I was twenty-five years old; about a year had passed since I’d arrived in the village. I don’t know if there was something about the weather that month, perhaps a dry wind had long been blowing across the region, so her lips were red and dry and she continually moistened them with saliva, or she had been secretly chewing on them, the way young girls do to produce alluring mouths, but on that particular day I didn’t in any sense notice that she was virtually without lips. I only remember that I was in the middle of my lecture when I saw her.
I was extremely well prepared. First and foremost because of Rahm. I wanted nothing more than to make a stunning impression on him. I knew I was fortunate; many of my classmates had received far less interesting tasks. As a recent graduate I could make few demands, to be taken under the wing of a well-recognized scientist was the greatest possible opportunity for success. At this time in my life, Rahm was the only person who meant something to me. From the moment I stepped over the threshold to his study, my mind was made up: he would be my most important relationship. He would not be just my soul mate and mentor, but also my father. I no longer had contact with my own and didn’t wish to have any, at least that was what I told myself over and over again. But under the professor’s guidance I could grow and flourish. He would turn me into what I actually was. I had never given a lecture before so I had prepared well. When Rahm asked me to make a contribution at his modest zoological evening for the residents of Maryville, I first regarded it as unimportant. But as the days went by, it built up inside me, grew into something almost uncontrollable. How would it feel? To stand there in front of so many people, everyone listening to my voice, everyone’s attention directed at me? Although the people of the village were of a simpler sort, to put it tactfully, than my peers at the university, it was nonetheless a scientific lecture. Would I be equal to carrying out such a task?
It wasn’t just the fact that I would be giving a lecture for the first time in my life, but also the meaning it could have for others that filled me with awe. The natural sciences were an unfamiliar subject for the village population; their view of the world was based on the Bible, which was the only book they had faith in. It struck me that I would have the opportunity to show them something more, to present connections between the small and the large, between the power of creation and creation itself, that I now had the opportunity to open their eyes and change their view of the world, yes, even of existence itself.
But how to best demonstrate this? Choosing a topic became an immense task, one that had me going in circles. Just about any topic was of interest when viewed from the perspective of the natural sciences. The earth’s crops, the discovery of America, the seasons. So many options!
In the end it was Rahm who made the decision. He put his cool hand on top of my clammy one, and smiled at my confused enthusiasm. “Tell them about the microscope,” he said. “The possibilities it has given us. Most of them don’t even know what such a device is.”
It was a brilliant idea; I would never have come up with it myself, so of course that decided it.
The day arrived, with this dry wind and sun from a towering sky. We were uncertain about how many would come. Several of the older villagers pointed out that what we were doing was ungodly, that one didn’t need any books other than the Bible. But curiosity had apparently titillated the majority, because the assembly hall was soon so crowded that it heated up to a summer temperature, despite the chilly April weather outdoors. It was out of the ordinary that little Maryville hosted events such as this.
I would be presenting my work first; that was what Rahm wanted. Perhaps he wanted to show me off, as if I were his own newborn child, perhaps he was still proud of me at this time. After a few long minutes, my voice trembling in time with my knees, I found my confidence. I leaned on the words that were so thoroughly prepared, discovered that they carried, that they absolutely did not lose their credibility as they left the paper and were dispersed into the air between the audience and me, but instead made it all the way to their destination.
I began by quickly summarizing the history, spoke briefly of the condenser lens that came into use all the way back in the sixteenth century, about the compound optical microscope, described by Galileo Galilei in 1610. To demonstrate the microscope’s significance in practice I had decided to tell them about one specific individual. I had chosen the Dutch zoologist Jan Swammerdam. He had lived in the seventeenth century and was never properly recognized by his contemporaries, was poor and lonely, but for posterity he was a true monument in natural history, perhaps precisely because he made a connection between creation and creativity at such an early stage.
“Swammerdam,” I said and allowed my gaze to sweep across the assembly. “Never forget his name. His work has shown us that the different stages in the life of an insect, the egg, larvae and pupae, are in fact different forms of the same insect. Swammerdam developed a microscope which enabled him to study the insects in detail. During these studies he produced drawings unlike anything else we have seen.”
With a dramatic hand gesture, which was well rehearsed, I pulled down a chart I had hung up behind me.
“Here you can see Swammerdam’s illustration of the anatomy of the bee, as he has drawn it in his work Biblia Naturae.”
I allowed myself a dramatic pause, let my gaze come to rest on the assembly, while they took in the extraordinarily detailed drawings. At that exact moment the spring sun in its passage over the roof of the assembly hall hit the window on my left, a lone ray of sunshine fell through, spread out towards the rows of benches and fell upon the person sitting furthest to the left, beside two female friends: Thilda.
Afterwards I’ve understood that it hadn’t been as much a surprise for her as for me. I was of course on the minds of many young women; the young natural scientist, educated in the capital, dressed in modern garments, well spoken, a bit short, perhaps, not the most athletic—to tell the truth I had already begun struggling with weight gain, but what I lacked in physical attributes, I made up for intellectually. The eyeglasses on my nose alone were testimony of this. I usually wore them pushed down a bit, so I could gaze sagely over the frames. When I got them, I had spent an entire evening working out the perfect position for the glasses, finding the precise spot on my nose where they were securely in place and which simultaneously made it possible to look people right in the eye, without having to look through the small oval lenses, well aware as I was that the concave lenses made my eyes look smaller. I also knew that many women found my lush mane of hair attractive. I kept my hair at medium length, which showed it off to its best advantage. Perhaps Thilda had already observed me for a long time, assessing me, comparing me with other young men in the village. Perhaps she had seen the kind of respect I was treated with, deep bows and humble looks, wholly different from the other young men she had in her circle, who were probably always coarse in both their dress and conduct and were treated accordingly.
Thilda was wearing her Sunday best, something blue, a dress, or perhaps a blouse, that was nicely fitted across her bosom. On either side of her round face corkscrew curls descended towards her shoulders, the virtually uniformlike hairstyle she had in common with all of her female companions, and which was also to be seen on many married women—even though one might think they should be past the need for that kind of tomfoolery with their appearances. It was, however, neither the curls nor the clothing that made such an impression on me. What the lone ray of sunshine wormed its way forward to, through the heavy air of the assembly hall, was an unusually straight and well-proportioned nose, like an illustration in a textbook on anatomy. It was a classical nose; I immediately got the urge to draw it, study it, a nose with a shape corresponding exactly with its function. Or so I thought. The function of her nose was regrettably not in keeping with its form, as I would later find out, in that it was always red and runny from an eternal cold. But on this day it beamed in my direction, neither shiny nor red, just extremely interested in me and my words, and I was unable to take my eyes off of it.