Phantoms of Breslau (2 page)

The boy ran out, happy to relieve his nostrils of the unpleasant smell. Mock rested his elbows on the table, slipped on his world-brightening pince-nez, and turned his face towards the sunlight pouring through the lace curtains on the front window. He rubbed his eyes, hissed in pain and then slapped them with open palms. Fireworks exploded beneath his eyelids. The corners of his eyes stung. His cigarette burned down in the ashtray.

“I’m fine now,” Mock said, taking a few breaths. “I won’t fall asleep.
I can tell you now. As you might have gathered, it’s all to do with that investigation of ours, the Four Sailors case …”

BRESLAU, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1919
HALF PAST SEVEN IN THE MORNING

Mock opened the heavy two-winged door and found himself in a flagstoned hallway in near darkness. He made his way forward slowly, without bothering to muffle the ringing of his spurs. Suddenly he came across a velvet curtain, and drawing it aside he entered another hallway, a waiting room with doors leading to several rooms. One of them was open but another curtain hung from its lintel, which made Mock hesitate for a moment. In one of the waiting-room walls, instead of a door, there was a window that gave, so Mock assumed, on to the ventilation pit. On its outside sill stood a paraffin lamp whose feeble glow barely penetrated the dusty windowpane. In this meagre twilight, Mock could make out several figures sitting in the waiting room. He did not, however, manage to get a closer look at them since his attention was drawn to the curtain hanging at the door of the room. It moved abruptly, and from behind it came a sigh. Mock made towards it but a tall man in a top hat barred his way. When Mock tried to move him aside, the man took off his headwear. In the pale semi-darkness, knots of scar tissue were clearly visible as they refracted the light. Instead of eyes, the man had a tangle of criss-crossing and interweaving scars.

Mock looked at their thick lines, at the dark patches that stood out on the wall next to his bed. He rubbed his eyes and turned away from the wall. The curtain isolating his bed alcove was bathed in sunlight.

From beyond the curtain came the sound of his father’s bustling. Mugs clattered, stove lids rattled, fire crackled and bread crunched beneath the weight of a knife. Mock reached for the metal jug beside his
bed and sat up so as not to spill the water as he drank. He tilted the jug and liquid poured into his dried-up orifice of a mouth and over his rough, swollen tongue. It flowed in a broad stream and soaked his nightshirt, which was tied at the neck with stiffly starched straps. Rusty rings squeaked along the metal rail, the curtain parted and let a bright band of light into the stuffy alcove.

“You look like the seven plagues of Egypt,” said a short, stocky man holding a chipped mug in his gnarled fingers.

His facial features, which had absorbed the fumes of boiling shoe-glue, his brown liver spots and stern, grey eyes had combined to make Willibald Mock the bogeyman of local children. Eberhard Mock was not afraid of his father, as he had long since ceased to be a child. He was thirty-six years old and had a piece of metal in his thigh, as well as rheumatism, bad memories, and a weakness for alcohol and red-headed women. Now, above all else, he had a hangover. He stowed the jug under his bed, sidestepped his father and entered the sun-drenched room which served as both kitchen and his father’s bedroom. Uncle Eduard, who had died several months earlier, had once jointed beef carcasses here, flattened tender pieces of pork and pounded sticky chunks of liver. It was here that he had stuffed intestines smelling of Riesengebirge bonfires, and then hung rings of sausages above the stove where Willibald Mock had set milk to warm for his hungover son.

“Don’t drink so much,” his father said as he left the alcove. Grey whiskers bristled above his thin lips. “I never neglected my work. I always sat down to my shoes at the same time each day. My hammering in the workshop was like the cuckoo of a clock.”

“I’ll never match up to you, Father,” said Mock a touch too loudly as he went over to the basin by the window and splashed his face with water. He opened the window and hung a razor-sharpening strap onto a nail. “Besides, I’m on duty a little later today.”

“What kind of duty is that?” Willibald Mock struggled with small bottles of medicine. “Booking whores and pimps. You should be out on the beat helping people.”

“Let it be, old man,” Mock said as he sharpened his razor and rubbed soap onto the thick bristles of a shaving brush. “You, on the other hand, spent your life breathing in the odour of other people’s smelly feet.”

“What did you say?” His father cracked eggs into a cast-iron frying pan. “What did you say? You’re talking quietly on purpose because I’m deaf.”

“Nothing. I’m talking to myself.” Mock scraped the foam off his cheeks with the razor.

His father sat down at the table, breathing heavily. He stood the frying pan with its yellowy mush on the bread board from which he had first carefully removed all crumbs. Then he spread slices of bread with dripping and arranged them one on top of the other to form a rectangular stack, evening out the edges so that none protruded at the sides. Eberhard Mock wiped the foam from his face, rubbed his cheeks and chin with a shaving stick, pulled on his vest and sat down at the table.

“How can you knock back so much?” With a pair of scissors, his father snipped the stalks of an onion growing in a flower pot and sprinkled them over the scrambled eggs. He separated the slices of bread he had already stuck together and scattered a tiny amount of chives between each one, and then stuck them back together and wrapped them in greased parchment. “I never got so drunk. But you do almost every day. Remember to bring the paper home – I’ll use it again tomorrow.”

Mock ate the semi-liquid egg garnished with its thatch of chives with relish, then got to his feet, slid the frying pan into a tub of water by the washbasin, put on his shirt, fastened a square collar to it and knotted his tie. On his head he placed a bowler hat, then he walked to the corner of the room and opened a hatch in the floor. He descended the steps to the
former butcher’s shop and stopped to glance at the row of hooks from which pigs’ carcasses had once hung, at the polished counter, at the gleaming shop window and stone slabs that slanted slightly towards a drain covered with an iron grille. Uncle Eduard had once poured warm animal blood into this grille.

Mock heard the wheeze of his father’s breathing and violent coughing coming from overhead. He smelled coffee being poured into a thermos. The coffee’s steam had momentarily taken his father’s breath away, he thought, or rather whatever had not already been taken away by the bone-glue fumes. Mock stepped outside, tinkling the brass bell on the doorframe.

From the window Willibald Mock watched his son as he walked through the back door and into the yard. Bowing to the caretaker, Mrs Bauert, Eberhard Mock glimpsed the friendly smile bestowed on him by the maid of Pastor Gerds – the tenant of a four-roomed apartment at the front of the house – who was standing by the pump. Snorting at a stray cat, he accelerated his step, jumped over a puddle and, unfastening his trousers and swearing at the excessive number of buttons, forced the rusty padlock and entered the privy in the corner of the yard.

His father closed the window and returned to his chores. He washed the frying pan, plate and milk pan, and wiped the oilcloth that was fastened to the table with drawing pins. He took his medicines and sat in the old rocking chair for a moment in silence. He stepped into his son’s alcove and stared at the tangled sheets on the bed. As he leaned over to fold them, his foot kicked the jug containing what remained of the water. It overturned and water ran into one of his leather slippers.

“Damn it!” he yelled, shaking his leg; the slipper flew straight into Mock’s face as he closed the hatch in the floor. His father sank onto his son’s bed and quickly unfastened the straps holding up his sock, which he removed and smelled.

“Don’t get worked up,” smiled Mock. “I don’t use a chamber pot any more, and even if I did I wouldn’t hide it under my bed. It’s only water.”

“Alright, alright …” muttered his father, pulling his sock back on with difficulty. He was still on his son’s bed. “Why do you need water under your bed? Oh, I know. It’s there ready for your hangover. You’re always knocking it back, knocking it back … If you got married, you’d stop drinking …”

“Did you know, Father” – Mock handed his father the slipper, sat down at the table and sprinkled a few pinches of blond tobacco onto the oilcloth – “that schnapps actually helps me?”

“Do what?” his father asked, taken aback by the friendly tone. His reproaches about alcohol and bachelorhood usually incensed his son.

“Sleep through the night.” Eberhard lit a cigarette and arranged on the table the objects which would soon find themselves in his briefcase: the packet with bread and dripping, a tobacco pouch and an oilcloth file containing reports. “I’ve told you a hundred times – if I go to bed sober, I get terrible nightmares; I wake up and can’t get back to sleep! I prefer hangovers to nightmares.”

“You know what’s better for helping you sleep?” The father began to make his son’s bed. “Chamomile and hot milk.” He straightened the sheet and suddenly looked up at him. “Do you always have nightmares when you’re sober?”

“Not always,” Eberhard smiled, closing the steel fastenings on his briefcase. “Sometimes I dream of the nurse in Königsberg. Red-headed and very pretty.”

“You’ve been to Königsberg? You never told me.” The father held up a jacket as his son slipped his arms and broad shoulders into the sleeves.

“I was there during the war.” Eberhard fanned himself with his bowler hat and reached for his watch. “There’s nothing else to say. Goodbye, Father.”

He made his way towards the hatch in the floor, hearing his father muttering behind his back: “He’d better not drink so much. Only chamomile and hot milk. Chamomile and hot milk.”

In the Hospital of Divine Mercy in Königsberg, a cadet officer of one year’s standing used to be given chamomile before he went to sleep. The beautiful, red-headed nurse gazed with admiration at the polished boots fitted with spurs that stood by his bed. She had called him “Officer”, not realizing that every scout from the artillery regiment wore spurs since they rode on horseback. Addressing him thus, she had poured spoonfuls of the infusion into his mouth. Twice-wounded Cadet Officer Mock did not have the strength to protest that he was not an officer, and was ashamed to admit that he had not passed his exams or undergone the appropriate training, but had found himself in the war simply through conscription. He was too shy to ask his angel her name, and he did not have the strength to turn his head to watch her go. In an attempt to broaden his field of vision, he had traced burning circles with his eyes. All they took in, unfortunately, was the neo-Gothic vaulting of the hospital. They did not see either the soldiers lying next to him or Cornelius Rühtgard, the greying, slender orderly to whom Mock owed his life; and the red-headed nurse did not fall within the wounded cadet officer’s field of vision ever again. Much later, when his broken limbs had set and he could move around on crutches; when finally he learned that his injuries indicated that he must have fallen from a great height, that the orderly Rühtgard – until recently a doctor in Cameroon – had, on his way to work, found him abandoned on Litauer Wallstrasse, and had quickly taken him to the hospital to treat his ribs and his lungs, which had been punctured by splintered rib bone; when Cadet Officer Mock knew all of this, he began his search for the red-headed nurse. Limping along, he rapped his crutches on the sandstone flags, but everywhere he met with a lack of understanding. The nurses grew impatient when the convalescent
produced yet another description of their supposed red-headed colleague, looked them in the eyes for the hundredth time and tried to catch the scent of their bodies. The caretakers and ward attendants shook their heads, some tapping their brows when he spoke of steaming cups of chamomile, until finally the former doctor Rühtgard, demoted to the rank of orderly, explained to the patient that the red-headed nurse may have been a figment of his imagination. Hallucinations were not unknown in people in similar states to that of Cadet Officer Mock on his arrival at the Hospital of Divine Mercy in Königsberg. For he had been totally unconscious. Not because he had fallen from a great height, but from alcohol.

Now Eberhard Mock went down the stairs to his Uncle Eduard’s old butcher shop.

“Chamomile and hot milk. Gets drunk, so he gets what’s coming to him,” came the voice of his father from overhead; he had remedies for all his son’s ailments.

Eberhard heard a hard hammering on the windowsill. “Must be that moron Dosche with his foul dog,” he thought. “That mongrel’s going to be shitting all over the polished stairs again while Dosche and my father play chess all day.”

The scrambled eggs and chives made him gag like a hair stuck in his throat. “Chamomile and hot milk. He knocks it back, always knocking it back.” Mock turned and went back up the stairs. His head appeared above the floor. The sill rattled again. His father was at the window, hopping on one foot; on his other hung a darned sock.

“Can you not understand, Father,” yelled Eberhard, “that chamomile and milk don’t bloody well work on me? I don’t have a problem falling asleep, it’s the dreaming!”

Willibald Mock stared at his son, understanding nothing. The torso above the hatch. Clenched fists. Hangover gushing in his head like the sea. Chamomile and hot milk. The father grew pale and did not say a word.

“And tell that shitty chessplayer, Dosche, not to come here with his mongrel and not to thump on the windowsill so hard, or he’ll be sorry.”

Eberhard’s legs were now in the room too. Without looking at his father, he went to the basin, knelt beside it, removed his bowler hat and poured a few ladles of water over his wavy hair. He heard his father’s voice through the stream of water that gushed over his ears: “It’s not Dosche hammering on the sill, it’s somebody for you.”

Eberhard leaned towards the old man and slipped the sock over his foot.