The dance of death of Würzburg

It was the night of 21-22 July 1349. The plague month was not yet over. The cathedral bell struck two. On the Marienplatz, empty and pale in the moon, fourteen people stepped forth from the five streets that opened onto it. Three women, seven men, four children. They knew each other; they had died in the last ten days.

They came into a ring. They held hands. They began a dance, slow, then faster, and a song no one in Würzburg knew any longer — an old one, from before there were bells. Summer nights are short; the dance lasted from two to three. In a dwelling on the Marienplatz a clerk named Hans Trapp woke. He looked out of the window.

Hans Trapp counted. Fourteen. He knew who they were; he had written their names into the plague book in the days before. He looked from the window without crying out, and reached for parchment. He began with shaking hand to write — not the dance, not the song he could not hear well. He wrote the steps. He counted them.

One, two, three, four — to the left. Five, six, seven, eight — to the right. He wrote fifty steps; he wrote a hundred. At the one hundred and fourth something happened that took Hans Trapp’s breath. In the ring there suddenly stood a fifteenth dancer. When he had stepped in — he whose face Hans could not see, because wherever the fifteenth stood, it was turned to Hans — no one knows. But he was there.

Hans Trapp did not stop counting. He did not stop writing. He wrote the fifteenth’s steps, who was several times half a step faster than the others, and saw that this fifteenth was no more than the measure of the dance itself. It was no dead. It was no person. It was — Hans understood — what dances when fourteen dead dance.

At the one hundred and forty-ninth step the fourteen broke into fourteen shadows and went back into the five streets they had come from. The fifteenth stood a moment longer, looked once more at Hans Trapp’s window, and then went through the centre of the square nowhere and was gone. The bell struck three.

Hans Trapp laid down his parchment. He was not taken by the plague. He left in the city archive a writing with the steps of the dance; it was lost in the fire of 1525. What the Würzburg chronicle has kept is his closing sentence: «The plague does not dance. The dead dance. The dance is the plague, but only if no one counts.»