Phantoms of Breslau (9 page)

“He walked in a funny way before,” Mock thought as he slid into his leather slippers, “nothing changed.” He emerged from the alcove in his nightshirt, over which he had thrown a quilted dressing gown. In his hand was the bottle of cognac. He raised the hatch in the corner of the room and went down into the butcher’s shop. He squatted next to the heavy metal grille that covered the drain and listened for the squeaking of rats. He heard nothing. He sat on the counter and put the bottle to his lips. After a few swigs he tied some string around its neck, hid it in the drain and
replaced the grille. Now his father would not find the bottle and pour it out. He went back upstairs and lowered the hatch, thinking about the rats he occasionally saw on the ground floor. Sitting heavily on his bed, he extinguished the candle and was sure he would soon be overcome by the sleep of a drunkard: heavy, thick, and free of nightmares. “It’s a good thing I didn’t tell him about my dreams.” He did not think kindly of Doctor Kaznicz’s wise eyes as he drifted off. His suppositions were correct: he did not dream of anything.

2.IX.1919

Eureka! I think I have found the clue that will enable me to continue, after all my endless searching. Today I came across a very interesting passage in Augsteiner, a quotation from a letter by Pliny the Younger. We read one of his letters in secondary school – trivial, charming holiday reading. This was towards the end of the school year, after a whole year of read the cripplingly difficult and dull-as-ditchwater Livy. That letter was light relief for us, if any Latin text can be considered light relief and not merely a superhuman exercise for the brain. It was a beautiful story about a boy swimming on a dolphin. I had not known that this same Pliny also wrote about ghosts. I quote the most important fragments of this letter in my clumsy translation:

“In Athens there was a house which was large and spacious, yet sinister and and surrounded by ill fame. In the night’s silence, at first as if from a distance and then ever closer, the clanking of iron would be heard, and if one listened carefully, the rattling of chains. Shortly afterwards a phantom would appear: a thin old man, dirty and emaciated, with a matted beard and his hair standing on end. There were chains on his hands and manacles on his feet. He shook them as he walked.

“The terrified inhabitants passed long sleepless nights of horror and gloom. Sleeplessness was followed by sickness, ever-increasing fear by death. Even by day, though the ghost had withdrawn, the memory of it tormented the household. It seemed to them that the spectre still glided before their eyes – fear tormented them for longer than what had caused it. So the house was uninhabited and condemned to being deserted; and all that it contained seemed to belong to this horror.

“The building was put up for sale – should someone ignorant of such great misfortune wish to buy or rent it.

“There arrived in Athens at this time a philosopher named Atenodor, who read the announcement about this sale or rental. Intrigued by the low price, he enquired about everything in great detail and when he learned the whole truth he nevertheless – or all the more so – rented the mysterious house.

“As dusk fell he ordered his bed to be made up in the front part of the house and asked for some tablets on which to write, as well as a graver and a candle. His family, on the other hand, he settled in the inner rooms. He tried to occupy his mind, eyes and hands solely with writing, so that none of the phantoms he had heard about and no unnecessary fears would arise in his idle mind.

To begin with there was nothing but silence, but a short time later the rattle of chains and clanging of manacles could be heard. The philosopher did not look up, did not set down his graver and remained deaf to the noise. The noise, on the other hand, grew louder and could already be heard on the threshold, already in the room …

He looked up and recognized the apparition that had been described to him. The spectre stood wagging its finger as if beckoning Atenodor. Atenodor, however, reached once again for his graver and wax tablets. Meanwhile the ghost continued to rattle its manacles, now almost above the philosopher’s head. Atenodor looked at it again, and the ghost made
the same sign as before. So he stood, picked up the candle and followed the phantom. It moved slowly, dragging its heavy chains. As it turned into the courtyard of the building, it suddenly dissolved into thin air. Atenodor remained alone. He picked up some leaves and grass and used them to mark out the spot where the spectre had disappeared.

“The following day he went to the administration and asked that the yard be dug up at that exact spot. Bones, bare and gnawed, were found bound by chains. Only they remained; the body had, over the years, perished in the soil. These remains were gathered up and officially buried. Ever since then ghosts have, fortunately, ceased to torment the household.”

What conclusion can be drawn from Pliny’s text? Man’s spiritual element can be abstracted, and then perceived through its urge to return, which must be appropriately contrived. Maybe this is a way of activating clusters of spiritual energy. We shall see. I have conducted an experiment; time will verify its results. How did I do it? I isolated the man and forced him to confess to his adultery in writing. It was a terrible confession for him to have to make since he was permeated to the bone with middle-class morality. I brought this man to a certain place late at night. He was bound and gagged. I freed his right hand, tied him to a chair and then asked him once again to deny what he had written previously, promising him that if he obeyed I would give this second letter to his wife. He feverishly scribbled something down. I took the second letter, the denial, and slipped it down the drain. I witnessed his fury and his pain. “I’m going to come back here,” his eyes told me. Then I took the man out to the carriage and drove away. Later I killed him, leaving him where he was sure to be found. His ghost will return and draw the attention of the inhabitants of that place to the drain.

BRESLAU, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3RD, 1919
TWO O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

Doctor Cornelius Rühtgard, specialist in sexually transmitted diseases, received patients in his five-room apartment at Landsbergstrasse 8, near South Park, on Wednesdays. The apartment occupied the entire first floor of the detached tenement building, so its windows looked out in all four directions. From one of the bathrooms stretched a view of the park, which was now being admired by a young woman pulling on a long-legged undergarment after her thorough examination. Doctor Rühtgard sat in his surgery writing out a prescription for Salvarsal. He smiled as he thought of her earnest protestations that over the past year, that is, ever since the death of her husband in the war, she had not had intercourse. The state of her health clearly indicated otherwise, and the time she last surrendered to the above-mentioned act – with all its consequences – could be established to within a few days. Pretending to take her at her word, he walked her to the door, then returned to his surgery and gazed out of the window. His patient approached a smart Daimler parked by a lamp post. She did not get into the car but, clearly upset, explained something to the person inside. Rühtgard knew what would happen next; he could almost hear the infected man yelling with fury and the tyres squealing as the automobile violently pulled away.

He would certainly have heard the shouts had it not been for the racket and piano cacophony coming from the parlour adjacent to the surgery. He wrenched open the door and a singular sight met his eyes: two young men were sitting at the piano, their four hands thumping the delicate keyboard on which his wife, who had died a few years earlier, had once painted the crystalline landscapes of the
Goldberg Variations
and executed the precise strophes of
Das wohltemperierte Klavier
. Clasped around the waist by some scoundrel, Doctor Rühtgard’s daughter, nineteen-year-old Christel,
was prancing beside the piano. Both she and her partner were pulling silly faces, evidence that these barbaric chords were giving them unutterable pleasure.

Rühtgard smelled sweat, an odour he loathed almost as much as the lice which had tormented him only a year earlier on the Eastern Front, or the pathogens of syphilis which devastated the bodies of his patients. The odour was strong, and he swiftly discovered its source: dark stains beneath the arms of one of the men at the piano. Both players noticed the doctor at once and leaped to their feet, bowing politely. The dancer stopped his prancing, bowed and clicked his heels. Christel stood still, smiling and flushed from movements which only a blind man would have called dancing. But Doctor Rühtgard was neither blind nor deprived of the sense of smell. And so his reaction was violent.

“What are all these savage dances?” he yelled. “What’s all this roaring like wild animals? Goodbye, gentlemen! Leave at once!”

“We’re sorry, Papa,” Christel said, frightened by his outburst. “We were just fooling around a bit …”

“Quiet, please” – the doctor was short of breath – “Go to your room. And to you, gentlemen, I bid farewell! Do I have to repeat myself?”

The young men quickly vanished, unlike the odour emanating from them. Rühtgard opened a window and with relief drew in the fresh air suffused with the scent of late summer. He sat down in an armchair and looked at Christel. She was so unlike his wife. His daughter did not have the warmth, softness and fragility he had so loved. Christel was rebellious, sporty, angular, strong and independent. “Probably deflowered already.” The thought pained him as he imagining her lying beneath the male with the sour smell.

“Christel,” he said as gently as he could. “The parlour is not a circus. How could you allow those stinking Hereros to demolish the piano on which your mother played?”

“And what would you say, Papa,” she snorted, “if one of those savages was to become your son-in-law?”

Without waiting for an answer, she went to her room; Rühtgard frowned and lit a cigar. He cast an eye around the parlour to seek solace in the beauty of the apartment he had been renting fully furnished for a year now, for the considerable sum of a thousand marks a month. Five rooms and two bathrooms. Tomes over a hundred years old. Eighteenth-century paintings. Turkish rugs and Arabian carpets. And amongst these works of art his sporty, baby daughter, with a dull-witted bull who knew nothing but how to thrust himself between her open legs. Rühtgard smoked his cigar and paced the apartment. He had to talk to somebody. Then he remembered that, apart from his daughter, his servant and himself there was someone else in the apartment. Someone he trusted completely. He knocked on the door of the second bathroom and, hearing a strident “Come in!”, he entered. In the bath spread with a sheet, lay a well-built, dark-haired man with a cigarette between his teeth. Criminal Assistant Eberhard Mock.

BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 3RD, 1919
THREE O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

Mock and Rühtgard sat at the chessboard devising clever strategies for the opening. Mock picked up a pawn from e2 and placed it on e4.

“You’ve got it made, Ebi,” muttered Rühtgard as he moved a pawn from b7 to b5. “You didn’t go to work after yesterday’s drinking binge … Nothing’s going to happen to you …”

“I did go to work, but not for as long as usual. Apart from talking to the psychologist I did nothing for five hours. It’s to do with the case I’m working on.” Mock looked miserable. “I’m not going to talk about it. Tell me” he said, suddenly coming to life, “is the thing I came to see you about serious? Did I catch anything from that girl?”

“Itching with no other symptoms” – the doctor smiled – “doesn’t mean anything. It might be nothing more than a desperate appeal for hygiene.”

“If you lived where I do” – Mock brought his knight into action – “you wouldn’t be making daily offerings to Hygiea either.”

“Well said. And what about your offerings to Hypnos?”

“I’m not sleeping.” Mock lost the desire to juggle with mythology. “I’m having nightmares. That’s why I drink or take up with harlots. When I’m pissed, I don’t dream at all. When I’m with a whore, I don’t sleep at home. And I only get nightmares at home. Unfortunately, I can’t move out because my father doesn’t want to. The only two friends he has live there: a retired postman and his dog.”

“Sorry for poking my nose into something that’s not my business, but why don’t you ask Franz to take your father in, at least for a while?”

“My father’s difficult. Irmgard, Franz’s wife, is even more difficult … But I don’t need to tell you that. Quietly and gracefully, she’s sucking away at my brother’s blood. Franz drinks and my ten-year-old nephew, Erwin, is constantly ill. That explains everything.”

“Yes, that’s clear enough.” Rühtgard attacked the knight with his bishop. “You know what, Ebi? I’ve been thinking about your nightmares and a simple solution occurred to me. Don’t eat supper and abstain from women for a time. I stick to a vegetarian diet, I don’t eat anything at night and I abstain from sex. Does that surprise you? It’s not difficult in my profession. I’ve seen my fair share of syphilitic pubes. Apart from that, I’m seven years older than you. We’ll see whether you’re such a stud at forty-three … If I do have dreams, they’re only pleasantly erotic ones. And another thing … You wouldn’t have to worry about any itching, or spend your time soaking in my bath. Do you know how much I have to pay the caretaker to heat the water?” He smiled. “Now, tell me honestly: how much did you eat last night?”

“A lot.” Mock threatened the bishop with a pawn. “A huge amount. But I can’t get to sleep if I’m hungry.”

“Then don’t sleep. And you won’t have nightmares.” The physician was deep in thought. “Either way, you’d get rid of the nightmares if you changed your way of life.”

“I don’t believe my nightmares have anything to do with overeating …” Mock said. He felt uneasy about his knight.

“It’s not a matter of what you believe,” Rühtgard said, then remained silent for a long while, pondering a winning move. “I’ll prove to you what a proper diet can do. But first of all, you yourself have to believe that the nightmares stem from your overloaded and overworked bowels. I’ll prove it to you, if you do as I say.” He struck a decisive and powerful blow. “Give up, or still struggling?”