Voltaire's Calligrapher Read Online Free PDF Page A

wasn’t going to kill you. It’s bad luck to kill a man on a full moon: he’ll haunt your dreams.”
    The executioner had big hands scarred by ropes and blades. I told him I knew about his former profession.
    “I’ve beheaded criminals in Paris, hanged poor wretches in Marseille, and pushed offenders off the top of a tower in Italy. They would land on marble below, and a painter would capture their final pose. But the real art is the ax: not many can cut off a head with a single blow. The rope, on the other hand, is the simplest yet least reliable of all the methods.”
    “Why? Did someone survive?”
    “Only one man lived to say ‘I was executed by Kolm.’ He paid my assistant to fray the rope so it would break when he dropped. A man can’t be hanged twice for the same crime in Marseille, so he was set free. But let’s talk about happier things.”
    Kolm worked for the courts in Toulouse, where he washed bodies in tubs of bleach water, sutured wounds, and sometimes determined cause of death. He was hired because of his experience as an executioner.
    “Do you miss your old profession?”
    “No. I got tired of being needed but despised. Take a look at this walking stick.”
    He held up a long cane made of dark wood. On the bottom wasa small but perfect replica of a hand, operated by a mechanism on the silver handle.
    “I was never allowed to touch any food when I went to the market. No one would speak to me. Then I had an artisan from Nuremberg make this walking stick. At first no one had a problem greeting the silver hand, letting it pick up apples or fish. But then it started to malfunction, and now it crushes everything it touches.”
    The hand opened and closed. Kolm invited me to try it. I lifted the walking stick and, as I looked up, saw a woman standing in a window. It was the passenger we had delivered to the toy manufacturer on rue des Aveugles.
    I heard the sound of the window as it closed.
    I had no intention of saying anything but suddenly heard my voice, as if it were another’s:
    “A dead woman just closed a window.”
    “I know the dead and I know they never come back; I’d have been visited by now if they did.” Kolm looked over at the house. It was the only one that still had any lights on. A bronze bell hung out front. “There are seventeen women who work there. They might disappear during the day, but they come back to life at night.”
    His words did nothing to reassure me, and I hurried away down the deserted street. I don’t know why, but Kolm followed me, and the moon followed him.

The Performance
    I went to see Kolm two days later, as he had promised to ask whether there were any openings at the court for a calligrapher. Kolm lived in a rooming house reserved for the brotherhood of executioners; they owned a building in every city to avoid the usual problems of lodging. Never having executed anyone, I wasn’t allowed in, but Kolm told me the rooms were decorated with axes, hoods, and belts that had belonged to legendary executioners. These made him nostalgic. I asked why he had left such a profitable profession.
    “Five years ago I helped to suppress an uprising against M. Ressing. I had cut off about ten heads when it seemed a pair of familiar eyes were staring up at me. I reached into the bloody basket and found my father’s head. We hadn’t seen one another in a long time, and I had executed him without even noticing. I know he recognized me, and yet he didn’t say a word: he wouldn’t interrupt my work. I haven’t executed anyone since. I was only able to recover my father’s head, which I put in a glass case and took to the town where he was born. There I gave him the funeral he deserved. For his epitaph I wrote:
Theodor Kolm lies here. And elsewhere as well.”
    It was Sunday and Kolm’s day off. We walked until we saw a crowd beside the market: a theater company was performing
The Calas Murderers
.
    The actors had erected a stage in a derelict square, amid statues of