HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

  He raised his hand, and I fell silent, uncertain what to add.

  ‘I congratulate you on your intuition, sir,’ he murmured. ‘Comparison may be possible. But the plates of her skull have been laid out in a very rough approximation. Do you mind if I set them straight?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ I encouraged, watching as he shuffled the pieces into a different sequence on the table, like a dealer shifting playing cards.

  ‘We must establish the lines of the sutura sagittalis and the coronalis, both of which appear to be relatively intact. I’ll need to clean these fragments properly first. The bone will have to be separated from the tissue, decomposing skin and compacted hair.’

  He turned to me for permission, and I nodded solemnly.

  He bent to his sack, took out a scalpel, then leaned on the table, his elbows braced, his eyes inches away from those human remains. Knife in one hand, a fragment of skull in the other, he began to peel away the rags of flesh from the bone, like a cook preparing onions for the pot, moving from one piece of the skull to the next, removing skin here, skeins of knotted hair and blood-spots there, cleaning and polishing each piece attentively with a rag.

  Hardly a word was said for twenty minutes.

  His blade clicked and scratched against the bone. No other sound penetrated the vault of the Old Fish Market. As each piece was cleaned to his satisfaction, he set it aside, then moved on scrupulously to the next, accumulating a pile of detritus, slowly separating the remains of the head from the clinging remains of the body.

  ‘There,’ he murmured, at last. He stood upright, stretched himself, then bent back to examine the fragments on the left-hand side of the table. Having arranged them to his own satisfaction, he looked at me.

  ‘The largest piece is this one,’ he said, indicating with the point of the scalpel. ‘It is one exact half of the squama frontalis, that is, the bone that supports the forehead.’

  He picked it up, and held it close to the lamplight. ‘The two sutures of the margo supraorbitalis are intact, together with a connected part of the os parietalis. They will be sufficient for our purposes. The blows to the skull were devastating, sir. Do you know how this woman died?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ I murmured. It would not serve my interest if I told him more. I wanted him to tell me. ‘This is what was found.’

  Aaron Jacob sighed out loud. ‘Hmm, just as I thought. The problem, my problem, is this. In the present state of damage, it is impossible to trace the patterns of the maternal suturae and make a fair comparison with those of the children. The lines are interrupted here, and here,’ he pointed. ‘Fragmentation of the missing pieces as a result of the impact makes any true comparison invalid.’

  He held the pieces of the female skull in his hands, then set them down on the table close to one of the plaster casts. ‘There are junctures missing at this point, and this one. Can you see? The child’s skull has a squiggly imprint at this meeting-point. These are the telltale signs in an undamaged skull, but in these pieces, they have been obliterated.’ He looked up and shook his head uncertainly. ‘The remaining pieces of the woman’s cranial plates have been even more severely damaged. I am not certain that I can help you. Not on the basis of the skull alone.’

  I had dared to hope that I would find definitive proof before Lavedrine returned. I had been silently praying that Aaron Jacob’s ability in the handling of skulls would pay dividends. I felt my heart sink. All that remained to convince me that the body belonged to Frau Gottewald was the fragile statistic that no other woman had been reported missing recently.

  ‘Is there no other way?’ I asked, impatience welling up inside me.

  Aaron Jacob held a piece of the skull in his hands, running his fingers over the surface with a look of intense concentration on his face.

  ‘I might be able to reconstruct the face,’ he murmured. ‘Not the details, but the general shape and form. Whether it was long or round. Whether the cheekbones were high, or prominent. The jaw is broken into five pieces, but it could be reassembled. We might attempt a general description. Approximate in the extreme, but better than the fragments of the faceless ghost that lie here on this table.’

  ‘Have you attempted it before?’

  His words had thrown fresh wood on the dying fire of my hopes.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he replied, ‘but only as an academic exercise. I have made a face when a skull came my way without accompanying notes, trying to imagine what the person looked like in life, but . . .’

  ‘But what?’ I insisted.

  The man smiled uneasily. ‘There was no way of verifying whether I was right, Herr Procurator. I did not ask for a portrait when I was looking for a skull. That aspect did not form part of my studies.’

  I began to search inside my leather shoulder bag. I carried it with me wherever I went. It contained a spirit-case, an assortment of linen handkerchiefs, which Helena always pressed upon me as I left the house, my French and Prussian identification papers, and a hundred other odds and ends.

  ‘Perhaps we can combine our talents, Herr Jacob,’ I said, taking out the silver carrying-case with a screw-top where I kept graphite, and my rectangular drawing-album with the stiffened leather back. I had taken the trouble to glue in the loose drawings that I had made at the Gottewald cottage: the corpses of the three children, the sketches of the kitchen and bedroom, and a plan of the cottage and the grounds. On more recent pages, I had inserted the drawings of Durskeitner’s lodge, the animals in their cages, skeletons of birds dangling from the ceiling, and the totems he had set up all around the hut. There was also an artistic sketch of the grim outline of the fortress of Kamenetz, as I had seen it the night I arrived, and rough attempts at portraits of Rochus Kelding and General Katowice, as I whiled away the hours on my return to Lotingen.

  ‘You are a fair artist, sir,’ Aaron Jacob said, as I flicked through the contents of my sketchbook looking for the next empty page.

  ‘Could you help me to trace out a shape for the face of this woman on the basis of these bones?’ I asked, ignoring the compliment.

  He glanced down at the table, then back at me. There was a bright, excited gleam in his black eyes. ‘An interesting experiment,’ he said. ‘And we may make it easier for ourselves.’

  His hands dived for the sack again and pulled out a thick candle. He lit it from my lantern, then set it down in a pool of its own wax on the edge of the table.

  ‘We may use it to good effect,’ he said.

  In the flickering light, I watched as he began to handle the bones, selecting and laying them out in an order known only to himself. Taking up a piece of the cranium in one hand and the candle in the other, he allowed wax to drip thickly along the fractured edge of the bone. Before it had dried, he picked up another piece and squeezed them together to form a single, larger plate. He continued in this way for some minutes, laying the shallow bowl on the table, building up the fragile walls with the remaining fragments of the skull. His hands worked quickly and efficiently, as if he knew exactly what he was doing, and had done the same thing many times before.

  The smell of hot wax and the smoke of the burning wick lent a rich perfume to the cold air, as it does in a church. If any man had entered in that moment, he might have thought that we were performing some strange pagan funeral rite.

  ‘That’s the best I can do, sir,’ he said at last, standing back. A moment later, he stepped forward again, gently lifted up the structure, turned it over, and placed it on its base, the right way up.

  I gaped at that skull in the gusting light of the candle.

  I remembered a gift that a friend of my father’s had brought back with him from Venice. This man had been to Italy during the winter carnival, and he presented father with a mask that he had purchased there. Bauta was the Venetian name for it. A spectral facial cast made of papier mâché. It was the glowing whiteness of the painted surface that gave the skull-like thing its power. As a child, I had been terrified of it. Then, as children do with things
they fear, I managed to smash it ‘accidentally’. But the image never left me.

  I was speechless. And as pale, perhaps, as the skull resting on the worktop.

  ‘You must imagine this as the base, sir,’ Aaron Jacob said, ‘with muscle and fat piled on top, contained within a malleable skin. She was no more than thirty, I would guess, so the features would tend to be soft and round. If you design the general outline, I’ll venture to suggest how the form might be modified by the jutting of the bones beneath, and the cushioning of the softer tissue. I will tell if something is probable, or not.’

  We worked together for an hour or more, in perfect harmony. Sometimes, he praised me for what I had done. At others, he chided me to do more. And when he was happy with the shape I had drawn, he told me so, and warned me not to change a detail.

  ‘All that’s missing now is the hair,’ he said at last. ‘This is the most difficult. We are almost bereft of clues. The strands were dark, I think, unless the hue has been altered by soaking in blood and oil. And long with a slight undulating wave. But how did she comb it? How did she dress it? There are no combs or clips. No ribbon, or band, and Gentile women are noted for being fickle. They wear their hair one way today, and it is altogether different the day after. And then, there is the fashion, which changes year by year, and month by month . . .’

  As he was speaking, my mind drifted off. I thought of Helena, and her rich head of dark rebellious curls. Then, I saw them pinned and tamed. She could be two quite distinct and different people. I made a decision then, and drew that woman’s hair as I thought it might be, flowing down to her shoulders in a gentle bow.

  Aaron Jacob held the sketch in his hand when I had finished.

  ‘Will anybody recognise her?’ he asked uncertainly.

  I looked at the hazy lines of the cheeks. The eyes were larger than I had intended. The lips and the mouth were more sensuous than a skull ought to have suggested to my mind.

  ‘It is certainly better than scattered bones,’ I replied.

  After all, there was somebody who might be able to identify her.

  29

  ‘WHERE IS HELENA?’ I asked.

  Lotte was standing by the hand-pump in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for dinner. The children were seated at the kitchen table, heads down, whispering secretively, slates and chalks in their hands. They glanced up, then quickly looked away. It was a game they often played. The baby was sleeping open-mouthed in his basket, which rested on a chair on the far side of the blazing fire. That scene of domestic bliss ought to have warmed my heart. Instead, I felt the icy grip of fear. Helena was not with them.

  Lotte raised her eyes from the potatoes, and looked at me disapprovingly.

  ‘Welcome home, Herr Stiffeniis,’ she said archly.

  Since Jena, Lotte Havaars had been our anchor. While we were hiding in the woods outside Lotingen, she managed to impose normality on a situation that was desperate in the extreme. She carried on as if nothing had altered, as if the invasion were a child’s bad dream to be soothed away. Naturally reserved, if Helena and I had need of privacy, Lotte would curtsy to her mistress and take herself off to look for mushrooms that were edible. Before lying down to sleep, when getting up at the crack of dawn to light a covert fire, whenever she retired to the wood on privy business of her own, or came back again, she was always the same Lotte: treasured nursemaid, the children’s second mother, Helena’s steadfast friend. We might have been safe at home for all the concessions that Lotte made to dire necessity. ‘I’ll not let Frenchmen rob us of our decency,’ she declared one day. ‘They’ll harm them babies over my dead body!’

  The same defiant spirit shone out of her now, a half-peeled potato in one hand, a sharp knife in the other. She wished me good evening, then stared me down, but she would not rise to my question.

  ‘Your papa is home,’ she said to the children. ‘Aren’t you going to greet him?’

  Manni and Süzi lifted their heads, smiling now. They blew me kisses from the palms of their tiny hands, as if they were delicate rose petals. I pretended to try and catch those kisses, and put them safely away in my pocket. But I did not take my eyes off Lotte as the children bent their heads contentedly to their drawing again.

  ‘Mistress is upstairs,’ Lotte said, ‘putting the stuff in order. Today is Wednesday, Herr Procurator.’

  I felt my heart lift. At least in part. Mother Albers always came on Wednesday, bringing fresh food to our door. A peasant, not a serf, the widow of a fairly prosperous farmer, she produced eggs and other foodstuffs on her smallholding near Lotte’s village, then sold her bounty door to door. She saved the best for Lotte, whom she remembered as a child, and for our children, who belonged to Lotte as much as they belonged to us. Many a time, only the old woman had stood between us and starvation. Helena’s fear was always that she would not be able to supply us with enough fresh eggs and other things to last out the week. The French had soon got wind of it, of course, and they were not slow to send requisitioning parties to the Albers farm. Once Sunday had passed, Helena would begin to show signs of an obsessive nervousness that reassurance could not placate. Nothing was to be wasted. Not a thing must be thrown out. Not before Wednesday. Scraps were hoarded in the larder. What if Mother Albers didn’t come? That was Helena’s terror. Monday and Tuesday were troubled by her frequent visits to the attic. She had to be certain that we had enough to last us till Wednesday. She feared loss, mould, damp, insects, and just about everything else, behaving as if our meagre store might disappear into thin air.

  Lotte went back to plucking black eyes from the potatoes.

  I stood by the kitchen door, my coat still buttoned up against the winter, unable to ask the question that hampered me.

  ‘Sir?’ Lotte was looking at me again, perplexed by my immobility.

  I moved close to the sink, not wishing to be overheard by the children. Lotte put down her knife and the potato, and wiped her hands on her apron, inviting confidence.

  ‘In recent months,’ I began uncertainly, ‘how many times has Helena been out of the house alone? Walking in the country, I mean. Without you or the children, that’s what I mean to ask.’

  I saw the colour rise to Lotte’s round cheeks, I saw the frightened look she threw over her shoulder in the direction of the children.

  ‘How often?’ I pressed her.

  Lotte wiped her brow with her forearm. ‘Twice, sir. No more. You were working. The mistress said she needed to get out of the house. She felt stifled. She wanted to walk . . .’ She glanced towards the door, a frown creasing her brow as she was drawn into this confession. ‘I offered to go with her, naturally. I would have dressed the children for the cold, or someone could have come to sit with them. But she didn’t want no company. She told me not to make a fuss, she’d be quite safe on her own.’

  There was a tremor in the maid’s voice, as if she feared my reaction to this news.

  ‘Did she tell you where she was going?’

  Lotte shook her head, and looked down. ‘She was set on going out, I didn’t ask.’

  ‘When did this happen?’ I insisted.

  ‘Weeks ago. A month, or more,’ she replied uncertainly.

  It was like squeezing whale oil from a lemon. ‘How long was she gone?’

  Lotte thought about this. ‘The first time she was out all afternoon,’ she said at last. ‘The second time for two, three hours, no more.’

  ‘Without telling you why she was going?’ I asked incredulously.

  I would never have believed that I would need to ask such questions of the maid. It felt like a breach of trust with regard to both of them. Especially with regard to my own wife, the woman I thought that I knew, heart and soul.

  ‘She did not say, sir. But I did make a guess.’

  ‘And what did you guess, Lotte?’

  I did not recognise my own voice. Obliged to whisper on account of the children, I heard the low growl of my mounting anxiety, supplicating and demanding at one and the same t
ime.

  ‘The usual thing, sir,’ Lotte replied promptly.

  ‘Food?’ I asked.

  Lotte nodded, her eyes darting towards the door again, as if she feared that Helena might enter the room at any instant. ‘She’s terrified—you know yourself, sir—that there won’t be enough to go round. Surely you remember when we were in the woods? She’d always been such a happy, chatty thing, but out there, everything changed. One thing on her mind all day, and nothing else. Food, food, food! I’ll never forget the day you caught that rabbit with your hands, sir. The look of joy on her face!’

  I did not recall the joy, but I remembered the haunted look that took possession of Helena’s face while we were forced to rough it in the woods. Terror had gripped her hard. She hardly touched her own ration. And I discovered that she was hoarding food in a bag which she hid beneath her cloak. She was jealous of bread the way another fugitive might guard his coin or jewels. I would never forget the way she used to stare at me as I dared to eat my own portion. As my teeth sank into a stale crust, there was a questioning accusation in her eyes: how can you eat it, Hanno? Manni and Süzi deserve it more than you do.

  ‘When she went out . . . walking,’ I asked, ‘did she bring things back?’

  Lotte nodded. ‘Raspberries, sir. We ate them for breakfast. Don’t you remember? With Mother Albers’ honey. Frau Helena was very pleased with herself. There are things to eat if you go out looking for them, she said. Fruits and nuts, salad grass, radishes, berries. If ever we had to hide in the woods again, she’d know what to look for. That’s what she told me, sir.’

  Exploring the countryside, looking for food, learning what was good to eat, and what was not. Was that how she had chanced to meet Frau Gottewald? Was that what they had talked about?

  ‘I’ll go upstairs and help her,’ I said, turning away.

  But Lotte called me back. ‘Be warned, sir. Mother Albers didn’t bring much.’

  I understood what Lotte intended. I would have to pick my words with care. I must not harry Helena when her mind was taken up with such important things. I nodded, and left the kitchen.