The Witch of Cologne

by Tobsha Learner

  That will be me in my final hours, she thinks, standing there in the swaying cart, absorbing every image, brain and eyes drinking in the last moments of the world: the horizon, the sun and the cosmos.

  Suddenly a rotten apple smashes against the bars, sending pieces of putrid fruit into the room. Ruth ducks then fearfully looks back out. Below a crowd of students and beggars stare up at her.

  ‘Jewish witch, your time will come!’ shouts a tall youth in the cheap black garb of a law student, leering at her. Another, a boy with a deformed leg, scrapes up some horse manure and hurls it upwards, his face a grimace of hatred.

  Overwhelmed, Ruth sinks onto the straw pallet and covers her head with the thin blanket.

  The hanging hill outside Mülheim is a desolate place populated by rats and stray dogs who live by day in tiny caves in the bank of the Rhine and feed by night on the putrefying flesh of the executed left to rot on rope or pyre. Above are the ever-present crows, circling in a clamorous medley, vying for a better position to swoop down and pluck a milky-blue eye from a green cheek, a purple sinew from a twisted leg, an intestine from a drawn and quartered torso. It is a graveyard of carnage, lacking the eccentric order of the battlefield, or even the plague-yards where child is laid beside mother, grandson next to grandfather. A macabre showground, each gallows, chopping block and smoking pyramid a different sideshow.

  Here a murderess dangles, blackened buttocks swaying beneath the decaying skirt, her blonde hair a ghoulish remnant of femininity on her sunken skull. There a man who failed to pay his taxes, his headless torso protruding from a shallow grave, half-eaten by dogs, his head, its mouth cavernous, tossed casually a few feet away. Beyond is the burning field with its outlandish crop, each wooden stake bursting out of the ashes like a deathly sapling with its black fruit of charred bones and smouldering flesh.

  It is here that the two new pyres have been erected, posts cut from sweet green birch with the flag of the city fluttering in the breeze atop them.

  Already the crowd is gathering. Some come from Mülheim, dressed in the sombre clothes of the Protestant. Others are from Deutz, the Jewish elders with tumbling forelocks and chest-length beards clutching the hands of their young disciples whose wide black eyes roll nervously beneath the tall hats. Others are families bringing their children to teach them a living lesson in mortality.

  The Catholics are there in numbers. Some carry straw baskets with bread and liverwurst poking out; others have brought stools to sit on and are accompanied by servants. Defiantly festive, with the white lily of the Madonna pinned to bosoms or woven through buttonholes, they are determined to enjoy themselves.

  Elazar ben Saul leans heavily on his stick as he picks his way across the broken rocks and burnt ground through which nothing seems to grow.

  ‘You do not have to witness this barbarity, Reb,’ says Tuvia, catching the old man’s arm as he stumbles.

  ‘I need to see the depth of this Spaniard’s hatred,’ Elazar replies. He pushes through the crowd, trying to ignore the searing pain in his arthritic legs.

  Weaving her way behind him, Rosa, panting with the effort, catches up. She is dressed in black, mourning for the imprisonment of her dear child. A flask of mead is strapped to her broad back and she carries a small oak stool, a viewing perch for the rabbi.

  ‘With all due respect, Reb Saul, I can’t think why—the man is the devil incarnate. He was an evil bastard when I knew him back in Spain and he has only grown more wicked with age. May the pox strike him down!’

  She spits, then rests for a moment, straightening her back. She is able to see the two pyres in the distance, stark against the backdrop of the glistening Rhine.

  ‘If I were a Christian I’d cross myself now,’ she mutters, but the rabbi overhears her.

  ‘May your God—who is Jewish—forgive you, Rosa.’ He sits heavily on the stool she has placed beside him.

  ‘God can do what he likes, because frankly, Reb, there’s not much he hasn’t already done to me—or to you for that matter…’

  The old nursemaid pauses. In the distance she can hear trumpets heralding the arrival of the accused. The horns sound three times, a haunting cascade from high to low. The crowd turns in the direction of the small docks where the procession is disembarking from its crossing of the Rhine.

  Tuvia leans towards the rabbi, his lean face alight with a sudden intensity.

  ‘If your daughter becomes my wife, I swear to you, her father, that next year we shall all be safe in the Holy Land, our people’s sanctuary. Shabbatai Zevi is the real Messiah; I have read the signs in the sky myself.’

  Rosa snorts dismissively but Elazar is silent, contemplating his response to the fervent youth.

  God protect us from such fanaticism, he thinks. This Shabbatai Zevi, this young zealot from Asia Minor who claims he is the new Messiah—who is he really and what miracles has he performed? He is just another charlatan exploiting the hysterical delusions of a desperate community. But he has power. His trickery spreads like a disease throughout Poland, Russia, Germany, even as far as Turkey. Too many have already packed food and linen and sent it to Hamburg in preparation for celestial summons to set sail for the Holy Land. May Tuvia see the light before he marries Ruth, Elazar prays silently.

  ‘There have been many Messiahs and all of them false. We are a troubled and oppressed people and such people are always hungry for hope. What makes Zevi different from the others?’ the old rabbi says cautiously, knowing that Zevi’s followers are quick to condemn those who dare to disbelieve.

  ‘For what have we suffered since 1648, since the Spanish persecuted our people? For what did the Jews of Poland suffer? It is written in the kabbala that the birth pangs of the Messiah will be painful but they will lead to a glorious end: the liberation of the Holy Land. And Shabbatai Zevi is the man who will lead us there. His arrival was prophesied.’

  Elazar clutches at the young man’s sleeve. ‘Shh! The elders might hear. Listen, Tuvia, I promise Ruth shall be yours, but first we must free her from prison otherwise there will be no redemption, no Holy Land, just this: innocent souls sacrificed and my child sharing in their wretched fate.’

  The pageant winds its way up the hill. The executioner leads the procession, a masked figure in black and scarlet leather, riding proudly on a draughthorse and flanked by two papal guards holding banners. A squadron of soldiers on horseback follows then comes the prison cart itself with its grim cargo. The condemned, silent and ashen, are beyond prayer. Behind ride the archbishop and his assistants and finally the inquisitor himself.

  As the cart rolls past, Elazar mutters a Kaddish for each of the accused, praying that their death will be as swift and painless as possible. Mid-sentence he sees Heinrich, sombre and sweating beneath the high hat of his office. Without thinking, the old man stumbles forward, trying to catch the archbishop’s attention. He falls inches from the pacing horses. Rosa and Tuvia rush to his side and pull him back before the hooves come crashing down. ‘Your highness! Your highness!’ the rabbi cries out, but his voice is drowned by the horns and the cheering.

  Heinrich peers blindly at the wall of spectators, looking for the familiar voice that called out his name. For a second he thinks he sees the chief rabbi, his hat knocked askew, his frail body being supported at either side. But before the archbishop has a chance to reach him, Elazar is swallowed by a sea of people moving forward as the condemned are marched up to the pyres.

  ‘The two accused, Meister Matthias Voss and Herr Jan van Dorf, are charged and found guilty of witchcraft and corruption under the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina and as such are condemned to burn until declared dead.’

  The herald, a portly man with a taste for pomposity, pauses to wipe the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief embroidered with the emperor’s crest.

  The accused are tethered to the stakes atop the piles of faggots. Voss drops his head but the Dutchman stares straight ahead, as if he has somehow transported his conscious being elsewhere. A small
red-headed child wriggles his way through the spectators and dives between the legs of the guards.

  ‘Vader!’ he cries before the guards catch him. ‘Vader! Mama says you are going to Heaven! Tell me it isn’t true, Vader!’

  ‘Tobias!’ Van Dorf tears at his ropes. ‘Tobias!’

  But by now a guard has caught hold of the struggling child who manfully beats against his captor’s breastplate. Laughing, the guard carries the boy back to his weeping mother, whose arms reach out of the crowd to take him.

  The Dutchman begins to howl, an inhuman sound which stuns the crowd into horrified silence.

  Heinrich holds out a limp handkerchief and a young page steps forward, horn in hand. The men at the foot of each pyre stand with burning torches held high, poised for the signal. With bated breath everyone watches as finally, with a weary wave, the archbishop signals his permission and the horn sounds. A great roar rises up from the onlookers as the flames dart up the dry wood like hungry ants.

  Elazar, standing on his stool, peers above the heads of those in front of him, determined to witness every moment. He watches aghast as the flames lick the base of Voss’s stake. This is a man his own age, the man they said helped his daughter on the terrible day of her arrest.

  ‘May God grant him a speedy death,’ he whispers and closes his eyes as Voss screams in agony. The fire darkens and the old merchant faints, his body falling limp against the spike. His skin blackens then splits open. The air fills with thick smoke and the sickeningly sweet smell of burning flesh.

  Several onlookers burst into laughter as one of Voss’s eyes pops out from its socket, dangling for a moment before exploding and shrivelling like bacon rind.

  Tuvia pulls at Elazar’s gown. ‘Reb Saul, enough. It is not good to watch.’

  But the rabbi is paralysed by the multitude of emotions which beat through him. When the setting sun becomes visible on the horizon, he is still there, staring motionless at the piles of twisted flesh that were once men.

  ‘Reb Saul, we must go, before the scavengers get here,’ Tuvia pleads.

  Finally Elazar’s concentration is broken. With ten more years burdening his ashen brow, he steps down off his viewing perch and allows Tuvia and Rosa to lead him away.

  – GEVURAH –

  Justice

  ‘Ahhh!’

  Ferdinand arches his body, sending a leech flying through the air. His nightshirt, pushed up to his shoulders, reveals a line of the swollen parasites neatly placed between each rib. His scarred abdomen protrudes like a grotesque fruit from his skinny frame. The air is foul with body gas. The physic, keeping his face averted, presses his patient back down onto the satin-covered bed and swiftly retrieves the leech which has landed in Alphonso‘s lap.

  ‘He seems dreadfully weak.’

  The actor anxiously stares at the white face of his lover. It is two days since the prince was first stricken by the mysterious illness; blue rings have appeared around his eyes and he is losing weight at an alarming rate.

  ‘It is natural. When his vitals have replenished themselves he will recover,’ the physic announces in his painfully slow Swiss-German accent.

  The count, who stands beside him, peers with visible distaste at the young royal. Noticing that the prince’s mouth is a nasty purple colour and his tongue appears yellow he ushers the physic to one side. ‘Could it be the pox? Or the Black Death? Or perhaps the wasting disease?’ he whispers fearfully and, worried about infection, crosses himself.

  The physic glances at his patient, whose limp hand is being caressed by Alphonso, then turns back towards the count. Without a word he walks out of the bedroom. The count, steeling himself for the worst news possible, follows. Outside they stand huddled in an alcove containing an icon of Saint Luke which once belonged to Gerhard’s mother.

  ‘If it were the pox, sire, there would be dementia and a rash. As for the Black Death, he has no lumps, no weeping sores. And if it were the wasting illness he would be pissing every hour.’

  ‘So what in all of Christendom is it, my good physic? You are aware that the prince is fourth in line from the emperor himself—if he should die both our lives are at stake, not to mention those of our families.’

  The physic winces nervously then, fearing spies, squeezes himself even further into the alcove. ‘I believe the ailment is intestinal. I suspect it is a blockage.’

  ‘The blockage, sir, is in your head. If he is not improved within the day I shall relieve you of your position.’

  Ferdinand opens his bloodshot eyes, blinks blearily at Alphonso then struggles to sit upright.

  ‘Hush, there is no need for formality, you are much weakened.’ Alphonso carefully places two pillows behind the prince’s bony back.

  ‘Does my uncle know? I fear he will think it the pox.’

  ‘Word has been sent. The message merely stated that you are stricken with a fever.’

  ‘Still, I think you should make sure the servants light a red candle for Saint Fiacre. He is the patron saint of venereal diseases, is he not?’

  ‘He is, my love. But it has not come to that,’ Alphonso whispers back.

  Distracted, the prince tries to crane his neck to see who else is in the room but finds that he lacks even the energy for this. Frustrated by his frailty he whispers to his lover, ‘Dismiss the pages.’

  Alphonso, adopting the persona he uses when playing King Lear, raises his voice and waves his hand regally. ‘You may all leave now.’

  Confused about whom to take orders from, the two pages and the prince’s personal valet bow then edge backwards out of the chamber. Once they have gone, Ferdinand immediately collapses back onto the pillows, his face pallid.

  ‘I fear I am dying.’

  ‘But my love, the physic is confident.’

  ‘I know myself. I am much weakened since yesterday. What if it is Cupid’s itch?’

  ‘I have seen the pox at close quarters, you have none of the markings.’

  ‘There is much I wish to achieve. Alphonso, what if I have no time left?’

  Surprised by the prince’s uncharacteristic intensity, yet honoured that he should be privy to such intimacies, Alphonso struggles to find a reply that will encourage recovery.

  ‘You shall have time. You shall have the rest of your life, I swear it. We will find you another physic—perhaps one that has more knowledge of the abdomen.’

  ‘I have always wanted to die nobly, on the battlefield, or as an aged reigning monarch or duke. Uncle has promised me a dukedom in Flanders. I will live there and you shall be my queen, my Rebecca of the bedsheets, and we shall love openly. Together we shall breed Arabian stallions and they shall be purple and gold with manes of the finest silver…’

  As Ferdinand lapses into another fiery delirium, Alphonso, who like his forefathers does not believe in the power of bloodletting, plucks four of the largest leeches from the prince’s body. He drops them into a dish of salt beside the bed. The creatures, glutted with blood, writhe atop the white crystals. Watching them die, the actor wonders whether the prince isn’t being poisoned slowly. Since Ferdinand fell sick he has been secretly testing his hypothesis by feeding pieces of the prince’s food to the count’s favourite Kammerhund. So far the animal appears unaffected.

  Yesterday Alphonso cornered a Jewish pedlar who was in the servants’ quarters selling fur pelts and trinkets from Muscovy. After pulling him away from the kitchen servants, the actor almost gave the poor man a heart attack by breaking into fluent Hebrew. Swiftly, before they were discovered, Alphonso questioned him about the Jewish medics who were available in the region.

  ‘There are only two,’ the man told him, his face weathered leather, creased around the hooked nose and mournful mouth, his Hebrew almost incomprehensible for the heavy Slavic accent. ‘Both live on the other side of the Rhine. Salomon Moses from Mülheim, Isaac Schlam from Deutz. But the best is not even a man.’

  ‘I have heard of her—Ruth bas Elazar Saul, the midwife?’

  ‘They
say she has a magic touch, that all she needs to do is hold her hands over you. But you will never get her, the Christians plan to burn her.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Who knows. They burnt two of their own last week. I was there, I haven’t seen such joviality since Christmas. It really cheered the people up. Man is strange—give me the sky and the open field any day.’

  Alphonso slipped two Reichstaler into a hand that felt as dry as sand. ‘My name is Alphonso de Lorenzo, I am a Christian,’ he whispered.

  ‘For two Reichstaler you can be an Ottoman Mussulman for all I care,’ the pedlar had replied cheerfully, pocketing the money.

  Now, looking at the prince’s deteriorated condition, Alphonso considers that the midwife might be Ferdinand’s only hope of survival. Leaning back with his eyes shut, the actor starts to review the plots of all the great plays he has performed. Suddenly he remembers a work by a dynamic French playwright that swept through the Viennese court the year before: Tartuffe by Molière, a master of convoluted plot and mannered high farce, a genius of exquisite social satire. Drawing a parallel between Emperor Leopold’s tolerance of Inquisitor Carlos Vicente Solitario and the disastrous obsession of Molière’s fallible nobleman Orgon with the religious hypocrite Tartuffe, Alphonso begins to form a plot of his own. He will appeal to Samuel Oppenheimer, he will ask him to intervene on behalf of the ailing royal.

  Inspired he sits down at the prince’s desk. Designed in the shape of a medieval castle by Hans Stethaimer, a famous architect of two centuries ago, the desk is one of the few gifts the prince received from his father, now long dead. Treasured by Ferdinand, it travels everywhere with him. With a gesture bordering on the sensual, Alphonso runs his hand along the edge of the lacquered rosewood fringed with tiny bastions, a miniature drawbridge crowning the top shelf. Oh to be an aristocrat surrounded by such artistry, he thinks sadly.