THE PEAKS OF SUCCESS

Général de Brigade Michel François Fourés had given up on being received by the Emperor.

At the Battle of Jena, and then leading his cuirassiers against Prussian forces along the Isserstadt–Vierzehnheiligen line, he’d forced General Hohenlohe’s troops into a wild retreat, all the way beyond Gross Romstadt and into the dewy Capellendorf Valley, the Prussians abandoning artillery, arms and supplies as they ran, surrendering by the hundreds. No matter, it seemed, this success. Instead of an audience with the Emperor, instead of orders to pursue the fleeing Prussians and their king (instead of honours), he’d been assigned administrative duties in Berlin.

The général was aware they all disliked him—Berthier, Soult, Lanne, Ney and Davout, the marvellous maréchals of this Prussian campaign (and before that the Italian, and before that the Austrian, and before that all the other campaigns). They had the Emperor’s ear. A ring of whisperers. The further up the ranks of the Grande Armée Fourés had risen, the more he’d had to contend with their politics and manoeuvring. Finally, it seemed, he’d reached his summit. There was no place else for him to go.

Administrative duties.

Of course, it didn’t help that his younger brother was a royalist who’d fled to England after the Revolution. For years now Étienne had published scurrilous pieces against Bonaparte in the Courier de Londres. It was said the Emperor hated Étienne Fourés the most of all the exiled royalist writers. Maybe, Général Fourés thought, maybe it’s true that I’ve done better than could be expected. If only Letizia hadn’t gone and left him, also.

Beautiful, young, cushioned Letizia.

‘I’m a lady,’ she’d said. ‘And I refuse to make love under grey canvas any longer. Surrounded by indecent soldiery!’

She’d often accompanied Fourés on campaign and it had never bothered her before. Then again, Captain Philippe Ducasse had never been around before either, handsome and dashing and just returned from distinguished service in the West Indies. A young man on the rise. Letizia knew a good bachelor when she saw one, especially in the wild like this, so to speak, away from tenacious Parisian competition. She also knew that Fourés’s wife refused him a divorce. And no doubt the young captain’s tent was bright and warm, anything but grey.

The général’s carriage pulled up in the street. His aidede-camp leaned across and looked out of the window.

‘The von Hoffmann house, Général,’ he said.

SUFFERING IS ONLY A SMALL PART OF THE TRUTH

Krüger sat in a corner at Otto Kessler’s coffee house on Taubenstraße. His notebook was open on the table in front of him. On a fresh page, he’d written:

All that can be known is there to know and is already known.

Only courage remains for us to author.

Courage the deed to this knowing.

But that was yesterday. All last night and this morning, too, he’d been unable to continue. Every word he wrote embarrassed him. It was all nonsense. And now he’d drunk too much coffee and his stomach burned. Berlin was a disappointment. Maybe the carriage out in the morning would jolt his thinking, break in some new ideas. For now, it was like being curled up and nailed into a box.

In Magdeburg, before she died, Hilde had said to him, ‘you think too hard, Heinrich.’ With her illness, her criticisms were sharper, without prologue, and they stung him. ‘But it’s not in there, my love,’ she said. ‘Everything is outside, all around you.’

Krüger frowned. There was that tone again, loving, sincere, calmly intelligent. Unimpeachable. He said, ‘What is?’

‘Everything you could wish to know.’

He rubbed his face with both hands; held them there, pressed and traced the ridges of bone over his eyes.

‘It doesn’t have to be so painful,’ she said. ‘Suffering is only a small part of the truth.’

‘Thank you, Fräulein Philosophia,’ Krüger said through his fingers. (How he regretted that childish tone now!)

Heinrich and Hilde. Hilde and Heinrich. Like the title of a play: a romance or tragedy, or a comedy perhaps.

She was a thousand times more gifted, more brilliant, more deserving of life’s riches, even now when she was gone.

BLOODLINES

The Tricolore flapped brightly over Charlottenburg Palace.

Inside, the Prussians were grim and lost. Their good King Frederick was gone, fled to Osterode with Queen Louisa and a thin cabinet of ministers. Their hearts ached for their king and they moved dejectedly among the striding French. Up and down the magnificent hallways of the palace and inside the magisterial rooms and chambers, the French! Enemy messengers, aides-de-camp, adjutants, soldiers and officers, instantly familiar, right at home, moved about with purpose, ignored them. Salt in the wounds. And yet, even in their whispering, defeated huddles, each man desired to see their conqueror in the flesh. To be tied to history, to have a story to tell their grandchildren. They looked up at every sound of footsteps and click of door latches, hopeful for a glimpse. He’s here, somewhere! Right now! they all thought. Napoleon!

The loyal, the shamed but not defeated (the truly loyal), were of course appalled by their fickle compatriots. They held the fight to the French. They’d hidden the wine and the brandy. They’d taken the firewood away in carts (as much as they could shift in the short time they had) and they’d stolen the candles and chamber-pots and the sugar, and they’d opened all the windows to let the cold evening air into the vast palace hallways and rooms. They’d be damned if Bonaparte would pass any comfortable days here.

Their heroism, inevitably, amounted to not much. They were only a small group. Most of their fickle compatriots thought them absurd and idiotic. The French paid no attention to their childish sabotage. They had plenty of brandy and pissed out the windows.

At the palace now, it was gossip and rumours at their zenith, every subject imaginable. The future of Prussia, the fate of Europe, the Emperor’s luncheon menu, his favourite cologne. A chambermaid had seen his penis.

‘Small,’ she’d said. ‘Like a little snail lost its shell.’

Every keyhole an eye.

Bonaparte had instructed the fires be lit in his chambers (the palace was like a tomb, he said). He was still waiting for someone to come. His fearful staff eventually broke the furniture and piled the mahogany splinters high. In the early morning he would depart for Poland.

The Empress Josephine had written that she was pleased for him, his great triumph. She’d sent him more liquorice from the confiseur on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Paris was grey without him, she wrote. And, no, she wasn’t pregnant.

INTRODUCTIONS

Günther Jagelman and the von Hoffmann family lawyer Seidlitz greeted Général Fourés and his aide-de-camp, Christophe Bergerard. Aunt Margaretha refused to come out of her bedroom (she would spend the next few weeks there). As they stood awkwardly in the entrance hall, soldiers brought the général’s things inside from the carriage and piled them on the parquet floor.

‘Welcome, Général,’ Seidlitz said.

‘Thank you, Monsieur.’

‘I must apologise, Général, for Frau von Hoffmann’s absence. She is suffering from the grippe and has taken to her bed.’

‘I trust our presence will not make her suffer for too long.’

Seidlitz smiled. ‘yes … or rather, no, not at all, Général!’

Fourés looked around, impressed by the wealth and obvious standing of his hosts. Among the portraits and landscapes on the walls, he noticed a Van Dyck and, nearby, a Terborch as well. He walked over to take a closer look (it was The Paternal Admonition, magnificent). He admired the painting and wondered how long it would take the Emperor’s plunderer, Vivant Denon, to come help himself and add the treasure to his Musée Napoléon. The man could smell a Vermeer at two hundred yards. (He’d already begun the removal of the quadriga over the Brandenburg Gate, as per Bonaparte’s wishes.) Fourés contemplated whether he shouldn’t tell these von Hoffmanns to hide their rare paintings, quickly now, but then decided to mind his own business.

‘Our chambers?’ his aide-de-camp Bergerard said.

Old Günther extended his arm. ‘This way, please.’

Elisabeth von Hoffmann met them in the hallway, where the lawyer Seidlitz introduced her.

‘Mademoiselle,’ the général said. He took her hand, bowed his head and kissed it. ‘I hope we will not intrude upon your lives too much.’

‘How can you not?’ Elisabeth said.

‘Then we must compensate you, Mademoiselle.’

Elisabeth said nothing, gave Fourés a shallow, mocking curtsey and continued down the hall.

By God, the général thought. A beauty!

As Elisabeth walked off, she was thinking that Général Fourés had paid much attention to the styling of his thinning chestnut hair. It was combed upwards and swept into soft curling waves, all of it together swirled to an impressive height, ensuring he was marginally taller than her. Licked points fringed his forehead and delicate wisps hooked his ears, just like on a Roman bust.

So he was vain (it’s not a sin, she thought). But she’d liked the sound of his voice, she supposed (did she really?). His teeth were clean and the shape of his mouth wasn’t cruel. She thought his brown eyes softened the otherwise haughty arch of his brows. He was older, that was true, and when he kissed her hand she’d caught a glimpse of the pink shininess of his scalp—but, then, nobody was perfect.

BERLIN’S A DOG!

What he wanted was a black woman.

No. He wanted Josephine.

Wesley Lewis Jr’s first sight of her: it was just after luncheon, his head pounding, soused and heavy in the gut, swaying beneath the hot, searing sky. Numb inside the cushioning sweet wet green of the surrounding sugarcane.

He saw her disembark from a barge on the river, a stunningly beautiful dark mulatto, barefoot in a pale blue European dress, a frilled rose-red umbrella in her hand, her arm hooked in Mr Hendrik’s. As they walked, Wesley Lewis Jr watched the Negro pack, damp down, light and then hand her a long wooden pipe, which she began to smoke, smiling, giggling, pressing her head to his shoulder, affectionate and loving. They’d been in town, a rare privilege, and she was his half-sister, barely fourteen years, and Captain van der Velde’s mistress. Wesley Lewis Jr had heard of her, and now understood the talk. Every desire he’d ever felt in his life that moment poured into the image of her. The beautiful slave Josephine.

Josephine of Surinam.

He’d bedded an abundance of black flesh in his time, from South Carolina to Cuba, from the Caribbean islands to the plateaus of Brazil, and in every shade of light and every shade of night, but none were like this vision here before him. The sun!

But she was half the world away. So, right now, Wesley Lewis Jr, no question, would pay double (triple!) for a black woman. And he’d pay for heat and sweat and sugarcane liquor, too.

Not a chance.

Christ Almighty, but Berlin was a dog!

Only one more night, he told himself. We’re leaving in the morning.

He poured more schnapps into his coffee cup, splashing some onto the table. Through narrowed, drunken eyes he watched the girls serving.

Nothing like the girls he knew. Those Surinam girls, van der Velde’s girls, deep into the night, deep into the dark, the table heaving, the candlelight, a ship’s hold of gorging and laughing and shouting and singing and fucking. Those girls.

Van der Velde’s girls. Beautiful Negresses, brown angel mulattoes, feasts, dark nipples and gleaming dark flesh, gleaming, molasses under the moon.

Kill-devil liquor, and heat, blue, green: impenetrable green. Remember the slave hanging from the tree?

Wesley Lewis Jr had just arrived at the plantation, first day, off the barge from Paramaribo and still wobbly after the sea voyage from South Carolina and there he was, the Negro, swinging gently in the breeze, an iron hook pushed into his ribs, hands tied behind his back, his face anguish carved out of stone.

‘Still not dead,’ somebody said. Still not dead, two days later. ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ they said. ‘you never can guess it.’

The serving girl at Otto’s came by. ‘More coffee?’

‘Nein!’ Wesley Lewis Jr’s bladder was tight as a drum, but he wouldn’t get up yet. He had capacity, by God he did, but enough damn coffee.

At Captain van der Velde’s the world stopped spinning. He had capacity! He held on. you couldn’t fall off if you held on. He’d never fallen off.

Everything floated: the food on the plates, the chairs in the room and the candlelight like illuminated smoke. The black beauties in embroidered Indian skirts, wrists tinkling with bracelets of polished stone and shell, blue and red, chains of gold and silver looped over their breasts and honey-yellow flowers in their hair, pollen-dusted. Wesley Lewis Jr would think of his preacher father and laugh. Preaching for pennies in Charleston.

‘Berlin’s a dog!’ he cried out.

A cockroach scampered across the table: gone by the time he smacked his hand down. Wasn’t that his first deal? That Catalan banker, the closet coleopterist, and the fat wife who’d wasted no time cashing in when he died. A priceless collection of six thousand beetles, painstakingly acquired over a lifetime, collected and meticulously organised in beautiful rosewood drawers, every specimen labelled and dated in fine penmanship, every armoured back and helmeted, devil-pronged head shining like polished black onyx. The wife had believed the crusted little bastards carried the plague, and she’d refused to fuck her husband, had denied him the marital bed every night but the first when they were married, that one time enough for twin sons. She’d snatched the purse out of Wesley Lewis Jr’s hands, the first price he’d offered.

‘Berlin’s a dog!’

People turned, looked at him, turned away again. He put his head down to rest on his arm; his other hand still held the mug. He slept, dreamless, until Mr Hendrik came to fetch him.

AN EASY DECISION

It was almost midnight when Krüger rushed downstairs from his room. He’d fallen asleep in his clothes and dreamed that he’d left his notebook on the table, but then woke and realised it was true.

Otto’s coffee house was busy. He asked one of the serving girls but she had no idea, so Krüger went over to the table in the corner where he’d sat earlier.

A man there, his face shadowed by the lamps hanging low from the ceiling beams. He was spooning soup over a piece of bread that stood in the middle of his bowl. Another man too, asleep, stretched out along the bench, snoring. On the table was an empty bottle of schnapps and another bowl of soup.

The first man looked up and it was only now that Krüger noticed he was a Negro.

‘Eat while it is hot,’ the man said and resumed spooning the soup over his bread. He nodded at his snoring companion. ‘He will never get to it.’

‘I wanted to ask if you’d seen a notebook here, sir,’ Krüger said. He held up his hands, palms facing, and made a width. ‘About this size. I left it here earlier.’

Mr Hendrik shook his head. ‘you sound hopeful. I am sorry. Was it important?’

Krüger sat down, defeated. ‘Thoughts,’ he said. ‘Ideas.’

‘Maybe it is for the best then.’ The Negro pointed at the soup. ‘Eat.’

The invitation seemed so normal and familiar that Krüger dragged the bowl over and picked up the spoon.

‘Thank you,’ he said, and began to tear at the bread that came with the soup, dropping the pieces into the bowl.

They introduced themselves, and after they’d eaten the soup they ordered mugs of beer. They asked polite questions of each other. Naturally, the talk turned to electrical eels.

‘Can they kill a man?’ Krüger said.

Mr Hendrik nodded. ‘It is an unpleasant death.’

‘How do you catch them?’

‘There are different ways. The Indians use wild horses to drive them out of the mud, then push them into baskets with reeds.’

‘What happens to the horses?’

‘They panic and fall. Some are killed, some drown.’

Krüger sat back, wrists on the table edge. He tried to imagine it. At the same time, he suddenly fathomed just how truly vast the world was.

‘you’ve come a long way,’ he said. ‘Collectors must pay handsomely.’

Mr Hendrik smiled. The whites of his eyes were yellowish in the lamplight of the inn.

‘Power,’ Krüger said. ‘To own rarities.’

‘They believe it exists in things.’

Krüger picked up his beer and drank. The ale was dark and strong and made him feel expanded. ‘Sometimes believing is enough to make things true,’ he said.

Wesley Lewis Jr mumbled in his sleep.

‘In Surinam, the rebel slaves wear obia around their necks, for protection,’ Mr Hendrik said. ‘you would call them talismans. The rebel slaves believe muskets cannot harm them when they wear the obia. They charge the Dutch without fear. Of those who are shot dead, they say he did not believe enough.’

‘Do you believe?’

Mr Hendrik opened his coat and undid two buttons on his shirt. He pulled out a corded necklace of coarse woven grass. There was a knot tied into it, with a thick finger of carved bone through the middle, strange markings down its length.

‘A gift from my sister,’ he said.

Krüger saw scars across the man’s chest, like lines of jagged candle wax. He stared at them, shocked at the silent violence they contained.

‘you were a slave,’ Krüger said.

‘I am still a slave.’

Krüger looked at the sleeping man. ‘Is he your master?’

Mr Hendrik shook his head. ‘Not even of himself,’ he said. ‘My master is in Surinam.’

‘He let you come?’

Mr Hendrik tucked the obia back inside his shirt, did up the buttons. ‘He has my sister,’ he said, and felt the longing for Josephine.

‘So you’ll go back.’

‘Of course.’

‘When?’

Mr Hendrik and Wesley Lewis Jr were due to leave for Rotterdam in the morning. The money for the electrical eels would be deposited at the master’s bank there, and then a few days later they’d board the Hoogendijk and sail back to Paramaribo.

The two men ordered more beer and spoke of different things and sometimes sat through comfortable silences.

Back in his room, Krüger lay down on the bed. He sank heavily into the straw mattress and his head spun wildly. There’s nothing for me in Berlin, he thought.

Without Hilde, there was nothing for him anywhere in dead, bloody Europe.

Why not Paramaribo? Why not?

A FAMILY AFFAIR

Captain Willem van der Velde stood in loose, cool, fine silk clothes, wearing a wide-brimmed hat against the glare, a long thin pipe in his hand which he smoked with quick puffs. His cheeks glowed, flushed with gin, his blue eyes squinting. He belched and swayed in the heat. Hamstringing was a standard punishment, but he always liked to supervise.

Beside him stood a young female slave, tray in hand with more supply of liquor. Her name was Anja. Her naked breasts were scratched and her bottom lip was swollen and bruised, the work of the master’s wife that morning when she found Anja in the master’s bed, a position she should have vacated before sunrise (these were the rules) but hadn’t due to her inebriation. And now, like her master, she stood there beneath the torturous sun and fought the nauseous agitations of her body, trying desperately to hold the trembling tray straight. Her lip throbbed and sweat stung at the raw fingernail marks striping her breasts.

She put her mind in her toes. She concentrated on the mouldering dark green leaves and the rich moist soil; she squeezed it between her toes. She put her mind in her toes and didn’t think about the boy being hamstrung, who was her son. And she didn’t think about the butcher, who was her half-brother. And she didn’t think about her belly, where a child by the master now grew.

Later, when the child was born, her half-brother’s same knife was used to sever the cord. She named the master’s child Josephine. By then her son had learned to walk again and Captain Willem van der Velde had Mr Hendrik help with raising the girl. His wife knew that he was the father and she regularly beat Mr Hendrik and his mother, and Josephine too, when she was old enough to be beaten, and this was just what life was like. The master had sired many children, but Josephine was beautiful from the beginning and only became more so as she grew, which was too much an affront to the master’s wife (and their unattractive daughters), and as much a temptation to the father as any of the other slave girls on his plantation.