In the other room, Anna waited. An enormous passivity warmed her. She felt herself relaxing — whether it was the wine, that exquisite liquor, or whether it was the presence of an old friend, she did not know. She had made her decision. Now she had only to enact it. As Anna regarded her long, slim fingers, the longer fingers that bejeweled her thighs began to tingle. Warmth surged through her body. At this moment, the handprints of her former life did not sear; instead, they caressed her thighs. Memories rose through her body, memories of lascivious nights. She regarded them now not with fear, but with lost longing.
Anna’s hands caressed her torso as Felix cooked in the kitchen just beyond. She placed her hands where she knew Rasputin’s prints to be. Anna stroked her burned thighs through the material of her skirt. “How I have loved you all these years.” Soon it would be time to say farewell.
“Now, my lady, what do you think of this?” Felix beamed as he carried in the meat. Behind him, Schatzie stumbled to her feet. But she sank down, inebriated, beside her dish.
It was the first time the Rat had smelled meat in an age. Her little nose twitched with pleasure; her whiskers trembled. She looked at Felix meltingly. That gaze.
Felix felt as if her glance struck his heart. He staggered, then set the meat down on the examining table. “Ah, dearest lady.” Never mind that he would go hungry for the next month. Just that look, that greedy, grateful look, was food enough. “Please. Eat. You must be hungry.”
Hungry! The Rat controlled herself, though in her mind she was already tearing the meat off the plate. Tentative and ladylike, she put out a claw. Yes, she was hungry. After all these years. “I told myself I would not eat as long as my children could not,” she said to Felix in a trembling voice.
“Is it true?” he asked.
The Rat nodded; her delicate nostrils quivered. She could not trust herself to speak further.
“Eat, dear lady.” Felix broke off a morsel of a lamb chop with his hand and held it out to her.
“But no,” protested the Rat, laughing, picking up a fork.
“My dearest lady,” Felix cajoled as he held the piece of meat, sizzling, dripping, steaming with warm, salty life, toward her lips. The Rat opened her little mouth. “Eat.”
“This is my body which is given for you…” Those words, those strange words from the liturgy, heavy with sadness, freighted from Orthodox religion, came to the Rat’s mind as she ate from Felix’s hand. The somber chants in Russian, the incense, the dark skirts of a man. “This is my body…” She closed her eyes.
“Why, this is exactly like feeding Schatzie,” Felix thought in surprise. Anna’s velvety lips nuzzled his outstretched hand. Felix tore off another morsel of dripping meat. As the little Rat chewed, her eyes closing in ecstasy, Felix poured more wine into their glasses. He held a goblet to the Rat’s mouth and watched her throat as she took a delicate drop. A flush slid down her body, disappearing at her neckline, a trail of delight. Felix imagined the rest of the path of that flush, making its curved way downward. He imagined licking her, the whole length of that drop of wine. Downward, downward. “Dear lady.” He longed to see her entirely; he was obsessed. To fling himself on her, to see her completely naked, submissive before his gaze. “Will you be mine tonight?” But this he did not say aloud.
No need. In the kitchen, the fingers of the men of the Tolstoi Quartet moved languidly, deliciously. The gentle rhythm of Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes encircled the old rooms. Felix gently placed a piece of potato into Anna’s mouth. “Take, eat; this is my body.”
There was dinner; there was darkness. The candlelight flickered on the remains of the meal. No need to say anything more. Had everything already been said? Now is the moment, thought the Rat. “My dear friend,” she began.
Felix put out a warning hand. “Ah, my dear lady.”
“There is something,” the Rat said firmly. “Something only you can help me with.”
“Yes, gladly. You may ask anything of me.”
Slowly, the Rat got to her feet. Silently, her eyes fixed firmly on those of Felix as she gauged his reaction. With a sad pride, she drew the hem of her dress upward. Felix fell to his knees.
“We have both drunk too much,” whispered the Rat in caution.
Felix pressed his abdomen to the ground, and reaching out, he touched one of the Rat’s small feet. “My Countess.”
“Observe, dear friend,” commanded Anna as the cloth of her dress slid upward.
Felix pressed his lips to the arch of the Rat’s unsteady little foot. He smelled and tasted black pores of boot leather, shined and waxy. He moved his lips upward toward the stockinged ankle. Stockings, ladies’ stockings! He inhaled joyously.
But the Rat was not thinking of him. In a kind of oblivious trance, her eyes commanding his to look, she unclasped her stockings and, with small, determined, agile hands, rolled them downward toward her knees. “Look.”
By now, Felix, rolled into a Schatzie-like bundle of delight, was whimpering softly, kissing his way up Anna’s leg. With one groping hand, he reached upward to caress her hump. “Dear lady.” He writhed. Schatzie, hearing her master, shook herself awake and came stumbling out of the kitchen to sit sympathetically beside him, licking his bent head from time to time, and regarding the Rat with alarm.
“Don’t be afraid,” murmured the Rat, drunk both with wine and with her own courage. “It is for this that I come only to you.” She gave him her most ravishing look.
“Come,” whispered Felix to her. He was licking the Rat’s knee by now.
Anna lifted her petticoat as Felix’s rough face traveled her leg. His whiskers brushed her skin; he put out an experimental tongue. So far, it was permitted. She swayed. “Look carefully,” she commanded. Reaching down with her little claws, she pressed Felix’s face against the soft crepey flesh of her inner thigh.
Felix’s nostrils contracted as the sharp odor of sulfur assailed the room. There was a sizzling noise as he approached that part of Anna’s body. “Let me see,” he crooned, but it was of the Rat’s hump that he was thinking. “I must see it.” He tried to move his hand surreptitiously to her spine.
“Oh, my friend,” cried the Rat suddenly. She fell into a dead faint beside his crouching body. She lay as if stone-cold at his feet.
“My lady!” cried Felix in alarm. Hastily, he began to scramble for his doctor’s bag. His point of view immediately shifted, and, mustering whatever sobriety was possible, he found the tube of smelling salts and broke it open.
The ashy scent of ammonia entered the room, commingling with that of sulfur and smoke. The whole formed a cloud and, blowing into the kitchen to join the repellent odors of formaldehyde and pickle juice, caused the entire company of Felix’s parts collection to begin twitching nervously.
Felix did not know whom to care for first. Leaving the prone Anna on the floor beside the examining table, he rushed into the kitchen and opened the doors of cupboards and the refrigerator desperately. “Quiet at once!” he shouted to all his specimens. But all — the parts of women and intellectuals and even his own scrap of scrotum — were flailing about, trying to escape extinction.
The poisonous cloud encircled Felix’s head. With a last supreme effort, he managed to fling open the window, and the diaphanous danger, a greenish coagulation, exited. The specimens began to subside as the fluids in the jars returned to normal. Felix scanned each one quickly, paying attention to the Tolstoi fingers. But they were drooping quietly in their jars; they were gradually resigning themselves to their prison.