The Witch of Cologne

by Tobsha Learner

  Detlef kneels in the centre of this bedlam, a peculiarly tranquil oasis of calm, his face gaunt, a thin yellow beard creeping up the hollow cheeks. His robe is strangely clean as if he has struggled to keep a semblance of dignity amid the carnage. In his hand he clutches a flask of holy oil with which to anoint the poor creature lying before him. The young man whose ravaged beauty still shines beneath the hideous sores is a law student Detlef once knew as a pupil, barely twenty years of age. His bloodshot green eyes burn in the waxen mask that his face has become as he stares at the canon, furious that he is dying.

  Secretly dismayed at the uselessness of the sacrament, Detlef is determined to carry out his task with as much grace as possible. Hiding his revulsion he reaches for the ulcercovered hand.

  ‘My son, may God be with you at this dark time, may he illuminate your path with light and fill your heart with love.’ Detlef continues to pray, unable to meet the man’s ferocious gaze for dread his emotions will betray him.

  Another young man wearing the black gown of the university student enters the hall. Overwhelmed by the foul air the youth retches then covers his nose with a sachet filled with herbs, stumbling between the diseased and dying as he makes his way across the room. As he draws near Detlef can see the resemblance between him and the man languishing before him. At the sight of the canon the boy stops in his tracks, his eyes cold: this is the third brother he has seen perish, the last of his siblings.

  The student kneels beside the priest as Detlef begins the anointing, indicating that he is performing the last rites. The canon reaches for the brow, smearing the scented oil beneath each puffy eye, then marks the man’s nostrils, mouth and ears. He pauses for a moment, wondering whether the youth is still conscious. The flicker of an eyelid indicates some life. Detlef continues.

  ‘May God pardon thee, whatever sins thou hast committed…’

  But the brother speaks over him, whispering into the dying man’s ear. ‘It is the Jews, Stefan. They have poisoned the wells. It is they who have brought this foul pestilence to our fair city. I shall avenge you, Stefan. I swear on your death bed that by nightfall these heathens, these infidels, shall be burning in their houses…’

  Detlef stops. The student, wondering at the priest’s sudden silence, looks up.

  ‘What’s wrong? Canon, can’t you see that he is dying? Finish the last rites for I shall be damned if I don’t see my brother die a good Catholic.’

  ‘Is there to be a Schülergeleif?’

  ‘What’s it to you? Those people are the anti-Christ. They are murdering our people with their poison.’

  ‘This pestilence was not brought by the Jews.’

  ‘Think what you want—nothing is going to stop us from crossing the Rhine.’

  ‘But such an act is against the principles of Christianity.’

  ‘Did not the Jews kill our Lord Jesus? Just as they are killing us now! Look around you! I will not let these people die in vain!’

  ‘You speak from pain and grief. There are Jews dying also.’

  The man lying between them groans as he tries to speak, but his throat and tongue, a blackened lump that sticks to the roof of his mouth, will not work. He clutches at his brother as his eyes start to roll back.

  ‘Enough! Finish the rites, Canon, if you do indeed have a Christian heart.’ The student stares desperately down at his fading brother.

  But Detlef is already standing, his hands shaking with rage as he starts to walk away. The young student runs after him. ‘Finish!’

  Several nuns look over. Groot, attending a patient nearby, moves towards the canon. Before the student has a chance to lay his hand on Detlef, Groot is by his side pushing the student away. ‘Careful, boy.’

  Detlef steps between them.

  ‘The good Father Groot will administer the last of the service,’ he announces calmly, then to the student’s amazement runs out of the hall.

  Disgusted, the youth spits then turns to Groot.

  ‘You clerics are all the same, all you understand is the glint of gold.’

  The small crowd of young men is already milling by the jetties. The area is eerily empty: the usual mongrels, alley cats and wandering livestock have disappeared entirely. At one end of the wooden docks lies an abandoned fisherman’s net, still full of rotting fish. Neither ship nor sailor has passed through since the plague was declared. One desolate vessel flying the Norwegian flag at half-mast sits in the shallows, caught in quarantine, its crew unable to leave and banned from disembarking. The calls of its cargo of starving livestock drift forlornly across the stagnant bay, adding to the sense that here time has stopped.

  Detlef, anonymous in plain clothes, pushes through the rabble. At its centre the leader, a student, stands on the back of a cart goading the motley throng of scholars, apprentices and the dispossessed into action. Another youth hands out all manner of weapons: hoes, pikes, old swords, even axes.

  ‘Here, comrade.’ The boy presses a hoe into Detlef’s hand. ‘Take this to strike down the infidel.’

  Detlef, appalled, hands on the tool as if it were red-hot iron.

  From the distance a group of chanting flagellants, stripped to the waist, their backs a seething mass of open sores and scratches, weave their way towards the crowd, whipping themselves with leather straps studded with metal. The wailing devotees—middle-aged women with grey hair wild and unkempt, burning-eyed priests, ruddy farmers driven off their land by disease—are bound by one desire: to take upon themselves the wrath of God who has decided to inflict such grief upon man.

  The student leader holds up a cloth effigy of a Jew strapped to a wooden pole.

  ‘Jude verrecke! Jude verrecke!’

  Screaming abuse he holds a torch to it. The crowd cheers as the scarecrow erupts into flames.

  Horrified, Detlef watches, then slips towards an abandoned rowing boat.

  Elazar, wrapped in his kittel, stands in the wooden pulpit in the centre of the small synagogue with the carving of the Lion of Judah watching overhead. Empty chairs line the walls and the enclosed women’s gallery is devoid of its usual chattering occupants. The temple is deserted but nevertheless the rabbi has opened the gilded gates of the ark to expose the large heavy scrolls of the Torah.

  Elazar bows his head to an invisible congregation then holds out his hands. Before him he can see Tuvia welcoming the community with his usual awkward grace. To the right of the young mohel stands Sara, smiling mysteriously at Elazar from beneath her bridal veil. And there is his nephew Aaron, at the age Elazar loved him most, just before his bar mitzvah, his voice trembling on the edge of manhood, the soft down beginning to pepper the upper lip. Beside Aaron, his hand proudly on his son’s shoulder, stands his father and Elazar’s brother Samuel, aged twenty, as he was when Elazar and he first visited the matchmaker to arrange his marriage. Behind Samuel are Elazar’s parents, his father’s long white beard hanging down over his velvet robe, his mother’s face crinkling with pride as she gazes up at the rabbi. It is an assembly of ghosts. But the elder does not care. These are his people, and love and memory run like beads of glistening dew across the floor and up the walls of the temple, making the old man forget that his congregration are no longer living beings.

  ‘I shall read from the Torah, the passage recounting Joseph’s courage when he faced the Egyptian Pharaoh with his prophecies. “Behold, I have dreamt and God has spoken through me…”’

  But as he recites, the old man becomes aware of a fiery light that has begun to burn a small hole in the second scroll which still sits within the gates of the opened ark. The radiance deepens, begins to etch out a golden word upon the silky parchment. Below him Elazar senses the rustle of clothes, a faint sigh, as the spirits turn to watch the miraculous light complete its message.

  ‘A’doni…’ Elazar reads out loud as he starts to name the unnameable: the sacred appellation of God. ‘A’doni,’ he repeats.

  Just then a rock comes flying through the window sending shards of stained glass
across the floor.

  Gravel squeezes up between her toes, clouds of white mud swirl around her naked shins. Determined, Ruth wades deeper into the river, her skirts hitched to her waist. Behind her Miriam follows tentatively, carefully placing one foot in front of the other on the slippery unseen rocks.

  Ruth, water to her thighs, throws one end of the homemade net back towards the hesitant girl. Miriam grabs it, almost falling over. Pulling the net taut in the rushing river they move forward in unison. Feeling the mesh tighten Ruth peers down into the white water. But before she can see whether it is a fish or a reed the other end of the trap floats loose. Furious, she looks across to Miriam, only to find the girl staring in the direction of Deutz.

  A thick column of smoke billows high above the forest that lies between them and the town. Without a word the two women drop their work and wade as fast as they can back towards the bank. Behind them the net, now a swirling eddy of mesh, twists itself around a pike that, curious, has ventured to the surface.

  The sound of the rabble reaches Deutz before the mob itself. Like a foul wind from the east, the banging of drums, boots against cobbles, stick against stick, rumbles up from the docks and sends a collective shudder through all who hear it.

  In the yeshiva the startled boys look up from their study, their teacher pauses mid-sentence. In the bakery, Schmul, alone since his beloved young wife Vida perished of the plague, thinks an army is approaching and in his terror allows the challah to burn. In the small cottages and crowded lodging rooms mothers and daughters drop their spinning and run for their sons and brothers.

  ‘Hep! Hep!’ they scream, the ancient cry that spans centuries.

  By the time the shouting youths pour into the town square, most of the community has fled, except for one infant who crawls lost beside the town pond. Screaming with fear, he stares around wild-eyed until a yeshiva boy darts across the square in front of the marching boots and rescues the bewildered child. With the babe in his arms he rushes towards an open door behind which the terrified mother cowers. The door bangs shut just as the leader of the horde is hoisted high onto the shoulders of a massive blond youth.

  ‘Burn them!’ he screams. ‘Bolt them into their houses and burn them!’

  Immediately a dozen students start tearing apart a discarded cart, throwing the planks of wood to their comrades who are armed with hammers and nails.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ A huge voice booms across the square. The leader swings around.

  Standing in front of the yeshiva is a group of elders. Hirz Überrhein, the leader of the community, an imposing man in his fifties, steps forward. ‘I am the bürgermeister of Deutz. State your grievances.’

  For a moment the dignity of the man and the stern patriarchal faces of the old men behind him intimidate the rabble. Then someone yells out, ‘You have poisoned our wells, you have brought the Black Death to our city!’

  ‘We have our own dead too!’ Hirz shouts back, then has to duck to avoid the first stone. It is followed by another and then another. One old man falls to the ground bleeding; the others, driven by the rain of missiles, retreat. Panicked, they pour back into the school building. Hirz picks up the fallen man in his arms before running back towards the shelter.

  Suddenly a small group of Jewish youths appears from behind carts, from around stone walls, clutching branches torn from trees and fence pickets wrenched from the ground. They walk towards the crowd. ‘Leave us alone,’ the oldest, fourteen at the most, shouts.

  ‘Where are your weapons!’ one of the rabble yells back, a taunting reference to the ban against Jewish men carrying arms.

  ‘Yes, Jew, show us your sword!’ another cries out.

  The boy, still beardless with prayer locks tumbling down his cheeks, steps forward and swings a lump of wood blindly. The crowd laughs. Within seconds the boy is knocked to the ground, his arms wrapped over his head as fists and feet rain down. A brawl breaks out as his companions move forward to protect him.

  It ends as quickly as it began. While the first youth lies senseless, the others are dragged semi-conscious into the yeshiva. As soon as the door is closed one of the mob begins to nail a plank across the frame; others join him in a frenzy. Soon the square rings with hammering as board after board is fastened over entrances while the terrified faces of the occupants stare out from the windows.

  Holding a flaming torch high, the leader steps forward and throws it.

  Detlef is running down the lane. His hood has fallen off and his face is streaked with dirt and sweat. His legs are pumping beneath him despite the exhaustion which tears at every muscle. In the distance he can hear the screams and shouts of the Schülergeleif.

  ‘Please let her be home, please,’ he prays to the God he fears has abandoned him, trying desperately to keep hold of his sanity and his faith, his sight blurring as the sweat pours into his stinging eyes. Over the bridge towards the cottage. But there is no smoke coming from the chimney. Detlef’s heart starts pounding with dread. He has not allowed himself to fully contemplate the possibility of her death. But now as he runs towards the dwelling, the thought of finding her body contorted by the Black Death, flung across the hearth or sprawled on the stone floor in the graceless posture of disease like so many others he has found, makes him ill to his stomach.

  Down the garden path, stumbling over an abandoned milking pail and farming tools scattered across the moss, brambles scratching at his legs. To her door. Which is open. Wide open.

  Please, good Lord Jesus, spare her life. Take mine if you have to, but not hers, please, my good Lord Jesus.

  He flings himself into the cottage, almost slipping on the muddy floor.

  ‘Ruth! Ruth!’

  His voice bounces off the bare walls. Pushing open the bedroom door he sees nothing but an empty pallet in the corner and a bowl of water. Relief and disappointment conflict, twisting in his gut.

  Through the window he can see the undulating columns of smoke beyond the forest. Outside again, Detlef gasps for breath in the pungent air. He leans for a second against a stone bench before sprinting off in the direction of the burning ghetto.

  The woman stands on the balcony. Her shawl, hanging from her twin-horned hat, billows out in the wind. She clutches a baby in swaddling and stares down at the jeering crowd, her face as white as the plumes of smoke behind her. A tongue of fire shoots out, catching at the edge of the veil. Without a word the woman jumps, flames licking the crown of her hat like a halo. When she hits the cobblestones her head smashes like a ripe plum, her limbs thrown askew like a broken doll. The baby rolls out from her body and is kicked between the legs of the roaring youths.

  Ruth stands on the other side of the square behind the mass of strangers—young men, students and craftsmen all in the dress of the Christian. She is screaming, a howl that is inaudible in the cacophony of falling timber, roaring fire and the delighted shouting of the horde. A cry which empties her mind, her body, her memory, of everything except the pain and the horror. A second later she is knocked flat.

  ‘Don’t move,’ Miriam whispers, her body pinning her to the ground. ‘They will see us.’

  Wide-eyed with excitement the midwife’s assistant draws her cloak over both of them, as if by hiding their own eyes they will be concealed from the mob. Ruth lies there for a second, stunned.

  ‘You spoke! Miriam, you spoke!’

  ‘This way,’ the girl continues, in the voice of a small child. ‘This way they will never catch us, but if they do they will kill us,’ she giggles.

  She has lost her sanity, Ruth thinks. My life now lies in the hands of a mad woman. Panicking, the midwife scrabbles to lift the cloak.

  Suddenly the two women are hauled to their feet. For a moment Ruth lashes out blindly, until she hears Detlef’s voice.

  ‘Stop! Ruth, it is me, Detlef!’

  The cloak is pulled off to reveal the canon. He pushes both women behind a dairy cart which is lying on its side in a pooling lake of milk.

  ‘We must go befor
e it is too late,’ Detlef says urgently into Ruth’s ear.

  ‘But my father…’

  Ruth cranes around just in time to see fire leap across the rafters of the rabbi’s house towards the synagogue. For an instant Rosa’s face appears at the top window, her mouth a silent howl as her fists pound uselessly against the clouding glass before the house explodes into flames.

  ‘Rosa!’ Ruth shrieks, fighting Detlef as he claps his hand over her mouth.

  Behind them Miriam makes a dash back towards the outskirts of the town.

  ‘Let her go! It is too dangerous to run yet.’ Clutching the flailing woman to his chest Detlef tries to calm her, holding her tightly. ‘We must stay silent and still.’

  Ruth, shaking with anger and fear, stares up into his hollow eyes as the strength of his arms draws her back into the possibility of survival.

  ‘Ruth.’

  Elazar’s voice startles both of them. The old man, his hair a wild storm, his kittel stained green with grass and torn with brambles, stands behind them. Immediately Detlef pulls him down behind the cart.

  ‘Abba! I thought you were in the synagogue,’ Ruth sobs with relief.

  ‘I was but then it started raining hailstones as big as rocks and the word of fire drew us out to the stream. Your mother is still there, washing her feet, her beautiful feet,’ Elazar announces solemnly, his eyes glazed over.

  ‘What is that smell? I know that smell.’ He turns towards the burning houses. ‘I must go back to the temple, the lanterns are all lit for Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. The congregation will be expecting me.’