Preview: Of Gilded Flesh

After his first chocolate of the day, Josef is off to his study to work before clients arrive. Although he has a shop full of creations, his most discerning customers prefer to have pieces designed to their specific tastes and unique personalities. There is also clientele with very particular needs that appeal to Josef’s unparalleled talents in a different way. Take, for instance, the clockmaker’s first appointment of the day, Herr Pascal Künzi.

Like many musicians of his era, Pascal was a child prodigy, playing at the age of five and a virtuoso by nine. He’d traveled much of the known world before he was fifteen, but at eighteen, his career came to a horrendous stop. While exiting his carriage in a torrential rain, Herr Künzi slipped to the cobblestone the same instant a thunderclap startled the horses. The harrowing shriek that came from the young pianist as a carriage wheel crushed his left hand will forever be etched in the memories of the bystanders.

Pascal went to a dark place after that. Depression blackened his days; self-destructive yearnings burned through his nights. When he vanished from public view, reclusive beyond reason, many thought him dead.

Such a prodigious gift extinguished too soon, some said.

What a tragedy—such beauty and youth simply gone forever, lamented others.

It was mostly women who mourned for Pascal Künzi, for he is as handsome as he is talented. Although his appearance may be eccentric by conventional standards, it is exactly that peculiarity that is so becoming. Like his hair—black, curled locks that fall loosely to his shoulders. He does not wear the in-fashion wigs because, simply, they itch. Few things are more distracting to a musician than an itch that can’t be scratched. Then there is the line of his aquiline nose, the sculpted contours of his lean face, and how his dark, compassionate, deep-set eyes stir even the most jaded of hearts.

To hear himself described in such a way would bring an awkward grin to the young man’s face. Though world-wise about many things, he still remains a boy of nineteen, not quite a man. It is his humble nature that most caught the attention of Josef Kronecker, Künzi’s greatest admirer.

“Young musicians are as common as syphilis,” Josef once said. “But few possess the mature sensitivity Herr Künzi has, his delicate touch upon the keys, or his intuitive interpretation of music.”

Having enjoyed Josef’s hospitality a number of times prior to the accident, Pascal Künzi is no stranger to the timepiece shop. This particular morning, he enters Kronecker’s with agitated anticipation, and the murmur of clocks does little to soothe him. He rushes to hide his leather prosthetic within his cloak as Anna approaches to greet him. She is aware of the loss of his hand, about his emotional turmoil. He really shouldn’t find himself in such a flustered state. Yet, he does.

Ever since his accident, the pianist has found empathy toward the downtrodden, the struggling…the broken, and he knows of no one more broken than Anna. Where he once saw only an assistant with bad legs, he now sees a woman who works twice as hard during her daily toil than others. He admires her effort, her fortitude. She is unlike anyone he has ever known. It is this commonality that has fed his adoration for Anna in recent weeks. Having also lost a part of himself, he has come to appreciate all parts of her, damaged or otherwise.

Where most men may notice her silken complexion in passing and move on, Pascal is stirred by how it brings out the natural hue of her lips, along with how the color of her hair changes with the light—one moment as rich as cocoa, the next a warm chestnut. It matters nothing to him that her head is misshapen. He looks into her skewed left eye and sees only a storm he aches to calm.

“How good it is to see you again, Herr Künzi,” Anna says. “You’re looking well.”

The young maestro shakes off his dreamy daze and approaches her with the composure befitting one who has performed in the presence of kings and queens. “Please, Fräulein Klor, call me Pascal.”

Anna smiles. “Yes, of course. Then you must call me Anna. Right this way, Pascal.”

He watches the laborious meter of her steps. He wishes to help her, to somehow carry her burden. But she doesn’t she needs his help. In spite of her injuries, Anna holds her head up with the dignity of royalty and the grace of a saint. He longs to take her thin form and feel the weight of her in his arms, the softness of her ivory flesh against his.

She leads him behind the stairs to the sitting room, with which Pascal is most familiar. He marvels, always, at the walls lined with mahogany bookshelves, over-filled with leather-bound tomes. Above the stone hearth, where a fire burns, hangs the room’s only painting: a landscape of an edelweiss-covered hillside.

What is new is the Stein fortepiano that sits in one corner. He looks at it with apprehension. He has not sat at an instrument once during these past months of despondent seclusion. It is too heartbreaking to be only half the musician he once was.

“Herr Kronecker will be with you shortly,” Anna tells him. She recognizes, like looking in a mirror, his disengagement. In a tone as warm and comforting as the room, she adds, “Can I bring you something? Tea? Hot chocolate?”

He responds with the sullen shake of his head, his eyes still on the piano.

“How about a shot of rum, then?”

Pascal finally smiles. “No. Thank you, Fräu—Anna. I’m fine.” Resisting the urge to watch her leave, he sits.

The pianist waits with his right hand resting upon the wood-and-leather appendage that is now his left, recalling a recent time during which he couldn’t bear to look at the hideous object, let alone touch it. The cold, monstrous fingers turned his stomach. But in his current state, he rubs the leathery palm and finds himself strangely soothed.

Josef Kronecker enters. “Dear Pascal. You’re doing well, I hope?”

“Yes, thank you.” He stands.

“You’re looking fit.”

“I’ve increased my fencing regimen. It’s kept me occupied.”

“Anna is bringing you something? Hot chocolate?”

“No. She was gracious to ask, as always, but I’m fine.”

Josef takes a moment to look at the young man now that pleasantries are out of the way. “No. You’re not fine, are you?” He motions for Pascal to approach, then takes his shoulders. “From this day forward, you will be better, my young friend.”

Josef looks to a table beside the piano that Pascal had paid little attention prior. Upon it rests a walnut box, the sight of which takes his heart from allegretto to allegro. He attempts to open the box with both his hands, fumbling and wrestling with the lid until he steps back, embarrassed by his impetuousness.

“Allow me.” Josef gently flips the latch and opens the box.

Pascal gasps, then covers his mouth with his right hand at the sight of the polished framework, the supple beauty of the steel, and the intricacy of gears and springs and wire. With his fingers, he touches its fingers; he caresses its palm. Eyes glistening, the young man grasps the wrist of his new left hand.

“Magnifique,” he whispers.

“It is, isn’t it?” Josef says this with disbelieving modesty that he himself could have created a mechanism of such complexity and engineering: steel rods for bones, wire for tendons, springs for muscles—all replicant of nature’s own perfection. “My finest design yet.”

“I have no words, Herr Kronecker.”

“None are needed. Are you ready to try it?”

Pascal answers by loosening the strap of his current “hand” and letting it drop to the floor with a lifeless clunk. He lifts the new appendage. “It is heavy.”

“Yes, as I cautioned. Besides fencing, have you exercised your left arm like Dr. Baeder suggested?”

“Yes.” Pascal nods. He inserts the stub of his wrist into the open end of the steel appendage and secures it into place. “It fits…”

“Like a glove?”

They laugh, from relief more than humor. Josef gives Pascal a glove made of the softest leather. “I tried to match the color to your complexion,” he explains. “The hand’s outer frame has been buffed and polished to be as smooth as glass to aid in the ease of donning and removing the glove.”

“It feels so natural.” Pascal he slips it over his new fingers and up to his forearm.

“I’ve padded the fingertips so that the steel won’t click upon the keys.” Josef gestures to the piano. “I ordered this for you. It arrived just the other day.”

“A fortepiano. I’ve considered composing a work for this unique instrument.”

The qualms Pascal had about ever playing again wane, overshadowed now by curiosity. He takes his seat on the bench as Josef reaches for a second box, from which he removes a metal disc. Although Josef once explained how the engraved, notched grooves “tell” the hand’s fingers what to do, Pascal still marvels at the concentric circles that spiral out from the disc’s center. The clockmaker lifts a slit in the hand’s glove and inserts the disc into the side of its mechanical wrist.

“Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Sonata in B Minor, the Allegro,” Josef tells Pascal. “I apologize that I can fit only a single movement on a disc. You’ll have to discreetly exchange them during a performance, but it presents only a minor challenge, I think.” With a touch to the back of the prosthetic, Josef activates it. “Just watch first.”

Pascal jumps as the hand’s fingers begin to move, as agile as his own once were. Then he grins as he recognizes their movement—the notes they are playing.

“It will be a strange sensation at first, and it will take practice to synchronize your hands,” Josef says. “I’ve tried my best to replicate your unique style. Try to imagine—to feel—the playing as it were your own, moving with the memory of your muscles.”

Pascal watches, mesmerized by the actions of the new fingers with a life of their own, until they suddenly stop. A pang hits Pascal’s heart at how still, how lifelessly frozen they become.

“Give it a try.” Josef interrupts the solemn moment. “The mechanism winds itself as it plays, so no need to worry about that. Press here to start. There’s a pause before it begins, so you can ready your right hand.”

Pascal takes a breath and presses the back of the appendage as he was shown. But he waits too long, and the hand begins playing before he’s ready.

“As I said, it will take practice.” Josef demonstrates how to stop and reset the disc. “You’ll also have to learn to use your arm to manage the touch upon the keys.”

A part of the young musician wants to run away—again—and vanish in shame. However, the part that desperately yearns to play music wins out, and he tries once more.

And again.

And yet again.

Until…It is one thing to hear music resonate within a symphony hall. But to experience it emanating from a room in a clockmaker’s shop, to feel it penetrate every corner of an otherwise ordinary space? Anna closes her eyes as she listens.

She moves from behind her curtain and toward the lively, melodious sounds, drawn like Ulysses’s men to the Sirens. Lured by the seductive voices of the piano, she finds herself at the door of the sitting room. Each note made under Pascal’s skilled fingers dances across Anna’s skin, tingles her senses, and penetrate her to a depth rarely ventured during her banal daily routine. She enters the room, cautiously and against her better judgement; she can’t seem to help herself.

With awkward but controlled movement, she brings herself to stand just behind Pascal’s right shoulder as the sonata ends. The final note sustains and lingers. She rests herself upon it, leans on her cane, and closes her eyes once more. Pascal places his right hand over the now motionless left. With a start, he notices Anna standing behind him.

Josef is, at first, annoyed by her presence; she knows he prefers to meet with clients privately. But instead of chiding her, he tells Pascal, “You must have been aware that Anna would work closely with me. Naturally, she would come to learn of your circumstances. I assure you, there is no better keeper of secrets than she.”

Pascal shrinks from her anyway, as though he were naked before her. Although he’d prefer the circumstances were different and that he were naked with her, at this moment, he feels vulnerable—more like a boy than a man.

“Pascal, that was…” Unable find the words, Anna instead places a hand upon his shoulder. A tender squeeze from her and his posture straightens. He gives her the slightest of glances and a grateful smile.

“Besides,” adds Josef, “this time, she was more than an assistant. She was…an inspiration.”

Anna’s eyes widen with wary expectation.

“Oh?” Pascal looks between them. “How so?”

Josef gestures to her. “If you wouldn’t mind, dear?”

Now it’s Anna who is annoyed. She’s not sure whether Josef is being petty about her presence in the room or if he is truly sympathetic to their young friend’s state. Probably both, she decides, and resigns to her master’s request.

With her left hand, Anna reaches for her right and rolls up her frock’s sleeve to her elbow. She pinches her skin and tugs at it, hard. Pascal cringes. She yanks at her flesh—or rather, what appears to be her flesh—pulling until it begins to peel from her, as though she were removing…a glove.

Pascal looks to his own new hand and the glove that covers it, then back to Anna. He takes in a curious gasp at the sight of the steel frame and springs that make up the lower portion of her arm. The mechanics of the appendage are rudimentary compared to his; the steel is rough and dull by comparison, not so polished. The harsh appearance of hers reminds him of an aged woman with swollen joints. Anna demonstrates how, with a twitch of her shoulder, she can make the fingers grasp and release. He reaches his true hand to her true hand with an empathetic touch but she pulls away.

“What happened to yours, Anna?” he asks.

Though his genuine concern touches her deeply, she only offers him a sullen gaze and says, “Another time, perhaps.” Anna works to replace her glove while holding her cane. “Be thankful you have the likes of Herr Kronecker in your life.” She begins a clumsy exit from the room. “I know I am.”

The room settles into silence after her departure.

Josef presents Pascal with a second box and opens it to reveal more discs for the new hand. “I’ve transcribed the most popular pieces of your extensive repertoire. I’m working on more.”

Pascal laughs and asks, “When do you sleep?”

“Sleep is for the dead.”

The young man gazes into the empty space where Anna exited the room. Josef presses the box into the pianist’s arms, stirring him to respond. “I am thankful for you, Herr Kronecker. Beyond words or financial compensation. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”

“You can invite me to your first—or should I say next—performance.”

Pascal tucks the box under one arm and grips Josef’s hand firmly before taking leave. On his way out, his steps in time with the ticking of the clocks. He takes a glance around but sees no sign of Anna before departing into the chill.