The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (22 page)

Shall I describe the emptiness to you? The emptiness when the lights go out and the last guest has gone, the emptiness when people disappear with a bit of one’s life, and one is torn up by the roots . . . the emptiness when I met the magistrate, the emptiness in my mother’s eyes during the last hours of her life . . . when did that happen? I can’t remember. A street girl has no concept of time, and her algebra consists of the most elementary sums: how many bottles of eau de cologne she uses in a year, how many bodices she can buy with a rich lover’s gratuity, how many post-stages away her next admirer is, how much train-oil her lamp burns up in one night . . . Oh yes, I remember you, you, my first admirer . . . How you comforted me when I cried, how you lulled me when I couldn’t sleep, defended me, stole for me, how you sucked the blood from my finger when I cut it on a piece of glass . . . But now it’s him calling in my memory, can you hear him, Hercule? The judge who laid waste our lives, Court Magistrate von Kiesingen . . . I shall describe it all for you . . . I’ll tell you my life story . . . if only you’ll be patient and don’t prejudge me . . .

Be still! Heinrich is eavesdropping at the door, wondering why it’s all so quiet in here. “I need to speak privately with Hercule,” I’ve told him, but how can Heinrich be expected to understand how we can communicate?

“But the cripple’s deaf and dumb, isn’t he?” he laughed nervously as the servant fetched his pipe.“How do you do it? Does he read your thoughts?”

Yesterday, in the library, when I told you about my marriage, he didn’t suspect a thing. He thought I was busy playing patience, when in fact I was laying him bare to you, my darling. You mustn’t have bad feelings about Heinrich. It was he who took me away from that prison, brought me to this house with all its servants and caged birds, two dozen rooms and four carriages for various needs, its one cook, six housemaids, one chambermaid, one foreman, three liveried footmen and a coachman who speaks flawless French. He lifted me up out of misfortune, just as I lifted you up into our carriage.

What is love, my darling? What is it made of ? I’ve read about it in Stendhal, I see it on artists’ canvases, I can hear it in the composers’ études; and I see it gleefully slip out of their hands just when they think they’ve captured it. Where have you been all these years? love asks me. Where have I myself been? In the kingdom of death, that’s where I’ve been, until the nightwatch neglected its patrol and in an unguarded moment I managed to slink out . . .

Heinrich is standing at the door eavesdropping, maybe even peeping through the keyhole . . . let him be; after all, what can he see? Nothing could arouse his suspicions. His wife, seated on the chaise-longue, an heirloom from his mother . . . a little deformed man, his legs dangling from an armchair
.

Outside the open window, the sun is shining, sounds float in from the garden, but the woman who is his wife, she’s sitting quietly, eyes closed, nodding every now and then, as if in time with some inner melody she’s listening to. Opposite her is the stranger she found in the street, her half-brother so she claims, this odd mute gentleman who wears a silk mask over his face
.

Why do you wear a mask, Hercule? You don’t have to play a part for me, take it away and let me kiss you . . . no, not just now, not with Heinrich standing behind the door. Let’s keep our story a secret just a little longer . . .

What are those two up to? my husband is thinking. What business has my wife with this cripple?

We were driving through the Royal Animal Park and had it not been for the right-hand horse being so lazy and the coachman halting to let the mail coach pass, we wouldn’t be sitting here now, and Heinrich wouldn’t be eavesdropping at his own door . . . They both seem to be asleep, he thinks . . . As if on the verge of dropping off, the moment when dreams summon helpless humans . . . and he hasn’t a clue that this is the way I speak to you, the way love wraps itself around us.

“Who is he?” my Heinrich asked me at dinner the other day. “Be so good as to answer me, Henriette. Is he really your half-brother? Do you intend me to believe that?”

But since last night the mote has gone from his eye. The story I told him made him blench.

“But good God, you can’t be serious, why haven’t you told me all this before?”

So he lives in the belief that we really are half-brother and -sister, Hercule. And after so many hardships along our separate ways, there is no Gabrielle Vogel left on this earth to denounce our kinship . . .

Climb inside me, Hercule, as you used to do when we were children . . . climb inside me and let me carry you behind my eyes. See yourself through my pupils . . . I’ll carry you behind my eyelids, you’re simultaneously in your own mind and mine . . . now I’m going to open my eyes and look at you, and your gift will enable you to see through mine . . . see yourself through me . . . and what do you find?

You find a deformed little man, not much more than three foot tall, wearing a green velvet swallow-tailed coat. My half-brother Hercule wears a grey ruffled silk shirt, has a French-style scarf around his neck and a triangular mask covering his face. On his feet are child-sized black shoes with silver buckles. He has become completely bald, black protrusions like forest snails reach down from his temples to the nape of his neck. His head is very large, and the doctors surmise that it’s hydrocephalic. He has no arms. His coat sleeves are empty, but in the openings one might suppose there are two petrified tufts of seaweed – his useless hands, good for nothing but frightening off birds. On his back one sees a hump: or could this just be his shoulder blades grown awry? His chest looks like a plucked chicken’s; but with his feet he can play the piano and make Baron Heinrich von Below gape in astonishment. He cannot speak, his cleft palate is too severe for that, and his tongue is forked like a snake’s. Anyway, he doesn’t know what words actually sound like, for he can’t hear them as other people do with their ears, but intuits them with his soul. He is deaf, say the blind men, while others have a feeling of his comprehending something beyond the horizons of hearing.

You must tell me, Hercule . . . who are these mysterious men who are searching for you? Two months have passed since they were last here. I allowed Heinrich to converse with them. They showed him papers from influential men, and asked about a certain Barfuss, a dwarf and a monster, retarded and deaf-mute. When Heinrich asked them what they wanted, they reminded him menacingly that they have patrons in positions of power.

The first time they mentioned your name I knew you were nearby, Hercule. Inwardly I rejoiced, for it proved you were alive . . .

Why are people afraid of you, my love? Even the maids are afraid of you. Yesterday, when we returned from our outing, I heard them whispering . . . They are afraid of you, but I just laugh at them . . .

Imagine if they knew I was pregnant . . . Heinrich’s going to thank God for this miracle.

Dr Herzl told him he was sterile . . . He’ll never guess what’s really happened.

I have so much to tell you, Hercule, about the last few years, about the church bells in Danzig, about the house where I worked, the sailors, the girls, about the angel of death who put me into the spinning house. And about Heinrich, my saviour, who rescued me and took me away to be his wife.

Listening at the door . . . and all he can hear is our breathing, the hum of his own wondering amazement, and the questions piling up. Is this cripple my wife found in the street and took pity on, and whom some people seem so keen to get their hands on, really her half-brother from a brothel in Königsberg?

I never forgot you, Hercule. How could I? It would have been like forgetting how to breathe. It was the hope of seeing you again that kept me going. In the end I saw you everywhere, even places you couldn’t possibly be. There was only one thing I dreaded: that I would never see you again. But God has heard my prayers and the miracle has taken place. You must tell me everything, about the places you’ve seen, everything that’s happened on your long journey. I want your memories, even the bitterest ones, I must catch up on my happiness...

Now Heinrich’s left his sentry-go and is calling for the servant: “Get the carriage ready, Helwes, I have to go to Potsdam and attend to my business.” When something baffles my Heinrich, he attends to his businesses: the mills at Dahlem, the property at Nicolasee, his estate, the brick kilns in Oranienburg. The weaving mill with its English machinery and the barge yard at Rostock. My husband is worth two million. All he lacks is an heir, a son to inherit the family’s titles. Maybe our child will be a boy? That would put Heinrich in seventh heaven. And it would gain us time.

Don’t be afraid, my love. Nothing will happen to you here. My husband’s on our side, although I’ve pulled the wool over his eyes . . . He would never hand you over to those men.

“If we have a boy,” he said once, “he’ll be named after the former Elector, and if a girl, she’ll be named after the King’s daughter Charlotte.”

But what if the boy is born deformed, like his real father? Would he suspect something then? No, no, he’ll listen to the maids and his aunts who’ll blame the Evil Eye for a monster happening to be in the house when the missus got pregnant.

He’s going now. Listen through my ears and you’ll hear him . . . listen through me, Hercule: can you hear the horses down in the yard, can you hear the carriage wheels on the macadam as my husband leaves? Take off your mask, we’re alone now, and nobody can see us. Let me kiss you. Can you feel the life in here? Don’t be afraid, Hercule. No-one can harm you here. If they find you, we’ll run away, with or without Heinrich. We’ve found each other. Nothing else matters . . .

HALF A CENTURY
later, when Henriette and Hercule’s daughter, Charlotte Vogel, had been carried on fortune’s trade winds to a house for impoverished widows on Helgeandsholmen in Stockholm, she would tell a friend, in broken Swedish, about the dreadful time her mother had been through in the Danzig spinning house. The path which had brought Henriette into Prussian court circles had been so lined with misfortune that a lesser person would have broken off their journey halfway. Life, her daughter would say, with its defective sense of justice, had punished Henriette far more than even her worst enemies could have wished.

Her story seemed so unlikely that at first no-one believed it, and many years were to pass before it came by chance to the notice of the feminist Frederika Bremer Foundation, which by and by published it as a pamphlet under the title “The Fate of a German Spinhouse Woman”. That was in 1915, when not even the flowery crinolines of her mother’s epoch remained.

On the afternoon Henriette and Hercule were reunited, thirteen years had already passed since their separation. The tale that she and her mother had started a new life with relatives in Saxony was mere hearsay which one of Gabrielle Vogel’s suitors had invented out of despair. True, they had looked up a relative, but in far from happy circumstances.

Since the turn of the century Gabrielle Vogel’s sister had been working in a run-down brothel in Danzig, and it was here that mother and daughter had headed for after Madam Schall’s establishment had been closed down.

Mercifully, they’d been allowed to stay. They shared a room with two girls who had just arrived from Pomerania in the company of the owner of a vodka distillery, who ran the business with the aid of bribes to the public prosecutor. The establishment was a dreary one. Rats scampered across its tables in the dead of night, sicknesses raged and alcohol was God. Sailors who had jumped ship bought themselves a moment’s love for a quart of beer, the girls gave themselves to tramps in exchange for food, and the distiller made the lion’s share of his income by serving liquor in the front hall. The inevitable could no longer be held at bay: within a week of their arrival, Henriette had been taken on as a prostitute.

Never would she forget the man who robbed her of her virginity, the stench of his rotting teeth and a brutality that seemed unnecessary. Afterwards she had cried, but that, her mother tried to explain, was customary, just as it was customary that she should learn, in future, to brace herself against the men’s repulsive ill-smelling breaths, their unwashed bodies, the lice feasting on the sweat in their armpits, their verminous souls and their mangy, vulgar bedroom conversation.

She had tried to blot all this out by thinking of Hercule. Over the next few years she did little else, falling into deep musings over where he might be, if indeed this unfortunate boy, so ill-equipped for the trials of existence, was anywhere at all. Despite the humiliations she never surrendered to despair. On the contrary, her sufferings fuelled her dreams. The deeper she sank, the closer she came in her imagination to Hercule.

Those first years in Danzig she would later recall as having been lived through as if sleepwalking. All contours had been erased, no faces remained, only bodies; an unbroken chain of strangers turning into a single male body with which she awoke and went to bed, unendingly, day after day, night after night.

By the fifth year she was awaking from one nightmare only to find herself deep in another. One winter night the distiller had taken her to a hotel in the town’s outskirts. A servant in livery had led them into a smoking room furnished in Eastern style, with Turkish carpets on the floor, a hookah in front of an armchair, the walls covered in antique marine charts. The distiller withdrew to a room where she could overhear him loudly discussing her price with the well-to-do suitor who had placed an order for her. Then he left the hotel, promising to pick her up the following morning. Still unsuspecting, she sat down in the armchair and looked around her at a splendour of which she’d not seen the like since Madam Schall’s heyday. Inhaling the smouldering tobacco fumes and contemplating a poster cross-section of a Havana cigar that explained in an incomprehensible language the difference between a
madurado
and a
claro
, she didn’t even notice the man coming up behind her chair until, turning round to locate the source of the mysterious sound of human breathing, she was struck dumb with horror at the sight of him. It was the same court magistrate who had brought about the ruin of Madam Schall’s establishment some years before.