Of course it wasn’t only specimens in jars here. There were also drawers full of undocumented pieces of bones, kidney stones, some fossils; there was a mummified armadillo and other animals, in very poor condition. A small collection of shrunken Maori heads, masks made out of human skin – two extremely disturbing examples of these had also wound up in the crematorium.
Blau and Kampa dug out a couple of real archeological rarities here, too. They came upon, for example, four specimens from Ruysch’s renowned collection from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, a collection that had been dispersed, its fate unknown. Unfortunately, one of them, Acardius hemisomus, which could have been the gem of any teratological collection, had to be sent to the crematorium because of a crack in its glass receptacle – there was no way of saving it. The committee, seeing the specimen in its state of considerably advanced decay, did consider briefly whether in such cases there ought not to be some type of funeral arranged.
Blau was overjoyed at this discovery because it enabled him to run a number of tests on the famous preservation concoction of Frederik Ruysch, the Dutch anatomist of the late seventeenth century. This solution was exceedingly effective for its time – it managed to maintain the natural colour of the specimen, as well as keeping it from swelling, which was otherwise the bane of that era’s fluid preservation. Blau found that in addition to brandy from Nantes and black pepper, it also contained ginger root extract. He wrote an article and joined in the old debate on the ingredients of ‘Ruysch’s solution’, that Stygian liquid intended to ensure immortality through immersion, at least for the body. From that time forward Kampa started calling their underground collections ‘pickles’.
He and Kampa – who brought him the specimen one morning – discovered something remarkable, on which Blau then worked for several months, in order to precisely understand the make-up and the workings of the conserving liquid. Namely, an arm. Male, powerful (the circumference of the biceps was 54 centimetres), 47 centimetres long, cut clean with the clear aim of showing the tattoo – multi-coloured, representing with great sensitivity to proportions a whale emerging from the waves of the sea (white crests captured with Baroque grace and precision), blowing a fountain into the sky. The drawing was perfectly executed, expecially the sky, which from the outside of the arm seemed intensely blue – though the closer you got to the armpit, the darker it became. The play of hues had been perfectly preserved in the translucent liquid.
The specimen had no label. The jar was reminiscent of those made in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, meaning it had a cylindrical shape – they didn’t know at that time how to make cuboid forms from glass, in any case. The specimen, attached to the slate cap by horse hair, appeared to float in the fluid. But the strangest thing was the fluid itself… It wasn’t alcohol, although at first glance Blau had thought this came from the beginning of the seventeenth century, and from the Netherlands. It was a mixture of water and formaldehyde with a small amount of glycerin. Its composition could be said to be very modern, quite similar to the Kaeserling III mixture still used today. The container no longer had to be hermetically sealed, because the mixture didn’t vapourize like alcohol. In the wax that was used to seal the lid haphazardly in place he found fingerprints which moved him, deeply. He imagined that those tiny little wavy lines, that natural stamp in the shape of a labyrinth, had belonged to someone just like him.
He took care of that arm and its artwork with something that might have been termed love. He wasn’t going to find out now whom it had belonged to, nor who had dispatched this arm with its tattoo on its travels through time.
He and Kampa shared a moment of terror – which Blau recounted later to a female first-year student, observing with satisfaction how her eyes became wide with surprise as her pupils turned a dark matte, which according to sociobiologists was a sign of erotic interest.
In the wooden boxes in one of the corridors that led to a dead end, they found some stuffed mummies in very poor condition. The skin was completely blackened, dry, torn, seagrass spilling out through the seams, which had split apart in places. The bodies were shrivelled, dried up, and to top it all off they were dressed in what must have once been considered lavish garments – now all the lace and the collars had taken on the same colour as the dust. Their decorations, folds and flounces had lost their distinguishing characteristics, become a ball of rotted material from which, here and there, some little button, made of pearl, stood out. From the stretched-out mouth, forced open by desiccation, grass emerged.
They found two mummies like this, small, that looked like children, but on close examination Blau realized they were – thank God – stuffed chimpanzees, very poorly preserved, completely unprofessionally; the sale and purchase of ones like these was quite widespread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of course their suspicions could have been confirmed, human mummies had also been bought and sold, and quite ample collections created out of them. Collectors were especially interested in acquiring what was different and exceptional, people of other races, the spectacularly crippled, the diseased.
‘Stuffing corpses is the simplest way of preserving them,’ mused Blau, guiding around the makeshift cellar collection two more female students who had enthusiastically accepted his invitation, much to Kampa’s disapproval and dismay. Blau was counting on at least one of them letting him invite her out for wine, adding a new photograph to his collection. ‘In so doing,’ he continued now, ‘they only really leave the skin, which means this isn’t, in the full sense of the word, a body. It’s just a section of a body, the external form stretched out over a dummy made of hay. Mummification is quite a pathetic way of conserving a body. It only gives the illusion that we have the whole thing here before us. In reality, it is an obvious fraud. A circus trick, since only its shape and external covering have been preserved. And in fact the body has been destroyed, in other words, the ideological opposition to preservation. Barbarity.’
Yes, they had breathed a sigh of relief that these were not human mummies. That would have brought them headaches since the law clearly forbids keeping in state museums whole human corpses (if they are not ancient mummies, and even with that people start to object and cause trouble). If they had been people – children, as they thought in the beginning – they would have faced a complicated bureaucratic procedure and lots of issues. Many times he had heard about these uncomfortable discoveries when collections at medical academies or at universities were put in order.
Emperor Joseph II had created such a collection in Vienna. In his cabinet of curiosities he had decided to collect everything that was particular, every manifestation of the aberration of the world, every instance of matter forgetting itself. One of his successors, Francis I, had not hesitated to stuff his black-skinned courtier, one Angelo Soliman, after his death. At which point his mummy, wearing only a grass band, was displayed for the viewing pleasure of all the monarch’s guests.
JOSEFINE SOLIMAN’S FIRST LETTER TO FRANCIS I, EMPEROR OF AUSTRIA
It is with a profound sense of sorrow and of shame that I come to Your Majesty, though also in the hopes that there has somehow been some sort of terrible mistake. Angel Soliman, my father, that unflinchingly faithful servant to Your Majesty’s uncle, Emperor Joseph (that vastly magnanimous lord to us all), has since his death (may he rest in peace) become victim to a truly reprehensible iniquity that must now be put to rights.