The list was laid out in a column:
A Horrors' Sewing Kit
a howl,
a black cat,
words and occasional silence,
a hand gesture,
shirts with one arm missing,
a prayer,
a set speech at the start of every parliamentary session,
a song,
a food dish,
a float in a parade,
commemorative porcelain shoes for the people,
tennis lessons,
plain truth common nouns,
onelongword,
lists,
empty good cheer expressed in extremis,
witness words,
rituals and pilgrimages,
private and public acts of justice and homage,
a facial expression,
a second hand gesture,
a verbal expression, [sic] dramas,
68 Nowolipki Street,
games for Gustav,
a tattoo,
an object designated for a year,
aukitz.
The full stop after the last item had perforated the page. The list had a curious poetry to it, an anti-poetry of the odd and the oddly juxtaposed, of the familiar and the strange. Henry's eyes stopped for a moment on an item towards the end of the list: 68 Nowolipki Street. The address tugged at his memory, but he couldn't tell why. He moved on. Clearly the taxidermist felt very strongly about this list and Henry was expected to ask questions about it. But he sighed inwardly. To tell a story through a list. It wouldn't be any more killing to an audience if he sat on a stage and started reading from the phone book. Henry arbitrarily picked an item.
"What are 'plain truth common nouns'?" he asked.
"They're judgments that are backed up by the dictionary. It's Beatrice's idea. So: murderers, killers, exterminators, torturers, plunderers, robbers, rapists, defilers, brutes, louts, monsters, fiends-words like that."
"I get the idea." Henry chose another item from the list. "And this 'verbal expression'?"
The taxidermist found the scene:
The taxidermist stopped.
Henry nodded. "And '[ sic] dramas'?"
"Sic is the Latin word for thus," the taxidermist replied. "It's used to indicate that a printed word is printed exactly as intended or is correctly copied from the erroneous original."
"Yes, I'm familiar with the use of sic."
"Virgil has this idea for short plays where every word, every single word, would be qualified by sic, because every word, in the light of the Horrors, is now erroneous. There's a Hungarian writer who writes like that, in a way."
The taxidermist didn't search for the scene where Virgil presents his [ sic] dramas, nor did he tell Henry which Hungarian writer he was referring to. Instead, he fell silent. They seemed to be in an intermission, so to speak. Henry decided to seize the opportunity and try again, but this time from a different angle, from the point of view of character development rather than plot and action. That might help the taxidermist with his play-and get him to talk about its genesis.
"Tell me, how do Beatrice and Virgil change over the course of the play?" Henry asked.
"Change? Why should they change? They have no reason to change. They've done nothing wrong. They're exactly the same at the end of the play as they were at the beginning."
"But they talk. They notice and realize things. They reflect in quiet moments. They gather up the items that go into the sewing kit. All these change them, no?"
"Absolutely not," the taxidermist said firmly. "They're the same. If we had met them the next day, we would have said they were no different from the previous day."
Henry wondered what his creative writing friend would have said at that moment. He had found three good words, more than that, in fact, but no story was coming from them.
"But in a story, the characters-"
"Animals have endured for countless thousands of years. They've been confronted by the most adverse environments imaginable and they've adapted, but in a manner absolutely consistent with their natures."
"That's true in life. I fully agree. I have no doubts about the organic workings of evolution. In a story, however-"
"It is we who have to change, not they." The taxidermist seemed flustered.
"I agree with you. There's no future without an environmental conscience. But in a story-here, take Julian in the Flaubert story you sent me. Over the course-"
"If Virgil and Beatrice have to change according to someone else's standards, they might as well give up and be extinct."
At that moment, it was Henry who gave up. "Yes, I see your point," he said, to placate the taxidermist.
"They do not change. Virgil and Beatrice are the same before, during and after."
Henry looked at the list again.
"Where's this '68 Nowolip-'" he was about to ask, to change the topic, but the taxidermist abruptly raised the palm of his hand in the air.
Henry shut up. The taxidermist got up and came round to his side of the desk. Henry felt a slight measure of apprehension.
"Only one thing really counts," said the taxidermist. It was nearly a whisper.
"What's that?"
The taxidermist slowly pulled the page from Henry's hand. Henry let it slide through his fingers. The taxidermist laid it on the desk.
"This," he said.
He took the lamp in one hand and with the other he ran his fingers against the direction of the fur at the base of Virgil's tail.
"This here," he said.
Henry looked. On the skin now exposed was a stitch, a suture, that circled the base of the tail. It looked purple, medical, horrible.
"The tail was cut off," the taxidermist said. "I reattached it."
Henry stared. The taxidermist put the lamp back on the counter and walked over to a table at the far end of the workshop. Henry reached and touched Virgil's fur, meaning to smooth it down, but instead he pushed it back to look again. He didn't know why he did this, but he looked and then he touched. A shudder went through him. He pulled his fingers back and patted the fur down. He felt gutted. How utterly barbarous to do that, to cut Virgil's splendid tail off. Who would do such a thing?
Henry wondered why the taxidermist had stopped telling him about his play. He was standing in front of a table, handling something. Had Henry been too hard on him? Insensitive to his struggles?
"Why don't you let me read your play, or what you have of it?"
The taxidermist didn't answer.
Was it the feeling that he would be revealing the treasure he'd been working on his whole life, and that once it was out, he'd be left empty, without secrets, bereft? Was he afraid of the exposure of his inner self? Of Henry's and other people's reactions? "Years of work and this is all you have to show for it?" Was he sensing the failure of his enterprise, for a reason he could not determine and with no solution he could imagine? Henry realized he couldn't answer any of these questions because he had no sense of the taxidermist's inner self. The man, despite the play and the conversations they'd had, remained a mystery to him. Worse: a void.
"I should…" Henry began to say, but he trailed off. At every visit, the taxidermist swallowed up so much of his time. He got up and moved to where the man was standing.
He was working on a red fox. It was lying on its back and he'd already made a cut along its stomach, from the lower ribs to the base of the tail. He began to lift the skin off the body, using his fingers and the knife. Henry watched him work with morbid fascination. He'd never seen a freshly dead animal so close up. The taxidermist pulled the skin away until he reached the base of the tail, which he cut from the inside with the knife. Then he worked on the legs until he reached the knee joints, which he cut through. There was little blood. Pale pink-muscle, Henry guessed-and streaks of white-fat-predominated, with only here and there spots and patches of deep purple. Henry thought the taxidermist would now continue upwards with the ventral cut, to the base of the neck, slicing the chest area open and doing there to the front legs what he had done lower down to the back ones. Instead the taxidermist started turning the animal's skin inside out, easing the body through the ventral cut, separating skin from body with the knife as he went along. The skin was coming off the animal like a pullover. When he reached the front legs, he severed the legs at the shoulders and continued peeling the animal's skin off the neck. At the head, he cut where the ears were attached to the skull. Two dark holes were left behind. The eyes were a weirder sight. Whereas the fox's ears, their outer structure, went with the skin, the eyes remained behind, staring out even more now for having their eyelids removed. The taxidermist artfully cut the only place in the eyes where skin and body were linked: the tear ducts. Then the mouth was released, the blade cutting through the skin next to the gums. Lastly, the nose, the final point of attachment, was dealt with, the black skin skinned off and the cartilage cut through. He returned the skin to its natural shape, inside in, and there they lay, side by side, the skin and the flayed carcass, like a baby that has been taken out of its red pyjamas, only a baby fiercely staring with the blackest eyes and displaying a full set of teeth.