Authors: Carl-Johan Vallgren
Götz noticed a tear in the corner of her eye; a tear she brushed his hand from when he tried to wipe it away.
“A whore!” she said in a voice meant to sound contemptuous but which failed to hide an innate sympathy for the vulnerable. “Thank goodness the children are in bed. If you weren’t bound by your Hippocratic oath I shouldn’t let you go there.”
Götz let her button up his fur coat right to the collar and put on his hat and lawn scarf before picking up his bag and going over to the girl. “Hurry,” he said, “or we’ll have the coachman’s life on our conscience in addition to the rest of this miserable business . . .”
The snowstorm was the worst within living memory; worse than the winter gales from Siberia that had ravaged the Bay of Danzig around the turn of the century. A flurry of snowflakes the size of half-crowns was blowing in with full gale force from the Baltic. So thickly wrapped up was the coachman that only the tip of his nose stuck out from his leather hood. The horses, Götz noticed as they drove off, had lost all sense of direction, and it was only instinct that prevented them trotting straight into the wall of the next house. The girl, buried under a mountain of rugs, her hair sprinkled with snow, sat opposite him.
“Tell me,” he demanded, “what has happened?”
As the sleigh moved along Königsberg’s snow-covered alleys, the doctor heard in outline of the misfortune that had driven the girl into the gale. One of Madam Schall’s girls had been in labour for more than forty hours, and her strength was giving out. From this account of the labour pains Götz realised that contractions had set in, but couldn’t be clear as to whether the birth itself was overdue.
“The head’s too big,” the girl said, in a voice that seemed not to trust its message. “The head’s too big, I saw it with my own eyes.”
Götz found it hard to believe the birth could have gone that far and then stopped. Probably the severity of the woman’s pains, he told himself, was due to a narrow pelvis. It transpired that this was her first childbirth. At the same time, the girl explained, shouting to make herself heard above the wind’s diabolical howling, another girl was giving birth in the next room. So it was a question of two deliveries, one normal, one with complications. Apparently the establishment had had no-one else to turn to.
Götz recalled an older woman who acted as a midwife and maybe even, in secret, as a baby farmer, though on that point he might be deceiving himself. Despite everything, his memories from those days lay blessedly in fallow, in a fifteen-year deep soil of premarital urges he had no desire to dig any deeper into than he’d already done this evening. When had the waters broken, he asked. The girl wasn’t sure. “The head’s too big,” was all she could volunteer, as if the words kept going round and round in her mind.
As far as Götz could make out, the sleigh was moving southwards, along Langgasse. The snow had eased up a little, but there was no change in the gale’s force. In Schloss Strasse a lamplighter was fighting an heroic battle to carry out his duty, and further down from Kneiphof Island bells could be heard tolling in the cathedral tower. The doctor wondered what the reason could be for ringing bells at the height of a snowstorm. The question baffled him enough to make him lean forward and ask the driver.
“Ain’t ye heard, sir?” the driver shouted back. “The Provincial Council has decided to go to war against Bonaparte. Which means more bloodbaths, and that’s for sure.”
Götz sank back into his rugs, and for a while his attention strayed from the call of duty and the girl in the sleigh, sobbing at the thought of her friend’s plight. It was a rumour Götz had heard a week ago, but hardly credited. Encouraged by the Russian successes, the Prussian nobility had decided to revolt against the Frenchman’s new order of things.
Painful shudders passed through the doctor when he thought back to the three campaigns he had served in, only just coming through them alive, the worst of them being Austerlitz, where the East Prussian grenadiers had been crushed by Marshal Davout’s divisions. He was still being tormented by nightmares from that battlefield, the terrible wounds caused by the French guns, the bayonet wounds, punctured lungs and intestines, limbs shot away, legs blown to pieces, burns that had made full-grown men cry like babies, scream for their mothers, suck their thumbs and die. In the field ambulances they’d worked in shifts carrying out operations, waded up to their ankles in an indescribable slush of blood, excrement and amputated limbs, all in an unbearable atmosphere of lethal anxiety and meaningless prayers that could cause the most hardbitten to faint. Yet it was true, what his immediate superior had afterwards said to him over a glass of port wine in a Berlin officers’ club: without all those deaths and our faithful body snatchers we wouldn’t be saving so many lives today.
They had become masters at staunching bleedings, sewing up cuts and slashes, removing shattered arms and flinging them on to a heap, at amputating with only a shot of brandy and a quiet prayer to numb the pain. But the price, Götz now understood from his nightmares, was a terror that wouldn’t leave them until the day when they themselves said goodbye to life. For terror it was that shadowed them after all these wars.
And now, he thought, seated in the sleigh bound for the love nest of his happy-go-lucky youth, the church bells ringing in his ears, now they were all set to go to war again, if only to reinstate their Prussian honour. That was why they – Count Yorck, Alexander zu Dohna-Schobitten and Baron Hardenberg – had ordered the bells to ring out through this blizzard, to get the King, hiding with his court at Memel, to show some courage.
In a cloud of whirling snow they drove on down Prinsenstrasse, Götz winning his duel with his horrific memories by thinking about Immanuel Kant, who had lived in a house on this street during his student years, and always been so punctual to the minute that people had set their watches by him. Awakened by his lame servant, who, so rumour had it, was under strict orders not to let his master go back to sleep even for ten minutes, even if he begged, Kant had risen at exactly a quarter to five every morning. In the evening, so another rumour went, this same servant would roll him ingeniously up in four patchwork quilts for him to pass the night, motionless as a mummy, because the philosopher maintained this enriched his dreams and stimulated his imagination. At nine o’clock sharp the light was put out.
Affected by the thought of Kant’s chronomania, Götz took out his silver watch and saw that it was past ten o’clock. They should reach the establishment in a quarter of an hour at most.
Brushing some snowflakes from his face, he stared out at the row of façades behind which the city’s wealthier businessmen sat counting their day’s takings; men who had also visited Madam Schall’s establishment in years gone by, and whose sons might possibly have fathered the infants he was now being called out to deliver. Could there be some connection, he wondered, between objects and events? As between the amber with the beetle in it, this uprising against Bonaparte and the delivery just now awaiting him in the House of Desires, for instance?
Madam Schall received him without a flicker of recognition. A characteristic piece of discretion, Götz assumed, developed over more than three decades in her trade, first as a common prostitute, then as a hostess and, finally, after many diligent intrigues and much saving up, as proprietress of the establishment and all its chattels, and with half a dozen girls in her debt for the rest of their lives. She had aged more than he might have imagined. In his day she’d been a striking woman who could as easily have been thirty as fifty, wearng a dress with a bustle and forever busy with her household accounts or calling in cash due from those who had enjoyed her services on tick. Now she was, at best, an ageless old woman.
“Thank goodness you could come, doctor,” she said. “The girl’s in a bad way. I hope you don’t think it inappropriate, but we’ve sent for a priest.”
Götz gave an embarrassed nod. “Just show me the way,” he said. “Science can’t wait for the extreme unction.”
They passed through a hall where time had stood still since his last visit. Its wallpapers were painted with the same frivolous Pompeiian motifs where everyone was hard at it with everyone else. In the windows hung the same white satin curtains, intended to create an atmosphere of cleanliness and luxury. But it was gloomier now than it had been. Before the turn of the century the brothel had been a playground for unmarried men in delirious mood. Laughter had echoed as a myriad customers hailed each other in a dozen tongues. In the doorways to their rooms half-naked women had whispered to their clients in the language of love, promising with indecent gestures to satisfy their most secret desires, assuage their gnawing hunger, their burning thirst, undressing them with their eyes and teasing them like children by snatching at their hats. On summer evenings Madam Schall had arranged masquerade balls. In the garden where Chinese lanterns, likewise painted with obscene motifs, had hung from the fruit trees, grown men had played hide-and-seek in the dark, naked men chased girls across the lawns, all in a spirit of joyful abandon, as if life consisted of suffering and humanity’s ultimate consolation lay in escaping unclothed into a game of hide-and-seek. Now only a gloom of inverse strength prevailed; or was it he himself who had changed and was seeing everything now with a newly acquired clear-sightedness – the furniture that had seen better days; the grubby tablecloths; the parlour table formerly laid with Meissen china, but now more likely populated with germs.
Upstairs he took in at a glance the room that was to etch itself for ever on his memory. On the bedside table lay the morocco jewellery box with its cheap trinkets, the enamel washbowl, the pitcher and the folded damask napkins which constituted every prostitute’s basic accoutrements.
In a bowl by the bed lay some oiled satin condoms, not to prevent pregnancy – on this point the girls still preferred
coitus interruptus
and herbal ointments from the Lithuanian market women – but to prevent diseases, some absolutely incurable and others that brought with them a slow putrefaction but spread such irritation to the brain that the victim died at one of the city’s lunatic asylums in a purgatory of indescribable itchings. In a wardrobe hung sinfully low-cut nightdresses. In a drawer lay underclothes in cambrics of seven different colours. On the dressing table stood a battery of soaps, perfumes, oils and pomades, and in the middle of the room, pale unto death, in a bed with a silken sheet covering her pudenda, lay the girl.
Götz set her age at about twenty though his unconscious conferred on her the qualities of an ageless angel. She was blonde, in the Slavonic way, with red streaks in her untidy knot of hair. Putting down his bag, he felt her pulse. She was hardly alive. Her breath came in intermittent gasps. Her feverish forehead was burning hot.
A movement from the other side of the room made him turn. It was the clergyman.
“Prepare yourself for a shock, doctor,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Whatever it may be, it won’t live long, thank God.”
Götz noticed the priest’s bag was like his own, filled, presumably, with implements for deliverance of the soul rather than the flesh: biblical words, sacramental wafers and bottles containing oils for the extreme unction. The man’s presence irritated him. Not just because he regarded himself as defending – as he often put it – the island of science against the stormy ocean of superstitions and metaphysics; or because he embodied the opposite of the commonsense atheism he, the doctor, cultivated, albeit in secret so as not to scare the daylights out of Catherine Götz or confuse his children and fill them with anxiety at a sensitive age. But more out of a feeling that this was a breach of etiquette; that this man in black spent his life wishing to high heaven what Götz himself wanted to keep firmly planted on earth.
Lifting the sheet, he recoiled instinctively from a sight that in all its monstrous detail was to haunt him to his dying day half a century later in the Age of Steam.
The child, which by some miracle had succeeded in getting itself halfway out into the world, was nothing but a quintessence of human deformity. So grotesquely large was the skull emerging from the birth canal that it had split the woman’s pelvis. He could scarcely bring himself to look at the face turned towards him. The harelip was such that neither nose nor nostrils existed. In the centre of the child’s face leered a dark red cavity, like a bowl whose lacerated edge ended at eye level. On the bald head were strange protruberances reminiscent of black fossilised snails. The tongue was split like a snake’s. Bumps and swellings disfigured the temples, the mottled skin was scaly like a lizard’s. It was a monster.
Götz had to close his eyes to keep his composure. The girl was probably beyond saving. Judging by the sheets, she must already have lost several litres of blood. Her deep unconsciousness bordered on coma. Her pelvic and stomach muscles had ceased to function, so there was no chance of getting the delivery going by natural contractions. For a moment Götz thought of delivering the child with the scalpel, but rejected the idea since, in her weakened state, it would put the mother beyond saving.
He took out lancets and scissors, disinfected his instruments. The girl’s heartbeat was so faint that at least it would not cause yet more excessive bleeding. Drenched in his own sweat, Götz cut open her vagina. His only thought was to at least save the life of this creature that, by its own force, had thrust its head out into the world. It was a miracle, he thought, the birth even having got this far, that the head could have left the womb without killing the girl instantly. All the time he worked, her pulse was growing weaker, but by now the vaginal opening was so large he could pull the child out without having to use the forceps. As if from far away in another world he heard the clergyman mumbling a prayer, preparing to bless this whore about whom neither of them knew a thing, but whom everyone realised was lost.
Slowly, centimetre by centimetre, he pulled out the child. What was supposed to be a face, he noticed, had a bluish flush, the umbilical cord having wound itself several times round the child’s neck as if nature had at the last moment opted for a mercy killing. Götz cut it and went on easing the body this way and that, the woman’s breathing meanwhile sinking so low it could barely support life. The deformities revealed themselves successively as he drew the child into the world.