Flights

DR BLAU’S TRAVELS (II)

He was emerging now from the body of the plane, down long tunnels, following the arrows and illuminated notices that gently divided passengers between those who had reached their destinations and those who were still en route. The streams of people in the large airport swelled and then dispersed again. This painless selection process led him to the escalators, and then a long, broad hallway, where fluidity was hastened by a moving walkway. Those in a hurry took advantage of technology’s advances and now leaped into another rate of time – at a leisurely pace they passed by others. Blau passed the glassed-in smoking area where nicotine fanatics, having fasted during extended flights, now gave in to their addictions with evident bliss. To Blau they seemed a separate species, living in an element that wasn’t air, but rather a mixture of carbon dioxide and smoke. He watched them through the glass with vague astonishment, as though watching animals in a terrarium – on the plane they’d seemed so like him, but here their distinct biological make-up had been revealed.

He handed over his passport, and the officer sized him up with a quick, professional glance, comparing both faces – the one on the photo and the one on the other side of the pane. Apparently he didn’t raise suspicions, because without delay they let him onto the terrain of this foreign nation.

The taxi pulled into the train station, where he showed his electronic ticket at the window. Since he still had over two hours he went to a bar. It reeked of stale grease, and as he waited for his fish, he examined those sitting around him.

The station didn’t have any particular characteristics to set it apart. The large screen over the departures table showed all the same ads, for shampoo and credit cards. A familiar logo made this foreign world feel safe. He was hungry. The artificial airplane food had left no trace he was aware of in his body. It was as though it had contained no substance – only shape and smell – which was apparently the food they’d serve in paradise. Food for hungry souls. But now the piece of fried fish served with salad, the piece of white meat fried golden, fortified the doctor’s compact body. He also ordered wine, served here in handy little bottles, its contents equal to one generous glass.

On the train, he fell asleep. He didn’t miss much – the train slogged through the city, through some tunnels and the suburbs, confusingly similar to other suburbs, with the same graffitied patterns repeated on the viaducts and the garages they went past. When he came to, he saw the sea, a thin bright belt between the cranes at the port and some ugly warehouse buildings and the shipyards.

‘My dear sir,’ she had written him. ‘Your questions and their formulations have instilled within me, I must confess, complete and profound trust. A person who knows what he’s asking is someone who can expect an answer soon. Perhaps what you need is that proverbial pinch that tips the scales.’

He wondered what sort of pinch she had in mind. He checked the dictionary thoroughly. He didn’t know any proverbs that had to do with scales and pinches. She had taken her husband’s last name, but her first name was fairly exotic – Taina. Which might suggest she came from some distant land and equally exotic language, in which both pinch and scale worked perfectly fine as proverb. ‘Needless to say, it would be best for us to meet. I’ll try to examine your dossier and all your articles in the meantime. Please come and see me. This is where my husband worked right up until the end, and his presence is still felt here. This will no doubt aid us in our conversations.’

It was a small seaside village stretching down the shore, belted by a straight asphalt highway. The taxi pulled off just before the last sign with the village’s name on it, heading downhill, towards the sea, and now they passed wood houses, pleasant to look at, with terraces and balconies. The house he was looking for turned out to be big, and the most elegant along this gravel road. It was surrounded by a wall of medium height thickly covered with some local vine. The gate was kept open, but he asked the driver to stop on the road and, taking out his wheeled suitcase, he went up the gravel-strewn driveway on foot. The focal point of the neat yard was a magnificent tree, clearly coniferous, but with a deciduous aspect, like an oak with leaves that had somehow been stunted into needles. He’d never seen such a tree, its almost white bark looked like an elephant’s skin.

No one responded to his knocking, so for a moment he stood there on the wooden porch, unable to make up his mind; he summoned his courage and turned the handle. The door opened, admitting him into a bright, spacious living room. The window opposite was completely taken up by the sea. A big orange cat came up to his feet, meowed and slipped outside, completely ignoring the houseguest. The doctor was sure there was no one home, so he set down his suitcase and went out on the porch to wait for his hostess. He stood there for a quarter of an hour or so, examining that mighty tree, and then he slowly started to go around the house, which was encircled, like the others in this area, by a wooden terrace, on which (as in every other place in the world) stood lightweight furniture with throw pillows. In the back he found a garden with a meticulously mown lawn, densely planted with flowering bushes. In one of them he recognized a fragrant honeysuckle, and guided by a path lined with smooth, round rocks, he discovered a passage he thought must lead straight to the sea. He hesitated for a moment. Then he set forth.

The sand on the beach seemed almost white; diminutive, clean, dotted here and there with white shells. The doctor wondered whether he should remove his shoes, because he realized that it might be rude to walk onto a private beach with shoes on.

In the distance he saw a figure emerging from the water in silhouette – the sun, already low, was still intense. The woman was wearing a dark one-piece bathing suit. On the shore she reached out for a towel and wrapped herself in it. With one end of it she rubbed her hair. Then she picked up her sandals and began approaching the startled doctor. He didn’t know what to do now. Whether to turn around and leave or to in fact walk towards her. He would have preferred to meet her in the calm of an office, in a more official setting. But she was already upon him. She held out her hand by way of greeting and said his last name in an interrogative tone. She was of average height and must have been getting close to sixty; cruel wrinkles shot across her face – you could tell she didn’t skimp on sun. Had it not been for that, she would probably have looked younger. Her short, light-coloured hair stuck to her face and neck. The towel she had around her reached her knees, below which were her evenly tanned legs, and her feet, marred by bunions.

‘Let’s go inside,’ she said.

She told him to take a seat in the living room and disappeared for a few minutes. The doctor flushed out of anxiety – he felt as though he had caught her in the bathroom, as though he’d walked in on her cutting her nails. This encounter with her nearly naked old body, with her feet, her wet hair – it threw him off completely. But she didn’t seem to be bothered by it at all. She came back after a while in light-coloured trousers and a T-shirt, a fine-boned woman, with flabby arm muscles, her skin teeming with moles and birthmarks, ruffling her still-damp hair with her hand. This wasn’t how he had imagined her. He’d thought the wife of someone like Mole would be different. Different how? Taller, more modest, distinguished. In a silk blouse with a jabot and a carved cameo at her neck. Someone who didn’t swim in the sea.

She sat down across from him, rolled up her trouser legs and slid a bowl of chocolates towards him. She took one, too, and as she ate she sucked in her cheeks. He looked at her, she had bags under her eyes, hypothyroidism or perhaps just a flabbiness in the musculus orbicularis oculi.

‘So it’s you,’ she said. ‘Could you please remind me exactly what you do?’

He hurriedly swallowed his chocolate whole – it didn’t matter, he’d grab another one. He told her who he was again and talked a little bit about his work and publications. He reminded her of his History of Conservation, which had been published recently and which he had included in the dossier he’d sent her. He praised her husband. He said that Professor Mole had engineered a veritable revolution in the field of anatomy. She watched him attentively with her blue eyes, with a slight, content smile, which he might have taken as friendly or as ironic. Despite her first name, there was nothing exotic about her. He suddenly thought that maybe this wasn’t her, that maybe he was speaking with the cook, or the maid. As he finished with his background, he wrung his hands nervously, although he would have liked to keep himself from displaying such obvious evidence of nerves; he felt bedraggled in the shirt he’d worn to travel, and she leaped up, as though reading his mind.

‘I’ll show you your room. It’s this way.’

She guided him up the stairs onto the dark second floor and pointed to a door. She went in first and pulled back the red curtains. The windows gave onto the sea, the sun lit the room up orange.

‘You can get settled in while I make us something to eat. You must be tired. Are you tired? How was your flight?’

He gave an off-handed answer.

‘I’ll be downstairs,’ she said and left.

He wasn’t quite sure how it had happened – this woman of average height in her light-coloured trousers and stretched-out T-shirt had with some imperceptible gesture, perhaps just by her eyebrows, arranged anew the whole space and all the doctor’s expectations and fantasies. She had rid him of the whole of his long and tiring journey and prepared speeches, possible scenarios. She had introduced something of her own. She was the one who dictated the conditions. The doctor gave into it without batting an eyelash. Resigned, he took a quick shower, changed his clothes and went downstairs.

For dinner she served a salad with croutons made of dark bread and baked vegetables. So she was a vegetarian. It was a good thing he’d had that fish at the station. She sat opposite him with her elbows on the table, crumbling what was left of the croutons with her fingertips, and she talked about healthy food, about the harmfulness of flour and sugar, about the nearby organic farms where she bought her vegetables, milk and maple syrup, which she used instead of sugar. But the wine was good. Blau, unused to alcohol and tired, felt drunk after two glasses. Each subsequent sentence would form in his head, but she always got there first. By the end of the bottle she had told him the story of her husband’s death. A motorboat collision.

‘He was only sixty-seven years old. There was nothing they could do about the body. Completely mutilated.’

He thought she would burst into tears now, but she just took another crouton and crumbled it onto the scant remains of her salad.

‘He was not prepared for death, but who is?’ she mused. ‘But I know that he would want a successor who was worthy of him, someone who is not merely competent, but also works with passion, like him. He was a loner, you know that, I’m sure. He left no will, gave no instructions. Should I donate his specimens to a museum? Several museums have already inquired. Do you know of any respectable institution? There’s so much bad energy around plastinates now, but of course today, in order to do something, it’s not as though you have to cut down the bodies off the gallows,’ she sighed, and shaped a few leaves of her salad into a slender roll, which she slipped into her mouth. ‘But I know he would want a successor. Some of his projects are only barely begun; I try to keep them going myself, but I don’t have as much energy and enthusiasm as he did… Did you know I am a botanist by training? There is, for example, a problem…’ she started, hesitated. ‘It doesn’t matter, we’ll have time to discuss that later.’

He nodded, suppressing his curiosity.

‘But you deal primarily with historical specimens, is that right?’

Blau waited until the echo of her words had petered out, then dashed upstairs and raced back with his laptop.

They pushed back their plates, and after a moment the screen lit up with a cool glow. The doctor panicked for a moment, wondering what he had on his desktop – if he hadn’t left any erotic icons – but he had just cleaned it up recently. He hoped she had read what he had sent her about himself, that she had looked over his books. Now they both leaned into the screen.

As they looked over his work, it seemed to him that she was giving him admiring glances. He noted this to himself – twice. He made a mental note of what had inspired her admiration. She knew her stuff, posing professional questions. The doctor hadn’t expected her to know quite so much. Her skin gave off a slight fragrance of the kind of lotion older women put on their bodies, nice, powdery, innocent. The index finger of her right hand – the one with which she touched the screen – was adorned with a strange ring with the shape of a human eye as its stone. The skin of her hand was already being covered by dark liver spots. Her hands were as ruined by the sun as her face. He thought for a second about what method might help stop the effects of the sun on this thin, corrugated skin.

Then they moved to armchairs, she brought half a bottle of port from the kitchen and poured out two glasses.

He asked: ‘Will I get to see the lab?’

She didn’t answer right away. Perhaps because she had port in her mouth, as she had had the chocolate before. Finally she said: ‘It’s a ways from here.’

She got up and started clearing the table.

‘You can barely keep your eyes open,’ she said.

He helped her put the plates into the dishwasher, and then with relief he went upstairs, muttering an indistinct ‘good night’ over his shoulder. He sat on the edge of his made bed and then immediately lay down on his side, not having the strength to take off his clothing. He heard her calling the cat on the terrace.

The next morning he did everything very methodically: he took a long shower, folded up his dirty underwear into a cube and put it inside a bag, unpacked his things and laid them out on a shelf, hanging up his shirts. He shaved, moisturized his face, rubbed his favourite deodorant under his arms, reinforced his greying hair with a little gel. His only hesitation was whether to wear sandals, but he thought it would be better if he continued with his laced-up loafers. Then, in silence (though he wasn’t sure why) he went downstairs. She must have gotten up before him, because on the kitchen counter a toaster was out, and a few crumbs from the bread for toast. As well as a jar of marmalade, a bowl of honey and butter. His breakfast. There was coffee in the French press. He ate some toast standing out on the terrace, looking at the sea, supposing she must have gone to swim again, so she would undoubtedly come from out there. He wanted to see her first, before she saw him. He was the one who kept an eye on others.

He wondered whether she would agree to take him to the lab. He was very curious. Even if she told him nothing about what was in there, he’d be able to figure out quite a bit from what he’d see.

Mole’s techniques were a mystery. Blau had come up with a few theories, of course, and might even have been close to solving it. He had seen his specimens in Mainz and then at the University of Florence on the occasion of the International Conference on Tissue Preservation. He could guess how Mole conserved bodies, but he didn’t know the chemical make-up of the fixatives, wasn’t sure how you operated on the tissues with them. Whether you needed to prepare them somehow, give them a pre-treatment. When and how were the chemicals dispensed, what was used in place of the blood?

How were the internal tissues plastinated?

However Mole did it (and his wife – of her involvement Blau was more and more certain), his specimens were excellent. The tissues kept their natural colour and a certain plasticity. They were soft, but also sufficiently stiff to lend the body the appropriate shape. In addition they were easy to separate, which had an unlikely pedagogical result – you could take them apart and put them back together. Endless possibilities in terms of travels within the body of the preserved organism. From the perspective of the history of conservation of the body, Mole’s discovery was revolutionary, it had no equal. Von Hagens’ plastination had been the first step in this direction, but at this point it seemed less relevant.

Again she came out in a towel, this time a pink one, and she was coming not from the sea, but from the bathroom. She shook her wet hair and stood in the kitchen, at the stove, where she was heating milk up for coffee in a metal mug. She moved the netted plunger up and down, slowly, until the milky foam poured out onto the heated ceramic surface with a hiss.

‘How did you sleep, doctor? Coffee?’

Oh, yes, coffee. He accepted his mug gratefully and let her add some foamy milk to it. He listened with feigned interest to her story about the orange cat, who one day, the day their previous orange cat had died, had come to their house – who knew where from – and sat down on the sofa as though he’d always lived here, and then stayed. So they had barely even noticed the difference.

‘That’s the strength of life,’ she sighed. ‘As soon as one person departs another being fills the void.’

Poor Blau – he would have preferred to get right to the matter at hand. He had never been good at small talk, he was bored by topics pronounced for the sake of maintaining a soothing social hum. He simply wanted to finish his coffee and get into the library, and to see where Mole had worked and what he’d read. Did he have Blau’s History of Conservation on his shelves? What routes had taken him to his remarkable discoveries?

‘It’s interesting that he, like you, started out by researching Ruysch’s work.’

Blau knew this, obviously, but he didn’t want to interrupt her.

‘In his first published article he demonstrated that Ruysch was trying to conserve whole bodies, by eliminating their natural fluids, if only that had been possible in those days, and replacing them with a mixture of liquid wax, talcum and animal tallow. Then bodies, prepared in this way, just like specimens of parts, would be immersed in a “Stygian water”. It seems the idea never came to fruition because of a lack of glass vessels that would be big enough.’

She gave him a hurried glance.

‘I’ll show you that research,’ she said and moved briskly to wrestle with the sliding door because of the coffee she held in her hand. He helped her, while she held his mug.

Behind the door was the library – a beautiful spacious room lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. With perfect aim she reached out to one of them and took down a moderately sized bound booklet. Blau leafed through it, giving her to understand that he already knew this text well. In any case, he had never been particularly interested in techniques involving liquids – that was a dead end. The example of the English man, William Berkeley, the fleet admiral Ruysch had embalmed with liquid interested him only insofar as it concerned the problem of rigor mortis. For this was the mystery of the marvellous appearance of that body, described with such delight by his contemporaries. Ruysch had managed to give him a very relaxed aspect, even though he had received the body he was to treat several days after its death, completely stiffened. Apparently he had hired special servants to massage the body patiently, and in so doing, to overcome its rigor mortis.

But something else entirely grabbed his attention. He handed her back the booklet without moving his gaze away from it.

By the window there was a big desk, and on the other side of it some glass display cabinets. Specimens! Blau was unable to control his excitement and found himself standing before them without realizing he’d reached them. She seemed annoyed he hadn’t given her time for a slow, museum-like preparation for what he was about to see. He’d got away from her.

‘This you might not be so familiar with,’ she said, somewhat grumpily, pointing to the orange cat. It was looking at them peacefully, sitting in a position that suggested an acceptance of existence in this form. The other, live cat followed them into the room now and, as though looking at its reflection in a mirror, gazed at its predecessor.

‘Touch him, pick it up,’ the woman in the pink towel encouraged the doctor.

His fingers trembling, he opened the display case and touched the specimen. It was cold, but not hard. Its coat gave a little bit under Blau’s fingertip. Blau picked it up carefully, holding its chest in one hand and its stomach in the other, as you pick up live cats – and it felt very odd indeed. Because the cat had the same weight as a live cat, and like a live cat, its body reacted to the doctor’s grasp. The impression was almost impossible to believe. He looked at her with an expression on his face that made her laugh, and again she shook her drying hair.

‘You see,’ she said, coming to stand next to him, as though the secret of the specimen brought them together, rendered them close. ‘Lay it down and turn it over.’

He did this carefully, and she reached out and laid her hand on the cat’s stomach.

Under its own weight the cat’s body stretched out and for a moment lay before them on its back, in a position no live cat would ever assume. Blau touched its soft fur and thought it felt warm, although he knew that was impossible. He noted that its eyes had not been replaced by glass ones, as was usual in such cases; instead, Mole had in some magical way left its real eyes in; they seemed only slightly turbid. He touched an eyelid – it was soft and gave under his finger.

‘Some sort of gel,’ he said, more to himself than to her, but she was already pointing him to the slit on the cat’s stomach, which split open after a slight tug and revealed the cat’s whole insides.

Gently, as though touching the most fragile piece of origami, with just his fingertips he pried apart the abdominal walls of the animal and got into the peritoneum, which also let itself be opened, as though the cat were a book made out of precious, exotic material for which there is no name yet. He saw the sight that had since childhood given him a feeling of happiness and fulfilment – the organs perfectly placed in relation to one another, packed into a divine harmony, their natural colours providing absolute verisimilitude, completing the illusion that here the insides of a living body were opening up, that one was participating in its secret.

‘Go ahead and open the rib cage,’ she said, taking a small step back but still hovering over his shoulder. He could smell her breath: coffee and something sweet, stale.

He went ahead and the fine ribs gave way under the pressure of his fingers. He was actually expecting to see a beating heart, so perfect was the illusion. Instead there was a click, something lit up red, and out came a screeching melody, which Dr Blau later identified as the famous hit by the band Queen, ‘I Want To Live Forever’. He jumped back, frightened, with a blend of fear and disgust, as though he had inadvertently harmed this animal outstretched before him. He held his hands up and out. The woman clapped her hands together and laughed outright now, joyously, pleased with the joke, but Blau must have had an overly stern expression on his face because she regained control and put her hand on his back.

‘I’m sorry, don’t worry, it’s just his little joke. We didn’t want it to be too sad,’ she said, now fully serious, although her blue eyes were still laughing. ‘I’m sorry.’

The doctor reciprocated her smile with difficulty, and watched fascinated as the tissues of the specimen slowly, almost imperceptibly, returned to their initial layout.

She did take him to the lab. They took the car down the gravel road along the beach and went up into some stone buildings. Once there had been a fish processing plant here, back when the port still functioned as such; now they’d been converted into a few large rooms with clean, tiled walls, and doors that opened with the touch of a remote, like garages. They had no windows. She turned on the light and Blau saw two large tables covered in sheet metal as well as several glass cases filled with jars and instruments. Shelves filled with flasks of Jena glass. ‘Papain,’ he read on one of them and was surprised. What had Mole used that enzyme for, what had he used it to break down? ‘Catalase’. Syringes of enormous dimensions for infusing and ordinary small ones, like those used to give people injections. He noted this to himself, not daring to ask. Not yet. A metal bath, a drain in the floor, an interior reminiscent simultaneously of a surgeon’s office and a slaughterhouse. She tightened the dripping tap.

‘Are you happy?’ she asked.

He slid his open palm down the sheet metal of the table and went up to the desk, which still offered up some printouts with a graph of some curve.

‘I haven’t touched anything,’ she said encouragingly, as though she were the owner of a home put up for sale. ‘I just threw out the unfinished specimens, because they were starting to go bad.’

He felt her hand on his back and cast a startled glance at her, then immediately lowered his eyes. She moved closer to him, standing so that her breasts were touching his shirt. He felt a panicked rush of adrenaline and just managed to prevent his body from jerking back against his will. But he found a pretext; the table, which he bumped into, swayed, and some small glass ampoules almost rolled onto the floor. He caught them at the last moment; thus he freed himself from that uncomfortable closeness of their bodies. He was certain it had happened naturally enough, as though she’d accidentally leaned on him. At the same time, he felt like a little boy, and suddenly the difference in their ages loomed so large.

She lost a bit of her interest in showing and explaining the details to him; she took out her phone and called someone. She was discussing some rental fee, making plans for Saturday. While this was going on he looked around voraciously, examined every detail and called upon himself to remember all of it. Record in his mind on a map all the equipment in the lab, every little bottle, the location of each of the tools.

After lunch, during which she talked to him about Mole, his daily schedule and little eccentricities (he listened attentively, sensing he was receiving an extraordinary privilege), she talked Blau into swimming in the sea. He wasn’t happy, he would have preferred to sit quietly in the library and examine the cat and the room itself once more. But he didn’t have the courage to say no to her. He made a last vague attempt to get out of it by pointing out he didn’t have a bathing suit.

‘Oh, come on,’ she said, not accepting the excuse. ‘It’s my private beach, there won’t be anyone. You can swim naked.’

But she was still going in a swimming costume. So Dr Blau took off his boxers underneath his towel and got into the water as quickly as he could. The cold of it took his breath away. He wasn’t a good swimmer – he’d somehow never had an opportunity to learn. In general he didn’t like exercise, being in motion. He uncertainly hopped around in the water, taking care to be able to feel the bottom under his feet. Meanwhile she swam out to sea in a beautiful crawl and then returned. She splashed water on him. Blau, surprised, shut his eyes.

‘Well, what are you waiting for, swim!’ she cried.

He readied himself for a moment for the plunge into the cold water, ultimately doing it in desperation, submissively, like a child not wanting to disappoint a parent. He swam a little distance and turned back. Then she slapped her hand against the surface of the water, hard, and kept going by herself.

He waited for her on the shore, shivering. As she walked towards him, dripping, he looked down.

‘Why didn’t you swim?’ she asked, in a high-pitched, amused voice.

‘Cold,’ was all he said.

She burst out laughing, throwing back her head and shamelessly exposing her palate.

In his room he dozed off briefly, before taking some meticulous notes. He even sketched the layout of Mole’s lab, feeling a little bit like James Bond. With relief he washed off the salt water, shaved and put on a clean shirt. When he went downstairs, she was nowhere to be seen. The door to the library was closed, and the key in the door had been turned, so he wasn’t brave enough to go in… He went out in front of the house and played with the cat until the cat ignored him. Finally he heard some sounds coming from the kitchen and went towards it from the yard.

Mrs Mole was standing by the counter and going through green lettuce leaves.

‘Salad with croutons and some cheeses. What do you think?’

He nodded eagerly, although he wasn’t at all convinced that would fill him up. She poured him a glass of white wine and, without conviction, he brought it to his lips.

She told him in detail about the accident, about the search for the body in the sea, which lasted for a long time, several days, and finally about how it had looked when they had finally found it. He lost all desire to eat. She said that she had been able to preserve a piece of the least destroyed tissue. She was wearing a long, airy grey dress with slits down the sides, with a deep-cut neckline that revealed her freckled body. Again he thought she might cry.

The salad and the cheeses they ate almost in silence. Then she took his hand, and he froze.

He put his arm around her, clevely hiding from her. She kissed his neck.

‘Not like this,’ he blurted.

She didn’t understand. ‘How, then? What do you want me to do?’

But he had slipped out of her embrace, stood up from the sofa and, red in the face, was looking helplessly around the room.

‘How do you want it to happen? Tell me.’

In despair, he realized he couldn’t pretend anymore, that he didn’t have the strength, that there were too many things going on at once, and turning his back to her, he whispered: ‘I can’t. It’s too soon for me.’

‘It’s because I’m older than you, right?’ she murmured, standing up.

He protested uncertainly. He wanted her to comfort him but without touching him.

‘It’s not like there’s a massive difference in our ages,’ he said, as he listened to her clear the table. ‘I’m with someone,’ he lied.

In a certain sense this was true, and truth is always true in a certain sense; he was with someone. He had already been wedded, married, connected by blood. With the Glasmensch and the wax woman with the open stomach, with Soliman, Fragonard, Vesalius, von Hagens and Mole, for God’s sake, who else could there be? Why should he bore into this living, ageing warm body, drill into it with his? With what aim? He felt like he would have to leave, maybe even right away. He ran his hand through his hair and buttoned up his shirt.

She sighed deeply.

‘So?’ she asked.

He didn’t know what to say.

A quarter of an hour later he was standing with his suitcase in the living room, ready to go.

‘Can I call a taxi?’

She was sitting on the couch. Reading.

‘But of course,’ she said. She removed her glasses and pointed to the phone, and then returned to her reading.

But since he didn’t know the number, he thought it would be better if he just went on foot to the bus stop; there had to be one somewhere nearby.

And so he arrived at the conference sooner than he’d planned. After a long debate with hotel reception he managed to finagle a room. He spent the whole evening in the bar. He drank a bottle of wine at the hotel restaurant, and then in bed he began to cry like a little child.

Over the next few days he heard lots of papers and gave his: ‘The Preservation of Pathology Specimens Through Silicone Plastination: An Innovative Supplement to the Teaching of Pathological Anatomy’ – an excerpt from his dissertation.

His talk was enthusiastically received. On the final evening of the conference at the banquet he met a nice, handsome teratologist from Hungary who confided in him that he was about to go to Mrs Mole’s house, at her invitation.

‘To her seaside home,’ – he emphasized the word ‘seaside’. ‘I figured I’d combine the two trips, it’s not really very far from here,’ he said. ‘Everything her husband left is in her hands now. If I managed to get a glimpse of his laboratory… You know, I have my theory as to the chemical composition. Apparently she is in talks with some museum in the States, sooner or later she’ll give all of it away, along with all the documentation. But if I could get access to his papers here and now…’ he went on dreamily. ‘My habilitation would be guaranteed, perhaps even my professorship.’

Fuckwit, thought Blau. This man would be the last person to whom he would admit he’d got there first. And then he looked at him with her eyes, for just a second. He saw his dark hair, gleaming with some sort of gel, and the little sweat stains under his arms on the blue material of his shirt. His already slightly protruding but still slim belly, his narrow hips, his fresh pale skin with the shadow of dense facial hair. His eyes already blurring from the wine and shining with the glory of impending triumph.