Death in Breslau

by Marek Krajewski

  “I’ve got some new, important information for you …”

  The host entered the hall and indicated for Anwaldt to do the same, after which he dismissed the sleepy servant. The spacious, panel-covered room was hung with portraits of the von der Maltens. Anwaldt did not see sternness and gravity in them but rather cunning and vanity. He looked around – in vain – for a chair. The Baron made as if not to notice.

  “What do you want to tell me about this case that’s new? I had lunch with Counsellor Mock today so I am more or less up to date. What could have happened this evening?”

  Anwaldt lit a cigarette and, for lack of an ashtray, shook the ash on to the polished floor.

  “And so Counsellor Mock told you about the Yesidi’s vengeance. Did he mention that the vengeance had not been wholly fulfilled?”

  “Yes. ‘The mistake of an old demented shaman,’ ” he quoted Hartner. “Did you come to see me, drunk as you are, at four o’clock in the morning to ask me about my conversation with Mock?”

  Anwaldt scrutinized the Baron and noticed quite a few shortcomings in his dress: the button on his vest, the strings of his long johns slipping out from under the dressing gown. He burst out laughing and stayed in this strange, doubled-up position for a while. He imagined the elderly gentleman sitting on the toilet and panting heavily, when here comes his drunken little son and destroys the sacred peace of the elegant residence. Laughter was still contorting his lips when he let loose words, swollen with anger:

  “Dear Papi, we both know that the dervish’s revelations are startingly consistent with family realities. The unofficial ones, of course. The god of the Yesidis has finally grown impatient and taken bastards into account. On the other hand, how is it that in this knightly family no warrior inseminated any captive, no landowner got hold of a comely peasant girl in a haystack? All were temperate and faithful to their marriage vows. Even my dear Papi. After all, he begat me before getting married.”

  “I would not joke in your position, Herbert,” the Baron’s tone was inalterably haughty – but his face had shrunk. In one moment he had changed from a proud junker to a fearful old man. His neatly combed hair had slipped to the sides, his lips sunk to reveal the absence of dentures.

  “I don’t wish you to call me by my first name,” Anwaldt had stopped smiling. “Why didn’t you tell me everything at the beginning?”

  The father and son stood face to face. Delicate streaks of dawn began to creep into the hall. The Baron remembered the June nights of 1902 when he would creep into the servants’ quarters, and the sheets – drenched with sweat – when he left; he remembered the disciplinary whipping which Ruppert von der Malten had personally bestowed on his twenty-year-old son; he remembered Hanne Schlossarczyk’s terrified looks as she left the lordly residence, literally booted out by the servants. He broke the ringing silence with a matter-of-fact answer.

  “I found out about the Yesidi’s curse today. And I wanted to tell you about our close relationship were the investigation to come to a dead stop. That would have encouraged you to go on.”

  “Close relationship … (Do you have a relative, asked the tutor, even a distant one? Pity, you could have spent Christmas away from the orphanage at least once.) Even now you’re a hypocrite. You can’t call it by its name. It’s not enough for you to have dropped me off in some refuge, paying nine years of fees at a secondary school: an offering for your peace of mind. How much did you pay that merchant from Poznań, Anwald, for his name? How much did you pay my mother to forget? How many marks does corrupting a conscience cost? But it called out in the end. It shouted: summon Anwaldt to Breslau. He’ll be useful. He happens to be a policeman so let him lead the investigation into his sister’s murder. But I’ll tell him about the family ties to mobilize him, right? Conscience is conscience, but practicalism is practicalism. Was it always like that with the von der Maltens?”

  “What you call practicalism,” the Baron proudly raised his eyes to the portraits of his ancestors, “I would term family pride. I summoned you to catch your sister’s murderer and avenge her terrible death. As a brother you had the absolute right to do so …”

  Anwaldt pulled out his gun, released the safety catch and aimed at the head of the first ancestor in the gallery. He pulled the trigger. The dry crack of the firing-pin resounded. He started to rummage through his pockets feverishly. The Baron caught him lightly by the shoulder, but quickly removed his hand. The policeman looked at him with hazy eyes.

  “I can’t stand … German Yesidi …”

  The Baron drew himself up as taut as a string. They continued to stand face to face in the misty, orange glow.

  “Please behave correctly and hear me out to the end. I told you about our family pride. It results from centuries of tradition, from the history of our ancestors. All that would cease to exist. My death would mean the end of the family, the last, Silesian branch of the von der Maltens would dry up.” He grabbed Anwaldt by the shoulders and spun him round so that the elegant, syphilitic faces gyrated. “But in this way our family will continue to exist in the person of Herbert von der Malten.”

  Suddenly, he ran up to the wall and took down a somewhat jagged sword with a golden hilt embossed with mother of pearl. Holding it on outstretched arms, he approached Anwaldt. He looked at him for a moment, holding back his emotions. As a man should. As a knight should.

  “Forgive me, son,” he bowed his head. “Gaze at all this around you. You are heir to it. Receive our coat of arms and our sacred family symbol, the sword of our great-grandfather Bolek von der Malten, a knight of the Thirty Year War. Bury it in the murderer’s heart. Avenge your sister.”

  Anwaldt received the sword ceremoniously. He stood astride and bowed his head as if he were going to be anointed. From his lips emerged a thin, derisive giggle.

  “Dear Father, your pathos makes me laugh. Did the von der Maltens always talk like that? I speak far more simply: I’m called Herbert Anwaldt, I’ve got nothing to do with you and I don’t give a damn about this pantheon of yours, which you’re going to end. I’m going to start my own. I’m going to give it a beginning, I, the bastard of a Polish chambermaid and an unknown father. So what? Nobody will know about it in seven centuries, and corrupt chroniclers will write up a polished life history. But I have to live, start my own family. And my life means the extinction of the von der Malten family. My life will blossom on your ruin. Do you like the metaphor?”

  He raised the sword and struck. The skin on the Baron’s head split, revealing the bare bone of the skull. Blood stuck to the neatly combed hair. Von der Malten threw himself on the stairs with the cry: “Police!”

  “I am the police,” Anwaldt climbed the stairs in his father’s tracks. The old man tripped and fell. He thought he was lying on a wet sheet in the servants’ stuffy quarters. The beige carpet covering the stairs sucked in the brownish-red gore. The pitiful strings of his long johns wound around the leather slippers.

  “I beg you, don’t kill me … You’ll go to prison … but here you’ve got a fortune …”

  “ ‘I am relentless and cannot be bought’ replies death.” Anwaldt rested the sword’s blade under the Baron’s rib. “You know that treatise? It was created when your ancestor Godfryd cut into the bellies of Arabian virgins with his Durendal.” He felt the blade hit upon an obstacle. He realized it had got stuck in the carpet. Behind the Baron’s back.

  He left the trembling sword and curled-up body on the stairs and turned to face the old servant who had been watching the spectacle with dumb horror.

  “Look, old man, here the knight Heribert the Invincible von Anwaldt has punished the lecherous one, the follower of Satan, the Yesidi … Give me the scorpions and we’ll fulfil the eternal prophecy … Aren’t they here? … Wait …”

  As Anwaldt, on all fours, was searching for scorpions on the floor, the Baron’s chauffeur, Hermann Wuttke, appeared in the hall and, without second thoughts, grabbed a heavy, silver candlestick. The sun was rising. The people of Bre
slau looked up at the sky and cursed yet another stifling day.

  † “Man pure, by crime untouched.” (Horace, Hymns 1, 22, 1)

  XVI

  OPPELN, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13TH, 1934

  NINE O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

  The Breslau–Oppeln train was two minutes late, which to Mock, who was used to the punctuality of German trains, seemed unpardonable. (It’s no surprise that in a state governed by Austrian sergeants, everything breaks down.) The train slowly drew in to the platform. Mock saw a man in a carriage window laughing and gesticulating wildly to he did not know whom. He glanced at Smolorz. He, too, had noticed the jester; he dashed towards the waiting room with the high, ornamental vault. The train came to a halt. Mock spied Erkin in the same window and right behind him the grinning man helping a lady take down a heavy suitcase. Erkin jumped briskly out of the carriage and made towards the waiting room. The jester threw the travelling valise of the unpleasantly surprised lady roughly on to the platform and swiftly followed him.

  There were only a few travellers in the waiting room. The Turk walked towards the underground tunnel leading to the city. The way down was divided lengthwise by an iron barrier. He walked down on the right. After years of living in Germany, he had managed to get to know Prussian “Ordnung” so that, on seeing a man climbing in the opposite direction yet on the right hand side of the barrier and against the current, his hand instinctively flew to his inside pocket where he kept a gun. After a moment, he withdrew it. The man was nearing Erkin, manoeuvring his body in such a way as not to deviate from a straight line. Parallel to the drunkard, but on the correct side of the barrier, walked four S.S.-men and a hunched pen-pusher in a hat. The drunkard got close to Erkin and blocked his way. Swaying to all sides, he was attempting to put a crooked cigarette in his mouth. The Turk, laughing to himself at his suspicions, said he did not have a light and tried to pass him, but he felt such a powerful blow to his stomach that he had to double over. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the S.S.-men leaping over the barrier. He did not have time to lean against the wall before they came up to him from the back. The abusive lady approached, tugging her heavy suitcase. The stocky man in a tight coat and a hat shoved her roughly aside. In his hand, he held a revolver. Erkin slipped his hand into his pocket, but it was the last move he managed to make. Pushed forcefully, he fell on to the barrier and hung there a moment. Two of the S.S.-men pressed him down and the pen-pusher aimed a terrible blow with a rubber truncheon. Erkin did not lose consciousness, but grew numb. He saw the stocky man in the overly tight coat walk up slowly, reassuring the Railway Protection Officer by holding up his identification. He was grinning broadly. The office worker with the rubber truncheon, clearly enraged by the mediocre results of his first blow, pursed his lips and took another, mighty swing.

  OPPELN, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 14TH, 1934

  ONE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  The wind blew through the gaps in the garage door. The cold restored Erkin’s consciousness. He was in an unnatural half-sitting position, both hands handcuffed to iron grips protruding from the wall. He shuddered with the cold. He was naked. Blood had coagulated over his eyes. Through a red fog, he saw the stocky man. Mock walked up to him and said quietly:

  “The day has finally come, Erkin. Who will avenge poor Marietta von der Malten? I will. You can understand that very well, can’t you? Vengeance, after all, is your sacred duty. I really do like your customs as far as vengeance is concerned.” Mock searched his pockets and pulled a disappointed face.

  “I have no hornets or scorpions with me. Somehow I forgot them. But, you know, your death is going to be like Marietta’s in one respect. You won’t be a virgin any more …” he glanced to the side. A man emerged from the darkness. In a face covered with pustules, burned tiny eyes. A shudder ran through the Turk. It ran through him again when he heard the clatter of a belt buckle and the sound of trousers being lowered.

  Schlesische Tageszeitung, July 22nd, 1934, p.1

  THE MISERABLE DEATH OF A MASON

  On Thursday, in the early hours of the morning, Baron Olivier von der Malten, one of the founders and members of the Freemasons’ Lodge, “Horus”, was killed in his residence on Eichen-Allee 13, Breslau. The killer is his illegitimate son Herbert Anwaldt from Berlin. According to witness Mattias Döring, the Baron’s butler, Anwaldt arrived at von der Malten’s residence in the night so as to impart some important news to the Baron. According to our informant, he had that very day learned that he was the Baron’s unlawful son and it was on that subject that he had wanted to talk to him at this unusual hour. The despair of a rejected child, the strong feelings of a scorned foundling, took the upper hand over reason, and Anwaldt, after a sharp altercation, pierced his father-not-father with a stiletto and was then incapacitated by H. Wuttke, the Baron’s chauffeur, who practically battered the killer to death with a candlestick. The accused, in a very serious condition, was taken to the University Clinic where he will remain under police surveillance.

  One conclusion can be drawn from this sad story; Freemasons are morally dirty. They should be eliminated from society.

  Tygodnik Ilustrowany, December 7th, 1934,

  p.3 (frag. from article Abyss of Foolishness)

  … Our western neighbours are using all they can in their campaign against the Jews and Freemasons, even the most repulsive of crimes. Here is an example. Last month, a mentally ill policeman murdered, in Breslau, a generally respected aristocrat, a member of the Freemasons’ Lodge, “Horus”, whom he considered to be his own father. Newspapers which are loudspeakers of German propaganda, such as the Völkischer Beobachter, are bursting with anti-Masonic hysteria. The alleged father (there is no mention of the mother) is presented as being scum who threw his own child into a cesspool; the latter, on the other hand, is considered by all and sundry as the just one who had avenged his own father’s wrongs. The effect is such that the demented knifeman, after a tribunal farce, has been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

  Breslauer Neueste Nachrichten, November 29th, 1934, p.1

  PATRICIDE CONVICTED TO TWO YEARS’ IMPRISONMENT

  After a trial lasting almost four months, former Criminal Assistant Herbert Anwaldt – whom the people call the bastard-avenger – has been convicted to two years’ imprisonment and, on his release, to compulsory psychiatric care for the murder of his father, Baron Olivier von der Malten. The court, when presenting its grounds for such a conviction, pointed to the burning harm caused to his child – raised in an orphanage – by the well-known aristocrat and liberal philanthropist. This discordance between the Baron’s words and his actions, his glaringly heinous injustice, appeared – to the court – to partially justify the crime committed under severe provocation by Anwaldt, who suffers a nervous disorder …

  Breslauer Zeitung, December 17th, 1934

  FAREWELL TO HEAD OF CRIMINAL DEPARTMENT OF BRESLAU POLICE, EBERHARD MOCK. MERITORIOUS POLICEMAN TAKES ANOTHER STATE POSITION

  Today, to the sound of marches played by the garrison orchestra, Breslau’s Police Praesidium bid a ceremonious farewell to Director Eberhard Mock, who is to take over a different government post. Mock, plainly moved, said goodbye to the institution with which he had been associated since youth. We have unofficially learned that he is not leaving the city which owes him so much …

  Schlesische Tageszeitung, September 18th, 1936, p.1

  AVENGER RELEASED FROM PRISON TODAY

  Today a large crowd of Breslau’s citizens waited outside the prison on Kletschkau Strasse for Herbert Anwaldt, perpetrator of the memorable vengeance bestowed on Freemason Olivier von der Malten, his unlawful father. Some of those present at this greeting held banners with anti-Masonic slogans. It is praiseworthy that the people of our city react so actively to the blatant injustice dealt by some crypto-Masonic judge in convicting this righteous man to two full years of imprisonment.

  Anwaldt was released at twelve o’clock and was immediately driven away in an awaiting car to
– as we learned – a certain clinic where, in accordance with the court’s verdict, compulsory hospitalization awaits him. This verdict must be changed! The liquidator of Freemasons deserves a medal, not a stint in a psychiatric hospital. His action was proof of a great presence of mind. Jews and Freemasons! Don’t make a madman of this honest German!

  XVII

  BRESLAU, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12TH, 1934

  TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  The monstrous, modernistic office block on the corner of Ring and Blücherplatz, where the administration of many municipal offices and a bank were housed, was equipped with an unusual lift. It was made up of numerous small single cubicles, one above the other, strung as if on a rope. This pulley was constantly on the move so that people entered and left the small, open cubicles in flight. If someone was lost in thought and did not get out on time, they would pass through the attic or basement in perfect safety. Complete darkness would suddenly fall, and the cubicle, shuddering and grating, would move – with the help of massive chains – horizontally, after which it found itself appropriately vertical again. As soon as the reinforced concrete monster had been built, this lift was the cause of much excitement, especially among the children who overpopulated the surrounding dirty streets and dilapidated yards. Caretakers had their work cut out for them and little rascals had their heads full of ideas as to how to outwit them.

  That day, caretaker Hans Barwick was particularly vigilant because, since morning, several scamps had been trying to make the exciting journey through the floors, attic and basement. He observed each entering client carefully and a moment earlier a man, his hat pulled over his brow and wearing a leather coat, had arrived. Barwick had wanted to check his identification but rapidly had changed his mind: dealing with such an individual foretold inevitable problems. A few minutes later, he was passed by a policeman whom he knew, Max Forstner. Barwick had first met him the previous year when giving a statement concerning a case which involved an unsuccessful bank robbery and since then had greeted Forstner with great deference. He did this every Friday, since on that day this official regularly visited the bank for reasons unknown to Barwick.