The Rat hurried onto the street and darted into a taxi. Soon she stood once again outside Felix’s heavy oak door, her head bent, spine curved, as always. Her little heart was beating quickly.
It was early in the afternoon. Not the appointed day. But she knew it was his Wednesday afternoon off, that sacred afternoon Felix reserved for himself and for his research. An immediate resolution brought her here a few days after her talk with Herbert. She was ready: the Rat knew what she must do. She hoped Felix would be ready, too.
Back at the apartment, nothing had been prepared. She would have liked to have left a moment or two for the children, but that didn’t matter now. She would have liked to have spoken some final words to Ilse. Too late. She must seize the opportunity that had presented itself, and act quickly. What was most important: her words with Herbert. “I love you,” uttered in Esperanto. The most important words in any language. “Farewell. It has always been you I loved best.”
Crashing music thundered against the big door and penetrated, through its cracks, the entire building. The Rat pressed her hand on the bell and rang again, firmly.
But there was no answer. Within, the music swelled, like a river of hot lava, throbbing through her concave chest as well. It was Wednesday afternoon, a respite from the time when Felix saw his little patients. His time, his own private time to do as he wished. Felix did not emerge.
“Yes, it is Strauss,” thought Anna, listening. “The naughty one.” The music, demonic in its energy, beat against the door, desperate to be let out. “I never liked the Strausses. Neither one of them.”
The Rat preferred the throbbing passion of Brahms. Her hands, trembling under the weight of so much sound, nervously smoothed the front of her coat. She patted her hair and then, once again with all her force, leaned into the doorbell.
“Aha!” The door swung open suddenly, to present a surprised Felix. The music rushed out in a great draft and hit the Rat with full force. She recoiled but stood her ground. “Aha!” cried Felix again.
Felix was wearing a frilly apron, and on his head sat a conical birthday party hat, held in place by an elastic under his chin. Beside him, the silent but enthusiastic Schatzie waddled, wriggling her wrinkled hindquarters and tail. Schatzie, too, was wearing a hat—a birthday hat—also fastened with elastic under her immense jowls. Both dog and master looked surprisingly alike.
“My dear Countess,” said Felix, hesitating at the door. He had not expected any visitors. When he saw it was her, hope rose in his chest. But he had no right to hope, did he? He stepped aside to allow Anna to enter. “Please, I beg you. Won’t you come in? To what do I owe…” He cast a hasty glance backward toward his laboratory.
Anna held out her hands, clasping the doctor’s between them. “My dear Felix,” she murmured, “I know you do not expect me today. I hope I am not intruding. I have come to tell you something important. I count upon your understanding.” Her voice quavered a little as she said these words.
Felix and Schatzie cocked their heads together and regarded her. They looked surprisingly like twin wizards, with their conical little hats. Above the crashing of the music, Felix said, “Schatzie and I, we were just having a little celebration, just the two of us. Weren’t we, Schatzie?” The dog wagged its body in response. Felix made an apologetic gesture, as if to begin to remove the hat.
“No,” said Anna. “I don’t want to disturb…” But she allowed Felix to take her coat. She entered. The faint smell of sulfur rose from her body, now in contact with the warmth of Felix’s rooms. With a faint swoon of warmth and delight, he caught the dusty, deliciously nose-wrinkling odor that rose from her skirts. But the Rat seemed unaware of all this, her spine bent, hands primly folded, her eyes on the floor. She willed her twitching thighs to be still.
“Come in, my dear Countess.” Felix said a bit belatedly over the music. He spread his hands. “The music, you see. It is the waltzes I miss. They help me concentrate. Sometimes I play them. When we are alone, just the two of us.”
Anna sighed.
“Do you dance, my dear Countess?”
“I used to. No longer.”
“Ah,” said Felix, wrinkling his brow. Tactfully, he went across the room and lifted the needle from the phonograph. The protesting silence screeched just once, loudly, and then Don Quixote fell on the floor between them, shattering into broken shards. Felix smiled as if he had willed it. The subservient silence awaited their words. “This is better, nein?” he said. “Now we can have our little talk.”
“Tell me,” he said when he had settled Anna, now with a cup of tea. “What is it that I can do for you?” Felix sensed the Rat’s distress.
Gratefully, she raised her head, her eyes brimming, the whiskers at the corner of her mouth trembling. Her little nose twitched, and she sighed as she looked at him. She said imploringly, “My dear Doktor, it is only to you that I have come. You were so kind to me last week. And I felt…I felt…” Something was guiding her speech. She looked at him with her most melting smile. She wanted to tell him that time was running out. “I could not stop thinking about you,” she said instead. And with that, in a most helpless wave of her little paws, she gestured toward her lap, now overspread with skirt and petticoat. “You have seen?” she asked.
“Yes.” Felix nodded. “I know now.”
“And can you…” The Rat did not finish the sentence, but, holding her breath, she looked meltingly into Felix’s eyes.
Felix’s eyes took in her entire body.
“Perhaps you would like to see more, my friend. Would you like to see everything?” she asked.
Felix could hardly breathe. He leaned forward and took one little hand in his. “Yes,” he replied gently. “Yes, I would.” Then, mustering confidence, he jumped to his feet, the birthday hat still on his head. Schatzie, as if in alarm, also stood up heavily. “First of all,” said the doctor, assuming heartiness, “perhaps you would like to visit my laboratory.”
The Rat, still in the throes of mustering her courage, did not seem to hear. Felix held out his hand to her. “Come, my Countess,” he said. Trembling, Anna allowed herself to be drawn to her feet.
Within her bowed breast, conflicting emotions struggled. “Felix,” she thought. “So it has been Felix all along.” The laboratory: so it was true. Everything she had heard. “For you, my old friend,” she thought. Then, as she willed her thought waves to be transmitted, she quickly translated her thoughts into Esperanto and sent them through the clear, bright, winging air to Herbert: “It is true. It is Felix.” Did Herbert hear? He didn’t need to. “Pay attention,” Anna told herself sharply. But to Felix, she allowed only the misted, vague emotion of her lovely eyes and little twitching nose. Her iron will she would conceal; she focused on getting her way.
“Then,” she forced herself to say gaily, “perhaps you will show me your ‘everything’ first.”
“Schatzie, come!” cried Felix. “We show our friend the laboratory, nein?” Schatzie didn’t want to follow, however. The minute the Rat and Felix left the room, she climbed laboriously back onto Felix’s couch behind the screen and, sighing softly, curling her tail end toward her mouth, lay down, looked after them indulgently—play, my children, play—and closed her eyes. “Schatzie!”
“Oh, leave me alone,” thought Schatzie. “Isn’t it enough that I wear this ridiculous hat?” The elastic was bothering her, and she scratched herself. The hat lay at an angle, and Schatzie’s breath came in even snores as she sank more deeply into the faded brown velour of the cushions.
“This is my laboratory,” Felix said as he guided Anna into the small closet-like space. He had his hand on her shoulder, and he could almost reach the place where her spine had finally curved, bowing forever her little neck. A sudden urge to touch her hump came over him. But he suppressed it.
“Look,” he said as he opened the curtain that covered the labeled shelves. “Here is the secret of life, my dear Countess. This is where life begins. You,” he said, addressing her, articulating each word slowly and carefully, as if this presentation had been planned, the one he had been preparing for all these years, “you are looking at the very creation of life. Matter into matter.” He stood back, his arm on her shoulder, surveying his life’s work. “And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ ”
Together, they regarded the jars. A strange phosphorescent greenish glow rose from the shelves, and there was a gentle vibrating humming about them. Inside each jar, pale green liquid swirled, dreamily, in a counterclockwise direction. Anna stared, mesmerized.
“It is a time of rest,” explained Felix. “All life must take its rest.” The waters swirled, and an even pitch became discernible to the Rat, one single vibrating note, the note of A, held and reiterated from each jar. A, the tone of the universe. A, the tone that instruments tuned to. A, the alpha, the alpha-bet—the universal A.
“Listen!”
From the closed refrigerator, also, came the sound of A, loud and clear, piercing, as the severed quartet fingers cried out from their concealment. “Aleph. We Are Alive!” All of New York was sounding to the tone of A: the skyscrapers, the trumpets, the solemn shafts of sunlight piercing, as in the inside of a cathedral, the dark streets.
Anna shivered. The kitchen pulsed with eerie light and sound. The sweetish odor of the fluid enveloped her. It was sickish, like ether, or violets, dying ones, mixed with formaldehyde and other meaty odors. Liverwurst.
Inside the jars she could discern small hairy fragments of things, floating, diaphanous, in cloudy fluid.
“Look carefully, my Countess.” Felix’s voice was warning her. It pierced the odor. “Look. Here you will see my miracles.”
Anna leaned forward, her dark eyes straining to read the fragments within. But she could not.
“Look,” urged Felix in a whisper. And he began to point out the specimens within. “Schatzie,” he whispered reverently, indicating the jar. “It’s a piece of her tail.” Slowly, he enumerated his favorite specimens and his plans for them. “Schnitzler. The genius Hombrisch. The famous beauty Frau Knoect. And others. Why should genius and beauty be allowed to leave the world?” He began to explain his theories to the Rat. “I decided to consecrate my life to the continuance of what is great and beautiful,” he explained. “My whole life. But I think I have found the secret now.” Modestly, he pointed out to Anna the jar that held a fragment of his own scrotum. “Man at his best. The culmination of desire. The preservation of the species.
“It is we who have been forced to leave, who are the best that Europe has to offer,” he continued. “We cannot be allowed to die.” He explained how he had studied, waited, and collected. How he had brought nothing with him when he left but his precious specimens and jars. And notes, too, of course. His friendship with Helmut. The chain of suppliers who could be trusted to send him fresh specimens, smuggled every few months. The correspondence. The careful observations and the recording of them. “Just the fact that these cells have survived, are still living, might already be enough. But look, they are growing.” Felix explained how he had found their proper nourishment. “The staple German diet, modified.” How his specimens were thriving. “Someday humanity will thank me,” he said. He paused. “But that will take a while.”
His mood shifted quickly. “Mankind is stupid, don’t you agree, dear lady?” He threw back his head and uttered a few quick sardonic barks, which somewhat approximated laughter as onstage. “Hah. Hah. Mankind is so stupid. Stupid!” he hissed. His fingers tightened on her shoulder and he suddenly crooked his head, peering into her face. “My dear lady, we must save mankind from itself.”
Anna felt faint. She was trying to comprehend, trying to gather this information as quickly as possible, thinking, “I must tell Herbert.” “But this is remarkable,” she said.
“Yes, isn’t it,” replied Felix, satisfied, spreading his hands. He started to take down his notebooks, the painstaking observations, timed and dated, and opened them to show her. “My records. It is so important to keep careful records.” Anna looked, uncomprehending. “You see, it is perhaps a secret now. But one day, people will want to know. It is important to make no mistakes.”
Felix bent toward Anna. She was looking carefully at everything in a kind of trance, hardly breathing, only her nose and the whiskers twitching. In a few minutes, he would have her entirely convinced. In a lavish, generous gesture, he flung open the refrigerator door, and the hum of A increased perceptibly. “Here, my dear Countess. This will explain it all to you. My pride and joy! My most recent acquisitions, and look how well they are doing.”
There was a jagged screech as the severed fingers of the Quartet protested against this invasion of their privacy. But it was momentary, that sound, and they immediately returned to their peaceful circling. “The Tolstoi Quartet,” Felix announced. “But we are going to make of them a new Quartet. A better Quartet. A more tasteful, less offensive Quartet.” He bent down to the jar. “Aren’t we, my boys?” he said. “Eh?”
There was again a momentary spasm of protest, as if a moment of Alban Berg had crossed the peaceful rumination in A. But then the fingers were passive again.
“Bad boys!” Felix said, leaning toward them. “Schrecklich! Are you being bad boys for our lady here? You should be ashamed of yourselves! Please, may I remind you of your manners!” The severed joints continued to float languidly. “Bad boys!” he hissed again. Felix shut the refrigerator door. “It will take them a while to get used to it. But they will.” He was confident.
He ushered Anna back into the main room. He felt expansive, happy. “This is the first time I have told anyone about this, dear lady. But I wanted you to know, to see what your old rascal Felix has been up to all these years.”
Anna leaned on his arm, dizzy. “Felix?” she asked anxiously. “Does anyone else know about this?”
“My friend Helmut in Germany. And yes, I have other friends. In high places,” he said significantly. “They have, perhaps, an idea.” Modestly, he added, “Perhaps one day you will even read my name in the papers. They might even establish a special Schweitzer Prize for me. But”—he waved a finger—“it is too soon, my dear lady. For we must have definitive results. But I have hopes.”
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?”