HS02 - Days of Atonement (43 page)

K
INDERGARTEN
—3
P.M.
Something to show you.

The note was not signed. Nor was it sealed. Brief to the point of rudeness, as if scribbled by someone in a hurry who believed he knew me well enough not to bother with a signature. But I was expecting a note from no one, and could not guess why that person might have chosen the Pietist Church of Christ Arisen for a meeting.

‘Who brought the message, Knutzen?’

My clerk shrugged his shoulders. His square peasant face was set in an expression of studied consternation that was habitual.

‘Someone pushed it under the door,’ he repeated obstinately. ‘It was there when I came this morning, sir.’

Gudjøn Knutzen divided his day between sharpening my quills, brushing dust from one corner of the room to another, and showing people into my office, but his heart was with his pigs, ducks, and milking cow. Defending his plot of cabbages from thieves was his only thought. On these resources, his large family eked out their survival. Certainly, they could not have lived on his salary as the Procurator’s scrivener. Prussian civil servants, myself included, had seen their salaries sliced by half after the recent war. The other half had gone to France in the form of war reparation, and to the king, who was trying to set the country straight and repair the damage after the invasion. Knutzen had worked in the Procurator’s office in Lotingen for thirty years by virtue only of the fact that he could read and write. But necessity had driven him back to the soil. He was more passionate about his livestock than he was interested in my papers, and this attitude showed in his dirty shirt, slop-stained trousers, and mud-coloured boots. Day by day, he looked more like a swineherd.

Four months after Jena, I reopened the Procurator’s office, and Knutzen hastened to take up his post again, bombarding me with requests for four months’ salary which I was unable to satisfy. As a result, he now presented himself at work only three days a week, ‘in lieu of lost pay,’ as he quaintly
put it. Even then he appeared only briefly, and I could hardly reprimand him for it.

On this particular day, it was almost ten by the time he decided to show his grubby face. I had been there an hour myself when he came, pulling that note from his pocket as he entered the door. He had been there before me, it appeared. Finding the office empty, he had stuffed the note in his pocket and gone about his business.

‘One of the pigs is ill,’ he said to explain his absence. ‘If that sow dies, there’ll be hell to pay. The French have put their mark on everything for requisitioning.’

In Knutzen’s eyes the health of his pig was of a personal and national importance that far outweighed any criminal investigation I happened to be engaged upon. And his announcement of the French interest put paid to those hopes I had expressed to Helena that Knutzen might be able to make up the shortages in our own food supply.

‘Just about anyone could have left that note, Herr Procurator. I can ask . . .’ Knutzen began, then decided for himself that it was hardly worth the effort of trying. He shook his head. ‘It’s useless, sir.’

Five minutes later, I called for him again, but he did not come.

That sick pig had a lot to answer for.

I turned my attention once again to the anonymous note. The cemetery behind the Pietist chapel was little frequented, except by the grieving parents of children who had recently died. If the writer harboured evil intentions, I would be likely to find myself alone and in a difficult position. Unless . . . A name suddenly occurred to me. If Dittersdorf had sent that message, why did he want to meet me there? He had had the Gottewald children interred in that cemetery. Did he want me to see the grave?

I determined to go, but first, a number of things had to be settled.

The judicial life of Lotingen had not been snuffed out by the massacre of the Gottewalds, or the discovery of the female corpse in Gummerstett’s warehouse. In lulls between active duty, I had completed my reports to Dittersdorf and the French, regarding my journey to Kamenetz. They were stacked on my desk, together with other reports relating to events in the town. I began at the top of the pile, reading the imprisonment order for the baker’s boy, Pincheas Redem, who was guilty of stealing two sacks of corn from his master. As I glanced over the sentence, I pondered for a moment on those sacks of grain. How many pounds of flour would they yield? Despite the statutory six lashes of the cane, and belated promises by his master of forgiveness, the thief still refused to say where he had hidden the goods.

‘What a waste!’ I thought to myself. Rats or rot would destroy the contents long before he was released. I was tempted to question Pincheas
Redem again, and throttle the information out of him. If the sacks were found, the French would get their hands on them. If I could get to them first, the baker might be persuaded to make the best of a bad job and let
me
have a portion of the flour. That would change the expression on Helena’s face. There’d be no more idle talk of appealing to Lavedrine for salvation.

I hesitated one moment, then signed the imprisonment order, and moved on to the remaining documents: petty theft of linen from a washing line, a contested will, a dispute resulting from the fencing of fields after the war. Domestic strife had taken hold of East Prussia again, and I was comforted by the stupidity of it for the best part of the morning and the early afternoon.

I was short of breath by the time I reached the burial ground.

It was bitterly cold in town, but there the temperature seemed to drop another ten degrees. A sensation of leaden desolation took me by the throat every time I was forced to enter the place. This feeling became more intense after the birth of my own children. There is nothing so bleak as a cemetery in winter, except a burial ground for infants. The Church of Christ Arisen had been built in the second half of the seventeenth century, but the cemetery was of a more recent date. The decision to lay out a graveyard for infants in the wooded area behind the church in the summer of 1723 was the brainchild of a pastor by the name of Johannes Huber. An epidemic of choleric fever carried off a quarter of the population of Lotingen that year, and the city fathers had been forced to dig large pits as common graves to accommodate the army of corpses. Shocked by the inhumanity of what he saw, Pastor Huber decided that the children at least should be decently buried, each in an individual grave with a headstone recording the name and age of the victim, together with a brief poetic epigraph. Even now that the epidemic was no more than a memory, the tradition persisted.

Above the gate through which I had passed was a banner worked in metal, badly rusting now, creaking in the wind, which alluded to the tender sentiments that had inspired the creation of that hallowed ground. It was, the parents said, a place where the souls of the dead children would play together for all Eternity, so they had called it the ‘Kindergarten’. Dead Babes’ Wood was the more sombre name by which the common folk of Lotingen referred to the necropolis where the little ones were laid in fond expectation of their future resurrection.

I closed the gate and looked around. The only sound was the swishing and thrashing of the wind in the trees. Snow lay in that deserted, sheltered place, though it had melted away in the busier parts of town. A shiver ran
coursing down my spine. Of a sudden, I realised my foolishness. What was I doing there, alone and unarmed?

‘I must say,’ I heard the voice as a twig cracked behind my back, ‘I do prefer burial in the ground to entombment in a crypt or charnel house beneath the flagstones of a church. Here, you walk among the dead, rather than
over
them. It is more respectful. Don’t you agree?’

I spun around to meet that voice. Trees and bushes grew closer in that direction, the shadows more deeply etched. The tiny white headstones stood out starkly, like milk teeth in a baby’s gums. Lavedrine’s pale face seemed to float in the gloom. But as he stepped out of the dark bower, his black cloak flapped and cracked, whipped about by the wind.

‘I am growing tired of corpses,’ I said.

‘I
never
tire of them,’ he snapped back. ‘I often find them more stimulating than the living. The dead try to keep their secrets. I try to catch them out. Isn’t it a dialogue of a sort?’

The dead do speak to us, Hanno
.

The voice of Immanuel Kant rang in my head. He had expressed a similar notion during our investigation in Königsberg. He and Lavedrine would have had a great deal to talk about.

‘The way a person dies,’ Lavedrine went on. ‘The way he faces death. The time. The place. His final words. His will and testament. Those he loved, and those he hated. Those who loved and hated him. It all comes out. Where and how he wishes to be buried. The words his relatives write upon his monument. The death of an individual tells us a great deal about his life, as I am sure you are aware.’

‘Wouldn’t we be warmer sitting in my office?’

‘Certainly,’ he agreed, ‘but this is the best place for our discussion.’

‘The Gottewald children? Is that your drift?’

‘Are they here, too?’

‘Dittersdorf took the task upon himself,’ I said.

Lavedrine shook his head. ‘They are one reason for coming, then,’ he continued, ‘but not the only one. Many other children are buried here, too. Try to imagine it. As the bereaved parents of Lotingen believe,’ he murmured with a slight, sardonic smile, ‘those children are playing together all around us, Hanno. You and I are surrounded by their ghosts.’

He leant forward and peered at the nearest funeral slab. He took a few paces, then bent to examine another, as if to get close to the truth that might lie beneath the cold earth. ‘Look at this one,’ he said. ‘The poetry is exquisite.
Margaretha von Bisten, born 2nd April, 1800, dead one month later. Here lies the last light of an aged mother’s broken heart
. What helpless yearning inspired the expression of such raw sentiment?’

I felt irritation mounting in my breast. There was something theatrical in his manner, desecrating in his smile. His sounding of the words seemed to me like a heartless profanation.

‘What have you discovered from the French?’ I asked.

‘All in good time,’ he said, flapping his hand at my impatience. ‘I brought you here to see something, as I said.’

‘What is there to see, if not for the Gottewald grave?’

‘Have you any idea how many children are buried in this cemetery?’ he asked, without waiting for an answer. ‘Three hundred? Four hundred? And those are just the newer stones. If we were to count them all together, there would be many more. Infant mortality is high in Lotingen, Herr Procurator. Very high. At least as high as in rural France. That is one of the things that I discovered. There are thousands of tiny corpses hidden beneath the ground of this fine cemetery, this
Kindergarten
.’

He began to pace up and down between the stones.

‘I heard a nursery rhyme in Italy once,’ he went on, stopping close to me. He tapped his forehead, as if to aid his memory. ‘The end-verse goes something like this:
Chiccolino, chiccolino, dove sei? Sotto terra, non lo sai? Chicco
is the native word for seed. Peasant mothers sing it to their infants as they sow the ground in autumn. It must seem such a waste to children, don’t you agree, throwing the seed onto the soil as the hard winter comes along. The mother tells the children that the seeds will sleep beneath the earth till spring, then they’ll sprout and grow into vegetables and fruits.
Chiccolino, dove sei?
Where are you, little seed? I always thought the rhyme extremely sinister.
Sotto terra, non lo sai?
I’m under the ground, the little seed replies.’

He shook his head, then passed his hand through his rebellious curls.

‘The little seeds buried in this cemetery will never see the light of day again.’

A different memory cast its shadow over my mind. The tale Rochus had told me in Kamenetz. Children hidden in holes beneath the snow by parents who did not want them to be taken off for soldiers. Children who died, while their parents searched frantically, trying to remember where they had hidden them. All those
chiccolini
buried alive, dead by the time spring came round to yield its bitter harvest of skeletons.

‘Why in heaven’s name are we here?’ I repeated stubbornly.

‘While I was away,’ he continued, ‘I was reading some of those reports that you Prussians love to compile with matchless precision. Can you guess what I discovered?’

He did not give me time to protest the uselessness of the question.

‘In the statistics regarding infant mortality,’ he raced on, ‘East Prussia has
an unusually high incidence of child death, even by your own national standards . . .’

‘I know the causes,’ I interrupted angrily. ‘Starvation caused by war. A blighted harvest. Wilful destruction of crops. Heartless French requisitioning of food. Repeated theft and slaughter of precious farm animals. Is that what you’re getting at? Is that why so many of our children die?’

His eyes fixed on mine. Slowly, he shook his head. The colour seemed to drain from his face. ‘You could not be more wrong,’ he said quietly. ‘I was looking at the figures for the years from 1725 to 1800. Long before the French set foot in Prussia.’

‘Very well, tell me. Why
do
so many of our children die?’

‘Look around you, Herr Procurator,’ he replied.

The white stones and crosses seemed to populate the ground more densely beneath the darkening sky.

‘Sixty per cent of the infants in Prussia die before they reach their tenth birthday, Stiffeniis,’ he began. ‘Some are not one day old. A day? An hour! All of those children—ninety-nine per cent, let’s say—die at home. At least seventy per cent of the deaths were not caused by illness, as one might expect. Babies suffocated in their cots, they fell down stairs, they were crushed by a cow, they drowned in a milk pail, swallowed nails, drank poison. The list is endless. Household accidents? The number of toddlers reduced to a heap of bones by a ravenous pig would astound you. Quite apart from an army of tiny corpses found in shallow graves in the woods, names unknown, deaths unregistered with the authorities.’