Flights

DR BLAU’S TRAVELS (I)

Grey beard and salt-and-pepper hair, he travels to a conference on the preservation of medical specimens, focusing on plastinating human tissues. He sits back in his chair, puts his headphones on, and listens to a Bach cantata.

The girl in the pictures he’s developed and is now taking with him has an amusing way of wearing her hair – cut straight across the back, but the strands in the front are longer. Reaching her naked shoulders, they flit flirtatiously over her face so that all you can see underneath them is the distinct, red-brown line of her lips, painted onto the smooth surface of her face. Blau liked that, that mouth, just as he liked her body – petite, taut, breasts compact, nipples punctuating the velvety plane of her chest. Hips slender, though her thighs were quite substantial. Blau has always been attracted to powerful legs. ‘Strength in the thighs’ could be Blau’s personal hexagram 65. A woman with powerful thighs is like a nutcracker: to venture between them is to risk being shattered. To venture between them is to disarm a bomb.

This excites him. He is skinny, small. Thus he risks his life.

He was in the grips of excitement as he took these photographs of her. He was naked, too, so that slowly his excitement made itself known, unmistakable, even. But with his face concealed behind the camera, he didn’t mind; he was a mechanical minotaur with a photographic face, the single eye of the lens atop a stalk zooming in and out, advancing and retreating like a mechanical trunk.

The girl noticed his state, which lent her confidence. She raised her arms, clasped her hands together at the nape of her neck, so exposing her defenceless armpits, the blind, underdeveloped possibilities of her crotch. Raised, her breasts became almost flat, almost boyish. Blau came closer, on his knees, the camera at his face, and began to photograph her from below. He was trembling. He considered that the tuft of black hair, shaved down to a thin line, which slimmed her hips still further to the eye and allured like an exclamation mark, might be about to scratch his lens. By now his erection was significant. The girl had had a little white wine – a Greek retsina, he thought – and she sat down on the floor now, crossing her legs and hiding the place the doctor was so moved by. He could guess what her position meant: they were edging towards the evening’s end.

But that wasn’t really what he was after. He retreated to the window, his bare thin buttock touching for a moment the cold sill. He was still taking pictures. Another act, this time a seated one, had now been captured. The lamb-like girl was smiling, proud of the readiness of Dr Blau’s body – for this meant she could work her magic from afar. What power! A few years ago, as a child, she’d played at magic, imagined she could move objects with just her will. Sometimes it seemed to her that some teaspoon or clip really did move a millimetre. But never had any object given into her will so evidently, so theatrically.

Meanwhile Blau was now faced with the real task at hand. There was no use at this stage in putting off the inevitable. Their bodies drifted together. The girl allowed him to caress her and lay her on her back. With gentle fingers the doctor disarmed the bomb. The hexagram of her thighs opened to all interpretation. The camera snapped.

Blau has a whole collection of these photos, dozens, maybe hundreds by now – women’s bodies against blank walls. The walls differ, because the places aren’t the same: hotels, pensions, his office at the Academy, occasionally his own apartment. The bodies are fundamentally similar, no mystery there.

But not the vaginas. Those are like fingerprints, in fact they could use those embarrassing organs, which the police have yet to appreciate, for identification – they are absolutely unique. Beautiful as orchids that draw in insects with their shape and colour. What a strange thought – that this botanical mechanism has been preserved somehow even into the era of humankind’s development. It would be understating it to say it’s been effective. It almost seems to him that nature itself so delighted in this petal-based idea that it became determined to take it further, heedless of the fact that man would wind up with a psyche that would slip out of control and conceal what had been so beautifully developed. Hide it in underwear, in insinuations, in silence.

He keeps the pictures of vaginas in cardboard boxes with patterns, boxes purchased at IKEA, changing only their design over the years, depending on the current fashion – starting with the garish, kitschy eighties, through the spare greys and blacks of the nineties, up until today – vintage, pop art, ethno. He doesn’t even have to write the dates on them, then – he recognizes them instantly. And yet, the doctor’s dream is to create a real collection, not made up of pictures.

Every body part deserves to be remembered. Every human body deserves to last. It is an outrage that it’s so fragile, so delicate. It is an outrage that it’s permitted to disintegrate underground, or given to the mercy of flames, burned like rubbish. If it were up to Blau, he would make the world differently – the soul could be mortal, what do we need it for, anyway, but the body would be immortal. We will never learn how diverse the human species is, how unique each individual, if we are so quick to condemn bodies to destruction, he thought. In the past people understood this – but they lacked the means, the methods to preserve. Only the wealthiest could afford embalming. But today the science of plastination was developing very fast, perpetually perfecting its methods. Anyone who wanted to could save his body now, and share its beauty, its mystery with others. Here is the wondrous system of my muscles, the sprinter would say, the 100-metre world champion. Look, everyone, at how this works. Here is my brain, the greatest chess player would cry. Ah, these unusual two grooves, let’s call them ‘bishop twists’. Here is my stomach, two children emerged from here into the world, the proud mother would say. So Blau imagined it. This was his vision of a just world in which we would not be so quick to destroy what is sacred. He therefore strives toward this vision with everything he does.

Why would anyone have any sort of problem with this notion? We Protestants certainly would not. But even Catholics ought not to raise any alarm about it: after all, we have old evidence, collections of relics, the patron saint of plastination might be Jesus Christ himself, when he shows us his red fleshy heart.

The gentle hum of the engines lent to the choir of voices in Dr Blau’s headphones an unexpected depth. The plane was flying west, so the night didn’t end where it ought to, dragging lamely on instead. From time to time he raised the shade to see if somewhere on the horizon in the distance a white glow wasn’t visible by now, glimmer of a new day, new possibilities. But there was nothing. The screens were off, the film had ended. Every so often they would show a map, and on it the small shape of the plane as it traversed at a turtle’s pace a distance not indicated on the map. And it even seemed that the map had been designed by Zenon the Cartographer – every distance is infinite in itself, each point launching a new space that cannot be surmounted, and of course, any movement an illusion, all of us travelling in place.

Unimaginable cold outside, unimaginable altitude, unimaginable phenomenon of launching a heavy machine into thin air. ‘Wir danken dir, Gott,’ sang Dr Blau’s angels in his headphones.

He glanced at the hand of the woman sitting to his left and could barely contain himself from petting it. The woman slept with her head on a man’s shoulder. To Blau’s right a boy dozing, a slightly plump young man. His arm hung limply off his seat, almost touching the doctor’s trousers. He also kept himself from petting those fingers.

He sat squeezed into his chair amidst two hundred people, in the oblong space of the plane, breathing the same air they were breathing. In fact this was why he liked travelling so much – en route people are forced to be together, physically, close to one another, as though the aim of travel were another traveller.

But each of these beings, to whose presence he’d been sentenced for another – he looked at his watch – four hours, seemed monadic, smooth and shiny; an orb to play pétanque with. Which is why the only kind of contact activated in Blau’s instinctive algorithms was petting; grazing with the tip of his finger, its pad, feeling the cool, even curvature. But his hands have lost all hope at this point of discovering any rift in it, having checked thousands of times on women’s bodies: there is no tab or hidden latch that would cautiously permit itself to be released by a nail, inviting him inside, no protrusion, no secret little lever, no button that, when pressed, lets out a burst of something, a small spring that would react and reveal to his eyes the desired complex insides. Or perhaps not complex, perhaps very simple, just the inverse of the surface, just curved inwards, a spiral wrapped up in itself. The surface of these monads hides within it vast mysteries, not even remotely hinting at the dazzling richness of these marvellously and cunningly packed structures – not even the cleverest traveller would be able to compose his luggage in this way, distancing from one another the organs, for order, safety and aesthetics, with peritoneal membranes, lining space with fat tissue, cushioning them. So went Blau’s ardent ruminations through his unsound airplane half-sleep.

He’s fine. Dr Blau feels happy. What more could he want. Seeing the world from above, its beautiful, peaceful order. An order that is antiseptic. Contained in shells and caves, in grains of sand and in the scheduled flights of giant airplanes, in symmetry – the age-old fit of right to left and left to right – in the eloquent light of the information screens, and in all light. Dr Blau tugged his blanket up over his slender body, fleece piece of material, property of the airline, and fell asleep for real.

Blau was a boy when his father – an engineer who, like others from socialist nations in the construction industry spent years rebuilding Dresden after the destruction of the war – took him to the Hygiene Museum. There little Blau saw the Glasmensch, a glass man created by Franz Tschakert, to educate. A six-foot-five golem without skin made of perfect imitation glass organs, arranged around the transparent body, seemingly devoid of secrets. It was in its particular way a monument to nature, designer of this perfection. There was in it a lightness and a thoughtfulness, a spatial sensibility, a tastefulness, a beauty and a play of symmetry. The wondrous human machine with rational, streamlined shapes, often resolved with humour (the structure of the ear), periodically eccentric (the structure of the eye).

The glass man became little Blau’s friend, at least in the boy’s imagination. Sometimes he would visit him and sit in his room, crossing his legs and letting himself be looked at. Sometimes he would incline politely to enable the boy to grasp some detail, an understanding of how the glass muscle tenderly embraces the bone and where the nerve disappears to. He became his friend and silent glass companion. Many children play, in any case, with imaginary friends.

In his dreams he came to life – although he did so rarely, playing what might be called a minor role. Even as a young man, Blau never particularly cared for living things, perhaps only to a certain degree. And then they would talk in silence all evening, under the covers, when he was told to turn out the light in his room. What about? Blau can’t remember anymore. By day he became the boy’s guardian angel and accompanied him – unseen – in school scuffles – in the boy’s imagination the glass man was always ready to pummel enemies on his behalf, and the class troublemaker on those group field trips to the botanical garden, boring and tiring, consisting largely in waiting for the group to be rounded back up again. The group, as a form of collective socializing, was also not a thing Blau ever cared for.

For Christmas he got from his father a small plastic miniature that couldn’t possibly compare with the original, it was more like a statue of a divinity, a painful reminder of the existence of the real thing.

Little Blau had a very developed spatial imagination, which would help him later in anatomy. Thanks to his imagination he assumed control over the Glasmensch’s invisibility. He was able to highlight in his body what seemed worth paying attention to at any given moment, making vanish what seemed irrelevant for that time. Hence the glass figure was sometimes a man made of tendons and muscles, without skin, without a face; simply a weave of muscles, chords pulled completely taut, bulging from the effort. Without even knowing himself when it happened, little Blau learned all there was to know about anatomy. His strictly minded and demanding father looked on proudly, already seeing his son’s future in very concrete terms – he would be a doctor, a scientist, a scholar. For his birthday the boy received beautifully coloured anatomical plates, and the Easter bunny brought him a life-sized human skeleton.

In his early years, at university and right afterwards, Blau travelled often. He visited almost every available anatomical collection. Like a rock groupie he followed von Hagens and his satanic exhibition around, until finally he met the master in person. His travels were circular, wending their way back to their point of departure, until it became clear that their aim was not far off, but rather here, on the inside of the body.

He studied medicine but rapidly got bored of it. He wasn’t interested in diseases, much less so in curing them. Dead bodies don’t get sick. He only really participated in his anatomy classes, where he volunteered for the exercises the frightened, simpering girls never wanted to do. He wrote a paper on the history of anatomy and married a classmate, whose specialization in paediatrics resulted in her spending most of her time at the hospital, which suited Blau just fine. When she got what she’d been angling for and gave birth to a daughter, Blau, now Assistant Professor at the Academy, started going off to conferences and on residencies, so she found herself a gynaecologist and moved with the child into his big house with its clinic in the basement. In this way they managed to bring to fruition a certain complete segment of human procreation.

In the meantime, Blau wrote a terrific dissertation entitled ‘The Behaviour of Pathological Samples Under Silicone Plastination: An Innovative Supplement to the Teaching of Pathological Anatomy’. His students nicknamed him Formaldehyde. He researched the history of anatomical samples and the preservation of tissues. He visited dozens of museums in search of material for his work, finally settling down in Berlin, where he got a good job cataloguing the collections of the Medizinhistorisches Museum, newly being created.

He arranged his personal life neatly, unproblematically. He felt decidedly better living alone; he quelled his sexual urges with his students, whom he would first feel out by inviting them for coffee. He knew it wasn’t allowed, but he was operating on the sociobiological premise that the university was his natural hunting ground, and that these women were, in the end, adults who knew what they were doing. He looked good – he was handsome, clean-cut, clean-shaven (from time to time he let his beard grow out, keeping it neat, of course), and they were curious as magpies. It didn’t seem he was cut out for romance. He always used protection, and his needs were modest, since the vast majority of his drive underwent a kind of spontaneous sublimation. Thus with this realm of his life there was no problem, no dark side, no guilt.

At first he thought of his new job at the museum as a respite from the teaching he had done before. When he would walk into the courtyard of the Charité complex, among the manicured lawns, the fancifully trimmed trees, he would feel that he had found himself in a place that was in some sense outside time. He was in the very centre of a huge city, but no noise, no rush, could reach in here. He would feel relaxed, and he would whistle.

He’d spend his free time mainly in the massive basement of the museum, which was connected underground to other buildings belonging to the hospital. Those passageways tended to be cluttered with shelves, old dusty display cabinets, armoured cupboards that once held God knows what and that had wound up here, empty, who knew when. But some of the corridors were traversable, and after a while, after making copies of a few keys, he learned to move through them through the whole complex. This was how he travelled daily to the cafeteria.

His work consisted in dusting off jars of samples or exhibits otherwise preserved from the murky depths of the museum’s stores, and in their expert identification. He was greatly aided in this task by old Mr Kampa, who had long since reached retirement age, but whose contract got extended year after year because there was no one else who would have been able to navigate those massive stores.

They put shelf by shelf in order. Mr Kampa would first carefully clean the tops of the jars, making sure not to damage their labels. They learned to decipher together the beautiful old sloping handwriting. Usually the label included the Latin name for the part of the body or the disease, as well as the initials, sex and age of the original owner of the organs the sample was presenting. Sometimes an occupation was given. Thus they learned that this magnificent intestinal tumor had been in the belly of a seamstress, A.W., aged 54. Often, though, the information was imprecise, the labels largely worn away. In many cases by the chipped sealant applied to the lids for samples in alcohol air got in, and the liquid clouded, and it enveloped the specimen inside in a dense fog – in those cases the specimens had to be destroyed. A committee made up of Blau, Kampa and two of the people who worked upstairs in the museum would meet and establish this in writing. Then Mr Kampa would take these pieces of human bodies, extracted from their jars, ruined, to the hospital crematorium.

Some of the specimens required special care (when their container had been damaged). Then Blau would take it to his little laboratory and there, with the utmost care, transfer it to a cleansing bath. Then, after careful examination, and after taking samples (which he would freeze), he would place it in a new container of the finest quality, in a modern solution that he prepared himself. And so although he could not provide the specimens with immortality, he was at least able to lend them a much longer life.

Of course it wasn’t only specimens in jars here. There were also drawers full of undocumented pieces of bones, kidney stones, some fossils; there was a mummified armadillo and other animals, in very poor condition. A small collection of shrunken Maori heads, masks made out of human skin – two extremely disturbing examples of these had also wound up in the crematorium.

Blau and Kampa dug out a couple of real archeological rarities here, too. They came upon, for example, four specimens from Ruysch’s renowned collection from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, a collection that had been dispersed, its fate unknown. Unfortunately, one of them, Acardius hemisomus, which could have been the gem of any teratological collection, had to be sent to the crematorium because of a crack in its glass receptacle – there was no way of saving it. The committee, seeing the specimen in its state of considerably advanced decay, did consider briefly whether in such cases there ought not to be some type of funeral arranged.

Blau was overjoyed at this discovery because it enabled him to run a number of tests on the famous preservation concoction of Frederik Ruysch, the Dutch anatomist of the late seventeenth century. This solution was exceedingly effective for its time – it managed to maintain the natural colour of the specimen, as well as keeping it from swelling, which was otherwise the bane of that era’s fluid preservation. Blau found that in addition to brandy from Nantes and black pepper, it also contained ginger root extract. He wrote an article and joined in the old debate on the ingredients of ‘Ruysch’s solution’, that Stygian liquid intended to ensure immortality through immersion, at least for the body. From that time forward Kampa started calling their underground collections ‘pickles’.

He and Kampa – who brought him the specimen one morning – discovered something remarkable, on which Blau then worked for several months, in order to precisely understand the make-up and the workings of the conserving liquid. Namely, an arm. Male, powerful (the circumference of the biceps was 54 centimetres), 47 centimetres long, cut clean with the clear aim of showing the tattoo – multi-coloured, representing with great sensitivity to proportions a whale emerging from the waves of the sea (white crests captured with Baroque grace and precision), blowing a fountain into the sky. The drawing was perfectly executed, expecially the sky, which from the outside of the arm seemed intensely blue – though the closer you got to the armpit, the darker it became. The play of hues had been perfectly preserved in the translucent liquid.

The specimen had no label. The jar was reminiscent of those made in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, meaning it had a cylindrical shape – they didn’t know at that time how to make cuboid forms from glass, in any case. The specimen, attached to the slate cap by horse hair, appeared to float in the fluid. But the strangest thing was the fluid itself… It wasn’t alcohol, although at first glance Blau had thought this came from the beginning of the seventeenth century, and from the Netherlands. It was a mixture of water and formaldehyde with a small amount of glycerin. Its composition could be said to be very modern, quite similar to the Kaeserling III mixture still used today. The container no longer had to be hermetically sealed, because the mixture didn’t vapourize like alcohol. In the wax that was used to seal the lid haphazardly in place he found fingerprints which moved him, deeply. He imagined that those tiny little wavy lines, that natural stamp in the shape of a labyrinth, had belonged to someone just like him.

He took care of that arm and its artwork with something that might have been termed love. He wasn’t going to find out now whom it had belonged to, nor who had dispatched this arm with its tattoo on its travels through time.

He and Kampa shared a moment of terror – which Blau recounted later to a female first-year student, observing with satisfaction how her eyes became wide with surprise as her pupils turned a dark matte, which according to sociobiologists was a sign of erotic interest.

In the wooden boxes in one of the corridors that led to a dead end, they found some stuffed mummies in very poor condition. The skin was completely blackened, dry, torn, seagrass spilling out through the seams, which had split apart in places. The bodies were shrivelled, dried up, and to top it all off they were dressed in what must have once been considered lavish garments – now all the lace and the collars had taken on the same colour as the dust. Their decorations, folds and flounces had lost their distinguishing characteristics, become a ball of rotted material from which, here and there, some little button, made of pearl, stood out. From the stretched-out mouth, forced open by desiccation, grass emerged.

They found two mummies like this, small, that looked like children, but on close examination Blau realized they were – thank God – stuffed chimpanzees, very poorly preserved, completely unprofessionally; the sale and purchase of ones like these was quite widespread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of course their suspicions could have been confirmed, human mummies had also been bought and sold, and quite ample collections created out of them. Collectors were especially interested in acquiring what was different and exceptional, people of other races, the spectacularly crippled, the diseased.

‘Stuffing corpses is the simplest way of preserving them,’ mused Blau, guiding around the makeshift cellar collection two more female students who had enthusiastically accepted his invitation, much to Kampa’s disapproval and dismay. Blau was counting on at least one of them letting him invite her out for wine, adding a new photograph to his collection. ‘In so doing,’ he continued now, ‘they only really leave the skin, which means this isn’t, in the full sense of the word, a body. It’s just a section of a body, the external form stretched out over a dummy made of hay. Mummification is quite a pathetic way of conserving a body. It only gives the illusion that we have the whole thing here before us. In reality, it is an obvious fraud. A circus trick, since only its shape and external covering have been preserved. And in fact the body has been destroyed, in other words, the ideological opposition to preservation. Barbarity.’

Yes, they had breathed a sigh of relief that these were not human mummies. That would have brought them headaches since the law clearly forbids keeping in state museums whole human corpses (if they are not ancient mummies, and even with that people start to object and cause trouble). If they had been people – children, as they thought in the beginning – they would have faced a complicated bureaucratic procedure and lots of issues. Many times he had heard about these uncomfortable discoveries when collections at medical academies or at universities were put in order.

Emperor Joseph II had created such a collection in Vienna. In his cabinet of curiosities he had decided to collect everything that was particular, every manifestation of the aberration of the world, every instance of matter forgetting itself. One of his successors, Francis I, had not hesitated to stuff his black-skinned courtier, one Angelo Soliman, after his death. At which point his mummy, wearing only a grass band, was displayed for the viewing pleasure of all the monarch’s guests.