There’s a beggar at the corner of Priest’s Street whom Anna Stina has walked past many times on her way up the hill to Old Square and its market. He usually sits on two pieces of wood that he has bound together into a stool, and in front of him on his lap he displays the disfigurement that is his livelihood. Both his hands are deformed, to such an extent that people who walk by either stop and stare or move over to the gutter rather than get too close.
It is not an injury caused by fire. It is as if something has turned his flesh into wax and formed it into strange new shapes and left him to set in this way. The tissue on his fingers looks as if it has melted and run off, and left his fingertips without nails and a layer of skin barely thick enough to cover the bone. On his palms and the back of his hands, there are odd patterns, hollows and bulges. The skin is colorless and almost as smooth as that of a newborn.
It is to him she turns with her question, and she finds he does not sit there all the time. She has to wait and tries to stamp the cold from her body when it becomes hard to bear. Finally he appears with a small sign under his arm and his hands wrapped in cloth. She gives him time to set up his pitch and sit down, as he gently unwinds the cloth to expose his lacerated hands to the gaze of others and to the falling snow. Her breath quickens as she sees they are just as she remembers. She walks closer and holds out the bread she has saved from her own breakfast. He blinks in bewilderment at this generosity, and is even more astonished when he sees who the giver is.
“God bless you, my child, but what have I done to deserve such a gift?”
“I want to hear what happened to your hands.”
He smiles, almost relieved.
“That is a story I have told many times and for less than this. Have you been down to Klara Lake, my girl?”
She nods.
“Then you may have smelled a certain smell, one that comes neither from the rot in the water nor from the dreck on land. There is a manufactory there where I was apprenticed. They make soap, both the kind that the poor folk scrub with for their Christmas bath and the kind that is used in the morning toilette of noblewomen. The craft is the same. The difference is in the exclusivity of the scents. But before the scenting there is a stench, and that comes from the animal cadavers. You melt them to render the fat. It is mixed with other ingredients and left to solidify, and before you can count to ten, the soap has turned clear and is ready to be used. I was a young and eager disciple and I became too enthusiastic when I was going to mix the potash with lime. The dose became too strong. I spilled the white powder over both my hands, and at the same time as I dipped them in water to clean myself, I heard my master call out his warning. It was too late. It was as if I had put my hands in boiling oil. Ash burns in water, you see, and it consumes everything in its way. That’s how I became like you see me today. They took pity on me and let me work with a broom since then, but I’m not as good at working as I was before, and what I make isn’t enough to live on.”
Anna Stina lets the words sink in as she thinks.
“How did it feel?”
He laughs.
“It felt as a foretaste of the hell to which I am surely on my way, little girl.”
When he sees that she is not satisfied, he continues in a more serious tone.
“I have never experienced anything worse. When my master took a bit of woollen cloth and brushed off the ash that had become a bubbling mess, it felt as if my skin was being peeled from my hands. He sent for lemons because he said their juice would ease my suffering, and maybe he was right but the pain stayed for days and it felt like I was squeezing hot coals with all my might.”
He spits at the memory and when he looks up his good mood is evaporated.
“Well, was there anything else? Now that I remember it all, I don’t think the bread is any kind of fair payment.”
“Can you make the ash again? The same kind that burned you? I’ll pay for it.”
It doesn’t take them more than half an hour to leave the City-between-the-Bridges. Maybe it is an illusion caused by the terrain, but it looks to Anna Stina as if the building by the shore of Klara Lake is leaning out over the water, as if the marshy land on which it was built will no longer carry its weight. They have to wait for the sun to go down and the work to stop. The laborers abandon the workshop one after another or in small groups and slip-slide over the ice. She can hear how the man with the deformed hands counts them all under his breath to make sure that everyone has gone home. He looks around anxiously before he signs for her to follow him.
They walk around the exterior of the building towards land and slide down the beach to the ice that is there. On the lake side, the house is supported on stilts tall enough to allow someone who is bent over to crawl in underneath. The beggar makes his way over to the planks above and swears quietly when his feet slip again and again below him. But he finds the hole he is looking for, large enough to admit a hand and forearm to pull a latch back. Under the trapdoor is a pile of frozen rubbish, and Anna Stina assumes that this is opened every morning when the floor is swept clean, and the dross deposited into the lake. Her companion asks for silence with a gesture as he props open the door slightly and looks up, his free hand over his mouth so the vapor from his exhalation won’t betray him. He stands for a long time before he pulls himself up onto the floor. Anna Stina waits for a sign before she follows him up.