The Willow King

by Meelis Friedenthal

  The shimmering patch of air in front of him started to acquire clearer outlines, and through the unbearable glare he could make out an oblong human form. There was a chalk-white face, offset against the dark ceiling in the background, and long hair, flowing down onto the figure’s shoulders. And through the gleaming light Laurentius could see a halo, slowly taking shape around the dark silhouette of the head. Flashes of light shot out intermittently from the shimmering image, piercing through his narrowed pupils and straight into his brain. His eyelids were flickering uncontrollably.

  The moment he closed his eyes and saw darkness, the face appeared clearly before him. He had seen it somewhere before. Some time ago, a long time ago. Had it been a dream? He had been standing by the gallows, grass and sand underfoot. There had been silvery trees which looked like people: roots for feet, branches for fingers. Long, arrow-shaped leaves.

  With a strain he managed to open his eyes.

  The candles were burning balls of flame, which illuminated the outlines of baskets and bowls on the table in front of him. Was that food?

  His recovery would require energy, and he needed food to restore it. He had to try to recover. Laurentius tried to control his anxiety and comprehend why he had been summoned from his dreamless sleep, why he could see a person standing in front of him, and why her clothes were brighter, much brighter, than he could remember from the previous occasion.

  “The previous occasion?” the question flitted through his mind.

  Now he could see that the young woman was clad in a long white robe, fastened around her body with green bands, and her hair was clasped with a strip of gold. Her hands were outstretched as if she were praying or proffering goods. He could see a large bowl of yellow honeycomb, baskets of oranges, shallow vases filled with yellow and red flowers, green apples, red tomatoes, pomegranates, a bright array of colours.

  Laurentius involuntarily closed his eyes.

  Damn it, he thought to himself, remembering what had happened. He had decided to let his own blood. That was why his arms were bloody, and why the phantasms had appeared, those hallucinations. The right thing to do would have been to wait until the morning, to overcome his qualms and go to an apothecary, or to try his luck with a barber again. He certainly should not have hurried, given the fragile state he was in. One had to be very careful when letting blood, since losing too much could cause fainting.

  Laurentius snorted angrily to himself. “Sufficiently careful!”

  He peered through half-shut eyes, and the table in front of him now seemed to be empty. But the room was still a strange shape, warped like an image viewed through a magnifying glass. His head started spinning, and he had to shut his eyes again.

  Of course some doctors held the diametrically opposed view, believing that fainting during bloodletting was the most reliable indication that the treatment had actually worked. Laurentius had always been suspicious of the whole process himself. His teachers in Leiden had not favoured the expulsion of large volumes of blood from the body, asserting that due to circulation, a phenomenon which Harvey had recently confirmed, it wasn’t really necessary. But Dimberg’s view on the matter had been quite convincing, and if a sceptical authority such as Boyle was also an adherent, then it was at least worth trying. According to Boyle, blood carried corpuscles of sickness, and if they were expelled in moderation it was easier for the body to deal with the ones left behind. In any case, bloodletting was one of the most popular and widespread forms of treatment.

  He tried to focus his gaze on something, but to no avail. What had actually happened earlier?

  He had been sitting there in his chair, holding the incision in his forearm open with a small glass rod, and reading prayers to himself.

  The blood had been dripping into the bowl, and it was already half-full—that was the last thing he remembered.

  He must have fainted. The rod must have slipped out of his vein, and the flow of blood had eventually stopped, otherwise he would no longer still be there. Had he spent the whole night sitting in that chair by the table, staring out of the window like a corpse hung from the window hook? Had he in fact been dead?

  And yet, and yet, he was sure there had been someone else there as well.

  Laurentius made a great effort and managed to stand up. His ears were ringing, and he had to grab hold of the back of the chair for support. As he stood there trying to recover his strength, he peered around the room. It was empty; there was no one there. He stumbled a couple of paces towards the bed and threw himself down. His limbs were no longer stiff, but he felt light and fragile, like a dried-out leaf. He was weak, but his senses were somehow functioning differently from usual. Sounds seemed louder; the light was different in some inexplicable way, almost the same, but slightly altered nonetheless. Was this another result of his illness? He knew that sickness was the Devil, delusion and fallacy. Fallacy immediately caught the eye; madness could be spotted from afar—it caused fear; it stirred up memories and phantasms. The memories, the furrows scratched in his soul, were still there: he could still feel them inside him. But somehow they were shallower, much weaker than before, as if they had been forced open. As if someone had taken a sharp knife and scratched the horrific stories and degenerate images from the parchment pages of a book, and now the dark ink dust was floating about in his soul. Maybe if he coughed, then the corpuscles of his memories would fly out of his mouth, as little droplets.

  Laurentius allowed himself to cough for a while. With every cough he felt healthier, revived.

  Once the coughing fit had subsided he lay on his bed thinking, and he remembered that he had to go to the banquet later that day. Nearly everyone he met had invited him to it, so it seemed wrong not to make an appearance. He felt very weak, but he would have to try to get himself into a decent state, and he should probably try to eat something as well. He had agreed with the maid and turned down the breakfast at his lodgings, but that had been with good reason: he was sure that his stomach wasn’t up to digesting that lousy sawdust-laden food; it might even make him faint again. He had to eat, but only good-quality food. Bread baked with decent flour, and even fruit, if he could find some. He remembered the basket of honeycomb and pomegranates which he had seen in the dim light of his room, and he swallowed. That was exactly what he needed.

  “Yes,” he said to himself, as if he had reached a decision.

  There were two options available: he could eat in a tavern somewhere, or wait until the banquet. They were sure to offer the finest dishes in Dorpat there. He would just have to endure for a while longer and try to rest; the banquet was supposed to start at lunchtime. Laurentius lowered himself back onto his bed and lay there, thinking of sweet honey and fresh red apples.

  THURSDAY

  THE STONE HOUSE had been neatly painted with green and yellow limestone paint, making it stand out from the other buildings, which generally had dark-grey planks of wood for their exteriors. Hardly anyone painted their houses in these parts, and due to the weather they tended to turn various shades of dull grey—the newer ones a bit lighter, the older ones darker, even black sometimes. Colour was a mark of affluence.

  There were dark, low-hanging clouds in the sky, and the candles in the stone house had already been lit. Their warm, flickering light shone through the windows, and inside one could make out silhouettes of people dressed up for a special occasion, walking around and conversing among themselves. They were like the silhouettes which artists sometimes drew, just as Butades’ daughter had preserved the shadow of her beloved on the wall before he went to battle. The servants standing on the stairway landings were dressed in respectable black, and Laurentius could not help thinking that it looked like the wrong heads had been placed on top of bodies dressed up in fancy clothes. These were the faces of young boys: pimply, insolent, out of place. Just a little earlier they had probably been running about barefoot, dressed in baggy clothes, stacking logs in a yard or leading horses somewhere. The worst of the mud had been washed off them; they
had been dressed up smartly, and sent to help at the rector’s reception. The boys watched the university students and professors with expressions which conveyed mistrust mixed with disdainful obeisance. They knew that the lives they lived in the backyards, out on the fields, were more real, more genuine. The students, done up in fancy clothes, some of them with wigs and overcoats embroidered with gold thread, were distant and alien to them. Like the shrieking white birds which flew across the gloomy autumn sky but lived their lives elsewhere, somewhere where the sun was shining.

  “Maybe in a sense that is how things really are,” Laurentius thought, watching as the servants lit the torches. Literacy, reading and the classics would always ensure that the students had a privileged position over the peasant boys—once they had learnt how to read the wax tablets then there was no going back. From then on their world had changed for ever, and it was impossible ever to forget the power of the written word. But peasant life was shaped elsewhere. Scurrying about in the cold mud, sleeping on hay in cramped, grimy rooms with animals grunting and children whining. And the swans flew over high above, stirring a dark yearning in the people down below. A long time ago, in the village where he had studied with Father Theodus, Laurentius had watched the swans with the same kind of longing. Theodus had tried to teach him how to forget, how to make his soul stronger, but in vain. Melancholy had left its imprint on his soul, and it was a burden he would always carry with him, which he could never forget. Only the company of others, their ideas, the books he read, and his fidgeting parakeet occasionally managed to distract his thoughts.

  As if answering his wishes, someone standing by the doors with the large, opaque glass panels announced something in a high-pitched yelp, bowed, and pushed the doors open from either side. Two of the boys unrolled a wide, dark-red carpet down the stone steps.

  Laurentius moved forward towards the unfurled red tongue with everyone else. He was now very aware of how weak the bloodletting had left him and he could feel cold shivers running up and down his spine, and cramp in his calves; maybe this was his fever flaring up again? He tried to focus on his surroundings. Who were all those unfamiliar people? There were a lot more of them than he expected to see at a rector’s reception at a provincial university.

  He coughed purposefully, adjusted the sword hanging from his hip and headed into the building. He felt a stabbing pain in his stomach as his feet sank into the soft red material of the carpet, which was spongy like a bog, like a sloping hillside covered in blood. Every step he took left a soft impression in it, like a stamp in wax, like a memory. Then the red carpet gave way to wooden floorboards. There was no dust or mud in there, and the air was acrid, thick from the soot of candle flames. The earlier stench had somehow got stronger again. Could it be the greasy candle wax, or maybe someone’s musk-scented body oil, or the soap used to wash the floor?

  Laurentius faltered slightly, but he allowed himself to be directed onwards. He was there now and there was nothing that could be done about it. He had to try to forget about everything which had happened.

  “Thank you,” he said politely as the servant took his coat.

  The illusion of a modern European interior was almost complete. It was only if one strained to look up at the ceiling joists and the knobbly edges of the plasterwork that one could detect the evidence of hasty, sloppy decorating work. But down below, at the normal plane of vision, there were smooth walls covered with dark wooden panelling, which had tapestries with plant designs and pictures hanging on them, and there was even a cloakroom. People were handing over their capes, warming their hands on the light-green ceramic stove tiles for a moment, and then heading deeper into the building.

  Laurentius positioned himself by one of the walls, looking slightly awkward. Fortunately the room was warm, which would assist his body’s humours in their struggle with the cold and damp. He realized that he had become terribly hungry.

  He watched the procession of young men as they entered through the open doors. Many of them were talking among themselves as if already well acquainted, and some of them were casting curious glances in his direction. He tried to locate Peter and Johannes among them, but the faces were all unfamiliar. It was quite clear that strangers didn’t appear in those parts often, and the students who had been there longer showed undisguised interest in every new arrival. Maybe they had already heard about his examination?

  “You must have arrived in Dorpat just recently?” a young man dressed in a fashionable overcoat and foppish wig addressed him. Judging by his extravagant and ostentatious appearance he must have come from a rich merchant family. The noblemen tended to be a little less attentive to their attire: they had titles to convey their importance, but the ordinary citizens sought to compensate for their lack of social status by overtly demonstrating their wealth.

  Laurentius made a vague movement of his head. “A little while ago, yes.”

  “Magnus Lundgreen, at your service,” the man said, introducing himself in the French manner.

  “Laurentius Hylas.”

  “Have you already found yourself lodgings?” Magnus enquired.

  “Yes, with Fendrius. It seems like quite a comfortable place,” Laurentius answered.

  “Ah, there. Yes, that’s a nice place, to be sure. Although they ended up throwing out the last lodgers. There was a right scandal there. They were Germans,” Magnus informed him.

  “Really?” said Laurentius, unable to think of anything else to say.

  “I hear that you came from Leiden—is that so?” Magnus continued in a light-hearted tone.

  Laurentius nodded. Clearly news of his arrival had already spread.

  Magnus’ formal manner initially took him aback slightly. The use of the second-person plural was generally a mark of refinement, and it certainly wasn’t widespread. Yesterday, Peter and the German students had addressed him in much more familiar terms. Laurentius preferred that kind of directness: there was something of the ease and clarity of Latin about it. When he was addressed in the polite form he normally opted to respond with some impersonal construction, which often seemed the only way to avoid offence. He spoke German and Swedish fluently, but trying to find the suitable form of address always had him in a fluster. It always depended on the context, but he normally assumed that his interlocutor knew which was correct. Right now he couldn’t decide whether Magnus was mocking him with excessive politeness, or just making an effort to be friendly.

  Before he had time to ascertain which it was, the guests were invited to the table, and he and Magnus went to sit at the places they were shown to. These kinds of events were always organized with great pomp, and there was normally not the slightest hope of speaking more freely or of leaving the table until at least two hours had passed. Whenever he found himself at such events Laurentius recalled the sad fate of the astronomer Tycho Brahe. At one reception he was forced to restrain his body’s natural functions for so long that his bladder burst, and he subsequently passed away. At least, that was what Laurentius had heard in Leiden student circles.

  “Silentium!” someone called out across the hall.

  Professor of theology Olaus Moberg stood up and started to say grace. He warned of the hard times which lay ahead, and said a prayer for those who didn’t have such sumptuous and inspiring food to put on their table that evening. Professor of philosophy Sjöbergh took his turn, speaking on the theme of starvation and the punishment of the Lord, which was intended to make people strive to better themselves. The Lord always meted out the harshest punishment to his chosen people, precisely to encourage them to be better. Sjöbergh added that as they witnessed death and starvation all around, they should always remember that in the deepest darkness light would appear.

  “Lux luceat in tenebris. Let our university bring light to this dark land! Vivat, crescat, floreat!” Sjöbergh exclaimed.

  Everyone looked very solemn for a while, but the mood soon became jolly again as the servants started bringing the food to the table. They served it in ord
er of seniority, which meant that Laurentius had to wait a while before the first dishes reached him. By now he was very hungry indeed.

  He nodded, raised his mug and smiled dutifully as the older students called out the traditional toasts. It was obligatory to drain the mug to the bottom, but thankfully the beer tasted surprisingly good.

  Hearing out the latest of many long and convoluted toasts, his neighbour turned to him and enquired in a half-whisper, “I don’t suppose you have plans for the evening?”

  “Yes, Peter Börk told me there is supposed to be some kind of performance taking place,” Laurentius answered, feeling some pride in being able to demonstrate he was so well informed. “But I’ve got a cold; I may not be able to come and watch it after all.”

  “Come off it. It’s going to be a major event. About Dorpat, the Athens of the Emajõgi river, and the Muses.”

  Laurentius raised his head, intrigued. “Really?”

  Laurentius had been thinking of the Muses when he eventually chose Dorpat over the other provincial universities. Dorpat had an ill-defined but indisputable reputation as a place where the Muses were most inspiring.