The Anatomist's Dream (7 page)

9

Mr Wharton's Most Wonderful Jelly

Philbert woke early the next morning, no one else abroad, still obscurely excited by the night before. Kroonk slept on oblivious beneath their cart so he extricated his arm from her shoulder and chose to wander through the quietness of the camp alone. It suited Philbert that morning, liking the thin curls of smoke and smells wisping from abandoned fires, mingling with the snores that crept through the crevasses and cracks of carts and canvas. He poked around several ash piles until he found a warm parsnip, peeling off the blackened skin, popping the melt of pale yellow pulp into his mouth. His stick-stabbed foot had begun to throb a little as he walked, so he went down to the shallows of the ox-bow lake to dip it into the cool water.

He was shocked to find someone there already, and more so that it was Kwert. He was kneeling, head bowed so low he must have been staring almost straight into his stomach if his eyes were open, breathing steadily and loud, mumbling the same refrain over and over, though Philbert could not make out the words. Only later did Philbert learn that Kwert was a Hesychast, and this strange way of kneeling was their way of prayer and meditation. For now, though, the Hesychast Kwert took no ostensible notice of Philbert, nor Philbert of him. Philbert went instead a little way off, sat himself on a promontory, dangling his bruised foot into the water, watching the shards of sunlight shimmering down to the white sand below.

In the quiet, Philbert could hear the man a little better: a strange language, rhythmic, breathing in on one sentence and out with the next, calm and even as the ripples Philbert found himself making with his foot. The whole world seemed to have relaxed with Kwert's chanting, even the ducks and moorhens dabbling gently in the weeds were quiet, and Philbert saw the oiled brown fur of an otter ciphering in and out of the sunlit water, plashing the surface gently with its paws, watching him warily with one eye, contemplating the sky with the other. After a while, Philbert heard the clatter-batter of Kroonk coming down the bank and she came up beside him, laid her head upon his knee. A distinct smudge of charcoal upon the edge of her snout told him she'd been snuffling for scraps, and was still hungry. The interruption roused Kwert and he stretched, hauled himself up and moved towards Philbert. Once alongside, he pushed off his mud-caked boots, Philbert seeing his white feet, the dirt clogged up between his toes, big blisters on his bunion lumps that were burst and raw, as they dipped into the water next to Philbert's own. No wonder then, that the man had been hobbling the night before, making him seem so much older than he actually was. Bad feet will do that to a person, as anyone who has tramped a country up and down for all his years will know.

‘Thank you for not disturbing me in my meditations,' Kwert said, his voice gentle and normal, nothing of the frightening intensity his whispers had held the night before.

‘That's alright,' Philbert replied. ‘It's good to be quiet in the morning.'

He turned his head, found Kwert smiling down at him, saw the stubble was grey on his chin, and was relieved he looked just like anyone else.

‘I expect you're wondering who I am,' said Kwert, offering Philbert his hand as if he were a man and an equal and not a boy maybe eight or nine years old, by the best reckonings.

‘I am Kwert,' he said by way of introduction. ‘Tospirologist and Teller of Signs. I read people's mottlements and murfles, their warts and whitlows, their freckles and their moles. I can read character in their patterns and tell the future from the way they fall. But to tell the truth,' said Kwert, tapping the side of his nose confidentially, ‘I make a lot of it up so's to please and amuse the public, as we all must do. A man has to make a living somehow in this world.'

Philbert heard him laugh softly, waiting for what else the man would say, knowing every showman has his spiel, and was not disappointed.

‘For instance,' Kwert went on, ‘I can tell by the red marks on the back of your pig that she is well loved and loving, has many friends and is not destined for the pudding-prick. And I can tell by the black marks on the end of her nose that she has a fondness for potatoes and roasted swede.'

Philbert smiled, waggling his feet in the water, sending up the silt, clouding the issue, though not for Kwert who added a coda to his previous statement.

‘But of course,' he said, ‘I was telling the truth about you.'

And before Philbert had time to get startled all over again Kwert stood up, hoisting Philbert with him by the oxters, asking Philbert to help him on with his boots as it was high time they went back to camp and chimed in with the morning's chores.

On their return journey Kwert began to lift up rocks, rootling in the damp earth below them, looking for Philbert knew not what, until finally Kwert called Philbert over and pointed with a long, soil-daubed finger.

‘What do you make of that?' he said, prodding the nest of soft-skinned pearls that lay snug in by a tree root. Philbert shrugged his ignorance, and Kwert enlightened him.

‘They are the eggs of the earth,' he said, pulling out a large square of linen and scooping the small cluster in, going on to lift more rocks, find more nests and more eggs. He lifted up a couple of snail shells, empty now, quite large, brown on the outer edge, striating into orange and amber, tipping into white at the spiral point.

‘Roman snails,' he explained, ‘come marching all the way from Italy so we may eat their eggs for breakfast.'

He looked at Philbert in that odd way Philbert would come to know so well.

‘It's a sign, Little Maus,' he said, putting his hand gently on the boy's head, and just as before Philbert saw flashes of things he should have been too young to remember, Frau Kranz's talking taking form and substance, a woman hard at work in the chocolate factory of Staßburg, the patterns on the bolts of cloth where they leant against the tin wall of a shack, the taste of salt upon his lips, the grainy feel of it in his hair, the vast, shining amphitheatre of the salt-mines, its surfaces faceted and factored out where the picks had dug and hewn. But these were no jagged fragments, more the rolling in of a smooth, un­dulating landscape. Last night a key had been turned swiftly in its lock; this morning the door moved slowly open. Kwert himself seemed oblivious of what he had so casually set in motion with so slight a gesture, and went on speaking.

‘They are a sign, Little Maus, of all the good things that are yet to come, the bounty of which hides below the surface of life's shell.'

Philbert heard none of this, and only when Kwert removed his hand a moment later did he see the trees and fields again, the river Mohne running quietly by as it had before; for a few moments he had inhabited two worlds, that of the present and the past, each as real as the other. And then his stomach began to rumble, and Kroonk jumbled herself up against his legs, and he came back to this side of life.

Back at camp things were awakening, Maulwerf rubbing his hands together before holding them out to a small fire.

‘Kwert!' he beamed, as the pair approached. ‘Come over and share breakfast,' at which Kwert made some disparaging ­comment about what Maulwerf could do with his cabbages and carrots and was off for something decent: snails' eggs to flip like oysters on Otto's hot anvil, Philbert to follow on when he had the chance. Kroonk recognised a good thing when she saw it and trotted off at Kwert's heels, Maulwerf laughing heartily as Philbert went to see to Hermann.

While he was rubbing a mint unguent into Hermann's poorly skin, he took the opportunity to ask about Kwert.

‘Aaaaghh,' Hermann sighed as the coolness of the ointment eased his itching. ‘I can't tell you much. I haven't come across him before, but Maulwerf knows him from way back. He ­wanders around telling fortunes and selling medicines, as so many do.'

Hermann sighed again as Philbert gently palpated the underskin of his arms, which were red and rigid as roof-tiles.

‘He seems to have taken quite a fancy to you, Philbert, most likely on account of your you know what. He reads them, I gather, freckles and bumps, like others read stars or tea leaves. You should have heard what he said to freckled Hannah last night! Or no, perhaps you shouldn't. I don't know what he'd make of me. I didn't meet him myself, keeping away from the fire as I must do, but I've heard tell that beneath all the ­gobbledegook he is obliged to spout for the crowds, he is a wise and devout man. A Hesychast, no less. Aaaghh, thank you, Little Maus, that's much better. Much better. Thank you.'

Making his way over to Otto's fire Philbert stopped by Kwert's cart, recognising the thin donkey that was busily exploring the oat-bag tied around her neck. One edge of the canvas siding had been hoisted and attached to a spindle on the ridge, exposing about a quarter of the cart's interior to open view. Curious, Philbert poked his head in a little, balancing himself on the cart-edge to get a better look, seeing several shelves with raised edges and rows of bottles secured by a cord across their middles. There were the usual ointments and unguents of varying colours, but one was different: very tall, upwards of twelve inches, ­yellowish in content and holding something else besides. Within the shadowed transparency of the glass he could see glutinous loops swaying slightly, run through with coloured threads, like toad-spawn on a stick. A hand on his shoulder made Philbert jump, set him rocking idiotically on the wood, knocking all the air from his lungs. Kwert laughed and set the boy gently on his feet, thrusting a poke of something hot into his hands. Philbert looked down into the rough paper cone he'd been given, intrigued by the odd smell, seeing an unappetising bundle of greying blobs, some whole, some burst, some looking like tiny gelatinised snails. It was obviously the cooked repast of earth-eggs Kwert had collected earlier, and made Philbert feel a little queasy.

‘Go ahead, Little Maus, eat,' invited Kwert, and so Philbert scooped in a hesitant finger and hoiked a few out, careful not to crush them, popping them quickly into his mouth before he could change his mind. They sprang juice like berries, with a gummy hint of salt and chalk that was not displeasing, indeed was extraordinarily reminiscent of much of the food he
'
d eaten back in Staßburg, which came as a shock, just that he should remember such a thing.

‘So, you were curious were you?' Kwert was saying, pointing at his cart. ‘And curiosity is no bad thing, the key to enlightenment. So what did you see?'

He lowered himself to the boy's eye-level, and then where he would be if he had, like Philbert, leant in as far as he could go.

‘Aah,' he said. ‘Of course. My funisi,' and he threw back the rest of the canvas over the top of the cart to reveal the contents in entirety, making the bottles gleam in the morning light. He tapped at the tall jar Philbert had been so intrigued by, setting the blue worm woolding and recoiling at his touch before lifting the jar out, holding it in front of Philbert's face, tracing his finger slowly down the glass.

‘This is quite something,' he said. ‘A human umbilicus. A trinity of threads: two in, one out. This is what held you to your mother like a boat to the bank, like a leaf to the tree.'

Kwert was off on his spiel again and he unscrewed the jar dramatically, a strong whiff of sour wine and rotten fish ­puckering Philbert's nose, and then he did more, and took the cord in his finger at one end and pulled it free of the jar, the umbilicus straightened and glistened and aligned in its coils, bouncing gently in front of Philbert's eyes, as if still faintly pulsing with life.

‘Like a fish on a line, like a flea on a dog,' Kwert continued, getting into his patter. ‘This cord stole life from your mother and gave it to you.'

Philbert dropped his poke of eggs. The feeling of disgust in him was so strong his fingers loosened of their own accord, the funisi twitching and dangling like a hanged man, making him see himself inside his mother's swollen belly, an ugly snail cracking at its shell, sucking at her blood with its hideous straw. It accused him with every slow curling movement as it stared at him with its long and clouded eye. Kwert was still speaking, and chose that moment to lean down and pinch at where Philbert's belly button would be beneath his clothes, his fingers wet and sticky, marking Philbert's shirt with a stinking spot.