‘Mama, they have asked me to speak next week about Nornepygge, at the university.’
She just stared at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Nornepygge?’ She began to look frightened, as she did more and more often at each unknown thing she encountered. Her hands started patting around her lap and knees, looking for something, as though her understanding was an object she had lost in the folds of the blanket that covered her.
‘Nornepygge? Nornepygge?’ she kept repeating with increasing alarm and volume.
I knelt beside her chair and took her fleshless hand in mine. I tried to anchor her shying eyes with my gaze.
From the corner of my eye I could see Elsa deciding whether to intervene, and my mother’s gaze skittered away uncertainly in Elsa’s direction for reassurance.
‘His book, Frau Brod: Nornepygge is the name of the book. He has been asked to read from his book at the university.’ Elsa nodded encouragingly at me and returned her eyes to her sewing.
My mother’s face turned back to me and seemed to wince with pain. ‘My poor child. And will you go?’
‘Of course! It is a wonderful thing. I had hoped you would come too.’ Although I knew that she couldn’t.
‘If you have already written it, why must you show yourself? All those people looking at you. Just send them the book if they want to read it.’
I could see Elsa ducking her head further into her neck, trying to make herself invisible.
‘Why not ask your brother to read for you?’ My mother was looking at me eagerly, pleadingly, wanting to help.
I felt a great, weary sadness then. My brother had been dead for more than twenty years. I had never even known him. I patted my mother’s hand. ‘Yes, Mama,’ I said. ‘What a good idea.’
Although she did not intend it, her words awoke in me the habitual dread that had been lying dormant under my unfamiliar happiness, a dread that was so connected with my broken body it was as though it formed its central organ, its dark pulsing heart.
That night I began to think of the reality of giving the speech. I had always disliked speaking to groups of people. Being called to the front of the classroom at school to give an answer or recite a poem had been painful for me. I would feel the eyes of the audience watching me, burning on my skin like little points of flame.
I began to wonder if people were only interested in me because I was an object of curiosity, a marvel such as one might find at a carnival sideshow; a two-headed man, or a dog that could sing. I remembered the hesitant faces of my friends when I had told them the news, and at last I understood the reason.
As the days passed I became more and more self-conscious, and at night I dreamed I was giving the speech, but instead of words coming from my mouth clouds of vermin spewed forth. Mice, bats, spiders and fleas crawled over the faces of the audience, no matter how much they tried to beat them off with their hands. I dreamed this dream so many times that it began to seem like it could really happen, and it spilled over into my waking life with bouts of nervous vomiting.
I found myself once again back in my old place, facing my old enemy, and now everything seemed to be against me. It was midsummer and over the next days the temperature rose. I began to obsessively check the weather forecast for the appointed night and deliberated over what I would wear—could I get away with my padded jacket? I stood for hours in front of the mirror, trying to straighten my poor body in preparation for the eventuality of having to appear without the jacket and expose it to view.
The night of the speech came, hot and close even after the sun had set. I had walked to the university and arrived with my face beaded with sweat and my shirt sticking transparently to my skin. Theodor met me outside, totally unaware of my distress. He was excited because there was a better turnout than he had hoped.
‘It’s quite a crowd! They can’t wait to see you.’
I knew he was trying to reassure me, but at that moment I was wishing for the opposite, for a shamefully empty room, a sea of vacant chairs. I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. In the mirror I could see my hollow chest tremble with the beating of my heart. I felt a spasm in my gut and tried to vomit into the sink to relieve myself, but couldn’t.
I still remember entering the lecture hall, feeling as though I were entering the scene of my own death. It was very crowded, with people standing around the door and up along the back wall. As I made my way through the crush towards Theodor, whom I could see standing at the front, I heard, or imagined I could hear, a hissing wave of shuffles and gasps as the bodies parted to let me through. I felt faint and hot. Sweat prickled on my back. My pounding heart filled all the space inside my chest, leaving no room for air, which I had to take in shallow sips.
Theodor introduced me and I mechanically read through a section of my novel and elaborated on its themes, but I was aware the whole time of all the eyes in that room. Even as I spoke, my brain was perversely trying to calculate the exact number of those eyes, and what percentage of the surface area of my body was taken up by their gaze. ‘Each eye,’ a voice said in my head, ‘is the size of a five-heller piece.’ Two hundred people in the room equalled four hundred eyes, which was approximately twelve hundred centimetres square, thus covering at least the whole of my upper body.
I fought a rising tide of nausea and struggled to keep my voice level, which I managed to do until the time came for the audience to ask questions. An old professor was the first to speak, giving a long-winded opinion about a seemingly unrelated theme, and I quickly lost the thread. By this time I was almost blinded by the sick feeling in my stomach and the room was swaying before me. I could no longer control my body and I was propelled, stumbling, off the podium. I limped through the audience, awkwardly steadying myself against their seated bodies with my hands. I could no longer suppress the spasms of retching, which echoed down the stone hallway like peals of thunder when I reached the door.
I ran down the hallway towards the bathroom, but I made it only a short distance, and vomited instead into a flowerbed. I stood for a long time afterwards, bent over and looking at the tips of my shoes. Sweat dripped from my face. I could sense someone, probably Theodor, standing a short distance away. Out of shame I didn’t turn my head to look at him.
Even now, more than a year later, the thought of a crowd of faces all turned towards me, with their silent, waiting eyes, unnerved me enough to raise my blood pressure. It was no longer the display of my ruined body to those appraising faces that was the source of my anxiety; to this act of exposure I had become resigned. Regardless of what a poor specimen it was, my body had still honoured its function of acting as an external barrier that protected my internal self from scrutiny and trespass.
To me now there was something about the act of reading my own words out loud that stripped me bare. I had a horror of speaking my words with my own voice, because I feared, as though it were some magic incantation, that this combination would enable the innermost part of myself to be exposed, recognised and, like my body, deemed monstrous, reprehensible.
That night, the fact that Fräulein Železný might be in the audience was making me more nervous than usual. I felt ill at the thought of her seeing me standing there, exposed, but at the same time I longed to see her again. The thought of meeting Franz also added to my unease; I could see again the young whore’s eyes sliding from him to me as we stood at the door, and I did not want to witness Fräulein Železný’s eyes making that same journey. My last encounter with Franz had changed my apprehension of him and I felt a panicky urge to keep him away from Fräulein Železný if possible. For this reason I had planned to arrive early, determined to get to Fräulein Železný before Franz had the chance. There was also the problem of Theodor. Once again I had found myself in the position of being forced to witness his first meeting with Franz. I could not hope for the possibility of Franz’s absence that evening. And now there was also the matter of Theodor’s offer of the book, the details of which were still unknown to me.