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.