End of the World in Breslau Read online

  Mock took the jeweller’s business card from his silver card-holder and carefully read the home address. “Breslau, Drabitziusstrasse 4”. Without shutting the window, he fired the engine and abruptly pulled away. A journey across the entire snow-covered city awaited him.

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 1ST, 1927

  NINE O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

  Paul Sommé the jeweller found it hard to swallow the saliva that aggravated his swollen throat. He felt his fever mounting. At times like this, he found comfort in one activity alone: perusing his numismatic collection. So he lay wrapped in his navy-blue dressing gown with purple lapels, browsing through his collection of old coins. His expert eyes, sparkling with high fever and armed with a powerful magnifying glass, caressed seventeenth-century Danzig guldens, Silesian gshyvnas and Tsarist imperials. He imagined his ancestors hoarding stacks of gold in their money bags, then buying property, homes, farms, women and titles. Given surety by the generously rewarded sheriffs, provosts and other officers of the law, he imagined their satiated, peaceful sleep during the wars and pogroms in Poland and Russia. Policemen always awoke warm feelings in Sommé. Even now, laid out as he was with a bad cold and torn from pursuing his collector’s passion by the sudden sound of the bell, he was happy to receive Criminal Counsellor Eberhard Mock’s business card from the butler.

  “Show him in,” he said to his servant and, with relief, lay his shivering body on the soft pillows of his chaise-longue.

  The sight of Mock’s broad figure filled him with just as much pleasure as had his business card. He esteemed the Criminal Counsellor for two reasons: firstly, Mock was a policeman; secondly, he was the husband of a beautiful and capricious woman twenty years his junior, whose changeable emotions frequently encouraged her husband to pay a visit to the jewellers. He himself, older than his wife by more than thirty years, was well acquainted with the sulking, melancholy and migraines of women. Only this did he have in common with Mock. His response to these phenomena was different, however; unlike the Counsellor, he was wise, understanding and tolerant.

  “Please do not justify yourself, Excellency.” Despite his burning throat he would not let Mock get a word in edgeways. “I go to bed late. Besides, no visit of yours is ever inopportune. How can I be of help?”

  “My dear Mr Sommé,” Mock, as always, was overcome by the impression made on him by the Dutch masters hanging on the walls of the jeweller’s office. “I’d like to buy that ruby necklace we spoke about. I absolutely have to have it today, but I can’t pay you until tomorrow or the day after. I beg you to grant me this favour. I will certainly pay.”

  “I know I can trust you,” the jeweller hesitated. His fever was distorting objects and perspective, and he thought there were two Mocks scanning his walls. “But I’m not very well. I have a high temperature … That’s the main problem …”

  Mock eyed the canvases and recalled the previous evening in Risse’s office – and the samurai with a knife-point held to his eye.

  “I would dearly like to grant you this favour, Excellency. I’m really not looking for excuses,” Sommé’s voice was breaking in agitation. His head fell back onto the hot, damp rut in his pillow. “We can call my doctor, Doctor Grünberg, right now – he can confirm that he’s forbidden me to leave the house.”

  Seeing the change in Mock’s face, Sommé quickly got up from his chaise-longue. He felt violently dizzy, and beads of sweat, occasioned both by his illness and the fear of losing a client, broke out all over his flushed face. He leaned heavily against the desk and whispered:

  “But that’s irrelevant. Please wait a moment. I’ll be ready in a minute.”

  The jeweller slowly made for the door of his bedroom. He pulled an old-fashioned nightcap onto his wet, bald head.

  “Mr Sommé,” Mock held him back. “Could your wife not go to the shop with me? You really are sick. I wouldn’t want to put you at risk.”

  “Ah, how considerate of you, Counsellor sir,” the jeweller mustered unfeigned admiration. “But that would be impossible. My beloved Edith left this morning to go to an auction of old silver in Leipzig. During her absence and my illness, our trusted assistant is looking after the shop. But that’s no good anyway. That is, the assistant can’t help you. I’m the only one who knows the code for the safe where the necklace is kept. I’ll just get dressed and we’ll go.”

  Sommé went into the bedroom next to the office and slowly closed the door. Mock heard the distinctive rustle of a body sinking to the floor and the thud of a chair or stool hitting floorboards. He ran into the bedroom, and saw the jeweller lying on the floor in a faint. He rolled him onto his back and slapped him across one burning cheek. Sommé came to and smiled to his dreams. He thought he saw his beloved Edith, her hair flowing, during their last holiday in the Eulengebirge mountains. Mock, however, had an entirely different vision: Edith Sommé, decked with jewels from the display cases, her neck entwined with his rubies, lying in a swoon with her legs spread on the ottoman at the back of the jeweller’s shop, and a handsome male, satiated with her body, yelling Reutter’s song as loud as he could.

  “There is nothing like a trusted assistant,” he thought, leaving the delirious Sommé in the care of his butler.

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 1ST, 1927

  TEN O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

  Mock entered his apartment and looked about. He was surprised by the silence and emptiness. Apart from the dog, nobody greeted him, nobody was pleased to see him return, nobody was waiting for him. As usual, when the servants had the evening off. Marta had gone to visit relatives near Oppeln, and Adalbert, who was suffering from the same ailment as the jeweller, was stretched out in the servants’ quarters. Mock removed his hat and coat and pushed down the handle of the bedroom door. Sophie was asleep, huddled under her eiderdown. Her arms were protecting her head as if warding off a blow, her fingers were wrapped around her thumbs. Mock had read somewhere that this unconscious configuration of a sleeping body signified uncertainty and helplessness. The tenderness he felt triggered a memory: Sophie and Eberhard at a station. He was leaving for Berlin to receive a medal for solving a difficult case, she was tenderly bidding him goodbye. A kiss and a request: “If you come back during the night, wake me up. You know how.”

  Mock could hear Sophie’s low, debauched laughter even now. He heard it as he took a bath, as he closed the bedroom door and turned the key on the inside. It resonated in his ears as he lay down beside his wife and began to wake her in the way she so loved. Sophie sighed and gently moved away from her husband, but he stubbornly persisted with his endeavours. Soon she was wide awake, looking into his glazed eyes.

  “Today’s the day,” he whispered. “The day we are to conceive our child.”

  “Do you believe in that rubbish?” she asked sleepily.

  “Today’s the day,” he said again. “I’m sorry about last night. I had to help Erwin.”

  “I don’t care,” Sophie sulked, pushing away her husband’s rapacious hands, “about Erwin or your astrological predictions. I don’t feel well. Let me sleep in peace.”

  “Darling, tomorrow I’m going to give you a ruby necklace.” Mock’s breath burned her neck. She got up and sat on the couch by the window, tucking her silk nightdress under her. She looked at the bed and remembered the old man with his scratchy beard.

  “Do you take me for a courtesan,” Sophie stared at a point above Eberhard’s head, “whose love can be bought with a necklace?”

  “You know how I love it when you pretend to be a little whore,” he smiled sensuously.

  “You only talk about yourself. It’s always ‘I’ and ‘me’.” Sophie’s tone was lustful and provocative. “What ‘I like’, what ‘interests me’ and so on. You never ask me what I like, what I might like to do. The whole world has to jump to your attention.”

  “And what do you like most?” Mock went along with her encouraging smile.

  Sophie sat beside her husband and stroked his strong neck with her h
and.

  “Pretending to be a little whore,” she replied.

  Mock grew wary. He could still hear her vulgar “You want to fuck?”, and feel the touch of her delicate feet which, a few days earlier, had kicked him off the bed and onto the floor.

  “So pretend you are one,” he instructed dryly.

  The little girl in white watched with horror as Baron von Hagenstahl slapped the red-headed harlot. “Am I to go on scattering the flowers?” she asked. Sophie felt exhausted. Staggering slightly, she approached the bed.

  “I can’t pretend to be a whore,” she sighed, slipping under the eider-down, “because you haven’t got anything to pay me with. You haven’t got the necklace.”

  “I’ll have it tomorrow,” Mock said, nestling against his wife’s back. “I can pay you as much as a high-class prostitute. With money.”

  “I’m an exclusive courtesan.” Sophie held him back by his wrists and moved towards the wall. “I only accept expensive presents from my clients.”

  “Good,” Mock panted. “You pretend you’re a whore and I’ll pretend to give you the necklace.”

  Sophie raised herself on one elbow and pulled her hair out of her face.

  “Stop it!” she shouted. “Leave me alone! I’ve had enough of this game. I’m tired and I want to sleep. You could just as easily satisfy yourself now and pretend you’re making love to me! Just pretend.”

  Mock panted even more heavily and pressed her to the bed with all his weight. The muscles in Sophie’s face slackened and her cheeks shifted imperceptibly towards her glowing ears. With her tightly closed eyes she looked like a little girl pretending to be asleep but about to burst out laughing at any moment to show her father, who is leaning over her, what a wonderful joke she has played on him. Sophie was not a child, Mock not her father, and what was happening between them now in no way resembled an innocent game. Sophie was thinking about the little girl in white, her eyes swollen from crying, her fists clutching the rose petals, and her horror at the sight of females on heat. Mock was thinking about cosmo-grams, stars and the as yet unborn Herbert Mock riding a pony in South Park on a Sunday.

  “Today is the day to conceive,” he whispered. “You know a lot of prostitutes get raped.”

  “You bastard! You swine!” yelled Sophie. “You boor! Don’t, or you’ll regret it!”

  Mock did. And later regretted it.

  BRESLAU, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2ND, 1927

  SEVEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  Mock regretted it greatly. He sat naked in the locked bedroom beside a cooling stove and pressed Sophie’s nightdress to his face. The material was torn in several places. At his feet lay jasmine-scented writing paper covered with her rounded writing:

  You bastard and scum,

  For the rape you have committed you’ll pay before God. And now, in life, with the loss of your miserable reputation …

  He laid his wife’s nightdress on the tangled bedclothes and cast his eye about the room. He stared at the empty dressing table and at the open, bare wardrobe, whose hinges Adalbert had only recently oiled. He ran his tongue over his palate. It was not dry and rough. He had not touched a drink the night before. If he had got drunk, he would not be sitting by the stove now. His tongue would not be moving around his mouth searching for traces of alcohol. It would be compressed in the mouth of a hanging man.

  You infertile impotent,

  You’ll remember this date for a long time – December 1st, 1927. On this day I cease to write my diary, which was a desperate cry for the respect and dignity owed to a woman and a wife. I have described in detail the violence you have inflicted upon me …

  He lay on the divan and, by the light of the bedside lamp, gazed at Sophie’s few fair hairs as he wound them around his finger. His first morning without a wife. His first morning without a hangover.

  He dragged himself from the divan to the floor. He lay on his stomach on the deep-pile carpet and with his arms gathered the mound of objects Sophie had built up like a funereal pyre. There were the furs, which, at his bidding, she had worn over her naked body, jewellery, perfumes and even silk stockings.

  I don’t need presents from you. All you are capable of is opening your wallet and buying forgiveness and love. But mine you can no longer afford.

  You pitiful old alcoholic, you couldn’t match up to a young woman like me. Your member is too small. But there are men in this city who are my equals. You haven’t even the slightest idea how often and in what ways I experienced carnal ecstasy in the week you have crowned by raping me. You can’t even imagine. Do you want to know? You’ll soon find out from the diary I’m going to publish secretly, and which my friends will distribute throughout all the brothels in Germany. You have no idea what I am capable of. You’ll find out from the diary how much life I sucked out of Robert, our former servant.

  Mock buried his face in the pillow that Sophie had bitten the night before. During his police career, he had conducted four murder cases in which husbands had allegedly killed their wives. In three of them, the reason for the crime had been that the wives had ridiculed their husbands’ sexual prowess. The deceased had made fun of the small size of their husbands’ sceptres and had told them they had found satisfaction in the arms of other men. Mock had checked these stories. They were, with no exception, fictitious tales, incredible fantasies – the ultimate weapon sought by ill-treated wives. He remembered the insolent looks their previous butler, Robert, had thrown at Sophie. He remembered his wife’s perfume filling the servants’ quarters, and the butler’s oaths that it was the scent of a street-walker.

  The Criminal Counsellor grasped his head. Were Sophie’s threats entirely unfounded? Had she really written a diary about her “carnal ecstasy”? It would make perfect reading for brothelists, and what was described there would have to be what they wanted. Were these pornographic experiences real, or were they the invention of an aristocratic woman abused by her plebeian husband, of an artiste oppressed by a brutal philistine, of a woman ready for motherhood, fruitlessly ravished by an infertile male? There was only one person who knew the answer to the question, the man whose task it had been to note Sophie Mock’s every move over the past week.

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 2ND, 1927

  EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  Mock left Main Station by the rear exit. He passed the Administration of Iron Railways on his right and the frost-covered trees of Teichäcker Park on his left, then cut across Gustav-Freitag-Strasse. He stopped on the square in front of Elisabethgymnasium, bought some cigarettes at the kiosk there, and sat down on a bench glazed with ice. He had to take a break to think, had to link up causes to effects.

  You’ll never find me. At last I am free. Free from you and those stinking Silesian provinces. I’m leaving for ever.

  His suspicions were confirmed. The ticket seller just finishing the night shift glanced at Sophie’s photograph and recognized her as being the woman who had bought a ticket at about midnight for the night train to Berlin.

  Mock drew the gaze of schoolboys hurrying to school; the woman selling newspapers and tobacco in the kiosk eyed him coquettishly; from a poster pillar he was pierced by the stare of a gloomy old man, below whom was the caption: “Spiritual father Prince Alexei von Orloff proves the imminent coming of the Antichrist. His portents: recurrence of crimes and cataclysms.”

  “He’s right, that spiritual father,” thought Mock. “Crimes and cataclysms are recurring. I’ve been left by a woman once more and Smolorz has started drinking again.”

  The thought of the Criminal Sergeant reminded him of the purpose of his expedition to a district he did not much like, behind Main Station. He walked along Malteserstrasse, passing Elisabethgymnasium and the red-brick communal school, and turned right into Lehmgrubenstrasse. He crossed at a diagonal, dodging the number 6 tram, and entered the gate of tenement 25 opposite the church of St Heinrich. On the fourth floor of the annexe lived Franziska Mirga, a young Gypsy from Czechoslovakia whose five-year-old
son bore the beautiful Silesian name of Helmut Smolorz.

  Opposite Franziska’s lodgings, on a toilet with the door wide open, sat a corpulent old woman. Privacy, evidently, was not something she greatly prized. With her skirts arranged in waves at the foot of the pan, she held onto the doorframe with her arms and scrutinized the panting Mock. Before knocking on Franziska’s door, he remembered the ancient adage about the candour of Gypsies, and decided to turn the old woman into his informer.

  “Tell me, grandma,” he shouted, holding his nose, “did anyone visit Miss Mirga last night?”

  “But of course they did, of course they did.” The old woman’s eyes glistened. “All of them military men, and one civilian.”

  “And was there a general among them?”

  “Of course there was. They all were. All of them military men and one civilian.”

  Nolens volens, Mock had to rely on the candour of Gypsies, questioned though it was by many. He knocked on the door with a force that shook the Advent wreath hanging there. In the gap above the door chain appeared the face of a young woman. When she saw the police identification, Franziska’s expression became serious and she unfastened the chain. Mock found himself in a kitchen. On the stove stood a saucepan of milk and a kettle. Steam was settling on a child’s clothes as they dried, on a small pile of neatly stacked firewood, on a bucket of coal and on walls covered with green gloss paint. Mock removed his hat and unbuttoned his coat.

  “Are we going to talk here?” he asked, irritated.

  Franziska opened the door to a room partitioned by a curtain depicting a sunset by the seaside, with boats bobbing on the waves. It was taken up almost entirely by a sideboard, a three-door wardrobe, a table and some chairs. On one of the chairs sat a small boy eating with relish from a bowl of semolina. If Kurt Smolorz ever wanted to disown his son, he would have to exchange heads with somebody.