HS03 - A Visible Darkness Read online

  ‘But they are cold,’ he shouted defiantly.

  ‘Come along,’ I said, jumping up, bustling more than was necessary. ‘That hole must be filled in before we can go home. Help your sister, Manni.’

  Süzi obeyed at once.

  Manni watched for a moment, then fell to work at her side, using his hands like outstretched pincers. The word-game was forgotten in an instant.

  I brushed the sand from my hands and clothes, then took a few steps towards Helena. She was sitting up straight—gown stretched out before her, her back resting against a little scarp of eroded sand where the dunes gave way to the beach. I sat myself down on the top of the mound and swung one leg over her head, as if I might have been playfully sitting on her shoulders.

  ‘Almost time to be getting back,’ I whispered in her ear.

  As I spoke, I pressed my knees gently against her arms. Then, I laid my hands on either side of her head and rested it back against the pillow of my stomach. Her up-tilted eyes looked into mine. It was the first time she had shifted her gaze from the thin line of the horizon where the dark blue sea and the pale blue sky collided. She closed her eyes and smiled more softly for a moment.

  I rested the point of my chin against her forehead, and began to massage the muscles in her neck. Then, I slid my hands down the length of her arms. Her hands were poised upon her swollen belly, as if to protect the creature growing there from whatever the world might throw at it.

  Before I could place my hands on hers, they slid away beneath her armpits like frightened deer retreating to the safety of the forest.

  ‘Manni’s right,’ she murmured. ‘My hands are cold.’

  ‘What is wrong?’ I asked her, resting the palms of my hands on the bulge of her womb. A month or so, and it would all be over. Maybe everything would be gone by then. Filth, flies, the French, as well.

  Helena’s hands shot out, and caught hold of mine.

  In that moment, I felt the chill of cold sweat on her damp palms.

  Her head pulled away. She stiffened, gazing out to sea again. It was as if a dark cloud had suddenly appeared in the summer sky, threatening to pitch a thunderstorm upon our heads.

  Further along the beach, three French soldiers came tramping noisily out from the dunes. Laughing and cat-calling to one another, they made their shambling way down to the water’s edge.

  Manni and Süzi froze like frightened squirrels.

  The soldiers had not seen us. They were gesticulating, shouting, pointing towards the waves which gently lapped upon the shore, as if they had never seen the open sea before.

  I did not move.

  I did nothing that might attract their attention.

  I took Helena’s cold hands in mine, and I pressed them hard.

  Then, I turned to the children.

  ‘As soon as you have finished, we’ll be going home,’ I encouraged them.

  Their eyes flitted from the far-off soldiers to me, then back again.

  The sound of my voice must have reached the Frenchmen. Two of the soldiers turned and looked in our direction, while the third man never took his eyes off the sea. One of the two took a step our way, raising his hands to cover his eyes from the direct rays of the sun. He stared at us for some moments, then he turned back to his companions.

  ‘They had the same idea,’ I whispered to Helena. ‘A peaceful day at the seaside, that’s all.’

  ‘I heard their wagons passing by all night,’ she said, as if I had not spoken.

  Was that the source of her uneasiness? The fact that the French army was on the move?

  ‘What’s happening in Spain should make our own lives easier,’ I said, intending to reassure her. ‘They like us well enough at the moment.’

  Helena’s fingers tightened into fists.

  ‘Do you really believe that?’ she hissed.

  ‘They mean us no harm,’ I said.

  The soldiers were making more noise than my children had done. They laughed and shouted, passing a bottle of wine between them.

  ‘I am not speaking of the French,’ she said. She turned her head, her eyes looked up into mine. ‘Not those three. Nor the rest of them. You understand the real danger, don’t you?’

  A vein was pulsing rapidly in her temple. She was like a lamb who has caught a glimpse of the butcher’s knife. It pained me to see her distress, yet I did not understand the cause of it.

  ‘What is it, Helena? The insects, the foul air, the filth . . .’

  ‘It is not that,’ she said quickly, looking down the beach again.

  Two of the men were naked now, their bodies gleaming white in the sun. They were dancing by the water’s edge, touching the sea with their toes, as if they meant to enter it and swim, while the third man seemed to be trying to dissuade his companions from such a bold enterprise.

  ‘What worries me,’ she said more slowly, ‘is what may happen here. Spain will put ideas into Prussian heads. And now, the French are weaker. That’s what frightens me. You know what they are like, our countrymen. If one of them comes up with a wild scheme, he’ll find a thousand who are ready to follow him.’

  At her side, the baby was sleeping beneath an umbrella. Anders turned on his blanket and let out a tiny whimper.

  ‘It’s time to go,’ I said, standing up, helping Helena to her feet, lifting up the baby, making haste to gather our things together and put them in the carriage, encouraging the children to do the same.

  The soldiers had come out of the water. They were jumping up and down to warm themselves. Soon, they would start looking for a new amusement.

  Within two minutes, Helena and the children were sitting quietly in the landau. Having removed the horse’s nose-bag and hung it on the nail at the cart’s end, I climbed up into the driver’s seat, cracked the whip, jerked on the reins, and we turned our backs on Mildehaven beach.

  Forty minutes later, I pulled hard and the carriage stopped before my door.

  There was a miasma hanging over Lotingen. The sun had brought the untreated sewage to a fiery ferment. The children jumped down and ran quickly into the house, as I told them to do. In Helena’s case, such speed was out of the question. I helped her to the ground, while Lotte came out and took the baby from her arms. When, at last, my wife’s heavy, fragile figure reached the door and entered the house, the children waving from behind the windows that Lotte did not dare to open, I felt as though I had sealed them all inside a tomb.

  As the carriage gathered speed again, I felt the spattering blows of insects on my brow. I had arranged to meet Gudjøn Knutzen at four o’clock that afternoon, but I did not relish the appointment. Nor the thought of what we would be doing. We had been collecting ‘evidence’—so-called—for the past two weeks. Fortunately, this would be the last occasion.

  Tomorrow the trial would begin.

  As I walked away from Daniel Winterhalter’s yard, stepping carefully through the filthy streets, I felt my angry stomach surging up into my throat.

  3

  GUDJØN KNUTZEN WAS waiting by the steps outside my office.

  My clerk was in his usual state: grey hair standing up on his head as if the comb were still waiting to be invented, his clothes as spruce as a strolling tinker’s. His wheelbarrow contained a well-worn shovel and a set of scales that had once belonged to his grandfather.

  ‘Which way today, Herr Stiffeniis?’

  ‘The Berlin road,’ I announced.

  He did not ask me why I had not come to work that morning. He did not care. He let out a loud sigh of resignation, and began to trundle through the streets behind me with his wheelbarrow.

  I had adopted a scientific method of working, a proven French method, in the belief that the French themselves would not be able to ignore such carefully documented facts. Each day, Knutzen and I would take ourselves to one of the main roads leading into town, looking out for what I called ‘fair samples’, that is, deposits of varying sizes—large, medium and small—which I could added to my statistical record.

/>   As we made our way through the town—I with my ledger under my arm, Knutzen pushing his wheelbarrow, both dressed up like bandits with handkerchiefs tied over our noses—I consoled myself with the thought that this would be the last time that I would be obliged to make a public spectacle of myself in the interests of the tiny commonwealth of Lotingen. The following day, those shocking statistics would be made public. The French would have to act upon them.

  ‘That’s a good one,’ I said, as we turned the corner into Berlinstrasse, though we had ignored a thousand similar hazards as we passed through the besmirched and stinking streets on our way there. Lotingen seemed to be sinking under a rising tide of horrid filth. Fresh cow-pats steamed like erupting volcanoes everywhere you looked. It was impossible to pass along the road without soiling your boots, impossible not to carry the mulch inside wherever you went.

  Knutzen grunted, and took out his scales.

  He dropped them with a clang, then reached for his long-handled shovel.

  ‘Smells like rotten tripe,’ he growled, as he shovelled it up.

  He held up the scales and moved the balance-weight across the iron bar.

  ‘It weighs precisely two pounds, nine ounces,’ I read from the gauge. In my notebook, along with the weight, I added a brief description of the nuisance: dark brown, fresh, extremely runny.

  While Knutzen dropped the contents into his barrow, I stepped back, waved the flies away, then moved ahead, looking for another decent specimen. I did not need to go two yards. I had decided from the start that six examples weighed and recorded each day would provide sufficient data for a statistical report that might end the squabbling which had divided the town for the past month.

  ‘Over here, Knutzen.’

  Again, he loaded the object onto his scales.

  Again, I recorded every detail: nauseous, fly-plagued, 3 lb 2 oz.

  ‘Stinks worse than the last one,’ Knutzen muttered as he turned the plate of the scales and let the contents slide with a lurch into the wheelbarrow. ‘Bloody flies!’

  He stood back from the cart with this exclamation, waving his shovel at the cloud of insects circling there, scattering droplets of liquid excrement in a scything arc from which I quickly distanced myself.

  ‘My wife was complaining again this morning,’ I confided, instantly regretting it.

  ‘Who isn’t,’ he muttered grimly.

  This glum taciturnity is one of Knutzen’s traits. I had acquired him with the office, there was nothing to be done about it. How many times had I thought to send him packing? I would have preferred a more sociable underling, but who in Prussia had the courage to turf a widowed father out of a job? He was in his fifties, a slovenly man of low birth and no manners, with only three things on his mind: his children; the animals that kept them alive; and the promise of a state pension when he reached his seventieth birthday. If I remained in Lotingen so long—and I had no wish to leave it—Knutzen and I were destined to pass many more years in each other’s company.

  ‘I hope that you’ll remember, sir?’

  I knew what he meant. His salary was nearly due.

  ‘I will, of course.’

  He nodded once. It was the only thing that concerned him. Where the money came from was a matter for my conscience. My meagre expenses had been strictly limited by cuts in the State economy after the Compromise of Tilsit; I would have to pay him his half-salary out of my half-salary. Did he thank me? He did not. The sixth cow-pat went slopping into his wheelbarrow.

  Knutzen turned to me. ‘That’s your lot done, sir.’

  As I closed my ledger, he shovelled three or four more shovelfuls into his barrow.

  ‘Back to the office,’ I announced.

  The relative enthusiasm that Knutzen had shown while we were choosing and weighing the cow-droppings went out like a light. An expression of sullen resignation took its place. I knew what he would be doing for the next hour. That manure would be spread on his vegetable-patch. Then, having milked his cow and made the round of his duck-run, collecting eggs, he would feed the piglet that he was fattening up to sell to the French. At five o’clock, he would return in a huff to the Court House and seat himself in the small closet at the end of the hall, ready (but not particularly willing) to usher in any visitor who had business with the law until closing-time.

  Together we returned towards the market square.

  What would Lavedrine have said if he could have seen me?

  The French criminologist and I had been thrown into fierce competition the year before as we struggled to solve a crime that was one of the most perplexing in the annals of recent Prussian history. Was he back in Paris, I wondered. What smiling sarcasms would flow from the Frenchman’s lips if could see me now, collecting cow-dung in the streets with the same concentration that we had employed to analyse the scene of the Gottewald massacre?

  The town was busy. I met numerous acquaintances, and was obliged to nod and wish them all a bright good afternoon. They looked at me, glanced at Knutzen and his wheelbarrow, then quickly moved away. And the more I tried to hurry him forward, the heavier his barrow seemed to become. The stink of the stuff in his cart hung upon us like a poisonous fog. Flies flew all around in a dense, black cloud. I stopped at the water-pump in the market square, and washed my hands, but I could not rid myself of the clinging stench of faeces.

  ‘The smell is corrupting the weave of my clothes,’ I muttered.

  My only hope was that Lotte would have some marvellous country remedy for unpleasant odours that modern science had not, as yet, dreamt up.

  ‘Hang them out to air,’ Knutzen advised me gruffly.

  While he pushed his cart away in the direction of his home, I went up the stairs to my chambers to pass the remainder of the day in the company of the file relating to the case which had obliged me to compile those revolting statistics: Keillerhaus versus Gaffenburger. First, I would make my final computation. Then, I intended to write my opening address to the Court.

  Apart from the loud ticking of the Dutch clock, the only sound in the room was made by the agitated rustling of tiny wings. How many flies had managed to find their way into my office, I could not begin to estimate, but I blamed Knutzen. The window looking out on the market square was open. It had been left that way all through the long, hot day.

  I sat down at my desk, and cursed him again.

  While we were walking out, I had asked him the usual questions.

  Had any mail arrived? Had anybody called at the office?

  ‘Nobody, sir,’ Knutzen said.

  Yet, clearly someone had been there. On the desk lay a book. It was a slim volume in a pale, expensive pig-skin binding. I picked it up and read the title.

  A MOST REMARKABLE PHENOMENON

  OF SPONTANEOUS CREATION.

  4

  ‘THE COURT OF Lotingen is finally in session.’

  That accentuated adverb was not a part of the ritual announcement. And perhaps Knutzen’s short temper was justified that day. As a rule, there are no more than five or six casual onlookers when the district assizes are called on the last Friday of every month in the Pietist meeting-house on Fromborkstrasse. The cases to be tried are generally matters of the dullest sort, petty theft, domestic wrangling, drunkenness, disturbing the peace.

  ‘Procurator Stiffeniis presiding!’ Knutzen added.

  The eyes of at least a hundred people turned in my direction as I made my way out from the minister’s vestibule, crossed the hall, and took my seat behind the raised altar-table, which had been cleared for the occasion and covered with a crimson damask drape. The eager excitement of the throng crushed together in the narrow pews—many of them seeing me in my judge’s toga and black cap for the very first time—and the grumbling of those less fortunate who had come too late to claim a seat and found themselves obliged to stand at the back of the hall, was the true measure of the civic importance of the case.

  ‘Silence in court!’

  Knutzen had to shout, calling for
order several times again before the proceedings could commence with any sort of reasonable dignity.

  On the right-hand side of the bench stood the plaintiff. Wearing a three-quarter-length coat of dark blue wool with a double row of brass buttons despite the persistent summer heat, studded leather sea-boots, his three-cornered nautical hat tucked beneath his arm, his face as dark, brown and wrinkled as a fried walnut, Fritz Keillerhaus looked every inch what he proudly claimed to be: a ship’s captain, who was used to ruling a crew of ruffians, alone and unaided in the pursuit of behemoths. On the other side, Augustus Gaffenburger, the owner of the Lotingen slaughterhouse, and the defendant in the case. They wore matching theatrical expressions of anger and impatience on their faces.

  I cleared my throat, then read out the deposition which had given rise to the dispute.

  ‘On the 20th of July, in this, the year 1808, after making repeated complaints—in the first instance, directly to the accused; in the second place, to the civic authorities of the town—I, Fritz Keillerhaus, captain (retired), do hereby solemnly swear and affirm that no action was ever taken by either party to correct the wrong that I have suffered. Indeed, the nuisance has grown steadily worse. Therefore, and most reluctantly, I feel obliged by honour to sue for the payment of substantial damages incurred as a result of the continuing assault upon my property . . .’

  ‘By his cows!’ Captain Keillerhaus burst out impulsively.

  ‘We know the nature of your grievance, sir,’ I answered briefly. ‘We are here to settle the matter. The essence of a fair trial is that after your complaints have been fully stated, the accused should be given the opportunity to refute them if he can. Allow me to finish, and we will get on with business!’

  Captain Keillerhaus looked down. For one instant, I thought he might be going to spit. He did not. Which was fortunate. It is an offence to expectorate in the presence of His Majesty’s magistrate in the performance of his duties, and even more so when the court makes shift in a consecrated chapel for want of any better assembly-room. I would have been obliged to fine him for it.