The Empusium, page 8
“I don’t know how to express my gratitude,” said Wojnicz to Opitz as they headed uphill, truly touched by the gift of the boots. “And you thought about me at such a difficult time. I’m eternally grateful.”
He really had no idea how to thank Opitz, who was leading their expedition. Pale and serious, he was looking extremely dignified today, his rather common features ennobled by mourning.
“You have no need to thank me. My conduct is as natural as can be, for he who is in need shall receive, Herr Wojnicz.”
Wojnicz told him about Dr. Semperweiss’s prognosis, adding that he might even be able to go home for Christmas.
Opitz merely sighed.
* * *
—
The charcoal burners’ settlement, which they passed deep inside the forest, made an unpleasant impression. Sticky mud full of bark, pine cones and twigs spilled around heaps of smoldering logs, as if the skin of the forest had been ripped off, leaving the wound inflamed. The charcoal burners stared at them gloomily, out of dark, sooty faces. Opitz shook hands with one of them and nodded in the direction of the hikers. They were waiting for Thilo, who was finding it hard going and kept stopping to catch his breath. Wojnicz held back with him. With humor that made light of his condition, Thilo talked about the virtues of landscape painting, but his broken sentences betrayed how difficult it was for him to breathe.
“Landscape…is a great…mystery…because in fact…it takes shape…in the eyes…of the beholder,” he struggled to say.
He added that it was a sort of projection of the spectator’s inner state, and that we should wonder whether what we are seeing might look entirely different in reality.
Wojnicz replied that as a child he had been bothered by the question of whether, for example, everyone saw the color green similarly, or was “green” just an agreed term for something that each person might perceive in their own way. If so, then our inner representations of the world might be dramatically different. Only language and social norms would be keeping some kind of order.
“But in fact colors are particular wavelengths, objective measures,” he concluded.
“Except that they can act on the human eye in all sorts of ways. How do you see green?” asked Thilo.
Wojnicz could not answer. Green like a leaf—that was all that occurred to him. He could only talk about it through comparison, through analogy with something else.
They set off up the hill again, where everyone was waiting for them, and out of necessity fell silent. The topic evaporated.
“Have you seen…the cemetery…in Langwaltersdorf?” asked Thilo, breaking the silence, breathing heavily. “It’s worth a look. It’s a special map of the world of the living.”
Wojnicz could not quite understand what he meant.
It was hard to describe the charcoal burners’ base as a settlement—there were just some large kilns, and near them some shacks cobbled together out of wood, branches and tar paper. With what seemed to Wojnicz undue animation, Opitz told them about the work of the charcoal burners, who hung around in a scattered group, looking totally uninterested in this entire show. Their black fingers held sloppily rolled cigarettes in dirty papers, and their eyes shone out of their charred faces. Their shabby, torn clothing brought to mind some bizarre fashion, exotic and primordial. Wojnicz felt as if they had all ended up in one of the prints he had enjoyed looking at as a child, depicting scenes from distant lands where two civilizations confronted each other for the first time.
Opitz showed them the kilns and with expert knowledge explained how they were filled. Once they were loaded with good material—the best wood was beech, which was plentiful here, as were hornbeam, alder and birch—to a total of twelve cubic meters, they were lit and left to heat. You had to wait until the right temperature was reached, and then close the hole at the top, letting the fire settle evenly, while the smoke emerged from small holes at the bottom. Under no circumstances could the vents be blocked, so keeping a constant eye on them was a crucial task. The kiln burned like that for hours on end, around the clock, then just before dawn you opened the lids and checked with a long stake to see if the charcoal had carbonized yet.
“These kilns are a local invention known as retorts,” said Opitz, raising a finger to call his inattentive tour group to order. “Now, as you can see, the retort is hot and the burning process is underway inside it, destroying what until recently was ordinary wood, to extract completely new and desirable, if not noble elements. These fellows know how to manage this, and how to check if the charcoal has appeared.”
With the gesture of a compere he pointed at the nearest group of charcoal burners. Their faces did not change—they expressed indifference, or even, thought Wojnicz, something like contempt.
“Once you have checked that everything is all right, you wait a few hours more, until white smoke appears, and then blue. At that point you must pour water over the oven,” continued Opitz.
“How much water do you need for something as hot as that?” asked Herr August astutely.
That Opitz did not know. In his verbose dialect he asked the man he had spoken to earlier. The man spat out a single word.
“About a hundred liters,” translated Opitz.
Then he explained that all the lids were sealed with mud to keep the steam inside. The next day, once everything had cooled down, the charcoal was ready. You opened the door and removed it with shovels. After burning the entire stock, you obtained about half a kiln of valuable product, and whatever had not burned up was used as tinder for the next load.
“And what could happen if the kilns were left unsupervised for a while?” asked Opitz rhetorically, leaning on his hiking stick decorated with little metal badges and edelweiss flowers.
The men with blackened faces looked at him with perhaps slightly greater interest.
He answered his own question. “The entire load would be incinerated. Instead of charcoal, you’d have a kiln full of white ash. The job would have failed.”
“Is it dangerous work?” inquired Wojnicz spontaneously, and immediately felt ashamed of asking.
“Oh yes,” replied Opitz jestingly, ending his lecture and gesturing for them to move on. “If you let yourself be enveloped in smoke, you lose your bearings and fall into the retort.”
The charcoal burners cackled.
The answer embarrassed Wojnicz, and he promised himself not to ask any more questions. Opitz let the hikers go ahead and watched with great patience as they trudged uphill. A handful of sickly men, wanting to believe they still had plenty of life ahead of them. He kept the closest eye on Thilo von Hahn. The boy came last, breathing heavily and looking down at his feet, as if thinking about another world entirely. The blood in his ailing lungs could not provide enough oxygen, so his heart was thumping; one might wonder why Opitz had insisted on his coming with them. Opitz gave a barely noticeable sign with his chin, connecting the figure of Thilo with the gaze of the charcoal burners. They replied with a faint nod, also barely noticeable. Wojnicz saw this, but, wrapped up in his own hurt pride, immediately forgot about it.
* * *
—
Although Dr. Semperweiss had firmly forbidden conversation during physical effort, the gentlemen paid this no mind, and carried on with the series of discussions they had started yesterday or the day before, or had been holding since time began, stopping now and then and leaning on their shepherd’s staffs. One of their inflammatory topics was the disappearance of the Mona Lisa. Two years ago, someone had broken into the Louvre and carried the painting off like a baguette. On the anniversary of the theft, as La Gioconda was still lost without trace, the newspapers had once again written at length about this event. The company was divided into two camps. According to Thilo and Herr August, this was the irreparable loss of a special cultural symbol, one of those works of art that are the axes of civilization, around which we organize ourselves spiritually as well as socially, and which humanity has a duty to protect above all. Herr August’s declamation on the topic struck a tone of heartfelt rapture that made it sound as if all the words were capitalized; striving to speak clearly but somewhat burdened by the weight of those letters, his lips swelled and became moist with spittle, so that with every P or B Herr August sprayed flecks of saliva, no doubt full of mysterious Koch’s bacilli. Opitz and Lukas in turn accused them of hysteria and exaggeration, claiming that there were more important matters than the Mona Lisa, and that although they appreciated Leonardo as an artist, one should not raise works of art onto such a high pedestal. Besides, they said, the Mona Lisa was merely a portrait of someone’s mistress, with a lecherous smirk to boot, arousing a certain impure pleasure in us (“Oh, no! Not in me!” retorted Herr August) and unworthy of the attention devoted to it. Works of art should educate and bring the past closer. Here Lukas grew particularly excited, and his voice became a bark. Changing the subject, he launched a crusade against modern art, which he regarded as primitive and devoid of merit. At this point the men fell into such heated debate that everyone had to stop for a rest, leaning on their staffs, for more time than they should have. But what was to be done? Thilo had to come to the defense of modern art, trying to show Lukas his own incompetence, parochialism and bad taste—and his intellectual limitation too. Of course, Thilo expressed none of this directly, but his tone took on a scathing irony, which made Lukas even angrier. Finally Mona Lisa herself took a beating—she was not even pretty. Generally the appeal of women relied on the fact that they were faking, as if hiding a mystery, which was what drew men to them. But that was just a pretense, concealing an intellectual void. At this point the emotions calmed, and it seemed that at least on this matter they were all in agreement. Opitz issued the command to march on. As they headed uphill, they had to focus on the stony path, so they walked in silence. Lukas took advantage of this:
“Woman represents a bygone, inferior stage of evolution, so writes Darwin, and he of all people has something to say on the matter. Woman is like…”—here he sought the right word—“an evolutionary laggard. While man has gone on ahead and acquired new capabilities, woman has stayed in her old place and does not develop. That is why a woman is often socially handicapped, incapable of coping on her own, and must always be reliant on a man. She has to make an impression on him—by manipulation, by smiling. The Mona Lisa’s smile symbolizes a woman’s entire evolutionary strategy for coping with life. Which is to seduce and manipulate.”
And soon, despite the steep path and the injunction not to talk during physical effort, the conversation had shifted onto new tracks and intensified again—on the topic of women they all had something to say.
Now Frommer took the floor. As he spoke, he often stopped to draw invisible figures on the moss with his cane. In his opinion, some singular things had happened in this part of the country. He stressed that he had found it all in an archive in Breslau, and that not an ounce of it was fabrication. He said that the local territory had been witness to the violent clash of two religious camps. The Reformation had found its bridgehead in the nearby Czech lands, but many were in favor of it in our Prussian territory too—the peasants, the townsfolk, but above all, the gentry. When the Catholics gained power, one of these local aristocrats, von Stillfried, was sentenced to the loss of his entire fiefdom and half of his inherited goods for participating in the “Czech rebellion,” as it was known. A painful punishment! To save his property, he converted back to Catholicism, and as can happen in these situations, he became more papal than the pope. In his religious fervor, he began to hunt down every deviation from the true faith, every act of heresy and, above all, paganism. It was he who unleashed the persecution of heretics in this district, and although he lived in a castle in Neurode, his influence spread all the way to Waldenburg in one direction and Glatz in the other.
And so, early in the spring of 1639, this Stillfried had condemned two women to death for witchcraft, after several days’ torture—Eva Bernhard and Anna Tieff. Yes, Frommer had memorized these names, and now served them up with a note of satisfaction, as if to say he was a serious, though amateur historian. Eva was interrogated in April, mainly about witches’ sabbaths on Homole, a peak on the Czech side. Eva named all the women she knew in the entire district, as well as those she knew only by sight or by hearsay, from the Czech side too—Barbara Brands from Kostenthal and Dorota Meisner from Braunau, as well as women from Nieder Wüstergiersdorf and Görbersdorf.
Eva was beheaded and burned in Neurode, while Anna did not live to see the pyre—she died in prison of the wounds suffered during torture.
It seems the judges scented blood like hunting dogs, and now they thought every woman was mixed up in witchcraft. And looking at the mountains and the forest, at the moss and the stones—and especially climbing Homole and seeing that enormous hole in the earth, out of which the devil himself emerged at their sabbaths—made it clear that these places incited women, who were after all born with a moral handicap, to abort their fetuses here, to make venomous potions and cast spells on the innocent. Now the women felt the scrutiny of priests, judges and their assistants. Even a neighbor was an enemy. A brother or a husband might be too.
In summer, such terror gripped the villages on both sides of the border that the women abandoned their families and duties and fled into the mountains, as if the sound of the devil’s flute had enchanted them.
“The villages were empty, the cows went unmilked, children wept with hunger, kitchen gardens were choked with weeds, clothing was frayed and full of holes”—as if in a trance, Frommer listed these degrees of the world’s collapse—“ovens were cold, provisions rotted, cats and dogs went feral, sheep were overgrown with wool. In Braunau on the Czech side too, Dorota and Barbara were taken away and tortured: they were stretched on a rack and tormented with fire and brimstone. The townsfolk quailed at the sound of their screams coming from the municipal dungeons, until finally, unable to bear it, the town of Braunau made an official plea to Prague. They asked if the torture had to continue, and whether the husbands of the accused should not bear the costs of the trial (two Reichsthalers), because Braunau was a poor town, and the aforementioned husbands happened to be wealthy. Who was to pay for it all? In reply, the appeals court in Prague ruled that the torture should stop and the women should be released, and that they should not be burdened with the costs of the trial. The women were freed, but the court in Prague would not agree to restore their good names. They died in disgrace. Unfortunately, Neurode did not defend its witches,” Frommer ended his account, as if in sorrow.
“A fine tale,” said Herr August. “And it shows the power of common sense and the market.”
“Apparently a good many of the runaways never returned,” added Frommer.
Wojnicz walked quietly, glancing anxiously at Thilo, and listening to Frommer with an attention that now and then was distracted by noises from the forest: rustling, the distant cry of a bird, the creaking of tall beech trees. Or the movement of an animal seen only from the corner of his eye, or wisps of fur torn from a body by a protruding branch. Or simply the great panorama of mountains that briefly shone through the tall trees, and then vanished as they descended and the forest grew thicker.
This story gave rise to a conversation about atavism. Panting and occasionally stopping, the gentlemen carried on a debate without in fact quarreling at all, but tossing in arguments on behalf of the same attitude. Being closer to nature and its rhythms in comparison with man, who is more civilized, woman represents a kind of atavism, stated Lukas with great self-confidence, adding emphasis by stressing each syllable of the word: a-ta-vi-sm. Opitz said that although he didn’t fully understand what atavism meant, he was sure that woman was often a social parasite; yet, appropriately controlled, she was able to work on behalf of society—as a mother, for instance.
“Whether we like it or not, motherhood is the one and only thing that justifies the existence of this troublesome sex,” he concluded, and they all understood that this was his way of trying to cope with the death of Frau Opitz, since, after all, she had not had any children.
Finally, as ever, Thilo spoiled the fun, by offering a curious hypothesis, apparently from France, that the Mona Lisa does not depict a woman but a feminized friend of Leonardo’s, as it was widely known that the artist preferred the companionship of men to that of women. This theory prompted a pitiful smirk from Lukas and the mute satisfaction of Herr August. Next Lukas, clearly tired, returned to his main theme, voicing a scathing criticism of modern art that ended: “All that’s good in art is whatever those cretinous maniacs obsessed with locomotives, propellers and all that futurism of theirs have not yet attempted.”
He pronounced the word futurism with the utmost contempt.
By now they were walking at an even pace along a flat woodland road. At this time of year, the beech forest on either side of it was idyllic, the dark red leaves forming claret-colored vaults overhead. Yellow and orange splashes of birch and maple intensified the autumn carnival of colors, especially against the turquoise and golden backdrop created by the rays of the sun and the blue of the early October sky.
“I’ve seen all this before in the spring,” said Thilo, and sighed. “We came here then too.”
He and Wojnicz were at the back of the procession. A few dozen meters ahead of them walked Lukas and August. The latter was gesticulating, so perhaps they had returned to one of those topics on which they could never agree.
