Meanwhile Blau was now faced with the real task at hand. There was no use at this stage in putting off the inevitable. Their bodies drifted together. The girl allowed him to caress her and lay her on her back. With gentle fingers the doctor disarmed the bomb. The hexagram of her thighs opened to all interpretation. The camera snapped.
Blau has a whole collection of these photos, dozens, maybe hundreds by now – women’s bodies against blank walls. The walls differ, because the places aren’t the same: hotels, pensions, his office at the Academy, occasionally his own apartment. The bodies are fundamentally similar, no mystery there.
But not the vaginas. Those are like fingerprints, in fact they could use those embarrassing organs, which the police have yet to appreciate, for identification – they are absolutely unique. Beautiful as orchids that draw in insects with their shape and colour. What a strange thought – that this botanical mechanism has been preserved somehow even into the era of humankind’s development. It would be understating it to say it’s been effective. It almost seems to him that nature itself so delighted in this petal-based idea that it became determined to take it further, heedless of the fact that man would wind up with a psyche that would slip out of control and conceal what had been so beautifully developed. Hide it in underwear, in insinuations, in silence.
He keeps the pictures of vaginas in cardboard boxes with patterns, boxes purchased at IKEA, changing only their design over the years, depending on the current fashion – starting with the garish, kitschy eighties, through the spare greys and blacks of the nineties, up until today – vintage, pop art, ethno. He doesn’t even have to write the dates on them, then – he recognizes them instantly. And yet, the doctor’s dream is to create a real collection, not made up of pictures.
Every body part deserves to be remembered. Every human body deserves to last. It is an outrage that it’s so fragile, so delicate. It is an outrage that it’s permitted to disintegrate underground, or given to the mercy of flames, burned like rubbish. If it were up to Blau, he would make the world differently – the soul could be mortal, what do we need it for, anyway, but the body would be immortal. We will never learn how diverse the human species is, how unique each individual, if we are so quick to condemn bodies to destruction, he thought. In the past people understood this – but they lacked the means, the methods to preserve. Only the wealthiest could afford embalming. But today the science of plastination was developing very fast, perpetually perfecting its methods. Anyone who wanted to could save his body now, and share its beauty, its mystery with others. Here is the wondrous system of my muscles, the sprinter would say, the 100-metre world champion. Look, everyone, at how this works. Here is my brain, the greatest chess player would cry. Ah, these unusual two grooves, let’s call them ‘bishop twists’. Here is my stomach, two children emerged from here into the world, the proud mother would say. So Blau imagined it. This was his vision of a just world in which we would not be so quick to destroy what is sacred. He therefore strives toward this vision with everything he does.
Why would anyone have any sort of problem with this notion? We Protestants certainly would not. But even Catholics ought not to raise any alarm about it: after all, we have old evidence, collections of relics, the patron saint of plastination might be Jesus Christ himself, when he shows us his red fleshy heart.
The gentle hum of the engines lent to the choir of voices in Dr Blau’s headphones an unexpected depth. The plane was flying west, so the night didn’t end where it ought to, dragging lamely on instead. From time to time he raised the shade to see if somewhere on the horizon in the distance a white glow wasn’t visible by now, glimmer of a new day, new possibilities. But there was nothing. The screens were off, the film had ended. Every so often they would show a map, and on it the small shape of the plane as it traversed at a turtle’s pace a distance not indicated on the map. And it even seemed that the map had been designed by Zenon the Cartographer – every distance is infinite in itself, each point launching a new space that cannot be surmounted, and of course, any movement an illusion, all of us travelling in place.
Unimaginable cold outside, unimaginable altitude, unimaginable phenomenon of launching a heavy machine into thin air. ‘Wir danken dir, Gott,’ sang Dr Blau’s angels in his headphones.
He glanced at the hand of the woman sitting to his left and could barely contain himself from petting it. The woman slept with her head on a man’s shoulder. To Blau’s right a boy dozing, a slightly plump young man. His arm hung limply off his seat, almost touching the doctor’s trousers. He also kept himself from petting those fingers.
He sat squeezed into his chair amidst two hundred people, in the oblong space of the plane, breathing the same air they were breathing. In fact this was why he liked travelling so much – en route people are forced to be together, physically, close to one another, as though the aim of travel were another traveller.
But each of these beings, to whose presence he’d been sentenced for another – he looked at his watch – four hours, seemed monadic, smooth and shiny; an orb to play pétanque with. Which is why the only kind of contact activated in Blau’s instinctive algorithms was petting; grazing with the tip of his finger, its pad, feeling the cool, even curvature. But his hands have lost all hope at this point of discovering any rift in it, having checked thousands of times on women’s bodies: there is no tab or hidden latch that would cautiously permit itself to be released by a nail, inviting him inside, no protrusion, no secret little lever, no button that, when pressed, lets out a burst of something, a small spring that would react and reveal to his eyes the desired complex insides. Or perhaps not complex, perhaps very simple, just the inverse of the surface, just curved inwards, a spiral wrapped up in itself. The surface of these monads hides within it vast mysteries, not even remotely hinting at the dazzling richness of these marvellously and cunningly packed structures – not even the cleverest traveller would be able to compose his luggage in this way, distancing from one another the organs, for order, safety and aesthetics, with peritoneal membranes, lining space with fat tissue, cushioning them. So went Blau’s ardent ruminations through his unsound airplane half-sleep.
He’s fine. Dr Blau feels happy. What more could he want. Seeing the world from above, its beautiful, peaceful order. An order that is antiseptic. Contained in shells and caves, in grains of sand and in the scheduled flights of giant airplanes, in symmetry – the age-old fit of right to left and left to right – in the eloquent light of the information screens, and in all light. Dr Blau tugged his blanket up over his slender body, fleece piece of material, property of the airline, and fell asleep for real.
Blau was a boy when his father – an engineer who, like others from socialist nations in the construction industry spent years rebuilding Dresden after the destruction of the war – took him to the Hygiene Museum. There little Blau saw the Glasmensch, a glass man created by Franz Tschakert, to educate. A six-foot-five golem without skin made of perfect imitation glass organs, arranged around the transparent body, seemingly devoid of secrets. It was in its particular way a monument to nature, designer of this perfection. There was in it a lightness and a thoughtfulness, a spatial sensibility, a tastefulness, a beauty and a play of symmetry. The wondrous human machine with rational, streamlined shapes, often resolved with humour (the structure of the ear), periodically eccentric (the structure of the eye).