Gretel and the Dark (2 page)

The town of Gmunden, with its placid lake surrounded by high mountains, was a peaceful summer retreat until the morning Mathilde observed that a certain General Pappenheim had brutally suppressed a peasant rebellion there in 1626. The name stirred up a hornets’ nest of resentments. Pappenheim was also the family name of that Bertha creature – the young patient Josef had been so preoccupied with. The one he had never stopped talking about, worrying over, at mealtimes, bedtimes, morning, noon and night, even when his own wife was so heavily pregnant. Why was that? Actually, she had a very good idea why, thank you very much, Doktor Josef Breuer. And she wasn’t the only one who thought along those lines. Ask Sigmund. He’d verify it.

Mathilde simply could not let the subject rest. The fact that almost two decades had passed made not a scrap of difference. Neither did Josef’s protestations. On and on the argument went, growing more accusatory, weighted with increasing bitterness, until he could stand it no longer and returned to Vienna alone. With the exception of the children’s old nurse, and the boy, of course, the house was empty.

At least it was quiet here. Or rather, after so many years, Josef was used to the muted noises from beyond the window. His mind no longer registered the distant rumble of trams or the grind and rattle of horse-drawn vehicles, the street cries, the high-pitched chatter of passing maidservants. Even late-night
revellers and their cacophonic renditions of melodies by the recently deceased Strauss were barely noticed.

Within his consulting room, only the somnolent pulse of the ancient clock usually broke the silence that filled the spaces between patients – and none of those would beat a path to his door until the rest of the family returned, marking the official end of his vacation. This morning, hunched over his desk, Josef became aware of another sound, a tremulous beat, a whisper-soft, allegrissimo countermelody to the groan of the clock. It seemed so much a part of him that he clutched at his chest, suddenly alarmed. However, it was not, after all, the arrhythmic fluttering of his heart, but merely the frantic escape bid of a rag-winged butterfly confused by the glass. That this realization took so long was a measure of how disturbing he’d found the earlier incident.

It had required enormous effort to unlock the girl’s fingers. He’d never before encountered such prehensile determination. The cat was still hiding beneath the bureau. Perhaps it was dead, for during the struggle Gudrun, shrieking with fury, had seized its head, forcibly yanking it free of the girl’s hands. Clawing empty air as it fell, the animal added its own banshee howl to the din. Benjamin, lurking beyond the door, had immediately bounded into the room. Pandemonium. And yet the girl continued to stare straight ahead, wordless, blank.

What had the animal done to warrant her assault? Plenty of people disliked cats, and some were reputed to have found them terrifying – Napoleon, Meyerbeer, the dissolute Henry III of England – but there were few who, expressionless and without even glancing down, would seize one by the neck and proceed to crush its windpipe.

Josef rose from his desk with a sigh, keeping well back in the
shadow of the curtain as he opened the window. After a moment’s hesitation, the butterfly – a
Großer Kohlweißling
, summer ravager of cabbage patches, against whose progeny Benjamin waged constant war – exited to certain death. He watched it flutter upward, keeping close to the building as it battled against the breeze. Not, after all, a Cabbage White: the sooty black spots on the forewings were too large, unusually pronounced, even for a female. It was a rare subspecies, perhaps, though it hardly mattered. The dying year had a voracious appetite for such delicate creatures. Today Josef could smell autumn on the air, a mixture of woodsmoke and fungus, death and decay. He sensed worms wreaking their transformation in the dark loam beneath the leaf mould. The trees were changing colour. A few leaves had fallen. Faced with the prospect of bleak winter, his mood always veered towards the melancholic, never more so than this year, which marked not only the end of the present century but also the end of love. Mathilde had turned from him. Her moods, this difficult passage marking in turn an end to her fertility, would pass; life would settle down again. But the harsh words, those vile accusations. He tugged angrily at his beard. Things could never be the same between them.

What remained? How could his declining years be faced, emotionally lacking, with affection rationed, touch denied? At least there was the steady acquisition of knowledge to sustain him –
suum esse
conservare
. Thank God for work. And, as if to underline it, this intriguing case had simply fallen into his lap.

Josef returned to his chair and stared at the virgin page, as yet unsullied by whatever agonizing secrets were waiting to be unlocked. The facts would have to be recorded. He wrote a
single word, ‘
Fräulein
’, and stopped. He scratched his head and looked about him at the familiar faces of his daily companions – the ancient clock, increasingly dragging its feet over the passing of time, the carved-wood deer’s head mounted with hugely branching six-point antlers, its gaze fixed on each patient, its ears pricked as if eternally eavesdropping, the portrait of his father, Leopold, watching, waiting. For over thirty years Josef had sat at this desk, never once lost for words. He should simply choose a name, any name, and alter it as soon as the girl’s identity was established. But still he hesitated. It was not an easy thing, for to name something established dominion over it. As with an infant, it shaped and moulded with the namer’s expectations that which was named. It set apart. It emphasized human aloneness. A pseudonym was different, a mere cloak.

Josef thought back to his first glimpse of the girl in Benjamin’s arms, swaddled in a horse blanket, its coarse folds framing her pale and bloodied face, the gashes on her throat a gaping second mouth, the shock of the almost naked skull, her eyes open but unseeing, as though fixed on a grim hereafter. In that moment, she had put him in mind of a broken flower. A flower name, then, for such was almost an endearment. Since she was so pale, so slender, and because it was his favourite flower, they would henceforth refer to her as Lilie.

Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne,

Die liebt’ ich einst alle in Liebeswonne.

The decision galvanized Josef into action. Squaring up his notebook, he began to write.

Fräulein Lilie X

Fräulein Lilie X appears to be in her early twenties and in good physical health. Nothing is known about her past life. Her well-kept hands and fine features suggest that she comes from the upper stratum of society. She was discovered unclothed on rough ground near the Narrenturm (27 August 1899). It is difficult to ascertain how long she lay there, but probably no more than twenty-four hours, as what has become known as the Tower of Fools is a favourite meeting place for schoolboys who congregate to throw stones at the lightning rod. Lilie’s condition was such that the boys who stumbled across her thought she was dead.

My primary examination revealed an exceptionally slow heartbeat and hardly discernible breathing. She appeared to have no awareness of self or others, neither reacting to the external world nor to the passage of time. Her eyes remained open, but were similarly unresponsive to stimuli. Skin and mucous membranes appeared normal. The teeth are all present and sound. The patient’s head had been crudely shorn. There was severe bruising behind the ears and around the left eye. Two shallow incisions had been made in the throat, close together, probably with a small pocketknife. There was further bruising on the lower arms and wrists, partially obscuring a line of inked characters on the left, which appear to be permanent. I also found bruising on the inner thighs and buttocks but no indication of very recent sexual assault. There were abrasions on both left and right scapulae consistent with the patient having been dragged along the ground by the feet. The patient has remained comatose for three days, during which time she has not eaten or taken liquid apart from a few drops of water spooned between her lips.

Josef put down his pen, reluctant to revisit the moment of change. Instead he made his way to the kitchen, drawn by his nose to the prospect of freshly made shlishkes.

The relaxed, almost
schlampig
way in which the house was run in Mathilde’s absence was a holiday in itself. To perch on a stool amid the scrubbing and chopping, the beating and mixing, the basting and the tasting, transported him back to childhood, when his grandmother had taken charge of his father’s house, especially as Gudrun was familiar with so many old Hungarian recipes. He took advantage of her turned back to palm surreptitiously one of the warm dumplings with its coating of sugar and caramelized breadcrumbs.

‘Leave them alone,’ said Gudrun, without even glancing over her shoulder, and in the fearsome voice formerly reserved for the nursery. ‘They’re counted.’ Josef said nothing. The old nurse had strict rules about speaking with one’s mouth full. She brought him coffee without being asked. ‘I’ve made some soup for the patient.’

‘I doubt she’ll eat it.’

‘She will, if I feed her.’ Gudrun stood before him, arms akimbo, glaring.

‘It’s no good forcing food into her mouth if she can’t swallow –’

Gudrun snorted. ‘Can’t?
Won’t
. I’m surprised you’re still taken in after this morning’s little episode. Vicious, that was. The girl deserves a good hiding. She needs locking up.’

Joseph ignored the venom. ‘She’ll stay in her room for another few days. I’ve come to the conclusion that we brought her downstairs too soon.’

‘And I’ve come to the conclusion that she’s play-acting, pretending to be dead to the world. You mark my words: there’s
more to this than meets the eye. She’ll probably wait until we’re off guard and then let in her accomplices to ransack the silver and murder us all in our beds. Vienna’s not what it was with all these strangers pouring into the city. I told you, plain as plain, you were bringing trouble into the house. Would you listen? No. Am I right? I am. And what’s the mistress going to say, tell me that?
Frau
Doktor
Breuer won’t want her nicely brought-up daughters associating with a wench who’s probably no better than she should be –’

‘The girl was brutally attacked,’ said Josef, in an attempt to stem the flow.

Gudrun moved the plate of shlishkes out of reach. ‘There’s no need to raise your voice.’

Josef was on the verge of forbidding force-feeding and then beating a hasty retreat when Benjamin clumped in carrying a frail piled high with vegetables, distracting Gudrun, who turned her bad temper on his muddy boots. The young man grinned, ignoring the ensuing threats.

‘How is she now,
Herr Doktor
?’

‘And you’ll scrub the floor until it’s clean enough to eat off,’ Gudrun finished, adding: ‘Never mind her. It’s the cat’s health you should be asking after. If the poor creature’s still alive.’

Her eyes gleamed. Josef recalled that she’d never liked the animal. He set down his empty cup, nodding as Gudrun hovered with the coffee pot. ‘Thank you.’ It was not his practice to discuss patients, but Benjamin’s quick action in bringing the girl … in bringing
Lilie
… here earned him the right to enquire. ‘Physically she’s much improved. The bruising –’

‘I told him already, the bruises are fading,’ Gudrun put in. ‘Almost gone, thanks to me. And those nasty cuts on her neck
have more or less healed.’ She sniffed. ‘I can’t shift those ink marks on her arm, though, no matter how hard I scrub.’

‘They’re tattoos,’ Benjamin muttered, rolling his eyes. ‘Tell her,
Herr Doktor
. She takes no notice of me.’ He glanced defiantly at Gudrun. ‘They’re tattoos. They won’t come off.’

‘Sailors have tattoos,’ Gudrun said scornfully. ‘There’s a reason for that, which I won’t go into. No reason for one to be on a young woman’s arm.’

‘Perhaps it’s decorative,’ hazarded Josef. ‘People have decorated their bodies with tattoos since the beginning of time. They used to pierce the skin with thin sticks and sharpened bones. A painful process, I should imagine, but I understand a New York man’s invented a tattooing machine.’

‘Must still hurt.’ Benjamin winced as he unlaced the offending boots.

‘Leviticus 19 verse 28,’ declared Gudrun. ‘ “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.” ’

The two men glanced at each other, but said nothing. Josef had taken the presence of those marks to confirm Benjamin’s suspicions that Lilie could not possibly be a Jew. It mattered now that Vienna had lapsed into one of its periodic bouts of anti-Semitism: taunts and slogans, occasional skirmishes – nothing new. This time he suspected it was being fuelled by Mayor Lueger for his own political ends, and exacerbated, as always, by ill-educated Roman Catholic priests exercising their fervid imaginations to embellish age-old myths of ritual murder, including sacrifice of Christian babies. The blood libel trial of Hilsner in Bohemia hadn’t helped. The similarities between the state of Anežka Hrůzová’s body – throat slashed, clothes half torn off – and that of Lilie had prompted the boy to act quickly for fear
of reprisals against the Jewish community. Lucky for them it was Benjamin’s younger brother and his friend who’d found her: within an hour the girl was safely concealed within the respectable Breuer house. Benjamin was to be commended for taking their late-night conversations so seriously.

‘Anyway,’ Gudrun continued, plunging her knife into the heart of a cabbage, ‘what self-respecting woman wants a string of lines and numbers decorating her wrist when she could have a nice bracelet? Whatever she is, the girl doesn’t look like a savage.’

‘Lilie,’ said Josef. ‘I’ve decided we should call her Lilie.’