A Lady in Shadows

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  All my muscles froze. My throat constricted. For a few seconds, I stood completely still, paralyzed by shock. And in those seconds, I was seized from behind by someone whose strength made a mockery of my brief attempt at resistance. My head was jerked back, and I recognized the strong smell of ether the instant before the rag was forced against my nose and mouth.

  I was being carried, slung over someone’s shoulder, with my head dangling unsupported at every step. It was very uncomfortable. If I had been properly awake, I would have done something about it. But I could not seem to locate and connect the nerve endings and muscle fibers I normally used to direct my body.

  Two men were arguing.

  “You’re mad,” the one carrying me said, in rather poor French. “Do you really think that it will not be discovered? That you will not be found out? For nine months?”

  “I don’t need nine months,” said the other one. “Just a few weeks until the cell division is well under way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If it can be done with an Angora rabbit, it can no doubt be done with a woman. The differences are not that great.”

  “You’re mad!”

  Then my head knocked against something, and the voices disappeared.

  I was thirsty. My throat was raw and painful. But I could not lift my arms or open my eyes.

  A child was swimming through the darkness. No, it was not a child; it was a fetus. No, it was not a fetus. It was a child so small that it should not yet have been born. It floated in the dark, severed and free, and something in me ached to see it like this.

  “Children that small should not be alone,” I whispered.

  But I could not hear my own words, and no one answered.

  Thirst. Darkness. Cold. A nagging anxiety that would not leave me. Where was the child?

  October 4, 1894

  “Where is the child?”

  This time I could hear myself, but at the same time I wondered at the words coming out of my mouth. What child?

  I opened my eyes. It made no difference. The darkness was absolute and I could see absolutely nothing. I felt so nauseated that it was difficult to breathe. For a while, that was all I could manage—to inhale and exhale, without throwing up. Then I threw up. Then I inhaled and exhaled some more until the nausea receded enough for me to have two coherent thoughts.

  The cold made me uncertain whether I was inside or outside. But outdoors, darkness is rarely so complete. What I was lying on must therefore be not bare earth but some sort of floor, damp and gritty though it was, smelling strongly of dirt, urine, and wet coke.

  It was when this information made its way from my nostrils to my consciousness that I began to understand where I was.

  In a room without windows, a room with walls and doors against which one could shatter one’s hands without being heard, without being released. A room where the floor was dirt and the walls were stone, and both were black from coal, dust, and filth. Fleur’s prison.

  I did not call for help. I knew it would do no good—it had done nothing for Fleur. But I tried to stand up so that I might at least learn the dimensions of the room. I was dizzy and weak at the knees but managed to get to my feet, observing that I could at least stand upright without hitting my head on the ceiling. Carefully, I stretched my arms out in front of me, then to both sides and at last up above my head. I did not meet resistance anywhere.

  I cautiously took a step forward. Then another.

  With the third, I stumbled and fell down on my knees on top of something living. A thick German curse made me scuttle back so that I ended up squatting a few meters away.

  “Herr Falchenberg?” I whispered.

  He did not answer, but I was nevertheless convinced that it was him.

  Abruptly, I recalled the angry discussion I had overheard during one of my brief befuddled moments of semiconsciousness. If it can be done with an Angora rabbit, it can no doubt be done with a woman. The differences are not that great . . .

  “What . . . happened?” I asked, and sincerely hoped that he would answer.

  A not very articulate moan was all the reply I received. I thought I could distinguish the words zum Teufel, but I was not sure.

  If someone . . . no, if Althauser, let us give the devil his proper name, if Adrian Althauser had inserted a glass tube into my vagina, would I be able to feel it now? Probably not. It was not in that sense a violent intrusion. It was only the effects that . . .

  I did not wish to complete the thought.

  Only a few of the unsuspecting women he had experimented with had become pregnant, I tried to assure myself. In the successful cases, he had performed the procedure repeatedly, often for more than a month.

  I did not feel particularly reassured. If that was his intention, what was to prevent him from doing it to me repeatedly? Fleur had not found any way out of this prison. Would I be able to?

  “Herr Falchenberg?” I called once more.

  “What?” he mumbled, still in German. “Go away.”

  “There is nothing I would rather do,” I said. “But unfortunately I don’t think it is possible.”

  I could hear him moving in the darkness—a quiet rustle of clothes against clothes.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “I had hoped you would be able to tell me that.”

  “Damnation. Why is it so dark? And cold.” His voice sounded slurred and uncertain, and I wondered if he was plain drunk. But no—I would have been able to smell it.

  “Are you injured?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I . . . my head. Something has happened to my head.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “Yes, damn it. I just said so.”

  I ought to do something. Examine him. Find out whether there were external injuries, internal damage. If he was bleeding . . . But I was not sure I could bear to touch him. And what good would it do anyway? I did not have a medical bag with me; I could not even see. Beyond placing a compress if he was in danger of bleeding to death, I did not see how I would be able to help him.

  “Are you bleeding?” I asked, just to be certain.

  “I think I was,” he said. “There is something sticky . . .” And then his voice suddenly came clear as day and sharply indignant: “He hit me. He hit me with that damn cane!”

  “Althauser?”

  “Who else?”

  “Why would he do that? I thought you were . . . conspirators.” Because it was Falchenberg who had carried me through the dark while he argued with Althauser, and I was fairly sure he was the one who had grabbed me in the passage behind the laundry shed and held the ether rag over my face.

  He was silent for a while, then he said, “You don’t know what he is like.”

  I felt a strong urge to say that I knew perfectly well, but I controlled myself.

  “What are you referring to?” I asked instead.

  “He has this knack . . . He quietly turns you inside out and studies what he finds. He picks at your intestines. He observes you when you are not looking at him, and when you turn around, he looks away. He notes what works and what doesn’t. And once he knows what the bleeding, pulsating heart of an Erich looks like, and what makes it beat . . . then he rips it out. Once he holds it in his hand, you are at his mercy. You must do what he commands.”

  I could not protest. Althauser had done what he could to dissect the heart of a Madeleine as well. He had quickly discovered what my most precious dreams were, which parts of me reacted if he compressed a nerve ending here or pulled a tendon there. If the clumsy Vice Marshall Delafontaine had not revealed the great plan a little too soon, might my clever tutor ultimately have discovered which part of the living flesh he must probe with his scalpel to make me accede to his will in this too?

  You and Malleau are without a doubt the most promising intellects in the class. I cringed when I thought how eager I had been to lap up his praise, the things I had done to myself and to innocent living creatures to humor him.


  “Surely you are possessed of free will,” I said in spite of my own thoughts. “You could refuse.”

  “Could I? When he possesses my innermost secrets? When he knows my deepest love—and uses it against me?”

  I recalled how he had lurked for hours in that doorway in Carmelite Street, hoping for August to pass by. How wretched he had looked. How guilt ridden he had seemed.

  “Did he get you to testify against August?” I asked.

  Again he was silent for a while.

  “Yes,” he finally said.

  “But . . . did that not make your innermost secrets public?” I asked. “What could he do to you after that?”

  He snorted. “You think I mean August. That he is the one I love.”

  Now I became confused. “And isn’t he?”

  “No. I am fond of him, and we . . . we enjoyed each other’s company. He helped me to recover after . . . after the terrible thing that happened. He showed me that I could still find joy in life. I was grateful for that, and that is why it was such a . . . a devilish thing to have to do to him.”

  I did not at all care to hear him describe how he and August had enjoyed each other’s company. But I could not help being curious.

  “Why did you do it, then?”

  “You know why. Because Althauser told me to.”

  “Yes, but . . . why did you think you had to obey him?”

  “Why should I tell you that, Fräulein?” A bit of the old arrogance crept back into his voice.

  “That is up to you, of course,” I said. “But I may perhaps be allowed to point out that the chances of us getting out of here are quite slim.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  I told him about Fleur. About how I had found the saddlery shop and its bricked-over windows and doors.

  “And you think this is it?” he asked.

  “I am convinced of it. And he has not put us here for the sake of our health.”

  “Oh, you have nothing to fear,” he said. “At least not for the first few weeks.”

  “Nothing to fear?” My voice had grown shrill. “Beyond being . . . being opened up like an Angora rabbit?”

  “Oh,” he said. “You know.”

  “I heard. And unfortunately I know precisely what Walter Heape did to his rabbits.”

  “In a way, it is a compliment,” said Falchenberg. “He would not go to such lengths to secure your hereditary traits if he did not consider your intelligence unique.”

  “Thank you, but I would prefer to do without such compliments. No doubt I am merely the first woman he has met who did not faint when she was asked to cut into a living squid. I am not at all sure that this is an admirable trait.”

  More silence. I could hear his breathing and the slight sounds he made when he changed his position. But when I listened for other signs of life—footsteps, voices, hoofbeats, anything at all that suggested that we were not alone in the world but were in the middle of a crowded, living city—I heard nothing.

  I had the feeling Falchenberg was falling asleep. His breathing changed, became slower but also a bit uneven. I hoped it was not because he was dying. Damage from a blow to the head could come like a thief in the night, I knew. A seeping of blood beneath the skull, gradually pressing harder and harder on the brain’s soft tissue. Body functions that quietly shut down, one by one . . .

  “Are you awake?”

  He did not answer. I crept across the floor until my fumbling hand met a sleeve.

  “Falchenberg!”

  “Leavemealone,” he slurred.

  “Wake up,” I said “Talk to me.” Why did we have no light? It was impossible for me to check the state of his pupils.

  “Go’way.”

  “I mean it! Sit up! If you fall asleep, you might die without me noticing.”

  He finally moved.

  “Well, that would be unfortunate,” he said dryly. “Far better to die while you can enjoy every single cramp.”

  “That is not what I meant.”

  “I know. I apologize.”

  “Then say something. Keep talking, so I know that you are not losing consciousness.”

  “What should I say?”

  “Whatever you want. Or if you can’t think of anything, then . . . sing. Whistle. Anything at all.”

  He snorted. After a pause, his voice came out of the darkness, not without a certain irony: “O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, wie treu sind deine Blätter . . .”

  I could not help smiling. And at the same time the old melody loosened something in me so that the tears also began to flow, quietly and warmly, unaccompanied by sobs. I began to sing along: “Du grünst nicht nur zur Sommerzeit, nein, auch im Winter wenn es schneit . . .”

  After the first verse, he stopped.

  “Fräulein,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “I am sorry, but . . . you are no Jenny Lind.”

  “Are you implying that I am off-key?”

  “Only on every other note,” he said. “But do continue. You sing off-key in a most . . . charming manner!”

  One loses all sense of time in a darkness as complete as the one in which we found ourselves. Especially if one dozes off. And we did doze, in spite of all our good intentions. The body has its own laws. That is why I discovered at some point that I was lying snuggled up against him because my sleeping self had sought out the only source of warmth that existed in this damp, cold room. Had anyone told me a month ago that I would be sleeping arm in arm with Erich Falchenberg, I would have considered their sanity and intelligence considerably at risk. But other rules were in effect here.

  We spoke. We sang. We argued. And we told stories. We explored our prison as well as was possible—about two meters in one direction and three meters in the other, cold stone walls, earthen floor. We experimented to see if one could dig under a wall. One couldn’t, not without tools. A shoe, bare hands, Falchenberg’s belt buckle—none of these made any significant impression on the compacted dirt.

  “It’s no use,” said Falchenberg. “We’ll die of hunger long before we get under the foundation.”

  “Or of thirst,” I said dejectedly, thinking of Fleur’s dehydrated organs.

  “Perhaps I can at least make a hole that can be used as a form of latrine,” he said. “I’m sorry, Fräulein, but . . . it will come to that as well.”

  After what seemed an endless time, a few narrow slivers of pale gray light appeared somewhere above us. It was morning.

  I got up and stared upward. The ceiling was much farther up than I had expected—between three and three and a half meters, I estimated. The faint glow of light I could see was daylight penetrating the cracks in the floor of the room upstairs. This probably was a coal cellar—or at least, the surface beneath us was the floor of such a cellar. Someone had removed the partition between the cellar and the saddler’s shop above it, so that it all became one high-ceilinged room. One could still make out the remains of the decaying beams that had supported the floorboards.

  To call it daylight would be an exaggeration, but after the total darkness it was still an encouraging transformation. I examined Falchenberg’s head and found a total of six bumps and cuts left by Althauser’s cane—one on his forehead and one at his temple, and four scattered across the back of his head.

  “You must have an unusually thick skull,” I said. “In my opinion, it is a miracle that you are still alive.”

  “I don’t think he is used to hitting people,” said Falchenberg. “His customary methods are less direct.”

  The light was wonderful, but after a while I must have fallen asleep again. I was woken by creaks and rustling from above. Then there was a scraping noise, as if a piece of furniture was being pushed across the floorboards.

  “Lie down,” I whispered to Falchenberg. “If he comes, it’s best that he think that he actually did kill you.”

  He did as I said.

  But when a square of blinding daylight appeared above us, it was not Althauser’s voi
ce we heard.

  “Mademoiselle?” It was Madame Arnaud, the saddler’s wife and Althauser’s anxious housekeeper. “Mademoiselle? Are you awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the young man?”

  I looked at Falchenberg. He was giving an excellent imitation of a corpse.

  “He’s dead,” I said in a hard voice. “Madame, you are working for a murderer. Go to the police. It is your one chance to avoid punishment.”

  “He said that I was not allowed to listen to you,” she said. “He said I should not let you speak. If you say anything more, you will not get any water.”

  Water. At that moment I think I was prepared to do much more humiliating things than just keep my mouth shut, if it meant that I would be allowed to slake my thirst.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I promise to remain silent.”

  “I will lower the bottle down to you,” she said. “Drink from it and then let it go so I can pull it up again.”

  She sounded as if she was reciting her catechism. I had no doubt she was repeating Althauser’s instructions word-for-word.

  The bottle came down at the end of a long piece of string, swaying and jiggling. I grabbed it and drank. I drank until it was almost empty, and then I filled my mouth as much as I could.

  “Let it go,” said Madame Arnaud.

  I did as I was told and the blessed bottle disappeared up through the hatch. Then the hatch was slammed shut again, and we could hear the furniture—whatever it might be—being pushed into place again on top of it.

  Falchenberg cursed very quietly and whispered, “The next time I don’t want to be dead. The next time I want something to drink too.”

  I placed a hand on either side of his face. His stubble scratched my palms, and I saw his eyes expand in shock. He must have thought I was going to kiss him. Instead, I slowly delivered the water I had not swallowed into his open mouth, and when he realized what I had in mind, he received it as only a thirsting man could.

  “Thank you,” he mumbled afterward.

  “I know it was not much,” I said. “But at least it may relieve the dryness of the mucous membranes.”