HS03 - A Visible Darkness

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘What about this girl?’ I asked, turning to the sketch of Ilse.

  They boggled at the triangular cavity in the girl’s throat, but neither spoke.

  Perhaps they were too shocked to speak. And yet, I thought, it was more than possible that girls like Ilse and Kati had made their way from Nordcopp to the shops in Königsberg, selling what they had managed to steal.

  I turned the page.

  There was Edviga. Whole, well, bright eyes sparkling. Clearly alive.

  ‘Have you ever seen this woman?’ I said, hoping for little, expecting less.

  Their heads turned, one to the other. An unspoken message passed between them.

  ‘I remember that scar,’ Klaus Flugge admitted. ‘It did not mar her face in the least. We have seen her here. Not recently, of course.’

  ‘How long ago?’ I asked.

  ‘Shortly after Jena, as I recall,’ the old man said, musing as he said it, and I remembered what the son had said about his father’s remarkable memory.

  ‘Two years ago?’ I quizzed him.

  ‘Not quite so long,’ he said. ‘She came from the Samland peninsula.’

  So, I thought, Edviga Lornerssen had worked elsewhere collecting amber, and for quite a while before she came to Nordcopp.

  ‘Did she bring you amber?’ I held the sketching-album propped against my chest like a reading-stand, hoping that the sight of Edviga’s face would spur him on to marvels.

  ‘What else?’ Paulus Flugge intervened. ‘We deal exclusively in amber.’

  I asked myself why the Flugges were now so ready to talk of Edviga. Was it because that portrait was clearly not the picture of a girl who was dead? Or, having imprudently revealed the fact that many of their customers were nationalists, had they decided to give me a titbit to keep me happy? By doing so, they would distance themselves from any suspicion regarding the girls who had died.

  ‘Where does your amber come from, sirs?’

  ‘Now, that’s a question that we can answer,’ Flugge Senior replied. ‘We purchase raw materials from the Königsberg Guild, sir. They pay the French, then they distribute it to us. Not to jewellers alone, please note, but to all the men who use amber in their trades. Makers of soap and furniture polish, for example. Mixers of medicines, paints and balms. They use powder made from broken bits and fragments, most of them. Amber of the best quality must be entered in the register of the local Guild. And in our accounts-book, too. Then again, sir, very occasionally, a young woman . . .’

  ‘Most infrequently,’ Paulus stressed.

  ‘. . . walks in through the door, bringing a piece of amber . . .’

  ‘Not quite through the usual channels,’ Paulus added.

  ‘And she asks if we would like to buy what she has for sale.’

  ‘But most infrequently . . .’

  ‘I wish to see your registers,’ I said, interrupting this duet.

  A thick book in a heavy red leather binding was brought out for my inspection. I felt my heart sink. What did I expect to find? There would be lots which was of no use to me at all, and nothing of what truly intrigued me, that is, amber containing insects, amber which the Guilds were no longer allowed to sell.

  ‘This volume covers the last ten years,’ Klaus Flugge announced. His confidence seemed to have returned to him. ‘Month by month.’

  I spent some minutes sifting through the pages. The Flugges bought roughly six pounds of amber every month, slightly more in the months before Christmas. Each time a purchase was recorded, there was an ink stamp and the signature of the emissary who had brought the goods, together with the signature of Klaus or Paulus Flugge. The emissary signatures for the last twelve months, I noted, were French, as were the exorbitant prices paid. The cost of unfinished amber had tripled in a year. Nothing that might be of help to me, however. The only thing of interest was a certain fussiness which the father and the son displayed, meticulously noting what they did with their monthly allowance of amber. Handles for knives and forks made up the bulk of their work, together with frames for miniature pictures and compact mirrors. They made twice as many earrings as bracelets and rings. Those pages reflected the changing tastes of Prussian fashion—brooches were out, lockets were in—though ever more frequently the name of the purchaser was French. In one instance, in March 1808, just five months previously, Messrs Flugge had acquired ‘two large lengths of solid amber—dark red in colour, streaked with yellow veins, opaque,’ as the description read. These had been transformed by Paulus Flugge into ‘two virile members, almost life-size’ on the order of a French chasseur whose name was Captain Noel Laganarde. The price agreed upon was fifty-six thalers ‘per item,’ which more than equalled the average monthly earnings of the shop. Nothing in the register suggested that the Flugges had ever set a piece of amber containing an insect in a patriotic clasp, or bought a piece of amber on the sly.

  I closed the ledger.

  I could have made a nuisance of myself. That is, I could have come back in the company of French soldiers, and turned their shop upside down. Or I could have reported them to General Malaport, suggesting that they might know the names of seditious elements that might be worth arresting. Then again, I could have had their names struck off the Guild’s list of registered amber-jewellers. I could have closed their shop, for ever.

  But I did none of these things. Rather, I compressed the threat that I represented into a few words as I prepared to leave the shop. ‘If I need any further information,’ I warned them, ‘I’ll be back.’

  I expected no reply, but Paulus Flugge had something still to say.

  ‘We’ll be here, sir,’ he said, his mouth set in a defiant fashion. ‘If you ever do decide to set that splendid piece of amber, Herr Stiffeniis, you know where to bring it, and what will be made of it.’

  I opened the door, and the bell tinkled.

  I stood outside and listened as the sound faded away.

  Lamps were being lit along the Kramerbrücke bridge. I saw a lamp-lighter going over with his stick, a large dog meandering at his heels. There were French soldiers guarding the near end of bridge now. They were chatting quietly, smoking their pipes, spitting occasionally into the water, their duty more of a pleasure than a burden. Down along the bank, a man was fishing with a perch-pole. The town across the water was lost in shadows, except for pinpoints of light which dotted the mass of buildings that lined the waterfront.

  I had learnt something, after all. Scientists were keen on amber specimens with insect insertions, but our nationalists were keener. Illegal pieces of amber were smuggled from Nordcopp by the girls who worked there. Edviga Lornerssen was one of them. She had hinted as much: ‘we go to Nordcopp, but sometimes further.’ When they found something special, they came to Königsberg. Had the girls who called themselves Annalise and Megrete come with stolen relics from the church?

  And was it here that they had met their Nemesis?

  27

  VULPIUS.

  His name was in the documents that Malaport had shown me. He had been stopped by a night-watchman in the company of two women on the Grünen Brücke bridge. The following week, two bodies had been found beneath that same bridge. For want of soldiers, the General had let him slip away. Vulpius had described himself as a ‘follower of Kant.’ That was now the only lead I had.

  Immanuel Kant had taught at the Albertina University in Königsberg for fifty years. If Vulpius really were a ‘follower of Kant,’ if he had ever registered as a student, or taken an examination at the university, he would have left some trace behind him. But it would not be easy. The Albertina was one of the largest universities in the German-speaking states, second only to Göttingen. Despite its isolation on the Baltic coast, Königsberg had managed to attract as many as five hundred students a year, and every one of them was obliged to study theology and metaphysics. The lists would be enormous.

  The afternoon was drawing on as I walked beside the River Pregel. The low sun cast a sheen of sparkling gold across the ripplin
g waters. Public offices generally close at four o’clock, and I was afraid that the Registration Office might have shut up for the night. Still, I pressed onward, hoping to find one clerk who was as serious as Professor Kant had been, a dedicated man who would still be at his desk despite the hour, ready and willing to point me in the direction of Vulpius.

  The great door to the Examinations Hall was wide open.

  In the quadrangle, a man was going already around with a spill on a long stick, lighting lanterns. Over one of the doors on the far side was a large blue enamel plaque. The word SECRETARIAT was written in gold. A smaller sign had been inserted into a slotted frame on the wall: AUTUMN SEMESTER ENROLMENTS IN PROGRESS.

  A group of young men were loitering outside. Three of them appeared to be playing hopscotch on the cracked flagstones. I hurried over, skipped inside the door, and found myself caught up in a mad scrimmage. I might have been standing on the docks of Königsberg harbour as a sailing ship from Tallin disembarked its passengers. At least two hundred persons were milling about inside the large room. Their buzzing voices were a constant droning undertone, broken now and then by a sharp cry, ‘Next!’ and the setting-to of all these combatants in a cruel, mysterious free-for-all, as they pushed towards desks which had been set at regular intervals around the large room.

  The French had brought the orderly queue to Prussia; the students of the Albertina did not seem to like the concept. Men in long black gowns wandered in and out among the crowd, waving canes, trying to keep order of a sort, shouting out as they went: ‘A civil engineering ticket! Tickets for mathematics!’ or ‘Two for physics! Two more for physics!’

  I watched transactions going on all around the room.

  A heavy hammer-beam roof rose high above the heads. The yellow-painted walls were filled with wooden boards on which a million pieces of paper had been pinned and posted higgledy-piggledy, one on top of the other. Above these written notices, a number of heraldic devices and brightly coloured coats-of-arms and a large fresco of a growling bear filled one wall, while dour, dust-encrusted portraits of long-dead academics loured down from the other walls, sternly disapproving of the lively assembly of modern youths who evidently wished to join their hallowed ranks.

  But something else surprised me.

  The Albertina had been renowned for theology and metaphysics. The Pietists had ruled the university for centuries; nothing else had ever been taught there. But I had heard the ticket-sellers, and now I saw the signs above the registration-desks. They were all for scientific disciplines. Was I in the wrong university? There seemed to be no exception. ANATOMY. METALLURGY. MEDICINE. CALCULATION. CHEMISTRY. MEASURES. The air was hot and heavy with the smell of young bodies, old clothes, stale tobacco smoke. It was like the cattle-market in Lotingen on the first Friday of the month. In front of each desk, students pushed and tussled, shook their horns and stamped their hooves, edging forward, tickets in one hand, money in the other, eager to be enrolled on the lists before each course was filled.

  Only one desk proved an exception to the rule.

  In the farthest, darkest corner of the room, a large, fat, red-faced man was seated all alone at a table. He was writing on a sheet of paper by the light of a candle, oblivious to the noise and the rumpus, totally untroubled by the urgency of everything that was going on around him. Above his head a small notice had been pinned to the wall: PHILOSOPHY / THEOLOGY / METAPHYSICS.

  Here was the man that I was seeking.

  He did not look up as I made my way through the crowd. Nor as I stood before him, waiting to catch his eye. While the secretaries of the other faculties listed students’ names and scribbled receipts for the payment of fees to the university treasury, he went on with his private task. His name was written on a folded card: DR NARCIZUS RICKERT. Sitting behind a wall of books, he was writing furiously on a sheet of paper.

  ‘Doctor Rickert?’

  His head jerked up, and he quickly covered what he was writing.

  ‘Do you wish to enrol?’ he wheezed incredulously.

  ‘I . . . I am interested in the courses of Professor Kant,’ I began.

  The black eyes of Narcizus Rickert did not flicker as I spoke. They peered out at me from under a heavy granite cliff of a forehead, like glistening stars in a stormy night sky. A tattered academic wig was perched on the crown of his head like a washed-out handkerchief.

  ‘Kant ceased teaching here in ’96,’ he said.

  ‘You miss my point, Herr Rickert,’ I corrected him. ‘I wish to know about the courses in Kantian philosophy at the university today. Indeed, I am looking for a follower of Professor Kant, and I wonder if he may be enrolled here at the moment.’

  Doctor Rickert set his chin on his shoulder. Rolls of fat bulged out from his jowls. He stared up at me and said: ‘Just look behind you, sir. Can you see anyone else in the queue?’ He did not wait for a reply. ‘It’s been like this all week. And today is the final day for registration. If you feel like signing up, you’ll have the whole place to yourself. Philosophy is dead in Königsberg. No one’s interested in thinking anymore. Just look at them,’ he snorted, waving his hands dismissively. ‘For them the world is a thing to weigh and measure.’

  He glanced at me, as if to gauge my reaction to this diatribe. Any man, it seemed, who was interested in philosophy ought to share his opinion.

  ‘Science,’ he sneered again. ‘French poison.’

  I tried again. ‘Regarding the person that I am looking for.’

  ‘Are you certain that he hasn’t signed on for something else?’ he suggested with an airy gesture. ‘Something more modern, I mean to say.’

  ‘His preference is definitely for Kantian philosophy,’ I insisted.

  ‘Are you, perhaps, the first butterfly announcing the coming of Spring?’ he asked rhetorically, taking up his pen again, pulling out a fresh sheet of paper, covering up what he had been writing before. ‘Just tell me your name, sir, together with the name of this other person, and I will joyfully enrol the pair of you.’

  I wondered whether the confusion in the room had dulled his hearing.

  ‘You misunderstand me, sir,’ I said, leaning over the table, raising my voice. ‘I am not here to enrol. I am looking for a person who has probably studied here, who may still be studying philosophy here. Kantian philosophy, that is.’

  Doctor Rickert dropped his pen, and picked up a large leather-bound book.

  ‘Kantian philosophy?’ he repeated. ‘That simplifies everything.’

  He flicked through the pages of the volume, then turned it around and held it up to me. The book was long, narrow, thick. The left-hand page was plain, containing the title and description of a course, together with the themes and subjects which the tutor intended to tackle in the first semester. An Introduction to the Works of Immanuel Kant, I read. The right-hand page was a narrow grid of ruled lines: a wide space had been left near the margin for the names of the participants, a line of boxes to the right of it, where their absences and presences would eventually be recorded as the course proceeded. The course had been planned for Wednesdays, three hours, starting at 3 p.m.

  Where the tutor’s name should have been, the space was blank. And so was the page where the students’ names ought to have been listed.

  ‘No names,’ Doctor Rickert explained. ‘No one to look for.’

  I was stunned.

  Doctor Rickert dropped his ledger heavily on the table. The page on which he had been writing was now exposed beneath the brown leather cover.

  ‘Draw blood out from the large vein. This will give the sacred Entity more energy on which to feed . . .’ I read.

  I looked up uncertainly. What was the nature of the subject in which he had been so deeply involved when I approached his desk just a few moments before? Like every other young man of my generation, I had read Gottfried Bürger’s poem ‘Lenore,’ Goethe’s ‘Bride of Corinth,’ Ossenfelder’s most famous work. I knew what vampires were reputed to drink. Did the ‘sacred Entity’
that Rickert was interested in belong to the same sinister genre?

  Rickert looked at me intently. ‘You are not from Königsberg, I take it.’

  ‘I come from Lotingen.’

  ‘You are lucky to find yourself at my desk,’ he said quickly, leaning forward with a smile. I counted seven brown teeth, three above, and four below, which were incapable of containing the stale smell of onions. ‘For a small consideration, I may be able to provide you with the information that you looking for.’

  ‘Consideration?’ I repeated.

  ‘A paltry fee,’ he said. ‘The usual student rate.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Two thalers, as a rule, sir. That is, two thalers per operation.’

  ‘What would this involve?’ I asked.

  Herr Rickert smiled, then rubbed his eyebrow with his fingernail. ‘You have studied, sir, I can see that. You know how a secretary earns his keep. For a tiny fee, all will be revealed. Where a lecturer keeps his room. What time his lessons start. All the changes to the timetable. I’ll provide your paper, ink, books. Find you a bed, or a lady to wash your collars and socks. The usual services.’ He winked.

  ‘I do not need such services,’ I replied. ‘I am not a student.’

  He raised his hand to stop me. ‘But you are looking for a student. A man who is interested in Kant. Is that it?’ He edged forward, lowering his voice. ‘You are searching for somebody who is a little . . . elusive, let’s say. Well, that is more unusual, more costly. Five thalers, sir. Just five thalers, and I will tell you where you can find a man who is interested in Kant, but does not choose to register at the Albertina.’

  I thought I could guess where he intended sending me.

  ‘You cannot believe,’ I objected, ‘that any Kantian would try to work his way through the chaos of the Kantstudiensaal?’

  ‘You know it already, do you?’ he said, and he seemed disappointed.

  I had been to visit Kant’s archive the previous year. The money that Kant had left in his will for the conservation and arrangement of his papers, books and publications had been woefully misspent. I had never seen such a disorganised tip. Serge Lavedrine and I had spent a night searching through the so-called ‘archive’ for a paper that Professor Kant had written in his youth. Before we could even start, we had had to drag the archivist in a drunken stupor from a tavern.