Face-Off. Chris Karsten
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and her speech is smoother than oil . . . Keep to a path far from her, do not go near the door of her house.” And from Thessalonians: “It is God’s will . . . that you should avoid sexual immorality.”
“You found me a house in a street of whores?” he whispered.
“Those were the old days, Abel,” said Ignaz. “The town fathers keep a strict watch on our town’s morals. There are no longer any whores here.”
Abel looked back at the quiet alley, the window boxes at the front doors, a restaurant signboard further along. Bicycles propped up against the walls, lace curtains at the windows, an old woman with a bag of groceries from which a baguette was protruding.
He felt better. His mother would understand that he’d been on a long journey, not without hardship, and had to find his way around a strange country. Besides, the presence of whores was no longer strange to him. He’d encountered them, vulgar and shameless in dress and behaviour, while he’d convalesced at the Sleep Inn in Bez Valley.
He watched Ignaz walk away. Then he turned and went back up the alley to his rented house. He didn’t blame Ignaz. He was helpful, had done his best. And Ignaz was his only friend.
Abel unpacked his bag: his few items of clothing, the paisley tie, the mask of Idia, the cardboard cylinder with the tanned skins that Ignaz was so keen to see. And between his folded clothes, the taxidermy instruments he’d bought in Johannesburg.
He opened the black case and took out his father’s violin, the 1942 Van de Geest that had fostered Abel’s love of violin music. He studied the instrument, ran his fingers over the shiny lacquer of the top, the scrolls of the F-holes, like those in Paganini’s beloved Guarneri.
Abel inserted a sharp new blade into a scalpel and slowly, with the delicate precision of a surgeon, began to work loose the seams of the maple back. It was almost two hours before the fortune in dollar, pound and euro banknotes lay exposed in its hiding place. He stood on a kitchen chair and hung the Idia mask on the wall in the front room, opposite the old easy chair upholstered in silver-and-gold brocade, antimacassars protecting the back and the armrests. Then he sank deep into the cushions and admired the mask, satisfied that he could simply raise his eyes whenever he felt alone.
With the Idia on the wall, the house no longer felt quite so strange and empty; it was as if his mother were with him again. Hadn’t the mask been on her face quite recently, weren’t parts of her still clinging to the wood, her skin cells, her spirit embedded in the Idia’s atoms and molecules? He sat in the chair, purging his mind, cleansing his thoughts, preparing his spirit. Then he put the iPod’s earphones in his ears and closed his eyes. He rested his chin on his chest, barely rising and falling, as if in a trance.
The sound of a solo violin filled his ears and his mind, Paganini’s unmistakable little monsters, the first of the twenty-four Caprices, initiation rite for every violin virtuoso.
Abel surrendered himself to the sweet tonality of the chords Perlman’s bow was coaxing from the strings. They frolicked and soared through the air around him, through the house, out into the street of whores. He sat motionless, allowing his receptive spirit to absorb, digest and interpret the music, every individual note from every string. His mind was filled with the image of the violinist: the right hand holding the bow that jumped, slid, criss-crossed; the pizzicato of the left-hand fingers as they plucked and strummed and pressed over the entire length of the fingerboard. The ricochet bowings of the fifth, the tremolos of the sixth, the staccato passages and the many long, slurred scales and arpeggios of the seventh, the jumping dotted notes of the eleventh, the lyrical melody of the twentieth . . .
* * *
On the morning of the third day after his arrival Abel stood at the bathroom mirror, trimming his beard with a pair of scissors, then applying shaving cream over his stubble. He picked up the razor and ran it across his cheek, watching the blade expose his hidden face. With his fingertips he stroked the white scars on his cheeks, his forehead, his nose and his chin.
He gazed at the strange, misshapen face in the mirror, recognising only the arhythmical blinking of the lazy eye. Like his name, his face had changed since he’d met his first two donors, and before WO Neser had forced him to flee.
The so-called weekend facelift in Bujumbura had been the first change. That botched attempt, the caricature created by the quack, had cost Dr Lippens his own face.
Thankfully, Abel’s mission to recover the Idia mask, his only remaining connection to his mother, had been successful. He’d given WO Neser the slip yet again, but it had been by the skin of his teeth, almost catastrophically so – the new scars on his face bore witness to that fact. He’d relaxed his vigilance and underestimated the attractive detective, in his eagerness to harvest the soft skin on a blonde woman’s inner thigh. But it had taught him a lesson: no impulsive behaviour ever again, no matter how desirable he might find a donor or her tattoo.
He picked up the cardboard cylinder containing the skins he intended to take along on his first visit to Ignaz Bouts. After many years of corresponding by e-mail on the subject of tanning skins and hides – Ignaz selflessly providing him with tips and advice, sharing his secret recipes for producing soft, delicate virgin parchment – Abel anticipated Ignaz’s astonishment when he unrolled his sheets of softly dressed vellum from the tissue paper, and revealed the contents of the cardboard cylinder. Ignaz would not be disappointed by the quality of the craftsmanship, and Ignaz had high standards. He was, after all, an expert on Jungfernpergament, or virgin parchment.
But the vellums in Abel’s cardboard cylinder were not from the soft belly skins of unborn calves or lambs, they had belonged to a hare and a dassie, a cat, a mole and a rat. Only one of each: the rest of his skins he had given to Jules Daagari in Bujumbura in payment for the African masks Jules had brought for Abel’s gallery of ethnic artefacts in Johannesburg.
Abel had patiently tanned and treated the hides of the small animals, adhering strictly to Ignaz’s centuries-old recipes, as recorded in ancient documents. The skins of the Bruges tanners, or huidenvetters, so Ignaz had assured him, were sought after all over Europe, even across the channel in England. Especially the tanned skins of cats and dogs, from which soft leather gloves were made for English lords and ladies, and the hides of larger animals – calves, goats, sheep, cattle, pigs – ended up as handmade shoes for Italian marquises and countesses, or calf-length boots for French barons and duchesses.
But Abel’s skins were not meant to be turned into gloves or shoes, and it wasn’t only his animal hides that Ignaz would appraise with a critical eye. It was the other two skins in Abel’s collection that filled him with eager anticipation as he walked out the front door into Stoofstraat, the precious cardboard cylinder in the crook of his arm.
Dijver was an open street, not squashed among others, a wide promenade along the riverbank, lined with umbrellas and souvenir kiosks. Abel stood beside the Dijver Canal and studied the buildings on the opposite side of the street. Between a café and a lace shop he saw the door he was looking for, the faded and peeling name on a second-floor window: De Boekbinderij Bouts, where Ignaz specialised in book conservation and leather covers.
Abel hammered on the brass knocker, then pushed open the door and entered.
Ignaz came down the stairs to meet him, his hands in white cotton gloves, a jeweller’s loupe above his left eyebrow, leaving Abel with the impression that Ignaz had two left eyes.
On the second storey, Ignaz took one of the sheets Abel had unrolled from beween layers of tissue paper, placed the vellum on a large glass-topped table and flicked a switch, turning on a diffused white light. He leant closer, adjusted the loupe and began to scrutinise the vellum – slowly, as if he were reading an ancient parchment.
“Excellent work,” said Ignaz from his position bent over the light table, the tip of his nose just millimetres from the table top.
Abel glowed with pleasure. Lit from below, his vellum looked almost transparent. He had himself used a loupe to search for impurities and hard patches, though he hadn’t had a light table at his disposal.
“Beautiful,”