The empusium, p.28
The Empusium, page 28
“Help, Hilfe!” he cried, but oddly, his voice seemed to get stuck somewhere near his face; totally deafened, he could not even hear himself. With an immense effort he managed to free one of his hands from its bonds. It was covered in blood and shaking. Trembling, he tried to untie the other one, but his fingers could not reach the right spot. All he could see were some pine cones rolling down, as if set in motion by a gust of wind.
Something was coming from above, something was sliding, pushing its way downward. Poor Wojnicz feverishly disentangled the cruelly tight straps binding his feet, but he froze still when he saw us.
Right beside him he caught sight of a mossy face and the flash of a pair of moist eyes, dark green like an underground lake. He was looking at a compact torso formed of sticks interwoven with pine needles, moss and wet earth. Warmer air swept over him, like breath that smelled of a heap of rotting foliage, and the large dark eyes were staring at him—with curiosity, but he could not sense any thought in it, this curiosity was certainly not human. The face came close to him, and from a short distance it scrutinized the pores of his skin, his eyelashes, lips and brows. It was joined by a second face, and then one more. Almost ceasing to breathe, he gazed at us with terror that gradually faded, for we wished him no harm. The poor human being could sense this, and with its free, bleeding hand touched our cheek, and felt that it was alive, that underneath there was a sort of body, not like its own, because our bodies have an experimental consistency, they are occasional, dependent on tides and air pressure, underground currents and transpiration.
Our eyes penetrate deep inside. We can see the skeleton, the beating heart, the peristalsis of the intestines, the esophagus working away as it endeavors to push down the saliva that has gathered out of fear. We can see the tongue, arranging itself to utter some word. The diaphragm rises and falls, drops of urine flow from the kidneys to the bladder. The uterus clenches like a fist, but the member swells with blood.
* * *
The straps fell off, and with stifled sobbing Wojnicz began to wobble his way downhill, catching hold of trees because his eyes were full of tears. His torso was bare, one foot was shoeless, and his messy fair hair ringed his head in an ash-gray halo. In the waning twilight the valleys were fading before him, but the darkness had not yet acquired its proper hue, because the show was only just beginning, and over in the east the sky had started to brighten with a different, not solar tone, until finally before Wojnicz’s eyes a lurid clipping of light appeared among the trees, and then the entire pitted face of the full moon. Below he could see Görbersdorf and the tiny figures of people. The paved high street was reflecting the moonlight and looked like a stage, and the modern electric lamps were shining too.
Wojnicz pushed on home, convinced that the most vital thing he must do was to hide under any sort of clothing, cover his exposed body—he was fully focused on that.
Stained with blood and earth, he appeared on the promenade, hobbling shakily in one shoe. It was surprisingly empty; instead of intensifying, the dusk was being diluted by the moonlight that was flooding everything. The scene he saw was like a black-and-white drawing on a gingerbread tin. It’s the Schwärmerei, he thought. He felt unwell, his legs were starting to collapse beneath him and his throat tightened: he was about to be sick. The one thing he had to do was reach the guesthouse and hide there, under the bed if need be. By now he was at the back of the sanatorium, next he had to cross the well-lit street and then run a few hundred meters. But he saw something moving by the side entrance to the Kurhaus. Limping, he ran into a courtyard and continued his journey along the back streets, parallel to the main one, from where he could hear conversations growing louder and the shuffling of feet. He peeped cautiously at the street and in total amazement saw a crowd of patients being herded along by Sydonia Patek, wielding a white cane—silvered by the moonlight, her medical gown looked like metal. The people at the front of this group were moving at a slow walking pace uphill toward the end of the village, toward the forest and the mountains where the charcoal burners had their encampment, but it could not be described as a march or a procession because there was no order in it—the small crowd teemed along in a bewildered manner. They were all in a good mood, judging by the individual voices that emerged from the multilingual chatter. He even heard someone cheerily exclaim in Polish: “No, my dear sir, I’m certainly not joking!” The bugle call sounded from the Kurhaus tower because it was suppertime, but it sounded rather sluggish, and on the second repetition it suddenly broke off, as if the trumpeter had had a moment of doubt and given up playing. Among the crowd in the distance he saw Lukas and August, deep in conversation as usual. He also spotted Frommer, standing slightly apart from the others, absorbed and pensive, holding an unlit cigarette. The entire throng was babbling, debating, joking and arguing about something in various languages, when suddenly Wojnicz realized that apart from Sydonia Patek in the form of a quasi-shepherdess with a cane, herding this human flock, there were no women at all. Wojnicz went back into the courtyard, and, still afraid someone might see him in this state, tottered as fast as he could to the guesthouse, passing the bench where this time Frau Weber and Frau Brecht were not in evidence, nor were there any lights burning in their windows.
When he finally reached his destination, it was not cold that he felt, but shame and fear that somebody might see him like this. He dashed into his room, tore off the bedspread and covered himself with it. Only now did he feel a chill and how very tired he was. With numb hands he managed to put on some warm vests and a wool sweater, and to change his trousers, which were ripped and soiled. The sock on his unshod foot was muddy and torn to shreds. He threw it away in disgust and wiped his dirty foot with a towel. He was shaking all over, no longer with cold but with the indignation that is always prompted by incomprehensible, totally unjustified violence. No, he could not say that he was unfamiliar with it. Somewhere on the edge of his consciousness, though reluctant and weakened by a continued effort to displace them, some memories of similar experiences lingered. He let out a loud sob, but quickly restrained himself from weeping. If he had let himself cry, he would instantly have been flooded by his old unhappiness, his great alienation. If he had yielded, he would inevitably have brought back the suffering from which he had saved himself. Or from which he had been saved.
Suddenly he heard a clatter overhead, as if something heavy had fallen to the floor. He held his breath and looked out into the corridor—silence reigned, clearly there was nobody at the guesthouse. Downstairs an oil lamp was burning, one of those that were always left alight to avoid wasting electricity, in case somebody wanted to go down to the sitting room. He heard the clatter again, this time accompanied by a dull moan.
Still in one shoe, but now with the other foot completely bare, Wojnicz went into the corridor and, listening intently, moved up the stairs as quietly as he could. The dim light of the November full moon was falling through the little windows, but here inside it was quite dark. The disturbing noises were coming from behind the closed door of the small attic room with the mansard window. As soon as the floor creaked under Wojnicz’s shoe, total silence fell. Wojnicz noticed that he could not hear the usual cooing in the attic either.
“Is anyone there?” he called hesitantly.
“Wojnicz? In here, here, come here!” He heard Opitz’s voice from behind the door. There was a note of feverish impatience in it.
Mieczysław opened the door, and in the moonlight falling into the room he saw the proprietor tied to a chair, trying to pull free of his bonds, but in vain. Wojnicz could see how tight they were.
“Untie me,” demanded Opitz in a fractious tone, addressing Wojnicz informally, as du, not Sie. “Come on, untie me.”
Wojnicz was so amazed that for some time he could not understand what Opitz actually wanted him to do. He stood as if spellbound, staring at the man writhing on the chair.
“Come on! What are you waiting for, muttonhead? What are you staring at? Untie me!”
Wojnicz continued to stand there. He was thinking.
“How the hell did you get here?” shouted Opitz. “You were meant to be gone! How do you come to be here?”
“Herr Opitz, please calm down,” said Wojnicz, squatting before the captive.
He tried to loosen the buckles securing the straps, but they had been pulled so tight that he could not shift the clasps, especially as Opitz was thrashing about furiously in the chair. He tried to stand up, but toppled over onto Wojnicz, and they both fell to the floor.
“Who tied you up? Who did this to you?” asked Mieczysław, scrambling from under the heavy, angular, chair-bound body.
Opitz cast him a wild stare. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot with effort.
“Raimund,” he wheezed. “Raimund tied me up.”
“But why?” inquired Wojnicz, while starting to manipulate the straps immobilizing the prisoner’s arms. They were doubly fastened, so tightly that poor Opitz’s hands had gone blue. As Wojnicz grappled with the pins he looked around for a tool to help him. He thought of going down to the kitchen for a knife to cut the diabolical bonds.
“But why? Why?” he repeated.
“What do you mean, why? I told him to do it,” mumbled Opitz angrily.
Wojnicz froze, but then something clicked into place in his mind and he understood. He suddenly went pale and backed away on his knees toward the wall; he could hear roaring in his ears.
“You tie yourselves up so you won’t go out! You tie yourselves up so that frenzy won’t come over you!”
“Untie me, you fool. Immediately,” jabbered Willi Opitz, with madness in his eyes.
By now Wojnicz knew he would not set Opitz free until he had told him the whole story. He started with a simple question:
“Why me?”
The man howled furiously and tried to kneel down with the chair on his back, but the chair legs prevented him from straightening his back, so he bent forward before Wojnicz, wheezing with rage.
“Why you?”
In his forced bow Opitz panted, possibly gathering strength before a final attempt to free himself of his bonds, or perhaps he had realized that Wojnicz deserved to hear the truth. He spoke incoherently, through his teeth, struggling to control his trembling, his nervous lockjaw and his body’s great impatience to join the procession of men.
It was meant to be that boy from Berlin. It was meant to be Thilo. But he had died too soon. Yes, sometimes the marked men whom they took to the forest and tied to a tree were the sickest. They’d have died anyway, so what was the harm in condemning a terminally sick person to death to save the fit ones? Wasn’t it perfectly reasonable thinking? Pragmatic? Yes, Wojnicz had to agree—the sick instead of the healthy, outsiders instead of locals, the old instead of the young…Opitz gasped out that for as long as he could remember someone from the village had been killed, so when Dr. Brehmer’s sanatorium opened up, they decided to take advantage. They selected somebody in September or October and kept an eye on him. This patient’s state of health was no secret, and after a glass of Schwärmerei Dr. Semperweiss and the others forgot about medical confidentiality. “A nice fellow, but he’s dying.” So then they had to lure the wretch into the forest and put him on display for the Tuntschi.
Wojnicz laughed nervously. He leaned back until he was looking into Opitz’s bloodshot eyes.
“What are the Tuntschi?”
Opitz glared at him with genuine hatred.
“Untie me this instant,” he hissed through his teeth. “Untie me, I’ve got to go.”
Wojnicz could not understand his meaning.
“Why do you want to go? What’s going on out there? Why must you?”
Opitz wheezed horribly, as if suffocating.
“You’ve got to release me, Wojnicz, I’ve got to go there.”
“Do I understand correctly that right now I am saving your life?”
Willi Opitz started to speak chaotically, as though the paradoxical nature of his own situation had not got through to him. The great cause, the sacrifice that saves the whole village. The ancient order. The law of nature. God and the devil. Afterward, as Wojnicz tried to assemble the pieces of his broken speech and make sense of it, what emerged was that Frommer had been right, at least partly.
As he could not tackle the straps on Opitz’s legs, he tried to release his arms. As soon as he managed to undo the first clasp, Opitz immediately began to grapple with the second, and then with one that bound a leg. When both buckles had given way, he tried to leave the room with the chair still attached to the other leg. Wojnicz screamed at him so shrilly that his own voice frightened him:
“Opitz, come to your senses!”
For a brief moment Opitz seemed to regain consciousness, and stood there breathing heavily, but then he pushed Wojnicz to the back of the room, only saying:
“Out of my way.”
Moments later, Wojnicz heard a clatter and his footsteps on the stairs. Without delay, Wojnicz followed him. Downstairs he put on his heavy boots, took someone’s coat from the rack and went outside. He saw Opitz staggering his way out of the grounds of the guesthouse, finally freeing himself of the chair and then crossing the bridge to join the parade of men. There he suddenly stood upright again, as if new strength had entered him, his face relaxed, his brow brightened, and to Wojnicz, who was watching him, Opitz had even grown handsome. He joined the end of the procession, but boldly pushed his way to the front, passing his friends on the way, but there were not many of these; two or three of them had broken straps on their arms or legs. Men from the sanatorium were in the majority, but there was also the new postmaster, some male nurses and Tomášek in steamed-up spectacles. Almost at the very end, not counting an obese patient and Herr Ludwig, a crippled artist from Hamburg in a wheelchair, came Frommer, flourishing a walking stick.
Wojnicz shouted to him:
“Herr Walter!”
Frommer looked at him almost unconsciously, muttering something under his breath, and then spun around on his axis in an utterly un-Frommer-like move that looked as if he were dancing.
This alien motion horrified Wojnicz. In long bounds he raced to the Kurhaus, then up the stairs to Dr. Semperweiss’s consulting room, where the rifle was leaning against the desk. Wojnicz took hold of it and checked to see if it was loaded. It was.
The boom of the gunshot rolled right across Görbersdorf, echoing several times off the surrounding mountains, off Hohe Heide, Floste, Trattlau and Gross Storch Berg, like the beating of a gigantic heart, but this made no impression at all on the men taking part in the strange procession, not even halting their advance for a second. Why not me? thought Wojnicz. Why wasn’t he submitting to the frenzy, why was he thinking so clearly, frighteningly clearly? He felt as if he were watching the preparations for an open-air event, as if they were off on a picnic or to a concert, perhaps—oh yes, all that was missing was a brass band and some bunting. But the crowd passed the concert shell and strode onward, to the trailhead; some had already gone into the forest, ignoring the fact that their shoes were unsuitable, and that instead of overcoats they were wearing smoking jackets. They walked along in high spirits, discussing the price of grain on world markets or the situation in the Balkans. They moved in harmony, making way for each other on the narrowing path or pushing straight through the forest off the trail, insensitive to the stones and the spruce branches. Opitz was telling a portly townsman from Breslau about his uncle who had served in the Swiss Guard, while Lukas and August appeared to be discussing ancient warfare, or perhaps modern philosophy. For some time Wojnicz followed them in unutterable amazement, with Dr. Semperweiss’s rifle beating against his legs, but at the edge of the forest he stopped, and the procession passed him by indifferently. Frozen to the bone, he gave up and almost ran back to the village.
He was just about to go inside the Guesthouse for Gentlemen when he changed his mind, entered the courtyard and peeped into the annex that was home to Raimund, whom he had not spotted in the procession. He caught sight of him, firmly chained to a chair. At the foot of the wall opposite lay the key, which Raimund had thrown away after securing himself. His face was red and his eyes bloodshot, with a beseeching look, but Wojnicz slammed the door shut and went back to his own room.
He was fortunate not to witness what happened after the procession had plunged into the forest. The mist adored these places. The bright, joyful moon, which had been illuminating all these happenings until now, had misted over and was flooding the forest with a light like diluted milk, in which everyone had a pale, corpse-like face. The walkers were straying among the trees, pushing forward with set expressions, each going it alone, following his own fate. The streaks of viscid mist disoriented them even more, introducing further confusion into the ranks of this bizarre raggle-taggle army, this chaotic, irreligious procession. Soon its participants were scattered about the vicinity, each in solitude confronting the mist, the rustle of twigs, the crunch of moss, the scribble of bark on the trees and their splayed branches.
Opitz stood alone at the edge of a small clearing, stooping a little, as if preparing to toss a weight onto his shoulders. He was breathing heavily, and each breath chilled his ailing lungs—after all, he was as sick as the others—before escaping in a little gray cloud into the frosty air, for the full moon had brought the winter with it.
There was nothing violent about it—just a fast, almost imperceptible motion, which left poor Opitz hanging above the ground. The expression painted on his face was one that we had never seen before: sorrow. He must have known what was going to happen.
