Authors: Dan Vyleta
‘Yes,’ said the doctor, and Zuzka saw his shadow re-enter the doorway in order to shake Vesalius’s hand. It looked to the girl like they were congratulating one another on their prudence.
‘Goodnight, Frau Vesalius. Rest assured this will remain between you and me.’
‘Thank you, Herr Doctor. So good of you to come.’
And with that she shut the door on the departing doctor. Zuzka used the cover of its bang to slip back into her room.
She did not come to a decision until halfway through the day; stayed in bed, in fact, complaining of ailments whose symptoms she enumerated to a sour-faced Vesalius. The idea itself was an old one, had been conceived in the depths of her, quietly, through those long nights of watching. It was the doctor who had brought it to the surface: the weary caution with which he took the measure of all action. ‘
If I were a man
,’ she had told him, prodding him onwards like a donkey. Her idea paid no heed to her sex’s frailty; it would ride with hussars, feasting on raw meat.
Once she had embraced it fully, she acted quickly, her cheeks flushed now by her own daring. She ran to the double doors that separated her uncle’s set of rooms from the rest of the apartment: opened them quietly and sneaked down the corridor to the bathroom on her left. Once inside she turned the key, ran a quick eye over the shaving paraphernalia that lay spread out on the sink. As a girl she had liked to play with her father’s razor: had cut shavings off the top of her fingernails, and collected them in a jam jar by her bed. At night, they would plant them, her sister Dáša and she, in the soft dirt of the herb patch, in the vague hope of growing an enamel child. Even now her nails had little divots at the centre, ragged, like the mark of small teeth. When she painted them, something of which her uncle disapproved, the polish would pool there, then harden and flake.
The image of her red-dipped fingertips returned her to the man with the painted face, and hence to her plan. She turned away from the sink; found a perch on the edge of the bathtub, then reached over and opened the medicine chest that hung screwed into the wall right next to the door.
She came to it often, would sit on the tub and study the array of pills and powders; had spent many an hour plucking the stoppers out of the brown pharmacist’s bottles and sniffing at their contents. There was morphine there that, on a handful of occasions, she had dared drip on to her tongue; powdered Veronal piled up in a jar; castor oil and iodine (she had once smeared her breast with it, painted a circle around the nipple); a brown paper bag marked ‘Acetylsalicylic acid’ in Speckstein’s careful hand. More than half the medicines carried no identification other than a series of letters and figures, and sometimes the date. The poisons were marked by a bright red skull, the alcohols by the jagged suggestion of a flame.
At times, on one of those long afternoons when there was nothing for her to do, she had picked a bottle at random, uncorked it and then upturned its neck on to the skin of her thumb. She had burned herself on acid once, and made herself giddy with the fumes of some potent type of ether. It wasn’t much of a game but it carried with it a whisper of risk: some years ago, back in her father’s house, she had read a story in which Russian officers held a revolver to their heads without knowing whether or not the chamber was loaded. It was a game she should have liked to play, but only if she knew in advance that she would live. It was the sound of the hammer bearing down upon the chamber that spoke to her, not the violence of the bullet. Her father used to say that there clung to her ‘the faintest whiff of brimstone’; would kiss her then, after he said it, to take away the sting, the palms of his hands sitting warmly on her ears and shutting out the noises of the world.
It took her a good few minutes to pick a drug. She reached for the ether first, then decided its fumes were too familiar; dabbed a spit-wetted pinky into an unknown powder and brought it to her lips, then spat the foul stuff into the sink. In the end she settled on a harmless solution of colloidal silver, putting a little into an empty bottle whose glass-and-rubber stopper doubled as a pipette. She found a length of masking tape, stuck it on the bottle, and boldly marked it with the letters ‘Ag-H
2
O (Lq)’ in a manner that approximated her uncle’s mode of classification. Her preparations complete, she closed up the medicine chest, unlocked the bathroom door, and quickly returned to the safety of her own room, where she stuffed the bottle into a leather handbag and chose a topcoat to wear out. There was no need to alert Vesalius to her leaving. She took the spare key off the hook in the corridor, slipped out on to the landing, and quietly turned the lock.
Identifying the correct door proved harder than she had imagined. She knew that his apartment was on the second floor of the building’s side wing, its windows facing into the courtyard. But when she climbed the narrow staircase of the side wing – itself very different from the elegant revolutions of the main flight of stairs – and came out on a cramped little landing, she found that all three of the doors before her might plausibly lead to a set of rooms with courtyard windows diagonally across from her own. Not one of the doors bore a name. There were no mail slots and no bells, just crude knockers set into the flaking paint. In the top quarter of each door, an inch above the crown of her head, a small window of green milk-glass replaced the lacquered wood, and bled faint traces of light on to the landing.
She stood around for some minutes, unsure of herself, then was startled when a corpulent man in a dirty tuxedo pushed up the stairs behind her, and brushed her buttocks as he squeezed his way past. She turned around after him without speaking, and he stopped halfway up the next flight of stairs, his features in darkness.
‘May-I help you?’ he shot out, the accent odd to her ears.
‘I am looking for the man with the painted face.’
This seemed to puzzle the stranger, who came down a step, the lower half of his face entering into the light. His skin was rough and as though yellow, the cheeks fleshy and pockmarked, full lips framed by the wisps of a beard. It angered her briefly that he had not bothered to remove his hat. She noticed now that he was carrying a case under one arm, black and cylindrical in shape. Its handle seemed to have fallen off.
‘Pain-ted fa-ce,’ he said, in his oddly accented German. ‘You-are look-ing for the clown.’
‘I don’t know what he is.’
‘There,’ said the man, pointing his free hand at the door to her left, then raising it upwards to lay a warning finger across the swell of his lips.
‘Bet-ter don’t disturb. He works all-night. And sleeps in daytime. Just like my-self.’
He chuckled at that, and, as he threw back his head to grant space to his mirth, she saw for a moment the contours of his face, unusually wide, the eyes slanting upwards under the heavy bones of his brow.
‘Thank you, Herr–’
‘Yuu,’ he said, ‘simply Yuu,’ and finally doffed his hat to reveal a head of black hair, cut very short above the ears and somehow jagged, as though he had done it himself. He bowed, turned, and was off, the leather heels of his dress-shoes loud against the staircase’s naked stone.
She waited until she heard him enter an apartment high above her in what she surmised was the garret, then reached out to rap the knocker of the door on her left. There was no answer. She waited, reached out again, wishing now that she had brought a warmer coat, for it was chilly on the narrow landing. A third rap was answered by a squeaky noise as though of a man sitting up in his bed. A fourth rap got him moving; she heard him stand up, cast around for clothes. When the door swung open, his hands were still busy buttoning his trousers. He wore no shirt and had pulled his braces over a ribbed, cotton vest, the shadow of old sweat forming a wedge between the muscles of his chest. His feet were bare, turned on their sides to limit their exposure to the floorboards’ chill, the toenails chipped and dirty.
‘What do you want?’ said the man, and leaned an arm against the door frame, exposing to her the dark tangle of his armpit. ‘You lost or something?’
She shook her head and stared at him. The first thing that struck her was that he was much shorter than she had thought, more muscular. There was a deep solidity to his arm and shoulder, to that compact body underneath the dirty, sleeveless shirt. His face, too, was alive with the movement of his muscles, the eyes open and passionate: the face of a boy itching for a schoolyard brawl. All this surprised her. He had seemed so calm behind the shelter of his make-up.
His eyelashes, she thought, were much longer than her own.
‘Can’t you speak?’ he asked her, more gently now, though the gentleness dissipated as soon as she had forced her tongue into an answer.
‘I am here about your wife.’
‘My wife?’
‘Yes. I heard that she was sick.’
‘My wife is sick? That’s what you have heard? Where?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I suppose Dr Beer told me. In passing, you know. He probably doesn’t even remember.’
‘Dr Beer told you my wife is sick?’
‘In a word, yes. I bring medicine.’ She reached into her handbag to produce the bottle she had so carefully marked. ‘It is sure to give relief.’
It was hard to make out all the emotions that ran through his face as she spoke. There was anger there, and scorn; fear, too, as he leaned out the door and shot a glance up and down the stairs. She wished he would open the door further and allow her to see more of the room. His sink, for instance, was invisible to her, as was the bed; the pile of magazines about whose contents she had so often wondered. All she could make out was an edge of the windowsill, and an ashtray that stood overflowing not far from the heels of his still out-turned feet. His armpit filled the air between them with the smell of his sweat. She found herself intrigued by the smell: it seemed to her, at that moment, more intimate an imposition than if he had stooped to grab hold of her hand and kissed it. Not that he seemed in the mood for gallantry: his anger was palpable, a physical presence, like a dog straining at the leash. And yet there was, in all his gestures, an odd awareness of her. She saw it in his eyes, which made a survey of her chest even as they glowered, and in the cock of his narrow hips. It was something her mother had once tried to tell her about, before embarrassment had slipped a gag into her thoughts: she had whispered a phrase about their milkman’s ‘quiet hunger’, and dropped her bony hands to rest a moment on the swell of her thighs. All of a sudden it struck the girl that this was the closest she had been to a man, unsupervised, if one disregarded her father, that is – and Dr Beer. The thought brought home to her her own audacity. She would have to find someone to whom she could brag about it later.
He took his time in any case, stared at the bottle with intense suspicion, then grabbed it from her without touching her hand. He unscrewed the stopper, drew the pipette out of the liquid, and squeezed a drop into his hand.
‘What’s this?’ he mumbled, then shot another glance into the dark of the staircase behind her.
‘Medicine. I’m afraid I forgot the name. I can make enquiries. But I’m sure it will do your wife no end of good.’
‘I have no wife,’ he said, harshly, and shoved the bottle back into her hand. ‘Who the hell are you?’
This drew her up short. There had been, in all her preparations, no plan for an answer. All she had imagined was this: her talking to the man across the yard. He should have thanked her by now, invited her in to meet his wife; or broken down and confessed to her the nature of his crimes. She had not reckoned on the menace of his physicality, the spastic bunching of his fists. It called to mind the blood she had seen washing down his sink, and she took a step back.
‘I am very sorry,’ she said. ‘I was told you live with your wife.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I live in the house. With my uncle. Main wing, first floor.’
She watched him turn his head to the window, work out her provenance. His face was very dark now, muscles bunching on cheeks and chin.
‘Did Speckstein send you? Is he watching me? Are you his maid or something?’
‘No, nothing like that,’ she said, then became uncertain. Perhaps it was better to signal that she wasn’t on her own. ‘Though he knows I am here.’
She paused, swallowed, stepped closer yet to the top of the stairs. ‘My room faces the yard,’ she said. ‘There was a woman–’
He grew angry again, eyes flashing in his bulging face. It cost him a great effort to speak. ‘You have been watching,’ he said. ‘Whatever you think you have seen . . . I’m an artist, you see. An artist. I perform . . . There are important people, you understand. They come to see me. My show, it uses props – mannequins – you understand?’
The door had opened more widely during his tirade and left unobstructed the view of the room, and the room beyond. She found herself staring past his shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of the unknown. He followed her gaze, then lifted a fist before his face. For a moment she thought he would leap out, smash her head in, but he quickly jumped back and closed the door until it stood open no wider than a crack. Only one eye remained visible to her.
‘There is nothing here,’ he hissed. ‘Nothing of interest. You hear?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, drawing closer again to the door. They stood breathing as though after a fight, his eye hanging head-high in the gloom.