HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

  I almost stumbled, reaching for a stair that wasn’t there, and came hard up against a wall. Feeling about in the darkness, my fingers touched stone, then wood, then the metallic cold of a large bolt. I slid it back, pushed open the door, and stepped out into the blinding light of the dull, grey day.

  ‘Hit him hard!’ a bass voice boomed.

  I pulled back hastily as a cloud of blood exploded in the air.

  It fell in a drizzle on a mob of urchins, who were wheeling around the yard in a screeching vortex. A loud cracking noise followed on, and cheers went up. A nose had just been broken.

  I gaped in awe at the only adult in the yard.

  Was he supposed to be keeping order?

  Black smuts on his once-white jacket suggested that he might have cleaned a chimney recently. His trousers were baggy, his boots caked with mud. One epaulette hung loose from his shoulder, flapping in the wind. Where were the smart uniforms, splendid horses, and the glorious new Prussia that General Katowice had been ranting on about an hour before?

  ‘Break it up!’ the officer shouted, wading through the mob.

  He turned to me.

  ‘Just look at them, sir,’ he appealed, holding the two fighting-cocks up by their collars for my inspection as if they had just been freshly hung from a gibbet. ‘Jesus, be saved!’

  The boy on the left could not have reached his thirteenth birthday. The other lad, whose nose and mouth were bleeding copiously, was tiny in comparison.

  ‘Scrapping?’ I enquired.

  The officer peered at me with bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Who are you, sir?’ he asked.

  There was no curiosity in the remark. The fact that I was inside the fort could only mean that I had been permitted to enter.

  ‘Magistrate Stiffeniis,’ I replied. ‘I’m sorry, corporal, I didn’t catch your name.’

  ‘Puffendørn, sir. Lance corporal,’ he corrected me.

  ‘I am here to inform Major Gottewald of a fact that touches him,’ I hedged.

  Puffendørn’s eyes widened with surprise.

  ‘He’s dead, sir. Didn’t they tell you?’

  ‘That’s why I am looking for the medical officer,’ I replied airily. ‘Do you know where I can find him?’

  The corporal pushed the two captives roughly away, aimed his forefinger at two others and snapped, ‘Get to it!’

  A new scrimmage started up with whoops and shouts. As fists and boots began to fly, Lance Corporal Puffendørn stepped up to me, and added: ‘Doctor Korna’s out a-harvesting.’

  ‘Harvesting?’

  Puffendørn raised his long jaw in the direction of the children. ‘He found this lot out in the woods near Padelstewtz. He’ll be back with another load soon. We try to turn ’em into soldiers. You’ll have to wait till evening, sir. The doctor won’t be back before then.’

  ‘Where did you say his office was?’

  If Dr Korna was absent, I thought, there might be an orderly who would let me see the medical archive of the fortress.

  ‘Far side of the fortress, sir.’ He raised his thick forefinger and pointed to a narrow archway. ‘You need to follow the rampart all the way round.’

  I hurried away between black granite walls which were incredibly high. They shimmered with damp, and sparkled bright green in places with dripping moss. At last, I spotted a weather-worn wooden plaque on the wall beside a narrow doorway: Sick Bay & Infirmary.

  I stepped into the passage, relieved to be out of the wind.

  ‘Who goes there?’ a voice growled at my back.

  I froze like a thief, then slowly turned around.

  A bayonet was quivering six inches from my throat, the steel gleaming in the half-light. A boy no more than twelve years of age was holding the weapon, and staring up at me. His eyes were small like a piglet’s, the pupils two green islands in an off-white sea, the eyelids red and raw, as if he had just been shaken out of a deep sleep, though I had seen him polishing boots outside General Katowice’s office an hour before. He must have followed me every step of the way.

  ‘Who goes there?’ he again snarled, with a ferocious scowl that made his scrawny features all the more outrageous.

  ‘You know who I am,’ I replied, wondering whether this was the most dangerous, or the most ridiculous situation in which I had ever found myself. ‘I am looking for the doctor’s surgery.’

  ‘Sick, are you?’ he snapped back.

  I stared into that impudent face. There was a ragged slash of a deep scar on the left side of his jaw, like the dry bed of a river. His head had been shaved down to the bone, the skin a flaking crust, as if soap and water were rare commodities in Kamenetz. Only his lips were thick and fleshy with youthful immaturity.

  ‘What do you want him for?’ he urged, waving the bayonet closer to my face.

  ‘I’m sure you know already,’ I said. ‘I am interested in the death of an officer of this garrison.’

  ‘Why stick your nose in that?’ he replied, dropping his blade with surprising speed to prod at my waistcoat.

  ‘The authorities in Berlin . . .’

  A gob of spit shot from between his teeth like a hissing projectile, and went whizzing past my arm. If he did not hit me, it was not because his aim was faulty.

  ‘Oops,’ the boy apologised with a vicious grin. ‘The word Berlin always gets on my tits. And as for the Prussian authorities!’

  I stared at him in silence, almost certainly failing to match the nastiness with which he glared at me.

  ‘Take care, my lad,’ I said slowly. ‘You malign the country that bore you.’

  ‘My name is Rochus Kelding,’ he replied flatly. ‘I am not your lad. Nor anyone else’s. My country is Kamenetz, and the only authority I recognise is General Katowice.’

  As he spoke the commander’s name, Rochus Kelding drew himself up stiffly. He was wearing the field-grey working jacket and trousers of the regiment. In a year or two, if he lived so long, he might grow into them.

  ‘Which dead officer?’ he asked roughly.

  ‘I’ll ask the doctor when I find him,’ I replied.

  ‘Wrong, Herr Magistrate.’ He grinned. ‘The name was Gottewald, right?’

  He sucked in his breath, slid his left hand inside his baggy tunic and pulled out a sheaf of papers, which he held up to me. The documents were creased and bent. Not only were they stained, streaked and dirty, they actually smelled of something foul.

  ‘Is this what you’re after?’ he said, thrusting the bundle into my face, as if to taunt me with that penetrating faecal odour.

  I took a pace backwards.

  ‘Don’t you want them?’ He grinned again, waving the papers under my nose again, taking evident pleasure in the embarrassment he was causing me.

  I froze for a moment. How should I react? If the boy felt free to behave in such a manner, he had been put up to it by General Katowice. Should I slap the messenger for trying to make a fool out of me, or snatch the papers from him and storm off indignantly, threatening to report the general to his superiors for failing to assist me in my duty?

  ‘Is this how you treat official documents in Kamenetz?’ I asked, stretching out my hand. ‘Wiping your arse on the memory of a Prussian officer? You’ll not live to see your next birthday!’

  ‘He don’t deserve no better,’ he answered. ‘We don’t have time for the likes of him. The report they write on me will be as white as snow. You can bet on that!’

  I considered this statement for a moment.

  ‘Are you suggesting that Major Gottewald died without honour?’

  The boy stared boldly into my face, as if he had just heard something funny.

  ‘Which exercises was he involved in when it happened?’ I challenged.

  Before the words were out of my mouth, I realised that Rochus Kelding would never tell me.

  ‘Exercises where officers who shit themselves die,’ he replied with a conviction that was rough, but syllogistically correct.

  ‘Did you know Major G
ottewald?’

  ‘Knew him,’ he said with a smirk.

  ‘And you didn’t like him?’

  The boy hawked and spat again, licking his lips with his tongue as the globule splattered on the flagstones between my feet. ‘They lost at Jena, didn’t they? That’s a fact. Next time, we’ll do better.’

  ‘The whole of Prussia lost on that battlefield, Rochus. Thousands of brave men were killed. Would you see them all go to the devil?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you think?’ he sneered, an evil light in his eyes. ‘Better read them papers fast, magistrate,’ he added. ‘You’ve got ten minutes. There’s naught else about him in the files—dead, or alive. It’s all there. Black on white, shit on shite.’

  He waved his bayonet in front of my face again.

  ‘We don’t get many strangers nosing round in Kamenetz,’ he hissed, ‘and some of them don’t go home again.’

  The threat was clear and unequivocal. The more dangerous for being so openly declared. I had just been told to watch my step, and the warning had certainly come from General Katowice.

  13

  ‘WHERE CAN I sit? I need to study these papers.’

  Rochus might have turned into a statue.

  Then, his eyelids flickered and broke the spell.

  He looked about frantically, glancing here and there, stretching on his toes to see beyond my shoulder, searching for some place to put me, some nook of which General Katowice would approve, or at least not disapprove.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said with sudden decision.

  I trailed behind as he darted past, but any sense of relief I might have felt was not destined to last for long. We walked the length of the short corridor, then Rochus veered to the left beneath an extremely low stone arch, obliging me to duck my head as I followed him. He pulled up sharply by another passage coming from the right.

  ‘Will that do you?’ he enquired, pointing.

  An iron grating had been let into the wall at shoulder height, a narrow step cut in the stone beneath it on a level with my knee. It was some sort of defensive position, from which an attacker could be easily picked off while trying to find his way to the centre of the fortress. But the step had two advantages, which I was not slow to appreciate. There was ample light, and solid support for my spine, which was aching after the journey and a restless night in the coach.

  ‘I suppose it will have to do,’ I said, sitting down.

  The air rushing in above my head took the edge off the stinking thing in my hands. There were three soiled sheets written out in a bold copperplate hand, each signed with a flourish by Captain Alexei Korna, physician-surgeon-apothecary of Kamenetz, in the bottom right-hand corner. An additional page in a less accomplished script had been signed by nobody at all.

  On this, the 8th day of October, I read, in this, the year of the Lord, 1807, being this, the tenth year of the glorious reign of our Supreme Monarch, King Frederick Wilhelm III, Ruler of all the States of Prussia . . .

  Since the so-called Boy King had been reluctantly forced to take his father’s place on the throne in 1797, glory and supremacy had been in short supply in Prussia. Though shivering with cold, I smiled at this outrageous incipit.

  As I read on, the smile soon faded from my lips.

  . . . the body of Bruno Gottewald, 1st Major of the Eighth Hussars, was conveyed to the infirmary in the fortress of Kamenetz. Clinical examination of the corpse, conducted by myself, the undersigned medical officer of this garrison, revealed extensive bruising of the right side of the head and the body, with multiple cuts and abrasions of the arms, the hands and the upper half of the trunk, both in front, and behind. In addition, a deep laceration crossing diagonally from the right temple to the left-hand corner of the mouth has almost destroyed the recognisable features of the face. This wound involves widespread crushing of the brow-bone, significant breakage of the nose, and total flattening of the cheek structure, with irreparable damage . . .

  Irreparable damage? A nursery rhyme that my children loved to sing with Lotte tinkled through my mind. All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men had tried, but they couldn’t put that broken egg back together again.

  . . . to the retentive muscles around the right eye, and the consequent evacuation of the eye socket. The visual organ, which is crushed and badly bruised, remains suspended only by the optical nerve and one partially severed tendon. There is also clear evidence of multiple fracturing of the osteo-nasal triangle, and the loss, either in whole or in part, of several teeth in the upper jaw. The lower jaw has been crushed and broken in at least three places, although compression of the mandible and shattering of the palate makes exact measurement extremely difficult. The tongue has also been severed from its root, and cleanly bitten through at one-third of its extension.

  Good God, I asked myself, what had happened to Gottewald?

  The neck and trunk have also suffered extreme violence. The neck has certainly been broken, though whether before or after the man was dead cannot be ascertained with reasonable security. There is widespread evidence of the collapse of the ribcage all down the right-hand side, many bones having pushed out through the flesh, which is, in turn, black and blue with haematin, and blood-caked. The bones of both the arms and the forearms—that is, of both the left and right upper and lower arms—have been smashed and broken in many places from the shoulder all the way down to the wrist. Tearing of the supporting muscles and rupturing of the internal tissue, despite the fact that the webbing of the skin is relatively intact, means that the arms are deprived of tonic form. Pressure with the fingers reveals that the underlying structure lacks any sort of solid consistency: it is not dissimilar to gelatine. There is also clear evidence of scarnification of the lower abdomen, the testicles and the virile member. The area is marked by deep cuts, scraping and significant crushing or compression.

  In conclusion, when physical pressure is applied to the left-hand side of the thorax, there is a sound of loud cracking, which leads me to suppose that the lungs, and perhaps the heart, have been pierced by fragments of bone, leading to lacerations of these vital organs, with consequent malfunction and collapse.

  It is my considered opinion that Major Gottewald died of pulmonary suffocation as a result of his injuries. There is ample congealed blood and mucus in the mouth, nose and breathing passages. No autopsy or examination of the internal organs was deemed necessary, given the evident gravity of the observable exterior damage.

  The report ended there. I sat back, raised the soiled document to within an inch of my nose and took a deep breath, juddering with revulsion as that unmistakable organic ordure worked its way down into my lungs. What had Bruno Gottewald done to earn such hatred? Was Rochus expressing his own childish disregard for a high-ranking officer whom he did not respect, or was there some other explanation for the posthumous insult?

  ‘What made Gottewald so popular, Rochus?’

  The boy was standing over me like a sentinel.

  ‘Is that what it says?’ he frowned. ‘It’s a plain lie. He was a dark one, all right. The fattest rat in the fortress was more popular.’

  I stored up this comment, and turned back to the document.

  What sort of accident or physical maltreatment had led to the man’s death? The doctor offered no hypothesis. He had simply set down the facts of what was clearly a cut-and-dried case of inevitable decease, listing the terrible injuries one after another, as if they were items on a shopping list.

  An additional sheet of rougher, darker paper had been pinned to the doctor’s report. This page had not been subjected to defecation, I noted with relief, and I read it over with growing curiosity. It was the report of Lieutenant Konrad Klunger, the duty officer, and it was dated 8 October, like the doctor’s note.

  No smile graced my lips this time as I read the weary formulaic introduction.

  On this, the 8th day of October, in this, the year of the Lord, 1807, being this, the tenth year of the glorious reign of our Supreme Monarch, King Fr
ederick Wilhelm III, Ruler of all the States of Prussia, the corpse of 1st Major Gottewald Bruno was carried into the fortress by trooper-privates Albrecht Rainer, Zoran Malekevic, Ludwig Karteller and Corporal Rodion Luthant at 4.51 this afternoon. By the sworn statement of the four men, corroborated by the other six men in the unit, and by an entry in the Out-Book, Major Gottewald led his men into the woods to the east of Kamenetz not long after first light this morning for a routine hunt-and-kill exercise, commonly referred to as ‘the deer hunt’.

  Despite the fact that he was officer in charge, whose duty was simply to observe and supervise, Major Gottewald surprised the men under his command by electing to play the deer . . .

  I knew exactly the sort of exercise that was being referred to. It was used in every military barracks and training camp in Prussia. I had played the game myself as a boy in the company of my brother, Stefan, and our friends in the hilly woods surrounding the family mansion in Ruisling. The idea was to run from point A to point B without being seen. This was the role of the deer. The hunters were supposed to hide themselves in the woods or grass along the way, and ‘kill’ the deer before it reached point B. ‘Killing’ in this case meant actually touching the deer, and shouting out ‘you’re dead’. When trained soldiers played out such an exercise, it would be extremely dangerous.

  How many times in his career had Gottewald been put to the test?

  How often had he elected himself to play the deer?

  I rubbed my brow in puzzlement, wondering what had gone wrong.

  Rainer and Malekevic swear that Major Gottewald insisted on running in a part of the wood where the men had never been before. Gottewald told them to report back to the fortress in time for lunch. He boasted that his men would find him waiting there when they arrived. At 2.00 p.m., the men were waiting outside the mess, but Major Gottewald did not present himself at the officers’ table. Having left the fortress at dawn, he had not signed in again at either of the gates. The obvious conclusion was drawn. He had been lost, possibly injured, while out on field exercises. Despite the fact that it was snowing, General Katowice promptly gave orders for a search to be launched, sending the men who had gone out with Major Gottewald that morning to search the same part of the woods where the game had taken place. By late afternoon, the body had been discovered at the bottom of a narrow gorge. The officer’s face was covered with blood. Possibly he had fallen over, or had accidentally struck himself in the face. In a state of temporary blindness, he did not see the insuperable obstacle which blocked his path, a chasm approximately fifteen feet wide, and he fell eighty or ninety feet to his death on the frozen bed of the river at the foot of the cliff. He had suffered extensive injuries, and may have been dead on impact. Jutting rocks were certainly implemental in inflicting the mortal wounds.