The Willow King Read online

  “Where is the host?” Laurentius enquired.

  “I own this inn,” the nobleman informed him. “The innkeeper is in town dealing with some matters.”

  “This is your inn?” Laurentius asked.

  “Listen, why are you in such a desperate hurry to get to Dorpat anyway?” the nobleman asked, ignoring his question. It looked like he was already handsomely drunk, and there was a revelrous haughtiness in his voice which didn’t bode well. “Have you been in some sort of bother? People normally go to Dorpat if they have not been accepted anywhere else, or if they are short of means. You don’t look like you belong to either category.”

  “Dorpat is the city most devoted to the Muses,” Laurentius explained.

  “So you’re going there to enlighten yourself, are you? Very well, I won’t poke around in your secrets any more,” the nobleman said.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Laurentius asked.

  “I predict you won’t catch much of a glimpse of intellectual life this autumn and winter. But there will definitely be plenty of other sights for you to witness,” the nobleman said.

  Laurentius got up and started pacing anxiously around the room. He took his watch from his pocket and glanced at it. He immediately regretted taking it out in public, but it was too late now. Flustered, he dropped the watch back into his breast pocket.

  “Very well,” he mumbled to himself.

  He still had some time for a walk around town before the city gates were shut. He wondered if the nobleman really did not realize that if he had already reached Estonia then he wasn’t likely to change his plans on the basis of some idle inn talk. That kind of wet, chicken-hearted behaviour was only fit for those who had no respect for intellectual discipline. But he did have respect; he had to.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to leave now,” Laurentius told the nobleman.

  “Well, go then. But I warn you, you will live to regret your decision,” the nobleman replied.

  “Can I leave my cage here?” Laurentius asked.

  MONDAY

  “MMM, AAHH.”

  He breathed the air in and out. In the cool of the autumn evening the warm, damp breath condensed into a mist which was momentarily suspended in front of his face. This was his expiration, from within his body, and it showed that his spirit was present, that he was alive. Instead of taking someone’s pulse it was possible to put a mirror in front of his mouth and establish from the mist which formed there whether that person was alive. Whether he was still able to produce moisture, to demonstrate that his soul was present.

  “Alive,” he whispered with a nod, before stepping into the carriage together with the other passengers.

  He chose a seat under a window which consisted of little more than holes hacked into the lead plating, and he watched as the other passengers got into that soulless box constructed from metal and wood, and sat down in their places, breathing heavily. They were all alive, all of them moving; they all knew their purpose, and where they were headed. They had already been sitting and waiting to depart for two days and all the subjects of conversation had been exhausted. The excitement which Laurentius had initially felt about embarking on the journey had turned into a bored torpor, tinged with distress about Clodia.

  The carriage driver flicked the reins, and the casket began moving forward on its wooden wheels. It had been sitting there like a hollow monument, like a shell, but once the people had entered it had taken on life, and now it departed as if to some plan, swaying and shaking as it got under way. An object which had no will of its own had gained a soul, and from that soul a life. But did the people inside the casket give their souls away to an external body, or did they somehow keep them as their own, for their own use?

  “When I climb into the carriage,” Laurentius pondered, “am I still myself, or have I taken on a new body, a body which no longer takes steps but rolls along on wheels, a body which can only move on roads covered with dirt and rough gravel?”

  “What?” Laurentius’ neighbour asked.

  “Nothing...” Laurentius replied.

  “Didn’t you just say something?” the neighbour asked again.

  “I was just mumbling to myself, it’s not important. Forgive me,” Laurentius explained.

  Laurentius rested his head against the side of the carriage, pretending that he was trying to get to sleep. But the passengers’ new, collective body was seeking its way; the large spoked wheels were engaging with the sharp-edged ruts, which in places had already collapsed into large potholes, and his head knocked painfully against the lead plating to the jarring rhythm.

  “Ouch!” Laurentius exclaimed.

  He was thinking about his parakeet. It looked like the characters in the inn had fed her something as soon as he had left for town—although they had all denied it vehemently. By the time he got back, Clodia had already begun to shake. The trembling and listlessness had lasted all night; his bird had not eaten or drunk anything at all, and by the following evening she had already given up the ghost. Laurentius had watched the onset of death in distress. First the feeble shivering, then the loss of balance, then her gaze became dull and hazy. Clodia had not survived two days on Estonian soil. It was not his fault that she died, but that was no consolation. Whether he was to blame or not, his pet bird was dead. Now the little spadger lay stiff and lifeless in her cage, on the baggage deck at the back of the carriage.

  Laurentius had not wanted to leave her behind, so he decided to take her to Dorpat with him. He had managed to arrange a place in a carriage, and so had decided against going on foot. Maybe it really was as dangerous on the roads as people said.

  “A new body,” began the woman sitting next to him again. “A new body, you said, or something like that... but how does that new body get here?”

  “We take it on ourselves.”

  “How’s that? I thought that you were talking about your parakeet again. Now I don’t understand anything at all.”

  Laurentius clenched his hands into fists and opened them again. These were his hands, his body. Were they part of him in the same way that he was now part of the carriage? This was his carriage, his journey. Was it also his cage?

  The woman made a deliberate gesture of placing her hands on top of her travel bag.

  “Forgive me,” said Laurentius.

  There was really nothing much to explain anyway; it was quite a mundane story, but for some reason he didn’t want to repeat it all again. When the passengers had first introduced themselves in Reval he had told them about his parakeet, but none of them had understood why he was so upset. For them a parakeet was just an expensive, exotic bird. They sympathized with him just as they would sympathize with a merchant whose cargo had sunk in a storm. These things happen, can’t be helped, life goes on... Laurentius sighed and fell silent, resting his head against the lead panelling and letting the cool metal soothe the sore spot, like a spoon soothes a bump. Life goes on.

  “What does it mean then, this new body?” the woman asked, refusing to let go of the subject.

  The woman’s husband had been cautiously holding his peace, but now he grimaced and shook his head, clearly irritated. “Now, don’t start all that again,” he told his wife.

  Laurentius tensely looked down at the floor, wondering how he could change the subject—the woman’s voice had already started to sound shrill and agitated. Those carriage conversations could often become strange and awkward. Laurentius didn’t have a gift for getting on with other people, much as he would have liked to.

  “I was just thinking that to start with, the soul is inside the body. But souls are of course immortal,” he said eventually. “So, in short, my question is: when the body dies, where do the souls go to before their resurrection?”

  “What do you mean? Surely they’re with God?” the woman said.

  “But where is God?” asked Laurentius.

  “In the sky, everywhere,” the woman answered.

  “Exactly, but then there must be souls e
verywhere. Here as well,” Laurentius suggested.

  “You mean to say that there are spirits here in this carriage?” the woman surmised snappily.

  “No, not like that... more like memories,” Laurentius said.

  “So then,” concluded the woman victoriously. “If there are memories in this carriage, and the memories are souls, then this carriage should be alive. But it’s not, is it? It can’t have children!”

  Laurentius thought of Aristotle and the beds. “Not all living people have children,” he said.

  The woman turned away from Laurentius and sat glowering angrily in the direction of the central gangway.

  “It’s not about having children, of course,” Laurentius added.

  But the woman was silent, almost obstinately, resolutely so. It occurred to Laurentius that he could tell his story once again, to explain the reason for his glum mood. But he had done so several times already, and it seemed pointless to do so again. It probably wasn’t worth bothering his fellow passengers with it. Clodia had always helped him to get on with people, livening things up with her cheerful tweeting. Her company was exactly what he needed at that moment. But now his childhood companion was lying wrapped in a sheet in her cage, wedged between sodden cases. Dead.

  “Awful,” he mumbled quietly to himself.

  “What did you say?” the woman asked.

  “Nothing,” Laurentius replied.

  “I’m sure I heard something,” said the woman gruffly, but then she fell silent again. The other four passengers were looking at them incredulously—Laurentius and the woman had been trying the whole journey to start a polite conversation, but their attempts had come to nothing.

  Laurentius sighed in exasperation, closed his eyes, and started making a serious effort to get to sleep. The carriage shook monotonously, the wheels engaging the furrows in the weathered road surface with a regular measured rhythm, like the swinging of a clock’s pendulum. He imagined that the carriage was a large golem made by Rabbi Eliyah, with people stuffed into its stomach like strips of paper, each one with the name of the Lord written on it. But how does that strip of paper feel inside the machine’s stomach? Does it have its own place there, or is it just passing through, whiling away the time in boredom? What is it like inside a human? Where does the soul come from, and where does it go? What about inside his parakeet?

  Laurentius shook his head and looked around uneasily. He didn’t want to get bogged down in those kinds of thoughts—he had to make sure he stayed rational. But he couldn’t help himself. Fragments of thoughts, individual sentences and memories permeated the edge of his consciousness like blood soaking into a bandage. This was the wound of his consciousness, which he dressed and treated, but to no avail. Laurentius had tried to immerse himself in learning, literature, theatre, other people’s company, anything to soothe the wound and help it heal. But it festered; the same thoughts kept returning, and the bad blood kept rising to the surface.

  He heard a clattering sound. The carriage had driven straight into one of the larger potholes, jolting the passengers, whose faces contorted in alarm. A travel bag fell off the knees of the man sitting opposite onto the floor.

  “Ouch!” someone exclaimed.

  The bag had fallen sideways onto the neighbouring passenger’s feet.

  “Sorry, I nodded off for a moment and hit my head,” explained the man, rubbing his ear with a vexed expression. “The state of the roads here is worse than anywhere I have travelled... Now, over in Sweden they’ve got proper roads. The ground is firmer there, of course—there aren’t so many marshes. But here...”

  The woman just mumbled something angrily to herself.

  The man prattled on, as if he had been holding himself back for some time and the jolt had caused him to start unburdening himself of everything which had been on his mind.

  “The local landowners are supposed to keep the roads here in good order, but do they hell. They’ll do anything to avoid it. And the state of the roadside inns does not even bear mentioning. In some of them you’re lucky if you get anything besides beer and spirit. You have to sleep on mouldy straw on the mud floor. And yet everything is so damned expensive. The inns in Sweden are decent: you get warm food in every one, and there are beds with fresh straw everywhere. I tell you, it’s a different thing altogether.”

  Laurentius sat up in his chair and smiled ruefully. From his experience the situation in Sweden was not in fact much better. He folded his coat flap so that he had a thick bit of material to put between his forehead and the side of the carriage. It cushioned him from the jolting a bit, but it did nothing at all to shield him from the man’s persistent chatter. The patter of raindrops against the outside of the carriage got stronger and stronger, drumming against his temple. The woven yarn of his coat turned fuzzy from the damp, and a barely noticeable mustiness started wafting out from between the fibres. He had in fact been lucky to get a place in a closed carriage. The majority of carriages travelling between Reval and Dorpat were little more than open hay carts, and the passengers got drenched in the cold rain just as the coachman and the footman were now.

  “Hmm, vile,” puffed the man sitting opposite him as he concluded his angry tirade against the roads and inns of Estonia and Livonia. He stretched out his legs, which were clad in muddy boots, far in front of him.

  Meanwhile, Laurentius was still thinking about his parakeet lying there limply in her cage, wondering whether he should put her into a smaller box. It seemed odd to carry a dead bird around in a cage like that. But he had got so used to dragging around that wire box, so used to hearing the cheeping coming from inside it, to talking with Clodia and taking care of her. She had always been quite happy sitting on his hand and pecking at his fingers. Her small feathered body had felt unexpectedly warm, almost as if she had a fever, and so full of life. But it seemed wrong to bring a cage with a dead bird into the carriage. The other passengers might think even worse of him than they already did.

  “Indeed,” said Laurentius without addressing anyone in particular. Silence ensued, and he coughed hesitantly. He closed his eyes and tried to think about what he would do once he arrived in Dorpat. First, he should get himself settled into lodgings; then he could go to pay his first visit to the university. In place of any clear thoughts, however, he heard the monotonous rumble of the carriage’s wooden wheels, the surging murmur of the wind, the rattling of the passengers’ cases tied together under the cloth cover, and the ceaseless spatter of rain. His head shook to the carriage’s jarring rhythm, and his temple knocked painfully against the pillow he had made from his folded coat. Not a single clear and comprehensible thought, just complete disarray.

  “Mm,” Laurentius mumbled.

  He opened his eyes, sat upright, and looked at the other people in the carriage. They all had downcast gazes; they were all sitting there quietly minding their own business. Now he could observe them properly. The woman next to him was sitting in a cramped position, as if she had been pushed up sideways against the carriage’s wooden seat. Her head was turned in the other direction, looking away. Her body was right there next to him, to be sure, but it looked like its owner was somewhere else. A body without eyes, unseeing, lifeless. Just an empty bag. Laurentius felt the need to speak, to talk to someone, but he couldn’t think what to say. He was afraid he might start an argument out of nothing again.

  He took his watch from his pocket and inspected the dial with its single hand. Soon it would be completely dark outside. He bent forwards towards the window, so that he could see out through the small holes. A view of the outside world opened up before his eyes. A mottled river, flowing unwittingly towards its goal. Leaves of many hues, sprinkled with glittering beads of rainwater. Lone forest clearings, sliding slowly past. But nothing that could hold his eye for long, nothing that could help his thoughts cohere. He was in need of Clodia’s supportive twittering right now, but all he had for company were the other passengers, half-asleep, half-conscious. He tried to banish the thoughts wh
ich were racing backwards and forwards in his head, scattering here and there, but the battle with the demons of his memory only made the images more distinct, gave them a form. Monsters born of reason.

  Laurentius coughed, and he felt a grating in his throat. He was finding it hard to breathe.

  He slowly became aware of an acrid stench which was seeping into the carriage. At first it had been barely perceptible, but now it was gradually becoming all-engulfing, dominating his senses completely, overpowering him like sleep overpowers a weary body.

  He spun around in panic. Where was the smell coming from? The other passengers were calmly sitting in their seats, not so much as wrinkling their noses. He reached forwards towards the window and looked out again. That stench must be coming from somewhere! In the distance he could see the dark silhouette of a building, a colossus of massive beams standing in the ominous, nightmarish half-light which came with the onset of dusk. Straining to see past the rainwater which was dripping in through the window holes, he wiped the wet inner surface clean, leaving a greyish, muddy streak in the palm of his hand. There, through the mist, next to a forest glade gleaming wet with rain, he could make out collapsed walls, misshapen rafters knocked together from planks of wood, flapping shingle roofing and bristling poles. Was that a barn? There was not a single light to be seen, not a single sign of life coming from the building’s carcass.

  The stench must be coming from somewhere over there, from those splayed, mildewed rafters, decided Laurentius. Definitely from over there.

  He looked to see whether anyone might have made a bonfire near the barn, although it was clear that in this weather no one could keep a fire burning for long. There was no flickering yellow glow of flame to be seen, just a dull, lifeless scene set against a backdrop of darkening blue sky. But somewhere there must be something, some substance, some liquid, some decay from which the poisonous smell was seeping. Maybe it was rotten hay smouldering inside the barn?