HS03 - A Visible Darkness

by Michael Gregorio

  OFFENCE, I read the large letters. In smaller letters:

  Archive closed one hour early on 17th inst. You were seen drinking beer in the Mermaid Tavern. Shirt collar dirty. It has been noted that the frontispiece of the Westphalia edition has been consumed by worms.

  WARNING: Let this be the last time!

  There was neither a date, nor a signature.

  Where the signature ought to have been, there was a large bluebottle.

  The insect had been squashed, then pressed down hard, leaving the imprint of a finger in the mulch. Fluids had stained a dull brown spot. The crushed contents of the thorax had attached themselves like glue to the paper. As the paper trembled in my hand, a fragment of the wing detached itself and caught against my thumb.

  ‘This was no accident, I think.’ I folded the paper up, and pinched it closed.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said, putting the note away, taking out another one, handing it to me in the same curious manner.

  I repeated the operation.

  OFFENCE: Preface to Critique of Pure Reason [1787 Riga edition] incorrectly returned to the shelves containing Social Essays.

  Late in opening 22nd inst.

  WARNING: This is the second time that books have been misplaced!

  No fly had been squashed on the paper. It was a spider this time. A large, long-legged spider, which had been crushed with a thumb, and spread across the page like strawberry jam.

  I closed it up, and gave it back.

  ‘Are these accusations justified?’ I asked, closing the letter, handing it back.

  ‘They were, sir,’ Ludvigssen admitted. ‘I have altered my ways. Stopped drinking, for a start.’

  ‘Would the idolaters do what those crushed insects seem to suggest?’

  It was cold down there, despite the oppressive heat of summer out in the streets, but a drop of sweat rolled down Ludvigssen’s nose and splashed on the surface of his desk.

  ‘I don’t intend to put them to the test,’ he said. ‘Kant’s important to them. He must be, mustn’t he? Why else would they threaten to squash me like a bug? I must beware of showing negligence towards his memory. I hope I never get another one.’

  ‘How many of these warnings have you received?’ I asked.

  ‘I have had four altogether.’

  ‘And are they always signed in the same way?’

  ‘Always, sir.’

  Had a band of zealots possessed themselves of Immanuel Kant’s archive, I asked myself. Fabien Berodstein’s face had contorted in a similar manner at the merest mention of our nationalist fanatics. And I recalled the buttoned mouths and frightened looks of the Flugges, father and son, the instant they realised that I could not be tempted with a rebel’s amber pin.

  Ludvigssen put the letter back in the bottom drawer.

  ‘But now, sir,’ he said airily, sitting up straight, as if he wished to change the subject, ‘about General Malaport, and those missing documents.’

  ‘I am here on General Malaport’s behalf,’ I said. ‘But missing documents are not what I am here to investigate. To tell you the truth, I am looking for a person.’

  The archivist’s face blenched with fear once more.

  ‘A person?’

  ‘Do you keep records of all who visit this room?’ I asked him. ‘Students, teachers, and so on?’

  ‘I keep a register scrupulously,’ Ludvigssen replied, a note of desperation in his voice.

  ‘I wish to see it.’

  He pointed towards one of the visitors’ desks, inviting me to take a seat, as if the reading of the register might take time. He hurried there before me, pulled out the chair, tucked it in behind me like a perfect footman. A few moments later, he laid the visitors’ book before me on the table.

  ‘Where do you wish to start, sir?’ His tone of voice was stiff and measured, less warm than before.

  ‘At the eleventh hour,’ I said. ‘When these benefactors appeared on the scene.’

  ‘That was eight months ago,’ he said. ‘Just after New Year.’

  Again, I noted the frills of lace peeping out from the cuff of his sleeve. His shirt cost a great deal more than I could possibly afford to spend. A generous, but menacing, God had smiled on him. He opened the volume, pointed with his finger. ‘Here we are, sir, 2 January 1808.’

  I began to look through the pages of the register. When names did crop up, there were not so many of them. There had never been two scholars in the room together, so far as I could see, though the entries were scrupulously kept:

  12th/13th/14th January: Bertrand Lupertz. Unpublished notes– Critique of Judgement.

  2nd/3rd February: Jeremias Kamansky. Dreams of a Visionary Explained by Metaphysics—rough notes, preparatory sketches, and addenda.

  7th February: Tobias Munst. Unpublished letter of Moses Mendelssohn, together with the onion-skin copy containing Professor Kant’s reply.

  The names were all clearly Prussian.

  The date was written at the top of each page, and every sheet was signed twice by the archivist himself, noting the time at which he had arrived, and at which he had left for the night. Then, I turned the page, and read the following note.

  9th February: Vulpius. Metaphysics of Habit [Königsberg ed.]

  With fumbling fingers, I searched through the register. He was there again on 10th February, and every day the following week, from the 13th to the 17th of the same month. My heart beat painfully as I worked my way to the most recent page on which his name appeared. 21th February 1808. Six months ago. For some reason, Vulpius had stopped coming to the Kantstudiensaal after that date.

  No clue was given to his identity. There was no address. He had arrived one day, come again on a number of occasions—I counted thirteen altogether—then he had disappeared from view. But what was Vulpius doing before he came to the Kantstudiensaal? Had he been living in Königsberg then? And where was he now? Had he completed his research in Königsberg, then taken himself off to some other university to continue his studies? Or had he left the city for the north coast?

  Had he gone to Nordcopp?

  ‘Here’s the man that I am looking for,’ I said, tapping my fingernail against an entry, purposely avoiding sounding alarums. ‘He came here a lot, it seems. Then, all of a sudden, he came no more. Do you remember him?’

  Ludvigssen did not reply immediately. He looked at the book, he looked at me. His face became a stiff, impenetrable mask. ‘He did come in frequently for a while,’ he said without emphasis.

  ‘What was he looking for?’

  ‘He was very catholic in his tastes, sir. Unsorted manuscript material, sir. Autographs. Notes. Letters. Unpublished writings for the most part. On a whole host of subjects.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  Had he found what he was looking for, I wondered.

  ‘Searching through an archive is like searching for silver in a river,’ Ludvigssen confided. ‘It’s hit-and-miss. Sometimes you find what you are looking for. Sometimes you don’t.’

  I flicked back the page to 9th February.

  It was true. Vulpius had started out with the MS copy of one of the better-known titles, but after that he had wandered into the dark unpublished forest of jottings, notes and letters. They were all from the latter part of Professor Kant’s life, I noticed, long after the publication of the titles which had made his name a household word. It was the period of Kant’s long, slow, mental decline, as I knew too well. If he had written anything about me—I felt a raw dryness in my throat—the pages would be hidden somewhere in the writings from that period.

  ‘Did he tell you what he had found before he left?’

  I did not raise my head from the register as I asked the question.

  ‘He did not, sir. He simply came no more.’

  ‘But you have a precise idea why he stopped coming here,’ I said, observing the shifty look of discomfort which had registered on the archivist’s pale face. His lips fell open, then closed tight shut. He clenched his hands together
and cracked the joints of his bony fingers.

  ‘He’s the one who stole the file, sir. I thought that that was why you had come here.’ His voice was rent with emotion as he spoke. ‘He carried it off with him, sir. I told the local police, as I mentioned before. I do my best to protect the contents of the archive, but there is only so much that a man can do.’

  Ludvigssen’s odd behaviour began to make sense. If his rigid controllers had threatened him for minor infractions, how would they react to the news that manuscript documents had been stolen from the archive? And how would they have punished him for it?

  ‘You have not received a warning in this instance, have you?’

  ‘I have not, sir,’ he replied. ‘But that does not mean that it won’t arrive soon.’

  I spoke gently, the way that one might speak to a child.

  ‘You must help me, then,’ I said.

  A film of sweat drenched Ludvigssen’s face and forehead.

  ‘You must tell me what you know about this Vulpius,’ I said.

  It was as if a dam had given way. Words poured from his mouth in a torrent. And I did not doubt that he was telling the truth. Indeed, he was garrulous, abundant in details of every description. But he knew nothing. He had no idea where Vulpius lived. He had hoped that the police would be able to locate the thief. He had been, he said, to enquire at the castle on several occasions, but the police had not been able to add a thing to the little that he knew himself.

  The description that he gave of Vulpius reminded me of my little son, Manni, when he came home from a walk with Helena and Lotte. The trees stretched all the way to the sky, papa! The rooks’ nests were armoured fortresses in the tree-tops. The birds spoke to one another in a croaking language only they could understand. They dined on gingerbread and vegetable soup.

  ‘Now, you must describe him to me.’

  While Ludvigssen talked, I attempted to sketch the face that he had seen on at least a dozen occasions. As I put the final touches to the impression, I realised that I could have walked out into the street and immediately arrested a score of men on the basis of it. The face of Vulpius was longer than it was round. His chin was pointed, but not so very pointed. More square, as a matter of fact, sir. His hair was brown, but neither very dark nor very light. Brown hair, then. Not so long as to reach his shoulders, nor so short as to reveal his ears. His eyes were so very green that they were almost blue. His nose was straight, pointed, aquiline. His mouth was a narrow slit with very thin lips, except when he smiled.

  It made for a slender harvest.

  When he finished speaking, and I showed him the face that I had drawn, I saw at once that Ludvigssen did not recognise the man that he believed he was describing. Of course, I asked him what I ought to change.

  ‘Nothing, sir. A perfect likeness. Precise in every detail!’

  But when I asked him about the missing papers, we made some progress.

  He checked his register, consulted his card file, and moved along the shelves tracing his finger over the reference-codes which were written on the spine of each file or box of papers. Silently, I beseeched the idolaters of Kant to send him a squashed beetle, warning him to speed things up, he was so very slow.

  At last, he took down a box, and brought it to the desk.

  ‘Here we are, sir. C.11–03, pp. 29–37,’ he murmured. ‘The stolen papers were the last two in this box.’

  The list describing the contents of that file was vaguely descriptive: ‘Random notes, meditations, and correspondence of a religious nature,’ it said.

  There were half a dozen sheets of writing-paper, each one very thin, yellow with age, scribbled on in pencil, top to bottom, and longwise in the margins too, where Kant had added notes and corrections to what he had already written. I recognised the crabbed script of the philosopher. It was the hand of an old man. His calligraphy sloped away badly to the right, his letters were cramped and often indistinct.

  I turned to the last sheet of paper in the file, which was almost blank.

  ‘The Probable Nature of Paradise’ was written large, as if it were a title.

  Three lines in the centre of the page. Like an epitaph on a gravestone. I read them once, then read them through again. They were almost infantile, as if Kant were quoting or remembering some nursery rhyme. As if, his mind were fading into darkness.

  If thou couldst but speak, little fly,

  How much more would we know about the past!

  Beneath this legend, there was a note.

  Theological considerations regarding a piece of amber

  shown to me by Wasianski.

  This was the subject that Immanuel Kant had written about in the missing pages.

  Amber.

  29

  THE AIR WAS heavy with the odour.

  Cooking fumes filled the night like virulent marsh gas. As I proceeded through the narrow, winding streets of Königsberg, following the directions that Dr Rickert had scribbled out to guide me, that overpowering aroma conquered every other smell. Except for a slice of black bread and some shrimps in vinegar that I had bought from a stall along the wharf outside Berodstein’s warehouse, I had eaten nothing all day. Now, the thought of food pushed everything else from my mind. Herr Doctor Rickert had promised to provide my dinner, and the persistent smell on his foul breath left no doubt of what I would be eating.

  Onions.

  I turned at last into Ritterstrasse, a narrow alley close to the River Pregel. The smells of fried and boiling onions persisted, but there were other less enticing odours, too. Slops and sewage soiled the ground, and I had to watch out for my boots. This was the poorest heart of the student quarter. Rickert’s house was at the bottom of the street. There were no lanterns. If not for a tiny pinpoint of light at the very far end, the street was as dark as a cellar.

  The district had figured prominently in the newspapers the previous year. Popularly known as ‘the Graves,’ the houses were tiny, squashed together like overcrowded tombs in a forgotten cemetery. No sooner had the French seized Königsberg than they sealed the area off, and took possession of the dwellings. The invading army had swollen enormously as the town held out against the siege, and defeat brought change. All the Prussian students had been flushed out of the Graves, making way for the swarming followers of the French camp: wives and washerwomen, officers’ grooms and servants, saddlers, boot-makers, blacksmiths, sword-smiths, and all the rest of the 5th Army’s random baggage had rushed in and laid their hands on every available room.

  The colonisation had lasted three weeks only.

  The French soldiers had threatened to raze the town, obliterate it from the map of the empire, unless some fitter accommodation could be found, asserting in one voice that the university quarter was no place for the likes of them, the backbone and muscle of the Grande Armée. The houses were lice-ridden, cramped and filthy, the by-ways under-lit and overcrowded, they complained. ‘The Graves’ was a danger to their health, with one communal privy out back for every twenty-four houses in a row. One day, therefore, the French charged out again, invading all the farms and villages around the city. As they ran out, the Prussians rushed back in: students, half-pay scholars, college cooks and servants, an army of private tutors, university teachers with no fixed tenure, and all who had once owned a house, or sub-let a room there.

  The ghosts, as the local joke went, rushed back to their Graves.

  It was no place to wander alone after dark.

  And yet, as Dr Rickert had promised, a lantern glowed outside his door. I had hardly lifted an iron knocker in the shape of a fist and let it drop, when the door was opened, and the man himself stood before me.

  ‘I was looking out for you, Herr Stiffeniis,’ Narcizus Rickert chirped, glancing over my shoulder, as if expecting me to come along in company with someone else. ‘Do come in, sir. Everything is ready.’

  My host had put aside his dark suit, and wore a bright green smoking-jacket of some shimmering material. He led me into a tiny room,
the lumpy walls of which had been papered yellow at some time in the last half-century. Garlands of faded flowers were still dimly evident. The windows were shrouded by washed-out grey linen swaths that might have been spiders’ webs; rope sashes painted red suggested they might actually be curtains. Despite the warmth of the evening, a fire blazed in a rusting cast-iron hearth. A covered pot was hanging from a chain, giving off little puffs of steam, the lid chattering quietly to itself like an old woman, filling the room with a most particular smell.

  ‘Onions?’ I asked.

  ‘Onion soup,’ he specified, and seemed quite proud of himself.

  To one side of the fire was a small armchair. On the other, pressed hard up against the wall, was a two-seat sofa. Rickert described it as his chaise longue while pointing out the other comforts of his home. ‘Small, but neat,’ he said more than once, while I looked all around me, noting the smoke-blackened ceiling, patches of mould like the maps of so many undiscovered continents on all the walls, and a precarious piling of thing on thing until it seemed that one thing toppling would topple every other thing. A tiny round table filled what remained of the room. This three-legged table was set for one person with a brown clay bowl, a pewter cup and spoon, and a dark green bottle which would serve as a carafe for water.

  Unlike the French, I did not complain.

  ‘I hope that you’ll excuse me, sir,’ he said, ‘but I’ve already eaten. A particularly painful swelling of the stomach, and a ripping gripe in the bowels, sets in if I eat too late. I’ll keep you company, of course. Unless you have already partaken?’

  ‘I made a point of waiting,’ I said, my stomach churning on the smell in that enclosed space.

  ‘Just heating it up for you. Ready in a few minutes. Would you care to view your bedroom before you dine, sir?’ he asked, as if certain preliminaries needed to be got out of the way.