HS02 - Days of Atonement (61 page)

‘Bravo, Lionel!’ laughed Lavedrine. ‘You are no longer master and mistress in your own house, my friends. His claws are sharp. Remember, Stiffeniis,’ he said, lightly tapping the pocket of his coat.

I recalled the strange ring with a sharp short blade which had probably saved our lives the day that we were surrounded by the mob on the quay. ‘I sincerely hope that you will not need to use it where you are going,’ I said,
as we made our way into the garden. That ring would hardly be a match for the bayonets, sabres, and muskets of the desperate Prussian rebels out in the East.

Pale day had come, a cold wind was getting up.

A compact two-wheeled carriage was waiting in the road, a young soldier sitting up in the driver’s seat. At his back, the roof was stacked high with an incredible array of trunks and boxes.

Inside the darkness of the carriage, behind the glass, the profile of a person was barely visible.

‘You have a mountain of luggage,’ Helena noted wryly, her eyes narrowing as she took careful stock of the heavily laden vehicle, and especially of the human cargo carefully stowed away inside.

Lavedrine shrugged helplessly.

‘Books and scientific instruments for the most part. The other bits and pieces’—he glanced my way, smiled apologetically, then turned back to my wife—‘do not belong to me. I don’t know when we will meet again, Helena, but I want you to keep a watchful eye on this fellow you have chosen as your companion.’ He waved a finger at me. ‘I have still not got the measure of him. Indeed, I am tempted to be poetic. Hanno’s soul is as vast, as dark, and as truly impenetrable as the night sky over East Prussia. Take good care of him!’

‘I shall,’ she promised, paying no attention to his poor poeticising or his fine sentiments. Her eye was fatally attracted by the presence in the coach. The pallid rays of the early morning sun were just sufficiently strong to reveal the outline of a large yellow bonnet and a high black collar.

Lavedrine stepped up and opened the carriage door.

We stood by the gate, shoulder to shoulder, watching him go. He might have been a relative or friend who was setting out on a long journey. But he was neither one, nor the other. Until very recently, I had thought of him as an enemy and a rival, an upstart Frenchman who had conquered my country, but not my affection.

Lavedrine was halfway into the coach, when he suddenly spun round. ‘I almost forgot,’ he called back. ‘Mutiez will give orders to satisfy those particular requests you made in your report. He will respond to me if they are not carried out to the letter. He’ll be in touch the instant there is any news.’

‘If there
is
any news,’ I said.

He waved his hand in the air. ‘There will be, I promise you.’

I did not reply.

I had been distracted by a hand catching hold of Lavedrine’s as he disappeared inside the coach. White, manicured, gloveless. Too long, too large to be feminine. I recognised those eyes that flashed in my direction from
beneath that strange yellow, turban-like hat. As Lavedrine sat down on the far side of the vehicle, the white hand came up again, playing nervously with the long dark curls that fell shimmering to the shoulder and beyond.

‘A woman?’ Helena whispered, slipping her arm through mine.

Her eyes were glued to the coach as the driver cracked his whip and the vehicle slowly pulled away.

‘A person,’ I replied. ‘To make the journey less tedious, I imagine.’

 41 

C
HRISTMAS CAME, CHRISTMAS
went.

The most joyless Christmas ever known in Lotingen. The curfew was still in force, house-to-house visiting was restricted to the hours of daylight. The weather was unbearably cold. The Buran brought snow in the morning, freezing winds in the afternoon, more snow that night. Children were glum for Yuletide stockings hanging empty at the foot of their beds. Adults were grumpy for the lack of decent food on the festive table. Everything worth the eating had been carried off by the French quartermaster. But we fared better than most. Manni and Süzi had Lavedrine’s cat to distract them from the lack of treats, and Lotte had, somehow, managed to lay her hands on a pheasant.

‘Somehow?’ Helena echoed.

‘There’s a poacher in my village,’ the maid reported shyly.

‘Are we going to lose you, Lotte?’

Lotte blushed, rolling out pastry for a pie that was large enough for ten, and lasted all the way through till New Year’s Eve.

I heard the banter, and played my part in it, but the holiday washed over me, and left me untouched. My thoughts were in a far-off, distant place.

It was Tuesday, 7 January, the day after the Epiphany, when I reopened the Procurator’s office. There was nothing of interest in the official despatches on my desk. As usual, Knutzen was nowhere to be found. I was making up the fire when Lieutenant Mutiez appeared.

‘
Bonne année, monsieur
,’ he greeted me, waving a sheet of paper in his hand, smiling as if he had brought me a belated Christmas present. ‘The morning he left, Colonel Lavedrine informed me of your requests, instructing me to let you know what went on in Kamenetz. All seems to have gone according to plan.’

He excused himself in the name of urgent duties, and I made no attempt to detain him, knowing that he would be able to tell me nothing more than the report contained. I sat down the instant that he left me alone. My hand
was shaking, the paper trembled. Whatever had happened out there, I had caused it to happen.

The battle in Kamenetz had raged for three days and nights before the rebels finally surrendered, throwing open the gate, allowing the combined force of French and Prussian besiegers to march in. It had taken another two weeks to decide what ought to be done with the men of the garrison. Most of them had been sent to ‘work under supervision’ (which meant forced labour) in French military installations scattered along the Baltic coast, though fourteen had died in the fighting.

I found the news that I was looking for towards the bottom of the page.

Until the end, Rochus Kelding had defended the fortress valiantly against the assault. Then, as night fell, he had led a group of boys out of the garrison by way of an underground tunnel known only to themselves. They had entered the nearby wood, and burrowed into the snow. Their plan was to surprise and slaughter the French troops and the Prussian ‘traitors’ as they attempted to withdraw from Kamenetz. But the Buran had brought an unexpected storm that night. Freezing winds and deep snow had trapped the French inside the fort for two days. When they did emerge, they found one of the boy soldiers wandering all alone. Wounded, black with frostbite. He recounted disobeying their leader, Rochus Kelding, digging himself out from beneath the icy crust with his bare hands. That boy had survived. The others had not. Including Rochus.

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.’