The Witch of Cologne

by Tobsha Learner

  ‘But Rabbi, there is a Schülergeleif. Your people are being slaughtered, you cannot go!’ Detlef reaches out to stop him.

  ‘Daughter, who is this man? He is not one of us. I do not know him.’ The old man hits out with his walking stick.

  Ruth grabs it. ‘Abba! They will kill you!’

  Standing against a horizon bloody with flame, Elazar smiles calmly. ‘Nonsense, child. I must be with my people. The burning word is calling me.’

  Before Detlef can once again attempt to drag him back to safety, a boy at the edge of the rabble turns at the old man’s voice.

  ‘Look! It’s one of them! One of their devil worshippers!’

  Several youths swing around, stunned for a second at the sight of the old rabbi standing erect, slowly lifting his kittel above his head and advancing upon the horde.

  ‘Behold the wrath of Moses, for he shall come amongst you and strike down all whose hands are awash with the blood of the children of Israel…’

  ‘Sure, old man! We’ll part for you like the Red Sea itself!’ they jeer, moving aside to let the rabbi walk between them towards the burning synagogue.

  ‘Your sons and their sons shall wear the wrath of the Israelites upon their foreheads. It shall be a flaming brand for all to see,’ Elazar continues as he walks fearlessly down the opened pathway strewn with broken glass, smoking embers, pieces of smouldering cloth.

  He reaches the old oak door and pushes against it with one hand. It falls flat, creating a wooden bridge into the temple. The crowd falls silent as the rabbi steps onto the burning door.

  Swinging around, he faces them. ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one! For my children are the children of God, they shall rise from the ashes and sing with the wind. And there shall be a Paradise and in it we shall all be free!’

  Several of the young men turn from his fiery gaze. One crosses himself. Another drops to his knees. Elazar spreads his hands wide in the silence, his body a crucifix against the flaming building. He begins to sing Kaddish then turns and walks into the blazing temple.

  They shelter in a ditch, the dried-up bed of what was once a creek. Above them an awning of tree branches engraves the black sky. A light wind brings the faint barking of dogs but there are no church bells, no town crier, no night birds, not even the owls. Ruth is lying beside him, her body rigid, her face dirty with soot, staring up at the stars. She has been like this for hours.

  ‘Ruth,’ Detlef whispers. ‘Ruth…’

  Her eyes, in a face criss-crossed by moonlight and shadow, flicker.

  ‘Come back to me.’

  He glances in the direction she is gazing and wonders whether the woman he knows still lives in this shattered heap of fear and bone. Here, pressed against the twigs and sandy soil, he can feel them dwindling into nothing. Without status, without civilisation, just two tiny figures stretched against the surface of a tumbling world. Free-falling through the great velvet chasm.

  Her mute face squeezes his heart until, after a century of silence, he wonders whether they will ever speak again. Shivering, he pulls her stiff body closer. Just as he is about to drift into sleep, he feels her reach up, touching his cheeks, his nose, his lips. Like a blind woman. Like a woman who, after a long absence, is spellbound by her lover’s features and searches for the memory of him with her fingertips. And it is then that this silent woman, this broken hollowed spiritcreature he barely recognises, covers his body with hers, runs her tongue over his eyelids as if trying to wash away the image of this terrible day. Daring not to breathe nor to move, Detlef lies like a child. Waiting.

  She draws his hands up to her breasts, warm under the rough cloth. Surprised by their heaviness he pushes her robe from her shoulders then touches her again in wonder; the nipples are far darker and larger than he remembers. She guides him down to her belly. His large hands draw the arc down to the hollow of her thighs then back up again. Amazed, he sits up and lays her gently down on her back, his eyes straining in the dark as he peers more closely at her body.

  ‘You are with child?’

  She nods.

  Astonished, he lays his cheek against the soft downy skin, cool to his burning ear. In all of this destruction, his seed, a new life. It is a miracle to him, a thread of dream against desolation. He presses his lips against the curved flesh, tracing with his hand the fine feathers of black hair growing down from her navel. Her vulva is swollen, the lips swelling beneath his touch, the bead of pleasure growing hard, pushing against his thumb. He parts her legs and lowers his mouth between them, then gazes up in wonder at the arched horizon of her womb above him. Running his fingers slowly across, he plays her until he hears her groan, then takes her into his mouth, caressing her over and over until her hips writhe under his hands. Only then does he lift himself up above her and enter her with the rushing ecstasy again and again until their shouts swallow the stars and the pain and the burning smoke and for a brief moment they forget their mortality and all that has gone before.

  – NETZACH –

  Victory

  Das Wolkenhaus, Late Winter, 1666

  Ruth sits at the virginal feeling the music pulsate through her fingers. Her feet pump in rhythm as the thin sound tries to fill the echoing chamber. Her embroidered shawl is draped over her shoulders and hangs below her womb which is full and round under the black muslin skirt. The piece she is playing is a romantic work from the Parthenia collection. As she searches for the notes she recalls her mother playing this particular passage over and over again, the forlorn prelude bringing back the earlier time so vividly that the image of Sara sitting in the front room in Deutz appears before her, the figure upright and visibly pregnant. It is as if the sensation of the child within the midwife has its own memory that stretches back through time, through the tissues of the body itself, from daughter to mother to mother.

  Ruth, fascinated by this notion, turns it over in her mind as she plays on. E, G, C sharp, F. It distracts her, and diversion is the opium she craves during this endless autumn and winter when she has been confined to Detlef’s country retreat. He has been gone for one long week, returned to Cologne to attend to his clerical duties. It is these separations that Ruth has begun to find increasingly difficult.

  She changes the tune to a vigorous ditty. She cannot bear silence any more than she can tolerate reflection. Reflection means thinking and that means descending into a terrain that is utterly barren: a landscape which was once fecund with hope is now a graveyard, devoid of intellect, belief, humanity.

  At night Ruth rocks herself for hours to hold back the deluge of grief that is ever present, and there is nothing Detlef can do or say. Sometimes she feels like an insect trapped in amber, paralysed, all emotion suspended, looking up through the thick golden crystal while the heartbeat of her unborn baby drums on relentlessly.

  She lays her hands over her womb. This child, she thinks, our child, conceived in love, a miracle, all the more so for its ordinariness. You shall be all to me, she tells the child within, the crystallisation of her father, a living manifestation of her affection for Detlef. The only future they have.

  Then, fearing a draught, she pulls her shawl tighter around herself.

  ‘Jugged hare and stewed cabbage!’

  Hanna marches across the parlour and plonks a platter piled high with food onto the small table.

  ‘You haven’t eaten since yesterday. It’s not right, you should be eating for two.’

  Ruth, smiling, gets up and puts her arm around the vast waist of the housekeeper. ‘Hanna, you feed me enough for twins.’

  ‘God willing.’ The housekeeper touches her pocket. ‘Finish that plate and I’ll give you another surprise.’

  ‘Is the master due back?’

  ‘That I don’t know, but I have other news. From Holland…’

  Ruth, unable to wait, thrusts her hand into Hanna’s pocket and pulls out a letter. As she unrolls the parchment, the housekeeper peers over her shoulder.

  ‘Is it news about the
war with the English? I have a cousin on the Dutch fighting ships there.’

  ‘No, although he mentions the war.’

  ‘He? This isn’t a rival for your heart, is it, Fraülein Saul, because if it is and the master finds out I won’t be long in this house.’

  ‘No, this man is a rival for no one’s heart. He is a great prophet and, as you know, prophets live above the weakness of the flesh.’

  ‘Does such a man exist? I think not!’ Hanna snorts and marches out again in her noisy clogs.

  Smiling, Ruth wonders what Spinoza would make of the stoic housekeeper’s pragmatic truths. Then she stretches, her back aching from the weight of her womb. Glancing out at the band of sunlight which has just begun to cut through the bluish morning she decides that, better than jugged hare, some fresh air will improve her mood.

  Sitting on a bench with moss creeping over its marble feet, she barely notices the faint promise of warmer weather tinting the breeze, the thawing snow which has begun to roll back to reveal the glistening grass beneath.

  Rijnsburg, January 1666

  Dear ‘Felix’,

  Forgive my long silence. Here too there has been plague and it, and the long English war, have kept me from correspondence.

  I am much grieved to hear about your plight. I too know the despair into which you must now be plunged. I have lost many dear friends this season—including Pieter Balling, which is a profound loss indeed—and despite many deaths to the scourge on both sides of the North Sea, the English continue to raid and wage war on our navy. These are unpredictable times and with that uncertainty comes the most insidious passion of all: fear. The Dutch are turning to the certainties of the past; Jan de Witt and his Republican cause lose support daily. It becomes increasingly dangerous for the enlightened philosophers who support my work. Even at the university of Leiden I have heard of several who have been severely reprimanded for quoting my texts. There is a necessity to protect ourselves, my dear earnest little Felix, for it is precisely in these dark days that there is a need for those who can see beyond the starving belly, beyond the plague cross painted on the door, beyond the priest offering penance and a holy wafer.

  Stay cautious and be like the wind: invisible but far-reaching.

  Yours, Benedict Spinoza

  His voice seems to speak out from another universe, one so remote that Ruth can see it only as a mirage in which she once lived, gloriously naive, wonderfully hopeful. It is not a being she can relate to now. Smiling sadly she folds up the letter and tucks it deep into her bodice.

  Lord, give me strength to battle my doubts and believe in my love, she prays, yearning for Detlef’s reassuring presence to dismiss the ghost of her father’s burning figure, Rosa’s screaming face and the terrible guilt of the survivor.

  ‘They say they will declare the scourge officially over as soon as next week. A good third of the city has perished but this last week there were only ten new deaths reported. Sadly Birgit Ter Lahn von Lennep’s sister was amongst them. We are blessed, Ruth, to escape all this and more.’

  Detlef stands naked in a large horse’s trough beside an old barn. He pours the icy water over his chest, gasping with the cold, his skin reddening, then scrubs himself down with a wet rag and a cake of salt. Ruth, her arms holding clean clothes for him, a woollen shawl crossed across the breast of her long muslin dress, shivers in sympathy. His horse, still restless from the long ride from Cologne, stands fastened to a post, munching on a bucket of oats.

  ‘The archbishop waits until we have buried our last before he returns. I suspect he has lost his stomach for funerals, but his absence has been to my advantage.’

  After rinsing himself with the bucket, Detlef steps out.

  ‘I hear you are championing a young man from the ribbon guild, Nikolaus Gülich,’ Ruth says, handing him a drying cloth of rough hessian. Detlef rubs the towel against his skin until it burns.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Hanna.’

  ‘He is challenging the city council and seeks my support and that of Maximilian Heinrich. It is an old argument but a persuasive one in this dangerous era. Let those who work honestly be rewarded for their labour. The time is over when a family name should be enough to buy one a seat on the council.’

  ‘What about your enemies, Detlef? You know you are closely watched.’

  ‘Truly, I expect both Heinrich and von Fürstenberg will try to obstruct me.’

  Ruth holds out a clean pair of breeches made of serge. Detlef pulls them on over a loose cotton undergarment then slips his feet into a pair of clogs.

  ‘But it would be a wondrous thing for a man to be judged on merit alone, would it not? A small step towards a true democracy, Ruth, think of that!’

  He caresses her hair. It is two weeks since they last saw each other and even in that short time Detlef observes how her womb has swollen, how the planes of her face have softened despite the grief still trapped in her eyes. If there was only a way of exorcising this spectre of horror that still haunts her, of hastening her healing, he thinks to himself. He saw men like this after the war, crippled by appalling memories, and then too he felt the same helplessness. There have been moments since the pogrom when he has despaired of seeing Ruth smile or laugh again. He has tried to talk to her of her family, but found that with remembrance comes agony and so has decided to let time work its own medicine. Still, he is painfully conscious of a mistrust that has risen up in her, an emotion she seems unable to control. Powerless to intervene, he secretly prays that the arrival of their child will return Ruth to him completely. Concealing his anxiety, he kisses her forehead.

  ‘We shall be the architects of change, you and I.’

  ‘That sounds dangerous.’

  Gazing at him she finds that she cannot bring herself to reach towards him, much as she craves to. Noticing, he covers her hesitancy with humour.

  ‘Too late, my love, you have corrupted me with your philosophies and I cannot be what I was before.’

  He kisses her lightly on the lips and leads her back into the kitchen. He sits her down and ladles out two bowls of the vegetable broth that has been left simmering in a large cauldron over the fire. Ruth watches him eat, waiting for her nausea at the oily smell of the soup to settle before joining him.

  Even after three months of living with him she finds herself looking at him with wonder. She is still astounded that they are living as man and wife, albeit in complete secrecy. Yet so much of him remains an engima; on each return he becomes a stranger again and she is compelled to discover him anew.

  Ruth consoles herself that this may be the very nature of love, a passion as fickle as the sea, full of certainty when the object of desire is absent, yet dubious when confronted again with the lover’s presence. An ambivalence she is able to exorcise when they make love or when Detlef’s intellect shakes her mind awake again with a brilliant observation which only the two of them can share. And yet she knows Detlef’s devotion to her to be unquestioning and constant. It is the steady foundation against which Ruth sets her own doubts: if he knows it must be so, how can it not be? Perhaps it is just not in her nature to surrender completely, she muses.

  ‘Ruth, you are very quiet.’

  ‘What news of the inquisitor?’

  Detlef reaches for some bread and pulls off a hunk, allowing the coal-black pumpernickel to sink into the broth before eating it hungrily.

  ‘Detlef, I am full of whispering spirits that speak of peril, I know them to be the chatterings of my fear but I am filled with foreboding.’

  ‘You should not think of such things. It is bad for the child.’

  ‘How can I not when there is no one here to speak with except Hanna and the barn animals? My mind is growing soft. I fear I lose both my wit and my craft.’

  ‘There is rumour that Solitario will return from Vienna when the road is open again. Wilhelm Egon von Fürstenberg has decided the inquisitor is needed for the resurrection of the Catholic spirit which has been much damag
ed by the scourge. At the same time he is watching me and calculating that my challenge to the nepotism that governs Cologne shall cause disfavour amongst the nobility. He has even spread word that I have lost my sanity as a result of my attendance on the dying in the pesthouse.’

  ‘Detlef, we should leave…’

  ‘Not yet. Not until the child is born and it is again safe to travel.’

  Inwardly angry that he does not seem to feel the same panic she now finds herself wrestling with, Ruth gets up and walks over to the cracked marble bench upon which sits a wedge of Edam, a hock of smoked ham and a jar of pickled beetroot. She slices into the ham with the long hunting knife that hangs from a hook above: three thick slices of the meat and a wedge of cheese for her lover.

  Does he not realise we are living on borrowed time, she thinks to herself, frustrated by his lack of urgency. What does he intend for the future? She cannot remain hidden at Das Wolkenhaus for ever, less so with a child.

  Obeying the kosher rules of her upbringing, she chooses a clean knife to cut her own cheese—the ham she will not touch—then carries the two platters back to the table, determined not to allow her irritation to show. Detlef, seemingly oblivious to her anxiety, pours himself a glass of wine.

  ‘Did you see the good Meisterin Ter Lahn von Lennep on the eve of her bereavement?’ she asks, then immediately regrets her provocation.

  Detlef, ham in hand, pauses; there is much he has not shared with her and yet there is little his mistress cannot guess. He wonders how much Hanna has confided to Ruth.

  ‘I have not seen her for many months,’ he answers carefully. ‘I was her confessor.’

  ‘Then surely there is even more reason to visit her now?’

  Detlef again speculates on Ruth’s intentions. Convinced by her tone that she knows he and Birgit were lovers, he wonders if this is another trial of his affection.