The French Manuscript
The town’s oldest coachman was pointed out to me in the smoky inn where he was drinking heady, fragrant October beer.
I bought him a drink and gave him some tobacco. He swore I was a prince. I pointed to his droshky outside the inn and said, ‘And now, take me to Saint Beregonne’s Lane.’
He gave me a bewildered look, then laughed.
‘Ah, you’re very clever!’
‘Why?’
‘You’re testing me. I know every street in this town – I can almost say I know every paving-stone! There’s no Saint Bere.…What did you say?’
‘Beregonne. Are you sure? Isn’t it near the Mohlenstrasse?’
‘No,’ he said decisively. ‘There’s no such street here, no more than Mount Vesuvius is in Saint Petersburg.’
No one knew the town, in all its twisting byways, better than that splendid beer-drinker.
A student sitting at a nearby table looked up from the love letter he had been writing and said to me, ‘There’s no saint by that name, either.’
And the innkeeper’s wife added, with a touch of anger, ‘You can’t manufacture saints like sausages!’
I calmed everyone with wine and beer. There was great joy in my heart.
The policeman who paced up and down the Mohlenstrasse from dawn till dark had a face like a bulldog, but he was obviously a man who knew his job.
‘No,’ he said slowly, coming back from a long journey among his thoughts and memories, ‘there’s no such street here or anywhere else in town.’
Over his shoulder I saw the beginning of Saint Beregonne’s Lane, between the Klingbom distillery and the shop of an anonymous seed merchant.
I had to turn away with impolite abruptness in order not to show my elation. Saint Beregonne’s Lane did not exist for the coachman, the student, the policeman, or anyone else: it existed only for me!
How did I make that amazing discovery? By an almost scientific observation, as some of my pompous fellow-teachers would have said. My colleague Seifert, who taught natural science by bursting balloons filled with strange gases in his pupils’ faces, would not have been able to find any fault with my procedure.
When I walked along the Mohlenstrasse, it took me two or three seconds to cover the distance between the distillery and the seed merchant’s shop. I noticed, however, that when other people passed by the same place they went immediately from the distillery to the shop, without visibly crossing the entrance of Saint Beregonne’s Lane.
By adroitly questioning various people, and by consulting the town’s cadastral map, I learned that only a wall separated the distillery from the shop.
I concluded that, for everyone in the world except myself, that street existed outside of time and space.
I knew that mysterious street for several years without ever venturing into it, and I think that even a more courageous man would have hesitated. What laws governed that unknown space? Once it had drawn me into its mystery, would it ever return me to my own world?
I finally invented various reasons to convince myself that that world was inhospitable to human beings, and my curiosity surrendered to my fear. And yet what I could see of that opening into the incomprehensible was so ordinary, so commonplace! I must admit, however, that the view was cut off after ten paces by a sharp bend in the street. All I could see was two high, badly whitewashed walls with the name of the street painted on one of them in black letters, and a stretch of worn, greenish pavement with a gap in which a viburnum bush was growing. That sickly bush seemed to live in accordance with our seasons, for I sometimes saw a little tender green and a few lumps of snow among its twigs.
I might have made some curious observations concerning the insertion of that slice of an alien cosmos into ours, but to do so I would have had to spend a considerable amount of time standing on the Mohlenstrasse; and Klingbom, who often saw me staring at some of his windows, became suspicious of his wife and gave me hostile looks.
I wondered why, of all the people in the world, I was the only one to whom that strange privilege had been given. This led me to think of my maternal grandmother. She was a tall, somber woman, and her big green eyes seemed to be following the happenings of another life on the wall in front of her.
Her background was obscure. My grandfather, a sailor, was supposed to have rescued her from some Algerian pirates. She sometimes stroked my hair with her long, white hands and murmured, ‘Maybe he…Why not? After all…’ She repeated it on the night of her death, and while the pale fire of her gaze wandered among the shadows she added, ‘Maybe he’ll go where I wasn’t able to return.…’
A black storm was blowing that night. Just after my grandmother died, while the candles were being lit, a big stormy petrel shattered the window and lay dying, bloody and threatening, on her bed.
That was the only odd thing I remembered in my life; but did it have any connection with Saint Beregonne’s Lane?
It was a sprig of the viburnum bush that set off the adventure.
But am I sincere in looking there for the initial tap that set events in motion? Perhaps I should speak of Anita.
Several years ago, in the Hanseatic ports one could see the arrival of little lateen-rigged ships creeping out of the mist like crestfallen animals.
Colossal laughter would immediately shake the port, down to the deepest beer cellars.
‘Aha! Here come the dream ships!’
I always felt heartbroken at the sight of those heroic dreams dying in formidable Germanic laughter.
It was said that the sad crews of those ships lived on the golden shores of the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Sea in a mad dream, for they believed in a fantastic land of plenty, related to the Thule of the ancients, lying somewhere in our cruel North. Not having much more knowledge than their forefathers of a thousand years ago, they had carefully nurtured a heritage of legends about islands of diamonds and emeralds, legends that had been born when their forefathers encountered the glittering vanguard of an ice floe.
The compass was one of the few items of progress that their minds had seized upon in the course of the centuries. Its enigmatic needle, always pointing in the same direction, was for them a final proof of the mysteries of the North.
One day when a dream was walking like a new Messiah on the choppy waters of the Mediterranean, when the nets had brought up only fish poisoned by the coral on the bottom, and when Lombardy had sent neither grain nor flour to the poverty-stricken lands of the South, they had hoisted their sails in the offshore wind.
Their flotilla had dotted the sea with its hard wings; then, one by one, their ships had melted into the storms of the Atlantic. The Bay of Biscay had nibbled the flotilla and passed the remainder on to the granite teeth of Brittany. Some of the hulls were sold to firewood merchants in Germany and Denmark; one of the ships died in its dream, killed by an iceberg blazing in the sun off the Lofoten Islands.
But the North adorned the grave of that flotilla with a sweet name: ‘the dream ships.’ Although it made coarse sailors laugh, I was deeply moved by it, and I might well have been willing to set sail with those dreamers.
Anita was their daughter.
She came from the Mediterranean when she was still a baby in her mother’s arms, aboard a tartan. The ship was sold. Her mother died, and so did her little sisters. Her father set out for America on a sailing ship that never returned. Anita was left all alone, but the dream that had brought the tartan to those moldering wooden docks never left her: she still believed in the fortune of the North, and she wanted it fiercely, almost with hatred.
In Tempelhof, with its clusters of white lights, she sang, danced, and threw red flowers that either fell on her like a rain of blood or were burned in the short flames of the Argand lamps. She would then pass among the crowd, holding out a pink conch shell. Silver was dropped into it, or sometimes gold, and only then did her eyes smile as they rested for a second, like a caress, on the generous man.
I gave gold – I, a
humble teacher of French grammar in the Gymnasium, gave gold for one look from Anita.
Brief notes:
I sold my Voltaire. I had sometimes read my pupils extracts from his correspondence with the King of Prussia; it pleased the principal.
I owed two months’ room and board to Frau Holz, my landlady. She told me she was poor.…
I asked the bursar of the school for another advance on my salary. He told me with embarrassment that it was difficult, that it was against regulations.…I did not listen any longer. My colleague Seifert curtly refused to lend me a few thalers.
I dropped a heavy gold coin into the conch shell. Anita’s eyes burned my soul. Then I heard someone laughing in the laurel thickets of Tempelhof. I recognized two servants of the Gymnasium. They ran away into the darkness.
It was my last gold coin. I had no more money, none at all.…
As I was walking past the distillery on the Mohlenstrasse, I was nearly run over by a carriage. I made a frightened leap into Saint Beregonne’s Lane. My hand clutched the viburnum bush and broke off a sprig of it.
I took the sprig home with me and laid it on my table. It had opened up an immense new world to me, like a magician’s wand.
Let us reason, as my stingy colleague Seifert would say.
First of all, my leap into Saint Beregonne’s Lane and my subsequent return to the Mohlenstrasse had shown that the mysterious street was as easy to enter and leave as any ordinary thoroughfare.
But the viburnum sprig had enormous philosophical significance. It was ‘in excess’ in our world. If I had taken a branch from any forest in America and brought it here, I would not have changed the number of branches on earth. But in bringing that sprig of viburnum from Saint Beregonne’s Lane I had made an intrinsic addition that could not have been made by all the tropical growths in the world, because I had taken it from a plane of existence that was real only for me.
I was therefore able to take an object from that plane and bring it into the world of men, where no one could contest my ownership of it. Ownership could never be more absolute, in fact, because the object would owe nothing to any industry, and it would augment the normally immutable patrimony of the earth.…
My reasoning flowed on, wide as a river, carrying fleets of words, encircling islands of appeals to philosophy; it was swollen by a vast system of logical tributaries until it reached a conclusive demonstration that a theft committed in Saint Beregonne’s Lane was not a theft in the Mohlenstrasse.
Fortified by this nonsense, I judged that the matter was settled. My only concern would be to avoid the reprisals of the mysterious inhabitants of the street, or of the world to which it led.
When the Spanish conquistadores spent the gold they had brought back from the new India, I think they cared very little about the anger of the faraway peoples they had despoiled.
I decided to enter the unknown the following day.
Klingbom made me waste some time. I think he had been waiting for me in the little square vestibule that opened into his shop on one side and his office on the other. As I walked past, clenching my teeth, ready to plunge into my adventure, he grabbed me by my coat.
‘Ah, professor,’ he said, ‘how I misjudged you! It wasn’t you! I must have been blind to suspect you! She’s left me, professor, but not with you. Oh, no, you’re a man of honor! She’s gone off with a postmaster, a man who’s half coachman and half scribe. What a disgrace for the House of Klingbom!’
He had dragged me into the shadowy back room of his shop. He poured me a glass of orange-flavored brandy.
‘And to think that I mistrusted you, professor! I always saw you looking at my wife’s windows, but I know now that it was the seed merchant’s wife you had your eye on.’
I masked my embarrassment by raising my glass.
‘To tell you the truth,’ said Klingbom, pouring me out some more of the reddish liquid, ‘I’d be glad to see you put one over on that malicious seed merchant: he’s delighted by my misfortune.’
He added, with a smile, ‘I’ll do you a favor: the lady of your dreams is in her garden right now. Why don’t you go and see her?’
He led me up a spiral staircase to a window. I saw the poisonous sheds of the Klingbom distillery smoking among a tangled array of little courtyards, miniature gardens, and muddy streams narrow enough to step across. It was through that landscape that the secret street ought to run, but I saw nothing except the smoky activity of the Klingbom buildings and the seed merchant’s nearby garden, where a thin form was leaning over some arid flower beds.
One last swallow of brandy gave me a great deal of courage. After leaving Klingbom, I walked straight into Saint Beregonne’s Lane.
Three little yellow doors in the white wall…
Beyond the bend in the street, the viburnum bushes continued to place spots of green and black among the paving stones; then the three little doors appeared, almost touching each other. They gave the aspect of a Flemish Beguine convent to what should have been singular and terrible.
My footsteps resounded clearly in the silence.
I knocked on the first of the doors. Only the futile life of an echo was stirred behind it.
Fifty paces away, the street made another bend.
I was discovering the unknown parsimoniously. So far I had found only two thinly whitewashed walls and those three doors. But is not any closed door a powerful mystery in itself?
I knocked on all three doors, more violently this time. The echoes departed loudly and shattered the silence lurking in the depths of prodigious corridors. Sometimes their dying murmurs seemed to imitate the sound of light footsteps, but that was the only reply from the enclosed world.
The doors had locks on them, the same as all the other doors I was used to seeing. Two nights before, I had spent an hour picking the lock on my bedroom door with a piece of bent wire, and it had been as easy as a game.
There was a little sweat on my temples, a little shame in my heart. I took the same piece of wire from my pocket and slipped it into the lock of the first little door. And very simply, just like my bedroom door, it opened.
Later, when I was back in my bedroom among my books, in front of the table on which lay a red ribbon that had fallen from Anita’s dress, I sat clutching three silver thalers in my hand.
Three thalers!
I had destroyed my finest destiny with my own hand. That new world had opened for me alone. What had it expected of me, that universe more mysterious than those that gravitate toward the bottom of Infinity? Mystery had made advances to me, had smiled at me like a pretty girl, and I had entered it as a thief. I had been petty, vile, absurd.
Three thalers!
My adventure should have been so prodigious, and it had become so paltry!
Three thalers reluctantly given to me by Gockel, the antique dealer, for that engraved metal dish. Three thalers.…But they would buy one of Anita’s smiles.
I abruptly threw them into a drawer: someone was knocking on my door.
It was Gockel. It was difficult for me to believe that this was the same malevolent man who had contemptuously put down the metal dish on his counter cluttered with barbarous and shabby trinkets. He was smiling now, and he constantly mingled my name – which he mispronounced – with the title of ‘Herr Doktor’ or ‘Herr Lehrer.’
‘I think I did you a great injustice, Herr Doktor,’ he said. ‘That dish is certainly worth more.’
He took out a leather purse and I saw the bright yellow smile of gold.
‘It may be,’ he went on, ‘that you have other objects from the same source…or rather, of the same kind.’
The distinction did not escape me. Beneath the urbanity of the antique dealer was the spirit of a receiver of stolen goods.
‘The fact is,’ I said, ‘that a friend of mine, an erudite collector, is in a difficult situation and needs to pay off certain debts, so he wants to sell part of his collection. He prefers to remain unknown: he’s a shy scholar. He’s already u
nhappy enough over having to part with some of the treasures in his showcases. I want to spare him any further sadness, so I’m helping him to sell them.’
Gockel nodded enthusiastically. He seemed overwhelmed with admiration for me.
‘That’s my idea of true friendship!’ he said. ‘Ach, Herr Doktor, I’ll reread Cicero’s De Amicitia this evening with renewed pleasure. How I wish that I had a friend like your unfortunate scholar has found in you! But I’ll contribute a little to your good deed by buying everything your friend is willing to part with, and by paying very good prices.…’
I had a slight stirring of curiosity:
‘I didn’t look at the dish very closely,’ I said loftily. ‘It didn’t concern me, and besides, I don’t know anything about such things. What kind of work is it? Byzantine?’
Gockel scratched his chin in embarrassment.
‘Uh…I couldn’t say for sure. Byzantine, yes, maybe.…I’ll have to study it more carefully.…But,’ he went on, suddenly recovering his serenity, ‘in any case it’s sure to find a buyer.’ Then, in a tone that cut short all further discussion: ‘That’s the most important thing to us…and to your friend, too, of course.’
Late that night I accompanied Anita in the moonlight to the street where her house stood half-hidden in a clump of tall lilacs.
But I must go back in my story to the tray I sold for thalers and gold, which gave me for one evening the friendship of the most beautiful girl in the world.
The door opened onto a long hall with a blue stone floor. A frosted window pane cast light into it and broke up the shadows. My first impression of being in a Flemish Beguine convent became stronger, especially when an open door at the end of the hall led me into a broad kitchen with a vaulted ceiling and rustic furniture, gleaming with wax and polish.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 48