Time heals all wounds, thought Greta. But ugly scars remain.
“The olifant is a strange creature indeed,” said Karl, pointing at the flickering drawing of an elephant on the canvas. This was the scientific part of their show, which Karl loved the most. “It uses its trunk for drinking, but also as a weapon and as an arm to break off branches. The legendary caliph Al Rashid gifted one such olifant to the great emperor Charlemagne. In battle, the enemy would run screaming from this giant beast.”
Karl had completed this image not long ago after he found the picture in an old book at a monastery. Meanwhile he had learned that Pope Leo also used to own one such elephant. Greta sometimes thought of the lunatic Medici pope who was killed by his own panthers during the attempt to summon the devil. Her father’s prediction had been right: the Vatican had swept the affair under the carpet. Officially, Leo had died very suddenly of a winter flu. His debts had been so extensive that, apparently, there hadn’t even been enough money to pay for the candles for his funeral.
Leo’s successor, Pope Hadrian VI, a pious man who had wanted to lead the church back onto the path of virtue, had died just a year later. There had been rumors of poison. Now there was another pope from the powerful Medici family on the throne. The Lutherans could no longer be stopped, the church was divided, and in Italy the German emperor and the French king were still at loggerheads. War, envy, and intrigue.
Basically, everything was the same as always.
Sometimes Greta wondered what had become of the igró pir recipe that her father had wanted to give Tonio in exchange for her son. Evidently, they hadn’t gone through with the trade. Tonio would have sold the weapon to the highest bidder, or perhaps to all parties at once so that Europe would be reduced to ashes. But Greta increasingly gained the impression that mankind succeeded rather well at killing and tormenting one another without Tonio’s help.
Tonio.
A chill ran down her spine as Karl told the audience about his journey through the hot deserts of Africa. They had never heard anything of Tonio del Moravia again. And yet Greta knew that he was still there, somewhere out there. Whether he was dead or alive, he would live on in the tales, just like Faust. Some nights she would wake up screaming because she thought Tonio was leaning over her, feeling her and sniffing her. Ravens and crows frightened her since the events in Rome, and she chased those inquisitive birds away by throwing stones whenever she saw any. Her father’s legacy still slumbered inside her, as well as the eerie gift of foretelling death.
She never wanted to use that gift again.
It was too somber, a kind of devilish mark of Cain that reminded her how like her father she was.
I am the daughter of Faust.
Greta looked over to Karl, who was nodding at her. She inserted the final glass plate into the slit. It showed the image of a guardian angel who was standing behind a child with its arms spread. Karl had drawn it especially for Sebastian, and it was the boy’s favorite picture. Even now he whooped with joy and pointed his little finger at it. In the background of the image, flames were lapping out of the ground, and the devil writhed with anger because he failed to drag the child down to hell.
The child was protected.
“Good people of this town, may your guardian angel watch over you on your way home and shield you from the devil,” said Karl, concluding their final show for the day with a wink. “And don’t forget to drop your kreuzers into my hat. As you know, I am Doctor Faustus and I can conjure up demons and worse if I don’t get paid!”
Greta hugged Sebastian tightly and gave him a kiss. Whatever might be lurking out there, she would never leave Sebastian again. Evil had no more power over her son or herself or Karl.
They had banished evil into their stories.
Or so Greta hoped.
As the people dropped their coins in Karl’s hat and walked out into the cold winter’s night, murmuring and laughing, Greta placed the last glass plate into the crate and shut the lid. Enough for today.
But tomorrow, the show would go on.
Johann Georg Faustus would live forever.
Afterword
When I was still in the middle of writing the first book in my Faust saga, The Master’s Apprentice, and told a friend of mine that there was going to be a second part, he replied promptly: “Well, Goethe’s Faust II was quite the flop.”
I truly hope it will be different with my sequel.
But basically, my friend was right. While Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust Part I is perhaps the best-known German play, hardly anyone knows the second part. And to be honest, it isn’t easy to get to know because it is rarely performed onstage—not least because it is so darned long. In the year 2000, well-known theater director Peter Stein brought both Faust parts together onstage, and without breaks, it took fifteen hours to stage it! Hardly any theatergoers have that much time. Allegedly, the director himself said later: “When you see the third or fourth showing, you realize that it’s rubbish.”
I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it is true that Faust Part II seems a little, well . . . overambitious. Almost as if toward the end of his life, Goethe wanted to show the world one last time what he was made of. The story is brimming with mythological figures and innuendos, and at the same time it is practically impossible to summarize the
