HS02 - Days of Atonement (64 page)

‘I wish to be alone with her,’ she said.

I saw the shock register on his face.

‘It is too dangerous,’ I protested, stepping between them. ‘That woman is being held to protect her from herself. To protect others from
her.
’

But Lavedrine regained his ascendancy quickly.

‘I guarantee that nothing will happen,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’

‘You are not obliged to see her, Helena,’ I insisted, laying my hand over hers.

She slipped her hand from mine, touched my lips to silence me.

‘I
want
to see her,’ my wife said quietly.

 43 

W
E SET OFF
down a different corridor.

Low, barrel-vaulted, narrow, darker. There were no bars, no windows, very few doors, and everything was strangely silent.

From out of the twilight gloom, a warder came towards us. She was walking on tiptoe, and stood aside to let us pass. But Lavedrine stopped beside her, stepping closer, saying something in a low voice. The woman’s eyes darted inquisitively at Helena, then at me, then back at Lavedrine.

She bowed her head in deference to his authority.

‘I’ll tell the bath-maid,’ she whispered, glancing at Helena again, examining her from head to toe. ‘She’ll need a waxed coat and a hood. Those are the rules.’

‘Very well,’ Lavedrine replied, cutting her short. ‘Come, Helena. Frau Barenstoft here will lead you in, and help you change. The atmosphere is hot and damp where Frau Gottewald is being treated. It would soak that fine cloak of yours in an instant. Stiffeniis and I will be close, I promise you.’

‘Not
too
close,’ Helena replied. ‘I wish to speak to her alone. I told you that.’

‘As we agreed,’ Lavedrine assented.

‘You must call for help if you need it,’ I added sternly.

Frau Barenstoft smiled. ‘There’s no danger, sir,’ she said, making a curtsy to Helena, inviting my wife to follow her.

As the door swung closed behind the two women, we stood in the corridor, watching through the window-glass. Frau Barenstoft stopped before a large cupboard, then turned to face Helena, indicating that she should remove her heavy travelling cloak. As she did so, the woman reached into a cupboard, came out holding a shimmering, sand-coloured canvas garment, and handed it to my wife. Helena looked bewildered as she donned the robe, and she put on a matching waterproof hat like a sou’wester with a peaked brim and a flap behind which covered her ears and neck. A moment later, they turned away from us. Frau Barenstoft stopped before a white
door, went inside for a moment, then came out and nodded, signalling Helena to go in alone. Without a word or backward look, my wife pushed open the door of the cubicle and disappeared from view.

For an instant, a wave of panic swept over me. I felt as though I had lost her. She was out of my sight, beyond the range of my help, in an asylum for the mad. In a room where some mysterious medical treatment was taking place.

Frau Barenstoft came calmly out of the dressing room.

‘Will there be anything else, sir?’ she murmured.

Lavedrine shook his head, and she walked off quickly into the gloom.

‘Come, Stiffeniis,’ he urged. ‘We must keep a watchful eye on our own dear Helena.’ He took my arm, pushed open the door, and led me towards the one through which my wife had disappeared.

Our own dear Helena . . .

‘You promised to leave her alone,’ I protested.

Lavedrine held more tightly onto my arm. ‘For safety’s sake, we will not let Helena out of our sight.’

I needed no prompting to keep my wife from harm. And I was curious to see the woman that Lavedrine described as Sybille Gottewald. We sprinted towards the door that Helena had passed through. It was wider than a normal door, painted white, divided into two halves, a round spyhole of curved glass in each half. Lavedrine looked through one window, I peered in through the other, standing shoulder to shoulder.

There were three large metal boxes inside the green-and-white tiled room. They had been lined up against the far wall, each one like a large brass coffin mounted on a stand. The dull burnished metal was heavily studded, a variety of tubes set into the upper lid of the casket. The arms and the body of the patient were constrained inside, while the head protruded from a hole, resting on a sort of brace which held a pillow. There was another woman sitting in a chair by the far wall, who was evidently the guardian of the place. Her size reassured me, as did the fact that she was comfortably asleep, her chin sunk onto her breast.

Helena sat on a three-legged stool beside one of the contraptions, in which a person had been imprisoned. There was no other patient in the room.

‘Frau Gottewald,’ Lavedrine murmured.

I stared hard at the woman. Her head was tilted far back against the pillow. Through the billowing steam that clouded the atmosphere, I could see only her bare throat, the cusp-line of her jaw, and her distended nostrils.

‘What’s going on?’ I whispered.

‘This is the bath-house. Here they float in magnetic fluid,’ Lavedrine
hissed, ‘oscillating between the positive and negative poles, washing away morbid disharmony, inducing a sense of warm well-being. The patient must relax and overcome all fears and anxieties. The conscious mind must surrender to the unconscious.’

A loud, rattling clink of pipes accompanied his voice. Vapour began to spout from the holes in the casket, enveloping the head of the reclining woman in a dense white cloud. The atmosphere inside the room was already hazy. Now, it seemed to swirl like fog. The mist clung to the inside of the window-glass, making it more difficult to see what was going on. I might have been staring into a vast aquarium. The hooded lanterns reflecting on the tiled wall made everything appear green in colour, melancholy in aspect, and I had to strain to see Helena.

She stood up, leaning forward over the metal casket. Her back and shoulders were partly turned towards the doors. I could only see the narrowest sliver of her profile as she bent her head towards the face of the woman in the bath. The bather had not moved an inch since Helena arrived. Her head was still reclining backwards, her lips barely visible, white steam puffing out generously all around her neck. Her disembodied head appeared to be floating on a pillow of rolling clouds.

Helena sat down again. She did not turn towards the door. She did not call to us. Yet she could have had no better view of that woman’s face. I felt a sense of enormous release.

‘Helena has no idea who that woman is,’ I said, facing Lavedrine. ‘She may be Jewish. She may speak German. She may even have murdered her own children, but she is
not
Sybille Gottewald.’

He laid his hand on my arm. ‘Don’t be so certain. They are conversing!’

I pressed my nose against the glass, struggling to see through the gloom and the steam. The woman in the casket had raised her head a fraction, and turned a little in my wife’s direction. Was that why Helena had shifted? So that we might see the evidence?

‘It is hard to see anything,’ I murmured uncertainly.

‘Now Helena is talking with the woman,’ Lavedrine insisted.

I shifted position, but all I could see was a slender new moon of white forehead. Helena’s cheeks and mouth were concealed by the curtain of her curls, which had fallen loose, probably made heavier by the moist air in that room.

‘She has a generous heart,’ I said. ‘Her first instinct would be to comfort any woman in distress.’

Even so, I had my doubts. I looked once more. Despite what I saw, I felt compelled to deny it.

‘It is a mirage, Lavedrine. You are imagining . . .’

‘Helena would have come away,’ he insisted.

In my heart I knew it, too. What reason could there be to linger so long beside a stranger?

‘There! Did you see?’ he cried again.

Suddenly, Helena stood up, and came towards us.

Lavedrine pulled the door open. He placed his hand on the arm of her saturated cloak as my wife stepped out of the treatment room. Her pale face glowed like a lamp. Her eyes were wide, her lips trembling. She caught her breath and gasped. Moisture ran down her cheeks and nose in streams, her matted hair glistened with liquid pearls. She looked at me. One instant only, then away again, as if she did not know me.

‘Well?’ cried Lavedrine expectantly. ‘What did Frau Gottewald say?’

Helena turned to him. ‘Frau Gottewald?’ she murmured. ‘What fantasy has possessed you, sir? I have never seen that woman in my life before today.’

Lavedrine gasped. His eyes shone with barely contained rage. The muscles in his face were taut, as if he meant to force her to tell him what he wanted to hear. He grasped her by the shoulders. ‘I saw your lips moving, Helena. She spoke to
you
! In God’s name, what did she tell you?’

I bridled at this harshness, but Helena’s tongue was faster. ‘Your desire to lay your hands on a monster has poisoned your wits, sir,’ she replied sharply. She stared at him in silence, a tight smile tracing itself upon her lips. ‘I did not hear a word. Nor any sound, except hot water bubbling through the pipes of that infernal machine. And the snoring of the matron. They were both in such a state of catalepsy, I doubt either one of them could have pronounced her own name.’

She paused for an instant, then she shook her head.

Like Lavedrine, I was astonished. By what she said, and the way she said it. I, too, had seen them speaking. Yet, she denied it absolutely. Their lips
had
moved. They
had
spoken.

Lavedrine was lost. He could do no better than accuse. ‘But I
saw
you, Helena! We both saw you.’ He spun around, and appealed to me. ‘Hanno?’

The silence was as suffocating as the steam that filled the room beyond the glass.

‘I saw my wife inside that room,’ I said, like a child repeating his catechism. ‘She was leaning over a bathtub. Her shoulders were turned to me. I could not see her face. The air was thick with swirling vapours. Can I honestly say that I saw her speak? Can you? Can you swear that it was not the distorting convex of the glass, or the effect of those vapours in the atmosphere?
I
cannot, sir.’

I darted a glance at Helena.

Half hidden behind his shoulder, her face was an open book. Her stunned
surprise was evident to me alone. That look, and the smile that followed it, might have been ample repayment for the uncertainty I had expressed, but she did not hold my gaze. She turned to Lavedrine, as if to gauge his reaction.

The Frenchman’s hand slipped from her shoulders.

‘As you wish, Helena,’ he murmured. ‘As you think best.’

In that instant, in that place, so far from home and our children, so distant from all that we held dear in life, after all the trials that the investigation of the massacre had heaped upon us, I felt a sense of renewed hope. I was reminded of our unity of spirit after Jena, as we hid out in the woods from the French. It was a magic cloak that wrapped around us both. It had shielded us from all that had happened since the fourteenth of October, 1806. I tried to catch my wife’s eye and share that emotion, but she bowed her head and looked away.

‘The Gottewald case is closed,’ I murmured.

Helena was quiet. Lavedrine seemed quashed.

‘Nothing can keep you here, I suppose,’ he said slowly. ‘And yet, I owe you both the same warm hospitality that you offered me. I have taken a house in Bialystok. If you would care to rest and be my guests . . .’

It was a hollow invitation, and I left Helena to answer it.

‘I would prefer to go home,’ she stated.

‘I must insist, Hanno,’ he said, turning to me. ‘It is getting late. You may have trouble boarding a coach. Better to leave in the morning.’

‘You take too much upon yourself,’ I replied, as one might reassure an old friend who is too insistently kind. ‘My wife has a cousin living in Lomza. We’ll be there before dark. How many years is it since we last saw Franziska?’ I turned to Helena, inviting her to share the little white lie. ‘She’ll put us up for a day or two, don’t you think?’

Helena did not answer me. Her eyes never shifted from Lavedrine’s face.