“Why do you want to lock Alfred up? What’s he done to you?” Mock heard her say as he made towards her father’s office. “You’re a foul monster! A miserable, drunken beast!” she yelled as he closed the door behind him.
Doctor Ruhtgard was leaning out of the window, pouring the hot coffee from Mock’s cup onto the lawn. He turned towards Mock.
“You’ve had your coffee, Mock. And now leave!”
“Don’t behave like some offended countess.” Mock was clearly pleased with his comparison. He felt perfidiously exhilarated and a faint smile appeared on his face. “Spare yourself the melodramatic gestures and tell me what’s happened! And without any preludes such as ‘You’re asking me?’”
“The day before yesterday my daughter returned from a concert at night. She was shaking all over.” Ruhtgard stood holding an empty cup with tracks of aromatic Kainz coffee running down its sides. “She said she bumped into you during the walk she decided to take after the concert. You were drunk and insisted on seeing her home. On the way you were vulgar towards her. By this you’re to understand that you’re forbidden from entering this house again.”
Mock strained his memory, but no Latin verse, no passage of prose came to mind which might calm him. He stared at a print on the wall showing a scene from the Gospels — the healing of the man possessed. At the bottom was written the year 1756. It dawned on Mock how he might quell his anger. He recalled an episode from schooclass="underline" Professor Moravjetz had thrown dates from German history at his pupils, who quickly translated them into Latin.
“Anno Domini millesimo septingentesimo quinquagesimo sexto,” Mock said, and flopped into the armchair.
“Are you out of your mind, Mock?” Ruhtgard gaped in amazement and the cup twisted on its handle spilling a few drops of coffee on his desk.
“If you believe your daughter, there’s no point in us talking.” Mock got to his feet and leaned over the desk. He looked into Ruhtgard’s eyes without blinking. “Shall I go on, or am I to obey your order and leave?”
“Go on,” Ruhtgard sighed, and he placed his hand on the head of a stork standing on a small, mahogany grand piano. The piano opened, the stork bent over and in its beak caught a cigarette which had appeared in place of the keyboard. Ruhtgard took the cigarette from the bird’s beak and closed the lid of the cigarette case.
“Only one thing in what your daughter says is true: the fact that I used inappropriate language towards a young lady from a good home. I won’t say any more. And not because I gave her my word of honour that I’d be discreet. I could quite easily grant myself dispensation … No, that’s not the reason … Someone once said that at times, truth is like a sentence. You don’t deserve a sentence.”
Ruhtgard pulled greedily on his cigarette for a minute and exhaled the smoke through his nostrils. A blue fog hung over the surface of the desk.
“Pour yourself some coffee,” he said quietly. “I’m not interested in what my daughter has been up to … Probably the same thing her mother liked so much … I never told you …”
“About her mother? Never. Only that she died of cholera in Cameroon. Before the war, when you had a well-paid job there.”
“I’ve told you too much then.” Ruhtgard did not look at Mock, but squinted at a point somewhere in the corner of the room. “May she be swallowed by eternal silence.”
Mock fell heavily into the expansive armchair. Silence. Ruhtgard quickly stood up and went to the Waldenburg service to pour Mock some coffee. He pressed the stork’s head and stuck the cigarette offered by the bird into Mock’s mouth. He walked out of his office, leaving his guest with an unlit cigarette between his lips.
BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1919
HALF PAST SEVEN IN THE MORNING
Mock and Ruhtgard sat in the dining room and buried their spoons in a mixture of soft-boiled eggs, butter and several leaves of parsley which filled two tall glasses delicately etched with slender lilies.
“Tell me, Ebbo.” Ruhtgard poured a stream of honey onto a crispy roll. “Why have you come to see me?”
“The diet didn’t help.” Mock sucked up the eggy concoction with gusto and helped himself to two fat veal sausages. “I still had nightmares. I’m going to tell you something you might not believe, or might even laugh at.” Mock broke off and fell silent.
“Go on, then.” Ruhtgard attacked a soft pear with his fruit knife.
“Remember how we used to entertain ourselves at night on the front with weird stories?” When Ruhtgard murmured his affirmation, Mock went on: “Remember Corporal Neymann’s stories about his haunted house? Well, my house is haunted. Understand, Ruhtgard? It’s haunted.”
“I could ask what you by mean haunted,” Ruhtgard said. “But first of all I know you don’t like that kind of question and, secondly, I’ve got to go to the hospital in a minute. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to hear you out. We can talk on the way. So, how does this ‘haunting’ manifest itself?”
“Noises …” Mock swallowed a mouthful of sausage. “I’m woken up by noises in the night. I dream about people with their eyes gouged out, and then a thumping on the floor wakes me up.”
“That’s all?” Ruhtgard allowed Mock to pass at the dining-room door.
“Yes.” Mock accepted his bowler hat from the servant. “That’s all.”
“Listen to me carefully, Eberhard,” said Ruhtgard slowly once they were on the stairs. “I’m not a psychiatrist but, like everyone else these days, I am interested in the theories of Freud and Jung. There are some very good passages in them.” They stepped out onto sun-drenched Landsbergstrasse and set off alongside the park. “Especially where they write about the relationship between parents and children. Both scholars write about paranormal phenomena. Jung apparently experienced them in his own house in Vienna … Both he and Freud advise hypnosis in such situations … Perhaps you could try it?”
“I don’t see why.” They turned left into Kleinburgstrasse. Mock stopped to let a young woman with a child in a huge wicker pram go by before they briskly walked on, passing the Communal School building with its garden and playground. After a lengthy silence he said: “This is happening in my house, not in my head!”
“I read several of Hippocrates’ tracts in Greek during my medical studies.” Ruhtgard smiled and led Mock to the right into Kirschallee, towards the enormous water tower. “That’s your field … I suffered like hell over that Greek text … I don’t remember now which of them has a description of the brain of an epileptic goat. Of course we can’t be sure if it really did have epilepsy. Hippocrates dissected the brain and concluded that there was too much moisture in it. The poor animal might have had hallucinations, but it would have been enough to drain some water from its brain. The same applies to you. A part of your brain is responsible for your nightmares and for the noises in your house. All we have to do is work on it — perhaps with the help of hypnosis — and it’ll be over and done with. You’ll never dream of those dead, blinded people whose murderer you’re after ever again.”
“Are you trying to say” — Mock stopped, removed his bowler and wiped his brow with a handkerchief — “that those terrifying phantoms are in my brain? That they don’t actually exist?”
“Of course they don’t,” Ruhtgard exclaimed with joy. “Can your father hear them? Can that dog hear them?”
“My father can’t hear them because he’s deaf.” Mock stood stock still. “But the dog can. He growls at someone, jumps up at someone …”
“Look, the dog is reacting to you.” Ruhtgard was flushed with the ardour of his argument. They passed the water tower and made their way along the narrow path between the sports ground and the Lutheran community cemetery. He took Mock by the arm and accelerated his step. “Come on, let’s walk faster or I’ll be late for the hospital. And now listen. Something wakes you, something that’s in your head, and you wake the dog. The dog sees his master on his feet and greets you. Understand? He’s not fawning on a ghost, he’s fawning on you …”