Beatrice and Virgil (6 page)

  The specimen before Henry was a superlative job. The vitality of its form, the naturalness of its pose, the fine evocation of its habitat--it was remarkable. Here, in an otherwise comprehensively manufactured environment, was a small, brilliant patch of tropical Africa. All it needed was to breathe for the illusion to be reality.

  Henry bent down to see if he could find any trace of a stitch along the animal's stomach or legs. There was nothing, only smooth hide flowing over muscles, with here and there ripples of veins. He looked at the eyes; they appeared moist and black. The ears were erect, listening intently. The nose seemed about to tremble. The legs looked ready to bolt. The display had the same testimonial weight as a photograph, the sense that it was an indisputable witness to reality, because when the photograph was taken the photographer necessarily had to
  be there
  , sharing the same reality. But the act of witness here had an added spatial dimension. That was the nature of the feat Henry was admiring: it was a three-dimensional photograph. In a second, the okapi would bolt, as an okapi in the wild would if it heard the click of a camera.

  It was only after some minutes that Henry noticed the street number above the door on the right: 1933. The very address he was looking for! There was a sign in gold letters   on a black background above the bay window: okapi taxidermy  .  Henry turned to look in the direction he'd come from. Craning a bit, he could see the edge of the grocery store, but otherwise the rest of the street around the corner was blocked from view. In the other direction, just a few steps ahead, the street made yet another turn, to the left, to continue its way now that the big brick building was past. Okapi Taxidermy was the only business on this hidden snippet of street. Such an oasis of peace would please an okapi, but it was surely a graveyard for a business and the despair of the owner of the store, who would see none of the busy customer traffic that the main part of the street enjoyed.

  A taxidermist. Here was another explanation for the interest in Saint Julian's hunted animals. Henry didn't hesitate for a moment. His plan had been to drop off his card, but he had never met a taxidermist before. He didn't even know taxidermists still existed. Keeping Erasmus on a tight leash, he pushed the door open and together they entered Okapi Taxidermy. A bell tinkled. He closed the door. A pane of glass on his left allowed him to continue admiring the diorama. Henry could now see the okapi from its side through the twisting vines, as if he were an explorer in a jungle stealthily coming upon it. How curious the impulses of natural selection that zebras should warrant getting a full coat of stripes while okapis only the leggings. Looking up into the diorama, Henry noticed that among the discreetly placed lights, one light, in a corner above the bay   windows, was set on a mechanism so that it slowly swivelled. In the opposite corner, there was a small fan that also pivoted to-and-fro. He guessed their purpose: in shifting the play of light upon the display, in rustling the leaves ever so gently, an added degree of lifelikeness was created. He looked at the vines closely. He couldn't see the least ridge of plastic or piece of wire or anything to shatter the make-believe. Could they be real? Surely not. Not in this temperate climate, however green a thumb one might have. Perhaps they were real, but somehow preserved, mummified.

  "Can I help you?" came a quiet, steady voice.

  Henry turned. A tall man was speaking to him. Erasmus growled. Henry yanked on his leash. Before he could say a word, the man said, "Oh, it's you. Just a moment, please," and he disappeared to the side out of sight.
  It's you?
  Henry wondered if the man had recognized him.

  His eyes distracted him from the question. Next to the okapi diorama was a counter with an ancient till upon it, silver in colour and with large, mechanical buttons. Behind the counter, hanging from the wall and from the back of the diorama, were four pale-yellow fibreglass shapes fixed to escutcheon-shaped wooden bases. It took Henry a second to realize what they were: models of heads, the foundations upon which the faces and antlers of hunted animals would be applied. Beneath them, against the wall, were the bit elements of taxidermy: a panel with glass eyeballs of all sizes, diminishing in scale unevenly, going from golf-ball size to marble size in one jump and then shrinking by much finer   increments, most of them black, but some coloured and with strange pupils; a board with needles of varying sizes, straight and curving; a rack of small pots of paint; bottles of various liquids, packages of various powders, bags of various stuffing, balls of various thread and twine; some books and magazines concerning taxidermy. These items were set atop and beneath a table that had what appeared to be real zebra legs. Next to the table stood a glass cabinet with an array of insects and colourful butterflies arranged in different display boxes, some featuring a single, spectacular specimen--a large blue butterfly or a beetle that looked like a small rhinoceros--others filled with a number of species, playing on variety.

  To the right of the counter, filling the store, was the larger, more striking stock-in-trade of a taxidermist. Three levels of deep, open shelves ran along the walls of the room, and it was a large room with a high ceiling. There were more shelves, free-standing ones, in the middle of the room, also running the length of it. Crammed upon these shelves, each and every one, without any gaps, were animals of all sizes and species, furred and feathered, spotted and scaled, predator and prey. All of them were frozen to the spot, as if Henry's appearance had surprised them and at any moment now they would react--with lightning speed, the way animals do--and the place would break into a pandemonium of snarling and screaming and barking and whining, as on the day Noah's Ark was emptied.

  Curiously, Erasmus, the only living animal in the room,   didn't seem struck by all the wild specimens before him. Was it their lack of natural smell? Their uncanny immobility? Whatever the reason, they had no more effect on him than a gallery of dull sculptures and he paid them no attention. With a sigh, he plopped himself onto the floor and rested his head on his paws, as bored as a child in an art museum.

  Henry, on the other hand, stared wide-eyed. A tingle of excitement passed through him. Now here was a stage full of stories. He took in a set of three tigers standing in the middle of the room. A male was crouching, staring dead ahead, ears swivelled around, every hair bristling. A female stood a little behind him, a paw raised in the air, a snarl upon her face, her tail anxiously curled in the air. Lastly, a cub had his head turned to one side, distracted momentarily, but he too was apprehensive, his claws drawn. The nervous tension emanating from the trio was palpable, electric. In a second, instinct would take over and the situation would come to a head. The male would confront--what? whom? A rogue male who had just appeared? There would be fearsome roars, perhaps outright combat if each male felt he could not back down. The female would turn and instantly vanish, leaping through the vegetation, moving all the faster to encourage her cub to keep up. The cub would not slacken in his efforts, no matter the pounding of his heart. Only the knowledge that these animals were dead, certainly dead, kept an equally fearful reaction from overtaking Henry. But his heart was pounding.

  He looked at the rest of the room. There was no natural light except that which filtered through the diorama and the front door's pane of glass, and the artificial lighting hanging from the ceiling was not strong. Shadows manufactured environments: forests, rocks, branches. At a glance, close at hand, Henry could see shrews, mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, rats, a domestic cat, a hedgehog, cottontail rabbits, two bats (one in flight, one upside down, hanging from a shelf), a mink, a weasel, a hare, a platypus, an iguana, a kiwi bird, a red squirrel, a grey fox, a badger, an armadillo, a beaver, an otter, a raccoon, a skunk, a lemur, a wallaby, a koala, a king penguin, an aardvark. Grouped together were some snakes, among them a skinny, bright green one, a reared-up cobra, its hood expanded, and a boa with a fat coil overhanging the shelf. Farther along he could make out a capybara, a lynx, a porcupine, a mouflon sheep with incredible horns, a wolf, a leopard, a tapir, a lion, a gazelle of some kind, a seal, a cheetah, a baboon, a chimpanzee. Along part of one shelf were whole mounted skeletons of mid-size four-legged animals, five or six of them, next to which was a skull set on a rod under a glass dome. At the far end of the room appeared a gnu, an oryx antelope, an ostrich, a grizzly bear standing high on its rear legs, and a baby hippopotamus with a peacock in full display resting atop it. Packing the upper shelves were concerts of birds, splashes of colour: hummingbirds, parrots, jays and magpies, ducks and pheasants, hawks and owls, a toucan, three small penguins, a Canada goose, a turkey and others Henry couldn't identify,   some of these birds perched, others about to take off, and still others in full flight, suspended from the ceiling, obscuring it. At the very back of the room, above the animals on the floor, animal heads--lions, tigers, several types of deer, a moose, a camel, a giraffe, an Indian elephant--covered the wall, giving the impression that the room was the end of a tunnel filled with animals and shadows.

  Aside from the koala sitting next to the wallaby and the jaguar next to the tapir and a few other elementary pairings, there was minimal sense to how the animals were ordered. The winged were generally above the footed and the smaller above the larger, with the very large tending to crowd the back of the room. Beyond that, anything went. Strangely, this higgledy-piggledy arrangement, by dispensing with notions of distinction and grouping, created an overall impression of unity, a shared culture of animalness. Here, diverse but one, linked by a common bond, was a community.

  "I have your book here," said the man, emerging from a side door.

  The man had recognized Henry. He had a sharp eye. Henry hadn't done much media in years and the man's memory of his appearance couldn't be a fresh one.

  "And I have a card for you," Henry said automatically, though he had not meant to deliver it in person. "Would you like me to sign your book?"

  "If you want."

  "A pleasure meeting you," said Henry, extending his hand.

  "Oh, yes." The shopkeeper's soft hand enveloped Henry's.

  They exchanged items. Henry inscribed the book. He wrote the first thing that came to his mind:
  To Henry, a friend of animals
  . The man, meanwhile, opened the envelope and took a long time to read the card. Henry worried about what he had written. But it gave him time to observe the man. He was tall, well over six feet, with a wide, gaunt body, his clothes hanging from big bones. His arms were long, his hands large. His black hair was oiled and combed back, to be forgotten, and under a tall forehead he had a pale, flat, long-nosed, jowly face. He looked to be in his sixties. His expression was serious, the eyebrows knitted, the dark eyes staring. He didn't seem a naturally social being. The handshake had been awkward, apparently not a grace practiced often, and the signing of the book had plainly been Henry's idea, not his.

  Erasmus seemed intrigued by the man, although not in his usual over-friendly way. He got to his feet and inched forward, sniffing tentatively at the hem of the man's trousers, his legs spread out and tense, ready to scurry away should he smell anything alarming. Seeing that the man wasn't reacting with a smile or a greeting or even a glance in the usual way of people who are meeting a friendly dog, Henry tugged on Erasmus's leash and brought him back to him. Inexplicably, Henry was feeling nervous.

  "Is the dog a problem? I can easily tie him outside," he said.

  "No," the man replied, without lifting his eyes from the card.

  "You can ignore the card. I just wrote it quickly, in case I didn't find you."

  "That's fine." He closed the card and placed it in the book Henry had returned to him. He did not look to see what Henry had written in the book, nor did he have anything to say about what he had written in the card.

  "Is this your store?" Henry asked.

  "It is," replied the man.

  "An amazing place. I've never seen anything like it. How long have you been a taxidermist?"

  "Over sixty-five years. I started when I was sixteen and I've never stopped."

  Henry was taken aback. Over sixty-five years? The man must be in his early eighties, then. He certainly didn't look it.

  "These tigers are remarkable."

  "The female and the cub I was given by Van Ingen and Van Ingen, a firm in India, when they closed. The male is my work, from a zoo. He died of a heart defect."

  He spoke without the least hesitation, and his delivery was clear and certain. He was not afraid of silence, either. I don't speak like that, Henry thought. I speak both quickly and haltingly, in stumbles and incomplete sentences that trail off.

  "And all these animals are for sale?"

  "Nearly all. A few are museum items I've repaired that are drying. A small number are display items. The okapi is not for sale, nor is the platypus or the aardvark. But the rest, yes, they're for sale."

  "Do you mind if I have a look?"

  "Go ahead. Look as closely as you want. All the animals are alive--it's time that has stopped."

  Pulling Erasmus along, Henry started going around the store. The taxidermist stayed in place, silent and staring. Henry discovered that behind most animals others were hiding, often of the same kind, but not always. A colony of tortoises was tucked under the legs of the cheetah. Next to the mouflon sheep, on the floor, was a pile of antlers. Rolled-up hides stood in the back corner next to the ostrich, along with some tusks and horns. Some fish mounted on wooden boards--trout and bass, a puffer fish--lay at the feet of the bear. The craftsmanship was superlative. The fur, the scales, the plumage--they positively glistened with life. Henry felt that if he stamped a foot, all these creatures would jump and flee. And despite being so packed together, each animal had its own expression, its own personal situation, its own story. Henry wondered if he would find here the stag that had cursed Saint Julian Hospitator. Or perhaps the bears slain with a knife, the bulls with a hatchet, the beaver in the lake with an arrow?