Little

Chapter Four

In which one becomes two.

That first evening together, I stood in the kitchen while Curtius tried to cook. Aiming to be useful and working as Mother had shown me, I asked Doctor Curtius if I might assist him, for he was very agitated, and so I stopped the pans from burning and helped in the preparation of the food. Doctor Curtius said to me: 'I'm not frightened of you. You don't frighten me at all. You have nothing, do you? Nothing at all.' When we were finished, and it was time for bed, Curtius watched me walk up the attic stairs.

'Good night, little child.'

'Good night, sir.'

'What is your name? I should know your name, you know. I'm not certain what to do with children, I'm sure to make mistakes, but it is generally understood that they have names. What do you go by?'

'Anne Marie Grosholtz. But Mother always calls me . Marie.'

'Good night, then, Marie. Go to bed.'

'Good night, sir.'

And so I went upstairs into the attic, harbouring frail hopes that Mother would be there again, so that I might tell her about this most extraordinary day. And of course she was not there any more. But though they had taken Mother away, they had forgotten the sheet she had hanged herself with; it remained in one corner of the room, in a heap. And I thought then that she really would not be coming back. Not tomorrow, or the next day, not by the end of the week; the city of Berne, the house of Curtius, even I myself would have to keep moving without Mother. I wondered where they had taken her.

I was very unsure of the attic room. When I looked away I could suddenly feel Mother still hanging from the rafters, with her bent neck and her head leaning to one side, but when I looked back she was gone. And that hanging person did not exactly seem to me to be Mother at all, but perhaps the person who had stolen Mother from me. I did not trust the room - I would rather be in any room, I thought, than the attic - and so when I felt certain that Doctor Curtius had gone to his bed I crept back down the stairs with a blanket, with Marta whom Mother had given me and with the jawplate that was Father's. I tried the kitchen, but in the kitchen I felt the hanging woman back again; I felt that twisted-necked mother sitting by the fireplace; I saw Mother's Bible still there upon the ledge and I was frightened of it now. I would rather be in any room, I thought, than the attic or the kitchen. But as I moved from the kitchen it seemed to me that the twisted-necked mother was following me about the house, and it occurred to me that the only place she would not follow me was the atelier. In the atelier, I knew, were kept all those terrible objects, all those secrets that were best undiscovered, but outside the atelier I felt the twisted-necked mother breathing nearby, and so I went very quickly there and closed the door hurriedly behind me. I was alone in a room full of body pieces, their characters crowding about me. But I could no longer feel the twisted-necked mother, and so I carefully made a little bed for myself under the atelier table, and begging the body parts to please be kind, and closing my eyes very tight, I finally fell asleep.

I had intended to be awake early enough to tiptoe back upstairs without Doctor Curtius hearing me, but all at once I was aware that Curtius was shaking me and that it was morning. 'And there you are! Asleep here!' he said. 'Come now, time to get up.' He said nothing more about my sleeping in the atelier, under his trestle table. I folded the blanket and placed it on a shelf, the remembrance of Mother's death rushing to me. 'Come on, come on,' he said. 'Hurry, hurry, you must hurry.'

Promptly at seven, my education began.

'You must remember,' he said to me, 'I am not used to people. I know only parts of people. Not whole people. I want to understand them; I want to know them. But the influence of my models upon me is too strong. I have begun to dream of myself in a rosewood display case backed with red velvet. Yes, and the worst of it is, what really terrifies me, what I can't get on top of, what I can't ignore, what I cannot seem to get over, is that in my dreams I feel so comfortable there. Let me out,' Curtius said, tapping my chest lightly with his fingers. 'Someone, let me out. Can't you hear me tapping on the glass? I'm in here. Who will let me out? I want to get to know people. I want to know you. Yes. Here we are. This is it. I'm not frightened of you. Not in the slightest.'

Doctor Curtius stood up suddenly and hurriedly went to work.

A short while later, he turned abruptly from what he was doing. 'I know!' he exclaimed. 'I know how to go about it! I know just the way!' He moved around the atelier collecting objects and positioning them upon the table.

'Let us, Marie - for that is your name, you know,' said Curtius when he was satisfied with his progress, 'let us, if you are ready and if you are willing, let us begin.'

'I am quite ready, sir.'

'These tools were once my father's,' he said. 'My father was the head anatomist at Berne Hospital, a very great man. When he died, these tools came to me.' He went over to a bin filled with plaster dust and took a measure of it, then poured this into a metal bucket and mixed it with a certain amount of water, stirring it thoroughly.

'To show you how it all works, so that you can get an understanding, so that you may follow the process, I shall take a cast. Not of any body piece, no, not today. Today I shall cast, for your education, if you do not object, your own head.'

'My head?'

'Your head, yes.'

'My head, sir?'

'I say again: your head.'

'If you wish it, sir.'

'I find I do.'

'Well then, sir, yes, my head.'

And so we began.

'First a very little oil' - he applied this oil to my face - 'so that afterwards,' he said, 'the plaster can be easily removed.' He began to apply it. 'Straws!' he suddenly called out. 'There must be straws! I almost forgot,' he said as he cautiously placed straws in my nose so that I might breathe. 'Close your eyes. Do not open them again until I say.'

He brought the plaster. I felt it dripping upon me in small layers, followed by more strips of cloth dipped in plaster. The strange warmth of the plaster seemed to lock into my face. All was dark and warm about my cheeks and eyelids and lips and neck, until I felt I was floating away somewhere and might even be dead already. In the darkness, once, I thought I saw Mother, but she was gone again and it was black and empty and no one was there at all.

At last the plaster was pulled away and light returned, and I was back inside the room. Doctor Curtius hurried with the cast to the table. Next he smoothed down my hair with oil, I was repositioned, and he took another cast of the back of my head, then further casts of my ears.

'Now,' he said, 'the stove must be laid, and lit. I shall do this but one more time only. The next: your turn.' He lit the stove. 'Now watch and follow.' He moved about placing tools upon the desk. At first he ground pigments. 'Madder lake,' he explained, 'cinnabar, together. And crimson dye. A little blue. And green. A touch. And crush. Very little yellow. And mix. Like this. Now this,' he said, marching to a large demijohn with a tap and pouring some out into a smaller container, 'turpentine oil, added all the time to the pigments. So: a mixture. So: your colour.'

He took from a shelf a large copper bowl, showed it to me, made me look into it. He placed the empty bowl upon the stove top.

'So far: nothing. Now, there is a stool, sit down upon it. Now, I think we are ready.' Picking up a large knife, he walked over to a locked cupboard, unlocked it, and very carefully, out of my sight, cut into something. Then he locked the cupboard again and returned.

'This,' said Curtius, holding up a slab of yellowish murky material, 'what I am holding, this substance, this is everything. And yet,' he continued, moving it lovingly around in his hands, 'and yet it is itself without character, without personality. In itself it is nothing, it is no one. And yet it can be friendly, it can be stand-offish, it can be beauty, it can be ugliness, it can be bone, it can be abdominal wall, it can be strings of arteries or of veins, it can be lymphatic nodes, it can be brainstems, it can be fingernails, it can be all, from the tiny stirrup we keep in our ears to the miles of intestines we keep curled up inside us. Anything! It can be anything! It can be: YOU!'

'But what is it, sir?' I asked.

'It is sight, it is memory, it is history. It can be grey lungs, and brown-red like a liver; it can be anything: it can be you.'

'Can it be Marta my doll?' I asked.

'It can be! Yes, it can! It can adopt the surface of any object with astonishing accuracy. Rough, smooth, serrated, shiny, flat, mottled, pitted, torn, scarred, crusted, slippery. Make your choice. There is not a surface it cannot be.'

'And can it then, can it be Mother?'

'No, child,' he said...