Unspeakable Things (17 page)

I
t was dusk. Time for milk, time for bedtimes and clean hair and the minty toothpaste kisses of tired children. Time for Ilse to stretch out and rest her sore legs on the sofa. Time for David to bend once more to the microfilm, trying to forget the scratching pain of his eyes. Time for Herbert to walk tiredly home. No, time for Herbert to visit his wife. Tonight belonged to rest. Perhaps he would prefer a simple supper—tea and toast—with his old friend Anna. But he would not let himself think about that.

For once, Anna was not sharing anyone else’s sadness. Even her own had been forgotten. It was dusk. It was Sunday. And she had been invited to dinner.

She crawled naked under the blanket and patted lotion all over her body. Her hands caressed the handprints of Rasputin.

In her best dress, her brooch at her neck and her little coat of mouse fur drawn tightly about her, she stood on Felix’s doorstep as the doorbell sounded somewhere far away in the reaches of his rooms.

“My dearest lady.” Felix beamed as he opened the door, an apron about his waist, and Schatzie, a welcoming little sausage, at his feet. He ushered the Rat inside.

Anna’s beautiful eyes gleamed. As Felix took the coat from the Rat’s shoulders, his eyes strayed furtively to her curved spine. He longed to see it, to touch it. “Come in.”

The table was already set, and flowers stood in a large vase next to Felix’s examining table. “Tonight we do not eat in the kitchen,” Felix said. “Tonight Schatzie and I welcome you, my good lady, with our very best.”

Anna looked around appreciatively. Felix quickly darted into the kitchen. “Quiet, be quiet!” he hissed as he opened the refrigerator. The Tolstoi Quartet was making a silent racket—nothing Felix could hear, but the agitation was visible. The fingers continued to play their one-note parts. “Quiet, children!” hissed Felix once again. “Do you want me to silence you, hmm?”

At this threat, the fingers stopped their restlessness, waiting until Felix closed the icebox before resuming their mad music.

“Yes,” hissed Felix. “If you are not good tonight, Uncle Felix will have to make sure you behave.” He thought of the vial of chloroform, wondering vaguely how much would silence, but not deaden, a specimen. It could be an interesting experiment. Perhaps he would write Helmut about it. An inquiry. Helmut would be interested.

Felix prepared the little plate of sliced rutabaga, poured the vinegar over it, and carried it into the next room. The wine stood ready on his desk, precious wine smuggled out of Europe. Courtesy of Helmut. An exchange of favors.

From the cut-glass decanter the doctor carefully poured the elixir into glasses. The two raised their glasses to their lips. As the wine entered Anna’s mouth, her eyes filled with tears. She swallowed; an inexpressible sweetness rose through her little body. She looked at Felix, a misty nearsighted gaze. “What is this?” her eyes seemed to ask.

“A present, my dearest lady. I have saved it just for this evening with you.” “Ah, thank you, my dear Helmut,” he thought. For was this not indeed the elixir of life? Felix spoke his thoughts aloud. “It is the elixir of life, is it not?”

Anna nodded. At the first sweet swallow, her body, arced, sang like a bow for its arrow.

Felix’s narrow chest swelled, too. “Ah, my dear lady.” He sighed. “We must try to be happy.”

“In spite of everything,” the Rat murmured, looking at her host significantly.

“Yes, exactly. In spite of everything. We must try to create happiness.”

“I had thought…,” Anna began tentatively in her melodious voice.

“That happiness was forever lost to the world?” asked Felix, finishing her sentence.

“Yes…” The two old people lifted their glasses again to their lips. The evening began. The candles, which Felix had set upon what had been, in daytime life, his examining table, shimmered, casting their shadow on the sheet that covered it. In the mouths of the dinner companions, the wine transformed itself.

“Please, dear lady.” Felix offered the first course. Anna politely took a piece of bread, a slice of turnip. Felix liked root vegetables. Anna did not. She waited for him to begin.

“It is we who are the guardians of happiness, is that not so?” Felix broke a piece of his bread.

“This wine…,” Anna murmured. “I had forgotten.”

“The blood of Tsars,” Felix explained as he refilled her glass.

“Ah, yes,” murmured the Rat. Nothing would surprise her tonight.

Felix returned to the kitchen for the next course. “My children,” he whispered quickly. Hastily, he poured a few drops of wine from his glass into Schatzie’s dish. The dog lapped and lay down quietly, sighing with pleasure. “Be still tonight, I beg of you,” Felix murmured into his laboratory shelves. He opened the refrigerator, where his most recent acquisitions, the fingers, were still playing like mad. “My children, the night is mine,” he crooned. He opened the top of their large jar with delicately probing fingers. “Share my happiness!” he whispered. Felix poured another few precious drops into the Tolstoi fingers’ brine. The fingers thrummed softly, then curled and relaxed.

“I shall be with you in just a moment, my dearest lady,” Felix sang out from the kitchen. Felix slid two lamb chops, his precious ration, into the pan. He turned the meat and took out the potatoes he had boiled that afternoon. “I’m coming.”

In the other room, Anna waited. An enormous passivity warmed her. She felt herself relaxing—whether it was the wine, that exquisite liquor, or whether it was the presence of an old friend, she did not know. She had made her decision. Now she had only to enact it. As Anna regarded her long, slim fingers, the longer fingers that bejeweled her thighs began to tingle. Warmth surged through her body. At this moment, the handprints of her former life did not sear; instead, they caressed her thighs. Memories rose through her body, memories of lascivious nights. She regarded them now not with fear, but with lost longing.

Anna’s hands caressed her torso as Felix cooked in the kitchen just beyond. She placed her hands where she knew Rasputin’s prints to be. Anna stroked her burned thighs through the material of her skirt. “How I have loved you all these years.” Soon it would be time to say farewell.

“Now, my lady, what do you think of this?” Felix beamed as he carried in the meat. Behind him, Schatzie stumbled to her feet. But she sank down, inebriated, beside her dish.

It was the first time the Rat had smelled meat in an age. Her little nose twitched with pleasure; her whiskers trembled. She looked at Felix meltingly. That gaze.

Felix felt as if her glance struck his heart. He staggered, then set the meat down on the examining table. “Ah, dearest lady.” Never mind that he would go hungry for the next month. Just that look, that greedy, grateful look, was food enough. “Please. Eat. You must be hungry.”

Hungry! The Rat controlled herself, though in her mind she was already tearing the meat off the plate. Tentative and ladylike, she put out a claw. Yes, she was hungry. After all these years. “I told myself I would not eat as long as my children could not,” she said to Felix in a trembling voice.

“Is it true?” he asked.

The Rat nodded; her delicate nostrils quivered. She could not trust herself to speak further.

“Eat, dear lady.” Felix broke off a morsel of a lamb chop with his hand and held it out to her.

“But no,” protested the Rat, laughing, picking up a fork.

“My dearest lady,” Felix cajoled as he held the piece of meat, sizzling, dripping, steaming with warm, salty life, toward her lips. The Rat opened her little mouth. “Eat.”

“This is my body which is given for you…” Those words, those strange words from the liturgy, heavy with sadness, freighted from Orthodox religion, came to the Rat’s mind as she ate from Felix’s hand. The somber chants in Russian, the incense, the dark skirts of a man. “This is my body…” She closed her eyes.

“Why, this is exactly like feeding Schatzie,” Felix thought in surprise. Anna’s velvety lips nuzzled his outstretched hand. Felix tore off another morsel of dripping meat. As the little Rat chewed, her eyes closing in ecstasy, Felix poured more wine into their glasses. He held a goblet to the Rat’s mouth and watched her throat as she took a delicate drop. A flush slid down her body, disappearing at her neckline, a trail of delight. Felix imagined the rest of the path of that flush, making its curved way downward. He imagined licking her, the whole length of that drop of wine. Downward, downward. “Dear lady.” He longed to see her entirely; he was obsessed. To fling himself on her, to see her completely naked, submissive before his gaze. “Will you be mine tonight?” But this he did not say aloud.

No need. In the kitchen, the fingers of the men of the Tolstoi Quartet moved languidly, deliciously. The gentle rhythm of Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes encircled the old rooms. Felix gently placed a piece of potato into Anna’s mouth. “Take, eat; this is my body.”

There was dinner; there was darkness. The candlelight flickered on the remains of the meal. No need to say anything more. Had everything already been said? Now is the moment, thought the Rat. “My dear friend,” she began.

Felix put out a warning hand. “Ah, my dear lady.”

“There is something,” the Rat said firmly. “Something only you can help me with.”

“Yes, gladly. You may ask anything of me.”

Slowly, the Rat got to her feet. Silently, her eyes fixed firmly on those of Felix as she gauged his reaction. With a sad pride, she drew the hem of her dress upward. Felix fell to his knees.

“We have both drunk too much,” whispered the Rat in caution.

Felix pressed his abdomen to the ground, and reaching out, he touched one of the Rat’s small feet. “My Countess.”

“Observe, dear friend,” commanded Anna as the cloth of her dress slid upward.

Felix pressed his lips to the arch of the Rat’s unsteady little foot. He smelled and tasted black pores of boot leather, shined and waxy. He moved his lips upward toward the stockinged ankle. Stockings, ladies’ stockings! He inhaled joyously.

But the Rat was not thinking of him. In a kind of oblivious trance, her eyes commanding his to look, she unclasped her stockings and, with small, determined, agile hands, rolled them downward toward her knees. “Look.”

By now, Felix, rolled into a Schatzie-like bundle of delight, was whimpering softly, kissing his way up Anna’s leg. With one groping hand, he reached upward to caress her hump. “Dear lady.” He writhed. Schatzie, hearing her master, shook herself awake and came stumbling out of the kitchen to sit sympathetically beside him, licking his bent head from time to time, and regarding the Rat with alarm.

“Don’t be afraid,” murmured the Rat, drunk both with wine and with her own courage. “It is for this that I come only to you.” She gave him her most ravishing look.

“Come,” whispered Felix to her. He was licking the Rat’s knee by now.

Anna lifted her petticoat as Felix’s rough face traveled her leg. His whiskers brushed her skin; he put out an experimental tongue. So far, it was permitted. She swayed. “Look carefully,” she commanded. Reaching down with her little claws, she pressed Felix’s face against the soft crepey flesh of her inner thigh.

Felix’s nostrils contracted as the sharp odor of sulfur assailed the room. There was a sizzling noise as he approached that part of Anna’s body. “Let me see,” he crooned, but it was of the Rat’s hump that he was thinking. “I must see it.” He tried to move his hand surreptitiously to her spine.

“Oh, my friend,” cried the Rat suddenly. She fell into a dead faint beside his crouching body. She lay as if stone-cold at his feet.

“My lady!” cried Felix in alarm. Hastily, he began to scramble for his doctor’s bag. His point of view immediately shifted, and, mustering whatever sobriety was possible, he found the tube of smelling salts and broke it open.

The ashy scent of ammonia entered the room, commingling with that of sulfur and smoke. The whole formed a cloud and, blowing into the kitchen to join the repellent odors of formaldehyde and pickle juice, caused the entire company of Felix’s parts collection to begin twitching nervously.

Felix did not know whom to care for first. Leaving the prone Anna on the floor beside the examining table, he rushed into the kitchen and opened the doors of cupboards and the refrigerator desperately. “Quiet at once!” he shouted to all his specimens. But all—the parts of women and intellectuals and even his own scrap of scrotum—were flailing about, trying to escape extinction.

The poisonous cloud encircled Felix’s head. With a last supreme effort, he managed to fling open the window, and the diaphanous danger, a greenish coagulation, exited. The specimens began to subside as the fluids in the jars returned to normal. Felix scanned each one quickly, paying attention to the Tolstoi fingers. But they were drooping quietly in their jars; they were gradually resigning themselves to their prison.

He closed the refrigerator, then reentered the room where the Rat still lay, now weakly lifting her head and smiling. He recalled with fascination what he had but dimly perceived in all the commotion that had ensued. The memory of his lips on her flesh, the soft feel, that odor.

“Are you feeling better, dear lady?” he asked.

The Rat nodded. And, regarding him again with her expressive eyes, she once again reached down and drew her dress upward, commanding him to look.

“Ach!” cried Felix as he began to comprehend. He dropped to his knees beside her, his eyes fixed with on the handprints burned into her flesh. “Yes,” Anna’s eyes seemed to say to him. “Yes, it is true. The Monk.”

“Rasputin’s?” Felix asked, his lips almost numb.

“Exactly,” the Rat replied, and her head fell back, her body twitching.

Felix stared at the large burned-in handprints on the little Rat’s withered thighs. The prints seemed to vibrate, to sizzle ferociously even as he looked. A sulfurous steam rose upward, smoldering. “Look elsewhere, everywhere. Feast your eyes on her. You have our permission,” they said. “She is almost unconscious. You can do what you want with her. She is already corrupted; take her now!”