The Willow King

by Meelis Friedenthal

  “Come, come with us,” they sang. “Leave your cold, stern Apollo behind and return to Dionysus. Only with him will you experience true joy and elation.”

  Laurentius watched them, feeling cold shivers run down him. The young men seemed very familiar, as if he had seen them somewhere before. They were dressed in rags, and they moved about jerkily, supposedly depicting crazy Greek women, although they bore more of a resemblance to starving peasant girls or witches. Their hair was hanging loose, and they had crazed looks in their eyes, as befitted the role.

  “They look like vagabonds, don’t they?” Laurentius commented to his neighbour.

  “They certainly do,” his neighbour mumbled in response. “But those are still the bacchants; you’re yet to see the Muses. They are definitely more respectable-looking.”

  Laurentius nodded. He knew that the Muses would bring Orpheus’ dismembered limbs to Leibethra, at which point the nightingales would start to sing overhead. That could be seen as an allusion to Dorpat’s Emajõgi river, which was famous for its nightingales.

  “I have always found the maenads rather horrific,” Laurentius answered with a grin.

  “Those vagrants?” his neighbour said, waving sceptically in the direction of the young men jumping about on the stage, and feigning surprise. “Come off it.”

  “Not necessarily those ones. In general,” Laurentius answered.

  His neighbour shrugged. “To be honest we’ve got more of those tramps and vagrants than we can cope with. The outskirts of town are completely full of them now, and the guard has been reinforced at the gates, to stop them coming and loitering about town. But they still get through somehow; I just don’t know what should be done about it. Anyway, as far as I understand, Peter couldn’t persuade a single woman to take on the bacchant roles. It would have looked a bit more respectable, I suppose.”

  Laurentius nodded in agreement as he watched the prancing ragamuffins, feeling detached and intoxicated from the effects of the beer and his fever. He imagined one of them holding the cage with his dead parakeet in it as they danced clumsily around. Bowing and singing, long willow branches flailing in their hands.

  Laurentius rubbed his forehead and his temples, and tried to focus on the maenads. They had started whirling around Orpheus and clawing at him like dogs setting on an elk. All the stiltedness and silliness of the scene had gone. The ragamuffins clustered closer together; an old fencing dummy appeared from somewhere, and then they started to rip off the head which had been sewn onto it.

  “Hey!” the public yelled animatedly.

  The ragamuffins lifted the head up high, and the brown, curly wig which was supposed to be Orpheus’ hair looked chillingly real and abject in the dim light of the room. Laurentius recalled the executions he had witnessed. The executioner had eventually lifted the head up so that everyone could see the face of the despised person whose soul had just departed, together with the blood which was trickling down the green knoll. But what happened to the body? Orpheus’ body was ripped into pieces; the intoxicated women gorged on his flesh; the blood flowed down their chins and onto their chests, and they washed it down with red wine.

  Laurentius had seen bodies being tossed into heaps and burned, the flesh charring and the hair smouldering in the flames. And he could remember the stench...

  Laurentius started coughing; his shoulders shook; he felt a stabbing pain in his stomach.

  THURSDAY EVENING

  ONCE THE PERFORMANCE WAS OVER Magnus offered to introduce Laurentius to the actors. After the last scene had been repeated twice and the final ovations had died down, they approached the motley band of young men sitting at one of the tables. They were dressed in jackets, without neckerchiefs and with open shirt collars, clearly trying to imitate the style of dress common among English actors, and they were discussing something heatedly among themselves, gesticulating wildly. They smiled in response to Magnus’ convoluted introduction and patted him on the shoulder as they acquainted themselves in a disorderly fashion. Peter shook Laurentius’ hand amiably and, evidently for form’s sake, enquired how his examination had gone. Laurentius took the pale, long-stemmed clay pipe which was offered to him, and started puffing at the tobacco together with the others. Smoking was generally seen as a vile habit, and students with Pietist inclinations would be likely to make their opposition known to it at every opportunity. But in this company it seemed to be just another part of everyday student life.

  “I’d like to work it up into a proper full-length tragic opera,” Peter started to say. “Add some Monteverdi-style opening scenes, and of course the final part with the Muses needs to be better brought out.”

  “You and your yearning for Italy! No one puts on Monteverdi these days. English comedies are far superior, that’s for sure,” someone objected. Laurentius recalled that he had been introduced as Matthias. “The cathartic effect of comedies is significantly greater too. Of course I mean decent comedies—we can’t include those German fairground farces in that category.”

  The company burst out laughing, and Laurentius recalled what the barber had said about catharsis. “I think comedy is actually a pretty complicated affair. It’s easy to find that the deeper meaning of a piece is replaced by below-the-belt burlesque. Many contemporary English comedies are extremely coarse,” he said, butting into the conversation.

  “That is often the case,” Matthias agreed with a vague wave of his hand. “But I’m talking about the basic principle. As we know, in comedies everything tends to go badly for the protagonist in the beginning, but it all works out in the end—that kind of development purifies the soul and leaves the audience with a nice uplifting feeling. Tragedies, however, make one gloomy.”

  “Tragedies are instructive,” Peter explained. They remind us that even when someone is experiencing life’s greatest happiness, fate can lead to his ruination. The purpose of theatre is not to create pleasant feelings, but to educate the public.”

  “But how are all those gloomy stories about the underworld and maenads supposed to educate people?” asked Matthias, unable to resist challenging Peter. “What’s more, there is so much wretchedness and strife all around us these days that it’s hard to see why it needs to be depicted on the stage as well.”

  “Matthias, you rogue!” Peter exclaimed. “Resorting to such underhand tricks to make your case! Well, all right then, I’ll give you an answer. There is indeed a lot of wretchedness and strife in the world, but it has no broader meaning to it. It is just chance, unrelated episodes. Only the theatre, and tragedy in particular, is capable of binding these episodes together. Just as a book’s cover binds the loose leaves into a single whole.” At that Peter jumped up onto his feet and started to declaim in a loud voice:

  “In its depth I saw ingathered, bound by love in one single volume, that which is dispersed in leaves throughout the universe: substances and accidents and their relations, as though fused together in such a way that what I tell is but a simple light.”

  The others nodded and chuckled knowingly, and even Matthias smiled.

  “Of course you know that Dante, whom you are quoting, named his work The Divine Comedy?” Matthias said.

  “Touché,” Peter exclaimed affectedly, and rolled his eyes. “But today all the divine comedies have been replaced with human ones, and only tragedy has the depth and the scope to rise above the buffoonery.”

  At that the academy’s French and dance teacher Mr Bazancourt, who had been sitting quietly with them up until then, livened up and started cursing his pupils. “Too little attention is paid to French in these parts. And no one wants to study dance either—they’re all too busy fencing!”

  “Exactly!” Matthias agreed emphatically. “In order to stage an opera properly there must be movement. Dance can lighten the burden from our souls and transport our thoughts to other places.”

  The company then started a muddled discussion on the good and bad aspects of contemporary playwriting and the lousy French skills of the students
at Dorpat. After that, the conversation moved to the classic question of the unity of place, action and time. And this inevitably led to a discussion of opera as a total spectacle which was capable of uniting all other art forms.

  But all those words just slid past Laurentius’ ears. He sat there for a while longer, watching the students arguing with a sleepy expression on his face, but eventually he made his excuses and got up to leave. By now the stench of sooty candles and the bitter tobacco burning in the clay pipes had become so strong that he couldn’t stay in the room any longer. No one had trimmed the candlewicks since the end of the performance, and now they were smouldering like shoemaker’s thread dipped in pitch. The smell mixed with the rotten stench which had already been wafting into his nostrils, creating a hideous new combination which he could no longer stand.

  “Oh, in my view song is even more important—don’t you think so, Laurentius?” Peter yelled after him.

  Laurentius managed a quick wave in response before stepping out into the damp darkness. “Music is the true art form of the Muses!” Peter called out.

  Outside, it was still raining and the lamp above the inn door was casting long shadows against the dripping trees. Laurentius sat down on a bench under the eaves of the building and stretched his legs out in front of him. The fresh air outside made him feel dizzy and light-headed. He rested his head against the wooden wall and closed his eyes, and he could make out indistinct sounds coming from inside—bursts of laughter, and the chinking of beer mugs. Drops of rainwater were trickling down from the eaves, forming puddles round the building, like a small moat. The cold wind blew his hair onto his face, but he didn’t raise his hand to push it aside. Laurentius was thinking of Orpheus’ hair, and how the maenads had tousled it. He remembered how they had ripped off his head and gnawed his body into pieces. In what had otherwise been an endearingly amateur production this episode had succeeded in being gruesomely true to life, and had caught him completely off guard.

  Laurentius shook his head and shifted his legs restlessly. He felt sick and on edge again. He should be inside in the warmth, but he knew he wouldn’t enjoy the chatter in there; he wouldn’t even be able to focus on it properly. He probably would have just got caught up in something silly. The most sensible thing would be to go to his lodgings, but he felt strangely listless and apathetic. As he coughed, recent images appeared in his mind, which combined with the apparitions which his fantasy created. He tried to think about his parakeet, but that just made him grimace. Instead, the image of the cage and the ragamuffin reared up before his eyes.

  That old man had been storming about just like those maenads. Starvation had caused him to bite people, tear at their clothes and leap about all over the place. If there had been more of his sort about maybe they would have ripped the tanner’s lad to bits and gobbled him down too, gnawed his limbs and his head from his body. Laurentius started to think that despite his odd views on witchcraft and familiars, the tanner may have been right about the old man. It was a good thing that the lad had managed to strike him dead with his pole. Who knows what could have happened otherwise.

  But had he really been responsible for that old man’s death? He had already been behaving oddly up by the barn, so he may have just been crazy from hunger, in which case Laurentius would have had absolutely nothing to do with what followed. Had the old man really eaten his parakeet? Did he really pluck out her feathers and gobble her down like that?

  Laurentius couldn’t bear thinking about it any longer.

  He tried to imagine the Muses dancing at Leibethra, the nightingales singing, and greenery all around. That had been the final scene of the performance. But it had been much weaker theatrically, and much less realistic than the frenzy of the maenads. An image of a clearing with brown grass and a low, grey sky appeared in front of his eyes. He was twelve years old, dressed in worn-out breeches, with no boots of his own to wear. He stood there barefoot on the cold ground, and a man in a black robe approached from amid the sinewy trees. He was wearing a greyish-white crown on his head.

  Laurentius had looked in the man’s direction, his eyes full of turmoil and shame. The executioner had wiped his sword on some blades of grass, and the court attendant said something. He had looked into those eyes for some time, and he had seen madness and grief there. The fever had been washing over him in waves, just as it was now. Someone had grabbed him by the shoulders; he had resisted, and one of the peasants had slapped him in the face. His lip had started bleeding. The blood had been red, like pomegranate juice.

  Laurentius started coughing and he felt a grating pain in the back of his throat. His stomach was contorted with cramp; he had a sour taste in his mouth and stinging pain on his tongue. He needed something to eat; he was so hungry. And something to drink, to rinse the taste away.

  He remembered the basket of fruit, the bread and the wine from that morning. Had it been a vision? He had told Dimberg that he did not believe in spirits and apparitions, but the images had seemed so real. The food and drink may have been nothing more than a muddle of wishful thinking and the phantasmagorical visions of his weary, feverish brain. He had to try to stay lucid. But it really had seemed as if someone were there in the room with him. He had seen a face with a bright white halo around it...

  “Eh?” a voice asked from directly above him.

  Laurentius came to with a start, and looked up in amazement. Standing there in front of him was a woman whom he had never seen in his life before. A moment earlier he seemed to have been looking at a very different scene. A pallid face, black hair, translucent skin. A basket full of honeycomb and fruit. He had seen it all very clearly in his mind’s eye, just like that morning. If a similar sight had appeared from the darkness right now it wouldn’t have surprised him at all. He had been expecting that, maybe even hoping for it to happen.

  “Eh?” Laurentius blurted in response and he gawped at the dirty, flushed face looking down at him.

  With her rough cloth skirt, which was sodden from the rain, her bare feet, her tangled hair and the wild look in her eyes, the woman didn’t resemble his phantasm at all. Laurentius was so amazed that he even forgot to avert his gaze, and he just sat there gawping at the woman.

  “Eh?” the apparition said in response, and she beckoned him over with her finger.

  Laurentius stayed sitting where he was, smoothing his hair with one hand, unable to think of anything to say. Then he realized that he was still staring straight into the woman’s eyes, and he quickly looked down.

  “Damn,” Laurentius hissed between his teeth. That was not meant to happen.

  “Fucken,” the woman proposed in broken German. “Das he fucken?”

  “I’m sorry,” Laurentius muttered, still confused. “Please go away.”

  The woman mumbled something in a plaintive voice and tugged at Laurentius’ overcoat again.

  “No!” said Laurentius, who was angry by now. “What sort of liberties do you think you are taking?”

  “Come, come,” she said, continuing to tug at him.

  Eventually Laurentius stood up and followed the woman. He wasn’t sure why exactly, although it may have been because he felt guilty for looking into her eyes for so long. They walked across a muddy square, past some stone houses, and left the town through the Russian Gate. The guards seemed to pay no attention to them at all as they passed. The woman had a fiery look in her eyes, and her movements were stiff and jerky, but she walked on with a sense of purpose. She clearly knew exactly where she wanted to go. Walking briskly, they arrived at the riverbank fortifications. From there a path laid with birch planks led across the blackened lowlands. Laurentius had already been there yesterday morning, and he recognized the willow trees which he had climbed to gather bark. That was the spot where the peasant men had been standing, watching him.

  For some reason he felt he needed to explain something, to justify himself to the woman. So he pointed in the direction of the willow trees and said simply “fever”.

  B
ut the woman didn’t stop to look; she just beckoned Laurentius on, and they headed deeper and deeper into the shabby outskirts of town, moving inexorably onwards, as if in a dream.

  Laurentius tried to focus on what was happening. Yesterday morning... yesterday morning Dimberg had told him to familiarize himself with a note about student life and customs, from which he had learnt that it was compulsory for all students to be in their lodgings by nine in the evening, otherwise the soldiers were entitled to escort them to the detention cells. That would certainly be an unpleasant experience, which he had to try his best to avoid. Laurentius attempted to come to a standstill, but as was often the case when he was dreaming he couldn’t control his limbs; it was as if his legs were obeying the woman, not him.

  He rummaged in his breast pocket for his watch. There was still a little time left before nine.

  “Fucken, fucken,” the woman repeated, and beckoned him on.

  He made another attempt to stand still, but the creature tugging at him was unexpectedly strong, and nearly succeeded in pulling him down to the ground.

  Laurentius shoved his hand into his breast pocket and pulled a small coin from his purse.

  “There, have that...” he said to the woman.

  But she took one look at the money and burst into tears. Then she fell onto her knees on the muddy ground, and grabbed hold of Laurentius’ high boots, sobbing uncontrollably.

  “Now, now,” Laurentius said, trying to console her.

  Evidently this was one of those girls who had been let go from the farm where she worked. The girls were taken on to gather and thresh what was left on the fields after the rotten summer, but the miserable harvest had resembled caraway seeds or mouse droppings more than grain, and the farmers could hardly hope to feed their families through winter, let alone the farmhands too. So she had been forced to come to town to look for food.