The Dark Monk

by Oliver Pötzsch

  Simon sat in one of the rear pews of the Altenstadt basilica, glancing over the shoulders of the aldermen and their families, who had taken their seats in front. Among them were the Schreevogls, including Clara, who had now completely recovered. Not far from them, a great wooden cross hung over the altar. For hundreds of years, the Great God of Altenstadt had looked down benevolently on churchgoers. The physician enjoyed listening as his voice merged with those of all the others in the congregation, swelling into a single mighty voice reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

  Since his experience at Clara’s house two weeks before, Simon’s attitude toward God had changed. Had he witnessed a miracle? Had the pills actually cured Clara completely—and the others as well? He still hadn’t figured out why the moldy herbs had worked. The hangman told him mold could prevent infections. For this reason, Kuisl occasionally placed moldy rags on the wounds of his patients, but the assertion that the white strands were effective against fever and coughing was something new, even to the hangman.

  By now he’d used up all the miracle pills and took to pestering Magdalena with questions about exactly which herbs were in the bag she had taken from the Augsburg pharmacy. But she couldn’t remember for the life of her.

  Simon sighed. He probably would never be able to recreate those pills. Well, at least they helped improve his standing in Schongau and with his father. Bonifaz Fronwieser was seated beside him, reciting the Lord’s Prayer in a croaking voice. He still smelled of last night’s brandy, but he’d come to church with Simon, something they hadn’t done for a very long time.

  Simon looked out of the corner of his eye to see Magdalena kneeling with the women in the last row of pews. Her hands were folded and her eyes closed, but as if sensing his gaze, she suddenly turned to wink at him. The physician felt a tingle course through his body. Perhaps they’d have a chance to be alone for a while this evening at the Candlemas celebration…

  “Don’t fall asleep during the doxology,” a dark voice grumbled next to him. “And if I catch you with Magdalena tonight, the Lord’s Prayer itself won’t be enough to save you.” With a grin, the hangman nudged him and sat down next to him in the pew. Usually, the hangman’s place was at the rear of the church, but at the Candlemas service, the priest didn’t pay much attention to ceremony.

  “When do you set out on your pilgrimage?” the hangman asked loudly enough that some of the parishioners turned around. “If you wait until summer, going barefoot won’t be a problem, but I think God wants to see you suffer a bit.”

  Simon cursed himself again for having told the hangman about his promise at Clara’s bedside. “There’s still too much to do here,” he whispered. “My patients—”

  “Your father can take care of them,” the hangman interrupted. “I’ve already told Lechner you’ll be traveling the next few weeks.”

  “You did what?” Simon’s voice was loud enough now that even the priest up at the altar cleared his throat. “But…”

  “Magdalena also didn’t think that was a good idea,” Kuisl sighed, lowering his voice again. “She still doesn’t trust letting you out of her sight, so I made her promise to go along with you to Altötting. You’ll go through Munich and pick up a few herbs for me, and some books. A fellow named Athanasius Kircher has written a new book about the plague and how to cure it…” The hangman’s face broke out in a broad grin. “If you don’t behave yourself in the next few days, I’ll think it over and perhaps come along, too.”

  Simon could hardly believe his good fortune. He’d have a few weeks together with Magdalena, far from this place where she was the ostracized hangman’s daughter. Nobody would know her!

  “Kuisl, how can I thank you…?” he whispered.

  “Don’t thank me; thank the one up there,” he replied, pointing up at the Great God of Altenstadt. “He convinced me to do it. Now I’ve done him two favors.”

  “Two favors?” Simon asked, baffled.

  Jakob Kuisl drew on his cold pipe as if he were at home and not in the church. “The larch wood in his back was rotten,” he began. “The day before yesterday, the carpenter Balthasar Hemerle had to repair the Savior for Candlemas, and he couldn’t find a good piece of wood for it…old, solid wood that had already survived sixteen hundred years…”

  Slowly, it dawned on Simon what he was talking about. “The True Cross of Christ in Steingaden…” he started to say.

  The hangman knocked out his pipe on the pew. “I was able to save a small piece from the fire as a keepsake. It fit exactly into the back of the Savior.”

  When Simon looked up at the Great God of Altenstadt, he thought he detected a smile cross the chiseled wood of Jesus’s face.

  But, of course, that was just an illusion.

  A FEW WORDS IN CONCLUSION

  Some time ago, I was in Hohenschäftlarn visiting my grandmother, who is now eighty-five years old. She lives in what was once a farmhouse that encompasses over twenty rooms filled with old furniture, paintings, and all sorts of knickknacks she’s collected in the last few decades at flea markets all over Bavaria. On the property there’s an enchanted garden, a deep, dark cellar, and a drafty attic, where my cousin and I used to sleep under thick down comforters. Every room, every object in this house, has a story to tell.

  In the large kitchen—at the same table I often hid under reading comic books as a boy—my grandmother used to sit with me all evening long, telling me stories about our ancestors, the Kuisls: my stubborn great-great-grandfather, Max Kuisl, who emigrated to Brazil during the 1920s with his entire family; my great-great-uncle, Eduard, who wrote fairy tales and who reminded her so much of me; my great-great-aunt, Lina, who studied at the Munich Academy of Arts, then fell head over heels in love with a French painter—all these ancestors whom I had known until then only through faded photographs and paintings. My grandmother could go on and on with stories and anecdotes about all these people until my head started to spin.

  Since the appearance of my first book, The Hangman’s Daughter, it’s strange to see how huge my family has become. Again and again, I receive calls or letters from people who are part of the large Kuisl family, too. They ask about a distant great-great-uncle or a long-lost aunt; they’ve traced their ancestry back many centuries, until we eventually encounter our common ancestor, the hangman Jakob Kuisl.

  We’ll never know what sort of man Jakob Kuisl was. All I can say with any certainty is that he was a hangman in Schongau during the seventeenth century and one of the first in a long line of Kuisls who were hangmen in Bavaria. All together I’ve counted fourteen executioners so far in our family.

  The Schongau town archives have little to say about Jakob Kuisl. We know he once killed a wolf. The documents also mention a daughter named Magdalena; his wife, Anna Maria; and the twins, Georg and Barbara. (There were two other children whom I’ve left out of the story for dramaturgical reasons.)

  Jakob Kuisl assumed the position of Schongau executioner at the age of thirty-six—a position also held by his father and grandfather—and lived a full eighty-two years. What he did before that time is unknown. It’s quite possible my ancestor served as a mercenary during the chaos of the cruelest of all German wars. His wife died just two years after he did. I can imagine they had a long and happy marriage, but this is where the realm of imagination takes over.

  Every book finds its own theme. Unintentionally, my second novel became a book about religion—all the madness, the insanity it can cause, but also the consolation and refuge it offered at a time when people could easily have doubted God. The natural setting for a book like this is a region like the Priests’ Corner, with its many monasteries and churches, its pious people, and heavenly countryside. And sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.

  Many things I didn’t have to invent, like the innumerable macabre relics in the Rottenbuch Monastery—they were just waiting for someone to write about them. The history of my family was also there long before I came along. I just embellished it a bit and put it down on p
aper.

  That evening at my grandmother’s house in Hohenschäftlarn, my son, daughter, and I visited the Kuisl gravesite on a hill directly above the entrance to the village church. I pointed to the names overgrown with ivy, and we stood there silently as darkness fell. I’ve always tried to create an awareness in my children that a family is more than just a father and mother, that it can be a large community, a place of refuge—and an endless treasure trove of stories.

  Later I sat in the kitchen correcting the first draft of this book far into the night. It was a strange feeling sitting in the same house, the same room, where so many of my ancestors had lived, worked, laughed, and brooded before me. It almost seemed as if their shadows were leaning over my shoulder to see what their descendant had to say about their large, old family. I hope they’re happy.

  The story you can read in these pages developed during the course of long hikes and bike tours and was inspired by the ideas and information from many people.

  Unfortunately, I can’t list them all here, but I’d like to give special thanks to the local Schongau historian, Helmut Schmidbauer, who told me about the Altenstadt Templars and without whose extensive knowledge the first novel, and also this second one, never could have been written. Many thanks likewise to Wiebke Schreier, who showed me around Augsburg and gave me enough ideas for three books. Professor Manfred Heim has, I hope, been able to correct most of my errors that concern the history of Bavarian churches. In addition, he’s an excellent Latin teacher!

  Dr. Claudia Friemberger of the University of Munich filled in the gaps in my knowledge of the Bavarian Templars, and Matthias Mederle from the German Rafting Society knows how fast a raft moves and at what times of the year it would have been used on rivers. Eva Bayer corrected my miserable French and knew the proper Parisian expletives. The pharmacist Rainer Wieshammer, who’s an expert on ancient medicines, prepares herbal medicines in his facility in Rottal and has a magnificent collection of Breverln—little cloth and paper talismans adorned with images of saints and prayers, which as late as the twentieth century were thought to have healing and protective properties. (Incidentally, Magdalena’s charm necklace looks just like the one Rainer Wieshammer donated to the Müllner-Peter-Museum in Sachrang. Perhaps someday you’ll have the chance to stop there for a look.)

  Everything I know about executions comes from the enormous collection of notes by my deceased relative Fritz Kuisl—a wealth of information I draw upon even to this day.

  Thanks also to my editor, Uta Rupprecht, who came up with the idea of the fungus herbarum antibiotic, and to my agent, Gerd Rumler, for a first-class Italian meal over which a few new ideas for the novel were born.

  And last but not least, thanks to my entire extended family: my wife, my children, my parents, brothers, grandmother, and all the aunts, uncles, and cousins who surround me and support one another. Without you—your patience, your pride, and support—this book would never have been possible.

  A TRAVEL GUIDE THROUGH THE PRIESTS’ CORNER

  If, like me, you’re one of those people who like to read a book’s epilogue first, you should stop now. This book is a journey that will take you from one riddle to the next and to some of the most beautiful places in Bavaria. What pleasure is there in solving riddles when you already know the solutions? So stop reading!

  STOP!

  If, on the other hand, you have finished reading the novel, then sit back and enjoy this section. The following pages will help you plan your next vacation to the Priests’ Corner, absolutely my favorite area in the Alpine foothills. If I had to explain to an extraterrestrial what Bavaria is—what it smells and feels like—I would just set him down on the mountain Hoher Peißenberg and tell him to look around for himself at a countryside as colorful as a robust painting from the Bavarian baroque period: monasteries, chapels, lakes, gentle hills, and the distant Alpine peaks that, when the warm, dry foehn is blowing down from the mountains, appear as close as the nearest cow pasture.

  The people who live here are all a little bit like my ancestor Jakob Kuisl: stubborn, grumpy, and reserved. But if you approach them with humility, respectfully doffing your hat politely in church, they won’t bite. Be brave!

  You can find all the places mentioned in this novel on a map today. After a trip through your imagination, what makes more sense than actually traveling to this area to check out all the riddles and the history behind them? To best appreciate Kuisl’s time, of course, you should travel on foot or at least by bicycle. Back then, things were not as fast or hectic as they are today. In researching this book, I walked everywhere and got lost several times in the Ammer Gorge. Why should you get off any easier?

  Enough said! Pack this book in your backpack with a pair of good hiking boots, a water bottle, and a local map, and come along with me to…

  THE LITTLE CHURCH OF

  ST. LAWRENCE IN ALTENSTADT

  To find the place where my story begins, I had to search an awfully long time. The former Church of St. Lawrence lies on the outskirts of Altenstadt, at the far end of St. Lawrence Street (Sankt-Lorenz-Straße). Though it dates back to the twelfth century, it was renovated and converted into a farmhouse in 1812. For this reason, I walked right past it twice on my first trip, winding up in the parking lot of a nearby company before I finally realized that the old ivy-covered building at the edge of town actually had once been a church. Only its massive blocks of igneous rock and the navelike structure suggested a time and place when fat priests like Andreas Koppmeyer preached to their flock. The babbling of the Schönach next to the house, the reed-covered river valley, and the roadway lined with mountain ash, however, conjured up that ancient locale in my mind’s eye. I’m sure they will for you as well.

  In Roman times and also later, in the Middle Ages, Altenstadt must have been an important trading center. Here, the Via Claudia Augusta, the greatest Roman highway this side of the Alps, intersected with the medieval Salt Route, which stretched from the Berchtesgaden area to the Allgäu. But the many merchants and travelers in that area also attracted robbers and hostile armies, and in the thirteenth century, citizens decided, therefore, to move to a protected hill a few miles away. That marked the birth of the town of Schongau, while Altenstadt—the “old city”—became a sleepy town and remained so until modern times, like Sleeping Beauty in the fairy tale.

  When the St. Lawrence Church was remodeled in the nineteenth century, they say a crypt was found containing some unusually large human bones. We don’t know whether this was the crypt of a Templar knight, but it’s an established fact that the order of knights was active here. Near the former little church, there is to this day a Templar Street (Templerstraße). Also, the bill of sale, dated 1289, an agreement between the Premonstratensians and a certain Fridericus Wildergraue, “Supreme Master of the Templars in Alemania and Sclavis,” still exists. When I first saw a copy of this document, I knew at once that this was the start of a new novel.

  Please follow me now to the center of town and…

  THE BASILICA OF ST. MICHAEL IN ALTENSTADT

  Within sight of the property formerly belonging to the Templars is my favorite church in the Priests’ Corner. Amid all the baroque splendor of the region, the Basilica of St. Michael, with its simplicity and large dimensions—its huge towers, massive outer walls, and rounded arches—looks more like a Romanesque castle than a sacral building.

  Over the main portal, a relief depicts a battle between two knights and a dragon, which gave me material for my second riddle. In the opinion of the local historian Helmut Schmidbauer, the two warriors are Enoch, the son of Cain, and the prophet Elijah—and I certainly accepted his opinion without question. His words, by God, are sacred! Anyone who wants to convince him of the contrary is welcome to try, but be prepared for the same Bavarian Priests’ Corner stubbornness you see in Jakob Kuisl.

  The “Great God of Altenstadt,” the huge crucifix inside, dates from 1200 and is famous throughout Bavaria and beyond. Whenever I stand before it, looking
into the rough-cut, sad, kindly face of the Savior, I always feel like Simon, an enlightened man suddenly infused with the Holy Spirit. And I like to imagine a piece of the actual True Cross secured inside this simple crucifix, even though, unfortunately, not a shred of evidence supports this.

  All that remains of the fourteen auxiliary saints in the north aisle is a fragment, so no one can prove that a holy St. Fridericus wasn’t among them at one time. As for the memorial plaque on the exterior church wall, I’ll freely confess that’s my own invention.

  Now let us set out on the way to…

  SCHONGAU

  Even though no riddle is hidden here, Schongau is the centerpiece of my first novel, as it is of this one. Schongau is a quiet little town with a medieval walkway along the battlements and many of the historical buildings that also appear in Jakob Kuisl’s adventures.

  Here’s my suggestion for walking through town in the footsteps of my ancestor:

  Start your trip out, just as the coffee-lover Simon might have, with a cup of black espresso in the Marienplatz; then enter the Ballenhaus, which is easy to recognize by its stepped gable. Here, in the former town hall, you can visit the second-floor meeting room where the clerk Johann Lechner and the Schongau patricians sealed the fate of the Scheller Gang. The beautiful carved wood ceiling dates from the sixteenth century, and the green tile stove plays a small, but not inconsequential role in my first novel.