City of Darkness

Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

Winter, 1884





It had all begun simply enough. He was a medical student. They called him promising. Enough so that he had been invited to dine in the home of one of his professors. It was a rare honor, and he had found himself seated beside the professor’s daughter.

He had saved his wages all summer just to purchase a single proper jacket for university. So of course he was wearing it that evening. He’d paid a barber for a shave, a trim of his mustache, the scent of sandalwood that was rubbed into his neck. He knew these dinners must be tiresome for the girl, having to feign endless interest in conversations with her father’s pet students. But she had smiled at him. Laughed at his jokes. And then, near the end of the meal, when they were waiting for the cheese to be served, she had, very briefly, put her hand on his arm.

A woman’s hand on a man’s arm. These things are the miracles of our lives, the small everyday miracles that might be the result of mere chance or might be something more - an indication of fate, the promise of something better. He was only twenty, new to the city, friendless and poor, so of course he would see his introduction to Katrina as providence. He had never known a woman who read books, who played the spinet, whose hands were soft and free of cuts or burns. The fact she would accept his clumsy efforts at conversation, the way she favored him with a smile…Most telling of all, the fact her father invited him back to dine the next Sunday. Who but an infidel could refute that this must all be the workings of a benevolent God?

The other students teased him. They choked on their jealousy. They had never seen Katrina, so they did not understand the full extent to which fortune had smiled on him, but they certainly did notice that the professor began to take a special interest in this young man so recently come from the country. The professor chose him for the demonstrations and was not so rushed or impatient when he answered his questions. So of course the young man could not help but dream. What would his career be like under the auspices of such a father-in-law? What would his marriage be like in the bed of a woman like Katrina? Imagining the answer to the first question made him arrogant, unpopular among his peers. Imagining the second drove him deep into the slums of the city.

He wasn’t the only medical student to visit the brothels. Of course not. They were as randy a bunch as any other men their age, and the profession they’d chosen required lengthy study and apprenticeship, meaning that it would be years before any of them could take a wife. Whores were as much a part of university life as books, and whenever his footsteps would turn toward the shadowed side of the city, he felt no guilt. He had a favorite among the girls, and he considered the fact that she bore a slight resemblance to Katrina to be a type of fidelity. Someday there would be a wife and a medical practice, a home with music and guests, perhaps even an appointment to the university seat the professor would vacate with his eventual retirement. Until then there was Wednesday afternoons with this thin blonde girl, who wore a Star of David around her neck but called herself by the ludicrous name of Collette. When he had asked her why, she had answered “It sounds French.” The pseudonym should have been a sign. It should have shown him that she too dreamt of something finer. But the young man’s ambition was so all-encompassing that it blinded him to ambition in anyone else.

And so he had been stunned on the morning he had opened the door of his rented room to find Collette - dressed and standing, two conditions in which he had rarely seen her – weeping loudly and proclaiming him to be the father of her unborn child.

There were probably dozens of men who could claim this dubious honor, but the girl was insistent. She had counted. It was him. The very fact she had managed to track him down there, in his rooming house, was frightening enough and he knew he had been imprudently talkative in the rest periods between bouts on her bed. Bragging had become habituated behavior in him by this point, as natural as breathing, and he had told the girl all about his favored status at the university, how he had been invited to assist in any number of surgical demonstrations while the other students had been able to do no more than watch. Kidneys were his specialty. He could get one out in eight minutes, utterly intact. The girl nodded. She had either been impressed or was pretending to be.

Now he grabbed the doorframe, almost buckling from the shock of what she was saying. She had been stealthy and persistent, just as his father had warned him the Jews so often were. Had put together certain things better than he would have guessed. If she had been able to follow him to where he lived, would she be willing to follow him to the university?

He asked her what she wanted.

Marriage.

He laughed.

He laughed, but his arrogance was fading fast. She held the cards, he realized, and he himself had dealt them to her, one Wednesday afternoon at a time.

The girl stood in his doorway, waiting.

Of course he would not marry her. That was out of the question. His future wife would play the spinet and host soirees; she would not be a retired whore. And no, no, don’t even bother to ask. He did not have enough money to support a child on the side.

The one thing he did have to offer her was his surgical skill.

Had he done this particular procedure? Of course not. It was scarcely on the curriculum. But it was simple enough in theory and there was no other way.

Naturally, this was not what the girl had hoped to hear. She wept. She clung to his shoulders. He took her hands and led her into the room, asked her to sit on the bed. He apologized for the laughter and said it was just the spasmodic result of his surprise, an explanation she seemed to accept. He promised future visits, a marriage someday, yes, of course, when he was out of school and could support her in the manner she deserved.

Did she believe him? Did she see a home, a family, the cozy comfort of being a doctor’s wife? Hard to say, but after a long conversation punctuated with kisses and tears, Collette had agreed that this particular child should not be born.





Church bells were ringing on the morning that he met her. It had to be a Sunday, the only time of the week when he could be absolutely sure no one else would be in the laboratory wing of the university. He had consulted the books and figured the steps he must take, the implements he would need. At first he had thought about trying to remove the surgical tools from the school but they were valuable and carefully accounted for at the end of every lab, so he ultimately decided it would be easier to get the girl in than to get the knives out. He was relieved to see she had celebrated the dawn with a good bit of vodka since he had no way of predicting how painful the procedure would be. She followed him unsteadily but without question through the dark halls of the university and then into the large silver laboratory.

“Tell me something,” he asked. “What is your real name?”

She didn’t answer. The fear, the vodka, the strangeness of the place. They had all rendered her mute and she did not even look at his face. The laboratory was bright with sunlight. She let him help her to the table where, only two days before, he had assisted in the dissection of a heart.

If a man was gifted enough to navigate the chambers of the human heart, he figured, it should be a simple enough matter to make your way in and out of a uterus, surely the most primitive of organs. No more than a muscular sack, a cove with a single outlet to the sea. He would never understand where it went wrong, what vessel he had managed to nick or why there was so much blood. He didn’t panic at first. Who could say how much bleeding might be normal in a task such as this one? The fetus had not been the problem. It had slipped out as easily as a pit is spooned from an apricot. He let the mass of material drop in a bucket and the girl had turned her head with the sound. The trouble started later, when he began to scrape the walls of her womb. This should have been the sweeping up part of the procedure, the simple part. But the blood was continuing to flow and the girl was squirming now, crying out in fear and pain. He dropped the scapula and went in with his hand.

Three walls were fine, clean, whole.

On the fourth, his finger found the tear. Slipped right through the membrane, and in that moment he knew that his whole life was turning, that everything he was and had ever hoped to be was slipping away. What now? Stitches? He couldn’t hold her open and sew at once, not to mention the impossible mess of the bleeding, or the fact the girl was fighting him, trying to pull her knees to her chest, trying to knock back his hands.

He began to have the sense that he was leaving his own body. That he was floating somewhere high above the room, looking down at the figures below him, watching the blood spread like an overturned bucket of paint, a glass of wine, watching it cover the table and begin to drip upon the floor. The girl screamed – loud, too loud, and although there was likely no one else in the building on a Sunday morning, it was impossible to be sure. He tried to shush her, to contain her, and when this proved impossible, he pulled his hand from her womb and punched her face with his bloody fist until at last she felt silent.

He had asked the professor, days before, where the school got the organs they used in dissection, where they had obtained that particular human heart. The class had been concluded for the day and they’d been standing at the big silver sink, washing up. He could still see it, the perfect beads of water on the hairs of the professor’s arm as he had explained that most the cadavers were indigents, whores, or criminals, people without families to claim them. This heart had been small. It had probably been taken from a female. And then the professor had suggested he make surgery his specialty, had said that he had a gift for the knife.

But what would the professor say if he could see this scene now, see him frantically trying to suture the hole he had ripped in this girl’s uterus, unable to stop the flow of blood, unable to see his way though it to the site of the damage? There would be no degree. No university post, no pretty wife with her pretty voice, no money, no position, no respect. He would be disgraced, jailed, excommunicated, sent to the work houses. His father would know. His landlady, the professor, the other students. Katrina. Katrina would know it all, would see that he was just a boy from a small town who worked in the fields, who trapped pelts in order to buy a single good coat. Society knows what to do with the people who have never had hope. They know where to house them, what to feed them, even how to make use of their bodies when they die. But what becomes of the people who had hope and lost it? The young man knew he would have to be far away before the next morning when his classmates would return, when the professor would push open this door and see this sight. Would find this bounty of healthy young organs for the edification of his future medical students.

The girl was no longer crying. She was lying very still. He stepped back from the table, unable to take his eyes off her, fumbling with his left hand for a chair. How much blood could one woman hold? It was eternal. Blood without end, amen. She was so quiet now. Her chest was still rising and falling but there was no sound with the breathing.

He found the chair with his hand and lowered himself into it. He knew he should be running, running now, but he was unable to move.

So this is how it ends, he thought.

She had been his first. This was not a strange thing. Country boys who came to the city were often virgins, but what disturbed him most, oddly, was that he had never known her name.

He sat for a long time. He watched as her life flowed slowly out, taking his life along with it.





He knew he should flee and yet he did not. Instead he left the girl’s body on the examination table, and went to Katrina’s house. What did he expect? Was there some part of his mind that thought she might escape with him…..but no, only a fool would have thought that, and he had never been a fool. Perhaps he believed that her father would help him, that when the professor saw how much his daughter loved…..no. Not that either. Perhaps he had only wanted to say goodbye, to see the grief in her eyes when he told her some pretty lie. Maybe that that his father was ill and he must travel home for a week or two.

She would forget him in time. He would never forget her.

He didn’t knock on the door but instead waited in the garden. She had so many dogs that he had never been sure of the exact number, but one or another of the little fluffs was always needing to go into the yard to lift a leg against a bush. He stood in the edge of the poplars for nearly an hour waiting and was at last rewarded with the sight of her drifting like a cloud across the lawn.

She smiled, surprised. Walked toward him, the yapping dogs all around her, with a hand extended as if she planned to pull him from his hiding place into the light. He did not wish to reveal himself totally in case someone else was with her, but he held out a hand too, beckoning her toward the woods, and that’s when she saw the blood on the cuff of his sleeve.

He was, after all, a medical student. There were dozens of plausible reasons why he might have a smear of blood on a white cuff, but Katrina’s mind went to none of those reasons and he was mute, incapable of directing her there. Perhaps he emitted the stink of shame, perhaps his face was frozen in a mask of guilt. Something must have given him away, because the girl stopped in her tracks and frowned.

“What have you done?”

Her voice was stern. Contemptuous. She had no way of knowing. A girl of her class probably didn’t even know it was possible to do the thing he had just done. But she looked in his face and had seen somehow, in that instant, that he had fallen, that he had made some large and ghastly mistake, the sort that would remove him from his rightful place at her father’s dinner table. He thrust his hand into his pocket, felt his fingers curl around the handle of the scalpel he had hidden there.

She frowned, repeated the words. “What have you done?”

Only then did he run.

How many days had it taken him to get to London, or should the question be how many weeks? His shock and confusion were so profound he lost his senses, hopped on trains that were going the wrong direction, spent hours unto days in deep, dreamless sleep in haystacks along the way. He did not know where he would go once he finally reached the city or what he would do next.

He only knew that two women, each in her own separate way, had ruined him.





Now, almost three years later, there are ways in which he remains a mystery to himself. The monstrous injustices of the world have always tormented him and yet he has never been able to stop himself from admiring those who stand above him on the ladder. He does know that he is following this particular girl because she somehow reminds him of Katrina. The same fair coloring, serene expression, the confidence with which she moves.

A man might prepare his whole life for a profession. He trains himself from boyhood into the kind of character that will allow him to escape poverty and hopelessness. Builds himself up through a thousand small steps, taken year after painful year, only to see his whole world come tumbling down on a woman’s whim. For women know how to make you want something you had never knew you wanted, and then, just when you dare to hope you might gain it, they know how to take it away. They are the apple-eaters, the dark angels, a mere afterthought of God, and whether they lay a gloved hand on your arm at a dinner party or spread their dirty legs for you in an alley, he knew that it was all the same.

The woman does not notice that he is following. Her stride is long and her chin is high. You can see at a glance that she bows for no man, that she is the one who does the choosing.

And despite it all, he has never been able to abandon hope that his betters will someday notice him. Will someday accept him as one of their own.

It is the failing of his lifetime.