The Anatomist's Dream (4 page)

‘This is Tomaso,' Lita introduced a boy whose sad face had two watery eyes in it and another that popped out like a frog from the back of his head. ‘His Mama left him too,' she said, automatically picking up a spill of apple-wood, ­dribbling water into Tomaso's third eye. It blinked slowly, as if in pain, but continued to stare off blindly into the middle distance.

‘We're all alone,' Lita said, ‘though here at least, we have each other.'

And then she started to sing, and though Philbert didn't understand the words he had a strong feeling he knew what she was saying as she sang, her voice both soft and brittle at the same time, and with a tune so doleful that tears began spilling from Tomaso's eyes, at least the two Philbert could see, for the boy had turned a little away from him, holding his head towards the shadows, Philbert recognising the gesture with shock, because it was something he did himself.

Too soon for Philbert it was the last night of the Fair; the neighbours had called in several times to check on Frau Kranz and now stood once more whispering in the doorway waiting for an invitation inside, an invitation that Frau Kranz refused to grant.

‘No need for another visit,' she croaked. ‘I'm quite well from your last ministrations. Is that you, Philbert?'

And it was, just back from his latest riverbank vigil, though Lita had not arrived. The neighbours hovered a few moments more, making a fuss of the boy, patting at Kroonk.

‘How well she looks,' they said, ‘how healthy and plump your little piggy is, Philbert, how smooth her skin.'

‘Go away,' Frau Kranz's attempted shout was feeble, ‘and get away from the boy and his pet.'

She emphasised the last word as much as she could, for she knew exactly what those neighbours were about and why so all of a sudden solicitous. She'd seen them licking their lips, the awful glint in their eyes, heard the sharpening of knives upon soap-stones, smelled the firing up of a spit at the end of their street and what it meant. Philbert came in, shutting out the neighbours behind the skinny tin door of the shack, as happy as Frau Kranz had ever seen him, Kroonk's little curly tail ­wriggling excitedly as she trotted in beside him.

‘Come here, Little Maus,' she whispered, and the boy and his pig came up to Frau Kranz, who was wrapped in her blood-splattered blankets in her chair by her dying fire.

‘There's something I need you to do for me, my Little Maus,' she faltered, laying
a
dry and wrinkled hand upon his head as he sat obediently on the floor beside her, letting her fingers brush briefly at his taupe.

‘You have to go,' she said. ‘You have to leave me.'

The boy turned his head towards her, the panic and bewilderment so evident upon his face that her heart took a final dash at life and beat just a little faster.

‘They mean to take Kroonk away from you, dear one,' she said, thin tears tracking down her parchment cheeks. ‘You must have seen the spit they have set up, down towards the bridge . . .'

The words came from her slowly, keeping her eyes on Philbert's, waiting for the shock of realisation that must come. And so it did, a single gasp escaping the boy as he threw his arms around Kroonk's neck; this small red pig who had been companion, brother and sister to him for as long as he could remember, and silently he wept, and silently he clung to her, Kroonk sitting there on her haunches like an overweight dog, her rounded belly pushing out between her legs.

‘I knew this day must come,' Frau Kranz went on, ‘I've been racking my brains for a solution, and now I have it. You must go, and you must take this with you.'

She fumbled her shaking fingers beneath her pillow and brought out a small wooden box the colour of newborn chestnuts, with a lustre that hinted of sun-warmed forests far away.

‘Look inside,' she said, and Philbert did, lifting out a long, curly tress of hair smelling of chocolate and spices, scents from long ago he half remembered every time he walked past the confectionery shop in town.

‘It's your Mamma's,' Frau Kranz wheezed. It had been a day of exertion for her, forcing herself up from bed into chair to endure the overzealous care of overzealous neighbours, trying all the while to come up with a way out of a situation of which she would not, could not, contemplate being even a small part. She had known the moment she woke that a decision had to be made, and now she'd made it, and was about to do the hardest thing she'd ever done in her life, sending away the one person who had ever really mattered to her, the child she'd helped into life and practically brought up those first few years, and done so single-handed in the few years following that. And by sending this child away she knew she was condemning herself to die alone in this little shack, with no one to light up her last few days or hold her hand when she passed into the hereafter. But he was so young, this little boy with his misshapen head, and it was precisely because of that head that she had found an answer at last.

‘Hush now, child,' she said, mustering every last inch and ounce of strength she had left in her. ‘You must take Kroonk and you must go away, my darling, for I cannot protect you any more.'

The boy was crying freely now, great hiccupping sobs breaking from him as he clutched the box she had given him in one hand and Frau Kranz's skinny fingers in the other.

‘You must go, my lamb,' she whispered, snatching breath from the air like scraps of autumn leaves. ‘And you must go now. There's a sack beneath the bed. I've packed everything you'll need.'

Philbert unwillingly let go her hand and pulled out the sack as she directed him, small hands trembling as he opened its neck, glancing inside, then placing Nelke's box in with all the rest.

‘But where will I go, Mama?' his voice was thin as smoke, hardly audible, but Frau Kranz heard, her heart squeezing almost shut to hear that one word
Mama
, a word she'd hoped to hear all her long life, but never had until now, right at the moment she was having to send this surrogate son away from her, knowing she would never see him again.

‘Go to the Fair,' she said. ‘Ask them to take you in. Offer to do any jobs for them that you can. Show them your taupe, Little Maus, and maybe that will help.'

She didn't know much about Fairs but she knew they liked unusual, and that was Philbert. She had no more words, so tired it was hard to draw in breath, could only squeeze Philbert's fingers lightly as he lowered his head upon her knees, feeling the warmth of his tears soaking through her skirts, looking down on that taupe of his, at the skin stretched taut over it the colour of spilled tea, that incongruous twist of hair growing slightly off centre; she stroked her Little Maus with all the gentleness her long and childless life had given her, stroked it ever more slowly, slowly, slowly, until she was asleep.

He was too young to understand the full implications of what he was about to do but Frau Kranz's word was good enough for him, so when her hand fell from his head to her lap Philbert moved, stood up, kissed his good Frau Kranz upon her clammy forehead. Then he picked up the sack she had prepared for him but did not go out of the door as might have been expected, for he'd grasped the import of what might happen to Kroonk if he did. Instead he went to the back of the shack and prised up a loose section of the metal-sheeted wall that was thin, corroded by all the salt that pervaded the whole of Staßburg. It gave easily, and soon wide enough for him and Kroonk to wriggle their way through. Straight into the yard then and down past the chicken coop, and from there to the river meadows where Shminiak and Nelke first lay down together, and on into the darkness, bypassing the neighbours' spit that Philbert saw burning merrily away at the tail end of their street, just as Frau Kranz had said it would be. His heart was thudding hard. When he was close by the bridge he picked Kroonk up, pulled her to his chest, dragging his jacket as far as he could across her to keep her hidden, holding the sack up in front of them both for a last protection.

To the Fair, Frau Kranz had directed him, and towards the Fair he went, and over the bridge without any trouble, keeping his head down, moving with the rest of the crowd surging over its back, jostling and laughing as they went to the Last Night of the Fair. He folded himself into the hustle and bustle of folk as they funnelled into the Fair's Ground, slipping a lead around Kroonk's neck as he let her down, wary of anyone who might yet recognise her and try to grab her up, moving immediately away from the crowds and down to the river. He listened to the water moving ever onward to who knew where. He listened to all the people shouting and singing, flinging themselves into this last night of holiday, fully aware that tomorrow it would be back to the mines, back to grudge and drudge, back to normality. He moved away, lay down on the river bank, eyes wide open – Kroonk beside him – wondering what to do, how to find Little Lita, make her understand. He was so tired and troubled that he didn't even realize he'd fallen asleep.

Next thing he knew he was being awoken by a small hand shaking his shoulder. Philbert started, jumped up, his hand gripping tight about the rope that held him fast to Kroonk, his eyes going straightaway towards the bridge, looking for trouble.

‘I'll not let Kroonk go!' he shouted, almost before he knew he was speaking. ‘I'll not, I will not!'

But the person standing before him was no enemy, no neighbour or townsperson wanting to turn his Kroonk into spit and sausage. Instead it was the one person in the entire world he wanted to see. It was Lita, and she was looking at him so strangely that his throat constricted and would allow out no more words, not even the gasp of surprise he felt but could not express. After his small outburst about the pig she did nothing for a few moments, was merely observing this small boy with his overburdened head and the small pig nuzzling at his knee like a frightened dog. She took a step back from them and glanced across at the river, seeing the lights of the Fair reflecting dimly from the shack she knew to be the boy's home, precisely because it had been from this very spot she'd first spied him – and his odd little pig – dipping their collective feet into the river. She'd seen in him at that moment something she recognised of old, the very reason she'd crossed the bridge that first night of the Fair just to check it out. And she knew why he was here now, though not the particular reason behind it, but she knew, and was kind, and reached out a hand and took Philbert's in her own.

‘It's always been like this,' Lita said, in that oddly high voice of hers that had Philbert thinking back to the serinette his father had given him the morning he'd left, hoping it was in the sack he was clutching as if it was a chicken whose neck he'd just wrung. ‘And maybe always will be,' she went on. ‘Towns we pass through? The people we see? Always someone to gather up with us when we leave. You're not the first, Little Maus, and you won't be the last.'

She wrapped her warm-as-tinder fingers around Philbert's lonely own and led him, as she'd done for others before, into a brand new world.

5

Introducing the Carneous Mole

They all left Staßburg along different paths, Nelke with her Frenchman, Shminiak with his sadness and Lamentations, Philbert with his Kroonk and the Fair. Only Frau Kranz stayed, buried in her blankets all the night while her neighbours combed the streets with their newly-sharpened knives. They came back during the night several times, hammering on her doors, shouting out to release the pig, but by then she'd braced a bolt of cloth up against the handle so they couldn't get in and, after performing this last rite of protection for the boy and his pig, she crawled from door to bed. Several days later, one of her neighbours came looking and did what she should have done before and had her man beat down the door with a sledgehammer. And there was Frau Kranz, curled up like a hedgehog on her bed, surrounded by blood-boltered sheets, her body a sack of rot already leaking out of every orifice.

No mourning for good Frau Kranz, nor the encomium she deserved, only the shack being put to torch and flame – with her inside – once it had been pilfered of anything vaguely useful, the conflagration surrounded by those same women in their clogs to whom Frau Kranz had so assiduously administered during the Great Grippe; paying that kindness no mind at all and ­spitting into the flames for allowing the boy to escape with the pig they'd been so eager to purloin, assuming it to be communal property having fed it their scraps and chuckings-out, dreaming of all the crackling and moist flesh, soups and pies now beyond their reach. They treated the traitor Frau Kranz no better than they would the coom that gathers at the naves of wheels, or the soot that blackens the oven mouth, pulling down the last of the shack after the burning, and brushing its ashes – and hers – roughly from their hands, as if they'd already forgotten her name.

By then, Philbert was many miles distant and so in thrall to his new adventure he immediately forgot everything that had gone before, including Frau Kranz and what might have become of her. He was bemused by everything Lita showed him, by the oddities and eccentricities of the Fair, no one giving his taupe a second glance. That first night, Lita tucked Philbert and his Kroonk away up over the tailgate of her travelling caravan, squashing them into a corner between the drawer she used for a bed and the giant Frau Fettleheim, who claimed to be the ­fattest woman in all the world, and whose wheezing filled the small space, along with her grunts and grumblings.

‘More mouths to feed, Lita,' the huge Frau Fettleheim moaned. ‘What were you thinking?'

But Frau Fettleheim was not a cruel person, and she had not refused the extra company of Philbert and his pig despite her apparent objections. She recognised straightaway, just as Lita had done, that both were cast-offs and had nowhere else to go. Everyone in the Fair understood this because, in one way or another, they'd all been there themselves. It wasn't long, therefore, before Frau Fettleheim began to pat Kroonk's head and tickle her ears, especially after Kroonk laid her head on Frau Fettleheim's knee, at which point she saw in Kroonk rather more of herself than she was comfortable with, this fat little piggling who had been destined, before her escape, to being gutted, sliced, divided and devoured.

‘Poor Piggy,' she said then. ‘Poor little piggy. And of course you must both stay.'

And so they did, Philbert and Kroonk hugging each other tight that first ever night away from their home, Frau Fettleheim huge and snoring on the one side, Little Lita curled up in her drawer on the other. They both lay awake for a long time, ­listening to the whelps of dogs, the stamping feet of unknown animals, the gentle plash of the river as it wrestled a tree bough down its length, men and women lurching and leaning against the wood of the small caravan, retching or relieving themselves a few inches away outside, owls later screeching close in the darkness, swooping down on wide black wings, claws ­skewering the mice and shrews that ran amongst the debris of the carts, and then the final, empty egg-blown silence when only the faintest fibrillation of wind and water were left once humankind had at last gone away, and all else was left to sleeping.

Morning came of a sudden, a huge hullabaloo that grew with every moment like a large bear growling and stretching at the dawn. The Fair people arose in a ripple, one person waking up their neighbours in the adjoining cart or tent, who woke up the next one, who woke up the next. There were general shouts of ‘Come on! . . . Halloo! . . . Good morning . . .' and the sounds of animals scratching and yawning, water splashing into kettles, onto faces, onto feet, fires being coaxed back into life, the strong smells of potatoes and cabbage frying together, of acorn coffee and pine-needle tea, pots and harnesses rattling, stalls being broken down, the clacking of wood on metal, great whooshes of canvas being folded and stowed.

Lita woke in a moment, put on her battered red shoes, and was up. She tidied the last few oddments still lying around, packing Philbert and Kroonk into a corner and telling them to stay quiet and still, folded some of her tiny dresses and put them into her drawer and closed it shut. Other cupboards in the ­caravan, cunningly concealed in floors and walls, under seating and tables, were revealed and filled. Frau Fettleheim's ­voluminous garments doubling as tablecloths and covers flicked expertly into the air and caught on the way down, rolled into tubes and pushed between Frau Fettleheim's feet if they could not fit elsewhere. She herself was still asleep, and Lita put her finger to her lips, whispering to the newcomers not to wake her, to stay put, that they would soon be on their way. Outside she went, pushing up the tailgate behind her and closing the wooden hatch of the door. The cart jangled and creaked and jolted as an animal was hitched into its shafts. Frau Fettleheim slept on, her giant, ­goitre-necked head lolling to and fro, the great bun of her hair gradually sliding to one side, unravelling with the movement, slipping onto her lap like a lazy cat. Then without further warning the cart lurched forward, began trundling over the ­flattened ground, settling after a few minutes into a gentle rock. Frau Fettleheim awoke briefly, her eyes misty and glazed, grunting something incomprehensible before falling back to sleep.

Cautiously, Philbert crawled upwards and knelt beside the snoring Frau, lifting the corner of the canvas. Up front he could see a man's dark back, hands casually flicking the reins back and forth over the rump of the pony that was pulling the caravan on, and could see maybe twenty, thirty carts in front, doing exactly the same. Little Lita suddenly tumbled into the back end of the cart and he turned towards her, saw she was holding a small basket on her knee. Lita smiled, thrusting towards him the basket filled with warm bread, dark and moist, smelling of pumpernickel and rye. Philbert pinched it off bit by bit, one for him, one for Kroonk, savouring it, glancing out behind Lita, who had turned her attention away. He could see through a chink in the tailgate's canvas the dust bowling up from the wheels of this cart and the one that followed, and the faint glories made by the newly risen sun around the salt ­crystals that had always made up his world, wondering what would happen now, searching for a last glimpse of the riverbank and the chicken-shed and the shack that lay beyond; but there was nothing but the sunrise and the dust-motes and the flapping of the canvas, until Lita tied it shut.

Philbert's new life was unimaginably exciting and exhilarating as he tried to make himself useful in every way he could. He watered Tomaso's third eye relentlessly until Tomaso begged him to stop, take it easy, do it every now and then or not at all. He was sick of having his collar drenched every few minutes, he chided Philbert, pushing him away, telling him to make himself useful elsewhere. Philbert was glad at this rejection, disliking the way that ghastly third eye kept gazing on unperturbed, always ungrateful, and switched his attentions instead to the man known as Herr Fischmann, finding
in
him a more willing recipient of his care.

Herr Fischmann had skin that flaked and floozied into red-rimmed scales, and he taught Philbert how to rub the tubs of paraffin-wax and jelly into his sores, making his skin shine like the oiled fish-back he was supposed to resemble, discovering that without this constant treatment Herr Fischmann would dry out like desert sand, his outer surface falling in handfuls to the floor, leaving raw red welts behind, scabbed over with dark black blood. He began to understand that Hermann, Herr Fischmann, spent only a tiny proportion of his life as a prize exhibit, the rest remaining hidden, dominated by a never-ending regime of being daubed over with liniments and swabs, or ­collecting the herbs that went into such treatments, no glamour for
The Half Man,
Half Fish
advertised on his hoarding, who was the saddest man Philbert had ever met.

‘You cannot imagine what it's like,' Hermann said, as Philbert rubbed Hermann's skin with soothing sage-scented oil, ‘to lie in bed and have a million moth-wings flutter at your body, feeling their eggs hatch and writhe beneath your skin, wriggling and squirming, squirming and wriggling. My whole night is like that, Philbert. My whole life. Turn and itch, scratch and turn, itch and scratch. And when I rise in the morning I shake from my sheets the litter of my body, the parts that have escaped me during the night. It
'
s terrible, Little Maus, a terrible curse . . .'

And Philbert supposed that it was. Certainly his own little bodily oddity was nothing in comparison, so unworthy of comment that nobody ever commented on it at all except for the adoption of the name Little Maus following Lita's lead, a pet name he became proud of, relating to his head absolutely and yet absolutely without offence. He'd no third eye, nor was he a giant like Frau Fettleheim, or a dwarf – as he now recognised Lita to be. His taupe, amongst such people, was negligible.

Philbert tended Hermann assiduously, quickly learning how to make his special liniments, soaking gelatine leaves overnight, mixing rose-water with the necessary albumen before adding glycerine of borax, heating and filtering all through a piece of twill. Hermann, in return, was the kindest of men, despite the constant scritch, scritch, scritch of blunt nails against skin and the stink of fish seeping from his pores.

‘It's the show,' Hermann sighed, dousing himself in cod-oil, standing in his pail and the green light quivering through his tent. ‘They pay and they expect,' he explained, staring at the plate of perch or trout or whatever else had been provided, that stared right back. The crowd came in and clumped about him, holding their noses, touching their fingers momentarily to his scaly skin, grimacing as Hermann forced the flesh of raw fish inside his mouth. They threw pennies into the water surrounding his flaking feet, gagging at the smell of him, the stink of his breath, the stench of his disease, then out they rushed into the fresh air, laughing at the spectacle they
'
d seen.

One night Philbert brought out his sack, extracting the first of his treasures, holding out to Hermann the long, long, lock of Nelke's hair, hoping it might give him some pleasure. Hermann would not touch it, saying he could not, would not taint it with his fingers. Philbert persisted but Hermann pulled back, reaching instead behind him and slipping a velvet cover from a large glass bottle and placing it on the overturned crate that made his table.