The Play of Death
Blood . . . water . . .
But she was too exhausted to think about it anymore.
15
OBERAMMERGAU, THE MORNING OF MAY 11, AD 1670
PONTIUS PILATE WASHED HIS TREMBLING hands in the bowl of water and looked around uncertainly at the crowd of Jews standing among the gravestones in the Oberammergau cemetery. Everyone was waiting impatiently for the Roman governor to find the right words.
“You . . . Pharisees, I wash my hands of the blood . . . of this innocent man . . .” Pilate stopped and stared into the crowd like a calf just before slaughter. Sweat poured down his brow.
“Who suffers . . .” whispered Simon, standing at the edge of the stage and serving again as a prompter.
“Who suffers this horrribble indignity,” Pilate proclaimed.
“Horrible . . . More passion—and pronounce it correctly!” Father Herele shouted, stamping his foot. Wedged between two bearded woodcutters dressed in yellow robes, the priest had been silent until then, intensely watching the events on the stage. Now he came forward, shaking his finger threateningly. “Didn’t anyone teach you peasants proper German in school? What will the pilgrims think, after coming from far and wide only to hear this gibberish?”
“That’s not gibberish, it’s Bavarian dialect,” exclaimed Pontius Pilate, who was actually the woodcutter Alois Mayer. “Where we live we don’t say horrible, but horrribble, just as we call death here boandkramer and the king is a kini.”
“Aha! I see. Do you think here in Oberammergau we should inscribe KINI OF THE JEWS on the cross?” the priest asked irritably.
“That’s all right by me,” snarled Jesus Christ, alias Hans Göbl, who was dressed in a white robe and stood alongside Pontius Pilate. “Nobody talks in pompous words like the ones in this play—except for our venerable priest, of course. But after all, he comes from Swabia!”
“Please,” Georg Kaiser begged, raising his hands and trying to calm everyone down. “I know everyone here is a bundle of nerves, but let’s continue—at least until noon.”
“I’ve got to be back in the barn by the noon church bells at the latest, or my Resl will scratch my eyes out,” grumbled one of the peasants, dressed in his costume and leaning wearily on a wooden cross. “This crap has been dragging on since early this morning.”
“And anyway, God doesn’t want us to put on the play this year,” a second one said. “Every ten years—that’s what our ancestors promised back then. And now this fat-headed Faistenmantel comes along and thinks we can do it all differently. Well, you can see what comes of that.”
Simon sighed and turned to the next page while his gaze wandered over the Oberammergau cemetery. Almost the entire village had shown up to rehearse the famous scene in which the crowd demands the death of Jesus, and Pontius Pilate washes his hands in innocence before finally delivering him up to the crowd to be crucified. Ever since Sebastian Sailer had been found dead the morning before in the Unterammergau Sacred Blood Chapel, the villagers had become increasingly restless, especially as the suspect, Xaver Eyrl, was still on the loose.
Father Tobias Herele had decided to rehearse the famous crowd scene in hopes of reviving a certain sense of community, but just the opposite occurred. People cursed, cried, and wailed; many couldn’t help wondering aloud who would be struck down next by this sinister curse that had already taken the lives of three men. But there were also some citizens, primarily confidants of Konrad Faistenmantel, who continued to support the accelerated schedule for the production.
“Please continue,” Georg Kaiser pleaded in a loud voice, turning to the crowd. “The people cry out ‘Crucify him.’”
“Away with him, crucify him,” mumbled the crowd. Indecisively they stood amid the gravestones in their homemade robes, appearing to Simon like a group of foreign pilgrims who had gotten lost.
This action doesn’t really take place on the stage, he thought. But either way it’s a Passion play, a story about human suffering.
The medicus admired the fine filigree of the painted backdrops that had been set up behind the stage before rehearsal with a block and tackle. Their depiction of houses, synagogues, and palm trees was so artistic that the audience might imagine that they had been transported to Jerusalem. Simon grinned. The Oberammergauers might be stubborn, angry people, but they were also artists, woodcarvers, painters, actors . . .
A really unusual place, he thought, in every respect.
“Can’t you speak a bit louder?” Georg Kaiser called to the crowd. “Come on, we want to hear you everywhere in the valley!”
“Crucify this man. Crucify him, for he has done much evil,” they called a bit louder, but they still sounded more like a grumbling crowd of drunken taverngoers than an enraged mob in the streets of Jerusalem.
“What’s the point of all this?” Pontius Pilate mumbled, drying his hands on his filthy toga. “We have no Judas anymore . . . Who’s going to betray the Savior?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll find another Judas,” Georg Kaiser said, trying to calm him down.
Mayer snorted. “I don’t think so, after everything that happened here last week. This curse is going to—”
Astonished shouts could be heard coming from the area near the cemetery’s entrance. Moments later Simon saw Judge Johannes Rieger striding solemnly through the crowd, waving his walking stick and heading toward the stairway leading to the stage. After climbing up, he turned toward the men and women who were watching him anxiously. His earnest expression suggested he had a very important announcement.
“Dear citizens of Oberammergau, hear me,” he began somberly, banging his stick on the floor of the stage. “I have just returned from a visit with the abbot of Ettal and have bad news for you, news that some of you may have been fearing for a long time.” He paused dramatically before continuing. “The play has been canceled. There will be no more rehearsals, and you can therefore all go back to your work, as is pleasing to God.”
The uproar now was quite a bit louder than the grumbling of the unwilling actors. Rieger raised his hand, and the crowd fell silent.
“The abbot is of the opinion that it was wrong to schedule an earlier performance, and all the dreadful events of recent days have shown we no longer have God’s blessing. We must now do everything we can to regain His favor.”
“A just decision,” cried the miller Augustin Sprenger. “The Passion play was cursed, and one of us would have been taken next.”
Some in the crowd loudly applauded him, but there were also objections.
“What are we going to do with all the backdrops and costumes we’ve made?” asked a young woman who came from a family of seamstresses. “Shall we throw them all in the Ammer?”
“They’ll be put in storage for the production that’s scheduled in four years,” Rieger responded. “Just as we’ve always done. I’ll repeat . . . It was a mistake to move up the schedule for the play, and God has punished us for that.”
“But we had expenses,” an old shoemaker protested. “Who’s going to repay us?”
Johannes Rieger grinned and pointed at Konrad Faistenmantel, who was standing in stunned silence amid the quarreling crowd. “The chairman of the town council will pay for everything, as promised. That’s the monastery’s irrevocable decision.”
Konrad Faistenmantel was stunned at Rieger’s words. The blood drained from his face, and suddenly he looked very vulnerable. Simon remembered that the fat, blustering merchant had just lost his youngest son a week earlier. The Passion play had sustained him since then, but now Faistenmantel slumped over.
“But . . . but . . .” he gasped. “How is this possible? I had figured on income from the play, and if it is canceled now, then . . .”
“Why should we give a damn?” one of the woodcarvers cried. “For years, you’ve forced us to buy wood at exorbitant prices, and paid us far too little for our carvings. Now it’s finally your turn to pay the piper.”
The crowd shouted their approval. A circle of angry villa
gers started to close in around Faistenmantel.
“I built the cross!” Alois Mayer shouted.
“And we painted the backdrops,” the younger Göbl brothers chimed in. “He promised us five guilders for that.”
“Pay up! Pay up!” they all started shouting.
“You’re getting nothing, you riffraff!”
Konrad Faistenmantel had evidently regained his old self-confidence. He glared at his creditors, his arms folded across his chest and a vein bulging out on his forehead.
“You have not yet heard the last of this,” he snarled. “I’ll speak with the abbot, and who knows . . .” His eyes narrowed to tiny slits. “Perhaps I know a thing or two that will displease His Excellency and make him change his mind.”
Franz Würmseer had remained in the background until then, but now he ran forward and seized Faistenmantel by the shirt collar. “You dog! What do you know? You . . . you know nothing!” He shook the fat council chairman, who was evidently surprised by the attack.
“Don’t push your luck, Franz,” gasped Faistenmantel as Würmseer kept a firm grip on him. “Nothing matters to me now.”
With a clenched fist, Faistenmantel took a swing at Würmseer, knocking him to the ground, but at the next moment the two younger Göbl brothers jumped up and started pummeling the council chairman furiously.
“Wait for me!” shouted Jesus Christ from up on the stage. “That bastard has it coming to him.”
Hans Göbl jumped down and joined in the fray. Even Pontius Pilate didn’t seem to want to wash his hands in innocence that day. Dressed in his gold-trimmed Roman toga, Alois Mayer pushed his way through the crowd, swinging his fists, until he got to Konrad Faistenmantel, who was now flanked by his two remaining sons. Together, the three Faistenmantels flailed in all directions.
“I built the damn cross,” Mayer shouted again, as if it were a battle cry. “Expensive, solid oak. The bastard owes me eight guilders.”
Johannes Rieger was still standing on the stage, staring in disbelief at the raging mob that, for the second time in a week, was now brawling in the cemetery.
“I hate these Oberammergauers,” he groaned, finally. “Why did I ever let them transfer me to this valley?”
“What did Faistenmantel mean when he said he knew a thing or two?” Simon asked. He ducked as a fist-sized clod of dirt came flying toward the stage.
Rieger stared at him angrily. “How should I know? Don’t always be poking your nose into things that don’t concern you, Herr Fronwieser. I warn you, that can have dire consequences,” he added menacingly.
Down below, the priest was still struggling to get the angry crowd under control, which was proving to be difficult. The only one standing above the fray, it seemed, was Georg Kaiser. The director had taken a seat on what was supposed to be the throne of Pontius Pilate, calmly observing the altercation, with a look of extreme relief on his face.
“So this is the end of this madness,” he said softly. “I probably wouldn’t have finished my revisions to the text by Pentecost, anyway.”
“Probably not even by the Last Judgment,” Simon answered, dodging a rusty helmet that landed on the stage.
Kaiser shrugged. “Some things just take time.”
Simon was about to reply when he stopped short. The melee was still continuing down below, but one of the participants had disappeared. Carefully, Simon looked around the cemetery, but he couldn’t find him anywhere.
Franz Würmseer had vanished.
Magdalena opened her eyes and found herself looking up into the branches of a willow that had grown together to form a sort of roof overhead. It took her a while to comprehend she was not lying under a tree but inside a simple hut. Outside, not far away, she could hear a monotonous rumbling, and it took her a while to figure out what it was. There was also the sound of rushing water, and she assumed it was the Ammer.
The Ammer . . . All of a sudden the memories came rushing back. The Tyrolean and young Lukas had spirited her out of Soyen in a barrel, then a fight had broken out on the bridge—a fight that Lukas lost. His sympathy for Magdalena had presumably cost him his life. Finally, the Tyrolean had thrown the barrel, with her inside, into the river. The barrel had finally burst, and sunk.
And now she was here.
Where am I?
Carefully, she sat up and looked around the sparsely furnished, dome-shaped hut. She was lying on a mat of rushes spread over a bare hard-packed dirt floor. Crab traps and mended nets hung on the walls, which, like the ceiling, were also made of willow branches.
Magdalena’s head still hurt, presumably from the blow she’d received in the shed in Soyen. She had a dry cough, and her limbs were as limp as swamp grass. She was probably running a fever, which would be no surprise since she’d almost drowned in the cold waters of the Ammer. But someone must have saved her. She remembered the gentle voice in her dreams as well as the water, the taste of salty blood, and her own burial . . .
Magdalena frowned. Something in the dream rang a bell.
Water and salty blood . . .
“Ah! You are already looking better,” said a muffled voice behind her.
Magdalena turned toward the entrance and cried in terror on seeing a horrible, positively nightmarish figure. The creature was wearing a thick woolen robe that almost looked like a suit of armor, but instead of a head, a sort of fuzzy sausage grew out of his shoulders, ending in a smooth protruding disk. It looked like a beheaded monster. Now the disk spoke again, once more in the strange, muffled voice.
“Oh, excuse me, I forgot I’m still wearing my beekeeper’s hat. How clumsy of me.”
Leather gloves tugged at the felt, and a friendly, very wrinkled face appeared. The head looked much too small atop the strange body in the heavy black uniform.
“I just returned from caring for my bees,” the man explained with a friendly smile. He had a monk’s tonsure and was probably going on seventy years of age. “We have a new queen, and there’s a lot of excitement,” he continued genially. “My little friends are not always especially kind to me.” He grimaced, pointing to his right ear, which had swollen to twice its normal size.
Magdalena couldn’t help laughing. “Excuse me,” she said, “but I briefly thought a monster . . .” she started to say before breaking out in a coughing fit.
The old man looked concerned and came forward to lay a hand on her forehead. “You still have a fever,” he murmured. “I’ll give you some of my honey—that will help at least with the coughing—and perhaps a potion made from willow bark.”
The deep voice seemed out of place coming from the delicate little man, but it had a calming effect on her. It sounded like the same voice she’d heard in her dreams. “Where am I?” she finally asked.
The old man looked surprised. “Oh, didn’t I say? You’re near the Augustinian monastery in Rottenbuch. I’m Brother Konstantin, in charge of caring for the bees, and occasionally I go fishing, too.” He shook his head slowly from side to side. “It’s lucky for you I was down at the river yesterday morning checking my traps.”
“Yesterday morning?” Magdalena was shocked. “And so . . . I’ve been here since then?”
“Yes, almost two days. Most of the time you were sleeping, but several times you spoke in your dreams. ‘The water, the water,’ you kept saying. It appears you almost drowned.” Brother Konstantin smiled sheepishly. “I had to kiss you in order to bring you back from the dead—the first kiss I ever gave a woman, and probably my last. The life of an ascetic monk can sometimes be very lonely.”
Magdalena struggled to sit up. “I’ve got to go to Oberammergau,” she said. “If it isn’t already too late.”
Brother Konstantin gently pushed her back down onto the reed mat. “You’ll go nowhere, at least not yet. You’ve got a fever, girl. You should thank God and all the saints that they saved you from the raging river.”
“With your help,” Magdalena replied weakly.
The monk shrugged. “I was only the tool. You we
re caught in my traps like a fish with especially beautiful scales, and I was sure you were dead. But you were still breathing, so I brought you back to my fisherman’s shack, dressed you, and—”
Magdalena was shocked. “I was naked?”
“Well, your clothes were soaked, and you needed something dry to wear.” Brother Konstantin winked. “Have no fear. I’m a monk, firm in the faith, and besides already quite old, so that the Lord has freed me from the desires of the flesh. All I needed was the kiss.”
Only now did Magdalena realize she was wearing a rough monk’s robe instead of her dress. It was black, made of heavy wool, and, even though it was scratchy, very warm. But it didn’t have any pockets, and . . .
The letter!
She suddenly remembered the message Jakob Schreevogl had given her. If she’d lost it in the river, then she was done for. Lechner would never believe her.
“Is this what you’re looking for?” Brother Konstantin asked, holding the folded and sealed paper in his hand. Evidently he had correctly guessed why she looked so shocked. “It got wet, but the parchment isn’t damaged, and surely the letter is still legible.” He smiled mischievously. “And as you can see, I haven’t broken the seal.”
“I’m deeply indebted to you,” said Magdalena, hiding the letter under the robe, “but I have to leave as soon as possible. It’s a matter of life and death. My sister is in grave danger, and if I can’t help her in time, she will have to suffer great pain and die—if she isn’t dead already . . .” she added in a broken voice.
Brother Konstantin looked at her sympathetically. “And you don’t want to tell me anything more? Not even why you almost drowned, or what the letter is all about?”
Magdalena hesitated. If she told Brother Konstantin the reason for her trip, he might pass the news on to the Rottenbuch abbot. Rottenbuch and Schongau had a number of commercial ties, and perhaps the abbot here was even aware of the plans of the Schongau burgomaster Buchner. With a sigh, she finally answered, “I’m afraid that’s all a bit complicated. To the best of my—”