The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (2 page)

. . . from a closer relative, Miss V, than you may suppose

ONE EVENING IN
February 1813 Dr Johan Götz was in his surgery sorting the bottles in his medicine cupboard when he came across the simple silver ring set with amber, which his wife had given him on their first day of marriage fourteen years before. That was when he opened his practice in Königsberg after finishing his medical studies at the famous Albertina university; that is to say, before the arrival of his children, before he employed two maids and before the somewhat disparaging military title of “barber-surgeon” had been added to those qualifications he already possessed. His fingertips, softened from a day spent palpating his patients, had discovered the ring in a crack in the wooden shelf he reserved for liniments and laxatives, next to a jar of congealed cream of mercury that he, in the course of the week’s treatments, had put back in the wrong place. He moved to the window, beyond whose pane a snowstorm had been raging for forty-eight hours. He was unable to recall when last he had seen this piece of jewellery. It must have disappeared during one of the ritual transformations of the old merchant house when the surgery had been moved from a smaller room to a larger to keep pace with his growing practice. He lit the argand oil lamp above the examination bench and held the ring up to the light. Encased in the amber was a scarab, an insect of a kind related to the Egyptians’ sacred beetle. Fetching a magnifying glass from his instrument cupboard, Götz, being the physician he was, noted coolly how death must have overtaken this creature shortly after it had emerged from the pupa, for it was seriously deformed. The head was twice as long as the body. Only one of its three pairs of legs had developed. It also lacked jaws and antennae. When the resin had caught it in its glassy trap its life had already been over.

Slipping the ring on to his finger, the doctor was pleased to notice it still fitted, despite the detrimental effects of good living on his physiognomy. I’m a lucky man, he thought, I have a wife who still throws me the same impassioned glances she did fourteen years ago. I have two beautiful daughters. My surgery is thriving to the point where I am grateful to every snowstorm that grants me some much needed rest. My name is respected even by my few enemies, and my studies in Lavoisier’s chemistry have won acclaim far beyond the borders of East Prussia.

From upstairs his children’s noisy laughter, followed by the sound of his wife’s stern admonishments delivered in the tones of all-embracing maternal love, confirmed the family’s bliss.

Götz put the last of the liniment bottles back in the cupboard and locked it. On the laboratory bench, beside the vertical volta batteries he’d recently purchased for curing Königsberg’s middle-class wives of their migraines, stood his pocket lens from his years at the faculty. On impulse he placed the ring under the lens and turned on the reflector. A miniature world stood revealed. Grains of sand, dust particles, microscopic air bubbles, the insect’s larvae so minute he could only now detect it with the naked eye. Two thousand years had passed, he thought, since, melted by a merciless neolithic sun, the amber had trickled down a tree trunk, bearing with it into the future a fragment of the past, a beetle. And this prehistoric hostage had borne witness to the fact that there had at least been no change in nature’s struggle for fundamental harmony. Enthralled by the beauty of the amber, the doctor allowed himself to sink into a daydream – of threatening Viking ships, of horse-borne Crusaders and Hanseatic Cogs on their way up the River Pregel to trade their amber with the savage Prussians. There was my cradle, he thought, the world where I – a direct descendant of the Astias, Prussians or Russ settlers on whom the scholar in me cannot but have its reflections – was born into a family of merchants and doctors; an offspring of amber collectors brought to the Christian faith in the final moments of the Middle Ages by Adalbert of Prague, Bruno von Querfort, Hermann von Salsa or some other crusading knight of the legendary Order of the Sword. My ancestors, thought Götz with a blasphemous shiver, worshipped animals and ancestral spirits, bent the knee to wooden idols in sacred groves, chanting ecstatically over the bodies of sacrificed slaves who might well have hung from the offspring of the very same tree whose resin is now lying there in its silver setting and revealing itself under my pocket lens. They had also sacrificed the misshapen, the deformed, the hare-lipped, the deaf and the blind, even the younger of each pair of male twins.

At the back of his mind he also smiled at love’s sublime music coming from upstairs as his wife and her chambermaid began putting the children to bed. Pomerania, Galinden, Natangen, his mental excursion went on; in those legendary lands my forefathers were collectors of amber, great hunters and horsemen, spoken of with dread by Gallus Anonymus, with longing by Ibrahim ibn Jakub (he who travelled to the land of Slavonians on behalf of the Spanish Moors and had fallen in love with one of the big-bosomed women the savages had made him a present of), who had earned respectful mention in the Madgeburg Annals, been mystically revered in Thietmar von Merseburg’s
Cronica
and been accorded a crusader’s frigid military salute by Peter von Duisburg in the documents of his Order.

Amazed by the wealth of detail in these overwhelming dreamy historical images, Dr Götz’s attention drifted from the inner to the outer vision as he came back to reality – the missing jaw, the over-dimensioned skull section of a monstrous insect – magnified twenty times over by the optics of his pocket lens. They made him shudder.

Lifting his gaze from the lens, he let the last traces of his daydream disperse. In the street the sound of hooves could just be heard, followed by a sleigh bell. “Anyone who presents himself in such a gale at this hour,” he thought, “must be out on an urgent errand indeed.”

It was Franzceska Beyer, the Götz’s maid-cum-nanny since the arrival of their youngest daughter Elizabeth seven years earlier, who opened the front door to the woman who was defying the snowstorm that night. As far as she would later recall, she had instantly realised – despite being half blinded by the Arctic winds, advancing from their cradle in the Gulf of Bothnia and howling and roaring like a wolfpack down the central quarters of the ancient city of Königsbert – it was a very young girl, moreover one of easy virtue. Yet she was clad as if for mid-May, wore saffron yellow shoes, a cock’s plume in her hat, and over her shoulders only a loosely buttoned Venetian cloak.

“Can I speak to Dr Götz?” she asked, shivering. “It’s urgent. A matter of life and death.”

Franzceska felt sorry for the girl’s light clothing and her face’s deathly pallor. Amid a perfumed cloud of musks and ambergris soaps she admitted her to the hallway, and saw through a gap in her outdoor garments that, save for a lace corset, she was virtually naked.

“In Jesu name,” she said, pointing to the hall tabouret, “do sit down. I’ll fetch the doctor and get you some tea to warm yourself.”

Two minutes later when Dr Götz appeared, together with the maid and likewise his wife Catherine, whose sixth sense never failed to pick up anything of note happening in the house, the girl had collapsed in sobs on the floor. Together they lifted her up. But scarcely had they placed her on the seat than she jumped up again, shouting, “There’s nothing wrong with me! It’s the Polish girl! She’s dying in childbed, and as Miss Vogel’s having a baby too and Madam Schall asked me to take the sledge to the doctor’s, and seeing as how you two are old acquaintances and known for saving the lives of both rich and poor without taking them in any special order . . .”

The girl’s hysteria released the doctor from his recollections of that part of his youth he believed was forever kept secretly screened off by a shield of family love. For it was his wife who bade him run and get his bag while she tried to calm the girl.

Taking the steps down to his surgery two at a time, Götz retrieved his emergency bag from its brass hook behind the door, and since it was a question of a delivery, supplemented its contents with two lancets, his tongs, styptic ointments, a dozen bandages and cotton compresses, plus a newly purchased and hitherto unopened bottle of laudanum. While he was busy with all this, he noticed the ring was still on his finger and – without being able to explain it or put up the slightest resistance – again let himself succumb to the kind of shameful excitement he had enjoyed in the distant past in the Sackheim district as a regular weekend client of Madam Schall’s love nest, known in those days as:
Your House of Desires.

That had been during his student years in Albertina, before the ball arranged by Königsberg’s cavalry officers at which he first met Catherine Mahlsdorf and behind the dinner hall’s damask curtain had given her the clandestine kiss which deprived him for ever of any desire for the kind of love one pays for. He recalled the women of six nationalities who travelled with the army’s baggage train who, between the wars, had been taken on at Madam Schall’s and who had let their daughters run amok in that enormous building, until such time as they were considered old enough to be sold to the highest bidder. He recalled a negress from the French colonies with cocoa-coloured skin and hair fuzzy as steel wool. Allegedly a Yoruba princess, one rumour had it she had been sold as a slave to the Russian tsarina before running away with a Dutch adventurer, who eventually lost her at dice to Madam Schall. He recalled with distaste the auctioning off of a weeping nine year old whose maidenhead was won in the end by a sailor. With similar excitement he called to mind the enormous grey-haired Agrafena Nehludova, a Russian woman who, surrounded by an endless array of soaps, perfumes, eaux de cologne and smelling salts, had lain, naked and audibly fermenting, on a divan that was a sea of satins and linen, in an undergrowth of flower vases, jewellery, hairpins, mirrors, obscene prints and love letters written on vanilla paper by ecstatic admirers of every age and class of society, and had received clients young enough to be her children, or, come to that, grandchildren. One evening, bewitched by the deep-red rose behind her ear and the sanctimonious smile that, after their copulation, seemed to promise him eternal life, Götz had himself boarded her ship of Olympian lechery, no less inebriated by a bottle of Malvoisie than by her odour of Havana snuff and debauchery. It was said she had not got up from her encampment for more than two decades – a rumour, culled from love’s mythologies, which Götz had never found reason to disbelieve. For never among all the evenings he had visited the establishment had he once seen her lift her massive anatomy from that erotic divan where, between amorous interludes, her goose quill replied to love letters or else she languorously vegetated with a pinch of snuff. Together with gonorrhoea, she had been the most unchanging feature of that establishment, where the girls came and went like migrant birds.

The doctor let his recollections of past excitements evaporate, again took hold of his professional self and found he had put the ring down, though he couldn’t recall where. When he left his surgery it was with the strange conviction that he would never find it again, and that Fate, in some inexplicable way, had linked this with the delivery awaiting him in Königsberg’s most celebrated whorehouse.

In the hallway, meanwhile, Catherine Götz, assisted by the maid, had given the girl a glass of linden tea and wrapped her in a woollen shawl. The colour had returned to her cheeks. Now she was sitting hunched up on the tabouret, the glass of tea cupped in her hands, her gaze fixed on some spot on the carpet that could equally have been a point on her inner horizon.

Drawing her husband aside as she helped him on with his fur coat, fox-fur gloves and intricate button boots, Catherine Götz whispered as she handed him his walking stick with the silver ferrule, “You’ll have to explain all this about the Schall woman’s establishment, Johan, as soon as you get home. I didn’t think we had any secrets between us, either from our life together or the past.”