Slipping the ring on to his finger, the doctor was pleased to notice it still fitted, despite the detrimental effects of good living on his physiognomy. I’m a lucky man, he thought, I have a wife who still throws me the same impassioned glances she did fourteen years ago. I have two beautiful daughters. My surgery is thriving to the point where I am grateful to every snowstorm that grants me some much needed rest. My name is respected even by my few enemies, and my studies in Lavoisier’s chemistry have won acclaim far beyond the borders of East Prussia.
From upstairs his children’s noisy laughter, followed by the sound of his wife’s stern admonishments delivered in the tones of all-embracing maternal love, confirmed the family’s bliss.
Götz put the last of the liniment bottles back in the cupboard and locked it. On the laboratory bench, beside the vertical volta batteries he’d recently purchased for curing Königsberg’s middle-class wives of their migraines, stood his pocket lens from his years at the faculty. On impulse he placed the ring under the lens and turned on the reflector. A miniature world stood revealed. Grains of sand, dust particles, microscopic air bubbles, the insect’s larvae so minute he could only now detect it with the naked eye. Two thousand years had passed, he thought, since, melted by a merciless neolithic sun, the amber had trickled down a tree trunk, bearing with it into the future a fragment of the past, a beetle. And this prehistoric hostage had borne witness to the fact that there had at least been no change in nature’s struggle for fundamental harmony. Enthralled by the beauty of the amber, the doctor allowed himself to sink into a daydream – of threatening Viking ships, of horse-borne Crusaders and Hanseatic Cogs on their way up the River Pregel to trade their amber with the savage Prussians. There was my cradle, he thought, the world where I – a direct descendant of the Astias, Prussians or Russ settlers on whom the scholar in me cannot but have its reflections – was born into a family of merchants and doctors; an offspring of amber collectors brought to the Christian faith in the final moments of the Middle Ages by Adalbert of Prague, Bruno von Querfort, Hermann von Salsa or some other crusading knight of the legendary Order of the Sword. My ancestors, thought Götz with a blasphemous shiver, worshipped animals and ancestral spirits, bent the knee to wooden idols in sacred groves, chanting ecstatically over the bodies of sacrificed slaves who might well have hung from the offspring of the very same tree whose resin is now lying there in its silver setting and revealing itself under my pocket lens. They had also sacrificed the misshapen, the deformed, the hare-lipped, the deaf and the blind, even the younger of each pair of male twins.
At the back of his mind he also smiled at love’s sublime music coming from upstairs as his wife and her chambermaid began putting the children to bed. Pomerania, Galinden, Natangen, his mental excursion went on; in those legendary lands my forefathers were collectors of amber, great hunters and horsemen, spoken of with dread by Gallus Anonymus, with longing by Ibrahim ibn Jakub (he who travelled to the land of Slavonians on behalf of the Spanish Moors and had fallen in love with one of the big-bosomed women the savages had made him a present of), who had earned respectful mention in the Madgeburg Annals, been mystically revered in Thietmar von Merseburg’s Cronica and been accorded a crusader’s frigid military salute by Peter von Duisburg in the documents of his Order.
Amazed by the wealth of detail in these overwhelming dreamy historical images, Dr Götz’s attention drifted from the inner to the outer vision as he came back to reality – the missing jaw, the over-dimensioned skull section of a monstrous insect – magnified twenty times over by the optics of his pocket lens. They made him shudder.
Lifting his gaze from the lens, he let the last traces of his daydream disperse. In the street the sound of hooves could just be heard, followed by a sleigh bell. “Anyone who presents himself in such a gale at this hour,” he thought, “must be out on an urgent errand indeed.”
It was Franzceska Beyer, the Götz’s maid-cum-nanny since the arrival of their youngest daughter Elizabeth seven years earlier, who opened the front door to the woman who was defying the snowstorm that night. As far as she would later recall, she had instantly realised – despite being half blinded by the Arctic winds, advancing from their cradle in the Gulf of Bothnia and howling and roaring like a wolfpack down the central quarters of the ancient city of Königsbert – it was a very young girl, moreover one of easy virtue. Yet she was clad as if for mid-May, wore saffron yellow shoes, a cock’s plume in her hat, and over her shoulders only a loosely buttoned Venetian cloak.
“Can I speak to Dr Götz?” she asked, shivering. “It’s urgent. A matter of life and death.”
Franzceska felt sorry for the girl’s light clothing and her face’s deathly pallor. Amid a perfumed cloud of musks and ambergris soaps she admitted her to the hallway, and saw through a gap in her outdoor garments that, save for a lace corset, she was virtually naked.
“In Jesu name,” she said, pointing to the hall tabouret, “do sit down. I’ll fetch the doctor and get you some tea to warm yourself.”
Two minutes later when Dr Götz appeared, together with the maid and likewise his wife Catherine, whose sixth sense never failed to pick up anything of note happening in the house, the girl had collapsed in sobs on the floor. Together they lifted her up. But scarcely had they placed her on the seat than she jumped up again, shouting, “There’s nothing wrong with me! It’s the Polish girl! She’s dying in childbed, and as Miss Vogel’s having a baby too and Madam Schall asked me to take the sledge to the doctor’s, and seeing as how you two are old acquaintances and known for saving the lives of both rich and poor without taking them in any special order . . .”
The girl’s hysteria released the doctor from his recollections of that part of his youth he believed was forever kept secretly screened off by a shield of family love. For it was his wife who bade him run and get his bag while she tried to calm the girl.
Taking the steps down to his surgery two at a time, Götz retrieved his emergency bag from its brass hook behind the door, and since it was a question of a delivery, supplemented its contents with two lancets, his tongs, styptic ointments, a dozen bandages and cotton compresses, plus a newly purchased and hitherto unopened bottle of laudanum. While he was busy with all this, he noticed the ring was still on his finger and – without being able to explain it or put up the slightest resistance – again let himself succumb to the kind of shameful excitement he had enjoyed in the distant past in the Sackheim district as a regular weekend client of Madam Schall’s love nest, known in those days as: Your House of Desires.
That had been during his student years in Albertina, before the ball arranged by Königsberg’s cavalry officers at which he first met Catherine Mahlsdorf and behind the dinner hall’s damask curtain had given her the clandestine kiss which deprived him for ever of any desire for the kind of love one pays for. He recalled the women of six nationalities who travelled with the army’s baggage train who, between the wars, had been taken on at Madam Schall’s and who had let their daughters run amok in that enormous building, until such time as they were considered old enough to be sold to the highest bidder. He recalled a negress from the French colonies with cocoa-coloured skin and hair fuzzy as steel wool. Allegedly a Yoruba princess, one rumour had it she had been sold as a slave to the Russian tsarina before running away with a Dutch adventurer, who eventually lost her at dice to Madam Schall. He recalled with distaste the auctioning off of a weeping nine year old whose maidenhead was won in the end by a sailor. With similar excitement he called to mind the enormous grey-haired Agrafena Nehludova, a Russian woman who, surrounded by an endless array of soaps, perfumes, eaux de cologne and smelling salts, had lain, naked and audibly fermenting, on a divan that was a sea of satins and linen, in an undergrowth of flower vases, jewellery, hairpins, mirrors, obscene prints and love letters written on vanilla paper by ecstatic admirers of every age and class of society, and had received clients young enough to be her children, or, come to that, grandchildren. One evening, bewitched by th
e deep-red rose behind her ear and the sanctimonious smile that, after their copulation, seemed to promise him eternal life, Götz had himself boarded her ship of Olympian lechery, no less inebriated by a bottle of Malvoisie than by her odour of Havana snuff and debauchery. It was said she had not got up from her encampment for more than two decades – a rumour, culled from love’s mythologies, which Götz had never found reason to disbelieve. For never among all the evenings he had visited the establishment had he once seen her lift her massive anatomy from that erotic divan where, between amorous interludes, her goose quill replied to love letters or else she languorously vegetated with a pinch of snuff. Together with gonorrhoea, she had been the most unchanging feature of that establishment, where the girls came and went like migrant birds.
The doctor let his recollections of past excitements evaporate, again took hold of his professional self and found he had put the ring down, though he couldn’t recall where. When he left his surgery it was with the strange conviction that he would never find it again, and that Fate, in some inexplicable way, had linked this with the delivery awaiting him in Königsberg’s most celebrated whorehouse.
In the hallway, meanwhile, Catherine Götz, assisted by the maid, had given the girl a glass of linden tea and wrapped her in a woollen shawl. The colour had returned to her cheeks. Now she was sitting hunched up on the tabouret, the glass of tea cupped in her hands, her gaze fixed on some spot on the carpet that could equally have been a point on her inner horizon.
Drawing her husband aside as she helped him on with his fur coat, fox-fur gloves and intricate button boots, Catherine Götz whispered as she handed him his walking stick with the silver ferrule, “You’ll have to explain all this about the Schall woman’s establishment, Johan, as soon as you get home. I didn’t think we had any secrets between us, either from our life together or the past.”
Götz noticed a tear in the corner of her eye; a tear she brushed his hand from when he tried to wipe it away.
“A whore!” she said in a voice meant to sound contemptuous but which failed to hide an innate sympathy for the vulnerable. “Thank goodness the children are in bed. If you weren’t bound by your Hippocratic oath I shouldn’t let you go there.”
Götz let her button up his fur coat right to the collar and put on his hat and lawn scarf before picking up his bag and going over to the girl. “Hurry,” he said, “or we’ll have the coachman’s life on our conscience in addition to the rest of this miserable business . . .”
The snowstorm was the worst within living memory; worse than the winter gales from Siberia that had ravaged the Bay of Danzig around the turn of the century. A flurry of snowflakes the size of half-crowns was blowing in with full gale force from the Baltic. So thickly wrapped up was the coachman that only the tip of his nose stuck out from his leather hood. The horses, Götz noticed as they drove off, had lost all sense of direction, and it was only instinct that prevented them trotting straight into the wall of the next house. The girl, buried under a mountain of rugs, her hair sprinkled with snow, sat opposite him.
“Tell me,” he demanded, “what has happened?”
As the sleigh moved along Königsberg’s snow-covered alleys, the doctor heard in outline of the misfortune that had driven the girl into the gale. One of Madam Schall’s girls had been in labour for more than forty hours, and her strength was giving out. From this account of the labour pains Götz realised that contractions had set in, but couldn’t be clear as to whether the birth itself was overdue.
“The head’s too big,” the girl said, in a voice that seemed not to trust its message. “The head’s too big, I saw it with my own eyes.”
Götz found it hard to believe the birth could have gone that far and then stopped. Probably the severity of the woman’s pains, he told himself, was due to a narrow pelvis. It transpired that this was her first childbirth. At the same time, the girl explained, shouting to make herself heard above the wind’s diabolical howling, another girl was giving birth in the next room. So it was a question of two deliveries, one normal, one with complications. Apparently the establishment had had no-one else to turn to.
Götz recalled an older woman who acted as a midwife and maybe even, in secret, as a baby farmer, though on that point he might be deceiving himself. Despite everything, his memories from those days lay blessedly in fallow, in a fifteen-year deep soil of premarital urges he had no desire to dig any deeper into than he’d already done this evening. When had the waters broken, he asked. The girl wasn’t sure. “The head’s too big,” was all she could volunteer, as if the words kept going round and round in her mind.
As far as Götz could make out, the sleigh was moving southwards, along Langgasse. The snow had eased up a little, but there was no change in the gale’s force. In Schloss Strasse a lamplighter was fighting an heroic battle to carry out his duty, and further down from Kneiphof Island bells could be heard tolling in the cathedral tower. The doctor wondered what the reason could be for ringing bells at the height of a snowstorm. The question baffled him enough to make him lean forward and ask the driver.
“Ain’t ye heard, sir?” the driver shouted back. “The Provincial Council has decided to go to war against Bonaparte. Which means more bloodbaths, and that’s for sure.”
Götz sank back into his rugs, and for a while his attention strayed from the call of duty and the girl in the sleigh, sobbing at the thought of her friend’s plight. It was a rumour Götz had heard a week ago, but hardly credited. Encouraged by the Russian successes, the Prussian nobility had decided to revolt against the Frenchman’s new order of things.
Painful shudders passed through the doctor when he thought back to the three campaigns he had served in, only just coming through them alive, the worst of them being Austerlitz, where the East Prussian grenadiers had been crushed by Marshal Davout’s divisions. He was still being tormented by nightmares from that battlefield, the terrible wounds caused by the French guns, the bayonet wounds, punctured lungs and intestines, limbs shot away, legs blown to pieces, burns that had made full-grown men cry like babies, scream for their mothers, suck their thumbs and die. In the field ambulances they’d worked in shifts carrying out operations, waded up to their ankles in an indescribable slush of blood, excrement and amputated limbs, all in an unbearable atmosphere of lethal anxiety and meaningless prayers that could cause the most hardbitten to faint. Yet it was true, what his immediate superior had afterwards said to him over a glass of port wine in a Berlin officers’ club: without all those deaths and our faithful body snatchers we wouldn’t be saving so many lives today.
They had become masters at staunching bleedings, sewing up cuts and slashes, removing shattered arms and flinging them on to a heap, at amputating with only a shot of brandy and a quiet prayer to numb the pain. But the price, Götz now understood from his nightmares, was a terror that wouldn’t leave them until the day when they themselves said goodbye to life. For terror it was that shadowed them after all these wars.
And now, he thought, seated in the sleigh bound for the love nest of his happy-go-lucky youth, the church bells ringing in his ears, now they were all set to go to war again, if only to reinstate their Prussian honour. That was why they – Count Yorck, Alexander zu Dohna-Schobitten and Baron Hardenberg – had ordered the bells to ring out through this blizzard, to get the King, hiding with his court at Memel, to show some courage.
In a cloud of whirling snow they drove on down Prinsenstrasse, Götz winning his duel with his horrific memories by thinking about Immanuel Kant, who had lived in a house on this street during his student years, and always been so punctual to the minute that people had set their watches by him. Awakened by his lame servant, who, so rumour had it, was under strict orders not to let his master go back to sleep even for ten minutes, even if he begged, Kant had risen at exactly a quarter to five every morning. In the evening, so another rumour went, this same servant would roll him ingeniously up in four patchwork quilts for him to pass the night, motionless as a mummy, be
cause the philosopher maintained this enriched his dreams and stimulated his imagination. At nine o’clock sharp the light was put out.
Affected by the thought of Kant’s chronomania, Götz took out his silver watch and saw that it was past ten o’clock. They should reach the establishment in a quarter of an hour at most.
The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred Page 2
