Читать книгу The Harvest of Chronos - Mojca Kumerdej - Страница 6

The Scapegoat

And that’s how it was, too, a few years earlier, when the populace made a certain widow the scapegoat for a number of seemingly natural catastrophes. She was known to brew concoctions from plants and animals, and people said she had brewed a young man into her concoctions, someone who had been coming to her place for months and then simply vanished. He wasn’t the only young man who had got himself involved with the hag (which is what most people called her), who surely had her own twisted reasons for never remarrying after her husband’s death. Indeed, it’s quite possible that these reasons were somehow connected to the death that had suddenly and under extremely suspicious circumstances struck down her husband. The death was said to have occurred when he was on the privy, or headed there, which (probably not coincidentally) was in early autumn, when the woods and meadows abound with mushrooms along their margins, in particular the tender-fleshed parasol mushroom. But there are others, too: one that is very similar to the parasol, when it is still small and demurely closed, is the green fly mushroom (as it is known here), whose only good quality is said to be its excellent flavour, but for anyone who has ever tasted it, it was also the last flavour they tasted, for within days they had departed this world. Not unlike the way her husband departed the world. He was a miller, around forty, and a healthy, hard-working and honest master. But don’t we say the same thing of everyone who dies, that he was hard-working and honest? People fear to speak ill of the dead, and not because God might hear but because the dead person might hear and, in fury at the gossips below, return to earth to make them shut their big mouths for good. Especially if the sinful soul is still wandering about, lurking in churchyards or dark, dank hollows, or on the riverbank, luring people into the water – a soul whose body was never properly interred and who is still waiting for someone to discover the now unrecognizable corpse and give it a decent burial.

And so people sang the praises of the late miller, who had crapped out his soul (so the story went that spread among the populace) – a soul very likely mixed with mushrooms remarkably similar to the delicious parasols, which in those days perhaps were not even called that but had an entirely different name.

As the priest intoned his prayers above the open grave and made the sign of the cross in the air, most of the mourners were glancing at the widow to see if she was sad enough, and sincerely sad, as befits a new widow. Did her breast heave with bitter sorrow? Was a tear trickling down her cheek? Or did her countenance possibly betray some other emotion? Well, not delight exactly – in such circumstances only a madwoman would display that – but, for instance, relief?

The thirty-five-year-old widow was, relative to her widowhood, too erect, not stooped enough, and her protruding lips were hardly pressed in woe but limp and relaxed. The miller’s death had been no great loss for the village; there was another miller working there who was both easier to do business with and better at his job. What’s more, people weren’t afraid of him, as they had been of the deceased miller – even horses, which are sensitive animals, could tell he was a highly strung man, not to say a boor. But a community must have order. There are rules to be respected and customs to be upheld, which are well known and clear to the populace of these parts. And one such custom is that the woman is in charge in the kitchen, in raising and caring for young children, in looking after blood relatives and in-laws, and in various other tasks that hold the community together, but the public representative of the property and the house, even if it’s just a flea-bitten cottage, is the master, that is to say, the man.

By the time the Requiem Mass was held, a week after the departed’s death, a theory had developed which said that the miller had died a natural death only in so far as mushrooms are part of nature, and that the deadly recipe had been literally cooked up by the new widow. The miller’s two maidservants, when cross-examined by the populace, did not have much to say.

‘It’s true we had mushrooms a few times in September,’ the girls admitted and listed the different sorts, ‘parasols, foxes, georgies, butter­caps, little doves and hoofs and claws and deadman trumpets …’

‘What sort of trumpets?’ the populace asked in alarm.

‘Deadman trumpets. That’s what they’re called,’ the girls said, at once regretting that they had mentioned the mushroom’s name at all. ‘They’re black and look a bit like they’re rotting, but they taste good. Although it’s best to use them as flavouring. You wouldn’t cook them like you do parasols or georgies.’

‘Well, maybe they don’t taste bad but still, someone could prob­ably get sick from eating them, couldn’t they?’ The populace had their suspicions.

‘No, if they’re fresh picked and properly dried and prepared, and if you don’t eat them late at night before you go to bed, they’re fine,’ the girls replied.

‘But if something has death in its name, it can’t be entirely good, since that small piece of it revealed in the name would surely be fatal. Anything that has something bad in its name, especially if it’s death, must be dangerous, and besides, deadly things have their doubles …’

‘But don’t we all?’ the girls asked.

‘That’s true. We good people do have doubles, who to look at aren’t very different from us, although in truth they are evil. And various herbs, too, or zeli – a word that itself contains “evil” – zlo – as well as many sorts of mushrooms, which most people don’t even know about and only a few can recognize – all these things can be very bad for you, fatal even.’

‘But we didn’t eat just mushrooms!’ the girls tried to soften what they had said. ‘We had lots of buckwheat and barley porridge and plenty of things we sautéed in fat; we wrung the necks of chickens, roasted dozens of trout and cooked up a whole bunch of carp. And there was no lack of milk and gruel, cheese and curds. We also ate cabbage and beans, kohlrabi and carrots and, of course, our daily bread.’

‘What did you girls have to eat right before the miller’s death? Mushrooms? And what did the mill hands eat? And her? What did she eat? And what was that story about her children? Or was it only one child? Well, we know about one child for sure. A few months after he was born – it’s been eight years now – the miller’s son, asleep in the crib, released a little trickle of blood.’

‘Is that really true? How did it happen?’ The populace looked at each other.

Indeed, it was true. And nobody knows why the child died. It was she who found him in the crib, already somewhat blue and rigid. The miller lost his head at the time, and whenever it flashed before his eyes how she had come to him pressing his son to her heart with a big black fly buzzing around the boy, he would always give her a few hard smacks. Where in God’s name had she been? How could she have left her newborn baby when by then she had two maidservants to help her? So she didn’t need to be turning the hay or whatever it was she was doing that day. She should have been looking after his son and nothing else, since when the miller grew old it was the boy who would take over the property and care for him in his old age, and in the end give him a decent burial.

At first there had been no son. There had been a daughter, who died the day after she was born. But losing a daughter is different from losing a son. A son bears the master’s seed and carries the family line forward, while a daughter, except for helping her mother with the housekeeping, is nothing but an expense from childhood to marriage (if she doesn’t make a whore of herself first), and to get rid of her you have to prepare a dowry, unless you hire her out on day wages when she’s little. That son, the never-to-be future master of the property, had died suddenly in his crib, and a second never appeared. Well, there was another daughter, but she also died very young when a strange childhood illness was ravaging the region. A little girl in the village died, and her friends came to bid her a last farewell. She was lying in an open coffin on the bier. Her friends sat beside her, caressed her and wept, and, before leaving, kissed her cheek. A week after the funeral, at the Requiem Mass, there were whispers going around that these same three little girls were now sick in bed and that the barber, offering not a shred of hope, had told the parents to summon the priest. One of the girls was the miller’s daughter, and he was shaken by her death. More and more he suspected that his family’s misfortunes were no accident; death, after all, doesn’t just come and strike down for no reason everything that’s his. So he started looking around, watching for whatever, or rather, whoever, was destroying his offspring and bringing misery and death into his home – if he didn’t do something soon, his property would remain without an heir and eventually pass into the hands of strangers. In such situations, even a daughter is welcome: someone marries her with her dowry and moves in, and with the arrival of the bridegroom the name of the house – which went back to God knows what ancestor – does not change.

For the first time in years the miller shed a tear. He took a few kreutzers from his purse and set off to the inn, where he replayed all his troubles, at length and with much repetition, for the company assembled there.

‘You’re right,’ they said, patting his shoulder. ‘Someone is doing this to you on purpose. We’ll track them down together. And, since we’re not animals, we’ll report them to the authorities, and they’ll be judged strictly and fairly. Maybe someone’s jealous of you because you’re a miller and make a good living for yourself and your family. Or maybe they’re jealous because you’re a handsome fellow and in good health. Or maybe they put it all together and came up with the following plan: The miller is doing pretty well for himself with his business and everything he owns. Still, it will be hard to cast a spell that damages his body – he’s strong as an ox – but it might be fun to take it all away from him, then we could find another way to finish him off.’

But who could have such a motive? The count and the authorities, right up to the highest power, would have gone about it differently. Nor did either of his brothers have a motive – the older brother had been impaled by the Turks in the Battle of Sisak in 1593, while the younger, who had mental problems and lived off his charity, would only be harmed by the miller’s death. So who, then?

‘Well, there’s one person in particular who would profit from such wickedness …’

‘But do we need to say who? To say it out loud?’

‘No, no,’ the miller said, holding his head in his hands.

‘So you know?’

‘Yes, but please don’t say out loud what I dread the most – that night after night I am lying in bed with a murderess, and whenever I sire an heir, or fine, an heiress, she kills them, one by one.’

‘So you thought it might be her?’

‘Didn’t you?’ The miller glanced at the men around him.

‘Yes, of course. And really, who else could it be?’

The miller drained his glass and hurled it to the floor, as if to say, that’s exactly what I’ll do to her; I’ll smash her so hard she’ll fly across the floor and blood will flow.

‘You’re right. She’s your wife, and you can do whatever you want to her. And we’ll support you; we’ll testify that you caught her murdering your children and she tried to kill you, too, deviously, from behind, which is hardly surprising since she’s a woman, but at the last moment you turned around and dealt her a deadly blow with your arm.’

Yes, yes, that will be best for everybody. The damned witch! It’s not easy getting rid of these evil women.

The populace loves children. More precisely, the populace doesn’t like people who don’t like children. This has nothing to do with sentimentality, which would require you to hold them in your arms, cuddle them, spoil them with the kind of protective parental love people would know how to show centuries later. The populace loves children because children are the vessels for the seed by which humanity continues into the future. Children are entrusted with the mission of carrying on our traditions and customs, so the more children the better – that way, the populace reasons, we have a better chance of not simply vanishing. What if there’s a terrible plague or some other disease that wipes every last one of us off the face of the earth, as if we never existed and meant nothing at all? Well, our Creator would know about us, but down here on earth nobody would be following our traditions and taking care of our farms, taking care of everything we had made and that, unfortunately, couldn’t take with us after death – debts, diseases and other troubles, of course, we would gladly leave behind in this world. But there would be nobody left to look after our graves. They would soon be overgrown and, a few decades later, cows would be walking and crapping on them, and a few centuries later new settlements would rise on top of our bones, populated by strangers with none of our blood and none of our customs; they would be living on top of our bones, and their lives would have no connection to us.

The same thing, however, must have happened to the people who lived on our land before us. They weren’t Christians like us. They had their own gods, customs and traditions, and they carved them on their tombstones, which not long ago the river disgorged. An entire graveyard opened up right here among our houses, yawning graves filled with grey bones in our kitchen gardens and fields, and we had no idea whose bones they were or what all those symbols and images could mean that were chiselled into the stone – oh, they must have lived very well, lacking nothing, to make such tombstones. But what about us? How can we sleep peacefully and be fruitful and multiply on top of an ancient graveyard, which is probably haunted, too? Because there are no crosses on these graves. One of the stones has strange spirals carved on it, while others have weird horses with long fishtails, and fish, too, which maybe are not really fish but dolphins, as we were told by some merchants from Trieste who have been living in our province – they used to watch them through the window, in the Gulf of Trieste, leaping in unison out of the water, and their faces were so adorable, like some sort of merfolk.

‘So,’ the populace asks themselves, ‘are these the same mermaids that galley slaves talk about, who show themselves to sailors, sing to them and drive them wild with their firm breasts when they lift themselves above the surface of the water, although from the waist down they’re no different from cold, scaly fish?’

‘No, no, no,’ the Triestine merchants reply. ‘Dolphins are wonderful, good creatures, who often circle around castaways and swim with them all the way to land. They are such incredibly magical animals that the ancient peoples would depict them on tombstones as guides who lead the departed to the realms on the other side, along with hippo­camps – those horses with the fishtails.’

Such things are terribly confusing for us. We’ve been here forever, well, almost forever, and as natives we enjoy certain rights that foreigners don’t have. But then the river floods or a ploughman digs too deep and the ploughshare gets bent when it strikes a stone, which turns out to be a tombstone from some past people we know nothing about except what the Triestine merchants tell us.

So would it be a good idea, we ask ourselves, if we collected all those bones scattered in our gardens and washed and buried them? And, if so, then where and how? Since they weren’t Christians, we can’t bury them in our churchyard, and to bury them just anywhere doesn’t seem right. Because maybe these graves are from before Jesus was born. And we’re not sure if Jesus, by dying and rising again from the dead, saved people who lived before him or if people who follow a different religion also go to heaven after they die. We’re terrified that these disinterred dead people will start haunting us out of anger, that they’ll wreck our barns and ruin the crops in our fields and kitchen gardens, that they’ll infect us with ancient diseases which lingered on after they died, and that they’ll turn up in our bedrooms and come out of our bureaus and chests and grab us with their skeleton arms.

‘But the world didn’t begin with you, or with Jesus, or even with the people who came before you. The world has been around – oh my goodness! – a long, long time. It says that right in the Bible,’ the Triestine merchants tell us.

‘Oh, really?’ We look at them and remember that they are

foreigners, and odd ones at that. ‘You should be careful, you Triestine merchants. How do you know so much about these old tombstones? We find that rather suspicious.’

‘We have lots of these stones on the coast, as many as you could want – stones from the pagan Romans,’ they reply.

‘What do you mean, pagan Romans? Rome is where the pope lives!’

‘Well, there wasn’t always a pope in Rome. And there was Rome before there was a pope; it’s where the pagan Romans lived, and they only gradually became Christians, sometimes by force.’

And then we look at the stones and at the bones scattered around. We look at the old walls, and the strange spirals and circles, and the old ironwork, spears and jewellery – which our women would gladly wear around their necks if they weren’t afraid it might hold some ancient spell. And it’s all terribly frightening and makes us sad, too. Because what if something horrible did happen to us, and our entire village suddenly disappeared? What would be left of us? Our houses, which are mostly wood, would sooner or later rot away, same as us, and that goes for our crosses, too, since we don’t have money for

chiselled tombstones that last forever. Everything we have, even our own life, is temporary and fragile. So will the people who come after us, those foreigners, be as confused as we are? Will they wonder what they should do with our bones if, by chance, the river disgorges them? ‘Who were these people?’ they’ll ask. ‘What were they like?’ Sure, we’ll be up in heaven with the blessed, but what about our bones? Nobody will know anything about our customs or how we lived.

‘And, more to the point, what about you, Triestine merchants? Where do you bury your dead? That time when one of your sons unexpectedly died, you didn’t bury him in the village churchyard or even a little further away by the prayer hall. Instead, very quickly, the day after he died, you took him over there, to the remains of those other graves, where nobody has buried their dead for decades – that graveyard without crosses, where nobody ever brought flowers either; all they did in the old days was put little stones on the graves.’

‘We mean you no harm,’ the Triestine merchants tell us. ‘We’ve even reduced our interest rates for you – it’s disgraceful how low we made them. And with the edicts on trade routes for wine and other goods, you wouldn’t be able to sell your crops and products to Gorizia and Trieste, let alone farther into Italy, without us. And you couldn’t get goods by other routes, from west or east, or, if you did, they would be a lot more expensive.’

‘That may be true, but we’re warning you all the same: don’t you dare try to confiscate our houses if our business dealings go belly up and we can’t pay our debts on time, and with interest. Don’t even think about it, you … merchants, whoever you are and wherever you’re from.’

But that’s not all that nags and gnaws at us. We’re also very worried about the lack of order in our community. We’re worried about women who first turn wanton and then try to conceal their expectant con­dition from everyone else, even from their own husbands, their lords and masters. If they’re not able to beforehand, then right after the birth they do away with the child in secret. An honest man has no idea what women are capable of doing. Supposedly, in the olden days in our country, if it seemed like a family couldn’t feed another child or if a child was born weak and sickly, they’d get rid of it. But such times are long past. We don’t put an end to newborns; much less do we let the women who bring them into the world make decisions about the child’s life. And they’re not alone in their secretive doings. It’s well known that midwives have ways of making sure the birth never takes place. What things don’t you find in their cupboards? All sorts of potions and creams and different implements, which they use to prevent the child from happening. Of course, we never summon the physician when a woman is giving birth – we can’t afford him – or even the barber, who is a man and knows more about straightening bones than delivering babies. And some young married women, despite their strong and healthy appearance, are simply not able to bring a baby into the world, no matter how much everyone wants it. In such cases, it’s good to make sure there isn’t some midwife involved whose little tricks are helping the woman deny offspring to her husband, the man with whom she is obliged to lie down in bed and do, or let be done, what is expected of a wife.

So a wife still in her youth might wait patiently for her husband to slip on the ice one winter’s day and crack his head, which then becomes hopelessly inflamed, or for some illness to come and claim his life while leaving hers untouched, or for mushrooms to start sprouting one August day, the kind of mushrooms you have to know how to recognize, how to pick, prepare and serve them, all without forgetting which plate is whose.

This last possibility, the populace speculated, is what most likely befell the miller. Not only was the widow left with a small bit of land and the mill, but, in addition to the mill hands and maidservants, she began employing young men who at home had never displayed any joy in work but now, on her property, picked up their tools with such zeal that the very sight of it was suspicious. They never complained about the weather and worked no matter if it was foul or fair. They never complained about the money, but rose at the crack of dawn, left for her fields, worked until evening and returned home late. From time to time, a young man might not even come back the same day but a day or two later, and a few never came back at all. More precisely, two never came back, but two is enough for it to seem like it might become a habit and, with repetition, a rule. The populace gave the situation some thought and resolved to act decisively.

Even before the two boys’ disappearance, the family of one of them took their son firmly in hand. They waited just long enough for him to put the money he had earned at the widow’s down on the table and then interrogated him, reproaching him for doing day-work for strangers, and especially for a woman who was a stranger.

‘How is she a stranger?’ the youth defended himself. ‘She’s from our village.’

‘Even so, she’s a stranger to us, and, besides, there’s plenty of work for you to do at home!’ His loved ones persisted, attacking him with the subject of his betrothed, who, they said, was in tears from feeling abandoned and in doubt. And then they told him about the various rumours and promised to do everything they could to protect him.

‘Protect me from whom?’

‘From her! So nothing bad happens to you, too – so you don’t, for example, eat those deadman mushrooms.’

The other boy, too, felt the pressure of his relatives, who even threatened to register him with the provincial army and arrange it so he was conscripted as ‘every fifth or third son’.

But clearly the families’ intervention was too late. The hag’s spell had already seeped into the boys’ brains and entirely corrupted them. They came home less and less and then vanished into thin air. One of them, apparently, later sent a letter from somewhere, which the priest read to the family (what, the hag even taught them to write?), and that, basically, was everything that spread among the populace – and stories spread among the populace like mushrooms in the undergrowth.

‘There must be some perverted reason why she didn’t remarry after her husband’s death and instead squeezed the life juices out of her young helpers, who rather than work at home preferred to till her fields, which, amazingly, haven’t suffered any terrible catastrophe, unlike the fields of us honest villagers. People say she can predict the weather and even command it …’ Thus the populace aired their thoughts, first refuting and then justifying them again.

‘But astrologers predict the weather, too …’

‘Sure, but they’re educated; she isn’t.’

‘That’s not entirely true. There was a preacher here who taught her how to read and write; he was even ready to marry her …’

‘So the preacher is why she poisoned her husband?’

‘No, no. The preacher came later, after her husband was well and truly buried, if not rotting in his grave like those black deadman …’

‘Trumpets?’

‘Those deadman trumpets, which trump even from the grave?’

‘But maybe it wasn’t them.’

‘Not the trumpets? Not the preacher? Not her own hand which did the poor fellow in?’

‘But the miller, that greedy miser, wasn’t a poor fellow; he was an oaf!’

‘Yes, he was an oaf. But in the end he was a poor bastard who lived with a witch and didn’t realize it until it was too late.’

‘And later, too, when he was already in his grave, she used witchery to get whatever she wanted. If she needed rain, it rained. If she wished ill on a neighbour, his cow got sick and died. That big storm – you remember that storm, which blew off half our roofs and there was lightning everywhere and five people were killed? – well, it was obliging enough to skirt around her fields and property.’

‘That preacher of hers – and we let him give us communion, too, back then, since back then we took communion from every priest who came around – well, people say he’d have married her if he hadn’t gone off to Württemberg because the authorities were chasing him and the other preachers out of the province. So why didn’t she go with him?’

‘If he had taken that witch with him to the German lands, she would have met the same fate she can expect here with us. All we Christian peoples have at least one thing in common that sets us apart from the Turks and the Jews – we know how to detect witches and have methods for getting rid of them. Which is why, after all these disasters from the Evil One, we had to take action and denounce her.’

At the castle, the criminal judge had the screws put on her in a dank dungeon so that, with the help of a well-tested method based on pincers for peeling off fingernails and a device for breaking and crushing limbs, she would spit out the truth and confess to the commission in attendance that the devil himself had minted the coins with which she paid her young workers and that it was not just labour she extracted from the youths but also, by means of spells, their life force and will – so that once and for all they could get rid of the hag and be free of the shackles of her inhuman power.

‘What happened to her husband and to those two boys will happen to you, too,’ parents warned their sons. ‘One night you’ll go to bed and close your eyes and never open them again, because the moment you shut your eyelids, her hornèd companion will come to your bed and suck your soul out through your guts or through your head and then dance off with it to his dark kingdom. Your heart and any other useful organs, even your brain, she will boil up and mix in with those trumpets fried in pig’s fat; then she’ll go on poisoning honest men and leeching them to herself so they can’t resist, can’t escape from beneath her wings – yes, yes, her wings – for we know what the old hag binds them with. No normal man would desire her unless he was drunk. Nobody wants an old woman for that sort of thing. Old women are good for doing the cooking and watching the children – the grandchildren, to be precise – and for certain kinds of farm work and craftwork, but for the things we healthy men so badly want, old women are no good. We know this because we’re strong and healthy, since everyone knows that men don’t age as fast as women. We men aren’t old until we’re very old, while women get old even when they think they’re still young.’

‘That’s true. We women know this, both those of us who are young and those who are her age or older. Only we know that we’re old, while she lives as if she’s young, as if she wasn’t one of us. And she isn’t!’

‘But even though she’s nearly forty, she has hardly any grey hair – now, why is that?’

‘It’s because of dyes made from stones and plants,’ she stammered in the dungeon as they popped the joints in her arms.

‘And why doesn’t she have bristles on her chin like we do? Why does her skin look so young?’

‘It’s because of creams made from herbs,’ she cried out in the dungeon.

‘Sure, herbs – zeli – but if you stir the word a little, the way she stirs those potions of hers, you get …’

‘Oooh! Nothing good, nothing good at all! Pure evil – zlo!’

During the interrogation, a physician, using a kind of metal horn, examined her for traces of the devil’s seed; he determined that, in his expert view, such traces did exist in a certain greenish, odoriferous mucus. Another piece of important evidence was the birthmark below her right breast. Such a mark is a third nipple, by which the devil imbibes the witch’s milk, which is full of the potions witches pour into themselves so they can suckle innocent young boys and bewitched men. The commission – which besides the judge also included the physician and other honest men from the district – ruled that they had all the evidence they needed to show that the woman was the devil’s whore and that everything she had done was with the sole

purpose of leading faithful Christians into sin and bringing harm to the community, even if that meant harnessing nature with the devil’s help and turning its forces against them.

The witch was given one last chance to prove her innocence. They hung a stone cross around the neck of the shattered, broken woman and pushed her off a bridge into the river, following the common-sense logic that, if she was guilty, she would sink with the stone. And if, on the contrary, she rose out of the water with the stone still around her neck, it would mean that supernatural forces were at work. But such forces could be either good or evil. For them to be good, however – in the event that the witch did not sink with the stone – an additional miracle must occur in which the grace of God was evident beyond all doubt. What sort of miracle this might be was difficult to predict, but, when it happened, the shining glory of the Holy Spirit would make it clear to all who were present.

But it didn’t happen. There was no miracle. The body of the accused sank.

As the bubbles rose to the surface from the bottom of the river, fewer and fewer each moment, a snake appeared out of nowhere. As it swam across the water, its body formed beautiful arcs and it kept its head upright above the surface.

‘Look! Look!’ somebody shouted. ‘The evil spirit has swum out of her body!’

‘You mean it survived?’

‘The devil must have summoned it to himself. Now that it can’t live in her body any more, the witch is of no use to it. Such forces aren’t so easily destroyed. You can only destroy the body in which they sojourn. You can’t drown them; you have to burn them to death. An evil spirit is only destroyed by fire.’

After the little snake swam beneath the bridge and then, miraculously, never appeared on the other side, which the populace took to mean that the hornèd one had pulled it down to hell, a gentle white swan appeared on the river – a female swan, they decided, since it did not seem brawny or aggressive, the way only male swans, pro­tective of their offspring, are known to be. She was swimming peacefully towards the bridge, but then she turned around beneath it, unlike the snake. After that, she started swimming back and forth on the water, occasionally looking at the people watching her, who were waiting to see what would happen.

‘If that’s her soul, it’s not very small.’

‘Well, her body wasn’t exactly tiny or delicate.’

‘What will happen now? Where will the swan go?’

‘She’ll probably fly into the sky.’

‘But look at her eyes! Why is she looking at us so strangely?’

‘What do you mean, strangely?’

‘As if her eyes were a little moist.’

‘Well, she’s swimming in water, and there’s lots of moisture in water.’

‘No, no. That look of hers … Doesn’t it seem like her eyes are accusing us?’

‘Accusing us of what? Does anyone really believe that we didn’t do the right thing? After all, the witch confessed!’

‘But who wouldn’t confess after such brutal torture! Maybe she only confessed to make the pain stop …’

‘ … and knew that God would see her heart and in the end separate the truth from the lies and take good care of her when she died …’

‘Well, even if that’s true and there is some sort of reproach in the swan’s eyes, there’s also mercy and forgiveness there. If in anything we did we were by chance mistaken, she – that is, her soul in the form of the swan – forgives us our mistake, for we acted in good faith, believing that what we did was just, honourable and good.’

‘So you think there could also be mercy and forgiveness in her eyes?’

‘Oh, yes, no doubt about it. Now her soul will swim off peacefully, up or down the river, to the other side, and if she herself is forgiven – since she’s not going to the other world completely sinless; nobody, except the littlest children, is without sin when they go to other side – then if we did make a mistake, God will forgive us, too.’

‘But we didn’t …’

‘Of course we didn’t, but still, just in case …’ This is what the popu­lace was thinking as the swan spread her wide wings, toddled across the water on her red feet and, after a few yards, lifted herself off the surface and rose into the air; then, circling twice above the bridge, she flew into the distance, an ever smaller dot on the horizon until she completely vanished.

‘Vanished just like …’

‘ … like everything vanishes.’

If God had wanted to, he could have prevented her death – a few

isolated voices quietly speculated. But clearly, he had decided to snatch the poor woman from her torturers’ cruel hands and call her to himself, and then, years later, he would send that community of purportedly honest men and women a punishment they would be talking about for a long time. A punishment designed not to look like a punish­ment at first but like yet another opportunity for the populace, led by the secular and religious authorities, to go completely wild, and then afterwards they could celebrate their methods from the pulpit and boast of what had happened as a lesson to sinners far and wide. But perhaps the worst part of the punishment was that nobody ever fully agreed on what had actually happened during those cruel events. For the story, which was told in various versions, sounded completely unbelievable – almost as unbelievable as the atrocities that came centuries later would have sounded to people back then.