The Fig Eater Page 11

  “This is my first visit to the Volksprater,” Wally says.

  “Yes? Then you must let me show you around after our coffee.” The woman’s loud voice puts Wally on edge. “I know where to find the Cartesian Diver who tells fortunes. Although I’m certain I can do just as well. Over at Calafatti’s there’s a great Chinaman. Taller than Chang the giant.”

  Wally’s father had told her about a giant and showed her a grainy picture in a magazine. After she pleaded, he took her to the fair and balanced her on his shoulders so she could see the freak on the stage. Wally watched the giant stand and stretch, his head and hands disappointingly tiny above the crowd. The noise here in the Volksprater is the same noise she remembers from the fair in London. It makes her unsettled. She brings her attention back to the cook.

  “You make desserts for Dora’s family?”

  The Mehlspeisköchin nods. “Only desserts. They’ve kept me on so long because of my torten and Strudel mit Röster. I don’t share these recipes with others. I know how to keep secrets. My ladies tell me sugar and butter embrace in the bowl when I mix them.”

  She proudly hands Wally a small square package covered with oiled paper. Wally solemnly unwraps it. Cake. She thanks her, and the woman seems disappointed Wally doesn’t devour it in front of her.

  “In Bohemia, before I came to Vienna, I cooked for an important family. The father was a colonel in the army. The horse he bought for his wife was an angel to ride but an evil-tempered beast who bit anyone who came near him. He nearly took the arm off the stable boy. One day, the colonel came into the kitchen just as I took a roast leg of lamb out of the oven. Without even asking, he picked up the meat in his gloved hands, marched out of the room with it. I followed him, and what do you think he did?”

  She stares at Wally, folding her muscled arms across her chest. Her skin has the opaque whiteness possessed by some blondes, blue veins turning to green, wired near the surface of her thick flesh. Wally shakes her head, puzzled.

  She continues. “In the stable, the colonel stood in front of the horse, waving the hot leg of lamb. The horse attacks, sinks its teeth into the meat, burns its mouth.” She closes her eyes and throws her head back to laugh. “He broke the horse of its bad habit. He was as gentle as a lamb after that. But I never cooked meat again.”

  Her story has made Wally shy. She busies herself with her coffee. “You know I was a friend of Dora’s. That’s why I was visiting the house.”

  “Terrible what happened to her. God rest her soul.”

  “Yes. Did you know Dora very well?”

  The woman shakes her head, no. Wally gently touches her on the wrist to gain her confidence, keep her talking.

  “Dora kept out of the kitchen. She couldn’t cook, not at all. She and her mother argued about it. Dora said she’d rather play the piano and she did. Then her brother complained it was too loud, he couldn’t study. So her father took the piano away. Didn’t tell her, just had it moved out one day.”

  “What did Dora do?”

  “Don’t know. I wasn’t in their kitchen for two weeks. But when I went back to the house, everything seemed the same. Her mother was cleaning like she always did, all day, every day. She could never leave anything alone. She’d lock her husband’s study and the dining room after dinner, so no one could enter after she’d cleaned. She locked the boy into his room at night. She kept all the keys.”

  “What about the gentleman who spent a lot of time with Dora? She was always talking about him.” Wally holds her breath, hoping the woman will recognize her description of the mysterious Herr K.

  The Mehlspeisköchin stops turning her spoon in her coffee. It’s a meditation for her, a reflex, like stirring cake batter. Her hands are always moving. “A gentleman friend of Dora’s? I don’t know who that could be.”

  “He’s married. His wife was also a friend of Dora’s. I forget their name.”

  “Must be Herr Zellenka and his wife. Now, they’re quite a couple.”

  “Yes, that’s what Dora said. She seemed fond of them. Don’t they live in Währing?” She doesn’t look up, knowing the woman will read the uncertainty in her eyes.

  “No. They have a house in Döbling. They have money. I baked for them once, although they argued about my fee. They took Dora on vacations. Went to spas for their health. But I’m not surprised calamity fell on her family.”

  “Why?”

  “You were friends with Dora, but she didn’t tell you much, did she?”

  The woman’s shrewdness shocks Wally like a slap.

  Smiling hugely, the Mehlspeisköchin leans back in her chair, her heavy body nearly tipping it over. She lifts up her arms and slowly takes off her kerchief, revealing braids of white blond hair coiled around her head. She spreads the kerchief on the table and forces Wally’s hand down on top of it. She lays her hands over Wally’s.

  Startled, Wally can’t speak for a moment, her language scattered, lost.

  “There are things I could tell you. Dora’s father has a curse on him. He has syphilis and he gave it to his wife. Dora thought she had it, too, passed along in the blood, father to daughter. All of them saw doctors, all the time. And the trouble I’d take to please those invalids with my baking. One doctor told them to purge and eat no sweets. I thought it was the end of my time in their house.”

  The Mehlspeisköchin has the physical confidence of a masseuse. She twists Wally’s hand around. “Let me read your palm.”

  Wally’s hand is roughly kneaded and stroked. She watches the Riesenrad turn, trying to distract herself from the woman’s aggressive fingers. The sharp point of a fingernail is drawn across her palm.

  “The lines here, furrows at the joint of the thumb, could mean an unhappy marriage, illness, or premature death.”

  “I didn’t ask you to do this.”

  “I saw something else in your hand that could help us understand each other.”

  Wally jerks her hand away.

  The canvas awning flaps over their heads. Faint music shivers across the park from a small group of string players and a cimbalom on the bandstand. The crowd watching a marionette show roars with laughter.

  Wally stands up and drops coins on the table, trying to calm herself. The Mehlspeisköchin squints up at her.

  “Think over what I’ve said, Fräulein.”

  Wally walks away. Later, she remembered she’d forgotten to ask the woman about Rosza and whether there is a fig tree in Dora’s garden.

  It grows dark as Wally wanders aimlessly through the park. She watches several young men test their strength against a machine that jolts them with electric shocks when it is touched. One of the men falls and doesn’t stand up for a moment. Suddenly, thousands of tiny lights blink on all across the fairgrounds, an uncanny illumination that mimics daylight but produces shadows the sun could never cast.

  The Volksprater stays open until the early hours of the morning, and she takes the last ride on the Ferris wheel, imagining she’ll see the sun rising before the rest of the city from its great height.

  Dora’s mutilated corpse was taken from the cemetery and laid on a table in the morgue. The Inspector can hardly bear to uncover her neck or the rest of her body, afraid of what he might find there. The smell is terrible, as intense and choking as a hand pressed on his throat. Franz is also affected, and avoids looking at the dead girl. He stares at the Inspector, for his hands are shaking as he pulls the dirty cloth off her bloated corpse. Under the harsh lights over the table, they find no suspicious marks or outrages on her body, nothing but the damage that decomposition has accomplished. The veins near the surface of her skin are clearly visible, an intricately forked brown network that the pathologist identifies as an arborescent pattern, a natural sign of putrefaction.

  After finishing the examination, the Inspector wishes that closing the door of the morgue would erase what his eyes have seen. The image of the body’s spoiling, swollen flesh, the dark colors that appear to have been pressed out of its skin — blue red g
reen and dark brown — have been seeded into his mind. Sometime in the future, a smell, a glimpse of a certain color or shape, will bring Dora’s corpse back to him, blooming unbidden in his memory.

  Egon is in the morgue to photograph Dora’s violated corpse. Her body is completely covered by a thick cloth, which doesn’t disguise its altered shape, the enlarged abdomen and limbs. The coldness of the room and the intense, unpleasant odor make him work quickly.

  He drops a handkerchief on top of the body, then ducks behind the camera to focus the lens on it. In a muffled voice, he calls Franz to hurry and help him. He caps the lens and waits impatiently, covering his nose with his hand.

  In the corner, Franz hastily puts on a white jacket and rolls rubber gloves up over his arms. As he crosses the room, he vows to immediately forget whatever he’ll see when the cloth is lifted off the body. He will have a stare of blankness, nothing will register, there will be a wall of white when he tries to recollect it. Before touching the corpse, he disassociates his hands from their movements. He gropes underneath the cloth and pulls out an arm, its skin colder than the air in the room. The limb twists easily in his trembling fingers, and he maneuvers it so the black hole on the swollen hand points up, right into the hard eye of the camera. The instant he releases the arm, he struggles to forget the way the flesh felt under his fingers.

  “Now I need you to light the powders. You’ll find the allumettes in my satchel.”

  Franz positions the dish of lightning powder on the stand parallel to the camera. He ignites an allumette, touches it to the powder, and it explodes into flame so terrifyingly fast that he jumps back, knocking the fire over onto Dora’s body. Panicked, he swats at the burning cloth, feeling the corpse soft under his hands, the smell of the gases from the body indescribable.

  Egon had served as an apprentice to Monsieur Bellieni, an elderly French photographer who had been exiled by the Commune. He taught Egon an old-fashioned system of lighting. To illuminate a room for a photograph, several small gas lamps were burned, and the exposure would last for several hours. For portraits and darker interiors, volatile lightning powders were used. It took one pound of magnesium powder to create enough light to photograph a ballroom, and buckets of water were placed around the floor in case of fire.

  It was Egon’s task to measure and sift the lightning powders — chlorate of potash, sulphurate antimony, gunpowder, pyroxylin, and magnesium. Sometimes crushed white sugar was burned with potash, or magnesium powder was sprinkled on guncotton. The powders were ill smelling, poisonous, and their transformation into heat and scorching light was fierce and unpredictable. Although he worked for Monsieur Bellieni for several years, he was always terrified of the explosive powders.

  Monsieur would wave his hand to indicate when Egon should light the powders. He watched closely for the photographer’s slightest gesture, his hands poised over the powder, every muscle tense, ready to strike fire. It was a dangerous, split-second maneuver.

  Once Monsieur was engaged to do a portrait by a beautiful woman. She wasn’t an actress or an opera singer, just a woman who wanted a picture of herself, perhaps a gift to a lover.

  She undressed in front of the camera, her back modestly turned. Egon watched. He didn’t move to prepare the lightning powders, even when Monsieur was already crouched behind the camera. Then the woman pulled the pins from her hair, and it fell over her bare shoulders down to her waist, breaking the spell.

  Monsieur’s head surfaced from under the cloth. Allez, get the materials ready, what’s the matter, he shouted. Shamed, Egon quickly brought the powders, careful not to look at the woman.

  Prepare yourself, boy. Mademoiselle, are you comfortable?

  Monsieur raised his hand, and Egon struck the allumette. At that instant, he dared to glance up at the woman. Perhaps the flame in his hand had given him courage. She smiled directly at him, stood up, and swept her hair off her naked body. Paralyzed at this vision, Egon didn’t pull his hand away as the powder ignited, and the greenish light and simultaneous explosion took away his fingers.

  Years later, a man at a dinner noticed Egon’s mutilated hand and asked him if he knew the Greek legend of Creüsa, a princess of Corinth. It’s about a body burning, he said. When Egon shook his head, no, he’d never heard the story, the man told him vengeful Medea had sent her rival, the innocent Creüsa, a gift of a beautiful robe. Flattered, Creüsa put on the robe, and it instantly burst into flames, burning her alive.

  Egon began to collect these stories.

  He learned Charles VI of France was nearly annihilated in the same way at a fancy dress ball. The king and four of his equerries were identically dressed as hommes sauvages in shaggy costumes made of grass. While the king and his equerries danced, the duc d’Orléans accidentally touched one of them with a torch, and the flames leaped from one man to another. The duchesse du Berry somehow recognized the king and threw her mantle over him, saving his life. The rest of the men all burned to death.

  The Inspector decides to rebury Dora in the same grave. The night before she is reinterred in the Zentralfriedhof, he takes certain precautions so her body won’t be disturbed a second time.

  He slips into the morgue and locks the door behind him. Dora’s coffin rests on a table, a dull and solid box. He’s still wet from the rain outside, and as he walks across the room, the air chills his damp skin, making him suddenly conscious of his bare hands, as if they had become luminous, swollen, hugely conspicuous in guilty anticipation of their grim task. He quickly opens the lid of the coffin, and a stench envelops him as he pulls at the shroud covering Dora’s corpse. He roughly jams a small tin plate under the fabric and works it down her body until it rests over her swollen stomach. He takes a long steel needle from his pocket and forces it into the place he thinks is above her heart. These two precautions — the needle and the plate — will keep Dora quiet in her grave.

  He learned these apotropaic methods from his wife, although he doesn’t plan to tell her what he’s done. He also hasn’t told her about the discovery of Dora’s mutilated corpse. He’s puzzled about why he keeps these secrets. Perhaps because Erszébet will always turn to an otherworldly cause to explain an inexplicable event. At this time, his mind can’t hold such a speculation.

  Later he slips the grave diggers and a priest money to recite prayers over Dora’s fresh grave. And a little extra to buy their silence.

  A thumb is cut off the hand of a corpse. What is the significance of this act? There is a superstition that revenants can be identified by something extraordinary about their appearance; their middle fingers are missing, or they have the hands and feet of an animal. Was this an attempt at a metamorphosis of the girl’s body? What else could provoke such a hostile act? A ritual? Revenge? Revenge for an unknown wrong by an unknown party. Someone in Dora’s family, or a friend? A lover? Is it a crime a woman would commit? Could someone acting alone open a grave and disturb a corpse?

  He tries to hold the facts about the murder in an order, with no judgment attached to them. In his investigative work, there is always the temptation to organize, to rush to a decision, to collapse the wait. Not to listen.

  When Franz first came to work as his assistant, the Inspector knew he believed crimes were solved by a mysterious process, almost a divination. No, he told him, it’s methodical, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. You see a color or a pattern on one piece that matches something else you have seen. Or you notice a blank shape on the puzzle board and it’s vaguely familiar, then you suddenly recognize its match. Listening and observation. It’s not a mystical operation like falling in love, he said, smiling at Franz’s embarrassment.

  He asks Franz to read a certain page aloud from the Kriminalistik book, where the dangers of the investigative process are presented.

  When he starts work, the most important thing for the Investigating Officer is to discover the exact moment when he can form a definite opinion. The importance of this cannot be too much insisted upon, for upon it success or
failure often depends. If he should come to a definite conclusion too soon, a preconceived opinion may be formed, to which he will always be attached with more or less tenacity till he is forced to abandon it entirely: by then his most precious moments will have passed away, the best clues will have been lost — often beyond the possibility of recovery. If on the other hand he misses the true moment for forming an opinion, the inquiry becomes a purposeless groping in the dark and a search devoid of aim. When will the Investigating Officer find this true moment, this psychological instant, of which we speak?

  It is nearly dark when Wally finds Herr Zellenka’s house in Döbling and walks around to the walled garden in back. She wears men’s clothing, gloves, and a flat cap, borrowed from her employer. She rummaged through his wardrobe, taking what suited her. She’s a hunter and gatherer. She has an electric torch, scissors, and pockets emptied to hold leaves from the fig tree.

  Slowed by the man’s unfamiliar boots, she clumsily wedges her feet against the thick vines woven over the wall and pulls herself up. The cold air is sharp, she feels it tunneling into her nostrils and flattening her cheeks. There is faint moonlight, not enough to make deep shadow. On top of the wall, she crouches and peers down, checking for obstacles below. The garden is a flat silver dimness, punctuated by the feathery gray outlines of the shrubbery and the darker mute shapes of the trees. She jumps, and the plummet lasts for a long count, as if there is a greater distance to the ground on the other side of the wall. She lands on her feet, then the palms of her hands are forced into the dirt as she falls forward.