“It’s cold.”
She was tall, almost as tall as him. She wore a black cloak down to the tops of her boots. A strong perfume preceded her as she stepped out of the shadows of the Cloth Hall. She wore a woolen cap, pulled low and decorated with a woolen rose; her cheeks were lightly rouged.
“Yes, cold.” He had stopped. He looked down at his feet, then back along the street, as if there were something of great interest there. “You have… a place to go?”
She named the street.
He nodded, his throat dry, suddenly sober, utterly.
They walked side by side. After a block, she took his arm. For a moment, embarrassed by the intimacy, he resisted. But it seemed less part of seduction than a formality; it would be stranger for them to walk apart. He wondered if he should speak. He felt as if he were already failing, an absurd thought given the nature of the transaction. But the thought was there; it was his duty to entertain. Like a child again. Stone prompts in my pocket. The portrait of Sobieski means I’m to speak of holidays; the bust of Chopin that I’m to inquire about my guests.
But his lips were numb, his tongue tied, and she asked for nothing. Indeed, her whole manner projected a professional’s indifference, the kind of assuring competence one might feel before a doctor or a priest. He felt, briefly, a kind of relief. They passed another woman, who exchanged familiar glances with his partner but didn’t speak. Her gaze, as she took in Lucius, had a strange, almost orchestrated quality, and for a moment, he felt as if there were others watching—his parents, or Margarete. He was relieved when they reached the door. There a price was mentioned, “for the normal.” If he wanted something else, it would be more.
They entered, a pocket of winter air accompanying him like a second traveler.
Inside, a doorman in threadbare livery greeted them and took her coat. Another portrait of the Emperor hung on the wall behind, and a flowery scene of nymphs pinching each other’s nipples was just above his desk. Feuermann would have had a laugh, thought Lucius, as the man briefly disappeared behind what looked to be a hidden panel. Ah, you cultured Poles! A bit of Neoclassicism with your pornography? But the thought was subsumed in a new worry that he had found himself in exactly the kind of establishment he had wanted to avoid. An unmarked doorway! Hidden panels! The doorman in his uniform gave off the sense of a time capsule, the faded decadence of a different age. As if he were about to find himself among a group of masked aristocrats fondling one another in a prelude to an orgy. Or worse, that he would have to dance.
Oh, he was nervous! He shifted, looking furtively at the woman, who was studying the contents of her purse. She wore a plain white blouse, a long, pleated skirt. If not for the rouge, she would have looked like a schoolteacher or governess. Briefly, he had the wild thought that she was not actually a prostitute. That they had met to read, or paint.
The man returned, with a key. She thanked him, then stepped through a doorway to a narrow, unlit caracole of stairs.
On the second floor they stopped, turned left, the boards creaking beneath their feet. The hallway was long and branching, rose up a set of stairs, turned and dropped a flight, then zigzagged before rising and falling again. He realized that the hotel must have been built outward, piercing the neighboring buildings, twisting like a corkscrew. He told himself to pay attention, in case, like Hansel of the folktale, he might need to find his way out. From around them came sounds of footsteps, voices, but they must have come from another hallway that turned helically about their own and never met.
At last they reached their destination. For a moment the key seemed stuck, and he wondered if they would have to go all the way back. But then the mechanism engaged, and the door opened to reveal a room with peeling wallpaper and a mattress on the floor. The woman sniffed; the room smelled sharply of paraffin. He suspected that whoever had last used it had overturned the lamp. When she lit the bedside candle, he half expected, half hoped everything would explode.
She closed the door. From the other side of the walls came a grunted mewling, but she didn’t pay it any heed. Without another word she removed her blouse, then, after a moment’s assessment of his initiative, took off her skirt, and then her button boots, until she stood there in garters and brassiere. He was still in his winter coat.
“Do you need help?” she said, after a while.
He shook his head.
“Take your time,” she said.
But the sight of her body brought his thoughts suddenly to the consequences of the act. Memories: his father inspecting the Croatian girl’s certificate of virginity with his monocle, a madwoman in the General Hospital, staggering from syphilis in her spine. The warnings of von Holzheim, eminent Professor of Dermatology, finger waving maniacally in the air, that nothing, nothing, not antiseptic douches, not leaky prophylactics made of rabbit intestine, nothing—Nothing, my students, nothing!—save blessed coitus abstentia would forestall this plague.
It eats the brain, devours it, my boys—and you, lady-student—until the patient knows nothing but pain and madness. The most excruciating of pains…
Speaking of our patients, of course.
Lucius recalled the woman clinging to him as she had crossed the market square. Had there been a slight shuffle to her gait?
But it already had been decided. Where could he flee to? More dreams of Margarete that left him trembling with longing? More fruitless searching? More humiliating scoldings from far-off nuns who dared to think they understood? No, if Longing were to be extinguished, it must be done so completely. “Walk for me,” he said, and confused, thinking he was asking her to put on a little show, she sauntered toward him. “No, walk normally,” he said, but now saw no evidence of tabetic gait, no sign of blue streaks of mercury injections in her buttocks. He placed his palm on her breast and felt no murmur of aortic insufficiency. He lowered his hand to feel for a chancre on her sex. Misunderstanding, she began to murmur, feigning pleasure, then licked her hand and lowered it to his.
In the room next door, the moans were getting louder. There was a candle-lamp; his last thought was that he should bring it between her legs to complete the examination. But the demon inside him was impatient. Now, it said. Eradicate her, or she will be with you forever. He withdrew his hand. The woman lay back on the mattress, exposed. Her breasts fell loosely back from her brassiere, and her abdomen bore the broad scar of a Caesarean. For a moment, the humanness of this—though less the fact that she had once been someone’s mother than that she’d been someone’s patient—almost scared him off. But he was a persistent person, not used to giving up.
After, he lay with her. He had fallen to her side. She had long black hair, and he breathed in deeply, drawing its perfume over the clipped, carbolic memory of Margarete. He recalled the hundred depot stations, the thousand soldiers gathering one last kiss by which to remember their wives. He felt that this was somehow what he was pursuing, but in inversion—not to remember, but to forget.
“Come from the mountains?” she asked. For a moment, he feared that she would tell him she had a husband or a son there, that he would have to consider the possibility that they were one of his. But she said nothing else.
He had.
“I knew,” she said.
He waited a long time for her to tell him why she asked.
“Hour’s up, soldier,” she said.
Soldier. But she was talking to him, of course. He could stay longer, she added, but it would cost.