Oliver Potzsch: The Hangman’s Daughter

The door closed and Simon was alone in the room. The hangman’s living room was large and spacious and took up almost the entire ground floor of the house. In the corner there was a large stove, which was stoked from outside in the corridor. Next to it was the kitchen table, and above it the executioner’s sword hung on the wall. A steep staircase led from the passage to the upper room, where the Kuisls and their three children slept. Next to the oven was a low, narrow door, which led to another room beyond. Simon ducked under the lintel and entered the holy of holies.

On the left stood two chests in which Jakob Kuisl kept everything needed for executions and torture-ropes, chains, gloves, but also thumbscrews and pincers. The rest of this threatening arsenal was owned by the town authorities and was kept in the tower, deep down in the dungeons. Next to the chests, the gallows ladder was leaning on the wall.

But Simon was looking for something else. Almost the whole of the opposite wall was taken up by an enormous closet that reached to the ceiling. The physician opened one of the many doors and looked into a confused mass of bottles, pots, leather bags, and vials. Inside the closet, herbs were hanging to dry; they smelled like summer. Simon recognized rosemary, goat’s rue, and daphne. Behind a second door were countless drawers, labeled with alchemical signs and symbols. Simon turned to the third door. Behind this were piled old dusty volumes, crackling parchment rolls, and books both printed and handwritten-the hangman’s library, collected over the course of many generations, ancient knowledge, completely different from what Simon had studied in the course of his many dry-as-dust lectures at the university in Ingolstadt.

Simon reached for a particularly heavy volume, which he often held in his hands. He ran his finger over the title. “ Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis, ” he murmured. A disputed book that was based on the idea that all the blood in the body was part of a perpetual circulation powered by the heart. Simon’s professors in Ingolstadt had laughed at this theory, and even his father had found it far-fetched.

Simon continued browsing. The Buch der Medicie , or Book of Medicine, was the name of a handwritten, poorly bound little book in which all kinds of remedies against illnesses were listed. Simon’s gaze was arrested by a page on which dried toads were recommended as a remedy against the plague. Next to it on the shelf was a work that the hangman could have acquired only recently. Das Wundarzneyische Zeughaus , or Surgical Armory, by Johannes Scultetus, the city physician of Ulm, was so new that probably not even the University of Ingolstadt had acquired it yet. Reverently, Simon let his fingers glide over the binding of this masterpiece of surgery.

“Pity that you have eyes only for books.”

Simon looked up. Magdalena was leaning in the doorway and looking at him brightly. The young physician couldn’t help swallowing. Magdalena Kuisl, twenty years old, was aware of the effect she had on men. Whenever Simon saw her, his mouth became dry and his head seemed empty. In the past few weeks, it had become worse, he always kept thinking of her. Sometimes before he fell asleep, he imagined her full lips, the dimples in her cheeks, and her laughing eyes. If the physician had only been a little superstitious, he would have supposed that the hangman’s daughter had cast a spell over him.

“I’m…waiting for your father…” he stammered, without taking his eyes off her. Smiling, she came up to him. She appeared not to have noticed the dead boy on the bench as she walked past, and Simon had no intention of bringing it to her attention. The few moments they had together were too precious to fill with death and suffering.

He shrugged and put the book back on the shelf.

“Your father has the best medical library for miles around. I’d be foolish not to use it,” he murmured. His glance wandered over her plunging neckline in which two well-formed breasts were apparent. He quickly looked the other way.

“ Your father sees that differently,” said Magdalena and slowly came nearer.

Simon knew that his father considered the hangman’s books to be works of the devil. And he had often warned him about Magdalena. Satan’s woman, he had said.

And he who has dealings with the hangman’s daughter will never be a respected medical man.

Simon knew that there could be no question of a marriage with Magdalena. She was “dishonorable,” just like her father. But he couldn’t stop thinking of her. Only a few weeks before, they had danced together for a short time at St. Paul’s Fair, and for days this had been the subject of gossip in the town.

His father had threatened to beat him if he was seen with Magdalena again. Hangmen’s daughters married hangmen’s sons-that was an unwritten law. Simon knew it very well.

Now Magdalena stood in front of him and ran her fingers across his cheek. She was smiling, but in her eyes there was an unspoken grief.

“Do you want to come to the meadows with me tomorrow?” she asked. “Father needs mistletoe and hellebore…”

Simon thought he heard a pleading note in her voice.

“Magdalena, I…” There was a rustle behind him.

“You can very well go alone. Simon and I have a great deal to talk about. Now off with you.”

Simon looked round. Unnoticed by him, the executioner had entered the narrow room. Magdalena looked once more at the young physician and then ran out into the garden.

Jakob Kuisl gave Simon a piercing and severe look, and for a moment it seemed he might throw him out of the house. Then he took his pipe out of his mouth and smiled.

“I’m pleased that you like my daughter,” he said. “Just don’t let your father know about it.”

Simon nodded. He had often had angry words with his father about his visits to the executioner’s house. Bonifaz Fronwieser considered the hangman to be a quack. However, his son wasn’t the only person he was unable to dissuade from making the pilgrimage to the hangman; half the people of Schongau went to him with their aches and pains. Jakob Kuisl earned only a part of his income from hanging and torturing. The major part of his business concerned the healing art.

He sold potions for gout and diarrhea, prescribed tobacco for toothaches, splinted broken legs, and set dislocated shoulders. His knowledge was legendary, even though he had never studied at a university. It was clear to Simon that his father just had to hate the executioner. After all, he was his toughest competitor and, in fact, the better physician…

Meanwhile Jakob Kuisl had gone into the living room again. Simon followed. The room immediately filled with great clouds of tobacco smoke-the hangman’s lone vice, but one that he cultivated intensely.

Pipe in mouth he went purposefully to the bench, lifted the dead boy onto the table, and turned back the blanket and cloth. He whistled quietly through his teeth.

“Where did you find him?” he asked. At the same time he filled an earthenware bowl with water and began to wash the face and chest of the corpse. He looked quickly at the dead boy’s fingernails. Red earth had collected under them, as if little Peter had been digging somewhere with his bare hands.

“Down by the raft landing,” said Simon. He related all that had happened up to the point where everyone had run up into town to take revenge on the midwife. The hangman nodded.

“Martha is alive,” he said, continuing to dab at the dead boy’s face. “I took her to the keep myself. She is safe there for the time being. Everything else will have to be looked into.”

As so often before, Simon was impressed by the executioner’s composure. Like all the Kuisls, he seldom spoke, but what he said had authority.