The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (21 page)

“Will you accept promissory notes?’’ he asked, sweat running down the back of his neck.

The Countess regarded him with the graciousness that becomes a good winner.

“From you, my dear Conrad,’’ she said amiably, “your untarnished honour is guarantee enough.’’

So the game went on, but now with IOUs for stakes . . .

It was getting on for two in the morning when the Countess looked at the wall clock, yawned a trifle exaggeratedly, and offered her opponent one last game. The Lord Chief Justice didn’t hesitate, by now he was in the claws of his gambling devil and acting according to the law which says that the more hardened a gambler is, the more happily he persists in his humiliation, and that big losses simply incite him to run even greater risks. So he answered, “You’re on, if you still trust my notes of hand.’’

The Countess nodded, cut and dealt.

Her opponent’s first hand exceeded all expectations: three aces, the queen of hearts and the jack of clubs. After a brief hesitation, which was feigned, he kept the queen and the aces, and with a hastily signed IOU bought a new card.

To his disappointment he got yet another jack. I oughtn’t to have abided by the rules of reason, but the law of life’s eternal injustice and got rid of the queen, he thought.

He bought a last card, placed it behind the ones he already had, and contemplated his hand. It was hard for him not to show some emotion or bat an eyelid or tremble involuntarily. He had a full house: aces and queens. If only I could tempt the Countess to go on bidding, he thought, I might be able to win back some of my losses . . .

The Countess’s deal had been bad, and the only card she kept was the king of spades. But on her second buy something almost incredible happened; she had all the remaining kings. Of course, thanks to her hidden assistant, she knew exactly what her opponent’s hand was. She was preparing to buy her last card, a mere formality, when she decided to put her plan into action.

“My dear Lord Conrad,” she said. “I’ll be generous. Even before making my last buy, I would like to give you a chance to win back what you’ve lost. The fact is, you look terribly upset. And I’m quite sure you will find it very difficult to explain to your wife where such a large sum as you’ve lost tonight has gone to.”

She paused for effect, meanwhile, once again, just to be on the safe side, enquiring about her opponent’s hand.

“I’m going to give you an opportunity to win back everything you’ve lost in a single game,” she said.

Her partner looked at her amazed. “And what do you want me to offer in exchange?” he asked. “An IOU for as much again?”

“My generosity must naturally be paid for at a certain risk . . .”

“Such as?”

“A blank cheque.”

“A blank cheque? Do you want to ruin me?”

The Countess sighed.

“You’re a gambling man,” she said. “You can say no and we’ll continue the last game in the ordinary way. But you can also say yes, because you’re tempted by the excitement. Look, I’m going to buy one more card, I don’t know what you’ve got in your hand, but you’ve just bought a last card, so your hand, at least up till now, hasn’t been full. I too am going to buy a new card, but I’m giving you the opportunity right now. I’ll put down two thousand . . . you call me with a blank cheque . . . Regard this whole thing as a lottery, double or quits!”

He hesitated. Not only did he have a full hand, it was also a very strong one. He wondered what she was hoping for, a straight or a suit. If she saw him with a full house, he’d win thanks to the three aces. After negotiating such a deal, it seemed unlikely that she had four of a kind. The simplest rough estimate told him he ought to win. But when it came down to it, he realised, it wasn’t a question of algebra but, just as the Countess had intimated, of excitement for its own sake.

Beads of sweat were breaking out on his upper lip. He licked them away and, almost imperceptibly, nodded.

“I’m in,” he said at last. “On condition you buy your last card for two thousand.”

And while his hostess was putting the money in the pot, he signed a blank cheque, gulped down his frantic excitement, felt its tremors, the cramps in his stomach and the faint nausea that infallibly befalls a gambler when the stakes are high, be it in a game of poker or in affairs of State.

The Countess leaned back and looked at her last card, even though it was of no account: a jack.

“If you want to see me, put your cheque in the pot,” she said. “Or if you’re regretting it already, it’s not too late . . .”

But the Lord Chief Justice had no regrets. He put the blank cheque into the pot and laid his full house on the table. The Countess cleared her throat.

“I’ve just ruined you,” she said, displaying her four of a kind, all kings.

During the hours the game had been in progress, the Countess’s hidden assistant had been dreaming of his reunion with Henriette. At the same time he was wondering whether it really was possible to find a missing person with the help of spirits. But hope, as we know, is the last travelling companion of the unfortunate. The great Swedenborg, he thought, had in any case been a remarkable man. And maybe it was true that everyone has his own guardian angel.

The closet was exceedingly cramped. But even here Swedenborgiana lined the wall:
Journal of Dreams
,
Arcana Coelestia
and
Divine Providence
. He wondered what would happen when he did see Henriette again, but couldn’t even imagine that moment. After all these years of absence she had turned into a creature in a dream. Perhaps she had met someone else? Perhaps she wasn’t even alive. But not so in his fantasies: there, just as he had never ceased looking for her, she was still waiting for him. And she was more beautiful than ever. And in one fell swoop her love would make amends for his whole life.

And in this manner, after the card game had come to an end and while Lord Chief Justice Conrad, in a state of shock at having lost his entire fortune, was making his way home from the two-roomed flat on Østergade, Hercule, fuelled by the stuff of his hopes, went on dreaming a pleasant dream in which, aided by the spirits, he was on his way to meet Henriette on a country road in Holland. It was spring. The lilac was in bloom. People were happy. His girl looked just the way she had in Königsberg all those years before; beautiful beyond words. On her left shoulder sat one of the spirits of the dead, and Henriette was talking with Swedenborg himself. Rushing up to her, he knew no time at all had passed since they’d been separated.

When he awoke it was morning, as he could discern from the light flooding in round the edges of the closet. But on trying to open the door, he found it was locked. He pummelled it with his feet, but no-one came to open it.

In fact, it was not until twenty-four hours later that the porter found him by sheer chance, half dead of thirst, lying in a feverish delirium in the dark cupboard.

Otherwise the apartment was empty, the Swedenborg library gone, the bed, the few pieces of furniture, the Countess’s playing cards and her healing crystals – all were gone.

When the porter threw him with a curse out into the bitterly cold Copenhagen street, he could only console himself with the thought that he was still alive. Life itself, he reflected, was now his last hope. Only life, in covenant with time, could help him find his Henriette.

HE WANDERED FOR
what seemed an eternity. Tramped thousands of miles – across the great northern plains, through forests, beside rivers and along godforsaken coastlines. It mattered not which map he followed, always it was the same unhappy landscape.

Shamelessly exposing his deformed body in the cities, he lay outside churches begging, his feet holding out his begging bowl to the passers-by.
What kind of animal is that?
he could hear them thinking,
What kind of sins has his mother committed that God should punish her so
 . . .

He laughed at them. He didn’t believe in their God. For creatures like him there was no God. How would they look if they had made Him in their own image?

Hidden in the luggage compartment of a stagecoach he came to a town in the Brandenburg plains: Berlin.

In the shops he planted a faint scent of smoke in the guts of shop assistants, making them run into the storerooms to check whether a fire had broken out, or else, as he slipped a piece of bread or a bit of cheese under his shirt, a non-existent voice ordered them to look the other way. Or he got them running out into the street from a sudden notion that a royal carriage was passing by, sent them astray in long-forgotten memories, made them puzzle their heads over a riddle or an arithmetical conundrum, gave them a sudden urge to go to the seaside, run away with some woman, or start a new life in the colonies. So deeply did they sink into their broodings, he could make off with all the day’s takings without their even noticing it.

His gift, he’d come to understand, was a weapon. One that could cause people to fall suddenly in love, render them oblivious to time and space, or make them burst into tears from some all-embracing sadness that, for no obvious reason or no reason at all, overwhelmed them and penetrated their minutest capillaries. Or sometimes he filled them with soundless music, wonderful harmonies that made them close their eyes in a pleasure beyond all explanation.

Once he was caught red-handed stealing a jug of gin from a liquor stall. The stall owner held him fast, shouting for the police. He responded with an itching that in a fraction of a second spread itself throughout his captor’s body, until the man lay at his feet, a dreadful sight to see, screaming with fear, scratching his arms till they bled and praying to God for the torment to cease. Drunk on his omnipotence he left the man lying there . . .

By autumn rumours abounded in the city. Superstitious folk spoke of a wizard come to overthrow the Hohenzollern dynasty; of the Devil having sent out his minions to punish Prussia for the sins she’d committed during the Seven Years War. Satan was said to have appeared in the guise of a leprous dwarf. But no-one associated Barfuss with these legends.

Now he was sitting blindfolded in a great armchair in the legendary Madame Mendelssohn’s salon on Wilhelmstrasse, describing the people in the room; where they came from, who they were, and their most secret thoughts. The officers were astounded when he wrote up their names and regiments on a blackboard. Women blushed when he exposed the identity of their admirers, a lieutenant-general left the room crestfallen when Hercule disclosed some counterfeit promissory notes he’d pawned with a relative.

He would write down the colours and shapes of objects kept hidden from him, as if holding them in his hand. People were astounded by his card tricks and his mnemonic faculty.

One evening he scribbled a verse on the blackboard and looked triumphantly round the room. A cry of amazement could be heard from a man in one of the front rows. It was the poet Chamisso who, in a dreamlike state, had begun the epigram that very morning and still had it in his mind.

So the rumour about the mind-reader spread. By Christmas the crowd at Madame Mendelssohn’s had grown so big that she had to allocate tickets to her salon by lottery. That’s when he grew tired of it all . . . and disappeared.

He was driven on by longing. Everywhere he searched through people’s memories for just one trace of Henriette, but found none. Squandering his last few coins in Hamburg’s red-light district, he could see the girls found him repulsive, recalled Madam Schall’s establishment and understood that fate had sentenced him to repeat himself.

He wrote down Henriette’s name on a piece of paper and showed it to people he fell in with, but no-one had heard of her. He searched surreptitiously through their minds, only to discover the losses in their own lives, the emptiness, the feelings of shame, thoughts benumbed by opium and brandy. Despair had driven him to buy himself a few weeks of tenderness. Only to be thrown out when his money came to an end.

All night long he would roam the docks. Girls shunned him like a disease. Pimps spat at him. Sometimes he was beaten up.

He slept in doorways with vagrants, heard their dreams through his own. He met the strangest characters, seamen who had been left behind when their ship had sailed, adventurers, an artiste who always performed in a swarm of yellow butterflies, a mad clairvoyant who ran away when he realised they were two of a kind. He felt he was soon going to die, though without knowing how or where.

Penniless, he returned to Berlin. He was in an atrocious state. People who saw him mistook him for a ghost. He expected nothing more of life than that it should soon come to an end. Death was a debt you paid only once.

It was as if he had become invisible. People scarcely noticed him. Considering himself to be already one of the dead, he slept in churchyards. Too weak now even to beg, he was beset by hunger hallucinations, thoughts that did not exist or that existed so far away he ought not to have perceived them.

Julian Schuster visited him. Inquisitor del Moro held a speech in Latin beside his grave. From Swedenborg’s heaven the Countess Tavastestierna laughed down at him.

He saw an angel alight from a carriage beside where he lay in the gutter. She wore a white satin dress, held a parasol in her hand and wore yellow kid gloves up to her elbows. Radiant with light, she bent down and whispered:

“Hercule, is it really you?”

It was at that moment he felt life returning from a source beyond the universe. It really was her, the girl for whom he’d been searching for more than half his lifetime.

L
ET ME BE
your ears, hear for you, just like when we were children . . . do you remember how I used to describe sounds to you? The girls’ gigglings, the laundry fluttering on the line, the soughing wind that made the horses restless . . . now I shall ask time’s memory: how did our footsteps sound when we ran through the house? How did the rain sound pattering against your hand, what was the sound of our heartbeat like? I’m hearing for you throughout time . . . hearing their voices calling through our past . . . my mother’s voice, Magdalena Holt’s voice, Madam Eugenia Schall’s. The voices of the men, their oaths and compliments . . . I don’t know if you’re listening, Hercule, maybe you never could hear my thoughts, maybe only love has enabled you to understand me
.