"In a ... How would you say it...? What is the word...?"
This is something of an affectation of Wolf's. He speaks English better than most of the literature students in the department, but sometimes he'll fish for a word like this, playing on his foreignness to add drama and, sometimes, melancholy, to whatever story he's telling. I don't dislike the affectation, in fact, I find it funny. But that doesn't mean I'm not familiar with its mechanics.
He's still at it. "A ... like a little tractor"
"You ran over your girlfriend's family dog in a 'little tractor'?"
"No. Well, yes. But I mean what is the word for little tractor?"
"I don't think there is a word for little tractor. What do you do with it?"
"You cut the grass with it."
"Oh! A lawnmower."
Wolf looks at me as if I'm simple. "I know lawnmower," he says. "You push a lawnmower. This other thing you sit on."
"Oh," I say. "Yeah, like a lawnmower you sit on. A ... Oh God. What do you call those things?" I think for a while. "I think they're just lawnmowers that you sit on. What did Catherine's family call it?"
"I think they called it the 'mower.' But I was sure there would be another term."
"I'm not sure there is. So, anyway, why were you on the mower?"
"The father, Mr. Dickerson, he had got it stuck and he wanted a 'big strong lad' to drive it out."
I laugh at the thought that anyone would call Wolfgang a "big strong lad." He isn't any one of those three things.
"Yes," he says. "Ha ha."
"Sorry. So, anyway, what were they like, the family?"
"Rich," says Wolf. "From carpets."
"And is there a future with Catherine?" I ask.
"For me?" He shrugs. "Who knows?" He gets up and takes the bottle of slivovitz from the shelf. He pours himself a large glass, but when he offers some to me I shake my head. "Anyway," he says, when he has sat down again, "how is your curse?"
"Hmm," I say. "Can you keep a secret?"
"You know I can. And I've already said that I don't care if I become more cursed."
"I don't think you'll become cursed just from hearing about it," I say.
"So what is it? An object?"
"A book."
"Ah, the curse of knowledge," he says immediately.
"I'm not sure if it is that," I say. "It's a novel. I think the curse might just be some superstition. But the book is very rare and potentially very valuable—although my copy is damaged, so it's probably actually worth nothing."
"And you bought this on Friday?"
"Yeah. With, basically, all my money."
"How rare is it?"
"Very rare." I explain to him about there being no known copies anywhere in the world, apart from the one in the German bank vault. "Even with the damage, it's still a pretty amazing thing to have. It's by that author I'm studying: Thomas Lumas. I could be the only person in the world to write a paper on the actual book rather than the mysteries surrounding it. I must be one of the only people to have read it in the last hundred years." Just as I'm getting excited about it, Wolf interrupts.
"And the curse is what?"
I look down at the table. "The curse is that if you read it, you die."
The book is still on the sofa where I left it, and I notice as Wolf's gaze travels around the room and then rests on it. He gets up and goes over to the sofa. But instead of picking up the book, he simply looks down at it as if it were an exhibit in a museum. For a moment I imagine that he's much more frightened of curses than he has let on, and this is why he doesn't touch it. But then I decide that it must be simply a respect for the age and rarity of the object. Wolf isn't scared of curses: He's said so.
He comes back to the table. "What's the story about?"
"It's about this man called Mr. Y, who goes to this Victorian fair-ground," I begin. I tell Wolf the story as far as I know it, ending with the last scene I read, where Mr. Y's wife has implored him to stop spending all night poring over medical textbooks. Mr. Y tells her to mind her own business and go to bed. This she does, and he resumes his reading.
"What does he think the mixture might be?" Wolf asks me.
"So far he has no idea," I say. "He thinks it might be based on laudanum, which is opium in alcohol, but isn't sure. He knows it's active as a liquid, so he has ruled out nitrous oxide—laughing gas—and chloroform, both of which you have to inhale. Other candidates include ether, a substance made from sulphuric acid and alcohol, and chloral. He's also trying to obtain more exotic herbals from further afield, and concocts a weird theory about some foreign witch doctor giving the information to the fairground doctor. But if this is true then the mixture won't be something he can concoct from ingredients to be found in any Victorian pharmacy. This basically throws him into total depression. But after a while he comes to the conclusion that it can't have been an exotic mixture. For two shillings it was unlikely to have included Peruvian tree bark, African snake venom, unicorn blood, or whatever. He works out that for two shillings, the mixture must have contained relatively cheap ingredients. But what?" I shrug. "Even if the ingredients aren't exotic, they could be anything."
"And you have no idea yet?" Wolfgang asks.
I shake my head. "No. But I'm looking forward to finding out, if you ever do get to find out, that is."
Wolf lights a cigarette and falls into a deep contemplation of his glass of slivovitz. I consider telling him about the preface to the book, and the hint that there could be something "real" about it, but I don't. Instead, I get up and rinse the coffee cups while Wolf drains his glass and gets up to go.
"I can do something gourmet tonight if you like," he offers.
I am tempted. What I've got here is at best "very gourmet," but I do want to finish the book.
"Thanks, Wolf," I say. "But I think I'm just going to keep reading."
"And complete the curse?" he says, with a raised eyebrow.
"I really don't think there is a curse," I say.
By eight o'clock it's freezing and I have to switch on all the gas rings. I am nearing the end of the book and it seems clear that Mr. Y is well on his way towards bankruptcy and destitution as the result of his obsession with the Troposphere and the method by which he might return there. He has taken to experimenting with various drugs and potions and lying there on his couch gazing at a black dot, but none of the drugs he has tried have worked. At every corner he is assaulted by advertisements suggesting cure-all panaceas like Dr. Locock's Pulmonic Wafers, and Pulvermacher's Improved Patent Galvanic Chain-Bands, Belts, Batteries, and Accessories. What was in the wafers, and could the fairground doctor's vial of liquid have contained it? And what about Pulvermacher's electrical objects? Perhaps the fairground doctor had in some way electrified whatever fluid he had concocted. Mr. Y realizes that there is no way he'll be able to find the concoction by chance. The only way he will ever be able to revisit the Troposphere is by finding that doctor and persuading him to tell him how.
By the beginning of chapter 12, Mr. Y has discovered that many of the people who travel the country with fairs in the summer end up in London in the winter, exhibiting their sideshow horrors in run-down shops and backstreet houses. As a last resort, Mr. Y has taken to spending his evenings, and much of his money, touring these establishments, trying to find some clue to lead him to the fairground doctor.
My search continued into November. The weather had turned bitterly cold but I kept at it every night, even as I began to doubt that I would ever find my man. It seemed to me that London had become a sort of Vanity Fair, with many of the establishments in the back streets of the West End—and beyond—dressed up with gaudy crimson hangings and advertising, by way of vast painted representations and pictorial facsimiles, such unsavoury offerings as the Bearded Lady, the Spotted Boy, the Giantess of Peru and various other mutants, savages and freaks of nature.