HS01 - Critique of Criminal Reason

by Michael Gregorio

  I paused, expecting some reaction from Professor Kant, but he remained silent, watchful, a pale shadow in the swirling fog.

  ‘When I returned,’ I went on, ‘the turbulence I had felt in Paris was still inside me, like a poisonous, invisible dart. I dared tell no one. Only Stefan, my brother. He listened to me in silence. He did not judge or criticise, but stared unflinching into my eyes. Then, some days later, out of the blue, he challenged me to do what Father had warned us never to do again.’

  ‘And what was that?’ asked Kant, tiring, perhaps, of my narration.

  ‘There is a rocky outcrop near the house called the Richtergade. When we were little children, sir, a race to the top was our favourite sport. I ought, nay, I should have refused the dare, but I did not. He egged me on, he provoked me. Stefan had proposed a distraction, a divertissement, a game, which I enthusiastically embraced. Physical, exhausting activity would take my mind off the problems which bore down on me. I did not think of him, except to remind him to take a glass of honey in his pocket. He answered with a quick nod, then off we went. It was cold, a good day for a climb, and I was the first to stand on the summit of the rocky mound. I had never ever won the race before. Standing on the brink, facing into the wind, the rush of elements subdued the storm within me. I yearned to tell Stefan of my exhilaration. I wished to thank him. But then I heard him panting as he struggled to grasp the rocky ledge below me. Looking down, I…I froze once more in the face of Death. Froth bubbled from his lips, his eyes rolled back, his muscles quivered as he tried to speak. His tongue was a balled fist. His nails scraped and slithered on the damp stone. A battle was being fought before my eyes, but it might have been a…a scientific experiment. Stefan slipped, fell back into the void. And what did I do? I did nothing. Nothing at all. I watched him fall to his death. Stumbling down from the heights at last, my mind in a turmoil, I found his lifeless body stretched out on the grass. A sharp rock, like an angry beast, had bitten a chunk out of his head as he fell. Blood and tissue spattered that mossy bank.

  ‘That evening, my father stormed into my room. In his hand he held a golden vial of honey. “I found this in your pocket,” he accused. The expression on his face is engraved in my memory. “Why did you not save your brother?” it seemed to say. Perhaps he had found the honey in a different jacket from the one I wore that day. I cannot say. I swear to you, I had taken no honey along with me. At least, I do not remember doing so.

  ‘He did not call me a murderer. That was the last word my mother spoke before she died. She lay in bed like a statue for weeks after Stefan’s death, her glassy eyes staring at nothing. She turned to me at the instant of her death and made an accusation that no faithful son should have to bear. I was allowed to attend her burial, then Father ordered me to leave the house, never to return.’

  I paused to catch my breath.

  ‘At the funeral, a friend of my father’s spoke of you, Professor Kant. He told me that the moral dictates of Reason are far stronger than the sentimental impulses of Man. I had to speak with you, sir. I felt that you might understand. I hoped that Philosophy would rescue me. That’s why I came today,’ I explained. ‘And so, at the end of the lesson, I made my way to your desk, saying…’

  ‘ “I have been bewitched by Death.” ’ Kant finished the sentence for me. He leaned close and peered into my face, a craving curiosity burning in his eyes.

  ‘Am I a murderer, sir?’ I asked.

  I might have been standing before God, waiting for supreme judgement, but Kant was silent for some time.

  ‘It was your brother who issued the challenge,’ he said quietly at last. ‘He knew the risks better than you. Let us say that you picked up the honey mechanically, without thinking. In that case, you really did not know it was in your pocket. Your brother, on the other hand, took for granted that he had done as he always did, whenever he left the house. But he had not done so. The mind plays strange tricks,’ he observed with a smile, tapping his forehead with his finger. ‘Have you never noticed? Sometimes there is a forgetful blank where habits are concerned. We forget to do the most obvious things, vital as those things may be.’

  ‘A blank, sir? But I stood watching. Why didn’t I try to save him?’

  ‘I would guess, Stiffeniis, that you were so unnerved by what was happening that you failed to react. Immobilised by fright, there was no one else to help. You take the burden of his death upon yourself, but this is only half the picture. The same thing might have happened, there or in some other place, whether you were present or not. He was ill, as you said.’

  ‘I was there,’ I repeated obstinately.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ Kant replied soothingly. ‘And in a very odd state of mind after what you had seen in Paris, I imagine. You were still haunted by the decapitation of the King when your brother’s death occurred. Death commands us all. Horror does possess us. Sublime terror calls forth,’ he hesitated, searching for an expression, ‘a most peculiar state of mind, a mental condition for which I can find no better term…’

  He paused and stared distractedly at the ground, as if he were searching for a word or concept that stubbornly refused to unbend and make itself known even to his penetrating mind.

  ‘What must I do?’ I pleaded, waiting for his verdict.

  What Professor Kant said was destined to change my life.

  ‘You’ve been inside the mind of a murderer, Hanno. You have harboured thoughts that few men would dare to admit. You are not alone! And the knowledge makes you special. Now, you must turn it to good account,’ he replied warmly.

  ‘But how, sir? How?’

  As he spoke, his words settled on my troubled spirit like a healing balm.

  ‘Bring order where crime brings chaos. Right wrongs. Study the law.’

  Two weeks later, I enrolled at the University of Halle as a student of Jurisprudence. Five years afterwards, my bachelor’s degree confirmed, I began my working career as a magistrate. Accompanied by Helena Jordaenssen, my wife of seven months, I started out in the country town of Lotingen. It was a quiet, regular sort of life, but I enjoyed the drab anonymity of it. I was not called upon to judge and punish, so much as to officiate. But I had only partly followed Kant’s advice. Violent crimes being unknown in the town, I had never been truly called upon to test myself.

  Until the day that Sergeant Koch entered my office.

  I looked down at the page and read what Kant had dictated to Lampe.

  The laws of Nature are turned upside down in the exercise of God-like power over another human being. Cold-blooded murder opens the doorway to the Sublime. It is an apotheosis without equal…

  The question presented itself to my mind with the force of a hammer blow. Had Professor Kant been infected by the insanity that he had meant to cure in me? Had I opened a barred path and handed him the Golden Apple of forbidden knowledge which lay at the end? Kant’s philosophy had been foundering on a reef, and I had unwittingly thrown him a lifeline. Had he found, in his declining years, the pathway to Absolute Freedom which the exercise of rational discipline and logical disputation had denied him? Just before the body of Sergeant Koch was found, Kant had been feverish, his voice hoarse with passion.

  ‘They cannot imagine what I have been able to conceive,’ he had raged. He had been talking of his detractors, the Romantic philosophers, the high priests of Sturm und Drang. ‘They cannot begin to know what I…’

  I completed the sentence for him.

  They cannot begin to know what I have done with your help, Stiffeniis.

  This thought erupted in my mind like red-hot magma exploding from an uncapped volcano. Had Immanuel Kant sown the evil seed in the mind of his valet with that book, dictating night after night, knowing that Lampe would take him at his word? Had Kant knowingly created a murderous Golem in his valet, then set him loose on Königsberg?

  If Kant knew…

  Jan Konnen, Paula-Anne Brunner, Johann Gottfried Haase, and Jeronimus Tifferch were his victims. He had provoked the
humiliation that led to the death of Procurator Rhunken, he had precipitated the murder of the serving-boy, Morik, driven the Totzes to suicide, pushed Anna Rostova beyond the pale, and made Lublinsky’s soul as monstrous as his face. The lives of Frau Tifferch and her embittered maid would be forever blighted by his meddling. Like those of everyone who had known or loved the murdered ones. The city and the people of Königsberg had been entangled in the web of terror that Kant had woven so artfully.

  And he had killed Koch. My faithful, stolid adjutant. Humble servant of the State and of myself. Sergeant Koch had found nothing safe in Kantian philosophy, nothing reassuring in Professor Kant himself. Koch had sensed the sinister nature of Kant’s involvement in the case, detected evil in that laboratory, while I had been overwhelmed with admiration.

  If Kant knew…

  He had chosen me for one reason alone. I had been inside the mind of a murderer. He had said it himself. He had chosen me – not Herr Procurator Rhunken, or any more expert magistrate – to admire the infernal beauty of his final philosophical thesis. The sublime expression of will, the act that went beyond Logic or Reason, Good or Evil: murder without a motive. The moment when a man is free, unchained from the claims of morality. Like Nature. Or like God. When I insisted on the need for logical proof, credible explanation, when I failed to understand what he intended me to see, Kant had opened the door and sent me out to be murdered with his own cloak on my shoulders. But Koch had stepped in the way. He had taken the fatal blow that was meant for me.

  If Kant knew…

  He had not been interested in the man I had become, a diligent magistrate with a wife and two babes from tranquil Lotingen, when he summoned me to him. He had appealed, instead, to a confused and troubled creature he had met only once before, spattered with blood as a king was butchered before his eyes in Paris, a morose individual who had watched his own brother die, a fool who had unwittingly revealed to him the darkest secret of the human soul as they walked together through the fog one cold afternoon beneath the Fortress of Königsberg. By entrusting that case into my hands, Professor Kant had intended to exhume the demon that he had met seven years before.

  And during those days in Königsberg, I thought with a violent shudder, had he not almost succeeded in calling up that ghost?

  Those heads in jars had thrilled me more than I had dared to admit. Was it science alone that fascinated me? Had I felt no shiver of excitement as I examined the frozen corpse of Lawyer Tifferch? The split skull of Morik? As I smashed my fist into the bloated face of Gerta Totz and gazed on the bloody mask of her husband’s self-destruction? I had embraced the idea of torture too warmly when the occasion presented itself, despite Koch’s warning. Augustus Vigilantius had poked a gaping hole in my shallow veneer of normality at our first meeting. Then Anna Rostova had bowed before my dark animus, recognising a fellow traveller, a nature perverse and damned like her own. I cannot deny that I had been aroused by her murderous carnality…

  I closed my eyes in shame.

  But a protest bubbled up from the depths of my heart.

  No! I had done it all to catch a murderer. I had used Kant’s laboratory in the interests of science and methodology. That was what I admired, not the macabre exhibits for themselves alone. Tifferch’s rigid body had told me how the victims had been killed. I had lifted my hand against Gerta Totz to spare her a far greater punishment. I could not have foreseen the desperate determination that had tied the husband and the wife together. Then, Anna Rostova had appeared. She was different from Helena, the woman that I had chosen as my companion. There had been moments when I hoped to protect the albino from the consequences of her crimes. Not to possess her body, but to save that beautiful flesh from the violence of the troopers.

  In Kant’s eyes, I had failed to appreciate the beauty of those murders. But I was no longer the creature he had thought me to be. That ghost had fled for ever. My heart had been warmed, redeemed, saved, by love. Love of my wife. Love of my little ones. Love of the Law. Love of Moral Truth. Nothing that Immanuel Kant had thrown in my way had brought out that dark and secret side of myself again. Seven years before, walking around the Fortress in the freezing fog with Professor Kant, I had been truly cured. I had been reborn. And it was all his doing…

  Sweeping up the papers, I dropped a coin on the table and rushed from the cafe. Outside, the cold night air was a benediction of sorts. It cleared my mind of doubt about what I was going to do. For what I knew I must do. As Professor Kant himself would have said, it was a Categorical Imperative. The irony was not lost on me. I had no choice. Reason obliged me. In the circumstances, there was no other way to achieve the Supreme Good.

  I dashed along the cobbled lane in the gathering gloom. Rushing out across the stone bridge at the end of the street, I stopped at the middle span. The swollen grey-brown waters of the River Pregel bubbled below me like hot treacle. Leaning out over the flood, I began to shred the leaves of the document that Frau Lampe had entrusted to my care. The white scraps fell like a flurry of fresh snow and were gobbled up by the hungry waters.

  Thus, the final work of Immanuel Kant, Professor of Logic at the University of Königsberg, was launched upon an unsuspecting world.

  Chapter 37

  Back home in Lotingen, I returned to work more convinced than ever that the daily round of a country magistrate was sufficient for my happiness. Disputes about common land and small legacies occupied my days, controversies between rival shopkeepers, farmers stealing fodder from their neighbours’ barns by the light of the moon, occasional bad manners, frequent drunkenness, minor breaches of the peace. These were my daily concerns. Nothing more violent troubled my days or disturbed my rest than the accidental crushing of a mature rooster as a horse-drawn cart went trundling home in the dwindling light of dusk.

  The events in Königsberg did not fade from my mind, but the experience seemed to retract and diminish with time and distance. That memory was like a raw scar that aches on a cold day, reminding us that the danger and pain are over, that the worst is past, that we are getting better day by day. Indeed, life was all but back to normal when early in April, I received a letter from Olmuth Hanfstaengel, who had been the family lawyer for as long as I could remember. Without any preamble, the writer informed me that my father had expired ten days before of a sudden fit, that he had been buried, according to his last wish, beside my mother and brother in the family plot in Ruisling cemetery, and that Hanfstaengel himself had been appointed to execute my father’s will. In this terse communication, the lawyer noted that the estate, the land, the house, and all that it contained had been sold off, with one exception, as my father had specified, and that the proceeds had been donated after death duties to the Junior Military Academy in Druzbha where Stefan had served his country for a few brief months. In a short codicil, Lawyer Hanfstaengel informed me that I had been directly mentioned once in my father’s will, and that I would have news from him again within a very short while. And with that scant announcement, the communication ended.

  Helena stood mute at my side as I was reading. Hands clasped tightly across her breasts, she seemed to be struggling to quell the mounting anxiety which the arrival of that letter had provoked. Without a word, I handed it her. Her eyes raced over the page, and when she lifted her gaze to mine some moments later, there was a sort of mirthful glee, a welling up of joy in her expression which, try as she might, she could not suppress.

  ‘I do believe that Stefan prayed for us, as I begged him to do when I went to Ruisling to lay fresh flowers on his grave,’ she said with a vehemence that I did not expect.

  Evidently, she was still inclined to believe that her chance meeting with my father that day in the cemetery had worked a miracle. She seemed to think that a reconciliation had been brought about, a change of heart which had led my father to remember me in his will, posthumously embracing me as his only surviving son. For an instant, I persuaded myself that she was right. But there was something perplexing in that letter, some
unspoken impediment which would not permit my own optimism to flourish as hers had done. Whenever he mentioned my brother, my father spoke of ‘Stefan, my beloved son,’ but when he referred to me, it was by my name alone.

  Still, in a state of heightened expectation – if that is the correct word – we waited for further news from Lawyer Hanfstaengel. It arrived two weeks later. A few words, no more: ‘Herein lies your inheritance, as prescribed in the last Will and Testament of the late Wilhelm Ignatius Stiffeniis.’

  We watched in a state of nervous agitation as the baggage was taken down from the wagon by the carrier and his boy and manhandled into the entrance hall. I recognised that trunk immediately. It was of steel-bound oak. The largest trunk in the house in Ruisling, it had always been kept in my mother’s dressing room. I did not need to open it to know what it contained. A creeping paralysis seemed to overpower my limbs. My heart froze within my chest, thudding painfully as it struggled to fight against the horror that consumed my mind.

  I knelt down on the cold stone floor and raised the lid.

  All the worldly possessions that had belonged to Stefan were stuffed haphazardly into the trunk: the clothes he most loved to wear, the trinkets he had kept in memory of happy days, the favourite books that he had read, and read again. And on the top of the pile, five glass vials of golden honey. For the latter, tormented part of his life, those tubes of sugary sweetness had guaranteed his well-being. A sixth vial had shattered during the journey. Fragments of broken glass and syrupy stickiness lay everywhere.

  That was my inheritance.

  My father did not intend to let me forget. He would not bequeath me peace of mind. The curse that he had laid on my head while living would not be laid to rest with his mortal remains. The relics of my brother’s shattered life had been transported into my own home.