By Night Under the Stone Bridge Page 5

  “I shall report to you when the matter has been settled,” Collalto replied.

  The big circular lawn in the Kinsky garden was one of the places to which the Prague nobility resorted to settle their quarrels with the sword. The lawn was surrounded by a gravel path. In the middle, between two lonely elm trees, there was a fountain, the splashing waters of which could be heard from a distance. A stone Neptune overgrown with moss lay outstretched on a rock, and the weather-worn sandstone mermaids, tritons and sirens that crouched round the edge of the pool sent criss-crossing jets of water to the reed pipe, the rocky reef and in steep arches up towards the sky.

  It was here on the lawn that Collalto met the baron, who had brought with him two Croatian servants carrying torches, for the moon was in its last quarter. The two Croatians, who had swashbuckling moustaches and long hair gathered into a thick knot at the back, were standing with heads bent facing the stone figures of the fountain, crossing themselves and muttering prayers.

  “My servants,” the baron explained to Collalto, “have never in their lives seen anything like this fountain. To them it’s a great miracle. In that Neptune they think they recognise St Laurence, my patron saint, and they think the mermaids and tritons are angels sent down from heaven to support the holy martyr lying on a grill by spraying him with water to cool him. Yes, my Croats are very religious and great venerators of the saints and, if there were no taverns here, they would crawl on their knees through all the churches in the town.”

  He showed the two servants where to stand so as to illuminate the lawn and path with their torches. The two duellists took up their positions facing each other at the prescribed distance, and saluted each other with their- swords. Then Collalto, who had picked up a pebble, tossed it straight up in the air while the men stood motionless, listening, for when it touched the ground, that would be the signal for the duel to begin.

  It did not last long. Collalto had holed many gentlemen’s coats with his sword-point, but this time he was up against an opponent who could have taken on four swordsmen at once. He could, as they say, have stuck three of them in his hat and asked the fourth how many there were left. He really was what Lobkowitz had called him, a deadly fencer. At first he merely stood his ground and left all the lunging to Collalto. But then with his cuts and thrusts he drove Collalto down the path and across the grass all the way to the fountain, asking him as he did so whether he didn’t find the evening air too cool, and when he had last seen his cousin Franz Collalto. He drove him twice round the pool and then back across the grass to the gravel path and then back the same way to the fountain again. There the duel came to an end, for Count Collalto had reached the point where he could neither stand firm nor retreat. With his torso bent back over the edge of the pool, he struggled for breath with the point of the baron’s sword at his chest.

  “So that’s that,” said the baron. “Thrusting my sword through you would be as easy as drinking a glass of wine, and I should do so with as clear a conscience. All your worldly troubles and tribulations would be over.”

  Collalto said nothing. Cold drops from the jets of water proceeding from the tritons landed on his face; and the strange thing was that now, after what the baron had just said, he felt an agonising fear, a fear far greater than anything he had felt during the duel.

  “What do you think of the blessed quality of mercy?” the baron wanted to know. “Haven’t you been told how pleasing it is to God? Are you not aware of the great merit that is acquired by those who practise it?”

  “If you spare me, you will have a true friend in me for ever,” said Collalto in an agony of fear.

  The baron let out a short, sharp whistle.

  “I have not sought your friendship, sir, and would not know what to do with it,” he replied.

  At that moment Collalto heard the distant music of a flute, a violin and a drum. The stately pace of a saraband came from behind the bushes and slowly drew nearer.

  “Perhaps your dancing is better than your swordsmanship,” the baron went on. “By gambling with the latter you forfeited your life. With the former you may win it back from me.” “By dancing?” Collalto asked, and it suddenly seemed to him as if all this, the baron’s voice, the splashing of the fountain, the sword-point at his chest and the music, which was now quite close, was only a bad dream.

  “By dancing, yes. If you wish to survive, you shall dance,” the baron said, the scar of the sabre wound on his brow reddening once more. “You made me a laughing-stock to the young lady.”

  He took half a pace backwards and Collalto straightened himself. He now saw that five more servants in addition to the two torch-bearers were standing behind the baron. All five wore the baron’s livery. Three were musicians and the other two, who were glaring at him very threateningly, were holding pocket pistols.

  “You shall dance from now until dawn,” said the baron. “You shall dance through all the streets of Prague. I advise you not to tire, because if you stop you will get a bullet in your body. If you don’t agree, say so. Well? Are you going to keep me waiting?”

  The two Croats raised their pistols, the musicians struck up, and Count Collalto, driven by the fear of death, began dancing a saraband.

  It was a strange nocturnal procession that made its way through the streets and across the squares of Prague. The torch-bearers led the way, next came the musicians with flute, fiddle and drum and Count Collalto dancing behind them, followed by the two men with pistols, who did not for a moment take their eyes off him. Baron Juranic, though he brought up the rear, was in fact the leader; for he showed the torch-bearers which way to go by pointing his sword.

  They went through narrow, winding alleys, uphill and downhill, past palatial houses of the nobility, narrow, lopsided gabled houses, churches, garden walls, taverns and stone fountains. The people they met saw nothing surprising in the procession; they thought the gentleman dancing behind the musicians was in a happy mood, having had rather too much to drink, and that a friend of his had provided an escort of musicians and flunkeys to see him safely back to his quarters; no one suspected that he was dancing desperately for his life. And just when Collalto felt so exhausted that his heart was going to break into little pieces and he thought he could go no farther, but found no mercy and had to go on, they happened to have reached a little square in the middle of which there was a statue of the Virgin Mary. And no sooner did the Croats spot the stone carving than they went down on their knees, made the sign of the cross and began saying prayers, while Collalto collapsed to the ground and recovered his breath.

  Baron Juranic burst into loud laughter.

  “By my poor soul, this was not intended,” he said, crossing himself like the others. “I should have realised it would happen. Yes, my Croats are very religious, they know what is due to Christ and his Holy Mother, and that tall fellow, the one with the pistol, is the most religious of them all. He’d rather cut his hand off than steal a horse on a Sunday.”

  Meanwhile the Croats had finished praying, all except the one who would never steal a horse on a Sunday and was still on his knees.

  “Get up, damn you,” the baron shouted at him. “Give the Holy Mother of God a chance to see something other than your face.”

  There were - and there still are - many hundreds of crucifixes and stone saints in the city of Prague. They stand suffering, blessing or imploring in the squares and niches and corners, outside church gates and hospitals and poor-houses and on stone bridges. And whenever the Croats came across one of them they went down on their knees and muttered prayers or sung litanies and gave Collalto a brief respite. At first Baron Juranic calmly put up with this, for he knew that in religious matters his Croats were not to be trifled with. But then he began getting more and more annoyed at the way in which the pious naïvete of his servants gave aid and comfort to his enemy, and he began thinking about how this could be prevented. And he ended by hitting on an idea that struck him as so tremendously amusing that he laughed aloud. To cap the ordeal he was inflicting on Collalto, he would make him dance his saraband through the streets of the ghetto, where there were no crucifixes and no sacred images.

  At that time the Prague ghetto was not yet surrounded by a wall; this was not built until the time of the siege by the Swedes. It could be entered from the streets of the Old Town without first having to knock at a closed gate. So the baron took his little procession down the Valentinsgasslein into the Jewish quarter, down narrow, winding alleys and along the cemetery wall to the bank of the Moldau and back, past the jewish baths, past the town hall and the bakehouse and the closed meat stalls and through the deserted flea market, and the musicians played and Collalto danced, and there were no sacred images to give him respite. Here and there a window would be opened when the procession passed by, and sleepy, anxious faces would look out, and then the window would be shut again. Here and there a dog would bark, suspicious of the procession. And when the two torch-bearers and the musicians behind them turned from the Zigeunerstrasse into the Breitegasse, just where the house of the Great Rabbi Loew stood, Collalto, who had reached the end of his tether, groaned, reeled, clutched his breast and weakly cried out for help.

  The Great Rabbi, sitting over his sacred and magic books up in his room, heard his voice and knew that it came from the depths of despair.

  He went to the window, leaned out, and asked who was calling and what aid he needed.

  “An Ecce Homo,” Collalto gasped in his extremity, dancing and reeling on and on. “An Ecce Homo, for the love of God, or it’s all up with me.”

  The Great Rabbi took in at a glance the torch-bearers and the musicians, the dancing Collalto, the two lackeys with pistols and the laughing baron, and that glance was sufficient for him to see why the dancing man was crying out f
or an image of jesus, and that here was a man in mortal danger to be saved.

  On the opposite side of the street there was a house that had been gutted by fire; only a single wall, blackened with age and smoke, still stood. And the Great Rabbi pointed to this wall, and by his magic power he caused a picture to appear on it, made of moonlight, dust and decay, rain and soot, moss and mortar.

  The picture was an Ecce Homo. But it was not the Saviour, the Son of God, the carpenter’s son who came to the sacred city from the hills of Galilee to teach the people and to suffer death for his teaching. No, it was an Ecce Homo of another kind. There was such nobility in his features, so appalling was the suffering that spoke from his face that the stony-hearted baron was struck by a lightning flash of self-knowledge and was the first to sink to his knees. And it was before this Ecce Homo that he arraigned himself for having been pitiless that night and without the fear of God.

  My tutor paused briefly; he was the medical student Jakob Meisl, who told me this and many other stories of old Prague.

  “There’s not much more to say,” he ended, “and if there were, it wouldn’t be very important. Young Count Collalto is said never in his life to have danced again, and Baron Juranic is said to have left the service, and that’s all I know about them. And the great Rabbi Loew’s Ecce Homo? It was not Christ. It was the Jews, the Jews, persecuted and derided through the centuries, whose suffering was shown in that picture. No, don’t go to the ghetto, you’d look for it there in vain. Time, wind and weather have destroyed it, and no trace of it remains. But walk the streets wherever you like, and if you see an old Jewish pedlar humping his wares from door to door, and the street boys running after him, shouting ‘Jew! Jew!’ and throwing stones at him, and he stops and looks at them with a look in his eyes that is not his but has come down to him from his fathers and forefathers, who like him wore the crown of thorns of contempt and suffered the lash of persecution, then perhaps you will have caught a glimpse, a slight and inadequate glimpse, of the Great Rabbi Loew’s Ecce Homo.”

  EMISSARY FROM HELL

  Rudolf II, Holy Emperor and King of Bohemia, was having a sleepless night.

  His anxiety began as early as eleven o’clock, anxiety about something whose coming he foresaw but could not prevent, even by barring the doors and windows. He rose from his bed, put on his dressing gown, and paced quickly up and down his room. Every now and then he stopped at the window and looked across the gleaming ribbon of the river to where he could make out the roofs and gables of the ghetto. It was from there that the woman he loved, the beautiful Jewess Esther, had come to him, night after night. That had been years ago, and it had come to an end on the night when the demons of darkness had snatched her from his arms. There too, in one of the houses of the ghetto, lay his hidden hoard, his secret treasure, the gold and silver of the Jew Meisl.

  The sounds that floated up to him from the deer park, the rustle of withered leaves carried by the wind, the whirr of moths, the sighing of the wind in the treetops, the nightly song of the frogs and toads - all these sounds bewildered him and increased his restlessness. Then, about one o’clock, came night terrors and ghosts.

  At half past one he flung open the door and with a groan in his voice called for his valet, Philipp Lang.

  But, as always at this time of year, Philipp Lang was on his estate at Melnik for the fruit harvest. The valet Červenka came hurrying along in his place, his nightcap askew on his head. He carefully wiped the perspiration from the Emperor’s brow with a small linen cloth.

  “I have often respectfully urged Your Majesty to take greater care of Your Majesty’s health and not to expose Your Majesty to the cold night air. But Your Majesty takes no notice of an old servant.”

  “Fetch Adam Sternberg and Hanniwald,” the Emperor told him. “I have to talk to them. And tell Colloredo to bring me some strong wine, Rhine Falls or malmsey, I need it.”

  There were three cup-bearers and eleven carvers of the imperial table, and the Emperor knew very well which of them were due to serve him on every day of the week according to the duty roster, but he didn’t know, or had forgotten, that Count Colloredo had died of a stroke several weeks before and that his successor as second court cup-bearer was the young Count Bubna.

  The first to enter the room was Hanniwald, the Emperor’s private secretary. He was a tall, lean man with silvery white hair, and Červenka had found him still at work. Soon afterwards Count Adam Sternberg, the Master of the Horse, appeared in his night clothes and only one slipper. The Emperor had been pacing quickly up and down the room, and his dressing gown had slipped from his shoulders, but now he stopped. His face betrayed agitation, helplessness and exhaustion. He took a deep breath and was about to begin describing what had happened to him that night and the two previous nights when the door opened and Červenka let in the young Count Bubna, followed by a flunkey with jugs of wine.

  The Emperor looked Bubna straight in the face, stepped back in alarm, and exclaimed:

  “Who are you? What do you want? Where’s Colloredo?”

  “Your Majesty will graciously remember,” said Hanniwald, “that recently, in accordance with God’s will, Count Colloredo went the way that we all must go. Your Majesty knows this, for Your Majesty was present at the Mass that was held in the cathedral for Your Majesty’s loyal servant.”

  “And this,” said Count Sternberg, taking up the thread, “is his successor, Vojtech Bubna, at Your Majesty’s service.”

  “But he looks like Bernhard Russwurm,” the Emperor exclaimed, again stepping back and raising his arm defensively. “Isn’t he terrifyingly like Bernhard Russwurm?”

  The Emperor was sometimes frightened by new faces. He thought he recognised in them the features of persons long dead by whom he imagined himself to be persecuted. Many years before, he had had General von Russwurm arrested and shot for duelling; he had ordered this in a fit of violent anger, and it weighed heavily on his mind. In every new face he saw Russwurm hatefully and derisively looking at him, and again and again Russwurm emerged from his grave and threatened him.

  “Russwurm? Oh, no,” Adam Sternberg said casually. “Russwurm was short, with a broad nose and a plump chin. I assure Your Majesty that I have known Vojtech Bubna ever since his shirt used to hang out of his knickers.”

  “But he looks just like Bernhard Russwurm,” the Emperor exclaimed with his teeth chattering. “Who are you? Where do you come from? Do you come from hell?”

  “I am here to serve Your Majesty, I come from Prastice, that’s our small estate near Chotebo? in the Caslau district,” the young Count Bubna explained; he could not understand what was going on or why the Emperor was so hostile to him.

  “If you’re not lying, recite the Lord’s Prayer, tell me the names of the twelve apostles, and recite the Creed,” the Emperor said.

  Young Bubna looked anxiously and inquiringly at Count Sternberg, who nodded vigorously, and so he recited the Lord’s Prayer, followed by the names of the twelve apostles (he forgot St Jude, but made up for it by mentioning St Philip twice). Then he began reciting the Creed, but dried up and came to a stop. He was rescued by the valet Červenka, who was standing just behind him and gave him the cue in a whisper.

  After the second Article of the Creed the Emperor had had enough.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “You’re quite right, Adam, I made a mistake, he’s not like Bernhard Russwurm. Russwurm can rest in peace, I forgave him a long time ago.”

  Červenka had gone behind the Emperor and laid his dressing gown round his shoulders. The Emperor took the wine jug from young Bubna’s hands and emptied it.

  Then he said:

  “It’s a merry life up here in the Castle, the strangest things keep happening. Someone came to this room and pestered me again tonight.”

  “Who came to see Your Majesty tonight?” Hanniwald asked, though he already knew the answer.

  “One of his envoys,” the Emperor, who disliked mentioning the devil by name, replied with a groan.