After lunch, during which she talked to him about Mole, his daily schedule and little eccentricities (he listened attentively, sensing he was receiving an extraordinary privilege), she talked Blau into swimming in the sea. He wasn’t happy, he would have preferred to sit quietly in the library and examine the cat and the room itself once more. But he didn’t have the courage to say no to her. He made a last vague attempt to get out of it by pointing out he didn’t have a bathing suit.
‘Oh, come on,’ she said, not accepting the excuse. ‘It’s my private beach, there won’t be anyone. You can swim naked.’
But she was still going in a swimming costume. So Dr Blau took off his boxers underneath his towel and got into the water as quickly as he could. The cold of it took his breath away. He wasn’t a good swimmer – he’d somehow never had an opportunity to learn. In general he didn’t like exercise, being in motion. He uncertainly hopped around in the water, taking care to be able to feel the bottom under his feet. Meanwhile she swam out to sea in a beautiful crawl and then returned. She splashed water on him. Blau, surprised, shut his eyes.
‘Well, what are you waiting for, swim!’ she cried.
He readied himself for a moment for the plunge into the cold water, ultimately doing it in desperation, submissively, like a child not wanting to disappoint a parent. He swam a little distance and turned back. Then she slapped her hand against the surface of the water, hard, and kept going by herself.
He waited for her on the shore, shivering. As she walked towards him, dripping, he looked down.
‘Why didn’t you swim?’ she asked, in a high-pitched, amused voice.
‘Cold,’ was all he said.
She burst out laughing, throwing back her head and shamelessly exposing her palate.
In his room he dozed off briefly, before taking some meticulous notes. He even sketched the layout of Mole’s lab, feeling a little bit like James Bond. With relief he washed off the salt water, shaved and put on a clean shirt. When he went downstairs, she was nowhere to be seen. The door to the library was closed, and the key in the door had been turned, so he wasn’t brave enough to go in… He went out in front of the house and played with the cat until the cat ignored him. Finally he heard some sounds coming from the kitchen and went towards it from the yard.
Mrs Mole was standing by the counter and going through green lettuce leaves.
‘Salad with croutons and some cheeses. What do you think?’
He nodded eagerly, although he wasn’t at all convinced that would fill him up. She poured him a glass of white wine and, without conviction, he brought it to his lips.
She told him in detail about the accident, about the search for the body in the sea, which lasted for a long time, several days, and finally about how it had looked when they had finally found it. He lost all desire to eat. She said that she had been able to preserve a piece of the least destroyed tissue. She was wearing a long, airy grey dress with slits down the sides, with a deep-cut neckline that revealed her freckled body. Again he thought she might cry.
The salad and the cheeses they ate almost in silence. Then she took his hand, and he froze.
He put his arm around her, clevely hiding from her. She kissed his neck.
‘Not like this,’ he blurted.
She didn’t understand. ‘How, then? What do you want me to do?’
But he had slipped out of her embrace, stood up from the sofa and, red in the face, was looking helplessly around the room.
‘How do you want it to happen? Tell me.’
In despair, he realized he couldn’t pretend anymore, that he didn’t have the strength, that there were too many things going on at once, and turning his back to her, he whispered: ‘I can’t. It’s too soon for me.’
‘It’s because I’m older than you, right?’ she murmured, standing up.
He protested uncertainly. He wanted her to comfort him but without touching him.
‘It’s not like there’s a massive difference in our ages,’ he said, as he listened to her clear the table. ‘I’m with someone,’ he lied.
In a certain sense this was true, and truth is always true in a certain sense; he was with someone. He had already been wedded, married, connected by blood. With the Glasmensch and the wax woman with the open stomach, with Soliman, Fragonard, Vesalius, von Hagens and Mole, for God’s sake, who else could there be? Why should he bore into this living, ageing warm body, drill into it with his? With what aim? He felt like he would have to leave, maybe even right away. He ran his hand through his hair and buttoned up his shirt.
She sighed deeply.
‘So?’ she asked.
He didn’t know what to say.
A quarter of an hour later he was standing with his suitcase in the living room, ready to go.
‘Can I call a taxi?’
She was sitting on the couch. Reading.
‘But of course,’ she said. She removed her glasses and pointed to the phone, and then returned to her reading.
But since he didn’t know the number, he thought it would be better if he just went on foot to the bus stop; there had to be one somewhere nearby.
And so he arrived at the conference sooner than he’d planned. After a long debate with hotel reception he managed to finagle a room. He spent the whole evening in the bar. He drank a bottle of wine at the hotel restaurant, and then in bed he began to cry like a little child.
Over the next few days he heard lots of papers and gave his: ‘The Preservation of Pathology Specimens Through Silicone Plastination: An Innovative Supplement to the Teaching of Pathological Anatomy’ – an excerpt from his dissertation.
His talk was enthusiastically received. On the final evening of the conference at the banquet he met a nice, handsome teratologist from Hungary who confided in him that he was about to go to Mrs Mole’s house, at her invitation.
‘To her seaside home,’ – he emphasized the word ‘seaside’. ‘I figured I’d combine the two trips, it’s not really very far from here,’ he said. ‘Everything her husband left is in her hands now. If I managed to get a glimpse of his laboratory… You know, I have my theory as to the chemical composition. Apparently she is in talks with some museum in the States, sooner or later she’ll give all of it away, along with all the documentation. But if I could get access to his papers here and now…’ he went on dreamily. ‘My habilitation would be guaranteed, perhaps even my professorship.’
Fuckwit, thought Blau. This man would be the last person to whom he would admit he’d got there first. And then he looked at him with her eyes, for just a second. He saw his dark hair, gleaming with some sort of gel, and the little sweat stains under his arms on the blue material of his shirt. His already slightly protruding but still slim belly, his narrow hips, his fresh pale skin with the shadow of dense facial hair. His eyes already blurring from the wine and shining with the glory of impending triumph.
PLANE OF PROFLIGATES
Reddened northern faces surprised by sudden sun. Faded by salt water, and that hair after several hours daily at the beach. Bags filled with dirty, sweated-in clothes. In their carry-ons last-minute purchases from the airport: souvenirs for loved ones, bottles of strong alcohol from the duty-free shop. Just men; they occupy the same part of the plane now in a sort of tacit pact. They settle into their seats, buckle their seatbelts – they will sleep. They will make up for those nights without sleep. Their skin still gives off a smell of alcohol, their bodies have not yet managed to fully digest that two-week dosage – after several hours in the air this smell will have saturated the whole plane. In addition to a stench of sweat mixed with remnants of arousal. A good criminologist would uncover more evidence – a single long dark hair snagged on the button of a shirt; trace amounts of organic matter under index and middle fingernails – human, someone else’s DNA; in the cotton fibres of their underwear, microscopic skin flakes; in navels, microquantities of sperm.