nearly finished. First of all the half-wit sabotages the building and then he must move in himself. Say what you like: God is just, after all.”
Simon had to chuckle. But immediately his conscience started to trouble him. Georg Augustin was a bad man, a lunatic, a child murderer who had, moreover, tortured him. The scar on Simon’s thigh still hurt. But in spite of this, he would not have wished this disease on even his worst enemy. Georg Augustin’s body would slowly rot away while he was still alive.
To turn their minds to other thoughts, Simon changed the subject.
“This betrothal of Magdalena with the Steingaden hangman,” he began.
“What about it?” Kuisl grumbled.
“Are you really serious about it?”
The hangman took a puff on his pipe. It was some time before he answered.
“I turned him down. The wench is too stubborn. He doesn’t deserve that.”
A smile spread over Simon’s face. It seemed that a heavy weight had been lifted from his mind.
“Kuisl, I’m really very—”
“You be quiet!” the hangman interrupted him. “Or I might change my mind.”
Then he stood up and went to the door. Without a word he motioned to Simon to follow him.
They went through the living room, which smelled of fresh-baked bread, across to the little workroom. The hangman, as always, had to stoop to get through the low doorway. Behind him Simon entered the holy of holies. Once again he looked reverently at the massive cabinet, which reached up to the ceiling.
Immediately the young physician was overcome with the urge to open the cabinet so as to browse through the books and folios. As he moved toward it he almost stumbled over a small chest standing in the middle of the chamber. It was made of polished cherrywood, with silver fittings and a solid-looking lock, with the key still in it.
“Open it,” said the hangman. “It belongs to you.”
“But…” Simon interjected.
“Consider it as payment for all your trouble,” he said. “You helped me to rescue my daughter and also save the woman who brought my children into the world.”
Simon knelt and opened the chest. The lid sprang open with a little click.
Inside there were books. At least a dozen.
They were all new editions. Scultetus’s
Simon rummaged through them, turning pages. A treasure lay before him, much greater than the one they had found in the tunnels.
“Kuisl,” he stammered. “How can I ever thank you? It’s too much! That…it must have cost a fortune!”
The hangman shrugged.
“A few golden coins more or less. Old Augustin didn’t notice it.”
Simon sat up, shocked.
“You mean, you—?”
“I believe that Ferdinand Schreevogl would have wanted it like that,” said Jakob Kuisl. “What use would so much money be to the church or the old moneybags on the council? It would have taken on dust just as it did down below in that hole. Now off you go and start reading, before I regret it.”
Simon gathered the books together, shut the chest, and grinned.
“Now you can borrow a few books from me when you want to. If in return, Magdalena and I…”
“You rascal, be off with you!” The hangman gave him a gentle slap on the back of the head so that Simon almost tripped over the threshold with the chest. He ran outside and along the banks of the Lech through the tanners’ quarter, into town, over the cobblestones of the Munzstrasse, and into the narrow stinking alleys, until he arrived panting at his house.
He would have a lot of reading to do today.
A KIND OF POSTSCRIPT
I DON’T KNOW WHEN I HEARD OF THE KUISLS FOR the first time. I must have been about five or six years old when, for the first time, my grandmother gave me a questioning look. It was the same thoughtful look she has to this day when she is busy classifying her entire family, by now consisting of more than twenty descendants, into Kuisls and non-Kuisls. At the time I wasn’t quite sure whether or not Kuisl was something good or bad. It sounded like a quality, an unusual hair color, or an adjective that I did not yet understand.
Extrinsic characteristics such as an arched nose, strong dark eyebrows, an athletic body, or abundant growth of hair have been regarded for a long time as Kuisl-like in our family, as have our musical and artistic talents and a sensitive, almost nervous disposition. The latter includes an introverted nature, a tendency toward alcoholism, and a certain dark melancholy. In the Kuisl description left to us by my grandmother’s cousin, a passionate amateur genealogist, we can read among other observations: “Bent fingernails (claws)” and “tear-jerking sentimentality and sometimes brutality.” Altogether not exactly a sympathetic picture, but then you can’t choose your family…
It was this same cousin who introduced me, much later, to the subject of what an executioner actually did. I was in my early twenties when one day I found a pile of yellowing papers on the table in our house—tattered pages, covered with typewritten text, in which Fritz Kuisl had collected everything about our ancestors. Along with them were black-and-white photos of instruments of torture and the Kuisl executioner’s sword (stolen in the 1970s from the Schongau town museum and never recovered), a two-hundred-year-old master craftman’s diploma belonging to my ancestor Johann Michael Kuisl, the last of Schongau’s hangmen, typed copies of newspaper articles, and a handwritten family tree several feet long. I heard about Jorg Abriel, a remote ancestor, and his
Since then the history of my family has never ceased to intrigue me. When Fritz Kuisl died some years ago, his wife, Rita, allowed me to enter his holy of holies, a small study filled to the ceiling with dusty files and old books about what an executioner is and does. In the tiny room were piles of chests full of family trees and copies of church registers, some from the sixteenth century. On the walls hung faded photographs and paintings of long-dead ancestors. Fritz Kuisl had recorded them on thousands of index cards—names, professions, dates of birth and death…
On one of those index cards my name was written, on another that of my son, who had been born just one year previously. Rita Kuisl had written in the name after the death of her husband.
The end of the line.
A shudder came over me at seeing these things, but also a feeling of belonging, as if a large community had taken me under its wing. In the past few years, genealogical research has become increasingly popular. Perhaps one of the reasons for this is that we are trying, in a world of increasing complexity, to create a simpler and more understandable place for ourselves. No longer do we grow up in large families. We feel increasingly estranged, replaceable, and ephemeral. Genealogy gives us a feeling of immortality. The individual dies; the family lives on.
In the meantime I tell my seven-year-old son about his remarkable forefathers. I leave out the bloody details. (For him these people are like knights, which sounds better than hangmen or executioners.) In his bedroom hangs a collage made up of photos of long-dead family members—great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, their aunts, their uncles, their nephews and nieces…
