The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (4 page)

Exterior ears there were none, and the auditory channels were overgrown by layers of some kind of petrified skin. The child was probably deaf.

Since the child had shown no sign of life, the doctor was struck by the thought that it might already be dead. The closed eyelids did not stir. It did not cry. Now he could see the child’s whole body. On its shoulders were protuberances he took for arms and hands, but which reminded him rather of parboiled roots from a very small plant. In a jumble of thoughts which banished his disgust but put pressure on his medical ethic, Dr Götz worked on. Should he make an intentional mistake? Why not? What good would this life be, and if allowed to live, what future did it have? And for how long; and at what cost of suffering?

His hands’ tactile sense took up the thought his mind refused to grasp: the protruberances, the lumps, the deformed chest indicative of underdeveloped lungs. The infant’s back, he noticed, was covered with black hair as thick as a kid goat’s. It’s more animal, he thought, than human being.

By now the body was quite free, and he could see it was a boy. So far only the genitals seemed normal, almost unrealistically so, without deformities. Someone behind him was talking about the girl. The poor creature was an orphan from some Slavonic minority, whatever that meant after Poland’s partition. On a trip to Danzig Madam Schall had found her begging in the streets and taken pity on her. In the three years she’d been working in the brothel she had managed to save up a little money, intending sooner or later to return to her home village. Who was the father? Uncertain. Probably an officer; they used to like her way of surrendering to their whims. Not that Götz heard any of this, or that they were already speaking of her in the past tense. He was working feverishly.

The legs, he saw with a certain relief, were better developed than the arms. A dwarf’s legs, but if he survived he’d be able to walk on them. He lifted up the boy, held him close and slapped the furry backside, hoping for a scream from the horrific orifice that was both nose and mouth, gullet and windpipe. The breathing did in fact start up, though there was not a sound, no gurgle or scream.

Götz became aware of the murmurs of the girls now gathered in the room. Laying the child down on the bed beside its mother, he put his ear to her mouth and listened. No breathing. Gently, he pressed his fingertips against the carotid artery. Quite still. He became aware of the clergyman standing beside him:

“It’s too late,” he said. “We can only hope the Lord will receive her.”

“Why wasn’t I called earlier?”

Götz was surprised by the anger in his own voice, an anger nourished by the fact that we always arrive too late for our most crucial encounters, as if fate intentionally delays sending out invitation cards. If only I’d been sent for ten hours earlier, he thought, perhaps I could have saved the girl.

The clergyman did not disguise his revulsion as he contemplated the boy.

“I can’t say a prayer over her,” he said. “Nor can I do an emergency baptism of this . . . whatever it is.”

“Why not?”

“You can see for yourself why not. Would the good Lord mock His own creation thus?”

Götz too looked at the boy: the furry back, the split face, the grotesque overgrown head, as large as the rest of the body. Though he was breathing, the eyes remained closed as if afraid to see the world that awaited them.

“What we have before us, doctor, is the fruit of Satan’s concubine. This creature isn’t begotten by man. It isn’t human at all.” Picking up his bag the priest went to the door. “Believe me,” he said. “This isn’t the first time. Only a month ago a boy was born in Lemberg that was half-human, half-wolf. He lived for exactly four minutes. Four minutes too long, in my opinion.”

The priest left the room, and in the ensuing silence the doctor turned to Madam Schall.

“Where’s the other girl?” he asked. “I was told there were two births.”

Two doors away the other birth had been without complication in the room that had once housed the great Agrafena Nehludova who, seven years ago, had suddenly and inexplicably arisen from her encampment and disappeared without trace, though the doctor knew nothing of that particular story. As he stepped over the threshold the baby was already lying at its mother’s breast, washed and wrapped in clean linens. It was a plump girl with nut-brown eyes and downy hair. He asked a few questions about the mother’s condition, comforted her when she started to weep over the fate of her unfortunate sister. It was then he noticed that the bells still tolled on Kneiphof Island.

“At least this little girl has come into this world in high style,” he said with an effort, to lighten the mood. “It’s for her the cathedral bells are chiming.”

He gave the newborn a routine examination. How unfair it seemed that Fortune should scatter her gifts so randomly. That this child could be so fully formed and healthy, while the boy in the next room, born this same night, in the same house, of the same sort of woman, had been denied even the most basic anatomical harmony. He wondered who would care for the orphan during the brief spell of life he assumed was left to it? Would anyone suckle him? He doubted it. They’d just take him to the baby farmer. The thought gave Götz a feeling of relief quite devoid of guilt, implying as it did an end to a life that would otherwise be only pain and suffering.

He devoted a few minutes more to the woman until he was sure there was no new bleeding, palplated her stomach and gave instruction on how to wash herself and feed the infant. Then Götz went back to the boy’s room.

He found the boy panting in Madam Schall’s arms, his eyes still closed. Some of the girls had already started to wrap the mother’s corpse in a winding sheet. A window, wide open, aired the unmistakable smell of death.

“What will happen to the boy?” he asked.

“We’ll look after him,” said Madam Schall, rocking the child, “for as long as he’s allowed to live.”

Only now did Götz fully take in the life he had brought into the world. He recalled the anatomy hall at Albertina. In glass jars filled with alcohol, the professors had kept deformed foetuses: Siamese twins, stillborn in the sixth month; a girl with hydrocephalus and on her back a birthmark shaped like a dragon; a boy with lockjaw and another with five rows of teeth and a brain showing growth failure in the fontanelle. All this monstrosity, this collection of grotesque jokes staged by heartless Nature, neatly numbered and arranged on shelves above charts of the circulatory and muscular systems, bones and intestines, had stuck in his memory. There were mongoloids and albinos, some of them seemingly mere fortuitous collections of bones and flesh, lives that had mercifully been rejected in good time, together with animal foetuses of every kind, two-headed calves, an incredibly misshapen pig, a lamb with its head growing from its stomach. But what he saw in front of him – this enormous skull with lumps like stones, the split face, the furry body and the inadequate protruberances representing arms – seemed the most cruel, because the child was still alive, cursed with a life against which it could not defend itself.

“Isn’t there anything you can do, doctor?” Schall asked.

“No,” he said. “The cleft palate is too severe to operate on.”

He took the bottle of laudanum from his bag.

“Give him a few drops of this for the pain. We can only hope he won’t use up too much of it.”

He waited while the girls washed away the blood and vernix. Wasn’t there something he had overlooked? He realised what it was. He had yet to look into the boy’s eyes.

He asked to hold him.

Amazed that this reflex could be missing, Götz gently prised the eyelids open with his fingertips. The eyes were grey and seemed clouded by an infection or cataract. But the boy, without a blink or so much as a shudder, and with a gaze so steady it seemed able to support a collapsing wall, ceased to gasp for breath.

Götz would never be able to explain exactly what happened that evening as the snow flurried and the bells’ clangour rang out over Königsberg. Suddenly, as the boy fixed his ageless eyes on him, it was as if he was at a central point inside Götz’s mind.

In some way the boy stared – or stepped – right into Götz, got inside him as a parasite intrudes unnoticed into a human body. Without language, scarcely aware he even existed, he flouted all scientific laws; and, worst of all, could read the doctor’s most secret thoughts.

This boy, Götz knew, could see into all the evasions and half-repressed thoughts and desires that were his self; was aware of what he was feeling at this moment, was an observer of his childhood’s long-forgotten emotional storms – the unquenched longing for breast milk and bodily warmth – his wordless death wish, his suppressed desire to exact revenge upon a cruel world, the shameful teenage excitements and the red-hot passion still seeking an outlet and auguring the day, two decades later, when he would leave his wife for a woman of a lower class. This boy saw his forbidden attraction to his youngest daughter, like a smell of rotting flowers; his crazy dream of crossing the Atlantic to the New World which reason had long ago rejected, but which he was amazed to find still alive in him with undiminished force.

The boy knew how he longed to run from the room and yet linger in it and watch him die, while at the same time hoping he’d survive; was listening to his secret thoughts at this moment, some having already taken shape in words, others not quite, rough drafts only, hewn out of the marble of consciousness; and though the boy did not understand them, new born as he was, the doctor knew he could feel them, for he was in his consciousness at the centre of what was himself.

Shuddering to the marrow of his bones, he handed the infant back to Madam Schall.

“The priest is right,” he mumbled. “This is no human being. It’s the Devil’s offspring.”

THE BELLS THAT
rang out over Königsberg the night the boy was born did indeed augur a new era. A decade of calamitous conflicts went into the grave at Leipzig and Waterloo, and the town on the River Pregel entered a new era of greatness. Madam Schall contrived to make the most of the general boom; for demand rose in every sphere, not least where love was for sale. Six evenings a week, Sundays as holy days apart, her house filled with clients. Calèches and landaus jostled with cabs in its courtyard. There was more laughter than tears, though the latter weren’t uncommon either. Madam Schall made it her business to win over the new-rich bourgeoisie for her establishment: provincial councillors specialising in Prussian land reform, influential judges, musicians and copyists; the city’s young snobs who preferred von Kleist to Goethe and Hoffmann to Jean Paul, as well as their Freemason fathers who had a craze for all manner of secret societies; and then, of course, young squires on leave, as much at a loss in peacetime as martial in war, sighing unconsolably for their fallen steeds and dead comrades. Under the new chandeliers captains from Uhlan regiments and cuirassiers in gala uniforms strove to outshine one another – until their clothes came off and left them as naked as the Lord had created them and the girls could admire the enigma of their battle scars’ fantastical sutures, the work of drunken barber-surgeons a hair’s breadth from death on semi-mythical battlefields, or shriek with horror as porcelain eyes were plucked out and held up like war trophies from some foreign land. Schall even succeeded in recruiting clients among employees of the new semaphore telegraph, secretly hoping they’d spread her brothel’s reputation far and wide by means of the complex light signals used on cloudless nights.

The economy blossomed. Some of her girls earned so much money they went home to their native villages, until within a few years nearly half Madam Schall’s tribe had been exchanged for new girls, some from as far away as Berlin, where Madam Schall had discreetly advertised in a supplement to the weekly news-sheet for “gentlemen’s companions”.

Now the same frivolous light-heartedness reigned as in her youth, notwithstanding all the sailors arriving from foreign shores with novel diseases almost impossible to stem, causing Schall to impose a special fee on anyone refusing to use the precautions she otherwise provided free of charge – a fee so high only the wealthiest merchants could afford this prophylactic measure, a hundred years before its time, to hinder the spreading of syphilis.

Her new girls were dear little things dressed in the latest fashions, and Schall, who in her youth had had governesses in a long-since ruined Bavarian business house, let several of them be taught the arts of poetry-reading and piano-playing, thus still further enhancing her establishment’s status.

The tradition of holding masked balls in the garden on summer evenings was also resumed, and likewise on Saturday afternoons, in the everlasting minor key of autumnal rains, poetry competitions in praise of love. During the last years of the decade some celebrities appeared, leaving behind them memories and anecdotes – or leaving a girl in the family way so she had to be handed over to an old wise woman Madam Schall had brought all the way from Kiev in exchange for a promise to look after her in her old age. The
luminatus
Jung-Stilling from the Palatinate, for example, who one evening demonstrated his magical skills in the room normally reserved for private parties; or Goethe’s miserable son August who, having bitten off in a single bite the nipple of a newly arrived girl, who then defended herself by stabbing him between the eyes with a hairpin, had caused a scandal by leaving the establishment, in broad daylight, in an open landau, naked save for a plaster on his forehead. Or Alexander von Humboldt, recently back from a long journey in a country no-one had ever heard of, and some even doubted existed, with a bunch of treacherous diseases which almost cost the temporary mistress of his affections her life and which, by love’s free circumambulations, was spread to four others.

Madam Schall was tolerant when it came to odd lusts and had a magistrate’s sense of justice when it came to disputes. “Everyone has the right to be happy in his own way,” she would say standing behind her desk upstairs meticulously totting up accounts for all the house’s services. “But it’s up to my girls to set the price.”