The Mysterious Sketch

by Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian

translation by Michael Wooff

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

Schlüssel shepherded me into a very dark, high-ceilinged courtroom, furnished with benches in a semi-circle. The appearance of this deserted courtroom, its two high windows protected by grilles, its crucifix of old oakwood stained brown on which the arms of Christ lay stretched out with the head sorrowfully resting on a shoulder, awoke in me I know not what religious fear in keeping with my present situation, and my lips moved as they framed a prayer.

I had not prayed for a long time, but misfortune always takes us back to thoughts of submissiveness. Man is such a small thing!

Facing me, on a raised dais, two people were sitting with their backs to the light, which kept their faces shaded from me. I could see it was Van Spreckdal, however, by his aquiline nose picked out by a slanting reflection of the pane. The man with him was fat; he had plump, full cheeks and wore a judge’s robe, as did Van Spreckdal.

Sitting below them was the clerk of the court, Conrad. He was sitting at a low table, tickling the lobe of his ear with the feather of his quill pen. He stopped when I arrived and looked at me with curiosity.

I was made to sit down. Van Spreckdal, raising his voice, spoke to me: “Christian Venius, where did you get this drawing from?” He showed me the nocturnal sketch then still in his possession. It was passed to me.

After I had examined it, I answered: “I drew it myself.”

This utterance on my part was followed by a fairly long silence; the clerk of the court, Conrad, was writing down my answer. I heard his pen hurrying over the paper and thought: “What does the question I have just been asked mean? It has no connection with the kick that I aimed at Rap’s back.”

“You drew it yourself,” Van Spreckdal resumed. “What is the subject of it?”

“It’s a subject out of my own head.”

“You didn’t copy these details from somewhere?”

“No, sir. I imagined all of them.”

“The accused would do well to reflect on the truth of what he is saying,” said the judge severely. “Do not lie to the court.”

I went red in the face and cried out exaltedly: “I have told it the truth.”

“Write that down, clerk of the court,” Van Spreckdal ordered.

The quill pen raced afresh.

“And this woman,” the judge went on, “this woman being murdered on the edge of a well... Did you imagine her as well?”

“I must have done.”

“You’ve never seen her before?”

“Never.”

Van Spreckdal got to his feet as if indignant, then, sitting down again, appeared to consult in a low voice with his fellow judge.

Those two dark profiles, silhouetted against the light-filled backdrop of the window, the three men standing behind me, the silence in the amphitheatre, all these things made me shudder.

“What have they got against me? What have I done?” I muttered to myself.

Suddenly Van Spreckdal said to my guards: “Take the prisoner back to the carriage. We’re leaving for the Metzgerstrasse.”

Then he addressed me directly: “Christian Venius,” he cried, “the situation that you find yourself in is most regrettable. Pull yourself together and consider that, if human justice is unbending, you can still seek the pardon of a merciful God. You can even merit it by confessing your crime!”

These words stunned me like a blow from a hammer. I recoiled from them with arms outstretched crying: “My God! What a nightmare!” And I fainted.

When I came around, the carriage was rolling slowly through the street, and another carriage was in front of us. The two policemen were still there. One of them, while we were still moving, offered a pinch of snuff to his colleague. I too automatically stretched out my fingers to the snuffbox, but he pulled it away from me sharply.

I felt my face go red with shame, and I turned my head to one side in order to hide my emotion.

“If you look outside,” said the owner of the snuffbox, “we’ll have to put handcuffs on you.”

“I hope the devil strangles you, you scurvy knave!” I thought to myself inwardly. And as the carriage had just stopped, one of them got down while the other held me back by the neck. Then, seeing his comrade ready to catch me, he pushed me out roughly.

These infinite precautions to ensure I did not run away augured nothing good, but I still had not the foggiest idea of just how serious the accusation was that was hanging over me when a frightful incident finally opened my eyes to it and plunged me into despair.

I had just been pushed into a low alleyway with broken and uneven flagstones. All along the wall there ran a yellowish ooze exhaling a fetid stench. I walked among shadows with the two men behind me. Further on the chiaroscuro of an internal courtyard began to become visible.

As I approached it, I was possessed by an ever-increasing sense of terror. There was nothing natural about it, just a harrowing feeling of impending doom, nightmarish, unnatural. I instinctively drew back from it with each forward step that I took.

“Get along with you!” one of the policemen shouted, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Walk, damn you!”

Imagine my sense of dread when, at the end of this passage, I saw the courtyard I had drawn the night before with its walls furnished with hooks, its heaps of scrap metal, its hencoop and its rabbit hutch. Not one skylight big or small, high or low, not one cracked pane of glass, not a single detail in my drawing had been left out!

I was transfixed by this bizarre turn of events.

Near the well were the two judges, Van Spreckdal and Richter. At their feet lay the old woman, supine, her long grey hair dishevelled, her face blue, her eyes open inordinately wide, and her tongue caught in her teeth. It was horrendous!

“Well,” Van Spreckdal said to me solemnly, “what have you got to say for yourself?”

I chose not to answer.

“Do you admit to having thrown this woman, Theresa Becker, down this well after strangling her to steal her money?”

“No!” I shouted. “No! I don’t know this woman! I’ve never seen her before! As God is my witness!”

“You’ve said enough,” he retorted drily.

And he strode off, without any further ado, in the company of his colleague.

The policemen then saw fit to put the handcuffs on me. I was taken back to the Raspelhaus in a catatonic state. I no longer knew what to think; even my conscience was plaguing me. I started to wonder myself if I really had murdered the old woman!

In my guards’ eyes I was guilty.

I will not tell you what my emotions were during that night in the Raspelhaus when, sitting on my bale of straw, with a skylight facing me and a gallows to look at, I heard the nightwatchman dissipate the silence with cries of: “Sleep, good people of Nuremberg, the Lord is watching over you! One o’clock!...Two o’clock!...Three o’clock and all’s well!”

Everyone must have some idea of what such a night is like.

Daylight came. Pale and hesitant at first, it lit the bull’s-eye window with its glimmers and the criss-crossed bars, then it burst out upon the far wall. Outside the street grew busy. There was a market that day. It was Friday. I could hear the creaking of the carts laden with vegetables and the good country folk burdened by baskets on their backs. A few hens in cages squawked as they passed by and women selling butter chatted among themselves. The market hall opposite was being opened to the public. The stalls were being arranged.

Finally it was broad daylight, and the vast buzz of the swelling crowd, of housewives coming together with their basket under their arm, coming and going, talking and haggling, told me that it was eight o’clock in the morning.

With the coming of the light, my heart regained a little of its confidence. Some of my darker ideas evaporated. I felt the desire to see what was happening outside.

Other prisoners before me had raised themselves up as far as the bull’s-eye, having made holes in the wall so as to climb it more easily. I climbed up it in my turn and when, as I sat in the oval hollow, my back bent, my head leaning forward, I was able to see the crowd, life, movement, my tears trickled copiously down my cheeks. I no longer contemplated suicide. I felt a need to live, to breathe in air that was truly extraordinary.

“Ah!” I said to myself. “To live is to be happy! They can make me push a wheelbarrow and attach to my leg a ball and chain. What does it matter? As long as I can go on living!”

While I was gazing thus, a man went by, a butcher, bent over double, carrying an enormous side of beef on his shoulders. His arms were bare right up to his elbows, his head was bent forward. A mop of long hair hid from me his face and yet, as soon as I laid eyes on him, I gave a start. “He’s the one!” I said to myself.

All my blood flowed back on my heart. I descended to my cell, trembling to the tips of my fingernails, feeling my cheeks wobble and my face flood with a deathly pallor and I stammered in a muffled voice: “It’s him! He’s there... he’s there... and I’m going to die in his place to expiate his crime. Good God! What shall I do? What shall I do?”

I suddenly had an idea, an idea crossed my mind like manna from heaven. My hand went into my jacket pocket! The box containing my charcoal was there.

Then, rushing towards the wall, I began to copy the murder scene with unprecedented vigour. No more uncertainty, no more trial and error. I knew the man. I could see him. He was posing for me.

At ten o’clock the jailer came into my cell. His owl-like impassiveness gave way to admiration. “Can such things be?” he cried, standing in the doorway.

“Go and fetch my judges,” I said to him, pursuing my work with mounting excitement as I did so.

“They’re waiting for you in the courtroom,” Schlüssel added.

“I want to tell them something,” I cried, putting the finishing touches to the mysterious protagonist.

He was alive. He was frightening to look upon. His face, seen from the side, foreshortened on the wall, stood out against the white background with a prodigious presence.

The jailer left me.

A few minutes later the two judges appeared. They stood there open-mouthed.

As for me, my arm outstretched and trembling in every limb, I said to them: “Behold the murderer!”

Van Spreckdal, after some moments of silence, asked: “His name?”

“I don’t know. But he is at this moment in time in the covered market. He’s cutting meat on the third stall on the left as you enter the market hall through the Street of the Bodyguards.”

“What do you think?” he said, leaning towards his fellow judge.

“Let that man be sent for,” answered the latter in solemn tones.

Various guards, stationed in the corridor, obeyed this order. The judges remained standing still looking at the drawing. I sank down on the straw, my head between my knees, like someone dead.

Soon steps resounded from afar from under the vaults. Those who have not waited for the hour of their deliverance and counted the minutes, long then like centuries, those who have not felt the agonizing feelings of waiting, terror, hope, doubt, those people will not be able to imagine the inner turmoil I was experiencing just then. I could have distinguished the footsteps of the murderer, walking flanked by his guards, from a thousand other similar ones. They were getting nearer.

Even the judges themselves seemed nervous. I had raised my head and my heart was in the grip of an iron hand. I was staring at the now closed door. It opened. The man came in. His cheeks were puffy, his broad contracted jaws made the muscles in his face stand out prominently right up to his ears and his little eyes, restless and wild like those of a wolf, glittered under bushy eyebrows of a reddish brown.

Van Spreckdal showed him my drawing without so much as a word being said.

This broad-shouldered sanguine man, having looked at it, went pale. Then, letting out a roar which made us all freeze in terror, he stuck out his huge arms and jumped backwards to knock down the guards. There was a frightful struggle outside in the corridor. All that could be heard were the butcher’s frantic panting, muffled curses, staccato speech and the feet of the guards, hoisted up off the floor, falling back on the flagstones.

This lasted for over a minute.

Finally the murderer was brought back in, his head lowered, his eye bloodshot, his hands tied up behind his back. He stared once again at the picture of the murder, seemed to ponder it and then, in a low voice, speaking as if to himself, came out with: “Who was around to have seen me at midnight?”

I had been saved from the hangman’s noose!

Many years have gone by since this terrible adventure. I no longer do silhouettes or portraits of burgomasters, thank God! By dint of perseverance and hard work, I have staked my claim to a place in the sun and I earn my living honourably by painting works of art, the only end, in my opinion, that any true artist should strive to attain. But the memory of the nocturnal sketch has always stayed in my mind. Sometimes, in the middle of working on something, my thoughts return to it. When that happens I put down my palette and dream for hours on end!

How was it possible for a crime carried out by a man I did not know in a place I had never seen before, to reproduce itself under my charcoal and chalk so accurately, right down to the finest detail?

Was it by chance? No! And besides: what is chance, after all, if not the effect of a cause that we cannot fathom?

Who knows? Nature is much bolder in the construction of its realities than man’s imagination in its fantasies.

Proceed to Challenge 893...