Apothecary Melchior and the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street (21 page)

‘That's my firm opinion, too,' remarked Melchior. ‘May he be praised for it. So Brother Adelbert was buried seventy years ago?'

‘If that's what you calculate, then he was,' replied the monk. ‘At that time I was just twenty, and Tallinn was my second monastery. I'd entered the order in the town of Palermo, where I was born, in the
ballei
administered by the General Preceptor of the Teutonic Order in Sicily and Calabria.'

Melchior had to spur the old monk on a bit – and there was no better stimulus for that than Melchior's dram – so that he wouldn't spend too much time chatting about his youth in Sicily, which was under the Teutonic Order and where he had seen bitter days, for he was the son of a servant in one of the Order's manor houses and the local nobles were fighting against the Order, and his father was hanged on the manor's gates, while his mother was delivered to the Dominicans in her son's donkey cart, taking with her the only silver coin they had; at the Dominican Monastery, under the guardianship of the Order, the coin was given back to her, and young Lodevic was taken anyway as a novice for no money, for they had seen how the love of God in his heart radiated like a flame …

But a couple of sips of the sweet drink forced the monk back to Tallinn, and he continued, ‘In charge of the Tallinn monastery at the time was Prior Helmich, a very God-fearing man. Times were
hard because war had recently been raging across the land, monks had been killed, the heathens had risen up, washed off their baptismal water and torn up all the agreements that bound them to the power of the Danish King and the Order. All of Livonia was drenched in blood – and Tallinn did not escape. Brother Adelbert had been buried in the Dominican cemetery, and one day Prior Helmich led me to his grave on which the grass had not even begun to sprout. That was to be a lesson to me, a novice, about whose determination the Prior was not yet fully convinced. He told me there how Satan had amassed temptations for Adelbert, for he was very greedy for the souls of monks, and in the end Adelbert had given in to the temptations of the flesh. And all this had happened on the street that is now called Rataskaevu Street.'

Melchior listened, and Lodevic related. Brother Adelbert was the son of a pious town clerk in Nordhausen. When he was young his father had started setting money aside to send him to the preaching brethren because as a child he had displayed a remarkable aptitude in reading the Scriptures and had a retentive memory. As Adelbert got older, however, he developed a taste for various kinds of worldly pleasures, and the company of women was one of them. And women, for their part, liked him and wanted to lead him into temptation at every opportunity. In the end, however, Adelbert was sent to the monastery anyway and then to Tallinn to keep him away from his old temptations. At first it seemed to the Tallinn brothers that young Adelbert was truly dedicated to the monkish life and bitterly regretted his sinful youth. He confessed assiduously, and, as is the Dominican custom, he confessed to his brethren as well and not just in the confessional. So the word about his old sins was spread among the brothers, and those stories must have been corroborated when the brothers saw, when they visited the
saun,
that young Adelbert's organ was really long and thick, one that would be very appealing to women, so all the brothers who saw it looked away and mentally said prayers of thanks that they didn't have one like that, one that would always lead them into temptation. Young Adelbert was sent out to collect donations,
as is the custom with all preaching brethren, and he began to enjoy this work, so much so that he asked to be released from his other monastic duties and be allowed to go into town more often with his basket. Some days Adelbert did not even make it back to the monastery in time for vespers, and for this he was roundly rebuked by the brothers. The Prior, though, was mostly satisfied with him because his donation basket always contained plenty of money, and in those hard times, when Tallinn was smaller and the monastery half the size that it is now, that was a great help.

Stories started to get around, said Brother Lodevic, vicious and spiteful stories about how Brother Adelbert, in preaching the gospel, was not only collecting a lot of money in his basket but that there were some wives in the town who lured him into their chambers to see his long sex organ and generously donated money for the pleasure. And they didn't just want to take a look. Some of them wanted to take it in their hands, play with it, stroke it, lick it with their tongues and even put it in their mouths to see how large it might get.

Melchior noticed that at this point a strange lustre came into the old monk's eyes. He licked his dry lips with his tongue, and his hands, groping for the bottle of spirits, trembled slightly.

‘But stories are stories,' Lodevic continued, ‘and no doubt it's happened before that they are driven by sheer malice. So one day the Prior invited Brother Adelbert into the scriptorium and demanded of him to swear in the name of God that the stories were false and that he was not going around the town shaming the name of the Dominicans. Adelbert burst into tears, kissed the cross and confessed that on one occasion he had been led into such temptation and that he found the determination to resist the sins of the flesh, that the woman had taken his tool only into her mouth and he had allowed this continue for the sole reason that he knew that if he did she would be very generous when it came to making a donation. But she had demanded that he come back to her house again when her husband was busy at the weighing-house and in the storehouses. Prior Helmich believed his story and commanded
that Adelbert now pray more diligently and do more work around the monastery and not go into town where he had so easily been led into temptation. And so it was that Adelbert worked industriously around the monastery, even taking on those simple tasks that are the lot of the lay brothers, chopping firewood, watering the plants, harvesting the crops, washing the other brothers' clothes and digging the cellar. He often went to confession and repented that he had dishonoured his monastic robes in that way.'

‘But what did he die of?' asked Melchior.

‘I was coming to that,' replied the monk. ‘Prior Helmich led me to his grave and said that here lay a brother who had died from the weight of his sins. That God had decided to call him to Him so young as a lesson to the other brothers who do not find the determination to resist temptation. One sin leads to another, a little one to a bigger one. Brother Adelbert bitterly repented of his sins, and the Prior had confidence in him, so a few months later he sent the young man back into town to collect alms but swore to him that if any evil rumour reached the Prior's ears he would be thrown out of the monastery in disgrace. That day Adelbert left for good. He didn't come back for evening prayers. Nor did he come the next morning or the morning after.'

Melchior shook his head. He didn't understand. ‘Didn't you just say he was buried in the monastery graveyard?' he asked.

‘You're rushing me, Apothecary,' replied the monk. ‘I'm an old man now, and I have to take my time in order keep things clear. And this biscuit is sweet indeed. Could I have another tot of something to drink with it?'

‘A jug of cold water from the well?' asked Melchior. ‘Or perhaps you'd like another dram, Brother?' What the devil! The old monk is ruining me, he thought to himself.

‘A sip of water would be good for a teetotal and frugal old man like me,' declared Brother Lodevic.

Thank God, thought Melchior, but as he poured water from the tub into the jug the old monk suddenly croaked, ‘A little sip of
water and then perhaps a mouthful of that sweet dram, too, since you're offering. The one made with the blessing of St Nicholas. You can't let things approved by the saints go to waste, can you now?'

‘Of course you can't,' grumbled Melchior, topping up his cup. ‘You got to the point where Adelbert disappeared – and yet he's buried in the Dominican cemetery.'

Lodevic sucked on the biscuit and gulped down his drink, breathed out and crumbled the sopping biscuit on the table, saying, ‘Yes, that's how it was. He vanished, and Helmich guessed that he had fled from Tallinn, because that had happened before when young monks struggle to keep their vows and the lay world calls them back so forcefully that they run away from their duties. Helmich thought he must have lost his head over some young woman and eloped with her, or something like that. The brothers went around town asking whether anyone had seen him, but no one had, and that's how things would have stayed had Adelbert not come back to the monastery one evening on the verge of madness.'

‘Heavens, so he hadn't run away then?' exclaimed Melchior. ‘Where had he been?'

‘They thought he had been in a brothel somewhere. At first they couldn't get a sensible word out of him. He only had prayers and the saints' names on his lips, and he couldn't speak properly. When they got him to perk up and let his blood he lost consciousness altogether and collapsed in an apoplexy and was sick for several days. He had a fever and was rambling. He was treated to get his reason back so as to be able to confess his sins, because he did have a few lucid moments during which he begged Helmich to take him for confession, and Helmich treated him so he would be fit to confess, because a person can only do so when sound of mind.'

‘So what happened then?'

‘Nothing more happened because, as Helmich told me, Adelbert never recovered and died on his sickbed in agony, in terrible spiritual suffering. Before he died, though, his mind was sound enough to be able to confess, but Helmich didn't tell me what sins
he had to forgive. And now I come to the point in my story where I began – why this is all connected with Rataskaevu Street.' Thank heavens, sighed Melchior to himself. ‘The well had not been dug yet,' said the monk, suddenly becoming pensive. He was thinking intently, and Melchior waited patiently. ‘What did they call this street then? Nothing comes to mind. It must have had some name, but … It's all the same …' ‘I think so, too,' replied Melchior, bored. ‘But, yes, that's how it was. Gossip gets around, and where there are acts there are witnesses,' the monk eventually continued. ‘This is what our esteemed Prior told me at Adelbert's grave, “Behold, here lies a sinner who could not manage to keep his monastic vows and heaped shame on the monastery, and to wash that away the brothers now have to serve God more diligently and pray for the welfare of this town.” And then he told me that a while after Adelbert had died in his agonies a rumour started that there had been a merchant by the name of Cristian Unterrainer who lived on this very street, here, in the house that still stands today, and that man had left Tallinn. At some point a wall had collapsed on to the house, and the Council sent masons to shore it up again, and then they had to demolish another wall and … and in a chamber of the cellar in the Unterrainer house a recently walled-in section was discovered, and it had to be demolished, and there they found …' The monk paused and slurped the last drop from his cup, but since Melchior was looking at him expectantly and not offering anything more he continued, ‘Yes, so it was, they discovered the dried-up corpse of a woman, who was stark naked and bound to a chair. The body was so well preserved that people recognized her as Ermegunde, wife of Unterrainer, whom her husband had said had long before gone on a pilgrimage to Germany.'

‘The woman was immured alive in the cellar?'

‘So she was, and so then the story got about town, and this person and that person had seen how Brother Adelbert often visited the Unterrainer house, and, what's more, when the husband was away on a ship or out of town and the wife Ermegunde was
home alone. And they went on to say that this Ermegunde was a really bad woman and she had told other women that she knew who had the longest and thickest dick in all Tallinn, and that she had made that man her own and now she knew what real heavenly love was like. That's the kind of shameless woman she was.'

‘So Adelbert visited Ermegunde to lie with her?'

‘Oh, that's what I heard later. The Prior didn't tell me that, but he did say that Adelbert did go in and out of the house. So one day Unterrainer happened upon them and …' The monk lowered his voice, and again an odd lustre came into his eyes. He licked his lips and carried on, but with a rather soft tongue and fumbling for words. ‘When Unterrainer saw what kind of whoring Adelbert was up to with his wife, he tied his wife up and ordered Adelbert to put on his wife's clothes, and then he threatened to cut off his dick if he didn't have sex with his wife again while he himself looked on, constantly beating Adelbert with a whip …'

‘Did Adelbert have wheals from the whip when he died?' asked Melchior quickly.

‘The Prior didn't tell me that, or if he did … Lord bless us, it was seventy years ago. Adelbert didn't die of his wounds but of repentance for his sins, and this instructive story I've kept in mind all my life, even though no one in the monastery has talked about it for a long time and everyone apart from me to whom Helmich spoke has long ago gone to meet his Maker and is sitting at the right hand of the Virgin Mary in Heaven.'

‘And have you heard anything, Brother, anything about the Unterrainer house being haunted?' asked Melchior.

‘The spirit of that shameless woman,' whispered Lodevic, leaning closer to the Apothecary, ‘who died in terrible agony and unshriven and who, after her death, was cast into a pit beyond the town as a worthless woman and an adultress and whose grave is unmarked by any dedication … The soul of this sinner flew out of her body when she was immured alive there in the Unterrainer house, and there that spirit has remained, oh yes. There she appears as a warning to all adulterers and temptresses off the monastic path.'

Before Brother Lodevic made ready to go he asked whether he could take a few small biscuits with him for the other brothers, since they didn't receive such things very often and after long hours at prayer they taste pleasantly sweet in the mouth and are beneficial to one's health as well, since they contain ginger and cardamom. Melchior agreed, of course, and watched dolefully as Lodevic emptied almost the whole tray into his alms-basket, explaining that there were many brothers, they had everything in common and it wouldn't be right for only one of them to get to taste them.