Paris Savages

The French technician used his knuckles to tap the plaster covering Bonny’s right shoulder.

‘I think it is time,’ the technician told Hilda, urging her back from Bonny’s head where she had been feeling for her friend’s breath and listening for the faintest murmur.

Hilda drew her shawl around herself and stepped backwards, wavering with fatigue. ‘I am still here, Bonny,’ she said loudly, so that he might hear. She looked towards the window. The tree branches and the park beyond had long vanished into the night. She had never anticipated such a long and dangerous process. It was nothing like the time they had made impressions of feet and hands under the warm sun of K’gari. How had she got it all so wrong?

The technician used a hammer to gently tap the cement-like plaster in various locations across Bonny’s torso and arms. It seemed a miracle to Hilda that Bonny was still standing under such weight. The technician made three knocks with his knuckles against the plaster covering Bonny’s face and skull.

‘It is the most important part,’ he said. ‘The plaster needs to be perfectly dry before it is removed. If the face is not accurately captured, there will be little or no interest in seeing the rest.’

‘He was offered a bed in the director’s residence next door. You were talking to Bonny, keeping him calm. Your father suggested that you rested for a short while, too, but you said no.’

‘Did I?’ She only vaguely remembered her father leaving and had always expected him to return. How would he have lived with himself if Bonny had stopped breathing? Her father had relied entirely on her, and she resented him with every cell in her aching body. ‘Please hurry,’ she said.

Hilda rubbed the skin on the back of her hand, still red where the plaster had splashed. She drew her shawl tighter. The sound of a lone horse whinnying rose from the street, then the rattle of a carriage and the horse’s hooves on the cobblestones.

‘It is dry,’ the technician said, gently fitting a chisel between the two sections of plaster covering Bonny’s right arm.

He removed the mould from the upper side first, the layer levered off with Hilda’s help after a slit had been opened-up across the top and along both sides. Beneath the plaster, Bonny’s skin in places appeared burnt. At the elbow, the skin had slightly adhered to the mould.

The technician’s face dropped, but he spoke calmly, as if trying not to further alarm her. ‘I will go and tell the others we must quickly remove the rest. I suspect that carriage was the director arriving from Paris. He asked to be present.’

‘Can’t we take it off now?’ Hilda asked, wanting to soothe Bonny’s injured arm but knowing that to touch it would hurt him even more.

‘I am going to need some help.’ Hilda stroked Bonny’s hand. ‘I am so sorry.’

A door slammed on a lower level of the building, and Hilda heard footsteps ascending. She made out her father’s voice and that of the German doctor, Haeckel. There was an unfamiliar voice also, French. As he entered the room, Hilda recognised the museum director from the framed photograph at the bottom of the stairs. He was well dressed in a pressed suit and had taken time to comb his hair and beard.

‘Bonjour a tous,’ he announced with a wide smile, clasping his hands. He pointed at Bonny. ‘He looks like one of our Egyptian mummies. Now, the grand reveal!’

‘Please hurry,’ Hilda said, also in French, her voice trembling. ‘The plaster burns.’ She showed the back of her hand and looked to Bonny’s arm.

The director eyed the technician questioningly.

‘Alors …’ the technician began.

‘Hurry!’ Hilda said, raising her voice.

‘Hilda!’ her father reproved.

‘Look at him, Papa! Look what we’ve done!’

She didn’t care any longer what anyone thought. She loved Bonny, she realised. It was actually very simple.

The director studied Bonny’s arm and frowned.

‘Perhaps we have taken too long, mademoiselle,’ he said. ‘I thank you for your concern and commitment. I am told you stayed here this evening with the Aborigine.’

She nodded.

The director continued, ‘I should explain that we have approached this moulage slightly differently. Often, especially for our medical casts, the ones where we showcase various diseases of the skin, we do only small sections of the anatomy at a time. And we don’t always use the bandages. With the Australian, we are attempting a full cast, and we are attempting it in a single day. It required that some of the sections be quite large. They take longer to dry, but I assure you any injury will be superficial.’ Already the technician had run a cutting implement down the dividing line at the sides of the mould and was working carefully now with a smaller instrument at Bonny’s head, left shoulder and across his neck, in preparation for separating the front from the back in sections.

‘He is an experiment?’ Hilda asked. ‘You haven’t done this before? I thought …’ There was a tightening in her chest and a whirring in her ears.

‘No,’ the director conceded, looking at his own fob watch. ‘But, respectfully, the procedure, in the end, has saved time, his and ours.’

Bonny swayed.

‘Please, be quick,’ Hilda cried, her voice cracking.

The technician frowned then swore. Hilda turned to see a streak of red on the snow-white plaster.

‘You’ve cut him!’ she screamed, leaning forwards and taking the knife.

‘I think your daughter has an unusual interest in this savage, Herr Müller. No?’ Haeckel asked.

‘Good God. Be more careful,’ Louis told the technician.

The room fell silent, and Hilda watched the blood glide down the plaster covering Bonny’s waist before running in a straight, lean line to the floor.

Haeckel and the technician slowly peeled the mould from Bonny’s back, but the pressure they exerted tipped Bonny forwards.

‘Stop!’ Louis shouted, quickly holding Bonny steady. ‘Lie him down. His legs are weak. Bitte.’ He waved the others towards him to assist but told Hilda to stay where she was, in front of Bonny.

The director and Louis held Bonny upright while Hilda moved the clothes rack and chair out of the way and the Parisian doctor arranged the sheets on the ground. Bonny crumpled at the knees, and the men carefully lowered him onto the floor.

The technician applied a small knife-like instrument around the sides of Bonny’s face, and Hilda felt again for her friend’s breath. She blew the plaster dust from the ends of the metal tubes and hovered her hand there. He was breathing, but faintly.

‘Quickly,’ Hilda said.

‘Take your time,’ Haeckel told the technician. ‘We might not have the chance to make another from a living subject.’

‘Not too long,’ the director said. ‘The poor man needs air.’

Hilda reached for the edge of the mould, near Bonny’s left ear.

‘Wait,’ the German doctor said, holding up his hand. ‘We must remove the tubes now or they will tear his sinuses. The timing is important. Too early and he can’t breathe.’

‘Oh God,’ Hilda said, stepping back.

The doctor lifted out the inch-long tubes at the angle they had been inserted. Hilda winced.

‘Ready?’ the technician asked Haeckel, and both men locked their fingertips around the mould of Bonny’s face. ‘Together now. Lifting …’

The pair tried to raise the section, but it was still attached in places. The technician quickly used the knife again, focussing on the areas around Bonny’s jaw that resisted their efforts. He tried to ease his fingers between the plaster and Bonny’s skin, and when he retracted his hand it was smeared with blood. To her horror, Hilda saw there was a stain, too, on the sheet, alongside Bonny’s back.

‘Papa!’

The technician eyed the director. ‘I was told to use a minimal amount of fat under this facial section. To maximise the accuracy. The detail.’

They attempted to raise the mould again and, finally, Bonny’s face was free. Bonny sucked in air through his burnt lips, but his breathing was still restricted by the plaster around his chest. Hilda took his hand in hers.

‘Bonny!’

He groaned, and Hilda looked at the men surrounding her.

‘You are monstrous,’ she told them. ‘You are the savages.’

‘Quickly, the chest,’ Hilda’s father said, clearly also upset. ‘Hilda, please move away, Liebchen.’

‘It’s nearly finished, Bonny,’ she said, speaking loudly in Badtjala. His eyes were shut. ‘What has made you so strong?’ she asked.

The technician continued, working with a fine knife down Bonny’s torso on the left side, where his still-plastered left arm lay against his body. The air swarmed with gypsum dust.

Haeckel, the Parisian doctor and the technician stationed themselves around Bonny and edged their fingers around the rim of the mould. Before the back section had been removed, the two halves had met as out-turned lips, like the flesh of a clam. During the mould making, a clay slurry had been painted between the halves to assist with the separation.

‘We must be delicate as we lift it off,’ the technician warned. ‘It will be heavy and could break under its own weight if we do it unevenly. Then it will have been a total waste.’

‘This is the end now,’ Hilda said in Badtjala, her mouth dry.

The men lifted the casing from Bonny’s chest, sliding their fingers back and forth in the bloody places where it had stuck. Finally, the large husk of plaster came away. Hilda pointed at the burns and the sections of missing skin.

She stared at the men, one by one, eventually holding her father’s gaze. ‘You have hurt him. Look at what you’ve done!’

She hung her head and wept before lifting her face again. ‘What would Mama have said?’

Hilda ran her hand across Bonny’s forehead.

‘What is it you want from him?’ she asked the men, her voice shaking. ‘What more can you possibly get? You will not have his bones, if that is what you are hoping for. They are not for sale.’

The technician crouched low to inspect the bag of plaster on the floor, beneath the large table. He took a pinch of the white powder into his fingers and held it towards his nose.

‘It has been contaminated,’ he said. ‘I opened a new bag for the torso and head.’ He set about removing the plaster from Bonny’s second arm and from the back of his head. A section of hair came away, and Bonny clenched his jaw in pain.

Hilda watched as a look of mortification and anger crossed her father’s face. He offered his hand to help her stand, but she refused it.

‘I am staying with him,’ she said. ‘Mama would want me to. She would have stayed.’ Hilda glared at her father. ‘She would never have let this happen.’

Bonny groaned again. ‘Gung,’ he managed to say in Badtjala, his voice gravelly. ‘Wasser,’ he repeated in German. Water.

‘Yes,’ Hilda answered him. She followed the technician’s pointing arm.

She ran through the neighbouring room, past rows of shelving housing dozens of plaster busts and heads. To her horror, the next room contained actual heads and body parts stored in large, fluid-filled glass vessels. Hilda stopped running and, as much as she didn’t want to look, the macabre bottles drew her attention. There were other items stored here also. Dried remains, bones and artefacts. On one of the shelves was a shape she could not identify straight away. She went closer and leaned into the open shelving. The roughly rectangular shape was a mummified ‘Aborigène’, knees drawn up to the chest as she had heard happened in some locations in Queensland where the dead were buried in trees. She wanted to be sick and hit her head on the shelf above as she drew away. On a nearby ledge was a small, mummified head with the label ‘Peru’ and, beneath it, a French name, presumably that of the collector.

‘God help us,’ she said.

Hilda held a cup of water to Bonny’s lips. When he had had enough, she moistened her handkerchief and wiped clean his chest, removing the gypsum powder from his skin, working carefully around the pronounced initiation scars. She offered him more water and applied salve, which she had found in a cabinet near the sink, to his lips. The door of the cabinet had a sign restricting access: réservé au personnel du musée.

‘He needs to go to hospital,’ she said, thickly smoothing the salve onto Bonny’s burnt brow.

The director wiped the blood from his hands as he leaned towards Hilda’s father and confided, ‘I would prefer that we look after him ourselves. I am ashamed that we have caused these injuries.’ He looked at the technician. ‘How was the plaster contaminated? I don’t understand.’

‘We used a different supplier for that bag. The one the sculptors use. It was less expensive. We have been doing many busts lately, many heads, and were running low on supplies.’ The technician paused. ‘You had asked us to look for efficiencies …’

‘I hope you don’t mean to blame me,’ the director said.

The technician was silent as he brushed the last of the plaster dust from the inside of the mould. Finally, he said, ‘It was a mistake. At least it will be a good reproduction of the man. It was not in vain.’

But Hilda knew that no amount of plaster, no amount of scientific study, would capture Bonny.

‘Can I speak to you all for a moment outside?’ Louis asked the men, who agreed. ‘I will be back in a moment, Hilda,’ he said.

The room went suddenly quiet, and Hilda could not remember the last time she and Bonny had been alone. Bonny had fallen asleep and, very gently, she mopped his brow. He didn’t stir, even as she leaned forwards and kissed his forehead. Hilda looked to the open door, the corridor behind it a thin grey colour in the pre-dawn light. She could no longer hear her father talking. She turned back to Bonny and leaned forwards again so that her face was just above his. He remained deeply asleep. Lightly, she kissed his lips.