The basement was filled with so much rubbish that one could hardly move around. There was everything, from broken crutches and rusty surgical instruments to old, moth-eaten medical manuals, dusty files of patients long dead, and seemingly endless amounts of medicines which had passed their “use by” date. But the basement also contained other, less everyday objects. Screwed to the wall and reaching all the way to the ceiling were wooden shelves which contained, standing next to one another, round, rectangular and triangular glass jars with corks or aluminium lids, some no bigger than ten inches, others extending over two feet. In those jars, preserved in formaldehyde, were the trophies of God knows who’s surgical undertakings: an amputated child’s hand, a few appendices, a cut-off ear, a foot with crushed toes, a kidney, a pancreas and two excised tumours. Sitting at the bottom of one of the larger jars, resembling a small overturned canon on wheels, was a male sexual organ, amputated with both testicles.
My Father was not a surgeon, merely a general practitioner, but often, whether for his own pleasure or as a matter of urgency, he undertook work which, by all the rules of medical practice, he should have left to others. Even so, most of the preserved organs could not have been removed by him, for the health centre lacked the necessary equipment. He could only have cut them out of dead or dying people, something he would hardly have found a good reason to do. After all, floating in one of the jars was a human heart. But I never doubted that it was he who had handled most of the aborted embryos and dead-born foetuses which lined the longest shelf. There were at least twelve in the glass jars, and every so often they would be joined by a new one. Some were so small they resembled large tadpoles rather than early shapes of anything human; others already had eyes and beginnings of limbs, noses, ears, tiny fingers. Some were almost fully developed, prematurely born little people of recognizable sex, with eyes which, even behind closed lids, seemed to express something akin to astonishment.
Although they were all fascinating, there was one that I really liked. In fact, I liked him more than anything else in the world, including Father, whom I liked a lot. This particular foetus was more developed than any of the others, and had a larger than usual head. Although I knew that this was not possible, he seemed to be smiling and his frog-like eyes appeared to be half open. In a strange way he seemed almost alive. He was also the only one with a name; stuck to the jar in which he floated was a label on which someone had scrawled, “Abortus, the son of Mary and Joseph.”
Joseph, or Joe as he was known, was my Father. Mary was my Mother. There could be no doubt that Abortus was my dead-born little brother. It often seemed to me that there was a certain resemblance between us, especially around the mouth and the eyes. We seemed to be looking at the world in a similar way: shyly, with concealed wonder, yet stubbornly at the same time. Father and Mother never mentioned the possibility of my not remaining an only child. Nor did I know if Abortus inhabited Mother’s womb before or after me. This was something we never talked about. What was clear, however, was the fact that I could have had a brother. After a while I came to believe that I did have one, simply one that could not leave his little home. And because he could not, it was my brotherly duty to live part of my life for him.
The main reason I kept coming to the basement was to talk to Abortus and tell him what was happening in the world outside. The things we did. Because part of my life was his I always felt that whatever happened, happened to both of us. I would tell him how the physics teacher made fun of us in front of the whole class. How during a football match Luke deliberately aimed a kick at our shins. How we combed our hair with a comb we found lying on Katya’s table, and how she lifted the comb in the air so the whole of the class could see it, and shouted: “Does anyone have a strong disinfectant?” As long as I believed that half of my life belonged to Abortus I felt only half the anxiety I would have felt otherwise. Of course I also shared pleasant things with him. Whenever Minny smiled at me in the school corridor, or the headmaster said that if I had less imagination and a trifle more perseverance I would definitely be the star pupil, I did not keep this to myself. I shared it with my little brother as though it was meant for him anyway, and I was no more than a transmitting agent.
We communicated in a seemingly simple way: I would talk, and he would listen. He would respond in his own way. At first I would connect the barely noticeable changes in his expression with the light which was coming in through the window, and which shifted every time a cloud passed before the sun or the tree branches swayed in the wind. But gradually I began to see the almost imperceptible movement of shadow and light round his mouth and eyes as his way of responding to my words. Step by step, we developed a way of communicating which enabled us to exchange information and views on a number of things. In my loneliness there was no one I could talk to as openly as I could to my little brother. Talking to Father was interesting, but not always warm or intimate; it seemed to me that for anything like that Father simply couldn’t find the time. Which, of course, did not mean he didn’t love me. Talking to Mother was mostly a pain: because of her incessant worrying about the respectability of our family she would mostly instruct me what to do and what not to do, while I would defy her by remaining stubbornly silent. Only to Abortus could I talk as an equal, as one half to the other half; only together were we a complete person.
So it seemed natural to entrust to him for safekeeping my dream diary, not only Dreams I but also Dreams II. In the tight space between the jar and the wall behind it the two notebooks were completely hidden from view by Abortus and the liquid surrounding him. The chances of Father stumbling upon them accidentally were practically non-existent. In any case he wasn’t coming to the basement because of Abortus or other glass jars. The objects of his scientific research were housed in containers which lined the shelves on the other side of the window. These containers, also made of glass, had unusual shapes: one was formed into a spiral, another was pinched in the middle like a sand-glass, the third resembled a large smoking pipe, and yet another a canon on two large wheels. There were others, less definable, resembling cucumbers, mushrooms, pears, elephants. Every so often a new surprisingly shaped container would appear on the shelf; Father was getting them by special order from the nearby glass-works.
All these containers housed tiny trees, mushrooms and other, more unusual botanical specimens, all of them grown to fit the shape of their particular glass enclosure. The spiral container housed a little pine tree which had spiralled into the most unusual growth I had ever seen, shocking in its deformation and yet profoundly beautiful. The sand-glass contained a cactus pinched in the middle, and the smoking pipe was the home of the most unusual tropical flower, with a pink blossom sticking out of the sucking end, and a blue one out of the filling end. There were some rather witty jokes among Father’s achievements in the art of growing bonsai: a mushroom grown to resemble a cucumber, and a cucumber grown to resemble a mushroom.
I knew that this was “the art of growing bonsai” because lying on one of the shelves nearby was a large book bearing such a title. I had leafed through it many times. But no photograph in the book showed anything remotely as beautiful as the strange living things produced by Father during his secret sojourns in the basement.
It is only now, after all these years, that I am beginning to understand why he refused to share those experiments with Mother and me, or with anyone else for that matter. He probably felt just as alone in the world as I did, and needed something that would be his, and only his, in the same way that I wouldn’t tell anybody about my little brother. Any knowledge about our special relationship by a third party would have robbed it of its uniqueness, which lay in the fact that Abortus, such as I saw him, was the product of my imagination, my artwork. In the same way Father must have felt that letting others in on his solitary efforts to add beauty of his own design to an ugly world would have spoiled