Read Online The Spirit Cabinet by Paul Quarrington - Free Book Online
Authors: Paul Quarrington
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Anna Thielmann blushed and chewed her bottom lip, finally said a few confusing words and consented to being photographed. She then pushed the reporter away with her fingertips.
It was this reporter who first made mention of the baby, although he wrote that the infant was “cradled in his mother’s arms.” The accompanying photograph—the item was placed on the back pages of the morning
Zeitung
and given an illustration—belies this. Little Rudolfo is caught in the crook of his mother’s left arm, facing downwards, his arms and legs splayed awkwardly. The baby in the picture is trying hard to raise his huge head, to look at the strange world around him.
Anna Thielmann, according to the photograph, was huge and regal, with a linebacker’s physique and a face that seemed to be made up of too many features. Closer examination of the newspaper photograph (Rudolfo still had a copy, folded into a wallet that he never carried because none of his clothes have pockets) reveals that Anna had the basic makeup: two eyes (dark as night), a nose (oddly triangular, like the protective flap hinged to industrial safety glasses), a mouth (Anna smiled by raising her upper lip and crimping it in the middle) and a spectacular obelisk of red hair.
Miss Anna Thielmann
, the story began,
arrived in the city yesterday having abandoned her career upon the great operatic stages of the world
.
Local opera aficionados were not familiar with the name
Anna Thielmann
, but when they heard her voice they were united in their support of her decision to abandon the stage. She spokelittle as a rule—she named cuts of meat at the butcher’s, rhymed off a list of inexpensive intoxicants at the wine store—but when she did her voice was froglike, not just in timbre but in character, leaping suddenly away up high and then landing with an awkward splat.
She seemed to have come not only from a strange place, but also from a strange time, the
fin-de-siècle
. She dressed in long scarves and feathered boas that seemed vaguely old-fashioned. Possessing a rump of exaggerated meatiness, she gave the impression that she wore a bustle, although she did not. Anna seemed to have missed the last fifty grievous years. She came to Bern imbued with a vague innocence, and this stayed with her even after it became clear to everyone that Anna was involved with drugs, that her apartment sat squarely on the Opium Route.
No one had ever seen Anna Thielmann herself smoke opium. True, they had seen her spill wild-eyed onto the cobbled streets of the old city, her monolith of hair tilted almost to the horizontal, but on such occasions she trailed substantial alcoholic fumes and vapours. No denying, however, that opium was smoked in her apartment. Anna’s clientele was for the most part eccentric. The Bernese prided themselves on a hard-earned normalcy, and they were shocked to see their city suddenly giving up a host of freaks. There were fat women and men with tiny heads, dissipated dwarves and melancholy giants. They filed in and out with a regularity that suggested that there was a doctor’s or dentist’s office at the top of the staircase at Kramgasse 49, an address Anna and Rudolfo shared, although not at the same time, with Albert Einstein.
Some of the people who came to Kramgasse 49 were young women, and they offset Anna’s quaint singularity with a violent embracing of modernity. They wore nylons and complicated brassieres. They wore shoes with long, thin heels, usually red and always so antithetical to locomotion that the ascent up thewooden stairs took hours. Young boys would push open the door at street level to gawk upwards and the women, clutching the walls and wobbling, would hurl down vile curses. These women tended not to go in and out; they would arrive in the early evening and leave with the dawn, nylons twisted, complicated brassieres abandoned and shoes slung over their shoulders.
It is not entirely true that Anna’s apartment was an opium den, not
It was this reporter who first made mention of the baby, although he wrote that the infant was “cradled in his mother’s arms.” The accompanying photograph—the item was placed on the back pages of the morning
Zeitung
and given an illustration—belies this. Little Rudolfo is caught in the crook of his mother’s left arm, facing downwards, his arms and legs splayed awkwardly. The baby in the picture is trying hard to raise his huge head, to look at the strange world around him.
Anna Thielmann, according to the photograph, was huge and regal, with a linebacker’s physique and a face that seemed to be made up of too many features. Closer examination of the newspaper photograph (Rudolfo still had a copy, folded into a wallet that he never carried because none of his clothes have pockets) reveals that Anna had the basic makeup: two eyes (dark as night), a nose (oddly triangular, like the protective flap hinged to industrial safety glasses), a mouth (Anna smiled by raising her upper lip and crimping it in the middle) and a spectacular obelisk of red hair.
Miss Anna Thielmann
, the story began,
arrived in the city yesterday having abandoned her career upon the great operatic stages of the world
.
Local opera aficionados were not familiar with the name
Anna Thielmann
, but when they heard her voice they were united in their support of her decision to abandon the stage. She spokelittle as a rule—she named cuts of meat at the butcher’s, rhymed off a list of inexpensive intoxicants at the wine store—but when she did her voice was froglike, not just in timbre but in character, leaping suddenly away up high and then landing with an awkward splat.
She seemed to have come not only from a strange place, but also from a strange time, the
fin-de-siècle
. She dressed in long scarves and feathered boas that seemed vaguely old-fashioned. Possessing a rump of exaggerated meatiness, she gave the impression that she wore a bustle, although she did not. Anna seemed to have missed the last fifty grievous years. She came to Bern imbued with a vague innocence, and this stayed with her even after it became clear to everyone that Anna was involved with drugs, that her apartment sat squarely on the Opium Route.
No one had ever seen Anna Thielmann herself smoke opium. True, they had seen her spill wild-eyed onto the cobbled streets of the old city, her monolith of hair tilted almost to the horizontal, but on such occasions she trailed substantial alcoholic fumes and vapours. No denying, however, that opium was smoked in her apartment. Anna’s clientele was for the most part eccentric. The Bernese prided themselves on a hard-earned normalcy, and they were shocked to see their city suddenly giving up a host of freaks. There were fat women and men with tiny heads, dissipated dwarves and melancholy giants. They filed in and out with a regularity that suggested that there was a doctor’s or dentist’s office at the top of the staircase at Kramgasse 49, an address Anna and Rudolfo shared, although not at the same time, with Albert Einstein.
Some of the people who came to Kramgasse 49 were young women, and they offset Anna’s quaint singularity with a violent embracing of modernity. They wore nylons and complicated brassieres. They wore shoes with long, thin heels, usually red and always so antithetical to locomotion that the ascent up thewooden stairs took hours. Young boys would push open the door at street level to gawk upwards and the women, clutching the walls and wobbling, would hurl down vile curses. These women tended not to go in and out; they would arrive in the early evening and leave with the dawn, nylons twisted, complicated brassieres abandoned and shoes slung over their shoulders.
It is not entirely true that Anna’s apartment was an opium den, not
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