The Witch of Cologne

She works swiftly, without thought, winding the shroud around the narrow hips, binding the arms against the collapsed rib cage. After stepping back to view her handiwork in its entirety, she pulls the pale cotton cloth low over the dead man’s forehead, covering his broken sight. The mouth and the patrician nose jutting out like a sliver of white marble are the only visible remnants of his humanity.

The sound of approaching footsteps makes the old woman pause. She is in an arched vault of a crypt below the cathedral, a hidden place where for centuries the church has brought its renegades to be laid out before the anonymity of a pauper’s grave.

A noblewoman in fine lace and a silk veil appears at the door of the chamber, lamp in hand. Without a word she hands the old woman a small purse heavy with gold. The corpse-dresser curtsies and moves to stand discreetly outside the door for a few moments. It is a ritual she has performed many times for many dead men who were once loved.

Birgit Ter Lahn von Lennep pushes back her veil. Her face, now older and fuller, has traces of its former sensuality but a new heaviness born of grief and discontent has worked a web of fine lines across the forehead and around the mouth.

Birgit crosses herself then, trembling, walks up to the corpse laid out on the marble slab. With the lightness of a butterfly descending upon a leaf, she places her fingertips on the cold mouth.

‘Once, Detlef, I would have wept to see you thus. Once I would have died for you. Now there are no tears, for there is no time left, my nobleman. Know this: I loved you honestly for all the art between us, but in a moment of weakness it was I who was your betrayer.’

In the stillness that follows, a terrible loneliness sweeps through her as she realises that all that ever mattered in her life were the moments she had loved with this man.

The shovel bites into the icy mud, cutting a sod seven inches deep. Hurled out of the deep hole, the sod lands on a pile of soil beside the grave. The grave-digger, drunk, sings a ditty in guttural Bavarian as he cheerfully continues to work in the rain.

Detlef’s body, stiff in its shroud, lies on the grass beside the open grave. Face and hands now entirely covered, the body less than a broken shell. Alphonso, kneeling, pushes back the hood of his short cloak. Allowing the rain to wet his cheeks he looks up at the leaden sky. An ordinary evening like any other, except that he is at the gravesite of a man who is about to be buried with no mourners but himself.

The actor pulls out a short dagger and carefully cuts the sodden fabric away from the corpse’s face. The visage is exposed, an ashen death mask of surprising tranquillity. Alphonso, barely pausing, cuts a lock of hair away from the scalp, then makes a rent in the stained cotton through which he takes out the lifeless hand. The silver wedding band is loose on the shrunken white finger. He pulls it off then covers up the corpse again.

He turns to leave, then hesitates. The grave-digger is still singing, a bawdy refrain the actor recognises from the brothels of Munich. Alphonso tosses a coin into the open grave and, as the grave-digger scrambles for the money, kneels again and in perfect Hebrew begins to recite Kaddish for the dead.

Carlos bangs shut the heavy door of his chamber. Leaning against it, he listens to the sound of his pounding heart.

If only this was all the world he had to deal with, he thinks, weary beyond belief.

A Basque folk song he used to play floats faintly into his mind, as absurd and meaningless as a hummingbird above a battlefield. Is this sorrow or relief, he wonders, suddenly aware that the great construction of his quest has evaporated into nothing but aching regret and the terrible devastation of unrequited love. There is no redemption, he thinks, except death and the peace it will bring.

Feeling every minute of his sixty-four years, he walks slowly over to his travelling chest and, kneeling, painfully brings out the casket that a young girl of twelve once gave him in innocent affection.

Slowly he opens the carved lid and is immediately struck by the absence of scent. There is nothing, no aroma of cedarwood, of oranges, of musk, of the sweet pungency of his youth’s passion, nothing but the bitter smell of smoke. He looks closer: the inside of the casket is mysteriously burnt, black with charcoal, as if the spirit of Sara’s anger has manifested and scorched away the last memory her young music tutor has carried with him all these years.

With great deliberation, Carlos breaks the wooden box against the marble floor. Reaching down to pick up a large splinter, he runs the jagged edge down his unblemished cheek. Bent over the shattered casket, one hand covering the old scar, the other the new wound, he weeps into his own blood.

As the stained tears splash upon the floor, a woman’s finger, long and gnarled, the nail resembling the tip of an owl’s talon, creeps unnoticed from the broken pieces of the casket. It is followed by a second finger, a third and fourth, then a crooked thumb, until the whole hand, deep purple in skin-tone, rests for an instant, still unnoticed, against the priest’s heaving chest.

Suddenly the hand springs open like the steel jaws of a hunter’s trap, the long nails pierce the grey cassock an

d punch a hole in the priest’s breast. Too shocked to scream, the inquisitor watches in horror as the hand fastens itself around his pumping heart and tears it out of his chest so that he is staring down at his own pulsating organ as the hand squeezes.

The bloody pulp pushes up between the skeletal fingers until the thudding organ shudders to a stop and Carlos falls, his lips still echoing Lilith’s name.

Jam waiting, my love, in a small cottage near the border outside the town of Aachen.

It is simple but comfortable. The widow here was once a noblewoman who fell onto hard times during the Great War. She is a sincere patron of the arts and has nothing but flattery for our ingenious actor. I have received no word of you yet and it has been four days since our arrival. I write this letter in the small hope that somehow you will receive it, either by messenger or pigeon, or perhaps miraculously through the aether of connectivity. Our child is well and happy. He even has a small playmate, for the widow has a grandson of some three years. Of his stay in Cologne he has nothing to say except that ‘Uncle promised him a pony!’ The simplicity of a child is a blessing indeed.

Husband, return swiftly for I fear that to dally longer is to tempt the Fates. ‘Tis strange, for this morning I thought I heard you calling me. I woke and for a moment you were beside me, your sweet breath upon my cheek. But was just a cruel trick of habit…

In Faith, your loving wife, Ruth.

‘Mama! Look!’

Jacob opens his hand, in its centre squats a tiny pink toad. ‘He is smaller than my thumb.’

‘He belongs in the woods, Jacob. You must return him to his home.’

‘But first he shall go to war with a beetle.’

‘Jacob, man must not decide these things. You must let the creature go.’