HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘What’s that?’ I grumbled hopelessly.

  ‘You believe that the murderer is to be found in Kamenetz. I insist that the answer lies where those children were massacred. That house is holding something back, some secret that I’ve not been able to unveil. We must return there, Stiffeniis. And next time, Helena will come with us.’

  32

  ‘WHAT WILL I be required to do?’

  Helena’s voice cut in on my thoughts, as we sat before the fire that night, and I told her of Lavedrine’s plan. There was a passionate intensity in her eyes which disarmed me.

  ‘He has great faith in you,’ I said, then quickly added: ‘And so have I. He hopes you may be able to clarify our thoughts about the way in which the Gottewalds lived.’

  I did not say, and died.

  ‘He blames himself,’ I continued. ‘He thinks that something has escaped his attention because he is French. Perhaps he ought to have blamed me,’ I tried to joke, ‘for being Prussian has not helped me a whit.’

  ‘What exactly is he looking for?’ she pressed me.

  ‘A female insight. He thinks that every person leaves their mark upon a place. The fact that Frau Gottewald was Prussian perplexes him. He’d have no problem if he were in Paris . . .’ I said dismissively. ‘He is convinced that a Prussian housewife is sure to notice if anything is not where it ought to be.’

  ‘Is that what he does?’ she frowned. ‘It seems such a strange talent, making connections between objects and actions.’

  I reached out to touch her hand. I was thinking of our attic. What would Lavedrine conclude about my wife if he ever got to see it?

  ‘He hopes that you will make some sense of the domestic arrangements,’ I said, trying to minimise the gravity of the task.

  Next morning, the coach arrived and we climbed up, leaving the children in the hands of Lotte. Just the two of us, as I had requested. If Helena had second thoughts, I would simply order the driver to turn around and take us home.

  Lavedrine was sitting alone on a tree trunk in the clearing where Mutiez had brought me on the night of the massacre. A brown saddle-cloak was wrapped more than once around his shoulders, as if he felt the cold intensely, despite the pale sun rippling across the open ground, as it struggled out from behind a ragged ridge of clouds.

  As the coach pulled up, he raised himself to his feet.

  I jumped down, pulled out the folding step, and helped Helena to the ground. Her hands were cold and slightly trembling. I held them tightly, intending to warm her fingers and lend her courage, but with a quick, furtive gesture, she slipped them beneath her cloak, looking over my shoulder in the direction of the Frenchman.

  I felt a stab of jealousy.

  Standing beside me, she seemed so very pale and fragile. She had dressed for the expedition in an enormous old black cloak. As she came down the stairs that morning, I had felt an electrical shock run through me. The year before, when we were forced to flee into the woods, I had carried that cloak away with us on account of its size and weight. It was large enough to make a tent to hide the children, warm enough to protect them from the damp and cold. I had never taken it out of the closet since the day we returned home. I assumed that it had been thrown out as a painful reminder of times past. It was too large for me, funereal in style, worn and torn from the rough treatment it had received while we were camping out. Any woman with a smarter mantle would have shunned it. Helena had cloaks enough of her own. But my wife had made her choice, and I was left to puzzle over what it meant.

  ‘I had no idea that garment still existed,’ I said.

  Helena smiled in a distracted sort of way, and ran her hands gently over the rough, fading material. ‘Oh, Hanno! I would never dare to throw it away. I’ll never forget or forgive what we were all obliged to suffer. This is my battledress.’

  These memories were chased away by Lavedrine’s voice.

  ‘Good morning, Helena. I was hoping for a brighter day. Still, despite the cold, we can’t complain. You are dressed for the weather, I see.’

  I saw a flush of colour suddenly appear in my wife’s cheeks. Her hair was tied up tightly behind with a slender velvet ribbon. A bunch of curls at the front and loose tufts on either side had fought themselves free, and the wind blew them crazily about her ears like a nest of anxious adders.

  I turned to face him.

  ‘Our Prussian winter cannot be so easily subjected to French hopes,’ I said, attempting a witticism, failing dismally.

  Lavedrine was white with cold. His eyes gleamed brightly from bruised caverns beneath a corrugated brow, his unkempt silvery hair even more dishevelled than it usually was.

  ‘There’s no one else?’ I asked, looking around for the carriage and the soldiers who must have accompanied Lavedrine to the cottage.

  ‘No one. As we agreed,’ the Frenchman confirmed, nodding to the far side of the clearing, where a grey horse was tied to a tree by the reins. ‘I will not impose my company upon you for the ride home.’ He smiled as if to reassure me, then he turned to Helena. ‘A wise choice, madame,’ he said. ‘It is cold in the woods, but the house will be colder, I think. Now, while the sun is up, I suggest that we make a start.’

  We entered the narrow, overgrown pathway leading to the cottage, Lavedrine leading the way, Helena following, while I brought up the rear. I was relieved to note that my melancholy impressions, gained the night of the massacre, were entirely altered in the light of day. The trees were taller, bare of leaves, the bushes less thick and dense than I remembered them. As we walked through the overgrown tunnel, the sun flashed speckled patterns on the pathway. I did not take my eyes off Helena. She strode after him, head up, following his lead, her foot falling exactly where his had been a moment before, avoiding sharp stones, patches of mud, and pools of water, as he had done. She looked so serious, so silent, as she marched after him, that my heart was moved by infinite tenderness in her regard. She had no idea what she was marching towards, while I had a clear picture in my head, and feared for the effect that it might have upon her. More than once I stretched out my hand, meaning to reassure her, but she did not respond. Her hands remained beneath her cloak, her eyes fixed on Lavedrine’s back.

  Suddenly, he stopped short.

  ‘This is it,’ he said, turning back, looking over Helena’s head, speaking to me, a hard glint in his eye. A corner of the house was just visible beyond the end of the hedge. ‘Wait here a moment, will you? I’ll go ahead and warn the soldiers that we’ve arrived. Mutiez keeps two men on guard, day and night, to frighten off idle sightseers. It’s hard to believe, I know, but the curious know no limits.’ A thin smile flashed upon his lips.

  ‘He uses it as a punishment. Our French tearaways are terrified of the place, especially at night. It’s almost as if . . .’ He stopped in mid-phrase, remembering Helena’s presence. I knew he did not wish to frighten her. ‘Most of them are city boys. They’d rather fight a battle than camp out in the woods after dark.’

  We waited in the shade, while he stepped out and called for the guards. Though he spoke to them in French, I caught a phrase or two—‘no one must disturb us,’ and ‘don’t go frightening the lady with your silly tales.’ Then he called more loudly: ‘Helena, you can come out now.’

  Without speaking, or looking at me, Helena walked forward, and I followed. We stood before the house. Nothing appeared to have changed since my previous visit just before dawn almost two weeks before, except that weeds seemed to encroach more thickly around the two shallow steps that led up to the kitchen door.

  ‘I opened the shutters while waiting for you to arrive,’ Lavedrine announced from the doorway. ‘I hope there will be sufficient light for you, Helena.’

  He might have been a charming host, intent on welcoming an unexpected guest. He held out his hand and smiled, encouraging Helena to enter.

  She did not hesitate. She skipped up the steps and disappeared inside the house, passing close to Lavedrine who breathed an encouraging word into he
r ear as she flitted past. I made haste to follow. I intended to keep close and protect her from any residue of horror that the cottage might contain, but Lavedrine caught hold of my arm as I reached him. ‘She must not be inhibited by your presence,’ he hissed. ‘Nor by mine. You and I must pretend, just for a little while, that this house is her house.’

  ‘But you can’t . . .’

  Lavedrine’s grip tightened on my arm.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ he snarled in a whisper, his lips close to my ear. ‘She needs it, can’t you see that? She wants to know what happened to the woman and her children. As much as you or I.’

  His grip did not relax on my arm as we stepped together into the kitchen, as if he feared to let me loose. Seen from the doorway, the light entering through the narrow windows cast a greyish-blue tinge on everything. We might have been in the wings of a theatre looking onto the stage. The room was just as I remembered it, a kitchen that also served as a dining room. In the centre, the table where Sybille Gottewald and her children had sat down together for the very last time. The room looked larger, more drab and melancholy than it had looked that night. I could understand why the soldiers were afraid. They knew what had happened there, but knowing only a fraction of the truth, the mystery remained, imprisoned in the musty air.

  Beneath the window in the far wall stood a sink of heavy, rough-cut stone. On the wooden draining-board, a large cooking pot had been turned upside down, as if someone had washed it out, then left it there to dry.

  ‘My instructions . . .’

  ‘Have been carried out to the letter,’ Lavedrine confided quietly. ‘The scraps of food were removed, of course. They would have drawn the rats.’

  Helena stopped beside the table, her hands still deeply thrust into the folds and pockets of her cloak, her mouth and chin hidden by the upturned collar, her gaze fixed upon the table-top and the plates, as if deciding whether to leave them where they were, or carry them across to the sink. Then, she did something which must have surprised Lavedrine as much as it surprised me. Without lifting her eyes from the table, she unhooked her cloak, catching it up as it slipped from her shoulders. It was cold, but that did not deter her. She looked around the room, as if in a dream, then folded the mantle and laid it over the arm of a chair standing to the right of the chimney-place. Then, she turned again to the table, moving around it, stopping now and then, resting her hand on the back of each chair, considering the perspective as it must have seemed to each of the persons who had eaten their last meal there.

  Carefully folding back the sleeves of her gown, she stepped over to the sink and rested both of her hands on the grey stone, leaning forward to look out of the window into the garden. She laid her hand on the upturned cooking pot, then ran her fingers lightly over the other culinary objects laid out on the draining-board. She seemed to caress those things of little worth—a wooden spoon, a colander, and so on—as if each item had a tale to tell. She reminded me of the blind woman who sells fruit and vegetables from a stall in Lotingen market. By touch alone that woman can separate a yellow apple from a red one. Helena seemed to be feeling her way into the house, exploring the objects that had made it a home.

  Without any hesitation or prompting, she took a pace to the right and stood before a tall wooden cupboard. Reaching out her hands, she pulled open the drawer. She did not look inside, but felt about with her fingers. A moment or two later, apparently satisfied, she glanced at the contents, and nodded, as if some intuition had been confirmed. She lifted out a breadknife and a cutting-board, turned around and laid them deftly on the edge of the table. Then, she touched the chair on her left.

  ‘This is where she sat,’ she said quietly.

  She turned back and opened the upper half of the cupboard. Crockery and glass were stored in good order on the shelves, but Helena did not close the cupboard door. Instead, her hands ranged along the shelves, moving something here or there, setting it carefully back in its place. Then she ran her hands along the undersides of the shelving, as if she thought to find something hidden or secret. And all the while, her gaze was lost, far away, ranging over the woodland scene beyond the glass of the window. A curtain of trees and juniper bushes enclosed the garden and separated it from the wilderness. In the centre, a clump of saplings, two knee-high oaks, and three smaller evergreen plants, were surrounded by a circle of stones.

  Suddenly, a sigh escaped from her lips.

  She might have been Sybille Gottewald alone, working in her kitchen.

  ‘She wanted to stay,’ she whispered. ‘She planted trees . . .’

  I glanced out of the window. A cream-coloured deer was standing frozen in the far corner of the enclosure. Helena had seen it. The animal had spotted her.

  Lavedrine relaxed his hold on my arm. ‘Good. Very good,’ he murmured to me. ‘She is playing the part exceptionally well.’ His eyes followed Helena’s every move, gleaming with tender hope, like the eyes of a music master watching his prize pupil perform exactly as he hoped she would.

  The sharp blade of jealousy jabbed at my heart, twisting this way and that as it sought out the most painful, vulnerable spot. My wife appeared as a sort of automaton, moving and behaving precisely as her maestro indicated. What unseen wires and hidden springs were being worked between the pair of them, I asked myself.

  ‘It did not happen here.’

  Helena’s voice was low, but it was firm. As she spoke, her eyes ran quickly over the table and the plates again, and ranged once more across the sink and beyond to the view of the garden through the kitchen window. The deer had disappeared as silently as it had materialised.

  ‘Am I right?’

  That question was not addressed to me.

  ‘You are,’ he answered. ‘This is where they ate. Durskeitner, the hunter, often saw them when he passed this way. Earlier that day, he saw the table laid for lunch. And he found the room in this state, the lamp lit, when he entered the house that night and discovered the bodies.’

  ‘Frau Gottewald had just put the cutting-board and breadknife away. But she had not time enough to wash up the plates and put them away again when the killer entered. Were they found upstairs?’

  Lavedrine silently nodded.

  ‘I’d like to go up there now,’ she said, glancing at the ceiling. ‘That ramp leads to the bedroom, I suppose.’

  I felt a protest rising to my lips, but Lavedrine spoke out before me.

  ‘It does,’ he said.

  She turned without a word, placed her hands on the rail, and began to climb.

  I made a move to follow, but Lavedrine’s restraining hand came up and held me back again. ‘Give her time,’ he whispered, his eyes on Helena as she climbed upwards, moving slowly, as if fearful that the creaking of the ancient wood might awaken someone sleeping in the bedroom. ‘We must leave her alone for some moments,’ he added.

  I took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

  ‘What do you expect from her?’ I hissed angrily.

  ‘Expect?’ he echoed faintly. ‘I hope that Helena will see what you and I have not been able to see, Herr Procurator. That’s what I want! A woman lived in this house for months, alone, except for her children. No man has been present for any extended period of time. Everything is positioned—organised—in the manner that the housewife left it. This house speaks of Sybille Gottewald. You and I are deaf to that woman’s voice, but Helena’s hearing is more acute, I’ll be bound.’

  We remained where we were.

  Above our heads, we could hear the footsteps of my wife. She moved across the room, the ancient wooden floorboards creaking and shifting beneath her weight. Each step she took seemed to provoke an echoing thump from my heart. Ever so slowly, she made her way over to the bed. For some moments, no sound was heard. I held my breath for longer than was good for me. Then, her position shifted, back and forth, as if she had moved her weight from one foot to the other, then back again. Was she hesitating? Had fright clasped her in its grip? Even as I made to lunge for the
stairs, the wood shifted above my head. She was walking to the window. She stood there for quite some time, looking out, I imagined, at the garden at the rear of the cottage. Suddenly, the boards creaked, and she moved again, following the line of the wall to the tiny adjoining closet-room. I heard the sound of sliding wood, and realised that she was opening a drawer, then silence as she examined the contents. This sequence was repeated three times. Lavedrine and I were standing side by side, our eyes fixed upon the wooden ceiling, as if it were made of glass and we could see what Helena was doing up there. Then, a drawer closed with a rumble, and her footsteps began to move again, crossing the bedroom, skirting around the end of the bed, and coming to rest in the darkest corner of the room, which was the furthest removed from the bed, the window, and the staircase. There, she stopped again.

  I cannot say how long we stood in silence. Helena above, Lavedrine and I below.

  I prayed that she would stop what she was doing, leave that place at once, and ask me to take her home. Lavedrine, no doubt, was doing the opposite: urging Helena on, hoping that she would manage to see whatever it was that he wished her to see.

  ‘Come up,’ she called.

  Lavedrine and I sprang forward like unleashed greyhounds after a bolting hare. My hands grasped at the rail leading up to the bedroom, as did his, but I was the first. I edged him back with my shoulder, blocking the way, fixing him with my eye, as if to say that I was ready and able to meet any challenge.

  He smiled coldly, lowered his eyes, and stood back.

  ‘This is not a race, Stiffeniis,’ he said. ‘After you, naturally.’

  I did not linger, but scurried to the upper floor. The room was lit by sunlight, a pale-yellow aura, and it was surprisingly warm. I had not expected that, but then again, what was I to expect? Instinctively, I looked towards the bed, as if those three corpses might still be laid out there. The bodies of the children had been buried, of course, but the evidence of their murder had not. Mutiez had done his duty well. The pillows and the sheets were marked with blood, as I remembered them, and they were arranged more or less as I had seen them. In such bright light, however, the effect was weak, pale, like a watercolour painting. The spattered trails of bloodspots, on the wall behind the bed and on the ceiling, had faded to a dullish brown, where I had seen them black, wet, fresh.