Unspeakable Things (16 page)

A
cross town, in their jar, the severed fingers of the Tolstoi Quartet musicians were going wild. It was always so in the evenings, when they sensed the beginning of music time. In the dusk, driven to a frenzy by the vibrations in the air, the fingers started their undisciplined dances against the sides of the jar. The urge to feel—anything. Even glass. As Adeline danced upon her bed linens, so the fingers, more sensitive for being their severed selves, began to twitch. The familiar rhythms, sound without voice, those faint tremblings in the air, became intolerable. The fingers knew their parts by heart. Adeline thrummed, raising the presence of her dearest child. And the fingers thrummed against the sides of their pickle jar: “Let us out!”

With one accord, they sought again the frequencies of Schubert’s
Death and the Maiden.
Da, da da duh da,
they played, each in his own part. The chemicals in which they lay sloshed to the music. They hammered against the sides of the glass. They would play as if compelled. For they were summoning now, summoning David to come and find them. “Come, save us,” they played to David. “We are here. We are waiting. Come to us. Hear us.”

But David did not hear them that night. He couldn’t sleep, sharing the uncomfortable cold couch with his wife. He twitched restlessly; he stared at the ceiling.

“Don’t leave,” Ilse begged, although she knew that he would have to go.

“It’s only for a little while,” he promised. He sensed a moment of irritation; something crossed his concentration. Were they never to have time enough together, never space of their own? “We are together always.”

“Always?” questioned Ilse. She thought of the distance between them, her job, the children, the problems of money and food and health.

David remembered the stale basement in which he worked, the temporary lodgings he shared with three other tired, impatient German refugees, all deciphering and translating what was for the most part nonsense, useless print. “Yes,” he said, against all evidence. “We are always together; you know that. Even when we must be apart.”

“Especially when we’re apart,” said Ilse thoughtfully.

Michael watched from the corner. “Love her. Be happy. Nothing else matters.” He uncoiled himself into smoke. David and Ilse drew in their breaths. Michael entered their mouths, kissing them both as he allowed himself to be inhaled. “I am with you.”

“He died for us,” thought the lovers. Then, quickly, as if to drown that thought, David kissed his wife deeply.

“My darling,” Ilse whispered. Was it to Michael or to David that she gave herself? It did not matter. Her love flowed toward him, out of the past they had lived together, all of them.

“Yes,” said the watching spirit of Michael from both within and without. Pressing himself inside their bodies, he felt the force of their lives’ pulsation. He sighed, expiring again, this time in ecstasy. He panted; he could not breathe. But it was all right, this not breathing.

The orgasm took David and Ilse, and at the crest, right where the wave curled, they saw the pale floating face of their skeletal beloved. David gasped as he took his wife in love.

“Help me!” begged Michael as he clawed at the jar of their memory.

“Oh,” cried David and Ilse in one hoarse whisper to each other. And spent, they lay upon each other while a black despair came over them. They held each other and tried to brush despair away. They would never succeed; it lay on the underside of every happy moment they were to have. Shaken by the depth of their love, they lay, not needing to speak, gazing into the bare room, each holding the precious body of the other.

“We will find a place for ourselves as soon as this bloody war is done,” David promised, kissing her. He stroked her strong hands, which lay softly opened toward him still. “We will find a little house, one with our own room.”

“Yes,” agreed Ilse, curling herself around her husband’s body. “David,” she whispered. “How I love you; I’ve always loved you. Yes, right from the moment I saw you.”

“And I, I, too, loved you,” David lied. For in fact, he had not noticed her in his university classes at first, this quiet girl. “But I love you more now than ever.” This was truly spoken. Quietly, they lay while the interchange softened their bodies, and finally they gave themselves together in sleep.

Was it Adeline who was dreaming this whole story? Adeline, who lay in her crazy bed, far removed from any action? Adeline drummed her fingers on the edges of her sheets and blankets, as if her blind fingers could find their way home through music. Her fingers found their way through the scores her brain half knew. Schubert, Brahms, Mendelssohn. “My son, I am calling you. From my bereft womb, I am calling you.” Michael sat beside her. His breath wreathed about her, and his parted lips still held, as a kiss, his last denied breath.

“It was always you whom I loved best,” Adeline’s fingers sang silently, reminding him. Adeline kept her eyes open. For it was she who controlled the world’s appearance. If only she could remember enough, go crazy enough—yes, even further than she had already traveled—all might be well again. “Herbert, I am trying to get well,” her fingers sang. “Herbert, I am trying to believe.” “Silly man.” Adeline’s fingers tapped in counterpoint.

While to the rest of her family Adeline lay, inert and unkempt, in a crazy house for old ladies, to Michael his mother was as beautiful and fresh as ever. They stayed in each other’s regard as if time had never happened. Adeline’s last moment of lucidity was when Michael was taken from her. “I shall never look beyond,” she promised herself and her dream boy firmly. Michael curled his smoke self beside her. “Play for me, dearest Mama.” So Adeline played on the sheets.

Anna, lying awake in the dark next to the sleeping Maria, smiled to herself and curled around Rasputin’s heavy handprints. She smelled the sleeping warmth of the little girl next to her, and, having enjoyed to the fullest the sounds of the young couple’s lovemaking, she gave herself to the languor that follows love. “Be happy,” she whispered into the dark toward the couch where the parents lay. Oh, to have known such relations. But Anna had her own memories: the dark side of the unspeakable. She lay there, her body throbbing. Something parted her thighs, placed rough hands on her, and, with a little moan—was it one of pleasure, or terror?—Anna allowed it, quietly, her breath held against the waiting darkness of the room, the delicious pulsations of release that took her body down its own river.

Da. Dah duh duh…
thrummed the fingers:
Death and the Maiden.
The Rat’s body burned and stirred. The air thrummed about her. The handprints vibrated. Something was calling her, summoning her body out of the darkened room. Her flesh danced with the ache of curiosity, a devil’s dance. Paganini? No, it was more than that, more sonorous. She lay on her bed, a sudden excitement animating her body. The orgasm, almost a seizure, left her, and her eyes shone with resolve. Across the city, the fingers were thrumming like mad, calling. But it was Anna who heard them; or rather, in some primitive way, it was she who sensed already the outcome of her story.

“We are playing. We are singing. We are calling. Here we are.” The fingers thrummed as never before, all longing and intensity.

The men of the Tolstoi Quartet woke suddenly to the sounds of their instruments still in their cases. The men wrapped themselves around their instruments. “Shh,” they whispered. In their dreams, they were playing Schubert perfectly and their instruments responded to their commands as if united with one another and with them. The men did not wake, or if they did, it was only to believe themselves dreaming. Each man closed his eyes and dreamed himself a part of a perfect quartet that was playing perfectly, the varnished musical instruments gleaming and swaying. And they were swaying, too, under the linden trees to the music of Schubert and perhaps Mozart as well. The linden flowers breathed their odor into the afternoon air and the men’s bodies vibrated with the music. The music took its crescendos and decrescendos, breathing through the dark, curved bodies of the musical instruments and so into the sonorous, resonating bodies of the men who embraced these instruments. The piano, insisting on skeletal structure, floated through French doors. The linden trees turned yellow. Leaves drifted softly onto the ground in the garden, where, seated at a glass table, a father and his elder son were playing chess. They were bent over the chessboard, seemingly intent. Did they hear the music? Did they breathe in the sweetness of that acrid air, that moment? Kristallnacht was waiting to shatter that perfection.
Dah, dah du deeh,
sang the Quartet in exaltation. The garden held its beauty; the young boys sensed the odor of the moment. Michael, overcome by the music, pressed his face into his mother’s skirts and the Quartet played as one. “Your move,” Herbert said to David.

W
hat happens when passion is “spent”? Where does it go? Is it like money, always circulating, finally ending up, after passing from hand to hand, as a dirty, wrinkled bill in some unlikely eager fist?

All the cries and sighs of lovers, wreathing upward in a kind of urgent smoke: what happens to them? The precise moment when one first recognized the lover? The precise moment when one began to suffer? Do those moments stay in the universe? They wait, like parasites, for another host to come by, attaching to them as fixedly as if their former source of blood had not already existed. Then, something happens; those moments of passion take a little rest. But look, it is not for a long time, for passion is merely waiting somewhere around the corner, unlikely but determined. Passion is just waiting to steal silently into one’s sleep.

Or maybe it is like the laws of continuous conservation of energy. Nothing goes away; it just changes. So evil stays in the world, perhaps only lying dormant for a moment, in a heap, its black wings folded. But nothing is ever lost—evil stays, and so do passion and suffering and love cries and the tenderness of parents for children and the children’s pulling away from it all and then the beginning of life all over again. Nothing is lost.

Passion transmutes itself if necessary, rising from one person or another, sometimes from a couple at the same time. And then…and then…the smoke of its urgency wreathes itself away into the general passionate universe. But sometimes, when it goes from one person to another, it leaves a little mark.

So on Anna’s flesh, the imprint of Rasputin’s hands. But it was not merely her flesh that was seared; this was just the external mark of it. Rasputin, when he took her, forced his mark not only on her small white thighs but on her heart itself. Even as he himself expired, in all senses of the word, his imprint remained. Somewhere in the world, still vital, still hot with its own fire, as his last breath left, spiraling upward to become part of the general world breath, perhaps to find its way into another’s body. But the mark of his passion remained behind. It was the fate of the Rat, small, hunchbacked, to bear it.

In the early hours of the morning, Felix, in an ecstasy he could not describe, cleaned up his rooms and then, in his dressing room, fell on his knees before his altar to the Führer. Clasping his hands, he rocked back and forth. “There are no words,” he murmured, pressing his lips to the glass-covered photograph. The Führer, glassy-eyed, stared back at him. “Oh,
mein Liebchen,
” Felix murmured.

Putting the photograph down, Felix, still in his silk dressing gown and his stockings, moved quickly to his desk, where he began to scribble a few notes. “My dearest Helmut,” he wrote, unable to contain himself. “I think I have discovered…” Here Felix paused—would his old friend understand? He must not say too much: “…the secret of life!” Felix underlined the last words and put the pen down. He went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. Yes, his precious jars were still there. Everyone was sleeping. He looked into the cupboards. The jars were quiet and peaceful, taking nourishment from the universal brine of sleep and renewal. Good. Felix sat down once more to his letter.

“Can you imagine? Perhaps we have not only the capability of keeping alive that which is best in humanity. Perhaps we can even do more than that.” Felix wrote quickly now, covering that which had been written with one hand as if to protect his thoughts from other prying eyes. “We had thought to improve on what was imperfect in man. We had thought to build a new race, a splendid new race from the fragments of our own. Such had been our dream. Do you remember?” Felix paused, then bent again to the letter. “But now it has been revealed to me—I dare not say how—that we can do much more. Oh, so much more.” Did he dare tell Helmut how? No, Felix decided, the authorities were no doubt everywhere. “I can say no more,” he concluded. “Only that I see a way—perhaps it is possible—to re-create the best and the greatest human possibilities.” “Nothing is lost,” thought Felix, “only transmuted.” Never had he felt himself so close to God.

To regenerate Rasputin. And after that, who knew? Felix’s mind swam at the possibilities. “Let me be worthy,” he prayed aloud. “Let me be worthy.”

But how to convince Anna to allow him to try? It would mean taking a bit, just a bit, from her thigh. Felix thought rapidly. Yes, if his laws of cellular multiplication were to be proved correct, one bit would be all he would need. Provided that Rasputin had indeed placed his imprint there. One cell, that is all it takes, one human cell. Felix thought with excitement of the specimens he had already collected. He had watched the Schatzie tail specimen now for nearly three months, and the particle showed every sign of wanting to regenerate itself. A supertail of a superdog. And the fingers of the Quartet. Felix planned to regenerate from them an entire quartet, better than the Tolstoi, less interested in modern cacophony, more interested, as in the past, in the classical compositions of his beloved composers. And his own sexual parts—was he not in the process of creating from that part of himself a supersex, a man of beauty and passion and supreme sexual confidence? In time, mankind would be able to create the exact shape and form of the most desired human attributes. Meanwhile, Felix had before him the possibility of working on this most cherished project, of re-creating the dead genius of the past from scraps that had been left on the flesh of others. For it was only through the dead genius that hope lay.

Felix thought of the troubles in the world, those that had led to mass exodus, displacement. Even he, Felix, servant of the Führer, had been forced to relocate himself. A victim of mankind’s folly. Now there was a chance to call upon the past with the aid of Rasputin. Maybe he wouldn’t have been Felix’s first choice. But the man had, after all, been the adviser to Tsars. And his hands lay almost beneath those of Felix.

The doctor realized that he had been working all his life just for this moment of revelation. “Schatzie,” whispered Felix, stroking the dog, who lay beside him on the couch. “We will see great things, you and I. It is not too late, hmm?” He shook the scruff of Schatzie’s neck affectionately back and forth, and Schatzie looked up at her master adoringly. “Great things lie ahead, my little one.” Schatzie thumped her tail sympathetically.