“When the panther leaped toward me, I ducked at the last moment,” said Faust now, accompanying his tale with wild gestures and grimaces. “As he flew past me, I jumped upon him and rode the beast like a horse!”
Greta was sitting in the first row and smiled. Karl always laid it on rather thickly. He elaborated on true stories, embellished a little here and there, spontaneously added some new monsters, and seasoned the concoction with a few scientific facts. During his presentations, his voice was always a little deeper and rougher than usual. People hung on his every word—he was a born storyteller. Even Greta was so entranced sometimes that she forgot to change the glass image in the laterna magica.
Four-year-old Sebastian on her lap, she was sitting on one of the few chairs in the hall, right beside the wooden box that Karl had built two years ago. Since then they’d been traveling through the German lands and beyond. The laterna wasn’t as big as the one her father had constructed once upon a time, but they didn’t visit any castles and palaces, either. Their stages were smaller, performing at taverns and inns along the post roads. Karl sold Doctor Faustus’s Original Theriac and Greta sometimes juggled a little or balanced on rope above the market square. She was still a talented juggler, but by now she had become an even better healer, and so had Karl. Following their shows the two of them cared for the sick and injured, and especially for those who couldn’t afford to see a physician, and there were many of them.
Their biggest attraction was still the laterna magica. In the beam of light streaming from inside the apparatus danced dust particles like tiny animals. Karl called the laterna his “story-weaving machine,” and he excelled at continually inventing new stories. Stories that helped to keep the one great tale alive.
The tale of Doctor Johann Georg Faustus.
“In Leipzig, I even flew upon a wine barrel when the tight innkeeper wouldn’t let me have it . . . wouldn’t let me . . . um . . .”
Greta startled from her reveries when she noticed that Karl had stopped speaking. He was looking at her expectantly. Once again she had forgotten to change the image. Her hands in thin leather gloves, she pulled out the hot glass plate and carefully inserted a new one into the slit. The crate on the floor in front of her contained dozens more glass plates, all neatly sorted, many of them showing figures from German folklore. Others showed animals from faraway countries or comic sketches.
When Doctor Faustus was shown flying through the air astride a barrel, pursued by a visibly furious and very fat, sweaty innkeeper, the laughter was great. Greta and Karl always made sure that each show included not only scary stories but also funny, instructive, and uplifting ones. After all, there were many children among the spectators, and also pious elderly and sometimes even the town priest or other dignitaries. Little Sebastian followed every show with wide eyes, even though he knew most of the tales by heart. Greta hoped ardently that to Sebastian, the encounter with Tonio del Moravia two winters ago was nothing but another nebulous tale. A glass plate whose image was slowly fading.
The cave beneath Palatine Hill.
In the days that had followed, the idea had ripened. At first Greta had been skeptical when Karl told her of his plan.
“We are going to keep the doctor alive,” he had told her back in Rome. “Faust is too great to die.”
Greta wasn’t sure why Karl chose to take this path. He had always been more of a scientist and physician than a juggler. But then she had understood that this was Karl’s final proof of love. By becoming Faust, Karl was keeping his love for him alive. It was as if he had ingested the doctor like a sacred wafer. Maybe Karl’s never-ending affection had something to do with the letter he had found in an inside pocket of his coat several days after the incident at the cave. It was a letter the doctor must have written shortly before his death. Karl had never told Greta the contents of the letter, but it must have been warm words of comfort. Karl always carried the letter with him, like a treasure.
The most amazing thing about Faust’s resurrection was that it had actually worked. During the first year they had avoided places that Faust and Karl had previously visited. But soon such precautions had no longer been necessary. No one ever pointed their finger at Karl and accused him of being a fraud. On the contrary: a few times people had told them about other traveling Fausts, whereupon Karl would declare with outrage that he was the only true Doctor Faustus and all the others impostors who ought to be put in the stocks. The most hair-raising tales were going around about the doctor, leaflets, drawings, and even a small book had been printed, and a bigger one was supposed to follow.
Greta couldn’t help but smile.
Faust is too great to die.
Karl had been right—the legend was greater than the man. And she and Karl fed this legend with each new story and with each new glass image that Karl created with paint and brush, often working all through the night.
For two years now they had been traveling thus, and most people probably assumed that Greta was the doctor’s wife. She didn’t do anything to discourage those assumptions. For a sodomite like Karl, who failed to resist temptation from time to time, it was good to have a woman and a child at his side. It protected him
