Sylvia

by Bryce Courtenay

  Frau Sarah turned. ‘What purpose?’

  ‘Alms, we will give half of what we earn to the poor.’

  ‘But you are the poor,’ Frau Sarah said, bemused.

  ‘Yes. So I will pay for the bathhouse.’

  ‘And to eat?’

  ‘Today we will fast for a penance,’ I said and looked at Reinhardt. ‘That is why I shall pay only for the bathhouse.’

  Frau Sarah turned to Reinhardt. ‘There remains much of the rat still in you!’ she snapped, her previous character now returned. She turned and left the room and returned shortly with a petticoat and slippers, both worn but clean and dainty, the first of each I had ever possessed. She also handed me the lye and two jars of herbal mixtures, then instructed me to wrap them within the petticoat and cautioned me against placing them in my Father John bag. ‘You must hold them close in your possession for you will pass through the markets,’ she warned. ‘Leave your leather bag with me or all within it will be stolen as you press through the crowd. Nimble thieving fingers you cannot feel will empty your bag as you walk. Also your stave, you will find it awkward.’

  ‘Nay, Frau Sarah, where I go, there goes also my stave.’

  ‘But it marks you a peasant and is not comely,’ she protested.

  ‘It is a promise made that I shall always keep. I cannot part with it.’

  ‘Very well, Sylvia,’ she said, puce-lipped. ‘I can see you are stubborn; in your very first lesson on comportment you have failed.’

  It was but a tiny victory but it told her I would not be pushed about.

  And so we made our way to the public bathhouse. I had not spoken to Reinhardt while Frau Sarah had been absent from the room and he was wise enough not to engage me in idle conversation. But once outside the tailor shop he advanced a tentative statement that did not require an answer. ‘When we pass through the markets you will see where we have with great good fortune avoided working,’ he said. I did not reply but walked steadfast and angry. We continued on a while, the silence between us growing until his garrulous self could no longer bear it. ‘What think you of the Jewess?’ he inquired.

  I stopped and turned accusingly. ‘Why?’ I demanded.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Did you betray our trust, lie and then swear it was the truth on God’s name?’

  ‘Ah, Sylvia, you do not understand the Jew, they will cheat you and take advantage if they think you are honest. Now the Jewess knows we are up to her game and can match her cupidity.’

  ‘Ha! You talk shit, ratcatcher!’

  ‘No, it is true!’ he asserted, raising his voice. ‘I know these Jews, they are all the same!’

  ‘And you’ll swear it on God’s name, I’ll vouch?’

  He ran several steps ahead of me and turned and spread his hands. ‘Sylvia, she is rich. Did you not see the cloth in that room? Alone it is worth a king’s ransom. They will make a pretty penny when they sell my rat-ridding services to the Jew’s cousin and you can be sure the percentage she demands of our endeavour is nothing short of onerous. I asked but a pittance, the money so that we, for her benefit, might be clean and break our fast. Was that such a crime?’

  That was the problem with the ratcatcher – he could well justify his most wicked actions and cause them to sound but a trifle, a mere indiscretion. ‘Nay, but you blasphemed, you swore it on God’s name. Don’t you understand, that is a mortal sin!’

  ‘Ha! Then all in the world is a sinner! We will shortly reach the markets and if you tarry at a stall but a few moments you will hear “My God!” this and “By God!” that, a thousand times each hour. This blasphemy you speak of, it is entwined within the language itself.’

  ‘And God writes each utterance in the Book of Sin and appends the utterer’s name to it.’

  ‘Forsooth, Sylvia! Thou art impossible!’ he cried. ‘In all eternity there would be insufficient ink or goose quills or skins rendered to parchment for the names that must perforce be inscribed in such a sinful book!’

  ‘Hence all the souls in purgatory and those that burn in hell!’ I exclaimed. ‘Frau Sarah told the truth when she named you yet a rat.’

  ‘Aye, I am not struck low by her remark. Rats are self-employed, persistent, cunning and will survive when all else perishes.’

  ‘To carry the plague,’ I added tartly.

  ‘Ha! What then of the Jewess naming thee contrary and cautioning you to sheath your sharpened tongue?’

  I thought at once to say ‘But only in the presence of a man’, but curbed myself just in time, for the hurt this would have caused him. ‘And thou shalt pay for the bathhouse and our food today!’ I said instead, knowing that to argue further would not be conducive to his better behaviour. But I was learning that he did not, as I had supposed, always get the better of me in argument.

  ‘Very well, but I caution you, after the Jews have taken their percentage, there will be precious little left for alms to the poor and we, I guarantee, will not gain the larger share.’

  ‘That’s not what you said before,’ I accused him. ‘You said we would work with gentlefolk and sleep warmly and eat plentifully and not compete with jugglers and the monkey on the hurdy-gurdy.’

  ‘Aye, that I did, but I did not then know of Sarah the Jewess, but thought only of doing business with the old man, a much gentler sort. She has the sharpness of a whip’s crack and her sting may hurt as much.’

  ‘Then should we continue with this dame?’ I asked. ‘Or perhaps persevere on our own?’

  ‘Aye, let us try her for size. If she does not suit we will abandon her.’ He grinned. ‘At least you shall have a clean wimple and a becoming gown and slippers and I a handsome outfit and undarned hose.’

  I shook my head. ‘Nay, ratcatcher, there thou go’est again! We shall keep these clothes we now possess and if perchance we leave, then we shall return what is not ours to keep.’

  ‘Sylvia, we will most surely perish with such Christian morality as our guide! Think Jew! They are not like us, but they survive through thick and thin.’ Before I could think to make a suitable reply he said, ‘Come now, we have reached the markets. Keep well thy vigilance, there are wicked folk abundant here.’

  Yes, and Christians all I daresay, but I kept this thought to myself.

  If I had hitherto thought the streets smelling of shit and piss and rotting garbage an affront to my senses, they were as a sylvan wood when compared to where we now entered. A miasma of evil-smelling stench hung at the height of the numerous stalls and tents, so that the morning sunlight could scarcely filter through and turned the air into layers of greenish, brown and dirty yellow effluvium that stretched in noxious strands as if the veils of hell itself. The vile smell of rotting meat and fish, mixed with pig shit, rancid fat, over-ripened cheeses and the stench of numerous substances that my nostrils had not before confronted sent me close to fainting. To add to this fetidity, the acrid smell of the smoke from charcoal fires further dimmed the air and made my eyes to water and caused my throat a raspy pain and my lungs to constrict and leave me short of breath. The noise of the stall-holders and the folk attending the market made conversation impossible and their pushing, bumping and elbowing left me feeling bruised and battered. I was not able to return the pushing or fend for myself as I held Frau Sarah’s slippers and bath jars wrapped in the petticoat crooked in my left arm and my staff in the right. Thus, for lack of momentum, I could scarce follow the ratcatcher as he walked ahead amongst the motley throng.

  Many of the stall-holders were peasant women of a type familiar to me, although the women selling wine and bread were from the town, a difference easy to discern from the colour of their cheeks and skin if not from the way they were dressed. The townsfolk were pale and sickly while the peasants of a much more robust hue. I thought to ask Reinhardt how anyone, a musician in particular, could entertain in such a place of ceaseless human babble and cries of sheep and goats and pigs and the barking of stray dogs.

  The bathhouse, when we reached it, sat beside
the river and was a building placed next to the communal bakehouse so that both might share the fire and thus reduce the cost of wood. Both were built on stilts against the flooding of the river. It was a wooden building with canvas flaps that fell from the roof on the riverside and when folded let the air in during the summer heat, but now, even though draped, they flapped in the breeze from the river and caused the enclosure to be most draughty.

  We paid the female attendant, a thin and sickly looking woman with a harelip and face heavily pockmarked, who took our coin with a grunt and in a voice as coarse as a carpenter’s rasp called over two young boys seated beside the bakehouse oven. She bade them each fetch two kettles of boiling water. Then she pointed to adjacent doors under which ran a set of six steps stretched across and under both doors, one the male, the other the female entrance. The bathhouse was separated down the centre with a wall of mud and reed, the floor covered with dried rushes, though dried only in the sense of being no longer green for they were wet from the previous bathers’ muddy feet and the splashing from the tubs.

  A dozen used wine barrels stood against the walls with three wooden steps beside them so that bathers could more easily enter these makeshift tubs. From three placed beside each other protruded the heads and shoulders of women. They seemed to be friends, as a rowdy cacophony ensued, with much laughter, interjection and shouting out, all talking simultaneously and none listening. They ignored me as I entered. I observed that there was a wooden peg placed on the wall above each barrel where I might hang my gown and sheepskin coat. I moved over to a barrel furthermost from the three bathers and waited, not knowing if I should undress the while.

  The pockfaced woman entered carrying two large kettles, the steam still coming from their spouts. She seemed too frail to carry even one and I hurried to help her. ‘Step back,’ she rasped impatiently, ‘or you will be scalded!’ Then placing down one kettle and lifting the other effortlessly she poured it into the wooden barrel that I now realised already contained cold water. She added the second kettle and without another word departed.

  I placed my stave against the wall, unwound the bundled petticoat and removed the two jars, hung the petticoat from the hook and placed the slippers, heel inwards, on two spare pegs.

  Then, first placing the small earthen jars upon the topmost step that led up to the top of the barrel I reached in to feel the temperature, but drew my fingers quickly back for it was exceeding hot. I decided I must wait a while or if the attendant should return, request she bring cold water to add to my bath.

  ‘Hey, fräulein! Why do you wait?’ one of the woman called out. ‘Take off your gown and let us see your little titties and tight sweet cunny!’

  There was a sudden cackling among them and then a quietness as they paused to see what I might do. I was unsure, not knowing whether to run, undress or stay and wait until the water grew sufficiently cool. I had stood naked twice before, in the presence of Frau Anna, Frau Gooseneck and Frau Frogface and, of course, the widow Johanna, but I knew they would not harm me. I watched, not moving, steam rising from the wine barrel.

  ‘Come, pretty one, show us!’ the same woman shouted out. Then with a great sucking sound she started to stand within her barrel and I saw that she was exceedingly fat and upon standing that her stomach seemed to fill the barrel as if she were its rightful plug. She gripped the sides and appealed to the other two to help her climb from it. Of a lesser stoutness, they stepped from their tubs and helped the huge fat frau from her own. She stood a moment panting, a gargantuan creature, bluish-white with rolls of lard that sat around her waist and hung like a heavy apron to her front and halfway to her knees. Her legs and arms were great pillars of dimpled fat, her arms alone thicker than my legs. She had three yellowed teeth, one of them at the bottom centre of her mouth, the two remaining at either side protruding crooked from her top gum. They seemed to frame a dark and threatening hole from the ugly face that leered at me. Then she commenced to walk towards me in a great menacing wobble. ‘Take off thy gown, wench, or I shall do so for thee,’ she commanded.

  ‘Nay, frau, the water is yet too hot, I would wait awhile lest I scald myself.’

  ‘Too hot is it?’ She turned to the other two. ‘Did you hear that? It is too hot for the dainty little virgin.’ They laughed and she turned back to me. ‘Jawohl! Then I shall take it for myself. My own is now grown cold, perhaps you would prefer it, eh?’

  ‘Nay, good frau, this is my bath, please will you leave me be,’ I pleaded. Then seeing her almost upon me I slipped my arms from the sheepskin coat and let it drop to the floor. In haste I undid my bodice and pulled the widow Johanna’s dress over my shoulders and waist and let it drop to the wet rushes before stepping quickly from it. Gripping the edge of the tub I lifted my leg to climb the wooden steps when her enormous arm closed about my neck from the rear.

  ‘My bath!’ she said and jerked me backwards, to send me sprawling onto my back, my legs flying apart. Before I could regain my balance her two naked companions fell upon me pinning me down. I cried out but felt a hand held to my mouth. ‘A virgin is she, let’s see!’ one of the women cackled and a blunt finger stabbed down between my legs.

  I bit as hard as I might and felt my teeth come down against the pink knuckle of the woman who had her hand to my mouth. She screamed and leapt from me. Then I kicked out and my right foot landed square into the stomach of the second woman, knocking the breath from her body so that she rolled away clutching at her stomach and gulping for breath, her eyes bulging.

  The woman whose hand I had bitten turned and rushed to where her clothes hung from a peg and in a moment I saw that she carried a butcher’s knife and turned to come towards me. ‘Biting bitch!’ she hissed. ‘Taste this!’

  ‘Cut her face!’ the fat frau shouted from the barrel. ‘The whore’s cut! Under the eye down to the mouth, slice hard, so we ruin her prettiness!’

  I had risen to my feet and was about to run for my life, but saw that the frau holding the knife stood between the doorway and me. I was also naked and there is no greater shame than for a woman to be seen naked in public. It was, I thought, better to die.

  Then, as if my mind was possessed, my fear turned to fury and in a trice I had my stave. Twisting the leather handle I withdrew the dagger and turned to face my attacker. The woman who was winded had regained her breath and now stood to her feet and, seeing me with the dagger in my hand, turned and ran towards the other frau. Then, seeing the one with the knife advancing upon me, she turned again to face me. I saw at once that I might not be able to overcome them both and so I ran to the fat frau in the barrel who sat with her back to me but had turned her head to watch. A look of great surprise now replaced the sneer upon her face. I grabbed her by the back of the hair and pulled fiercely to jerk her head backwards and expose her throat, placing the point of my dagger to it. ‘Touch me, and she dies!’ I screamed at the other two, but then realised they stood behind me and could easily attack me.

  I released the fat frau’s hair and moved quickly to her front, placing the dagger to her heart so that I faced the other two. ‘Out! Get out! Get out of my bath!’ I screamed, my voice hysterical, my spittle landing in a spray upon the fat frau’s frightened face.

  The fat frau rose slowly, the rush of water falling from her in a sucking sound. Then turning to the other two I yelled again, ‘Get out of here or I will kill her and then you, I swear it!’ They hesitated a moment. ‘Out!’ I pushed the point of the dagger lightly into the soft blue-veined flesh, its point making a tiny prick to break the skin so that a thin trickle of blood ran quickly downwards over her nipple and onto her stomach and then rested in a crease created by a tube of fat that sat about her waist.

  ‘She has stabbed me! Help!’ the fat frau screamed. ‘Murder! Murder!’

  Without further ado the two women turned and ran naked and screaming from the bathhouse, the woman with the knife dropping it to the rushes as she reached the door. ‘You! Get out!’ I screamed again at the helpless frau
in the tub.

  ‘I cannot!’ she cried in terror. ‘I am stuck! Please do not kill me!’ she sobbed.

  A fear rose up within me and I thought I must faint from fright, and my hand began to shake so that I thought I must drop the knife. Then, as suddenly, the thought that this cruel woman, stuffed like a pickled porker in the barrel, would have caused me to be mutilated and then slept as easily in her bed at night caused me to regain my courage. My fear was now replaced by a cold anger. I had endured sufficient humiliation in my life. I would stand for no more.

  But I had not seen her right hand pull free and suddenly it shot from the barrel and gripped my wrist and twisted so that the dagger flew from my hand. She was far too strong for me and holding me in a vicelike grip she attempted to throw me off my feet. I bit down hard into the soft underpart of her arm as she fought to pull her left hand from the barrel so that she could grab me about the throat. Still holding my wrist she screamed and pulled fiercely back in pain and her momentum, hard against the tub, overturned it. Feeling herself falling she released my wrist and landed in a great wash of water to the floor, spilling from it onto her back, her legs spread to reveal her dark and obscene hairiness. With amazing speed for one so large, she twisted about and was at once upon her hands and knees seeking the dagger.

  But I had reached it first. Seeing this and fearing for her life again she turned and snuffling like a sow fled across the rushes towards the bathhouse door, her great fat dimpled buttocks wobbling and emitting loud farts, then she shat herself and, still upon all fours, passed to the outside.

  ‘Dear Jesus, forgive me, I have sinned in my heart.’ I wept aloud, then sank to my knees and naked before my Creator I prayed for forgiveness.

  Why then had I drawn the knife? Did I want to kill the fat one? For I knew in my heart that the mixture of fear and fury was sufficient to do so. I had also bitten the other’s hand deeper than was necessary to make her remove it from my mouth. The harder I seemed to try to be pious the more I seemed to sin. Jesus instructs us to turn the other cheek and I had not done so when it would not have been difficult. All the fat frau wanted was my hot bath and the other two would, in the end, have done me little harm had I not so stubbornly resisted. I would have been humiliated and then forced to endure a cold bath in dirty water. It would not be the first time I had held my silence when I had been shamed. Why had I, by biting her, forced the woman to get her knife? Why had I drawn Father John’s dagger this time, when in the past I had allowed Frau Anna to spit upon me in the market and then to humiliate me in front of Father Pietrus? I had allowed the priest to denigrate and insult me and had not so much as murmured in my own defence. I had taken a hundred insults from village folk and remained silent. I had meekly submitted to my father’s wanton cruelty time after time.