The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (6 page)

Then it happened again, without his lips stirring or him looking at her, the goldfish having recaptured his attention. Inside her mind she heard him say, quite clearly:
You scared me! Let me be!

Years later she would note that the boy had actually spoken to her in Danish; and she was clever enough to realise that most probably he sounded different depending on who he was communicating with, as he made himself understood, so to speak, beyond the confines of language, and therefore what she heard as a voice was in fact a thought. Yet one so personal she had instantly known it to be his and no-one else’s, just a shade more toneless than if he’d actually spoken out loud, as if the acoustics were worse inside her head.

Though all likenesses were inadequate, Magdalena accepted that the boy not only read her thoughts, conscious or subconscious, but with all the ease in the world could suddenly start to speak inside her.

The fourth and final occasion was shortly before Magdalena, determined to make up for past horrors with a happier future, left Königsberg for good in a little lateen-rigged fishing boat that flew the Danish ensign.

The terrible mutilation of her breast was by then a fact, and Hercule had come into her room to comfort her, because in those days she was crying nearly all the time. The pain had made her close up like a mussel. She had wanted him to go away. But before she knew what was happening he started singing inside her in that strange ghost-voice of his: a simple, children’s ditty she herself had sung to him during his earliest years at the time when she imagined he would at least be able to respond to her voice’s vibration. Now she could hear his voice clearly inside her, how he was speaking loving words of comfort to her mingled with a child’s innocent sympathy.

Don’t be sad
, he was saying,
everything will be all right, you’ll soon be leaving here
.

Many years later she would look back at him in a religious light and, shortly before her death, write to a woman friend in Odense: “Nothing could be hidden from him, and that was a relief. It was like making a great confession.”

Hercule Barfuss’ talent wasn’t to everyone’s liking, however. And it would be even less so after he had learned to control it.

People who experienced it during his first half-dozen years at Madam Schall’s were in the habit of blaming their experiences on something else, to the general relief of their common sense, their sanity.

In her second year there one of the girls, Anke Strittmater, suffered a nervous breakdown after being bitten by an adder that had somehow got into the house. Once, when Hercule happened to be in her room, she had cried out so loudly before she lost consciousness it could have shattered the crystal glasses in Madam Schall’s display cabinet. Later, when asked what had happened, she explained she had heard the ghostly voices of dead children; and after that had dreamed her father was coming to rape her.

This was not altogether far from the truth. Several of the girls, especially those who had not been driven to prostitution by war or by hunger, or been thrown out of their homes after some scandal involving their honour, had been victimised by their fathers or brothers. Some were conscious of what incest was, others were not. Fräulein Strittmater was one of the latter. Never in her life would she admit that the mental image which came to her in the boy’s presence was an exact reenactment of the scene within her home’s four walls, staged not once but repeatedly from her sixth birthday until, one night in an August thunderstorm, aged fourteen, she had run away. It was a scene her conscious mind had rejected, had thrown overboard like bulky ballast to save her from going under. Instead she had blamed it all on her weak nerves after the snake bite, and thereafter, to be on the safe side, had avoided being alone in the same room with Hercule.

Other girls claimed they heard strange voices of ghosts or the “little people”, blaming it on the brothel lying so close to a churchyard known for accepting suicides. Yet others, again, realised it was Hercule speaking inside themselves, or else put it down to idle imaginings due to fatigue after a whole night in the service of love. And though some had their suspicions, most hadn’t the least inkling of Hercule’s gift since he learned as time moved on that it was not merely dangerous, but also fraught with responsibility.

From the time of his christening, when death had granted him a reprieve of uncertain duration, Hercule Barfuss became the exception in a house where love had to be paid for. It was on him, on the altar of unconditional love, that Madam Schall’s girls lavished their purest feelings. His appearance didn’t frighten them, for they had learned from experience to fear the monstrosity of the soul, not of the body. On the contrary, he fortified them. Now they knew for certain there was someone whose lot in life was worse than their own. He could come and go as he pleased, and from the day Magdalena Holt ceased bottle-feeding him he was no longer tied to any girl in particular, except Henriette Vogel.

For Hercule, Madam Schall had only one rule: from six p.m., when the first clients began to arrive, he had to keep out of sight.

Everyone understood why, though she gave no reason. He was such a terrifying sight she was afraid he would deter customers. So from six p.m. until late at night when the last of her guests had gone he was kept locked in one of the servants’ rooms on the top floor.

During those hours the house became businesslike, filled with a singular atmosphere. Lovesick men turned up looking shamefaced or passionate. Each chose the lady of his heart in one of the halls where the girls sat in a row, perfumed and scantily clad in honour of love, and disappeared with her into one of the meagre private rooms, with its washbowl, towels and bunk. The house turned into a ship with a cargo of dreams and there were times when Hercule had a weird sensation of being rocked to sleep on the open sea.

At the end of his extraordinary career Hercule would think back on the atmosphere he had inhaled in his room late at night. On his inner wavelength he would listen to every secret: the students’ nervousness on their first amorous nights, gentlemen’s murmured declarations of love, the latent fear in the girls’ giggles, the sabre duel of two sergeant majors out in the garden as they fought over some new arrival. All the thoughts in seventeen languages. He would recall the sad odours of loveless affection, of the soul’s wilting flowers and the heart’s frozen watercourse; the pain as champagne glasses clinked in hollow toasts. The excitement of quarrels and fights. The light from fireworks. Drunks’ mindlessness, fiascos and defeats. Sorrow in its every aspect, and a thousand different wishes which floated up to him from every corner of the establishment.

Alone in his room he traced these thoughts back to where they had first taken shape, to the mind in which they had first sprung up, all manner of thoughts and passions he, Hercule Barfuss, had the peculiar talent of divining. In this house were assembled all the longings: for affection, for pain, for ecstasy, for forbidden fruits – and to inflict suffering on others.

This last desire, emanating from the soul’s darkness, from years of bitterness and hatred, was what frightened him most, realising as he did it was part of human nature. He could trace it back to its source, perceive the sick lechery, not the people, not their faces, but their terrible fantasies. When the tragic incident occurred with Magdalena Holt he already knew who the perpetrator was for he had already sensed him, years earlier, in this throng of impulses in the house.

As far back as he could remember Hercule had adored Henriette, ever since she was a little girl. Fate, for some inscrutable reason, had brought her into the world on the same night as himself. His was a love whose beginnings were lost in time’s first narrow passage, before the world had taken shape. He had no first memory of her. She had always been there, as taken for granted as the air he breathed, as night and day. They had been fed their milk in the same room, slept in the same bed, been put in the same playpen, cared for by the same sisters in misfortune who shared a common fate. Children of the same establishment, fathers unknown, they were bound to each other by love’s manifold mystery.

That February night when the bells had pealed and thundered, Henriette’s mother had asked herself, just as Dr Götz had, about Fate’s lack of justice. But at the same time she’d had a feeling that everything was already written down in life’s book, whose text no man on earth can alter and whose author finds it beyond him to own up to his own mistakes. In tragic conformity with some law, her sister in misfortune had to die so that she herself could live, and a boy had to be born so deformed that her daughter might be healthy. To such a degree had she been filled with these thoughts that shortly after her delivery she’d had a sensation of being dangerously in debt to Providence. She would have liked to come to terms with a happiness she did not consider that she deserved by adopting the boy; but Madam Schall, whose word was law in this autocratic kingdom of price-tagged delights, had delegated all maternal duties to Magdalena Holt, the new arrival.

For the newborns to be bonded together as brother and sister would in any case have been a supererogatory formality. They were twinned souls beyond any blood-tie. From the age when they started to crawl they turned to each other. Neither of them could imagine doing anything in their waking hours without the other. And on more than one occasion they had literally been dragged apart at bedtime. They were hungry and thirsty at the same moment, laughed at the same things and cried for identical reasons. Some found it eerie when their first milk teeth appeared on the very same Friday afternoon in July, or when they each took their first steps as a thunderstorm shook the building to its foundations one spring morning. People were amazed by their seeming to understand each other wordlessly, that they played soundlessly and hardly had to exchange glances to know what the other wanted. In the same extraordinary way one always seemed to know where the other was or was intending to go.

This child couple – the one so perfectly formed, the other so crippled – moved the girls to tears, and the incompatibility of the match became more evident with the years as Hercule never grew to be more than a metre in height, whereas Henriette grew to be a tall girl.

Sheltered not only from prying eyes, but also from any view of the outside, Hercule led a quiet life. Madam Schall’s girls being the only people he ever met, he knew nothing of the outside world. In the daytime he never transgressed the boundary between the two worlds and it was an unwritten rule that no-one took him with them on outings or errands into town. For girls who took money for their dishonour this had nothing to do with a lack of courage; on the contrary, they well understood the necessity of protecting him from a world that rarely accepts deviates. So his dismay was all the greater the day he encountered it for the first time.

This incident occurred at Easter in the seventh year of his life. One Maundy Thursday, to be exact. It was mild for the time of the year, but windy, and he was in the garden with Henriette where the girls were busy pruning fruit trees, when a sudden gust of wind caught her printed calico cap and tossed it high above the privet hedge into the neighbouring yard, enclosed by four walls, which belonged to an old stablemaster. Taken aback, the girl stood looking after it and Hercule Barfuss did not hesitate for one moment to take his first historic steps out of love’s sheltered realm; he scraped off his left shoe with his right foot, opened the gate with his toes and, without so much as a thought, without any further consideration, without hearing any alarm bells, but filled with a sense of excitement for which he had no name, Hercule ran with one bare foot out on to the potholed road, weathered by the winter storms.

He didn’t stop until he got to the stablemaster’s house, by the wall of which lay the cap, alongside a budding daffodil. Picking up the cap with his foot and putting it between his teeth – as he usually did with things he wanted to move – and glorying in being at Henriette’s service, he did not notice until that moment that he was being watched.

In front of him stood a boy, horrorstricken at seeing, for the first time in his life, a figure out of a fairy tale, of the kind that edifies children by scaring them out of their wits. Hercule himself, sensing the boy’s terror, became equally frightened and dropped the cap. But when he tried to calm him by smiling, the boy started to scream, which brought more people to the spot.

Surrounded by an outraged crowd of men, women, children and old folk, he heard the buzzing of their thoughts –
an abortion . . . what is Satan doing here on our road on Maundy Thursday?
– filled with such fear and hatred that for a split second he was afraid he might drown in it.

No-one would remember who cast the first stone, and for Hercule it was all a muddle – the uproar, the strangers – so nothing of all this left him any memory of the faces.

Afterwards, when Henriette Vogel comforted him up in the servants’ room, she told him – in the remarkable way in which they had learned to communicate – that the hairs on his back had stood on end. He himself had no memory of how he’d managed to get back into the house with her cap in his mouth. Where he lay, curled up close to her, he was still too upset to be reconciled with an evil world, so he barely noticed the pain in his head where the stones had struck him. Only when she held the cap up for him to see did he smile, comforted by the thought that his suffering had been for love.

This event was significant. No sacrifice was too great for Hercule to make for this girl, the inexplicable object of his affection, whom he loved without a second thought, limitlessly, and without asking for anything in return. In summertime he picked flowers for her in the garden and tied them up in silken bouquets. In the autumn of her years Madam Schall, who saw him on one occasion tottering along in the flower bed, carefully breaking off the flowers’ stem between two toes and gathering a bunch of them in his mouth, would commission an artist to depict this ontological love she had devoutly preserved in her ever more confused memory. Hercule carved wooden figures for Henriette, also, of course, with his feet. He made up stories he knew would amuse her, combed her hair and undid her plaits – all with his toes but with such dexterity it became a legend in the establishment. When Henriette was troubled he would caress her with his feet until she fell asleep, when she was sad and cried he would put his leg around her waist.