Oliver Pötzsch: The Werewolf of Bamberg

Without warning Bartholomäus, Jakob jumped. Vaguely he caught a glimpse of the small lane beneath him, covered with snow and garbage, and then he felt solid ground again. He’d made it to the next roof.

Relieved, he looked around at his brother, who was still standing hesitantly on the ridge of the roof. Just as Bartholomäus was about to leap, Michael Berchtholdt appeared alongside him like a ghost and dragged him back down the icy roof. Other boys followed and started beating Bartholomäus, who screamed desperately for his older brother.

“Jakob, Jakob! Help me! They’re killing me!”

Jakob saw the wide eyes of his brother staring back at him. He heard the blows raining down on Bartholomäus-six or maybe seven boys had jumped him. That would be too many-even for Jakob, who, with his strength, could perhaps have taken on three of them. Besides, if he jumped into the fray, there would be no one to warn Mother and little Lisl before even worse things happened. Suppose the unruly mob attacked their house down in the Tanners’ Quarter while he was fighting with the street urchins here? Perhaps they’d already set the house on fire. He couldn’t waste any time.

But there was something else Jakob was reluctant to admit, even to himself-something that spun a fine, sticky web around him.

The zeal Bartholomäus had shown the day before while piling the wood around the stake; his constant praise for their choleric father; his cool, dispassionate curiosity concerning the torture of the old shepherd. . all of that had increased Jakob’s contempt for his brother. It was a palpable disgust that sometimes caused him to gag and even now left a bad taste in his mouth.

At that moment it became painfully clear to Jakob that Bartholomäus was just like his father and the whole goddamned family of executioners. Jakob himself had never been one of them, and he wouldn’t be in the future, either, no matter how much he’d always longed for his father’s acceptance.

Without being aware of it, Jakob had made up his mind.

“Jakob, help me!” Bartholomäus wailed as the blows continued raining down on him. “Please don’t let me die!”

For one last time, Jakob stared into his brother’s wide, terrified eyes. Then he turned away without saying a word and ran across the roofs of Schongau toward the eastern city wall, where the Tanners’ Quarter was located.

Behind him he heard a high-pitched scream, like that of a dying animal.

He ran faster, until he could no longer hear his brother’s cries.

AFEW MILES FROMBAMBERG, OCTOBER 26, 1668 AD

MORE THAN FORTY YEARS LATER

Damn it! If those people up front don’t start moving their asses, I’ll grab them by the scruff of the neck and whip them all the way to Bamberg myself.”

With a strong curse on his lips, Jakob Kuisl rose from his seat in the oxcart and stared ahead angrily. An entire caravan of all kinds of carts and wagons blocked the narrow pass through the hills and, after a number of sharp turns, ended in a riverbed. The rain was pouring down, and the trees in the dark forest of firs all around were just barely visible. Water dripped from the low-lying branches, and the constant drumbeat of the rain mixed with the many other sounds down at the ford in the river. Pigs squealed, men shouted and cursed, and somewhere a horse whinnied. The muffled roar of the river and the rain overwhelmed most other sounds.

Magdalena frowned as she looked at her father, who was spewing his anger like a volcano. More than six feet tall, he stood out above the carts like a church steeple above a nave.

“Damn it all to hell. I-”

“Can’t you see there’s something wrong up in front at the ford in the river?” interrupted Magdalena, who was sitting between sacks of grain. She yawned and stretched her back, which ached after she’d had to sit so long. The cold rain had drenched her woolen shawl, and she felt a chill. “Do you think we’re sitting here in this mess just for fun?”

The Schongau executioner cleared his throat and spat with disgust into the swampy ground surrounding the wagon. “These damn Franks are capable of anything,” he growled, now somewhat more calmly. “I keep wondering what hole in the ground all these people come from. There’s more turmoil in this goddamned forest than at a proper execution. Where are we, anyway? Didn’t they say we’d get to Bamberg before sundown?”

“Well, this ford is the only place you can get across the river in such weather. And, as you see, we’re certainly not the only ones.”

Peeved, Magdalena turned around. The traffic both in front of and behind them was the worst she’d ever seen in their region, the quiet “Priests’ Corner” in the Alps. It had been three weeks since she and her family had left Schongau to pay a visit to her uncle Bartholomäus in Bamberg. Since their stop the day before in Forchheim, in Franconia, the muddy road had been getting busier and busier. Wandering journeymen traveled from town to town; stooped peddlers struggled under the weight of backpacks full of rudely carved wooden spoons, grinding stones, and cheap knickknacks; other riders on horseback, dressed in fancy clothing, hurried by silently in the rain. Most of the vehicles making their way through the forest along the crowded road were simple, canvas-covered two-wheeled carts without springs.

“Hey, what’s wrong there up front?” the Schongau executioner called out again, cupping his huge hands to form a mouthpiece. “Are you idiots sleeping up there?”

Now the wagon drivers in front and behind them began to grumble, too, and here and there someone cursed loudly. Magdalena noticed the worried, anxious glances on the faces of some of the men looking into the forest, which, despite the early-afternoon hour, was beginning to look threatening-as if behind the first few rows of trees night was already falling. A shiver passed reflexively up Magdalena’s spine.

“Probably a wagon got stuck in the mud of the river, that’s all. Or a few calves were spooked and didn’t want to go on,” she said, trying to comfort herself as she tugged on her father’s dirty linen shirt. “So you’d better sit down before you start an argument with someone.”

“It can’t be that hard to cross such a narrow part of the river,” Jakob replied, shaking his head. “These Franks are simply too stupid, that’s all there is to it. These stupid drunks would probably get stuck even in a dry riverbed.”

The hangman grumbled a little while longer, then finally sat down again and started puffing morosely on the long, cold stem of his pipe. Jakob had used up all his tobacco just as they were leaving Nuremberg, which didn’t do anything to improve his mood. The other members of the Kuisl clan were huddled together between the sacks of grain. Magdalena’s younger sister, fifteen-year-old Barbara, stared blankly into the steady downpour. Magdalena’s boys, Peter and Paul, were scuffling farther back in the wagon, in danger of falling backward into the swamp at any moment. As he did so often, the younger boy, Paul, had the upper hand; he was holding his five-year-old brother in a headlock, and Peter was gasping for air.

“Damn it, can’t you just once stop fighting?” scolded Simon, who was sitting up front on the coachbox alongside the wagon’s owner, a humpbacked old farmer. The long wait had clearly gotten on Magdalena’s husband’s nerves, as well. Until then, the Schongau medicus had been trying to read a book on medicine for midwives. Though the volume was bound in leather and wrapped in an oilcloth, rain kept dripping onto the pages. Now he put aside the tattered, drenched book and cast a severe glance at his two sons.

“You’ve been fooling around like that for hours. If you don’t stop right away, I’ll tell your grandfather and he’ll stretch your ears out on the rack. You know he can do that.”