The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (26 page)

He saunters down the final sand dune on the shore of what he assumes to be an island. He trips over something: a tortoise with jewels set in its shell. It nods at him with its wrinkled old-man’s head, and he senses it wants to communicate with him, but its way of thinking is so slow, so archaic, he can’t translate it into his own tongue, and anyway the girl is waiting for him.

She’s wearing a silk mask, he sees it now. His own. “Henriette?” he says, but she doesn’t react; and suddenly he realises she is deaf, that in an act of self-sacrificing love she has taken his deformity on herself, along with his mask. Then he takes her mask off in order, once more, to exchange destinies with her, and when, a moment later, he opens his eyes, she is as endearingly beautiful as ever . . .

She is lying in bed beside him in his room in von Below’s palace. The moon is casting a milky white light across the floor. Nobody sleeps as elegantly as Henriette, he thinks, like a temple dancer, with one hand on her forehead and her mouth formed into a kiss.

How long has she been there?

Since midnight, when she, cat-like, sneaked through your door and lay down beside you, Hercule, double your height, double your weight, infinitely more beautiful, but not double your love, since love, like silence, or come to that, eternity, cannot be multiplied.

Night broods the house. Everyone is asleep except the tortoises who, with unending meekness, go on crawling across the floors downstairs. Henriette moans in her sleep, a tress of hair has fallen across her face and using two of his toes he brushes it aside and tucks it behind her ear. Whereupon she smiles in her angelic dream, in which he partakes, since if he concentrates hard enough, he is able to follow the series of dream images and finds to his astonishment that she is dreaming the same dream he has just dreamed. She too, is on the beach of an unknown island. He sees her, still wearing his mask, though in her dream he’s the same as he always is, and she can hear and speak as usual.
Hercule
, she thinks in the dream,
why did you lend me your mask?

There he sits in the night, unable to answer, still in phase with his unspeakable joy; dissecting it, examining a thousand wondrous particles spread before him on the quilt, reassembling them in the same pattern as before, or in a new and equally perfect one; a happiness beyond his wildest dreams, beyond anything he could ever have imagined.

But these last few weeks’ restlessness has been a steady companion, so he gets up, rocks himself carefully from side to side until he has picked up enough momentum to roll over to the edge of the bed, turns on his axis, and slides, feet first, down to the floor, no mean drop for a man of his inconsiderable stature.

A beam of moonlight runs the length of the room. The light falls on to him like a weightless mantle. Now he goes and sits down at the desk by the window; a child’s desk with a footstool for a chair. Carefully he opens the drawer, takes out a quarto sheet of paper between two toes and puts it on the desk. He eases off the top of the inkwell, picks up the quill between his big and second toe, dips the tip into rose-scented ink, wipes off a superfluous drop on the blotting paper, and writes: “I, Hercule Barfuss, am about to embark on a new life . . .”

A blot has formed beside the lavish initial letter he drew; never mind, he thinks, and goes on, words to the effect that he’s just been born anew, is reborn along with his daughter, no, he corrects himself: the year before, when Henriette found him again, an unforgettable moment. Adding that all the years of hardship were as nothing compared with one second of happiness together with the woman he loves. He writes about the tickets to America, about their departure, only a week away, their plans and the precautions they have taken, the trunks packed in secret and the money they’ve set aside. Charlotte, his daughter, they will take with them. Everything is planned down to the last detail, they have rented a carriage which is to take them to Hamburg-Altona. They have a confidante, the squint-eyed Lisaveta, who runs their errands no questions asked, the baron must on no account become suspicious.

The thought of the baron makes his heart constrict. His happiness will be the baron’s tragedy. He is a noble soul, he thinks, and he is indebted to him. After all, he was the one who rescued Henriette, wasn’t he?

Yes, von Below’s the last in a long line of this waning species and it hurts him to have to deprive the baron of the woman he loves almost as much as he himself does . . . Whereupon a pang of jealousy passes through him. He can’t help it, for jealousy is ever love’s morbid companion in funeral clothes, a death in miniature that leaves a taste of lead in one’s mouth. The object of this emotion could well have been of a lower moral standing, but jealousy is non-negotiable. Love’s inflamed appendix, it lives its own life, so he lets himself be placated by Henriette’s assurances that although she is indeed most grateful to the baron for all he has done for her, it counts for nothing in love’s omnipotent perspective.

The moon goes in behind a cloud and the room turns pitch black. Hercule gropes for the lamp with his feet, finds it, screws up the wick, lifts the glass and lights a tar match – all this with an orthopaedic elegance that would secure him a position in any circus. The lamp gives off a greenish glow, like some luminous aquatic plant, had he only been able to imagine such a thing. Again he dips his quill in the inkwell; writes the words symbolising his future: United States of America.

No-one knows what awaits them, but since no-one is able to recall their birth or envisage their own death, everyone already possesses a premonition of eternity and is already living now and for ever. America, he thinks, is a geographic eternity, a cartographic “for ever”.

He gives a start, so violent he almost loses his balance. On the window ledge, by the trelliswork, sits a raven. It pecks lightly at the windowpane as if trying to draw his attention. Naturally, he can’t hear the sound, but instead feels the vibrations. The bird, he surmises, probably sees its own image in the pane, and thinks it has found another of its own kind.

With an instantaneous act of will, Hercule does the most fantastic thing his gift permits: he puts himself inside the raven and looks at himself through its beady eyes. Then he climbs back into his own body again, grasps the pen and writes: “Does the raven see the world in black and white, or does this particular raven just happen to be colour-blind? The image is rough-grained, the mask especially, I forgot to take it off when I went to bed.”

The bird takes flight and he with it, first over to the horse-chestnut tree in the yard, where an owl frightens it away with its executioner’s eyes, so it flies off again, with Barfuss inside it, ten fathoms up, twenty, forty, a hundred, straight into the dark Berlin sky.

He senses the city beneath him; the alleys, courtyards, stables, shopping streets, palaces and hovels. The stench is indescribable, rubbish is piled everywhere, dead rats float in the gutters amid human excrement thrown down from windows and balconies, but that’s how nineteenth-century cities are: gigantic rubbish dumps, refuse tips for their budding civilisation.

The bird’s consciousness, he notes, is no better than that of an imbecile, its thoughts are obsessive, scarcely distinguishable from instinct. For days on end, without cease, it repeats the selfsame thing:
rest, rest, rest
, or
thirst, thirst, thirst
. It sees everything with the same liberating air of indifference, nothing causing it to become unduly elated nor, for that matter, sad.

It’s a dark night. The only visible sources of light come from a street lamp, or a window behind which a student sits studying, or a seamstress works late. Animals sleep in stables and sties. It is cold, the air extremely damp.

This last year he has been freer than ever before in his use of his gift. For hours on end he can travel with what he has begun to call his “carriers”. A cat. A bird. Sometimes a mule or an ox. Only in exceptional cases, a human being, and then, preferably, a child. Sometimes he lets himself be carried several miles outside the city. It is easy for him to break off the journey and come back to his body whenever he wishes. But the night is long and he is restless, so he takes a respite behind the raven’s eyes, gliding in ever widening circles above the von Below palace, feeling a little dizzy and seeing the world in black and white, until the bird descends and lands at the foreman’s window.

A lamp fuelled with train-oil is alight, and the foreman, standing by a sideboard, is getting dressed. What’s he up to at this late hour? By the look of things, some urgent business. He’s trying to pull his boots on at the same time as he’s frantically looking for a bushel for the light.
They’ve come
, he thinks, just these words,
they’ve come . . .
invoking the image of some serious-minded gentlemen whose faces Barfuss can’t recall having seen before.

The raven, unaware of being steered like a kite on the string of a human will, lifts again and lands eight windows away at Lisaveta’s, the housemaid of Russian descent. Distracted, a trifle unsure of its own motives, and maybe even a little sceptical about its own strength of character, the bird pecks at some seed on the windowsill. From here Hercule can intuit the girl’s dream; something about money and her mother. Lisaveta’s the only one of the servants who isn’t frightened off by his appearance. Sometimes he has even felt feelings of sympathy emanating from her, and to Henriette she has always been as loyal as a daughter. She is almost twelve years old, and was bought by von Below at one of the workhouse auctions.

Again the raven takes off and lands in a tree outside the garden wall. The bird is as sleepless as he is, it has lost something, but can no longer remember what: his mate perhaps . . . or a chick? The moon reappears. Three men are standing outside the garden wall, one of them, oddly enough, has a monkey on his shoulder. But the bird, which has sighted a crust of bread on the ground, isn’t interested in the remarkable group, and at the same moment as it lands before its booty, Hercule too loses interest and returns to the desk.

Death, he thinks, not knowing where the word has cropped up from so suddenly. Henriette, who has instructed him in life’s complicated book of rules, has once told him about the city repository where von Below wants to be taken when he is thought to be dead. It’s to Berlin’s repositories that people suspected of not really being dead are taken, and placed in a mortuary with a bell tied to one foot. Not until they have been there several weeks without once having rung the bell, and are already beginning to smell, are they carted off to the churchyard to be buried in Christian soil. Love’s repository . . . he thinks, but doesn’t pursue the thought, because now, on his extrasensory wavelength, he notices the foreman leave his room. Something has been bothering him for weeks now, but love, which makes Hercule less inclined to rummage about in other people’s minds, causes him to throw caution to the winds. He has quite enough to cope with in the emotional landslide unleashed in him by Henriette and his daughter.

Lowering his pen, he looks around him. Henriette is sleeping her cherubic sleep. She is beauty personified: her long, naturally wavy hair, her smile’s touch of eternity, her noble profile, the triumphant arch of her nose, the almond eyes, her gait – like that of a timid gazelle – the perfect breasts, the profundity of her gaze, the wise feet, the mysterious ears, the sensitive temples, the holy vault of her forehead, the exotic fruit that is her mouth. He closes his eyes to avoid the thought of having to wake her up before dawn breaks, so that she has time to creep back into her own room before the household awakes.

Will their daughter be as beautiful? For several months he had feared the worst, but the girl had been born without any deformities. In his mind’s eye he sees them together in America. Unspeakably happy.

Then still sitting up, he dozes off. It’s been a long week, filled with preparations for their journey. He dreams about a rat. Dressed in a frock coat and wearing a green mitre, the rat hands him a letter, warning him of something terrible about to happen. Then, caught out unprepared on this fateful night, he wakes up in a cold sweat, still seated in the same position he’d fallen asleep in: on the stool by the child-size desk, with a quill pen between his toes.

Henriette moans in her sleep. She needs her sleep, he thinks, soon enough she’ll need all her reserved energy. He puts the pen down, wipes a drop of ink off his toe, walks silently over to the bed, climbs up into it by the steps the foreman has made for him. He strokes her cheek with his foot, and she emits another moan. It must be the moon- and lamplight that are troubling her, he thinks, and with amazing alacrity he takes off his mask and places it on her face to shield her eyes. She is curled on her side, her knees pulled up under her breasts. In this gloomy light, it occurs to him, they could be mistaken for each other.

He returns to the desk, but halts in the shaft of moonlight in the middle of the floor. The revolving antennae of his sixth sense are signalling some kind of movement, he focuses his attention and in his consciousness, so blurred by happiness, appears a single image. The monkey!

The monkey he had seen through the eyes of the raven shortly before was somewhere in the house.

How could it have got in? He doesn’t know. Its mind is that of a child. It sees nothing in the dark and appears to be deeply confused.

He opens the door and walks out into the corridor to see if it’s there. Nothing. All that’s moving is the shadow of some trees lit up from behind by a sentimental moon. He carries on down the stairs, into the main building, coming to a halt outside the wet-nurse’s door. She’s dreaming a complicated dream in which someone keeps repeating the words: “It was on a Tuesday in April.” Next to her, in a cradle, his daughter is sleeping. She, the newborn, is also dreaming, but kaleidoscopically, in blocks of colour mixed on an internal palette. Vague contours, hands maybe, appear out of a red backdrop. The dream is wordless. Suddenly, in her dream, he sees his masked face, perceives the memories she has of the wet-nurse’s heartbeat, the rich flavour of breast milk, which makes her mouth water, and the memory of mother Henriette’s smell.