HS03 - A Visible Darkness (44 page)

The list describing the contents of that file was vaguely descriptive: ‘
Random notes, meditations, and correspondence of a religious nature
,’ it said.

There were half a dozen sheets of writing-paper, each one very thin, yellow with age, scribbled on in pencil, top to bottom, and longwise in the margins too, where Kant had added notes and corrections to what he had already written. I recognised the crabbed script of the philosopher. It was the hand of an old man. His calligraphy sloped away badly to the right, his letters were cramped and often indistinct.

I turned to the last sheet of paper in the file, which was almost blank.

‘
The Probable Nature of Paradise
’ was written large, as if it were a title.

Three lines in the centre of the page. Like an epitaph on a gravestone. I read them once, then read them through again. They were
almost infantile, as if Kant were quoting or remembering some nursery rhyme. As if, his mind were fading into darkness.

If thou couldst but speak, little fly,
How much more would we know about the past!

Beneath this legend, there was a note.

Theological considerations regarding a piece of amber
shown to me by Wasianski.

This was the subject that Immanuel Kant had written about in the missing pages.

Amber.

T
HE AIR WAS
heavy with the odour.

Cooking fumes filled the night like virulent marsh gas. As I proceeded through the narrow, winding streets of Königsberg, following the directions that Dr Rickert had scribbled out to guide me, that overpowering aroma conquered every other smell. Except for a slice of black bread and some shrimps in vinegar that I had bought from a stall along the wharf outside Berodstein’s warehouse, I had eaten nothing all day. Now, the thought of food pushed everything else from my mind. Herr Doctor Rickert had promised to provide my dinner, and the persistent smell on his foul breath left no doubt of what I would be eating.

Onions.

I turned at last into Ritterstrasse, a narrow alley close to the River Pregel. The smells of fried and boiling onions persisted, but there were other less enticing odours, too. Slops and sewage soiled the ground, and I had to watch out for my boots. This was the poorest heart of the student quarter. Rickert’s house was at the bottom of the street. There were no lanterns. If not for a tiny pinpoint of light at the very far end, the street was as dark as a cellar.

The district had figured prominently in the newspapers the previous year. Popularly known as ‘the Graves,’ the houses were tiny, squashed together like overcrowded tombs in a forgotten cemetery. No sooner had the French seized Königsberg than they sealed the area off, and took possession of the dwellings. The invading army had swollen enormously as the town held out against the siege, and defeat brought change. All the Prussian students had been flushed out of the Graves, making way for the swarming followers of the French camp: wives and washerwomen, officers’ grooms and servants, saddlers, boot-makers, blacksmiths, sword-smiths, and all the rest of the 5th Army’s random baggage had rushed in and laid their hands on every available room.

The colonisation had lasted three weeks only.

The French soldiers had threatened to raze the town, obliterate it from the map of the empire, unless some fitter accommodation could be found, asserting in one voice that the university quarter was no place for the likes of them, the backbone and muscle of the Grande Armée. The houses were lice-ridden, cramped and filthy, the by-ways under-lit and overcrowded, they complained. ‘The Graves’ was a danger to their health, with one communal privy out back for every twenty-four houses in a row. One day, therefore, the French charged out again, invading all the farms and villages around the city. As they ran out, the Prussians rushed back in: students, half-pay scholars, college cooks and servants, an army of private tutors, university teachers with no fixed tenure, and all who had once owned a house, or sub-let a room there.

The ghosts, as the local joke went, rushed back to their Graves.

It was no place to wander alone after dark.

And yet, as Dr Rickert had promised, a lantern glowed outside his door. I had hardly lifted an iron knocker in the shape of a fist and let it drop, when the door was opened, and the man himself stood before me.

‘I was looking out for you, Herr Stiffeniis,’ Narcizus Rickert chirped, glancing over my shoulder, as if expecting me to come along in company with someone else. ‘Do come in, sir. Everything is ready.’

My host had put aside his dark suit, and wore a bright green smoking-jacket of some shimmering material. He led me into a tiny room, the lumpy walls of which had been papered yellow at some time in the last half-century. Garlands of faded flowers were still dimly evident. The windows were shrouded by washed-out grey linen swaths that might have been spiders’ webs; rope sashes painted red suggested they might actually be curtains. Despite the warmth of the evening, a fire blazed in a rusting cast-iron hearth. A covered pot was hanging from a chain, giving off little puffs of steam, the lid chattering quietly to itself like an old woman, filling the room with a most particular smell.

‘Onions?’ I asked.

‘Onion
soup
,’ he specified, and seemed quite proud of himself.

To one side of the fire was a small armchair. On the other, pressed hard up against the wall, was a two-seat sofa. Rickert described it as his chaise longue while pointing out the other comforts of his home. ‘Small, but neat,’ he said more than once, while I looked all around me, noting the smoke-blackened ceiling, patches of mould like the maps of so many undiscovered continents on all the walls, and a precarious piling of thing on thing until it seemed that one thing toppling would topple every other thing. A tiny round table filled what remained of the room. This three-legged table was set for one person with a brown clay bowl, a pewter cup and spoon, and a dark green bottle which would serve as a carafe for water.

Unlike the French, I did not complain.

‘I hope that you’ll excuse me, sir,’ he said, ‘but I’ve already eaten. A particularly painful swelling of the stomach, and a ripping gripe in the bowels, sets in if I eat too late. I’ll keep you company, of course. Unless you have already partaken?’

‘I made a point of waiting,’ I said, my stomach churning on the smell in that enclosed space.

‘Just heating it up for you. Ready in a few minutes. Would you care to view your bedroom before you dine, sir?’ he asked, as if certain preliminaries needed to be got out of the way.

Had other lodgers made themselves at home, eaten his onions,
then fled as soon as they saw the bed without bothering to pay him?

He pointed to a shimmering grey curtain, which was heavy with grease and smoke, then pulled it aside like a theatre-manager who intended to impress with the scene he would reveal.

‘Did you shift out when the French came through?’ I asked, staring into the narrow cubicle beyond the curtain. My ‘bedroom’ was six feet long and four feet wide, a corridor closed off by a barred door, which led, I guessed, to the rear of the house where rubbish could be tipped and chamber-pots emptied. If there was a bedroom upstairs, it was his. I knew such ‘lodgings’ from my own days at the university in Halle.

‘Not for very long,’ he said with a hearty chortle. ‘This is the bit of Prussia that they didn’t want. I’d like to see the rat-holes
they
are used to in Paris,’ he added with a sarcastic French accent on the second syllable.

He stepped into the alcove, and gently ran his hand over the bed. ‘These sheets are fresh. Three nights only, as I told you,’ he said again, raising the grey pillow-case to his nose, inhaling deeply. ‘The lad was most particularly clean. He sat his doctoral tripos the other day. It went off very well.’

He pinged his knuckle against a large ewer which was standing in a matching bowl on top of a hat-box.

‘Water for washing and drinking, sir.’

He flicked his nail against a chamber-pot.

‘Freshly rinsed,’ he said.

I nodded, thinking that I would need to keep my wits about me during the night. I did not wish to drink from the one when I ought to be drinking from the other. There was no lamp or candlestick, which was no bad thing. In such confinement an outbreak of fire and instant immolation was more than probable.

‘And now, sir, if you wish to eat, the soup is on the hob.’

We turned around, the curtain fell on the scene of my nocturnal slumbers, and we were in the kitchen again. I sat down at the table where the plate had been set. He pulled up the armchair and sat
himself opposite, reaching for the pot and the ladle, carefully filling my bowl to the brim.

‘Did the French leave onions behind to pay the rent?’ I asked convivially. ‘The streets are full of the smell of them.’

‘You have a selective nose, Herr Stiffeniis. The French complained of everything else. Our onions are in good supply this year.’

As he spoke, he gestured impatiently to me to eat.

‘Delicious!’ I lied, spooning up the thin and tasteless gruel. ‘And thank you for pointing me towards the Kantstudiensaal today. It has greatly changed, as you remarked. Do you go there often, Herr Doctor Rickert?’

His eyes gleamed fiercely. ‘I would if I had the time. Unfortunately . . . Still, I am glad that noble benefactors have taken the place in hand.’

‘Noble?’ I queried.

‘In a figurative sense,’ he replied quickly. ‘I’ve no idea, really. But if that archive were to close, why, it would be as if Kant had died a second time. It had fallen into a terrible state before the French came along and laid another heavy block of granite on Kant’s grave.’

‘Do you know who pays for it all? The Albertina University does not, as Herr Ludvigssen happened to mention.’

Rickert stared at me, then he winked. ‘Good Prussians, sir. Who else?’

‘Ludvigssen does not seem to think so,’ I replied.

His eyebrows met in a stern frown. ‘Is he complaining? I’d like to know what for!’

I broke a piece of black bread. ‘The new masters watch him like sharp-eyed, sharp-beaked hawks,’ I said. ‘He feels threatened by them.’

Rickert’s eyes widened. His lips pursed. ‘Threatened? They are paying him a decent salary!’ he snorted. ‘While I’m obliged to rent out rooms to survive . . .’ A sickly smile lit up his face. His lips parted, exposing his brown teeth again. ‘Of course, sir, it is a great, a very great, pleasure for me to have guests. Guests like you, I mean. Unless we get some students for philosophy, the Albertina
will decide to get rid of me next. Then, I’ll be obliged to find a sponsor, or take in sailors, soldiers, and the refuse of the taverns. It will be the ruin of me, I can tell you!’

He sank into a fit of sighing depression.

‘Did Herr Ludvigssen find a sponsor?’ I asked. ‘Or did the sponsor find him?’

Rickert closed his eyes, shook his head. ‘No idea, sir. No idea at all.’

‘Did you manage to find any trace of Vulpius in the lists, as you promised to do?’

Rickert’s eyelids flickered rapidly. ‘Did you discover nothing at the Kanstudiensaal?’

‘Vulpius had been there pretty frequently, but Ludvigssen had no idea where he might be living.’

Dr Rickert put his hands to his head and pulled fiercely at his hair. Blond on the crown of his head, it was dyed as black as coal around his ears. Even Pietists fall prey to vanity, it seemed.

‘Goodness me! I thought we’d solved that little problem. That’s where I send anyone who, you know, expresses an interest in Professor Kant nowadays.’ He pushed his lower lip out in a show of uncertainty. ‘But, sir, I made it clear, I think. The . . . the money which you gave me was for pointing you towards the archive.’

‘The money which I
paid
you,’ I repeated more severely, ‘was to ensure that you searched through the Albertina registers.’ If I hoped to get anything out of him, I would need to show the same regard for cash that Dr Narcizus Rickert did.

He poured me a beaker of water like the perfect host.

‘I wouldn’t like you to feel that money has been squandered, sir,’ he murmured. ‘I did look, and would have given you my report in time. Vulpius has never been enrolled in the schools of theology or philosophy. Not in the last ten years, at any rate.’ He pursed his lips and thought for a moment. ‘Still, you really should have found him there at the archive. If he is a true follower of Professor Kant, you’ll find him nowhere else. They all go there . . .’

He spread his arms wide, his palms turned up to heaven, like the plaintiffs who sometimes appear before me in the court-house. ‘You
will remember, sir, the price that we agreed on does not, cannot, guarantee the successful outcome of the research. One can only try. Do one’s best, so to speak. What did you particularly want to know about him?’

‘His address,’ I said.

He rubbed his hands, then asked me: ‘Have you ever actually met the man?’

‘Never.’ I lifted the water to my lips, drained it off, then stared into the thick bottom of the glass, as if the information might be found there. ‘Have you ever met him?’

‘Me, sir? Vulpius?’ His appeal to me was not so much of surprise, more of alarm. ‘Can you believe, Herr Stiffeniis, that I would not have told you everything and straight away?’

There, that was the point. Could I believe what he chose to tell me?

He knew about the recent changes at the Kantstudiensaal. He must have realised that the archive had become a potent symbol of nationalist resistance, the hub and focus of a movement which had found its inspiration in Immanuel Kant. I recalled the concern that General Malaport had expressed regarding the presence of Prussian rebels in Königsberg.
They are everywhere
, he had said. To the local French authorities, the archive might seem like little more than a pathetic attachment to a former glory, a long-forgotten library where the books and papers of a deceased Prussian philosopher were kept. It was a small bone that might be thrown to the Prussians without losing any sleep.