she writhed and cursed and called for her father and her brother and mother and sisters and tried to crawl off as he mounted her in the cool dirt, clawing the soft moss and wet fallen leaves â¦
The old man looked at his withered fingers in the fire's flickering light. The cold was back upon him, purpling the teeth marks of that mating long ago. She had forever scarred the thick flesh below his thumb. How small and crude the cup had looked in the woman's hands. The stone all black. And along one side the carved faded image of Her Above, graven in the Sleep Time â a crescent moon, with thirteen chiseled lines, Her thirteen births, her thirteen deaths, her rising and setting tale of each year's passing. He took Eldest Daughter of the Claymaker to wife, and she drank his blood that day, the blood of his manhood's veins, Then drank wine from the cracked stone cup. Long time he lived with her. And made her mother of the Dancing One, who, a lifetime later, teased him in the darkness, while the faces chanted:
“You â you! ⦠You â you!”
Alone and womanless, he shivered by the fire that threw no heat to his old cricket bones. The faces drew off like ghosts ⦠the Dancing One stood still. Only the stranger's eyes remained, red coals in the blackness. The father-son cup had fallen to the ground between them. Young man daring old to pick it up.
The bright Swiss sky lit the hospital room. Heat piped up the silver-painted radiator, and a thread of steam hissed out the valve. By the bed, Herr Doktor still trembled in the guise of the old man. At this point the dark grove of trees faded from his mind, and he found himself drawn back to the stuffy room. The dry reality of the hard wood floor on which he knelt, the soft contours of his clothes, the thrum of the hospital beyond, and finally the gawky scarecrow of a girl towering at the end of the room.
Now he rose and changed persona. Shedding his palsied old age, revealing the strong sturdiness of his limbs, becoming the other, his rival â the shadow man. But no longer faceless. The stranger's face his own. Himself standing in the grove, straight and tall, a hunter of the night.
Fräulein Schanderein came to him now, dipping once and stepping lightly. She chanted flatly:
We gave the wreath
We drank the wine
We saw the darkness fall.
The Old Moon wanes
The clouds fly off
Tonight the New Moon callsâ¦.
Her voice growing cold and pitiless, each word sweet pain upon her tongue:
Tear off the wreath
And spill the wine
In manly terror hide.
The eyes of stars see
The new moon hunt
Tonight the Old Moon diesâ¦.
She came to a full stop and looked scornfully toward the corner of the bed, where she saw the old wreck, too terrified to pick up the cup. Hissing:
“He thinks he can hide.”
Then, peering intently into Herr Doktors face, searching for any sign of doubt: “But he can't, can he?”
“No.'
“Then what shall we do to him?” she demanded. The fullness of her voice leaped eagerly. She knew the answer.
“Yes, what
shall
we do with him?” he asked quietly.
“I want to see his blood.” Her breath came in rapid jerks. “I want to see you bring him low and take his skin off in strips while he's still alive and calling my name. I want to hear him beg me. Beg me. Beg!” Spittle flew from her lips. “I want to tear his thing off with my hands, yank it off and shake it in his face!” She was pawing Herr Doktor, breathing in gusts, erupting:
“Look! Look! The old man picked up the cup. He's running. Trying to hide! After him! After him!”
Herr Doktor leaped to the chase, first into the corner by the bed where last the old man knelt.
“No! No!” she shouted. “Behind the tree!”
Herr Doktor looked sharply from side to side.
“That one!” Shrieking at her wit's end. “Are you blind? That one!”
He sprang across the room, barking his shin on the copper bathtub. He didn't care: the bloody hunting heat coursed through him. He landed like a cat in the corner by the door. Too late.
The room went silent. She stood stock-still: her eyes flickered toward the bed. The signal. The time had come for quiet â the noiseless stalking. Slowlv. slowlv. Herr Doktor
event
toward the bed Inches and half inches. The seconds crawled like sweat. Minutes passedâ¦. He had drawn close, gliding like smoke. His legs quivered from the strain. At last he stopped.
Inside, all his strength gathered, a winding rope of fury and lust, tied like a heavy calmness around the fist of his heart.
“He's near â¦,” she whispered. A fleck of spit glistened at the corner of her mouth. She licked it away with a wet pink tongue.
“Ja,” he breathed. “Here ⦔
He crouched low for the final spring, staring intently at the bed. He groped at his side, drew out a make-believe dagger, and ran his thumb along the invisible blade. “Do it!” she urged him. “He's right there. In the thicket. I can smell his fear.”
He closed his eyes, forgetting everything. The room, the hospital, the girl breathing urgently beside him ⦠The old King was very close. Wanting to die. To die running, before he'd yield his neck for the kill.
“Now!” she cried.
He jumped on the bed, clanging it to the wall. A shout went up from a patient across the hall, but who cared? The killing heat rolled to a boil. Fräulein strangled her pillow,- he stabbed it with the dagger.
“Again! Again!” she shrieked.
He plunged in the bloody knife. She clawed the pillow, tearing the linen case. The seam opened, spilling an ooze of goose down â the life ripped from its guts. Then, finally, they tired, their blows coming to an end. Her hands unclutched bit by bit. Herr Doktor threw away his invisible dagger. They sweated, panting in long, hard gasps of murder. As the killing heat passed like smoke, the two of them lay exhausted, side by side on the bed. He waited for his heart to stop pounding in his chest. She stared intelligently into his face. No signs of a twiddle. No dementia. Haughty. Self-knowing. And she always recovered before him.
She leaned luxuriously against the wall, reclining. With one hand she languorously stroked the beaten pillow as if it were a purring cat. Indeed, she started to purr herself,- her lips glistened in a naughty smile. So much more in control than he ⦠She stopped petting the pillow cat, and both hands came to her rib cage. She caressed her ribs, then brought her hands under her breasts, cupping them for a moment and letting them fall. An easy, natural gesture, shamelessly satisfying. And as she stared at him, a dreamy smile came across her face, her eyes drowsy and drugged. Petting the pillow-cat.
“Come to the Queen," she said like honey. ââCome, she wants youâ¦. You can have her now. Come and take her.”
He said nothing. Drained and spent. Part of him crushed, ashamed, but that passed too. Poor, poor dead pillow, he always thought. And then he wanted to laugh. Poor pillow! A petted pillow-cat. Lucky thing.
His heart slowed as he regained his composure, tucking his shirt-tails back into his pants. The great intelligence he saw in her eyes was dying out.
“Come to the Queen,” she murmured in a silly drawl. Losing interest.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because ⦔ Her eyes dead. “Because,” she said again, but this as a final answer. Just because.
His skin prickled. They were being watched. The thick piece of construction paper for the viewing slit lay on the floor. In the hunting and the struggle and the wild murder, it must have come loose as it had before. Senior Physician Nekken's narrow Satan face floated behind the glass â watchful and expressionless and numbingly calm. The face disappeared. Then Orderly Bolzens eyes flitted past as he stole a forbidden peep through the viewing slit.
Herr Doktor replaced the blue sheet of paper. He looked back at the girl on the bed. All the fiery candle flame of intelligence â extinguished to nothing. The burnoose had wrapped itself around her head, covering even her eyes. A sheet hid her body. Underneath the tent of her wrappings he saw the rhythmic sawing of her twiddle. The Ritual was over.
He must finish the letter soon.
Fritzi the postman knew his daily visit to 19 Berggasse was of the utmost importance to Herr Professor. So after delivering the mail to the butcher's shrewish wife, whose shop fronted the street â “Vhat! Only dese stupid bills again! I've paid dem ten times already!” â Fritzi the postman passed through the carriageway into the courtyard where Herr Freud waited anxiously at his door. The man came out in good weather and bad, in rain or freezing cold, greeting him with a simple “Guten tag, Fritzi. And what have we here?”
The postman had a theory about the letters he carried, a sort of parlor game. That you could tell what the letter said just by looking at the envelope, the style of the address, the manner of the handwriting â¦
Take today's packet for Herr Professor: not your ordinary mail â catalogs, magazines, fees from patients with no return address, and so forth. Nor what other professionals routinely received: fancy envelopes with black or gold or silver lettering, which Herr Professor of 19 Berggasse never got. But now this: a creamy gray envelope, smooth, flat, and
heavy
. Beautiful Swiss stamps showed a noble William Tell with crossbow, and another the Swiss Guards of the kind they sent to the pope in Rome, The return address printed in raised British Lion red:
Krankenhaus Burghölzli
Zurich
Schweiz
And printed by hand in the upper left corner: C.G.J. RM 501. The sender's initials. His office number à man known at his place of work Fritzi had always meant to tell Herr Professor about his theories, but instead he always made a joke about it. Pretending to be a mind reader, holding the letter to his forehead and gazing blankly into the Great Beyond, uttering the essence of its contents.
So he played the mentalist as he handed over all the mail but this creamy gray envelope. He pressed it to his forehead with a sly glance at the sky. The postman's fingers gently rubbed the edges of the packet as though receiving its inner vibrations. “I feel confusion here. I sense chaos â”
“That's because you can't decide what's in the wrapper, Fritzi.”
“No, no, not so ⦠The chaos, the confusion â this is the
subject
of the communication. And I feel the plea here. Someone is desperate.”
“The human condition is desperate.”
“Your vibrations are very bad, Herr Professor. Very disruptive. I can feel the sight slipping from me ⦠but ah! I sense here an opportunity. Yes, that's it, an opportunity.”
Fritzi handed over the envelope. Herr Professor took it rather doubtfully. “My vibrations are always bad, Fritzi. But we shall see.”
Yet when Herr Professor felt the weight of the thing, yes, he knew the oddness of the package. He paused for a moment at the bottom of the stairwell. If only there were noises coming from the waiting room above, the murmur of many voices ⦠Impossible, of course. His waiting room always lay empty. He arranged it that way, letting each patient out by another door so no two would ever meet. But as he gazed up the carpeted stairs he imagined the clamor of a dozen voices. The smoke from their cigarettes and pipes, the scraping of chairs, the creaking of the floor as they paced to and fro. Ladies in black with their hats, gentlemen standing with their umbrellas: a veritable throng begging for a few minutes of his time. Oh, it could have been that way â so easily, so easily. If only his practice had been podiatry, internal medicine, dermatology â even proctology!
But not good-for-nothing psychology. An obscure field where no two patients might even sit in the same room together. How impossible to make money this way, to raise a family. How futile.
He stared blankly at the gray envelope from Switzerland. He knew the Burghölzli, of course. Who didn't? Direktor Bleuler ran one of the great onesâ¦. He should have liked a position there. They paid well, and earlier in his career old Bleuler had smiled upon him, might even have given him a job. But no more â too late to go begging at the door of a strange institution in another country. So what did the Burghölzli want with him?
The rest of the mail fluttered to his feet. He tore open the gray envelope and saw there ⦠much too much to read on the staircase. But he knew how to get to the point without reading every damn word. His shoulders sagged. A case history from outside his little circle of Vienna.
A
consultation
,
The one thing he never let himself hope for. Not from an émigré this time, no, not from a Jew or an angst-ridden hausfrau disenchanted with life in general and her husband in particular â- but a genuine request from a sturdy pillar of Swiss society. A blessed physician from the golden halls of the exalted Burghölzli Sanatorium, seat of all power, font of all knowledge. How eminently just. Exactly the type of referral his Gentile colleagues fawned over,, because when they paid, they paid so well. And when they didn't, they still enhanced ones reputation, drawing other consultations in their wake.