Rhinoceros

“There was no one tending the zoo, so we just walked in.”

Across from the apartment building where Nicholas and I lived was a train station. There weren’t any trains, but a café whose small metal chairs were spread out across the vast space, and a kiosk. The kiosk sold navy blue gloves, packages of powder you put in water to make colorful sweet drinks, syrup that did the same thing, pads of gray paper and sea monkey kits, nylon stockings that smelled like chemicals, and broke into holes as soon as you put them on, small jars of salt, and bars of pink candy that were very waxy in consistency and came in a package with a goofy, yellow animal with long ears represented on it. Everyone knew what a rabbit was, even if they had never seen one, because of that candy. I thought, if Nicholas were an animal he’d be a rabbit like that. He was small, and almost albino.

Nicholas and I went to the station often, because it had speakers which played music, very faintly, and there were old, interesting posters on the walls: a large poster for the film Peculiar Jane, one for a dark imported beer—the beer bottle was surrounded by crows—and another poster of a winged insect made out of metal or something. That one was for a jewelry shop that was no longer open. We had written down the address and visited, but there was no sign of it ever being a jewelry shop: In its place was a closed-down bakery filled with empty bread shelves. Nicholas had sketched and painted the posters many times. The station was very drafty, lukewarm teas from the café didn’t help much, but we were used to being cold. The very old brick fireplace in our living room had been filled in with an electric one that didn’t work. It had strange white bars covered in fuzzy looking red wires behind a metal bar grate. It looked like a very bad drawing of a real fire. The hearth was covered in beautiful tiles with green flowers on them. Once, when desperate, we tore one of the tiles off and sold it. It didn’t get us more than two cups of tea however, and we became so nervous about the landlord discovering the missing tile that Nicholas painted a replica on hard paper and glued it in the empty space. One could hardly tell the difference, as long as they didn’t step on it.

Above, on the mantelpiece, Nicholas kept his sea monkeys in a plastic castle-shaped aquarium. They were tiny gray things, they resembled aquatic bedbugs, really. The water was murky. I had bought them for Nicholas’s birthday. The package had pink creatures with chimpanzee-like faces and clear roles—mother, father, son, daughter, wearing fancy outfits. In his childish way, Nicholas was disappointed that the creatures didn’t resemble the image at all but he still painted them, using a magnifying glass.

Beside the aquarium was a mantel clock that looked like a shrunken train station, a small, long skull—the person we bought it from said it was a rat’s—and two winking face teacups Nicholas had inherited from his grandmother. We didn’t use them because Nicholas thought they would scream if we poured hot liquid into their heads.

Directly across from the fireplace was a red couch with some sort of botanical design on it. It was inside the couch that I found the beef can, after removing the cushions and cleaning underneath because the couch sometimes gave off an odd smell. The can had a white animal on it, called a beef. Nicholas became terribly excited. He opened the can with a knife, thinking there would be a tiny beef inside that looked like the one on the cover. It was just horrid, blackish mush inside—it smelled wicked. I said, Nicholas we ought to throw it out, it might be dangerous, and he threw the stuff out but kept the lid, washed it off, and painted it many times. I had encountered the word beef in novels before. It was something English people often ate, but I didn’t know what it looked like till now, and the novels were now half ruined by the image of the characters eating that black, smelly substance.

Every five months, a man in a gray top hat visited to pick up Nicholas’s paintings and drawings. He loved the one of the beef, saying it was very noble and asked where we had found the image. Nicholas showed him the tin lid.

We found it on the street, Nicholas said. The man replied he’d like to have it too if we didn’t mind, and put the lid in his pocket, saying, I haven’t seen one of those since I was a boy. We weren’t sure if he meant the animal or the tin.

Don’t worry, Nicholas said, after the man left, I kept a sketch of the beef just for us, it’s in the suitcase under the bed.

That suitcase also contained some drawings of me, kept hidden because we were under obligation to give all of Nicholas’s artworks to the man in the top hat, though I don’t think the man would’ve liked them. He never acknowledged or expressed interest in me, only in Nicholas and his paintings of sea monkeys, pots, insects, and whatever else he could find.

He gave us money and sometimes food in exchange for the artworks. The food was never consistent, for example, he brought us two bags full of greenish-brown grapes. We ate as much as we could. Some of them were moldy and shriveled, which gave Nicholas the idea we could make raisins out of them. The air of the apartment turned out to be too damp for them to turn into raisins, though we did hold them over the stove for some time.

Another time, he brought us a large sack of flour. I didn’t know what to do with it. I made a dreadful white soup out of it that gave us both stomachaches, but fortunately we were able to sell the rest of the sack at a market we went to every week to look for treasures. Nicholas was always looking for bits of animal, but someone sold him a jagged piece of broken porcelain saying it was a bone, he didn’t have a good eye for such things. I found the rat’s skull, and traded a nice blue dress I had for it. My only other clothes were a brown skirt with white spots on it, a black skirt with pink and green flowers, and some shirts and jumpers Nicholas and I shared, mainly inherited from his grandmother. Whenever the man in the gray top hat visited, Nicholas made me put on a pink jumper—the only one without paint stains on it, though it did have a large moth hole on the chest covered with a badge that used to say vote maximillian on it. We thought this phrase might be dangerous so we blacked it out with paint. It just looked like a large black button.

We showed Nicholas’s paintings in the living room, the light there was good. We also had a studio room for Nicholas, a bedroom, a bathroom with a large green tub, and a dining room we didn’t use as we didn’t have a table, and there was a foreboding-looking light fixture dangling from the ceiling.

Sometimes the market had picture books wrapped in plastic, but we couldn’t afford them so we tried to memorize the images on the cover, a hairy animal wearing a straw hat, a pink one in overalls, a large gray house. Nicholas quickly drew them all after we left, but the results were frightening, too frightening to paint, we thought. The animals just looked like misshapen people.

It took us almost two hours to walk to the art supplies store. We walked arm in arm.

One old man lived above us, the only other person in the whole building, he owned a bicycle. I tried to be friendly to him, bringing him some tubers and tea, but he never offered to lend us the bicycle though Nicholas and I always looked so tired when we returned home. The old man didn’t use the bicycle often, only once a week or so to buy bread or a bottle of spirits, which he put under his arms while cycling but never dropped.

I pictured Nicholas and I on the bicycle often, me pedaling, he sitting on the back with his arms around my waist.

I always packed us a lunch for our trip to the art store: a thermos of tea and some boiled tubers wrapped in foil. We stopped somewhere nice, a statue, a fountain with no water in it, to eat. We also had to stop for Nicholas to cough more often than I liked, but Nicholas wouldn’t let me go alone. He insisted we go together though it exhausted him. I think he was also afraid of me choosing the wrong things.

Whenever we went out Nicholas brought his net, just in case he saw an insect or something. There were three cockroaches taped to the wall of his studio room which he had found in the halls of our building, and a bedbug kept in a velvet box. When we ate at home he was deliberately messy, hoping to attract something living.

On one of our walks to the art supply shop we discovered a cavernous grocery store. We could hear our feet echoing as we walked through it. Not all the lights were turned on, so we just went into the aisles that were lit up.

There were shelves and shelves of tea, all the boxes were quite faded and old looking, and the tins rusty. That was about all, I think the shop also had some cotton kitchen cloths, dusty bottles of syrup, and some dried white things—we didn’t know what they were.

Does tea go off? I asked Nicholas. He said he didn’t think so, so we bought a few of the cheapest boxes, I was afraid of the rust on the tins. As we felt so abundant in tea, Nicholas used some of it to do paintings of his cockroaches on paper. They looked like light brown watercolor pictures, very lovely, but the next time we went by the grocery store it was closed, shuttered up.

The art supply shop was squished between two vegetable shops. There were curtains drawn across the windows, mildewy ones that had become stuck to and stained by a handful of brown dead plants giving the unpleasant impression of a healing wound and bandages. It was half empty. There were small plaster busts of men with beards and lots of boxes of chalk.

Sometimes it took the owner a long time to find the paints Nicholas wanted. Nicholas always became nervous that there wouldn’t be any more, that he’d have to start drawing with chalk, which gave him a funny, unpleasant feeling to touch, and which you could just wipe away.

The store had lots of nice paper. Sometimes Nicholas tried to buy me some, but I said no, the gray paper pads from the train station kiosk were fine enough for me.

The last time we were there, the owner had hardly any paint left and wasn’t sure if he could get more, but told us there was another art supply store if you walked along the train tracks until you were at a station with a green roof, walked through it, or around it if the doors are locked, and then on a few streets from there. He drew us a map, but couldn’t say how long it would take, though it was sure to have more supplies as it was so out of the way. Nicholas was enthusiastic about making the journey, but I was worried about his health. It could take hours, or days even, and what if they had nothing but white chalk?

I dug up a bunch of tubers and made them into pancakes for our trip. There was a small lot behind the building, I grew tubers there, when we first moved in it had been overgrown with sinister ferns. I put the pancakes, a bar of rabbit candy and some jumpers in a bag. I made Nicholas wear the scarf.

We never made it to the other art supplies store because we discovered a zoo on the way. We stopped in one of the stations along the tracks to eat lunch, there was even a tea machine which served tea in tiny plastic cups. On one of the walls was a map of the neighborhood, and it said zoo here with an arrow. There was no one tending the zoo, the ticket booth was empty, so we just walked in. Nicholas was shaking.

All the cages were empty, of course. Leaves, puddles, and eroded concrete, but each cage had a sign with an illustration of the animal that had once lived there, and information on what they had liked to eat and where they were from. That’s the rhinoceros then, he said, the elephant, the zebra. He made sketches from the illustrations. As I couldn’t draw, I wrote Zebra in my notebook three times for emphasis, as that was the animal I liked most.

Nicholas was too tired and excited from the zoo for us to continue on our way to the art supply store.

We went back to the zoo the next day, Nicholas couldn’t rest until we did. He frantically sketched all sorts of beasts and winged creatures. All the illustrations were in black and white, we didn’t know what colors to paint them, Nicholas decided to paint them pink and brown like humans. The rhinoceros horn obsessed him. Was it like the rat’s skull, or a fingernail?

He decided to grow one of his fingernails long to know how to paint it, thinking a rhinoceros horn was probably like some sort of thick fingernail. It looked grotesque, and he let it get very dirty. I was relieved when he cut it off. He wanted to add it to his collection on the mantelpiece, but I convinced him that it might disgust or offend the man in the gray top hat, so he put it on the bathroom windowsill.

I was looking at it from the bathtub, I think it had started to curl from the condensation, when something came out of me, a pink lump. It was flat on the ends, like a tuber with the tips sliced off. It had no mouth, eyes, or hands, but it was alive: It was struggling in the water. I grabbed it and put it on my stomach. When I stood up, it squirmed so much I almost dropped it. It was soft, boneless. I wrapped it in a towel, like I had seen babies wrapped, and held it. There wasn’t any blood.

Nicholas was painting. I crouched in the dining room holding the thing. I fell asleep, and when I woke up it was still, and strangely hardened. I hadn’t figured out how to feed it or anything. Perhaps I couldn’t.

The lamp I didn’t like was swinging to and fro.

I didn’t want Nicholas to paint the thing, or even to see it. I wrapped it in a green scarf I didn’t like to wear and put it in a porcelain jar that said mustard on it and had always been empty. Nicholas was asleep comfortably in bed, a smear of white paint on his face.

I felt agitated, however, with it sitting in the pantry with all our food. I didn’t want to bury it in the yard in case I later mistook it for a tuber. The next time we were getting ready to go to the zoo, I stuffed it in a small beaded purse I had, it was all withered and darkened. At the zoo, I wandered off as Nicholas was sketching a wolf.

I unwrapped the thing, and threw it between the bars of the zebra cage. It landed just on the peripheries of a puddle. I wished it were more hidden, but perhaps it would roll away, or leaves would cover it eventually.

When I returned to Nicholas, he had stopped drawing, and was crouched over, coughing. What if Nicholas expired and dried up like the thing that had come out of me? Then what would I do? I helped him up and we returned home, though he hadn’t finished his drawing. He had only done the wolf’s head, floating in the space of the paper like an abandoned hat.

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“Rhinoceros” is reprinted by permission from The Doll’s Alphabet, published by Coffee House Press in the US, Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK, and Coach House Books in Canada, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Camilla Grudova.