The Witch of Cologne

Spread out before her is the valley beyond her small plot of land. The winter forest winds its way down the gentle slopes, broken only by a stream which turns silver as the sunrise breaks over the horizon. Ruth finishes and shakes herself then pulls her skirts down over her hips. The view before her is without the mark of man. If she were to look closer, she would see new saplings sprouting out of the fallow fields which were once farmland. But she chooses not to. She loves this vista precisely because it is nature untarnished, a deceptive Eden which she likes to think of as spirit personified. She pauses, closes her eyes and listens to the landscape: the rustle of the trees, the faint cry of a hawk, the bleating of sheep and, perhaps, the beating of wings.

Suddenly a woman’s cries pierce the vision. Miriam bursts screaming from the cottage, followed by two young soldiers who, laughing, catch at her skirts and pull her down. A third soldier comes flying through the cottage door and glancing around sees the midwife. Indignation rises like bile in the back of Ruth’s throat but it is laced with a sharp fear which momentarily bolts her to the ground.

Then, without knowing how, she is beside them. She throws herself onto the young soldier’s back and hauls him away from Miriam whose face is now as white as the snow she has been flung against. Lucid with horror Ruth barely notices the blow from the soldier’s fist. Lying on the ground, her petticoats thrown up, she feels nothing but humiliation and intense frustration that she is not strong enough to attack back. Dizzy, she struggles to her knees, dimly recognising the warm liquid running down her cheek as blood.

‘What do you want of us?’ she screams out in German.

She crawls again towards Miriam. Blank with shock her assistant stares back at her. Her white legs are splayed awkwardly like the porcelain peg legs of some grotesque doll as the soldier pounds his body into her over and over. Before Ruth reaches the young girl a leather boot crashes against her shoulder, the pain driving her back down into the muddy snow. This time she rolls herself into a ball, tensing her body for the next blow. It does not come.

‘Ruth bas Elazar Saul, you look like your mother.’

Ruth, shocked at the Spanish words which float down as if from a great height, tries to peer through the streams of blood which have clouded her eyes.

‘Who are you?’ she manages to spit out, her mouth now acrid salt.

A face looms above. Olive skin. A face disfigured by a thin red scar, eyes shining with hate. She is struggling to understand whether she knows this man, trying to recall through the dulling pain whether she has slighted him or wronged him, anything to give reason to the violence that is being done to her and her assistant.

The priest smiles, a deceptively benevolent expression.

‘I am your saviour. I will be your confessor, bruja, and you shall surrender all to me.’

Again the Spanish words float down like dandelion seeds and Ruth finds it hard to associate the tenderness of his tone with the stabbing pain which shoots through the core of her body.

The Jewess’s face has a similarity to her mother’s but is different, Carlos observes silently. It has the same narrowness around the jaw and cheeks that widen sharply. The eyes are almond-shaped like her mother’s, but instead of deep black, these eyes are green and a different spirit looks out, a psyche which appears more wary and closed. Part of his own soul cannot help but long for some epiphany to link his flesh with that of the dead woman he both loved and persecuted. Bruja, witch, how seductive are the echoes of the flesh, he thinks. Sara…she feels so close he could almost reach out and crush her with one hand.

Aching with longing the priest stands. With a barely visible nod he gestures to one of the young soldiers. Coarse hands push Ruth back against the frozen ground. Her legs are pulled apart. For a moment she sees herself spreadeagled, a tiny figure of white skin and black and scarlet cotton, as the man above her tears at her clothes.

‘Enough!’

Detlef grabs the soldier by his hair and hauls hi

m off the Jewess. The young woman lies still. Broken, like a straw poppet. For a moment he wonders if she is still alive or whether she has died of fright like a caged bird.

‘Not the midwife!’ he bellows into the flushed face of the uniformed youth.

Outraged, Carlos, his own face red with excitement, pushes forward. ‘She is the devil’s spawn, she must be punished!’

‘Nothing has been proved! Besides, she is the rabbi’s daughter, it is not politic to defile her!’

Detlef throws Ruth’s skirts back over her legs. Standing, he wipes his hands on his breeches, finding it distasteful to be presented with the depravity of man. The vision of the sprawling semi-conscious woman is equally repugnant to him. Her dress and manner repulse him, but he knows that her father has some influence amongst the harbour traders and that it would not behove the archbishop to allow her debasement. Behind him the rape of her serving girl continues.

‘I suspect that you have an interest in protecting this creature, Canon.’

‘I have no interest other than protecting the archbishop’s reputation.’

‘The archbishop is a Jew-lover?’

‘I will not dignify that question with an answer. May I remind you that we are on Protestant ground here, our presence is perilous. Make the arrest and let us be on our way, Monsignor Solitario, before my patience wears thin.’

Detlef steps aside to allow the soldiers to carry the midwife to the prison cart. Miriam is left unconscious, her blood staining the snow.

The three men, each trapped in his own misery, cower against the bars as the soldiers push the young woman towards them. Her face streaked with dirt and blood is barely recognisable. The Dutchman glances at her then looks down in embarrassment, while Herr Müller, disgusted that he should be forced to share the prison cart with a Jewess, spits into the straw. Only Voss, seeing that it is the midwife from Deutz who delivered his own grandchild, reaches over to the bedraggled creature retching with pain and covers her breasts with his own cloak.

‘Child, stand proud, we are not at the stake yet,’ he whispers as he helps Ruth to her feet. Dazed, she grips the bars and stares back at the diminishing view of her cottage.

‘When they know who we are, they will release us. There has been a terrible mistake, mark my words, a terrible mistake.’ The old merchant mutters these words over and over, as if the normalcy of the sentence will reverse what is irreversible.

The prison cart bounces along the cobblestone lane towards the village. As the grim cargo passes each house families come to the windows and stare. Some stand in doorways. Others run inside clutching their children, memories of past pogroms turning their entrails liquid with terror.