Anna shivered. The kitchen pulsed with eerie light and sound. The sweetish odor of the fluid enveloped her. It was sickish, like ether, or violets, dying ones, mixed with formaldehyde and other meaty odors. Liverwurst.
Inside the jars she could discern small hairy fragments of things, floating, diaphanous, in cloudy fluid.
“Look carefully, my Countess.” Felix’s voice was warning her. It pierced the odor. “Look. Here you will see my miracles.”
Anna leaned forward, her dark eyes straining to read the fragments within. But she could not.
“Look,” urged Felix in a whisper. And he began to point out the specimens within. “Schatzie,” he whispered reverently, indicating the jar. “It’s a piece of her tail.” Slowly, he enumerated his favorite specimens and his plans for them. “Schnitzler. The genius Hombrisch. The famous beauty Frau Knoect. And others. Why should genius and beauty be allowed to leave the world?” He began to explain his theories to the Rat. “I decided to consecrate my life to the continuance of what is great and beautiful,” he explained. “My whole life. But I think I have found the secret now.” Modestly, he pointed out to Anna the jar that held a fragment of his own scrotum. “Man at his best. The culmination of desire. The preservation of the species.
“It is we who have been forced to leave, who are the best that Europe has to offer,” he continued. “We cannot be allowed to die.” He explained how he had studied, waited, and collected. How he had brought nothing with him when he left but his precious specimens and jars. And notes, too, of course. His friendship with Helmut. The chain of suppliers who could be trusted to send him fresh specimens, smuggled every few months. The correspondence. The careful observations and the recording of them. “Just the fact that these cells have survived, are still living, might already be enough. But look, they are growing.” Felix explained how he had found their proper nourishment. “The staple German diet, modified.” How his specimens were thriving. “Someday humanity will thank me,” he said. He paused. “But that will take a while.”
His mood shifted quickly. “Mankind is stupid, don’t you agree, dear lady?” He threw back his head and uttered a few quick sardonic barks, which somewhat approximated laughter as onstage. “Hah. Hah. Mankind is so stupid. Stupid!” he hissed. His fingers tightened on her shoulder and he suddenly crooked his head, peering into her face. “My dear lady, we must save mankind from itself.”
Anna felt faint. She was trying to comprehend, trying to gather this information as quickly as possible, thinking, “I must tell Herbert.” “But this is remarkable,” she said.
“Yes, isn’t it,” replied Felix, satisfied, spreading his hands. He started to take down his notebooks, the painstaking observations, timed and dated, and opened them to show her. “My records. It is so important to keep careful records.” Anna looked, uncomprehending. “You see, it is perhaps a secret now. But one day, people will want to know. It is important to make no mistakes.”
Felix bent toward Anna. She was looking carefully at everything in a kind of trance, hardly breathing, only her nose and the whiskers twitching. In a few minutes, he would have her entirely convinced. In a lavish, generous gesture, he flung open the refrigerator door, and the hum of A increased perceptibly. “Here, my dear Countess. This will explain it all to you. My pride and joy! My most recent acquisitions, and look how well they are doing.”
There was a jagged screech as the severed fingers of the Quartet protested against this invasion of their privacy. But it was momentary, that sound, and they immediately returned to their peaceful circling. “The Tolstoi Quartet,” Felix announced. “But we are going to make of them a new Quartet. A better Quartet. A more tasteful, less offensive Quartet.” He bent down to the jar. “Aren’t we, my boys?” he said. “Eh?”
There was again a momentary spasm of protest, as if a moment of Alban Berg had crossed the peaceful rumination in A. But then the fingers were passive again.
“Bad boys!” Felix said, leaning toward them. “Schrecklich! Are you being bad boys for our lady here? You should be ashamed of yourselves! Please, may I remind you of your manners!” The severed joints continued to float languidly. “Bad boys!” he hissed again. Felix shut the refrigerator door. “It will take them a while to get used to it. But they will.” He was confident.
He ushered Anna back into the main room. He felt expansive, happy. “This is the first time I have told anyone about this, dear lady. But I wanted you to know, to see what your old rascal Felix has been up to all these years.”
Anna leaned on his arm, dizzy. “Felix?” she asked anxiously. “Does anyone else know about this?”
“My friend Helmut in Germany. And yes, I have other friends. In high places,” he said significantly. “They have, perhaps, an idea.” Modestly, he added, “Perhaps one day you will even read my name in the papers. They might even establish a special Schweitzer Prize for me. But”—he waved a finger—“it is too soon, my dear lady. For we must have definitive results. But I have hopes.”
Sitting down beside the Rat on the couch, he moved the sleeping Schatzie aside. “Perhaps you have some questions, my dear Countess?”
Without waiting for her response, he sprang up again and rushed into the kitchen for the decanter of wine, cut crystal, and two small glasses. “The true elixir of life,” he joked, raising his glass to hers and cocking one bushy eyebrow ironically.
Anna drained hers in one gulp. She gathered her forces and looked Felix directly in the eye with her limpid gaze. “So I was right to come here,” she said with determination. “You know why it is, my dear friend, that I have come to you? Only to you?”
Felix seized her hand, pressing his lips to her dry little back of the hand and then the palm.
“Yes,” said Anna. “You are the only person who can help me. I have thought about this for a long time. But now the time has come. My time,” she added significantly.
“No,” Felix protested.
“I am an old woman now,” said the Rat, “and there is no more need of me. But first, my dear Doktor, I have a favor to ask.”
“Anything.” Felix felt faint.
Anna looked at him meltingly, her gaze piercing his bosom, right into his very soul. “You know, my dear Doktor,” she began, “I have never felt what other women feel….” She let her voice trail off.
“You mean…” He looked at her and thought he understood everything. His chest swelled with feeling. She had come to the right person.
Her answering gaze indicated her misshapen body. “Yes. I want you to take me. I want you to make me feel what I have never felt, what is a woman’s highest privilege. That transport, that abandon of self, that total surrender to another human being.” As she spoke, she could see the effect she was having on him. Pity and greed crossed his face simultaneously.
“Yes,” she added. “Take me!”
With a murmur — was it sadness, regret, comfort, or perhaps love? — Felix reached up and for the first time touched the Rat’s humped spine. It felt like bone, the vertebrae curved and mangled. He stroked her back gently, and the Rat allowed herself a small sigh.
“Use me,” the Rat whispered to him. “Use me in every sense of the word. I want to shiver like other women. And in return for those divine services, I shall offer you my entire body, and all the marks upon my body, those very marks. I know you want this. I’ll do it any way you want it. Do with me what you will! But take me, my friend, take me quickly. I long to be in your arms. Forever.” She gazed upon him, a beautiful supplicant.