Unspeakable Things (19 page)

Sitting down beside the Rat on the couch, he moved the sleeping Schatzie aside. “Perhaps you have some questions, my dear Countess?”

Without waiting for her response, he sprang up again and rushed into the kitchen for the decanter of wine, cut crystal, and two small glasses. “The true elixir of life,” he joked, raising his glass to hers and cocking one bushy eyebrow ironically.

Anna drained hers in one gulp. She gathered her forces and looked Felix directly in the eye with her limpid gaze. “So I was right to come here,” she said with determination. “You know why it is, my dear friend, that I have come to you? Only to you?”

Felix seized her hand, pressing his lips to her dry little back of the hand and then the palm.

“Yes,” said Anna. “You are the only person who can help me. I have thought about this for a long time. But now the time has come. My time,” she added significantly.

“No,” Felix protested.

“I am an old woman now,” said the Rat, “and there is no more need of me. But first, my dear Doktor, I have a favor to ask.”

“Anything.” Felix felt faint.

Anna looked at him meltingly, her gaze piercing his bosom, right into his very soul. “You know, my dear Doktor,” she began, “I have never felt what other women feel….” She let her voice trail off.

“You mean…” He looked at her and thought he understood everything. His chest swelled with feeling. She had come to the right person.

Her answering gaze indicated her misshapen body. “Yes. I want you to take me. I want you to make me feel what I have never felt, what is a woman’s highest privilege. That transport, that abandon of self, that total surrender to another human being.” As she spoke, she could see the effect she was having on him. Pity and greed crossed his face simultaneously.

“Yes,” she added. “Take me!”

With a murmur—was it sadness, regret, comfort, or perhaps love?—Felix reached up and for the first time touched the Rat’s humped spine. It felt like bone, the vertebrae curved and mangled. He stroked her back gently, and the Rat allowed herself a small sigh.

“Use me,” the Rat whispered to him. “Use me in every sense of the word. I want to shiver like other women. And in return for those divine services, I shall offer you my entire body, and all the marks upon my body, those very marks. I know you want this. I’ll do it any way you want it. Do with me what you will! But take me, my friend, take me quickly. I long to be in your arms. Forever.” She gazed upon him, a beautiful supplicant.

Felix began to throb. “Little Hänschen” reared up in pride. This went beyond all his dreams. “Thank you, my Führer,” he thought. Never had he been asked to perform such an act of mercy. “An honor, dearest Countess, an honor. May I address you by name?” He hardly dared such familiarity.

Anna’s body began to vibrate and glow, and from her cells also came the tone of A, a faint hum growing louder. Felix, encircling Anna’s shoulders, felt his body vibrate in answer. A, like the violin sections of an orchestra tuning up. He picked up the tone and echoed it. “Alive!” He could have stayed like that forever.

Faintly, Anna recalled something. “Wait. I must tell you this before we go too far,” she whispered, and she put her hand on Felix’s. “They know. My friend, I have come to tell you we must be quick. They know.”

“What?” Felix lifted his head sharply.

“Yes.” And quickly, in a whisper, Anna told him what she had heard from Herbert.

“Herbert? David?” In an instant, Felix understood. “Of course, that is why I have had no response from Helmut these many months. My letters have been intercepted.” Quickly, he tried to recall what it was he had written. Had he been elliptical enough? “Wait!”

He refilled the crystal decanter—why hoard this precious wine?—and came back with it. “Now, my dear lady, tell me again.”

The Rat did not know too much, but while she murmured again the little she had overheard, Felix was mentally packing. He had been ready for this always, of course. The sulfur odor from the Rat’s body, warmed by the steady passage of intoxicating wine, rose and filled the room. Felix’s nostrils quivered with delight. There would be time for everything, he knew. He put his glass aside, took hers from her hand, and set it down. Now! It was time to act immediately. They looked at each other. “Everyone needs a master,” Felix said, “even Rasputin. Even”—he straightened Anna’s skirt—“even you, my dear lady.” His chest swelled with pride. “Isn’t that so, my dear Schatzie, hmm?”

The dog, hearing her name, raised her head and her tail thumped twice before she fell back asleep.

“So it is Rasputin who has branded you so,” Felix murmured softly to the Rat. “Do you still love him? Is that it?”

In answer, Anna took the doctor’s large head in her two small hands. “That was the past,” she whispered. “Today I have come here to give myself to you. In the interests of science, of course,” she added. “And in the interests of love. Take me. One last time.”

“Is it true?”

“Yes. But we must be quick.” The stench of sulfur rose around them both. She gathered her wits about her, though the light was fading from her eyes.

Felix kept his hands on her thighs, and the embers of the enormous heat of Rasputin’s fingerprints glowed under his.

“You see,” said the Rat, “I have found out—don’t ask me my sources—that our war is almost over. Soon I shall be just another old lady, boring everyone with my stories, dependent on everyone, a bother. I want to be free to meet my Maker unspoiled, to forget all the troubles, just to be peaceful.” She paused, then continued. “Here I am, dependent on Herbert’s family, and for what? I see how hard Ilse works, I see the children growing up, and I ask myself, ‘Anna, why do you go on living?’ ”

The doctor stared intently into her face.

“And I answer myself,” she said. “ ‘There is no reason to go on.’ ”

“What is it you would like from me?” Felix was nervous. “You know I am at your service always.”

“I want”—the Rat leaned forward and took both his hands in hers—“I want to give Rasputin to you for your experiments. I want you to take him from my body.”

Felix held his breath.

“And I want you to take me, too. For I know one is impossible without the other.”

Felix started to protest.

Anna stopped him. “Do not say you can never accept. Do not say you can never find the way. For I have seen your work now. And I know you can.”

Felix’s mind was racing. It was true, he knew; he could and would accept. He could do it. His final proof. The final experiment he needed to prove the validity of all his experiments.

“You see,” said Anna, as if reading his thoughts. “I came here today to give myself, my entire self, to you.” She looked into his eyes significantly. “My entire self,” she repeated.

Felix whimpered.

“Do not be afraid, my friend,” she said. “Do you not see that this is what we both want?”

Felix nodded, pressing his lips once again to her lap. Anna took his head in her hands and raised it so that Felix’s gaze met hers. “It shall be so. But, my dear Doktor,” she said slowly, clearly, “I ask only one thing in return.”

“Anything,” Felix replied.

“In return,” said Anna clearly, “I ask only for the Tolstoi Quartet musicians’ fingers.”

“The fingers?” They looked at each other, astonished.

“Yes,” Anna repeated. “The fingers of the Tolstoi Quartet.”

Felix did not hesitate. For these were troublemakers, and the fact of being offered a whole living person—no, two persons, already regenerated, in exchange for mere body parts—well, there was simply no choice.

“Done, my dear lady.” He raised his wineglass. “You see how Felix answers you. Just name your price. You shall have it. I shall do just as you wish.”

Anna fixed her eyes on his and, while he watched, began to undo the brooch at her throat. “Come to me, my
Liebchen,
” she whispered. “Come to me now. While there is still time.”

In one quick gesture, Felix flung himself onto the floor beside the couch and Anna’s feet. In a kneeling position, he clasped her body and pressed his large oily head into her lap. He reached up and caressed her, the whole length of her little bent body.

Rasputin gathered the forces of his old rage, and Anna’s body grew hot where once he had touched her. The odor rose in the room. Anna quivered.

Felix kissed Anna’s body through her skirt and petticoat. And as he did so, intoxication overcame him. “My darling,” he murmured. “My darling little Countess. My Anna.” Familiarity permitted.

With a voluptuous sigh, forced out of her unwillingly, the Rat gave in to pleasure. She had not been called “my darling” for such a long time. She closed her eyes, and her left whisker thrummed. Felix stroked her body gently. In a swoon of pleasure, they vibrated together.

Gently, Felix slid his hands over Anna’s hump again. He trembled, and his entire body, not only the sexual location of feelings, became aware of itself and the sensation of love. He stroked her. The handprints, stimulated, also began to caress the Rat, sliding themselves into her secret places. “Oh,” the Rat moaned, for they burned her. They probed, fingers of fire.

“Does it hurt? Tell me where it hurts.”

The handprints, which could not bear to be touched, which had never, not since those fateful evenings, felt the presence of a man near them, began to sizzle and hiss in warning.

In a resolute gesture, Felix raised Anna’s skirt and petticoat and forced himself to look. “Rasputin.” Anna opened her body to Felix’s hands.

Each place the Monk’s hands had touched the Rat, her body flared red, like a hot coal, then ash white, and then, around the edges, a blackened mark appeared. There was the smell of cinders. The long, bony fingers still clasped her thighs, twisting like ivy or mistletoe. They had grown into her, yet one could see their own imprints dancing crazily as they wound. At Felix’s approach, they burned themselves in deeper, holding on for dear life.

Felix made himself look with clinical interest. “I must write Helmut of this,” he thought. Then, in an instinctive healing gesture, he leaned forward and put his lips on the hand marks. There was a sizzle of heat as the wet surface of his lips was seared by the molten passion of the prints. But where he kissed, the dance of fire subsided. He kissed her everywhere. And when he was done, the handprints lay still on her body, subdued, and the flesh began to resume its color again. But Anna herself was unconscious.

“Now, my boys,” Felix said to them, “you see who is the master here.”

Anna lay back across the sofa, her life force almost spent.

“Wait!”

Felix rushed into the kitchen and flung open the refrigerator door. The fingers, thinking they were going to be fed, woke from their slothy green dream, circling peacefully, and sensing his presence, they began to drum impatiently on the glass. “We are here we are here it is Mozart!”

Felix could not stand them. “Stop this at once.” The little fingers stopped. “Boys, I have news for you.” cried Felix. “You are soon to be released.” The fingers did not understand, sensing only the vibrations of his voice upon the sides of their prison. “You are going to be permitted to help a beautiful woman. One of the last,” he added. “Prepare yourselves.”

The fingers waited.

“But before this happens,” commanded Felix, “I want you to play for me one last waltz.”

The finger joints turned to one another uncertainly.

“You hear me, boys? Today I shall be giving you your liberty. But the price is one last waltz. None of that dissonant stuff, either,” he warned them. “You know what I mean.” The fingers were silent in their green fluid. “Play for me now all the Strauss waltzes, and by tonight you will be free to rejoin the hands of the Tolstoi Quartet.” He leaned close to the jar. “And if you disobey your Uncle Felix, you will never see liberty again.”

The fingers turned to one another uncertainly and began to take up a jerky swimming motion.

“Yes, that’s the idea,” said Felix. His mood changed to slightly manic. “Play, my boys, play!”

The joints of the fingers swung into the most famous waltz—
dah dah dah de dummm
—and began turning in the jar in time to the music.

“Yes, that’s it. That’s it exactly!” cried Felix over his shoulder. He forgot to shut the refrigerator door as he ran into the next room, back to the Rat. She was waiting for him, her eyes trancelike, turned up, her entire body exposed to him and for him alone, to do whatever he wanted with it, her breath almost gone from her body.

“May I have this dance?”

“S
chatzie,” Felix murmured as he circled past the watching dog. “Do not think I have forgotten you. It is only that human must seek human, do you not think? It is the law of the species, is this not so?”

Felix scrutinized the Countess carefully. Perhaps he had put too much anesthetic in her wine. He didn’t think so, but he was worried. He lifted her eyelids; the pupils stared back at him, enlarged. But perhaps it was better that he had given her a large dose. He had practiced before on people who were almost dead. Enough of that, not to think. That was another life, before his desires were fulfilled.

If the Rat understood, she gave little sign; she just tightened her arms around Felix and held him close, ever so close. She smelled the odor of his cigar, the scruffy man smell of him, and her being was suffused with his odor. Her body assumed its own outlines now.

“Felix, shouldn’t we…,” the Rat slurred.

“We have all the time in the world.” His fingers caressed her. His organ swelled. The waltzes played on through the darkening afternoon.

The Rat sank into dreamlike lassitude. “Soon it will be time, my dear Doktor,” she managed to say. She tried to wake up.

Felix kissed her words back. “I am master here. You need not worry,” he crooned.
Ta tah tah dee dum!
Everything circled to the universal note of A. Twilight darkened the windows; the city throbbed beneath them. As they danced, they watched the shadows lengthen, darken. Even Schatzie was a shadow dog, watching them as they circled solemnly, holding each other and, in a free hand, a long-stemmed glass. “Music, music.” Felix sighed. “Yes.” The Rat was silent.

“How much time did they say I had?” asked Felix finally. Part of him did not even care. “Human warmth, my Helmut, human warmth…friendship, kinship, the closeness of a woman, the hump, the little Countess, imagine….”

The Rat did not seem to hear Felix, so absorbed was she in her own dream of closeness. Finally she murmured, “Not much time, I am afraid.”

Recalled to themselves, they smoothed their vulnerable, imperfect bodies. “Not much time.”

“You tell me, dearest Countess, when you are ready.” Felix kissed her long, drifting fingers.

“Yes…,” she signaled, her eyes closed. He kissed her eyelids. “Yes.” Her hand drifted over his narrow chest.

“I assume they will be coming for me soon. They know where I am, is it not true?”

“Yes.” Anna was in a swoon of decision, preparing to enter some other world.

“I am already packed. I have already foreseen this,” Felix said. “I have always known that someday, somehow, mankind would find a way of stopping me. My bags have been ready for a long time.”

Felix thought of his arrangements, the ticket long since bought, the letter sent to Helmut, giving emergency instructions. His laboratory could be dismantled in minutes. His large trunk, the one with the careful shelves prepared, each with its leather strap to hold in precious specimens, was ready to be sent to the address of a willing woman friend, a contact of Helmut’s in Venezuela. Felix looked forward to his new life there. He had heard many good things. It was rumored that the Führer himself planned to live in South America one day, had even had a grand villa built for him there. There was a room prepared for Felix. “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” he thought. He imagined the place prepared for him, the choice bedroom, the laboratory promised in the basement of this villa, with real shelves, not just a kitchen cupboard.

“I have all faith in you,” the Führer had said.

Music played from the open refrigerator. The afternoon passed from dusk to night. The contents of the apartment seemed to swirl in the milky, darkening light. It was as if they were enclosed in a jar, a jar containing elements of life: oxygen, a watery, permeated air that nourished them as they swirled slowly, counterclockwise, thrumming to the universal tone of A—A-live—as did the groups of cells where life or semilife was being formed. A city held them, and beyond that city a continent, a planet. They danced, supporting each other, like little stick figures in a larger enclosure. Their eyes were focused on their own private reveries.

“Is there anything you’d like, dear lady?” asked Felix. “I mean, before?”

“Nothing,” Anna replied. “I am at peace now.”

“Good. It is good to be at peace.”

For the first time, the Rat felt her body united within a larger universe of music. The grasp on her body and soul that she had endured, first because of her deformity, and then because of her experiences with the Mad Monk, now fell away from her consciousness. No longer was she the prisoner of a consciousness of her body; she finally became her body, inhabiting herself as if for the first time, from the inside outward. She forgot herself, her bent, tortured fishhook spine, and, in that forgetting, became beautiful. Dreamily, she opened her heavy-lidded eyes and regarded Felix. Turning her palms upward, Felix felt all his tenderness flowing toward the Rat.

“So this is love, this sensation….” Felix surprised himself. Then he corrected himself, for he truly loved Schatzie also. And the Führer. What love of woman could replace love of ideals? Though Felix knew he was soon to be the agent of destruction, or at least partial destruction, he also knew that he would be the agent of liberation for the Rat, too.

Perhaps he would be able to bring her back again, unmarked, a new Countess Anna, to live a new, proud life in a proud body. But it was not the regeneration of the Rat that interested him so much, despite his feelings. No, it was Rasputin. The regeneration of a political mastermind. Felix wondered what Rasputin would be up to in the current world in which he would soon find himself.

Well, never mind, that was not his affair. “I am a scientist,” he reminded himself sternly. “I am a scientist first and foremost.”

As the stars and planets circled New York City, the sky began to glow. The sounds of the city were hushed; only a jazz samba beating itself upon the waves of the night rose up to their ears and caressed their damp hair.

“Listen.” Anna raised her face to the night air, closing her eyes, as if memorizing the sensation.

The sky was beginning to lighten, almost imperceptibly. “We still have a few hours,” Felix murmured, pressing his face to her hair.

“My dear,” the Rat said gently.

“Yes, perhaps you are right.” Quickly, he ran into the kitchen and said something to the Tolstoi fingers. “The last waltz,” whispered Felix tenderly as he took her in his arms. “My beloved Countess, may I have this waltz?”

Once more he held the wineglass to her lips, that wine into which, unseen and quickly, he had slipped something else. “Mercy,” he thought. “And compassion. My Hippocratic oath.” He watched as her eyelids became heavier and heavier. Before she could sag totally in his arms, he led her back into the kitchen and helped her onto the shelf. Dreamily, Anna lay down, curled into a small shell of herself, becoming the size of a shrimp.

“Gently.” Felix held her hand as she eased herself into the large jar that awaited her. She found a comfortable position and adjusted herself.

“Easy, my beauty,” he crooned.

The Rat curved and curled herself into the large-bellied earthenware jar. It was the one Felix had used in former times for making pickles and sauerkraut: his biggest jar. The Rat had no difficulty finding her curvature in the jar. She closed her eyes. Felix watched until she was fully asleep. The Rat did not move, but imperceptibly, as by a force larger than herself, the rhythm of the spheres, she began to circle slowly inside the jar. Slowly. Felix watched her, breathing his love into the rotating enclosure her curved body made.

As Anna sank further and further into her trance, the jar began to glow, and a strong greenish light flared up from it. There was a heavy odor of sulfur, mixed with the sweetness of violets and all the other flowers the Rat had ever worn on her body. The scent of grass, the scent of clean clothes and sunlight, all this rose from her body also. But over all was a yellow-green wrinkling odor. The odor rose and gathered itself forcefully. Before Felix’s watching eyes, the handprints revealed themselves and shimmered as if phosphorescent.

The prints danced upon the Rat’s body. Felix watched as they grew stronger and brighter in outline, sizzling in their dervish dance. The Rat sank more and more peacefully into her drugged sleep. But the hands cried out in their shining presence. Their hot smell filled the room.

Hastily, Felix now began to empty the shelves in the kitchen, filling his large trunk. He ran back and forth as daybreak threatened. He would leave no trace of himself. Felix thought of Herbert, of David, of the whole group who wanted to stop his experiments. His escape had been planned. He had always been prepared for its eventuality. “Come, Schatzie,” Felix commanded. But Schatzie did not move. She snoozed as if drugged. Felix did not worry too much about her. He found his ticket and papers. He was almost whistling as he packed quickly. The photo of the Führer was the only one he took. The photographs of children, the little ones who had been his patients, they could stay on the walls. A museum. He had no time now.

Accidentally, Felix’s sleeve brushed against the counter, where a row of jars stood waiting to be packed. There was a crash as one slipped off onto the floor. “Ach,
Dummkopf
!” Felix muttered to himself. There was no time, no need to clean up the mess of broken glass and liquid on the kitchen floor. He was running out of space. He would not be back.

“We must be quick, eh, Schatzie?” Felix asked. The dog did not respond. Felix opened the refrigerator and emptied the jars into the trunk. Each jar had its place and was cushioned. Carefully, reverently, he placed the jar containing the Countess and the handprints in its special place in the trunk. Felix wrote a quick note to Helmut. Then he wrote another to Herbert and David, and placed it openly on his desk, where it would easily be seen. He left a special jar behind as well. He had already drugged Schatzie, who was sleeping soundly.

At six in the morning, the movers arrived, ready to take Felix to the dock, to the ship that would take him to his new destination.

Felix tapped the trunk. “Careful with that.” Inside, the future slept in its jars, circling head to tail, as if in mothers’ wombs. The Rat dreamed on, shrinking more and more into herself, circling head to feet, as if her body had been made for this moment. A greenish light came from the trunk, even as the men carried it carefully. The handprints sizzled and leaped with excitement, merging their hot will to live with all the other animate parts of beings that Felix had collected. A smell of phosphorus rose from the trunk as two strong men staggered under its weight.

“Jeez, man, what you got in there?”

“My personal effects, gentlemen. My worldly effects.” Felix planned to tip them well. He smiled as he walked, and with satisfaction, he inserted his monocle into his eye socket. He did not wake the sleeping Schatzie, but rolled her in a blanket and tucked her under his arm.

Before closing the door of the apartment behind him, Felix took one last look upward at the angelic faces of the many children he had served. They looked down at him out of the frames, into their future lives, their loves, their own children. “For Uncle Felix with love.” “This, too, has been part of my real life,” he thought. “This, too.”

He felt pride, even now, at this moment, holding his dog in a rug under his arm, and a small shabby suitcase in his other hand. As Felix stood at the top of the stairs and supervised the downward descent of the trunk, he thought again of the children and said good-bye to them in his heart. Too bad he did not have enough place for their sweet faces in their glass frames, but his trunk was already full, given over to the sacrament of glass jars holding new life.

“I will make many more children,” he thought. And he squared his shoulders with pride. A super-race of superchildren. “And most of them from me,” he thought. “So now, my new children,” he addressed the specimens within the trunk, “we go forward. Forward, into a new world.”

The vermilion cry of four stringed instruments screeching in unison illuminated his departure. “Don’t leave us. Don’t leave us here alone!”

“Sorry, my boys. I am truly sorry. But it’s
auf Wiedersehen
for now. Till we meet again.”

Felix closed the apartment door behind him, walking behind his trunk. There was the sound of a plucked string from the apartment he had left.

Was all the wine of the night before making him giddy? Or was it the sudden rush of early-morning air striking his face and body? Why was this precipitate departure filling him with such joy? It was freedom, freedom to end a life that had already become too entrapping. It was the freedom of picking up, packing up, and leaving. Soon there would be the usual troubles: papers, officials, the effort of finding a place to put down his trunk and suitcase. What if the Führer’s house and place for Felix were not already prepared? In a part of himself, he knew that might be possible. Only…only…“No, my Führer will not let me down,” he thought. Felix forced his thinking into more positive channels again. For he was leaving his worldly practice to devote himself full-time to the regeneration of life. Already, as he said good-bye to his New York surroundings, he was preparing himself for the work to come.

“My children, we have work to do!” he called gaily down to the two moving men who now, near the final turn of the landing, set the trunk down on one end and took a breath. “It is a new day!” cackled Felix.

“Oh yeah?” The men regarded the little doctor sourly. Felix’s monocle glittered in the early-morning daylight, and his bushy hair stood on end, making an aureole around his head like the illustrations in the German children’s book
Struwwelpeter.
“What is he so happy about?” They looked at each other.

“A fine morning, gentlemen,” said Felix, stumbling down the stairs after them. Felix struggled under the weight he was carrying. In his small suitcase, he had managed to reserve a special place for his photograph of the Führer, and his own personal specimen, the bit from his own sex. Otherwise, the bag was filled with his journal observations and notes, a few personal grooming items such as his mustache comb, and that was all. Under the other arm, he held his heavily sleeping dachshund. “Wait for me,” he panted.