“Schatzie,” Felix murmured as he circled past the watching dog. “Do not think I have forgotten you. It is only that human must seek human, do you not think? It is the law of the species, is this not so?”
Felix scrutinized the Countess carefully. Perhaps he had put too much anesthetic in her wine. He didn’t think so, but he was worried. He lifted her eyelids; the pupils stared back at him, enlarged. But perhaps it was better that he had given her a large dose. He had practiced before on people who were almost dead. Enough of that, not to think. That was another life, before his desires were fulfilled.
If the Rat understood, she gave little sign; she just tightened her arms around Felix and held him close, ever so close. She smelled the odor of his cigar, the scruffy man smell of him, and her being was suffused with his odor. Her body assumed its own outlines now.
“Felix, shouldn’t we…,” the Rat slurred.
“We have all the time in the world.” His fingers caressed her. His organ swelled. The waltzes played on through the darkening afternoon.
The Rat sank into dreamlike lassitude. “Soon it will be time, my dear Doktor,” she managed to say. She tried to wake up.
Felix kissed her words back. “I am master here. You need not worry,” he crooned. Ta tah tah dee dum! Everything circled to the universal note of A. Twilight darkened the windows; the city throbbed beneath them. As they danced, they watched the shadows lengthen, darken. Even Schatzie was a shadow dog, watching them as they circled solemnly, holding each other and, in a free hand, a long-stemmed glass. “Music, music.” Felix sighed. “Yes.” The Rat was silent.
“How much time did they say I had?” asked Felix finally. Part of him did not even care. “Human warmth, my Helmut, human warmth…friendship, kinship, the closeness of a woman, the hump, the little Countess, imagine….”
The Rat did not seem to hear Felix, so absorbed was she in her own dream of closeness. Finally she murmured, “Not much time, I am afraid.”
Recalled to themselves, they smoothed their vulnerable, imperfect bodies. “Not much time.”
“You tell me, dearest Countess, when you are ready.” Felix kissed her long, drifting fingers.
“Yes…,” she signaled, her eyes closed. He kissed her eyelids. “Yes.” Her hand drifted over his narrow chest.
“I assume they will be coming for me soon. They know where I am, is it not true?”
“Yes.” Anna was in a swoon of decision, preparing to enter some other world.
“I am already packed. I have already foreseen this,” Felix said. “I have always known that someday, somehow, mankind would find a way of stopping me. My bags have been ready for a long time.”
Felix thought of his arrangements, the ticket long since bought, the letter sent to Helmut, giving emergency instructions. His laboratory could be dismantled in minutes. His large trunk, the one with the careful shelves prepared, each with its leather strap to hold in precious specimens, was ready to be sent to the address of a willing woman friend, a contact of Helmut’s in Venezuela. Felix looked forward to his new life there. He had heard many good things. It was rumored that the Führer himself planned to live in South America one day, had even had a grand villa built for him there. There was a room prepared for Felix. “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” he thought. He imagined the place prepared for him, the choice bedroom, the laboratory promised in the basement of this villa, with real shelves, not just a kitchen cupboard.
“I have all faith in you,” the Führer had said.
Music played from the open refrigerator. The afternoon passed from dusk to night. The contents of the apartment seemed to swirl in the milky, darkening light. It was as if they were enclosed in a jar, a jar containing elements of life: oxygen, a watery, permeated air that nourished them as they swirled slowly, counterclockwise, thrumming to the universal tone of A—A-live—as did the groups of cells where life or semilife was being formed. A city held them, and beyond that city a continent, a planet. They danced, supporting each other, like little stick figures in a larger enclosure. Their eyes were focused on their own private reveries.
“Is there anything you’d like, dear lady?” asked Felix. “I mean, before?”
“Nothing,” Anna replied. “I am at peace now.”
“Good. It is good to be at peace.”
For the first time, the Rat felt her body united within a larger universe of music. The grasp on her body and soul that she had endured, first because of her deformity, and then because of her experiences with the Mad Monk, now fell away from her consciousness. No longer was she the prisoner of a consciousness of her body; she finally became her body, inhabiting herself as if for the first time, from the inside outward. She forgot herself, her bent, tortured fishhook spine, and, in that forgetting, became beautiful. Dreamily, she opened her heavy-lidded eyes and regarded Felix. Turning her palms upward, Felix felt all his tenderness flowing toward the Rat.
“So this is love, this sensation….” Felix surprised himself. Then he corrected himself, for he truly loved Schatzie also. And the Führer. What love of woman could replace love of ideals? Though Felix knew he was soon to be the agent of destruction, or at least partial destruction, he also knew that he would be the agent of liberation for the Rat, too.
Perhaps he would be able to bring her back again, unmarked, a new Countess Anna, to live a new, proud life in a proud body. But it was not the regeneration of the Rat that interested him so much, despite his feelings. No, it was Rasputin. The regeneration of a political mastermind. Felix wondered what Rasputin would be up to in the current world in which he would soon find himself.
Well, never mind, that was not his affair. “I am a scientist,” he reminded himself sternly. “I am a scientist first and foremost.”
As the stars and planets circled New York City, the sky began to glow. The sounds of the city were hushed; only a jazz samba beating itself upon the waves of the night rose up to their ears and caressed their damp hair.
“Listen.” Anna raised her face to the night air, closing her eyes, as if memorizing the sensation.
The sky was beginning to lighten, almost imperceptibly. “We still have a few hours,” Felix murmured, pressing his face to her hair.
“My dear,” the Rat said gently.
“Yes, perhaps you are right.” Quickly, he ran into the kitchen and said something to the Tolstoi fingers. “The last waltz,” whispered Felix tenderly as he took her in his arms. “My beloved Countess, may I have this waltz?”
Once more he held the wineglass to her lips, that wine into which, unseen and quickly, he had slipped something else. “Mercy,” he thought. “And compassion. My Hippocratic oath.” He watched as her eyelids became heavier and heavier. Before she could sag totally in his arms, he led her back into the kitchen and helped her onto the shelf. Dreamily, Anna lay down, curled into a small shell of herself, becoming the size of a shrimp.
“Gently.” Felix held her hand as she eased herself into the large jar that awaited her. She found a comfortable position and adjusted herself.
“Easy, my beauty,” he crooned.
The Rat curved and curled herself into the large-bellied earthenware jar. It was the one Felix had used in former times for making pickles and sauerkraut: his biggest jar. The Rat had no difficulty finding her curvature in the jar. She closed her eyes. Felix watched until she was fully asleep. The Rat did not move, but imperceptibly, as by a force larger than herself, the rhythm of the spheres, she began to circle slowly inside the jar. Slowly. Felix watched her, breathing his love into the rotating enclosure her curved body made.
As Anna sank further and further into her trance, the jar began to glow, and a strong greenish light flared up from it. There was a heavy odor of sulfur, mixed with the sweetness of violets and all the other flowers the Rat had ever worn on her body. The scent of grass, the scent of clean clothes and sunlight, all this rose from her body also. But over all was a yellow-green wrinkling odor. The odor rose and gathered itself forcefully. Before Felix’s watching eyes, the handprints revealed themselves and shimmered as if phosphorescent.
The prints danced upon the Rat’s body. Felix watched as they grew stronger and brighter in outline, sizzling in their dervish dance. The Rat sank more and more peacefully into her drugged sleep. But the hands cried out in their shining presence. Their hot smell filled the room.
Hastily, Felix now began to empty the shelves in the kitchen, filling his large trunk. He ran back and forth as daybreak threatened. He would leave no trace of himself. Felix thought of Herbert, of David, of the whole group who wanted to stop his experiments. His escape had been planned. He had always been prepared for its eventuality. “Come, Schatzie,” Felix commanded. But Schatzie did not move. She snoozed as if drugged. Felix did not worry too much about her. He found his ticket and papers. He was almost whistling as he packed quickly. The photo of the Führer was the only one he took. The photographs of children, the little ones who had been his patients, they could stay on the walls. A museum. He had no time now.
Accidentally, Felix’s sleeve brushed against the counter, where a row of jars stood waiting to be packed. There was a crash as one slipped off onto the floor. “Ach, Dummkopf!” Felix muttered to himself. There was no time, no need to clean up the mess of broken glass and liquid on the kitchen floor. He was running out of space. He would not be back.
“We must be quick, eh, Schatzie?” Felix asked. The dog did not respond. Felix opened the refrigerator and emptied the jars into the trunk. Each jar had its place and was cushioned. Carefully, reverently, he placed the jar containing the Countess and the handprints in its special place in the trunk. Felix wrote a quick note to Helmut. Then he wrote another to Herbert and David, and placed it openly on his desk, where it would easily be seen. He left a special jar behind as well. He had already drugged Schatzie, who was sleeping soundly.
At six in the morning, the movers arrived, ready to take Felix to the dock, to the ship that would take him to his new destination.
Felix tapped the trunk. “Careful with that.” Inside, the future slept in its jars, circling head to tail, as if in mothers’ wombs. The Rat dreamed on, shrinking more and more into herself, circling head to feet, as if her body had been made for this moment. A greenish light came from the trunk, even as the men carried it carefully. The handprints sizzled and leaped with excitement, merging their hot will to live with all the other animate parts of beings that Felix had collected. A smell of phosphorus rose from the trunk as two strong men staggered under its weight.
“Jeez, man, what you got in there?”
“My personal effects, gentlemen. My worldly effects.” Felix planned to tip them well. He smiled as he walked, and with satisfaction, he inserted his monocle into his eye socket. He did not wake the sleeping Schatzie, but rolled her in a blanket and tucked her under his arm.
Before closing the door of the apartment behind him, Felix took one last look upward at the angelic faces of the many children he had served. They looked down at him out of the frames, into their future lives, their loves, their own children. “For Uncle Felix with love.” “This, too, has been part of my real life,” he thought. “This, too.”
He felt pride, even now, at this moment, holding his dog in a rug under his arm, and a small shabby suitcase in his other hand. As Felix stood at the top of the stairs and supervised the downward descent of the trunk, he thought again of the children and said good-bye to them in his heart. Too bad he did not have enough place for their sweet faces in their glass frames, but his trunk was already full, given over to the sacrament of glass jars holding new life.
“I will make many more children,” he thought. And he squared his shoulders with pride. A super-race of superchildren. “And most of them from me,” he thought. “So now, my new children,” he addressed the specimens within the trunk, “we go forward. Forward, into a new world.”
The vermilion cry of four stringed instruments screeching in unison illuminated his departure. “Don’t leave us. Don’t leave us here alone!”
“Sorry, my boys. I am truly sorry. But it’s auf Wiedersehen for now. Till we meet again.”
Felix closed the apartment door behind him, walking behind his trunk. There was the sound of a plucked string from the apartment he had left.
Was all the wine of the night before making him giddy? Or was it the sudden rush of early-morning air striking his face and body? Why was this precipitate departure filling him with such joy? It was freedom, freedom to end a life that had already become too entrapping. It was the freedom of picking up, packing up, and leaving. Soon there would be the usual troubles: papers, officials, the effort of finding a place to put down his trunk and suitcase. What if the Führer’s house and place for Felix were not already prepared? In a part of himself, he knew that might be possible. Only…only…“No, my Führer will not let me down,” he thought. Felix forced his thinking into more positive channels again. For he was leaving his worldly practice to devote himself full-time to the regeneration of life. Already, as he said good-bye to his New York surroundings, he was preparing himself for the work to come.
“My children, we have work to do!” he called gaily down to the two moving men who now, near the final turn of the landing, set the trunk down on one end and took a breath. “It is a new day!” cackled Felix.
“Oh yeah?” The men regarded the little doctor sourly. Felix’s monocle glittered in the early-morning daylight, and his bushy hair stood on end, making an aureole around his head like the illustrations in the German children’s book Struwwelpeter. “What is he so happy about?” They looked at each other.
“A fine morning, gentlemen,” said Felix, stumbling down the stairs after them. Felix struggled under the weight he was carrying. In his small suitcase, he had managed to reserve a special place for his photograph of the Führer, and his own personal specimen, the bit from his own sex. Otherwise, the bag was filled with his journal observations and notes, a few personal grooming items such as his mustache comb, and that was all. Under the other arm, he held his heavily sleeping dachshund. “Wait for me,” he panted.
“Forward!” The merchant ship Calypso was ready down at the docks, with instructions to carry its secret, most important passenger to Venezuela. A laboratory and a job were already waiting for him. On board, Joe Riley, the young captain, waited. In the port of La Guaira, the beautiful one-legged whore, Carmelita, was also waiting hungrily for Joe. The parrot on his shoulder, Sugar, took an instant dislike to Felix, and as he walked onto the deck, Sugar, squawking, hurtled out and grabbed him by the nose.
But Felix was now safely on the boat and out of the harbor, turning from time to time to gaze back at the receding skyline of New York with mingled pleasure and regret. Then he allowed himself to look fully forward, to the horizon, toward which the boat was steaming. Felix finally put Schatzie, still in her rug, on the deck near his feet and lit a cigar. He leaned on the rail. For a brief time, at least, he could relax.
Three hours later, when David and his men from the federal government, carrying their solemn warrant of arrest for espionage, came to Felix’s apartment, they did not even have to break open the door. David sounded the bell a couple of times. Then he tried the handle. The door swung open, welcoming them inside. Above, the somber faces of little children watched them enter, impassive. “To Uncle Felix with gratitude.” The apartment was hushed.
“Anybody here?” But there was no one, no answer. “This the place?”
“Yes,” said David.
But just as David had suspected—in fact, as he had halfway hoped—Felix was no longer there. David felt a mixture of exasperation and relief. He rubbed his grainy eyes. Cold morning light leaked all over the place, revealing the shabby carpet and curtains. Felix’s office was tidy, the instruments carefully laid out beside the sterilizer, and the examining table with a fresh sheet on it. All was impeccable.
David went to Felix’s desk and halfheartedly opened and shut the drawers. He was hoping to find nothing. And his hopes were rewarded. “This is it, gentlemen,” he said. He wanted to go home, home to Ilse and the children, back to that little room where he could at least lay his head down for a moment and take a few hours’ repose. But he could not ask for that. His personal life he kept secret from the men with whom he worked. Of course there was a dossier on him; he knew that. But as long as things were not spoken aloud, David could keep his family alive. Somewhere, he was important, needed, and the core of a family. Somewhere in the world—in fact, right here in New York, across town, if anyone cared to know it. “Oh, hurry up!” he thought, as the agents opened and shut each drawer again.
David walked into what had served as Felix’s kitchen and blinked. A large jar stood on the counter. From it rose a briny smell, and a glow. Within it, now totally silent, curved and imploring, lay the meek little fingers of the Tolstoi Quartet. David looked, first at the jar and then away for a moment, clearing his vision to look again more closely. The fingers lay without sound. On the counter, there was also a large crinkled envelope. David took it. “Whistle the first few lines of the Mozart—you will know which one—and these boys will find their way to their rightful owners. Sorry for all the trouble. Heil Hitler.” Felix had scribbled this in Esperanto.
From the mess of brine and glass shards on the floor at his feet, in a great heave and shudder, a small dachshund staggered up, groveling and licking at David’s shoes. “Schatzie!” said David, thinking he recognized the dog. The dog he called Schatzie snuffled and snorted, wiggling the entire back half of her body in ecstatic greeting. The dog shook off the glass shards from her short hair. And it was then that David saw that this dog, now wagging her behind most enthusiastically as she begged to be loved, to be picked up, gathered in, and taken home to a family, had a slight but visible deviation that made it impossible to call her Schatzie. The dog, a Schatzie replica in almost all respects, differed in a most important one. This dog, now thumping unmistakably in greeting, had two tails. Two tails! Yes, two perfect tails.
David recoiled from the dog. Then, in one gesture, saying, “All right, all right,” he patted the dog and bent down and picked it up. “All right.” The fingers began to drum a strange rhythm on the glass.
David felt in his bones the beginnings of relaxation. All he wanted was summer, which he knew was coming, and then, for his family, a quiet place with a garden. In his mind, he saw himself teaching little Philip to play chess. Music filled the dream space where he watched this scene, his father aging, watching this with him. Then David watched himself also aging, sitting in the garden with his wife and children, then Maria growing up, then Philip.
He put his arm around his wife, who sat with a basket of apples, which she was peeling, while the wind blew its autumn leaves about the garden. There was music coming from the house behind them. Ilse looked at her husband lovingly. He tightened his arm around her; no need to say a word. Maria and Philip married; their children played in the garden. David and Ilse were old now, peaceful. The War had ended long ago. And at their feet in that autumn garden, an old dog watched them and laid its head on its paws. The old dog, the family dog. Thump, thump, a soft brushing sound that accompanied them always, hardly noticed, so constant was it through their lives. The sound of two tails, two happy tails wagging in unison. “Yes, Mitzie. Dear Mitzie,” they crooned to the dog.
Thump, thump. Swishing through life.