Unspeakable Things (12 page)

Ahead of him in the brightening spring air, Grand Central Station squatted, a yawning hulk. David felt for his press pass, the one that allowed him to travel for free. The early-morning newspaper hawkers were grouped beside the flat open mouth of the station, and the shoeshine boys had already set up their thrones for customers inside the door. The light shifted and changed in the doorway, reaching in striated bands through the gloom. The building clanged with activity—the sharp heels of impatient people clattering against the stone floor, and the information rotunda ringed with light and flurry like a pulpit.

David stood for a moment, his eyes adjusting to the changing light and sound. The station opened its dank mouth, and its bad breath soared toward and enveloped David. A dragon, ready to roar flames from its menacing mouth. In his mind’s eye, David saw the station as if hit by a bomb, crumbling suddenly to rubble. The scurrying figures rushing toward trains looked like ants to him, and he saw their twisted limbs, heard their suffocated cries. An acrid smell of flesh burning. David turned on his heel as the choking sensation overwhelmed him. He knew where he must go now. He flagged down a taxi.

There was morning activity at the psychiatric hospital, and David waited for a moment in the hopeful light of Adeline’s ward before being able to make out which bed was hers. The hospital echoed with hustle—the hopeful chirping sounds of trays, the shoes of the nurses whispering along the floor.

From a distance, David observed his mother, her thin hands picking at the sheets. She lay, her gray hair in a tousled aureole, staring at nothing. David was shocked to see her thin, frowsy face and form; he had never before seen his mother so untidy.

Before he knew it, David found himself kneeling beside her bed. “Mother,” he said. Adeline did not respond. Bitterness flooded his throat. There was dust under the iron bed, and parings of nails and scraps of adhesive. Disgusted, David got to his feet. “It’s me, David,” he said, clearing his throat.

Under the iron bedstead, a thin, flattened heap of bones, an imagined watching skeleton shifted slightly. What was that rustle that only David seemed to hear? Perhaps Adeline heard it, too, for she stopped her endless fingering of the sheets and held out one hand to David. As if blind, her hand walked about his face. “Michael?” She queried vaguely. “Is that you?”

David felt the impatient anger welling up in him. He knew he shouldn’t have come. “No, it is I, Mother. David,” he replied.

“Remember how you use to love my clothes?” said Adeline longingly, ignoring his self-identification. “Sit down, my darling boy,” and she pulled him to her side on the bed. David sat down reluctantly. The familiar hatred for her welled in him, but he tried—no, willed himself—not to show it. “I loved to see you dress up in my clothes,” Adeline said again, and a smile came to her ravaged face.

“No, Mother, that was not me,” David said cruelly.

But Adeline seemed not to hear. “They always said you looked like a girl, like me. Remember, my darling?”

David uncrossed his legs, standing up. “I just came to see you, Mother, but I cannot stay. I must get back to work.”

“Oh no,” cried Adeline suddenly. “Please don’t go. Stay with me awhile. Please.” Tears came into her eyes.

“Self-pity,” David thought disgustedly.

“I am so alone here,” she said. But it was too late for personal revelation. David deliberately looked at his watch.

“I must go, Mother,” he said again as cruelly as he could. He hated himself for his moment of weakness. How had he ever thought he could find tenderness with her?

Anger, deprivation, and mourning threatened to rise to his eyes, too, as he felt his brother’s presence among the dead.

“But where is Michael, then?” Adeline asked thinly, as if reading his mind.

As David did not answer, she quavered again, more loudly, “Where is my Michael, then?”

“Lie,” the ghost of Michael whispered. “Lie!”

“He’s fine, Mother,” said David weakly.

Disgusted by the answer, Adeline turned her face away.

David sat down again. “Mother, listen to me.” He gripped her hands as if to breathe his own life into hers. “You must try to think of something else. You must try to live.” Adeline gave no sign that she had heard him. Leaning forward, David hissed into her ear. “You must, for Father’s sake. You owe at least that to him.”

“Don’t speak of what I owe him,” Adeline retorted, suddenly catching fire in fury. “What do you know of it? How dare you presume to tell me what I should and should not do!” It was the old Adeline for a moment, imperious, arrogant, impossible. David did not know whether to laugh, be relieved, or feel angry about how difficult his mother could be.

“I have every right,” he said. Her eyes flashed and a bit of life came into her skin. “It’s selfish of you to keep on like this,” he continued.

“How dare you say this to me, David,” she retorted, proving that she had recognized him all along. “You! David! After everything that’s happened.”

“Especially after everything!” David responded. “Exactly.” He was impatient with her, did not approve of her, had never approved of her, he realized in an instant. He was too practical, disliked her airs and aspirations. It was Michael who had been close to her, the girlish one, the artistic hope of the family. Michael had loved dressing up in Adeline’s lace things, had loved the smell of perfume and flowers. Michael had Adeline’s nervous, delicate temperament, her love of music. David, the practical one of the family, was Herbert’s son. In that moment, David saw and accepted this. Darkness fell away from him; his old jealousies over his younger brother’s relationship with Adeline slid off him. They fell to the floor and his shoulders straightened, lightened.

“Let it go, brother,” Michael breathed from the dead space beneath the bed. “This is good.” Deftly, Michael scooped up the dark, useless pieces of David’s discarded weight, and with a thin, bony hand, he carefully piled them alongside the heaps of dust he had collected.

As if sensing this, Adeline’s mood suddenly changed, and she sat up in her bed. “David,” she said, addressing him directly and patting his hand, “I am so happy to see you.” She spoke to him now as one lucid person to another. “Sit down. I have something to tell you.” David sat tentatively again, and she looked into her remaining son’s eyes as if seeing him for the first time. “It is so good of you to come.” David waited. “You have always been so good, my dear David,” said Adeline directly to him. “To all of us.”

“She sees me! She knows who I am!” David’s heart grew wings.

“Thank you, David,” whispered Adeline, as if the effort of clarity had exhausted her strength. She sank back after giving this benediction, and David’s eyes glistened.

“Mother,” he said, this time respectfully, and raising her small hands to his lips, he kissed them.

“Did your father tell you the news?” asked Adeline. “The wonderful news?”

“No,” David said, waiting for her to go on. Or to lose the thread of her speech.

“The Tolstoi Quartet,” she said. “They are here in New York.” David did not tell her that he already knew this. “And when I am better, I am going to play the Schubert piano quintet with them in Carnegie Hall. Think, David, Carnegie Hall!” Adeline’s eyes shone. “So you see, my darling, I must practice. A lot.”

David realized that what he had seen when he first entered Adeline’s hospital room, the unending restless movements of Adeline’s hands on the sheets, were the movements of a pianist’s hands upon a keyboard.

“Do you remember your part?” he asked.

“In fact, I remember most of it. I am surprised,” she said proudly. “But I have asked your father to get the score for me, as I must rehearse. There is not much time to lose.”

David thought of the Tolstoi Quartet, that brave group of aging men. How fondly they had treated him, walking into the family house, carrying their instruments ahead of them. Frankly, David had been bored when the music started, and he had amused himself by watching the people in his mother’s living room. His brother, for example, who was taking it all in with large, rapturous eyes. David was frightened for his kid brother when he saw that swooning look. How could they ever communicate? Was it possible two such different souls could be brothers?

Allied with Herbert, his father, outside that soft, delicious circle, David felt as his father often did. Foolish, loving, practical, a taken-for-granted balance to the family.

The Tolstoi Quartet, like everyone else, not seeing the tensions, treated both boys as one. They smiled at David/Michael tenderly, nearsightedly as they left. “Such fine boys,” they said vaguely as Herbert and Adeline stood at the doorway, thanking them. Herbert paid them handsomely. “Good night.” The cries fluttered back into the apple-scented garden. David saw the family house in Vienna, solid, bourgeois; the garden, the garden wall, the street, the streetcars running on curved tracks, taking him and his brother to school each day.

“Good night.” The Quartet struggled into their coats and, embracing their instruments, descended into the soft night. “Fine boys,” they said again mildly as Michael stood pressed against his mother, regarding them gravely with great eyes. David, standing by his father, manfully shook their hands.

As if reading his memories, Adeline sighed now. “Ah, my David. Shall we ever hear such fine music again?”

David shook himself out of the past. “I don’t know, Mother,” he replied, forgetting to lie this time. “I don’t know.”

Both mother and son were silent. The spring air hovered somewhere, wafting to the far-off strains of music. Was it Mozart? No, it was a popular song on a tinny radio, down a gloomy corridor in a place where institutional food was being prepared.

“Well,” said Adeline, for once practical. “We must act ‘as if.’ And for that reason, I am rehearsing, even as I lie here. In case they should need me. In case, indeed, they meant it when they said we would play together in New York. It’s always best to be prepared, son.” The organized maternal side of Adeline, which occasionally surfaced, showed itself now. David felt the old moral lessons starting again.

“Of course,” he replied meekly. Then, more kindly, he said, standing up, “Of course they will play again. And you with them. It will be grand.” He put his hands in his pockets. “But now I must go. And you must practice. I will see that you get the score,” he promised. “And I will be back for the concert, you may be sure.”

“Good-bye,” Adeline replied absently as he quietly left the room. But her eyes were staring at something else, and her fingers were already beginning to move in chord-seeking clawlike gestures upon the folded edge of the sheet. She was humming to herself, humming so quietly that only Michael, lying close to her, pressing his very ashes against her living body, could hear.

Behind him as he left, David felt rather than heard the music going through Adeline’s mind. He was startlingly angry with his father for giving his mother such false hope. But since it was unthinkable to be angry with Herbert, David stopped the thought immediately, hurrying, now running with long, relieved strides through the streets of New York City toward the arms of Grand Central Station, which this time welcomed him joyously. The train was waiting when he arrived at the tracks, waiting just for him. And the old train sang on its rails, singing to the rhythm of Schubert, carrying David back to Washington, where he would spend days, weeks, and longer, hunched like a mole over old newspapers, magnifying glass in one hand, sorting carefully through all the old newspaper ads of Europe for those that advertised, in code, yet proudly, for additives: elixirs that, when ingested, would somehow deliver the attributes someone, a geneticist, for example, might crave.

“Be Smart.” “Get Lucky.” “Think Positively.” “Improve Your Memory.” “Develop Your Muscular Potential.” “Grow Hair in Only Twenty-one Days.” “Learn to Play Music in Twelve Easy Lessons.” “Enlarge Your Bust.” “Become the Master of Your Fate.” “Find True Love.”

These were the kinds of advertisements David scrutinized. What did they offer? What did they really mean? And who was profiting from all this in the end?

Somewhere, right now, people were doing experiments. In Europe, clearly, but the pills and powders that made it possible, the ground-up substances supplying these laboratories, were, David knew now, coming from America.

E
ach night after she had satisfied herself that all the others were sleeping, Anna, the Rat, undressed carefully under the heaped bedclothes in the darkened room. But this morning, she woke early. Spring light moved across the room. But the family slept, Ilse as never before. Herbert had already left. The Rat wondered what time it was; perhaps time to wake Ilse and the children.

Spring caressed Anna’s cheek as she regarded the still-sleeping figure of Maria, tucked in so tenderly beside her. Painfully, the Rat managed to shift herself into an upright position, which is to say a semicurled sitting one. Her spine ached. Anna drew aside the blanket where it weighted her. And in the soft first light of the morning, she peered at her body as she pulled her nightgown aside.

Anna’s spine, curved in a semicircle, condemned her to stare forever at her own lap. Because of this, she always, even to herself, even in the dark, kept herself covered. But now she took a look.

There it was. The handprints were still there. A sulfurous burn of a hand mark, each long finger articulated on her withered white flesh. The hands were etched into the flesh of each upper thigh as strongly as the print of a leaf can etch itself into cement or stone.

“Oh.” She sucked in her breath in dismay.

She forced herself to look closely. The bony, determined fingers, the emblazoned palms, the hands gripped her thighs and moved them forcibly apart. As she looked, a smell of quickly struck phosphorus rose up from her body. She felt herself on fire, scorched again and forever by the rapacious hands of Rasputin.

“Unspeakable things,” she murmured to herself, now tracing the outlines of the cadaverous hands on her body. She ran her own small, soft hands over the large marks. “He did to me unspeakable things.” And even while she said this to herself, even while she experienced anew the shame and horror, a little spasm, the beginnings of wild excitement, began to mount.

The hands flickered into flame; the flame ignited. Anna melted into her memories, confounded of shame and excitement. “Yes!” she cried to her now-dead lover. Unwillingly, yet at the same time gladly, the sigh rose up from her silent body. Rasputin seized her, looking into her beautiful eyes, entering her once more. Her body throbbed around his. And Anna gave way, rapturous and horrified.

“Dear lady…,” Rasputin had said ironically. “Would you do anything to save your husband?”

“Yes,” Anna had replied. “Little fool,” she thought now, looking back.

She saw herself once more in the dark room alone with the Mad Monk, a candle flickering. His savage, sensual face stared at her, the head hooded, partially hidden by his cowl. But nothing could veil his fierce desires.

“Very well,” he had commanded, not even bothering to look directly at the woman as she stood, a supplicant for her husband’s lands and money, a bent figure bowed before him. “You shall be my companion for two weeks. And after that, I shall intercede with the Little Father on your family’s behalf.” How quickly Anna had agreed. Even then her heart had pounded with dread. Her body itself was a hooked question mark. She waited meekly. Rasputin took her roughly by the hand, blew out the candle, and led her through a hall.

A cold wind swirled around them. And suddenly, there was an ignited odor in the air. Perhaps it was the odor of fresh air after lightning; perhaps it was the Devil himself. But always, forever after, no matter how often she washed, the Rat was to perceive that odor. It would accompany her everywhere. Like night fog, it swirled about them, and her body was forever after impregnated with it.

“Look at me,” Rasputin commanded. Rasputin parted the skirts of his robe. His mad eyes fixed on hers; he drew from his skirts his enormous member. It throbbed and weaved toward her, pointing toward her body as surely as a dowser’s stick. It quivered. “Look!” Anna tried to look away, down, up, anywhere but directly in front of her. “Look. Behold the Rod of God!” There was moisture on the end of it, a shiny, pearly drop hanging from its tip. The enormous branch of flesh moved toward her; it appeared to be drooling lasciviously. Despite herself, an answering river of liquid ran through her body, down her thighs, a shining river on which to travel inward.

Rasputin stared at her fixedly as his member grew and swelled. “Down on your knees,” he commanded. “Down on your knees before your God!” He grappled for her hump, held it, clawing, palpating. Roughly, he pushed her head against him. The oversized penis grew and found her mouth. “On your knees. Pray,” commanded Rasputin. “Pray, my little Countess.” His head was thrown back; he was staring fixedly at something far away. He began to rock in her mouth. “Pray.”

On her knees, with Rasputin fondling her hump, Anna was trying to pray. “Please, God,” her heart cried. Her mouth choked around his huge organ. Above her, Rasputin spasmed, whispering strange sounds, fingering the heavy rosary. The beads swayed against Anna’s face. There was a rank smell rising up from his robes and his body, from the enormous searching organ, with its mysterious forested hillocks below.

“Pray, my Countess. Behold thy God,” Rasputin commanded. “Say it aloud. Let me hear you.”

“Please, God,” Anna choked.

“Oh God,” said Rasputin at the same moment. He tore the clothes from her hump, and his hands forced themselves downward. Suddenly, he drew his huge throbbing penis out of her mouth. He grabbed her and in one motion ripped the clothes from her body. “You were praying then,” he muttered. “Now I will give you something to really pray about.” He turned her around and around in his large hands, the smell of incense and unwashed male musk mingling together. “Ah, let me take a good look at that little body of yours.” Anna tried to hide with shame, but Rasputin carefully examined her hump, her deformed spine. Then he once again tipped her face to his. “Look at me, little Countess,” he commanded. “They call me the Devil. Do you think I am the Devil?” He grasped his enormous penis in both hands. “Some may say I am the Devil, but in fact I represent the only true Christ. I come to you as the only true Christ. The living God, do you hear me?”

Rasputin pushed her down on a rough bed. “
Your
God, do you hear me? I am your God.” Grappling in the dark, the Rat tried to defend herself from his sudden cruel hands. “Say it,” he whispered. “Let me hear you say it.”

Before she could say anything, Rasputin grasped her mouth in his. He bit her savagely. A taste of salt…He bent his head toward her thin breasts. A searing pain shot through her body. “Say it.” Anna smelled his sulfurous odor mixed with sweat and wine.

Rasputin pulled up his monk’s robe and fell upon her voraciously. “Pray, dear lady,” he hissed sardonically.

Anna began to cry piteously. “Have mercy,” she pleaded.

“God has no mercy,” replied the monk. Inexorably, he held her legs apart and gazed at her sex.

“What a pitiful thing a woman is,” he mused. “They give us life. And they can destroy our lives as well.” He seized the huge silver crucifix dangling from his rosary and pressed it to Anna’s bluish lips. Then he held it to own lips and kissed it. “Blessed Virgin Mary, I do this in your name.” The words were drawn out of him, thick and slow. “I do this for you.”

Shrinking, the Rat lay exposed under his gaze. “A poor sad creature, you are, eh, Countess?” He burned her with his eyes, which changed color, green to fiery, as he looked at her. “And a poor sad creature is your husband, the so-called Count,” he added. Anna tried to curl herself up, to really become the small protected shrimp. “Remember your duty to the Tsar and the Holy Family!” Rasputin roared.

Then he fell to his knees, grasping his swollen upright penis as if it were a candle. Or a crucifix. He held it between both hands as it became a shining fleur-de-lis. The monk bent and kissed its blazing purple tip, taking it reverently between his lips. He fingered his rosary, rubbing it against the organ. “Lord, I give myself to you. Take my ornament; take my bright sword. Use it as thou wilt against thine enemies.” His penis flared; a shining aureole surrounded it.

“Lord, I am prepared to do thy will.” Grasping her firmly by each thigh, Rasputin forcibly tore her body open. A searing pain—the wrack of Anna’s fused spine cracking open. There was a sizzle of flesh, an imprint of his large hands forcing her body apart, an imprint so strong that she did not even notice it under the greater pain of her body’s deformity giving way. He entered her and the hot light of his organ pierced her. Rasputin forced deeper and deeper, his penis growing so huge it reached to her heart. And there it penetrated, stayed.

“Let us pray together,” he said. The hot organ became a burning fer-de-lance and drove itself in farther. Her flesh sizzled. He grabbed her hump and forced her head back. His eyes rolled up and she saw only the whites. He rammed his member into her again and again, until finally he was sated. First light was leaking through the high wainscoted windows. She swooned.

When she came to, Rasputin was already retying his robe. “Clean yourself up, dear lady,” he said. “I shall expect you here at the same time tomorrow night.” He pushed her aside with not another glance. Small, naked, broken, the Rat lay in her violation. She heard heavy-booted footsteps receding through the stone corridors. It was the hour of Matins.

The Rat lay there dry-eyed. She did not weep for the rough violence that had entered her. She did not weep for her own insignificance. What, after all, was she offering Rasputin? Hers was the body of a woman who had never known sexual pleasure. The reluctant advances of her husband had never aroused her. “Anna?” he had pleaded wetly, once his mother had given him the idea of what to do. “Anna, tell me. Is it all right?” The more her husband had asked her permission, the more she despised him, lying inert. The Rat could not remember how they had managed to conceive their children.

As she found her clothing, pasting it over her humped body, the sound of monks chanting was rising from the chapel on the other side of the building. She made her way out, shamefully. Now, like a dog, the Rat dragged herself home through the streets of Saint Petersburg. It was not yet dawn, and finally she managed to find her carriage, the coachman sleeping peacefully, in front of the palace beside the frozen Neva. She stumbled painfully, spots of blood staining her passage, into the large house, and then to bed. There she lay all day, her eyes closed.

She dreamed of Rasputin, his huge organ, and of her total surrender. Anna was in a state, climaxing again and again. She could not stop the strange sensations overtaking her. She refused to see anyone, even her children. She could not live until she would be with the Mad Monk once again. “Your mother has a headache,” her mother-in-law said, shooing the children away.

The next evening, the Rat once more summoned her carriage when the others were asleep, and returned to the covenant she had made.

Rasputin looked at her directly, his somber eyes burning with knowledge. “So, my dear lady,” he murmured, “you will come to like this. Even this.”

The words, the realization of truth, sent Anna into an immediate panic. “No…,” she pleaded on his bed, naked, curled up around herself.

“My dear Countess…” Rasputin smirked. He raised her small clawed hand to his lips and kissed it sardonically. His large hands were gentler this second night. They prayed together.

The same smell of sulfur, the same searing of large handprints on her thighs. But this time, Anna ignited also. A strong burning smell rose up from her flesh as her body met his. There was a green sizzle in the air. Rasputin poured his hot spurt into her again and again. His enormous organ throbbed. “My sword of Christ,” he called it, forcing it into her till she thought she would burst. His hands seared her body. He touched her everywhere. She swooned. But her body’s mouths cried
More!

His hand grasped her hump, and he forced her over the bedpost and took her one last time from behind. “On your knees, Countess,” he hissed, “on your knees!” He rammed her again and again, reciting the liturgy as he did so. Blasphemies and exhortations. He recited it backward and forward. He took her both ways, too.

At dawn, Rasputin pulled out of her as quickly as before. But this time, Anna wanted to keep him in her, to know this man. She tried to hold him with her body, squeezing against him as he withdrew. He laughed ironically. “So, perhaps you are changing now, my fine little lady?” She opened her eyes just long enough to see him close his monk’s robe about him once more. A glimpse of something strange and hairy—was it a tail?

“Dress yourself, dear lady,” he said. Anna’s torn-open body lay meekly, still throbbing with desire. All of a sudden, she longed to put her arms around the monk, to kiss his large sensual lips with a passion she had never felt before. “You will come to like this, to crave this,” Rasputin murmured cruelly, as if reading her thoughts. “Already you are developing the appetite. You see, dear lady, even a countess is not so high-and-mighty.” He mocked her as he left the stone-flagged room, his rosary clicking, his robe swirling about his legs.

Anna managed once more to get herself to the entry and then into her waiting carriage. The monks’ chants rose mournfully from their stone crypt. By now, the Rat had become obsessed. All day she lay in her bed at home, not speaking to anyone. She thought without stop of the moment when she would rejoin Rasputin and her pact with the Devil.

The sulfurous handprints on her thighs throbbed with desire, seeking again their owner. They would not be still. Her body twitched and jerked, as if now it had become a phantom body desperate for completion—Rasputin’s hands on her thighs, his large entry into her, his blazing sword. Anna felt she had come into her real life. Everything before had been unreal, uninteresting. She burned only for her nights with Rasputin.

As the two weeks neared their end, Rasputin began to be tender toward Anna. He kissed her hair, moved her body toward his more gently. He still came as many times, sometimes even more. He would not let her move from him; he lay in her body, hardening again and again, coming without end. “Now I am truly lost,” he murmured. He caressed her private parts. “The source of joy…” He spoke aloud to the Holy Mother and then he came in Anna again.