Unspeakable Things (7 page)

The Rat twitched in her little space, and Maria moved her body accommodatingly to make room for her. Everyone stirred in the little room, as if a wind had touched them, and then everyone, in unison, turned over and slept more deeply.

A
fter the last little patient of the day had left, Felix took a moment to enjoy a cigar, a glass of wine in hand. Schatzie lay at his feet, adoring. But Felix did not linger too long. For he was a disciplined man with a careful schedule laid out for himself.

He moved rapidly toward his laboratory, as he called it: a small dark closet that he had cleverly converted into a small working lab, complete with a microscope, smuggled in from Germany during those last days, and shelves of slides. He screwed his monocle more tightly to his eye and bent toward the eyepiece of the microscope.

There, a small number of cells lay beneath his eye in their petri dish. It appeared, though he could not be too sure, that there had been some activity. Briskly, Felix tried to focus the eyepiece further. He could not be sure; no, he could not. He moved to the counter beside the instrument and carefully noted the date and time, as well as his hesitant observations.

Felix opened the small refrigerator beneath the counter. His jars lay in their opaque darkness, small bits and pieces swimming in fluid. Felix regarded them gravely, then shut the refrigerator again. Schatzie sighed and shifted position, waiting outside the laboratory door. The laboratory was the one place she was not allowed to go, although Felix was carefully cultivating, in a small dish, some specks of Schatzie’s dander.

In another dish, a small section of Schatzie’s tail, a very small, scrupulously clean bit of tail tissue, lay in its formaldehyde, ready for regeneration. Felix had taken this bit from Schatzie under local anesthetic; the dog had not even felt it. It was only when Felix had shaved the dog’s tail preparatory to the incision that Schatzie, feeling slightly shorn and humiliated, had turned and regarded Felix with reproachful eyes. Felix, before he anesthetized the shaved tail, had washed that part of Schatzie so tenderly that the dog had finally sighed with pleasure. Felix was skillful; the anesthetic had worn off quickly, and Schatzie was her old happy self again, wagging the bare thing with its little Band-Aid on it. Now the hair had grown back. But the piece of Schatzie lay in Felix’s cell bank, ready to be immortal. A superdog. With a supertail.

Felix believed in regeneration, the creation of the whole organism from its smallest part. For this reason, he had collected body parts, which he was storing until he could finally discover the secret of growing whole ones again.

His jars were full of mysterious things. The closet smelled strangely: formaldehyde, vinegar, and a kind of protein broth that Felix made himself over a hot plate and fed to the body parts. It was part oatmeal, part liverwurst. The tissues thrived in their milky jars, and seemed to thrash and swim when he dropped the mixture in.

Felix surveyed his collection happily. All seemed healthy, in good condition. “Rest, my little ones,” he said, preparing his mixture carefully and filling an eyedropper. The gruel had to be fresh each evening, he had discovered. He had killed an ear by feeding it old gruel. Now he was more careful, and the results, he thought, were good.

Felix’s main goal was the study and propagation of genius. What was genius? How could one ensure its survival? How could one produce it? What happened to the bodies of dead geniuses? Did their genes die with them, or could the cells, the genetic code, somehow be preserved? Felix devoted many hours to the study of these questions.

Felix had managed to preserve a piece of skin from Marthe’s neck. “One never knows,” he had thought in his practical way. “There might come a time when I will need it again.” There she lay in her jar. But Felix was not sure he would want Marthe again, even though he wept for her occasionally. Felix liked to weep; he liked the slow, soft letting go of tears: so warm. He liked to weep for Marthe; it made him feel tender, almost sexual. Thinking of her sadly aroused him.

But Marthe was not, had never been, a genius. Her regeneration would have to wait. Felix had more important things to do.

Felix coveted a piece of Herbert, that wily rascal, to round out his collection. He respected Herbert a great deal. It was too bad Herbert was misguided, but perhaps with some genetic engineering that could be changed. Felix had not yet figured out how to get Herbert’s consent to donate his tissue. He meant to talk to him, but somehow Felix quailed before the prospect. Best, he thought, would be a section from Herbert’s scalp. It was liver-spotted already. Felix might be able to convince him he had skin cancer, offer to remove it. He smiled to himself. That might do. After all, the family trusted him.

He had been present at the birth of Ilse, as a medical student assisting Marthe’s father. Marthe’s father had been called away, and it had been Felix who had, in fact, delivered the baby. Not only that, he had also delivered Ilse of Maria, a very strange little girl indeed. But an interesting one. They had every right to be grateful to him, grateful even for their lives, which he, Felix, had breathed into them. How strange that they had found themselves in New York after all these years.

Herbert had much to thank Felix for, if only he were to think about it, but Herbert was stubborn and strong; in his own way a great, a very great man indeed. There was something magic about the man, powerful; a great negotiator, a man of principle. Even in Felix’s youth, Herbert, “Herr Hofrat,” was legendary. Felix was not fit to touch the hem of his greatcoat. Yes. The man should be preserved, thought Felix. He belonged in the collection.

Felix squirted a little red dye onto the slide before him, adjusting the cover slip with a delicate hand, and bent once more to the microscope. He thought he saw the cells wiggle. He had learned to be patient. Regeneration might take a bit of time.

Each month, Felix received a shipment from Europe, jars carefully packed in dry ice, and delivered (emergency, Red Cross) by airplane and then by ambulance to his door. Carefully, lovingly, Felix opened these packages, cradling the jars in his hand. Someone had written on them, identifying the parts. So far, he had managed to collect a bit of the brain of Rolfe Kahn, the physicist whom the Nazis had managed to collect for him. That was his best specimen so far.

Also among his choicest prospects was the left eye of Oswald Herten, the painter. (Felix would have preferred the right eye, which had the better vision, but that had somehow been lost in transit.) He had a scrap of bone from Lenhard Weisen, the famous German Jewish runner who had appeared briefly, during the Olympic Games, but who then had somehow mysteriously disappeared. He had a fragment of thigh from another half-Jewish high jumper; the tip of the earlobe of Heinz Werner, a composer; a few cells from the nose of a famous—now dead—literary critic; and various scraps of body parts of assorted European playwrights, artists, and writers, all of dubious origin, all disappeared now. His network had been good.

His source of supply was his dear old childhood friend who had remained in Austria throughout the unfortunate war. Felix remembered their discussions during medical school. Helmut had always believed in the concept of the “master race,” perhaps even more than had Felix himself. Helmut had even tried to dissuade Felix, sometimes strenuously, from marrying Marthe. Perhaps he had been right. Marthe had proved nervous, neurasthenic. Helmut himself had never married.

“Ours is a fine and manly friendship,” Felix told himself, thinking of Helmut, his earnest face and keen eyes. It was an intellectual meeting of the minds that endured far beyond any feeling for women.

Helmut was the last person he had seen at the station. Helmut had gripped Felix’s hand in his own and looked deeply into his eyes in a firm, manly way when Felix left. “God be with you!” Helmut had shouted after the departing train. Now the two doctors maintained a clandestine correspondence, a brief scientific notation smuggled in with the jars. Felix recognized Helmut’s writing on the labels.

“My friend, my dear friend,” he thought sentimentally. And tears welled up in his eyes. He wondered when he would see his friend again. Perhaps after all these troubles were over. Felix waited for a sign that he could return to Europe once again. Meanwhile, he rejoiced in Helmut’s important position in the Party. Together, they were participating in a great new experiment, the thing they had always dreamed of: the creation of a better, purer society. This, this new society created from the old, would be their true progeny, the child they would create together finally. Felix knew Helmut, in his laboratory in Austria, felt exactly the same. He pictured his friend also bending over a microscope, carrying out his experiments, making his notations on reproduction.

Of course, all human life could not be so serious. Felix respected beauty, too. In various jars reposed various scraps of what had once been famous Jewish beauties. Felix had worried that the SS would not preserve for him these vital parts of these women; he worried, as is the way of soldiers, that they would simply use and abandon the women once they took them in. But he needn’t have worried. The police were under strict orders to exercise self-control in these matters. And so the fragments were shipped to Felix in New York, each one carefully classified: Frau Kohner, Frau Schwartz, and so on. Felix remembered with nostalgia the beauty and gaiety of these women.

“Someday you will live again, my darlings,” he promised them. He sighed with pleasure. But no, he must go slowly. He must study a great deal before attempting anything so daring. Felix turned to his collection of large and secret books on alchemy, cell biology, and necromancy. There was something to be found in them all. He was not ready yet to synthesize his knowledge. He must study more.

Felix knew he also was a genius, perhaps the most important one of all. He had taken the precaution of preserving a bit from his scrotum, just in case. There it lay, in its own jar, winking at him merrily. Felix remembered the courage it had taken to operate on himself. It had been minor in the end—injecting himself with the novocaine and then, with a surprisingly steady hand, slicing off just the surface layer, a little patch. It had hurt afterward, he remembered. Nevertheless, Felix knew that if his experiments in regeneration were a success, his tissue would be of foremost interest, especially to future generations. After all, he had no child of his own to carry his amazing genetic makeup. But he knew he could produce, once he had discovered the secret, a man-child of his own makeup, springing forth, as it were, from his own loins. Felix was proud of his practical foresight.

He touched the jar containing his own tissue with reverence and love. Felix believed in talking to his specimens. He approached each bit of tissue with love and respect. Reverence for life—he believed in that.

Before leaving his laboratory, after having fed all his jars, Felix caressed his newest acquisition, a larger, round-bellied mason jar, wherein swam the four little fingers of the musicians of the Vienna Tolstoi Quartet. Felix thought of the wonderful music they would make together once he had done his work with them. He remembered the music the Quartet had made in the past. How he loved their Brahms and Beethoven and Schubert. He would make sure the fingers played together once again; not that horrible modern stuff, but the dear old music he and Marthe had enjoyed so much. “Hello, fellows,” Felix whispered to the jar’s cold, rounded side. He could hardly believe his good fortune.

Felix closed the door. Schatzie, patient as ever, wagged her tail, rising to her feet. “Good girl,” said Felix, bending down and scratching her silken ears. Schatzie followed him down the long hall toward the bed behind the screen.

Felix undressed and, reaching into the large wardrobe, drew out a picture of his beloved Führer and set it on the mantel. Then he pulled a corset and some stockings out of the closet and quickly put these on over his short legs. Carefully he applied the lipstick, and then a brassiere followed upon his squeezed chest. “Lie down, girl,” he exhorted Schatzie, who obediently bowed her head. Felix fell to his knees before the picture. “
Mein
beloved Führer,” he whispered. It seemed to him that the image of the Führer looked down at him, only him, poor humble servant that he was, with tenderness and approval in his eyes. “My faithful servant,” the picture seemed to say back.

Felix writhed in his constricting woman’s clothes, the black lace lingerie straining over his crotch, pinching him cruelly, the whalebone brassiere digging into his body. His “broken leg” throbbed.

He took out “Little Hänschen” from between the garter belt and the top of his stockings. He began to stroke it tenderly, crooning,
“Ja.”
It was small and velvety; then, as he caressed it, it grew in his hands. Little Hänschen liked to be free; he grew big and strong with pride.

“My Führer, my beloved.” Felix sobbed, giving himself to the overarching ecstasy. To whom was he crooning? The hot come began to spurt into his hand, and suddenly he felt ashamed. Delicious shame, the most delectable emotion of all. He stroked more quickly now.

“Forgive me, my father, for I have sinned,” he gasped. The familiar litany of his childhood prayers soothed him. Before he knew it, he was crying. The warm tears coursed down his cheeks, and he felt the relief of confessing to his Führer all his sins. The picture forgave him. “I know you are doing your best,” the picture seemed to say. “My son, you are indeed my true son.”

Felix wept in a luxury of self-abnegation. “Pray for me, Father,” he sobbed.

“You are my faithful servant,” the glass-covered picture said. Felix straightened his stockings, his makeup smeared. He bent over tenderly and kissed the Führer’s lips. He buried his head against the warm side of his faithful dog. “Oh, Schatzie, my dearest,” he sobbed, overcome with the emotion. The dachshund licked Felix’s hand. Felix thought he could sleep now.

S
nores punctuated the drab air of the room above the city where Maria lay in a half sleep. Beyond the blanket partition, Herbert coughed once, lying on his narrow cot in his own little area of the room. Maria’s mother, sleeping on the couch, did not move at all, lying as if she had suddenly fallen, startled, amid a heap of sheets.

In the first circle of the orchestra at the Vienna State Opera, Herbert regarded his wife’s sleek shoulders beside him, her smooth hair as she bent her head to the program in her lap. The lights shone about them like beacons, shedding amber on the red velvet interior. All was muted and golden. Onstage, the musicians were tuning up behind their curtain: the crisp sounds of the A from the concertmaster, a spark in the thin air, and then the answering calls of the other instruments as they responded to the tuning note of A taken up from the first violin section. The instruments mooed and lowed in their preparations.

Herbert put his hand on his wife’s, and she looked up at him and smiled. “Are you happy, my dear?” he asked her.

“Yes, my darling,” she replied, squeezing his hand in return. She leaned her head briefly against his shoulder.

Herbert had heard that Adeline was in love with Herr Mahler, who would be conducting tonight. But he discarded that rumor. Mahler was, of course, a genius. Who wouldn’t be attracted to his eccentric power? Herbert himself was one of Mahler’s benefactors, even though he found that actually listening to Mahler’s music was an ordeal. There was too much pain in that strange music, too much the outraged groan of the outsider. Yes, thought Herbert, too much pain.

He looked at Adeline fondly.

“The children, they were wonderful tonight, weren’t they?” she said to him, smiling.

“Yes, but, my dear, you really favor Michael too much,” Herbert replied, thinking of the little imp. “You let him stay up too long. He got much too excited.”

“But he wants so much to be like his brother. Anyway, what’s the harm in letting him stay up with us?”

Herbert sighed. The evening meal had ended with Michael’s protesting shrieks as their nursemaid ushered the two boys upstairs.

“No, Mama!” Michael howled, flinging himself against Adeline’s knees and holding on. Herbert and David regarded the scene with quiet eyes, though they exchanged a hidden smile. David was prim and full of virtue next to his younger brother.

“Hush,” said Adeline, patting the younger boy. “I’ll come up and say good night before we go out.”

“I want you to stay with me,” protested the child, clinging to his mother even more forcefully.

“Come, Michael,” exhorted David. “We’ll play with the soldiers.” At the thought of being allowed to touch David’s precious toy soldier collection, Michael disengaged himself in a hurry.

“I’ll come soon, my darling,” Adeline said regally to Michael as David scurried upstairs behind his brother. She dismissed them, though David continued to follow his mother’s beauty with a pleading glance.

“Good night, boys.” Herbert watched them approvingly. Adeline smoothed her skirt. From the rooms upstairs Herbert could hear the treble exclamations of the younger boy, and, from time to time, the lower notes of David’s voice, calming him. Herbert turned his attention away from them. He was waiting for something else.

“Papageno, Papageno, Papageno!” sang the figure onstage. A waiting body leaped forward onto the apron of the stage and danced to the edge. A glance passed between the figure onstage and Herbert, who watched from the second row of the orchestra seats of the Opera. How had the setting changed so fast? The music was satisfying, harmonious. The figure shook its headdress of tatters and bells and danced away. Herbert could no longer see him in the crowd of figures that swirled onto the stage now, singing as they danced. They carried trees aloft, peeping through the leaves at the conductor. The dancing figure of Papageno reappeared, casting one backward glance at Herbert as he was once more lost in the swirl of the opera production.

With a start, Herbert recalled himself and reached for Adeline’s hand. But all he grasped was the rough wool of the blanket that covered him where he lay on a narrow cot in his son’s cold-water flat in New York. “Adeline!” Painfully, Herbert remembered where he had left her. He coughed. His lungs hurt, his body, too. Carefully, so as not to wake the children, the Rat, and Ilse, David’s overworked wife, he shifted position on the cot. The gray light of dawn was coming in beyond his clothesline partition. It was bleak, and the chill in the room was a dirty one.

Herbert closed his eyes once more and tried to remember Herr Mahler. And Adeline’s wild passion for him—a passion that had made her sob each afternoon alone in her dressing room, her hair in disarray, eyes glittering. A passion he, Herbert, had pretended not to notice, even when, at the end of each day, he entered the silenced house, a house shuttered against the mourning animal upstairs. Herbert had pretended he did not see Mahler’s rejection of his lovely wife, even while he comforted her through it. “Shh, my darling.” And while he held her, her hot face against his waistcoat and asked, “Why are you crying so?” He made a sign behind her back to Papageno. “Leave us for the moment.” Papageno obeyed, and with a small answering gesture of the hand, almost imperceptible, he disappeared.

Herbert dressed quickly in the half-light, trying not to cough as he pulled on the garments, stiff with cold.

“My dearest Herr Professor,” Mahler had written long ago. “It is only you who can help us now. My wife and I implore you on this most urgent matter. The situation can only get worse, as you, of course, do not need to be told. If you could only be so kind? I realize, of course, that a man in your position…I would be so grateful….”