Phantoms of Breslau iem-3

by Marek Krajewski

  “You’re pissed again!” he heard his father say.

  He soaped his neck and armpits, mumbled something in reply and sat down in the basin, feeling his testicles contract with cold. Rot burst in from behind the curtain and stood up on his hind legs, wagging his tail. Mock stroked him on the head with wet hands and returned to his ablutions.

  “What is this, damn it? What’s this supposed to mean?” his father shouted, clattering the lids on the stove. “Where were you last night?”

  Mock washed his feet and rinsed off the soap with water from the jug. The floor was soaked. He wrapped an old dressing gown around himself and emerged from the alcove. His father’s grey hair stuck out alarmingly in all directions, and behind his pince-nez his eyes flashed with anger. Mock took no notice. He fetched a rag from under the stove, wiped the water off the floor, then lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling. The damp patches on the wall formed the features of a face. Mock strained his imagination, but the face did not appear familiar. “After today, I ought to be seeing Johanna’s face everywhere,” he thought. He felt pangs of guilt that it was not so.

  “Come and get some soup!” called his father.

  Mock sat at the table and reached for a spoon. The first mouthful flowed down to a stomach of stone. The second stopped somewhere on the way. Mock set down the spoon.

  “I’ll eat in a minute.”

  “In a minute it’ll be cold. Am I supposed to heat it up for you again? Do you think I’m your cook or something?”

  Little Ebi is sitting in the kitchen eating dumplings. “Eat up or they’ll get cold” says his father, lighting his pipe. Ebi washes them down with soured milk and feels the doughy balls expand. They fill his gullet and mouth, the grey dough swells, sticks to his palate, he cannot breathe. “Daddy, I can’t have any more.” “You’re not leaving the table until you’ve eaten. The dumplings are delicious, you little brat, and we haven’t got any pigs! Everything’s got to be eaten! Look at Franz, he’s polishing it off!” …

  “I’m not eating.” Mock pushed the plate of soup aside. “Don’t cook anything for me, Father. I’ve told you so many times.”

  He went to his alcove, opened the wardrobe and laid out a clean shirt and long johns on the bed.

  “Pushing his plate away like that, the little rat.” The wheezing in his father’s lungs turned to rasping. “And you, old man, you wash up, you do everything for him …”

  Mock dressed carefully and raised the hatch; his heels rang out against the steps. He went outside and stood in the sunlight. He no longer felt like a visit to the Red Tavern. He sat down on a bench beneath an acacia and lit a cigarette. He heard Rot barking and his father’s footsteps on the stairs; a moment later Willibald Mock appeared in the small porch to which his brother Eduard’s clients had once swarmed on slaughter days. In his hand was a tin plate heaped with steaming potatoes.

  “Maybe you’ll eat this?” he asked.

  Eberhard Mock stood up and walked away. He turned and looked at his father standing in the porch. Short. Helpless. Mashed potatoes steaming in his hands.

  BRESLAU, SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1919

  THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  The red-headed nurse stroked Mock’s hand. Her skin was so fair and smooth he thought the tear now falling from her lashes would slide down her cheek in one hundredth of a second. The nurse removed her bonnet and let down her hair. The thick copper locks fell with a gentle rustle onto the starched collar of her housecoat. She leaned over Mock. He caught the scent of her breath. Gently, he touched the fabric stretched across her large breasts. The girl stepped back abruptly, knocking over the bedside table. Mock had expected a sharp, metallic sound, but it was dull and somewhat muffled. All of a sudden the sound exploded, as if someone were thumping their fist against a wooden door. Mock sat up in bed and pulled aside the curtain. A penetrating cold shudder ran through him. “Must be hunger,” he thought. “I didn’t have anything to eat yesterday.” It was pitch black. He lit a candle and looked around the room. His father was snoring quietly, and Dosche’s dog was looking at him attentively, his eyes glowing amicably in the dark. Mock reached under his pillow where he kept his Mauser, a wartime habit, and stood in the middle of the room. He could have sworn that the noise which had woken him had come from the hatch leading down to the old butcher’s shop. He lay flat on the floor, opened the hatch a little and peeped through the smallest gap by the hinges. He knew any intruder would attack where the gap was widest. He yanked open the hatch and jumped back. Nobody attacked. With shivers still running down his spine, Mock held the candle to the opening. He could not see further than the first few steps. He glanced at the dog; it was resting its head peacefully on its outstretched front paws, blinking sleepily. The animal’s behaviour vouched there was no danger. Mock went down the stairs, holding the candle high.

  The butcher’s shop was empty. He directed the light to the grille on the drain, and finding nothing went out on to the porch. The September night was fair but cool. He made sure the door to the shop was locked securely and went back upstairs. He yawned, stood the lighted candle on the table and got into bed without drawing the curtain. Images drifted before his eyes: a discussion in the street, scraps of conversation, a lame horse pulling a droschka, a porter pulling the shafts of a two-wheeled cart. Something falls from the cart and lands with a loud noise on the cobbles.

  Mock leaped to his feet and looked at his father and the dog. His father was snoring, but the dog was growling. He shuddered — the animal was staring at the hatch and baring its teeth. He sat down on his bed, the Mauser in his hand, and felt sweat trickling from his armpits. Suddenly Rot jumped up and started wagging his tail. Standing on his hind legs he went round in circles, just as he had done when he had greeted Mock some hours earlier as he was washing behind the curtain. The dog then lay down to sleep in his usual place. For a long time Mock heard nothing but the dull thumping in his chest; unlike the dog, he did not sleep a wink that night.

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1919

  SEVEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  Birdsong could be heard through the open window of Doctor Cornelius Ruhtgard’s office. Mock stood next to the sill, breathing in the cool mist formed by sunlight on damp grass. Doctor Ruhtgard himself could be heard singing in the bathroom adjacent to the office, a sure sign that a well-honed razor was making fine work of his morning stubble. The doctor’s servant knocked on the office door and entered silently to place a tray with a coffee service on a small table by the desk. Mock turned away from the fresh scent of the awakening park, thanked the servant with a nod and sat in the armchair next to the small table. He noticed that his hands were shaking as he clumsily knocked the spouts of both the coffee pot and the milk jug against the rim of his cup. To alleviate this classic ailment suffered by insomniacs, he concentrated instead on admiring the Waldenburg porcelain, the provenance of which was disclosed by the letters t.p.m. As he inhaled the aroma of Kainz coffee he heard an unsettling sound, like a muffled moan. He set down his coffee on the marble tabletop, rested his stubby hands on the edge of the table and listened. The singing in the bathroom grew by turns louder and quieter as Doctor Ruhtgard gargled to rinse out the tooth powder. During a moment of silence Mock went out into the hall. He heard another moan from behind a closed door next to the kitchen. As he approached it he sharpened all his senses. His hearing told him that someone was crying behind the door, tossing and turning in their sheets and thrashing their pillow with every moan. His nostrils caught a faint whiff of perfume and the stuffiness of a bedroom.

  “I hope you’re not intending to visit my daughter in her room.” Doctor Ruhtgard was glaring at Mock from where he stood at the other end of the corridor in a dark-crimson quilted dressing gown with velvet lapels. He did not look like a man who only a moment earlier had been humming a couplet from Ascher’s operetta, What Young Girls Dream Of. He marched into his office and slammed the door.

  Mock could not explain his friend’s b
ehaviour. The thought of his walk two nights earlier with the rebellious young madame who had provoked such an improper response in him now entered his tired and aching head. His ears, which a moment earlier had listened so attentively to the sound of a girl’s muffled despair, rang with the various forms of the verbs “to pleasure” and “to screw”, with which he had tried to shock the young woman torn between her love for a sensitive good-for-nothing and her possessive father. He realized that it had been two days since he had questioned that good-for-nothing, leaving him at the mercy of a murderer. He pictured Christel Ruhtgard behind the closed door of her bedroom, burying her face in her pillow so as to muffle the sobs that were tearing her apart. He reached for the telephone receiver in the hall and dialled Wirth’s private number. Ignoring the maid who had just entered the apartment with a basket of hot bread rolls, Mock croaked into the receiver:

  “I know it’s early, Wirth. Don’t say anything, just listen. You’re to lock Alfred Sorg up in the ‘storeroom’. He’s the man I questioned in the yard behind the Three Crowns. He’ll either be there or at the Four Seasons.”

  He replaced the receiver and became aware of Christel Ruhtgard standing in the doorway of her bedroom. The anger in her swollen eyes made her resemble her father.

  “Why do you want to lock Alfred up? What’s he done to you?” Mock heard her say as he made towards her father’s office. “You’re a foul monster! A miserable, drunken beast!” she yelled as he closed the door behind him.

  Doctor Ruhtgard was leaning out of the window, pouring the hot coffee from Mock’s cup onto the lawn. He turned towards Mock.

  “You’ve had your coffee, Mock. And now leave!”

  “Don’t behave like some offended countess.” Mock was clearly pleased with his comparison. He felt perfidiously exhilarated and a faint smile appeared on his face. “Spare yourself the melodramatic gestures and tell me what’s happened! And without any preludes such as ‘You’re asking me?’”

  “The day before yesterday my daughter returned from a concert at night. She was shaking all over.” Ruhtgard stood holding an empty cup with tracks of aromatic Kainz coffee running down its sides. “She said she bumped into you during the walk she decided to take after the concert. You were drunk and insisted on seeing her home. On the way you were vulgar towards her. By this you’re to understand that you’re forbidden from entering this house again.”

  Mock strained his memory, but no Latin verse, no passage of prose came to mind which might calm him. He stared at a print on the wall showing a scene from the Gospels — the healing of the man possessed. At the bottom was written the year 1756. It dawned on Mock how he might quell his anger. He recalled an episode from school: Professor Moravjetz had thrown dates from German history at his pupils, who quickly translated them into Latin.

  “Anno Domini millesimo septingentesimo quinquagesimo sexto,” Mock said, and flopped into the armchair.

  “Are you out of your mind, Mock?” Ruhtgard gaped in amazement and the cup twisted on its handle spilling a few drops of coffee on his desk.

  “If you believe your daughter, there’s no point in us talking.” Mock got to his feet and leaned over the desk. He looked into Ruhtgard’s eyes without blinking. “Shall I go on, or am I to obey your order and leave?”

  “Go on,” Ruhtgard sighed, and he placed his hand on the head of a stork standing on a small, mahogany grand piano. The piano opened, the stork bent over and in its beak caught a cigarette which had appeared in place of the keyboard. Ruhtgard took the cigarette from the bird’s beak and closed the lid of the cigarette case.

  “Only one thing in what your daughter says is true: the fact that I used inappropriate language towards a young lady from a good home. I won’t say any more. And not because I gave her my word of honour that I’d be discreet. I could quite easily grant myself dispensation … No, that’s not the reason … Someone once said that at times, truth is like a sentence. You don’t deserve a sentence.”

  Ruhtgard pulled greedily on his cigarette for a minute and exhaled the smoke through his nostrils. A blue fog hung over the surface of the desk.

  “Pour yourself some coffee,” he said quietly. “I’m not interested in what my daughter has been up to … Probably the same thing her mother liked so much … I never told you …”

  “About her mother? Never. Only that she died of cholera in Cameroon. Before the war, when you had a well-paid job there.”

  “I’ve told you too much then.” Ruhtgard did not look at Mock, but squinted at a point somewhere in the corner of the room. “May she be swallowed by eternal silence.”

  Mock fell heavily into the expansive armchair. Silence. Ruhtgard quickly stood up and went to the Waldenburg service to pour Mock some coffee. He pressed the stork’s head and stuck the cigarette offered by the bird into Mock’s mouth. He walked out of his office, leaving his guest with an unlit cigarette between his lips.

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1919

  HALF PAST SEVEN IN THE MORNING

  Mock and Ruhtgard sat in the dining room and buried their spoons in a mixture of soft-boiled eggs, butter and several leaves of parsley which filled two tall glasses delicately etched with slender lilies.

  “Tell me, Ebbo.” Ruhtgard poured a stream of honey onto a crispy roll. “Why have you come to see me?”

  “The diet didn’t help.” Mock sucked up the eggy concoction with gusto and helped himself to two fat veal sausages. “I still had nightmares. I’m going to tell you something you might not believe, or might even laugh at.” Mock broke off and fell silent.

  “Go on, then.” Ruhtgard attacked a soft pear with his fruit knife.

  “Remember how we used to entertain ourselves at night on the front with weird stories?” When Ruhtgard murmured his affirmation, Mock went on: “Remember Corporal Neymann’s stories about his haunted house? Well, my house is haunted. Understand, Ruhtgard? It’s haunted.”

  “I could ask what you by mean haunted,” Ruhtgard said. “But first of all I know you don’t like that kind of question and, secondly, I’ve got to go to the hospital in a minute. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to hear you out. We can talk on the way. So, how does this ‘haunting’ manifest itself?”

  “Noises …” Mock swallowed a mouthful of sausage. “I’m woken up by noises in the night. I dream about people with their eyes gouged out, and then a thumping on the floor wakes me up.”

  “That’s all?” Ruhtgard allowed Mock to pass at the dining-room door.

  “Yes.” Mock accepted his bowler hat from the servant. “That’s all.”

  “Listen to me carefully, Eberhard,” said Ruhtgard slowly once they were on the stairs. “I’m not a psychiatrist but, like everyone else these days, I am interested in the theories of Freud and Jung. There are some very good passages in them.” They stepped out onto sun-drenched Landsbergstrasse and set off alongside the park. “Especially where they write about the relationship between parents and children. Both scholars write about paranormal phenomena. Jung apparently experienced them in his own house in Vienna … Both he and Freud advise hypnosis in such situations … Perhaps you could try it?”

  “I don’t see why.” They turned left into Kleinburgstrasse. Mock stopped to let a young woman with a child in a huge wicker pram go by before they briskly walked on, passing the Communal School building with its garden and playground. After a lengthy silence he said: “This is happening in my house, not in my head!”

  “I read several of Hippocrates’ tracts in Greek during my medical studies.” Ruhtgard smiled and led Mock to the right into Kirschallee, towards the enormous water tower. “That’s your field … I suffered like hell over that Greek text … I don’t remember now which of them has a description of the brain of an epileptic goat. Of course we can’t be sure if it really did have epilepsy. Hippocrates dissected the brain and concluded that there was too much moisture in it. The poor animal might have had hallucinations, but it would have been enough to drain some water from its brain. T
he same applies to you. A part of your brain is responsible for your nightmares and for the noises in your house. All we have to do is work on it — perhaps with the help of hypnosis — and it’ll be over and done with. You’ll never dream of those dead, blinded people whose murderer you’re after ever again.”

  “Are you trying to say” — Mock stopped, removed his bowler and wiped his brow with a handkerchief — “that those terrifying phantoms are in my brain? That they don’t actually exist?”

  “Of course they don’t,” Ruhtgard exclaimed with joy. “Can your father hear them? Can that dog hear them?”

  “My father can’t hear them because he’s deaf.” Mock stood stock still. “But the dog can. He growls at someone, jumps up at someone …”

  “Look, the dog is reacting to you.” Ruhtgard was flushed with the ardour of his argument. They passed the water tower and made their way along the narrow path between the sports ground and the Lutheran community cemetery. He took Mock by the arm and accelerated his step. “Come on, let’s walk faster or I’ll be late for the hospital. And now listen. Something wakes you, something that’s in your head, and you wake the dog. The dog sees his master on his feet and greets you. Understand? He’s not fawning on a ghost, he’s fawning on you …”