Fortune

by Lenny Bartulin

  ‘I trust our presence will not make her suffer for too long.’

  Seidlitz smiled. ‘yes … or rather, no, not at all, Général!’

  Fourés looked around, impressed by the wealth and obvious standing of his hosts. Among the portraits and landscapes on the walls, he noticed a Van Dyck and, nearby, a Terborch as well. He walked over to take a closer look (it was The Paternal Admonition, magnificent). He admired the painting and wondered how long it would take the Emperor’s plunderer, Vivant Denon, to come help himself and add the treasure to his Musée Napoléon. The man could smell a Vermeer at two hundred yards. (He’d already begun the removal of the quadriga over the Brandenburg Gate, as per Bonaparte’s wishes.) Fourés contemplated whether he shouldn’t tell these von Hoffmanns to hide their rare paintings, quickly now, but then decided to mind his own business.

  ‘Our chambers?’ his aide-de-camp Bergerard said.

  Old Günther extended his arm. ‘This way, please.’

  Elisabeth von Hoffmann met them in the hallway, where the lawyer Seidlitz introduced her.

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ the général said. He took her hand, bowed his head and kissed it. ‘I hope we will not intrude upon your lives too much.’

  ‘How can you not?’ Elisabeth said.

  ‘Then we must compensate you, Mademoiselle.’

  Elisabeth said nothing, gave Fourés a shallow, mocking curtsey and continued down the hall.

  By God, the général thought. A beauty!

  As Elisabeth walked off, she was thinking that Général Fourés had paid much attention to the styling of his thinning chestnut hair. It was combed upwards and swept into soft curling waves, all of it together swirled to an impressive height, ensuring he was marginally taller than her. Licked points fringed his forehead and delicate wisps hooked his ears, just like on a Roman bust.

  So he was vain (it’s not a sin, she thought). But she’d liked the sound of his voice, she supposed (did she really?). His teeth were clean and the shape of his mouth wasn’t cruel. She thought his brown eyes softened the otherwise haughty arch of his brows. He was older, that was true, and when he kissed her hand she’d caught a glimpse of the pink shininess of his scalp—but, then, nobody was perfect.

  BERLIN’S A DOG!

  What he wanted was a black woman.

  No. He wanted Josephine.

  Wesley Lewis Jr’s first sight of her: it was just after luncheon, his head pounding, soused and heavy in the gut, swaying beneath the hot, searing sky. Numb inside the cushioning sweet wet green of the surrounding sugarcane.

  He saw her disembark from a barge on the river, a stunningly beautiful dark mulatto, barefoot in a pale blue European dress, a frilled rose-red umbrella in her hand, her arm hooked in Mr Hendrik’s. As they walked, Wesley Lewis Jr watched the Negro pack, damp down, light and then hand her a long wooden pipe, which she began to smoke, smiling, giggling, pressing her head to his shoulder, affectionate and loving. They’d been in town, a rare privilege, and she was his half-sister, barely fourteen years, and Captain van der Velde’s mistress. Wesley Lewis Jr had heard of her, and now understood the talk. Every desire he’d ever felt in his life that moment poured into the image of her. The beautiful slave Josephine.

  Josephine of Surinam.

  He’d bedded an abundance of black flesh in his time, from South Carolina to Cuba, from the Caribbean islands to the plateaus of Brazil, and in every shade of light and every shade of night, but none were like this vision here before him. The sun!

  But she was half the world away. So, right now, Wesley Lewis Jr, no question, would pay double (triple!) for a black woman. And he’d pay for heat and sweat and sugarcane liquor, too.

  Not a chance.

  Christ Almighty, but Berlin was a dog!

  Only one more night, he told himself. We’re leaving in the morning.

  He poured more schnapps into his coffee cup, splashing some onto the table. Through narrowed, drunken eyes he watched the girls serving.

  Nothing like the girls he knew. Those Surinam girls, van der Velde’s girls, deep into the night, deep into the dark, the table heaving, the candlelight, a ship’s hold of gorging and laughing and shouting and singing and fucking. Those girls.

  Van der Velde’s girls. Beautiful Negresses, brown angel mulattoes, feasts, dark nipples and gleaming dark flesh, gleaming, molasses under the moon.

  Kill-devil liquor, and heat, blue, green: impenetrable green. Remember the slave hanging from the tree?

  Wesley Lewis Jr had just arrived at the plantation, first day, off the barge from Paramaribo and still wobbly after the sea voyage from South Carolina and there he was, the Negro, swinging gently in the breeze, an iron hook pushed into his ribs, hands tied behind his back, his face anguish carved out of stone.

  ‘Still not dead,’ somebody said. Still not dead, two days later. ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ they said. ‘you never can guess it.’

  The serving girl at Otto’s came by. ‘More coffee?’

  ‘Nein!’ Wesley Lewis Jr’s bladder was tight as a drum, but he wouldn’t get up yet. He had capacity, by God he did, but enough damn coffee.

  At Captain van der Velde’s the world stopped spinning. He had capacity! He held on. you couldn’t fall off if you held on. He’d never fallen off.

  Everything floated: the food on the plates, the chairs in the room and the candlelight like illuminated smoke. The black beauties in embroidered Indian skirts, wrists tinkling with bracelets of polished stone and shell, blue and red, chains of gold and silver looped over their breasts and honey-yellow flowers in their hair, pollen-dusted. Wesley Lewis Jr would think of his preacher father and laugh. Preaching for pennies in Charleston.

  ‘Berlin’s a dog!’ he cried out.

  A cockroach scampered across the table: gone by the time he smacked his hand down. Wasn’t that his first deal? That Catalan banker, the closet coleopterist, and the fat wife who’d wasted no time cashing in when he died. A priceless collection of six thousand beetles, painstakingly acquired over a lifetime, collected and meticulously organised in beautiful rosewood drawers, every specimen labelled and dated in fine penmanship, every armoured back and helmeted, devil-pronged head shining like polished black onyx. The wife had believed the crusted little bastards carried the plague, and she’d refused to fuck her husband, had denied him the marital bed every night but the first when they were married, that one time enough for twin sons. She’d snatched the purse out of Wesley Lewis Jr’s hands, the first price he’d offered.

  ‘Berlin’s a dog!’

  People turned, looked at him, turned away again. He put his head down to rest on his arm; his other hand still held the mug. He slept, dreamless, until Mr Hendrik came to fetch him.

  AN EASY DECISION

  It was almost midnight when Krüger rushed downstairs from his room. He’d fallen asleep in his clothes and dreamed that he’d left his notebook on the table, but then woke and realised it was true.

  Otto’s coffee house was busy. He asked one of the serving girls but she had no idea, so Krüger went over to the table in the corner where he’d sat earlier.

  A man there, his face shadowed by the lamps hanging low from the ceiling beams. He was spooning soup over a piece of bread that stood in the middle of his bowl. Another man too, asleep, stretched out along the bench, snoring. On the table was an empty bottle of schnapps and another bowl of soup.

  The first man looked up and it was only now that Krüger noticed he was a Negro.

  ‘Eat while it is hot,’ the man said and resumed spooning the soup over his bread. He nodded at his snoring companion. ‘He will never get to it.’

  ‘I wanted to ask if you’d seen a notebook here, sir,’ Krüger said. He held up his hands, palms facing, and made a width. ‘About this size. I left it here earlier.’

  Mr Hendrik shook his head. ‘you sound hopeful. I am sorry. Was it important?’

  Krüger sat down, defeated. ‘Thoughts,’ he said. ‘Ideas.’

  ‘Maybe it is for the best t
hen.’ The Negro pointed at the soup. ‘Eat.’

  The invitation seemed so normal and familiar that Krüger dragged the bowl over and picked up the spoon.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and began to tear at the bread that came with the soup, dropping the pieces into the bowl.

  They introduced themselves, and after they’d eaten the soup they ordered mugs of beer. They asked polite questions of each other. Naturally, the talk turned to electrical eels.

  ‘Can they kill a man?’ Krüger said.

  Mr Hendrik nodded. ‘It is an unpleasant death.’

  ‘How do you catch them?’

  ‘There are different ways. The Indians use wild horses to drive them out of the mud, then push them into baskets with reeds.’

  ‘What happens to the horses?’

  ‘They panic and fall. Some are killed, some drown.’

  Krüger sat back, wrists on the table edge. He tried to imagine it. At the same time, he suddenly fathomed just how truly vast the world was.

  ‘you’ve come a long way,’ he said. ‘Collectors must pay handsomely.’

  Mr Hendrik smiled. The whites of his eyes were yellowish in the lamplight of the inn.

  ‘Power,’ Krüger said. ‘To own rarities.’

  ‘They believe it exists in things.’

  Krüger picked up his beer and drank. The ale was dark and strong and made him feel expanded. ‘Sometimes believing is enough to make things true,’ he said.

  Wesley Lewis Jr mumbled in his sleep.

  ‘In Surinam, the rebel slaves wear obia around their necks, for protection,’ Mr Hendrik said. ‘you would call them talismans. The rebel slaves believe muskets cannot harm them when they wear the obia. They charge the Dutch without fear. Of those who are shot dead, they say he did not believe enough.’

  ‘Do you believe?’

  Mr Hendrik opened his coat and undid two buttons on his shirt. He pulled out a corded necklace of coarse woven grass. There was a knot tied into it, with a thick finger of carved bone through the middle, strange markings down its length.

  ‘A gift from my sister,’ he said.

  Krüger saw scars across the man’s chest, like lines of jagged candle wax. He stared at them, shocked at the silent violence they contained.

  ‘you were a slave,’ Krüger said.

  ‘I am still a slave.’

  Krüger looked at the sleeping man. ‘Is he your master?’

  Mr Hendrik shook his head. ‘Not even of himself,’ he said. ‘My master is in Surinam.’

  ‘He let you come?’

  Mr Hendrik tucked the obia back inside his shirt, did up the buttons. ‘He has my sister,’ he said, and felt the longing for Josephine.

  ‘So you’ll go back.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘When?’

  Mr Hendrik and Wesley Lewis Jr were due to leave for Rotterdam in the morning. The money for the electrical eels would be deposited at the master’s bank there, and then a few days later they’d board the Hoogendijk and sail back to Paramaribo.

  The two men ordered more beer and spoke of different things and sometimes sat through comfortable silences.

  Back in his room, Krüger lay down on the bed. He sank heavily into the straw mattress and his head spun wildly. There’s nothing for me in Berlin, he thought.

  Without Hilde, there was nothing for him anywhere in dead, bloody Europe.

  Why not Paramaribo? Why not?

  A FAMILY AFFAIR

  Captain Willem van der Velde stood in loose, cool, fine silk clothes, wearing a wide-brimmed hat against the glare, a long thin pipe in his hand which he smoked with quick puffs. His cheeks glowed, flushed with gin, his blue eyes squinting. He belched and swayed in the heat. Hamstringing was a standard punishment, but he always liked to supervise.

  Beside him stood a young female slave, tray in hand with more supply of liquor. Her name was Anja. Her naked breasts were scratched and her bottom lip was swollen and bruised, the work of the master’s wife that morning when she found Anja in the master’s bed, a position she should have vacated before sunrise (these were the rules) but hadn’t due to her inebriation. And now, like her master, she stood there beneath the torturous sun and fought the nauseous agitations of her body, trying desperately to hold the trembling tray straight. Her lip throbbed and sweat stung at the raw fingernail marks striping her breasts.

  She put her mind in her toes. She concentrated on the mouldering dark green leaves and the rich moist soil; she squeezed it between her toes. She put her mind in her toes and didn’t think about the boy being hamstrung, who was her son. And she didn’t think about the butcher, who was her half-brother. And she didn’t think about her belly, where a child by the master now grew.

  Later, when the child was born, her half-brother’s same knife was used to sever the cord. She named the master’s child Josephine. By then her son had learned to walk again and Captain Willem van der Velde had Mr Hendrik help with raising the girl. His wife knew that he was the father and she regularly beat Mr Hendrik and his mother, and Josephine too, when she was old enough to be beaten, and this was just what life was like. The master had sired many children, but Josephine was beautiful from the beginning and only became more so as she grew, which was too much an affront to the master’s wife (and their unattractive daughters), and as much a temptation to the father as any of the other slave girls on his plantation.

  THE 4E RÉGIMENT ÉTRANGERS

  Posen was damp, the wind was keen, the sky was an open window, bright blue with cold. Here, Johannes and Wolfie were officially enlisted into the ranks of the 4e Régiment Étrangers: three battalions or thereabouts, mostly Prussian prisoners of war and deserters, plus a mix of variously criminal Danes, Swedes and Russians. In other words, Grande Armée cannon fodder.

  They’d marched from Berlin; their shoes were wrecked. ‘And now we’re a hundred ’n fifty miles closer to being blown up,’ Wolfie said.

  The first day was long and confused. The French shouted orders from their mounts, rode fast up and down the columns, their horses kicking divots of turf at the new recruits. From one endless line to the next, Johannes and Wolfie stood and waited, never quite knowing what they were waiting for. In one line, the rumour was food, boiled potatoes and schinken, but when they got to the front of the queue there was no schinken and the potatoes were only half cooked. In another line they were vaccinated for smallpox, the needle jabbed right through their sleeves by an old, unbuttoned orderly smoking a pipe and flanked by two grenadiers. (‘S’il vous plaît,’ he said in a monotone to every man, then, ‘Je vous remercie.’) Later, in the last line of the day, they were given uniforms: a green Prussian fusilier kollet with a red collar and white epaulettes, a white-plumed shako, green pants and red vest, hussar boots, white cross-belts and a brown leather knapsack, cartridge boxes, an infantry sword and scabbard, and a light musket of dubious condition (not that Johannes had any idea about muskets). Weighed down with their new uniforms and equipment, the men were then marched to a soggy green field on the outskirts of the city, where rows and rows of canvas tents marked a vast square alongside a riverbank. There were soldiers everywhere Johannes looked, standing in groups beside smoky braziers, muskets bayonet-racked in perfect spiky clusters around them, stern, empty looks upon their faces.

  The chill off the fast-flowing river burned the men’s cheeks. The crisp breeze swayed the grass and rustled the linden trees. The sound of the river, the wind, the earthy, wet green smell of the grass kindled childhood memories that made the men feel very far from home. All of this was in the air, a foreboding, of winter approaching, of hardship down the line.

  ‘When do we run?’ Johannes said. Wolfie had promised him they would.

  ‘Soon,’ Wolfie said. He could see the fear in the boy’s eyes. He reached out and squeezed his shoulder. ‘We’ll be all right for now.’

  LOVE IS REJECTION

  Earlier in the year, a young Polish artist had come to paint Aunt Margaretha’s portrait. His name was
Kasimir Wieczorkowski and he’d recently been making a name for himself in Berlin. He was a serious young man, temperamental, and barely spoke to anybody in the house (he’d stayed in the room where the général was now lodged). Elisabeth von Hoffmann never saw him smile the whole time. Each day he woke late and waited for a platter of bread and cheese to be brought to his room, together with a bottle of warm beer (conditions of his accepting the commission), and then he spent a lot of time over his breakfast, almost until noon. Aunt Margaretha sat waiting for him in the study, where the light was deemed best, and looked at herself in the large mirror opposite her chair, at first practising and admiring her different poses, then slumped a little in the shoulders as she grew tired of waiting for Wieczorkowski to appear. Eventually, he would come out to work, though this didn’t involve any actual painting. Mostly, at the start, he’d just sit there, staring at Aunt Margaretha, silent and brooding.

  In fact, the artist didn’t pick up a brush for a whole week. ‘you don’t know how to sit!’ he’d say, tearing up the brief pencil sketch he’d made into the smallest pieces he could manage.

  Rather than paint, he fussed for hours over the way Margaretha von Hoffmann sat. He adjusted her head, her arms, her shoulders, the folding of her hands in her lap, the folds of her skirts. He snapped at her in Polish if she moved. Elisabeth was shocked by how her aunt bore his insolence, and expected any day for the artist to be thrown out into the street by Günther. But vanity has terrific qualities of endurance.

  And then, at last, during the second week of his residence, he began to paint.

  Kasimir Wieczorkowski’s hair was long and the colour of wheat and he constantly flicked it out of his eyes with a quick movement of his head. He had long slender fingers, a fine straight nose and blue-grey eyes that were, if one were truthful, probably a little too close together. He was thin, his clothes hung loose on his frame, and his paleness must have been from all the cheese he ate.

  Elisabeth von Hoffmann told her friends about Kasimir, though her version was far more flattering.