Brushing some snowflakes from his face, he stared out at the row of façades behind which the city’s wealthier businessmen sat counting their day’s takings; men who had also visited Madam Schall’s establishment in years gone by, and whose sons might possibly have fathered the infants he was now being called out to deliver. Could there be some connection, he wondered, between objects and events? As between the amber with the beetle in it, this uprising against Bonaparte and the delivery just now awaiting him in the House of Desires, for instance?
Madam Schall received him without a flicker of recognition. A characteristic piece of discretion, Götz assumed, developed over more than three decades in her trade, first as a common prostitute, then as a hostess and, finally, after many diligent intrigues and much saving up, as proprietress of the establishment and all its chattels, and with half a dozen girls in her debt for the rest of their lives. She had aged more than he might have imagined. In his day she’d been a striking woman who could as easily have been thirty as fifty, wearng a dress with a bustle and forever busy with her household accounts or calling in cash due from those who had enjoyed her services on tick. Now she was, at best, an ageless old woman.
“Thank goodness you could come, doctor,” she said. “The girl’s in a bad way. I hope you don’t think it inappropriate, but we’ve sent for a priest.”
Götz gave an embarrassed nod. “Just show me the way,” he said. “Science can’t wait for the extreme unction.”
They passed through a hall where time had stood still since his last visit. Its wallpapers were painted with the same frivolous Pompeiian motifs where everyone was hard at it with everyone else. In the windows hung the same white satin curtains, intended to create an atmosphere of cleanliness and luxury. But it was gloomier now than it had been. Before the turn of the century the brothel had been a playground for unmarried men in delirious mood. Laughter had echoed as a myriad customers hailed each other in a dozen tongues. In the doorways to their rooms half-naked women had whispered to their clients in the language of love, promising with indecent gestures to satisfy their most secret desires, assuage their gnawing hunger, their burning thirst, undressing them with their eyes and teasing them like children by snatching at their hats. On summer evenings Madam Schall had arranged masquerade balls. In the garden where Chinese lanterns, likewise painted with obscene motifs, had hung from the fruit trees, grown men had played hide-and-seek in the dark, naked men chased girls across the lawns, all in a spirit of joyful abandon, as if life consisted of suffering and humanity’s ultimate consolation lay in escaping unclothed into a game of hide-and-seek. Now only a gloom of inverse strength prevailed; or was it he himself who had changed and was seeing everything now with a newly acquired clear-sightedness – the furniture that had seen better days; the grubby tablecloths; the parlour table formerly laid with Meissen china, but now more likely populated with germs.
Upstairs he took in at a glance the room that was to etch itself for ever on his memory. On the bedside table lay the morocco jewellery box with its cheap trinkets, the enamel washbowl, the pitcher and the folded damask napkins which constituted every prostitute’s basic accoutrements.
In a bowl by the bed lay some oiled satin condoms, not to prevent pregnancy – on this point the girls still preferred coitus interruptus and herbal ointments from the Lithuanian market women – but to prevent diseases, some absolutely incurable and others that brought with them a slow putrefaction but spread such irritation to the brain that the victim died at one of the city’s lunatic asylums in a purgatory of indescribable itchings. In a wardrobe hung sinfully low-cut nightdresses. In a drawer lay underclothes in cambrics of seven different colours. On the dressing table stood a battery of soaps, perfumes, oils and pomades, and in the middle of the room, pale unto death, in a bed with a silken sheet covering her pudenda, lay the girl.
Götz set her age at about twenty though his unconscious conferred on her the qualities of an ageless angel. She was blonde, in the Slavonic way, with red streaks in her untidy knot of hair. Putting down his bag, he felt her pulse. She was hardly alive. Her breath came in intermittent gasps. Her feverish forehead was burning hot.
A movement from the other side of the room made him turn. It was the clergyman.
“Prepare yourself for a shock, doctor,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Whatever it may be, it won’t live long, thank God.”
Götz noticed the priest’s bag was like his own, filled, presumably, with implements for deliverance of the soul rather than the flesh: biblical words, sacramental wafers and bottles containing oils for the extreme unction. The man’s presence irritated him. Not just because he regarded himself as defending – as he often put it – the island of science against the stormy ocean of superstitions and metaphysics; or because he embodied the opposite of the commonsense atheism he, the doctor, cultivated, albeit in secret so as not to scare the daylights out of Catherine Götz or confuse his children and fill them with anxiety at a sensitive age. But more out of a feeling that this was a breach of etiquette; that this man in black spent his life wishing to high heaven what Götz himself wanted to keep firmly planted on earth.
Lifting the sheet, he recoiled instinctively from a sight that in all its monstrous detail was to haunt him to his dying day half a century later in the Age of Steam.
The child, which by some miracle had succeeded in getting itself halfway out into the world, was nothing but a quintessence of human deformity. So grotesquely large was the skull emerging from the birth canal that it had split the woman’s pelvis. He could scarcely bring himself to look at the face turned towards him. The harelip was such that neither nose nor nostrils existed. In the centre of the child’s face leered a dark red cavity, like a bowl whose lacerated edge ended at eye level. On the bald head were strange protruberances reminiscent of black fossilised snails. The tongue was split like a snake’s. Bumps and swellings disfigured the temples, the mottled skin was scaly like a lizard’s. It was a monster.
Götz had to close his eyes to keep his composure. The girl was probably beyond saving. Judging by the sheets, she must already have lost several litres of blood. Her deep unconsciousness bordered on coma. Her pelvic and stomach muscles had ceased to function, so there was no chance of getting the delivery going by natural contractions. For a moment Götz thought of delivering the child with the scalpel, but rejected the idea since, in her weakened state, it would put the mother beyond saving.
He took out lancets and scissors, disinfected his instruments. The girl’s heartbeat was so faint that at least it would not cause yet more excessive bleeding. Drenched in his own sweat, Götz cut open her vagina. His only thought was to at least save the life of this creature that, by its own force, had thrust its head out into the world. It was a miracle, he thought, the birth even having got this far, that the head could have left the womb without killing the girl instantly. All the time he worked, her pulse was growing weaker, but by now the vaginal opening was so large he could pull the child out without having to use the forceps. As if from far away in another world he heard the clergyman mumbling a prayer, preparing to bless this whore about whom neither of them knew a thing, but whom everyone realised was lost.
Slowly, centimetre by centimetre, he pulled out the child. What was supposed to be a face, he noticed, had a bluish flush, the umbilical cord having wound itself several times round the child’s neck as if nature had at the last moment opted for a mercy killing. Götz cut it and went on easing the body this way and that, the woman’s breathing meanwhile sinking so low it could barely support life. The deformities revealed themselves successively as he drew the child into the world.
Exterior ears there were none, and the auditory channels were overgrown by layers of some kind of petrified skin. The child was probably deaf.
Since the child had shown no sign of life, the doctor was struck by the thought that it might already be dead. The closed eyelids did not stir. It did not cry. Now he could see the child’s whole body
. On its shoulders were protuberances he took for arms and hands, but which reminded him rather of parboiled roots from a very small plant. In a jumble of thoughts which banished his disgust but put pressure on his medical ethic, Dr Götz worked on. Should he make an intentional mistake? Why not? What good would this life be, and if allowed to live, what future did it have? And for how long; and at what cost of suffering?
His hands’ tactile sense took up the thought his mind refused to grasp: the protruberances, the lumps, the deformed chest indicative of underdeveloped lungs. The infant’s back, he noticed, was covered with black hair as thick as a kid goat’s. It’s more animal, he thought, than human being.
By now the body was quite free, and he could see it was a boy. So far only the genitals seemed normal, almost unrealistically so, without deformities. Someone behind him was talking about the girl. The poor creature was an orphan from some Slavonic minority, whatever that meant after Poland’s partition. On a trip to Danzig Madam Schall had found her begging in the streets and taken pity on her. In the three years she’d been working in the brothel she had managed to save up a little money, intending sooner or later to return to her home village. Who was the father? Uncertain. Probably an officer; they used to like her way of surrendering to their whims. Not that Götz heard any of this, or that they were already speaking of her in the past tense. He was working feverishly.
The legs, he saw with a certain relief, were better developed than the arms. A dwarf’s legs, but if he survived he’d be able to walk on them. He lifted up the boy, held him close and slapped the furry backside, hoping for a scream from the horrific orifice that was both nose and mouth, gullet and windpipe. The breathing did in fact start up, though there was not a sound, no gurgle or scream.
Götz became aware of the murmurs of the girls now gathered in the room. Laying the child down on the bed beside its mother, he put his ear to her mouth and listened. No breathing. Gently, he pressed his fingertips against the carotid artery. Quite still. He became aware of the clergyman standing beside him:
“It’s too late,” he said. “We can only hope the Lord will receive her.”
“Why wasn’t I called earlier?”
Götz was surprised by the anger in his own voice, an anger nourished by the fact that we always arrive too late for our most crucial encounters, as if fate intentionally delays sending out invitation cards. If only I’d been sent for ten hours earlier, he thought, perhaps I could have saved the girl.
The clergyman did not disguise his revulsion as he contemplated the boy.
“I can’t say a prayer over her,” he said. “Nor can I do an emergency baptism of this . . . whatever it is.”
“Why not?”
“You can see for yourself why not. Would the good Lord mock His own creation thus?”
Götz too looked at the boy: the furry back, the split face, the grotesque overgrown head, as large as the rest of the body. Though he was breathing, the eyes remained closed as if afraid to see the world that awaited them.
“What we have before us, doctor, is the fruit of Satan’s concubine. This creature isn’t begotten by man. It isn’t human at all.” Picking up his bag the priest went to the door. “Believe me,” he said. “This isn’t the first time. Only a month ago a boy was born in Lemberg that was half-human, half-wolf. He lived for exactly four minutes. Four minutes too long, in my opinion.”
The priest left the room, and in the ensuing silence the doctor turned to Madam Schall.
“Where’s the other girl?” he asked. “I was told there were two births.”
Two doors away the other birth had been without complication in the room that had once housed the great Agrafena Nehludova who, seven years ago, had suddenly and inexplicably arisen from her encampment and disappeared without trace, though the doctor knew nothing of that particular story. As he stepped over the threshold the baby was already lying at its mother’s breast, washed and wrapped in clean linens. It was a plump girl with nut-brown eyes and downy hair. He asked a few questions about the mother’s condition, comforted her when she started to weep over the fate of her unfortunate sister. It was then he noticed that the bells still tolled on Kneiphof Island.
“At least this little girl has come into this world in high style,” he said with an effort, to lighten the mood. “It’s for her the cathedral bells are chiming.”
He gave the newborn a routine examination. How unfair it seemed that Fortune should scatter her gifts so randomly. That this child could be so fully formed and healthy, while the boy in the next room, born this same night, in the same house, of the same sort of woman, had been denied even the most basic anatomical harmony. He wondered who would care for the orphan during the brief spell of life he assumed was left to it? Would anyone suckle him? He doubted it. They’d just take him to the baby farmer. The thought gave Götz a feeling of relief quite devoid of guilt, implying as it did an end to a life that would otherwise be only pain and suffering.
He devoted a few minutes more to the woman until he was sure there was no new bleeding, palplated her stomach and gave instruction on how to wash herself and feed the infant. Then Götz went back to the boy’s room.
He found the boy panting in Madam Schall’s arms, his eyes still closed. Some of the girls had already started to wrap the mother’s corpse in a winding sheet. A window, wide open, aired the unmistakable smell of death.
“What will happen to the boy?” he asked.
“We’ll look after him,” said Madam Schall, rocking the child, “for as long as he’s allowed to live.”
Only now did Götz fully take in the life he had brought into the world. He recalled the anatomy hall at Albertina. In glass jars filled with alcohol, the professors had kept deformed foetuses: Siamese twins, stillborn in the sixth month; a girl with hydrocephalus and on her back a birthmark shaped like a dragon; a boy with lockjaw and another with five rows of teeth and a brain showing growth failure in the fontanelle. All this monstrosity, this collection of grotesque jokes staged by heartless Nature, neatly numbered and arranged on shelves above charts of the circulatory and muscular systems, bones and intestines, had stuck in his memory. There were mongoloids and albinos, some of them seemingly mere fortuitous collections of bones and flesh, lives that had mercifully been rejected in good time, together with animal foetuses of every kind, two-headed calves, an incredibly misshapen pig, a lamb with its head growing from its stomach. But what he saw in front of him – this enormous skull with lumps like stones, the split face, the furry body and the inadequate protruberances representing arms – seemed the most cruel, because the child was still alive, cursed with a life against which it could not defend itself.
“Isn’t there anything you can do, doctor?” Schall asked.
“No,” he said. “The cleft palate is too severe to operate on.”
He took the bottle of laudanum from his bag.
“Give him a few drops of this for the pain. We can only hope he won’t use up too much of it.”
He waited while the girls washed away the blood and vernix. Wasn’t there something he had overlooked? He realised what it was. He had yet to look into the boy’s eyes.
He asked to hold him.
Amazed that this reflex could be missing, Götz gently prised the eyelids open with his fingertips. The eyes were grey and seemed clouded by an infection or cataract. But the boy, without a blink or so much as a shudder, and with a gaze so steady it seemed able to support a collapsing wall, ceased to gasp for breath.
Götz would never be able to explain exactly what happened that evening as the snow flurried and the bells’ clangour rang out over Königsberg. Suddenly, as the boy fixed his ageless eyes on him, it was as if he was at a central point inside Götz’s mind.
In some way the boy stared – or stepped – right into Götz, got inside him as a parasite intrudes unnoticed into a human body. Without language, scarcely aware he even existed, he flouted all scientific laws; and, worst of all, could read the doctor’s most secret tho
ughts.
This boy, Götz knew, could see into all the evasions and half-repressed thoughts and desires that were his self; was aware of what he was feeling at this moment, was an observer of his childhood’s long-forgotten emotional storms – the unquenched longing for breast milk and bodily warmth – his wordless death wish, his suppressed desire to exact revenge upon a cruel world, the shameful teenage excitements and the red-hot passion still seeking an outlet and auguring the day, two decades later, when he would leave his wife for a woman of a lower class. This boy saw his forbidden attraction to his youngest daughter, like a smell of rotting flowers; his crazy dream of crossing the Atlantic to the New World which reason had long ago rejected, but which he was amazed to find still alive in him with undiminished force.
The boy knew how he longed to run from the room and yet linger in it and watch him die, while at the same time hoping he’d survive; was listening to his secret thoughts at this moment, some having already taken shape in words, others not quite, rough drafts only, hewn out of the marble of consciousness; and though the boy did not understand them, new born as he was, the doctor knew he could feel them, for he was in his consciousness at the centre of what was himself.
Shuddering to the marrow of his bones, he handed the infant back to Madam Schall.
“The priest is right,” he mumbled. “This is no human being. It’s the Devil’s offspring.”
THE BELLS THAT rang out over Königsberg the night the boy was born did indeed augur a new era. A decade of calamitous conflicts went into the grave at Leipzig and Waterloo, and the town on the River Pregel entered a new era of greatness. Madam Schall contrived to make the most of the general boom; for demand rose in every sphere, not least where love was for sale. Six evenings a week, Sundays as holy days apart, her house filled with clients. Calèches and landaus jostled with cabs in its courtyard. There was more laughter than tears, though the latter weren’t uncommon either. Madam Schall made it her business to win over the new-rich bourgeoisie for her establishment: provincial councillors specialising in Prussian land reform, influential judges, musicians and copyists; the city’s young snobs who preferred von Kleist to Goethe and Hoffmann to Jean Paul, as well as their Freemason fathers who had a craze for all manner of secret societies; and then, of course, young squires on leave, as much at a loss in peacetime as martial in war, sighing unconsolably for their fallen steeds and dead comrades. Under the new chandeliers captains from Uhlan regiments and cuirassiers in gala uniforms strove to outshine one another – until their clothes came off and left them as naked as the Lord had created them and the girls could admire the enigma of their battle scars’ fantastical sutures, the work of drunken barber-surgeons a hair’s breadth from death on semi-mythical battlefields, or shriek with horror as porcelain eyes were plucked out and held up like war trophies from some foreign land. Schall even succeeded in recruiting clients among employees of the new semaphore telegraph, secretly hoping they’d spread her brothel’s reputation far and wide by means of the complex light signals used on cloudless nights.
The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred Page 3
