32. Medical Science

Night took possession of Scheller Street, and Novalis, baleful and melancholic, passed again like a shadow through Katja’s dreams, in her sleep awaiting the lips of Julia the Savior. Facing the fire, Lola feels Katja’s torpor place itself between her and the world: but what does it matter, dinner is ready and served on platters that Wulda is taking upstairs almost nimbly, almost floating as if she were now accustomed to the task that she was not going to have to do anymore because Madame Helena had spoken with the new servant in her office, a strapping girl with red hair and full lips who came recommended by Madame Hartenbach. Lola, annoyed and tired, or as she tells herself discouraged and exhausted, sits at the table in the kitchen storeroom waiting for Wulda while, in the checkerboard of the sky, Aristarchus of Samos enjoys plotting the new design for the constellations. Lola does not care if Wulda is late, perhaps Madame Helena has called her in, perhaps she has had some problem with the platters, all she wants to do is sit still like a stone so that nothing happens, so that death does not come to take her along with Katja because she is suddenly sure that Katja is going to die; she has a thick bitter taste in her mouth that has risen up like a silent invader from her stomach and she thinks she is also going to die, that death is going to come disguised as a pilgrim or civil servant dressed in black with a big hooked nose and ravenous little eyes and is going to look at them, at her and Katja, look at them hard, ponder whether to take them or not, and in the end is going to decide yes and gesture for them to follow and they will have no choice but to obey, and then she feels a pain sharper than all the pain in the world and she breaks in two holding her belly in her hands.

Impatient but trying not to show it, Madame Helena asked Herta the Red questions while the women of the house on Scheller Street milled around her, touched her hair the color of dying fire, sniffed her, and checked under her arms, down her neckline, between her legs, and behind her ears. Herta’s eyelids were fine and dark and had visible blue veins when the girl blinked. Madame Helena was telling her that for the time being she would have to sleep in an improvised bedroom because there was a sick girl, a convalescent girl she corrected herself, in the servant’s room. The rich and slender women, women in pink and gold who had lived in the house on Scheller Street, covered their mouths to roar with laughter so the public would not consider them impolite coarse country girls like the one in dormition whom death was going to take before dawn. Oh, Luduv, Katja sighed, don’t leave me alone, and Luduv got up and Novalis’s arm could be seen at the far end of the street where a coach pulled by bolting horses appeared every night to run past and disappear in a gray cloud of clay kneaded by the Lord’s hands under Aunt Bauma’s attentive gaze. Mr. Pallud entered the brightly lit salon and seeing that he was alone, left, paused in the corridor at the foot of the stairs looking at the place where Katja had fallen face-up against the edge of the steps and thought that he should go see her, thought that he would want to be there when Kati-Kati opened her eyes, thought that perhaps she would never open them again, and then returned to the salon at the moment when someone knocked on the door. Mr. Pallud remained in the salon, merely listening, not leaving, not moving, and heard the door being opened, heard the doctor’s voice, another door, the voice of Madame Helena, of the girl who served dinner, and another voice of a woman he did not know: if the fish-man devoured the princess, what would become of him? He would go back, he decided, he would go back to his room immediately and wait there for the commotion of doctors and strange women to be over. In the corridor he passed the doctor and Madame Helena, and they all said good evening, but he saw no one else.

Medical science worries about what is lost: sleep, appetite, composure, blood, or strength; it attempts to recover them and when it cannot, to replace them; it touches bodies, probes them, searches them, opens them and sews them up, both holy and profane, infinitely wise, infinitely ignorant, using only two weapons, desire and rejection, always defeated by death, always defeating death. With two fingers, the doctor very gently opened one of Katja’s eyes. The women whimpered but he did not hear them, studying what he saw in the eye. He lowered the eyelid with his fingers, carefully again, and palpitated the sleeping girl’s head. Luduv! Katja said because she had seen him come in through the window, and he smiled at her. The doctor said there was little hope that Katja would ever wake up, to wait twenty-four hours more and if the situation had not changed, he would recommend taking her to Mercy Hospital. He left the room with Madame Helena after having wiped his hand on a white kerchief moistened with alcohol, and behind the door that Madame Helena closed, the women of the house, laughing, welcomed Luduv, and Katja sat up to hug him. In the corridor on the first floor Madame Helena and the doctor encountered young Gangulf who accompanied them downstairs. At that moment and as Wulda went ahead to open the chancel door, a sharp howl exploded in the house, a long desperate shriek like an animal snapped by a steel-toothed trap it had not seen. The house stopped, the air went still, breaths ceased, the party in Katja’s room jumped out the window in a flight of gauze and braids and satin slippers and Luduv’s floating hair, Katja’s eyes shining, mouths full of laughter, and it was lost in the sweet air of the heavens where Novalis’s blue flowers opened. Madame Helena and the doctor looked at each other and only Wulda moved and ran down the stairs toward the kitchen. When the doctor arrived, he saw Lola’s head resting on Wulda’s lap, who was stroking her forehead. Lola, enormous as the world’s oldest mountains, dress stained with blood, and smiling, lifted up her hands looking for something to grab before another tense pain came. She knows what this is, finally she knows, and when the sorrow for Katja disappears she begins to look around as if he were there with her, the man with the gold teeth who pursues her and surrounds her and corners her on the top floor of the tavern next to the river.

Much can be said of medical science but not that it wastes an opportunity when desire is bellowing and the lady of death has left, satiated. The doctor took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and fell to his knees next to Lola:

“You, girl,” he said to Wulda, “get behind her and hold her hands, and you, madame,” he said to Madame Helena, “open my case, give me those scissors, that’s it, that white cloth, the forceps, and look for towels to take the baby.”

Miss Esther, rocked to sleep by the train, dreamed that the next day she would walk on the deck of a ship; Mr. Pallud paced impatiently in the corridor; young Gangulf also thought about ships; for the first time other hands closed the doors of “Miraflora” while the General felt death brush past him and move on this time and this time only; and Miss Nehala Simeoni tried to get up from her armchair to go to the door to see if the servant was coming with the dinner tray. In London, in the boarding house of Mrs. Stewart, Madame Nashiru took clothing from her suitcases and placed them in the wardrobes while in the dining room Mrs. Stewart told her guests that the woman she had just introduced came from Tokyo to open a jewelry store in London that would sell pearls, especially pearls, pearls from Saboga, Niushu, and the warm seas of Siganda. Madame Helena climbed the stairs laboriously, heavily, which she had gone down with such composure and decision every morning before the clock in the salon struck eight: she hoped that Herta could serve dinner with decorum, hoped the night would pass soon, that another day would arrive, that Wulda would leave, that Katja would get well, that Mr. Ruprecht would come and occupy the suite on the ground floor that opened to the garden, that everything would be the same as before, tranquil, quiet, restrained, and unchanging for a long time. The house creaked in the night, and the women’s laughter echoed all along Mill Alley, on the water in the river, in the treetops, on the balconies, a small round thought like a cherry warmed by the sun on the facade of the house on Scheller Street.