The Justice of a Body Snatcher
– a love story by renan goksin –
Episode Three: Good Friday
On Friday 20th of April, when Herman woke up late in the morning, he had a niggling feeling in his liver. He never had breakfast. The weather was still. He didn’t like that either. He preferred winds, rain and storms, which complemented his inner disposition and made him feel more at ease with the world. He decided to stroll towards the main square, then continued until he reached the Lord’s Tavern; no sooner had he received his regular drink than the dream ricocheted into his head like a shrapnel of stained glass in one million pieces. At that instant, Herman knew Alphonsina of the wealthy and pious Vanhausen family had quietly passed away with the raven.
Herman was a professional body snatcher. He was a heavily built man, which was advantageous given the strains of his profession, especially for someone who preferred to work alone as Herman did. Born on the cusp of Gemini and Cancer, he was thirty-three years old, ‘the age Christ was crucified’ as he was lately fond of saying. There was a thoughtfulness about his watery blue eyes and a fleshy mole at the corner of one eye added a gentle humanity to the otherwise stern expressions of his face. Few would have suspected him of being anything other than a drunkard, who seemed to possess the luxury of a small family inheritance. In truth, Herman was a prolific reader of encyclopedias with a keen interest in the new branches of natural sciences and a passion for secular enlightenment philosophy. He only drank in between jobs, which of course, even given his extraordinary skill could mean weeks or months; but if he drank, it was partly because he found the company of downtrodden folk rewarding for the valuable bits of information he could obtain from them and if nothing else, it enhanced his sense of futility and made him all the more eager to excavate the next grave. For those who regularly saw him at Lord’s, quietly seated by a window with his heavy hand wrapped around a glass of chartreuse, he looked so permanently contented that it was hard to imagine Herman employed in any other activity. Yet this unassuming, reserved man of a tidy appearance, without conceding to fashion, was an insatiable resurrectionist, prepared to go to any lengths to retrieve a corpse. He was perhaps the only true professional in the entire province. Others were petty thieves, content with snatching the easy corpse here and there when in need of gambling money, whereas for Herman it was a dedication; a deliberate, calculated art form through which his pride and anger found their highest expression.
Herman’s successes, his gift for detecting mock burials performed to offset thieves and then robbing even the most carefully guarded graves, were partly responsible for the hysteria that had gripped the entire province. He was blessed with an uncanny perception; a keen sense of the smell of death, which he likened to rabbit meat cured with cinnamon. It gave him nausea and yet made him tremendously successful. There didn’t seem to be any logic to the many allergies he suffered. While cinnamon caused a severe reaction in him, nutmeg was its antidote. He could not touch walnuts, cashews, almonds, whereas nuts which started with the letter P, pistachios, pinenuts, pecans were harmless. He was allergic to fish, fowl, beef, in fact all meats except for pork, for which he once mockingly went to church to give his thanks to the Lord for having spared him from being Jewish. And all his life he complained about having been born in the wrong century when the spices from the Orient had become so disturbingly widespread.
However, in Alphonsina’s case; because of both the sinful circumstances of her demise and the fear of thieves, her death had been so well concealed, and the burial conducted in such secrecy that even Herman had failed to detect the smell of death. Had it not been for a vagrant raven, he would have missed this scrumptious display of decay and bourgeois hypocrisy. Thanks to that premonition, he became the second person outside the Vanhausen family to learn of the tragic event. As fate would have it, the two outsiders represented the kind of moral degradation the Vanhausens dreaded the most. The first was the very person from whose company they had vainly tried to protect their daughter during her life, while the second was the last person they would have wished to have learnt of her suicide.
to be continued…
next episode: 4 – The Walnut Tree