HS03 - A Visible Darkness Read Free Page A

It pained me to see her distress, yet I did not understand the cause of it.
    ‘What is it, Helena? The insects, the foul air, the filth . . .’
    ‘It is not that,’ she said quickly, looking down the beach again.
    Two of the men were naked now, their bodies gleaming white in the sun. They were dancing by the water’s edge, touching the seawith their toes, as if they meant to enter it and swim, while the third man seemed to be trying to dissuade his companions from such a bold enterprise.
    ‘What worries me,’ she said more slowly, ‘is what may happen
here
. Spain will put ideas into Prussian heads. And now, the French are weaker. That’s what frightens me. You know what they are like, our countrymen. If one of them comes up with a wild scheme, he’ll find a thousand who are ready to follow him.’
    At her side, the baby was sleeping beneath an umbrella. Anders turned on his blanket and let out a tiny whimper.
    ‘It’s time to go,’ I said, standing up, helping Helena to her feet, lifting up the baby, making haste to gather our things together and put them in the carriage, encouraging the children to do the same.
    The soldiers had come out of the water. They were jumping up and down to warm themselves. Soon, they would start looking for a new amusement.
    Within two minutes, Helena and the children were sitting quietly in the landau. Having removed the horse’s nose-bag and hung it on the nail at the cart’s end, I climbed up into the driver’s seat, cracked the whip, jerked on the reins, and we turned our backs on Mildehaven beach.
    Forty minutes later, I pulled hard and the carriage stopped before my door.
    There was a miasma hanging over Lotingen. The sun had brought the untreated sewage to a fiery ferment. The children jumped down and ran quickly into the house, as I told them to do. In Helena’s case, such speed was out of the question. I helped her to the ground, while Lotte came out and took the baby from her arms. When, at last, my wife’s heavy, fragile figure reached the door and entered the house, the children waving from behind the windows that Lotte did not dare to open, I felt as though I had sealed them all inside a tomb.
    As the carriage gathered speed again, I felt the spattering blows of insects on my brow. I had arranged to meet Gudjøn Knutzen at four o’clock that afternoon, but I did not relish the appointment. Nor the thought of what we would be doing. We had been collecting‘evidence’—so-called—for the past two weeks. Fortunately, this would be the last occasion.
    Tomorrow the trial would begin.
    As I walked away from Daniel Winterhalter’s yard, stepping carefully through the filthy streets, I felt my angry stomach surging up into my throat.

 
     
3
     
     
    G UDJØN K NUTZEN WAS waiting by the steps outside my office.
    My clerk was in his usual state: grey hair standing up on his head as if the comb were still waiting to be invented, his clothes as spruce as a strolling tinker’s. His wheelbarrow contained a well-worn shovel and a set of scales that had once belonged to his grandfather.
    ‘Which way today, Herr Stiffeniis?’
    ‘The Berlin road,’ I announced.
    He did not ask me why I had not come to work that morning. He did not care. He let out a loud sigh of resignation, and began to trundle through the streets behind me with his wheelbarrow.
    I had adopted a scientific method of working, a proven French method, in the belief that the French themselves would not be able to ignore such carefully documented facts. Each day, Knutzen and I would take ourselves to one of the main roads leading into town, looking out for what I called ‘fair samples’, that is, deposits of varying sizes—large, medium and small—which I could added to my statistical record.
    As we made our way through the town—I with my ledger under my arm, Knutzen pushing his wheelbarrow, both dressed up likebandits with handkerchiefs tied over our noses—I consoled myself with the thought that