BOOK I
ALWAYS BEGIN WITH THE FACTS
The little man was riding a beautiful white horse, they say, the day he marched into Berlin. Of course he was. Who’d sit Napoleon on a mule?
But, really, it doesn’t matter. Time sullies every truth. History can’t tell you a thing for sure. Well, maybe the date.
It was 27 October 1806.
L’ENTRÉE DE NAPOLÉON À BERLIN
Johannes Meyer was there, in the crowd gathered along Unter den Linden, as cool late-afternoon shadows fell from the buildings and the victorious Grande Armée followed their emperor through the Brandenburg Gate. He was a young man of eighteen years and no particular talent, was like other young men of his generation, those who tended towards romantic poetry, aimless walks in the woods, passionate ideals debated until dawn in the smoky din of coffee houses. Their heroes were Goethe and Schiller and Humboldt, and they could recite passages by heart. They had no money and the future was a bright dream of unbounded freedom and promise. Their mothers worried and their fathers thought them useless.
Johannes Meyer had no parents to contend with, but no matter how hard he pushed, he simply couldn’t get through the crowd to catch even a glimpse of Napoleon Bonaparte.
‘Hey, leave off!’ the man in front of him said and thrust back with his elbow, catching the boy in the ribs. ‘Want me to knuckle you, son?’
His friends were all gone, they’d managed to slip through, but Johannes remained caught at the rear, a lonely leaf in the swirling current.
EVERYTHING HAPPENS, ALL THE TIME
The crowd was vast. They’d come to see the most famous man on earth, the most feared, the most powerful, the man who’d just crushed mighty Prussia at the battles of Jena and Auerstedt, each a mere afternoon’s work. The man who’d sacked the kings and bishops, the man who’d made the Creole an empress. Often, people were disappointed seeing him up close (Bonaparte could always tell and it made him cranky and cruel) but on a white horse at the head of his men, triumphant, surrounded by his preening maréchals and générals, all jostling their mounts to be nearer, eager for reflected glory, the Emperor was all that could be imagined, and more.
The Prussian crowd was silent, the men awed, the women in turmoil. The women endured the grip of an unpatriotic lust. Many succumbed, the energy around them was too intense, impossible to resist. All those lonely soldiers’ wives, the widows, the daughters. And from the most wretched, toothless canonniers, to the eau de cologne colonels, the French reaped desire that day and for a score of days to come, thanks to their short, magnificent leader.
‘Vive l’Empereur!’
Johannes Meyer, too.
Her name was Beatrice Reiss and she’d recognised him instantly; he was tall and looked lost as always, that face, a blush of boyish softness on the cusp of rugged manhood. Dark curly hair, and the dimple in his cheek when he smiled. He often came to the coffee house where she served, arriving with his handsome young friends, laughing and embracing one another, drinking and arguing into the early morning. She’d seen him in the crowd just now and squeezed through the endless shoulders, forced her way over, and then she was standing right beside him, their arms touching, pressed full length. Without a word, without even thinking to do it, she took Johannes Meyer by the hand.
He felt the grip, the moist heat of her palm, and turned to look, his face a question.
Beatrice smiled. The girl from the coffee house.
Her hair was red and plaited down the back, with curling wisps escaping over small ears that stuck out from her head. Pale and freckled, pink-lipped and wide-mouthed, Beatrice wasn’t much older than Johannes but knew far more. This deeper mystery was there in her hazel eyes; the boy saw it and was unable to resist. He’d thought of her often enough, back in his cold attic room, and now here she was.
Beatrice pulled him down towards her, said into his ear, ‘Come with me.’
Johannes followed as she led him out from the crowd. They held hands and turned left and right and then left again, at first against the endless stream of people, soon into less congested streets. Further on, in a clean, wide cobbled lane, Beatrice found a door and opened it with a key, rushed them both in. She called out once and confirmed nobody was there, then fell upon a couch and pulled up her skirts. She motioned to the boy, his face still asking something of her, and embarrassed now, too.
‘Johannes,’ she said.
He hesitated: a childish fear.
She repeated his name, but softer, breathless. She held out her arms.
He went to her on the couch.
Everything happens, all the time. It had just never happened to Johannes Meyer before.
PISTOLS
Nothing much had ever happened to Stendhal either, apart from syphilis.
He was also in Berlin that day, in the crowd at the Brandenburg Gate, though his name was still Marie-Henri Beyle and nobody had ever heard of him. Twenty-three and plump, with a wispy jawline beard and fancy hair, fired by grand artistic ambitions all currently on hold as he endured the duties of an adjutant military commissary (family connections). Under his coat were two loaded pistols. Wary of the crush of people, he’d held his elbows pressed in, hands up at his chest, and walked in a strange, stiff manner all day. He mentioned the pistols when he wrote his sister later that night, but of course said nothing about posing in front of the mirror in his room, arm extended and taking aim side-on, head high and saying to his reflection, ‘Sir, you have injured my good name. Prepare thyself . . .’ and other versions of the same, though he was unable, in the end, to settle upon a final wording.
In the same letter to his sister, Henri Beyle wrote of the Emperor: For the entrance, Napoleon wore the dress uniform of a général de division. It is perhaps the only time I ever saw him. He was riding about twenty paces in front of the soldiers; the silent crowd stood only about two paces from his horse. Anybody could have fired a gun at him, from any one of the windows.
Further on, he added: I don’t know what gave them the idea to put a city in the middle of all this sand.
Like the posing with the pistols in his room, young Henri didn’t mention seeing Johannes and Beatrice through the window either.
After leaving the crowd on Unter den Linden and heading back to his billet, he’d heard the unmistakable sounds of human passion. The future Stendhal stopped before the window, shocked, and listened intently to the soft, rhythmic groans of pleasure. He checked the street, up and down, then pressed his face to the window glass and cupped his hands around his eyes.
He watched and watched, until he heard footsteps at the corner. He continued watching even as they approached and grew louder, holding his breath, unwilling to relinquish the sight. Finally, at the last moment, he swore and dashed away, delighted and thrilled, a memory of Berlin he’d never forget.
More of him later.
FIRST SIGHT
Elisabeth von Hoffmann came around the corner and noticed a man running away down the lane. He looked funny, unnatural, elbows clamped tight at his sides, like little wings pinned to his coat.
She was with her aunt’s secretary, Günther Jagelman, who was old and deaf and so didn’t hear the breathless sounds of lovemaking through the window as they passed. But Elisabeth von Hoffmann heard, and she turned in her stride and saw, disbelieving, the couple on the couch. She forgot about the running man and his chicken wings. All the downy blonde hairs on her arms and scalp lifted, and she felt something like a surge of cold well-water from her head to her toes.
Elisabeth was seventeen years old and locked inside the heated tumult of a young body. Her skin was sensitive to even the thought of a touch; her nights were long and sleepless in her transforming. She was overwhelmed by love and longing, could hardly wait to enter the world and be found by this love, a dream of such exquisite possibility that it seemed inevitable. Instead, she found herself in a constant state of anticipation, disappointment and, ultimately, boredom.
It was torture. It was all she could do to endure another day at her aunt’s home, endure another day in Berlin, caught inside her life like a bird in a cage. With the news of Bonaparte’s victories and impending arrival in the city, she’d felt neither fear nor loss but, rather, hope; this was the glorious upheaval she’d been praying for. There is no greater freedom than things being taken out of our hands.
The messengers had come and gone all morning with news of Bonaparte’s progress towards the capital until at last, unbelievably, he was there. Aunt Margaretha had forbidden it at first, but Elisabeth had convinced Günther to take her, and so they’d gone together to see the Corsican ogre. The crowd, unfortunately, was enormous and impossible to penetrate; they’d arrived too late. Like Johannes Meyer, they left without even a glimpse.
Behind them now, Elisabeth felt the silence and the hush that pressed down on the crowd when Napoleon appeared in their midst. And it was just then that she heard the strains of passion, too, and looked over her shoulder through the window and saw the couple on the couch. The moment came to bear upon her exactly like that, with that great hush, with a surprising, silent force.
In that same instant, Johannes Meyer looked up from the couch and their eyes met, and it was as though she could see everything that was inside the boy. And he saw her too (she knew it!) and together they confirmed something they’d always known but only now remembered.
AT OTTO KESSLER’S COFFEE HOUSE IN TAUBENSTRAßE
A portly young man came one evening and proposed that each one of us was a living premonition and proof (in the ever-present) of the past and the future fused together.
‘We are a weld,’ this man named Krüger said, ‘of every event and eventuality.’
Nobody listening responded, or seemed to understand (Krüger could tell by their eyes; he’d had this before and in other places). Disappointed, he cleared his throat and again willed brightness into his voice. It was particularly noisy at Otto’s on Taubenstraße that Wednesday night.
‘Déjà vu,’ Krüger said. ‘Déjà, it means already: the sense that something has already happened before, though it’s also happening now. Who hasn’t felt it?’
Again, nothing.
His brightness dimmed. Krüger preferred to bounce off people when he spoke, draw up quickly against their arguments, derive an intuitive direction and logic from the to-and-fro. Otherwise, in the lagging silence, he had a tendency to grow flustered and confuse himself, lose confidence, his arguments then clattering around in his mind like a shod horse spooked on cobblestones. Which was exactly what had happened to him the previous year, during his disastrous oral presentation at the University of Jena, when he’d been denied a degree.
He took a deep breath, composed himself.
‘Time isn’t a straight line and it doesn’t travel a distance,’ Krüger said. ‘Our lives are merely remaindered embodiments of this false notion, anxious and afflicted because time is imposed. For truly, and we all know it, there is no timeline. Our lives don’t actually go anywhere. We are always here, wherever we are.’ He held out his arms. ‘Where is there to go?’
Somebody called out, ‘Home!’
Laughter.
Another voice: ‘But haven’t I been there before?’
They were gathered around a couple of tables in a corner of the coffee house. Otto’s on Taubenstraße was full of students, young men, older men, lonely men, wounded soldiers, philosophers without formal qualification, cold street dwellers clutching a few begged pfennigs, poets. They smiled. They were enjoying this fellow.
‘The truth is that we churn in a state of circular intertwining,’ Krüger said, persisting, nothing to lose now, ‘caught in a ceaseless and immutable folding, like . . . like cards shuffled by the gods. There are only so many combinations.’
Johannes Meyer leaned forward on his elbows, tried to listen, but the man’s arguments were difficult to follow with the growing chatter. Still, something had caught like a hook into his feelings. This man called Krüger was awkward and Johannes could sense how he’d alienated himself from the crowd there at Otto’s, and maybe that was all it was, the hook: that Johannes knew how the man felt and could hear the truth in his voice. He believed him.
‘The rigid retrospectives of age,’ Krüger said, ‘the prison of numbered years, those most tenacious and insinuating agents of measurement, are an illusion. They draw a single straight line through life, but cannot by nature contain the whole of the movement encompassed. Life is not unfurling in a line, but rather being spun, constantly, around and around our voluptuous Mother Earth, who is herself simultaneously turning, turning!’
Krüger was twenty-four, pear-shaped like his mother, with narrow sloping shoulders adding emphasis to the thighs and buttocks. His blue eyes had often earned him a second look, but so far he’d been in love only once. He claimed to be from a small town in Westphalia, but nobody had ever heard of it, and later, when he left, the regulars at Otto Kessler’s on Taubenstraße agreed that his accent wasn’t even close to Westphalian.
‘And so,’ Krüger said, ‘thereby, our conclusion: the inevitability of passing through where all and one have already been before and, in fact, must and will be, forever.’
LOVE IS RECOGNITION
Johannes Meyer couldn’t recall everything Krüger said that night, nor did he understand much of what he remembered; but now, as he looked up from the couch and saw Elisabeth von Hoffmann’s face in the window, framed in warm light, pale gold, beautiful, eternal, some impression of the man’s words made him suddenly think: Yes!
Their youthful eyes met and exchanged the moment, unrestrained, fluid, full. Their youthful eyes held and locked together. Johannes Meyer had been here before, that was the feeling, and he knew the girl, or must have known her once, or would do so, or . . . or, otherwise, why this overwhelming sense of her?
‘Listen,’ Krüger had said finally at Otto’s that night, though by now only Johannes and two or three others were listening to him. ‘The heart, not the mind, sets all criteria for truth, and love is its ingenium. And love is recognition: recognoscere, cognoscere, to know. Yes? All that is behind us, and all that is before us, is here, always, already, to know. You know it. You already know what’s true. You already know.’
Johannes Meyer looked up and he knew. And the girl in the window, she knew it too. And though they neither had any idea what it was that should be known, the revelation that something was known and could be known seemed more than enough.
LOVE IS LOSS
Beatrice pulled the boy down and held him tightly in her arms. She closed her eyes, so the world was as small as it could be.
She’d noticed, seen it straight off, Johannes looking away from her then; she knew, she’d seen what had come into his eyes and felt his departure keenly, his heart, his presence, everything dissolving. And never mind the cruel moment, that it was exactly a betrayal, unkind and unforgivable. This wasn’t the injury complete. It was her failure too, her self-loathing, that she couldn’t contain the boy, even after lifting her skirts. It wasn’t enough, was never enough, no matter how much she hoped it would be.
Her father had said to her once: ‘It’s what you bring upon yourself.’
Johannes had also felt the moment between them as it died, but the face of the girl in the window had refused to fade from his eyes and now it was impossible to recover what had been with Beatrice in the moments before.
She stood up from the couch and smoothed her skirts. She tucked loose strands of hair behind her ears, pulled at her sleeves, fussed at her clothes. She looked everywhere except directly at Johannes.
‘Beatrice,’ he said.
‘You have to go now,’ she said firmly. ‘You can’t be here.’
They were in the home of Claus von Rolt, whom Beatrice worked for when she wasn’t at Otto’s coffee house. Here she cleaned and mopped and dusted, sometimes kept his bed warm, too. She’d known Rolt was going to be away for the afternoon.
‘See you, Johannes.’
‘Wait . . .’
But Beatrice turned away, went to the front door and stepped outside. Then the door closed and she was gone.
And that’s all we’ll ever know about her. She has slipped off our map.
EELS
On the other side of Berlin, in an empty storehouse in Königstadt that smelled strongly of manure, straw and damp flagstones, Claus von Rolt was with the American, Wesley Lewis Jr, and his Surinamese Negro companion, introduced simply as Mr Hendrik.
Claus von Rolt stood with his arms crossed, staring at a briny oak barrel of dark sludge. He was disappointed with everything today: with the American, with the barrel, with Bonaparte at the gate. He reminded himself of his personal dictum—that expectations in life should always be cold, contained and disposable—but it didn’t help.
‘Genuine New World electrificated eels,’ Wesley Lewis Jr had said, levering off the barrel lid with a small iron bar. ‘You can look, but just don’t dare touch ’em.’
Rolt was still staring at the barrel. He watched an oily bubble slowly dome on the surface and expand for a moment, then pop, exhausted. Of the six eels slopping around in there, one was dead and floated belly up. The others slid their slimy bodies over it every now and then, but appeared so sluggish that death was surely imminent for them also. The American’s asking price was offensive for so damaged a cargo.
Still, Rolt wanted them. There were collectors willing to pay exorbitantly, and there were people to gift and impress, as always, in the effort to slip open sluice gates and direct the flows of profit. Rarity and exotica was his game, and even bruised in careless handling (even dead) it would always attract good money.
The Negro, Mr Hendrik, watched silently, leaning off his lame leg.
‘Mr von Rolt?’ Wesley Lewis Jr said. He could never remember if you were meant to say the von.
‘I’ll pay half,’ Claus von Rolt said.
The American grinned, but not because anything was funny. Three months to get here and now this pompous Prussian wanted to haggle. Jesus, but what a prick. He felt the twitch he’d recently acquired return to the corner of his left eye. In that deranged little spasm, all he’d endured: the steaming, insect-plagued forests of Surinam, the crossing of roiling, pirate-infested seas on that bloated slug the Alfons, then the volatile borders all through Europe, harassed by murderous highwaymen and fleeced by counts and princes to pass their roads, and now, the sudden walking blind into a war and Bonaparte’s two-hundred-thousand-strong stinking, looting, cutthroat Grande goddamn Armée on the march in the same direction. And everybody wanting to know, everywhere they went: What’s in the barrel, son?
And his companion, the Negro, speaking barely a word the whole time, except to say ‘water’ now and then, as though Wesley Lewis Jr needed reminding to replenish the barrel in order to keep the eel sons-of-bitches alive and kicking.
‘How about you stand there and watch,’ he’d say, inserting the tap at the bottom of the barrel to drain it, after some hours trying to find fresh water in a dead village somewhere, skinny dogs barking at him, cannon thunder and smoke on the horizon. ‘Make sure I do it properly.’ But the Negro never bit.
Wesley Lewis Jr walked slowly over to the barrel and picked up the lid that was leaning against it. He turned the greasy wheel in his hands, looking it over, then placed the lid carefully on top of the barrel, crouching a little to check the alignment. He gave it some attention, took his time, made sure it was straight. Then he stood back, put his hands on his hips.
‘The day we set off into the forests of Surinam,’ he said, ‘the barge nearly sank after hitting a reef of sunken trees at the river edge. The port bow plunged down and we took a big slurp of water and all the slave paddlers panicked, stood up and rushed around the deck like a bunch of chickens, sent the barge tilting even more. The Negroes can’t swim, of course, and naturally one of them fell in. While he thrashed about drowning, a giant, fifteen-foot caiman woke up from lying in the sun and slipped off the bank into the river. For a few seconds you could see the crust of black mud on his back melt and billow out into the water like smoke, but then he disappeared deeper and it was just the sunlight tinkling on the ripples he’d made. The boy was still drowning and a couple of Negroes were trying to reach out to him with their paddles, all the rest of them were yelling, gibbering and gesticulating— it was enough to wish ’em all drowned. And then, just like that, the boy went under, gone. Everything quiet.’ Wesley Lewis Jr wiped his hands down his pants. ‘We kept watching the spot where he’d been, waiting, waiting, but nothing happened, it was like the whole thing was a dream. And then there was this great almighty splash and the surface broke and we saw the boy again. Only now the caiman had clamped his enormous jaws down on his shoulder, and was trying to wrap himself around the boy, and began rolling him, both of them spinning like logs. The boy’s face, Jesus—screaming terror! I’ll tell you, Mr von Rolt, there isn’t anything more obscene or sickening than the sight of that beast’s buttery, slimy-scaled belly. There’s a reason why God put him so close to the ground.’
‘Herr Lewis,’ Claus von Rolt said. ‘I think we should—’
‘We clear the snag, we go on, fifty miles of river,’ Wesley Lewis Jr said, cutting the Prussian off, ‘then a four-day trek to get to where the eels are, one man short. You ever experience the wild forests of the New World, Mr von Rolt? Swarms of mosquitoes, the even bigger zancudos, and these little bastards the French call bête-rouge, make you itch to kingdom come. And then there’s the chegoes, which love to crawl into your boots and burrow into the skin between your toes and lay their eggs. Of course, the snakes, caimans, jaguars, all that. I could go on, but I understand you’re a busy man. When we finally got back to my employer’s sugar plantation—that’s Captain van der Velde, whom I believe you’ve had correspondences with— well, he wants to test something out. Before we barrel up the eels, he wants to see what happens if you touch one. So he orders one of his slaves—an older man, scarred all over from the whip—Captain van der Velde orders him to pick one up out of the barrel.’
Wesley Lewis Jr slapped the barrel wood.
‘Of course, the Negro’s reluctant, but he’s got no choice. Trembling, he slowly reaches in and then, before he can even get a decent grip on the slimy bastard, receives such a jolt that he falls back onto the ground as though he’s been shot. Then the captain orders another slave to push the eel onto the man’s body, which he does, terrified, with a stick, and then we all watch it stretch along the Negro’s body and begin to pulse and change colour, and the Negro sets to twitching and shaking. His black heart’s already stopped, but he keeps twitching and shaking until the eel is spent. Then the creature rested a moment before slithering away.’
Wesley Lewis Jr paused. ‘One of these eels, sir, right here in this barrel. A man killer.’
‘Half,’ Claus von Rolt said again.
Wesley Lewis Jr frowned and was about to reply when Mr Hendrik took him by the arm. Turning to the Prussian, the Negro bowed his head a little, blinked his eyes in the slow, sleepy way that Wesley Lewis Jr couldn’t stand, and said, ‘We accept your offer.’
GUESTS
The family lawyer Seidlitz was there when Elisabeth von Hoffmann returned home with Günther Jagelman. She couldn’t stand Seidlitz and mostly wished he’d fall under a horse. Hearing the man’s voice as they entered the house, she turned into the sitting room and walked to the large window that looked out over the street. The house wasn’t far from Unter den Linden and people were everywhere still, passing by below the window, heading towards Napoleon. She watched them, indifferent, could only think of the boy she’d seen.
From down the hall, her aunt’s voice. ‘Elisabeth!’
She rolled her eyes, whispered, God, and then composed herself. She went to see what Aunt Margaretha wanted now.
‘Must I call you twice?’
‘I’m sorry, Aunt, I didn’t hear you.’
Aunt Margaretha shook her head, a quick, irritated movement that wobbled her old jowls and jangled her long silver earrings, hanging low on doughy lobes. She was on the settee, heavy and spread out, the lawyer Seidlitz beside her on a chair, and Günther standing nearby, silent as always.
‘And how was Napoleon?’ Margaretha said. ‘Did you give him my regards?’
‘Of course, Aunt, just as you wished. We had schnapps together.’
Margaretha scoffed. The lawyer proceeded to unbuckle two thin straps on a satchel in his lap. He removed a document scroll and laid it on the satchel. Seidlitz was short, fat and tightly bound in unfashionable clothes, still preferring to display his plump calves by wearing trousers with leggings and high-heeled shoes. He crossed his legs and bounced his foot lightly up and down, pointing the toes.
‘We are to have a guest,’ Margaretha said. ‘A Frenchman.’
‘Who?’
‘Général Michel François Fourés,’ the lawyer Seidlitz said, unfurling and holding up the document that had arrived earlier from the French military administration.
‘Dear God!’ Margaretha said. ‘What will people say? Serving the enemy!’
‘We are not the only ones, Frau von Hoffmann,’ the lawyer said. ‘Most of the French officers are being billeted with the finest families across the city.’
‘My life has been cruel and unrelenting!’ Margaretha said. ‘And persists!’
Elisabeth’s aunt longed only to return to her bed, where she spent most of her time these days. For this sentence of loneliness, and for her ageing spinsterhood, she explicitly blamed her family, and most particularly Elisabeth’s father, her brother, whose face she saw each time she looked upon the rosy bloom of her young niece. She blamed Elisabeth’s mother, too. They’d both died young so inconsiderately and burdened her with their loathsome child.
‘It will not be forever, Frau von Hoffmann,’ the lawyer Seidlitz said. ‘We will endure and soon prosper once again.’
Aunt Margaretha began to weep. Günther reached across and patted her shoulder. The lawyer joined in on the other side.
Elisabeth said, ‘Can I go now?’
THE VULTURE, OTHER SPECIMENS, AND THE SEASHELL
Sarcoramphus papa, on a heavy wooden plinth; scaly bald head of red, black and mandarin yellow, hooked red-orange beak beneath its grisly caruncle, enormous black-and-white wings, kinked like giant arrowheads and held aloft, as though the bird were about to hop over the furniture on its huge, blunt talons. Its eye followed Johannes Meyer, the eye disconcertingly alive. He moved past it, at a distance.
The room was spacious, opulently furnished, painted vases and cut-glass bowls and silver trinkets everywhere. A clock ticked and eased the silence.
Johannes walked through a doorway. The adjoining room was darker, cooler. Cabinet cases, apothecary shelves, books to the ceiling. The smell of leather, tobacco, dust, something acidic.
In pale honey-coloured box frames on the walls, leaves, pressed flowers, butterflies and beetles, and gruesome fine-haired spiders with black marble eyes, all set in scrupulous rows, pinned and named. In specimen drawers with thin brass handles and Latin designations on yellow card, fossils and rocks and molten drops of amber, perfect mosquitoes and muscle-legged grasshoppers entombed inside, waiting. In glass cabinet displays, gleaming river stones and shards of crystal, everything arranged in perfect themes of shading, lightest to darkest, pastel pinks and watery blues, dusty reds and creamy greens; and birds’ eggs too, smallest to largest, grey and black-speckled, blue, pink and white.
Johannes Meyer went from one display to the other. Opened drawers and closed them. With his fingertips traced the corrugated coils of baby snakes in jars of yellow liquid. For the second time today, he experienced the feeling of having been somewhere before.
On a mahogany side table he found a large seashell. It was smooth and polished, white orange and bright, even there in the dimness of the room, as though sunlight and the shimmering of tropical waters were stored in its curled, half-closed porcelain flower. He picked it up, and just as he pressed the rounded lips of the shell to his ear, exactly then, he heard the front door snap its latch and creak open.
Beatrice coming back? He listened.
On Unter den Linden, the Emperor waved to the crowd and there was a cheer that spread out into the surrounding streets and entered the front door of Claus von Rolt’s house, even reached into the room where Johannes Meyer stood. He held his breath while his old life overlapped with the new, the seams stitched by the hoof-taps of Bonaparte’s horse.
‘Life is an uncertain navigation of transcendent uncertainty,’ Krüger had said. ‘It begs only a scrutiny of the heart.’
Not Beatrice, but three men walked into Claus von Rolt’s house.
YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE
Wesley Lewis Jr was small and slightly built, as though the designation at the end of his name had manifested itself physically.
His father was taller and broader and closer to God, too, a preacher in South Carolina with flagellatory tendencies towards his son (switches, belts, whips, riding crops). He daily cleansed the boy of sin on behalf of the mother, who’d long abandoned them to whore out her comforts for corn liquor in Georgia, in Alabama, in Louisiana last they heard. Still, Wesley Lewis Jr hated neither mother nor father as much as he hated the Surinamese Negro, his companion, Mr Hendrik.
There in the storehouse with the cocky Prussian waiting, and the electrical eels half dead in the barrel and Mr Hendrik’s hand still on his arm, Wesley Lewis Jr looked into the Negro’s burnt molasses eyes, those huge, round, voodoo eyes, animal and cannibal. The crippled slave so much older than his years, in frockcoat and buckled shoes, for Christ’s sake.
‘And what would your master say to such a price?’ Wesley Lewis Jr said from between his clenched teeth.
‘Leave it done,’ Mr Hendrik said.
Wesley Lewis Jr pulled his arm free. Since they’d left Paramaribo together with their rare merchandise, he’d been thinking of it, how he might murder the Negro, be done with him and pocket the purse, make his way back to America. But he’d become fearful, at times even believed that Mr Hendrik knew exactly the thoughts percolating in his mind. Black magic, the obia, oh yes, he knew the sly, shifty Negro was versed in such things. He’d seen it. Like the night in Havana on the way, in one of the stinking lanes leading from the docks to the taverns, Mr Hendrik and himself suddenly surrounded by three men, one armed with a pistol.
‘Entregar o morir!’
Even with the limp, a broken body, in a flash the Negro had slipped a knife and slashed the wrist of the gunman. Before the pistol had clattered on the ground, the second man clutched at his throat and collapsed. The third ran, desperate for his life, followed by the bleeding gunman, crying out, ‘El diablo! El diablo!’
And that later midnight, docked in Rotterdam, Wesley Lewis Jr asleep in his hammock, then waking with a jolt and Mr Hendrik there above him, staring down, his bloodshot eyes glowing moon-yellow in the dark; and then, in a blink, gone! Only the creaking of briny timbers, the hull groaning, burdened, the dark ghouled. He was shaken for days. How often had the Negro watched him sleeping? What had he read in Wesley Lewis Jr’s dreams?
Josephine. He must surely have seen Josephine.
A most deceitful and murderous Negro!
Claus von Rolt said, ‘Then we are in accord?’
Mr Hendrik nodded.
‘Good,’ Rolt said and indicated for his assistant to take care of the barrel of eels. ‘We can take my carriage and complete our transactions over brandy in my home.’
LIQUORICE
A native woman called Susanna had retrieved the shell for her husband, Georg Eberhard Rumpf, who collected plants and seashells and worked for the Dutch East India Company. This was in Ambon, in the Moluccan Archipelago, about a century ago. She’d dived expertly through twenty feet of water as clear as sky to pluck it from the sea-floor. Maybe it was already a thousand years old, maybe more. However old it was, hers were the first human hands ever to touch it. And Johannes Meyer’s the last! In between, it had traced an invisible route to Rolt’s mahogany side table (as had the mahogany).
On Unter den Linden, Bonaparte casually slipped a piece of liquorice into his mouth; and here, three men walked in to surprise Johannes, holding Susanna’s rare shell in his hands. Shocked, frightened, he dropped it and watched open-mouthed as it shattered into pieces across the floor.
HOW GREAT IT IS TO RUN
Mr Hendrik didn’t try to stop the boy. In fact, he moved a little to the left, out of the way of the door, and let the boy run past.
Claus von Rolt lunged, cried, ‘Stop!’ but couldn’t get hold of him. The boy burst outside and into the street.
‘Why didn’t you grab him?’ Wesley Lewis Jr said with disgust. He quickly ran off after the boy and Rolt followed.
Mr Hendrik stood in the doorway and watched. His face was inscrutable, but inside he urged the boy on.
Run.
He felt the flutter of nerves in his own legs, even the useless one. The dull ache there sharpened, a memory triggered, a twitch from the past.
Run, boy.
A CHILDHOOD
Mr Hendrik was twelve years old, thin and long-legged.
His own uncle wielded the knife and four slaves held his limbs, splayed out over the ground, and there was another hand that pushed his face down, so that he thought they meant to drown him in the mud. His miserable uncle with the blade, given the task and no choice about it, the blade blunt and crude and purposely so, sawing the boy’s leg with gruesome imprecision, through skin and flesh and then at last the tendon above and at the back of the ankle, hacked and severed with a whip snap. The boy howled and thought he was going to die.
When he finished, the uncle wiped the blade on the grass. This wasn’t the first or last hamstrung Negro he’d midwife. And he’d told the boy too, warned him before and shaken him as he did so: Don’t run, you fool. There’s nowhere to run.
But Mr Hendrik hadn’t planned on a destination. It was enough just to run, in any direction. It was at the core of him and thoughtless, like life.
POET
The crowds were packed into every street, every lane. Johannes crashed into them and tried to push through, but not even a crack opened to him. As he struggled, a hand grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back, threw him roughly to the ground. A French soldier.
Claus von Rolt’s voice: ‘He’s the one!’
Wesley Lewis Jr stood beside him, hands on his knees, looking up but breathing hard from the pursuit.
All Johannes could see were legs and boots. He tried to get to his feet but was kicked in the stomach, hard enough that all the air was punched out of his lungs. Then he was slapped across the head and dragged along the cobblestones by his coat collar. The coat ripped at the shoulder stitching and one of his shoes came off.
Somebody said, ‘What’d he do?’
‘A rioter!’
‘No!’ Johannes said. He couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He wasn’t thinking of the seashell, of being caught in the house; it was that they’d already tried to sweep him up before, the authorities, gather him in their net, his friends too, for war, for death, for the Fatherland. He was a poet, not a soldier, never!
Johannes was pulled up onto his feet. Two French soldiers had him by the arms and more of them stood around. Some of the crowd had heard the commotion and they turned now to see Johannes in the hands of the French. Their compatriot and the enemy. A whisper began, more heads turned, and then a few people approached the soldiers.
The French, battle-worn but sharp to the changing atmosphere, closed ranks. Muskets were unslung and bayonets pointed. More of the crowd turned, more faces frowned, the whispers grew louder. A young man jumped out and waved his fist.
‘Verdammte Französische fotzen!’
The blow from the stock of a soldier’s musket knocked him to the ground.
Now the crowd hesitated, shocked. The moment shaped itself to each individual fear. The French soldiers, who’d marched hundreds of miles and knew every kind of fear there was, waited, firm, resolute. Johannes raised his head, grimacing in pain, saw his countrymen step back and dissolve into the larger crowd behind them, still waving and cheering for Napoleon Bonaparte.
AGITATOR
Twelve days later, Sous-lieutenant Hubert Pessac, the new prison commandant in Berlin, ran his finger down a list of names written in the ledger open before him on the desk. The list recorded everyone arrested in the city on 27 October 1806. There were twenty-two names in total, written in a slanting script. He dragged his finger down and found the next entry.
Meyer, Johannes, eighteen, Hirtengaße.
Pessac called for the man, and his sergeant went out to bring the prisoner up from the cells.
‘Make sure you tell them you’re a deserter,’ a man called Wolfie said. He was the only man in the cells who’d bothered to speak to Johannes. He didn’t have many teeth left but liked to smile. The boy reminded him of a brother, long gone now and buried in the mud of some forgotten battlefield.
‘But they’ll know,’ Johannes said.
‘Just tell them. They’ll put you in the army if they think you can hold a musket. Then at least there’s a chance to run. Otherwise it’s the galleys and an oar at your guts until your beard reaches your balls. That’s if you don’t die first and they throw you overboard. Right?’
‘But I didn’t do anything!’
‘That doesn’t matter anymore, my friend. Best forget it.’
The day everybody went out to see Napoleon Bonaparte enter the city, Wolfie had been caught breaking into houses. His wife had sewed long pockets inside his coat and Wolfie had filled them with bread, brandy, sausage, silk handkerchiefs, jewellery, silver cutlery. He told Johannes it had been a grand day, the best day ever, until they caught him. ‘I was greedy,’ he said. ‘I should’ve gone home after the first few houses. But what a day! I couldn’t resist. It felt so good to be rich.’
He slapped Johannes on the back. ‘Trust me, boy.’
‘But what will I say? I don’t know anything about the army.’
‘Tell them you deserted from the Puttkammer Infantry Regiment. Number forty. Auerstedt. Got it?’
‘They might check.’
‘Be confident! What’s there to check? They always need soldiers.’
When the sergeant came and took Johannes away, Wolfie called after him, ‘Look ahead, son. Dead straight ahead. The past is over.’
In Pessac’s office, the sergeant pushed Johannes towards the desk. His wrists were shackled and so were his ankles.
‘Stand there.’
Pessac sniffed a lavender-scented handkerchief at his wrist, tucked inside the cuff of his jacket.
‘Proceed,’ he said.
The sergeant began to narrate the circumstances of the boy’s arrest. Johannes quickly interrupted.
‘Sir, I did nothing wrong!’ he said. ‘I’m innocent of all charges!’
‘Silence!’
‘It’s a misunderstanding!’
The sergeant punched Johannes in the kidneys.
Pessac held up his hand and nodded. The details really had no bearing on things. While Johannes Meyer groaned and kneeled into the pain ripping through him, Pessac dipped his quill into the inkpot. He wrote agitator into the last blank column.
Johannes managed to look up. He knew for certain now that everything was over. He wasn’t going home. The realisation came coldly and, to his surprise, with strange relief.
‘Sir, I’m sorry,’ he said. There was nothing to lose now. ‘Sir . . . I’m a deserter.’
The prison commandant frowned. ‘From where?’
‘Puttkammer Infantry Regiment, sir. Number forty. Auerstedt.’
Pessac cleared his throat, took a deep breath. Really, they wasted so much of his time. He’d have to blot out what he’d already written. Fine. He did so, and changed agitator to deserter. Then in another column he wrote 4e Régiment Étrangers. Then he waved the boy and the sergeant away.
GODS
They’d also watched Bonaparte’s victory parade, as they watched many things in the world and would always watch them, and (among others) they’d picked Johannes Meyer out. It mostly always happened like that, for no reason and at random. Probably they were bored with Bonaparte; he’d had such a good run since being plucked out of Corsica, and here was just more of the same pomp. Everyone knows the gods love a good joke, and look . . . They grinned and nodded between themselves and then pointed down at the crowd, made more random selections: him, her, her, him et cetera. Choices made, they whipped up the sticky tendrils of fate and loosed the surging winds of change (those puff-cheeked cherubs) and young Johannes Meyer felt a shiver down his back.
And then the gods took a well-deserved afternoon nap.
All that’s left for us are the incomplete maps, to conjecture and argue their scale.