Laurentius squatted down to look at the small sleeping figure. The girl opened her eyes slightly and sighed.
“The king,” she whispered barely audibly.
FRIDAY EVENING
THE COLD HAD ARRIVED SUDDENLY, and by the time Laurentius arrived at Sjöbergh’s the earlier rain had given way to fat, wet snowflakes. At first they melted as they touched the ground, forming a thick, dirty sludge under people’s feet and the horses’ hooves, but as the weather got colder and colder the snow coated the mud in a thick white layer. The wind had picked up and was rattling the windows, blowing white flakes against the panes, down people’s collars and into their faces.
Laurentius pushed the basket of wood closer towards the fireplace and tossed a couple more logs onto the fire.
The wood smouldered and hissed as it released its dampness into the room. The languid flame didn’t give off enough heat to be felt more than a couple of steps from the fireplace. But when Laurentius squatted down in front of the hearth, shaking from the cold, he immediately started to feel hot and uncomfortable. He could hear the stone chimney breast crackle, and the thick grey smoke and warm air disappearing up the chimney with a whoosh. As he bent down to position the logs so that they would catch better, he felt his face flush bright red like a drunkard’s and his skin smarted, although that may have just been his fever rising again. The temperature in the room oscillated continually between hot and cold. The warmth spread outwards from the fireplace in concentric circles, like ripples around a stone tossed into the water. They grew weaker a couple of steps from the centre, forming little ringlets as they collided with various obstacles, covering the small floor space of the room unevenly. The external walls of the building should have held that warmth in, deflecting it back into the room, coddling it, nurturing it. But they did not. They were made of plaster, powder—dust which had set firm. They were a bridge between warmth and cold, a bridge between inhabitable and uninhabitable spaces.
Laurentius rocked backwards and forwards on his heels.
He had lit the fire himself, without calling for the maid, struggling with the birch bark kindling with hands which were stiff from cold, growing gradually more frustrated with how long it was taking. But calling for her would only have made things worse. He would have had to make conversation, exchange pleasantries. He had no time for those kinds of formalities now.
Laurentius sat down at the table and rested his head in his hands.
As soon as he had seen the woman’s corpse on the stretcher by the caves he had been sure that his melancholy would deepen. He had felt fear, almost panic. Looking at the corpse he had realized that he was no different to those people who lived in irrational fear of witchery, who were gripped by the talons of crazed superstition, who could only be saved by education. He had been one of them once; he had also been afraid. As he stood there by the cave he had sensed that they were being watched by a king, wearing a crown and a cape. And all the people there had looked as if they were painted onto paper: in small, two-dimensional, unnatural colours. As if he were looking at a picture of which he was also a part. Only the king had seemed real.
Blood had been dripping onto the blades of grass. But then Pastor Mellinck had arrived and spoken about writers, debated theories and methodologies, and complained about financial strictures. He had provided a logical explanation for everything, proved that there was nothing unusual or supernatural going on. And he had added that due to crop failure Forselius’ noble initiative might come to nothing. Laurentius had nodded, and as they shook hands Mellinck had said that he should come to visit without fail. Laurentius had felt like he was at a Sunday service, where the priest had given his benediction after Mass. He had felt his anxiety slowly subside, giving way to a momentary shimmering in front of his eyes, before clarity had dawned. As he had headed towards town it had started to snow. He knew now that only study could save him. He proceeded to Sjöbergh’s house hurriedly, even eagerly. Almost joyfully.
The housekeeper had directed him up the steps to a slightly overheated study. All the books had matching leather binding, with raised bands visible on the exterior, and there was a piece of parchment stuck onto every spine. The abbreviated titles of the books had been inscribed onto the parchment in handsome uniform handwriting. In the case of the multiple-volume works this was a fairly long sequence of letters. There may have been as many as two hundred books on the shelves which lined the walls of the room, mostly fairly modern publications. Sjöbergh had regarded him thoughtfully and even apologized, after a fashion, for his behaviour that morning. He had explained that excessive acquiescence could kill a discussion dead, and that he was expecting the disputation to provoke a stimulating debate. He had no doubt that a well-educated young man like Laurentius was capable of writing a very good thesis, and he planned to give him a fairly free hand.
“Cartesian interpretations accommodate our contemporary understanding of physics much better; Aristotle is outmoded now,” said the professor with an expression which suggested that he regretted that fact. “But Descartes’s theories of the soul have received a great deal of critical attention. Make sure to address them also.”
Laurentius had nodded. After some brief discussion with the professor and having listened to his advice he decided to take just three books with him. The first one was naturally Aristotle’s On the Soul; then the second volume of Alsted’s encyclopaedia, which dealt with pneumatics and psychology in general, and the third book was Descartes’s Passiones animae.
He had been quite determined to start writing his disputation that very evening. Full of nervous excitement about the prospect of getting home and starting it, he was already drafting arguments and planning the structure in his mind. It might be what he needed to finally comprehend his own condition. Maybe it would even give him some sort of explanation for everything else which had been happening. He had bid a polite farewell to Sjöbergh, trying not to reveal what a hurry he was in, and stepped outside, straight into a gust of white flakes. It was a fine, fresh autumn evening, and there was a whirling flurry of snow falling. He took a better grip of the heavy tomes which he had bundled in cloths, wrapped his coat around him and hurried homewards, feeling happy. He had the books, now he wanted to get down to work. Now he had a clear target in sight, like an arrow fired from a bow.
His head had first started spinning when he squatted down in front of the fire, hurriedly trying to get the hissing logs to catch. As he snatched up the logs he had grazed his knuckles against the stone fireplace, drawing blood, and now he felt a stinging pain. The fire seemed not to want to light, and as much as he blew and blew, the logs would not catch. The acrid smoke reminded him that the vile, rotten stench had still not gone anywhere. He saw the scene from the cave, the episode from his dream, where he had been squatting down in front of damp logs, trying to get them to light with wisps of straw. There had been a crow there, or maybe a magpie… For some reason he started worrying about the sick girl again. His fever stealthily started to rise, and he grew ever more anxious.
“No, I must get down to work!” he told himself.
He grabbed hold of one of the books determinedly, and pulled it towards him. Alsted’s encyclopaedia provided a good overview of the relevant theories; it was systematically organized, and quite well written too. He decided it would be worth his using a similar structure. Laurentius found himself a sheet of paper to make notes, and tried to concentrate. The book was large and heavy, but the script itself was tiny and faded, and it hurt his eyes to read it, as if his eyeballs were being scratched with a rasp. Scraping, irritating, distracting. The printer had clearly tried to fit as much text onto each page as possible, but due to the small typeface all the details had run together, and the text was quivering in the flickering candlelight, making it even harder to read. Laurentius shook his head in frustration, and leant closer towards the text. But the words and characters remained distant and disjointed, as if he were looking at them through a fog. Sometimes they were blurred,
but then suddenly they would come swimming towards him from out of the whitish mist, acquiring razor-sharp definition. Despite all his efforts the sentences simply would not come together into a single whole; they were empty, voiceless, hollow phrases which were devoid of any meaning, and they just kept slipping out of his grasp. The yellowed, porous paper of the encyclopaedia started glowing in the candlelight, dominating his entire field of vision with its luminescence; then his eyes started smarting, and he had to close them. He was aware of a low humming sound, a strange unsettling drone, breaking the earlier oppressive silence.
“Hopeless,” Laurentius said to himself.
He put the volume to one side and looked out of the window, but he could still see the lines of text quivering before his eyes; he could almost make out some of the individual letters. He could see white snowflakes whirling through the night air. He breathed in. Then once again. In and out. His breath almost looked like a fog floating in front of him. He noticed a bad taste in his mouth again. The snowflakes were striking the windowpane with a gentle pinging sound, and the window frames were rattling in the draught.
“What’s going to happen?” Laurentius asked himself.
The feeling of uneasy torpor was becoming more oppressive. He felt completely alone, helpless and vulnerable. His earlier enthusiasm for the disputation had totally disappeared.
“Clodia…”
Laurentius felt as if he were no longer quite present in his room, as if he were physically located in his lodgings, but somehow differently from usual. Almost as if he were dreaming and separated from reality, lying with his eyes shut, surrendering to oblivion. Was his consciousness no longer capable of distinguishing between reality and imagination? All the colours in his room seemed very pale; even the candle flame was somehow a cold, sterile white colour. Was that reality? Then, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed something black moving across the pale wall. A spider. He watched it, thinking that it must have been crawling there for some time already, behind his back, beyond his field of vision. It occurred to him how often that must happen. Things are right there, all around, but you do not perceive them; you are completely unaware of their existence. You only notice them when they make themselves known, when they start moving, buzzing and hopping. But where were they the rest of the time? Did they actually exist? When my head is resting on the pillow and someone comes to stand beside my bed, watches me and pats me on the head so tenderly that I do not feel it—has that actually happened? If my eyes are closed, then I do not know.
Laurentius went up to the wall and observed the spider. It was moving somewhere, towards an unknown goal.
“This is now the company you must keep,” he whispered to the arachnid. “Cold and black.”
Or maybe it was just a mechanical being, of the sort that Descartes had described. A being which had no free will, no soul, no humours, just an impulse for forward movement. Which felt no pain, which knew nothing of good or evil. An arrow fired from a bow. He watched the spider busily going about its affairs, and he hoped that that was indeed how things were. But the insect didn’t care what he thought; it just continued on its way, eventually reaching the window and crawling onto the window frame. There beyond the window he could see an expanse of darkness. Cold and black.
Laurentius shook his head. No, that spider was no company of his. The company he would keep were the birds up in the sky, light and radiant.
He pushed the window open and leant out. The crisp, cold air helped him to focus his thoughts, and he gulped down lungfuls of it. It was slightly acrid, but still damp and fresh.
He had to balance the heat of his fever somehow. He watched as puffs of steam flew from his mouth, confirming that he was still breathing, still alive. He stood in complete silence, slowly inhaling the cool air, watching the little shreds of mist flying from his mouth and then dissipating, disappearing together with the soft glow of candlelight into the promised land of darkness beyond.
Was his breath like that spider scurrying across the wall? Always present, but seeming not to exist until the moment it made itself known. A moment earlier the very same breath which had disappeared into the darkness had been inside his lungs, in contact with his blood, animating his body. That breath would now be absorbed into the damp air of night and became a part of it; it would continue to flow in and out of his lungs even as his spirit and his reason became more and more dulled by the advance of evening. Even when he had collapsed into bed, when he had fallen asleep, into the void of memories. So was the breath which flowed in and out of him life itself, that which made him human? If one raised a mirror to it, the glass surface would display the condensed vapour, the warmth of his body, its damp humours. That was life, ever present. Like logs hissing in the fireplace, demonstrating the existence of something intangible. In the same way that the reflection in a mirror represented the existence of a person, a painting represented a person’s face and body, and the letters on the paper represented the voice. Some form of existence was being realized. Always alien to itself, always uncertain.
Laurentius could see some lone lights flickering faintly in the darkness, candles which people had lit to mark their homes. To guard their warmth, and keep strangers at bay. He felt very acutely that he was a stranger in this town. Everyone was a stranger there.
He sighed.
The fever was to blame for all this. He had to try to get better, to keep his reason clear. There was nothing left for it but to take the spirit he got from the apothecary and the willow bark he had gathered by the river. He could not allow his fever to get any worse, and the willow bark and the spirit were now the only remedies available to him. Maybe what he really needed was aurum potabile, but even Dimberg didn’t know how to make that.
“Where is one supposed to find it?” he mumbled to himself. But he knew that it was just the unattainable dream of alchemists, not a remedy tested by medical science.
He found himself thinking about the sick girl, and the vision of the king. He picked up his knapsack to look for the bottle of spirit, and as he rummaged through his things he came across a slightly dusty, worse-for-wear bread roll lying at the bottom of the bag. He smiled involuntarily.
“Of course,” he said to himself.
It was the roll Clodia had given him. He had not eaten properly for days now, and as a result he had been weak from hunger the whole time. There was no way that he could recover his health while he was in such a feeble state. He would have to force himself to eat, whatever the food tasted like. Bloodletting had broken down his body’s defences; now he had to rebuild his organism afresh. How had Dimberg explained the chemistry behind it? Laurentius picked up the bread roll and tossed it in the palm of his hand.
“Very well,” he said, and bit into it.
It was no surprise that it tasted as bitter as wormwood. But he managed to swallow down a couple of large mouthfuls, if only to get the unpleasant substance out of his mouth as quickly as possible. After he had swallowed it, however, it brought a sweetness to his stomach. As if he had just eaten honey.
NIGHT
EVENING HAS ARRIVED AGAIN. The snow has melted, leaving puddles of muddy water behind. It is a foggy, rainy evening, as always in these parts. I am travelling by carriage with my godfather, and we are sitting looking out of the window in silence. The window shutters are almost closed; the windows are smeared, grimy with soot, grease and condensation from the warm breath of the passengers. I have no idea where we are. But the road somehow feels very familiar. I have been here before. The carriage rattles on; fewer and fewer voices are audible from outside, and there are no longer any buildings for the pounding of horses’ hooves to echo back from. Then, suddenly, we have emerged into grey, open land, and we trundle on in silence. Eventually the carriage comes to a stop; my godfather opens the door and I get out. Before me is a painfully bleak expanse of land, the focal point of which is a single house, a few trees with tangled branches growing around it. The house is made of wood, and it is long and narrow like
a coffin, with a low roof. The absence of any sign of human activity around the house is unsettling. No cinders marking where fires have burned, no laundry hung out to dry, no barking dogs, no prowling cats, no horses. None of those everyday things which are inextricably part of human life, without which we cannot survive. I can see sinewy willow trees and sandy knolls with hollows, passageways and caves burrowed into them. As I get out of the carriage my shoulders shudder from the chill air. I feel a little afraid, but I struggle to suppress that feeling. I walk on down the wet gravel road. Thin streaks of fog slide past the knolls, descending down-valley; I feel my bare feet and my trouser legs getting wet as they brush against the blades of grass. No one knows me in these parts, even though I have visited here many times. It is just a place where I come in my dreams again and again. I walk down the weather-worn road which leads directly to the house. There are small puddles of brown water here and there, and in places the carriage wheels have left slimy tracks on the gravel. The sand crunches under my feet as I walk on, trying to avoid the puddles and glancing occasionally at the yawning cave mouths and burrows to my right. I look up at the sky, and the stars are tiny piercing dots, pulsing with the movement of the air, and there are light shreds of cloud stretching across the dark backdrop. The house in front of me is entirely unremarkable: grey walls, which have started to rot, and darkened windows. I walk up to it and stoop to enter through the low doorway. The walls are made from wood shingles, covered in streaky stains from many years of rainfall; the roof is made from branches, and in places flashes of dark-purple night sky are visible through the gaps. I can see a corridor, and either side of it are camp beds made from rounded wooden poles the thickness of a forearm, where people are lying in silence. But I know that without looking. Young and old, men and women. I quietly approach one of the figures lying on the plank bed, and stand there beside him. The man has long grey hair which is falling onto his face; his breathing is regular and stable like someone sleeping, but his eyes are wide open. He looks straight at me, but he says nothing. I smile at him. I know this place. This was how the barn near Aruküla looked, the place where people took refuge from starvation, the building which I once visited in real life. A woman is lying quite close to the man; her face is cut, but she has a smile on her lips. Her foot straps are torn. I know everyone here. I bear the blame for their deaths. I feel such terrible remorse, but there is nothing I can do. Whatever I try to do is overshadowed by a curse which I cannot comprehend, by a nightmarish feeling of guilt about what has happened. I want to be free of all this, but I know very well that it is not possible. I will bear this burden for the rest of my life. I have murdered many times. And not a single person knows.
The Willow King Page 19