‘He was only sixty-seven years old. There was nothing they could do about the body. Completely mutilated.’
He thought she would burst into tears now, but she just took another crouton and crumbled it onto the scant remains of her salad.
‘He was not prepared for death, but who is?’ she mused. ‘But I know that he would want a successor who was worthy of him, someone who is not merely competent, but also works with passion, like him. He was a loner, you know that, I’m sure. He left no will, gave no instructions. Should I donate his specimens to a museum? Several museums have already inquired. Do you know of any respectable institution? There’s so much bad energy around plastinates now, but of course today, in order to do something, it’s not as though you have to cut down the bodies off the gallows,’ she sighed, and shaped a few leaves of her salad into a slender roll, which she slipped into her mouth. ‘But I know he would want a successor. Some of his projects are only barely begun; I try to keep them going myself, but I don’t have as much energy and enthusiasm as he did… Did you know I am a botanist by training? There is, for example, a problem…’ she started, hesitated. ‘It doesn’t matter, we’ll have time to discuss that later.’
He nodded, suppressing his curiosity.
‘But you deal primarily with historical specimens, is that right?’
Blau waited until the echo of her words had petered out, then dashed upstairs and raced back with his laptop.
They pushed back their plates, and after a moment the screen lit up with a cool glow. The doctor panicked for a moment, wondering what he had on his desktop – if he hadn’t left any erotic icons – but he had just cleaned it up recently. He hoped she had read what he had sent her about himself, that she had looked over his books. Now they both leaned into the screen.
As they looked over his work, it seemed to him that she was giving him admiring glances. He noted this to himself – twice. He made a mental note of what had inspired her admiration. She knew her stuff, posing professional questions. The doctor hadn’t expected her to know quite so much. Her skin gave off a slight fragrance of the kind of lotion older women put on their bodies, nice, powdery, innocent. The index finger of her right hand – the one with which she touched the screen – was adorned with a strange ring with the shape of a human eye as its stone. The skin of her hand was already being covered by dark liver spots. Her hands were as ruined by the sun as her face. He thought for a second about what method might help stop the effects of the sun on this thin, corrugated skin.
Then they moved to armchairs, she brought half a bottle of port from the kitchen and poured out two glasses.
He asked: ‘Will I get to see the lab?’
She didn’t answer right away. Perhaps because she had port in her mouth, as she had had the chocolate before. Finally she said: ‘It’s a ways from here.’
She got up and started clearing the table.
‘You can barely keep your eyes open,’ she said.
He helped her put the plates into the dishwasher, and then with relief he went upstairs, muttering an indistinct ‘good night’ over his shoulder. He sat on the edge of his made bed and then immediately lay down on his side, not having the strength to take off his clothing. He heard her calling the cat on the terrace.
The next morning he did everything very methodically: he took a long shower, folded up his dirty underwear into a cube and put it inside a bag, unpacked his things and laid them out on a shelf, hanging up his shirts. He shaved, moisturized his face, rubbed his favourite deodorant under his arms, reinforced his greying hair with a little gel. His only hesitation was whether to wear sandals, but he thought it would be better if he continued with his laced-up loafers. Then, in silence (though he wasn’t sure why) he went downstairs. She must have gotten up before him, because on the kitchen counter a toaster was out, and a few crumbs from the bread for toast. As well as a jar of marmalade, a bowl of honey and butter. His breakfast. There was coffee in the French press. He ate some toast standing out on the terrace, looking at the sea, supposing she must have gone to swim again, so she would undoubtedly come from out there. He wanted to see her first, before she saw him. He was the one who kept an eye on others.
He wondered whether she would agree to take him to the lab. He was very curious. Even if she told him nothing about what was in there, he’d be able to figure out quite a bit from what he’d see.
Mole’s techniques were a mystery. Blau had come up with a few theories, of course, and might even have been close to solving it. He had seen his specimens in Mainz and then at the University of Florence on the occasion of the International Conference on Tissue Preservation. He could guess how Mole conserved bodies, but he didn’t know the chemical make-up of the fixatives, wasn’t sure how you operated on the tissues with them. Whether you needed to prepare them somehow, give them a pre-treatment. When and how were the chemicals dispensed, what was used in place of the blood?
How were the internal tissues plastinated?
However Mole did it (and his wife – of her involvement Blau was more and more certain), his specimens were excellent. The tissues kept their natural colour and a certain plasticity. They were soft, but also sufficiently stiff to lend the body the appropriate shape. In addition they were easy to separate, which had an unlikely pedagogical result – you could take them apart and put them back together. Endless possibilities in terms of travels within the body of the preserved organism. From the perspective of the history of conservation of the body, Mole’s discovery was revolutionary, it had no equal. Von Hagens’ plastination had been the first step in this direction, but at this point it seemed less relevant.
Again she came out in a towel, this time a pink one, and she was coming not from the sea, but from the bathroom. She shook her wet hair and stood in the kitchen, at the stove, where she was heating milk up for coffee in a metal mug. She moved the netted plunger up and down, slowly, until the milky foam poured out onto the heated ceramic surface with a hiss.
‘How did you sleep, doctor? Coffee?’
Oh, yes, coffee. He accepted his mug gratefully and let her add some foamy milk to it. He listened with feigned interest to her story about the orange cat, who one day, the day their previous orange cat had died, had come to their house – who knew where from – and sat down on the sofa as though he’d always lived here, and then stayed. So they had barely even noticed the difference.
‘That’s the strength of life,’ she sighed. ‘As soon as one person departs another being fills the void.’
Poor Blau – he would have preferred to get right to the matter at hand. He had never been good at small talk, he was bored by topics pronounced for the sake of maintaining a soothing social hum. He simply wanted to finish his coffee and get into the library, and to see where Mole had worked and what he’d read. Did he have Blau’s History of Conservation on his shelves? What routes had taken him to his remarkable discoveries?
‘It’s interesting that he, like you, started out by researching Ruysch’s work.’
Blau knew this, obviously, but he didn’t want to interrupt her.
‘In his first published article he demonstrated that Ruysch was trying to conserve whole bodies, by eliminating their natural fluids, if only that had been possible in those days, and replacing them with a mixture of liquid wax, talcum and animal tallow. Then bodies, prepared in this way, just like specimens of parts, would be immersed in a “Stygian water”. It seems the idea never came to fruition because of a lack of glass vessels that would be big enough.’