The Anatomist's Dream (2 page)

3

The Leaving Game

When Philbert was two, a man began to visit Nelke and Shminiak. He was dashing and debonair, arriving on a grey-black horse whose pelt shone like molten metal in the sun. He sat and talked quietly with Shminiak of exports, trade-flows, projections and plans. He poured
Kirschwasser
into the gleaming goblets he always brought with him, taking dainty sips, ­dabbing at his fine moustache with a square of white lace. But when Shminiak was gone abroad to Westphalia and France on his mission to sell Staßburg salt, still that man came and talked quietly with Nelke, still using the language of trade-flows and projections, though of quite a different kind
;
still sipping softly from his goblet, but dabbing at her lips with his own, brushing his fine moustache across the thin lines of her face, sharing the best of French liqueurs with her, and his wide, green cloak. While all this was going on, Philbert was bundled off next door to good Frau Kranz, drinking buttermilk from her best cracked cup, surviving and thriving despite his mother's parental ­deprivation of her son.

The world of men is like a vine that throws its tendrils out, binding each one together with talk and tales, and Shminiak, while away, got news of this Frenchman visiting Staßburg in his absence, and of Nelke throwing her doors wide and giving him welcome. Most men would have galloped home in a fury, picking up on the way the stoutest stick he could find, beating his wife to a pulp with it on his return before locking her in the town stocks for a day or two until she understood the meanings of virtue and loyalty. But Shminiak was not most men, and knew about violence and what it begets. He could never forget the bad years he'd spent as a youth, escaping deprivation of one kind only to find worse as he scraped his way from Armenia to the Black Sea shores; the squalid ports, the beatings he had taken, the hard life he'd had before he came to Staßburg where he'd discovered a stability he'd previously only dreamed of. He loved his Nelke and his home, had found a purpose there, was given the great good fortune of a son, no matter that he wasn't perfect.

So, instead of a stick, Shminiak picked up something else on his way home, passing as he did through the market town of Bad Salzyflen and buying what, back home in Armenia, would be a possession worth more than gold. But not in Staßburg, and not to Nelke, who was standing at her table when Shminiak returned with his prize, her tattered apron around her waist, hair dishevelled, hands automatically chopping at the cabbage for that night's soup.

Big ‘Halloo!' from her almost-husband, huge smile, little red hairy pig wriggling in his arms.

Nelke stood aghast at the table, knife poised in the thick summer air, unsure into whom she should first heave the blade.

‘
Für meine Liebchen
,' Shminiak beamed, plonking the porker down on the table where it proceeded to thrust a snotty snout into the mess of shredded cabbage Nelke had just chopped. Nelke put one hand over her mouth and collapsed weeping into a chair.

‘What is to become of me when my husband brings me a pig for a gift?' she wailed, as soon as she was able to draw breath. ‘One pig from another, both animals, both filthy. I cannot bear to look at either of you. Get out! Get out! And take that
­schweinerei
with you!' she yelled, kicking her young son Philbert out from under the table where he spent so many of his days. The force of her foot bumped him across the floor like a turnip. ‘Just leave me alone, all of you! Please, just leave me . . .' Nelke cried out, her misery so evident and present it was shocking in its intensity, her fingers running through her hair, entwining a shred of cabbage there, leaving it hanging, unforgiven, across the sweat of her brow. Shminiak knew all was lost. He turned away, saying nothing. Not even Grigor could help him now. He deposited child and piglet with Frau Kranz before heading his familiar way to the inn.

Good Frau Kranz heard all through the thin, tin walls of their adjoining shacks and asked no questions, taking in the refugees without a murmur, doing her best for both when no one else would. It was a selfless act of kindness that would catapult its way down the years, long after Frau Kranz was gone from life, long after Philbert himself had emerged from the black tunnel of his childhood. An act of kindness Philbert would remember keenly twenty years later when he was passing by a smoking village, another one trampled and stamped out of existence by a filch of foreign renegades who
'
d deserted whatever army they had once been press-ganged into. In they came and stripped it bare, every ear of barley ripped from every stalk to feed the marauders' horses, every whisker of wheat in the granary bagged and loaded, every animal haltered and taken with them when they went, every man who dared to fight, beaten and shot and kicked into the nearest ditch. And that's where Philbert found a man the following morning, crumpled below a hedge. Almost dead. Not quite. Philbert dribbled water onto his mouth and held his hand, recognising the need people have not to die alone. Philbert, by then, had long left Staßburg and met death face to face in many guises; he'd seen suicide, murder, desertion
,
and understood the consequences of each. But the care good Frau Kranz gave him in his early years stayed with the man he became and, by the time he sat by the dying man in the ditch, Philbert – who never knew his father's name – had already lived a life most extraordinary, grown like a burr that snags everything it touches, taking away a little fragment from each life, each word, each story, each loss he encountered, of which there had been many.

But the first of these was Nelke, the mother who had never wanted the boy-burr, and who grieved for the non-existent flower of the imagined Elsa who should have been born in his place, and who grieved for this lost child all her life. And it was Nelke who took the decision that one of them had to go and, seeing as Philbert at that time could hardly walk his way past the chicken shed without falling over, she took the burden of leaving upon herself.

For Nelke, it went like this: she woke up with a smile for the first time in years, listening to the chickens scratching in the dry mud outside her shack without rancour, knowing it would be the last time she would ever hear them. Shminiak was in Lippstadt doing business, Philbert in his cot underneath the table with his wretched pig, who snottered like an old man, christened with a name that was just as she sounded, which was Kroonk. Nelke didn't know the boy was awake nor that he too was listening and watching, seeing his mother moving quietly about the kitchen, taking a few extra minutes to brush her hair, braid it into a silken snake down her back. She put on her best cotton dress, fingered through the others in the ratty box before closing the lid knowing she would never have to wear another, or sew them when they split, or patch them when they tore. Nelke wanted to sing with the larks she could already hear fluting above the hay meadows and to laugh with the river ­tugging playfully at its banks beyond. Instead, she crept around her home and picked up a small basket, placing within it the comb and mirror her beau had brought her on his last visit – at last a man who knew the things a woman wanted, as only a fine Frenchman could. She tip-toed past the table and lifted the latch, seeing the sun shine down on her new life and the dusty path that beckoned her on. She sniffed the air, smelt the flour and salt for the very last time, threw her shawl around her shoulders and for a moment, just one moment, she turned to look at the boy beneath the table, wondering if at the very last her heart would waver. But there was nothing but contempt for the shack in which she had been cooped these past few years, and nothing for the child she had never considered her own. Strangely, in that last long look, the only thing she regretted leaving was the one thing never there at all: her little flower bud Elsa who had never bloomed. And it was for Elsa, not Philbert, that Nelke shed a few tears as she took her quick way along the path to the bridge and the man offering escape.

Philbert stayed below the table with only little Kroonk for ­company, hungry and bewildered, waiting for his Mamma to return. Eventually Frau Kranz came in, as she often did, and fetched him up, took him back home with her. But the next day found him back beneath his table, expectant, too young to comprehend that Nelke was never coming back. This went on for several weeks until Frau Kranz began to take the place of Nelke in his head, and he would sit every morning on a chair while she pounded at her dough, rolled out her noodles, trying to explain that sometimes people just disappeared and it wasn't the fault of those they left behind. And eventually four-year-old Philbert forgot his mother's face, her smell, and her anger, the constant dripping of her tears, and for a while there was only Philbert and Kroonk and Frau Kranz, lying beneath their own hedge, in their own ditch, crying out for help, hoping – as people in those places always hope – that help will one day come.

The neighbours talked, the neighbours gossiped, the neighbours regarded the disappearance of the Confectioner's girl as something of a scandal, a trope for all the disappointed women, unwilling mothers, flirtatious courtesans they had ever known. And they soon came tap, tap, tapping at Frau Kranz's door wanting more, wanting details, although she never gave them up. Surprisingly they also took much interest in Kroonk, ­examining her as they examined every newcomer to the town, unanimous in their decision that she was too small, too red and runtish, and absolutely did not like the way she sneezed and snottered. There were murmurings of swine-fever, which Frau Kranz expertly batted aside.

‘Stuff and nonsense,' she grumbled, mysterious with her knowledge. ‘It's just a cold, little piggy, and don't let nobody tell you different.'

Frau Kranz scratched Kroonk's little red ears, rubbed her down with warm wet towels, fed her, as she had once fed Philbert, with a twist of flannel soaked in milk-bran and mashed-up biscuits, until the sneezing dried out into a purr and the coughing a husk of what it had been, and the neighbours gathered one more time and declared her fit, though fit for what they did not say.