Wolf on a String Read online

  This was to be another of Prague’s many mysteries that I would not succeed in solving, and I mention it only by way of an example of the general strangeness of life in that city on the Vltava. Everyone did everything, even the most commonplace tasks, in so much stealth and secrecy that they seemed to live their lives engaged in a vast, compulsory, and endless conspiracy. Magická Praha the Praguers call their city, but it is a mundane magic they practice.

  Welcome as these services and deliveries were, they, and the clandestine manner in which they were carried out, increased my anxious state. I was like a shepherd who feels the eye of the unseen wolf fixed on him, and my unease was of a piece with the deepening sense I had of being at the center of an intricately devised, immensely subtle, and cruelly malicious game. There in Prague I felt as if I had been blindfolded and led into the middle of a vast room and spun about by the shoulders and released to grope my way here and there dizzily, with arms outstretched—rather as I had done when I was first thrust into that dark dungeon in the tower on the wall—while all round me unseen gamesters, hands clasped to mouths to stifle their mirth, pranced and skipped adroitly out of my path.

  Yes, it’s true, in all my time in that city I never lost the sense of being used for a plaything, of being the butt of an elaborate, malicious jest. There were many jesters, and they came in many forms.

  I am thinking of that hazy, snow-lit morning when I looked out of my window and saw a closed carriage outside, stopped in front of my door. I had not heard it arrive, and wondered how long it had been waiting there—for it was in wait of a passenger, that much was plain, and who could that passenger be but me?

  The carriage, or coach, I should say, was a grand affair, painted gleaming black, with much gold ornamentation and gilded wheel rims. I saw with a little shock of excitement that on the door was emblazoned the Emperor’s coat of arms, with its double-headed eagle rampant. Two black geldings stood steaming in the traces with nostrils flared, stamping a hoof now and then and agitatedly tossing a plumed head. Thinking I was to be taken to the castle, I donned my coat and cap and hurried outside. It was a cold and misty day, though the sky was the brightest it had been since my arrival in the city.

  The coachman was huddled high up on his box, sunk in a black greatcoat and wearing a leather helmet with a visor that obscured much of the upper part of his face, including his eyes, so that it was a wonder he could see his way at all. I spoke to him but the fellow gave no reply, indeed made no acknowledgment at all of having heard me or of being even aware of me; the only indication that he was a living creature and not a Golem got up in human garb was the smoky plume of his breath, which mingled with the steam rising from the horses’ gleaming flanks. Now, still without so much as glancing at me or saying a word, he reached down sideways and with the handle of his whip deftly flipped open the carriage door. I had hardly climbed inside and taken my seat when there came the loud crack of his whip, and starting off with a violent lurch we rumbled away at a rolling pace up the lane, the horses’ hooves sliding and thudding on the snow-clad cobbles.

  We turned a corner, and then another, and I began to feel a downward tilt. When I pulled back the curtain at the window I saw that indeed we were not headed upwards in the direction of the castle and the Emperor, as I had expected, but were instead descending the hill towards the river.

  Soon we crossed the Stone Bridge and entered the Old Town. I sat forward on the edge of the upholstered seat, looking keenly out the window and noting the aspect of the streets we were passing through; I recognized none of them from my previous venture into this part of the city with Jeppe Schenckel. By now I had begun to feel apprehensive. What new and mystifying encounter awaited me this time? To ease my mind, I decided to believe that, since it was the imperial coach I was traveling in, and that I was again in the Old Town, I must be on my way for a second visit to the house of Dr. Kroll, there to engage in another confidential parley with His Majesty.

  Yet it soon became apparent that we were not going in the direction of Dr. Kroll’s house, either. We continued on, into the deepest depths of the Old Town, and at last the coach came to a skidding halt at the steps of an ancient church. I sat quietly in the creaking stillness, waiting for some indication of what I was to do. But no one came, and at length I pushed open the door impatiently and stepped down into the snow.

  The street in both directions was narrow and winding. Few people were about, and those few were heavily shawled and hatted against the cold. The air here was saturated with a particularly dense, milky fog, and a muffled silence reigned. One of the horses turned its head and rolled back at me a great dark eye, burnished and gleaming like black glass.

  I tried the driver again, calling up to him, but he sat huddled as before, unmoving and silent. “Damn it, man,“I cried, “what place is this, and why am I here?” At this he stirred himself, and pointed with his whip towards the church door. “Thank you!” I snapped, intending not the least note of gratitude.

  I climbed the steps and entered the church. Again I saw myself as the blindfolded one at the center of a malicious game, stumbling helplessly forward, pulled and plucked at by misguiding phantom hands.

  Inside the church it seemed colder than it had been outside. At the sound of my step, a pigeon that had been perched in the embrasure of a small rose window high up under the cross-hatched stone arches of the ceiling took flight and circled about with a noisy clatter of wings before alighting on a granite buttress and releasing a single feather, which seesawed down through the frigid, grainy air.

  I looked about in the gloom, peering everywhere, but there was not a soul to be seen. I sat down in one of the pews in front of the altar and drew myself deep into my coat for warmth, but even the thickness of the beavers’ fur could not keep out the chill.

  I was not then, and would not ever be, a man of faith. I believed in God, more or less—more, it shames me to say, in times of peril or need, and less when times were easy and I was not in danger and had money in my purse. But whatever respect I might have had for the Church, either that of Rome or Luther’s reformed version, had been thoroughly knocked out of me by my foster parents, for whose brand of hypocritical piety I had from my earliest days the deepest loathing and contempt. I did not hope to be forgiven my sins in this vale of tears, nor did I look for redemption when the time should come for me to be interred in its clayey depths. The world, in my estimation, was all we could ever hope to have—was more, indeed: was everything. I would enter death as a shadow enters darkness, and that would be the end of me; this I believed then, and I believe it still. Yet as I sat there in that cold nave, under the unblinking eye of the sanctuary lamp, I seemed to feel something brush against me, seemed to sense the touch of some ancient tragic suffering presence. Let us say it was the spirit of the place, whether benign or otherwise I know not, and it caused a numinous shiver to run all along my nerves.

  A door slammed somewhere, the sound of which sent echoes skittering among the pews and up into the dome of the ceiling, disturbing that pigeon again. A moment later a figure came bustling out of the sanctuary in a flurry of dark robes. He crossed the altar, almost forgetting to genuflect, and waddled rapidly forward to greet me, sketching a rapid blessing on the air as he approached. Stopping before me, he grasped me by both my arms and examined me keenly, shutting one eye and drawing his head far back and cocking it to the side.

  “Greetings to you, professore,” he said, “you are very welcome to my little church.” He spoke Latin in a light and airy manner, ending his words with a breathy little falling dip, attaching to each one a sort of phantom vowel. “I am Malaspina, Bishop of San Severo and the Holy Father’s Nuncio to the Emperor Rudolf. Are you hungry?”

  I must say that, from the start, I was greatly taken with this worldly prelate, not least for the fact that he was so very unlike that other Bishop, my unholy father.

  Girolamo Malaspina was a man of force, of character, and, most notably, of weight, which is not to speak figurati
vely, but of actual physical bulk: he was of truly remarkable proportions. I have never encountered a human being who gave the impression of being so nearly a perfect sphere—or two spheres, I should say, for with a round head set atop a seemingly neckless, squat, round body, he resembled nothing so much as one of those absurd diagrams of planetary motion that Ptolemy devised to account for anomalies in the orbits of the heavenly bodies, in which a little circle is superimposed on the circumference of a much larger one. He had very short arms and very short legs, and such was the size of his belly, an enormous round, that it seemed he must at any moment topple over and roll helplessly this way and that about the floor, his little limbs bristling like a beetle’s. His face might have been fashioned from handfuls of sallow dough slapped together into a ball; so fat was it that the features were almost entirely sunken in the flesh, like specks of fruit stuck into a yeast loaf fully risen and ready for the oven. His eyes in particular, tiny, dark, and gleaming with merriment, might have been a couple of raisins poked by a child’s thumb into the pale wad of flab below his forehead.

  He wore a black robe with a hood, a velvet jerkin with a thick fur collar, and a hat of black felt that sat close upon his globular head like a large poultice, quite covering his ears.

  Now he turned me about and, putting a hand into the small of my back, swept me ahead of him out into the street, where the moribund coachman and his haughty pair of steeds awaited us.

  “So kind of His Majesty to lend me his coach,” Malaspina said, “for my own has a broken—a broken—what do you call it?”

  He pointed.

  “Axle?” I said.

  “The axle, sì sì sì! Such a strange word.”

  It took time, effort, and ingenuity for the Nuncio, with my assistance, to maneuver his vast bulk into the coach. At one stage in the procedure I had to put my shoulder to the broad, black-clad episcopal posterior and give it a mighty shove, which elicited from the holy man first a squeak of protest and then a helpless, wobbly laugh.

  We set off and trundled round a corner into another, even narrower street. No sooner had we entered here than the Nuncio thumped a fist on the wooden roof above our heads to signal to the coachman to stop, which he did, on the spot, with a bone-shaking lurch. I put out my head at the window and looked back. It was such a short distance we had traveled that even the Nuncio in all his rotundity could surely have walked it and saved us the effort of getting him into the coach in the first place, an effort which now had to be repeated in reverse in getting him out of it again. None of these awkwardnesses seemed to embarrass this irrepressible churchman or blunt his good humor.

  We had been delivered at what turned out to be the nunciature. This was a tall, narrow house squeezed between a church on the right side and a pie shop on the left, which, given the fat man’s calling and his tremendous girth, I could not but think a nicely apt arrangement.

  Entering the building, we proceeded to a fine high chamber, where two fires burned, at opposite ends of the room. There was a long table of pink-veined marble, at the midway point of which two places were set, also opposite each other, with pewter dishes dully agleam, knives and spoons of old silver, and goblets of Bohemian crystal that sparkled and flashed in the light from the twin fires. The Nuncio stood for a moment to survey these splendors, then gave a sigh of deep satisfaction, happily patting the ample upper slope of his belly with his little plump paws.

  “Ecco, signore,” he said. “Now we shall feast!”

  9

  And feast we did. That was the day I underwent a Damascene conversion and became the trencherman I have been ever since. All young men should hasten to train themselves in the delights of the table, for these delights outlast all others, even those of the bed, a thing you can take my word for.

  The meal that was set before us was opulent, rare, and bewilderingly varied. To start there were slices of pigeons’ livers on toasted flatbread and a rounded loaf of minced pork studded with globs of glassy fat. Next came a plump, sweet carp swimming in a clear sauce fragrant with herbs, after which we cleansed our palates with quince-flavored water ices. At the pinnacle of the repast there was borne in on a silver platter a spit-roasted capon stuffed with truffles; ah, how my mouth waters even now at the far-off memory of that noble bird! To follow, there was fruit compote slathered with clotted cream, an almond cake drenched in honey, and, to close, rocky lumps of a fine old crumbly Parmigiano cheese—the first such I had ever tasted.

  As for wine, the rarest vintages were poured out in abundance. We had a vigorous and fruity Württemberg Riesling the color of straw, then a glorious red all the way from the Tuscan hills, blood-warm and thick, and, when all that had been drunk to the dregs, a cold clear aqua vitae from Friuli distilled from wine leavings that made an icy tinkling in my mouth yet ran like liquid fire along my veins. There were little thimble-sized cups of a bitter brew, much favored by the Turks, so the Nuncio informed me, which I had not encountered before, and which was so strong a stimulant that presently my heart was palpitating and my hands were trembling, so much so that I felt as if I had been struck by a bolt of lightning.

  The food was served by a trio of novices. Two of them were big-boned country girls, pink and jolly, but the third, with a heart-shaped face and delicate little hands, was as slight and darkly voluptuous as one of the countless sinuous nymphs that Bartholomeus Spranger used to paint in those days for the Emperor Rudolf’s insatiable delectation. She kept her eyes cast demurely down; the other two giggled helplessly when the Nuncio pinched their backsides, as he did repeatedly and with progressive shamelessness as the dishes came and went and the wine freely flowed.

  The Nuncio expounded volubly on various topics—the food, the wine, the weather, and suchlike—though he said nothing about the reason for my being there. I assumed, since I had been fetched hither by the imperial carriage, that His Grace had something from the Emperor to convey to me, some communication to be delivered as discreetly as if we were in the confessional, and I was content to eat and sup and bask in the warmth of the twin fires, confident that I should eventually be enlightened.

  Perhaps it was the wine that made my eye stray with ever more interest to the paintings crowding round me on the four walls. Most were deftly made, and one or two I thought very fine indeed, although I was, and am, no connoisseur of such things. All of them, in subject matter and in execution, were of a passionate voluptuousness verging, and more than verging, on the openly indecent.

  One of these works, hanging on the wall directly opposite to where I sat, I kept returning to, with a guilty inward hotness. It was a tall, narrow canvas and depicted what I took to be Venus, the goddess of love, posed under an apple tree heavily laden with fruit. She was naked save for a braided gold necklace and an elaborate circular hat of clustered white feathers as wide as a small cartwheel—the hat was shaded in with particular delicacy and niceness of detail, as if the painter had sought to tease the viewer by distracting him away from the goddess’s frankly displayed charms. By her side stood Cupid, a tiny, fat fellow with a shriveled pizzle and a miniature pair of swan’s wings. He was being set upon by bees, and was looking up at his mother in angry distress and proffering to her a honeycomb that he must a moment past have wrenched out of a mossy cleft in the trunk of the apple tree behind him.

  What was most striking in the scene, and the thing that at once stirred my blood and troubled my conscience—though only a little, to be sure—was the manner in which the goddess, her head tilted to the left, looked out at the viewer—at me, that is—with a slyly inviting, shameless simper that was to occupy my nocturnal fancies for many a night to come.

  The Nuncio saw how my glance roved back repeatedly to the pale-limbed lady—although it was obvious she was no lady, and no goddess, either, for that matter. His little dark deep-set eyes glittered with lubricious merriment.

  “You have a taste for pictures, I see,” he said. “Mine is a fine collection, do you not think? There is a nice balance of quaintness and�
�—he hesitated, searching for the word—“salacità. Eh? What do you say? They are salty—salacious—enough for your taste, yes? The Emperor himself covets not a few of them, in particular that one”—he turned fully about on his chair to glance up at the Venus and Cupid behind him—“to which you seem to be especially drawn.”

  I cleared my throat and said in a somewhat thickened voice that I thought the paintings very fine, very—here I, too, sought for the apt word, but stumblingly—very picturesque. The Nuncio chuckled, his adipose jowls trembling.

  He seemed altogether a disreputable old rogue, but with my legs fixed comfortably under his generous table I felt more warmly towards him than ever. I was of that age when the smallest kindness seemed a token of eternal friendship.

  When the novices had cleared the table, the Nuncio and I moved with our glasses of liquor to the hotter of the two fires and seated ourselves in deep, soft chairs on either side of the hearth. My brain felt heavy and dulled after so much food and drink, and I was having distinct difficulty keeping my eyes fully focused. But Malaspina, although he had drunk fully as much as I had, seemed as sharp as he had been at the start of the meal. He sat opposite me in his broad armchair, with his robes draped over his enormous midriff, and fixed me with a mischievous and fondly mocking eye.

  “So now, young man,” he said, “you must tell me all you have seen and done since you come to this sinful city.”

  Which, of course, having been made loquacious by the wine, I was only too happy to do. I told how I had arrived from Regensburg at close of day and lodged in the Blue Elephant—I mentioned the lice and the dying diamond merchant, but not the innkeeper’s wife—and how the old soldier and I had blundered in our cups out into the night, and how I had found Magdalena Kroll, dead in the snow with her throat torn out. I recounted too, with a quaver of self-pity, how in the middle of the night the soldiers had broken into my room at the inn and hauled me off to be questioned by the High Steward Wenzel.