The Eyes of a King (38 page)

There was nothing to do in the house. In Stirling’s Bible, I found the passage that I was supposed to read for the service, thinking to practice it. But I began to cry again, because in the front of the Bible was written, in my father’s own hand,
To Stirling on your christening. May you grow up safe in the light of God’s law. With all our love, Mother and Father.
I remembered him writing it, for one thing, when Stirling was still a baby; and for another thing, all of them—Mother and Father and little Stirling—were so far away. And it hurt to see his stupid wish, that his son could be kept safe, because no one could be kept safe by God’s law alone. Because God was in heaven, and we were on earth, and he could not reach out to us even if he wanted to. And God liked to test people, to see what it took to break them. And God’s law is not a light, I thought. It’s a burden that none of us can lift. If people try, it only crushes them.

The worst thing was thinking of Father and Mother, in Alcyria or further away, who thought Stirling was still safe. They had left him when he was two years old. Father was a wanted man and they had to escape quickly; they were going to send word in a month or two, to tell us to follow. If they did, it never reached us. Grandmother thought they must have been caught crossing the border, and she would not let us set out after them. She was convinced that they were dead.

I hadn’t looked after Stirling for them as I should have
done. Mother wouldn’t have let him catch silent fever. Father would have run all the way from the eastern hills, no matter how tired he was.

I read through the passage that I was supposed to speak, and tried to imagine how I would read it. But I worried now that I would break down and cry, break down at the front of the church, and everyone would see me. So I shut the Bible and sat and stared out the window at the unchanging view, until Grandmother cooked dinner. I hardly ate anything. I felt guilty that I was nervous about reading at the service. But it was not just reading; it was the whole thing. Everyone would be staring at me, watching how I reacted, and it was our last chance to say goodbye to Stirling forever.

“Help me, Stirling,” I said in my head that night, unable to get to sleep for worrying. “Help me. I can’t read. I just can’t. I won’t be able to speak.” I tried to imagine Stirling’s answer, but it was no good. Stirling thought of kind things to say, and wise things, and I couldn’t think of those things myself. “I wish you were with me, Stirling,” I said in my head. “I never realized how much I need you.” I knew he couldn’t hear. I cried myself to sleep.

I dreamed that I was standing at the front of the church, but I was dumb. As if I had silent fever. No words came from my mouth, no matter how much I tried to talk. And then I dreamed that I was falling into Nothing, and woke up shivering and sweating.

But when I eventually drifted back into sleep, I had a completely different dream. I was sitting opposite Stirling at the table, and it was snowing outside, like it had in December, when the fire drove out the early shadows and I began to teach
him to read. He handed me the Bible and pointed to a passage, and I read it. “ ‘And I saw a new heaven, and a new earth …’ ”

“How did you learn to read so good, Leo?” he said when I finished, and I heard his voice so clearly that I thought he must really be speaking to me and woke with a start. I was smiling when I woke. And then I remembered. Perhaps it was stupid, but for a moment, although I knew he was dead, I didn’t feel as if he was gone.

A
t the front of the church, standing at the lectern in the colored light from the window, I spoke the last words: “ ‘And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.’ ” There was a silence, and my footsteps echoed as I walked back to sit down. Maria, at the back of the church, began to cry. I sat down again in the front pew, beside Grandmother, and she took my hand. “You make me proud, Leo,” she whispered.

When I read, I didn’t read as myself. I didn’t think of Stirling being dead or of what the words meant. I just read them. I thought of Nothing. And I managed to get through the reading that way. I managed to get through the whole thing that way. Which is why I barely remember anything about it now. I was so wrapped up in not crying that I hardly thought about anything else. Maybe it was the wrong thing to do, but at the time I could see no other way to endure that service.

When Father Dunstan began his sermon, I tried to concentrate, but I kept being distracted. I wondered if I had remembered
to shut the door of the apartment. It was crazy, because I had gone back twice to check it, and I didn’t care if anyone broke in anyway, not anymore.

“When something like this happens,” Father Dunstan was saying, “our life is irreversibly altered. We cannot explain something as terrible as Stirling’s death. We begin to question everything. Nothing makes sense to us anymore. In the words of the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes, ‘Everything is meaningless.’ In the face of such a tragedy, everything can become meaningless.

“The Teacher, the writer of Ecclesiastes, is weary of life. He has seen the unfairness and the inexplicability of it. He has searched for wisdom, but found only that everything is meaningless. At the beginning of the book, there seems little hope. But as it progresses, we see a new meaning in life. The meaning is God. The Teacher argues that everything is meaningless without God.

“So what is his conclusion? What does he come to, after his examination of life? At the end of the book, the conclusion is quite simple: ‘Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.’ And that, I think, is what we must do. Fear God and keep his commandments.

“It would be difficult for any one of us to try to explain why Stirling died—what purpose his death served. But I feel sure that, when we reach heaven, it will become clear to us. God adds a new meaning to our earthly life, one which is beyond us now. But what we do know now is what we have to do.

“God wants us to continue with our life, even if we are not sure where we are going at times. He wants us to obey the words of the Teacher. Although we cannot explain why we carry
it out sometimes, we know what our task is. ‘Fear God and keep his commandments.’ There is nothing in the scripture about understanding God, for that is beyond any of us. There is nothing that tells us that we must know exactly why we carry on, all the time. Only that we must do this: continue to live, in the way that God wishes us to, until the end of our days.

“Truly, everything has a meaning, and though we may not see it now, in time it will make sense to us. Although we are struck with the incomprehensibility of Stirling’s death, we can carry on as God, and Stirling, would want us to. We can carry on with our lives, by striving our utmost to fear God and keep his commandments.”

Then I stopped listening. He talked for more than twenty minutes, and that is all I can remember.

“What did you think about Father Dunstan’s sermon?” Grandmother asked me after the service. I did not know what I thought. My mind was empty.

But I remembered his words. And now I think that maybe what he was trying to say was right.

On the way back from the service, someone came stumbling up behind us. We had been moving slowly, as if we were walking against a current, but we stopped now and turned. It was Maria, clutching the baby to her chest. She stopped in front of me and looked as if she was about to speak and then shook her head and stared at me in silence.

She was different somehow. Baby Anselm clenched his fist and stretched it again. I watched him and thought that even he had changed. I remembered that barely a week had passed since
we had fought over something inconsequential, me and this girl I used to know. I tried to remember what it was, but I couldn’t. She went on looking at me. “Leo, I don’t know what to say,” she began eventually. “I wanted to talk to you, and then you left for the border. Leo, that this should have happened …” She shook her head and fell silent. I watched her tears and my own landing in the dust of the road, like when the first rain begins. I watched them as you watch a stranger’s tears. Whenever I remember that day, I remember it as something that happened to a stranger. Not because of the years that have passed; it was like that at the time.

Grandmother took Maria’s hand briefly, and then Maria took mine. I think I let her, but I can’t remember now.

And then I was thinking of that day when the truancy officer had called, when Maria and I had sat together in the apartment and later Grandmother had stood and rocked the baby. And now we four were standing in the road in mourning dress—tears lying in the creases in Grandmother’s face, Maria sobbing openly, the baby silent and expressionless as if he knew. Maria’s hair was covered and she had taken the jewels out of her ears. I started to remember then what I had said to her. Something about righteousness, or the baby. Could I have said that? I didn’t know anymore. The old Leo was still stranded somewhere beyond the shock and silence of the last few days, wondering faintly if he should apologize. “What I said to you …,” I began, tears running down my face. I coughed and started again. “Before, what I said to you …”

Maria shook her head, almost angrily, and gripped my hand. “Leo, don’t,” she said. “How could that matter now?”

T
he next day was strange and empty. I got up and dressed, but that took all my strength, so I lay back down on my bed and stared at the ceiling while the minutes passed. Grandmother came in several times, but I did not move. “Get up, Leo,” she said eventually. “Don’t lie there. Come with me to the market.”

I sat up and looked at her. “We are going out,” she said, more briskly. “Put your overcoat on.”

I did not want to. She picked up the coat and tried to put it over my shoulders, roughly. I shook my head and covered my face with my hands. She gave up, looking as exhausted as I felt, and knelt on the floor and cried.

Something had fallen out of the pocket of the overcoat. It was that black book, the old book that I had read to Stirling. She picked it up, sniffling like a child. “Leo, what is this?” She leafed through the pages, then closed it and sobbed louder. “I will never understand you, Leo,” she said. “You will not speak one word to me, and yet you have been writing all these stories.”

I shook my head. I had not. But after she had gone trailing back to the living room, still crying, I picked it up and turned over the pages. And even just glancing at the words, I could see what the story was. It was the same as the dreams that had been haunting me these past days—Aldebaran, the prince, and Anna. And more, pages more, as though the writer thought I still cared about that.

I ripped the book in half, down the spine, so that the pages scattered on the dusty floorboards. It made me sick to see those words there as though things were normal. What did this fairy tale mean to me now, after all that had happened? I did not want stories anymore. I wanted to be left in peace.

But later, when it was growing dark, I gathered the pages again. I put them together between the two covers in the pocket of my overcoat, as I would have done before. That was the story I had read to Stirling. Whether or not I cared about it, he would have. He would have wanted to find out what happened next. He cared about them like real people, these three we read about in the desperate days when he was ill. And I could not throw away that book.