HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

  She did not rush to my arms. Nor did I throw them wide in welcome.

  Slowly, the lantern sank to rest at her side. She came towards me, advancing step after step along the path, murmuring all the while like a prayer, ‘Thank the Lord! Thank the dear Lord!’

  She stood before me, like a child in a trance. Her head fell forward slowly, and came to rest on my shoulder.

  ‘You are home,’ she whispered close to my ear.

  I set my hand gently upon the crown of her hair, my fingers burrowing down through the thicket until I felt the warmth of her skin. ‘Come,’ I said. ‘Let’s go in before the cold puts paid to us both.’

  I could find no other words to say.

  As we entered the house, Lotte leant over the balcony in front of the children’s room.

  ‘Welcome home, Herr Procurator!’ she cried in a bright whisper. She was still wearing her apron and day-cap, and must have just finished putting the children to bed. ‘Shall I bring the babies down to greet you, sir?’

  I waved my hand to prevent her.

  ‘Manni won’t forgive you,’ Helena said, as we passed into the parlour. ‘He said that you would return this night. I promised to bake a strudel if he was correct.’

  The apples from our orchard were stored in a barrel in the attic. Helena thought of them as her secret treasure. Every day she would check that all was well, removing fruits that showed any sign of bruising. If fit to eat, they were eaten after lunch. If not, they were used for baking.

  ‘He was correct in his estimations,’ I said.

  ‘Then I must sacrifice my precious apples,’ she replied.

  There was nothing playful in the tone of her speech.

  I stood in my parlour in outdoor clothes, like a stranger who had lost his way and come knocking at the first door that he happened to find. The room was warm, though the fire in the grate was almost extinguished for the night. Already stiff with cold, my fingers trembled with inner tension as I tried without success to unhook the clasp and shrug off my travelling mantle.

  Helena’s hands settled gently over mine.

  ‘Let me do that,’ she said.

  Deftly, she undid the fastenings and freed me of the weight. She dropped the cloak over the back of a chair, turned to me, took my hands in hers once more, and led me to the horsehair sofa. Applying gentle pressure, she sat me down, then turned away to tend to the fire. With kindling, some sticks, and a flurry of the bellows, bright flames were roaring up the chimney in a twinkling.

  ‘You’ll be warmer in a bit,’ she said, glancing back over her shoulder. She employed exactly the same encouraging note when one of the children had a mishap. ‘I’ll get you a glass of wine in a moment. Just think what a surprise it will be for the children, to find their papa sitting down to breakfast with them in the morning!’

  It was not the heat that began to seep from the fire, but the sound of Helena’s voice, the selfless goodness of her ministrations, which began to melt the stiffness from my limbs, to break the ice that had encrusted my heart. She brought me a glass of wine seasoned with pepper, carefully wrapping my fingers around the stem of the glass. ‘Drink this,’ she said, ‘it will do you good.’

  It was some minutes before I was in any condition to respond.

  ‘I spoke with Lavedrine,’ I began.

  Helena drew up a chair and sat herself in front of me.

  ‘I thought you had,’ she said quietly. ‘And you want to know how that meeting came about.’

  I had never imagined for one single moment that I would be required to interrogate my own wife. I did so that evening in the hope that she might tell me something, some small, insignificant detail, that she had not already told to Lavedrine. That massacre had fallen from the sky like a meteorite, and it had landed squarely in the middle of my own living room.

  ‘Why did you go to him?’ I asked.

  ‘I did not,’ Helena replied, her voice as vibrant as catgut on a fiddle. ‘I did not go directly to him, as such. When I learnt the truth of what had happened, I felt compelled to speak. The truth was not what you had told me, Hanno.’

  I did not allow her to finish. ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Mother Albers always comes on a Wednesday,’ she replied. This matron went from house to house in Lotingen, regardless of the weather, a basket perched upon her head, containing fresh-laid eggs. ‘She told me where the family lived, and that they were still looking for Frau Gottewald. She told me what had happened to those children. She showed me a notice saying that the French authorities wished to speak with anyone who might have news of that family.’ She was silent for a moment, then she added with decision: ‘Lavedrine put out those handbills. It was inevitable, I suppose. Meeting him, I mean.’

  I took this information in, evaluating its worth. ‘What leads you to believe that you may have known the woman?’

  Helena sat stiffly on the wooden chair, looking down at her hands. They rested on her knees, which were pressed closely together. ‘I was walking near the wood where the massacre took place. The fact that the victims were three young children. The peculiar state of mind of the woman that I met.’

  I said nothing for a moment.

  ‘Isn’t that an incredible coincidence, Helena? There is a massacre, a woman disappears, and you have met her. By chance. You, and you alone, in the whole of Lotingen.’

  Helena’s eyes did not flinch from my own. Years seemed to fly by in those few moments. She did not speak, and seemed determined not to do so, as if silence were the only objection she would make to the doubts that I had voiced.

  ‘Why not, Hanno?’ she cried suddenly. ‘Our whole lives are shaped by chance, by coincidence. Can you believe there is some pattern in our world after everything that we have been through? We are alive, not dead, by chance alone! She was searching for food that day, as many women do to feed their children nowadays in Lotingen. I had never spoken to her before. I’d never even seen her. But I met her, and spoke to her. That day, and no other.’

  She looked down, as if to study more attentively the silver wedding band that she wore on her little finger. If I had been the helpless waif a few minutes earlier, as Helena mothered me in from the cold, our roles were now inverted. My wife looked like a very young maid who had been unjustly accused of doing wrong by a stern, unbending father.

  But then she rebelled.

  ‘How could you, Hanno?’ she murmured. There was pain in the protest, but there was also accusation. ‘How could you think to keep the truth from me? Could such a terrible thing be kept a secret? Even for so short a time?’

  My thoughts flew back to Lavedrine. He had warned me of the dangers of prevarication. He had read the implications of the situation better than I had done. Then again, I thought bitterly, he has a vast experience with the opposite sex.

  ‘It was cowardly of you. The less I knew, the easier it was for you to go away and leave us here in Lotingen alone. This was unfair,’ she concluded, ‘not to me alone, but also to your children.’

  Was that how she chose to interpret my actions? Not as a conscious desire to spare her the shock and the fright, but as a pretext to spare myself the necessity of worrying about her while I was gone. It took me some moments to regain control of myself.

  ‘When did you see that woman?’ I asked in a measured, professional tone of voice. ‘I know you have already told Lavedrine. But I want to hear it for myself.’

  She looked away.

  ‘Did you enter the house?’ I insisted.

  ‘No!’ she protested violently. ‘I met her walking in the lane. And she spoke to me. I did not ask her name, but it was her, I know it was! It was in that part of the country, near the Wolffert estate. That’s why I went to Lavedrine. To tell him what I knew.’

  Helena showed no hesitation as she told her tale. She gave no hint that she had understood the real question that taunted me. A question that my lips refused to form.

  Why were you there, Helena? What were you doing in that lonely place?
/>   ‘Was this woman alone when you met her?’ I asked.

  ‘She had two children with her. Another child—a little girl—had stayed at home in bed. A head-cold, I think she said.’

  ‘She told you that she had a daughter. But you did not see the child.’

  Helena stared at me in silence.

  ‘Why would the woman lie?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘That is not the point,’ I replied. ‘I am trying to establish the facts.’ I wondered how Lavedrine had reacted when my wife recounted the tale to him. Was Helena making comparisons between us? Had the Frenchman been a more gentle and persuasive inquisitor?

  ‘How did this meeting come about?’ I asked.

  Helena began to speak in slow bursts, each sentence followed by a pause. She seemed to be searching for each word, each phrase, before she would let it out of her mouth.

  ‘She had been picking raspberries. She had a basket on each arm. One was almost full to the brim.’

  ‘Raspberries, then. Two baskets. One almost full,’ I repeated calmly. But in my mind, I thundered again: In heaven’s name, what were you doing there?

  ‘I asked what she was going to do with them. The fruits, I mean.’

  ‘And what did she reply?’ I prompted.

  ‘She said the children would eat them for dinner. In a bowl. With milk.’

  The table laid for the evening meal in the Gottewald house flashed through my mind. The children had eaten fruit that night. And they had drunk milk. Were such tiny details sufficient to suggest that Helena had really spoken to Sybille Gottewald? The abandoned woods on the Wolffert estate must have been a fine hunting ground for wild fruit. How many women from Lotingen might go there every day with a basket on each arm, hand in hand with their children, intent on picking raspberries? Since the coming of the French, whole families had survived on little else.

  ‘Do you remember when it was? The day, I mean? The hour?’

  She did not answer, looking away from the fire to the darkest corner of the room.

  ‘Come, Helena,’ I encouraged gently, ‘surely, you must be able to tell me that?’

  Her head drooped, and she stared once more at her motionless hands. ‘Early in October, Hanno,’ she replied. ‘One day is much like any other. It was late in the afternoon. There had been rain. A dull, grey dusk with huge, dark clouds presaging night. A night that promised to last for ever . . .’

  I held my breath at this ominous description. Was Helena privately telling me something of her own state of mind that day, something that I, her husband, ought to have realised?

  A cold, detached, cynical voice in my head probed at the wound: she had told all this to Lavedrine, he had made no mention of it to me. The Frenchman had left me to draw my own conclusions about my wife’s emotional state.

  ‘Before or after Dittersdorf’s feast?’ I insisted.

  ‘Does it matter?’ she said angrily.

  ‘I’m afraid it does,’ I replied. ‘The missing woman’s husband died that month.’

  ‘He died?’ she whispered, the colour in her face draining away with her anger.

  ‘That is why I need to know precisely when you met her,’ I clarified.

  ‘It was before the Dittersdorf feast,’ she said. ‘A week, perhaps . . . I remember that it was exceptionally chilly. The first cold day of winter. I recall thinking that the days and nights to follow would be ever colder and more dreary.’

  The note of desolation in her voice was harrowing. Helena had always hated the winter season. After Jena and the occupation, her hatred had become more intense. It was as if the French had condemned us to a life of never-ending cold and privation. And yet, I had to admit, there was a hint of something far more ominous, something menacing and even final, in what she had just said.

  ‘In that case,’ I pressed on, ‘she must have known he was dead, if . . .’

  ‘If she truly were his wife.’ Helena was staring at me, her eyebrows tightly knit, as if she were in pain. ‘They are all dead, then. The husband, wife and children. How did he die, Hanno?’ she implored.

  I told her of my meagre findings in Kamenetz, then turned to her again with questions. ‘Did that woman mention that she had recently lost her husband?’

  Helena frowned, concentrating hard on her memory of that meeting.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I could see that she was upset . . . No, that is not exact. She was in a state of terror, Hanno. I spoke of this to Lavedrine . . .’

  ‘Terror?’ I interposed. ‘What was she afraid of? Did she tell you?’

  Helena slowly shook her head. Then she glanced up. ‘I will never forget that woman’s eyes.’

  Her own were two dark pools which stared blankly into mine.

  I felt as if I were standing on the shore of a fathomless mountain lake—nothing moving on the surface; nothing stirring in the icy depths. All silent, all still. Why was I convinced that she had not told me everything? Or that she had told me less than the unadorned truth would allow?

  ‘Describe her to me, Helena. Those frightened eyes. Her face, her hair . . .’

  She protested with a tired shrug. ‘I told Lavedrine.’

  ‘Repeat it to me,’ I replied with a passion that I was unable to suppress. It was, in any case, the first rule of the Prussian magistrature. The witness should be made to tell the story again and again to search out any contradiction or incongruity.

  ‘Very well.’ She sighed. The woman was small of stature—petite, Helena insisted, employing the French adjective. Her hair was brown, her skin was dark, almost swarthy. Her eyes were sparkling chestnuts—huge, compelling, glistening with fear.

  ‘There,’ she said, fright gleaming in her own eyes, ‘that’s what I told him.’

  I do not know at which point her hand had come to rest gently upon my knee. I felt the impulse to place my hand on hers, to reassure her that all was well, but I did not do so. As she finished speaking, her hand slid away. There was no taking it back, I thought with regret.

  ‘And then she said those puzzling words to me. They will always remain impressed upon my mind,’ she continued. ‘We were talking about the raspberries, and where she’d found them. The baby in her arms had fallen fast asleep. The other little boy was holding onto her skirt. Those children were both dark of skin, and hair, and eye. They seemed to be the image of their mother. Of course, I had never seen their father. I could make no comparison. Two pretty boys in excellent health.’

  This description corresponded with the children I had seen laid out across the bed. Healthy and robust, except for the fact that they were dead, the throat of each one gaping like an edible marrow with a slice taken out.

  ‘What did she say?’

  Helena started in her seat. ‘It was not a question of what she said, but the manner in which she said it.’

  When she spoke again, her voice was hardly her own. It was low, piteous, urgent.

  ‘Go home to your little ones. Go home before the long night falls. Before the reaper comes . . .’

  ‘The reaper? What did she mean by that?’

  Helena shook her head. ‘I cannot say. But she was terrified. I thought for just one moment . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought she might be talking of . . . her husband.’

  Husband?

  I froze. What was passing through her mind?

  ‘Gottewald was dead,’ I stated coldly. ‘Before his children’s throats were slit.’

  She sat in silence staring down at her hands.

  ‘Were you alone?’ I asked.

  I saw her start as the words flew off my tongue. I was not thinking of another man. I was thinking of the children. But those words had been said, there was no recalling them.

  ‘Our little ones,’ I added quickly.

  ‘Safe and well,’ she replied. ‘At home with Lotte.’

  I was silent, considering this extraordinary admission. My wife had been alone. Wandering unprotected in the country outside the perimeter of the tow
n. Why had she never told me of this outing?

  A shiver shook her shoulders beneath her nightgown, despite the flames now roaring in the grate. ‘The sky was dark, rain was threatening. Soon it would be night. Perhaps she intended nothing more than that. No more . . . no less . . .’

  ‘But you think otherwise.’

  ‘She was afraid,’ Helena repeated, her own eyes wide with fright. ‘As a rule, the weather may hamper our plans, but it does not provoke fear.’ She shook out her hair, and stared at me intently. ‘I may be making more of what that woman said than she intended, but . . . I took it as a warning. A warning to me. Am I a witness, Hanno?’

  ‘Is that what Lavedrine said?’

  ‘I want you to tell me,’ she replied.

  ‘Lavedrine says, and I quote, that you are a credible witness.’

  Then, I know not what took possession of me. My words were rough, but I chose them with care. ‘I found him in a bordello this evening,’ I said. ‘A whorehouse. In the company of a creature of the night.’

  She looked at me, her face a mask of troubled incomprehension.

  ‘What were you doing that day?’ I asked. ‘Alone in the countryside.’

  Helena looked down. Her head sank low. I could not see her for the mass of waving dark curls, like seawort in the rolling tide, or the glistening serpents of some mysterious Medusa.

  Her words were sharp and clear, though she choked back tears.

  ‘What were you doing this night, husband? Roaming the town instead of seeing that your babes were safe. Instead of reassuring me that all was well.’

  21

  AS DAWN BROKE, I crept from the house like a thief.

  I had no wish to relive the ugly tension of the night before, no desire to add extra fuel to the fire of the interrogation to which I had subjected my wife. Before I saw her again, I would need time to decide how to put the questions that still rankled in my mind.

  Under cover of a dense white fog, I closed the kitchen door, and set out along the road to town, making myself and my destination known to the all-too-familiar French soldiers guarding the East Gate. Though preparing myself for a busy day, I had no idea how hectic it would turn out to be. I made my way through the empty town and went directly to my office. I was faced with the tiresome necessity of writing two distinct and different accounts of my voyage to Kamenetz. The first was meant for the eyes of Count Dittersdorf. The other would be added to the mounting pile of documentation regarding the massacre, which would be scrutinised, sooner or later, by the French. If I had hoped that the freezing cold, and the fifteen-minute walk which separated my home from the courthouse, would be sufficient to shake the cobwebs from my head, I was wrong.