The Wax Child
About this book
Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noblewoman, makes the doll from beeswax and warmth. The created child cannot open its eyes or ears, yet it observes the rumours gathering around Christenze and other women accused of serving a headless devil.
Claims of stolen happiness, illness, and forbidden acts move through households and courts until the stake becomes an administrative possibility. The doll’s strange perspective records how fear turns neighbours’ stories and women’s relationships into evidence.
Olga Ravn draws from real Northern Jutland trials, letters, legal documents, spells, and grimoires. Historical research does not demystify the novel; it shows that magical belief and institutional violence were parts of the same lived world.
The Wax Child is translated by Martin Aitken. It is a brief work of historical horror about power, nature, accusation, and an object made to witness what its maker cannot survive.
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From the opening
A Rumor of Witchcraft
I am a child shaped in beeswax. I am made like a doll the size of a human forearm. They have given me hair and fingernail parings from the person who is to suffer. I was borne by my mistress for forty weeks under her right arm as if I was a proper child, and my wax was softened by her warmth. After this time, she took me to a pastor; it was night, the church was dark and still, and he christened me, the wax child. I was an instrument. This was at Nakkebølle Manor, in southern Funen. My wax mouth cannot be opened.
I know the humans well, though they don’t know me. I am an image, in the absence of a child. I have this bottomless, shaft-like longing for the woman who made me, whose name was Christenze Kruckow. Her sweat smelled so tangy, of … cloves, perhaps. There were carriages and horses and soldiers. There was marjoram and thyme and rose hip. There were ships that journeyed far across the sea to lay claim to territory. There were ships filled with living bodies in the darkness of their holds. There was a scream. And a refinement. The finest pattern cast by the sun through the grill of the confessional. And through the towns religious processions went, and chorused wonderful song. The year passed, and the years passed. And I was a wax child. I did not age. I lay in the ground and saw it all. Insects and worms approached, to retreat on sensing my poison. I saw the rising of realms, the founding of states, the centralizations of power. I saw the clouds hasten by. I saw the great black tongues of oil advance as the fern from the soil puts out its feelers. I saw hands be raised and clench into fists. I saw knives gleam, children play. I saw steam locomotives, the smallest particle split and exploded. I lay in the ground. And from there, at certain times of the month, I could observe the brilliant moon. No one was carrying me anymore.
No one listens to a thing I say. Although I speak all the time. I am a lump of beeswax shaped in the image of a newborn child. I am no more than what may melt and stiffen again in the night. No one comes to me here. I lie and speak with my eyes. My family no longer exists, or rather: my kind of family, a very large one, no longer exists. And still I speak. A steady stream of words that slip from me without cessation, and I too am inclined to think it is often an embarrassment. But I cannot stop it, my mouth will not desist, though I don’t know how the words get out—I have no larynx, no vocal band, no tongue. But who does it interest? Children should be seen and not heard, as they say. But then I’ve already told you, I am not a child, only something that looks like one. Something that longs to be one. I’m an internal event. By nature unfinished, or condemned to anticipation, awaiting my mistress, who since she is dead comes no more. Now I speak again to the soil that covers my face. Now I speak again to the semicarbonized, the soon composted apple someone tossed, in the place where I lay.
There was a night when I was still lying in the bed of my mistress. Yes, I remember it. She wakes with a start, sits up, looks out. Others, in the surrounding houses of the town, wake in the same manner. They don’t know why. They are possessed by such a strange feeling. I observe them. I hear their thoughts. There’s something not right, something awry. The salty air—as if the sea has flooded into their rooms. They don’t know it yet, but still they sense it. The Earth turns slowly into modernity. And in the space of an imperceptible moment, the old world has succumbed conclusively to the new.
Whenever a woman nearby to me was about to give birth, I would lie in the ground and feel almost exalted, as if the arrival of every child was a chance for me to find a place in the world, for my soul to dart into one of those newborn infants, my mouth to open and expel its very first cry. But I remained there.
Whenever a woman nearby was about to give birth, a messenger would make haste to the midwife and whoever else the pregnant woman had asked to help. All let go then of whatever was in their hands, and came as quickly as they could. Some in the night, others in the frost of morning; with fleetness of foot they came, and barely inside the door would take upon them the housekeeping. They would introduce a new and temporary regime, which meant that those who normally frequented the house would have to find new places to stay. I saw these women form a ring around the one in labor and lead her to the bath house. I saw them douse the burning-hot rocks with water; I saw the steam and the scalding herbs. They undressed the birthing woman, and the naked one was Anne Bille, the young mistress of Nakkebølle. And by the stone wall of the bath house they had placed me in the ground, and I lay and listened there as Anne Bille gave birth to the first of her children. And the midwife came then with her long strides, known for her skill of directing into another the pains of the woman in labor, and it would be said then that she who received the pain of the travailing woman held the skin girdle. And the women of the household took turns to hold the skin girdle on Anne Bille’s behalf. And my own mistress, Christenze, could hold it the longest, and it was said then that this was because she had never lain with a man and therefore possessed a virgin’s strength. And later in the morning, Eiler, Anne’s husband, returned to the manor, and he stood and kicked at the gravel outside the stone bath house, and said, I heard it myself, to the midwife, that this was a dreadful racket his wife was making in there, and how much could such a thing hurt, and I saw then the midwife’s eyes narrow, and without him understanding what was happening she gave him the skin girdle to hold and immediately he fell to the ground and cried, O, help me, I feel such terrible pain, and all the women then laughed, Christenze and Ousse and the others too, they shrieked with laughter, and Ousse said: There, she certainly gave you the skin girdle to hold, that you may learn what your woman endures to bring your offspring to the world.
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But every time Anne Bille gave birth, no matter who held the skin girdle, the child died in the days that followed. I heard one of them scream as if death had appeared before it, and soon it expired at Anne Bille’s breast, not a single night old. Others were blue and lifeless, too small at birth to survive. Then one day my mistress said to Anne: Anne, I have noticed you are rather unwell. Come to me and I will give you sheep’s milk. You have borne four children, and none is alive. Let me help you to keep the next. And my mistress went and milked a sheep. In the kitchen, she took up some of the milk on a spoon and as she heard Anne approach the door she picked from her pocket, with two fingers, a spider and placed it in the milk so that the attercop was concealed in it. She stood with the spoon ready when Anne came in, and obediently Anne went to the spoon, put the spoon without a word into her mouth and swallowed the milk and the spider unknowingly in one gulp, and went on her way. At this time she was eight months pregnant and was full of hope and anxiety, and would accept any advice. And when the child came it was alive and well-formed, with the correct number of toes and fingers, a girl with chubby cheeks, and Anne sat up in her maternity bed and was radiant, a sigh of relief went out, not only over Nakkebølle, but over all of southern Funen—at last a healthy, bouncing baby was given to Anne, and she swaddled the child. But the next morning the newborn lay cold in her cot. It was Ousse who discovered it, and Anne turned away onto her side in the bed with her back to the child and said nothing. I shall let her be, so you can say goodbye, Ousse said, but Anne did not reply, and Ousse went then to the kitchen, for she was a servant girl, to share the solemn news. And there she sat as yet when Anne came bounding with the child. It lives, it lives! she cried, and held the child out for them to see, and Ousse and Anne bent over the newborn and it was true, the face, with its closed eyes, widened and crumpled, the mouth shaped the smallest of movements, and the lips parted slowly as if to expel a tentative sound. There, you see, Ousse! Anne cried. She lives! And the child’s mouth opened and out came not a sound but a spider; and they stood then, as if they were petrified, and gaped at the infant as the spider scuttled across her face and jumped away, and Anne screamed and let go of the child, whose body fell to the stone floor.
And thus some twelve years passed, and before Anne was thirty-two she had given birth to and lost fifteen infants. And with every child that died she became meaner and more bad-tempered, unhappy, abusive, and she would scratch the faces of her servant girls and at dinner would stab her own hand with forks and laugh out loud, and she cast her gaze at Christenze, my mistress, then still younger, though not young, perhaps thirty-six years old, but unmarried, and fond of riding, often at dinner she would still be in riding boots, and Anne scowled then at this ruddy-cheeked, unwed noblewoman and hissed between her teeth: You, ‘tis you, you are a witch. But Christenze merely laughed and rolled her eyes and drank more wine, and there were times when Christenze, my mistress, would think it better if she had been born a man, when still a child the thought had struck her that she possessed that very restlessness and strength; and if ever the chance came her way to gallantly step in and perhaps shield in her arms a servant girl who happened for instance to be frightened by a fierce dog at the moat, then the rest of her day would be spent pondering what Christenze understood were manly values, protecting and shielding, riding and fencing. So Christenze had never ingratiated herself to any potential husband, had never married, never wanted to, never felt an urge for mayor or king’s lieutenant, nor any marital bed, had shunned all notion of prenuptial agreement, bridal veil and marriage chest, preferring to horse-ride on her own and drink red wine and read letters well into the night; the Beheaded Virgin is what she later would call herself—after death, of course—her head, separated from her body, told me so from within the flames, when they tossed both it and the body, headless, onto the fire, Farewell my child, the lips sighed on seeing me on the arm of another in front of the bonfire, and had I been able to cry my eyes would then have cried, and had my mouth been able to shape a word it would then have done so, but I saw her detached head say: Farewell, my child, farewell from the Beheaded Virgin. However, all this was a long time later. I am anticipating events. Christenze is still alive. It is night, night over southern Funen. She is asleep in her room. She has put me in the basket. The still being of night entwines itself in the treetops. I think I love her with that part of me that is never illuminated.
Whoever wishes to know if a sick person will live or die shall take a gemstone that is known by the name of emerald and place it then upon a person who is gravely ill. If he is to die, the stone will shatter. It should be placed upon the heart.
Or count how many days from the beginning of his illness and take then a herb having as many leaves as the number of days, and hang it upon the sick person.
Or take the milk of a woman giving breast to a boy and put it in the sick one’s urine. Stir, and if the milk runs together, he will become well again.
Or take a crumb of bread and stroke with it the temples of the sick one, then give it to a dog to eat.
Or take a piece of flesh and rub the soles of the sick one’s feet with it, and throw then the flesh to a dog. If the dog devours it, this is a sign the sick one will become well again; if the dog does not, then he will die.
A man entered a town hall with an anticipation of total obedience. As a child he was offered the choice between an apple and a knife. He learned how to slaughter a pig. The man I see has access to many castles and manors. He never lives in the same place for any length of time. He is always on his way, administering his realm. He is Christian IV, king of all Denmark and Norway. Mail is read to him. He smells of hidden blood.
She chose the night in which to do it. She lit the fire and began to heat up the water. She saw a shooting star from the window. There was a draught. The beeswax in the pot started melting from the sides. It smelled of honey. When she stirred the pot in order to turn the lumps of wax, it was as if something that at first occupied the darkness surrounding the manor house now had entered the kitchen. She could feel its gaze upon her, a beast such as a wolf, or an elf creature perhaps—it bit her on the neck. She put her hand to the bite. Two eyes hung before her in the air and looked at her a moment until falling to the ground with a chiming sound as made by flint stones. She searched herself for strength, a love of herself. Tightly she wound a strip of fabric around the mold, and stirred the wax to make sure it was melted. She rubbed some human hair into a knot between her fingers and dropped it into the mold before carefully pouring in the beeswax. The beeswax ran and settled, as inchmeal she poured. And during this procedure her first memory suddenly comes to mind, a recollection she has held inside her, like a lucky pebble or a patch of open water in an ice-covered pond, a recollection to which, many times, she has since returned: She is lying in a bed beside a window. The bedstead is constructed of pale wood, and light is spilling in on her. Outside the window two or three black birds fly with pointed wings. The dark span of the wings is repeated in her mother’s dress or long cape, her mother and father are standing over her, about to leave, she cannot remember their faces, only their figures and the sounds their voices made, and that they are speaking about her, but she does not understand their words. They are in a happy mood, and proud, leaving for somewhere. That is all. And now she stands in the kitchen and it is night. No one knows her. I want to give her everything I have. She loosens the figure from the mold. The figure is me. She whispers certain things into my ear. She swaddles me like a child. She tidies up after her. She removes every trace. She knows certain things about the world. She knows that a rumor of witchcraft pursues her and Ousse. She must be careful. But she knows too that the king will not be so bold as to provoke the nobility at the present time, and that she is protected by her title. There is pleasure in producing me. There is pleasure in the hollow of the night, where a person may be inside the navel of the world.
She fully believed they would never seize her. That she was as invincible as a star. But I saw clearly that a star such as she was a star made of hair, and the hair wound slowly outwards like the shoots of the bindweed, latching onto everything in its path, twisting, sucking the capacity from its surroundings, that it be delivered to its own starry middle, the empty void where wax children live. They will do right to fear me, Christenze thought; but to me my mistress was harmless, as invincible as the foam that tops the wave as it crests into its final peak.
There grew small bluebells along the surrounding wall of Nakkebølle, and in their waists these flowers bore droplets of dew, and it was in these droplets of dew that an exchange in the manor house cellar became preserved, so that I, when once I came into contact with the bluebells’ moisture, heard everything. Ousse sat chained to the wall and weeping, and there stood Anne before her and ordered her hatchet man to pinch Ousse with a red-hot pincer.
Tell me who it is, Ousse, Anne said.
Anne, Anne, Ousse sobbed, as if in the hope of bringing Anne to her senses. Anne, God has given you a terrible cross to bear, that all your children should die so young, but it was never my doing, Anne, I have done nothing.
Pinch her again, Anne said, and the hatchet man gripped Ousse’s thumb with the pincers, and this scream it was that quivered in the droplets of dew. I think that any person who travels to Nakkebølle today and who puts their ear to the dew immediately after it has fallen on the enclosing wall of the manor house grounds may still hear those cries. And now Anne speaks very softly, as if her mouth were very close to Ousse’s ear:
Who is it, Ousse? Who kills my children?
God, Anne, it is God, Ousse wailed.
Pinch her again, Anne said. And then: No, Ousse, it is something evil, it can only be Satan. But someone has allowed Satan inside me, to enter my womb. Who is it, Ousse? I know it is you, but who else?
Now there is but a whimper from Ousse, as if she were nothing but a bluebell herself in that cellar, trembling in the wind.
It was you, Ousse, was it not? Good, it is good that you nod. You will go to heaven now, for confessing your sin. Dear Ousse, I have known you for so long and am quite ill with grief, but I sense how it alleviates that grief for the truth to come out, and that is all I wish. It will do you well to cleanse yourself, so that you may receive the forgiveness of God, this is a good thing, and my inquisitor here shall be my witness, but make sure to expel it all, Ousse, for you must stand cleansed before your God, you must be cleansed of your sin, there must not be a single smudge left upon you, if He is to take you. So I must ask you one last time, Ousse, and now you must answer me honestly, otherwise I shall be compelled to order him to heat up the iron again. Because you do understand, do you not, that I have become wise to your having lied to me the whole time, that you are one of the reasons I have been subjected to all this pain? But I forgive you, Ousse, for I know you were seduced by another, a devious serpent I have nourished at my breast in this house and called my friend, and that person is Christenze, is it not, Ousse? It is Christenze who is behind it all, is it not? She has hated me for being married while she has remained unwed; because she has no money, although she is noble. And because she is ugly, even if she cannot help it, still it has made her believe that she deserves better, and now I see, Ousse, that she is behind it all, and no doubt has threatened you into silence; indeed, she must have done, so do not feel badly about it, Ousse, you have merely been an instrument in the wrong hands, and God and everyone else will forgive you when the name of your evil mistress passes your lips. My dear friend, do you remember when we picked the flowers of the field on Bartholomew’s Day and swore that we would always be true to each other? It is Christenze, is it not? You nod. Open your lovely eyes so that I may see my Ousse of old. Yes, the tears of relief now run upon your cheeks. Fear not, for as truly as once I took your hand in mine on that meadow, I shall make sure Christenze is duly punished.
Within the labyrinth of pleasant smells and pale green pent roofs where my mistress walked was a taste of alkaline, of chloroplasts and perfume. In one hand she carried Eiler and Anne’s summons, in the other a letter of her own composition that she would request be read out to the court on her behalf. She was not intending to be there herself. She does not think about Ousse, and will not. She does not think about Ousse’s swollen eye that looked at her through a hole in the stone wall. She does not think about Ousse’s mouth, puckered as a knot in a rope. She does not think about the stupid tear that trickled down Ousse’s filthy cheek. She does not think about Anne, nor about Anne’s soft and ever cool hands when, always, they would clasp Christenze’s face in gladness on her return from horse-riding. She does not hear their laughter, her hand does not recall the cloth she pressed against Anne’s flesh that it would not be torn open; she does not think about that time they found an ancient coin in the bleaching field and were excited at their discovery. She does not think about the king, nor does she think about tar; she does not think about her own tongue and its yearning for the scream. She grinds her teeth until a sliver of one comes away and unwittingly she swallows it, eats of her own skeleton.
This man, I see him, by the name of Eiler Brokkenhuus, master of Nakkebølle Manor, who requests a thing-witness, an assembly of eight good men to be convened at Salling hundred court in the month of May 1615, wishing thereby to initiate proceedings against my mistress with the charge that she did harm by the means of witchcraft his wife Anne Bille, thereby causing her to have lost her children; I see how, in the bead of perspiration that trembles upon the bow of his upper lip, a bare oak tree is reflected, as my mistress’s closest male relative, her cousin Jens Axelsen of Årslevgodt, reads to the court her written reply: Since you, master of Nakkebølle Einar Brokkenhuus, and you, mistress of that house Anne Bille, have summoned me, these words shall be my reply to the mendacious accusation made with diabolical intervention by Ousse Lauritzens against my person. How, in the presence of God, can you justify the manner in which you now act towards me, an innocent, impoverished victim of untruth? I, who for so many years have toiled in your house like the poorest of servant girls. Can you, or anyone else, say to me in all honesty that I have concerned myself with witchcraft, such as you claim on the grounds of Ousse Lauritzens having confessed it? I will remind you, Anne Bille, of what you said of your unfortunate birth when I sat with you on the edge of your bed, and fed you before you rose: you said then that you were not hurt as much by giving birth to dead infants than by the thought that others believed that you had been poisoned or were yourself the reason for them dying. And you said too that the doctor Cornelius had told you the reason for your losing the child the first time you gave birth. The same reason without doubt that you lost all the others too. I know that truth, yet am not inclined to reveal it here.
I wish only to be made as leprous as Naaman, as cursed as Judas, if all that is written about me in the confession of Ousse Lauritzens is not demonstrably the clearest and most obvious lie. May God give that all who have concocted these accusations against me stand with shame and scaling hearts. Here said and written at Bellinge, this seventh day of the month this present year.
I see the king with the smell of the eye. The wind travels far; across the bay alone with this vision. He is impelled to issue a commandment. Listening, I hear time as a clearing among trees, where cattle graze freely; and I hear the eye when later it is crushed like a fruit of slime beneath a hoof. The eye belongs to a cobbler, a smith, a baker, one who calls himself a theologian, good citizens, king’s lieutenants, noblemen, a bishop. A diamond-shaped amulet of jade hangs around the king’s neck and he fingers absently the finely cut stone while the matters of the day are presented to him. A society of witches has been exposed in Funen. Someone from Nakkebølle has sent him Christenze Kruckow’s written speech. A notary reads it aloud to the meeting. It is the first time he hears her name.
Take a swallow bird. Take her heart and roast it on a stick. Take then the swallow’s tongue and place it underneath your own. Eat then the swallow’s heart. Carry with you thereafter the swallow’s tongue, and whenever someone is angry with you place the swallow’s tongue underneath your own and speak to the person who is angry and her anger towards you will at once be stilled.
And so Christenze was done with southern Funen, she left Ousse to the bonfire, packed her wadmal skirt and her medallions and her house altar with its image of the Virgin Mary and did not look back, wanting only to escape the rumor that clung to her, and when the carriage trundled out from Nakkebølle’s courtyard, the gravel crunching beneath its wheels, Anne’s scream was heard far across the fields; but underneath Anne’s scream Christenze heard another, and it was I who screamed, wordlessly, in the soil in front of the stone house, without opening my mouth I screamed, and as a whistle sounds in the ear of a dog, my mistress heard me, Wait, she said to the driver, and jumped out and ran back, it was imperative that she not be discovered, and yet she ran to where I lay and scrabbled in the earth to exhume me, and had my eyes been able to weep I would surely then have wept when she whispered, Good morning, brushed the dirt from my beeswax face, tucked me away under her skirts and ran back to board again the carriage and speed away to North Jutland. The year was 1615 and soon the king would send his ships to India. She was without money and unmarried. Her only child was me. I snuggled against her thigh, I breathed in the detail of her smells, I heard the bell tower sound.
I saw the low-slung hills, Rold Forest, Rebild Bakker, Aalborg. I saw, between the trees as we rattled past, a big heart, closing. Christenze was occupied by considerations unknown. I kept my thoughts on the moon. Cold, long nights in the red glow of the fireplace. From the town and its environs: a sense of scale. From the dead through the years: a sense of scale. I saw ships arrive, drunken folk fall into the harbor. I saw buildings be erected, lanterns suspended in the streets at Christmas. I saw goldsmiths’ stalls and sheeny lemons in wooden crates. Now and then, I turned my back on progress. Everything throws, when entering the path of the sun, a shadow. Time too has its shadow, the ages of man and what the poets call the spirit of the age have shadows, and I saw them hurry across Aalborg, in the great perspective of things a large and a small town all at once, a pearlescent kitchen midden. The passage of the spirit of the age is long and laborious, some four hundred years I have seen, and now it turns onto its opposite side, the great serpent in its corridor-shaped nest, the times are changing. The wheel revolves, old ideas are swept away and trampled underfoot, soon you shall all be crushed. And Christenze looked for friends. In one of her dreams she came to me and said she was afraid of her body. But when awake she was as ever fearless, and I was her mending and received all needles.