HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

  He was a strange surly creature. Not stupid certainly, but his humour was fired by alcohol. If he had hoped to make some progress in the academic world by accepting the bursary left by Immanuel Kant, evidently he had made none, for he was, somehow, marked by failure and an air of dissolution.

  ‘And you, sir?’ he enquired, rocking slowly in my direction. ‘Are you a Prussian thinker, then? The last of a short line . . .’

  ‘I am a magistrate,’ I replied sharply. ‘I could lock you up for the night for indecorous speech and conduct, if it pleased me. Just answer as you are requested.’

  ‘I cannot . . . recall the question,’ he murmured, burping in the middle of his response.

  ‘The archive,’ Lavedrine reminded him. ‘Kant’s papers. This Kantstudiensaal. Where is it?’

  ‘At the university,’ the man slurred.

  ‘But you have the key in your pocket?’

  He nodded as Lavedrine grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him to his feet, upsetting the little that remained of Ludvigssen’s ale.

  ‘Take us there. Now.’

  Five or ten minutes later, having pushed and prodded the drink-sodden archivist across the cobbled cathedral square, where snow was gusting in again from the Baltic Sea on the wings of a furious wind, and through the narrow cobbled streets, where the snow fell in gentler flurries, we stood once more outside the doors of the university library.

  Ludvigssen fumbled in his pockets, and eventually produced a keyring. The largest key of all turned noisily in the lock. The lychgate door fell back with a resounding creak, and we stepped inside, relieved to be out of the wind.

  ‘Who goes there?’ cried an anxious voice.

  Footsteps sounded, a hollow echoing in the dark, then a stocky nightwatchman appeared in the hallway a moment later, a lantern in his hand, a nightcap on his head. This was the man who had greeted us so curtly from the upstairs window half an hour before.

  ‘Herr Ludvigssen! What are you doing here, sir? Two gentlemen . . .’

  ‘We are scholars,’ Lavedrine replied swiftly, stepping forward. ‘Come to examine the archive of Professor Kant.’

  ‘Professor who?’ the man replied, turning away, probably going back to some warm corner where he had made his nest. There was nothing remotely aggressive, or even challenging in his manner. The fact that we were with Ludvigssen was enough to reassure him, though I had my suspicions that Ludvigssen’s presence would tranquillise any man alive. Indeed, I wondered how he had managed to stay sober for long enough to impress the University authorities of his competence as a scholar.

  ‘We’ll be in my room,’ Ludvigssen added, but the nightwatchman and his lantern were already receding into the distant gloom. The archivist turned to us. ‘Follow me, sirs.’

  Nightlights had been placed along the staircase that spiralled down to the basement. It was not well lit, but bright enough to avoid a tumble. At the bottom of the stairs, we turned to the left and followed a corridor that became darker and murkier the further we progressed along it. At the very last door at the end of a corridor which seemed to run the length of the library above our heads, Ludvigssen stopped, and began to feel about on his keyring again. The wrong key went into the lock, then the right one, and the door swung open. A smell of mildew and mice wafted out into the passage.

  ‘One moment, sirs, I have a lamp in the corner here.’

  He went into the room ahead of us, while Lavedrine and I stood waiting in the darkness. The sound of a flint being struck was rewarded a moment later by the glint of a flame, and a lantern swinging, as the archivist held it up.

  ‘Come in, sirs,’ he invited. ‘I can light another, if you wish.’

  As he bent over a table, lighting a larger lamp from the one that he held in his hand, he turned to us, the left side of his face glowing like a peach in the candlelight. ‘What do you want to see?’ he asked.

  Before he spoke, I thought I felt the delight of Lavedrine vibrating in the cold air.

  ‘Everything,’ the Frenchman said. ‘Every single scrap of paper that Professor Kant conserved.’

  As we were entering, I had looked around curiously, realising for the first time what a daunting task we had set for ourselves.

  Ludvigssen did not speak, he merely gestured with his hand. That room was as large as my own dining room; that is, it was very large by Prussian domestic standards. With the exception of a desk piled with papers in the centre of the room, and a single chair, the rest of the space was taken up with towering piles of manuscripts, folder upon folder of them, each one filled with sheaves of paper, propped up and tottering against the walls to shoulder height. Books and pamphlets filled a cabinet at the far end of the room. That bookshelf was six feet high, and three times as wide. I caught a glimpse of fading gold-tooled letters stamped on vellum spines in many languages: German, of course, but also English, French, Italian, Spanish, some more of Russian, Estonian, and Lithuanian origin, the titles in Cyrillic lettering, and even a group of books that bore what looked to me like curlicues from the Greek and the Arabian alphabets.

  ‘The lot, sir?’ Ludvigssen sounded amused. ‘You’ll be here a good while, then.’

  Lavedrine moved quickly around the room, trying to take it all in—attempting, I imagined, to make some sense of what seemed like a disorganised panoply, a huge and disorienting collection of books and random papers.

  ‘How long have you been working here?’ he asked.

  Ludvigssen sat himself down in his chair. ‘Going on two years now, sir.’

  ‘And what have you done in all that time?’

  The archivist pointed to the shelves. ‘I started with the published works,’ he said dispiritedly. ‘They are catalogued from A to Z, together with a brief abstract relating to the contents of each book, or publication. I took particular interest in those that were sent to the printer by Kant himself, and those foreign translations that were sent on to him by respectful publishers. Thank God, most of them didn’t bother! If I’d had to trace all the robberies as well, I wouldn’t have finished in my own lifetime. Can a man write so much, and be so soon unread and out of fashion?’

  I walked across and scanned the spines of the books. The three Critiques alone took up three shelves, including unrevised loose-leaf proofs cut roughly into book form and held in shape with metal clips, first and subsequent editions, then all the foreign editions as well. One Critique—the fourth and final volume, the Critique of Criminal Reason—was missing, and the greedy brown waters of the River Pregel would never yield that up again. I would never forget the sight of page after page disappearing beneath the waves. I tore them up and threw them into the river the night of Kant’s funeral. That book would certainly not have been forgotten. Ever . . .

  ‘What about these papers, Ludvigssen?’ Lavedrine asked, with a wave of his hand. ‘How far have you got in the sorting?’

  Again, the archivist sighed, and seemed amused in the lonely, self-interested way that only a scholar working in his ivory tower can know. ‘I have managed to build them into piles,’ he said. ‘A more Herculean task than you might think, sir. Filthier than the Augean stables. At the time when Professor Kant’s house was sold, I had still not been employed to organise his material. Everything went willy-nilly into a hundred boxes, none of which was marked. There was no order in it.’

  I remembered the painstaking precision that Kant had brought to his assembly of evidence in the Königsberg case on which we had worked together. Despite his age and frailty, the methodical approach he employed gave sense to material that would have had no apparent meaning whatsoever, thrown haphazardly into a box.

  ‘As each sheet of paper was taken out, I attempted to put it where it belonged.’

  ‘Each sheet?’ I queried.

  Ludvigssen ran his thin hand through his lank hair. ‘It sounds like hyperbole, I know, but I am not exaggerating. Of course, many of his manuscripts came to me more or less intact, a sheaf of pages tied up with a ribbon, or held in a folder, or a cov
er, identifying the nature of the work, but many thousands of pages—letters from his publisher, his copies of his letters to them, correspondence with readers and critics, notes and footnotes, addenda, and so on—had just been tipped straight into the boxes. Whoever bought Kant’s house was in a hurry to make space, and I’ve been trying to make sense of the chaos ever since.’

  ‘But you have made a start?’

  This was Lavedrine, whose impatience knew no bounds. Ludvigssen realised, for he turned to the Frenchman with a mincing smile, and asked: ‘Have you ever tried to shift a mountain with a teaspoon, sir? I have grouped everything roughly into related blocks, but that’s about it. If you tell me where your interest lies, I may be able to point you in the right direction. Mind, I promise nothing.’

  ‘We are searching for notes or documents written in the 1760s,’ Lavedrine replied, giving nothing away. ‘Now where would those be?’

  Ludvigssen turned and nodded in the direction of the farthest corner. ‘Juvenilia and ephemera,’ he said dismissively.

  I looked where he had indicated, and my heart sank. Imagine a library after it had taken a full hit from a twelve-pounder cannon! Papers lay in a crushed, crowded, knee-deep, yellow pile. It would take a week just to rifle through it, a year or two to read every word.

  If I was daunted, Lavedrine was not.

  ‘Let’s get started, Stiffeniis,’ he said.

  ‘If you don’t need me,’ Ludvigssen remarked, ‘I’ll rest my head on the table and sleep until you’ve had enough.’

  Without waiting for a word of encouragement, he did just that.

  Lavedrine pulled a loose sheet from the top of the heap. ‘A letter dated 1746,’ he read. ‘From his father’s family in Tilsit, expressing regret for the father’s death. That’s no use to us. We are digging through the dunghill of a great man’s life, Stiffeniis. God knows what we shall find!’

  I knelt down and began to imitate the Frenchman, picking up a paper, glancing at the contents, setting it aside. One unpublished essay dated 1756 referred to the earthquake that had destroyed the city of Lisbon the year before. Kant noted that an acquaintance of his had felt the seismic shock, though escaping with his life and a few minor scratches. I felt a shudder of relief as I read it. The name of the friend was indicated only by the man’s initials, P.D. If Professor Kant had ever mentioned me in his writings, I prayed that he had employed a cipher known only to himself.

  As we moved the mound inch by inch and foot by foot from one spot to another, the night wore on. Lavedrine remained fortified by boundless enthusiasm. He did not seem to doubt for a moment that somewhere in that mound of papers he would find some clue to throw a shining light on the case of the Gottewald children. My hands grew cold as I sifted through the life and thoughts of Professor Kant, but a colder sweat drenched my body, and my terror increased as the work continued without result. Somewhere, I was certain, there would be a reference to me. I quaked at the prospect of finding it. Let it fall to me, or not be found at all, I prayed. My only hope was that my name, or my initials, were buried as deeply in that sea of documents as one of those rare monsters that marine biologists tell us never leaves the dark ocean bed in search of light.

  ‘How I envy you, Stiffeniis, working so closely with this remarkable man,’ Lavedrine said at one point. ‘No expert’s knowledge or opinion was equal to his own. Just think of it, a fledgling scholar, a promising student of philosophy, still unknown and unrecognised at home, who dared to question Isaac Newton. There’s a letter here from a Swedish astronomer. Kant had written to him, wondering whether the Englishman had got his mathematics right!’

  I smiled, as I must, then continued burrowing into the pile, casting aside whatever was irrelevant as soon as I had caught the gist of it. That phrase of Ludvigssen’s had me in a state of nervous alarm: ephemera, he had called it. Was my own collision with the meteor Kant nothing more than an ephemeral incident, at least in the eyes of an archivist? Each time I picked up and read another sheet of paper written out in Kant’s neat, small handwriting, I half expected to find myself the subject of the thesis. His mind had ranged over almost every subject in the academic universe, from German poetry to Lithuanian folklore, from European politics to the most elegant form of wig that might be worn by a gentleman in the aftermath of the Russian occupation of Königsberg in January 1758. My nervous anxiety never ceased. One page seemed to have been written in the early 1740s, the next in the late 1750s, then I jumped ahead to a letter explaining how he had come to publish ‘Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space’ two decades later. Anything might emerge from that mound of forgotten controversies.

  As it soon did.

  ‘Unbelievable!’ Lavedrine announced, holding up a letter dated 1750. ‘Just look at this. Voltaire thanking Kant for praise of his Treatise Concerning the Metaphysics. It makes you wonder whether the young Immanuel had already worked out the whole thing!’

  By midnight, Ludvigssen was snoring loudly. I had dusty grit in my mouth and would have given the world for a glass of fresh water. I was on the point of suggesting that we call a halt, when Lavedrine said suddenly, echoing my thoughts, ‘Let’s stop for the night. These papers will still be here tomorrow.’ He glanced in the direction of the sleeping librarian. ‘And for many years to come, I believe.’

  I stood up, brushing dirt from my hands and cobwebs from my clothes, looking around for my hat which I had laid aside hours before. But there is something obsessive and bewitching about the hunt. La chasse, as the French call it with that lilting-nostalgic urge to find and catch and keep at any price. The fisherman’s heart is always in his mouth for one last pike to grace his table, the hunter’s for one last shot at a rabbit for his cooking-pot. Policemen and magistrates are not so different. If there is one last chance to find a thing, to settle a question, they will take it, in the hope that this may be the key to what they seek. Had I not done just that with Aaron Jacob and the dead woman’s bones? With Helena’s sketch of Sybille Gottewald?

  Standing up, Lavedrine brushed off his hands and shook the dust from his hair.

  ‘I’m ready to leave when you are,’ he said, then dropped immediately to his knees again, sweeping up one last bundle of paper, and glancing at the swathe of rag-cloth with which it had been bound.

  ‘Quelle chancel’ he said quietly, walking across to me, thrusting the manuscript into my hands with the grin of a schoolboy stamped on his face.

  The label was peeling from the cover, the ancient glue having lost much of its efficacy:

  Concerning the Death of an Infant, 1765

  35

  THE MANUSCRIPT BUNDLE was made up of a number of sections.

  To Lavedrine and myself, as we examined the document that night, it revealed the young Immanuel Kant to be an acute observer of social minutiae. Those papers were a vivid testimony to the passion with which he embraced the question of one life cut short by murder, and another cut short by the offices of the public executioner.

  Like two climbers who have reached the summit of a high peak, we sank to the floor exhausted. Lavedrine was exhilarated, having found what he was looking for. I felt relief. He had not found what I most feared.

  He read the first page, then passed it to me. And so we continued to the end.

  PAGE 1: TITLE

  Concerning the Death of an Infant in the Year of the Lord, 1765 by

  ImmanuelKant of Königsberg

  All across this title page, from the bottom left-hand corner to the top right corner, the following declaration had been written out in massive capital copperplate letters: PLEA REJECTED. It bore the blue seal of the Central Police Bureau in Berlin, and the scrawled signature of the Magistrate General.

  PAGE 2: PREMISE

  To His Excellency, the Magistrate General,

  Baron Erlich von Bülow, Berlin.

  Mostnoble sir,

  I, Immanuel Kant, a private gentleman and loyal citizen of His Royal Majesty, King Frederick II of t
he house of Hohenzollern, do hereby solemnly swear that every statement and description which follows in these pages is, to the very best of my knowledge, and in the soundness of my judgement, true and indisputable.

  It is my intention to examine the following questions:

  a. the death of Georg-Albert von Mandel, son and heir to Humbert-Arthur von Mandel, 6th Duke of Albemarle and Svetloye, in the canton of Königsberg;

  b. the accusation of murder brought against Karlus Wettig, footman to the house of Albemarle, and serf to the 6th Duke;

  c. my relations with the Albemarle household in Svetloye and in Königsberg, and my observations of what I know of both those houses;

  d. my conclusions relating to the sentence which is due to be pronounced by Procurator Helmut-Philip Reimarus, magistrate, in the city of Königsberg on 24th October next, in the year of God, 1766.

  In faith and loyalty,

  Immanuel Kant, philosopher, this day, 1st October, 1766

  PAGE 3 FF.: THE EVENT

  Death of Georg-Albert von Mandel, heir to Duke Albemarle of Svetloye.

  At half past six on the morning of 2nd December, 1765, a nursemaid, Edith Peckenthaal, was present in the bedroom where the eight-month-old son, and only heir, to the Duke of Albemarle was found dead. The infant had been put to bed by his mother, Dorothea-Ann Lundstadt, Duchess of Albemarle, and the nurse, at the usual hour of seven o’clock the previous evening. Nurse Edith sat with Georg-Albert, knitting a shawl for him until 10:30 p.m., when she extinguished the candles in the room, leaving only one nightlight burning next to the child’s cot. By her own account, Fraulein Peckenthaal sat by Georg-Albert for another half-hour, or more—the boy’s sleep had been disturbed for a week by teething pains. Certain that her charge was comfortably settled for the night, Edith removed herself from the room for fifteen minutes, as she was permitted to do, going down to the kitchen, where she drank a glass of milk and ate several biscuits in the company of the cook, Frau Angela Schmidt.