Fortune

by Lenny Bartulin

  ‘The rigid retrospectives of age,’ Krüger said, ‘the prison of numbered years, those most tenacious and insinuating agents of measurement, are an illusion. They draw a single straight line through life, but cannot by nature contain the whole of the movement encompassed. Life is not unfurling in a line, but rather being spun, constantly, around and around our voluptuous Mother Earth, who is herself simultaneously turning, turning!’

  Krüger was twenty-four, pear-shaped like his mother, with narrow sloping shoulders adding emphasis to the thighs and buttocks. His blue eyes had often earned him a second look, but so far he’d been in love only once. He claimed to be from a small town in Westphalia, but nobody had ever heard of it, and later, when he left, the regulars at Otto Kessler’s on Taubenstraße agreed that his accent wasn’t even close to Westphalian.

  ‘And so,’ Krüger said, ‘thereby, our conclusion: the inevitability of passing through where all and one have already been before and, in fact, must and will be, forever.’

  LOVE IS RECOGNITION

  Johannes Meyer couldn’t recall everything Krüger said that night, nor did he understand much of what he remembered; but now, as he looked up from the couch and saw Elisabeth von Hoffmann’s face in the window, framed in warm light, pale gold, beautiful, eternal, some impression of the man’s words made him suddenly think: yes!

  Their youthful eyes met and exchanged the moment, unrestrained, fluid, full. Their youthful eyes held and locked together. Johannes Meyer had been here before, that was the feeling, and he knew the girl, or must have known her once, or would do so, or … or, otherwise, why this overwhelming sense of her?

  ‘Listen,’ Krüger had said finally at Otto’s that night, though by now only Johannes and two or three others were listening to him. ‘The heart, not the mind, sets all criteria for truth, and love is its ingenium. And love is recognition: recognoscere, cognoscere, to know. yes? All that is behind us, and all that is before us, is here, always, already, to know. you know it. you already know what’s true. you already know.’

  Johannes Meyer looked up and he knew. And the girl in the window, she knew it too. And though they neither had any idea what it was that should be known, the revelation that something was known and could be known seemed more than enough.

  LOVE IS LOSS

  Beatrice pulled the boy down and held him tightly in her arms. She closed her eyes, so the world was as small as it could be.

  She’d noticed, seen it straight off, Johannes looking away from her then; she knew, she’d seen what had come into his eyes and felt his departure keenly, his heart, his presence, everything dissolving. And never mind the cruel moment, that it was exactly a betrayal, unkind and unforgivable. This wasn’t the injury complete. It was her failure too, her self-loathing, that she couldn’t contain the boy, even after lifting her skirts. It wasn’t enough, was never enough, no matter how much she hoped it would be.

  Her father had said to her once: ‘It’s what you bring upon yourself.’

  Johannes had also felt the moment between them as it died, but the face of the girl in the window had refused to fade from his eyes and now it was impossible to recover what had been with Beatrice in the moments before.

  She stood up from the couch and smoothed her skirts. She tucked loose strands of hair behind her ears, pulled at her sleeves, fussed at her clothes. She looked everywhere except directly at Johannes.

  ‘Beatrice,’ he said.

  ‘you have to go now,’ she said firmly. ‘you can’t be here.’

  They were in the home of Claus von Rolt, whom Beatrice worked for when she wasn’t at Otto’s coffee house. Here she cleaned and mopped and dusted, sometimes kept his bed warm, too. She’d known Rolt was going to be away for the afternoon.

  ‘See you, Johannes.’

  ‘Wait …’

  But Beatrice turned away, went to the front door and stepped outside. Then the door closed and she was gone.

  And that’s all we’ll ever know about her. She has slipped off our map.

  EELS

  On the other side of Berlin, in an empty storehouse in Königstadt that smelled strongly of manure, straw and damp flagstones, Claus von Rolt was with the American, Wesley Lewis Jr, and his Surinamese Negro companion, introduced simply as Mr Hendrik.

  Claus von Rolt stood with his arms crossed, staring at a briny oak barrel of dark sludge. He was disappointed with everything today: with the American, with the barrel, with Bonaparte at the gate. He reminded himself of his personal dictum—that expectations in life should always be cold, contained and disposable—but it didn’t help.

  ‘Genuine New World electrificated eels,’ Wesley Lewis Jr had said, levering off the barrel lid with a small iron bar. ‘you can look, but just don’t dare touch ’em.’

  Rolt was still staring at the barrel. He watched an oily bubble slowly dome on the surface and expand for a moment, then pop, exhausted. Of the six eels slopping around in there, one was dead and floated belly up. The others slid their slimy bodies over it every now and then, but appeared so sluggish that death was surely imminent for them also. The American’s asking price was offensive for so damaged a cargo.

  Still, Rolt wanted them. There were collectors willing to pay exorbitantly, and there were people to gift and impress, as always, in the effort to slip open sluice gates and direct the flows of profit. Rarity and exotica was his game, and even bruised in careless handling (even dead) it would always attract good money.

  The Negro, Mr Hendrik, watched silently, leaning off his lame leg.

  ‘Mr von Rolt?’ Wesley Lewis Jr said. He could never remember if you were meant to say the von.

  ‘I’ll pay half,’ Claus von Rolt said.

  The American grinned, but not because anything was funny. Three months to get here and now this pompous Prussian wanted to haggle. Jesus, but what a prick. He felt the twitch he’d recently acquired return to the corner of his left eye. In that deranged little spasm, all he’d endured: the steaming, insect-plagued forests of Surinam, the crossing of roiling, pirate-infested seas on that bloated slug the Alfons, then the volatile borders all through Europe, harassed by murderous highwaymen and fleeced by counts and princes to pass their roads, and now, the sudden walking blind into a war and Bonaparte’s two-hundred-thousand-strong stinking, looting, cutthroat Grande goddamn Armée on the march in the same direction. And everybody wanting to know, everywhere they went: What’s in the barrel, son?

  And his companion, the Negro, speaking barely a word the whole time, except to say ‘water’ now and then, as though Wesley Lewis Jr needed reminding to replenish the barrel in order to keep the eel sons-of-bitches alive and kicking.

  ‘How about you stand there and watch,’ he’d say, inserting the tap at the bottom of the barrel to drain it, after some hours trying to find fresh water in a dead village somewhere, skinny dogs barking at him, cannon thunder and smoke on the horizon. ‘Make sure I do it properly.’ But the Negro never bit.

  Wesley Lewis Jr walked slowly over to the barrel and picked up the lid that was leaning against it. He turned the greasy wheel in his hands, looking it over, then placed the lid carefully on top of the barrel, crouching a little to check the alignment. He gave it some attention, took his time, made sure it was straight. Then he stood back, put his hands on his hips.

  ‘The day we set off into the forests of Surinam,’ he said, ‘the barge nearly sank after hitting a reef of sunken trees at the river edge. The port bow plunged down and we took a big slurp of water and all the slave paddlers panicked, stood up and rushed around the deck like a bunch of chickens, sent the barge tilting even more. The Negroes can’t swim, of course, and naturally one of them fell in. While he thrashed about drowning, a giant, fifteen-foot caiman woke up from lying in the sun and slipped off the bank into the river. For a few seconds you could see the crust of black mud on his back melt and billow out into the water like smoke, but then he disappeared deeper and it was just the sunlight tinkling on the ripples he’d made. The boy was st
ill drowning and a couple of Negroes were trying to reach out to him with their paddles, all the rest of them were yelling, gibbering and gesticulating—it was enough to wish ’em all drowned. And then, just like that, the boy went under, gone. Everything quiet.’ Wesley Lewis Jr wiped his hands down his pants. ‘We kept watching the spot where he’d been, waiting, waiting, but nothing happened, it was like the whole thing was a dream. And then there was this great almighty splash and the surface broke and we saw the boy again. Only now the caiman had clamped his enormous jaws down on his shoulder, and was trying to wrap himself around the boy, and began rolling him, both of them spinning like logs. The boy’s face, Jesus—screaming terror! I’ll tell you, Mr von Rolt, there isn’t anything more obscene or sickening than the sight of that beast’s buttery, slimy-scaled belly. There’s a reason why God put him so close to the ground.’

  ‘Herr Lewis,’ Claus von Rolt said. ‘I think we should—’

  ‘We clear the snag, we go on, fifty miles of river,’ Wesley Lewis Jr said, cutting the Prussian off, ‘then a four-day trek to get to where the eels are, one man short. you ever experience the wild forests of the New World, Mr von Rolt? Swarms of mosquitoes, the even bigger zancudos, and these little bastards the French call bête-rouge, make you itch to kingdom come. And then there’s the chegoes, which love to crawl into your boots and burrow into the skin between your toes and lay their eggs. Of course, the snakes, caimans, jaguars, all that. I could go on, but I understand you’re a busy man. When we finally got back to my employer’s sugar plantation—that’s Captain van der Velde, whom I believe you’ve had correspondences with—well, he wants to test something out. Before we barrel up the eels, he wants to see what happens if you touch one. So he orders one of his slaves—an older man, scarred all over from the whip—Captain van der Velde orders him to pick one up out of the barrel.’

  Wesley Lewis Jr slapped the barrel wood.

  ‘Of course, the Negro’s reluctant, but he’s got no choice. Trembling, he slowly reaches in and then, before he can even get a decent grip on the slimy bastard, receives such a jolt that he falls back onto the ground as though he’s been shot. Then the captain orders another slave to push the eel onto the man’s body, which he does, terrified, with a stick, and then we all watch it stretch along the Negro’s body and begin to pulse and change colour, and the Negro sets to twitching and shaking. His black heart’s already stopped, but he keeps twitching and shaking until the eel is spent. Then the creature rested a moment before slithering away.’

  Wesley Lewis Jr paused. ‘One of these eels, sir, right here in this barrel. A man killer.’

  ‘Half,’ Claus von Rolt said again.

  Wesley Lewis Jr frowned and was about to reply when Mr Hendrik took him by the arm. Turning to the Prussian, the Negro bowed his head a little, blinked his eyes in the slow, sleepy way that Wesley Lewis Jr couldn’t stand, and said, ‘We accept your offer.’

  GUESTS

  The family lawyer Seidlitz was there when Elisabeth von Hoffmann returned home with Günther Jagelman. She couldn’t stand Seidlitz and mostly wished he’d fall under a horse. Hearing the man’s voice as they entered the house, she turned into the sitting room and walked to the large window that looked out over the street. The house wasn’t far from Unter den Linden and people were everywhere still, passing by below the window, heading towards Napoleon. She watched them, indifferent, could only think of the boy she’d seen.

  From down the hall, her aunt’s voice. ‘Elisabeth!’

  She rolled her eyes, whispered, God, and then composed herself. She went to see what Aunt Margaretha wanted now.

  ‘Must I call you twice?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Aunt, I didn’t hear you.’

  Aunt Margaretha shook her head, a quick, irritated movement that wobbled her old jowls and jangled her long silver earrings, hanging low on doughy lobes. She was on the settee, heavy and spread out, the lawyer Seidlitz beside her on a chair, and Günther standing nearby, silent as always.

  ‘And how was Napoleon?’ Margaretha said. ‘Did you give him my regards?’

  ‘Of course, Aunt, just as you wished. We had schnapps together.’

  Margaretha scoffed. The lawyer proceeded to unbuckle two thin straps on a satchel in his lap. He removed a document scroll and laid it on the satchel. Seidlitz was short, fat and tightly bound in unfashionable clothes, still preferring to display his plump calves by wearing trousers with leggings and high-heeled shoes. He crossed his legs and bounced his foot lightly up and down, pointing the toes.

  ‘We are to have a guest,’ Margaretha said. ‘A Frenchman.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Général Michel François Fourés,’ the lawyer Seidlitz said, unfurling and holding up the document that had arrived earlier from the French military administration.

  ‘Dear God!’ Margaretha said. ‘What will people say? Serving the enemy!’

  ‘We are not the only ones, Frau von Hoffmann,’ the lawyer said. ‘Most of the French officers are being billeted with the finest families across the city.’

  ‘My life has been cruel and unrelenting!’ Margaretha said. ‘And persists!’

  Elisabeth’s aunt longed only to return to her bed, where she spent most of her time these days. For this sentence of loneliness, and for her ageing spinsterhood, she explicitly blamed her family, and most particularly Elisabeth’s father, her brother, whose face she saw each time she looked upon the rosy bloom of her young niece. She blamed Elisabeth’s mother, too. They’d both died young so inconsiderately and burdened her with their loathsome child.

  ‘It will not be forever, Frau von Hoffmann,’ the lawyer Seidlitz said. ‘We will endure and soon prosper once again.’

  Aunt Margaretha began to weep. Günther reached across and patted her shoulder. The lawyer joined in on the other side.

  Elisabeth said, ‘Can I go now?’

  THE VULTURE, OTHER SPECIMENS, AND THE SEASHELL

  Sarcoramphus papa, on a heavy wooden plinth; scaly bald head of red, black and mandarin yellow, hooked red-orange beak beneath its grisly caruncle, enormous black-and-white wings, kinked like giant arrowheads and held aloft, as though the bird were about to hop over the furniture on its huge, blunt talons. Its eye followed Johannes Meyer, the eye disconcertingly alive. He moved past it, at a distance.

  The room was spacious, opulently furnished, painted vases and cut-glass bowls and silver trinkets everywhere. A clock ticked and eased the silence.

  Johannes walked through a doorway. The adjoining room was darker, cooler. Cabinet cases, apothecary shelves, books to the ceiling. The smell of leather, tobacco, dust, something acidic.

  In pale honey-coloured box frames on the walls, leaves, pressed flowers, butterflies and beetles, and gruesome fine-haired spiders with black marble eyes, all set in scrupulous rows, pinned and named. In specimen drawers with thin brass handles and Latin designations on yellow card, fossils and rocks and molten drops of amber, perfect mosquitoes and muscle-legged grasshoppers entombed inside, waiting. In glass cabinet displays, gleaming river stones and shards of crystal, everything arranged in perfect themes of shading, lightest to darkest, pastel pinks and watery blues, dusty reds and creamy greens; and birds’ eggs too, smallest to largest, grey and black-speckled, blue, pink and white.

  Johannes Meyer went from one display to the other. Opened drawers and closed them. With his fingertips traced the corrugated coils of baby snakes in jars of yellow liquid. For the second time today, he experienced the feeling of having been somewhere before.

  On a mahogany side table he found a large seashell. It was smooth and polished, white orange and bright, even there in the dimness of the room, as though sunlight and the shimmering of tropical waters were stored in its curled, half-closed porcelain flower. He picked it up, and just as he pressed the rounded lips of the shell to his ear, exactly then, he heard the front door snap its latch and creak open.

  Beatrice coming back? He listened.

  On Unter den Linden, the Emper
or waved to the crowd and there was a cheer that spread out into the surrounding streets and entered the front door of Claus von Rolt’s house, even reached into the room where Johannes Meyer stood. He held his breath while his old life overlapped with the new, the seams stitched by the hoof-taps of Bonaparte’s horse.

  ‘Life is an uncertain navigation of transcendent uncertainty,’ Krüger had said. ‘It begs only a scrutiny of the heart.’

  Not Beatrice, but three men walked into Claus von Rolt’s house.

  YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE

  Wesley Lewis Jr was small and slightly built, as though the designation at the end of his name had manifested itself physically.

  His father was taller and broader and closer to God, too, a preacher in South Carolina with flagellatory tendencies towards his son (switches, belts, whips, riding crops). He daily cleansed the boy of sin on behalf of the mother, who’d long abandoned them to whore out her comforts for corn liquor in Georgia, in Alabama, in Louisiana last they heard. Still, Wesley Lewis Jr hated neither mother nor father as much as he hated the Surinamese Negro, his companion, Mr Hendrik.

  There in the storehouse with the cocky Prussian waiting, and the electrical eels half dead in the barrel and Mr Hendrik’s hand still on his arm, Wesley Lewis Jr looked into the Negro’s burnt molasses eyes, those huge, round, voodoo eyes, animal and cannibal. The crippled slave so much older than his years, in frockcoat and buckled shoes, for Christ’s sake.

  ‘And what would your master say to such a price?’ Wesley Lewis Jr said from between his clenched teeth.

  ‘Leave it done,’ Mr Hendrik said.

  Wesley Lewis Jr pulled his arm free. Since they’d left Paramaribo together with their rare merchandise, he’d been thinking of it, how he might murder the Negro, be done with him and pocket the purse, make his way back to America. But he’d become fearful, at times even believed that Mr Hendrik knew exactly the thoughts percolating in his mind. Black magic, the obia, oh yes, he knew the sly, shifty Negro was versed in such things. He’d seen it. Like the night in Havana on the way, in one of the stinking lanes leading from the docks to the taverns, Mr Hendrik and himself suddenly surrounded by three men, one armed with a pistol.