by Clio Gray
‘Of course the softer ones among us, mostly women like Helge, had grown fond of the wretched things, keeping them for company or in case the plague came back. Pah!’ Ullendorf swatted at the window, though the cats remained unmoved. ‘Little chance of that. I could have told everyone if I was here, for the moment I returned I saw those supposed plague victims, hoping for proper buboes, for what an opportunity that would have been! I’ve a jarful up here somewhere, but not from anyone in Lengerrborn. Those plague-victims of Fatzke’s were nothing more than a few itinerants with a nasty outbreak of boils. He’d gone to the trouble of dying them black and told the fellows to sneeze a lot before going in search of idiots to sell his cats to.’ Ullendorf laughed. ‘He made a fortune, for it was a jolly good scheme, one way and another. And some people still think him a bit of a hero for taking those old men into his home and nursing them through their final illness, which involved nothing more than a bowl of broth, a couple of coins and a quick ride in the middle of the night to deposit them back from where he’d found ’em.’ Another admiring chuckle from Ullendorf. ‘Crafty devil. For no sooner had the danger of the supposed plague passed than he set himself up in the cat-killing business, selling poisons and fumigants, catapults and peashooters, or Katzkriegers as they call them hereabouts. Very popular still, though I’m not so sure I like that streak in him. Painful deaths, some of those poor cats have suffered.’
The stub-eared tom blinked outside the window, fixing his gaze on Philbert as if he was an over-sized shrew waiting to be caught and devoured. It was unnerving, and Philbert began to move back towards Kwert as Ullendorf wrapped up his story, one that he told almost word for word to any newcomers to his house. Kwert had got the whole of it the night before and paid not the slightest attention.
‘As for me, Philbert,’ Ullendorf said, tapping at the side of his nose, ‘now I use potassium salts; just a little in their food, and poof – dead in a few seconds. Have to net them first sometimes if they’re the wild, scratching kind, stick them in a box to breathe in the fumes, which is not so tidy. You get the odd convulsion, which can make dissection harder. Still, once again, as an asphyxiant, you’ll get nothing better.’
He started back across the room to the shelves and lifted down a jar or two, showing Philbert more bits of cats and some of dogs, a few rats, several human feet, hands and ears, and a lot of entrails. All had abscesses, ulcers, lumps or bumps of differing kinds. He showed Philbert a hand that could have belonged to Hannah, all sprinkled with freckles and white as Philbert’s face now was. And then he brought over his grand finale, this time not in a jar, but a boiled skull with a hole in it the size of a small quince.
‘It came from France,’ Ullendorf said, ‘and is five thousand years old, at an educated guess. Just think, Philbert. What I did to your head someone did to this gentleman all those thousands of years ago.’
Philbert put his hand involuntarily to the spot where Ullendorf’s drill had gone through. The skin had sucked over the hole leaving only a small mark like a pinprick, as inconsequential as a bubble in a bog.
‘None of your fancy drills and saws then, Philbert,’ Ullendorf continued. ‘Just a piece of chiselled rock. Obsidian was good, often used in the Americas. Very ancient practice, trepanning; Hippocrates writes about it, and in first century Rome Aulus Cornelius Celsus was a celebrated master of the art. And of course the Islamics knew all about it – the great Abu Quasim being only one of its many practitioners. Now though, come with me Philbert, for I have a bit of a treat for you. Come over here and see the inside of your very own head.’
Philbert went as directed, interest piqued, glad to be diverted from the awful tale of the cats, watching closely as Ullendorf produced a small glass slide, smeared on one side, and slid it into the mounting of a brass microscope. Standing on a stool Philbert, directed by Ullendorf, looked down the eyepiece, squinting hard, trying to focus, wondering how the insides of him might look. Ullendorf fiddled with the mechanisms of the microscope until all came into view. Philbert was massively disappointed, seeing only a network of squashy squares. Ullendorf for once registered Philbert’s reaction and was at pains to explain.
‘They may not look very remarkable to you now, Philbert, but when I take another plug from your head, this time I’ll be able to keep them alive. And how alive! Imagine those cells you are looking at all moving around, breathing in and out, their little insides wriggling and kicking; imagine them slowly swimming around and around like big soft bellies sliding over one another, growing and expanding before sneezing into two, separating like a pair of half-set jellyfish.’
Philbert tried to imagine such a scenario but could not, but Ullendorf’s enthusiasm was infectious, and he listened hard.
‘Imagine what we’ll find, my dear boy, in that head of yours when we’ve taken a proper look. There’ll be hundreds of thousands of those cells living and moving and growing in their own little word, islands within islands. I’m going to take just a few of them outside of your head and let them grow. And I’m going to introduce you to some of the most famous minds in Europe, and together we will teach them the marvels of taupe teratology . . .’
Ullendorf at last ran out of breath and instead clapped his hands excitedly, and although Philbert wanted to be as enthusiastic as Ullendorf was, wanted to be the prodigy Ullendorf so plainly believed him to be, he didn’t really comprehend how that could happen. Ullendorf had already cut a little bit out of his head – for here it was on this microscope slide – looking nothing more than a rather depressing landscape of barren and abandoned fields, with no more life in them than the specimens Ullendorf kept all around this room: that woman with her extruding, lily-pond eyes, those cats in pieces, those human feet and innards, the hand that looked so much like speckled Hannah’s. What Ullendorf would have made of Hermann, Philbert shuddered to think. What he would make of Philbert, Philbert was about to find out.
18
Times of Singing and Gypsy Tales
Ullendorf took Philbert’s head, clamped him in strong leather bands secured by strong iron buckles; he got out his needle-sharp drills and went once, twice, and many more times deep into Philbert’s head, taking cores, as Ullendorf called them – tubules of taupe, each only a sliver in diameter but a good finger’s length. He probed his instruments through Philbert’s growth right down to the skull, though never back through bone again as he’d done in Finzeln. He went to great lengths to make sure Philbert felt as little of these operations as he could, but Philbert would recall them well, always wondering if those times strapped to Ullendorf’s bench in Lengerrborn were the cause of his dark days as well as the ones overwhelmingly filled with light. The dark days were dark indeed, when the older Philbert laid himself out on his bed and drank wine and more wine and saw nothing at all but the dark deeds that had gone before, that he’d precipitated, seeing them, hearing them, witnessing them, over and over again, just as they’d happened then. On the good days he drank less wine, and saw the whole of his life laid out before him like a forest whose every tree was frozen from movement, winding himself through its paths; noting the glory of each memory as if they were bullfinches, robins or golden oriels forever secured upon their branches or suspended in mid-flight as he passed them by, his feet recognising the feel of every stone, every inch of earth preserved on every path he had ever trodden, able – as few were – to access to his past in such detail.
Ullendorf was kind and considerate. He performed only one small procedure every couple of days, stopping the moment his tiny drills hit the bone; and the moment he extracted Philbert’s taupe cells and got them growing in the various solutions he’d prepared for them, he ceased his intrusive operations altogether. He continued to take measurements of Philbert’s head daily and very precise measurements they were, the conclusion of which, after a month or so, was that the taupe was growing an almost imperceptible amount each day, imperceptible except to Ullendorf’s ingenious me
asuring mechanisms.
Most of the time Philbert was at Lengerrborn he was left entirely to his own devices, Ullendorf and Kwert wrapped up in their studies; he spent much of his time eating Helge’s food or prowling amongst the currant bushes in the garden, practising with the Katzkrieger peashooter Ullendorf had given him; he never shot at the cats, for Philbert had grown used to them and liked them, oftentimes sat outside while they curled around his feet, loving their purring, and their warmth that so reminded him of Kroonk, whom he sorely missed.
‘Terrible, dirty animals,’ Helge would say when Philbert brought in one or other of the kittens he found mewling in the bushes in the garden. But even as she said the words she would run her soft hands along the small arches of their backs. ‘It really is time someone got rid of them. Always hungry and yowling for more,’ she would say, pouring out milk into the bowls she had ready for them, scraping bits of meat from bones to keep them fed. Philbert would come in later to find a spool of little kittens curled up in a basket of old clothes and blankets by her stove.
‘Of course it’s only sensible to keep a few of them handy,’ she would say then, ‘just to keep down the mice and the rats.’
‘And the plague?’ Philbert would ask, and the two of them would start giggling, throwing sidelong glances towards where Ullendorf and his study were, both knowing verse for verse, word for word, the tale of Fatzke and his cats.
Helge taught Philbert the rudiments of cooking and some of the many songs she had known since her youth. They chorused the Ziguenerlied together, Helge telling Philbert its origins as a folktale, one that Goethe later retold as his Gypsy Song: the story of a boy who lived alone in the deep, wild woods about Lengerrborn and who one day shot dead a cat. But not just any cat, for it was the familiar of a witch named Anna, and she sent her werewolves out by night to catch the boy and tear him to pieces for the awful thing he’d done. It was the first song Philbert had ever learned, and he remembered it for as long as he had a memory, exactly as Helge always sang it, every intonation, every lift of tune, every speeding up and slowing down.
Im Nebelgeriesel, im tiefen Schnee,
Im wilden Wald, in der Winternacht . . .
WILLE WAU WAU WAU!
Wille wo wo wo!
Wito hu!
They sang sometimes like madmen, dancing in circles around the kitchen table, howling like the wolves Anna sent after her foe, drumming on their pans with wooden spoons before collapsing, laughing, into their separate seats, Philbert feeling in those brief moments as if he really had a mother, and Helge feeling in those brief moments as if she really had a son.
It all came to an abrupt end when Heinrich Ullendorf got the call from one of his colleagues. By then Philbert and Kwert had been at The Anchorage almost six weeks, Ullendorf bursting into the kitchen one evening as Helge and Philbert were busy wille-wooing and pounding out the next morning’s bread.
‘Philbert, get ready, get ready!’ Ullendorf exclaimed. ‘My letters have at last been answered, and tonight is the night! You’re going to meet the extraordinarily famous Professor Von Ebner of Jena University. He’s arrived in Lengerrborn, and just this very minute a message has been brought to me to say he will receive us! We’re to meet at the Westphal Club tonight!’
Helge thumped her portion of bread dough on the table and frowned at her brother.
‘Oh Heinrich,’ she sounded exasperated. ‘Why must you continue to go to that awful place? Don’t you know how people talk about it? Isn’t it enough to get drunk in an ordinary tavern without inviting trouble?’
Ullendorf occupied himself with straightening his hat and propelling a small messenger boy forward to distract his sister’s attention.
‘Give the lad a crust or two before you dispatch him, Helge,’ he said, ignoring her concern. ‘And Philbert, you be ready in one hour. One hour, do you hear? This is going to be a most auspicious night!’
Ullendorf departed, leaving a dishevelled lad standing on the flagstones, his cap already doffed, his nose twitching, his stomach beginning to rumble. Helge had no option but to sit him down, begin to sort out the leftovers of the previous night’s dinner of venison fillet, warm up some pumpkin sauce with which to serve it and get something ready in the meantime to keep the boy’s stomach from growling. Philbert was by now in tune with Helge’s need to cook and fuss, and started frying up some cold potato cakes she’d dipped in vinegared plums before handing them to her helper.
‘What’s the Westphal Club?’ Philbert asked, sampling the wares, the warm damson juice dribbling down his chin, making a beeline for what had been a clean shirt. Helge tushed and swept at Philbert roughly with a cloth, her main focus now on the boy her brother had just deposited who was so plainly in need of a good, hot meal.
‘It’s a very low sort of place indeed,’ she answered, ‘and yet, according to Heinrich, it’s as overrun with clever gents as Lengerrborn is with cats.’ Helge smiled indulgently at the small boy who’d brought the message, popping his venison and pumpkin sauce into the oven before grinding poppy seeds and rubbing them with some butter into the dough she and Philbert had been preparing earlier, knocking it hard against the table. ‘What he’s thinking taking you there is beyond me.’
Again the knock, knock, knocking of the bread, and the small messenger boy kicking his feet against his chair in time, salivating at what he knows will come. She picked up the dough and threw it into a tin, stabbing it harshly with a knife before slapping on some cold milk. ‘And who’s this Von Ebner he’s so excited about anyway?’
‘He’s a head-doctor, Miss,’ piped up the boy. ‘Very big in treating hysterics and mad women, so they say.’
‘Mad women indeed,’ muttered Helge, clattering plates, thrusting the bread into the fiery depths of her oven, checking the meat at the same time before pushing it back inside and clanging the door shut. ‘Is it any wonder, I ask you?’
‘He’s chopped loads of people into pieces,’ said the boy, unfazed, hands twitching as Helge searched for spoon and fork with which to serve him his meal. ‘He’s chopped loads of people into pieces, and says you’re only mad on the outside if you’re all sort of sick on the in.’
‘I’ll give you sick, you scamp, if you don’t pipe down.’ said Helge, flicking the boy with her tea towel. The boy stopped speaking immediately, understanding that Helge could whisk away the marvellous food the smells in this kitchen were promising him. ‘And as for you, young man,’ Helge said, advancing towards Philbert with menace, tidying his clothes, spitting on his hair and getting it straightened. ‘Don’t you be taking any strong drink tonight. And tell Heinrich I’ll expect you both home by midnight.’ Helge rubbed hard at Philbert’s face to clean it before running her soft hand over his head as if she might never see him again.
She was more right about her brother’s club than even her brother knew, let alone Philbert and Kwert, when they set off from The Anchorage that night, leaving the messenger to his venison and pumpkin sauce and the hot potato cakes Philbert had fried on the skillet.
It’s a mistake to believe that the small things surrounding you do not matter a whit, and a bigger mistake to believe that if you withdraw yourself from the world then the world will go on as if you’ve never been; every action every person takes has meaning, reverberation and consequence, whether or not they understand it at the time those actions are taken.
But there it is all the same: small actions can ripple out and change the world, and this single night in Lengerrborn was no exception.
19
Von Ebner’s Nucleus
Kwert and Philbert got into Ullendorf’s carriage and went down the long winding road into town, surrounded on both sides by tall dark lines of cypress trees dripping and swaying with the light rain falling on their leaves. They were heading towards the patchwork of roofs Philbert had seen but not experienced, and soon were right amongst them, clopping past white-washed
walls, hedged gardens and courtyards. The streets were remarkably busy, this being a warm, soft evening, people able to ignore the sporadic showers by sitting in open-doored porches or beneath awnings pulled out from bars and taverns. Ullendorf’s carriage wound through narrow alleys and backways behind the main thoroughfare of the town into the dark, unpopulated streets that made up the less salubrious parts of Lengerrborn, where the houses were shabbier, the cats scrawnier, the gas-lamps dimmer – if they were there at all.
A short while later the carriage drew up, hooves clattering on the cobbles. Ullendorf flung open the door and threw himself out telling his driving-boy not to wait but to come back at midnight, wrapping his cloak tightly about his shoulders, making sure his hat was on fast and sure, beckoning Kwert and Philbert with him up a mean ginnel set between two rows of tall-stacked houses. It was dark, their footsteps echoing dully between the flanking walls, the recently fallen rain splashing against their legs when they stepped into unseen puddles. Ullendorf stopped at a break in the wall, tapping at a small narrow door with his knuckles – rat-a-tat-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat-tat. A small window opened in the wood, closed again, then the door opened, Ullendorf and Kwert having to bend in half to get through, Philbert nearly getting stuck trying to step over the high ledge at its base. And then they were in, a mangle of wet capes and hats, the door closed quietly behind them, two large bolts drawn over to keep them in.
Philbert could see very little, but was aware of murmurings and scraping noises and the strong smells of beer and tobacco. Ullendorf handed over his cloak, talking sotto voce to the man who’d opened the door to them and who was eying Kwert and Philbert with suspicion, looking them up and down and round and round before eventually nodding. He jangled a large set of keys as he took all three through an arched tunnel, like those found in beer cellars. At the very end of it, he unlocked another door.
