The Anatomist's Dream Page 9

  Philbert was rather taken by Zacharias’s clocks, and ­examined each of them with great interest. His particular favourite was small, six sides of glass set into a cubed wooden frame, its innards exposed to view, small cogs clicking their teeth with precision, banks of wheels whirring first one way and then the other. He had a fancy this was what the inside of his taupe might look like if it was ever revealed to the world, sometimes thinking he could hear a faint tick, tick, ticking somewhere deep inside his skull.

  ‘Hello all,’ Hermann said as he came into the tent, bending to pat whoever was closest, which happened to be Huffelump, who raised her head sleepily from Lita’s shoulder, unfurling a long grey tongue to lick at Hermann’s fingers. Hermann carefully removed his fine green shirt and fussily began to place it on a specially constructed hanger that Otto had planed and smoothed out of an ash branch, so as to minimise the wear and tear of his most precious possession. His skin was still pink and smooth as pomegranate juice, though in the dim light from the little brazier it looked as though some of Hannah’s freckles had rubbed off on him, small patches of brown appearing around his waist and upper arms.

  Once wrapped in a cotton shift, Hermann threw himself down on the cot and asked Philbert what he and Lita had been talking about when he’d come in. He’d not been the slightest surprised or angry to find his tent space taken up by Lita and her monstrous calf, Philbert and his little red pig. He was instead delighted that he could touch people again, stroke animals, take pleasure in wearing his shirt, enjoying being in the company of the people he cared about without annoying them with his itching, or the noxious smell of his ointments.

  Philbert told him about the glass clock, and Hermann ­commented cryptically that time flew by like a hawk outside the open door of a person’s life, and that his clog almanac marked it quite quick enough for him. Then he pulled out a rectangular length of dark, polished wood, each edge notched to indicate season, month and week, marked with studs and holes for Quarter Days and Feasts. Hermann took Philbert’s hand and traced his fingers along one edge and then another as he turned his almanac around.

  ‘See this little cross?’ he said. ‘This marks Advent, and this other one is the start of Lent, and these little tacks mark the goose-markets the Fairs follow every year.’ Next he pointed out some small scratched letters beside each tack. ‘These remind me which town we’re going to, so here’s DD for Dortmund, and MU for Münster. And, according to this, we should be leaving any day now for GU, OS, and FZ.’

  Maulwerf’s Fair took a three-year circuit about the lands of Germany, Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire so as not to tire their welcome or clash with other Fairs going the same ways he did. Philbert listened with interest as Hermann laid out the route, finding pleasure in the sounds of towns, the cough of their consonants, the rolling wealds of their vowels, repeating them like an alphabetical mantra, learning their spellings, discovering their rhythms. And it was not just idle interest that made him pay attention. Kwert had been dismayed, though not surprised, to discover that Philbert could hardly read, as neither more could Lita nor Tomaso, and had insisted on demonstrating the glory of words in every way he could, teaching them with tales, telling them stories with words they didn’t know, ­encouraging them to recognise the basic alphabet and their pronunciations by squiggling sticks in sand or drying pools of mud.

  Of the three, Philbert was by far the most diligent in his studies, and he repeated these latest names again and again, making up his own mnemonic to remember them, just as Kwert had taught him to do, finding in it an easier knack than he’d expected, a rhyme sequence coming to him almost straightaway from the nowhere-land that was his head: from Dortmund to Gütersloh, from goose fair to stepping stair, from Gütersloh to Osnabrück, from stepping stair to winter lair, and then to Finzeln, and journey’s end.

  And that was exactly where and when Maulwerf led his Fair as they came up to the cold month of December. Other fairs at this time of year took a southerly trajectory, aiming to spend the winter in more clement climes, which was precisely why Maulwerf took the opposite route, always ready to cash in where others feared to tread. These, he reasoned, were precisely the times when the sudden splash of a fair upon a town’s doorsteps could urge out its citizens; people who were already beginning to tighten their belts and batten down their doors and quail against whatever hardships the coming winter would bring, folk who would think, Well why not? Why not one last splurge before we really have to pull in our horns . . .

  It was no surprise then to Philbert when they arrived upon the tattered outskirts of yet another backwater town and Maulwerf called for a quick show-and-stopover before moving on. The place was called Hochwürden, and Philbert would never need a mnemonic to remember that hamlet’s name, for it would soon be scratched upon Hermann’s almanac by Philbert himself.

  12

  The Highest of Bridges

  ‘Die Fastnachtspiel hat begonnen!’

  A roar from the small crowd went up as the blanket was dropped and the stage revealed. The theatre troupe were performing a much-recycled comedy routine that didn’t demand too many props or actors. The erstwhile Tingelburg and Tangelrichter were now designated Fraulein Plappermaul and Herr Pluderhosen, who hailed from the Province of Posen. It was the Eve of their Wedding Night, having won each other in the Dance of the Noses competition that had just taken place, with much enforced participation and noisy adjuncts from the happy spectators, Bride and Groom now exhibiting their strap-on papier-mâché hooters with ribald glee.

  ‘I adore your nose, my turtle dove, the way your nostrils flare –’

  ‘I love yours even more, Liebschön, and I especially admire the hairs.’

  The crowd roared again as Fraulein Plappermaul flicked Pluderhosen’s nose with a kerchief while he acted up a sneeze, sending a jet of green ooze – made from Maulwerf’s vegetable leftovers – arcing into the front few rows of spectators.

  ‘Your teeth, my peach, they shine like pearls, and fittingly smell of oysters –’

  ‘And yours, my love, are like diamonds, with the gleam of a throwster –’

  ‘They shine like the scales of a newborn fish –’

  ‘And how yours gleam at night from the darkness of their dish!’

  And so the play went on, and the crowd roared, and Harlekin rose up at the back like a great black cloud, flinging out small flashes of thunder and lightning from the patterns of his suit, the air heavy with the yellow haze of burning grease from the footlights and tinged with the faint, but unmistakable, background odour of blood, for the Fair had arrived, fortuitously, just after Slaughter Day – a common occurrence in these parts at this time of year – when every animal and fowl that couldn’t last the winter through on acorn-must or stored fodder was put to the knife, blood bled into sausages, flesh sliced and diced into huge barrels of brine, or put to hang in the smoke-houses.

  Hochwürden, as its name implied, was built high upon the ledge of a sandstone gully, the houses, Rathaus and even the church perched along its edge, their dark red stones glowing dimly in the reflections of the many fires that had been lit, seeming to breathe and move with the rising flames, pockets of resin exploding, smoke slinking under handfuls of fresh green wood, off-cuts of beef, mutton and pork dripping into the embers. The narrow streets, scraped back to the bare red rock, heaved slowly in the shifting light, their sporadically chiselled drain-ways threading a backbone down their middles, angled to catch the waste that was now viscous with blood and hair. Slowly, and without hurry, each runnel led to the lip of the chasm by which the town had been built, disgorging its ­contents into the river churning far below.

  On the evening of the Fair’s arrival a slight haze hung over the chasm and the bridge that crossed it, the smoke of its charnel fires catching in the myriad droplets that were flung up from the water as it dashed against the rocks beneath, shimmering in the fading light, faint stubs of rainbows appeari
ng every now and then as Philbert walked the bridge’s length, turning his head this way and that. Away on the far side stood a forest, dark and hunched and silent, seeming to repel the bridge that had been built to reach it, begrudging the toll the townsfolk took as they pillaged its depths sporadically for the fuel and wood they needed, resenting the intrusion of the pigs and goats who foraged their floors for rotting berries, dropped acorns and mast. It seemed to crouch just beyond reach, looking alien and entirely without welcome, a tangle of low-grown branches hiding the boar that were hunted every autumn just as winter began to drag the sun down from the sky. Hundreds of years before, Philbert knew, men must have seen that bounty just out of reach, and had brought pulleys and ropes, planks and nails, thrown out a crude walkway from one side of the deep-scoured gully to the other, bracing their first bridge against the ancient oaks and beeches that leant away from them, trying to shrug off their nooses and snares. What courage it must have taken for the first man to cross that chasm; Philbert shuddered to think about it.

  He’d left the crowds who now were snuggled drunkenly around their fires, the actors having finished their plays and joined them, the few Fair folk who had bothered to set up their booths in a place of such obvious poverty still shouting out their wares to dwindling interest and acclamation. He left the shouting and the swearing and the smoke and stink of blood that had begun to clot within the runnels, making the waste-water hard-running, pooling over the clogs in places, making the streets oily and slippery with grease, and made his way instead to the bridge which, after a few hundred years of ­architectural acumen, was now buttressed with two arms of stone that rose against the chasm sides, supporting a single, if untidy, sandstone arch. In daylight, people walked across it, ran across it, rode across it, took its width and length with abandon, and even now – though it was late into the night – the light of a couple of braziers crackled where a few old men were huddled upon the nearest of the parapet seats, safe as seagulls on their ledge, drinking acorn coffee splashed with bad brandy, telling stories about fairs long gone by, when that pig had up and run with the blade still halfway across its throat, screaming like a demon, kicking its way down the street and out over the ledge of the gorge into oblivion.

  ‘Still hear him today,’ said one. ‘Never heard nothing like it, ’cepting the wife, that first time in Finkel’s hay barn.’

  Sniggers then, as the old men wheezed and cackled into their pipes, remembering their own first times in their own first barns, one of them omitting to say it had been with a pig, though without a knife plunged hard into its throat.

  ‘Mind when young piss-pot Hugo caught himself on fire?’ said one, the spittle from his pipe clinging like snot-drops to his beard, making Philbert wary, hanging back in the shadows, yet still oddly fascinated by what might come next.

  ‘Still smell him today,’ added another. ‘Never smelt nothing like it.’

  ‘Crackled like nuts in a stove, so he did,’ commented the first.

  ‘Didn’t have no nuts after that, though,’ commented another, at which they all coughed again, as they tried to cackle.

  ‘His old wifey never went short, though, I can tell you that.’ Another voice, another round of rancid laughter.

  ‘Not so old, neither, I’ll have you know. A lot of years in that mare, God bless ’er. Beggin’ for it, she was, night an’ day.’

  ‘It was charity, is what it was,’ came the first voice, and again the pipe smoke rose up in gusts as the old men remembered what another generation would let fade away into the mist that hung about the bridge like thin gauze about a wound. Philbert turned away, obscurely offended, understanding what they were talking about, at least in the abstract, and not wanting to hear more, shivering with the damp, throat itching from the smoke of their pipes. He slid past them through the shadows, made his way right out onto the middle of the bridge, and leant himself against the stone. The thought of the dead drop underneath was frightening, but he liked the cool of the stone against his elbows, beneath his feet, felt a frisson of whispering from the alien forest on the other side.

  These old men, he thought, and those old trees, both having a malevolence about them he didn’t like. He felt bounded by them, trapped in the space between, the stonework of the bridge the only thing keeping him safe, holding him suspended between twin evils, a moment he filed away amongst the myriad other memories he seemed never able to forget; a memory, Kwert had said philosophically, should never be forgotten but rather explored.

  One day, one night, one dawn, did the Fair linger in Hochwürden; one day and one night that resulted in drunken men and women lying in disarray about the smouldering ­carcasses of their fires, lumps of newly slaughtered meat congealing beside tipped-up plates, half-filled mugs of ale still and flat as their owners. A headache settled and brattled upon the entire town, and on Philbert; even Kroonk was slow to stir that final morning. They’d spent the night before, had Philbert, Lita and Tomaso, toting themselves around the various groups of ­drunkards, giving them close-ups of lumpy heads, third eyes and tiny feet, hoping to scrape up the odd coin from those too far gone to know better. Despite their efforts, the townsfolk were clench-pocketed to a man, and all they’d earned were tooth-torn hunks of half-smoked Wurst so peppery even the smell made them choke, a few swigs of the local ale, brewed to its absolute alcoholic limits, more cloudy and raw than Kwert’s Quash, and God knew, that was lethal enough. Tomaso left first thing to seek out the lace-maker, a motherly old woman who was teaching him her trade, the maker of a lace collar Tomaso had once given Philbert, presupposing a friendship that was never furthered, mutually unwanted on both sides. Lita too had absconded, fed up with the crude comments and cruder ­inspections that had been attempted upon her tiny person, retreating back to the safer environs of Frau Fettleheim, who had not made a single outing for display upon her cart, knowing the moment they landed in this half-arsed town that there was little money to be made, and none worth the turning out of the likes of her.

  Philbert, though, had wandered out and about a bit longer, having consigned Kroonk to Lita’s safekeeping, sampling some of the town’s food and drink, later vomiting it all up again over the side of the bridge before going back to Hermann’s tent and curling into uneasy sleep.

  He awoke a few hours later, feeling ill, cold and cramped, having an urgent need to breathe air that was fresh and free. He made his way through the debris, human and ­otherwise, that was littered about the still sleeping and snoring streets, arriving once more at the bridge, immediately enlivened by the fresh breeze that arose from its waters. He felt a slight pang of guilt as he passed the thin threads of spittle he’d left on the stonework the night before, deciding he would go back and clean them off once he felt better, get a bucket of water and un-besmirch the stones he’d sullied, for no matter how debased the inhabitants of the town might be, how desperate for a last hoorah before winter set in, there were certain things Philbert, young as he was, would not tolerate.

  The chasm was wreathed in a mist of its own making as Philbert took his way out across the bridge, hearing the water crashing hard against the stones somewhere far below. He could hardly see two yards ahead as he made his way forward, clinging to the bridge’s edge with white-knuckled hands, daring himself to go further, gazing every now and then over the side, glimpsing beneath the shifting shadows of mist into the dizzying depths it had failed to hide, peering down onto the cushions of cloud and moss where the chasm narrowed into dripping crevasses of stone folded and worn by millennia of floods, its rocks round as pillows, softened by liverworts and ferns, thin layers of soil anchored to the rocks by the roots of short sturdy trees and shrubs. He was halfway across, thankful to be breathing deeply of the breeze-blown air, the water boiling and laughing in its ginnels, the mist wreathed about him, cold as ghosts, when he heard a voice that near catapulted him out of his skin.

  ‘Hello, Little Maus.’

  The voice was low and h
ollow, as if hewn from the ­whispering mists and murks that came up from beneath the stonework, Philbert unable to tell at first from where it had come, or from whom. He wasn’t afraid, the use of his familiar moniker making it obvious it was someone he knew, and when the clouds spraying up from the river cleared slightly, wafted by the low wind that began to breathe from out the forest, he saw Hermann, perched upon a parapet like a friendly gargoyle, his back to the chasm, elbows resting on his knees, hands held out to the residual warmth coming from the old men’s charcoal brazier of the night before, twitching its dying scents of damp ashes and old tobacco into the air.

  ‘Hello, Little Maus,’ Hermann said again, and Philbert could see him clearly now, how he was sat all in a droop, as if a keystone was weighing down upon his shoulders, his neck pushed into the submission of its arch. His fine green shirt was dull and damp, and clung so close to Hermann’s skin that Philbert could see the cord of his spine spaced out beneath it. There was no surprise in Hermann’s face as he saw Philbert approaching; it held instead an expression of relief, as if he’d been waiting for his Little Maus all along.