Anne FingerCONVALESCENCEIStout, walleyed Sophie sits next to Klara's bed at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus in Vienna in 1882, staring into the middle distance. Dr. Freud, sans beard and without his glower, not a gray hair yet on his head, who everyone expects will make quite a name for himself in the treatment of cerebral paralysis–came into the room half an hour ago and, having clicked open his black bag, held fast to Klara's spastic arm, and plunged the thin needle of his syringe in, and now the child, who had been writhing in pain and moaning as if she were getting fucked by pain is splayed across the bed, a series of beatific smiles flitting across her face. Sophie's left eye is strabismic and her face is pocked with boils. It is on account of her eye, with its habit of wandering off on its own, and her cratered face she's ended up in Vienna, for not a single gentleman caller, no matter how elderly or ill-favored, had ever asked permission to sit in the parlor with her; this despite the fact she was known in her home village as being nearly as strong as the family oxen which she foddered daily. "We can't be feeding you forever," her mother had finally said, arms crossed her bosom, as she ordered her into exile in the city. "But I don't want to go to the city," Sophie had wailed, and her mother had given her the look an ox would give if you said such a thing to an ox. * * * After Dr. Freud's needle had plunged into Klara's arm, she experienced a shock of coldness spreading through her veins, followed, seconds later, by bliss. Now, she has no more to have a word enter her brain–say "Africa"–then a watering hole on the Serengeti Plain appears before her, with baboons, shrews, leopards, and hyenas drinking from it. The original explorers who brought back tales of these strange beasts were thought to be fabulists. And that thought causes the animals to be replaced by fantastical ones: a two-headed hyena, one head cackling, the other speaking in Attic Greek, twin human infants suckling at its teats; an animal formed of the union of a sloth and a lizard, scuttling the enormous bag of its body across the ground; bush pigs with iridescent wings flying in lazy circles above the watering hole. * * * Klara is the invalid daughter of a father indulgent and oft-absent, and a dead mother–although no one in her family uses the stark monosyllable death–sounding even cruder in their native German: "Tod." Her father is a freethinker and prides himself on disdaining euphemism, so there's no The dear child's mother passed away and certainly not She's smiling down on us from heaven, with the result that precious little is said about Klara's mother's absence at all. The household consists of Papa, Klara, and, along with various other servants, a slightly sadistic–well, perhaps more than slightly–housekeeper who wears hats of ruched velvet adorned with dingy ostrich plumes and bits of mended veil, Fraulein Rottenmeier by name. Klara has cobbled together, from overheard remarks and evasive answers to her probing questions, a series of vague images, scarcely connected enough to deserve to be called a narrative. Her mother's demise–which was in some ineffable way connected with Klara's birth, and her birth with her strange condition–must have been something attenuated and fey, like a leaf being caught by a current of wind, and swirled upwards on it, borne into the distance, becoming smaller and smaller, until it passed into invisibility. Klara has always had a great deal of time to think and daydream and spin her foolish fantasies–which concern not only her mother's death, but all manner of other unwholesome subjects. Altogether too much time, if you asked Fraulein Rottenmeier, but no one does, no one cares a fig for her opinion, although sausages rather than figs are the food used to express scant worth in the German commonplace. When Fraulein Rottenmeier gets particularly exercised at the lack of regard paid to her views, the phrase that runs through her head is, "They don't give a sausage for my opinion; no, not a bratwurst nor a leberwurst." At the worst of times, she'd add to the ones above blutwursts, knockwursts, zervelatwursts, until trails of cured meat hung like stout phalluses from the rafters of her indignation. But Fraulein Rottenmeier is not our concern here; nor is little orphaned Adelheid, she with the strange nickname Heidi, who, later on, will be brought to Frankfurt as Klara's companion, but who, at the moment when Klara is watching the flying bush pigs circling above the watering hole, is trudging along in hobnail boots, bundled in every garment she owns, one atop the other, making her a miniature of the woman she will be in stout middle-age, being force-marched by her Aunt Detie across a meadow peppered with primroses, gentian, and buttercups towards the craggy, snowcapped peaks beyond. From a distance, the village they are entering looks charming, although the chalets are little more than huts, packed to their sagging beams with blind grandmothers with matted hair and boys so dull they're baffled by the alphabet; the villagers so interbred that everyone is their own second cousin once removed. The grown-ups in those villages are forever dying, timbers cracking open the skulls of the fathers, the mothers sinking into a vortex of grief or puerperal fever. It's all a punishment from God for our sins, or a trial, to prove our faith. And the children are forever being abandoned. Not just Klara and Heidi, about to be dumped on queer old gramps, but the secret bastard offspring of Fraulein Rottenmeier, boarded with relatives in Bavaria. Some half-century hence, Fraulein Rottenmeier's grandson, tracing his genealogy back–a necessary step before he can enroll in the Nazi Party–will discover there was no Grandpa Rottenmeier, and feel not his grandmother's shame, but pride: he was descended from those who heeded the call of blood rather than the laws of man. * * * How Papa loves his darling Klara! The thought: I lost my beautiful wife for this never crosses his mind. Never! Why if she were not–well, the way she is–he'd have bought her a matched pair of pure white ponies, and a gaily painted cart, which she could have driven around the grounds of his mother's estate, wearing a dress of vermilion velvet with a golden ribbon in her hair. But she is the way she is, so she has a white nightgown instead of a velvet dress, and to show his love for her, her father has sent her to this far away house of pain and linen sheets and blood. Her body has been slit open and the Achilles tendon on her left side, her bad side, has been stretched in the hope that her foot would cease to have its equine appearance. * * * Every now and again, Klara emerges slightly from her fog of morphine-addled pain to have food shoveled into her mouth–the usual invalid's fare of a soft boiled egg and a pap of bread mashed with milk. Like every human being on God's earth, food and drink go in at the top and come out at the other end, and Sophie must attend to both the in and the out. Little Klara must also be washed, and have her bedclothes and nightgown changed, and have fresh bandages wrapped around her foot; but these needs take up no more than a few hours out of the day, so mostly Sophie sits by her charges bedside and stares. After Sophie has set the tray of food in front of her, or changed her dressing, Klara always says "Thank you," but Sophie never says a word. * * * Sometimes Sophie sleeps, her head lurched forward, her mouth hanging open. * * * Klara's father had been assured his daughter would have her own private duty nurse and the good doctor did nothing to disabuse him of the image that rose in his mind, of someone fresh-faced and devoted, perhaps even a distant relative of the doctor, from a family of utmost moral probity who had fallen on hard times. But the bare fact was one couldn't always get the best sort of help in these situations. The doctor also explained that during the period of Klara's convalescence, visitors would not be allowed, as they disturb the patient. He did not say that the patients also disturb the visitors, what with the stinks being given off by their festering bodies, their moaning, the occasional screams that can be heard coming from the operating theater. The white nightgowns and fainting couches, etc. that surround the fin-de-siecle business of invalidism are all a sham, a Potemkin village; behind that facade, it's a nasty business indeed. * * * Klara's doses of morphine are being tapered down–Dr. Freud does not want to get the reputation of being too free with the needle, his name having already been sullied by his earlier enthusiasm for cocaine, which he had advocated not just as a cure for opium addiction but also as a general tonic and pick-me-up. The Age of Laudanum gives way to the Age of Pain. By the end of the first day, Klara has learned the secret of pain. You cannot ask any questions of it: Not "Why did you start?" nor "When will you end?" nor "Why am I the one who suffers from you?" It does not matter whether you ask these questions with an air of aggrieved self-pity or with the detached mien of a philosopher. If you ask such questions pain will get the better of you. It is necessary to attend to pain acutely, as one would listen to the performance of a great opera: the soprano voice of the incision and the baritone of the dull ache deep within her muscles. Klara utters the word, "Bedpan." Sophie hears the tinkle of Klara's pee hitting the enameled steel, and then the hiss and grumble of shit being expelled. Having removed the pan from beneath Klara's buttocks, Sophie flips her charge on her side. One of Sophie's haunch-like hands grabs the upper cheek away from the lower. The child begins to whimper as the hot cloth, twisted around Sophie's finger, scours the puckered flesh that surrounds her asshole, and probes inside, getting rid of every last bit of muck, there, clean, clean, clean, just like the doctor ordered! "Oh, it's too hot, it's too hot." "The doctor says I must scrub you well. He says you have little animals, so tiny they can't be seen, crawling on you, like maggots and fleas on the carcass of a dead dog. Of course, you've probably never even seen a dead animal, have you, little missy?" "Oh," Klara says, "Oh, it hurts." At the same time Klara is crying out, "Oh, it hurts, it hurts!" she feels a wave of pleasure. It is not diffuse; it rises slowly, like an ocean wave far from shore, pulsing outward from Sophie's probing finger. As it crests, Klara cries out, "No, oh no!" Is she crying out because of the pain or because the wave is about to break? Sophie brings her face close to Klara's and hisses, "Quiet! You are bothering the other patients!" Sophie smells of mutton and brussel sprouts. Well, if she doesn't like it hot, perhaps she'd be happier with cold? And Sophie fetches some ice from the tub of ice kept for cooling patients in the grip of high fever, and wrings out the cloth in cold, cold water, although it makes her own hands sting, and washes the child's nasty parts with that. Happy now, little princess? * * * Dr. Freud and his retinue of medical students sweep into Klara's room, and she is presented to as a case of cerebral paralysis, a 12-year-old, intelligent, cooperative, and stalwart in the face of the difficulties with which life had presented her. (Klara is quite surprised but nonetheless pleased to hear the word "stalwart" applied to her.) He then describes the surgical lengthening of her Achilles tendon, adding, "The incision was closed with catgut." Her leg is freed from its bandages so it can be displayed to the medical students, and Sophie watches as Klara props herself up so she can see where her ankle was slit, and the two lips of flesh laced together. Her leg has swollen to elephantine proportions and is deep red. Her leg is also dotted with a collection of purple-black bruises, the size and color of Damson plums. As Klara stares at her leg, she feels a surge of exhilaration: not at the thought that is she going to made well–she knows full well that is a game they are all compelled to play. Her happiness is her wonder at what the body can endure. Slice it open. Pull its sinews and muscles this way and that. Stitch it up with catgut. She understands that when Pascal said, "The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of," it wasn't a bit of romantic folderol. The heart he spoke of wasn't metaphoric: it was that organ in one's chest, plodding on like a stubborn mule. A mule doesn't like to get started, you may have to hit it with a stick to get it going, but once it gets going, it doesn't want to stop. The heart's reason is its steady animal thump. This knowledge will be folded up inside of her until the morning of February 5, 1944. She will bump herself up the stairs of the cellar in which she will have taken refuge the night before to discover that her house will have taken a direct hit from a RAF bomber. That solid neighborhood of stone houses and stained glass and broad avenues will be rubble; the veins and sinews of the houses, their electrical wires and pipes, left hanging in the air, protruding from the half-standing walls. Here will be a cinder, here a bit of ash. What were these a few hours before–her family's mahogany table? One of her neighbors? In the distance, a boy of maybe fourteen or fifteen will be shoveling rubble into a wheelbarrow. An ant, carrying one grain of earth at time, would move a mountain more quickly. "Granny!" he will call to her and make his way across the wasteland, every now and then spreading his arms like a tightrope walker to keep his balance. "Granny! What have they done to you?" "This is not from the bombing. No. No. I have always been this way." "Oh, that's good," he will say, and then catch himself, and give a slight laugh. "There's a shelter set up," gesturing into the distance, towards a prehistoric land where streets still have names and space is demarcated by walls and roofs. He will lift her up in his arms and carry her, her long gray hair fluttering behind her, a boy not yet grown, carrying an ancient infant in his arms towards his wheelbarrow, into which he will gently lower her, and wheel her away, whistling, perhaps Deutschland Ueber Alles. Klara will be as happy as she has ever been in her life. She will move her hand so she can feel the steady beat of her heart. Is there a more glorious sound? Yes, she will remember, yes, I knew this when I was a child of twelve. Later on, when this is all over, those who lived through it will be able to talk about the stink of corpses; about trapping rats for food; about their neighbor who had just torn open a telegram screaming No! No! for hours on end; but this, this they will never be able to talk about: the obscene, implacable thrill of living. * * * The pain begins to ebb, and Klara discovers there is something worse than pain. Boredom. Rest, she is to rest. Rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest. What does she think about, during all those long, long hours? Food. Before breakfast, she wonders about the degree of firmness the egg will have: when she pokes the center with her fork, will the yolk flow out, almost like water, or will it be thick as blood? Will there be a slug of uncooked albumen on the edge of the skirt of white, the sight of which will make her gag? After breakfast, she thinks about dinner; and after dinner, supper. Beef tea. Pearled barley. Boiled egg. Chicken broth. Pap of bread squished into milk. Beef tea. Boiled egg. Pearled barley. Chicken broth. Pap. (Klara would like to bite into something solid: a slice of roast beef, a bratwurst, Sophie's arm.) She wonders if her body really is being held together by something sliced from the insides of a cat. The night before her surgery, had Dr. Freud lurked in some alley, tempting a tough old tomcat out from his lair with a fish head or a bottle of milk? Had he at the ready in his pocket a rag soaked with ether which he swooped over the nose and mouth of the cat which, in the space of a few seconds, went from being snarling and wary to a limp pile at his feet? Had he wrapped it up in an old towel, to protect himself from its lice and fleas, and taken it back to the laboratories that l ay beyond the operating theater, sliced it open, cut its dark insides into long strings which were used to sew her body back together? Klara had to stop herself from retching at the thought. No, she is being foolish, the doctors themselves would not have done such a thing. They would have sent one of the men who lurked about this place, men who had once themselves been patients and walked with gallumping limps, men who were missing their front teeth and smelled of tobacco and red wine. She wonders what Sophie looks like without her clothes. She has never seen a naked woman in the flesh–other than herself, and surely this body of hers does not count. Klara has seen photographs of Greek statuary, and tries to i magine Sophie's head atop the Venus de Milo, but she is certain Sophie's flesh beneath her clothes is like the flesh that protrudes from her clothing, mottled and rough, nothing like marble. "What are you knitting?" Klara asks. Sophie continues to knit. Klara asks the question again. Again, Sophie answers with her vast and impenetrable silence. "Why won't you tell me?" Sophie jerks up her head, glares at her for a solid minute, and goes back to her knitting. "Why won't you tell me?" Klara begs. "Why should I tell you?" "Because I so want to know." "That is precisely why I won't tell you." Every day, Sophie changes Klara's dressing. The clatter of the instruments against the steel tray. The creak of scissors, cutting through the indigo paper in which the fresh cotton bandages are wrapped. Sophie has been instructed time and again that, in order to lessen the chance of contamination, the fresh gauze should be kept wrapped until the old dressing has been removed and discarded, but she has had quite enough of being told what to do by those who look down on her, thank you just the same. She balls up the paper in which the gauze was wrapped, and shoves it into the pocket of her jumper. How Klara yearns to have that square of indigo paper! Sophie yanks the old bandages off, revealing the dried pus that leaves its mark on Klara's leg as the tides leave behind their grainy hand print on the sand; the scab forming over the incision, black on the edges, reddening towards the center. Sophie picks up a medical instrument, like a pair of scissors but with a forward bending crook, which makes Klara think of the head of a praying mantis. Sophie clutches a ball of cotton in the jaws of the instrument, anoints it with alcohol, and proceeds to dab it along the incision, leaving a trail of stinging pain, a relief from the dull thud, which has become quite ordinary. Klara asks Matron if she might be permitted to read. "To read?" "It's only–that I am so bored." "You must rest. Reading is enervating." "Perhaps Sophie could read aloud to me." Matron seems to be considering the possibility when Sophie looks up from her knitting and says, "Can't." Matron nods, and withdraws, pausing in the doorway to say, "You are a clever child. Your father warned us of that." "Reading," Sophie mutters into her knitting. Sophie was sent to school, but she has deliberately forgotten all she learned there. She does not understand the point of the word C-A-T written on the page, since those letters cannot rub up against your leg nor can they catch the mouse that is driving you mad with its endless scritch-scritch-scritching in the wall. Finally Klara understands that she too can use silence as a weapon, that if she ceases to ask Sophie questions, if she ceases to say "Thank you," when Sophie sets the tray in front of her, Sophie will eventually speak to her. It is the hardest thing Klara has ever done, but she does it, she keeps her silence, and after four days, Sophie
says: Klara is so delighted at the question that she is almost grinning as she says, "My mother is dead." Then she makes a show of biting her lip and sounding wistful as she says, "She died giving birth to me. It was a great tragedy." * * * "I have a book," Sophie whispers in Klara's ear. "But you can't read." "It has pictures," Sophie says. "Where did you get it?" "I took it from the doctor's study. I must put it back before he notices it is gone." "Where is it?" "Wouldn't you like to know?" "Please. Please. I am so bored. You cannot imagine..." "Poor thing. Poor, poor thing." But then Sophie can't stand to keep her secret anymore, and she hitches up her skirt, and Klara sees her drawers, with her hairy legs sticking out from them, and in the waist of her drawers is the book, bound in fine calfskin leather. "Look," Sophie says. "This is what you looked like before you were born." She shows her a line drawing of a lumpy polliwog with an oversized head. And then Sophie shows her another picture, not a line drawing this time, but a photograph of the place between a woman's legs, jowly like the face of a basset hound, with a penumbra of hair atop it. "That is what you look like. I know. I have seen it. I see it when I clean you." "Is it hairy–down there?" "Not yet. You will grow it later." "Even me?" "It happens even to the idiots upstairs." Klara looks at another drawing, the cross-section of a woman's body showing a baby struggling to be born. Klara understands that her mother's dying could not have been less like a leaf being caught by a gust of wind and then carried on that breeze hither and thither beyond the point of visibility. IIHer papa comes upon Klara in the library, weeping quite copiously, and when he pets her and asks her why she is crying, she refuses–or perhaps is unable–to say; although he does manage to get that she misses her nurse–Sophie–from the hospital. Perhaps he made a mistake in undertaking the surgery–the exposure to the wider world, in however stunted a form, has made the straits of her circumstances at home evident to her. He allows himself to think–yes, it might have been better if–not that if she too, had died, no, not that, but if her mind had been affected as well. Instead Klara is as sharp as a good knife, but having no wider world in which to excercise her intelligence, that blade often seems to be turned against herself. The child needs a friend, but he knows full well he cannot broach the subject of introduction to the daughters of his business partners. But it turns out that a relation's kitchen girl has a niece–a lovely unspoiled child from the countryside–who would make a perfect companion to Klara. And then Heidi shows up. The child–motherless, fatherless, unschooled, unchurched–has lived too long with her queer old grandfather, the two of them vagabonds on their mountaintop, the beds never made, everything scattered hither and thither. She's dressed in ragamuffin clothes, stinking of the countryside and gaping when she's spoken to: a backwoods half-wit. Ah, well, beggars can't be choosers. After dinner, Fraulein Rottenmeier calls Heidi into the kitchen and, putting her thumb and forefinger on the child's arm and pinching hard, she says, "The little mistress needs her sleep. If you keep her awake half the night, you'll pay for it," and adds a twist to the pinch. "Into the cellar you'll go, with the rats and the bats." Heidi looks around in wonder at Klara's bedroom, which she is to share. There is a chest of drawers made of polished mahogany and a closet packed with dresses; velvet ribbons; a silver comb and silver brush. As soon as the lights are turned out, Heidi starts sniveling. "Stop crying," Klara orders. Heidi tries but her trying only makes her cry harder. "Waa-waa," Klara mocks. "Waa-waa." "I miss my grandpa," Heidi says. "What's your grandpa like?" Heidi thinks for a long time. "He's old." Klara sighs with exasperation. "He smells like the goats." "What do goats smell like?" Klara has only seen pictures of goats in books; it had never occurred to her they smelled. Heidi thinks for a while and then says, "Like my grandpa." "You've been brought here to amuse me. And you are not amusing me in the slightest. I'm finding you quite trying. Perhaps I shall have to tell Fraulein Rottenmeier to send you back." "No," Heidi pleads, "no. Please." For the first time in her life, Heidi's belly is full, not half-full with barley and groats and occasionally a bit of stringy goat stew, from a nanny whose stopped giving milk or a billy who can no longer do what the good Lord put billies on this earth to do, but full up to the tippety-top with meat and cakes: she may miss the wind and the trees and the hawks gliding above, the blood and the soil, but she doesn't miss the always-hungry nag of her stomach. "I'm putting my hand on the bell cord. When I pull it, Rottenmeier will come–" "She said–that lady–she would put me in the cellar. With the bats and the rats." Heidi is sobbing so that it is hard for her to speak. "I'll do anything. Please don't call her. I'll give you my hat." It is her most prized possession. "Your hat? As if I would want your old hat!" "What do you want? What do you want?" Klara thinks for a minute, deciding between all the delicious possibilities. "I want you to take off your nightclothes and show me–down there." Heidi starts giggling; she's giggling so hard she can't stop. She whips her nightdress off over her head, and spreads her legs so Klara can study her. Heidi keeps giggling and giggling and giggling; her sides hurt, she feels like she might throw up. * * * At dinner, Heidi glances around to be sure no one is looking and stuffs a roll into the pocket of her jumper. She doesn't know what to make of these fine Frankfurt people, who have never known what it is to be hungry–the kind of hunger that makes your head ache and fills your dreams with rivers of melted butter, mountains of whipped cream. Sometimes these city-dwellers say, Oh, I'm famished. I'm starving! but they don't know what those words mean. Heidi has been bandied about like a shuttlecock, lobbed from Mama to Detie, from Detie to Gramps and now from Gramps to Klara. It may seem she has no more desires than a shuttlecock, but that isn't true. It's just that she's learned there's no connection between wanting and getting. * * * The next night, as soon as Fraulein Rottenmeier has shut the door after saying, in a voice so saccharine it borders
on sarcasm: "Sleep well, my dear little children," Klara whispers: All day long, Heidi has been dreading what's going to happen when the two of them are together behind the closed door. She's so relieved that there's just to be a story, no showing off her naughty place. And Klara whispers the story of Hansel and Gretel, although as she is telling the story, she imagines that she is playing the part of Hansel and Heidi is playing the part of Gretel. When she gets to the part about the house made of bread and cake and sugar with the witch who lives inside, instead of saying that the witch is old and ugly and leaning on a crutch, she says: "The witch was very beautiful, with long dark hair and eyes so narrow it seemed perhaps she was a Tartar." Heidi doesn't object in the slightest, it's clear no one's ever read her the stories of the Brothers Grimm. Every night, Klara orders Heidi not to cry and tells her a new story from the Grimm's fairy tales. The one about the father chopping off his daughter's hands and the one about the bridegroom who eats human flesh. Ugly stepsisters force their put-upon younger sister to scrub the floor and carry water, they tease and torment her; but in Klara's version of the story there's no handsome prince who whisks her away, instead Cinderella creeps down the stairs when the wicked stepsisters are asleep, snoring operatically, their pasty white limbs splayed this way and that, and ties them to their bedposts by their own coarse hair. Then she takes a feather from a pillow, and begins to tickle their flesh. At first the two stepsisters bat lackadaisically at their flesh, like hibernating bears, but then they come fully awake, and struggle to rise, but the more they struggle the tauter their bonds of hair become. The sisters screech and screech, but Cinderella just laughs, and the more she torments them with the feather, tickling not just their flabby bellies and the soles of their feet, but their breasts and the place between their legs. "What happens next?" Heidi asks. "She leaves them tied up. She doesn't feed them. The sisters live off their fat for a long, long time, but finally they die. And then Cinderella opens the windows, and bats and birds and insects fly in through the open window and eat their dead flesh, until their skeletons are completely picked clean. Then she takes the bones and carries them upstairs, and puts them in a trunk, and she lives happily ever after." "What happened to the mother and father?" "They went to Paris a long time ago and were run over by a trolley car." * * * Heidi goes on trying the patience of Fraulein Rottenmeier! She is a naughty, naughty girl! She sneaks out of the house, and runs hither and thither, climbing towers and meeting up with street urchins and organ grinders, once coming home with a basket filled with kittens. Kittens! Klara picks up the kittens, spreads their hind legs, staring at the place in between, their assholes scrunched up like a shut eye, their soft budding penises, their mysterious slits. Their mouths make little useless suckings, as if the air were their mother's teats. At dinner, Heidi makes sure no one is looking and slips another roll into her pocket. After Fraulein Rottenmeier turns off the gas lamps, Heidi says, "Tell me about the evil stepsisters again." Each time Klara tells the story it is a little bit different: Cinderella opens up the windows before the sisters have died, and the bats and the kites gnaw on the stepsisters' living flesh; spiders weave webs between their legs; a prince comes to call, and Cinderella feeds him a stew made of her dead sisters, and he gobbles it all up and asks for seconds and then thirds. One night Heidi says, "I could be the evil stepsister. You could tie me up." "No," Klara says, "I want to be the bad one. You tie me up. Use the sashes from my dresses." The part of Heidi is played by Shirley Temple and the part of Klara by Marlena Dietrich. Or maybe it's the other way around. Heidi's giggles come bubbling out of her, she's pressing her mouth against the crook of her elbow, the harder she tries to suppress them the faster they come. Not Klara. She has the serious mien babies sometimes have, when the stare out at the world as if they were ancient Zen masters. What a thrill it is for Heidi to grab hold of Klara's ankles, feeling them twitch beneath her fingers, binding them to the end of the bed. "Not like that," Klara says. "Spread my legs apart." So Heidi undoes the knots with her fat, sausage-like fingers, and then ties Klara's left leg to the left bedpost, her right leg to the right bedpost. An air of almost religious solemnity has settled upon the two girls. "I want the air to touch the bad part. The part between my legs." Heidi lifts Klara's nightgown up above her waist, and gazes at the dark splotch of hair growing there. "Tell me I'm bad," Klara says. "You're bad," Heidi says. "Not like that. Be mean to me. To my body." Heidi draws her mouth so close to Klara's ear that her lips almost brush the lobes, and whispers ferociously: "You must stop this shaking. You disgust everyone. The servants imitate you behind your back. At dinner, your spoon rattles against the edge of the soup dish. Everyone is so ashamed." "Yes," Klara says. "Yes, like that." "You must stop this shaking. You must stop this shaking or I will have to punish you." "But I can't," Klara says. "I can't stop." "You must stop. You must stop or you will be punished." And Heidi pulls on the fabric that ties Klara's legs to the bed. "Do you hear me? Stop. Stop. You must stop." * * * How long the next day is: the endless meals, at which Heidi tries not to catch Klara's eye, for fear she will burst out in anxious laughter; the tutor's droning lessons; even the footsteps of the servants on the staircase seem to be those of somnambulists. At long last night falls, at long last Fraulein Rottenmeier is shutting the door, the triangle of light from the hallway becoming more and more acute until it disappears into nothingness, and the two girls are at last alone in the dark. "Shall I be mean to you again?" Heidi asks. "Yes." She kneels down between Klara's legs and studies the thing she has no word for. She clears her throat. "You are very bad down there. I will have to do an operation. It is going to hurt. It is going to hurt a great deal." "Oh, no," Klara cries, with fear that is both real and playacting. "If you struggle and complain, it will only hurt more." Heidi picks up Klara's silver-plated hairbrush from the bureau. "I am going to fix you." Shame is no longer an amorphous, ungraspable fog that surrounds her: it has been made into the sensation of Heidi pulling on the lips of her labia, pushing the handle of the hairbrush inside of her. "Does that hurt?" Heidi asks. "Yes. Yes. Oh, it hurts. It hurts so much." "Does that hurt more?" "Yes," Klara cries, "that hurts more." "Does that hurt more?" "Yes." And she pushes the handle of the brush harder and harder inside of Klara, harder and harder, almost hard enough, almost.
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