These thoughts weren’t really getting him anywhere although they did help to normalise his heart rate.
Where does this amulet come from, though? Stop asking questions, concentrate on your work, Farin!
The old woman’s face was the personification of innocence. He stopped short again. Really? It certainly looked more relaxed, or was he just imagining things? He took a cleanish cloth from the hook and dipped it in diluted brandy, liberally rubbing it into the forehead, cheeks, chin and neck. This slowed down the decomposition process.
Be careful not to use too much. Or waste it, as father would say. No wonder – he preferred to drink the cheap booze.
Next, he added a little colour to the deceased’s cheeks. For this, Farin used a thin paste of ochre and oil – an old, secret family recipe for enhancing the appearance. He blackened the lids and eyebrows with a stick of charcoal and added a little shine with a touch of sheep-grease. Then he combed the corpse’s hair.
He took a step back and looked at his handiwork. Miraculously, the woman looked a few years younger, around eighty maybe. It still didn’t make her more alive. Damn it, what was her name – it was on the tip of his tongue.
Farin yawned. It was late and he decided to go to bed. He’d wash the dress a second time in the morning – that would leave enough time for it to dry. Perfuming was tomorrow’s job anyway – the aroma would only dissipate overnight. The old woman wasn’t going to run away, and so he went to the cottage where his father was.
Such was his life, and such was his home. Simple. The little hut consisted mostly of clay. A firmly trampled clay floor, wattle walls plastered in clay, the roof covered in flat clay shingles. There was only one room. He smelled and heard his old man before he saw him. He was lying in the corner behind the stove, grunting and farting and sleeping off his inebriation. His mouth was open, and his lips glistened with dribbling drool. An old man, bowed down by life, eaten up by hatred and embittered by jealousy towards those who were better off. More or less the whole village then.
Farin took off his dirty trousers, lay down on the straw mat opposite, and fell asleep immediately.
"Lazy good-for nothing!" His father’s loving voice, accompanied by an encouraging kick, woke him up.
"The cock has finished crowing and you’re still asleep."
There was something about this tradition. Father always claimed the cock had finished crowing. Because Farin was still sleeping at that time, he could never put that claim to the test. Maybe he should just stay awake one night and keep his ears peeled.
"What’s the story with ugly Gerlunda – she’s still lying naked in the hut, kindly get her done, son."
Farin sat up. It was still dark outside. "Gerlunda! Of course, that’s her name. Why couldn’t I remember?"
"Because you’re stupid, lad," his father explained.
Oh, right!
A few moments later and he was standing in front of the body in the shed, dressed only in his shirt. She was lying there, just as he had left her, and her dress was hanging from the beam. In the light of day Farin questioned the fears he’d had the evening before. Had he been dreaming? Instinctively, his hand went to his chest and immediately rejected that possibility. An amulet was hanging on a hemp cord around his neck.
How did this peculiar piece of jewellery end up on Gerlunda’s body, and what did it mean?
He peered at the body with a mixture of suspicion and wonder. Gerlunda – the preparer of poisons – that’s what the villagers called her. He grabbed the dress, ran back into the house, picked up his trousers from beside the door and hurried to the stream. First, he washed the two pieces of clothing thoroughly, and then himself. Farin rubbed his forefinger across both rows of teeth and then washed his mouth out. He cleaned the gaps between them with one of the little pointed sticks that he kept safe here. His reflection thanked him with a white grin. Mother had shown him how to do it, while father just had laughed at the idea. He looked at his dark, unkempt hair in the stream. He liked it like that – he’d comb his hair when he was dead.
When he arrived home, father was standing beside the corpse with his hands on his hips.
"Where have you been hiding yourself?" he snorted. Then he pointed at Gerlunda. "We’ll add the bowl, the comb, the cord and the make-up to the bill. Is that clear?"
"And what about the water for washing?"
"Don’t be getting greedy, lad. We won’t charge for that." He gave a wheezy laugh.
Farin took little pleasure in such business acumen. All of the objects he’d used in preparing Gerlunda were now considered unclean and no longer usable – especially the washbowl. This was traditionally destroyed after the procedure and added to the bill for the bereaved. Farin looked at the bowl and frowned. A truly amazing implement, because it must have been destroyed and added to the bill at least thirty times. The same was true for the comb.
"The burial is this afternoon, so get cracking, lad."
"What happened to her?" asked Farin.
His father cocked his head and stared at him. He couldn’t stand questions. Especially questions like that. He growled: "The priest found her in her hut, dead. He came into "The Warm Beer” yesterday afternoon and told me. After that he sent the old woman here with the alderman."
"The Warm Beer" was the name of the village tavern opposite the church – a very enticing and appealing name. Presumably the innkeeper would have had the same number of regulars if he’d called his pub "The Warm Piss" – for the simple reason that it was the only tavern in the village.
"How did she die?"
Father scowled. The tip of his tongue darted through the gap between his upper teeth like a snake – it sashayed in and out beautifully, thanks to the two incisors having fallen out.
He aped Farin: "How did she die?" This particular question always annoyed him – but Farin kept on asking it. "Her heart stopped, what else, son."
"Oh, right!"
He knew well that his father knew much more, and that he knew that Farin knew. But dear daddy didn’t give a damn. "Dead is dead", father regularly said, and like many of his pearls of wisdom, it was hard to contradict. "Questions only damage business." At the end of the day everybody died because their hearts stopped. Period! Even though Farin had been looking for reasons of late that might at least make a mockery out of this particular insight of his father’s, he had to admit that the phrase did contain a grain of truth. People’s hearts stopped sometime. That applied equally to everyone, whether it was a seventy-year-old succumbing to age, or a warrior stabbed through by his enemy, or even a ten-year-old boy, falling from a tree and breaking his neck.
"I’ll go dig, you finish off the old woman. And remember: Dead is dead. Questions only damage business."
Farin didn’t reply.
Father grabbed the pickaxe and shovel and headed off towards the graveyard. Not bad, considering there were days when he generously left this work to his son too.
Farin wouldn’t see his old man until early evening. After digging out the grave, the old man would retire to the village tavern opposite the church and get drunk, just like yesterday and the day-before-yesterday and every day before that. At that hour he would generally drink alone with the innkeeper, while the other regulars would turn up considerably later. That was fine by father – he had to sit at a corner table behind the door anyway, far away from the other villagers, who wanted to have as little to do with the gravedigger as possible. That made no odds so long as the tavern was empty.
Farin watched his father leave. He yawned.
I’ll catch up on some sleep later, he thought.
the village
T he clatter of hooves woke Farin at around noon. He quickly slipped into his still-damp trousers and stepped out of the hut. The village alderman pulled up with horse and cart in the middle of the yard.
"Come on, you scoundrel! Load up the old woman!" was his greeting.
"And good day to you too!" He gave Hamak a friendly smile.
The
re was no smile in response. "Stop talking! Get on with it!"
"Wait, I’ll bring her to you."
"Hurry up!"
The alderman was always in a hurry, nobody knew why. His name was Hamak, but for some reason Farin never addressed him by that name.
He shrugged his shoulders and went to the shed. He carefully straightened out Gerlunda’s dress one last time and looked at his handiwork. All in all, he’d prepared her pretty well, he thought to himself with satisfaction. As was his practice, he shoved his arms under the woman’s body and carried her to the cart. Being eighteen and having a powerful build, this wasn’t a problem for him. Farin was used to dealing with considerably heavier people. That, along with countless digging of graves, had resulted in powerful arm and back muscles. He gently laid Gerlunda onto the bed of the cart.
The alderman glanced at the corpse and smirked joylessly. "The old one never looked that good before." Hamak clicked his tongue and tapped the horse with his reins. The animal turned the cart around in the yard.
"When is the burial?"
"When the bells ring, scoundrel."
His name was Farin, but for some reason Hamak never addressed him by that name.
The horse, the cart, Hamak and Gerlunda left the yard with a clatter of hooves.
Shit, he’d forgotten to cover Gerlunda with a burial shroud. He looked up at the cloudy sky. Not fatal – as long as it didn’t rain.
Father arrived home in the early evening with empty hands and a stomach full of beer. He staggered and shouted and shouted and staggered around the place, aimlessly and pointlessly as so often before, listlessly chewing on a crust of bread before sinking down peacefully onto his mattress. Father had left his pickaxe and shovel in the tavern as was his custom. If he woke up at the crack of dawn the next day and two of his most important implements were missing, he would angrily place all the blame on his wayward son. And because Farin knew no other ne’er-do-well he in turn could stick the boot into, he headed back to the village himself.
It was raining – an unpleasant, grey drizzle. He pulled the hood of his cloak further over his face. The bell in the church tower had stubbornly refused to chime, but if the funeral was to take place today, then it would need to be happening soon. The journey to the village took three-quarters of an hour if you were fast; it took Farin half an hour. The red-tiled church steeple rose in the distance above the tree-tops – the proud high-point of the little town. He trudged through the mud in his bare feet. Winter was bearing inexorably down, and he urgently needed a new pair of shoes. A pair of simple clogs from the village turner would do. That was a job he’d have loved to have trained in and practised. He loved the smell of new wood and sawdust; he loved the implements, the merry lathe, and the pole lathe. He’d spent many days in the workshop as a boy and had always lent a hand. Until father had got wind of it.
The first huts of his home village of Heap appeared right and left in front of him. Gerlunda had lived on the very edge of the forest, in one of the further houses. Hardly anyone in the village could stand the preparer of poisons – they had all steered well clear of her.
It’s not much different for the gravedigger, thought Farin.
No wonder! Father reminded people of the inevitable, the uninvited, the unrelenting. And he was the gravedigger’s son, the inheritor of this unpopularity. The villagers might as well despise and avoid him: Death was God’s broomstick. And Farin liked things to be tidy.
He could hear it in the distance already: the faded sign with the warm tankard of beer swinging wantonly in the wind. The mounting, two rusty chains hanging on two rusty nails, squeaked gently and guided the ears towards the village tavern. A cunning move on the innkeeper’s part.
Now he could see his destination too. A simple, half-timbered building with a taproom and four guestrooms above. The innkeeper, his wife and two sons lived in the annex to the rear.
When it came down to it, Farin didn’t like being among people. But he plucked up courage, stepped onto the broad wooden step and forcefully pushed open the door. The latch slipped out of his rain-soaked hand and when the door crashed into the inner wall, it rattled for what seemed like an eternity. What an entrance! All of the regulars in the pub turned to look at him. Farin smiled apologetically. Nobody smiled back. About a dozen men were sitting there, including Alderman Hamak. He turned away with a bored expression. None of the others showed any reaction when they recognised the gravedigger’s son. He wasn’t worth it. They turned back to their beers and their pipes.
"It’s only the gravedigger’s son," grunted the innkeeper.
"I can see that myself, Georig," replied the man with the rat face, whose name Farin had forgotten.
Everyone in the village had a name – with a few exceptions. His father, for example – he was simply called gravedigger. And then Farin was gravedigger’s son.
It smelled of alcohol, sweat and pipe-smoke. Each of the men was puffing away at his own individual sucking-device – long, short, thin, fat, high or flat, each pipe was discussed, disputed over, or spun yarns about. This was the raison d’être of these village champions. On the table lay an array of pipe-bowls, mouthpieces, pipe tools and tobacco tampers.
"My new briar has to be smoked in yet. First, I’ll fill her loosely up to a third," explained ratface, dramatically holding up his churchwarden pipe.
The others nodded appreciatively and honoured his expertise with a moment’s silence. Then half of them stuffed their pipes with earnest devotion, the others cleaned their pipes with unshakeable meticulousness.
Farin didn’t give a damn about their pipe blather, but he’d never have said so out loud. He wasn’t allowed to join in the men’s conversation anyway. In the village pecking order he came somewhere between the mangy street mutts and the goats. Knackers, whores, executioners and gravediggers had to sit in a corner to the left of the front door. They got their beer in separate tankards at a separate table. Which was exactly where Farin found both pickaxe and shovel – he could always rely on father.
He took the tools and stepped into the middle of the room.
"Alderman, please say when the burial is."
The men disliked being spoken to during their smoking sessions, especially by the gravedigger’s son.
"Don’t be so pushy – your father is never satisfied, is he?"
"What do you mean?"
"You two can’t wait to cash in, can you, scoundrel?" grunted Hamak. He tugged at one end of his tousled handlebar moustache. "And anyway, it’s raining – does anyone here want to put the old preparer of poisons six foot under in this weather?"
A collective groan came from the group, not least because rain was the natural enemy to any delicious pipe.
"Now piss off, gravedigger’s son. Don’t you see I’ve just lit my pipe?"
It was a sacred ritual in the village of Heap, and one couldn’t be disturbed after the packing and lighting of a pipe. It was, after all, the gentlemen’s most fervent desire to follow the tradition of dedicating oneself to the enjoyment and fraternity that was kindled by smoking.
And so, with the pickaxe on his left shoulder and the shovel on his right, Farin stood there none the wiser, like the village idiot, in the middle of the tavern and knew neither what to do nor what to say. In fact, his plan had been simply to return the amulet to the deceased’s family. The men turned their attention back to their pipes, clearly intending to ignore him, not just for now, but for all eternity. With a lump in his throat, Farin wondered if it might just be best to give the amulet to the alderman – then he’d be done with it.
One last shot: "Did...did...", what was her name again? "...the preparer of poisons have family?"
He could have passed the hat around considering the uproarious laughter his question provoked.
One of the men snorted: "That takes the biscuit! Does Gerlunda have family? Did you ever hear the like?"
Once the men had stopped laughing, Hamak grunted: "The old one had no living relatives. Nobody vis
ited her over the last few decades either. Now, get lost, gravedigger’s son."
What else had he expected? Farin slowly turned to the door and left the tavern. Hardly was he outside when the innkeeper’s son came around the corner. The gaunt lad’s name was Blossak.
"Hey, Farin. I heard the news. Did you really prepare the preparer of poisons for the grave?"
They’d known each other since they were nippers. They’d been good pals when they were children, but they’d hardly met each other in the last few years. The innkeeper’s son avoided the gravedigger’s son too.
"Hey, Bloss. Yes, I did. And she really was quite dead."
That was clearly what Blossak had wanted to hear, for his face took on an ominous expression. Farin knew this face – usually it was accompanied by some absurd plan, which meant a lot of trouble if it was implemented.
"People are saying the maddest things about the preparer of poisons. Some people are convinced she was possessed by evil spirits." He was whispering as if he were afraid that she might hear his words.
"If that’s true, then they’re dead too. I haven’t heard much of the gossip going round."
"That’s because your customers usually don’t chat to you much."
The Gravedigger’s Son and the Waif Girl 1 Page 2
