“What kind of play is it exactly?” Laurentius asked.
“Don’t ask, you’ll spoil the surprise. Better to wait and see it for yourself.”
Laurentius nodded. “You’re right, of course. But unfortunately I’m not sure that my health will permit me to come today.”
By now he felt so frail from the bloodletting that he found it very hard to assess what kind of state his health was in. Sometimes he would feel fine, but before long his head started spinning and he began to worry that he might faint from the fever. But that may also have been the effect of not eating for so long. That always made his organism weak—just like a fire in the fireplace needed wood to burn, the human body needed regular nourishment. When he didn’t have enough, then his flame would gutter and smoulder without giving off any warmth. He would start to feel the chill darkness creeping closer towards him.
Magnus flashed a brief smile at Laurentius, and then turned to gesture to the younger students to finally bring them some food.
Eventually a lanky young man made his way up to Laurentius and Magnus and, with tetchily pursed lips, he placed a rustic, blue-glazed clay dish down on the table between them. Presented with undeniable artistic flair, on top of it was the main course of the evening: pike baked in leaves, covered in a rich cream sauce. The skin had turned quite crisp from the heat and the edges were properly browned; a few peppercorns could even be seen floating in the white sauce. Laurentius helped himself to some.
“Doesn’t look like the famine which Sjöbergh was complaining about has reached here yet. This food looks splendid,” he commented to his neighbour.
Magnus was poking at his fish with a thin two-pronged fork. He raised his eyebrows. “Of course. We don’t have any problems here; there are plenty of stocks. Everything has become very expensive, but we certainly don’t have to worry about going hungry.”
Laurentius broke off a piece of bread and started to pick the tender fish off the bones. He noticed that only a couple of people other than his neighbour were using forks; probably that level of refinement was not yet widespread in Dorpat. He was quite relieved about that—whenever he had to use a fork it somehow felt awkward in his hand. And after seeing the light-hearted way his neighbour had spoken about starvation while waving his fork in his hand the custom seemed particularly unpleasant.
Laurentius bit into the fish and gulped some of it down. But it seemed that the appetizing roasted exterior had created entirely false expectations. The fish immediately disintegrated into a viscous mass in his mouth; the flavour was somehow muddy and tainted, and he had to restrain himself from spitting it out. Only after taking a deep swig of bitter beer, and chewing a piece of the dry, sour bread was he able to force down the insipid, slimy mass. It seemed to be the same kind of bread as yesterday morning, but it was still several times less disgusting than the fish.
“How is the fish?” he asked his neighbour after his third large gulp of beer.
“The fish is always very good here,” Magnus said approvingly. “Especially the pike. But we don’t get to eat it very often.”
Laurentius looked around and noticed that everyone else seemed to be eating the fish with gusto; some of them were even licking their fingers clean. Clearly the problem wasn’t the fish or the bread. The fish was good, or at least it was edible. That rotten, muddy taste must be coming from inside him. Ever since Clodia’s death everything had smelt and tasted disgusting.
“So you reckon there is no threat of famine here in Dorpat?” Laurentius asked his neighbour.
“I’m sure of it—we’ve nothing to worry about here, as I already told you. Especially in the city itself. The military keep their grain stocks here. Don’t worry, just eat your fish,” Magnus assured him.
But by now Laurentius was feeling vile. “As I mentioned, I’ve got a cold. It’s ruined my appetite.”
“So you’ll let me have your fish then?” Magnus asked, and before waiting for an answer he lifted the fish from Laurentius’ plate onto his own, just as if they were already on familiar terms.
“Please, be my guest,” Laurentius said, watching as his neighbour got stuck into the fish. “But one could get the impression from what Sjöbergh said that the country folk are suffering pretty badly. I saw plenty of starving people myself as I arrived.”
“True, the situation is pretty bad,” his neighbour said with a nod. “But what are we supposed to do about it? We can’t just produce extra grain for them. As far as the peasants are concerned, His Majesty issued a decree repealing serfdom two years ago, so they’ll have to get by on their own now. They’ll survive the winter somehow. They always have something put aside; it’s never as bad as it seems.” For some reason a remorseful tone had crept into Magnus’ voice. “If you want to talk about wretchedness, then it’s the young farmhands and the girls whose existence has become really miserable. They definitely won’t survive the winter. The situation has already turned quite nasty.”
“That’s how it seems to me as well,” Laurentius agreed.
“The city even put up some sort of shed for them. Before that they were just hanging about outside the city walls and wailing all the time. It was a horrible sight. Every morning some citizen would find a young child or woman outside his door, starved to death. The ones that are close to death have such a craving for bread that they start wailing in that ghastly way, begging for so much as a pin-sized crumb. But you must never give them any. As soon as they get their hands on a bit of bread and eat it, they drop down dead. I’ve been horrified to witness a twelve-year-old lad chewing greedily on his own fingers and moaning: ‘Oh, I’m so hungry, so hungry!’ When I eventually gave him a bit of bread he grabbed hold of it like a crazed thing, scoffed it down, and then collapsed onto the floor and passed away, just like that. That sort of experience gives one quite a fright, of course. I think the most wretched cases get food tokens from the city, and they’re not allowed within the city walls any more,” Magnus explained, pushing the long locks of his wig back over his shoulder as he spoke.
“Tokens?” Laurentius asked.
“Anyone who is entitled to support from the city gets a tin token which they can exchange for bread. Of course, no one wants to see women and orphans suffering. But I’ve already heard stories about the stronger lads stealing the tokens, and some people are even saying that they’re being forged. It’s a really nasty business. Strapping big men beating up women and threatening their children. Those food handouts are a bad idea: they just bring more beggars and villains here—the city can’t feed all of them anyway. Who knows what will happen next? They might start rioting, or even bring the plague with them.”
Finishing his explanation, Magnus shrugged his shoulders and carried on picking fish off the bones.
THURSDAY AFTERNOON
THEY ENTERED A ROOM which was almost as bare as a barracks. At first Laurentius thought it might be a hay barn or a storeroom, and it took a few moments before he realized that they had entered an ad hoc theatre, which had been set up in a converted inn room. It clearly had no hopes of competing with Bollhuset or the London theatres, but it nevertheless seemed to aspire to being a theatre of sorts. There was a handsome carved music stand, and some chairs for the musicians positioned in the centre of the room. Two large candelabra, each with a number of arms, were positioned either side of the stage, casting a honey-golden glow around their vicinity. But the guttering light of the smelly tallow candles only reached as far as the front rows, and towards the back of the room the light was dim, so that one could only just make out people’s faces and the glint of the occasional wig, propped up high on their wearers’ heads. Laurentius found himself a place in the almost pitch black of the back row, and stood and watched as the young men in embroidered overcoats entered and inspected the handwritten programme nailed to the door, trying to keep their fancy clothes as far away from the walls as possible. At shoulder height there were stripped logs with planks nailed to them, and they had turned dark and smudgy from the smoke c
oming from the fireplace, which vented straight into the room. There was evidently a crack in the roof somewhere, as rainwater was seeping along the rafters and dripping down onto the earth floor. Although the earth itself had been trampled hard, the straw covering it was wet and slippery in places. The innkeeper was seeing to it that everyone had a large tankard of strong beer to drink, almost forcing the mugs into the students’ hands. It may have been a theatre, but that was no reason to miss an opportunity to make some money. Laurentius had taken a mug of beer along with everyone else, and now he was trying to read the sign to try to work out what kind of performance was in store. But he couldn’t recognize a single name.
“Are they local composers?” he asked his neighbour.
“Why do you ask?” his neighbour queried.
“All the names look unfamiliar to me,” Laurentius said.
“Are you serious? You don’t know anyone at all?” His neighbour sounded surprised.
“Should I?” Laurentius asked.
“Well I don’t know...” His neighbour tailed off.
The performers arrived in almost complete silence, looking slightly nervous, and sat down on the chairs placed against the wall, their backs straight, their hands on their knees, staring straight ahead, seeming somehow lifeless, like sculptures. Laurentius recognized Peter as he stepped out in front of the audience and made a toast to the performers and visitors, which was followed by a long verse in Latin. Laurentius guessed that it must have been Peter’s own work since the imagery was quite laboured and seemed to follow assiduously a formula learnt at university. But there were nevertheless a couple of witty wordplays in it, and a rather neat verse structure, which together made for a fairly pleasant, refined result. Laurentius laughed along with the others and waved his handkerchief in the air to show his appreciation. Peter gave a nod of acknowledgement to the audience, and briefly introduced the plot of the play. It turned out to be an allegorical piece: Orpheus loses his beloved to the underworld and returns to the land of the living, downcast and lonely. He starts to follow the god of art and learning, Apollo, which angers the bacchant followers of Dionysus, who set upon him and tear him to pieces. The Muses appear; they gather up Orpheus’ limbs and bury the poet in his beloved Leibethra. In death, Orpheus is finally reunited with his wife Eurydice. The audience was evidently supposed to understand that the plot represented the academy being shut during the war and then reopened as home of the Muses. But it could also have been an allegory on the theme of moving the academy to Pärnu because conditions in Dorpat were unamenable, due to the constant conflicts with the local soldiers.
Laurentius smiled at the comparison of His Majesty’s soldiers with the rowdy bacchants. It certainly wasn’t very patriotic, but unfortunately it was often close to the truth.
The conversation in the hall died down, and people started looking expectantly at the performers. The compère made a gesture and one of them stood up and walked confidently but a little stiffly to the centre of the stage. He looked at the sheet music for a moment, and then lifted a lute up to his chest and started playing. Laurentius was pretty sure that he had not heard the melody before—it was old-fashioned, but distinctive and harrowing. He wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about music, but he guessed the piece had been influenced by the works of Dowland. It bore some similarity to the Lachrimae pavane, and was intended to convey Orpheus’ melancholy and sorrow. Everyone listened attentively, raptly even. But as the act went on and on Laurentius started feeling strangely distant from it all. The music seemed to grow quieter and quieter just as the stench in his nostrils grew ever stronger. The bitter beer had not washed away the vile rottenness of the fish, and now it seemed as if the music had somehow revived the taste and was drawing it from his tongue deeper into his nose and his head. He felt sleepy from the loss of blood. Clearly the bloodletting had not been a good idea at all.
“Hopeless,” he whispered to himself.
The candles were starting to gutter and give off dark smoke; it was getting harder and harder to breathe in the low-ceilinged room, and he could feel a scraping sensation at the back of his throat. As Laurentius struggled to control another fit of coughing he cursed himself and mechanistic philosophy. It looked as if no good had come of following that advice about bloodletting; it had only caused his fever to flare up again. But now he had to try to focus.
After the act had finished two students went round trimming the wicks with long scissors, but the candles carried on smouldering. It looked like they must be the cheapest sort available. The musicians left the stage, and three young men appeared in front of the audience. One of them started singing jauntily, while the other two performed a dance in unison. It was clear that they were trying to present an operatic scene in the spirit of those staged by Molière and Lully in France. The scale was of course several times smaller, but one could not deny that fashionable theatre had reached these parts quite quickly. It was certainly not what Laurentius was expecting. Whenever anyone elsewhere spoke of Dorpat they would always mention that the town was on the distant periphery of the Swedish empire, that the locals were uneducated and ill-natured, and that they spoke a language which was incomprehensible to anyone else. And the situation at the academy was not supposed to be much better.
“Just the place for someone like me to come and lie low for a while,” Laurentius had thought to himself at the time.
So when the Swedish state had granted him a stipend to come and study in Dorpat, the decision was made. This was the best place for him to wait quietly for the scandals to blow over before going back to Leiden.
But now it turned out that Professor Dimberg had read Newton and Boyle, and the students were even staging an opera. One could assume that the music he heard at the beginning was written locally or at least somewhere in the neighbouring region, but it was in no way inferior to the English original. He tried to immerse himself in the scene in front of him.
The dancing students seemed to have a significantly worse mastery of their craft than the musicians. In the flickering candlelight the young men’s jolly prancing seemed somehow comical and frivolous. Laurentius assumed that they were supposed to represent Orpheus’ male lovers, with whom he had his fun after he lost Eurydice, his true sacral love, to the underworld by looking back and killing her with one glance. Succumbing therefore to carnal love. But no, thought Laurentius, shaking his head. That would definitely have been too bold, and not at all in the spirit of the Lutheranism which was supposed to hold sway in the Swedish universities.
It was quite possible that the dancing men were supposed to represent the friends and companions who had tried to console Orpheus after he lost Eurydice, but one couldn’t help suspecting that an alternative interpretation was also being suggested. Homosexuality had become almost fashionable in both the English and French royal households, and Laurentius was pretty sure that if the opera had already reached here, then those kinds of influences would have done so too. In any case this was yet another indication that the place was not nearly as provincial as he had thought. In some of the German universities, theatre was banned outright.
He stood up on tiptoe and looked around the hall. The other young men were standing and watching the play with appreciative looks on their faces, and there was almost no one chatting or being rowdy. There were a couple of students sitting at a table right at the back of the room and playing dice, but even they seemed somehow quiet and well behaved.
Laurentius took a swig of beer. He was finding the whole experience genuinely interesting.
The performers swapped round: some of the audience members clapped; others waved their handkerchiefs approvingly, and the conversation picked up a bit.
Laurentius could not help acknowledging the effort that had gone into putting on the performance. The result was in the spirit of English theatre, where Apollo and Hyacinthus’ or King William of Orange and Arnold van Keppel’s unconventional relationships were often made fun of, but never maliciously or moralizingly—more
in a gentle, light-hearted vein.
He smiled and clapped with the others. But his body was racked with fever, and anxiety was welling in his chest after having gone so long without food. His forearm was aching where the blood had bled from him. He had to try to put those things out of his mind. The beer was good, and the mood of the company was contagious. Theatre was also known to be one of the best cures for melancholy. He had been to the theatre in Germany, Holland, Sweden, and seen plenty of performances which were far inferior to this one here in Dorpat.
“Encore! Encore!” he called out with the others as the second act came to an end.
In the midst of the hubbub Peter stood up on his chair, and the hollering got even louder.
“It’s still early for an encore; the story is not yet finished. Our hero is lonely and despondent; he is yearning for his lover. But it’s no good for a man to be alone: only wretchedness and despair can come of that. This was just a start, a foundation, from which we will now move on.”
Peter gestured for everyone to quieten down, and then read out a hexametric poem in Greek, taking great care over the scansion. From that it became clear that now was the turn of the maenads, whose grisly task it was to rip off the poor bard’s head. The musicians started playing again, but more vigorously this time, and together with the lute one could now hear a flute and even bagpipes. The wild, low-pitched droning sound suited the impassioned rage of the crime which was soon to be committed.
Some figures wrapped in white robes, with long flapping skirts, rushed onto the stage, and Laurentius leant forward to see them better. These were the younger students, and their childlike features were tensed, their cheeks were daubed black, and they had tangled old wigs fixed on their heads. Their bare feet stepped across the straw which had been strewn over the earth floor, and they thronged around Orpheus, whirling about and crying out. There were wreaths of woven willow twigs in their hair, which given the local climate were probably the closest available substitutes for olive branches.
The Willow King Page 13