The Witch of Cologne

by Tobsha Learner

  Knowing that the child’s death means their own, Miriam stifles a scream with her fist. But Ruth, emotionless, picks up two small copper pegs. She manipulates the slippery head, now half-hanging from the groaning woman, until she can reach the umbilical cord. Clamping it in two places, she deftly cuts the fleshy lifeline and pulls it clear from the neck. Then, carefully, she pushes her fingers inside and eases the child’s passage so that one shoulder comes clear of the vagina then the other.

  ‘Push,’ Ruth urges the young woman who is now delirious. The woman makes one last effort and the rest of the baby shoots out into the midwife’s hands.

  The baby lies in her grasp, his skin coated in white pungent vernix, his genitals swollen and bulbous, his face blue, lifeless.

  Covering the baby’s nose and mouth with her mouth, Ruth sucks the viscous fluids clear from the child’s airways then spits them into a bowl. Skilfully she swings the baby upside down, slaps it on the bottom.

  Silence. Not even a whimper from the small body dangling lifelessly from her clenched hands. Abigail Brassant moans, her eyes half-open. Convinced they are both doomed Miriam falls to her knees.

  Ignoring the young woman’s hysterics, Ruth slaps the baby again. This time a thin miaow sounds and a rosy hue floods the child, transforming the mauve flesh to pink. Smiling for the first time in hours, the midwife holds up the baby as it coughs then begins bawling.

  ‘It is a boy,’ she tells Meister Brassant who has appeared in the doorway. ‘And he is healthy.’

  The merchant rushes over and gathers the child into his arms, age abruptly etching his face. Then, to Ruth’s surprise, he weeps with relief.

  Suddenly exhausted, she sinks to the ground.

  The town crier, a corpulent Westphalian who lost his left eye in the Thirty Years’ War, steps delicately over the stream of sewage running alongside the wet cobblestones. Curling his fat fingers firmly around the handle of a large brass horn he sounds in five o’clock morning-tide. Nothing stirs except for a large pig snuffling at a pile of icy turnip peelings and old cabbage leaves thrown against the wall of a beer hall. The town crier yawns and, stretching his stiff bones, squints up at Meister Brassant’s windows. There is a light shining in the mistress’s bedroom and the maid has hung a garland of winter poppies over the balcony. A child has been born, a male child. The town crier smiles; with luck he will get a jug of mulled wine and a kiss if he knocks at the back gate, maybe even a little more. Whistling, he kicks aside the cabbage leaves and makes his way across the narrow lane.

  While the town crier stands at the wooden shutters waiting for the maid to respond to his tapping, Ruth, her face concealed by a large hood, steps out of the servants’ quarters further down the lane followed by Miriam clutching a covered basket full of instruments of midwifery. The grey of their cloaks blends perfectly with the muted hues of the high rickety houses, precarious towers of wooden beams and plaster which seem to reach out to one another across the passageway, almost blotting out the sky overhead. The two women, painfully aware of being trespassers, fear prickling their scalps, glide across the street towards a waiting cart. Its outline is barely discernible through the hovering mist which has lingered on through the night. Both women move silently with the practice of a race which, over centuries, has learnt to survive by making itself invisible.

  Ruth takes the basket and hoists it onto the cart, then pulls herself up to sit shivering on the wooden seat while Miriam climbs in beside her.

  The coachman makes a clicking sound and the huge draughthorse rolls its flanks mournfully into action. As the town crier turns at the sound of hooves the cart is already disappearing into the fog.

  The port master, surly and pockmarked, takes the five Reichstaler bribe from the coachman and spits into the gutter. For Jews he is prepared to turn a blind eye, but he is not willing to condemn his soul to eternal damnation. The decree is that no Jew shall stay overnight in the Holy Free Imperial Catholic city of Cologne, but if the rich want the Hebrew doctors to visit them that’s their business. Still, if anyone should care to ask the port master, he would care to tell—for a price.

  Bleary-eyed with sleep he watches the cart drive through the huge wooden gates. The hooded woman is young and haunting with her chiselled profile and white skin, her green eyes visible below her cowl. The port master knows who she is: the witch from Deutz, the best midwife in the Rhineland. He beckons his son over and picks up a wooden stick. Crouching, he draws the sign of the cross and two wavy lines beneath it in the mud—a hex to ward off the sorceress’s evil spirit. Pointing to the cart as it winds down towards the harbour, he tells the boy that he’s heard the woman uses Jewish magic, the kabbala, to protect her own and can draw out spirits from the sick as well as create a golem, a slave-giant made from the river clay itself.

  ‘They say that on the Passover she sacrifices young boys then drinks their blood. Meister Brassant must have been desperate to employ such a woman,’ he whispers, checking over his shoulder for spies.

  Confused, the pimply-faced adolescent thinks of how he lusted for the woman the moment he saw her. Could that be her magic too? With one hand the boy pushes down his erection, crossing himself with the other in case she has cursed him.

  Ruth leans back in the cart. Behind them the hollow thud of the huge wooden gates sounds out; she does not care to turn around.

  There are many in Deutz who would consider it an honour to enter the walled bastion; Ruth is not among them. The so-called free city with its churches and holy relics is an irresistible lodestone for the desperate pilgrims who pour through its gates every day seeking redemption, hoping for a miracle as they claw over each other to gaze at the crumbling bones of the three Magi. But Cologne seems quaint to Ruth after five years in Amsterdam, a city bursting with enlightenment. She misses the exhilaration of debate, the fierce intellectual curiosity that had no fear, the celebration of a Republic, of a democracy which would free all those young spirits after thirty years of war. The energy of revolution. Of change! Here, in this medieval stronghold, all is backward-looking. Trapped in the Middle Ages, Cologne still rests on its former glory as a trading power.

  If the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the glorious mercantile years of Cologne, the seventeenth century belongs to Holland. The Dutch religious tolerance, born out of a commercial pragmatism, serves the fledgling Republic well. The Netherlands has become the new axis for philosophy as well as medical and scientific advances. A magnet for all who think beyond the narrow confines of a world where church and state are one and the sun still flies around the earth.

  The wooden docks and the sailing ships beyond come into view. As the mist clears the Rhine glistens under the moonlight. On the right are moored the great seagoing vessels of Holland, Spain, France, even England. On the left the smaller German river boats wait to take the cargo upstream to Münster, Bremen, Hamburg and beyond. This constant exchange of cargo is how the city has always made its money, exploiting its strategic position on one of the main trading routes of the Middle Ages. The glorious Rhine. What must it have been like a hundred years before? A bustling harbour full of activity and intrigue. Now there is industry but life is harder, the port quieter. The discovery of the great territory which lies beyond the European horizon—the East Indies, China and the Americas—is destroying custom. These new trading routes have eclipsed the old paths and Cologne, starved of commerce, suffers.

  Ruth counts ten oceangoing ships and a flotilla of hopeful sailing boats anchored against the wooden jetties. It is still a magnificent sight. The fading moon catches the tips of the small waves rippling across the river and creeps up across the carved wooden prows of the sleeping ships, transforming the oiled riggings into ghostly snakes of silver and blue. No matter how familiar the panorama, Ruth can never suppress the excitement which fills her each time she sees a ship with its cargo of mystery, gliding into the harbour like a crane.

  On the opposite bank lie the small towns of Deutz and Mülheim, located within
the Protestant domain belonging to the Hohenzollerns, an area outside the Catholic territory of Cologne. Looking downriver towards Mülheim, Ruth can just see the grey tower of the small Calvinist church which sits at the top of the main street. Its tiny scale forms a stark contrast to the towering half-built spire of the Catholic cathedral on the opposite shore with the wooden crane on top, bent out like a beak.

  To the south of Mülheim is Deutz. Ruth grew up in the narrow crowded streets of the small ghetto, amongst the remnants of what was once the thriving Jewish community of Cologne before the infamous pogrom of St Bartholomew’s night in 1349. That night nearly every Jewish man, woman and child within the city walls was slaughtered. The few who escaped emigrated to more sympathetic cities like Frankfurt or Amsterdam, even as far east as Cracow. But some families struggled on. And, joined by new settlers, recreated a small outpost on the right bank of the Rhine in Protestant territory which was marginally more tolerant.

  A cluster of Jewish women are waiting at the river bank for a barge to take them back across to Deutz. Ruth guesses they have been selling their wares—hot bread and cheese—to the Dutch and Spanish sailors marooned on their boats due to quarantine. Despite the fact that she is wearing the same uniform, the Orthodox women look archaic to Ruth with their double-peaked caps and long-sleeved robes, the obligatory yellow circle stitched onto the breast. Absent-mindedly she traces her own circle, which Miriam has dutifully sewn on. It is the emblem Jews have been forced to wear in Germany for over a century and means that Ruth cannot travel into Cologne, or anywhere else in the Rhineland, without permission. It is a decree which has forced many Jews to resort to bribery or journeying with a Christian escort to ensure safe passage.

  The cart arrives at the first of a series of barges which together form a floating bridge across the Rhine. Ruth and Miriam disembark and the driver leads the nervous horse onto the vessel. In the distance the midwife can see the water mills grinding away, while in front of her the chimneys of Deutz blow thin streams of grey into the sky. It seems centuries away from her time in Amsterdam.

  The cart rolls over onto the next barge. It is January and the river roars past, swollen with melted snow. The frosts have been bitter for as long as Ruth can remember, although her father often tells of the winters of his childhood which lacked the icy harshness and relentless cold of recent times. ‘It is God’s retribution for thirty years of war—Christians fighting Christians, over what? No wonder he let the North Sea freeze and allowed King Gustav to march across with his army of toy Swedish soldiers. Altsding lozt zich ois mit a gevain…everything ends in weeping,’ Elazar would finish philosophically.

  Ruth turns back towards the rushing water and allows the incessant roar to fill her head and empty her mind. It is a deliberate ploy she uses when she remembers her father; it is the only way she can rid herself of the overwhelming sorrow she feels when she thinks of how he cannot forgive her for her flight, her silence and now her presence back in her hometown. She has spent hours standing outside the house she grew up in, waiting for the old man to make that first step, to lift the religious ban. But Elazar has not yet found forgiveness for his daughter’s betrayal.

  When Ruth first returned from Amsterdam, it was only through her father’s pleading with the rabbinic council that she was allowed to stay in Deutz at all and practise as a midwife. Now, regarded as a heretic by the community, no amount of safe deliveries will ever absolve her. And as the chief rabbi, any clemency would be seen as an audacious and politically dangerous move—in this way Elazar’s hands are tied. But still Ruth lives in hope. She longs to sit beside her father and speak with him of her travels, to reassure him that the young daughter he knew still exists. But she struggles to fit in; in reality she never has. Life back in Deutz is a constant balancing act between the security of tradition and superstition and the searing intellectual curiosity she was born with. Cursed with, she sometimes thinks.

  They arrive at the opposite bank. With wheels creaking the cart rolls off the barge and into the thick mud. Ruth shouts at the coachman to avoid the town square—the resident street of chief Rabbi Elazar ben Saul—and she and Miriam climb back on board.

  Soon they are on the outskirts of the settlement, trundling down a back lane which opens out into the countryside that lies beyond Deutz. Forest, much of it green saplings, has started to creep over the fallow farmland, swallowing up the edges of the small town. It amazes Ruth how much of the countryside, particularly in the north and north-east, still has not recovered from the Thirty Years’ War. The land here remains lush, but further north lie the abandoned fields, the burnt-out farmhouses. A third of the peoples of Germania have been slaughtered, their lands ravaged repeatedly by Protestant and Catholic, Frenchman, Swede and Prussian.

  She stares at the broad back of the coach driver. He probably fought, she thinks, they all did. But he was one of the lucky ones. In many places the working men are only now reappearing, most of them refugees in search of a new start in the empty cities of the north and south. Dutch Calvinists, Italians, even Swedes have fled to the Rhineland, their suffering visible in their hollow cheeks and haunted eyes. Suspicious of these strangers, the local Germans grow defensive and bitter. Resentful of the loss of their own sons, they are being forced to embrace more difference. Now is not a good time to be a foreigner.

  The horse whinnies and rears then refuses to go on. The coachman, grumbling, dismounts and trudges through the slush towards a frost-covered mound in the centre of the road. He pokes at it with his whip and an arm falls out, the skin mottled blue and muddy against the snow. The coachman lurches back and covers his mouth with his sleeve.

  ‘Plague!’

  He stumbles back to the cart. Ruth climbs down to examine the corpse but the driver grabs her arm.

  ‘One touch and we’re all doomed!’

  ‘Calm yourself. I will know if it is plague or just poverty—remember I have some training as a medic.’

  She pulls away from him. Carefully brushing the snow from the wizened face of the man, she finds none of the telltale marks or swellings that speak of the Black Death. The corpse looks about sixty but Ruth guesses he was more likely forty; just another one of the thousands uprooted by the war who spend their lives walking from village to village begging for food, sleeping in ditches and fields. The lost peoples of Middle Europe.

  ‘There is no plague here, just Mother Starvation. Load him up onto the cart, we’ll give him a burial back in the village.’

  ‘He’s a Christian, you can’t bury him.’

  ‘In that case we’ll leave him at the church door.’

  ‘It’s too much trouble. He’s just driftwood, he’s worth nothing to anyone.’

  ‘He still has a soul.’

  ‘But is it Lutheran or Catholic?’

  ‘Do you think God cares?’

  The coachman stares at her. If she were a man he would hit her. There is something about her authority which intimidates him. Maybe it is true that she has supernatural powers. He once drove her to the house of a possessed man and she had cured the shuddering invalid before his very eyes. The coachman is not prepared to argue with the devil. Still protesting he throws some old sackcloth over the body and hoists it up onto the back of the cart. The corpse weighs as much as a bag of twigs and there isn’t even enough flesh on it to sell it to the secret anatomists back in Cologne. Curse the Jewish witch, he thinks, this would be the last time he drives for her if she didn’t tip so well.

  The cart wheels start up again. Soon the tall pine trees laden with snow give way to small neat fields where the Protestant farmers grow wheat, barley and oats. But now the fields are blanketed in white. Ruth knows some of the families: some, Dutch Calvinists; others, Lutherans from the north. She has delivered their babies. They are hospitable enough but guarded, always cautious.

  The cart trundles its way towards Deutz. A hawk circles above, hopeful for carrion. Spiralling up from the cottage roofs are pillars of smoke from the bakeries. Today is
Friday and already, even at six in the morning, the wives and daughters of the community are preparing for the sabbath meal.

  Ruth is overwhelmed by a sense of homecoming. It is this feeling of belonging which finally drove her back to Deutz and reinforces her desire to reunite with her father. It is stronger even than the soaring emancipation she found in Amsterdam.

  The Holy City of Cologne

  The lock of flaxen hair is thick and coarse. It lies entwined in three long fingers that Detlef blearily recognises as his own. Slowly the crimson coverlet embroidered with the crest of the now defunct von Dorfel family comes into focus. Birgit…the night before…the heavy claret still echoing at the back of his furry tongue. Birgit. And sure enough, as his other four senses shake themselves awake, the pungent scent of his lover, the soft hot curve of her buttocks pressed into his hardening groin, the rest of her waist-length hair—some of which now etches an irritating path across his face and up his nose—and finally her light snore, which always reminds him of an indulged cat, confirms his worst fear. That again he has overslept in the illicit bed of his married mistress. The young canon sits up with a jolt and inadvertently pulls the lock of hair with him.

  ‘Detlef!’

  Birgit Ter Lahn von Lennep née von Dorfel untangles her hair from Detlef’s fingers. Her symmetrically pleasing features are just a little too heavy. Cynicism and good living have already started to thicken the pert nose. Her round cheeks, once concave, are on the verge of burying the ice-blue eyes above them.

  ‘You would render me bald as well as an adulteress?’

  Smiling, she slips her hand under the coverlet, reaching for his penis. Detlef allows one caress then scowling pushes her hand away.

  ‘I have a mass to attend.’

  ‘Let me be your sacrament.’

  ‘You will go to Hell for that.’

  He swings his legs out of the bed and reaches for his robe, which he notes with some distress lies like an abandoned skin on the chequered tiles of the ornate bedroom.