The Witch of Cologne

by Tobsha Learner

  ‘This is your last chance. All you need do is whisper the name of the village, and then freedom!’ Carlos, out of his mind with frustration, shouts into the dying man’s ear.

  I turn her face towards me, she is smiling that mysterious crooked smile of hers. I kiss her, and as she softens in my arms I realise that this is the moment I have been living for. Contentment. In trust. In joy. In peace. For I have come home.

  My Lord, I have not failed you in this moment of darkness and you have not failed me. For in love I surrender my life, and in love I am everything and nothing. For ever and ever. Amen.

  His body starts to shake violently as it goes into its final throes.

  ‘No! No! You cannot do this to me. Give me the witch! Give me Sara!’

  Carlos thuds his fists onto Detlef’s shuddering chest over and over until the body stops twitching. Only then does the inquisitor come to his senses, staring at his hands which are covered with the dead man’s blood.

  He swings around to the guard. ‘Get a priest! Now! Don’t you understand? He needs the last rites!’

  ‘But Monsignor, you are a priest!’

  ‘No. Not me, you idiot! It cannot be me!’

  The guard glances at the contorted body on the rack, the prisoner is obviously dead. Confused, he looks back at the inquisitor.

  ‘Go! You fool! Now!’

  Carlos pushes the guard towards the door but Heinrich, flanked by two clerics, stands blocking the entrance.

  ‘What have you done? He was cousin to a prince! A Wittelsbach!’

  ‘He was a heretic!’

  ‘Heretic or no, I made a promise. He did not deserve this death!’

  ‘The Grand Inquisitional Council—’

  ‘Out! Out of my sight!’

  After the inquisitor has gone, Heinrich tenderly lays the two feet together. Taking Detlef’s broken hands into his own, he strokes them, muttering softly as if to a child, and crosses them over the bruised and bloody chest. To the amazement of the guards, the archbishop takes off his own purple cloak and covers the body with it carefully, meticulously tucking the folds around the lifeless flesh. Then and only then, on his knees in his pale undergarments, his face close to Detlef’s battered features, does Heinrich perform the last rites, his silent tears falling onto the torn flesh.

  Behind the kneeling archbishop there is a sudden splash from the dunking vat. Unable to suppress his curiosity, a guard tiptoes over. He looks in, then jerks his head back in horror as three huge eels writhe up out of the water.

  The old woman carefully presses the gold coin into the eye socket. The eyes have gone, but now that she has sponged the blood and broken flesh from the face she can see that this was once a handsome man, grace still visible in the creased flesh. He looks familiar but she knows better than to search her memory, for she is the corpse-dresser brought in to put to rest the secretly murdered, the tortured, those the authorities wish to forget.

  She works swiftly, without thought, winding the shroud around the narrow hips, binding the arms against the collapsed rib cage. After stepping back to view her handiwork in its entirety, she pulls the pale cotton cloth low over the dead man’s forehead, covering his broken sight. The mouth and the patrician nose jutting out like a sliver of white marble are the only visible remnants of his humanity.

  The sound of approaching footsteps makes the old woman pause. She is in an arched vault of a crypt below the cathedral, a hidden place where for centuries the church has brought its renegades to be laid out before the anonymity of a pauper’s grave.

  A noblewoman in fine lace and a silk veil appears at the door of the chamber, lamp in hand. Without a word she hands the old woman a small purse heavy with gold. The corpse-dresser curtsies and moves to stand discreetly outside the door for a few moments. It is a ritual she has performed many times for many dead men who were once loved.

  Birgit Ter Lahn von Lennep pushes back her veil. Her face, now older and fuller, has traces of its former sensuality but a new heaviness born of grief and discontent has worked a web of fine lines across the forehead and around the mouth.

  Birgit crosses herself then, trembling, walks up to the corpse laid out on the marble slab. With the lightness of a butterfly descending upon a leaf, she places her fingertips on the cold mouth.

  ‘Once, Detlef, I would have wept to see you thus. Once I would have died for you. Now there are no tears, for there is no time left, my nobleman. Know this: I loved you honestly for all the art between us, but in a moment of weakness it was I who was your betrayer.’

  In the stillness that follows, a terrible loneliness sweeps through her as she realises that all that ever mattered in her life were the moments she had loved with this man.

  The shovel bites into the icy mud, cutting a sod seven inches deep. Hurled out of the deep hole, the sod lands on a pile of soil beside the grave. The grave-digger, drunk, sings a ditty in guttural Bavarian as he cheerfully continues to work in the rain.

  Detlef’s body, stiff in its shroud, lies on the grass beside the open grave. Face and hands now entirely covered, the body less than a broken shell. Alphonso, kneeling, pushes back the hood of his short cloak. Allowing the rain to wet his cheeks he looks up at the leaden sky. An ordinary evening like any other, except that he is at the gravesite of a man who is about to be buried with no mourners but himself.

  The actor pulls out a short dagger and carefully cuts the sodden fabric away from the corpse’s face. The visage is exposed, an ashen death mask of surprising tranquillity. Alphonso, barely pausing, cuts a lock of hair away from the scalp, then makes a rent in the stained cotton through which he takes out the lifeless hand. The silver wedding band is loose on the shrunken white finger. He pulls it off then covers up the corpse again.

  He turns to leave, then hesitates. The grave-digger is still singing, a bawdy refrain the actor recognises from the brothels of Munich. Alphonso tosses a coin into the open grave and, as the grave-digger scrambles for the money, kneels again and in perfect Hebrew begins to recite Kaddish for the dead.

  Carlos bangs shut the heavy door of his chamber. Leaning against it, he listens to the sound of his pounding heart.

  If only this was all the world he had to deal with, he thinks, weary beyond belief.

  A Basque folk song he used to play floats faintly into his mind, as absurd and meaningless as a hummingbird above a battlefield. Is this sorrow or relief, he wonders, suddenly aware that the great construction of his quest has evaporated into nothing but aching regret and the terrible devastation of unrequited love. There is no redemption, he thinks, except death and the peace it will bring.

  Feeling every minute of his sixty-four years, he walks slowly over to his travelling chest and, kneeling, painfully brings out the casket that a young girl of twelve once gave him in innocent affection.

  Slowly he opens the carved lid and is immediately struck by the absence of scent. There is nothing, no aroma of cedarwood, of oranges, of musk, of the sweet pungency of his youth’s passion, nothing but the bitter smell of smoke. He looks closer: the inside of the casket is mysteriously burnt, black with charcoal, as if the spirit of Sara’s anger has manifested and scorched away the last memory her young music tutor has carried with him all these years.

  With great deliberation, Carlos breaks the wooden box against the marble floor. Reaching down to pick up a large splinter, he runs the jagged edge down his unblemished cheek. Bent over the shattered casket, one hand covering the old scar, the other the new wound, he weeps into his own blood.

  As the stained tears splash upon the floor, a woman’s finger, long and gnarled, the nail resembling the tip of an owl’s talon, creeps unnoticed from the broken pieces of the casket. It is followed by a second finger, a third and fourth, then a crooked thumb, until the whole hand, deep purple in skin-tone, rests for an instant, still unnoticed, against the priest’s heaving chest.

  Suddenly the hand springs open like the steel jaws of a hunter’s trap, the long nails pierce the grey cassock an
d punch a hole in the priest’s breast. Too shocked to scream, the inquisitor watches in horror as the hand fastens itself around his pumping heart and tears it out of his chest so that he is staring down at his own pulsating organ as the hand squeezes.

  The bloody pulp pushes up between the skeletal fingers until the thudding organ shudders to a stop and Carlos falls, his lips still echoing Lilith’s name.

  Jam waiting, my love, in a small cottage near the border outside the town of Aachen.

  It is simple but comfortable. The widow here was once a noblewoman who fell onto hard times during the Great War. She is a sincere patron of the arts and has nothing but flattery for our ingenious actor. I have received no word of you yet and it has been four days since our arrival. I write this letter in the small hope that somehow you will receive it, either by messenger or pigeon, or perhaps miraculously through the aether of connectivity. Our child is well and happy. He even has a small playmate, for the widow has a grandson of some three years. Of his stay in Cologne he has nothing to say except that ‘Uncle promised him a pony!’ The simplicity of a child is a blessing indeed.

  Husband, return swiftly for I fear that to dally longer is to tempt the Fates. ‘Tis strange, for this morning I thought I heard you calling me. I woke and for a moment you were beside me, your sweet breath upon my cheek. But was just a cruel trick of habit…

  In Faith, your loving wife, Ruth.

  ‘Mama! Look!’

  Jacob opens his hand, in its centre squats a tiny pink toad. ‘He is smaller than my thumb.’

  ‘He belongs in the woods, Jacob. You must return him to his home.’

  ‘But first he shall go to war with a beetle.’

  ‘Jacob, man must not decide these things. You must let the creature go.’

  They are interrupted by the sound of horses approaching. Before Ruth has a chance to stop the child, he is running to the small iron gate of the sloping cottage garden, his short sturdy legs determined to reach his father before anyone.

  ‘A donkey, Mama! A donkey and a funny little man with a tall man on a horse! But where is Papa?’

  Ruth reaches the gate as Alphonso and La Grande ride into view. She waves at the actor but he does not wave back, continuing to ride towards them, face grimly set. Ruth, heart pounding, pulls Jacob off the gate.

  ‘Go inside, Jacob.’

  ‘But Mama…’

  ‘Go!’

  The child, frightened by her tone, runs back towards the cottage and is ushered through the darkened doorway by the widow who waits in a panicky fluster of pale muslin.

  Alphonso leaps from his horse and strides towards Ruth, his expression impenetrable. He does not speak and she does not ask. She already knows. Faltering in the bright sunlight she steadies herself against the hot stone wall. All switches into sharp relief. The blades of grass, birdsong, the buzzing of a passing bee.

  This is it, she thinks, Paradise before the Fall, the moment of futile hope before knowledge. Detlef, my husband, my love, my life.

  Catching her arm as she stumbles, Alphonso presses something into her palm. Ruth stares down, then curls her fingers so tightly around the lock of Detlef’s hair that Alphonso fears she will break her hand.

  – YESOD –

  Truth-speaking

  Rampjaar, The Hague, Winter, 1672

  Ruth pours water out of the jug on the washstand in the corner of the bare room and scrubs the grime of the streets from her hands, then splashes her neck with the fragrance of jasmine. The chamber is built into an attic. Sparsely furnished, it contains a three-legged table in another corner, the chest Detlef brought with them from the Rhineland and the glass cabinet he gave her on the eve of their marriage. Over the bare hearth hangs the one possession that has travelled with Ruth throughout her life: Aaron’s sword.

  Exhausted, the midwife unlaces her long-waisted dark grey serge blouse and unhooks the full black muslin skirt. She hangs the clothes on the back of a chair then throws a woollen shawl around her shoulders. The room is cold, it is January. Outside, a light snow falls from the early morning sky. Ruth pokes at the dying embers of the fire then glances across at Jacob. He lies sleeping in the bed that they share.

  Now almost six years of age, his features are those of a boy, the shape of his mouth and jaw so reminiscent of Detlef that it sometimes pains Ruth to look at him. She tiptoes over to the child, treading softly for she knows that her landlady, an older widow with four children of her own, rests lightly and will hear any creaking of the wooden floor above her. Ruth pulls another blanket over Jacob. His blond hair falls across his eyes, his fine features wistful in dreaming.

  It is almost two years since Detlef’s death. Two summers, two autumns, two winters, during which she has lived a half-life, Ruth thinks, like the water creatures she examines through her lens, swimming slowly, blindly, through thick syrup. The midwife has survived only because of the generosity of friends who have put food in their mouths and the clothes on their backs. If she did not have her son, and if to take one’s life was not a mortal sin, she would have put an end to the Hell she has lived beyond Detlef.

  Silently conjuring the image of her dead husband, Ruth rocks herself as she watches the child, remembering those first months of constant weeping, of Jacob coming to her each night crying for his papa, of the folding up of Detlef’s clothes and papers and laying them carefully in the chest that has become the memory-keeper of their lives together. How with every new day she would wake and think for a moment that he was with her, the warm naked length of him stretched out beside her, before the terrible remembering rushed in. Every day for a year.

  With no body and no grave to mourn over—for to return to Cologne would have meant certain arrest—Ruth erected her own shrine. A memorial consisting of Detlef’s lock of hair, his wedding ring and a small portrait of his likeness she had painted. It was here that Ruth found herself praying, and when the praying stopped the talking started. Whispering, she would tell Detlef about the domestic things, the financial struggles, the failures and triumphs of her midwifery, Jacob’s first written words, and sometimes, late at night, of how she longed to touch him, to take his mouth, fingers and hands into her flesh and finally surrender her love in a way she now knew she never had during their time together.

  Gradually, reasons for continuing her life crept back: the joy of a successful delivery, a letter from Spinoza urging her to further her work, her mounting research now consolidated into a paper she is trying to find a publisher for, and, most importantly, her son.

  Tonight has been long. She has delivered twins, identical boys, but the second babe perished, partly damaged by the birthing hook she had to use to pull him out of the womb. With every inch of her body aching, she stands and goes into the adjoining room.

  It is a small chamber with a single window set high, its curved iron casing framing a church spire and a parchment moon plastered onto the indigo night beyond. A wooden desk holding the lens and its mounting stands below the oval porthole.

  Ruth pulls out a thick bound notebook and dips a quill into an inkpot. Carefully she sketches the womb with the twins contained, calculating how they must have been sitting for such a disaster to occur. There has to be a gentler way of extracting the baby, there has to be. Ruth sits meditating upon the quandary then, inspired, reaches for her sketchbook.

  Later, as she curls up around Jacob, she is gripped by a coughing fit. Pulling the blanket around her, she curses the cold weather.

  Benedict Spinoza pushes the shutters open. A warm humid breeze coming off the port enters the room immediately, bringing with it the scent of the city.

  ‘The air is foul in here, Ruth, you must allow the summer in.’

  ‘I fear for my lungs.’

  ‘We all fear for our lungs. Living is a hazardous profession. And in this current climate more so than ever, especially for Republicans.’

  He places three oranges on the table. She notices how feminine his hands are, delicate and olive-skinned, unblemished by p
hysical labour.

  ‘They tell me the fruit is good for the body.’

  ‘Thank you, Benedict.’

  The philosopher sits at the table and looks across at the shrunken woman wrapped in a long fur robe.

  How old she has become, he thinks, as if her radiance left the flesh with the death of her husband. But still an unstoppable spirit seems to burn beneath the skin, the indomitable will of Felix van Jos, the shy fierce-eyed youth he once taught. Although she is a remarkable individual, she suffers for her abnormality, her fragile feminine form unable to substain the ferocity of her masculine intellect, he notes. It is this will that is making her sick, she is burning up from within. He was right about the physiognomy of the female mind, he reassures himself, yet marvels at the way her husband loved her regardless. Remembering, he reaches across to take her worn hand paternally.

  ‘I am not here just as the Good Samaritan. I have also come to tell you that I think I may have found you a publisher.’

  Not daring to hope, Ruth looks away. ‘That I cannot believe. I myself have sent the manuscript at great expense to a dozen or so, even beyond the borders of the Netherlands. Not one will consider it.’

  ‘Jan Rieuwertsz will publish. He has published several of my works, including Theologico-politicus, he is a man dedicated to the illumination of scientia nova. He will publish under your own title, The dangers of birthing hooks, a treatise on gentler methods of midwifery, and believes he will receive interest from the medical faculties of both Leiden and Oxford.’

  Ruth, tears welling up, coughs into a handkerchief and covers her brimming eyes. Spinoza pretends not to notice.

  ‘How shall I be able to thank you?’

  ‘You can thank me by taking better care of yourself, Ruth. Now you have the responsibility of a child and of a burgeoning career as a published medic.’