The Witch of Cologne (30 page)

Down the garden path, stumbling over an abandoned milking pail and farming tools scattered across the moss, brambles scratching at his legs. To her door. Which is open. Wide open.

Please, good Lord Jesus, spare her life. Take mine if you have to, but not hers, please, my good Lord Jesus.

He flings himself into the cottage, almost slipping on the muddy floor.

‘Ruth! Ruth!’

His voice bounces off the bare walls. Pushing open the bedroom door he sees nothing but an empty pallet in the corner and a bowl of water. Relief and disappointment conflict, twisting in his gut.

Through the window he can see the undulating columns of smoke beyond the forest. Outside again, Detlef gasps for breath in the pungent air. He leans for a second against a stone bench before sprinting off in the direction of the burning ghetto.

The woman stands on the balcony. Her shawl, hanging from her twin-horned hat, billows out in the wind. She clutches a baby in swaddling and stares down at the jeering crowd, her face as white as the plumes of smoke behind her. A tongue of fire shoots out, catching at the edge of the veil. Without a word the woman jumps, flames licking the crown of her hat like a halo. When she hits the cobblestones her head smashes like a ripe plum, her limbs thrown askew like a broken doll. The baby rolls out from her body and is kicked between the legs of the roaring youths.

Ruth stands on the other side of the square behind the mass of strangers—young men, students and craftsmen all in the dress of the Christian. She is screaming, a howl that is inaudible in the cacophony of falling timber, roaring fire and the delighted shouting of the horde. A cry which empties her mind, her body, her memory, of everything except the pain and the horror. A second later she is knocked flat.

‘Don’t move,’ Miriam whispers, her body pinning her to the ground. ‘They will see us.’

Wide-eyed with excitement the midwife’s assistant draws her cloak over both of them, as if by hiding their own eyes they will be concealed from the mob. Ruth lies there for a second, stunned.

‘You spoke! Miriam, you spoke!’

‘This way,’ the girl continues, in the voice of a small child. ‘This way they will never catch us, but if they do they will kill us,’ she giggles.

She has lost her sanity, Ruth thinks. My life now lies in the hands of a mad woman. Panicking, the midwife scrabbles to lift the cloak.

Suddenly the two women are hauled to their feet. For a moment Ruth lashes out blindly, until she hears Detlef’s voice.

‘Stop! Ruth, it is me, Detlef!’

The cloak is pulled off to reveal the canon. He pushes both women behind a dairy cart which is lying on its side in a pooling lake of milk.

‘We must go before it is too late,’ Detlef says urgently into Ruth’s ear.

‘But my father…’

Ruth cranes around just in time to see fire leap across the rafters of the rabbi’s house towards the synagogue. For an instant Rosa’s face appears at the top window, her mouth a silent howl as her fists pound uselessly against the clouding glass before the house explodes into flames.

‘Rosa!’ Ruth shrieks, fighting Detlef as he claps his hand over her mouth.

Behind them Miriam makes a dash back towards the outskirts of the town.

‘Let her go! It is too dangerous to run yet.’ Clutching the flailing woman to his chest Detlef tries to calm her, holding her tightly. ‘We must stay silent and still.’

Ruth, shaking with anger and fear, stares up into his hollow eyes as the strength of his arms draws her back into the possibility of survival.

‘Ruth.’

Elazar’s voice startles both of them. The old man, his hair a wild storm, his kittel stained green with grass and torn with brambles, stands behind them. Immediately Detlef pulls him down behind the cart.

‘Abba! I thought you were in the synagogue,’ Ruth sobs with relief.

‘I was but then it started raining hailstones as big as rocks and the word of fire drew us out to the stream. Your mother is still there, washing her feet, her beautiful feet,’ Elazar announces solemnly, his eyes glazed over.

‘What is that smell? I know that smell.’ He turns towards the burning houses. ‘I must go back to the temple, the lanterns are all lit for Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. The congregation will be expecting me.’

‘But Rabbi, there is a Schülergeleif. Your people are being slaughtered, you cannot go!’ Detlef reaches out to stop him.

‘Daughter, who is this man? He is not one of us. I do not know him.’ The old man hits out with his walking stick.

Ruth grabs it. ‘Abba! They will kill you!’

Standing against a horizon bloody with flame, Elazar smiles calmly. ‘Nonsense, child. I must be with my people. The burning word is calling me.’

Before Detlef can once again attempt to drag him back to safety, a boy at the edge of the rabble turns at the old man’s voice.

‘Look! It’s one of them! One of their devil worshippers!’

Several youths swing around, stunned for a second at the sight of the old rabbi standing erect, slowly lifting his kittel above his head and advancing upon the horde.

‘Behold the wrath of Moses, for he shall come amongst you and strike down all whose hands are awash with the blood of the children of Israel…’

‘Sure, old man! We’ll part for you like the Red Sea itself!’ they jeer, moving aside to let the rabbi walk between them towards the burning synagogue.

‘Your sons and their sons shall wear the wrath of the Israelites upon their foreheads. It shall be a flaming brand for all to see,’ Elazar continues as he walks fearlessly down the opened pathway strewn with broken glass, smoking embers, pieces of smouldering cloth.

He reaches the old oak door and pushes against it with one hand. It falls flat, creating a wooden bridge into the temple. The crowd falls silent as the rabbi steps onto the burning door.

Swinging around, he faces them. ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one! For my children are the children of God, they shall rise from the ashes and sing with the wind. And there shall be a Paradise and in it we shall all be free!’

Several of the young men turn from his fiery gaze. One crosses himself. Another drops to his knees. Elazar spreads his hands wide in the silence, his body a crucifix against the flaming building. He begins to sing Kaddish then turns and walks into the blazing temple.

T
hey shelter in a ditch,
the dried-up bed of what was once a creek. Above them an awning of tree branches engraves the black sky. A light wind brings the faint barking of dogs but there are no church bells, no town crier, no night birds, not even the owls. Ruth is lying beside him, her body rigid, her face dirty with soot, staring up at the stars. She has been like this for hours.

‘Ruth,’ Detlef whispers. ‘Ruth…’

Her eyes, in a face criss-crossed by moonlight and shadow, flicker.

‘Come back to me.’

He glances in the direction she is gazing and wonders whether the woman he knows still lives in this shattered heap of fear and bone. Here, pressed against the twigs and sandy soil, he can feel them dwindling into nothing. Without status, without civilisation, just two tiny figures stretched against the surface of a tumbling world. Free-falling through the great velvet chasm.

Her mute face squeezes his heart until, after a century of silence, he wonders whether they will ever speak again. Shivering, he pulls her stiff body closer. Just as he is about to drift into sleep, he feels her reach up, touching his cheeks, his nose, his lips. Like a blind woman. Like a woman who, after a long absence, is spellbound by her lover’s features and searches for the memory of him with her fingertips. And it is then that this silent woman, this broken hollowed spiritcreature he barely recognises, covers his body with hers, runs her tongue over his eyelids as if trying to wash away the image of this terrible day. Daring not to breathe nor to move, Detlef lies like a child. Waiting.

She draws his hands up to her breasts, warm under the rough cloth. Surprised by their heaviness he pushes her robe from her shoulders then touches her again in wonder; the nipples are far darker and larger than he remembers. She guides him down to her belly. His large hands draw the arc down to the hollow of her thighs then back up again. Amazed, he sits up and lays her gently down on her back, his eyes straining in the dark as he peers more closely at her body.

‘You are with child?’

She nods.

Astonished, he lays his cheek against the soft downy skin, cool to his burning ear. In all of this destruction, his seed, a new life. It is a miracle to him, a thread of dream against desolation. He presses his lips against the curved flesh, tracing with his hand the fine feathers of black hair growing down from her navel. Her vulva is swollen, the lips swelling beneath his touch, the bead of pleasure growing hard, pushing against his thumb. He parts her legs and lowers his mouth between them, then gazes up in wonder at the arched horizon of her womb above him. Running his fingers slowly across, he plays her until he hears her groan, then takes her
into his mouth, caressing her over and over until her hips writhe under his hands. Only then does he lift himself up above her and enter her with the rushing ecstasy again and again until their shouts swallow the stars and the pain and the burning smoke and for a brief moment they forget their mortality and all that has gone before.

R
uth sits at the virginal feeling the music pulsate through her fingers. Her feet pump in rhythm as the thin sound tries to fill the echoing chamber. Her embroidered shawl is draped over her shoulders and hangs below her womb which is full and round under the black muslin skirt. The piece she is playing is a romantic work from the Parthenia collection. As she searches for the notes she recalls her mother playing this particular passage over and over again, the forlorn prelude bringing back the earlier time so vividly that the image of Sara sitting in the front room in Deutz appears before her, the figure upright and visibly pregnant. It is as if the sensation of the child within the midwife has its own memory that stretches back through time, through the tissues of the body itself, from daughter to mother to mother.

Ruth, fascinated by this notion, turns it over in her mind as she plays on. E, G, C sharp, F. It distracts her, and diversion is the opium she craves during this endless
autumn and winter when she has been confined to Detlef’s country retreat. He has been gone for one long week, returned to Cologne to attend to his clerical duties. It is these separations that Ruth has begun to find increasingly difficult.

She changes the tune to a vigorous ditty. She cannot bear silence any more than she can tolerate reflection. Reflection means thinking and that means descending into a terrain that is utterly barren: a landscape which was once fecund with hope is now a graveyard, devoid of intellect, belief, humanity.

At night Ruth rocks herself for hours to hold back the deluge of grief that is ever present, and there is nothing Detlef can do or say. Sometimes she feels like an insect trapped in amber, paralysed, all emotion suspended, looking up through the thick golden crystal while the heartbeat of her unborn baby drums on relentlessly.

She lays her hands over her womb. This child, she thinks, our child, conceived in love, a miracle, all the more so for its ordinariness. You shall be all to me, she tells the child within, the crystallisation of her father, a living manifestation of her affection for Detlef. The only future they have.

Then, fearing a draught, she pulls her shawl tighter around herself.

‘Jugged hare and stewed cabbage!’

Hanna marches across the parlour and plonks a platter piled high with food onto the small table.

‘You haven’t eaten since yesterday. It’s not right, you should be eating for two.’

Ruth, smiling, gets up and puts her arm around the vast waist of the housekeeper. ‘Hanna, you feed me enough for twins.’

‘God willing.’ The housekeeper touches her pocket. ‘Finish that plate and I’ll give you another surprise.’

‘Is the master due back?’

‘That I don’t know, but I have other news. From Holland…’

Ruth, unable to wait, thrusts her hand into Hanna’s pocket and pulls out a letter. As she unrolls the parchment, the housekeeper peers over her shoulder.

‘Is it news about the war with the English? I have a cousin on the Dutch fighting ships there.’

‘No, although he mentions the war.’

‘He? This isn’t a rival for your heart, is it, Fraülein Saul, because if it is and the master finds out I won’t be long in this house.’

‘No, this man is a rival for no one’s heart. He is a great prophet and, as you know, prophets live above the weakness of the flesh.’

‘Does such a man exist? I think not!’ Hanna snorts and marches out again in her noisy clogs.

Smiling, Ruth wonders what Spinoza would make of the stoic housekeeper’s pragmatic truths. Then she stretches, her back aching from the weight of her womb. Glancing out at the band of sunlight which has just begun to cut through the bluish morning she decides that, better than jugged hare, some fresh air will improve her mood.

Sitting on a bench with moss creeping over its marble feet, she barely notices the faint promise of warmer weather tinting the breeze, the thawing snow which has begun to roll back to reveal the glistening grass beneath.

Rijnsburg, January 1666

Dear ‘Felix’,

Forgive my long silence. Here too there has been plague and it, and the long English war, have kept me from correspondence.

I am much grieved to hear about your plight. I too know the despair into which you must now be plunged. I have lost many
dear friends this season—including Pieter Balling, which is a profound loss indeed—and despite many deaths to the scourge on both sides of the North Sea, the English continue to raid and wage war on our navy. These are unpredictable times and with that uncertainty comes the most insidious passion of all: fear. The Dutch are turning to the certainties of the past; Jan de Witt and his Republican cause lose support daily. It becomes increasingly dangerous for the enlightened philosophers who support my work. Even at the university of Leiden I have heard of several who have been severely reprimanded for quoting my texts. There is a necessity to protect ourselves, my dear earnest little Felix, for it is precisely in these dark days that there is a need for those who can see beyond the starving belly, beyond the plague cross painted on the door, beyond the priest offering penance and a holy wafer.

Stay cautious and be like the wind: invisible but far-reaching.

Yours, Benedict Spinoza

His voice seems to speak out from another universe, one so remote that Ruth can see it only as a mirage in which she once lived, gloriously naive, wonderfully hopeful. It is not a being she can relate to now. Smiling sadly she folds up the letter and tucks it deep into her bodice.

Lord, give me strength to battle my doubts and believe in my love, she prays, yearning for Detlef’s reassuring presence to dismiss the ghost of her father’s burning figure, Rosa’s screaming face and the terrible guilt of the survivor.