Free Phantoms of Breslau by Marek Krajewski

head and spat out the cigarette butt. A trickle of sweat flowed down from beneath his bowler hat. He looked about him. He was still sitting on the bench by the wall. His father was just disappearing through the gate. Mock got to his feet, picked up the cigarette butt – much to the concierge’s satisfaction – and hurried after his father. Willibald Mock had wanted to get home, but feeling tired he had sat down on a bench by the butcher’s shop. He was breathing heavily. Rot lay down beside him and hung his pink tongue out. Mock hurried over to his father, touched him on the hand and said:
    “Let’s move out. I’m plagued by nightmares here. Right from the start, ever since we inherited this apartment after Uncle Eduard’s death, I’ve been plagued by phantoms in my dreams, right from the very first night in this foul butcher’s shop … That’s why I drink, do you understand? When I’m dead drunk, I don’t dream …”
    “Every drunkard has some sort of excuse …”
    “This isn’t some twisted explanation. I didn’t sleep at home last night and I didn’t have any bad dreams, not one. And now, I only just got here, I nodded off for a moment and had another bad dream …
    “Chamomile and hot milk. That does the trick,” his father muttered. He began to breathe more easily and returned to his favourite pastime other than chess, that of amicably teasing Rot.
    “I’ll buy a dog,” said Mock quietly. “We’ll move to the centre and you’ll be able to take the dog for a walk in the park.”
    “And what else!” The old man caught the dog by its front paws and listened with pleasure to his growl. “He’d have diarrhoea like Rot. He’d be bound to soil the house … Anyway, stop talking nonsense. Get yourself to work. Be on time. Somebody’s always having to come to get you, always having to remind you it’s time for work … Look, here they are again.”
    Mock turned to see Smolorz climbing out of a droschka. He did not expect to hear good news, and his intuition did not fail him.

BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 2ND, 1919
EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
    No noise from the street reached the mortuary on Auenstrasse; the rays of the strong September sun did not penetrate; the smoke and smell of the bonfires burning on the nearby banks of the Oder near Passbrücke did not float in on the air. In Doctor Lasarius’ kingdom reigned a silence that was broken only by the grating of trolleys bringing in more bodies. There was an odour hanging in the air like that of overboiled carrots, but nobody was cooking vegetables here. All that could bring a kitchen to mind was the sharpening of knives.
    And so it was now. Doctor Lasarius’ assistant sharpened a knife, approached the corpse lying on the stone table and made an incision from the collar bone down to the pubic hair. The grey skin fell aside to reveal a layer of orange fat. Mühlhaus snorted violently; Smolorz rushed out of the mortuary, and when outside the building opened his mouth wide to take in as much air as he could. Mock stood on the viewing platform intended for medical students and fixed his eyes on the open body, absorbing the information the pathologist was passing on to his assistant.
    “Male, aged about sixty-five.” Mock saw the assistant note the information beneath the name “Hermann Ollenborg”. “Height one hundred and sixty centimetres, weight seventy kilograms. Water on the lungs.”With a quiet crunch of the knife, Lasarius cut away the bloated, hard lobes of the lungs and made incisions with a pair of small scissors. “There, you see?” – he showed Mock the pulp and water that ran from the bronchi – “That’s typical of death by drowning.”
    Lasarius’ assistant lifted the dead man’s skull a little, inserted the tip of his knife behind one ear and made another incision. He then got hold of the scored skin of the occiput and a whitish membrane and drew both layers across eyes which were no longer there. They had been