The Willow King

by Meelis Friedenthal

  “Greetings,” said Laurentius.

  “Have you come for a wig?” the barber asked in a sing-song voice with an indeterminate accent. “Your hair is certainly quite unsightly; we will have to cut it all off. It just lacks the necessary refinement. My wigs are first rate—all the gentleman in town buy from me.”

  Laurentius bowed, making sure the whole time to direct his gaze downwards. “In fact, I came regarding bloodletting.”

  “Ah, is that so? Not today I’m afraid,” the barber replied, sounding disappointed. “Now is a bad time. Mars is in an unfavourable position and brings sickness. But I can offer you an enema or cupping instead—they’re actually better than bloodletting. They cost a little bit more, but it’s worth it.”

  Laurentius stood there indecisively.

  “It is in your own interests,” the barber explained. “One has to be sure to observe the correct days for bloodletting.” He jabbed his hand in the direction of a piece of paper on the wall. “I’ve got everything written down here; I had the mathematicians do it for me. It’s very precise and reliable. But come on in; we’ll get some cups on you right away. Now would be an opportune moment to do an enema too. One way or another you will have to empty your bowels before letting blood.”

  He clattered about in his cupboard and produced a sturdy-looking enema pump with a wooden handle. It looked worn out from repeated use, and didn’t seem particularly clean either. The barber eyed it glumly as he made a few pumping movements, and then nodded in approval. What Laurentius took to be the musty smell of urine and faeces assailed his nostrils, but he found himself hoping it was just a figment of his overly powerful imagination. At that moment the possibility that this was the stench which was already in his nostrils, which came from his soul’s black bile, seemed considerably more appealing than the other explanation. He shuddered and screwed up his face. Enemas were a common form of treatment, but he had always been wary of them. He purged his body in the natural way as often as he found necessary, and felt no need to assist the process artificially.

  Noticing Laurentius’ reaction the barber’s expression became serious and he shook his head, causing his long locks of hair to flap about. “Don’t you be so squeamish; the King of France himself has an enema performed on him regularly—you can’t be more fastidious than him. First we’ll scrub you clean and then we’ll give you a good, proper enema.”

  “I’ve had hardly anything to eat all day; it’s unlikely to be necessary for me,” said Laurentius, trying to decline politely.

  “Well, eating is one thing but purging the bowels is quite another. The ancient Greeks already knew all about cleansing—catharsis they called it. That is the whole point of the enema. We’ll flush your intestines clean for you and then you’ll be a new man,” the barber persisted, slowly edging closer to Laurentius as he spoke. Laurentius got the impression that he was planning to perform the procedure right there and then, without worrying too much whether he had the client’s consent.

  “That’s true, but it was more in the figurative sense,” Laurentius said, gradually backing towards the door. “At least, it certainly was in Aristotle’s case.”

  “Oh, I’ve given enemas to everyone here: the rector, the professors, even their wives.” A wistful note had come into the barber’s voice. “And definitely not in the figurative sense. All of them got their catharsis, that’s for sure.”

  “Professor Dimberg did advise me to let blood; I have to try to cure my sickness,” Laurentius tried to object.

  “I’m sure you do, but just you pull your trousers down and come and sit on this chair. We’ll put a bowl underneath you as well,” said the barber, showing no intention of listening to Laurentius’ objections.

  Laurentius glanced quickly behind him, groped the door open with his fingers, and with a forced smile on his face, slid out. “I may come back at a more opportune moment,” he said hurriedly, before darting off down the street.

  “Curses,” he hissed through his teeth.

  Laurentius sensed that he had just made a lucky escape. Experiencing a strange combination of euphoria and panic, he walked down the street towards the university, trying to gather his thoughts. What now? The idea of going to the next barber he could find to try to let blood seemed silly now. After that episode with the overzealous convert to catharsis he had no desire to entrust himself to the next quack he came across. Even thinking about it caused the stench in his nostrils to grow so strong that he had to stop and gasp for breath.

  “Damn it,” he cursed quietly to himself, and he leant forward with his hands on his knees and tried to calm himself down. His hair was wet from the endless spatter of rain, and he could feel drops of rainwater trickling down his collar. Dusk was gradually falling and the street already looked as if it were just waiting for thieves and cut-throats to arrive; it was the time of day which always brought an unpleasant edginess. If he still wanted to let blood, then the right thing to do would be to find someone who was properly educated and less in thrall to astrology, someone who instilled confidence that he had some idea what he was doing. But where could he find someone like that in this unfamiliar town? At the apothecary’s? Although it was possible to find the occasional apothecary with a university education and expertise in his field, their shops tended to be dens for gambling and beer-drinking, and they were not averse to the stronger drinks either. In their eagerness to sell their medicaments they could forget they had ever learnt anything about medical science, and they would start trying to palm off all manner of dubious concoctions on you. Homemade salves, powders and poultices—and who knows what else. They would dream up overblown and unappetizing names for them such as “Rhazes’ white pastilles” or “worm oil”. For the most part these preparations were no use at all, but you could be sure of paying a handsome price for them. Laurentius decided it would be better to put off his investigation into the local apothecaries until a later time. He should anyway be able to manage a simple procedure like bloodletting by himself. He probably already had all the necessary tools; it would just be important to prepare for it properly...

  “Yes,” Laurentius said to himself. “Of course.”

  Feeling that he had arrived at some kind of decision, he headed off down the cobblestoned footpath. As he walked he noticed how the rain had washed out the sand from between the stones, creating a long, streaky pattern along the ground. There was rubbish lying about in the mud by the roadside, and he could see dots of yellow light reflected here and there in the puddles. They were the same flickering lights which illuminated the faded paintwork of the houses and the passers-by with their hunched forms and glistening overcoats. Directly in front of him he noticed a young man and woman walking unhurriedly, arm in arm, seemingly oblivious to the rain. Laurentius couldn’t help thinking that there was something familiar about the appearance and gait of the young woman.

  He slowed down a bit so that he had more time to observe the wet hair which was visible from under the hat, savouring the prospect that he might see a familiar face there.

  “Her hair looked exactly the same...” Laurentius found himself thinking.

  The appearance of this girl from out of the damp mist had an inexplicably uplifting effect on his mood. Could this be the same young woman who had been standing on the steps outside his lodgings yesterday evening, with whom he had spoken? Laurentius shook his head. He didn’t want to be in too much of a hurry to find out. After all, he couldn’t just walk up to her and start inspecting her face—that would be impolite.

  “Of course, what’s the reason to doubt it? It’s quite possible that she is one and the same,” he told himself.

  Most probably the young woman lived somewhere nearby, and that was why he had now seen her twice in a short space of time. There was nothing unusual in that as such. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that the first time he had seen her was in a dream, rather than real life. In fact he was so sure that she had been an apparition that it didn’t seem possible that she really existed
. What had she looked like anyway?

  As he struggled to recall the vision of the girl, he glanced down at the ground. There, goggling back at him from the muddy road, was a dead jackdaw. Its wings were pressed flat against the sides of its body, and its legs were bent as if it were poised to take off from a branch, but one could tell straight away that the bird’s body was already as stiff as iron.

  “So then,” thought Laurentius to himself, coming to a standstill.

  The girl and her companion walked on, with the rain continuing to spatter against their hats and capes.

  “So then,” he repeated to the jackdaw in a sterner tone of voice.

  “Yes, indeed,” the jackdaw’s gaze seemed to say in response.

  Laurentius squatted down and prodded the bird cautiously with a twig. He felt uneasy about touching a dead creature with his hands—God only knew what it died of.

  The jackdaw flipped over onto its other side.

  “I should try to push it to the edge of the road somehow,” he decided, remembering how the ragamuffin had come and grabbed his parakeet. It seemed the situation was a little better in town, otherwise someone would have already plucked the jackdaw’s feathers and made a meal of it. Although it may have just recently fallen to the ground, so no one had yet had time to.

  He shoved some sodden twigs under the dirty bird, planning to lift it to one side. But as was often the case with dead birds, its body turned out to be surprisingly light, and he misjudged its centre of gravity. He flicked it up to almost waist height before accidentally dispatching the wretched, floppy bundle of feathers into the nearest puddle.

  “Damn it,” he found himself saying, and suddenly he felt afraid.

  The jackdaw’s corpse fell into the puddle with a gentle splash. The stream of water which had accumulated after several days of rainfall took the bird’s body with it, and it started moving slowly towards the small pool which had formed in the centre of the road, temporarily getting lodged against the various obstacles which it encountered on its way. Laurentius watched as invisible currents played with the dead creature and sodden maple leaves clumped around its tiny form.

  “Whoa, whoa!” a voice yelled out.

  Laurentius heard a clatter, and a carriage appeared, water splashing up from its wheels and the horse’s hooves. He quickly hopped to one side, but he couldn’t avoid getting his stockings wet. The driver flashed an angry look at him, and then the whole contraption was swallowed up into the dusk, like a demon disappearing into the night. The coachman’s whoaing and the rattle of wheels rang out for a little longer, before silence descended again. The jackdaw had disappeared, perhaps pressed into the mud by the carriage wheels.

  Laurentius shrugged his shoulders and looked about him. There didn’t seem to be anyone at all around.

  “Home,” he said to himself.

  At least he now had somewhere to go in this town, a place he could call home. Maybe once he was back there he would have a clearer idea of what he should do next. Feeling as if he had reached a decision, he lengthened his stride. Once he had got to the church of St John, he turned to walk past the university building again, and from there he headed in the direction of Broad Street. Having walked a couple of buildings past the university he came across a large group of students, standing in the dim light outside what looked like a storehouse, discussing something among themselves. Passing by quite close, he recognized Johannes, who greeted him with a friendly wave of his hat.

  “Evening! What’s afoot?” Johannes called out to him.

  “I’m heading to my lodgings,” Laurentius answered in a weary voice.

  “We’re going into town; perhaps you would like to join us?” Johannes suggested.

  “I’m not sure; perhaps...” Laurentius answered with a sigh.

  It might have been a good opportunity to get to know the other students a bit better, but he already had a pretty clear idea of what lay ahead. The German students could always be relied on to be good company—largely because they were better off than the Swedes, and they had a reputation for buying drinks for whomever they were with. For them it was a matter of honour to make sure that the table was always laden, and that people’s hearts were always full of good cheer.

  Laurentius had started to feel a vague sense of nervous anticipation in the pit of his stomach. Something was telling him that he should go, while also warning him that perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea.

  “Come on, come with us,” Johannes said, trying to spur Laurentius on, and he grabbed him by the arm. It was clear that they had made a start somewhere, and the company already seemed nicely merry.

  Laurentius warily let them take him along for a bit, listening to their jesting and trying not to stick out as a foreign element too much. They had already embarked on a philosophical discussion, evidently on a subject covered in a recent lecture.

  “Plato provides a good example of the virtues in Menon,” a young man with red-rimmed eyes proposed. “There are a great number of them, a myriad, just like bees!”

  “Who? Bees?” Laurentius queried in surprise. “Actually, Plato wrote that the soul of a man who has lived a good life is reborn as a bee. Their souls are like bees.”

  “No, that’s another dialogue! There are lots of bees, but they all express a single idea. The idea of a bee! It’s the same with the virtues. There is really only one virtue,” the young man insisted.

  “But bees are born out of decay and putrefaction,” Johannes interrupted. “Pliny states that—”

  “That’s a different subject—for God’s sake don’t get sidetracked again,” groaned the young man who had started the conversation. “Virtues—”

  “They really are born like that,” said Johannes, refusing to back down. “They are born of death. And Porphyry says that they are eminently just and sober beings.”

  “Well, then you definitely aren’t a bee,” snapped the young man who had been trying to discuss the virtues. “It’s just a metaphor. A figurative usage.” And as if to reinforce his point he pulled out his sword and waved it in the air.

  “A metaphor for what?” Johannes said in a slightly teasing tone of voice.

  “For the most important thing,” the young man answered.

  “Because they gather honey? A metaphor for collaboration?” Johannes asked.

  Laurentius realized that this was the kind of conversation which would inevitably go awry, and he feared that if he stayed with the students nothing but trouble would come of it. He had to somehow free himself of the tension which had built up inside him as a result of his autumn melancholy, the fever and fear over his uncertain situation. But he didn’t have many options available. He either had to let blood, or he had to spend time in the company of people whose jollity might help to soothe his soul. He had to do something! But it wouldn’t be a good idea to let himself lose control and drink himself drunk, even if losing control—oblivion—was exactly what he wanted at that moment. Tick-tock—his clock clicked on, but it was getting slower and slower.

  “I really should go,” he told Johannes. “I still have some matters to take care of today.”

  “A meeting, is it?” Johannes asked with a grin.

  NIGHT

  LAURENTIUS LAY THERE listening to the dripping of the rain outside. Drip, drip... It was the first thing to impinge on his waking consciousness. Like a perpetual clock, which measured out the days, hours and minutes of his heartbeat while he himself was absent. The kind of clock which did not need winding. Somewhere up above, almost invisible drops of water had started trickling downwards through the narrow cracks in the shingle roof. The droplets had slowly collected on the ceiling of his room, the surface tension temporarily giving them a nebulous spherical form, before they strained free from gravity’s grip and fell with a gentle dripping sound to the ground. Drip, drip. They fell more and more frequently, until they had eventually made a blurry brown patch on the floorboards. He was pretty certain that it hadn’t been there in the evening.

 
; Laurentius was sitting slouched in his chair, staring into the distance with unseeing eyes, his gaze fixed on a point which culminated somewhere beyond the limestone paint, the plaster, the stacked stone wall, the hazy town air and even the sky above. Staring into nothingness. His eyes looked as if they had been painted onto the slack features of a madman, and his gaze was empty, unblinking, piercing into eternity. He might just as well have been dead. The dried blood on his forearm, which was resting in a bowl half-filled with a dark liquid, reinforced the impression.

  Drip, drip.

  The damp air felt chill against his sweaty forehead, but he didn’t dare to move, even to wipe the sweat away. He feared that the slightest exertion would cause him to lose his senses, that he would fall forward and hit his head against the floor with a thud. His heart had almost stopped beating, out of fear that his muscles would stretch too much and grow limp; his blood was no longer circulating evenly throughout his body; his veins were filling up with salts, becoming clogged and unfit for use. All movement inevitably ends in destruction, and all things strive towards their final resting place. But what, then, was man’s place?

  Laurentius felt as if his body were that of a dead saint, inert and imperishable. But he knew that could not be, that it was impossible. The moment his body gave up on movement, on the breath passing through his nostrils, something would die within. That was how people always died. His brain, concealed within the hard bone of his skull, would give one final tremor and cease its activity, and his consciousness would disappear somewhere. All those things which had indisputably existed, which one could name and see, would be lost. But where did they go? Into nothingness?

  The air had started shimmering before his eyes, and although it was yet to take on any clear form, it already had dimensions, and light was radiating from it. It was too bright for his eyes, which were used to staring into emptiness.

  His eyelids closed reflexively.

  It felt like he might gradually be regaining consciousness. He must have made some stupid mistake... what could it have been? Where had he been all that time? That which has no substance is impossible to conceive, because words can never capture it. Did I have consciousness? Am I my consciousness? Do we possess it, or do we embody it? No, Laurentius told himself. He must not allow himself to get bogged down in those kinds of thoughts: they would exert his brain, use up his energy, cause his body to release its warmth, out through his scalp into the chill of the room. He would have to try to restrain himself. To restrain himself from thinking, to restrain himself from speaking, the main thing was to keep hold of his consciousness. If he could eke out the breaths which he had been allotted, conserve the beats which that lump of gristle produced, then he could live. He still needed to live, for some reason.