HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

I was short of breath by the time I reached the burial ground.

  It was bitterly cold in town, but there the temperature seemed to drop another ten degrees. A sensation of leaden desolation took me by the throat every time I was forced to enter the place. This feeling became more intense after the birth of my own children. There is nothing so bleak as a cemetery in winter, except a burial ground for infants. The Church of Christ Arisen had been built in the second half of the seventeenth century, but the cemetery was of a more recent date. The decision to lay out a graveyard for infants in the wooded area behind the church in the summer of 1723 was the brainchild of a pastor by the name of Johannes Huber. An epidemic of choleric fever carried off a quarter of the population of Lotingen that year, and the city fathers had been forced to dig large pits as common graves to accommodate the army of corpses. Shocked by the inhumanity of what he saw, Pastor Huber decided that the children at least should be decently buried, each in an individual grave with a headstone recording the name and age of the victim, together with a brief poetic epigraph. Even now that the epidemic was no more than a memory, the tradition persisted.

  Above the gate through which I had passed was a banner worked in metal, badly rusting now, creaking in the wind, which alluded to the tender sentiments that had inspired the creation of that hallowed ground. It was, the parents said, a place where the souls of the dead children would play together for all Eternity, so they had called it the ‘Kindergarten’. Dead Babes’ Wood was the more sombre name by which the common folk of Lotingen referred to the necropolis where the little ones were laid in fond expectation of their future resurrection.

  I closed the gate and looked around. The only sound was the swishing and thrashing of the wind in the trees. Snow lay in that deserted, sheltered place, though it had melted away in the busier parts of town. A shiver ran coursing down my spine. Of a sudden, I realised my foolishness. What was I doing there, alone and unarmed?

  ‘I must say,’ I heard the voice as a twig cracked behind my back, ‘I do prefer burial in the ground to entombment in a crypt or charnel house beneath the flagstones of a church. Here, you walk among the dead, rather than over them. It is more respectful. Don’t you agree?’

  I spun around to meet that voice. Trees and bushes grew closer in that direction, the shadows more deeply etched. The tiny white headstones stood out starkly, like milk teeth in a baby’s gums. Lavedrine’s pale face seemed to float in the gloom. But as he stepped out of the dark bower, his black cloak flapped and cracked, whipped about by the wind.

  ‘I am growing tired of corpses,’ I said.

  ‘I never tire of them,’ he snapped back. ‘I often find them more stimulating than the living. The dead try to keep their secrets. I try to catch them out. Isn’t it a dialogue of a sort?’

  The dead do speak to us, Hanno.

  The voice of Immanuel Kant rang in my head. He had expressed a similar notion during our investigation in Königsberg. He and Lavedrine would have had a great deal to talk about.

  ‘The way a person dies,’ Lavedrine went on. ‘The way he faces death. The time. The place. His final words. His will and testament. Those he loved, and those he hated. Those who loved and hated him. It all comes out. Where and how he wishes to be buried. The words his relatives write upon his monument. The death of an individual tells us a great deal about his life, as I am sure you are aware.’

  ‘Wouldn’t we be warmer sitting in my office?’

  ‘Certainly,’ he agreed, ‘but this is the best place for our discussion.’

  ‘The Gottewald children? Is that your drift?’

  ‘Are they here, too?’

  ‘Dittersdorf took the task upon himself,’ I said.

  Lavedrine shook his head. ‘They are one reason for coming, then,’ he continued, ‘but not the only one. Many other children are buried here, too. Try to imagine it. As the bereaved parents of Lotingen believe,’ he murmured with a slight, sardonic smile, ‘those children are playing together all around us, Hanno. You and I are surrounded by their ghosts.’

  He leant forward and peered at the nearest funeral slab. He took a few paces, then bent to examine another, as if to get close to the truth that might lie beneath the cold earth. ‘Look at this one,’ he said. ‘The poetry is exquisite. Margaretha von Bisten, born 2nd April, 1800, dead one month later. Here lies the last light of an aged mother’s broken heart. What helpless yearning inspired the expression of such raw sentiment?’

  I felt irritation mounting in my breast. There was something theatrical in his manner, desecrating in his smile. His sounding of the words seemed to me like a heartless profanation.

  ‘What have you discovered from the French?’ I asked.

  ‘All in good time,’ he said, flapping his hand at my impatience. ‘I brought you here to see something, as I said.’

  ‘What is there to see, if not for the Gottewald grave?’

  ‘Have you any idea how many children are buried in this cemetery?’ he asked, without waiting for an answer. ‘Three hundred? Four hundred? And those are just the newer stones. If we were to count them all together, there would be many more. Infant mortality is high in Lotingen, Herr Procurator. Very high. At least as high as in rural France. That is one of the things that I discovered. There are thousands of tiny corpses hidden beneath the ground of this fine cemetery, this Kindergarten.’

  He began to pace up and down between the stones.

  ‘I heard a nursery rhyme in Italy once,’ he went on, stopping close to me. He tapped his forehead, as if to aid his memory. ‘The end-verse goes something like this: Chiccolino, chiccolino, dove sei? Sotto terra, non lo sai? Chicco is the native word for seed. Peasant mothers sing it to their infants as they sow the ground in autumn. It must seem such a waste to children, don’t you agree, throwing the seed onto the soil as the hard winter comes along. The mother tells the children that the seeds will sleep beneath the earth till spring, then they’ll sprout and grow into vegetables and fruits. Chiccolino, dove sei? Where are you, little seed? I always thought the rhyme extremely sinister. Sotto terra, non lo sai? I’m under the ground, the little seed replies.’

  He shook his head, then passed his hand through his rebellious curls.

  ‘The little seeds buried in this cemetery will never see the light of day again.’

  A different memory cast its shadow over my mind. The tale Rochus had told me in Kamenetz. Children hidden in holes beneath the snow by parents who did not want them to be taken off for soldiers. Children who died, while their parents searched frantically, trying to remember where they had hidden them. All those chiccolini buried alive, dead by the time spring came round to yield its bitter harvest of skeletons.

  ‘Why in heaven’s name are we here?’ I repeated stubbornly.

  ‘While I was away,’ he continued, ‘I was reading some of those reports that you Prussians love to compile with matchless precision. Can you guess what I discovered?’

  He did not give me time to protest the uselessness of the question.

  ‘In the statistics regarding infant mortality,’ he raced on, ‘East Prussia has an unusually high incidence of child death, even by your own national standards . . .’

  ‘I know the causes,’ I interrupted angrily. ‘Starvation caused by war. A blighted harvest. Wilful destruction of crops. Heartless French requisitioning of food. Repeated theft and slaughter of precious farm animals. Is that what you’re getting at? Is that why so many of our children die?’

  His eyes fixed on mine. Slowly, he shook his head. The colour seemed to drain from his face. ‘You could not be more wrong,’ he said quietly. ‘I was looking at the figures for the years from 1725 to 1800. Long before the French set foot in Prussia.’

  ‘Very well, tell me. Why do so many of our children die?’

  ‘Look around you, Herr Procurator,’ he replied.

  The white stones and crosses seemed to populate the ground more densely beneath the darkening sky.

  ‘Sixty per cent of the infants in P
russia die before they reach their tenth birthday, Stiffeniis,’ he began. ‘Some are not one day old. A day? An hour! All of those children—ninety-nine per cent, let’s say—die at home. At least seventy per cent of the deaths were not caused by illness, as one might expect. Babies suffocated in their cots, they fell down stairs, they were crushed by a cow, they drowned in a milk pail, swallowed nails, drank poison. The list is endless. Household accidents? The number of toddlers reduced to a heap of bones by a ravenous pig would astound you. Quite apart from an army of tiny corpses found in shallow graves in the woods, names unknown, deaths unregistered with the authorities.’

  His hand fell heavily on my shoulder.

  ‘Take a hard look at this cemetery, Stiffeniis. How many of these children—lights of their mothers’ lives, those pious inscriptions say—were victims of culpable lack of care, or something worse? Forty per cent, more, perhaps, did not die. They were killed, but no Prussian magistrate appears ever to have investigated these deaths. They are statistics. Nothing more. Can you see this place in a darker light, now?’

  His grip relaxed. ‘What point are you trying to make?’ I asked. ‘That note slipped under my door. This lugubrious setting. Tiny seeds sown, but never harvested. Prussian statistics, domestic fatalities. What has any of this to do with the killing of the Gottewald children? Those children’s throats were slashed open, their bodies were mutilated. Their father died far away in the East, and as for the mother, well . . . They do not enter into your statistics.’

  Lavedrine took a step closer. ‘Do you remember our pact, Herr Procurator? You and I, no one else?’

  ‘I do, indeed.’

  ‘Very well, then. I brought you here to tell you what I have discovered, and how these statistics relate to the news.’

  ‘I am pleased to hear it,’ I said.

  In answer, he said not a word. Nothing. His mouth formed that thin ironic smile that was so typical of him, and it persisted for longer than was comfortable.

  ‘I am waiting, Lavedrine,’ I hissed. ‘What did you find?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied at last. ‘There is no trace of Bruno Gottewald in the French archives. Not a single mention of his name. No one has heard of him. He is not listed as a spy. A French spy, at any rate. If Bruno Gottewald and his children were exterminated for that reason, his fellows in Kamenetz made a huge, tragic mistake.’

  As he spoke, an icy coldness closed upon my heart like the clamp of hard frost at the start of the Prussian winter. I might have remained there, stunned and helpless, until the first warm breath of spring, a maelstrom of panic swirling in my mind, sucking my hopes down into black hopelessness.

  ‘Are you certain?’ I asked, throwing my last vain hope into the arena.

  ‘Poor Hanno! Your theory is as dead as these poor chiccolini.’ He chuckled. ‘But don’t be so downhearted! I did find one scrap of information that might be useful. It’s not much, but it is a curious coincidence. You’ll never guess who has been in touch with the French authorities, and on more than one occasion.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked helplessly.

  ‘Our old friend, Leon Biswanger,’ he said, and chuckled again. ‘Do you recall? So frightened of Prussian nationalists that he did not wish to speak to us? Well, it seems that he has been writing letters to the French general quarters in Königsberg.’

  ‘Is that where you’ve been?’

  He nodded.

  ‘What did he write to them about?’

  He began to search about in his pockets. ‘I made a rough copy of one of his missives,’ he said, pulling out a sheet of paper, shaking it open in the wind, which blew more boldly as darkness fell. ‘Here we are. I had to be quick, they would not leave me alone for long, but you’ll get the gist of it.’

  . . . in the light of recent political developments, I read, in particular, the recent ratification of the Treaty of Tilsit, I wonder whether it may be possible, your Excellency, to name a date at which, I am certain, all men in Prussia will rejoice in being free . . .

  I quickly read the rest, then returned the paper to Lavedrine’s waiting hand.

  ‘If you have no more urgent business on your plate,’ he said, ‘we should speak with the man. Biswanger may be afraid of the power that we wield, but he has told us less than the truth.’

  If Lavedrine thought to dazzle me with the light of this discovery, he was mistaken.

  ‘Is there any point?’ I asked. ‘He will plead personal reasons tied to business, no doubt. He might have written on behalf of Aaron Jacob, or some other Jew.’

  ‘A man like Biswanger?’ Lavedrine laughed. ‘Strike dead the goose that lays the golden egg? Aaron Jacob is too valuable an asset.’ He shook his head. ‘I am convinced that this should interest you, Herr Procurator, as much as it puzzles me. Do you have anything better to do in the next half-hour?’

  ‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘One thing, since we are here.’

  The Gottewald children had been buried in the newest part of the cemetery.

  As if to confirm what Lavedrine had said about infant mortality in Prussia, we found two other fresh graves nearby which had been filled in since the massacre, and an open pit with planks around it and a mound of earth, which might have been dug in preparation for a funeral the next day. There was not much to see: three identical white slabs, each one bearing the name of a Gottewald child, the age, and the year, 1807. An identical inscription had been carved on each of the stones, as if the stonemason had been taxed to find sufficient verses for three children, though I suspected that the epitaph had been chosen by Dittersdorf. It had the sort of lofty aristocratic air so typical of him: Hoc est, sic est, aliud fieri non licet.

  ‘It is a fact,’ I translated. ‘It is self-evident. And could not be otherwise.’

  ‘Plain words to cover a mystery,’ Lavedrine muttered. ‘Now, are you ready to visit our industrious undertaker?’

  Outside the cemetery gate, we walked towards the centre of the town. Only then, I forced myself to say, ‘So, Lavedrine, you have been to Königsberg.’

  ‘A city you know well,’ he replied.

  I believed I knew what he was thinking.

  ‘A beautiful town,’ he went on with enthusiasm. ‘The Venice of the Baltic, they call it. An exaggeration, of course, but it is a fine place. An important administrative centre, too. I wondered whether they might have some general information that would be of use to us. By chance, those ugly statistics about infant mortality that I quoted earlier turned up in the town hall. In a sense, Stiffeniis, I have to admit, I did deceive you there.’

  ‘Really? How?’ I asked reluctantly.

  ‘Those figures I cited. The incidence of improbable “accidents” among the infant population in Prussia. They are out of date by now. Indeed, they refer specifically to the years 1760 to 1765.’

  ‘Hardly worth considering,’ I said, as we turned into the square and down into Nogatsstrasse, heading for the bridge and Biswanger’s dwelling.

  ‘Hardly,’ he agreed. ‘Except for the question of who compiled them.’

  ‘Who did?’ I asked, not in the least interested.

  ‘A private citizen sent those figures to a local magistrate all those years ago. Someone who dared to throw back the curtain on a crime which everyone else chose not to see. A man who was convinced that there are many sides to crime. Later on in life, he made a name for himself. A name that you know well. Professor Immanuel Kant. As I thought, he was interested in violent death. Very interested, indeed.’

  31

  THE GHOST HAD returned.

  Would he never leave me alone?

  Immanuel Kant called to me once more from beyond the grave, but I closed my mind to that voice, and talked determinedly of other things. As we crossed the river, I told Lavedrine what I had done in his absence, describing my examination of the human remains in the Old Fish Market the day before, briefly mentioning the help I had received from Aaron Jacob. I was careful to say nothing of the portrait that I had drawn with his assistance. N
or did I tell Lavedrine of the additions I had made at my wife’s prompting. What would he say if he were to recognise Helena in that sketch, as I had done?

  ‘It was not wise to bring that man out of the ghetto,’ he observed.

  ‘Not wise, but necessary,’ I replied. ‘I hoped that he might discern a similarity between the skull of that woman, and the heads of the children.’

  ‘Her skull was smashed to pieces!’ he remarked with evident surprise.

  ‘Indeed, there was too much damage for any meaningful comparison,’ I admitted. ‘Otherwise it might have borne fruit.’

  ‘Aaron Jacob is full of the strangest notions.’ He shrugged with an indulgent smile. ‘What similarity could there possibly be between the skull of a mother and the heads of her children? I have never heard anything so bizarre!’

  We were ten yards short of the house when Lavedrine began to sniff the air.

  ‘Not a whiff of rotting flesh,’ he observed with a grim smile. ‘Has Biswanger no clients today?’

  I rang the bell, but it was not Biswanger who answered the door.

  The matron looking out at us was stout, middle-aged, her face the colour of pounded beef. Dressed in a stiff white apron and linen house-cap, the sleeves of her black gown rolled up above her elbows, we might have interrupted her preparations for the evening meal.

  ‘Yes?’ she said crossly

  ‘Is Herr Biswanger at home?’

  ‘My husband is busy,’ she said, folding heavy arms over heavy breasts. She had the same sharp eyes as the undertaker, but a more forbidding manner. ‘If it’s a burial, I can make the necessary arrangements for you.’

  The blood drained from her face as Lavedrine informed her who we were.

  Without a word, she turned and clattered off on her wooden pattens. Not a minute passed, but she reappeared and asked us to step inside, carefully closing the door to the street. ‘In there, sirs,’ she mumbled, pointing to the room where we had met Biswanger on the previous occasion.

  We entered without knocking.

  Two persons were with Biswanger: a man whose head and shoulders were hidden beneath a large black cloth, and a pale, plump lady of mature years who was sitting very still in a high-backed chair staring straight ahead.