The Anatomist's Dream Read online

  Berlin had seen the worst of it, where starving peasants had erected barricades throughout the town, smashing the boots they hadn’t boiled for stew through shop windows, storming the storehouses of the rich. The Potato Revolution, as it was known, didn’t last long. Men were weak, soldiers stronger. The peasants got the pleasure of breaking down the walls of the crown prince’s palace before having their heads stamped into the frosty ground and filthy pavements of Berlin, or got themselves strung up ten at a time on gibbets that scarcely trembled under their combined and paltry weight. The Kartoffelkrieg was over almost before it had begun, but ideas are slippery as eels and move just as quickly and like fire can sneak off into the undergrowth, feeding on subterranean sources, flaring up in unexpected places, and soon all the towns around Berlin had their own little revolutions and their own little parties of rope and wood, and yet still some escaped, and on they went.

  The leader of the straggly band Philbert’s Fair bumped into was a woman. She’d lost her husband, her father, her brothers and two sons. Several daughters and daughters-in-law had gone missing along the way every time they passed a troop of ­soldiers, and what happened to them didn’t bear thinking about. And so this was a woman with anger sewn right into her bones, and a brace of ugly little grandchildren sucking greedily at her drooping breasts. They melded into the Fair’s protection, extras in the semi-permanent acting troupe that had been thinned out, as was normal, by winter, disease and desertion. But they brought a posse of Schupo mercenaries on their heels who ­swaggered into the camp one evening, blazing pistols and ­blunderbusses. The Fair was already set up and going well; the village they’d stopped upon still had a few coins to bandy about and a few scrawny goats to roast, so one night out of their lives didn’t seem too much to squander for the villagers’ entertainment.

  ‘Roll up! Roll up!’ Philbert was already shouting at the top of his pipsqueak voice, and Maulwerf already had his table out and laid. Lita was pirouetting on Frau Fettleheim’s knees and singing her songs, giant and dwarf complementing each other’s size, all of which had drawn the crowds. Across the temporary stage the acting troupe were scraping out their steps, the laughter rising at their farces and antics and the latest popular ballads about princes with necks like chickens and beaks of gold. The night was sparkling with embers blown free from fires by the wind, and the goats had had their throats sliced and haunches skinned and were sizzling on their spits.

  The screams, when they started, were only somewhat out of place, and nobody took much notice until that anger-spun woman came yelling through the mud and carts, her children’s children hanging like an overweight necklace from her thin shoulders, cursing with all her might the iniquities of the state and the scourge of taxes and the wickedness of the world that had taken so much from her and left her with only poverty and starvation for companions. There was no doubting the woman had gone mad on her trek out from Berlin, drawing that pack of soldiers behind her like hornets after honey. The men on horseback had been sent scouring for the troublemakers and had not far to look. They sent a few shots into the crowd to discourage any upstarts who might complain, killing one man stone dead as he raised his fist to throw nothing more ­iniquitous than his dice; they sent a lance through one of the dancers because she was wearing an unpatriotic combination of colours, sending the rest of them skittering from the stage, sliding on her blood; they broke up the painted backboards because they depicted a rural idyll with no sign of prince or palace, skewered several of the old woman’s followers to its splintered remains because they started flinging handfuls of sugared sweets at the soldiers in feeble protestation.

  That woman’s voice was hoarse as a boar’s by the time she skidded into the mud at Philbert’s feet, her throat still wobbling with all the words she could no longer get out, shaking with frustration as she tried to pick herself up, untangle her legs from her skirts and grandchildren as the soldiers came crashing along the cartways, knocking people over, upsetting stalls, sending gaming boards flying, spilling all their tiny counters and carved wooden figures into the ruck of wet grass and mud.

  Philbert scooped up one of the woman’s dropped grand­children as the hooves hove into view, the sweat and froth of the wild-eyed horses trampling the other child beneath them as they got that woman nicely caught between their flanks, her fists still flailing, her hair all gone wild and getting into her mouth as she found the strength again to scream about injustice and starvation and the families that had been butchered on the streets of Berlin. It didn’t last long, those men having done all this before, and they caught her up by her hair and hauled her behind one of the horses with a rope, firing a few more shots at random into the air until her fellow Berliners came forward one by one, eking themselves out from the rest of the Fair, not wanting the people who had taken them in to hang with them.

  ‘My baby,’ the woman whispered as she was dragged around the course and came to land back where she’d started, and the soldiers misunderstood and looped their rope around the closest child’s neck, ready to throttle her last remaining family before her eyes. Philbert’s eyeballs were almost squeezed from his head with the pressure of it, Maulwerf hurrying forward, scrabbling for Philbert’s arm as the man on the horse began to haul Philbert up, his feet kicking and struggling, into the air.

  ‘It’s the wrong boy!’ Maulwerf was shouting, and the baby Philbert had dropped started squalling where it lay and the woman reached out her fingers to touch her.

  ‘The last one,’ she managed to whisper, and the soldier laughed as Philbert’s feet cleared the ground, coming level with the underbelly of his horse.

  ‘The last one,’ she croaked again, and started to crawl away from the horse towards the fallen child, and then at last the man saw the little body towards which the woman was squirming and let go the rope, sending Philbert crashing to the ground between the great iron-shod hooves of his horse.

  ‘I see you, woman,’ he said, no colour to his voice, no anger, nor compassion or regret. He merely took his pistol from his belt and shot the child through the belly, the woman he had pursued so far feeling its hot little body’s blood running out through her fingers while he slowly reloaded, finally bringing an end to the drama by firing a shot through the back of her neck.

  Many years later, Philbert could still recall lying there beside the woman and her child, looking at the dappled, mud-­splattered underside of that great horse, the twist at the right side of the girth-strap, the shine of the man’s boots and the neat tie of their buckles, the soft leather of his gaiters reaching from heel to knee, the harsh catch of new breath as Maulwerf hauled him by the rope to one side and sliced through the knot with his knife, the enormity of the following barrage of shots and the sudden release of the noose making his ears bleed, so that all that he could hear as the soldiers cleared out was a subdued wave of outrage, men and women weeping as they dragged the Berliners’ corpses to one side, the sharp slice and thud of spades going through grass as their collective grave was dug.

  Such were the times in which they lived, and all this happened again and again before the real revolution began. Philbert couldn’t know then that he would play a small but vital part in that revolution, as the trigger is a small but vital part of a gun. And it was such a small thing he would do, such a small ­mistake, yet it sent other men in other towns upon his heels with their own ropes in their hands and their own pistols at the ready on their belts, pursuing him far harder and more relentlessly than ever they had done this woman from Berlin.

  A single flake of snow can start an avalanche, so goes the saying, and for every deluge there must, of necessity, be a first drop of rain to set it off. Snow and rain, so was Philbert. The start of snow and rain.

  7

  The First Nail

  It was under the wheelwright’s wagon that Philbert slept with Kroonk for his first couple of years with the Fair. Hermann offered to share his tent but his constant scrattelling and
sighing kept anyone within ten yards awake, and sadly Philbert had to go elsewhere. It was also an addendum to the hanging incident, Philbert feeling the need to be outside and free, would wake with his hand at his throat making sure it was still there and not being stretched like a length of washed-out sheep-gut on a rack. He developed a fear of big horses, couldn’t bear the touch and scratch of rope upon his skin, had to have a special twine made of leather for Kroonk’s lead.

  His miraculous escape from a hard death became well known, and he turned into a lucky charm of sorts for people who might not say a word to him, nor speak his name, but would often place their palm briefly upon his head as they passed him by, trying to take a little of the mouse-boy’s good fortune for their own.

  The one person Philbert felt truly safe with was Otto Stellmacher, the wheelwright, huge and red with work, arms bulging like beer kegs, hard as cooper’s bands, and with a ­massive beard pockmarked with cinder-holes hiding him from cheek to chest. He mended wheels, staves, strouters and strakes; shoed horses and donkeys; cooped barrels and mended ploughs. He tried to teach young Philbert about spoke-dogs and ­whipper-trees, twisty-bits and clouts, coach-screws and cotter-pins, dowels and gugs; but there was too much to remember, too many names and whats and wheres and which to weld or tap and turn. Philbert nodded as though his neck really had been broken, trying to concentrate before sidling off under pretext of having something else to do, Stellmacher sadly shaking his head behind him, saying that one day he would regret not learning a proper trade when he’d nothing left to sell in this world and nobody left to teach him.

  But he was still there the morning Philbert came crawling back, flush-faced beneath the wheelwright’s mournful gaze, begging for the lessons he had treated previously with lack of interest, explaining his grand plan as best as he was able, telling Otto about Frau Fettleheim: how she could no longer leave her cart for her size, could hardly move, had begun to smell like a leper-gatherer’s cart, worse than the turd-heaps piled high to dry in a dyer’s yard; how Lita struggled in her attempts at weekly bed-baths, how the oranges she’d soaked with attar and stuck with cloves to hang as scent-lockets were all too little and too late. Otto listened, thinking mostly of Little Lita, having already noted how pale and pinched she looked, or rather how much paler and more pinched she looked than usual; he knew, as all the fair-men did, that she’d said the night before that she couldn’t take it anymore and would have to leave the little caravan that had been her home and the woman who was the closest thing she had to a mother. And besides all that, the Little Maus’s idea was rather a good one, having the triple advantage of teaching the boy the rudiments of a trade, airing out the Frau, and letting Lita back into her home. Frau Fettleheim herself was not immune to her own condition and keenly regretted Lita’s absence, giving a short, heartrending speech to anyone who would listen as the tears fell down the uncooked pastry layers of her face.

  ‘I cannot bear to be this big, but I don’t know how to be any other way. And I cannot bear my own stench, nor that it has finally driven Lita away. Have someone drag my cart down to the river, hack out the boards and throw me in. Walk away and leave me. At least I’ll get to be outside again, if only for the few moments before I sink. And I’ll get to see something other than the same view of those behind and those ahead, and the roads and the mud and the arse-end of one town followed by the back-end of the next . . .’

  Otto was moved by the woman’s plight and by Philbert’s attempt at a solution, ashamed he’d not come up with the idea himself. He stroked his beard, pulling the gold-and-grey streaks of it into tracks, revealing a small hint of lips moving somewhere beneath the overlying scrub of hair, because it was indeed an elegant solution.

  ‘So once we’ve built this cart of yours, Philbert, how do you propose to propel it?’

  He’d already formed an answer but wanted to push Philbert into thinking of it for himself.

  ‘We could pull it ourselves?’ Philbert asked, at which Stellmacher had to laugh, a sound akin to the spilt water he sent over his anvil sometimes to cool it down, then bent down and drew his finger through the sand.

  ‘Like this,’ he said, making several lines. ‘This is the shaft, and these are called sides; here are the summers, shutlocks and cross keys. We’ll build big wheels rimmed round in iron, and place the fore-carriage just above the axle to give it more strength, for my God, the strength they shall need!’

  He chuckled, swore Philbert to agreeing he would learn the names of each bit of wood, the square, the aft and fore, the bevel and pin. Philbert hung his head and accepted his fate, understanding that a man should suffer for his friends, unaware how much they would suffer for him in the future.

  He took all Otto’s instructions and worked harder than he had ever done. Otto’s hands were tough and strong as tanner’s boards, unlike his which were soft, and wept blisters in their misery. He planed the ash, hewed the oak, lathed the shafts and cornered the keys. They made the cart narrower at the front so that when tipped it would loosen its load the easier.

  ‘Very important,’ said Otto, ‘particularly considering the load.’

  He taught Philbert to rest his wrist on his knee so he didn’t chop off his fingers with knife or saw, how to drive in a nail without splitting the board. Philbert watched as Otto fitted the felloes of the rim, shouldered the spokes, swung the hammer to drive them harder into the stock, admiring the way he dished the wheel so it leant in at the top, out at the bottom. And then together they painted the finished product the glorious green that only a mixture of white-lead and arsenic can give, and when dried and all was ready, the cart shining and gleaming, it was late in the evening, but no one wanted to wait and away they went to Frau Fettleheim’s, solemnly knocking on the boards, announcing that the carriage awaited its queen.

  It was a truly glorious creation, just the right height to shift Frau Fettleheim over from caravan to cart, and the fat lady squawked with delight, kicking up her ankles, sending a ripple through bloomers and chins and her very best dress. Once satisfied everything was in order, Otto took the reins and led the donkey off, slowly at first, Frau Fettleheim sighing with delight just to breathe fresh air, and down the field they went towards the river, people looking up from whatever they were doing as they passed, gasping at the sight, soon starting to laugh, whoop and whistle, flinging caps into the air as they followed the procession, Philbert running alongside the cart making his bows, Kroonk snaffling at the scraps that were flung in celebration, her tail wiggling madly in the excitement, people shouting out:

  ‘The Maus is moving a mountain! Only look! Here comes the Maus and the mountain he has moved!’

  Only Hermann stayed behind in the doorway of his tent, waving solemnly as the procession passed him by for the second time, seeing Philbert in the lead with the donkey, grinning like a cockle, and Frau Fettleheim’s face wet with tears of joy. He stayed inside because Otto had lit an enormous fire of whin and wood scraps in celebration of Frau Fettleheim’s long-awaited release from incarceration, as was only right, and he could not have been happier for her. But he couldn’t step any closer to that fire, his skin would not abide it, would start its constant scritch and scratch, knowing there could be no such easy release for him. He watched the celebrations from afar, seeing the leap and crackle of flames reflected in others’ faces, the shiver of stars becoming visible in the sudden dark drop of the night.

  Only one person thought of him later, when the official ­wagon-whetting had been done and the gentle celebration descended into general riot, and that was Philbert, who came and stood by the open flap of his tent.

  ‘Everything alright, Little Maus?’ Hermann asked from his cot. And the boy came forward, proudly showing him the ­official wagon-whetting nail Otto had put about his neck on a thong.

  ‘It should be yours,’ the boy said. ‘For it was you came up with the whole plan.’

  Hermann smiled as Philbert took the thong
from his over-large head and offered it up. He took it a moment, held the nail in his hand, felt its warmth, and the warmth behind its giving, before giving it back.

  ‘It’s yours,’ Hermann said. ‘It was you and Otto did all the hard work. So tell me, is the Frau pleased with her gift of freedom?’

  He saw the boy nod, and saw too that the boy was crying. Hermann said nothing, just placed a single hand upon Philbert’s head which seemed enough, the boy subsiding to the floor, curling up, apparently going to sleep. Hermann rolled back onto his cot, trying not to scratch or sigh. He didn’t know why Philbert was so upset but understood that sometimes a person doesn’t want a crowd but doesn’t want to be alone either, just wants to know someone is there, not too far away in the darkness.

  He was right about that, but wrong to believe Philbert was sleeping, for he was not. Something about Otto’s giving him the nail had brought back a memory: the sudden outline of his Papa shadowed somewhere near the fire, wiping the beer from his beard; made him think of those gifts of the little serinette that sang like a lark, the donkey with its saddle of softest silk, Philbert scanning back through every minute of every day trying to find the memory of where they lay, having the strongest feeling that if he went back slow enough and long enough, he would find them hiding in some crook and cranny of his mind. And he was thinking something else too: that the whole world of his past was deep inside him, and that sure as toad follows tadpole, something good was coming, and then would come the bad.

  8

  The Arrival of a Stranger

  Later that same Autumn, the Fair camped on the banks of a small ox-bow lake some distance from the River Mohne. Frau Fettleheim was happier than ever, Lita had moved back into her beloved drawer. People still touched Philbert’s head for luck, for Fair folk were a superstitious bunch, but it was so commonplace an occurrence Philbert hardly noticed. He was unaware that his almost-dying with the Berliners outside Belzig had made of him a token, a figure apart from the rest, like a shadow from the one who casts it, someone who has only to reach out his hand in order to touch the other side. The goings on with Frau Fettleheim and her cart only enhanced this image, giving it clarity, making it seem as if this Philbert had brought into ­existence another facet of the stone into which they had all been cut, able to see things from a different angle. For how else could a child as young as he, and as alien to their way of life, have conjured up a plan the rest of them should have thought of long before? That the root of the solution had come from Hermann and not Philbert, who had only posed the question, was inconsequential, for the fact remained that had the boy not posed the question the solution would never have been found.