The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  When he awoke it was morning, as he could discern from the light flooding in round the edges of the closet. But on trying to open the door, he found it was locked. He pummelled it with his feet, but no-one came to open it.

  In fact, it was not until twenty-four hours later that the porter found him by sheer chance, half dead of thirst, lying in a feverish delirium in the dark cupboard.

  Otherwise the apartment was empty, the Swedenborg library gone, the bed, the few pieces of furniture, the Countess’s playing cards and her healing crystals – all were gone.

  When the porter threw him with a curse out into the bitterly cold Copenhagen street, he could only console himself with the thought that he was still alive. Life itself, he reflected, was now his last hope. Only life, in covenant with time, could help him find his Henriette.

  HE WANDERED FOR what seemed an eternity. Tramped thousands of miles – across the great northern plains, through forests, beside rivers and along godforsaken coastlines. It mattered not which map he followed, always it was the same unhappy landscape.

  Shamelessly exposing his deformed body in the cities, he lay outside churches begging, his feet holding out his begging bowl to the passers-by. What kind of animal is that? he could hear them thinking, What kind of sins has his mother committed that God should punish her so . . .

  He laughed at them. He didn’t believe in their God. For creatures like him there was no God. How would they look if they had made Him in their own image?

  Hidden in the luggage compartment of a stagecoach he came to a town in the Brandenburg plains: Berlin.

  In the shops he planted a faint scent of smoke in the guts of shop assistants, making them run into the storerooms to check whether a fire had broken out, or else, as he slipped a piece of bread or a bit of cheese under his shirt, a non-existent voice ordered them to look the other way. Or he got them running out into the street from a sudden notion that a royal carriage was passing by, sent them astray in long-forgotten memories, made them puzzle their heads over a riddle or an arithmetical conundrum, gave them a sudden urge to go to the seaside, run away with some woman, or start a new life in the colonies. So deeply did they sink into their broodings, he could make off with all the day’s takings without their even noticing it.

  His gift, he’d come to understand, was a weapon. One that could cause people to fall suddenly in love, render them oblivious to time and space, or make them burst into tears from some all-embracing sadness that, for no obvious reason or no reason at all, overwhelmed them and penetrated their minutest capillaries. Or sometimes he filled them with soundless music, wonderful harmonies that made them close their eyes in a pleasure beyond all explanation.

  Once he was caught red-handed stealing a jug of gin from a liquor stall. The stall owner held him fast, shouting for the police. He responded with an itching that in a fraction of a second spread itself throughout his captor’s body, until the man lay at his feet, a dreadful sight to see, screaming with fear, scratching his arms till they bled and praying to God for the torment to cease. Drunk on his omnipotence he left the man lying there . . .

  By autumn rumours abounded in the city. Superstitious folk spoke of a wizard come to overthrow the Hohenzollern dynasty; of the Devil having sent out his minions to punish Prussia for the sins she’d committed during the Seven Years War. Satan was said to have appeared in the guise of a leprous dwarf. But no-one associated Barfuss with these legends.

  Now he was sitting blindfolded in a great armchair in the legendary Madame Mendelssohn’s salon on Wilhelmstrasse, describing the people in the room; where they came from, who they were, and their most secret thoughts. The officers were astounded when he wrote up their names and regiments on a blackboard. Women blushed when he exposed the identity of their admirers, a lieutenant-general left the room crestfallen when Hercule disclosed some counterfeit promissory notes he’d pawned with a relative.

  He would write down the colours and shapes of objects kept hidden from him, as if holding them in his hand. People were astounded by his card tricks and his mnemonic faculty.

  One evening he scribbled a verse on the blackboard and looked triumphantly round the room. A cry of amazement could be heard from a man in one of the front rows. It was the poet Chamisso who, in a dreamlike state, had begun the epigram that very morning and still had it in his mind.

  So the rumour about the mind-reader spread. By Christmas the crowd at Madame Mendelssohn’s had grown so big that she had to allocate tickets to her salon by lottery. That’s when he grew tired of it all . . . and disappeared.

  He was driven on by longing. Everywhere he searched through people’s memories for just one trace of Henriette, but found none. Squandering his last few coins in Hamburg’s red-light district, he could see the girls found him repulsive, recalled Madam Schall’s establishment and understood that fate had sentenced him to repeat himself.

  He wrote down Henriette’s name on a piece of paper and showed it to people he fell in with, but no-one had heard of her. He searched surreptitiously through their minds, only to discover the losses in their own lives, the emptiness, the feelings of shame, thoughts benumbed by opium and brandy. Despair had driven him to buy himself a few weeks of tenderness. Only to be thrown out when his money came to an end.

  All night long he would roam the docks. Girls shunned him like a disease. Pimps spat at him. Sometimes he was beaten up.

  He slept in doorways with vagrants, heard their dreams through his own. He met the strangest characters, seamen who had been left behind when their ship had sailed, adventurers, an artiste who always performed in a swarm of yellow butterflies, a mad clairvoyant who ran away when he realised they were two of a kind. He felt he was soon going to die, though without knowing how or where.

  Penniless, he returned to Berlin. He was in an atrocious state. People who saw him mistook him for a ghost. He expected nothing more of life than that it should soon come to an end. Death was a debt you paid only once.

  It was as if he had become invisible. People scarcely noticed him. Considering himself to be already one of the dead, he slept in churchyards. Too weak now even to beg, he was beset by hunger hallucinations, thoughts that did not exist or that existed so far away he ought not to have perceived them.

  Julian Schuster visited him. Inquisitor del Moro held a speech in Latin beside his grave. From Swedenborg’s heaven the Countess Tavastestierna laughed down at him.

  He saw an angel alight from a carriage beside where he lay in the gutter. She wore a white satin dress, held a parasol in her hand and wore yellow kid gloves up to her elbows. Radiant with light, she bent down and whispered:

  “Hercule, is it really you?”

  It was at that moment he felt life returning from a source beyond the universe. It really was her, the girl for whom he’d been searching for more than half his lifetime.

  VI

  LET ME BE your ears, hear for you, just like when we were children . . . do you remember how I used to describe sounds to you? The girls’ gigglings, the laundry fluttering on the line, the soughing wind that made the horses restless . . . now I shall ask time’s memory: how did our footsteps sound when we ran through the house? How did the rain sound pattering against your hand, what was the sound of our heartbeat like? I’m hearing for you throughout time . . . hearing their voices calling through our past . . . my mother’s voice, Magdalena Holt’s voice, Madam Eugenia Schall’s. The voices of the men, their oaths and compliments . . . I don’t know if you’re listening, Hercule, maybe you never could hear my thoughts, maybe only love has enabled you to understand me.

  Shall I describe the emptiness to you? The emptiness when the lights go out and the last guest has gone, the emptiness when people disappear with a bit of one’s life, and one is torn up by the roots . . . the emptiness when I met the magistrate, the emptiness in my mother’s eyes during the last hours of her life . . . when did that happen? I can’t remember. A street girl has no concept of time, and her algebra consists of the most ele
mentary sums: how many bottles of eau de cologne she uses in a year, how many bodices she can buy with a rich lover’s gratuity, how many post-stages away her next admirer is, how much train-oil her lamp burns up in one night . . . Oh yes, I remember you, you, my first admirer . . . How you comforted me when I cried, how you lulled me when I couldn’t sleep, defended me, stole for me, how you sucked the blood from my finger when I cut it on a piece of glass . . . But now it’s him calling in my memory, can you hear him, Hercule? The judge who laid waste our lives, Court Magistrate von Kiesingen . . . I shall describe it all for you . . . I’ll tell you my life story . . . if only you’ll be patient and don’t prejudge me . . .

  Be still! Heinrich is eavesdropping at the door, wondering why it’s all so quiet in here. “I need to speak privately with Hercule,” I’ve told him, but how can Heinrich be expected to understand how we can communicate?

  “But the cripple’s deaf and dumb, isn’t he?” he laughed nervously as the servant fetched his pipe.“How do you do it? Does he read your thoughts?”

  Yesterday, in the library, when I told you about my marriage, he didn’t suspect a thing. He thought I was busy playing patience, when in fact I was laying him bare to you, my darling. You mustn’t have bad feelings about Heinrich. It was he who took me away from that prison, brought me to this house with all its servants and caged birds, two dozen rooms and four carriages for various needs, its one cook, six housemaids, one chambermaid, one foreman, three liveried footmen and a coachman who speaks flawless French. He lifted me up out of misfortune, just as I lifted you up into our carriage.

  What is love, my darling? What is it made of ? I’ve read about it in Stendhal, I see it on artists’ canvases, I can hear it in the composers’ études; and I see it gleefully slip out of their hands just when they think they’ve captured it. Where have you been all these years? love asks me. Where have I myself been? In the kingdom of death, that’s where I’ve been, until the nightwatch neglected its patrol and in an unguarded moment I managed to slink out . . .

  Heinrich is standing at the door eavesdropping, maybe even peeping through the keyhole . . . let him be; after all, what can he see? Nothing could arouse his suspicions. His wife, seated on the chaise-longue, an heirloom from his mother . . . a little deformed man, his legs dangling from an armchair.

  Outside the open window, the sun is shining, sounds float in from the garden, but the woman who is his wife, she’s sitting quietly, eyes closed, nodding every now and then, as if in time with some inner melody she’s listening to. Opposite her is the stranger she found in the street, her half-brother so she claims, this odd mute gentleman who wears a silk mask over his face.

  Why do you wear a mask, Hercule? You don’t have to play a part for me, take it away and let me kiss you . . . no, not just now, not with Heinrich standing behind the door. Let’s keep our story a secret just a little longer . . .

  What are those two up to? my husband is thinking. What business has my wife with this cripple?

  We were driving through the Royal Animal Park and had it not been for the right-hand horse being so lazy and the coachman halting to let the mail coach pass, we wouldn’t be sitting here now, and Heinrich wouldn’t be eavesdropping at his own door . . . They both seem to be asleep, he thinks . . . As if on the verge of dropping off, the moment when dreams summon helpless humans . . . and he hasn’t a clue that this is the way I speak to you, the way love wraps itself around us.

  “Who is he?” my Heinrich asked me at dinner the other day. “Be so good as to answer me, Henriette. Is he really your half-brother? Do you intend me to believe that?”

  But since last night the mote has gone from his eye. The story I told him made him blench.

  “But good God, you can’t be serious, why haven’t you told me all this before?”

  So he lives in the belief that we really are half-brother and -sister, Hercule. And after so many hardships along our separate ways, there is no Gabrielle Vogel left on this earth to denounce our kinship . . .

  Climb inside me, Hercule, as you used to do when we were children . . . climb inside me and let me carry you behind my eyes. See yourself through my pupils . . . I’ll carry you behind my eyelids, you’re simultaneously in your own mind and mine . . . now I’m going to open my eyes and look at you, and your gift will enable you to see through mine . . . see yourself through me . . . and what do you find?

  You find a deformed little man, not much more than three foot tall, wearing a green velvet swallow-tailed coat. My half-brother Hercule wears a grey ruffled silk shirt, has a French-style scarf around his neck and a triangular mask covering his face. On his feet are child-sized black shoes with silver buckles. He has become completely bald, black protrusions like forest snails reach down from his temples to the nape of his neck. His head is very large, and the doctors surmise that it’s hydrocephalic. He has no arms. His coat sleeves are empty, but in the openings one might suppose there are two petrified tufts of seaweed – his useless hands, good for nothing but frightening off birds. On his back one sees a hump: or could this just be his shoulder blades grown awry? His chest looks like a plucked chicken’s; but with his feet he can play the piano and make Baron Heinrich von Below gape in astonishment. He cannot speak, his cleft palate is too severe for that, and his tongue is forked like a snake’s. Anyway, he doesn’t know what words actually sound like, for he can’t hear them as other people do with their ears, but intuits them with his soul. He is deaf, say the blind men, while others have a feeling of his comprehending something beyond the horizons of hearing.

  You must tell me, Hercule . . . who are these mysterious men who are searching for you? Two months have passed since they were last here. I allowed Heinrich to converse with them. They showed him papers from influential men, and asked about a certain Barfuss, a dwarf and a monster, retarded and deaf-mute. When Heinrich asked them what they wanted, they reminded him menacingly that they have patrons in positions of power.

  The first time they mentioned your name I knew you were nearby, Hercule. Inwardly I rejoiced, for it proved you were alive . . .

  Why are people afraid of you, my love? Even the maids are afraid of you. Yesterday, when we returned from our outing, I heard them whispering . . . They are afraid of you, but I just laugh at them . . .

  Imagine if they knew I was pregnant . . . Heinrich’s going to thank God for this miracle.

  Dr Herzl told him he was sterile . . . He’ll never guess what’s really happened.

  I have so much to tell you, Hercule, about the last few years, about the church bells in Danzig, about the house where I worked, the sailors, the girls, about the angel of death who put me into the spinning house. And about Heinrich, my saviour, who rescued me and took me away to be his wife.

  Listening at the door . . . and all he can hear is our breathing, the hum of his own wondering amazement, and the questions piling up. Is this cripple my wife found in the street and took pity on, and whom some people seem so keen to get their hands on, really her half-brother from a brothel in Königsberg?

  I never forgot you, Hercule. How could I? It would have been like forgetting how to breathe. It was the hope of seeing you again that kept me going. In the end I saw you everywhere, even places you couldn’t possibly be. There was only one thing I dreaded: that I would never see you again. But God has heard my prayers and the miracle has taken place. You must tell me everything, about the places you’ve seen, everything that’s happened on your long journey. I want your memories, even the bitterest ones, I must catch up on my happiness...

  Now Heinrich’s left his sentry-go and is calling for the servant: “Get the carriage ready, Helwes, I have to go to Potsdam and attend to my business.” When something baffles my Heinrich, he attends to his businesses: the mills at Dahlem, the property at Nicolasee, his estate, the brick kilns in Oranienburg. The weaving mill with its English machinery and the barge yard at Rostock. My husband is worth two million. All he lacks is an heir, a son to inherit the family’s titles. Ma
ybe our child will be a boy? That would put Heinrich in seventh heaven. And it would gain us time.

  Don’t be afraid, my love. Nothing will happen to you here. My husband’s on our side, although I’ve pulled the wool over his eyes . . . He would never hand you over to those men.

  “If we have a boy,” he said once, “he’ll be named after the former Elector, and if a girl, she’ll be named after the King’s daughter Charlotte.”

  But what if the boy is born deformed, like his real father? Would he suspect something then? No, no, he’ll listen to the maids and his aunts who’ll blame the Evil Eye for a monster happening to be in the house when the missus got pregnant.

  He’s going now. Listen through my ears and you’ll hear him . . . listen through me, Hercule: can you hear the horses down in the yard, can you hear the carriage wheels on the macadam as my husband leaves? Take off your mask, we’re alone now, and nobody can see us. Let me kiss you. Can you feel the life in here? Don’t be afraid, Hercule. No-one can harm you here. If they find you, we’ll run away, with or without Heinrich. We’ve found each other. Nothing else matters . . .

  HALF A CENTURY later, when Henriette and Hercule’s daughter, Charlotte Vogel, had been carried on fortune’s trade winds to a house for impoverished widows on Helgeandsholmen in Stockholm, she would tell a friend, in broken Swedish, about the dreadful time her mother had been through in the Danzig spinning house. The path which had brought Henriette into Prussian court circles had been so lined with misfortune that a lesser person would have broken off their journey halfway. Life, her daughter would say, with its defective sense of justice, had punished Henriette far more than even her worst enemies could have wished.