End of the World in Breslau

by Marek Krajewski

  † If I may use the words.

  Mock lit a cigarette for the first time since leaving the hospital. The fragrant smoke of the Halpaus drifted down into his lungs and filled his head with a light, pleasant confusion. He looked at the bored expressions of his colleagues and then, feeling a prickling in his throat and a stabbing pain in his spine, sat down in his chair.

  “That is all, gentlemen,” Mühlhaus broke the silence. “We can go home. Oh, I’m sorry Doctor Hartner … I see you have something to add …”

  “Yes.” Hartner pulled a neat pile of cards fastened with a paper clip from his yellow, pigskin briefcase. He spoke very slowly, savouring the anticipated outburst of knowledge, questions and admiration. “In the space of one day, the commission I am leading arrived at an interesting conclusion. As you know, gentlemen, the last murder was committed on December 9th. I told my team, therefore, to look for a crime committed between December 9th and the end of the year.” Like every armchair scholar, Hartner suffered from a galling lack of listeners, and decided to hold their attention by means of retardation. “As Counsellor Mock has stated, the most recent murder differed from the others in that, in all certainty, it had to be discovered … I no longer quite remember your reasoning …”

  “Well,” Mock said, extinguishing his cigarette, “the first crime could quite easily have gone undiscovered if the shoemaker in whose workshop Gelfrert had been walled up had had a weaker sense of smell. The neigh-bours would have found Honnefelder after two or three weeks, when the corpse’s stench would have begun to penetrate beyond the walls and closed doors of the room. Geissen had to be discovered very quickly, either by the caretaker or by another client entering Rosemarie Bombosch’s room. The murderer is shortening the time span between the crime being committed and its discovery … If this isn’t mere coincidence then the next murder will be committed practically before our very eyes … If only we knew when and where it is to take place …”

  “And we do know,” Hartner said, dragging out the syllables and relishing the sight of flushed cheeks, shining eyes and trembling hands. “We do know. The next murder will take place on Christmas Eve. And it will be committed at Antonienstrasse 27. We even have the time – half past seven. In that tenement on that same day at that time in 1757, two people were killed …”

  BRESLAU, SATURDAY DECEMBER 24TH, 1757, TEN O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

  The town was wrapped in smoke from hearths and dying fires. It wound its way over roofs and was sent back down chimneys by a gusting wind. Prussian mercenaries, who had three days earlier conquered the town, were still drinking in the inns and bawdy houses. The wind forced the hat of a Prussian foot soldier down over his eyes as he watched, in the glow of torchlight, a merchant seated up on the box of a large wagon. Candles in the windows of the factory next to Nicolai Tor threw flickering reflections onto the two men and the sergeant who, armed with a spontoon, had now approached them. The sergeant nodded to his men who were sheltering from the gale behind a low stone wall by the round tower, and motioned to the merchant to proceed, receiving in return a small barrel of honey and a casket of alum. The merchant’s wagon rolled into the narrow Nicolaistrasse, the horse’s hooves squelching through the slush and horse manure. The candles on a Christmas tree decorated with apples shimmered in the window of the corner house. A dog lying outside the house growled at the merchant, and then put all his energy into scratching at the door and whimpering. The tired horse pulled the wagon along the embankments, then turned into Antonienstrasse and stopped at the back of the Franciscan monastery, beside a small, wooden house where not a single light was burning. The Town Hall flautist sounded for supper. The merchant climbed down from his wagon and went into the yard. On wooden frames in the neglected garden hung lengths of felt, stiff with frost. He approached the small servant’s room and peered in through the window. Two apprentice weavers were sitting drinking weak beer, with a basket of bread rolls in front of them. The merchant anxiously retraced his steps to enter at the front of the house. In the entrance hall, he inhaled the smell of prunes. He leaned against the small barrel of beer standing outside the door to the room and felt a wave of drowsiness. He opened the door and found himself in his familiar, warm world of many varied scents. From the stove drifted the aroma of gingerbread cake; from a pigpen in the corner came the stench of animal excrement; from the barrel dug into the dust floor, the pleasant smell of salted meat. The stove was lit but, because its little door had been closed, the fire gave out only a dim light. The merchant sat down at the table and another of his senses came into play: he heard the scratching of a mouse, the banging of wooden shutters, the moaning of a woman in the next room, the rustle of a weasel’s paws on straw, and the rustle of straw in the mattress, the grating of forces unknown in the beams sunk in the wall, the familiar throaty cries of ecstasy coming from the woman, the hiss of the fire in the stove, the panting of a man and the squeaking of bedboards beneath them. The merchant quietly went outside to his wagon, stroked the horse’s muzzle, threw aside the caparison that covered the cart and groped about in search of something among the sacks of salt, barrels of honey and little bales of Ghent cloth. He found a small chest of medicines. He returned to the room and sat down by the stove. His feet were numb with cold. From the chest he took a syringe and a bottle of liquid from which he filled the syringe completely. He then approached the door to the side room and, by the sounds that came from within, soon recognized the approach of those final moments when lovers feverishly reach the point of climax. The merchant entered the room and stroked the face of the baby asleep in its cot. Then he focussed his entire attention on the amorous scene. In the feeble light of the Christmas Eve star he made out an enormous backside bouncing up and down between a pair of legs spread wide. On the floor lay a uniform braided with cord and a tall hat with two plumes. The outfit revealed the man to be a Prussian hussar. The merchant regained control of his feet at once; he no longer felt cold. He bounded onto the bed and sat on the man’s back. With one hand he pressed down on the man’s neck, with the other he plunged the syringe into his buttock, pumping in its entire contents. The hussar threw off the merchant, leaped from the bed and reached for his sword. Then he started to choke. The woman stared in horror at her husband, the syringe in his hand, and sensed the inevitable approach.

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 21ST, 1927, FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

  Barasch Brothers department store was bursting at the seams. It was mostly filled with children running around frenetically, paying no heed to the trickles of sweat running down from under their caps. In the enormous two-storeyed hall encircled by two galleries, metre-long metal arrows hung from the glass ceiling and pointed towards the toy stalls. They moved up and down on springs activated by men employed temporarily for the Christmas and New Year period. So the children knew perfectly well how to find the smiling Father Christmases who, demonstrating the allure of the goods on sale, set colourful tops spinning wildly, carefully mounted the rocking horses, rummaged through armies of lead soldiers, stuck dummies into the mouths of unwilling dolls, set porcelain lions upon tortoise-shell giraffes, made wound-up strongmen lift weights, and ran trains incessantly along the same electric route.

  Mock unbuttoned his coat, removed his hat, smoothed his unruly waves of hair and sat down on a quilted seat made of two concentric cylinders. Leaning back comfortably, he began to wonder why he had come. All he knew was that he had been drawn there by an irrepressible urge that had emerged from his earlier ruminations, but realized, to his horror, that he could not remember what they were. To reconstruct this chain of associations, he would have to go back to Hartner’s story. He remembered his efforts to justify the actions of the merchant’s unfaithful wife: she sinned, and therefore she was human, extremely human! Bah! Alexei von Orloff would claim that, at the moment of sinning, she was closer to God! And how would that Russian sage judge her husband’s actions? In killing her, he too was committing a sin! Which of them was closer to God? The one who
se sin was the greater?

  Mock recalled his violent reaction to this perverse axiology of sin, and his attack of rage when he had passed Sommé the jeweller’s. “Isn’t it better to get rid of the sin,” he thought at the time, “and forget it rather than dwell upon it?” The notion of rejecting sin provoked another thought – little Eberhard’s First Confession in the vast Schutzengel church in Waldenburg, his father’s work-worn hand shaking his when he apologized to his parents for his sins. He did not really know what he was apologizing for – he did not feel that he had any sins, even regretted not having any, and thought he was deceiving his father. Eberhard Mock could still feel the hard pressure of shoemaker Johannes Mock’s hand as he watched the children tearing themselves away from their parents and running around under the huge neon sign, gebr. barasch. Now he knew why he had come to the department store. He stood up, made his way to the alcohol counter and bought a square bottle of Schirdewan schnapps, which his brother Franz adored.

  “The next crime won’t be committed for another three days,” he thought as he passed a string quartet playing the Christmas carol “O, Tannenbaum”† on the ground floor. “So I’ve got plenty of time. All my men have got a bit of time before Christmas Eve. So I can get happily drunk – and anyway, why should I get morbidly drunk?”

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 21ST, 1927 HALF PAST FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON

  Mock just about managed to climb to the fourth floor of the tenement on Nicolaistrasse and, panting loudly, knocked hard on one of the four doors. It was opened by Irmgard, who then turned away and sat on a stool like an automaton. Stove lids rattled. Mock looked into the anxious eyes of his sister-in-law, and walked past her to enter the room. Railway engineer Franz Mock was sitting at the table in a collarless shirt. Strong, black tea ate into the enamel mug in front of him. The muscles of his forearms tensed as the index fingers and thumbs of both hands gripped a lined sheet of paper covered in even handwriting. Eberhard stood the schnapps on the table and, without removing his coat or hat, reached for the letter. Franz gripped it even harder and began to read in a strong, hard voice:

  “O, Christmas Tree”

  Dear Mama,

  I’m leaving your house for ever. It was more of a prison than a home for me, more a gloomy dungeon than a peaceful haven. And in that dungeon I was kicked around by a raging tyrant. He didn’t even try to understand me and had only a coarse notion of a world in which every poet has to be a Jew or a homosexual, and where life grants a prescription for success only to railway engineers. I’m giving up school and I’m going to live with a woman with whom I wish to spend the rest of my days. Don’t look for me. I love you and uncle Eberhard. Keep well, and farewell for ever.

  Yours,

  Erwin

  When Franz finished reading the letter, he raised his head and stared at his brother. In his eyes lurked the certainty of his impending judgement.

  “He thinks of you as his father,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “You got what you wanted, eh, you filthy swine? You brought my son up for me. You couldn’t produce one of your own with that useless prick of yours, so you made it your business to bring mine up instead …”

  Eberhard fastened his coat, turned up his collar, pulled his hat down on his head and left the room. A few seconds later he returned for the square bottle of Schirdewan schnapps, his older brother Franz’s favourite.

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 21ST, A QUARTER TO FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON

  It was loud and crowded in the Silesia pastry shop on Ohlauerstrasse. Wrapped in a fog of cigarette smoke, waitresses in navy-blue dresses and lace collars slalomed between the bar and the marble tables, the misted mirrors, the noisy shopkeepers, the office workers stuffing themselves with strudels, and unhappy schoolboys who blackened paper napkins with the sorrows of love, delaying the moment when they would have to settle their bills for as long as they could.

  One of these “sorrowing Werthers” was racking his brain for a metaphor that might most appropriately render – in a rather Expressionistic style – Catullus’ “Odi et amo”,† when a shadow fell on his napkin of tangled emotions. The boy looked up and recognized Mr Eberhard Mock, the uncle of his friend Erwin. In different circumstances such a meeting would have given him enormous pleasure. Now, however, the sight of the Criminal Counsellor greatly embarrassed the schoolboy, just as it had when, at a few meetings a year earlier, Mock had helped Erwin and his friends understand Livius’ tortuous style; just as it had when, after several free private lessons, they had invited the Counsellor to this very same café and listened to his police tales. Without a word, Mock sat down next to the schoolboy and smiled. From his coat pocket he extracted a cigarette-case and ordered coffee and apple cake from a waitress. The schoolboy did not say anything either and wondered how he could prolong this silence indefinitely. He knew why the Criminal Counsellor had come.

  “Tell me, Briesskorn,” Mock pushed the cigarette-case towards the young man, “where can I find Erwin?”

  “He’s probably at home.” Without looking at Mock, the youth fished out a cigarette from under the elasticated band.

  † “I hate and yet I love”. Poem 85.

  Mock knew Briesskorn was lying, that this was another schoolboy’s joke like the one he had cracked when – according to Erwin – their Latin teacher, Piechotta, had asked him where the predicate was in a particular sentence, and he had answered that it was between the first word in the sentence and the full stop. Mock was certain Briesskorn was lying because Erwin’s uncle would have looked for him at home first, and not in this steam bath full of cakes, coffee and thick, warming liqueurs; anybody in on the secret of Erwin’s absconding would have known this, and so in saying: “He’s probably at home,” the schoolboy had in fact meant: “I know where he is, but I’m not going to tell you.”

  “My dear Mr Briesskorn,” Mock bored into his interlocutor with his eyes, “did you know that Professor Piechotta was a colleague of mine when we were students? A good colleague at that, almost a close friend. We went through a lot together, and drank many a beer during our students’ union meetings. Many a time did we sweat together in our pews as Professor Eduard Norden glared at us, picking out a new victim to analyse the metre in one of Plautus’ choruses … Yes …” He cut the apple cake with his spoon. “We were good friends, like you and my nephew Erwin; we were loyal to each other, neither of us would have betrayed the other … But if Ferdinand Piechotta’s relative or friend had been looking for him in those distant days in order to speak to him, to prevent some foolish act, then I’d have broken my word to Piechotta …”

  “Do you, Counsellor sir, imagine that I’m going to be persuaded to betray my friend by such an interesting proposal?” Briesskorn was twirling a second cigarette in his long fingers. “I know Piechotta hates me, and he would sooner break with you than stop tormenting me …”

  “You insult me.” Mock finished his coffee and, getting up from the table, carefully felt for the bottle in his coat pocket. “You doubt my word … You’re not stupid – you’ve understood my proposal correctly. But you think I want to deceive you, that I’m a petty swindler, a shady cheat, right? Young man, do you know the meaning of friendship between men?”

  “Erwin is at Inge Gänserich’s,” said Briesskorn and crushed the unlit cigarette in his fingers. The pale Georgia tobacco crumbled onto the marble surface of the table.

  “Thank you, sir.” Mock offered his hand. The schoolboy grabbed it and held on to it tightly.

  “A man’s word and friendship between men are without doubt the surest things in the world,” said Briesskorn. “I believe you, Counsellor sir … The fact that I have revealed Erwin’s whereabouts to you doesn’t mean our friendship will die …”

  “The surest thing in the world,” Mock turned his hat in his fingers, “is death. Write that to your Lotte.”

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 21ST, 1927 HALF PAST FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON

  Mock did not need to ask anyone who Inge Gänserich was,
nor where she lived. He knew the annexe at Gartenstrasse 35, behind Hartmann’s haberdashery, perfectly well. This, he remembered from his files, was where the famous painter who had arrived in the Silesian capital ten years earlier now lived. At first she had tried her luck as a model. She was notorious for the fact that, if she agreed to pose for an artist, it explicitly meant she had consented to share a bed with him. Her consent was not granted very often, however, and to a large extent depended on what she would be paid. It was therefore no surprise that beautiful, mysterious and taciturn Inge became a model and muse to only the wealthiest of painters. To one of these, a certain Arno Gänserich, a painter of surrealist underwater seascapes, Inge had given her consent twice: once shortly after he had been introduced to her, and then at the altar. After a grand wedding, the young couple had lived at Gartenstrasse 35 and, to the horror and fury of their quiet and industrious neighbours, had continued with their wedding celebrations most nights for over a year. This was where Mock had seen Inge for the first time when, in 1920, he had been called in by his boss at the time, the Chief of Police of the fifth district, to quell a wild, drunken orgy organized by the newly married couple. The painterly passion of the guests at the party had made Mock’s life a misery. He had roundly cursed the artistic talents of the men and women who, intoxicated with morphine, had tipped out pots of paint and mixed it together with their naked bodies, using the floor as a palette. Mock had grabbed Inge and covered her with a blanket, and then began the Difficult struggle of leading her out of the apartment. Even today, as he passed Hartmann’s haberdashery, he could feel her teeth in his hand, still see her pour over his suit of expensive, Polish Bielsko wool a pot of blue oil paint otherwise used by her husband in his attempts to depict the melancholy of an underwater-scape. Mock also remembered, as if from a distance and in slow motion, how he had raised his fist above Inge’s shapely head and struck her a blow.