Marek Krajewski: Death in Breslau

The words broke up, the grammar was confused — Anwaldt started weeping like a child. His abused and stung face was contorted by wrenching sobs. Mock opened the door to the corridor and looked around. A drunken client was kicking up a row between the tables downstairs. Mock closed the door and approached the window to open it wider. The garden was bursting with the warm scent of lime trees. Some Bacchante was groaning in the next room.

“Don’t exaggerate, Anwaldt.” He bit his tongue. (He had wanted to say: “Don’t whine; you’re a man”.) His irritation was expressed by a loud puff. “Don’t exaggerate; it’s enough for you to take great care until we catch Erkin. And then the curse will not be fulfilled.”

The young man now sat with dry eyes. He avoided Mock’s gaze, nervously snapped his knuckles, rubbed the small cut on his chin, whipped his eyes from side to side.

“Don’t worry, Herbert,” Mock understood the state he was in all too well. “Who knows, maybe our neuroses are caused by us holding back our tears. After all, Homer’s heroes cried, too. And bitter tears at that!”

“And you … do you sometimes cry?” Anwaldt looked at Mock hopefully.

“No,” he lied.

Anwaldt was gripped by anger. He got up and shouted: “Well, right … because why should you want to cry? You weren’t brought up in an orphanage … Nobody made you eat your own excrement when you couldn’t swallow the spinach! You didn’t have a whore for a mother and a cursed Prussian aristocrat for a father who did nothing more for his child than put him in a Catholic orphanage and secondary school specializing in the Classics! You don’t wake up happy to have survived one more day because somehow no-one’s torn your belly apart and poured vermin into your guts! Listen to me, man, they waited seven centuries for a boy and a girl … Why should they let an opportunity like this go by now? Their possessed shaman is even now undergoing a revelation … The deity is approaching …”

Mock was no longer listening; he was feverishly searching through scrolls of memory, like someone who, at a stiff, official reception cannot bear silence at the table and is trying to find some joke, anecdote, pun in his head … Anwaldt yelled; someone knocked at the door. Anwaldt screamed; the knocking intensified. A fake groan resounded in the other room and spilled out into the garden through the open window. Anwaldt was hysterical; someone thumped on the door.

Mock got up and took a swing. His small palm bounced off his yelling assistant’s cheek. Silence. Nobody was knocking at the door; the Maenad next door gathered her clothes which lay scattered on the floor; Anwaldt froze; Mock found his lost thought in the darkness. He heard his own voice resound in his head: “Don’t exaggerate; it’s enough for you to take great care until we catch Erkin. And then the curse won’t be fulfilled … curse won’t be fulfilled … curse won’t be fulfilled …”

He was standing very close to Anwaldt and looking him in the eyes: “Listen, Herbert, Doctor Hartner wrote that their vengeance is invalid if it is not executed in exactly the same circumstances as the crime to be avenged. The Yesidis waited centuries for a son and a daughter to be born to the von der Malten family … But there have already been siblings of mixed sex in the family. Olivier von der Malten’s aunt and his father, Ruppert. Why didn’t the Yesidis kill them , rape her and sew scorpions into their innards? Hartner suspects that revenge could not be taken in a closed convent.” Mock shut his eyes and experienced self-loathing. “I don’t think so. Do you know why? Because their father was no longer alive. Those twins were born after the death of their father who was killed at Sadowa. I know that perfectly well. My university colleague, Olivier von der Malten, told me about his grandfather-hero. So the curse was not fulfilled … But if von der Malten were to die …”

Anwaldt walked up to the table, grabbed the bottle of wine and knocked it back. Mock watched as the wine ran down his chin and dyed his shirt. Anwaldt drank to the last drop. He hid his face in his open hands and hissed out:

“Alright, I’ll do it. I’ll kill the Baron.”

Mock choked on his own self-loathing.

“You can’t. He’s your father.”

Anwaldt’s eyes flashed between his fingers.

“No. You are my father.”

BRESLAU, THURSDAY, JULY 19TH, 1934

FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

The black Adler stopped in front of von der Malten’s manor. A man got out and staggered towards the gate. The sound of the doorbell tore through the silence. The Adler drove off with a screech of tyres. The man at the wheel looked into the rear window and contemplated his own reflection for a while.

“You’re the lowest son-of-a-bitch,” he said to the tired eyes. “You pushed that boy into committing a crime. He has become a tool in your hands. A tool to remove the last witness of your masonic past.”

Baron Olivier von der Malten stood on the threshold of his enormous hall. It looked as if he had not been to bed at all. He wrapped the crimson dressing gown around himself and watched the swaying Anwaldt severely.

“What are you thinking of, young man? That this is a police station, a hostel for drunks?”

Anwaldt smiled and — in order to hide his stammering speech — said as quietly as he could:

“I’ve got some new, important information for you …”

The host entered the hall and indicated for Anwaldt to do the same, after which he dismissed the sleepy servant. The spacious, panel-covered room was hung with portraits of the von der Maltens. Anwaldt did not see sternness and gravity in them but rather cunning and vanity. He looked around — in vain — for a chair. The Baron made as if not to notice.

“What do you want to tell me about this case that’s new? I had lunch with Counsellor Mock today so I am more or less up to date. What could have happened this evening?”

Anwaldt lit a cigarette and, for lack of an ashtray, shook the ash on to the polished floor.

“And so Counsellor Mock told you about the Yesidi’s vengeance. Did he mention that the vengeance had not been wholly fulfilled?”

“Yes. ‘The mistake of an old demented shaman,’ ” he quoted Hartner. “Did you come to see me, drunk as you are, at four o’clock in the morning to ask me about my conversation with Mock?”

Anwaldt scrutinized the Baron and noticed quite a few shortcomings in his dress: the button on his vest, the strings of his long johns slipping out from under the dressing gown. He burst out laughing and stayed in this strange, doubled-up position for a while. He imagined the elderly gentleman sitting on the toilet and panting heavily, when here comes his drunken little son and destroys the sacred peace of the elegant residence. Laughter was still contorting his lips when he let loose words, swollen with anger:

“Dear Papi, we both know that the dervish’s revelations are startingly consistent with family realities. The unofficial ones, of course. The god of the Yesidis has finally grown impatient and taken bastards into account. On the other hand, how is it that in this knightly family no warrior inseminated any captive, no landowner got hold of a comely peasant girl in a haystack? All were temperate and faithful to their marriage vows. Even my dear Papi. After all, he begat me before getting married.”

“I would not joke in your position, Herbert,” the Baron’s tone was inalterably haughty — but his face had shrunk. In one moment he had changed from a proud junker to a fearful old man. His neatly combed hair had slipped to the sides, his lips sunk to reveal the absence of dentures.

“I don’t wish you to call me by my first name,” Anwaldt had stopped smiling. “Why didn’t you tell me everything at the beginning?”