HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

  All eyes were attracted by the main course as it entered the room. The servants carried in a large pewter tray, where a roasted pig of the most gigantic proportions had been laid out on a bed of chestnuts, a cooked apple in its mouth, its skin peppered with black chives. As tradition required, this splendid sight was greeted with loud cheers and clapping, before it was set to rest on a side-table at the top end of the room. Count Dittersdorf then began to hack and saw, heaping slices of pork onto the plates of his guests, which were taken up empty from the table, two at a time, by the servants and carried to their master, before being returned to the fortunate recipient.

  Seated at the very foot of the banquet, our appetites sharpened by the mountains of carrots and beetroot in trembling gelatine, the steaming plates of boiled potatoes set down at intervals along the table, this ritual was destined to take some time. In the lull that naturally followed as we waited self-consciously for our turn to come, watching enviously as other guests received their loaded plates, and ours remained empty, I was grateful when Professor Krazman boldly chose to invent a topic of conversation.

  Whether from politeness or genuine interest, he leaned out over the table, and directed his attention towards the two newcomers.

  ‘The Emperor has travelled a great deal, has he not?’ he said in a quaint, delicate manner, pronouncing each foreign word with carefully controlled accuracy, the general effect of his schoolboy French made almost comical by the exaggerated volume of his quavering voice.

  The Frenchmen exchanged a quizzical glance, then Lieutenant Mutiez replied in an artificially slow and measured tone: ‘Indeed, he has, sir.’

  Professor Krazman smiled warmly, and seemed to congratulate himself on being understood. Indeed, he felt encouraged to venture further. ‘And you, good sir? Have you travelled with him?’

  The young man smiled as he replied, ‘Indeed, I have, sir!’

  Professor Krazman was drawn inevitably deeper into discourse. Having asked a leading question, the curt reply obliged him to ask another, which came after some moments. ‘To Egypt, too?’

  The young lieutenant laughed heartily, glancing at his companion, who smiled a more languid smile. ‘I was still in swaddling clothes in ’98,’ he quipped. It was a blatant lie, but who would dare to question his humour? He swept his hand in a sort of theatrical bow towards the older man, as if desiring to draw him into the conversation. ‘But Colonel Lavedrine was in Egypt. He’ll tell all you wish to know, I’m sure.’

  This must have been a more than adequate introduction for any man, no matter how distinguished, but it did not suit this Colonel Lavedrine. He did not speak, merely nodded assent, as if that should be answer enough for any man’s curiosity.

  Thus Professor Krazman was obliged to step even further out onto the thin ice of his scholastic French.

  ‘How I send you!’ he declared ecstatically.

  Everyone sitting nearby laughed gleefully. Professor Krazman had chosen wrongly from his small stock of vocabulary, substituting the word envoyer for envier.

  ‘Professor Kazman envies your good fortune, sir,’ I said, stepping in to right the wrong. ‘Not many men have been to Egypt. And of those who went,’ I added, ‘not all came back in one piece. The Mamelukes are renowned for their ferocity. Even here in Prussia.’

  ‘I had to swim at Abukir,’ Lavedrine replied offhandedly, making no attempt to excuse the naval defeat at the hands of Nelson and the British fleet.

  ‘You are a lucky man!’ I said, turning to the servant at my elbow, watching as he made his way up the room towards Dittersdorf, my plate in one hand, Helena’s in the other.

  Colonel Lavedrine stared hard at me.

  ‘You are yourself, sir,’ he said at last.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I returned, my eye bewitched by the mountain of food on Professor Krazman’s plate. I had seen nothing like it since the feast the year before. Blighted potatoes and boiled nettles had been the staple ingredients of our meagre diet. The harvest had been all but lost in the aftermath of defeat, and the invading French army had snapped up everything that survived the pilfering and destruction.

  ‘You mentioned earlier that your name is Hanno Stiffeniis. You were acquainted with Immanuel Kant, were you not?’ He nodded kindly in the direction of Professor Krazman, and repeated the lexical error which had amused us all three minutes earlier: ‘How I send you, sir!’ he said.

  I gaped at him. Was my history an open book to every Frenchman who chanced to pass through Lotingen?

  ‘Professor Kant?’ I repeated uncertainly, saved from saying more by the arrival of the servant and the plates of food for Helena and myself. I jabbed hastily at an over-large piece of pork and stuffed it into my mouth, chewing rapidly, tasting nothing. My mind flew back to Königsberg, recalling the last occasion I had seen Immanuel Kant: laid out in the coffin in his living room, the day he was buried. That day, I had been obliged to face the final, unimaginable twist of his philosophy.

  Suddenly, I realised that Colonel Lavedrine was addressing me.

  ‘. . . a most remarkable man. I had a short, but fruitful, correspondence with him.’

  I set my knife and fork down, managing to swallow the lump of pork that seemed to have clotted on my tongue, while Lavedrine continued to fix me with those clear blue eyes. There was something hawk-like and rapacious in his stare, as if he knew far more than he was prepared to say, and was waiting for me to fall into some snare.

  ‘You corresponded with Kant?’ I asked, the good things on my plate forgotten.

  ‘The man himself,’ Lavedrine replied.

  ‘Were you a student of his?’

  ‘A student?’ Lavedrine echoed with an ironical smile. ‘It would be truer to say that Professor Kant was a student of mine. For a short while, at least.’

  I made an elaborate show of racking my memory for the name of this man who claimed to have tutored Immanuel Kant. ‘I did not catch your name,’ I said.

  ‘Lavedrine,’ he answered. ‘Serge Lavedrine. Of Paris.’

  ‘Which aspect of philosophy are you interested in, Colonel?’

  ‘Philosophy does not interest me,’ he said dismissively, wiping his mouth with his napkin. ‘Some years ago, I was working on a report that had been commissioned for inclusion in the revision of the Encyclopaedia. But my master died, and I was left with the papers unfinished in my hands.’

  ‘Your master?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘Monsieur Diderot was my tutor at the Sorbonne,’ he said. ‘I studied the new science of social anthropology under him. The Apology for Man, as he himself defined it. I was, and I am, particularly interested in criminal behaviour.’

  ‘This was . . . when?’ I asked, attempting a show of ingenuous interest.

  ‘Diderot died in 1784, but I continued with my studies, and published a short pamphlet, L’assassin rural, at my own expense in 1793. Professor Kant wrote to me a few months after the work appeared. Despite the fact that half the sovereign states of Europe were at war with France, at least one copy must have reached Prussia,’ he said, appearing to be amused.

  I took another forkful of pork, and chewed more slowly, saying nothing. There was something patently false about this tale. Was this French upstart trying to gain credibility for himself by inventing a learned correspondence with Immanuel Kant, the greatest mind in the whole of Prussia?

  ‘L’assassin rural,’ I murmured. ‘I’ve never heard of it, I’m afraid. What was the topic of your research?’

  ‘Murder,’ he said quietly. ‘Within the context of the French peasant family. You’d be surprised how many deaths in rural areas are less than timely.’

  ‘Kant? Murders committed by peasants?’ I asked too sharply, raising my wine glass to my lips to cover my acidity of tone.

  ‘Most certainly,’ he replied. ‘Professor Kant was interested in just about everything under the sun.’

  ‘Everything under the sun,’ I answered more mildly, ‘but not crime.’

  ‘I would hard
ly have expected it myself,’ he replied smoothly. ‘But one day I received a most intriguing letter from him. It spoke of nothing else.’

  Now he had gone too far. Immanuel Kant was at the height of his public fame in 1793, all of his greatest works—the Critiques that would make his name immortal—published and acclaimed. Could one really imagine him writing to an unknown student in Paris to enquire about a vulgar pamphlet that the man had been obliged to publish at his own expense? It was a ludicrous suggestion. I determined to treat this provocation with the disdain that it deserved, and say nothing.

  ‘His intuitions went far beyond anything I could have imagined,’ Lavedrine continued aggressively. ‘But you know what Professor Kant was capable of. And it is wrong to say that crime did not interest him. He made such acute critical suggestions that I was obliged to open up a line of reasoning that had never occurred to me before. I simply could not ignore the possibility.’

  ‘Which possibility?’

  Like Professor Krazman before me, I had been drawn into a conversation from which it would be difficult to escape. The topic was one that I would have preferred to avoid.

  ‘What inspires murder, in your informed opinion, Herr Magistrate?’

  The sarcastic tone of voice, and the gesture that accompanied this question, were unthinkably rude. He shook his forefinger at my face as if it were a duelling rapier.

  ‘Life is sacred,’ I said. ‘When anger, jealousy, greed, or the mistaken desire to right an action that is perceived to be wrong, take hold of the mind, there is no anticipating the consequences. If a lethal weapon happens to be on hand, we may expect the worst.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Lavedrine replied with a dismissive flick of that offensive forefinger. ‘Correct, sir, but banal. There is a less predictable side to the human heart, as Herr Professor Kant was quick to point out. ‘ “The bent wood of humanity,” don’t you remember? I believe he was thinking of a particular case when he wrote those words.’

  ‘A criminal case?’ I said. ‘That is impossible! He had never shown the slightest interest in crime until the final year of his earthly existence. And even then,’ I paused, weighing my words with care, ‘he became involved against his will. The peace of Königsberg was threatened, the police were helpless, and so, despite his declining health, he attempted to resolve the question for them. But his efforts were wasted. The murderers were identified by myself in the end, shortly after Professor Kant’s death, though they were never captured.’

  Colonel Lavedrine smiled and looked away, gently touching the forearm of his young companion, as if to suggest that he should listen attentively, that some telling comment was about to be heard which would successfully conclude the argument in his own favour.

  ‘You misunderstand me, Herr Stiffeniis,’ he said. ‘Or else you have a less informed view of Professor Kant than you would like me to believe. I tell you again, and I can prove to you, if necessary, that Kant was interested—passionately—in the nature of criminal behaviour a decade before that spate of murders in Königsberg led him to search out the doer with your assistance.’

  ‘And I say again, sir. You are wrong. You pretend to possess knowledge in fields in which you are probably a novice.’

  Helena placed her hand on mine, and whispered calming words in my ear, but I did not hear a thing she said.

  Lavedrine’s youthful companion stretched forward in his chair.

  ‘Be very careful, sir!’ he warned. ‘Colonel Lavedrine is a guest of this house, and this nation. I can hardly believe that any Prussian would be so foolhardy as to doubt his word. Every man in Paris has heard of his capacities. I see no reason why this Professor Kant of yours should not have heard of them, too.’

  Lavedrine sat back in his seat, a thin smile on his lips, stroking his chin with his thumb and forefinger. He seemed to be scrutinising me, curious to hear what my reply would be.

  ‘If Colonel Lavedrine can prove the truth of what he says,’ I returned, glancing between my accuser and the man I had accused, ‘I will apologise with all my heart. And if that apology does not satisfy him,’ I added, leaning back in my chair, shrugging my shoulders, ‘the prison cells are waiting for Prussians such as me, who are obliged to have guests such as you!’

  I suddenly realised that the room was silent.

  All eyes had turned towards our end of the long table. Not one knife or fork moved. Wine settled untasted in fifty goblets. The joys of the table were forgotten in the unexpected thrill of the moment.

  ‘Come, come,’ Colonel Lavedrine said gently, smiling warmly, standing up and taking his faithful friend by the arm. ‘If I have taken umbrage, Henri, I am old enough to settle my own scores! I assure you, I have taken no offence. My apologies to you, Herr Stiffeniis. Perhaps I have spoken of a subject which is close to your affections? I did not intend to belittle the memory of a man whom all the world admires. I simply meant to point out that even in the field of criminology, an activity in which Professor Kant was only marginally concerned, he was able to teach something to a man such as myself, who is interested in little else.’

  He raised his glass and held it up to the room.

  ‘To the memory of Immanuel Kant!’ he cried.

  All present lifted their glasses to the toast.

  I waited a moment longer. I wanted Lavedrine to understand that although I had not been taken in by his fine words, I was willing to accept the olive branch of peace that he was holding out to me. Helena’s hand tugged fitfully at my sleeve. I raised my glass, and added my voice to all the others.

  ‘Very well, Monsieur Lavedrine,’ I said, as the cheering died down, sitting back, resting my elbow on the table, as if I might be prepared to listen to whatever he wished to tell me. ‘I wonder what Immanuel Kant might have been able to teach to an expert such as yourself? Which door, exactly, did he open?’

  ‘The door marked “Affection”.’ Lavedrine’s eyes flashed, his voice was heavy, intense. ‘Love, if you like. All of us fight for the things we love most dearly. We fight, and we die, if necessary. Or we kill to defend them. Sometimes, too, we kill what we love.’

  He narrowed his eyes and furrowed his brow, as if involved in a private process of the most serious reflection. ‘Professor Kant had something specific in mind, I think, because he asked me whether I had ever come across a crime that was motivated by sincere affection. He wanted to know what might be the modus operandi chosen by a person who kills for such a reason. He was interested in details.’

  I was speechless.

  If I had deceived myself into thinking that no correspondence between Kant and Lavedrine concerning the question of murder could possibly exist, I was now obliged to accept that it did. Lavedrine suggested that they had been in touch in 1793. That year I had made a pilgrimage to Königsberg. That year I had sought the philosopher out, confessing my tangled feelings as I watched my brother die, unwilling and unable to save him. Was Professor Kant thinking of me when he spoke of motives which might lead to the death of a loved one? Had he asked this ‘scientist of crime’ to explain my unnatural behaviour?

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the voice of Count Dittersdorf thundered, ‘the moment has arrived for us to sample the first pressing of this season’s cider!’

  All those who were ‘in the know’ expressed their enthusiasm. The newcomers, many of whom had never tasted Prussian cider, were curious, carefully watching every move that Count Dittersdorf made, as he stirred the contents of a huge silver salver, then served out a helping of this nectar, which gave off a smoky vapour as it settled heavily in the waiting cut-crystal goblets, and was handed out to the assembled guests. Everyone turned excitedly to his or her neighbour, commenting on the fine colour of the liquid, and the delicious aroma that began to settle like a perfumed cloud over the long table.

  When Dittersdorf held up his glass, inviting us all to drink to the Fruits of Autumn, a second cry went up, and I believe that it was first heard from the lips of my wife: ‘Long live dear Count Aldebrand!’<
br />
  As I drank to both these toasts, looking around the table, intent on sharing my appreciation of the cider with the other guests, my eye settled on Colonel Lavedrine. He was staring at me, oblivious to the feast.

  ‘I hope that we will have the opportunity to speak further,’ he murmured, taking a brimming jug of cider which the waiter brought to our end of the table. ‘More cider, Herr Stiffeniis? Hold up your glass, Henri! And for you, madame?’

  Helena thanked him graciously, but a vein was pulsing nervously in her temple.

  We rose from the table shortly afterwards, the faces of the men inflamed by the final glass of Bischoff’s cordial that our host had pressed upon us to ward off the cold. The Dittersdorfs took their customary places by the door to thank their guests, an air of satisfaction clearly stamped on Count Aldebrand’s large face. His habitual expression of stern severity had been replaced by a milder one. He appeared to consider the evening a sort of personal triumph, as if the ‘reconciliation’ of Lotingen were no longer just a hope, but a fact. I prayed to God that he was correct, only too well aware that the rebels of our own defeated forces had not been invited to the feast. They were still capable of causing untold damage.

  ‘Thank heavens no blood was spilled,’ I heard him whisper to Helena as he bowed to kiss her gloved hand.

  She turned to say goodbye to the Countess, who seemed more evidently relieved that the evening was over, and that nothing worse had come of it. ‘Sometimes the fact that we speak our different languages is a blessing in disguise,’ our hostess said with a nervous smile.