What Takes

by Harry Benjamin, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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I

The guinea pigs lived in the cellar because the cellar held its warmth longest, and in the March of 1920 warmth was the thing the Vivarium had least of. Pepi Haberl came down the iron stair at six with a sack of carrot tops over one shoulder and a can of warm water in the other hand, and the animals heard him on the third step and began to whistle.

He fed the left-hand row first. That was the row of the ordinary ones, the controls, which the doctors upstairs did not visit. He tipped the carrot tops into each box and changed the water and looked at every animal for as long as it took to see it. A wet nose, a dull coat, a back held too high: anything like that went into his head, and then into the book upstairs, in his own hand, which was not a good hand.

The right-hand row was the Professor's. Here the boxes had cards wired to the front with numbers and dates, and the animals inside had been opened when they were a few days old and closed again with something taken out and something put in. Pepi had held a good number of them while it was done. He knew where the scars were on each one, under the fur, the way you know where the stairs creak in your own house.

The fourth box on the right held a male whose card said only M 31 and a date in 1917. Pepi called him Herr Rat, because he was old and grey about the muzzle and sat very upright. Herr Rat had a female's nipples, and a female's way of sitting, and that spring he had let a litter that was not his own crawl under him and drink. Two of the doctors had come down to see it with a lamp. One of them had written in a notebook against his knee. The other one had said, to nobody, Look at that, and gone quiet.

Pepi gave Herr Rat the softest of the carrot tops and a piece of turnip he had brought from home.

At the top of the stair, when he came up, Rudi Kraupa was sitting on the bench by the porter's lodge with his cap in his hands.

"They've given me a day," Rudi said.

Pepi put the empty sack down. The porter, old Swoboda, was not in the lodge. The hall smelt of formalin and wet stone and the river.

"Which day?"

"The twelfth of April. A Monday." Rudi turned the cap round once by its peak. "At the sanatorium. Not here. I thought it would be here."

"They don't do people here," Pepi said. "Only us."

Rudi laughed, which was what Pepi had meant him to do. He had a laugh that went up and broke, like a boy's, though he was twenty-six and had been at the Piave. He worked in the Wurstelprater for the man who owned the second-biggest roundabout, and in the winter, when the roundabout was shut, he painted its horses in a shed behind the Schweizerhaus. There was blue paint under two of his fingernails now.

"You can come in," Pepi said. "It's warmer at the bottom."

They went down. The guinea pigs whistled again, then saw that Pepi had nothing in his hands, and stopped. Rudi crouched by the fourth box on the right. He had seen Herr Rat before. He put a finger through the wire and the old male smelt it and did not bite.

"This is the one," Rudi said.

"This is one of them."

"The newspaper said they change completely. Inside and out." Rudi kept his finger on the wire. "It said a man in the Professor's study married in the summer after."

Pepi had read the same newspaper. Swoboda left them in the lodge. He had read married and he had read in the summer after and he had not read anything about the year after that.

"What does it feel like?" Pepi said. "Now. Before."

Rudi took his finger back.

"I mean it," Pepi said. "I'm not trying to talk you out of it. What does it feel like?"

Rudi stood up. He looked at the boxes along the left-hand row and the boxes along the right, and at the little window high in the wall where the dark of the Prater was.

"Like being careful," he said. "All the time. At my mother's. At the shed. On the tram. Like carrying something full to the top and not being allowed to put it down."

Pepi nodded. He did not say anything about himself. Rudi had not asked about himself.

"Will you come after?" he said.

"Where?"

"Here. Or to mine. After."

Rudi put his cap on. He looked at Pepi properly for the first time since the stair.

"I don't know what I'll be," he said, "after."

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II

They had met in the October of 1918, in the long avenue of chestnuts, when half Vienna was in bed with the influenza and the other half was burying it. Pepi had been walking home from the Vivarium with a dead rabbit wrapped in newspaper, which Dr Mendl had said he could have, and a man in a soldier's coat with the insignia cut off had stepped out from under the trees and asked whether it was for sale.

It was not for sale. Pepi had said so. Then, because the man had stood there with his hands open in a way that was not quite begging, he had said that if the man had a stove, it could be cooked, and then it would be for two.

Rudi had a stove. He had a room above a saddler's in the Ausstellungsstrasse, with a window that would not shut, and a stove that smoked if you looked at it. They had cooked the rabbit with an onion and nothing else and eaten it off the one plate. Nobody had said anything about anything. When Pepi stood up to go, Rudi had said that the stairs were dark and he would light him down, and on the half-landing, with the candle, he had not lit him down.

That was a year and a half ago. Since then Pepi had learnt that Rudi slept on his left side with one hand under his jaw; that he could not eat cabbage since the war and would not say why; that his mother in Simmering believed he was saving to marry; that he was frightened of the police in a way that had nothing to do with anything he had done, only with what he was, which was enough under the law. Pepi had been to Simmering once, as a friend from work, and had eaten the mother's dumplings and been asked whether he had a girl.

"Not yet," he had said, and Rudi had looked at his plate.

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III

On the Monday of the operation Pepi went to the sanatorium in the ninth district and stood across the street for an hour. He did not go in. He was not family, and he did not have a reason he could give at a desk. At noon a woman in a brown coat came out and stood on the step and wept quickly into a handkerchief, and he knew from the set of her shoulders and the way she folded the handkerchief afterwards into a square that she was Rudi's sister. Mitzi. He had heard about Mitzi.

He crossed the street.

"Fräulein Kraupa," he said. "I'm a friend of Rudi's. From the Prater."

She looked at him the way people look at a stranger who knows their name.

"He's out of it," she said. "They say it went well. They took the one of his own and put in the piece from the other man and sewed it." She touched her own side, low down, by the hip bone, without meaning to. "He's asleep. He won't know anyone till tonight."

"Thank you."

"Are you the one from the animal place?"

Pepi said he was.

Mitzi put the handkerchief into her bag and closed the clasp.

"He said you'd come and stand outside," she said. "He said you wouldn't come in."

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That week, upstairs, Dr Mendl did a series of grafts on young males of the third litter, and Pepi held them. You held a guinea pig for that with the flat of the hand under the chest and the thumb along the spine, firm, the way you would hold a loaf you did not want to break. The ether went on a pad in a glass. The doctor worked quickly and cleanly and talked to the animals in Czech, which he said they preferred.

What Pepi knew, and what was not in the newspaper, was what happened in the weeks after. He knew it because he was the one who fed them, and turned them, and felt along their bellies every morning with two fingers. Some of the grafts took. The place under the fur stayed soft and warm and in a month you could not find it. Others did not. They went hard, first like a pea and then like a bean, and the skin over them went tight and shiny, and then one morning there was a yellow bead at the scar and a smell. Those had to be opened again and the dead piece taken out. Dr Mendl wrote them up as resorbiert or nekrotisch, and Pepi wrote them in the feeding book as lump bad, and that was the same thing.

It happened in guinea pigs whose own glands had been taken out first, so that the new piece had nothing to fight. It happened more, Pepi had noticed, when the animal was older, and when the piece came from a stranger and not from a brother in the same litter. He had never been asked what he noticed. He had once said to Dr Mendl, holding a buck from the second litter, that the brothers did better, and Dr Mendl had stopped with the scissors in the air and looked at him and said, Did they, and then gone on. Later Pepi saw that a new column had been ruled in the doctor's book.

He thought about the man whose piece was now in Rudi. A stranger. Not a brother.

He did not write anything down about it. There was nowhere to write it.

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IV

Rudi did not come after.

Pepi saw him in May, from a distance, in the Wurstelprater, where the roundabout was open again and turning under its striped roof with the organ grinding out the same four tunes. Rudi was in his shirtsleeves on the platform, pushing the slow horses round by hand to start them, and then stepping off as the motor took. He was walking stiffly, Pepi thought, the way a man walks with a fresh stitch in the groin. He did not see Pepi, or he did and went on pushing the horses.

In June, Rudi came to the Vivarium in daylight with a girl.

She was a nice girl in a shop girl's straw hat, with a laugh that went on too long. Swoboda had let them in for a coin, as he let in anyone on a Sunday who asked nicely, to see the old aquarium hall with the tanks along the walls, where Dr Kammerer's salamanders sat on their wet stones and Dr Przibram's mantises turned their heads after you. Pepi was cleaning the glass on the axolotl tank. He went on cleaning it. Rudi showed the girl the salamanders, yellow and black, and then the toads, and then he came along the row to the axolotls and stopped.

"This is my friend Pepi," he said to the girl. "He looks after all of it."

"All of it?" said the girl.

"Not the toads," said Pepi. "Dr Kammerer's very particular about the toads."

The girl laughed. Rudi did not. Pepi looked at him through the glass of the tank, past the pale floating animal with its feathery gills, and Rudi looked back.

"It's taking," Rudi said. "The Professor says it takes months. He says I'm to be patient."

"Yes," said Pepi.

"Months," said Rudi.

"He would know," said Pepi, and wiped the glass, and the axolotl drifted down to the bottom and lay there with its small hands spread.

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In July a doctor came from New York.

He was a German, from Berlin by his voice, though he had lived in America since the war had stranded him there. He was a friend of the Professor's and had come to see the animals and to see the clinical cases, and the Professor was away in the mountains, so Dr Mendl took him round, and in the end Dr Mendl had a lecture to give and handed him down the iron stair to Pepi.

He was a neat man in a light suit, not tall, with his hat in his hand and a manner that Pepi could not at first place. Then he placed it. It was the manner of the better sort of vet. The man went along the right-hand row box by box and asked, at each one, not what had been done, which was on the card, but what Pepi saw.

Pepi told him. Herr Rat and the borrowed litter. The bucks from the second litter, how the brothers did better. The lumps, the pea and then the bean. The yellow bead and the smell.

The doctor wrote some of it down in a small book, in English. He wrote quickly, with a short pencil, and he did not hurry Pepi.

"And how long," he said, "from the operation to the first hardening?"

"Five weeks. Six. Sometimes ten. In the old ones sooner."

"And when it takes?"

"Then you can't find it."

The doctor closed the book on his pencil.

"The Professor is a great man," he said. "I mean that. Nobody has shown what he has shown with these." He nodded at the boxes. "But the men upstairs are not guinea pigs, and some of what is said in the newspapers about the men is said before the men have been asked." He looked at Herr Rat, who was sitting very upright with his paws folded. "In Berlin, at Hirschfeld's, they are sending men for the same operation. Good doctors. I don't say they are wrong. I say I should want to ask the men in a year. In two years. What they feel. Not what they do."

Pepi held the empty sack against his chest.

"There's a man," he said. "Had it in April."

The doctor waited.

"I can't ask him," said Pepi.

"No," said the doctor. "But you might be there when he tells you."

He shook Pepi's hand, which nobody upstairs had ever done, and went up the iron stair, and Pepi never learnt his name.

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V

Rudi came at the end of August, at night, in the rain.

Swoboda had gone home. Pepi was alone in the building, sleeping on two chairs in the porter's lodge as he did when there was a litter due, and he woke to a knock on the glass of the side door and knew the knock before he was awake.

Rudi was wet to the skin. He had come across the Prater from the roundabout without a coat, and he stood dripping on the tiles of the hall with his arms folded across his stomach, holding himself in.

"It's gone hard," he said.

Pepi took him into the lodge and put him on the chair by the little stove, which was not lit, because there was no coal in August that the Vivarium could spare. He lit it anyway with the last of the porter's kindling and three pages of an old Neue Freie Presse. Then he crouched in front of Rudi and said, "Show me," and Rudi undid his trousers and showed him.

It was not the bean. It was further on than the bean. The scar ran three fingers long in the crease of the groin, neat, the stitch holes white, and under it something sat the size of a walnut, hard as a walnut, and the skin over it was tight and hot and shone. There was no bead yet. Pepi laid two fingers beside it, not on it, and felt the heat come up.

"Since when?"

"Three weeks. Getting worse. It hurts to push the horses." Rudi's teeth were going. "I went to the sanatorium on Thursday. The assistant looked. He says it must come out. He says sometimes it doesn't take, it's no one's fault, it's the material." He said material the way you say a word you have been given. "He says they can try again with another piece."

Pepi fastened Rudi's trousers for him, because Rudi's hands were too cold to do it. Then he got the porter's blanket and put it round Rudi's shoulders and sat down on the floor with his back against the lodge wall, near enough that their knees touched.

The stove ticked. Rain came down the big windows of the hall in sheets.

Rudi did not say anything for a long time. Pepi did not either. He had learnt from the animals that if you went on being there, something came out of the box to see what you were.

"Nothing changed," Rudi said at last.

Pepi waited.

"I kept waiting. I kept – every morning I'd lie there and see if I still wanted. Before I was awake properly. I'd think, today. Today I'll get up and it'll be gone, and I'll go to Simmering and Mother will make dumplings and I'll take Hedwig to the Volksgarten and it'll be gone." He wiped his face with the edge of the blanket. "Hedwig's the girl."

"I know."

"She's nice."

"She seemed nice."

"And it didn't go. Not for a day. It just hurt more, here." He touched the place. "And I thought it's not taking because I'm doing it wrong. Because I'm not letting it. So I didn't come here, and I didn't come to yours, and I walked Hedwig up and down the Hauptallee on Sundays." He laughed, and it went up and broke. "Up and down. Right past your door. And every time I didn't look at it I thought about the box with the old one in it."

"Herr Rat."

"Is that his name?"

"It's what I call him."

Rudi bent forward with his elbows on his knees and the blanket round him and looked at Pepi on the floor.

"You knew," he said. "In March. You knew it wouldn't."

Pepi thought about what he knew. He knew a pea and a bean and a yellow bead. He knew about the brothers. He knew that in guinea pigs the ones that took did change, and that he had never been sure he could say what a man was from what a guinea pig was, and that the doctor from New York had not been sure either.

"I didn't know," he said. "I knew about guinea pigs. You're not a guinea pig."

"What would you have said? If I'd asked."

"You didn't ask." Pepi pulled his knees up. "I asked you. What it felt like."

"Like carrying something full to the top."

"Yes."

Rudi looked at the stove. The newspaper had burnt down and the kindling was catching. The little mica window had gone orange.

"And now?" said Pepi.

Rudi was quiet. His teeth had stopped. The heat from the stove had got as far as his hands, which he held out to it, open, the way he had held them under the chestnuts.

"I'll have it out," he said. "I'll let them take it out. I won't let them put another in."

"All right."

"That's not what you asked."

"No."

Rudi put one wet foot against Pepi's shin and left it there.

"Now it feels like I've put it down," he said. "I don't know if I'm allowed. But I've put it down."

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At half past five, before Swoboda came, Pepi took the can to the tap and filled it, and set it on the stove to warm, and found the sack of carrot tops where he had left it by the cellar door. Rudi had slept a little in the chair. He woke when the iron stair rang under Pepi's boot.

"Where are you going?"

"Feeding."

Rudi stood up, stiff, holding his side, and folded the porter's blanket and put it on the chair. He came to the head of the stair. Below, the guinea pigs had heard the step and were whistling, the whole cellar of them, left row and right.

"Can I?"

Pepi handed him the can. It was warm now. Rudi went down first, slowly, one hand on the rail, and Pepi came after with the sack, and at the fourth box on the right Rudi crouched, carefully, and waited for him to show how much.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Harrīcō Beniāmīn per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Harry Benjamin, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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