The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  His adventure with the madman is cut out of a similar cloth. Panic possessed a town of the Empire, because an unknown man living among the people induced young women to follow him into dark places and there murdered them by stabbing them with a large knife: most of them died on the spot, and the few who lived long enough to speak, could not describe the murderer. This man became so bold that he sent notes by special messenger to the chief of police announcing some new outrage, and even, one evening, passed his head, in a mask, in at the window of the police-station, telling them, in a polite voice, that he would have another victim that night.

  At last a father of three daughters, who had lost one daughter in this way, took a long journey and came to the alchemist, to implore him to find out by sagacity or magic some way of recognising and catching the vampire. “The police,” he said, “are in a pitiable and almost comic state of confusion, and spend their time accusing each other of laxity and cowardice.”

  “Have you in the town,” said the alchemist, “men well known for piety, divination, medicine, austerity, or other virtues and talents? I must consult with them.”

  “There are three such persons,” said the father; “a magistrate whose judgments are so just that no-one, not even the wretched malcontent, the most unregenerate felon, nor the most vengeful plaintiff, has ever murmured against them. He is always for mercy rather than condemnation, and when he makes his address to the guilty, or questions a witness, you would think he was made of stone and ate the scales of justice every morning for breakfast. Men listen to him in trembling: one would say, old Moses himself!”

  “Good!” said Albertus Magnus.

  “Next,” said the man, “there is a banker, whose commerce, and good works, and generosity have put money in the pockets of the whole town. He is now past fifty, of benevolent aspect, has a wife he loves dearly, and three daughters and three sons: he has endowed a lunatic asylum and a chair of humanities in the University and given a silver cup for aviation.”

  “Splendid!” said Albertus Magnus.

  “Third,” said the visitor, “I would name a master carpenter of the town, so ingenious and so pleasant that he has driven out of business every competitor. This man can make in his workshops coffins of every sort, wood, metal, stone and clay, decorated as you wish, as well as headstones of the finest design, with inscriptions of the purest style; he carves beds in which rich uncles are glad to die, chests in which money can be safely kept, tool-chests for gravediggers, altarpieces for canons, front-door knockers of a really comical diabolical turn, and hobbyhorses that you would swear waltzed by themselves, so light and bestridable are they. He will polish, paint and decorate all as you like, and he often throws in a true-lover’s knot, a harp or a garland, for luck. And what is most curious is that, despite his occasionally grim trade, he is universally respected and loved, he makes one at every feast and every celebration in the town. He is friends with the priest and the confidant of every young girl wanting a husband and every wife wanting a child: he can sing, dance, play the fiddle, and invent poems on the spot, he is fond of hunting and fishes better than any man, he is a splendid actor, so good a sleight - of-hand man that we have often advised him to go on the stage, and the greatest comic in riddles and charades that you ever saw! But he knows the limits of moderation: besides, no-one can say a word against him, for he is seventy-eight years of age, has lived in the commune since he was a boy, and gets up every morning at six o’clock to tend his flowers and vegetables, and is so earnest a worker that we often hear his hammer tapping far into the night.

  “The singular thing about him, though,” continued the visitor, carried away by the virtues of the carpenter, “is that every coffin he makes fits perfectly the corpse it was made for—and I mean, not only in size, but in decoration and shape. Everything on it is suggestive of the man’s life, and, one would say, of his inmost thoughts. Since he has been so long in the town, the carpenter knows them better than their parents or wives. And since a certain amount of malice always attends a funeral, no-one objects to the fantastic truths of the carpenter, revealed by the symbolic carvings of the coffin. For instance, a violinist died: his coffin was of polished wood cut like a double-bass, with four strings in wood, very delicately cut, and on the strings were four fingers in wood also, but cut off at the hand, and it seemed that blood was spattered on the strings. After the funeral some close, lifelong friends of the violinist recounted an old tale, that the violinist out of jealousy, in youth, had climbed to the bedroom of a rival and had cut off the fingers of his right hand with a razor.”

  “Indeed,” said Albertus Magnus, “I recognise that hand.”

  “No!” said the man in astonishment.

  “I mean the hand of the carpenter,” said Albertus: “I think I knew him once. In any case, it simplifies my task. Now tell me if these three persons between them would know all the souls in your town.”

  “Souls, that is to say, persons? Yes,” answered the man.

  Albertus Magnus then took three white fowls from an osier cage, killed them, and with their entrails traced three circles with magic letters on the floor. Then he took the feathered carcasses and said, “Bring me here the magistrate, the banker and the carpenter of D——,” and in a twinkling the disembowelled fowls had gone and two of them were back again bearing the magistrate and the banker. The third entered presently without a rider, and squawked plaintively, “I could not bear him, he was too heavy.” Albertus then took a black fowl, made it eat the entrails of the others and sent it out, and in a second, with a loud sound, it was back and there was the undertaker on its back, smiling with a gay and innocent old man’s smile.

  Then, while he built up the fire and put the requisite ingredients into the cauldron, the guests of Albertus ate a fine meal which the apprentices placed before them, and invisible pipes played to keep them amused. Presently from the cauldron arose a bubble about three feet in diameter, transparent, but with rainbow hues. Into this bubble the alchemist skilfully introduced blue smoke by means of a clay-pipe; the smoke curled and curdled in the bubble. He told his apprentices to put out all the candles except one candle, which he placed behind the bubble, and he brought from the kitchen his housekeeper’s young baby sleeping in its cradle, from which Albertus drew one drop of red blood on a needle. He dismissed the baby, brought his guests before the bubble and put the drop of blood on the top of the bubble. The drop of blood glistened bright like a ruby, and the guests sitting on a bench began to see defile before them in the bubble hundreds of men, women and children, of all sorts.

  “These are the townspeople of D——,” said the alchemist: “if the murderer be one of them you will see him designated by the drop of blood: you must then name him.”

  They watched steadily, but with the darkness and the strain of watching the weaving smoke and of gazing earnestly at all the faces, the banker, the magistrate and the father fell asleep, and with the efforts of digestion even began to snore slightly. Then Albertus said to the carpenter, who was nodding there, rosy, but bright-eyed as a child:

  “You don’t sleep, old one!”

  “Since you asked us to watch!” said the carpenter politely.

  “I know you, sleepless one,” said Albertus; and rising swiftly and standing in the circle he had previously drawn, he began the incantations of exorcism. At first the air was thick with groans, cries and terrible whistlings, and the apprentices, terrified out of their wits, began to whimper and cry; but the master cried to them, “Stir neither hand nor foot, and you will be safe,” and after that the poor creatures did not dare to stir. Then, instead of the carpenter, they saw on the bench a tiger, which leaped off and circled round Albertus Magnus roaring. Next, instead of the tiger, they saw a crocodile, and instead of the crocodile a scorpion, and then a snake, and the strangest shapes like toucans, vultures, sturgeons, turtles, wharrow spindles with legs, harps with arms, mandrils, narwhals, kiwis and newts; then there was nothing there but a fair-haired child with pathetic eyes and t
ransparent flesh, which seemed to ask for help, and after the child was a young man, naked, of the most beautiful form, and then a curly little dog with engaging manners, and then a lovebird with glossy plumage; but at the end of the incantation, the devil himself stood there, and said:

  “What can I do for you, A. M.?”

  “Bring the murderer here, old one,” said Albertus Magnus; “do me this favour and I won’t call you again for a year. And, my compliments! You’ve certainly won over the town of D——”

  The devil was flattered, and replied:

  “I’ll be off then: just say your eeny, meeny, miny, mo, and the rest of the gibberish you reserve for these ninnies, and I’ll come again. The murderer’s a fiend of mine who has a twenty-year holiday to do monkey-business on earth, but I’ll send him somewhere else to please you.”

  The devil vanished. The magician woke up his guests and revived his apprentices and showed them that the bubble was blank again, for all the townsfolk had passed through, but that the drop of blood still shone on top. Then Albertus said to the banker and the magistrate:

  “You must each give me ten gold pieces, for I must call to our aid a powerful agent.” The good citizens did this without a murmur, which shows the value of Balderdash. After muttering some words, the alchemist showed them in the depths of the bubble a green wood, and in the wood a person approaching. This person was a striking looking young man with wild black eyes, and a prominent eyebrow-ridge, who wore a cap and soft-soled shoes. In the wood next appeared a young girl gladly hurrying to meet him, dressed in summer clothes, with her hair flying and a posy of wild flowers in her hand: she was arranged with ignorant artfulness like a country girl going to meet her lover. The young man’s eyes glittered when he saw her. The citizens saw him, in the foreground of the scene, lift his jacket at the side and finger a sharp butcher’s knife which hung there without a sheath. They cried out, and breathless with terror, begged Albertus to stop the scene, and the murder.

  The youth and girl kissed and the youth persuaded the girl to sit down on the grass; then as she reclined there, blushing and confident, he leaned towards her to kiss her and at the same time began to draw his knife softly from his belt. The citizens roared in their fright, and Albertus Magnus said in a loud voice:

  “Fiend, come here!”

  They saw the girl alone on the grass, staring on both sides, with terror, and then rising and taking to her heels, as pale as death. At the same moment the door opened to admit a young working-man who held his cap in his hand and saluted the company. The bubble ran red from top to bottom; the banker and the magistrate trembled, and the father rushing up, took the young man by his collar. Then Albertus Magnus took a chain and chained the young man, and put him into the care of the magistrate, saying in Greek:

  “Now, look here, little fiend: you know you may escape from this body when you will: but you will do me the favour of accompanying these good people to the county jail, for your master promised me that much. Afterwards you can go where he tells you.”

  The town councillors, of whom the father was one, put on a new window tax and sent a thank-offering to Albertus Magnus …

  “Then Albertus Magnus invented the cinema,” declared the Schoolboy.

  “But that is a stupid story,” said the Doctor of Medicine. “According to these tales, you can get even the Fiend himself to work for you with a few formulas. You set up in business with a Greek letter and the name of a Hebrew devil, and there you are, rich for life. I like modern tales, myself: I have no patience with this mumbo-jumbo. The credulous age has passed: nowadays, the poorest mother studies pediatrics, the simplest working-man asks his doctor about the functions of the endocrine glands.”

  “A gentle science,” said the Centenarist, shaking his patriarchal head, pettish at being criticised, “invented by you medical gentlemen, to conceal the ailment described by Shelley in his famous poem, beginning, ‘A cat in distress, nothing more, nothing less …’”

  “Centenarist,” said the Viennese Conductor, “you are out of your element: a sage is not allowed to get crusty. Tell us another story.”

  The Centenarist objected. “Our modern magician will tell us how he manages the current abracadabra.”

  “I have told one,” said the Doctor, with a good grace “(you need not throw up at me that unfortunate Latin we learn in medical school), and I cannot tell another. I am no fabulist and can never remember conversations: I can dissect what is before my eyes and I like rigorous thinking—but describe what isn’t there, or build fantasy on platitude: it’s a horror to me. Still, I admire those who can reel it off without thinking.”

  THERE was a doctor (said the Centenarist) who invented one of the most picturesque episodes of modern religious history out of his head, and he was a serious man, too, who afterwards was greatly respected.

  “Jossel of Klezk, a classical scholar and doctor of medicine, born in 1710, thought himself called upon to watch for the Messiah, who has not yet come to earth, according to Jewish belief. To watch well, he undertook solitary vigils in the streets at night. The demons can seize a man who stands still, so Jossel waltzed all through the dark hours in the Polish snows, tossing his head from side to side, kicking out sideways, and thrusting his arms upwards with furious grimaces. This fit first came on him when his wife appeared in a new pair of pointed red shoes which she said her cousin had given her; and when she began to sing and dance about the house, playing runs on the harpsichord and shrilly laughing to herself in her chamber. After this the sight of red shoes threw him into convulsions; and to bring himself to the highest pitch of religious ecstasy he had only to put on a pair of red shoes. He listened at cabarets and private houses for the wild music of peasant dances, or a harpsichord playing a solitary tune. Then he would spin off into the snows as if flung off a wheel, and all night long the people returning home late would see this grotesque figure doing antics in the road. Sometimes he shouted that he waded in blood, and the people looked fearfully at the road, expecting to see a stream of blood, but saw nothing but the red light of their lanterns; at other times they heard him talking to invisible presences, or shrieking to demons to keep away from him. Meanwhile, his wife ran shamelessly through the village every night to a lover, going by the side-streets and avoiding her crazy husband. This disorderly life suited her and she bloomed like a rose, so that when Prince Radziwill himself passed through the village he noticed her and later took her for his mistress. From sensing obscurely the presence of demons and hearing their rustling, from knowing them simply as evil vapours which came forth from the grave or as sable winds that rushed out of trees, and as the voices of owls and nightjars, Jossel began to see them clearly, visible under the ordinary surface of the earth, as thick, poisonous clouds of bad ones who kept the Messiah off the earth and who retarded his coming, and who managed things so, that even if he came, he would not be recognised, men having fallen through them into gross error and bestial folly.

  Jossel saw the seven accursed brothers who live in storms, pestilences, famine and hurricanes; they crept like snakes on their bellies, going on their hands to eat flesh and drink blood; they were grey, bow-backed and bristled with hair like hyenas; and if in the evening he passed by a cabin where the rooms stunk of mice, vermin or rotten flesh, he knew it was because they lay low there; and if he heard creatures yelling like a pack of bloodhounds, he knew their voice too: and when once an eclipse passed over his head, he knew it was the seven accursed brothers who brought it on so that foul deeds could be done on earth. He heard and saw pass in the night, likewise, as he courageously danced alone in the snows, the half-human goblins, lilu, lilitu and ardat lili, the desirous ghosts of unmarried youths and maidens, the insatiable ghosts of those dead unmarried, who as succubi go out seeking human wives and husbands, who live with men and get children by them, themselves the children of Lilith and Adam. He saw some going to a fearful rendezvous with their earthly love, some hurrying to the deathbed of an earthly parent to crowd his natural
children away, to smother him and claim his spirit when he died. He saw under all things, sluggishly stirring, the great formless dragon which was there before Time; treading warily through the universe, he heard the great Adversary, and the loathsome scapegoat who inhabits with satyrs deserts and wastes, as they did before man came to earth: he saw Lilith, the night-monster who lurks in desolate places, the circle-treading aluqa, which sucks the blood like a horse-leech, the great she-demon Rahab, and Leviathan, capable of darkening the day; and there came in his more lucid hours the seven spirits of fornication, gluttony, fighting, obsequiousness, chicanery, pride-lying-and-fraud, injustice-theft-and-rapacity; and the fallen angels who took human wives and taught the sin-conceived arts of enchantments, astrology, the making of swords, abortion, writing and all the arts of civilisation which have a root in sin.

  He saw those enchanted into spirits who had eaten the fungus on trees when hungry, and those who had eaten the mushrooms that shine at night. He saw the inhuman spirits in their innumerable hordes, the utukku who lurks in the desert waiting for man, and also in mountains, seas and graveyards, the gallu and the rabisu, the last one he knew well, she who sets the hair of the body on end; and the labortu, the labasu and the abhazu, the first a female demon dangerous to children in mountains, marshes and cane-brakes, and the sedu, a giant spirit overshadowing heaven and earth; and many another nameless spirit, almost formless, thronged about him in the windy freezing dark; and still, dancing, dancing and straining his eyes and ears, he could not begin to count them nor to come to the end of them.

  Then he studied the most ancient writings of the races of the East to find out the golden number, and the signs, incantations and gestures necessary to drive them out of his soul and from the earth. Every night he hurried more, pirouetting and chanting, taking little food or drink, fearing he would be too late. They heard him chanting the antique songs learned in the legends and scriptures: