The Bells (20 page)

XVI.

T
he soldiers lifted me off my knees and dragged me behind the abbot out of the cellars. When we reached the ground floor of the dormitories, the abbot stopped and turned. The soldiers dropped me to the wooden floor. I knelt and looked up at the abbot.

“You must bathe,” he said. “Change your clothes. Should you wish to confess your sins, you may come to me.”

There was no fatherly smile now, just disgust at what he saw in the light: my filthy clothes, my pallid skin, and my other deficiencies.

I lunged at him. He was not expecting this, and so my pounce toppled him backward. Few sounds in my life have I enjoyed as much as the pleasant thump of his skull on the oaken floor. He yelled. He cursed. He raised his hands before his eyes in fear that I would try to gouge them out. But that would have to wait for another day. The soldiers grasped for me as I took off. My legs were long, my body light, and they were armed and muscled. And more: love blew at my back. The soldiers had no chance to catch me as I darted into the cloister. I was through the gate and into the Abbey Square before they could raise an alarm.

It was mid-morning in early autumn. The hundred persons crossing to the abbot’s palace, loitering in the sun, or accessing the perfect church all turned to watch the filthy novice monk—his lanky legs barely touching the ground, like an alighting bird’s—race across the square. Three soldiers chased me now, but I left them far behind.

They called to a fourth soldier who stood blocking the gate to the city.

“Knock him out,” one yelled.

“Tried to murder the abbot,” another called.

The soldier at the gate was young, dull-eyed, and built like a bear, with shoulders twice as wide as mine, though he was not as tall. He smiled and bared his claws.

Ten strides shy of this single strapping youth, I inhaled the deepest breath I could, and when I exhaled, I sang the most awful screeching devilish scream. I twisted up my face. I spread my long arms like a dragon’s wings. My scream was so loud and harsh that every person in the square covered his ears. The oaf at the gate stumbled back in fright, sure that I was a demon who had escaped from hell. He held his hands before his face. I only touched him lightly on the arm as I flew past, but he recoiled as if my touch had burned him.

There were people on the streets!

My first reaction entering that daylit city for the first time in years was not unlike the man who comes home to find his rooms overrun by mice. These streets had been mine and hers alone! How I wished these people would again retreat into their houses. They drove carriages and oxcarts filled with bolts of white linen. Their clothes were fine and clean. They stared at the filthy monster. Children pointed with pink fingers.

The soldiers had lost me, or given up the chase, when I arrived at Haus Duft. I banged my fists on the stately front doors until the elderly porter opened them. I grabbed his velvet coat with one hand and tugged his silly cravat with the other.

“Call Amalia,” I said. “I must speak with her immediately.”

I saw he could not concentrate on my words as long as he was being choked, so I released him and smoothed out his fabrics. He stared at me as if I were a wolf, distracted by my filthy face and odor.

“Fräulein Amalia Duft,” I said, calm and patient as a schoolmaster.

“Fräulein Duft,” he repeated unsteadily. Then a light came into his eyes. “
Frau Riecher
now,” he said. He shook his head. “But she left for Vienna ten days ago.”

I backed away, and he did not miss his chance. He slammed the door in my face.

I stumbled through the city. I had only one place in the world left to go.

As soon as I had unlocked the door, I heard a chair knocked over. The old, scarred man had leapt up in surprise. “Where have you been?” Ulrich yelled. He grasped the table as if the earth quaked around him. “Where is she? What has happened?”

I walked across the room and began to climb the stairs.

“Moses!” he called after me. “Tell me there is nothing wrong! Where is she?”

In our room, where we had spent our nights, I pressed my teary face to the sheets. I cried until I drifted into dreams of her.

When I finally opened my eyes again, it was nearly dark, and her scent had been slaughtered by my stink. I hunted the room for other remains, but there was nothing. I had found and lost the world’s greatest treasure: the sounds of love.

In the last of the evening’s pinkish light, I saw the painter’s wife in her portrait. It still lay on the floor where Amalia had dashed it in her anger. I hugged the canvas to my chest and remembered then that in his sadness, the painter had painted her portrait with his blood. If only I could drain mine with song!

I stepped to the window and punched through it. The broken glass tinkled in the street below like falling ice. I broke off a large shard and sat on the bed, the portrait between my feet. I would slice my veins and die here on this bed.

But suddenly Ulrich stood at the door.

“What are you doing here!” I roared, furious that he would dare to pollute our sanctuary.

“Please,” he said. “I have waited every night for a month. I must know. Is she … is she dead?”

“It is nothing to you!” I yelled. “Get out or I will knock you down the stairs!”

But he took another skating step into the room, his hands stretched before him. “I listened to you,” he said. “Every night. I heard you sing. I heard her ringing with your voice.”

No words had ever been more repulsive to my ears. I stood up. I lifted a chair from the table and heaved it across the room. He heard the whoosh of air and held up his arm. The chair grazed his arm, knocked him back, but he did not fall.

“Just tell me and I will leave,” he said. “Is she dead?”

“As good as dead,” I yelled. “Married and gone to Vienna. Now go.”

But he did not move. He reached out a hand as if for something to lean upon, but found nothing.

“Not dead?” he said, as if to himself.

“Get out!” I yelled again.

“But then,” he said as I laid my hands on another chair. “Why are you here?”

I hurled the chair across the table. This time, it glanced off his head. He stumbled back and fell, without so much as a groan. He sat by the door. His sealed eyes stared at me.

“Moses. Why have you not gone after her?” he murmured.

That he should ask such a stupid thing angered me even more.

“She called you her Orpheus.”

This only brought back the cold guilt of my deceit. “And that,” I said, lifting another chair, “is exactly what I can never be.”

I thought then how this man huddled on the floor now was the architect of my tragedy—and yet to kill the pathetic, broken Ulrich would be such small recompense for all that I had lost. I dropped the chair, and he did not even cringe at the noise.

“Leave me be,” I said. I turned my back and hid my face in my hands.

There was such a silence I feared I may have killed him after all. But when I turned, he still sat there, his head gently shaking. “I have wronged you,” he said.

“That you did,” I replied.

“No,” he said. “Not that. Of course there is that as well, but that is so long ago, and I have asked God every day to forgive me for it. What I speak of is another wrong, one that carries to this day.”

He was climbing to his feet. Blood traced a line from his temple to his chin. He held out a hand for some support.

“Moses, when I finally found you again, I so feared that you would leave this city, that I would never hear your voice again. I knew I would never find you if you left. And so, when you told me of the shame the abbot used to keep you here, I did not contradict him. He fears that you will tell others what happened in his abbey, and because of this, he has lied to you. I, too, in my silence, have lied to you.”

I watched him, confused. He reached out and shuffled toward the table.

“Yes, the world is indeed a difficult place for those like you. If the abbot has told you that you may not marry, that you may not become a priest, here he has not lied. If he has told you that simple men will laugh when they hear you are not a man, that they will not let you live among them without ridicule, that is also true.”

He had one hand on the table now. I felt a warm prickling along my neck.

Ulrich crept as he spoke, “But there is more he did not say. More that I would have told you if I had not feared that I would never hear you sing again. Moses, beyond these villages where you will find no friends, there are cities that even the abbot does not comprehend.”

I saw that his hands shook as they slid along the edge of the table. “In those cities they can be cruel as well—but there, you will sing. You will tame them with your voice. They will give you gold and make you rich. Moses, you must know that Vienna is such a place.”

He reached the end of the table. He released it. A hand reached for my face. “She called you Orpheus!” he said again, as if this were reason enough to travel across worlds. He took another sliding step toward me; the white and cracked hand strained for my face. “I heard it all, every note of every night. Hate me for it! Kill me! I don’t care anymore. But, Moses, you, too, heard it all! When you came tonight alone, I thought that she was dead. Only death would have explained it to me, but even death was not enough to stop Orpheus! Moses! Your Eurydice is alive!”

When his hand reached my cheek, I did not shy from his touch. He gasped, as though the feel of my skin awakened in him a million faint memories of my voice.

“But I am not Orpheus,” I said weakly.

His hands felt along my jaw. He ran them down my long, noble neck. One hand paused briefly to hold the place where the treasure of my voice lay hidden in my throat. Then he felt the contours of my bulging chest, below which breathed lungs twelve times as large as the ones he had touched years before.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you are.”

One last time he laid a hand upon my throat, his touch as light as silk. “Go!” he whispered. “Go!”

ACT III

I.

I
did not even pause to wash the prison grime from off my face. I left that blind man in the attic. He fell to his knees and called for me to sing one final time. I did not.

I strode out of the city at dusk, and then asked the first farmer I met which way was Austria. He looked me over, for he had certainly never seen such a large man with such a boyish face, and I felt a shadow of the old shame. But then he rubbed his chin, and we both turned twice around. He finally pointed toward the distant Rhine. “That way,” he said. Then he shrugged and turned back to his plough.

And so I walked until I reached the great river at dawn. I had never heard its copious waters tinkling along the gentle banks, though I had spent twelve years not five leagues away. I followed its stream, for it made sense to me that this magical Vienna must be where this river’s crystal waters had their source. I carried on like this for several days, watching the horizon for a glittering city.

Of course, in my total ignorance of geography, I did not notice as the Rhine curved back on itself and led me southwest. And so for several days I climbed into the mountains, my face aglow with hope, my back toward the object of my heart. I stole food at night from the finest houses I passed—stealing as well their sounds—and shared my plunder among any poor, kind peasants I encountered.

One of the poorest and kindest of these, an ancient man who had long ago been a soldier, finally said to me, “Boy, you are a fool.” He shook his head. “Head west a lifetime and you won’t get near Vienna. East, boy. It’s east you want!” He took me by the shoulders and turned me about like a doll.

“Each day, head for the morning sun,” he whispered into my ear from behind. “Rest at noon, then follow your shadow in the evening.” He pushed me off, and I stumbled back down the same road I had climbed. And so I pillaged the same fine houses again, was cheered by my same peasant friends. I followed my sage’s rule, and asked every friendly face how I might find the Holy Roman empress.

Thank God I was a fool! Otherwise, I never would have had the strength even to begin such a journey. My memory conjured Amalia’s sounds from around every bend, and so I did not give up even when my bare feet began to bleed, when it got so cold my fingers ached, when a column of Austrian soldiers knocked me into the mud.

The snows closed the Arlberg Pass and kept me in Bludenz for the winter. I swept dust and polished floors for a blind widow who heard me sleeping in her cellar, and heard something in my voice to pity. She bought me shoes and clothes that made me a good imitation of a man. I crossed the pass as soon as the snow melted, and rode a trader’s cart down to Innsbruck. In the early summer, time seemed to run ahead of me as I descended the mountains to the plains, so that centuries passed as I left the rough footpaths behind for the towpaths of the canals. Then I found the widest river God could ever build.

I asked a passing man what this river might be called and if it might lead me to my goal.

“It is the Danube,” he said. “And if you are a fish, you might yet reach Vienna before autumn.” I sat on the banks and watched the gentle current. I chewed on the last scraps of a stolen salted ham. My feet ached. I resolved to walk no more, but to find a way to float down this massive river, for my love was as plentiful as its waters.

I waved at every passing boat, large and small. I yelled, “Are you going downstream?” as if the direction of their bows were not proof enough. Some shook their heads; others pretended not to hear. None stopped to take me as their passenger. Then I looked at my reflection in the waters, and what I saw surprised me. I had not bathed since the widow’s house in winter, some four months hence. I tried to wipe off the thickest dirt with the cloudy water, but that only streaked the mud along my cheeks, like the stripes of a savage’s war paint.

Finally, at dusk, a narrow boat weighed down with sacks of grain drifted downstream. It was a sorry sight. Its hull showed as many patches as the clothing of its captain, who stood at the stern languidly pushing his pole into the shallow water. A lanky boy, all bones and pimples, sat dumbly at the bow. I felt down to my tired toes that this was the ship for me. I jumped up and paced beside them on the bank.

I sang a simple song.

The captain jabbed his pole into the mud of the bank, as if twisting a dagger into a wound. The boat swung around on this anchor. The man’s jaw hung open, like his son’s. They did not move, just listened, mesmerized.

I finished singing, but they did not close their jaws, and so I began another song. While they listened in dumb amazement, I stepped into the muddy river, waded to their boat, and climbed aboard.

From the moment I stepped on the swaying craft, I knew that boats were not for me—first an uneasy swaying in my belly, as if I had sipped a bubbly drink. I stopped singing and clamped my mouth for fear of losing my dinner with my song. As the boatman recommenced his languid stirring of the soup, I was paralyzed by sickness, and collapsed into the sacks. I thought to shout for them to throw me on the bank, but stopped myself, for just then we began to drift slowly downstream, and through the fog of nausea, my heart cried out in joy,
Amalia, I am coming!