Sylvia

by Bryce Courtenay

  He sighed. ‘Sylvia, we must learn to trust each other or we shall not survive.’ He pointed to the leather bag Father John had made for me, which sat snug to my back. ‘We are about to enter Cologne. If it is in there then you will be relieved of it ere we’ve walked two minutes into the markets – it is a place most wicked and thieves abound. There is a legend that goes thus: a man, entering an abbey, found many devils in the cloister but in the marketplace found only one alone on a high pillar. This filled him with wonder. But it was told him that in the cloister all is arranged to help souls to God, so many devils are required there to induce monks to be led astray, but in the marketplace, since each man is a devil to himself, only one other demon suffices.’

  ‘Then should we venture there?’ I asked.

  ‘All do and are safe enough in person if one is not quarrelsome or foolishly inclined, but terrible close care must be taken with possessions for there be pickpockets not yet eight years old who will steal the wax from your ears. They will in a trice be gone with your alms purse,’ he warned again.

  ‘And you deem it safe in your possession?’

  He shrugged. ‘If I’d wished I could have taken it while you slept and claimed some thief must have stolen it in the night.’

  I indicated the satchel with a backwards jerk of my head. ‘That’s why I use it as my pillow!’

  ‘And sit bolt upright in your sleep three or four times each night and cry out,’ he grinned. I knew this to be true for I had sometimes wakened sitting upright after dreaming that my father, returning from the tavern, had dragged me from the bed to the pigsty as he had often enough done. ‘I could as easily have taken it then,’ he added.

  I removed the leather bag from my back and, opening it, handed him the alms money. ‘I know the exact amount!’ I warned.

  ‘Aye, ever the peasant,’ he replied, placing the money into the money satchel strung to the centre of his waist.

  ‘And what is to stop some thief cutting the leather strap about your waist that holds your wallet and making off with it? Did not that merchant last night boast that his scissor blades from Ratingen would cut the stoutest leather as if it were butter?’

  ‘Well said, Sylvia! You grow quickly accustomed to the ways of the city. The strap is leather plaited with wire so that a knife or shears cannot separate it.’

  While I had yet to learn to fully trust the ratcatcher, it was comforting to know that I wasn’t entering the city with some clodhopper or country bumpkin but instead someone who well knew the nefarious ways of city folk. I wondered how I could ever have considered coming here on my own and how I might have fared if I had so done.

  We entered the gates of Cologne and I was much excited but also somewhat afraid by the prospect of so big a place. There was a great milling at the entrance of the gate and the street beyond was filled with carts and wagons, men on horseback, dogs, donkeys, mule carts, cattle, goats, pigs, herds of sheep and, of course, people. People everywhere bumped and pushed and acted most contrary and with the rudest mien. The noise was as if I’d found myself transported into hell itself. But my first impression was not just of the maddening throng, but of the smell! Never had my nose been so affronted by the noxious ordure to be found in the churned and muddy streets. At first I thought it must have rained the previous night and what I smelled was pig and sheep and cattle dung – these were smells familiar to me – but I soon realised this was not the stuff of barnyards. I then saw that on either side of the thoroughfare there ran the ditches of which the ratcatcher had spoken and where folk deposited their nightsoil.

  I observed that the premises that opened to the street were mostly places of trade, shops, workshops and the like, while the city folk lived above them. The houses were so built that the top portion overhung and the house each side of the street was seen to nearly touch the other and so all but enclose the sky. Then I realised what caused the wetness: women simply emptied their night buckets of piss and shit into the road below, ostensibly aiming it to land within the ditch, but because of the overhang it mostly landed in the street itself. The mud that squelched between my toes was not the good clean earth of nature – nor was it mud at all!

  ‘We must purchase boots – the earth is foul and my feet are soiled,’ I said, when at last the crowd had thinned and the noise abated sufficiently to be heard.

  ‘Aye, boots for the street and dainty slippers, petticoats, a pretty gown of velvet and a new white wimple,’ he said, in a manner I took to be most flippant.

  I pointed to my toes, then cried out, ‘Don’t you mock me, ratcatcher! I shall not walk in shit!’

  He looked surprised. ‘Nay, I do not mock you, Sylvia. When we perform and wish to attract the better folk with our entertainment we will need the right apparel. For you a pretty dress and slippers with a clean, starched wimple, and for me stockings bright and a velvet jacket and perhaps a cap adorned with a peacock’s feather.’ He looked down at his feet. ‘These boots are well worn but I will cause a shoemaker to repair and stain them red so they may suffice a while longer and match my new red stockings.’

  I looked at him incredulously. ‘And how shall we come about such grand attire?’

  ‘The Jew,’ he answered, allowing no further explanation.

  ‘The Jew? Is he a moneylender? Father Pietrus says all Jews are. That money once borrowed from a Jew grows quickly to a greater sum than that which has been borrowed. Is this true?’

  ‘It is called interest and it is how the moneylender makes a profit on his loan. It is not cheating, Sylvia, unless the interest is too high. But for the most part this Jew is a tailor to the rich and a garment hirer to the not-so-rich and an occasional moneylender.’

  ‘Garment hirer? He sells old clothes, you mean?’

  ‘Nay, his garments are most prepossessing and fit for a rich merchant or a nobleman or town clerk or dignitary – someone who would wish to impress for some earnest or dishonest purpose. Perhaps someone who, previously of raised status, has come upon hard times and is now somewhat the ragamuffin but who wishes to attend the wedding of a rich relative or present a business proposition to a guild member or merchant of high repute.’

  ‘But we are neither imposter nor of a raised status now or ever previously.’

  ‘In all things there is a pecking order, even in the business of entertainment,’ he explained. ‘We must place ourselves above the jugglers, fire-eaters, acrobats, stilt walkers, buffoons and sword-swallowers, dancing bears and monkeys performing to the hurdy-gurdy, and alongside the troubadours, lute and harp players who might be employed at a wedding or a feast in the house of a rich merchant or nobleman. If we stay the way we are then we will have to work the streets or perform at the weekly markets, the cockfights, wrestling or dog baiting, where you know full well the peasant folk are not a generous lot. If we seek a venue better paid we must dress the part and so not disgrace the company we keep.’

  ‘But even so, would not this Jew’s finery be too grand?’

  ‘Most of it, yes. But he has clothes suited for an entourage, should the hirer need to impress with servants or footmen who attend him. When this cloth is worn, the Jew will repair it well and hire it to a more impecunious person.’

  ‘And we have money sufficient to pay him?’

  Reinhardt shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  I stopped and folded my arms across my chest. ‘Do not think to use my alms purse, ratcatcher!’

  He turned, his voice taking on a whine. ‘Sylvia, think you a moment – if we should succeed with better folk, your alms purse will grow more quickly than if we must divide in half the pittance earned from gawking, mean-fisted peasants.’

  ‘It is God’s money . . . for God’s poor!’ I protested, knowing that what he said made sense and also knowing that once promised, alms may not be taken back and to do so would be stealing from God Himself and so put me in a poor light concerning the learning bargain I had made with the Almighty. Sensible as such a suggestion might be, I told myself that I must bear the
sweet and light burden of Christ’s yoke and sacrifice the advantage the alms money may perchance bring to us.

  Observing my stubborn expression, he said as if to calm me, ‘Let us wait and see, there may be another way – with a Jew you can always strike a bargain.’

  ‘What is this Christ-killer’s name?’ I asked.

  ‘Israel of Bonn – Tailor to the Aristocracy, a good, kind man,’ Reinhardt assured me. I was shocked to hear a Jew described with virtue added to his name, but said nothing. ‘Come, it is not far from here.’

  He led me through a series of narrow, twisting streets and finally to a small shop where a man and a woman sat sewing, she a cape of rich red velvet and he the ruffle to the sleeve of a lady’s blue gown. From the walls about them protruded rods and from these hung every imagined gown or form of grand attire so that the walls glowed with such a rich colour of cloth that I had never imagined existed.

  Reinhardt bowed and swept his hat across his knees. ‘Good morrow, Master Israel, sire,’ he called out, an ingenuous smile upon his pretty face.

  The Jew looked up at us, his flinty black eyes taking us in with a single glance, and then silently returned to his work. I had never seen a Jew before and was somewhat disappointed.

  The tiny man seated before us grew a trim goat’s beard and had an altogether neat and clean appearance about him, although a wild clump of frizzy grey hair grew on either side of his head, like two small bushes growing in the cleft above his ears. Otherwise he was smooth-skinned and shiny to the topmost part of his crown, upon the rear portion of which sat a small black cap no bigger than my fist. As there was no single hair present to pin this upturned cup of cloth to, I could not but wonder if he might have glued it to his pate so it wouldn’t fly away against the slightest zephyr. His smooth pink face was most normal-looking, and while his eyes were sharp his mouth did not possess the cruel twist that, I had been taught, indicated a Jew’s heart of stone. Moreover, I observed that his nimble fingers working needle and thread were blunt, with nails well cut and clean, not long and fiercely taloned, blackened underneath with the crusted blood of innocent children used in a terrible ritual named Passover. Nor was his nose bigger or shaped differently to any other and it was not, as I had been led to believe, large and hooked, resembling the curved beak of a great bird of prey.

  ‘Do you not remember me, sire?’ Reinhardt asked, unabashed that the Jew had not returned his greeting.

  ‘Tush! Must I remember every ruffian who darkens my door? Can you not see I am a busy man? Who are you and what do you want?’ He said all this without raising his eyes from his work, and while his words were brusque they did not in the way he pronounced them sound unkind, but seemed more a test of what the ratcatcher might say next.

  ‘I take it then that your cousin, Solomon of Zülpich, is well content to have rats in his granary?’ Reinhardt said, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

  The Jew glanced up, a surprised expression upon his face. ‘Mein Gott! It is the ratcatcher returned. It is three years you are not coming!’

  ‘And the rats are bad, eh?’

  ‘Terrible . . . terrible!’ He turned to the woman who had glanced up when we had first entered but then, disinterested, returned to her needlework. ‘My dear, it is the ratcatcher.’ The woman nodded but did not look up. ‘Sarah, it is the ratcatcher with the flute! Remember? Solly’s rats running down to the river and kaplonk they are drowned, one hundred, two hundred, maybe more, who is counting?’

  ‘Ja, I can see, Israel. Ask what does he want.’

  ‘Want? He wants to catch Solly’s rats! What else?’

  The woman Sarah sighed and put down the cloak she was mending and looked impatiently at Israel. ‘Ask, is the girl for sale?’

  ‘The girl? What girl?’ The tailor looked puzzled, glancing up and noticing me for the first time. ‘Ah, a girl!’ he exclaimed, surprised.

  ‘The winkelhaus,’ Sarah said in an over-patient voice as if she should address a dull servant. ‘When your brother-in-law Abraham borrowed money for extensions, do you not remember, we took a quarter share as security.’

  ‘Ja, of course, but we are tailors, my dear.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So of winkelhäuser, what do we know?’ He spread his hands. ‘Nothing!’

  ‘What’s to know? She is dirty and her gown is stained and old, but underneath the goy is very pretty and young enough to learn to please.’

  ‘No! You make a mistake! She is not for sale!’ Reinhardt called out in alarm.

  The little tailor’s shoulders visibly jumped at the sound of the ratcatcher’s cry. ‘For sale? This goyim girl is for sale? What for we are buying a girl?’ He looked at his wife, confused.

  ‘I merely asked,’ Sarah answered, her right eyebrow arched and her lips pulled tight.

  As for me, I was as much confused as the Jew. Someone wanted to buy me for a winkelhäuser, a slave in a winkelhaus! What was a winkelhaus? Why did it need slaves? Or was this just their derogatory name for a maidservant? If so it wasn’t very nice to regard a person thus. I hoped that the ratcatcher might later have the answers to my questions. But now he asked one of his own. ‘This winkelhaus, is it of good repute?’

  Sarah looked him over, her expression close to a sneer. ‘Why do you wish to know? It is too good for use by such as thee.’ Then she smiled suddenly. ‘Ah! I see! It is not the wench who is the pretty one for sale!’ She laid aside her sewing and rose and came to stand beside him. ‘Hmm . . . tall, pretty face, pretty nose, pretty eyes and when washed clean the skin will shine, smooth as Cathay silk,’ she said, appraising all the while the ratcatcher as if he were an animal for sale. She then said, ‘I do declare there is a secret accommodation in Master Abraham’s winkelhäuser for those who prefer a rear entry.’

  I could see from the ratcatcher’s expression that whatever this meant he was not pleased but before he could open his mouth the tailor said in agitation, ‘Sarah! What know you of this winkelhaus?’

  ‘Enough to know that when you lend money and take a share as security, it is as well to know the investment is safely held,’ she replied.

  ‘But is that not your brother’s concern? It is in the family?’

  ‘’Tis all the more reason to know how goes his business.’

  ‘Business? Boy, girl, winkelhäuser, rats, musicians?’ the little Semite shouted, raising his arms and flapping his hands above his head. Then he turned to Reinhardt and pointed angrily. ‘What brings you here that concerns a winkelhaus? We are not that sort. You will at once answer or be gone, the both of you!’

  ‘Why, sire, no winkelhaus. I told you afore, it be your cousin Solomon’s rats.’

  Israel turned to his wife. ‘See, I told you so! It be about Solly’s rats!’ Then a thought occurred to him and he turned to Reinhardt. ‘You know full well the place of my brother’s granary beside the river. Why do you not go to him directly?’

  Reinhardt shrugged his shoulders, spread his hands and answered most calmly, ‘Because it is to you I wish to make a proposition, sire.’

  The Jew’s expression changed now to one of suspicion. ‘Proposition? What proposition? I am a tailor, you are a ratcatcher. We have no rats here.’ He thought a moment. ‘Well, but a few. The alley cats do well enough to keep them down.’

  ‘I am no longer a ratcatcher,’ Reinhardt declared. ‘Now I am a musician.’ He turned to me and smiled. ‘My partner is a singer of great talent and repute.’

  The Jewess looked me over once again, this time her eyes travelling from head to foot in a way that reminded me of the time in the village market with Frau Anna. A look of distaste was clear to see upon her face, so that I drew back, thinking she might spit upon me. ‘Oh, I can well see how you will succeed with such a stylish lady of repute at your side,’ she said in a voice most disdainful, then turning away, returned to her seat.

  ‘Ah! But good lady, you said yourself she is pretty and young enough to please.’ Reinhardt looked down at his soiled clothes
, spreading his hands. ‘Pray, do not judge us thus for ragamuffins. We have travelled from afar and you know well how it is best to dress in a humble fashion to discourage footpads and the like. Then with the autumn rains the road was most muddy. We arrived but this very hour and came straight here.’ He turned to the Jew. ‘Sire, had we but known your good lady was so particular of the appearance of others, judging them for their dress and not character, we would have washed our attire and visited the public bathhouse first.’

  ‘Would somebody tell me maybe also what is going on?’ the tailor cried, bringing both hands to wrap around the tiny cap.

  ‘A proposition, I have a proposition to make to you,’ Reinhardt repeated.

  ‘Tush! They are musicians!’ the Jewess shrilled, stung by the ratcatcher’s rejoinder and now dismissing us with a backward wave of her hand.

  ‘Musicians, perditions!’ Israel shouted, then glaring at us he cried out almost tearfully, ‘What proposition you got, eh, Mr Ratcatcher now musician?’

  Reinhardt gave me a quick glance then turned back to the Jew. ‘First you must hear us perform, sire,’ he said.

  By now I knew him well enough to know this was an idea that only a few moments before had entered the ratcatcher’s head.

  ‘No! No!’ Israel cried, his hands held up to heaven for mercy. ‘I am a tailor, not a choirmaster!’

  Reinhardt, ignoring his protest, removed his flute from his belt and commenced to play the opening bars to ‘Cursed be the Linden Trees’. I had no idea where all this might be leading us, but forced to trust the ratcatcher, I began to sing.

  If I may be forgiven my immodesty and if I may say so myself, my voice was sweet and pure that morning. My singing was most mellifluous and the high notes held firm and long as they danced along a single note held by the ratcatcher’s wonderful flute, and when at last the flute could endure no more they flew a cappella off the end to rise yet higher still.

  But after two verses the tailor shouted, ‘Enough! Enough already!’

  Reinhardt stopped abruptly and I ceased singing halfway through a verse.