HS02 - Days of Atonement (35 page)

‘More than interested,’ Lavedrine replied. ‘But I asked you a question earlier, and you did not answer it. Are you a qualified physician, sir?’

Aaron Jacob seemed to shrink inside his voluminous robes. He stared at Lavedrine with what might have been distaste.

‘Put yourself in my place for a moment,
monsieur
. Do you believe that I could ever qualify as a doctor? In Prussia? I am a Jew. An outcast. I make no secret of my creed, or my origins. I can never be anything outside my own community.’

I knew what he was speaking of. In many of our cities, Jews were allowed to enter the town by one gate only—the gate reserved for cattle and other beasts, and they were taxed at the same rate. Jews were not permitted to own a book published in the German language, and they could be expelled from the country for possession alone. Unless they were prepared to forswear their religion, they were banned from our schools and universities. In my own class at the Institute of Halle, a student known as Franz Schmidt had been unmasked as a secret Jew. The university authorities had whipped him through the town for trying to pass himself off as a Prussian in order to study Jurisprudence.

‘Even so, you work “miracles”,’ Lavedrine contended.

‘Inside these walls, I do what I can,’ the man replied. ‘I know more than common ignorance will allow, but everything that I know, I have learnt by private study.’

‘Forgive me if I ask, but which German books have you, a Jew, been able to consult?’ I queried.

Aaron Jacob smiled at me. He pulled the coverlet from his head and let it fall on his shoulders. His hair was greasy black with tallow wax, parted in the centre, pulled tight behind his ears in a pigtail. On the crown of his head he wore a small white skullcap.

‘I was born in Lithuania,’ he said, ‘but I am not Lithuanian. I live in Prussia, but I am not Prussian. I am a Jew. We have no
nation
—no home—except for the one that we have lost. I have made my way among fellow travellers. I speak German, but I also know Latin and Italian. French is no mystery to me. I read and understand the language. Russian is my second tongue. I admit to owning no German books,’ he paused. ‘But not all books are German, Herr Procurator. Many of the best come from Scotland in the north, Italy in the south, and other places, too. I have read everything that is relevant to my studies. From the greatest of the Ancients, Paracelsus, to Professor John Brown, who is living in Edinburgh at this very moment. If you wish to know why those children died, I can show you.’

Lavedrine looked questioningly at me.

‘Lead on,’ I said.

‘We are not going far,’ Aaron Jacob replied, taking a hooked stick from the wall, turning towards the windows. ‘On that wall, there’—he pointed to the darkest corner of the room—‘I keep my specimens.’

He reached up, caught the hook in a loop of string suspended from a shutter, and pulled. I blinked as light flooded in. What had seemed in the heavy gloom like a badly made wall full of unsightly lumps was transformed by light into an exhibition of a most curious sort. As the Jew pulled back the other shutter, I was oddly reminded of my own kitchen. Helena had made a habit of hanging bits of old crockery on the wall by way of decoration. But the objects on these walls were not blue-and-white pottery from the Low Countries. They might have been plain clay bowls, rather than pretty plates. Each one was facing the wall, as if to hide the design, the colour, and the glazing.

Aaron Jacob turned to us like a university demonstrator, his long hooked stick in his hand. ‘Which of these belonged to the children who were massacred the other week, do you think?’

I was bewildered by this question, my eyes flashing from one to another of the dozens of dull forms that were ranged upon the wall, searching for examples that were smaller.

‘What are they?’ I asked.

‘Cranial imprints,’ snapped Lavedrine, before Aaron Jacob could say a word. Then he turned to the Jew. ‘Did all of these come from Biswanger?’

‘Oh, no, sir.’ Aaron Jacob moved closer to the wall, like a
cicerone
in an Italian church, preparing to explain the mysteries of a fresco for a pittance. ‘Only four of these were made by him. The rest were in my baggage when I made my escape from Vilnius. I have friends in places where the Jews reside. Knowing of my research, they try to obtain impressions from a corpse whenever anything remarkable occurs. They send me a plaster cast, and a short history of the person who has died. Sometimes, of course, I pay. As you know, I am a man of adequate means. News of the local massacre spread to Judenstrasse. Biswanger mentioned that he had the bodies in his workshop. I knew what he was after.
Geld
is everything to that man.’

‘Why did you want them?’ I asked, trying to stifle my feelings of revulsion.

The Jew turned to me. ‘Have you heard of Gottfried Treviranus, sir?’

‘Another gravedigger?’ I asked with a shudder.

‘Professor Treviranus recently invented the science of Biology,’ Aaron Jacob continued without batting an eye. ‘By careful observation of the human body, he says, we may make genial intuitions about its nature, and speculate intelligently about how it functions. A simple instance, the spleen. Does any man truly know what it is for?’

‘The seat of melancholy,’ I murmured automatically, like any man who has read a book of Renaissance poetry in his youth.

‘A genial intuition,’ the Jewish scholar of the macabre replied, ‘but poetry hardly leads to intelligent speculation about what the organ is
for
. That is what the medical researcher is interested in knowing. If one spleen, or a hundred, are left in water, the liquid will always turn black. Chemical analysis of the fluid tells us that various minerals have been deposited there, and nowhere else in the body. From this evidence, we can deduce that the spleen in every human body is a sort of chamber pot, though we still have no clear idea why certain substances gather there.’

‘I see that you are a scientist,’ Lavedrine praised him. ‘But let us limit our talk to heads. The heads of the Gottewald infants.’

The Jew bowed his own head, as if to acquiesce, then raised his stick and pointed to the top row of plaster casts on the wall. ‘Science does not consist in merely cataloguing random facts,
monsieur
. It requires the formulation of a hypothesis that will explain them,’ he continued. ‘I began with these six Gentile casts. They are impressions taken from the skulls of persons who had led unexceptional lives. This one belonged to a boy of ten,’ he said, tapping the plate on the left. ‘They range in ten-year intervals—step by step—to this one over here, a man of sixty. Each one died of what might be called unexceptional causes, common illnesses: cold, hunger, congestion, fever, and so on. The sutures—the points of joining of the cranial plates, here and
here—are quite regular. They are, I repeat, unexceptional in every way. These six became my template,’ he explained.

‘At that point, for the purposes of comparison, I began to collect the skulls of Jews and Gentiles who had died of exceptional causes. Accidents, acts of God, for the most part. Murder in some cases. Like the Gottewald children. Their heads are remarkable,’ he said. His brow creased into deep wrinkles. ‘But we must take one small step at a time.’

‘A mob is howling for blood,’ I urged. ‘How many steps will they allow us?’

‘As many as we need to understand,’ Lavedrine snapped. As if the subject truly interested him. As if he thought that it ought to interest me as well. ‘Please, go on, Herr Jacob.’

Aaron Jacob bowed. ‘In 1791, Galvani discovered the existence of the neuro-muscular electrical impulse. This is the same
spiritus vitalis
, or “vital force” that Franz Anton Mesmer also describes. Magnetism is both terrestrial, as Newton suggests, and it is animal. That is to say, the human body is a battleground of conflicting electrical charges. I believe that the magnetic tension inside the head, the ebb and flow within the blood-paths of the brain, is the direct result of external stimuli, and I am trying to construct a theory based on the positive–negative poles of magnetic attraction. Some people appear to attract only positive energy. They live a long and a peaceful life. Others attract negative energy, which will eventually destroy them.’

‘Where do the Gottewald children fit into your scheme?’ Lavedrine enquired.

The Jew tapped his stick against the last three plates on the bottom row. ‘I have examined their skulls with care. Biswanger swears that the casts he made were perfect. Yet there is something truly perplexing about them, and I am hesitant to explain it.’

He set aside his stick, removed the three cranial casts from the wall, and laid them on a small table beneath the window.

‘You will see them better there,’ he said, taking up a candle, lighting three others that were resting on the table. ‘I suppose you are asking yourselves why I am so interested in phrenological science?’

‘I do not care,’ I snapped. ‘Just tell us why the children died.’

I might have been alone in the vast Arctic wilderness for all the response I got. Aaron Jacob turned to Lavedrine, as if I had ceased to exist. ‘Do you know the history of the Jewish nation, sir?’ he asked with extreme gravity.

‘Everyone has heard tales from the Bible,’ the Frenchman conceded.

‘That is a start, I suppose.’ The Jew shrugged. ‘The Five Books of Moses inform us that the Jewish people have been plagued with misfortune from the dawn of time. We were God’s Chosen, but always—invariably, I might
say—we made the wrong choice. We ignored the Voice from the Burning Bush. We worshipped graven images. We offended, we were punished, carried into exile, forced to wander forty years in the desert of Sinai. We have been adrift ever since. On our heads the weight of celestial judgement has fallen heavily, and our sufferings are by no means over. If I were to take down one of the Jewish casts, I could show you, trace for trace, the terrible persecutions we have suffered as a consequence of defying the holy words of the Torah.’

‘An interesting notion,’ Lavedrine said quietly.

‘It is not a question of the colour of our skin, or the peculiarity of our language,’ the Jew went on. ‘There are actual physical mutations! They may be caused by the way in which a people or a nation is forced to live and suffer, though I cannot swear to it. There may be other causes. God may mark out one people in a certain way, and mark all others differently, in a manner only He can see. But I repeatedly noted minute striations and some significant patterns in the way that the bones are knit together in Jewish skulls, and I have drawn certain conclusions from them. I have made comparison with Gentile skulls and never found a trace of these telltale signs. With one exception. The Gottewald children, but they, of course are Prussian . . .’

‘Which signs?’ I snapped. I believe in Practical Reason. I have no time for men who see the future written in the stars, or women who claim to read the lines of the hand for a
Pfennig
.

‘The human skull is a map,’ Aaron Jacob answered, his eyes gleaming with passion. ‘In Jewish skulls, there is evident fragility in the parietal suturing, a curious rotundity in the
protuberantia occipitalis
, a distinct porosity of the calcium . . .’

‘They are different,’ I interrupted again. ‘According to you.’

‘According to science,’ he countered, pointing to an almost imperceptible ridge that ran down the centre of the cranium on the left. ‘Here, do you see it? And here, again? In the case of the little girl, there seems to be a less dramatic suture, but it does not greatly alter the matter. What does this mean? The answer is as simple as it is inevitable. These three children were marked from birth as victims. Though Gentiles, Divine wrath was irresistibly attracted to them. They had committed no sin, but they have been punished. As certainly as a magnet attracts iron filings. As inevitably as a Jew calls forth Christian hatred. They have been struck down.’

There was a mad light shining in that man’s eyes as he raised his forefinger to the heavens.

‘A universal law of violence?’ I asked incredulously. ‘All who die cruelly bear the mark of Cain? That is absurd! Why should God’s retribution fall on the blameless heads of three Prussian children?’

Suddenly, I saw the flaw in the man’s argument. Aaron Jacob was a Jew. He would tell us that the world was square if it explained the tragic history of his people. He was obsessed, desperate for an explanation. He thought to find it in his treasure trove of horrid objects.

‘Are you suggesting that murder is not the action of free will?’ I pressed him. ‘That it is simply a casual attraction of contrasting energies? I know the works of Mesmer and his followers, but your interpretation is without parallel, sir. You’ll be telling us next that all the victims of the guillotine were unlucky souls whose heads just happened to be the wrong shape!’

‘I would give my fortune to examine each and every one of them,’ Aaron Jacob replied defiantly. ‘Those skulls would provide definitive confirmation of my theory.’

‘Or reveal its total lunacy,’ I counter-attacked.

Aaron Jacob stared at me in silence. I had the feeling he would have loved to run his fingers over the irregularities of my own head. ‘Does the idea disturb you, sir? God knows and sees all things. If He knows of injustice, why does He not prevent it? He could have saved those children, yet He did not. I repeat what I said to you before. They were born to die by violence.’

He might have added Bruno Gottewald to his list. Sybille Gottewald, too, if the mangled corpse we had found that morning could be identified. He knew nothing about them, and I was glad of that. Aaron Jacob would only have twisted the information to suit his own ends.

‘We are looking for a more logical solution,’ I said plainly. ‘A solution that is supported by evidence.’

Aaron Jacob took a step towards me. A light was burning in his eyes. His body seemed to quiver with determination. ‘Can you offer one single reason that explains the persistent tragedy of my people over the course of thousands of years?’

‘We are not here to investigate the vicissitudes of the Jews,’ I answered. ‘We are interested in three children murdered in Lotingen. We must learn why they died. And why their mother is missing.’