Authors: Marek Krajewski
Von Hardenburg wiped his monocle and ordered spare ribs from a passing waitress. He tapped his cigarette against the lid of his gold cigarette case with its engraved crest, and looked intently at Mock.
“But maybe you can explain this strange love Kemal Erkin has for the beautiful Silesian land, our Switzerland of the North?”
Mock lit his cigarette, without a word. Rituals in honour of Bacchus
had begun on the stage. Von Hardenburg put his monocle in place and followed the spectacle with intent: “Look at that red-head on the right. A true artist!”
Mock did not look. All of his attention was concentrated on the sparks flashing in the dark red wine. Deep thought was expressed by the horizontal lines on his forehead. Von Hardenburg turned his eyes away from the stage and raised his glass.
“Who knows, maybe your explanation would help both me and my superiors in Berlin to make a decision favourable to you? Apart from that, I hear you’ve got quite a large file of character profiles of various people …”
A powerfully built girl walked up to their table and smiled at von Hardenburg. Mock smiled at him too and raised his glass. They clinked glasses, almost noiselessly.
“So, maybe we can meet tomorrow in my office? And now, please forgive me. I have an appointment with this Maenad. Bacchus beckons me to his mysteries.”
* * *
That evening Mock did not play chess with his girls for the simple reason that chess was a marginal activity to them, and they were now performing their primary role in quiet boudoirs with other clients. Mock, therefore, did not play the royal game which does not mean that he did not satisfy his other, non-chess-related needs. At midnight, he said goodbye to a stout brunette and went to the boudoir which he usually occupied on Friday evenings. He knocked several times, but nobody answered. So he opened the door a little and swept his eyes across the room. Anwaldt, entirely naked, was lying on the divan among Moorish cushions. The schoolgirls were slowly getting dressed. With one gesture, Mock hastened their movements. The embarrassed Anwaldt also pulled on his shirt and trousers. When the giggling girls had disappeared, Mock stood a bottle of
Rhein wine and some glasses on the table. Still feeling the effects of his hangover, Anwaldt swiftly knocked back two glasses.
“How are you feeling? Has the oldest and best therapy for depression worked?”
“This painkiller works on a very short term.”
“Did you know that the vaccine against any disease is nothing other than the virus causing it?” Mock obviously liked this medical metaphor. “And so I’ll infect you for good: von Hardenburg confirmed that our suspicious Erkin is a Yesidi who has come to Breslau on a sinister mission. He’s completed half of it
par excellence
.”
Anwaldt leapt up from the chair, catching his knees on the chess table. The glasses danced on their thin legs.
“Mock, sir, you’re playing at rhetorical games here, but what hangs over me is no game. Somewhere not far from me, maybe even in this brothel, a fanatic who wants to stuff me with scorpions is lying in wait. Just look at that wallpaper, how well Persian verses would look written on it in my blood. You prescribe brothel therapy for me … But what therapy can help a man for whom having a father – his deepest longing – has at one and the same time become his greatest curse?”
The words broke up, the grammar was confused – Anwaldt started weeping like a child. His abused and stung face was contorted by wrenching sobs. Mock opened the door to the corridor and looked around. A drunken client was kicking up a row between the tables downstairs. Mock closed the door and approached the window to open it wider. The garden was bursting with the warm scent of lime trees. Some Bacchante was groaning in the next room.
“Don’t exaggerate, Anwaldt.” He bit his tongue. (He had wanted to say: “Don’t whine; you’re a man”.) His irritation was expressed by a loud puff. “Don’t exaggerate; it’s enough for you to take great care until we catch Erkin. And then the curse will not be fulfilled.”
The young man now sat with dry eyes. He avoided Mock’s gaze, nervously snapped his knuckles, rubbed the small cut on his chin, whipped his eyes from side to side.
“Don’t worry, Herbert,” Mock understood the state he was in all too well. “Who knows, maybe our neuroses are caused by us holding back our tears. After all, Homer’s heroes cried, too. And bitter tears at that!”
“And you … do you sometimes cry?” Anwaldt looked at Mock hopefully.
“No,” he lied.
Anwaldt was gripped by anger. He got up and shouted: “Well, right … because why should you want to cry? You weren’t brought up in an orphanage … Nobody made you eat your own excrement when you couldn’t swallow the spinach! You didn’t have a whore for a mother and a cursed Prussian aristocrat for a father who did nothing more for his child than put him in a Catholic orphanage and secondary school specializing in the Classics! You don’t wake up happy to have survived one more day because somehow no-one’s torn your belly apart and poured vermin into your guts! Listen to me, man, they waited seven centuries for a boy and a girl … Why should they let an opportunity like this go by now? Their possessed shaman is even now undergoing a revelation … The deity is approaching …”
Mock was no longer listening; he was feverishly searching through scrolls of memory, like someone who, at a stiff, official reception cannot bear silence at the table and is trying to find some joke, anecdote, pun in his head … Anwaldt yelled; someone knocked at the door. Anwaldt screamed; the knocking intensified. A fake groan resounded in the other room and spilled out into the garden through the open window. Anwaldt was hysterical; someone thumped on the door.
Mock got up and took a swing. His small palm bounced off his yelling assistant’s cheek. Silence. Nobody was knocking at the door; the Maenad
next door gathered her clothes which lay scattered on the floor; Anwaldt froze; Mock found his lost thought in the darkness. He heard his own voice resound in his head: “Don’t exaggerate; it’s enough for you to take great care until we catch Erkin. And then the curse won’t be fulfilled … curse won’t be fulfilled … curse won’t be fulfilled …”
He was standing very close to Anwaldt and looking him in the eyes: “Listen, Herbert, Doctor Hartner wrote that their vengeance is invalid if it is not executed in exactly the same circumstances as the crime to be avenged. The Yesidis waited centuries for a son and a daughter to be born to the von der Malten family … But there have already been siblings of mixed sex in the family. Olivier von der Malten’s aunt and his father, Ruppert. Why didn’t the Yesidis kill
them
, rape her and sew scorpions into their innards? Hartner suspects that revenge could not be taken in a closed convent.” Mock shut his eyes and experienced self-loathing. “I don’t think so. Do you know why? Because their father was no longer alive. Those twins were born after the death of their father who was killed at Sadowa. I know that perfectly well. My university colleague, Olivier von der Malten, told me about his grandfather-hero. So the curse was not fulfilled … But if von der Malten were to die …”
Anwaldt walked up to the table, grabbed the bottle of wine and knocked it back. Mock watched as the wine ran down his chin and dyed his shirt. Anwaldt drank to the last drop. He hid his face in his open hands and hissed out:
“Alright, I’ll do it. I’ll kill the Baron.”
Mock choked on his own self-loathing.
“You can’t. He’s your father.”
Anwaldt’s eyes flashed between his fingers.
“No. You are my father.”
BRESLAU, THURSDAY, JULY 19TH, 1934
FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
The black Adler stopped in front of von der Malten’s manor. A man got out and staggered towards the gate. The sound of the doorbell tore through the silence. The Adler drove off with a screech of tyres. The man at the wheel looked into the rear window and contemplated his own reflection for a while.
“You’re the lowest son-of-a-bitch,” he said to the tired eyes. “You pushed that boy into committing a crime. He has become a tool in your hands. A tool to remove the last witness of your masonic past.”
* * *
Baron Olivier von der Malten stood on the threshold of his enormous hall. It looked as if he had not been to bed at all. He wrapped the crimson dressing gown around himself and watched the swaying Anwaldt severely.
“What are you thinking of, young man? That this is a police station, a hostel for drunks?”
Anwaldt smiled and – in order to hide his stammering speech – said as quietly as he could:
“I’ve got some new, important information for you …”
The host entered the hall and indicated for Anwaldt to do the same, after which he dismissed the sleepy servant. The spacious, panel-covered room was hung with portraits of the von der Maltens. Anwaldt did not see sternness and gravity in them but rather cunning and vanity. He looked around – in vain – for a chair. The Baron made as if not to notice.
“What do you want to tell me about this case that’s new? I had lunch with Counsellor Mock today so I am more or less up to date. What could have happened this evening?”
Anwaldt lit a cigarette and, for lack of an ashtray, shook the ash on to the polished floor.
“And so Counsellor Mock told you about the Yesidi’s vengeance. Did he mention that the vengeance had not been wholly fulfilled?”
“Yes. ‘The mistake of an old demented shaman,’ ” he quoted Hartner. “Did you come to see me, drunk as you are, at four o’clock in the morning to ask me about my conversation with Mock?”
Anwaldt scrutinized the Baron and noticed quite a few shortcomings in his dress: the button on his vest, the strings of his long johns slipping out from under the dressing gown. He burst out laughing and stayed in this strange, doubled-up position for a while. He imagined the elderly gentleman sitting on the toilet and panting heavily, when here comes his drunken little son and destroys the sacred peace of the elegant residence. Laughter was still contorting his lips when he let loose words, swollen with anger:
“Dear Papi, we both know that the dervish’s revelations are startingly consistent with family realities. The unofficial ones, of course. The god of the Yesidis has finally grown impatient and taken bastards into account. On the other hand, how is it that in this knightly family no warrior inseminated any captive, no landowner got hold of a comely peasant girl in a haystack? All were temperate and faithful to their marriage vows. Even my dear Papi. After all, he begat me before getting married.”
“I would not joke in your position, Herbert,” the Baron’s tone was inalterably haughty – but his face had shrunk. In one moment he had changed from a proud junker to a fearful old man. His neatly combed hair had slipped to the sides, his lips sunk to reveal the absence of dentures.
“I don’t wish you to call me by my first name,” Anwaldt had stopped smiling. “Why didn’t you tell me everything at the beginning?”
The father and son stood face to face. Delicate streaks of dawn began to creep into the hall. The Baron remembered the June nights of 1902 when he would creep into the servants’ quarters, and the sheets – drenched with sweat – when he left; he remembered the disciplinary whipping which
Ruppert von der Malten had personally bestowed on his twenty-year-old son; he remembered Hanne Schlossarczyk’s terrified looks as she left the lordly residence, literally booted out by the servants. He broke the ringing silence with a matter-of-fact answer.
“I found out about the Yesidi’s curse today. And I wanted to tell you about our close relationship were the investigation to come to a dead stop. That would have encouraged you to go on.”
“Close relationship …
(Do you have a relative, asked the tutor, even a distant one? Pity, you could have spent Christmas away from the orphanage at least once.)
Even now you’re a hypocrite. You can’t call it by its name. It’s not enough for you to have dropped me off in some refuge, paying nine years of fees at a secondary school: an offering for your peace of mind. How much did you pay that merchant from Poznań, Anwald, for his name? How much did you pay my mother to forget? How many marks does corrupting a conscience cost? But it called out in the end. It shouted: summon Anwaldt to Breslau. He’ll be useful. He happens to be a policeman so let him lead the investigation into his sister’s murder. But I’ll tell him about the family ties to mobilize him, right? Conscience is conscience, but practicalism is practicalism. Was it always like that with the von der Maltens?”
“What you call practicalism,” the Baron proudly raised his eyes to the portraits of his ancestors, “I would term family pride. I summoned you to catch your sister’s murderer and avenge her terrible death. As a brother you had the absolute right to do so …”
Anwaldt pulled out his gun, released the safety catch and aimed at the head of the first ancestor in the gallery. He pulled the trigger. The dry crack of the firing-pin resounded. He started to rummage through his pockets feverishly. The Baron caught him lightly by the shoulder, but quickly removed his hand. The policeman looked at him with hazy eyes.
“I can’t stand … German Yesidi …”
The Baron drew himself up as taut as a string. They continued to stand face to face in the misty, orange glow.
“Please behave correctly and hear me out to the end. I told you about our family pride. It results from centuries of tradition, from the history of our ancestors. All that would cease to exist. My death would mean the end of the family, the last, Silesian branch of the von der Maltens would dry up.” He grabbed Anwaldt by the shoulders and spun him round so that the elegant, syphilitic faces gyrated. “But in this way our family will continue to exist in the person of Herbert von der Malten.”
Suddenly, he ran up to the wall and took down a somewhat jagged sword with a golden hilt embossed with mother of pearl. Holding it on outstretched arms, he approached Anwaldt. He looked at him for a moment, holding back his emotions. As a man should. As a knight should.
“Forgive me, son,” he bowed his head. “Gaze at all this around you. You are heir to it. Receive our coat of arms and our sacred family symbol, the sword of our great-grandfather Bolek von der Malten, a knight of the Thirty Year War. Bury it in the murderer’s heart. Avenge your sister.”