A Witch's Burden

by D. W. Goates

  Elke neither had the time nor the energy to tell them how wrong they were, or to reiterate that she had never met the creepy man before in her life. Emitting a sigh, she resolved to keep any future horrors to herself.

  After school, she made sure to hurry home before nightfall. On her way she saw nothing out of the ordinary—no signs of the strange man, though she scrutinized each denizen of the street. Arriving at home, she locked the door and with relief dragged herself upstairs to her room. Elke finished her light supper before dark that evening and, in spite of the hour, had just begun considering her nightclothes and a book when a knock came to the door downstairs.

  Frau Krüger lived in the rooms below by the kitchen. Though she abhorred the stairs, the old, arthritic widow was spry enough to answer callers to the house. She only ever ignored them on the rare occasion that they came at night. This caller had arrived at dusk, and so was just in time.

  Noting this, Elke stepped swiftly and softly to the window. Parting the curtains she looked down on the entryway below, and froze at the sight. Elke couldn’t see just in front of the door because of the angle, but back from it, in the shadow cast by the house in the fading light of day, there stood a man dressed in black. Is that him? It was hard to tell from her second story vantage, but he did wear a black top hat like the man before. It has to be him! Dear God, I must warn Frau Krüger! But before she could turn, she heard the old woman’s voice addressing the visitor.

  Unnerved, Elke crossed quickly to her door. After ensuring it was locked, she pressed her ear to it, trying to hear the conversation downstairs. It was no use. Their voices were too faint, though soon she heard the front door close and the widow calling up to her from the stairwell.

  “Fräulein . . . Schreiber! You have a caller! Are you coming?”

  Elke knew that the old woman was trying to avoid climbing the stairs and so unlocked her door and, cracking it, yelled back.

  “Frau Krüger, I don’t know the man. Please tell him to go away and to leave me alone!”

  “What man? It’s a boy.”

  “A boy? Tell him to go home. I’ll see to him at school tomorrow!”

  “You tell him! I’ve had enough of this yelling back and forth. It’s too late for it.”

  Elke felt relieved. So it was a disgruntled parent who had tracked her home. If ever there was a time to relish being an assistant it was now, especially after such a long day. This man would have to know that anything on his or his son’s mind was not the responsibility of this mere teacher’s assistant.

  Elke opened her chamber door and began bounding down the stair. She could hear the annoyed muttering of the old woman as she shuffled down the hall to her apartment in the back of the house. In spite of the circumstances, she felt at ease enough—depending, of course, upon the father’s grievance—to share with him her amusing story about the start he had given her the previous night. She was smiling at this thought as she swung open the front door.

  It was a boy, as advertised, and behind him stood the man from before. But this boy was no student of hers, either from her present school or from that awful reform place. He wore a fine tailored suit the likes of which the teacher had never seen on someone so young. Waiting there, with his hat in his hand, he looked like a little prince, but she knew he wasn’t one. No, this smart-looking little mule-in-horse-harness was but a footman—a footman with golden hair and piercing hazel eyes.

  Elke was so surprised that she forgot to breathe. She had to gasp to get the word out.

  “Sascha!”

  A cheerful smile developed on her young caller’s face, but before he could speak, Elke was upon him, grasping him as a bear might its prey. It was an embrace that he was all too happy to reciprocate.

  “I’m so very glad to see you,” said Elke with her eyes closed and cheek lingering upon his head.

  “I found you,” replied Sascha, as much to himself as to her.

  The two friends enjoyed their reunion and remained entwined until it occurred to Elke that they were being stared at. Opening her eyes, she shot the stranger a glance; unmoved, the man continued gazing on with the same utter dispassion as before. Choosing to ignore him, Elke grasped the boy by the shoulders and thrust him out suddenly to arm’s length.

  “Just look at you! What a fine-looking gentleman you are!”

  He colored, adorably, before returning the compliment with a grin that did nothing to hide his discomposure. “And you . . . You look well, fräulein.”

  Elke shook her head in disagreement. “You have no idea . . . But I am now—now that you are here! Please, come inside out of the street.” Having said this, she realized the singular nature of her invitation; however, before she was able to raise the matter of the stranger in their midst, Sascha intervened.

  “Carl, please wait for me outside.”

  Nodding dutifully to the boy, the man did just that while Elke watched on in surprise. With this resolved, she ushered Sascha in to a salon near the entryway. Frau Krüger did not allow her unmarried female boarder to receive guests at night—and never in her room—but Elke felt sure that she was entitled to an exception in this case, especially as the evening was still young.

  “Please, sit. Would you like something to drink? Are you hungry?”

  “No, thank you,” he replied, taking his seat on a settee across from the happy host.

  Elke sat in a nearby armchair and leaned forward in her eagerness to put the boy to no narrow quantity of questions. “I was so worried about you. I almost followed you down the mountain, but knew I’d never catch you. I knew you were resourceful, and here it is made further evident, thank God!”

  “I was surprised to hear that you had come back. I heard it from a man named Loritz.”

  “You’ve got to tell me all about it—how you made your escape, and how you’ve come to me now! And what’s with the old man and the fancy suit?”

  Elke had not experienced such delight since her return home, and she made no effort to conceal her feelings. It was as if a long-lost beloved brother had been suddenly returned to her. There was something about Sascha; she knew him less than she felt she did, yet he seemed more like family to her than her own mother.

  “Drahomir and the Margrave told me to run when the villagers came. I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay and fight, but they wouldn’t let me. I got out through a secret passage—”

  “I know it. I found it! I could see your footprints. Was it just you?”

  “Yes. I went down the mountain and found a hunter’s cabin. I didn’t know what to do. I saw that they had burned the castle. I guess I knew I’d eventually end up in Waldheim. When I got there, I wanted to burn the place down like they did to us. I still do in my dreams . . .”

  “Die Rache ist mein; ich will vergelten . . .” she counseled, quoting Romans.

  “I know. I know, fräulein. It’s hard . . .”

  “We have to believe that they will get what’s coming to them . . . So, you found Loritz?”

  “He found me! I thought for sure that I’d been captured.”

  “I told him about you, and how clever you are. I figured you’d supply yourself like a thief in the night; was I right?”

  “You weren’t wrong,” he replied, smirking raffishly. “He told me about you, too, that you’d mentioned to him that I might be coming. He was a great help to me—even gave me a horse.”

  “How did you find me here?”

  “Well, I knew you were going home to Bremen, and I know that you are a teacher, so . . .”

  “So . . . you had me stalked?” she retorted, her feigned offense made the more obvious by her playful smile.

  “Yes. How else was I to find you?”

  “But why me?”

  “Truth is I no longer have anyone else . . . I got nowhere else to go.” Sascha’s smile turned sad, a despondence that Elke became immediately
intent upon dispelling.

  “All right . . . Well, that explains everything but the suit, and the, um . . . manservant?”

  “Carl’s my valet.”

  “This had better not be the fruits of some criminal enterprise,” she admonished.

  Sascha leaned in to her as if to impart something in confidence. “It’s the Margrave’s treasure—as much as I could carry. He insisted I take it with me when I escaped. He said the townsfolk would steal it. I have some of his writings as well.”

  “You’re rich?”

  “Yep,” he said proudly, patting the breast of his expensive suit.

  Elke began to laugh—quietly at first—but was soon without a care, convulsing with mirth; the prim teacher had lost control of herself entirely, and it felt good. Her laughter proved infectious and, before long, the boy joined in her merriment.

  Only when the cachinnation became such that it proved them both fools of their howling did Frau Krüger finally arrive to put a stop to it. “Great gods, what’s going on in here? Young man, away with you! Can’t you see it has gotten dark outside? And you, young lady, stop making such a racket and go to your room. You’ve got work tomorrow!”

  The widow’s cold-water bath restored Elke to her senses, and though it had washed away their party, it did nothing to dry the tears from her laughter.

  “Will you meet me . . . after school tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he replied, standing to go. It was obvious the old woman had reached her limit and would soon begin shooing the young instigator out, whether he was ready for it or not.

  The following afternoon Sascha was waiting for Elke, alone, just outside the gate to the schoolyard.

  “I still can’t believe that you are here,” she said, smiling as she walked quickly over to him.

  “It’s good to be here, and to be welcomed someplace,” he replied.

  “Speaking of . . . Where are you staying here in Bremen?”

  “I’ve rented a house—”

  “A whole house?”

  “Do you want to see it?”

  “I certainly do.”

  “It’s just this way. We can get something to eat, too.”

  Sascha took Elke to the townhouse he had rented with Carl’s help. It was comfortably furnished and centrally located in the old part of town near the river, the sort of place that often served as lodging for foreigners visiting the city on business. Here she learned that Carl was but one of many adults the boy had engaged for his purposes while on his trek northward to find her. These men were all from humble backgrounds; Sascha would rescue them with a warm meal and suit of clothes, then instruct them on how best to represent an “out of town” aristocrat through service to “his son.” It was a ruse that had yet to fail in working its magic.

  After supper they returned to the place, and Sascha showed Elke the attic wherein he kept his cache of treasure. Though he had carefully hidden it from Carl, he showed no compunction in revealing it to his friend. It was splendid: a king’s ransom in miniature. Within a single satchel were golden coins, fistfuls of precious gems, some jewelry, and even three small—obviously ancient—figurines decorated with delicate gold filigree. With these were two of the Count’s manuscripts, which Sascha gave to her. He offered her money, too, but she demurred.

  “You should consider it your inheritance, and shepherd it wisely,” she said to him. She also encouraged him to enroll at the school, but he steadfastly refused. They resolved to meet regularly, not only in friendship, but so that she could tutor him privately. The boy knew much, but Elke was sure she would find gaps in his knowledge that she could help him with.

  In the weeks that followed, however, things did not proceed as clearly or as orderly as Elke imagined. Little upsets developed that, working in concert, served to undermine the young teacher’s already uneasy relationship with reality—or more accurately, the reality of others: not how things were, but how the people of Elke’s present society would have these things believed. This growing disquiet set the stage for the upheaval soon to come.

  The first of these little upsets came with Elke’s early realization that she had been wrong in her initial encouragement that Sascha enroll at her school.

  “‘Quaecumque tamen diligat, si coetus est multitudinis non pecorum, sed rationalium creaturarum et eorum quae diligit concordi communione sociatus est, non absurde populus nuncupatur; tanto utique melior, quanto in melioribus, tantoque deterior, quanto est in deterioribus concors,’” said Elke, reading deliberately from a book. “And what does this mean?” she asked, looking over to Sascha during one of their evening sessions. She had yet to actually begin tutoring the boy, and was still engaged in discovering the frontiers of his education.

  “I haven’t really learned Latin yet, fräulein—”

  “I see—”

  “But I think I recognize that quotation,” he finished slyly.

  “Oh, you do? What does it mean, then? And who said it?”

  “Isn’t that Augustine? Something about what constitutes a people, how you can know them by what they agree upon to esteem, and how the value of that which they have agreed upon can be used to judge their relative virtue as a society.”

  “Yes. A people, united by loved things held in common . . . And what of these people? Do they love the truth, or cling to their own ideas—or worse, superstition? Do they favor free association, or . . . do they burn their pariahs at the stake?”

  “It was one of the Count’s favorites,” said the boy.

  Elke pushed the book away, signaling a break, and chin in hand, sighed with a mix of fondness and frustration. “I’m afraid I don’t quite know what to do with you.” It was evident from their nightly meetings that he was further along than she had thought. Conventional wisdom was in his case rather wrong. Sascha would indeed have been ill-served by enrolling at the school, even grades ahead of his age group, not to mention horribly bored. She guessed him to be no less than almost ready for university in his current state; only his mathematics weren’t up to snuff.

  “You could teach me Latin; I had only just begun to learn when—”

  She cut him off—intent on preserving his smile at all costs. “I’ll bet you could teach yourself Latin,” she said, admiring him with soft eyes. “That’s not my point. My point is that we learn things like Latin to learn of our history—a history whose principal lessons you already seem to grasp. What is fletching but a diversion to one whose quiver is endless? You’re smart, well-spoken, well-mannered, world-wise, and you’ve a firm, Godly grounding in morality. You’d be a better teacher than most at my school. They are only interested in conformity—not in seeking what is true, lasting, and good.”

  In her haste and sincerity, Elke failed to perceive the consequences of her words; with each compliment the boy’s demeanor had grown more smug. By the time she had finished, it was too late: with her unwitting spark, the puffed-up little monster was alive with self-satisfaction.

  “See. I told you,” he said, digging up their disagreement over enrolling at the school for a proper reinterment.

  “Not so fast! You forgot about Herr Keil.”

  “Keil? Who’s Herr Keil?” asked Sascha, baffled.

  “Herr Keil teaches math. If you’re to be a gentleman, you’ve got some work to do in that department; there I’d put you at no better than average for your age.”

  He’d been put to rout. “So, I should go . . .?” he said, deflated.

  “Nah,” she answered, recalling the boy’s expression from before. “What I said stands: you’ve no need of that school. I’ll help you with your mathematics . . . and your Latin,” she added with a sparkle in her eyes.

  The Margrave’s witchy writings gave cause to another of Elke’s upsets. She was now sleeping less than ever before, for each night, after returning home from Sascha’s house, she remained awake for hours p
oring over the manuscripts he had given her. The words of these writings and those the Count had spoken to her on that fateful night in his library remained with her even into her fevered dreams. Elke began to see the great unburdening he had spoken of, and it was taking place in everyone—everywhere. This unburdening—initiated by, and at the expense of, others—meant even the unassuming teachers at her school were complicit. Teachers, whom she had believed were to impart information and instill wisdom, were there solely to perpetuate a culture, however bankrupt it might be.

  And she could see further into this blackness. Society as a whole now looked to her to be no more than the passing of a yoke—a yoke that should never have existed in the first place. This great disaster she now saw as granting masterships to apprentices for time served, respect for parents for merely breeding then relying on their children to make good their own failings, and situations only for those who eschewed personal dreams and scrambled for them while still young. For the rest—those foolish enough to try something different—there was naught but banishment. The teacher began to see it all as she never had before: not trite, nor even meaningless, but malevolent.

  As those lines became blurred, so came the last of her upsets: Elke’s sense of the pointlessness at her nightly journey by darkened street home to Frau Krüger’s. Home to her was with her family, with Sascha, where they ate and talked about everything under the sun—for he was a curious boy. Her initial plans at tutoring him had become more organic, more reciprocal; as he learned from her, she too learned from him. And they had fun with it, discovering shared interests and strengthening their bond until they became happier together than alone or with anyone else, for no one else understood them. Other people were too caught up trying to impress each other, or living to an ideal established for them by someone else: parents, teachers, government officials, even priests, though never God. Between Elke and Sascha, there was none of this fatuity. Unencumbered, they shared freely with one another—ideas, interests, information—contributing where they could, and enjoying or learning where they could not.