The Witch of Cologne (6 page)

The priest sits on a low stool—the only seat in the monastic cell—and opens the box with trembling hands. It is the third time in his life that he has unfastened the casket. An intense slow burning, not unlike approaching orgasm, infuses his whole body. With a high sweet note, barely audible, the carved lid falls open and the fragrance of cedar which already fills the room like an invisible cloud is joined by an underscent of something far less discernible, a lemony perfume with an overlay of orange blossom. The scents
merge like a filigree of delicate lace flooding with blood. To the quivering friar the bouquet is his youth: the orange blossom still lingering at dusk in the long Aragon summer; the sweet faint sweat of a young woman’s armpit; crushed grass beneath soft leather.

Moaning, Carlos throws back his head. This is the aroma that manifests the greatest joy and the greatest tragedy of his life.

He looks back down and traces the empty interior of the box: the ribbed grain of the wood which he imagines to be her silken flesh, the heavy weight of her hair, the dry warm imprint of her hand. Slowly, with a great sense of ritual, he lifts the casket and holds it beneath his flaring nostrils.

Inhaling, the inquisitor conjures up the very odour of the girl’s skin, the luminous intelligence of her huge black eyes, the cutting wit which shattered the hopeful soul of a young music tutor, leaving nothing but fixation and bitterness. Sara Navarro of Aragon, later known as Sara bas Elazar Saul, wife of Elazar ben Saul, rabbi of Deutz.

Thirty years before, as a young friar, Carlos had taken to teaching his second great love, the viola da gamba, to supplement his dependency upon the common purse. He applied for a position as a music tutor with the Navarro family. The sumptuousness of their villa combined with their sophistication—all of them travelled regularly across Europe—had intimidated the young country boy. A shy stuttering individual, he was too deeply ashamed to admit that he came from a peasant family in the barren south.

Isaac Navarro was one of the wealthiest diamond merchants in the city of Zaragoza in the province of Aragon. The family were
conversos,
one of the many Jewish families forced into Catholicism by the decree of King Philip and
Queen Isabella several generations before. Although they had changed their name from the Jewish de Halevi to the Spanish Navarro, the patriarch Isaac had been shrewd enough to reinforce their assimilation by establishing close relations with the local aristocracy, supplying them with gifts of gemstones and loans of money. When the second wave of persecution hit and the Spanish authorities decided to pursue the
conversos
for being false Christians, Isaac was convinced that his family were untouchable. After all, he had donated a fortune to the Catholic church, his children were educated alongside the sons of princes and invitations to his banquets were the most sought after in all of the city.

It was into this atmosphere that Carlos Vicente Solitario was employed as the music tutor for Sara Navarro. Isaac thought it would benefit his daughter to be seen in the company of an earnest young friar, and that to play the viola da gamba could only increase the chances of a profitable match for the stunning twelve year old. Blessed with an intimidating beauty, the young girl spoke four languages, could embroider like an angel and was notorious for dancing her suitors off the dance floor so charged was her energy. The viola da gamba was to be Sara’s third instrument as she had already mastered the lute and the clavichord. What Isaac hadn’t calculated on was the fanatical nature of the young tutor, a characteristic the diamond merchant had tragically mistaken for diligence.

Still virgin at twenty-seven, Carlos’s world was far narrower and darker than that of Sara Navarro, whose attributes were already legendary. The first time the young friar was introduced to his young pupil, she was sitting under a marble arch that led into an interior courtyard filled with bougainvillea and almond trees.

Carlos remembers the tinkling of water. The filtered sunlight across the young girl’s elegant hands as they rested on the strings of a lute. Her face lay in shade, her features a
shadowy enigma, her head framed by a halo of light which transformed the curls of her thick black hair into something more threatening and animalistic. It was only when Sara Navarro stood up, stepping out into the sun, that the friar realised she was the most glorious being he had ever seen. Gazing at him with smouldering eyes she appeared to intuitively sense his hidden vulnerabilities, his awkwardness as he stuttered through the formalities in his thick rustic accent. As he stared back, it felt to the young friar as if his destiny had suddenly shifted.

Over the months that followed, using his natural intellectual curiosity and stumbling charm, he deliberately cultivated an intimacy with the family in the white marble hacienda in the hills. And as they slowly relaxed their guard he began to notice a trail of tantalising evidence, fragments of a puzzle. Tiny scrolls he discovered tucked into a music case. Strange Hebrew symbols scratched into stones. The few occasions when he arrived unannounced and interrupted the family in the middle of what looked suspiciously like a sabbat meal. Clues that led him to the conclusion that Sara Navarro was not only a false Christian but a Jew, who, along with the rest of her family, practised her religion clandestinely.

But by now the young friar was completely besotted. What did it matter that they still observed their faith secretly, he argued with himself every night, alone in his stone cell at the friary. They were still Catholics; in fact the Navarros were the most pious Catholic family he knew. Señor Navarro was the main benefactor of the friar’s order, his wife a devout member of the congregation. Besides, the daughter was a miracle, the living embodiment of sainthood, or so the friar thought. Her grace was exceptional, her beauty sublime and her musical ability extraordinary. In twenty lessons she had surpassed Carlos’s own craft and had begun to compose
sonatas of her own. By the thirtieth lesson they were playing the duets she wrote. Although immature, the work displayed a rare musicality which, Carlos liked to believe, transcended gender.

As the trembling young man guided the soft hands of the girl across the instrument, he imagined that their relationship was a rare discourse, a marriage of emotion and art. A union not besmirched by the sinful fires of lust, but a sacred tie, a consummation of souls. He was positive his love would be reciprocated. Why, had not Sara pressed her thigh against his that time during the recital? More importantly, when he had pressed back she had not pulled away. Surely this was a sign that she loved him also? What about when with sparkling eyes she had untied her shawl during a lesson to reveal her bosom? It was as if she was daring the young friar to respond to the heady perfume that rose up from her perfect cleavage. The vision had nearly crucified Carlos, who, crossing his legs, was thankful for the long weighty cassock concealing his stiffening organ.

He had not slept for a week after that, haunted each night by impossible temptations. To cleanse himself he took to fasting and making endless supplications to Saint Dominic, Saint Anthony and, for good measure, Saint Jude, patron saint of desperate situations. Only after much prayer and several stuttering confessions did the young friar finally convince himself that the rightful action, should his pupil show her affections one more time, would be to declare his love.

The music tutor had arrived at their next lesson trembling with anticipation. Giggling wildly, the twelve year old, her lush hair fighting to be released from its demure cowl, presented the blushing friar with a love letter she had written and asked him if he could examine it for grammar. Carlos’s heart leapt when she explained that her secret love was a literary man and she wished to make no error.

‘It is an affection that dares not declare itself,’ she told him, her eyes wide and serious.

Abandoning all protocol, convinced now of their mutual adoration, he had flung his arms around her and kissed her passionately. ‘
Mi corazón, mi tesoro, me llenas el alma.
I knew you would come to me.’

Horrified, the girl pushed him away violently then slapped him. The stinging blow shocked Carlos to his very core. Deeply mortified he clutched his reddened cheek while, furious, the young girl stormed up and down in front of him.

‘I shall not betray your actions to my father only because you are a great teacher and a great musician, but if you place another finger on me I shall tell of your terrible impudence. What kind of a man of God are you to assume such a thing?’

‘Firstly, I
am
a man, despite these robes. Secondly, I had thought that—’

‘What? That I should love you? You are a peasant, señor, a peasant wrapped in a cassock. Do not forget your place.’

Humiliation scars deeper than the lash.

That night Carlos felt his abasement clawing his back like some hideous hag he could not shake off. Profoundly shamed, he twisted from side to side on the hay pallet in his small cell. When the talons of mortification finally lifted and sleep mercifully descended, a woman visited his dreams. A beautiful creature, seven feet tall, her black hair streaming behind her, her sex a pulsating scented bush that drew his eyes and fingers, her heavy breasts taunting pillows crowned with huge buttonlike nipples that seemed to dance before him as she rode him like a wild bucking mare. The young friar woke in the morning embarrassed to find his thighs stained with his own seed. A demon has visited me, he thought, crossing himself in an attempt to purify what had been made impure. She has stolen my seed and she will steal my sanity.

The next night he had one of the priests bind his wrists together to prevent him inadvertently touching himself during sleep. But the fiend came to him anyway, laughing derisively at the leather bindings, touching his sex with her mouth and hands until the struggling friar surrendered himself to the shuddering pleasures she brought.

After a week of hallucinations, Carlos, now hollow-eyed and thin, borrowed one of the friary donkeys and rode for three hours to visit the seminary at Villanueva de Gállego, famous for its library containing the largest collection of writings on witchcraft in Christendom.

As he turned the pages of an illustrated manuscript in the huge Gothic athenaeum, the vaulted arches above writhing with carved granite forests and imaginary monsters of Satanic proportions, Carlos finally recognised the evil spirit which had been possessing him. Lilith. First wife of Adam, Lilith the seducer, the murderess of newborn children, Lilith who used the nocturnal emissions of innocent men to beget her demon children. Lilith the grandmother of Satan. The discovery sent him running out into the sun-scorched grounds where, trembling, he vomited violently amongst the gnarled vines.

Shaking with a mysterious ague, the young friar walked for hours in the scrubland of the surrounding countryside until the burning eyes of the evil spirit and her musky fragrance fused with the scent of goats and cacti flowers and the searing heat of the midday sun, and finally he fainted into the soft sand.

He woke hours later in his own cell to the sensation of water dribbling into his mouth from a sponge placed between his burnt and peeling lips. He had been discovered by a shepherd who had recognised his order from his robes.

That night, as the shadows lengthened and darkness fell, he feverishly begged his prior to tie him to the bed to prevent him reaching out to the horror he knew would visit. The prior
refused, sternly suggesting instead that the young friar should begin a spiritual incantation at the first sight of any visitation. Later, as Carlos tossed in sweaty turmoil, the demon came to him, but this time, as with slippery ease she mounted his writhing body, her face transformed suddenly into that of his young student. Cheeks flushed, her hair twisting away from her, Sara gazed down at him with sickening innocence.

With a great cry the friar woke himself. Determined to catch the witch at her art, he raced through the deserted streets of Zaragoza to the Navarros’ hacienda.

Darting past the bubbling fountain in the moonlit courtyard, he climbed a vine to Sara’s balcony and entered her bedchamber. He stood there peering around the dim room, looking for evidence that she had flown magically through the sky to reach him. There was nothing except a single feather cast carelessly upon the marble floor. An owl’s feather. A screech owl: Lilith’s totem. As Carlos bent to pick up the plume he heard the soft breathing of the girl from behind the veiled canopy of the bed.

The young friar walked over to gaze through the fine meshed silk at the girl’s white breasts, her black hair running like serpents across the pillow. Suddenly her sleeping face twisted violently into Lilith’s visage and Carlos, determined to finish the possession once and for all, threw himself on top of her, tearing off her nightdress to reach down between her legs.

Screaming, Sara woke and struggling wildly cut his face with her ring. The pain held him off long enough for the servants to hear her cries.

The next day Isaac Navarro dismissed the music tutor. The day after that Carlos Vicente Solitario went to the Inquisitional Council and standing before them condemned the Navarro family as false Christians and Satanists.

R
uth stands outside the narrow house
squeezed between the tiny synagogue, the mikvah and the small hall which functions as a school for the Jewish boys of the town. She looks up at the window where she knows her father is sitting; she senses his hidden gaze. A boy pushing a hoop runs past, then stops and stares back at her.

‘The rabbi is inside but he won’t see you.’

‘I know.’

‘You are untouchable, they told us at the yeshiva, but you look harmless to me. My mother says you are a good woman.’

Ruth recognises the boy’s elfin features, the white skin and jet black hair, the Russian slant of the eyes.

‘You are Rebecca’s child, Benjamin? I knew your mother when she was your age.’

‘She has four sons now.’

‘God grants her a full harvest.’

Encouraged, the boy edges closer. He looks at the imposing oak door with the mezuzah fixed above it. The
brass lion of Judah which serves as a doorknocker glares down at both of them. For a moment Ruth, looking through the child’s eyes, sees how the magnificence of the entrance is a symbol of unquestionable authority for the small community.

‘Why don’t you knock? You have nothing to lose but your pride,’ the child says with the lucidity of the innocent.

‘I have knocked before, therefore I know it will not open.’

Instead she presses her cheek against the cool stone and closing her eyes remembers her mother, Sara, with her wild hair. A young Spanish woman with her black eyes smeared with kohl, her head defiantly uncovered, the shining gold in her ear lobes that seemed to pull the Mediterranean sun into the grey northern sky. Her winsome grace had intimidated the Ashkenazi women and made them conscious of their own sturdy gaits as they paraded in their best clothes to the synagogue.

‘The rabbi’s foreign wife,’ they whispered, drawing their veils across their faces as if her exoticism was contagious. ‘They say she is like a man, that she knows the secrets of the kabbala as well as the Christian Bible.’ They were careful not to touch the
anusa
for fear they would catch her mystical ways.

Sara Navarro, who after her escape to Amsterdam had reconverted to Judaism, outraged her Spanish relatives in Holland by marrying an Ashkenazi—a community the Sephardic considered well below their own status. A reaction Sara felt more strongly once she had joined Elazar back in Deutz and was struggling for acceptance from his own people, an acceptance that was never realised.

The image of herself as a six year old comes back to Ruth as she stands before the old house, a fierce thin child cowering against her mother’s legs as the women passed, refusing to greet them.

‘Ruth,’ Sara would say, in broken Yiddish laced with a mellow Spanish accent, ‘stand proud, you are the daughter of kings.’ And a sudden vision of what she might be—if of another sex, another faith—would rock the child’s body.

Then Elazar ben Saul would sweep out of the house, young and handsome in his robe and prayer shawl, the deeply serious expression upon his face betrayed only by the wink he gave his young daughter as he marched purposefully towards the temple of worship. He was the great figure of her life, rocking backwards and forwards in the humble synagogue wrapped in the prayer shawl embroidered by her mother’s own hands, a kabbalistic symbol for good health and happiness hidden in the seam.

Only Ruth knew about the amulet. Only she had been there when her mother slipped it in and stitched up the hem. And only Ruth had been there when, hiding under the benches in the women’s section, she had heard a mysterious cry. Recognising her mother’s voice, she peered down through the balusters and was shocked to see her parents wrapped around each other, their limbs locked in a strange dance the small child did not recognise at the time. Her mother’s hair flung across the temple floor, her cheeks as red as her mouth, while her father, his robe hitched up above his waist, lay on top of her, the pale orbs of his slender buttocks undulating like sleepy sand dunes in the candlelight. There was an ethereal beauty to their movements that held the child in awe and stopped her from calling out. Fascinated, she watched as their dance grew more frantic. The musicality of their sighing and panting reached a crescendo that burst across the rafters like the fireworks Ruth had once seen shooting across the walls of Cologne. Wide-eyed in amazement, the child was convinced that her parents must be praying in the secret manner her father had once alluded to: dancing for God.

Seventeen years later, drawn back to Deutz by such
memories, Ruth found herself propelled by the desire to protect her father in his old age.

The shame of Ruth’s flight had almost killed Elazar. How to explain to the elders the sudden disappearance of a young girl on the eve of her marriage, the daughter of a rabbi no less? There were rumours of a Christian lover, a secret pregnancy, of abduction. But Elazar ben Saul, refusing to answer the furtive whispers, had grown his beard and smeared ashes on his forehead, wrapping his grief in a leaden silence. ‘My child is dead,’ was all he uttered to the leaders of the community when they asked. For him, the child he loved had become a ghost and the woman she had evolved into irrelevant.

A goat bleats and Ruth looks up from her thoughts. Two widows from fields beyond the village are tethering their animals outside the mikvah. Both are shyly excited at the prospect of the ritual bathing and the monthly exchange of local gossip. The midwife turns to the boy but he has gone, running with his hoop between the geese and falling snow.

‘Ruth!’ A rich alto voice shouts out the banned name defiantly.

Rosa, her old nursemaid, a bustling buxom woman in her fifties with hennaed hair peeping scandalously from under her cowl, stands in the entrance of the mikvah. She wears the uniform of an attendant.

‘Don’t just stand there gawking at the unbreachable! Come in and sit with me, it’s warm in here.’

As Ruth steps into the bathhouse Rosa enfolds her in a huge embrace, pressing her against the powdery bosom Ruth remembers from childhood.

‘I have news of your father,’ the Spanish woman whispers conspiratorially as she leads the midwife through a low archway into the waiting area adjacent to the first bathing pool.

Women of all ages and sizes, in various stages of undress, lean against the walls or sit talking to friends in reverent muffled tones occasionally broken by a peal of very unholy laughter. This is a sanctuary for women, their domain from a thousand years before and to a thousand years hence.

Ruth sits down next to Rosa on a low wooden bench and removes her headdress. Her thick black hair falls down her back to hang below her waist. Immediately a window of silence opens up around her.

‘Your beauty frightens them,’ Rosa whispers in Spanish.

‘Hush, you know it is not my beauty but my reputation that frightens them. They think I am a female Ba’al Shem, that I can invoke demons.’

‘Let them think. For me you will always be just a strongwilled little girl,’ the nursemaid retorts, sentimentality filling her eyes.

‘So how is my father?’

‘Not wonderful. The reb feels his age, which is good for maybe now he will realise the foolishness of banishing his only child.’

‘He has sickness?’

‘Ruth, your father is near sixty, he has nothing wrong with him except too much religion and not enough soup. He would forgive you if you were to make a marriage.’

‘A marriage? After my broken engagement who would have me?’

‘Rabbi Tuvia.’

‘Tuvia! He’s just a boy.’

‘A man now and a disciple of your father’s.’

‘I cannot, it would be dishonest.’

‘Dishonest?’

‘I do not love him, nor could I.’

‘Since when did marriage have anything to do with love? Besides, that much-overrated emotion comes with habit.’

‘Many things come with habit, like warts. Anyhow, Tuvia would never allow me to continue my study. No, Rosa, it shall not be.’

‘Be warned: do not make an enemy of Tuvia.’

‘And this is the man you would have me marry?’

Rosa pulls her closer. ‘He has your father’s ear and that of the whole town.’

The other women are murmuring now, whispering in Yiddish, some openly staring, some glancing sideways—the rattle of Spanish makes them suspicious.

Ruth knows what is running through their minds, fed by the rumourmongers, the web of gossip that links the Jewish communities from as far south as Arles through to Minsk. Has the rabbi’s daughter returned a virgin? Is it true she can will a male child upon you by reciting a spell from the Zohar, that she has associated with the heretic Benedict Spinoza and, worse still, Christians? And what about Rachel’s baby, the one that was born silent and hasn’t made a sound since two summertides ago? What curse did the sorceress lay upon that innocent soul? Is it true that she is a secret worshipper of Lilith, the demon?

The muttering grows louder, swirling around the glistening walls of the bathhouse like a low incantation. Rosa, bristling with indignation, takes Ruth’s hand.

‘Ignore them, my darling. They are born from a small town and their minds are as small as their bellies are big. Lord knows, I miss Aragon. Now there was sophistication.’

A young woman, her face pockmarked, a telltale bruise showing under one eye, emerges out of steamy mist. Ruth recognises the voluptuous form as Vida, the fourth wife of the baker Schmul. The young girl inherited her husband Schmul’s six children as well as having one of her own. The baker is not a cruel man but he has enough money to become irritated when he chooses. Vida’s bruised eye is testimony to
his short temper but despite this there is a fondness between the two of them: the affection of the protected towards the protector, which Ruth recognises and respects.

Vida curtsies. Unable to help herself Ruth breaks into a wide grin; the formality seems absurd as the young woman is entirely naked.

‘Fräulein Saul, it is an honour to see such a great midwife in the mikvah. May the blessings of the Almighty protect you,’ Vida says loudly, fully aware of the disapproval rippling through the bathhouse.

‘And you, Vida. How is the child?’

‘Thanks to you he has lungs like Joshua himself blowing down the walls of Jericho, may I stay so lucky.’

The birth had been difficult, further complicated by the size of the baby. But the child had lived and Schmul had been so grateful he supplied Ruth with free challah for a full month afterwards.

It was the first of many births Ruth had been called upon to attend. First as a medic then, as her reputation grew, as a midwife. Now even Betsheba, the traditional midwife who delivered Ruth herself twenty-three years before, seeks her advice. And yet they still believe it is witchcraft that makes her good, not her knowledge, she thinks, trying to forgive the women’s hostility as, clicking disapproval, they pull Vida away and turn their shimmering wet backs to her.

‘Ruth, promise me you will be careful. I had a dream last night that you were a baby again and you were snatched from my arms. The spirit of your mother, God bless her soul, would never forgive me if something happened to you.’ Rosa distracts her attention away from the women.

‘Superstitious nonsense. My work goes well, I am being accepted. Only last night I was called to Cologne to deliver a child.’

‘Perhaps, but the wind can change, just like that. Here…’

Rosa presses a small stone amulet into Ruth’s hand. Hiding it from the others, she turns it over. The Shield of David, a six-pointed star surrounded by six circles filled with kabbalistic lettering, is carved into its smooth surface.

‘May my love and the love of your forefathers protect you,’ the old nursemaid mutters, then turns to hand a towel to another customer.

But as Ruth looks back towards the bathing rooms she is convinced she can see the hazy outline of her mother’s ghost drifting for a moment between the clouds of steam.

‘Outrageous! How dare a trumped-up Spanish rat give orders to the archbishop, protector of the holy bones of the three great Magi themselves! And how dare he intercept my personal correspondence!’

Maximilian Heinrich strides down the centre aisle of the great cathedral where sunlight streams in through the half-constructed roof, his green mid-week vestments flying behind him. ‘A pox on Leopold!’

‘Sire! Be silent, I beg you, there are spies everywhere!’

Wilhelm Egon von Fürstenberg follows like a hawk at Heinrich’s shoulder. The archbishop reaches the altar and stares up at the massive Gothic carving of the crucified Jesus, garish blood oozing from his elongated oak hands and feet. The nobility of the martyr is laudable, he thinks, but regrettably he himself will always err on the cowardly side of human nature. He loves life too much to end it as some forgotten assassinated pawn.

The Hapsburgs’ days are numbered, but still Heinrich wrestles with guilt about courting France as a potential ally against the Austrian emperor. The future lies with the French king, Louis: he will be the new order. Is he, a Wittelsbach
prince, to be silent like a fawning puppy? The dilemma which has tortured him for years circles again around and around in his mind. Staring at von Fürstenberg, he is reminded of the wheedling way the minister has drawn him into this Byzantine maze of information and intrigue, how he has skilfully manipulated both Heinrich and his informants at the French court. Squeezed between the demands of the bürgers and the expectations of his aristocratic peers, Heinrich sometimes feels little more than a puppet being jerked by a thousand invisible threads. Suddenly the complexity of the situation infuriates him.

‘No!’ he shouts aloud. A flock of roosting pigeons scatter from the rafters. Unruffled, von Fürstenberg gestures to a small page who goes running for a bottle of good wine—the archbishop’s favourite tonic.

The minister waits for Heinrich’s tantrum to dissipate then tentatively leans forward, furtiveness arching his corpulent body.

‘Your grace, be patient. Emperor Leopold is a young man, he is infected with the zeal of youth. Soon he will realise that King Louis is a better ally than enemy.’

‘In the meantime I am to be sacrificed to these plebeian Dutch-loving bürgers who will crucify me for these arrests.’