“And what would that be?”
“A sword.”
Jeremias looked at him, astonished. “A sword? I don’t understand. For the first time, you’re actually making me curious.”
Georg pointed at the old, battered trunk in the corner. “Well, when I brought the children to you, they went to play back there by the trunk. Paul was crazy about a short sword he found there. It was actually just the handle and the lower part of a blade that had broken off, dull and scratched. At first I didn’t pay any attention to it, but then I remembered what Paul had said to me when we were out by the river. He was very keen on going to see you. He has a sword just like Uncle Bartholomäus, only smaller. Those were his exact words, and at first I didn’t know what he meant by that. But now I do.”
Meanwhile, Jeremias had gone over and opened the old trunk. He took out the broken sword and held it reverently in his hand. It was a “great” sword, a two-hander-dull and rusted, and its handle was just as rough and gray as on the day it was forged.
“The handle is of sharkskin,” Georg whispered. “Isn’t that right? A handle only found in Bamberg executioners’ swords. I always admired Uncle Bartholomäus’s sword. Even if you’re anxious and your hand is sweaty, every drop will run off, and your hand won’t slip when you deal the deadly blow. I always wanted to have a sword like that. You have one, or at least a broken part of one. Why?”
“Why don’t you tell me,” Jeremias replied. His eyes had lost their warmth now. He looked sad and very, very tired, almost as if he’d aged years in the last few minutes.
Georg placed the cup down on the table and stared at the cripple for a long time. “I asked my uncle once how he’d become a hangman in Bamberg. After all, he was a stranger here, and the job almost always goes to the firstborn son of the previous hangman. The hangman before my father, however, had no children.”
“No, he didn’t,” Jeremias said in a soft voice.
“After the witch trials, the hangman disappeared without a trace,” Georg continued. “Nobody ever saw him again, though I think people were somewhat relieved. His name was Michael Binder. As the Bamberg executioner, he took upon himself the weight of the city’s guilt. He had tortured and executed almost a thousand people, on the orders of the bishop and a special inquisition committee, and then he simply disappeared. And with him, the guilt.”
“The guilt remains,” Jeremias replied. “It can’t be washed away, not even with caustic lime. The good citizens cannot wash it away, and the hangman certainly cannot, either. He must continue to live with this guilt, especially with the one. .”
Georg could see tears welling up in the custodian’s face, and suddenly he felt sorry for him. “What kind of guilt do you mean?” he asked hesitantly.
Jeremias smiled sadly. “You’ll be a good hangman someday, Georg. I can tell, believe me. Good hangmen are like sharp swords. They relieve suffering, if possible. Just a whoosh of air and it’s done. Be careful not to think too much about it. With the thinking comes dreams, bad dreams.” Jeremias groaned as he returned and sat down on the bed with the sword handle. “Especially when you’re torturing someone, your mind must be as clear and clean as a freshly forged sword. The screams, the pleading, the wailing must all bounce off you, have no effect. But sometimes you can’t do it. Perhaps you will know some of the victims-not well, but you’ve met them and greeted them on the street. They are neighbors, casual acquaintances, the tavern keeper from where you’ve always ordered your beer, the midwife who helped your wife birth her child. This isn’t a large city, and to some degree everyone knows everybody else. And the day may come when you must torture and execute someone you. .” He hesitated. “You really love. This guilt stays with you forever.”
“My God.” Georg looked at him, horrified. “You. . you. .”
“Carlotta was sixteen,” the old man continued, staring blankly into space while his fingers clutched and kneaded the sword handle. He seemed lost in his own world. “She was the daughter of a well-to-do linen weaver. Our love was clandestine. No one was to learn of it. But we swore we would get married someday. As a sign of my affection, I gave her a dress of pure fustian as soft as goose down. Toward the end of the third wave of persecutions, at the time of the Great Plague, the tavern keeper of the Bear’s Claw claimed he’d seen my Carlotta dancing with the devil in the parish cemetery at the time of the full moon. In those days, lots of people danced with the devil,” Jeremias said with a dry laugh. “The trial didn’t even last half a day, then they handed Carlotta over to me. I can still remember her wide-open eyes. My hands trembled, but I did my job, as always. They asked her about the people she knew, and every time I applied the tongs to her, I thought she would speak my name. But she didn’t. She just looked at me the whole time with her big, brown eyes, like those of a sweet little fawn. .”
“Did you burn her at the execution site?” Georg finally asked, breaking the silence that followed.
Jeremias shook his head. “She hanged herself in the dungeon with a rope made of the dress I’d once given her. Perhaps she wanted to spare me the sight of the execution.” He laughed bitterly again. “The sinner spares the hangman from having to kill her. What irony. The devil really had a time with us.”
“What happened then?” Georg asked.
“I couldn’t live with the guilt. That very night I smashed my executioner’s sword and fled from the town. I found shelter in an old shack built by a worker at a limestone quarry near Rossdorf in the Bamberg Forest, and I cried my eyes out. Then I decided to end my life and wipe all memory of me from the face of the earth. So I poured the unslaked lime in a trough, added water, and jumped in. But the pain was too great. I couldn’t bear the same pain I’d inflicted on others. I wandered through the forest, half-blind and screaming in agony, hiding in stables and barns, until finally Berthold Lamprecht found me and took me in.”
“The innkeeper of the Wild Man,” Georg added with a nod.
“And a good Christian, God knows. He’s a distant relative of mine, the only one who knows who I really am. The young people in Bamberg don’t know me, of course, and the elders just regard me as an old, scar-covered cripple. None of them ever recognized me on the street, and if anyone started giving me a closer look, I pulled my hood over my face and moved on. I’m just a monster, and monsters have no past.” Jeremias bared his teeth. With his scarred head and deformed face, he looked so horrible that even Georg could not help feeling repelled.
“Back then,” Jeremias continued, “Berthold went to the executioner’s house and fetched some of my things, among them this goddamned broken sword.” He weighed it in his hand like a feather. “Then he gave me work and this room that I’ve lived in ever since, like an ugly beast inside a mountain. I kept the sword, God knows why. Perhaps so I would never forget my evil deeds, and always remember my beloved Carlotta. .”
Tears ran down his scarred face; he cried silently as the birds in the cage above his head, now fully awake, began to chirp cheerfully. Georg was sure he’d never met such a lonely man.
And yet, I have to ask him this one last question.
“Do you know what I still find strange?” Georg said after a while. “As I told you earlier, sometimes little details stick in my mind. That happens to me often when I’m talking to people, and it did this time as well. When I mentioned the sleep sponge before, and Father’s assumption that the werewolf uses it to stun his victims, you laughed. You said my father was an imaginative fellow if he thought a werewolf would sedate a prostitute and then rip open her rib cage. Well. .” He paused and stared intently at Jeremias.
“What are you trying to say?” the old man asked, wiping the tears from his face. “What about it?”
“I never said anything about prostitutes nor a ripped-open rib cage, and I don’t think you could have heard about it. My father told me that Captain Lebrecht wanted to keep these matters absolutely confidential. Basically, there’s only one other person who would know about it.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “The murderer.”