The Witch of Cologne

by Tobsha Learner

  ‘Firstly, I am a man, despite these robes. Secondly, I had thought that—’

  ‘What? That I should love you? You are a peasant, señor, a peasant wrapped in a cassock. Do not forget your place.’

  Humiliation scars deeper than the lash.

  That night Carlos felt his abasement clawing his back like some hideous hag he could not shake off. Profoundly shamed, he twisted from side to side on the hay pallet in his small cell. When the talons of mortification finally lifted and sleep mercifully descended, a woman visited his dreams. A beautiful creature, seven feet tall, her black hair streaming behind her, her sex a pulsating scented bush that drew his eyes and fingers, her heavy breasts taunting pillows crowned with huge buttonlike nipples that seemed to dance before him as she rode him like a wild bucking mare. The young friar woke in the morning embarrassed to find his thighs stained with his own seed. A demon has visited me, he thought, crossing himself in an attempt to purify what had been made impure. She has stolen my seed and she will steal my sanity.

  The next night he had one of the priests bind his wrists together to prevent him inadvertently touching himself during sleep. But the fiend came to him anyway, laughing derisively at the leather bindings, touching his sex with her mouth and hands until the struggling friar surrendered himself to the shuddering pleasures she brought.

  After a week of hallucinations, Carlos, now hollow-eyed and thin, borrowed one of the friary donkeys and rode for three hours to visit the seminary at Villanueva de Gállego, famous for its library containing the largest collection of writings on witchcraft in Christendom.

  As he turned the pages of an illustrated manuscript in the huge Gothic athenaeum, the vaulted arches above writhing with carved granite forests and imaginary monsters of Satanic proportions, Carlos finally recognised the evil spirit which had been possessing him. Lilith. First wife of Adam, Lilith the seducer, the murderess of newborn children, Lilith who used the nocturnal emissions of innocent men to beget her demon children. Lilith the grandmother of Satan. The discovery sent him running out into the sun-scorched grounds where, trembling, he vomited violently amongst the gnarled vines.

  Shaking with a mysterious ague, the young friar walked for hours in the scrubland of the surrounding countryside until the burning eyes of the evil spirit and her musky fragrance fused with the scent of goats and cacti flowers and the searing heat of the midday sun, and finally he fainted into the soft sand.

  He woke hours later in his own cell to the sensation of water dribbling into his mouth from a sponge placed between his burnt and peeling lips. He had been discovered by a shepherd who had recognised his order from his robes.

  That night, as the shadows lengthened and darkness fell, he feverishly begged his prior to tie him to the bed to prevent him reaching out to the horror he knew would visit. The prior refused, sternly suggesting instead that the young friar should begin a spiritual incantation at the first sight of any visitation. Later, as Carlos tossed in sweaty turmoil, the demon came to him, but this time, as with slippery ease she mounted his writhing body, her face transformed suddenly into that of his young student. Cheeks flushed, her hair twisting away from her, Sara gazed down at him with sickening innocence.

  With a great cry the friar woke himself. Determined to catch the witch at her art, he raced through the deserted streets of Zaragoza to the Navarros’ hacienda.

  Darting past the bubbling fountain in the moonlit courtyard, he climbed a vine to Sara’s balcony and entered her bedchamber. He stood there peering around the dim room, looking for evidence that she had flown magically through the sky to reach him. There was nothing except a single feather cast carelessly upon the marble floor. An owl’s feather. A screech owl: Lilith’s totem. As Carlos bent to pick up the plume he heard the soft breathing of the girl from behind the veiled canopy of the bed.

  The young friar walked over to gaze through the fine meshed silk at the girl’s white breasts, her black hair running like serpents across the pillow. Suddenly her sleeping face twisted violently into Lilith’s visage and Carlos, determined to finish the possession once and for all, threw himself on top of her, tearing off her nightdress to reach down between her legs.

  Screaming, Sara woke and struggling wildly cut his face with her ring. The pain held him off long enough for the servants to hear her cries.

  The next day Isaac Navarro dismissed the music tutor. The day after that Carlos Vicente Solitario went to the Inquisitional Council and standing before them condemned the Navarro family as false Christians and Satanists.

  Ruth stands outside the narrow house squeezed between the tiny synagogue, the mikvah and the small hall which functions as a school for the Jewish boys of the town. She looks up at the window where she knows her father is sitting; she senses his hidden gaze. A boy pushing a hoop runs past, then stops and stares back at her.

  ‘The rabbi is inside but he won’t see you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You are untouchable, they told us at the yeshiva, but you look harmless to me. My mother says you are a good woman.’

  Ruth recognises the boy’s elfin features, the white skin and jet black hair, the Russian slant of the eyes.

  ‘You are Rebecca’s child, Benjamin? I knew your mother when she was your age.’

  ‘She has four sons now.’

  ‘God grants her a full harvest.’

  Encouraged, the boy edges closer. He looks at the imposing oak door with the mezuzah fixed above it. The brass lion of Judah which serves as a doorknocker glares down at both of them. For a moment Ruth, looking through the child’s eyes, sees how the magnificence of the entrance is a symbol of unquestionable authority for the small community.

  ‘Why don’t you knock? You have nothing to lose but your pride,’ the child says with the lucidity of the innocent.

  ‘I have knocked before, therefore I know it will not open.’

  Instead she presses her cheek against the cool stone and closing her eyes remembers her mother, Sara, with her wild hair. A young Spanish woman with her black eyes smeared with kohl, her head defiantly uncovered, the shining gold in her ear lobes that seemed to pull the Mediterranean sun into the grey northern sky. Her winsome grace had intimidated the Ashkenazi women and made them conscious of their own sturdy gaits as they paraded in their best clothes to the synagogue.

  ‘The rabbi’s foreign wife,’ they whispered, drawing their veils across their faces as if her exoticism was contagious. ‘They say she is like a man, that she knows the secrets of the kabbala as well as the Christian Bible.’ They were careful not to touch the anusa for fear they would catch her mystical ways.

  Sara Navarro, who after her escape to Amsterdam had reconverted to Judaism, outraged her Spanish relatives in Holland by marrying an Ashkenazi—a community the Sephardic considered well below their own status. A reaction Sara felt more strongly once she had joined Elazar back in Deutz and was struggling for acceptance from his own people, an acceptance that was never realised.

  The image of herself as a six year old comes back to Ruth as she stands before the old house, a fierce thin child cowering against her mother’s legs as the women passed, refusing to greet them.

  ‘Ruth,’ Sara would say, in broken Yiddish laced with a mellow Spanish accent, ‘stand proud, you are the daughter of kings.’ And a sudden vision of what she might be—if of another sex, another faith—would rock the child’s body.

  Then Elazar ben Saul would sweep out of the house, young and handsome in his robe and prayer shawl, the deeply serious expression upon his face betrayed only by the wink he gave his young daughter as he marched purposefully towards the temple of worship. He was the great figure of her life, rocking backwards and forwards in the humble synagogue wrapped in the prayer shawl embroidered by her mother’s own hands, a kabbalistic symbol for good health and happiness hidden in the seam.

  Only Ruth knew about the amulet. Only she had been there when her mother slipped it in and stitched up the hem. And only Ruth had been there when
, hiding under the benches in the women’s section, she had heard a mysterious cry. Recognising her mother’s voice, she peered down through the balusters and was shocked to see her parents wrapped around each other, their limbs locked in a strange dance the small child did not recognise at the time. Her mother’s hair flung across the temple floor, her cheeks as red as her mouth, while her father, his robe hitched up above his waist, lay on top of her, the pale orbs of his slender buttocks undulating like sleepy sand dunes in the candlelight. There was an ethereal beauty to their movements that held the child in awe and stopped her from calling out. Fascinated, she watched as their dance grew more frantic. The musicality of their sighing and panting reached a crescendo that burst across the rafters like the fireworks Ruth had once seen shooting across the walls of Cologne. Wide-eyed in amazement, the child was convinced that her parents must be praying in the secret manner her father had once alluded to: dancing for God.

  Seventeen years later, drawn back to Deutz by such memories, Ruth found herself propelled by the desire to protect her father in his old age.

  The shame of Ruth’s flight had almost killed Elazar. How to explain to the elders the sudden disappearance of a young girl on the eve of her marriage, the daughter of a rabbi no less? There were rumours of a Christian lover, a secret pregnancy, of abduction. But Elazar ben Saul, refusing to answer the furtive whispers, had grown his beard and smeared ashes on his forehead, wrapping his grief in a leaden silence. ‘My child is dead,’ was all he uttered to the leaders of the community when they asked. For him, the child he loved had become a ghost and the woman she had evolved into irrelevant.

  A goat bleats and Ruth looks up from her thoughts. Two widows from fields beyond the village are tethering their animals outside the mikvah. Both are shyly excited at the prospect of the ritual bathing and the monthly exchange of local gossip. The midwife turns to the boy but he has gone, running with his hoop between the geese and falling snow.

  ‘Ruth!’ A rich alto voice shouts out the banned name defiantly.

  Rosa, her old nursemaid, a bustling buxom woman in her fifties with hennaed hair peeping scandalously from under her cowl, stands in the entrance of the mikvah. She wears the uniform of an attendant.

  ‘Don’t just stand there gawking at the unbreachable! Come in and sit with me, it’s warm in here.’

  As Ruth steps into the bathhouse Rosa enfolds her in a huge embrace, pressing her against the powdery bosom Ruth remembers from childhood.

  ‘I have news of your father,’ the Spanish woman whispers conspiratorially as she leads the midwife through a low archway into the waiting area adjacent to the first bathing pool.

  Women of all ages and sizes, in various stages of undress, lean against the walls or sit talking to friends in reverent muffled tones occasionally broken by a peal of very unholy laughter. This is a sanctuary for women, their domain from a thousand years before and to a thousand years hence.

  Ruth sits down next to Rosa on a low wooden bench and removes her headdress. Her thick black hair falls down her back to hang below her waist. Immediately a window of silence opens up around her.

  ‘Your beauty frightens them,’ Rosa whispers in Spanish.

  ‘Hush, you know it is not my beauty but my reputation that frightens them. They think I am a female Ba’al Shem, that I can invoke demons.’

  ‘Let them think. For me you will always be just a strongwilled little girl,’ the nursemaid retorts, sentimentality filling her eyes.

  ‘So how is my father?’

  ‘Not wonderful. The reb feels his age, which is good for maybe now he will realise the foolishness of banishing his only child.’

  ‘He has sickness?’

  ‘Ruth, your father is near sixty, he has nothing wrong with him except too much religion and not enough soup. He would forgive you if you were to make a marriage.’

  ‘A marriage? After my broken engagement who would have me?’

  ‘Rabbi Tuvia.’

  ‘Tuvia! He’s just a boy.’

  ‘A man now and a disciple of your father’s.’

  ‘I cannot, it would be dishonest.’

  ‘Dishonest?’

  ‘I do not love him, nor could I.’

  ‘Since when did marriage have anything to do with love? Besides, that much-overrated emotion comes with habit.’

  ‘Many things come with habit, like warts. Anyhow, Tuvia would never allow me to continue my study. No, Rosa, it shall not be.’

  ‘Be warned: do not make an enemy of Tuvia.’

  ‘And this is the man you would have me marry?’

  Rosa pulls her closer. ‘He has your father’s ear and that of the whole town.’

  The other women are murmuring now, whispering in Yiddish, some openly staring, some glancing sideways—the rattle of Spanish makes them suspicious.

  Ruth knows what is running through their minds, fed by the rumourmongers, the web of gossip that links the Jewish communities from as far south as Arles through to Minsk. Has the rabbi’s daughter returned a virgin? Is it true she can will a male child upon you by reciting a spell from the Zohar, that she has associated with the heretic Benedict Spinoza and, worse still, Christians? And what about Rachel’s baby, the one that was born silent and hasn’t made a sound since two summertides ago? What curse did the sorceress lay upon that innocent soul? Is it true that she is a secret worshipper of Lilith, the demon?

  The muttering grows louder, swirling around the glistening walls of the bathhouse like a low incantation. Rosa, bristling with indignation, takes Ruth’s hand.

  ‘Ignore them, my darling. They are born from a small town and their minds are as small as their bellies are big. Lord knows, I miss Aragon. Now there was sophistication.’

  A young woman, her face pockmarked, a telltale bruise showing under one eye, emerges out of steamy mist. Ruth recognises the voluptuous form as Vida, the fourth wife of the baker Schmul. The young girl inherited her husband Schmul’s six children as well as having one of her own. The baker is not a cruel man but he has enough money to become irritated when he chooses. Vida’s bruised eye is testimony to his short temper but despite this there is a fondness between the two of them: the affection of the protected towards the protector, which Ruth recognises and respects.

  Vida curtsies. Unable to help herself Ruth breaks into a wide grin; the formality seems absurd as the young woman is entirely naked.

  ‘Fräulein Saul, it is an honour to see such a great midwife in the mikvah. May the blessings of the Almighty protect you,’ Vida says loudly, fully aware of the disapproval rippling through the bathhouse.

  ‘And you, Vida. How is the child?’

  ‘Thanks to you he has lungs like Joshua himself blowing down the walls of Jericho, may I stay so lucky.’

  The birth had been difficult, further complicated by the size of the baby. But the child had lived and Schmul had been so grateful he supplied Ruth with free challah for a full month afterwards.

  It was the first of many births Ruth had been called upon to attend. First as a medic then, as her reputation grew, as a midwife. Now even Betsheba, the traditional midwife who delivered Ruth herself twenty-three years before, seeks her advice. And yet they still believe it is witchcraft that makes her good, not her knowledge, she thinks, trying to forgive the women’s hostility as, clicking disapproval, they pull Vida away and turn their shimmering wet backs to her.

  ‘Ruth, promise me you will be careful. I had a dream last night that you were a baby again and you were snatched from my arms. The spirit of your mother, God bless her soul, would never forgive me if something happened to you.’ Rosa distracts her attention away from the women.

  ‘Superstitious nonsense. My work goes well, I am being accepted. Only last night I was called to Cologne to deliver a child.’

  ‘Perhaps, but the wind can change, just like that. Here…’

  Rosa presses a small stone amulet into Ruth’s hand. Hiding it from the others, she turns it over. The Shield of David, a six-pointed star
surrounded by six circles filled with kabbalistic lettering, is carved into its smooth surface.

  ‘May my love and the love of your forefathers protect you,’ the old nursemaid mutters, then turns to hand a towel to another customer.

  But as Ruth looks back towards the bathing rooms she is convinced she can see the hazy outline of her mother’s ghost drifting for a moment between the clouds of steam.

  ‘Outrageous! How dare a trumped-up Spanish rat give orders to the archbishop, protector of the holy bones of the three great Magi themselves! And how dare he intercept my personal correspondence!’

  Maximilian Heinrich strides down the centre aisle of the great cathedral where sunlight streams in through the half-constructed roof, his green mid-week vestments flying behind him. ‘A pox on Leopold!’

  ‘Sire! Be silent, I beg you, there are spies everywhere!’

  Wilhelm Egon von Fürstenberg follows like a hawk at Heinrich’s shoulder. The archbishop reaches the altar and stares up at the massive Gothic carving of the crucified Jesus, garish blood oozing from his elongated oak hands and feet. The nobility of the martyr is laudable, he thinks, but regrettably he himself will always err on the cowardly side of human nature. He loves life too much to end it as some forgotten assassinated pawn.

  The Hapsburgs’ days are numbered, but still Heinrich wrestles with guilt about courting France as a potential ally against the Austrian emperor. The future lies with the French king, Louis: he will be the new order. Is he, a Wittelsbach prince, to be silent like a fawning puppy? The dilemma which has tortured him for years circles again around and around in his mind. Staring at von Fürstenberg, he is reminded of the wheedling way the minister has drawn him into this Byzantine maze of information and intrigue, how he has skilfully manipulated both Heinrich and his informants at the French court. Squeezed between the demands of the bürgers and the expectations of his aristocratic peers, Heinrich sometimes feels little more than a puppet being jerked by a thousand invisible threads. Suddenly the complexity of the situation infuriates him.