The Witch of Cologne

by Tobsha Learner

  For some time Elazar had been preparing his daughter for an arranged marriage with the son of a scholar who lived in Hamburg. Having covertly indulged Ruth’s intellectual curiosity by allowing her access to his vast collection of religious and philosophical works, the bewildered father suddenly found himself confronted with the task of transforming a rebellious spirit—whom he privately thought too masculine—into a traditional Jewish wife. This meant Ruth had to learn to weave, embroider, cook the traditional high holiday dishes, as well as master some accountancy to manage household expenditure. Worst of all, she had to abandon her secret readings of the Torah. It was a rude shock for the strongwilled adolescent who found the tedium of weaving mind-numbing and often got sidetracked by the mystical meaning behind the numbers of her accountancy, forgetting the notion of balancing the books. Frustrated and secretly anxious that his daughter would be discovered to be unmarriageable, Elazar took extreme measures, caning Ruth with rushes and locking her in her bedroom until she finished her tasks.

  The date for the marriage drew near. Despite Elazar’s praise for the young man and the painted miniature sent from Hamburg which hung over her bed, Ruth felt nothing but dread. She had the overwhelming sense that her life—as she had envisaged it—was about to end.

  The harbour and its promise of escape was always visible through her bedroom window, and that was how the fifteen-year-old Ruth saw the Dutch ship with its tricolour of red, white and blue flying from the mast. As a cloud passed over the sun, its shadow fell across her haunted face and her plan of escape suddenly became manifest.

  Dressed in Aaron’s clothes, the young girl crept out that night with the little money she had saved, her cousin’s sword and the kabbalistic word for strength inscribed on an amulet she wore hidden under her shirt.

  She bribed the ferryman to take her across to the sleeping port and refusing to give any name other than Aaron, she offered herself as a cabin boy aboard the Dutch ship. The old merchant seaman only agreed to take her when she said she would cook in exchange for a free passage. On board she was befriended by a German chevalier who had fought for both the Dutch and the Spanish and would fight for anyone who would pay him enough. Cynical and bitter, he regaled the young boy with battle stories of famine and rape, of pillage and power.

  ‘Power is a whore and religion her pimp,’ he proclaimed, wondering why the boy had such smooth skin. ‘Don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise, boy.’

  On the third night, lying beside her on a narrow wooden bunk, he reached for her and was so shocked to find breasts on the struggling youth that he failed to complete the rape. Ruth, exercising all her wits, managed to hide from him until they docked in Amsterdam the next morning.

  Using the little Dutch she had acquired from relatives who had visited from Amsterdam, she made her way to the student quarters attached to the new school of medicine in the Heiligeweg. With rain slanting down behind her, shivering with cold and hunger, she had bashed against the thick wooden doors until a tall lad with a humorous intelligence about the eyes finally lifted the latch. He gazed in amazement as Ruth uttered three words in Latin: ‘Knowledge search I.’

  Dirk Kerckrinck, only eighteen himself, laughed out loud at the youth’s clumsy pronunciation before Ruth dropped like a sack of rags to the pavement in a dead faint. The medical student, recognising the German insignia embroidered on the breast of the muddy military jacket Ruth wore, carried the insensible young stranger up to his humble quarters. He laid her down by the hearth and as he watched her struggle into consciousness decided that such determination deserved a position. Without even asking, he appointed her his valet.

  Later, when Ruth revealed her identity as both female and Jewish, Dirk Kerckrinck was delighted. He risked prosecution by sheltering a Jew, but the young radical’s addiction to risk was matched only by his intellectual curiosity. An attribute he soon discovered he shared with his new valet, whom he teasingly reconstructed as Felix van Jos, a shy Calvinist from the city of Utrecht.

  In the months following, Dirk Kerckrinck took Ruth to his Latin classes at the house of his teacher, Franciscus van den Enden, on the Singel canal. Van den Enden was a Flemish radical who funded the publication of his own revolutionary ideas by teaching Latin to the children of wealthy and fashionable bürgers. He also had daughters of his own, girls whom he had educated so they were able to hold their side in debate with the outspoken young intellectuals who sought shelter under his roof. If van den Enden suspected the true gender of the awkward youth Kerckrinck insisted on bringing to his tutorials, he never spoke out. The charismatic teacher, mentor to many, could not help noticing that the young man did not shave and his voice was of suspiciously high timbre. But the boy was bright and his enthusiasm for learning phenomenal. Almost as phenomenal as another of van den Enden’s prodigies, Benedict Spinoza.

  The slight, dark young man with the handsome face was already famous for his very public excommunication from the Sephardic community. Now, bereft of family and friends, Spinoza had not only abandoned his Hebrew name of Baruch for the Latin equivalent, Benedict, but had actively carved out for himself a new family of like-minded intellectuals. The sons of merchants who, like him, sensed there was a greater meaning beyond the commerce and banality of prosperity that was making the Dutch nouveau riche flabby and self-regarding. Suspecting that the youth also had a Hebrew background, Spinoza warmed to Felix van Jos immediately.

  Oblivious to Ruth’s true sex, Spinoza took to instructing the young valet himself, perceiving the youth’s precociousness as a mirror of his own. After the Latin classes when Kerckrinck and Spinoza retired to the beer halls to drink and discuss politics, Spinoza always insisted that the shy youth accompany them. There Spinoza held court, arguing his theory of a God that encompassed all of nature, all of the universe and, even more controversially, that this God’s power was not the power of a king, but of nature, of life.

  Fascinated, Ruth would watch as Spinoza, holding up an empty beer glass so that the light shone through it like a prism, continued his soliloquy, oblivious to the rowdy revellers around him.

  ‘Everything flows from God, but we are limited by imposing our human perceptions upon him. Man designs God according to his own image and the image man has of himself is flawed. It is not our so-called free will which makes us want or desire something, but the disposition of our mind and body at any given time. Our only freedom lies in exercising reason to such a degree that we transform the passive emotions and the confused ideas which enslave us into a clear awareness of what motivates us. Reason knows exactly and precisely what must be done. Never forget that, young Felix.’

  As Spinoza spoke, Ruth felt as if the air itself had suddenly congealed then broken into shards of shining clarity. She saw a way she could apply his philosophies to her own life and the choices she had made so far to pursue her intellect.

  It was there in the smoky tavern, between the rowdy students and the whores, that Felix van Jos alias Ruth bas Elazar Saul decided that she would consciously rein in her passions and serve God through a vigorous and rational pursuit of knowledge at the expense of all else.

  Often when Spinoza looked at the youth with his soft cheek and luminous green eyes, he found himself wondering why the boy always refused to drink beer and fell into an uneasy silence when the subject inevitably turned to women and the latest sexual conquests. The philosopher assumed he must be virgin and was on the brink of suggesting to Kerckrinck that they pool their money to take him to a brothel when, drunk and morose one night, Dirk confessed that his young valet was female and a Jewess. Worse, that he had begun to lust after her.

  Deeply shocked, Spinoza—who regarded women as inherently inferior beings—found that he could only accept Ruth as a freak of nature, an abnormal creature with the intellect of a man trapped in the feeble shell of a woman. He told Dirk never to mention the true sex of his apprentice again. Only when Dirk’s handsome face collapsed into trembling confusion did the philosopher take pity and, smiling,
advised the lovelorn medical student to find a less endangering obsession.

  Nevertheless, struggling one night over a translation from the Dutch to the Latin, Ruth leant over Dirk only to find his lips on her neck. Groaning, the student continued to kiss his way up to her mouth despite her protests.

  Amazed by the ripples of pleasure that burst from deep within her body, Ruth was unable to push him off. Tasting his tongue, she searched his face in tender amazement. Months of living together, of knowing each other intimately, flowed over and ran like spilt quicksilver across the bare floorboards, fusing their limbs, their skin, their mouths. Until Dirk, bursting at his hose, hoisted her up onto his hips and was about to carry her across to his bed, at which moment Ruth pleaded with him not to destroy both her ambitions and her maidenhood.

  With his whole body trembling, the young man lowered her to the ground. Apologising profusely he begged her forgiveness, but Ruth, loins aching, silenced him with another kiss then ran.

  Confused, she walked for hours through the crowded streets, along the canals, across the bridges. Turning the situation over and over in her mind, dissecting it like the small animals she had watched Dirk meticulously pull apart. It was as if she was searching for an imaginary organ that would somehow render a love between them possible. Rationally she knew there was no future in such an affection, but the overwhelming sensuality of the experience made her realise that she could no longer deny her gender or her sexuality. It was then that she decided to return to Deutz, to reunite with her father and serve her people with the medical knowledge she had acquired.

  Three hours later she found herself standing outside Spinoza’s door. They talked until dawn, Ruth watching with relief as the philosopher eventually found within himself the possibility of continuing in his role as her mentor. Although saddened by her decision to leave, Spinoza saw the logic of it and offered to continue their dialogue through correspondence. He confessed that although he regarded her as an aberration, he still respected her intelligence and philosophical ambition. He swore he would send her the latest treatises and pamphlets, thus ensuring she would not be intellectually isolated in Deutz.

  They parted with an embrace, a rough gesture any man would give a youth. That night Ruth packed her belongings while Dirk was at a lecture and, after leaving a note, departed without seeing the young medical student again.

  ‘All manner of man and creature are equal in the eyes of nature, and nature is God.’ The memory of Benedict Spinoza’s soft resonant voice comforts Ruth as she stands shivering in the cold Deutz air. Taking moral responsibility for one’s actions—isn’t that what the philosopher advocates, and before him Descartes? If every man is equal in the eyes of God, and if God is nature and nature is God, then man is not a puppet acting out a preordained fortune but a free agent carving out his own destiny. She is living the life she has chosen and must learn to enjoy it, Ruth reminds herself, and pulls the wooden shutters closed.

  In the candlelight she wearily peels off her clothes, damp with the night’s efforts and the dew of the morning. As she steps across the room towards the waiting bath, she catches herself in the broken fragment of a looking glass her mother gave her as a child. A pale oval face, pensive, with a mane of long black hair. Large eyes which appear as a streak of green in white, blurred by some distant grief as yet unlived. It is not a face Ruth associates with her own. She has no image of herself: she deliberately stopped looking at her reflection many years before when, as a twelve year old, she no longer wanted to be thought of solely as beautiful. It was enough that she could feel with her own hands the health under her skin; nothing else mattered. She would not suffer to be defined by her physicality while she fought to be defined by her intellect.

  Should a man ever want her, it must be her nature he embraces, not merely her form, she thinks as she steps into the warm water, one white foot breaking the surface before she submerges the rest of her body.

  She lies there, in that unnatural light. In the distance are the faint sounds of the waking town: cockerels crowing; the soft bleating of goats, the growing clatter of their hooves as they are herded past the cottage; the remote peal of the church bells, Protestant bells; the laughter of children; the muted echo of a Hebrew chant; a skipping song she recognises from her own childhood. And gradually, as the sound expands into a vague medley of activity, an exquisite solitude settles upon her.

  The young woman looks down at her body under the water, her breasts that float above the shimmering surface, her narrow hips with the bush of black hair curling up the belly as if it is an independent animal resting momentarily against her thigh, her long legs that are still slim like a girl’s. It promises none of the fertile roundness of her patients. A virgin body without the wear and tear of love marked across it. And as she looks it is as if the whole room, even time itself, takes a deep breath and holds it, catching the minute slivers of sunlight, the trembling water and Ruth’s pale flesh into one frozen dream. Then, just as suddenly, this second of potency crystallises and sinks itself like a tiny splinter into her memory.

  Ruth, slipping beneath the water, believes the sensation must be happiness.

  Dear Benedict, Thank you for Decartes’ writings, I have read most of Discours de la méethode and have found it most illuminating. How to apply such ambitions to this small town! This place is a thousand years from Franciscus van den Enden’s study, where ideas soared like angels with steel wings. Ideas of democracy, of a Republic where all would stand equal in politics as well as mind.

  This morning I was midwife to the young spouse of a bürger within Cologne itself. It seemed barbaric to be so conscious of being a trespasser. I have forgotten the habit of humility and I am loath to adopt it anew.

  You would not recognise your little Felix, she has grown her hair and is forced to cover her head. I am a woman. I wear the yellow circle upon my breast like an obscene stigma. All this I tolerate. For I believe that maybe, through my meagre practice, I can spawn reform. I am careful, for unlike you I wish to stay within my community, for all that they label me witch. In the dark hours I have often found myself lying in fear—of what? God’s reprimand? Only of their God, a jealous God which is not my own. But still I have hung the kabbalistic tree of life with its ten Sefirot over my bed and a pouch of garlic at the back door. And the women still demand that I take these talismans to their birthings to ward off the demon Lilith and other horrors. The practice fortifies them and makes them believe in my skill. Am I a charlatan to exploit such tawdry magic? Faith saves lives and dignifies death; surely that is justification alone. I hear you chastising me already, Benedict. I remember your philosophy on the kabbalists as clearly as if the words were etched on my own skin: ‘Triflers whose insanity provokes my unceasing astonishment, such arrogance to believe that they alone may be held to possess the secrets of God.’

  Forgive me, master, but here in Deutz it is still twilight. Enlightenment is yet to reach these battered walls. Let my people dream. It is one of the only things they have left.

  Tell Dirk Kerckrinck he is to be congratulated on his promotion to chief medic (pity his poor patients!).

  Please write back, there is a Dutch ship nearly every week and your wisdom would be of great encouragement to me. Always yours, ‘Felix van Jos’

  ‘I am sorry to see that his royal highness the archbishop does not grace me with his majestic presence but instead sends a servant.’

  Carlos Vicente Solitario, inquisitor, Dominican friar and advisor to the great emperor Leopold I, listens intently as Juan, his secretary, translates the sentence from Spanish into bad German. Both parties have refused to speak Latin; it is an unspoken signal that their discourse is of a political not spiritual nature.

  Carlos, a short bald man in his sixties whose Mediterranean constitution has begun to suffer the bite of the northern winter, stands in the spartan room the Jesuits have given him and shivers. The confidence and magnetism of the canon Archbishop Maximilian Heinrich has sent makes the inquisitor
nervous. There is an arrogance to Detlef’s blond beauty, a supercilious intelligence behind the eyes that the Dominican finds untrustworthy.

  Solitario has visited Germany before, but in the far east, in Breslau. There he discovered that the phlegmatic nature of the Prussians gave them a strategic advantage over his own Latin emotiveness: in matters of diplomacy they could deceive where he could not. This time the inquisitor is determined not to compromise one degree of his mission. He leans forward and deliberately adopts a grin of utter naivety.

  Unperturbed the young canon smiles blandly back. Stalemate.

  Gesturing, Detlef gives permission to his assistant to speak for him. Clearing his throat pompously Groot begins.

  ‘Canon Detlef von Tennen is not a servant. He is a Wittelsbach prince, cousin to the archbishop himself. Therefore it is an honour that the archbishop has sent a member of his family to receive Monsignor Solitario.’

  ‘Especially as the aristocracy wields such power in Cologne,’ Carlos replies cynically in perfect German.

  Groot is startled by the inquisitor’s deliberate insult at choosing not to speak German until now, but also by the Spaniard’s knowledge that the local aristocrats, once hugely powerful within Cologne, are now to their great chagrin barely tolerated by the bürgers. Groot swings around to Detlef to determine his reaction, but the canon’s cool mien is unaffected.

  Behind the inquisitor a hood suddenly falls down from a black robe hanging next to a travelling chest in the corner of the whitewashed cell. Beside it stands a viola da gamba. The unfolded cowl heralds a scent of ambergris which floats through the room.

  ‘I have friends in Breslau. They send their regards and regret that it would be unsafe for them to cross Saxony to welcome you,’ Detlef replies in good Spanish. They are the first words he has uttered since entering the chamber.