Unspeakable Things (20 page)

“Forward!” The merchant ship
Calypso
was ready down at the docks, with instructions to carry its secret, most important passenger to Venezuela. A laboratory and a job were already waiting for him. On board, Joe Riley, the young captain, waited. In the port of La Guaira, the beautiful one-legged whore, Carmelita, was also waiting hungrily for Joe. The parrot on his shoulder, Sugar, took an instant dislike to Felix, and as he walked onto the deck, Sugar, squawking, hurtled out and grabbed him by the nose.

But Felix was now safely on the boat and out of the harbor, turning from time to time to gaze back at the receding skyline of New York with mingled pleasure and regret. Then he allowed himself to look fully forward, to the horizon, toward which the boat was steaming. Felix finally put Schatzie, still in her rug, on the deck near his feet and lit a cigar. He leaned on the rail. For a brief time, at least, he could relax.

Three hours later, when David and his men from the federal government, carrying their solemn warrant of arrest for espionage, came to Felix’s apartment, they did not even have to break open the door. David sounded the bell a couple of times. Then he tried the handle. The door swung open, welcoming them inside. Above, the somber faces of little children watched them enter, impassive. “To Uncle Felix with gratitude.” The apartment was hushed.

“Anybody here?” But there was no one, no answer. “This the place?”

“Yes,” said David.

But just as David had suspected—in fact, as he had halfway hoped—Felix was no longer there. David felt a mixture of exasperation and relief. He rubbed his grainy eyes. Cold morning light leaked all over the place, revealing the shabby carpet and curtains. Felix’s office was tidy, the instruments carefully laid out beside the sterilizer, and the examining table with a fresh sheet on it. All was impeccable.

David went to Felix’s desk and halfheartedly opened and shut the drawers. He was hoping to find nothing. And his hopes were rewarded. “This is it, gentlemen,” he said. He wanted to go home, home to Ilse and the children, back to that little room where he could at least lay his head down for a moment and take a few hours’ repose. But he could not ask for that. His personal life he kept secret from the men with whom he worked. Of course there was a dossier on him; he knew that. But as long as things were not spoken aloud, David could keep his family alive. Somewhere, he was important, needed, and the core of a family. Somewhere in the world—in fact, right here in New York, across town, if anyone cared to know it. “Oh, hurry up!” he thought, as the agents opened and shut each drawer again.

David walked into what had served as Felix’s kitchen and blinked. A large jar stood on the counter. From it rose a briny smell, and a glow. Within it, now totally silent, curved and imploring, lay the meek little fingers of the Tolstoi Quartet. David looked, first at the jar and then away for a moment, clearing his vision to look again more closely. The fingers lay without sound. On the counter, there was also a large crinkled envelope. David took it. “Whistle the first few lines of the Mozart—you will know which one—and these boys will find their way to their rightful owners. Sorry for all the trouble. Heil Hitler.” Felix had scribbled this in Esperanto.

From the mess of brine and glass shards on the floor at his feet, in a great heave and shudder, a small dachshund staggered up, groveling and licking at David’s shoes. “Schatzie!” said David, thinking he recognized the dog. The dog he called Schatzie snuffled and snorted, wiggling the entire back half of her body in ecstatic greeting. The dog shook off the glass shards from her short hair. And it was then that David saw that this dog, now wagging her behind most enthusiastically as she begged to be loved, to be picked up, gathered in, and taken home to a family, had a slight but visible deviation that made it impossible to call her Schatzie. The dog, a Schatzie replica in almost all respects, differed in a most important one. This dog, now thumping unmistakably in greeting, had two tails. Two tails! Yes, two perfect tails.

David recoiled from the dog. Then, in one gesture, saying, “All right, all right,” he patted the dog and bent down and picked it up. “All right.” The fingers began to drum a strange rhythm on the glass.

David felt in his bones the beginnings of relaxation. All he wanted was summer, which he knew was coming, and then, for his family, a quiet place with a garden. In his mind, he saw himself teaching little Philip to play chess. Music filled the dream space where he watched this scene, his father aging, watching this with him. Then David watched himself also aging, sitting in the garden with his wife and children, then Maria growing up, then Philip.

He put his arm around his wife, who sat with a basket of apples, which she was peeling, while the wind blew its autumn leaves about the garden. There was music coming from the house behind them. Ilse looked at her husband lovingly. He tightened his arm around her; no need to say a word. Maria and Philip married; their children played in the garden. David and Ilse were old now, peaceful. The War had ended long ago. And at their feet in that autumn garden, an old dog watched them and laid its head on its paws. The old dog, the family dog.
Thump, thump,
a soft brushing sound that accompanied them always, hardly noticed, so constant was it through their lives. The sound of two tails, two happy tails wagging in unison. “Yes, Mitzie. Dear Mitzie,” they crooned to the dog.

Thump, thump.
Swishing through life.

B
efore leaving, David picked up the smoky lab jar that held the fingers and queasily closed it. The liquid was oily and the fingers started to circle. He put the jar in his briefcase and walked to midtown. That afternoon, he waited at the Automat. “Enjoy the dance,” David said to the jar. “It might be your last.” The fingers gyrated madly in their amniotic brew.

David waited a long time in front of a curdled cup of coffee. He knew that the members of the Tolstoi Quartet, informed by his father, would come to him. Finally, by late afternoon, curious and pulled by news they could only half understand, the musicians arrived. “We expected your father, Herr Hofrat.” They looked at David suspiciously.

Their eyes were furtive yet hopeful. Shabby and unwashed, clutching their instruments, the Quartet seated themselves at the scratched Formica table. The chairs protested as the men pulled them in. “So, my boy, have you brought news for us?”

David unscrewed the lid of the large jar and placed it on the table. Furious green fumes rose up. The men peered at David and then at the jar and its contents. They looked at one another, while David nodded encouragement. One by one, they slid their damaged hands into the open jar. The life-giving fluid was noxious, pea green and bilious. It rose up to meet each violation of its surface, and lapped, carnivorous, to catch each hand.

Voraciously, each severed finger leaped onto its place on the hand of its rightful owner as if to strangle it. They attached themselves and started sucking greedily.

The shock was so secret and so immediate that no one could speak. It had happened so suddenly. Without a further word, the men pushed back their chairs and left the Automat.

David sat there wondering what to do with the jar and where to pour the remaining liquid. He dumped his leftover cup of coffee into the jar, and quickly, before anyone could notice, he, too, ran out of the Automat. The jar waited on the stained table. That evening, it would be added to the huge ever-steaming pot of unusually strengthening pea soup. There would be a number of street fights in the city the next day among the temporarily insane warriors who had ordered soup for lunch.

The Quartet walked through the city grimly without speaking. Their left hands were tightly curled around their newfound brothers. A green cloud surrounded them. “Welcome back,” crooned the restored hands from every cell as they caressed their prodigals. Holding their precious left hands carefully, the musicians entered the subway and took the long trip back to their underground living quarters. Their shabby basement room was home to them now. And all of New York City was their city now. They walked the last blocks. The great-spired city, its dusk like conflagration, reverberated with magnificence. The organ notes of sunset were calling to one another, orange-purples and a corolla of reds. Sound ricocheted from the gleaming towers. A hundred thousand little lights went on. “We’ve been here all along,” they blinked. “Did you just notice us?”

“And where have you been, my darlings?” asked the fingers of the restored missing ones. “We have been waiting so long for you.”

“Wait and find out,” thought the pinkies impatiently to themselves. They couldn’t bear to be touched, for they were different now. But the hands could not keep from caressing the soft pads, the fingertips no longer calloused, of the newfound fifth fingers.

“We have been so lost without you. Now we are complete.” They stroked each other in the safe snail of the closed hands. The pinkies shook off the grasp of thumbs and loving palms. Being fingered by others irritated them.

Once back in their room, the Quartet could not wait to try their beautiful new hands. The instruments bucked in their cases, ready to be let out. “Easy, boys,” the musicians soothed as they carefully released their instruments and began the ritual of wiping them down. They were gentle and loving, and the left hands lay compliant.

“Bach,” the first violinist declared. “It must be Bach. For thou shalt have no other God before Bach. The hushed harmonies of God.” He stopped, and the musicians hesitated. “No,” he said, correcting himself, “Mozart. Mozart is more joyful.”

“Yes!” cried the fingers in finger language, unwinding themselves from one another and stretching. The lost brothers twitched in the presence of their newly attached siblings and tried to free themselves from this quintuplet group behavior.

As the first strains of the Mozart Quartet No. 1 in G Major began, it was evident that something was wrong. Discordancy and squeaking erupted along the fingerboards. Since the musicians were rusty, they tried to ignore the involuntary misbehavior of their left hands. They pressed closer to their instruments, urging the music forward with their bowing arms. But the hands cramped and the fingers squabbled against one another.

For the newcomers, these regenerated fingers, were not “normal.” They had become superfingers. They were no longer team players. After being nourished for so many months by Felix’s brew of liverwurst and other life-enhancing substances, they had evolved into a master race of little fingers. They stretched in strange ways, made sexually suggestive motions, and clambered all over the strings of their instruments in lewd postures. They threatened to break the others’ knuckles. Angrily, they shoved and scratched. “Move out of the way!” They reached out and hammered the notes of all the parts.

But the other fingers and thumbs would have none of this. Calloused, with strongly developed muscles, they also fought back. “Keep off, this is my note,” they insisted, shoving just as hard. Nevertheless, the old fingers were being pushed out of their way by the superpinkies, and they could no longer hit the true notes. Those new digits were dominant, prehensile. They could do anything, reach any note at any moment, and hit the top harmonics, too. They were aggressive and warlike. “We’re the boss now!”

While the fingers quarreled about who would be boss, the musicians stopped playing. “What is it?” asked the second violinist. “What are they doing?” He looked at his twisted fingers, excitedly scratching one another. “Listen.”

“Can it be? I think they were playing Wagner.” The cellist sighed. “It sounds so dark and so horrible. This is not Mozart!” This was the dawn of a new race, a master race with master fingers. It was the sound of triumph and victory.

Outshouting the sweet notes of Mozart, the little fingers tapped the
Meistersinger
overture, which Hitler had decreed for every rally.

The Tolstoi musicians listened to the music and watched their alien fifth fingers knocking out every note. The new fingers were celebrating the immolation of the old order.

The Quartet realized that the new fingers had to be retrained. The musicians decided to use a system of punishment and reward. Recognizing that only Germanic authority would work at first, they reluctantly began spanking their lost fingers. The new pinkies were strong-willed, but the Quartet simply would not tolerate Wagner. Each time they pushed another finger out of the way, each time they secretly plucked down a Wagnerian note, the musicians whacked the offending fingers with their bows. “This hurts me more than it hurts you!” they grunted. Then the cellist cried, “It hertz!” The four men doubled over in laughter.

Deprived of the elixir that had sustained them, and without Felix’s formula, the fingers slowly shrank. They were no longer special. They missed their liverwurst mixture, pig fat and innards, which the Quartet, on principle, refused to serve. To stave off all noxious Germanic influences, the Quartet switched to Italian salami instead. The little fingers became weaker and more compliant. The men worked hard to accustom them again to the familiar classical tuning, to move them down on the strings, to get over the habit of pressing the strings slightly higher and sharper, when the rest of the fingers were peacefully obeying their traditional tuning.

For tuning had changed. In the middle of the nineteenth century, some composers and players had started adding additional stretch to their instrumental tuning, But in 1939, Goebbels, then Minister of Propaganda, made it official. He decided to change the tuning of all musical instruments. The note A was cranked from 432 hertz to 440. The old classical tuning of A, as it stood, was too calming, too inward. Goebbels wanted something that would incite the crowds. Though not discernible to the human ear, this change moved the whole tuning up, one whole tone sharper and more insistent. The director of music, Furtwängler, supported this edict. It was known that Verdi, Italian and individualist, had refused to alter all his tuning, while Richard Wagner, his nineteenth-century contemporary, had complied. The operas of Wagner, Teutonic, nationalistic, now with an entire industry devoted to them at Bayreuth, inspired the passions of the Führer. That was enough reason for Goebbels’s decision. He did a few experiments in support of the edict. And the music of Wagner was on the last program given by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra before it was forced to close its doors at the end of the War.

The government-ordered tuning was effective at inciting mob violence. People went berserk more easily, and no one knew why. Soon all of Germanic-conquered Europe was screwed to a higher pitch. Beneath the perception of hearing, the tuning raised the level of crowd anxiety and patriotism. It was a do-something tuning. Inspired by this new level of sound, crowds went wild. People could be easily persuaded now. Political speeches rose to a shriller tone, and the music did, too. An immense collective destruction rose uneasily at the sound of military bands, the warlike sounds of triumph and anxiety. Later, European orchestras would tune their instruments even higher, some to 444 and beyond.

The members of the Tolstoi Quartet had never been made aware of Goebbels’s edict regarding the new tuning, and even so, they would have ignored it. But the new fingers were restive. The Nazi 440 they were accustomed to made the old tuning sound a little flat to them. Each time the little fingers inched their way a bit above the normal note according to the old tuning, the Tolstoi musicians whacked them again with their heavy horsehair and Pernambuco bows.

After a while, the pinkies were forced to play melodically with the others. Hitched like oxen forever joined to the rest of the hand, the new fingers became sullen and sluggish. They drooped, were less eager to dominate all the notes and the other fingers. They feigned sleep and finally refused to move at all, falling asleep during passages where they were called up to excel, lulled into laziness by the more interior sound of the old tuning. They buckled and lay down on the job.

“Work for a living!” the men cried, flogging their fingers unmercifully. Sore at night, resentful and full of self-pity, the pinkies finally learned. And so they went back to work.

When the pinkies started to behave again, the men allowed them a tiny smear of liverwurst on their knuckles. But it would take a lot of smears of liverwurst to retrain those hands to play as one. And a long time to get the little fingers out of their reflexive Wagnerian obsession and back into harness with good old Mozart.