Back in my rooms, I poured myself a healthy portion of schnapps, which I downed in a single draught. The strong liquor burned its way through my system like a fine stream of lava, but instead of calming me as I'd hoped, it left me with a restless feeling. It was now just past one o'clock in the morning, and yet I felt totally awake. I moved across the sitting room to the large bay window, parted the heavy curtains and looked down to the small park directly across from my dwelling. Despite the bleakness outdoors, the ornate wrought-iron gateposts at the park entrance, bracketed by tall gas lamps, their yellow light gallantly flickering, presented a warm and satisfying picture. My rooms could not be called lavish, but they were comfortably furnished and a source of pleasure to me.
What was even more pleasing to me was the thought that I had just been admitted to the private world of one of the most illustrious couples in Germany and indeed the whole of Europe, a world light years removed from my origins.
The town of Zwicken, where I was born in 1820, was located in the heart of poor farming country. To characterize our town as “the heart” was not exactly appropriate, for it was a heart that pumped very little blood. The place was not much more than a collection of humble houses and shops leaning against one another for support in their old age. From backyards one could hear chickens and geese clucking away meaninglessly, like village idiots. Occasionally a sow could be heard grunting as she rolled over on her side, inviting her piglets to feed. Horses and cows left their calling cards on the unpaved roadways, obliging pedestrians to step gingerly when crossing, like children learning to walk.
Not long before I was born, Napoleon Bonaparte's infantry and artillery had shuffled and rattled into our town, confusing Zwicken with another and more important centre nearby, Zwickau. Disgruntled over their mistake, the Frenchmen had taken their unhappiness out on the local townsfolk. While their officers turned a blind eye, the troops proceeded to ransack the shops until every shelf was bare. Worse still, with the kind of brute desperation known only to conquering soldiers far from home, they harassed or raped any young woman who could not run fast enough to escape their hungry pursuit.
On the day of their departure for Zwickau, Napoleon's heroes left behind them a town drained of its energy, its resources, and above all its dignity. The populace licked their wounds and patched their scars as best they could. But Zwicken's reason for existence had pretty much petered out, like the footprints of the last French militiamen.
My father, Wolfgang Preiss, operated a small tailor shop on the main thoroughfare of Zwicken, an occupation which, given the state of affairs in the town, left him with much time on his hands. This permitted him to indulge every day and most nights in the labour that was dearest to his heart—writing novels. Though not well-educated, he had read the works of Goethe, Schiller, and several other distinguished German authors and poets, and dreamed of joining their ranks with his tales one day, when the literary world would finally wake up and recognize his own peculiar genius.
He fashioned himself a writer of what came to be known years after his passing as speculative tales of the fantastic. Being a dreamer, he convinced himself, could have its rewards if only he could transcribe his visions into words. These conceptions, and many more, he incorporated into novels in which the protagonist, an inventor, being a prophet of sorts, existed without honour in his own land only to be acknowledged as a true visionary after he was dead and gone. To my father, this theme constituted life's ultimate tragedy.
Alas, publisher after publisher rejected my father's novels. Somewhere between the tailor shop and his wished-for career as an author, our family's meagre finances steadily leaked away.
For years, my mother suffered anxious days and restless nights waiting for the sky to fall and put an end to our seemingly endless miseries. So ramshackle was our house that it became the subject of a local joke: neighbours, it was said, pleaded with us in winter to keep our doors and windows shut tight to prevent the cold within from escaping into the outdoors.
It was after one particularly bitter January day that the boundaries of my mother's vast patience were at last breached, and she could no longer restrain her fury. “Look at this house!” she cried. “It is a desolate place, windswept by hopelessness and neglect!”
Father pondered this for a moment, then nodded appreciatively. “I like it, Emma…yes indeed, I think it's quite wonderful.”
Mother eyed her husband with disbelief. “You like this house?”
“No, no,” Father replied quickly, “I mean the sentence, the way you expressed yourself just then.” He paused, gazing up at the crumbling ceilings. “Ah yes, ‘a desolate place…windswept by hopelessness and neglect’…” Excusing himself, he dashed off to his writing table to jot down my mother's words in his small, tattered notebook.
Leaping after him, my mother continued at the top of her lungs: “Wolfgang, listen to me, this family cannot go on much longer clinging by our fingertips to the unsteady ledge of your ambitions! Do you hear what I am saying?”
“Please, Emma, please,” my father begged, “speak more slowly. I cannot write so fast. What came after ‘unsteady ledge?’”
So it went: my mother uttering printable sentences that seemed to flow naturally from her tongue; my father keeping up the pretense that he was the literate one in the family, while at the same time increasingly unable to distinguish fiction from reality.
As for my little sister Ilse and me, we played games of make-believe in which we imagined ourselves the offspring of German nobility, dispatched to this shabby household by a vengeful wicked witch, whose amorous advances our handsome princely father had once made the mistake of spurning. Soon, very soon, we told ourselves, a carriage drawn by eight white horses would clatter up to our doorstep, and our father—the prince, that is—would sweep us off to our rightful palatial chambers.
During much of my childhood and early youth, then, that was how our days were spent. My father nourished his fantasy that any day now the name “Wolfgang Preiss” would replace “Goethe” on the lips of Europe's literati. My mother nourished her fantasy that any day now she would become a widow and, with her looks still miraculously intact, attract a solid provider as a second husband. My sister and I shared a dream that, restored to noble surroundings, we would be brought up as all well-born children should be—by doting servants.
The one fortunate aspect of my childhood was my scholastic prowess, especially in the sciences. My instructors in chemistry and physics at the Gymnasium discerned that I possessed an extraordinary aptitude for scientific investigation. In my senior year, they encouraged me to apply for the only scholarship available to a youth of my social station. And so it was that, shortly before my eighteenth birthday, I found myself at the tiny railway station in Zwicken, about to leave home for the first time. I was to attend the National Police Academy in Hamburg. At last, liberation!
Overcome with uncontrollable grief, my mother and sister could not bring themselves to accompany me to the depot. (In moments when I feel less than charitable, I cannot resist the feeling that their recipe for uncontrollable grief consisted of one part sorrow and ninety-nine parts envy.)
It was while I stood on the station platform awaiting the train that my father drew me aside, seized me by the shoulders and, gazing deeply into my eyes, intoned, “My boy, this above all—”
He halted in mid-sentence. Whatever thought was on his mind seemed to be momentarily suspended above us like some enormous mudslide.
“Yes, father?” I said.
“This above all,” he repeated. Again there was a pause while he glanced about him to make certain there were no eavesdroppers, though we were the only people at the depot. Lowering his voice, he said, “If you remember nothing else, Hermann, remember this: avoid surprises!”
Our relationship up to this point was such that I never questioned or challenged my father's advice or his perceptions about the world around us. This was so at first because of the strict rules of filial respect and obedience that prevailed in the God-fearing households of the day. Later it was so because the man was such a patent fool that there seemed no point in taking issue with him on any subject. Still, as we waited now for my train, the grave expression on his carelessly shaven face suggested that it was possible, just barely possible, that the man knew something I didn't. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I repeated dutifully, “Avoid surprises.”
“Good boy!” My father jerked his head with approval. “You see, Hermann,” he explained, “there is no such thing as a good surprise. Without exception they're bad, all of them. Death, infidelity, insolvency…a sudden knock on the door and—poof!—you're a corpse, or a cuckold, or some brazen bill collector makes off with your trousers. Then there are riots in the streets. And, of course, diseases. An innocent glass of water tonight, tomorrow morning your body is on fire and covered with purple spots!”
Listening to these last-minute cautions, I was willing to bet the few humble banknotes sewn into the lining of my jacket that the old gent had taken one pinch too many of his beloved snuff and sneezed his brains into his hat. Though I'd never been more than ten kilometres in any direction from Zwicken, even I knew this much: of the countless evils to be shunned in a port city like Hamburg, surely innocent glasses of water were far from foremost. It was no secret in Germany that Hamburg's waterfront was an immense open sewer, where human waste and wasted humans mingled so freely in the tides that they were often indistinguishable. The city's sidewalks and shady entrance-ways throbbed with brothel life around the clock, offering with one hand a few minutes of pleasure, and guaranteeing with the other a lifetime of embarrassing skin disorders. Innocent glasses of water indeed!
Nevertheless, I was determined that my last few minutes in Zwicken should be spent agreeably. “Thank you, father,” I said, “I will try to remember your words of wisdom. I consider myself blessed to be the son of a true sage.”
My father's eyes suddenly gazed even more deeply into my own. “Ah yes, Hermann,” he said, “that's the other thing I meant to tell you.”
“Other thing?”
“Yes. You are not my son. Your mother was pregnant by another man…possibly a French warrant officer at the time of the invasion, though there was also this commercial traveller from Potsdam…when I agreed to marry her. Since you are not my own flesh and blood, my last will and testament leaves nothing to you. I'm sure you understand that it's only fair that your dear little sister Ilse should be my sole beneficiary, bearing in mind that she is to the best of my knowledge and belief my own flesh and blood. Now then, my boy, do try to be of good cheer at all times. Goodbye and best of luck.”
The truth is that the sudden news of my disinheritance came as nothing more than a very glancing blow. After all, when there's nothing to gain, there's nothing to lose. But the revelation that my mother's egg had been fertilized by some random sperm from out of town left me profoundly unsettled not only throughout the train ride to Hamburg that night but for the many years that followed. To this day I am nagged by doubts about my origins and the taint of illegitimacy.
That I chose to remain a bachelor, despite the odd flirtation now and then, was directly attributable to that conversation at the railway station in Zwicken. Given my parents’ incessant wrangling, was it any wonder that I came to regard the temple of marriage as being no more reliable than a tent in a hurricane.
Bachelorhood had its positive side in my case. It left me free to immerse myself in my work in the field of crime in general, and homicide in particular. Not for me the scheduled life…supper at six, bedtime stories for the children at seven, pipe and slippers at eight, lights out at nine. When most men were sitting down to dine, or to listen to the end-of-the-day chatter of their children, or lie snugly against the flannel of their wives’ nightclothes, I found myself bending with boundless curiosity over a bludgeoned corpse, or examining a knife planted like a flagpole in someone's chest, or figuring out the trajectory of a bullet lodged in someone's skull.
There is an irony here, of course. For one who was warned to avoid surprises, I had made it my occupation to deal with those very things. The surprises I dealt with, however, happened to others, not to me. This fact made all the difference. No matter how heinous the crimes I encountered, I was able to view them dispassionately. Objectivity is the soul of professional crime investigation, and mine had never faltered.
In short, my work was my life.
Still, there came a point in each day when I was able to lay down the tools of my trade and say “Enough.” It was at such times that, in effect, I managed to hand the crime back to society, as one hands back to its mother an infant that has done something bothersome in its under-clothing. Once removed, if only for a few hours, from the jigsaw puzzles of my profession, I was at liberty to immerse myself in a very different kind of life, a life of good food, good wine, great music, and the company of a beautiful woman, namely my cellist friend Helena Becker.
And it was the same Helena who now—to my complete astonishment—interrupted my thoughts about the Schumanns and my own career with a discreet knock on my door.
“Do forgive this intrusion, Hermann,” she said as she swept into my suite of rooms. Her face was flushed, and there was an air of unbridled excitement about her. Before I could take her cape, she circled her arms about my waist and pulled me to her. My first instinct was to laugh with pleasure. In the several years we had known one another, I had seldom seen her in such a state of elation.
“Don't tell me, Helena, let me guess,” I said, inhaling her perfume and the natural clean scent of her hair, “you've been to the opera to see Wagner's Lohengrin again. I know how that opera always thrills you, especially the love scenes.”
Like a coquette, she fluttered her eyelashes. “Wrong,” she said, not letting go of me. “Guess again, Hermann.”
“You were at an orchestral concert, and they played Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. That's it. The final movement's enough to make anyone want to do something wild and wicked.”
“Wrong again.”
I have to admit that at this hour of the night, my enthusiasm for playing a guessing game was growing thin. “I'll guess once more,” I said, trying to look stern, “and if I'm incorrect this time, I'm going to throw you out into the cold street. Now, then, I've heard a rumour that that dashing Hungarian Liszt is in Düsseldorf and that Baron Hoffman and his big fat frau were throwing a party to honour the man…to which, incidentally, I was not invited. I take it, Helena, that you were?”
Helena gave me a generous kiss on the cheek. “I love it when you play clever detective. Yes, Franz Liszt was at the Hoffmans’, and he played his piano transcription of one of Wagner's overtures. My God, Hermann, the passion…I can scarcely describe it…it is so—so arousing!”
The minutes that followed were dizzying. I found myself occupying the space ordinarily occupied by Helena Becker's cello. I could feel her right arm sliding back and forth across the small of my back, as though she were wielding her bow. With her left hand, she fingered the notes, as it were, up and down my shoulder blades, digging deeply.
But when I closed my eyes, it was not Helena Becker's face I was imagining.
It was the face of Clara Schumann.