HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

  Chiccolino dove sei?

  Lavedrine’s Italian rhyme rattled through my head. He was right about it sounding sinister. They would be looking for skeletons in the spring.

  The final paragraph mentioned Bruno Gottewald. I had asked for his corpse to be exhumed from its tomb of shame in Kamenetz, requesting that the remains be sent back to Lotingen. The despatch noted that I had been appointed executor. I would decide, and Mutiez would follow my instructions, regarding where the corpse should finally be laid to rest for eternity.

  There was only one person who could tell me which earth should cover that body. As darkness began to fall, not wishing to be recognised by the Prussians living close to the ghetto, I directed my steps towards Judenstrasse. The sentinel on the gate urged me to go quietly about my business. ‘Anything could spark another outbreak of violence, sir,’ he warned.

  News had been put about in Lotingen before the holiday that the Gottewald case was closed. The official explanation was that the children had been murdered by thieves, who had carried off the mother as they made their escape, using her for their pleasure in Gummerstett’s warehouse, then killing her as well. The rioting had rumbled on for a while, but like all such protests against the body politic, it had finally suffocated in its own inertia.

  Judenstrasse was dark and silent. Occasionally, a window opened, a head poked out, then the window quickly closed again. The ringing sound of my footsteps in the street was enough to provoke a sudden blackout in many houses. I had no need to ask directions to the house of Aaron Jacob, of course, and his door opened the instant that I knocked.

  He was wearing the same dark-brown, hooded tunic he had worn the day that Lavedrine and I went to visit him, but he was not the same proud man. It was not merely the pale expression on his face that told me, but a stark jagged scar that marked his forehead like a streak of lightning.

  ‘What is this?’ I asked, tracing a similar mark on my own brow.

  Aaron Jacob touched the wound. ‘I was attacked, Herr Procurator,’ he stated plainly. ‘That night, coming home from the Old Fish Market. Someone recognised me, despite the Gentile disguise I was wearing. Perhaps they saw me walking towards the gate. The French guards had been advised of my coming, but a mob fell on me before I reached them.’ He trembled at the memory. ‘Thanks to the soldiers, my life was saved. But I took a beating first.’

  He shrugged his shoulders as if he had nothing more to add.

  ‘I blame myself,’ I apologised. ‘I should not have asked you to help me.’

  He raised his hand to hush my protests. ‘It was an improbable disguise,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘The Gentiles knew me. With or without a Prussian hat and coat. But please come in, sir.’

  It might have been hours, rather than months, since the last time I entered his rooms. The same melancholy gloom, the same sweet odour of putrefaction, disinfectant, and conserving fluid clogged the air. The plaster casts still decorated the wall. But only one night-vase was standing covered on the mantle-shelf. Another child, I supposed, that Aaron Jacob was trying to save from the ravages of the worm.

  I pointed, and smiled. ‘Things are looking up, then?’

  He nodded. ‘My garlic potion does the job,’ he said. ‘Which does not mean that the cause has been removed. Our children still succumb to it. Filth and squalor have become the principal materials from which Judenstrasse is made.’

  He looked up, an unspoken interrogative in his gaze.

  ‘You have not come on that account, I think.’

  ‘The Gottewalds were Jewish,’ I told him, as flatly as I might have announced that night follows day.

  He raised his hand to his mouth to suppress a cry.

  Then I told him what had been the cause of their deaths.

  His eyes widened with horror. ‘Thieves . . . they said,’ he stuttered. ‘And the mother carried off . . .’

  ‘That story of a robbery was spread to pacify the hatred in the city.’

  ‘Will you tell me now, sir, that my theory is foolish superstition? I ought to have recognised the signs. The heads of those children. Destruction was written there. Not theirs alone. Yom kippur. They were marked by death . . .’

  He trembled visibly.

  ‘We live in a terrible world, Herr Jacob,’ I replied. ‘I would not attempt to deny it. Judenstrasse is an adequate demonstration. The fate of the Gottewalds is further proof. But so is the crushing presence of the French. Every man, woman, child in Prussia is forced every day to face a thousand perils. Not the Jews alone. There is nothing in you, in me, or in any person, which inevitably attracts Divine punishment. God had nothing to do with it.’

  We stood silently, face to face.

  I would have liked to find some words to counter that man’s anguish, but no words of comfort came. ‘The Gottewalds deserve a decent burial,’ I said at last, as if that simple formula could cure all ills.

  The darker side of the question occurred to him at once.

  ‘What about the mother? What will become of their . . .’

  He did not pronounce the word, but it hung between us in the air. Executioner.

  ‘She is buried for the moment in the cemetery behind the building that the French have turned into a field hospital,’ I said. ‘The children are lying in the Kindergarten, but I think they ought to be moved to a more suitable place. Gottewald intended to raise his children in the Jewish faith.’

  ‘He wanted to be a Prussian and a Jew,’ Aaron Jacob reminded me. ‘And he wanted the same for them.’ He tried to smile, but managed only a grimace. ‘It seems impossible, doesn’t it? And yet, it is such a simple wish.’

  Suddenly, he placed his hand on my arm. He drew it back quickly, as if he had presumed too far. Even so, he smiled. A warm, luminous, genuine smile. ‘The Kindergarten is where they should remain, Herr Procurator. Safe with all the Prussian children. And the parents should also be buried as Prussians. In a Prussian cemetery.’

  ‘But Gottewald died because he wished them to be known as Jews.’

  He stared at me, a burning light in his black eyes. ‘God knows and sees all things,’ he replied. ‘He knows that they belonged to the Chosen People. There is a way to honour his wish in death, Herr Procurator. A shallow dish placed inconspicuously beside the grave.’

  ‘For flowers?’

  Aaron Jacob grinned conspiratorially. ‘For stones,’ he replied. ‘It will be a sign. Every time you visit the place, sir, leave a stone or a pebble in the dish. It is an ancient tradition of ours. In memory of the dead. They will be Jewish tombs. And Prussian ones, too. Wasn’t that what he wanted?’

  ‘So easy?’ I said with astonishment. ‘A dish and a stone? The dead are more easily contented than the living.’

  ‘They’ll have what Jews have never had,’ he erupted with passion. ‘Peace! They would find none in a Jewish cemetery.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Surely you’ve heard of the regular vandalising of our burial grounds, Herr Procurator? I have been to the East, to Insterberg, on four occasions to visit my own wife’s grave . . .’ He raised his hand and hid his eyes. ‘On each occasion, I had to rebuild it.’ He choked on the words, then struggled to continue. ‘Bruno Gottewald has had his portion of violence. In a Prussian cemetery, they will not be subjected to humiliation after death as well. His ears, and the ears of his children, will not be forced to hear that shameful cry. Hep! Hep! will never sound again for them.’

  I listened in stunned silence. I had seen, and failed to recognise, those words scrawled in blood on the bedroom wall. I had held them in my hand for an instant, before they vanished from the blackened paper.

  His eyes gaped wide, as I grabbed his arm and held him fast.

  ‘What does it mean?’ I asked.

  ‘It is ancient Latin, sir. Hierosolima est perdita,’ he intoned. ‘Jerusalem is lost. No hope for the Jews. That’s what it means. It means many things, none of them good. Those words are shouted out to rouse other Jew-haters. Bring your clubs. Hierosolima est perdita. Hep! Hep
! Slay the Jews!’

  As he uttered the words in a rough, urgent voice, like a swineherd rounding up his pigs, I recognised the sound. I had heard it the day that Lavedrine and I ran close to being lynched by the mob on the quayside. My heart felt deathly cold. Was that the ‘dreadful sound’ that Bruno Gottewald had warned his wife about? The ‘chanting voice’ that haunted his dreams and hounded his steps in Kamenetz?

  ‘She wrote those words on the wall,’ I whispered. ‘Hep! Hep! Written with her children’s blood. She’d been frightened by a letter that her husband wrote. What else could drive a mother to such an act? I am convinced that she heard the cry Hep! Hep! inside her fuddled head. As if some frightful nemesis were coming.’

  He shuddered, then he looked up.

  ‘Describe that room to me,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you saw there, sir.’

  Lavedrine had discovered the murderer. I had found the cause. Was Aaron Jacob now going to pull the threads together and tell me how the crime had been committed?

  ‘I can do more than that,’ I said, opening my shoulder bag, taking out my sketchbook. ‘I can show you.’

  I sat on the edge of the unlit fireplace, ignoring the dirt and ashes, and spread the album open on my knees. Aaron Jacob sat down at my side. As Immanuel Kant might have done, I had inscribed a title on the cover: Drawings Relating to the Gottewald Murders.

  ‘This is the first,’ I said. ‘A sketch of the children’s bodies laid out on the bed. As you can see, they were covered with a sheet. Only the heads were exposed, hanging over the edge of the bed.’ I turned the page, my fingers trembling as I did so. ‘In this one, the sheet had been pulled away. The bodies are exposed to view. On a pillow at the foot of the bed, we found the sexual organs of the two boys, which had been sliced off . . .’

  ‘Rough work,’ he murmured quietly. ‘I wonder why she didn’t call a rabbi.’

  ‘To bury them?’

  ‘To assist her. She prepared her children for the sacrifice, I think. But please, turn to the next page. If I am right, the other drawings will confirm it.’

  I ran my finger over the next drawing. ‘This is a simple plan of the furniture in the bedroom,’ I said. ‘As you can see, there wasn’t very much. The bed, of course. A small table by the bed, and this chair here.’

  He laid his hand on mine, preventing me from turning to the next sketch. He tapped his nail against the paper. ‘One chair only in the room? In this position at the foot of the bed?’

  I nodded. ‘I remember thinking that it was an odd place to leave a chair.’

  ‘Like a humble throne, is that what you mean?’

  I nodded again. ‘I would not have used those words exactly. But that was the impression that I had.’

  ‘And where was the writing?’

  ‘Just here,’ I said, pointing to the wall nearest to the children’s feet. ‘Beneath the window sill. An awkward and improbable place to write. I can show you exactly what I mean.’

  I turned the album leaf. ‘There was very little to see. But such thick blood as this, so far from the bodies. There was nothing casual in it. She had tried to write on the rough plaster.’

  Aaron Jacob bent down close to examine the marks that I had tried to draw.

  ‘I can tell you precisely what happened in the room,’ he said. ‘If the children were going to die as Jews, then a sign was needed.’

  ‘A sign?’

  ‘The Jews are renowned for their humour, Herr Stiffeniis. On the Day of Atonement, we say, the Lord will ask each man to stand up. And He will recognise his own.’

  He laughed in a hollow, empty manner.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Berit milah,’ he answered. ‘A rite carried out on the eighth day of a male child’s existence. Or any time after, if he has not already been admitted to the community. In this case, there are obvious irregularities. The rite is never performed in the presence of a woman. And never by a woman. Normally, a Mohel is present. But this woman was alone and terrified. She had no rabbi to turn to. She was not known as a Jew in Lotingen. She cut roughly, but she did her best in the circumstances.’

  I knew in a blinding flash what he was speaking about.

  The plan of the Gottewald bedroom seemed to seethe with frantic life as he described the scene. The crazed desperation of Sybille Gottewald was given direction and purpose.

  ‘Turn back to your plan of the room, sir. We can see what happened that night. Perhaps she gave them some medicinal substance to make them sleep. She laid them crosswise on the bed for her own ease. They would not have chosen to sleep in such a position, their heads dangling uncomfortably back over the edge of the bed. But their throats were exposed, and she slit them. Once they were dead, she thoroughly cleaned the room. She did not lack respect. She buried the blood, but not the corpses, and when order had been restored, she attempted to circumcise the boys. But every action is marred by fear, by panic, by inadequate preparation. Her knife was long, and not sufficiently sharp. Even so, she eviscerated the boys as best she could, laying their sacrificed flesh on the pillow for the Prophet to witness . . .’

  ‘Was somebody watching while she did it?’ I gasped with horror.

  The Jew turned to me, and nodded. ‘This chair, Herr Procurator, was not empty. Elijah the Prophet was sitting there. He may not have approved, but he was there in spirit. He saw it happen. In the berit milah ritual, his throne is placed next to the altar as witness to the saving of another soul. A foreskin placed on a pillow is an offering to God. In return for the sacrifice, the circumcised child will enter the kingdom of heaven.’

  The album slipped from my fingers and fell to the floor.

  Aaron Jacob picked it up and opened it. The book fell open at the page where I had tried to sketch the face of the mother.

  ‘I gave you an outline of her face,’ he murmured, ‘but this is more exact. Is it the fruit of your imagination, sir?’

  ‘A witness helped me,’ I replied cautiously. ‘That person may have spoken to Sybille Gottewald.’

  ‘Such unusual eyebrows,’ he commented. ‘I would never have guessed. Only a witness could describe them so precisely.’

  He closed the album, and handed it to me. ‘Bury them all, Herr Stiffeniis. In a Prussian cemetery with a Jewish symbol on the grave. Satisfy the desire of Gottewald, the Jew. Have you not discovered their real name?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But I will, I promise you.’

  A knot in my throat inhibited the expression of my sentiments. I did not say how fortunate I had been in meeting him—a Prussian upbringing has its faults. But I hoped that he would comprehend my gratitude.

  I walked away from Judenstrasse in a sort of trance. A dense sea fog had smothered the town. All was silent, all was still. I went to my office and penned a note to the effect that I intended to bury the remains of Bruno Gottewald in the Pietist cemetery as soon as the body could be discharged from French hands, telling Knutzen to carry the announcement over to the general quarters, with a copy to the office of Dittersdorf. I was counting on the proven efficiency of Mutiez, and the incapacity of Dittersdorf, to oppose any scheme that had been approved by the French. More so after the debacle of Kamenetz, and the subsequent placing of General Katowice under house arrest.

  The fog was gone by the time I left the office, and the temperature had dropped some degrees. I was walking quickly, shivering with cold, when I came in sight of the house. As I looked eagerly towards my door, a wild black spot appeared in the moonlight. Helena was running to meet me without a shawl, her hair flying wildly about her, a piece of paper in her hand.

  I saw the strained look on her face as I charged towards her.

  ‘Bialystok,’ she gasped, pushing the paper at me, begging: ‘Open it.’

  ‘Do you want to die of cold?’ I snapped, perplexed by the urgency in her voice, taking her arm, leading her towards the garden gate.

  No sooner had I shut the door than she turned to me.

  ‘Read it, Hanno. Please.�
��

  She moved to my elbow, watching as I broke the sealing wax, stretching to see what was written there. One hand flew to her mouth, the other to my sleeve.

  ‘This is madness, Hanno! He wants us both to go. What he says cannot be true!’

  I read again what Lavedrine had written.

  ‘He believes that the case is still not over.’

  Helena had never been parted from the children, but our bag was ready within the hour.

  42

  THE DRIVER RAPPED hard on the roof.

  ‘Next stop, the new Jerusalem!’ he announced with a whoop.

  We had been voyaging continuously for two days and nights.

  The coach trundled across the River Biala by means of an ancient wooden bridge, and pulled up ten minutes later in the crowded market square of Bialystok. As I helped Helena down, I kept a watchful eye on our bag. We might have been in a foreign country. It was more than a matter of geography, the closeness of the Russian border. People swirled around us in the square. The men wore tight black jackets reaching beneath their knees. The women wore smocks of grey wool. The children were tinier versions of their parents. But it was the hair that gave the game away. Long, tangled beards which had never known a barber’s blade. Each man wore a black hat, skullcap, or a black-and-white striped blanket over his head, wild curls and ringlets dancing about their cheeks. Those people spoke a tongue that I recognised, but did not understand.

  ‘You were lucky to fall upon me, sir,’ the coaching-master boasted, as we hired a trap. ‘Not many here in Bialystok know German. Half speak Yiddish. The rest speak Hebrew. This town’s pitch-full of Jews.’

  ‘Not entirely full,’ I murmured to myself.

  French troopers armed with muskets, their long bayonets fixed, stood in tight knots around the square, but they were vastly outnumbered, and would have stood no chance of survival had a rebellion broken out against them. I was still looking around when the trap arrived.

  ‘Where are you going, sir?’

  ‘Doctor Schubert’s,’ I replied.

  The coaching-master looked attentively at Helena for some reason as he handed me the reins. ‘It stands over yonder. On top of the hill,’ he pointed.