Gertrude and Claudius

by John Updike

  “I remember,” she said, “an oval silver platter, with strange intense linear designs all along its broad brim, that you sent to our wedding, which you were unable to attend.”

  “I regretted my absence. I thought I would not be missed.”

  “You were, by me, though we had not met since I was a child, when you favored me with a glance now and then. I have often thought back to how you seemed. The brother of one’s husband is a figure of interest, providing another version of him—him recast, as it were, by another throw of the dice.”

  “It has been my fate,” said Feng, with some impatience, “to be seen always as a lesser version of my brother. Accordingly I have travelled to where the comparison could not be made. His wedding to King Rorik’s daughter loomed, I supposed, as yet another opportunity to compare my fortune unfavorably with his.”

  This man spoke with a thrilling freedom, Gerutha thought, in a way challenging both to her and to himself. He enunciated easily, with intriguing variations in speed, the words tripping and then languishing on his lips, which were not thin and prim like Horwendil’s or fat and slippery like the lower lip of Corambus but ruddy and shapely, the exact amount of necessary flesh, like a woman’s lips, without being exactly feminine. His lips were not cut like Horwendil’s or loosely poured like Corambus’s but molded, as if by loving and careful fingers. His voice was deeper—a more lustrous instrument, expertly bowed—than her husband’s, and his skin darker, whether from natural tinge or southern sojourn she didn’t know. He was one or two inches shorter: nearer her own height. “Eighteen years ago, if memory serves,” he said, “the Holy Roman Emperor’s diplomacy had sent me to the Kingdom of Aragon, where the stalls behind the cathedrals offered items of an illicit trade with the Emirate of Granada, artifacts produced by the fanatically patient hands of the infidels. The design you noticed is a writing, running opposite to the direction of ours, stating, I believe, that there is no god but Allah, and a camel trader called Mahomet is his prophet.”

  His voice had become dry and rapid, with a certain drag of mockery slowing some sentences as if holding them up to the light of irony. His hair was black and cut short, with stiff gray strands bracing the erect coiffure. There was a patch above one temple where a shiny dent declared an old wound and the hair had grown in pure white, to give a pied look. His eyes were less blue and less long than Horwendil’s; they were brown and slightly slant, with dramatically thick eyelashes, like an actor’s eye-rings of kohl. His nose was hooked, with avid flared nostrils. He appeared, though younger, older than Horwendil, more seasoned. He had marinated in a saturnine essence. Gerutha liked the creases that the exposure and wear of his travels had wrought upon his leathery skin, and the way his face was worn to its lean tendons, with muscular ins and outs. He had the wiry vitality of one who had escaped constraints. She sensed that this man could casually lie and deceive those who loved him, but this did not repel her; it gave his interior in her mind’s eye something of his exterior’s agreeably creased, contoured texture. As Horwendil had aged, his appearance had become prey to the tendencies of fair, thin-skinned men. The tip of his small straight nose had turned pink, and his upper eyelids drooped, and the puffiness of his throat and jaw and cheeks were insufficiently concealed by the patchy, curly beard she had coaxed him, when still a wife with influence, into growing.

  Feng was forty-seven. After the legendary slaying of Koll, Horwendil had expanded and consolidated his fortunes and secured the kingship, while Feng set out upon the forest paths and crumbling Roman highways of the world to the south. He had returned now to Denmark to reverse, if he could, the decay of his mortgaged Jutland estates—pillaged by his neighbors and his overseers, while his peasants had been ravaged by plague and crop failure—and to establish, with some months’ residence in the manor that Rorik had granted him, a place in his brother’s royal court. His largely foreign guard of soldiers, their horses and pages, had all to be accommodated at Elsinore, for days at a time. Horwendil grumbled. Feng turned out to be a formidable convivialist; he drank without stint, though he showed drunkenness only in an extra deliberation of his movements. In the late stages of a feast he preyed, it was said, upon the serving-girls, but this disgusted Gerutha less than it should have. Rorik had behaved similarly, once his Ona was dead. Feng, too, it turned out, had once had a wife, Lena of the Orkney Isles, married not long after his brother’s wedding. Her figure had been as slender as a fairy queen’s, Gerutha gathered, and her hair so fine that a length hanging down her back could be coiled into a circlet no bigger than a wedding ring. Feng carried such a lock pinned to his undertunic over his heart, it was said: Herda passed on this servants’ gossip, seeing her lady’s interest. Lena had died, it was related, of nothing more distinct than her own unearthly beauty and goodness, before she could bear a child. So many good women dead young: it seemed a characteristic of these fallen, plaguey times. Gerutha could not but wonder if her own persistent vitality betrayed a lack of virtue, some unstated pact with evil. She was now thirty-five, regarded by all save herself as old.

  In her company Feng was irreproachable, and seemed indeed to shy from her touch, when she involuntarily reached out to brush his sleeve or tap the back of his hand in titillated gratitude for some especially vivid or amusing anecdote, some bauble fetched from this or that corner of a variegated, fabulous Europe. She was unused to a man she could talk to, and who was willing to listen to her. Horwendil and Amleth would walk away from her in the middle of a sentence, to exchange masculine facts and to make their private calculations.

  “My brother seems to please you,” Horwendil remarked in their lofty, drafty bedroom. His voice was neutral and reedy, a stoic nagging.

  “He tells me of lands where I shall never go, since I lack a man’s freedom. In Venice, he tells me, palaces are erected on tree trunks sunk into the sea; the streets are water, and men and women go back and forth on bridges like so many little staircases, and use boats as we use horses and carriages. In Castile, it rains only in the spring, when poppies turn the hillsides red. In France, each village has erected a church the size of a mountain, dedicated to the Virgin.”

  “Such tidbits you could gather from your romances. Which may be where Feng has himself gathered them. As a boy he gave my father and mother much grief with his incorrigible propensity for lying. My brother is one of those people, gifted in many regards, and of course charming, who believe that there exists a shortcut to the prizes of life, whereby patient labor and fidelity to obligation can be circumvented. Because he is my brother, by the blood-bonds God has forged I must love him and receive him, but you need not be as lavishly hospitable as you are. The Prince has observed your tête-à-têtes, and is disturbed.”

  As they spoke she was helping the King out of his jousting armor, undoing the many little latches and catches and knotted thongs that held the burnished layers each in place. Chain mail was giving way, as swords grew sharper and arrows swifter, to plated armor; in the overlapping scales of his flexible brigandine Horwendil seemed a kind of merman, bulky and gleaming. As she helped remove the articulated segments, and then unknotted at his back the supporting articles of leather and quilted padding, the effect of gradually diminishing bulk left him appearing rather pitiable and shrunk, though he had put on paunch with the years.

  Clad in her own nightgown of undyed wool, Gerutha fetched her husband’s and, while his arms were struggling with its folds, launched her reply at his enwrapped, hidden head. “I am surprised,” she jousted, “that the Prince has deigned to notice any behavior of mine. Ever since infancy he has been steadily fleeing me, so as to embrace you ever more closely. He is tormented by the half of him that belongs to his mother. When he next reports to you the perturbation of his offended sensibilities, you might suggest that he himself show his uncle more courtesy of attendance. Feng very possibly finds my feminine company trifling, but it is all that is offered him, since you and Amleth contrive always to be elsewhere within Elsinore, or else away together on some
superfluous foray.”

  “It is important that the boy learn the ways of manhood and kingship,” Horwendil informed her, with that aggravating grave calm he assumed when placing himself on a higher level of authority. The public self he had developed felt to her so wearisomely hollow. Kingship had gutted the private man even in a nightgown. “Within a year, Amleth will be leaving us to study in the Emperor’s domains, where modern enlightenment, guided by the Church Fathers’ divinely inspired precepts, is attaining heights to overshadow the ancients.”

  “Denmark has its clever enough tutors. I don’t see why we must banish our only child.”

  “ ‘Only’ not by any desire of mine, Gerutha.”

  “Nor mine, my lord.”

  “I would have welcomed a brood, to ensure that our royal line flourish.”

  “I did not shy from my duties, though the first birth was ominously hard. I was willing to face torture again, to supply the throne.”

  “The womb is the appointed venue,” he argued, “the male principle a mere tangency. Resentment of our early betrothal, it may be, curdled your fructifying juices. They lacked no supply of seed.”

  Gerutha’s gray-green eyes flashed like poplar leaves before a storm. “Seed sown, it may be, in such coolness of spirit it failed to kindle the willing soil on which it fell.”

  His visage changed; he blanched, then flushed and stepped closer as if to embrace her, this furry wall of a man, suddenly breached. “Oh, Gerutha,” Horwendil brought forth, “I was not cool. I am not cool toward you now, eighteen years after our wedding night.”

  “You fell asleep.”

  “To spare you a drunken lout I did—to bring you my better, morning self.”

  There was something archaic in his homage, something reminding her of Marlgar’s old-fashioned accent above her cradle, that made the Queen flinch into repentance of her angry mood. “Forgive me, husband. I cannot imagine a man serving me more worthily and lovingly.”

  Yet she could imagine such, at moments when awake beside his snoring mass, or when in mid-morning, as she lifted her eyes from the parchment page of a chanson de geste describing El Cid or Roland, Christian heroes in armor that fitted their lean bodies like a serpent’s skin, her gaze greeted, through the two-pillared window of her solar, the bile-colored Sund and the bleak beckoning strip that was Skåne.

  November, even late November, when the trees have shed their faded leaves and the wild asters have been stripped back to stalks by the morning frosts, brings its unexpectedly warm days, and on one such Feng invited Gerutha to visit his estate. The King being away, she accepted. They rode in an entourage, the Queen side-saddle since the people must not see her with her skirts hiked. The horse she rode, a young chestnut stallion, felt taut and skittery beneath her, the springs and sinews of him tightened to beyond what the brain in his great long skull could quite control. Gerutha felt herself inside this skull, seeing in two directions at once, the two views failing to meld. Sunlight gilded the gray twigs; the shorn farmland through which their strung-out party passed released to the warming air odors of cow-dung and rotting fruit-fall, of parching hay and smoking peat. Dark dapples like schools of fish fanned out against the sky’s glowing white, an incandescent sheet cut up and scattered as the horses carried their riders into a copse of birches and pines and out again onto a ridge where a forsaken crossroads shrine to the Virgin held a jumble of plaster fragments, some of them blue. The land on either side of the ridge lay in strips tinted according to the crops they had borne, each exiguous fief jealously tilled by its holder, the boundary corners marked with conical cairns.

  All this she saw and sensed through one eye: out of the other Gerutha descried herself, in russet riding cloak and diapered green bliaut that exposed but the pointed tips of her ankle-high elkskin boots, gliding through this rare adventure, under the protection of her husband’s brother, out into the land that for her had been mostly scenery viewed through the wide-silled windows of a castle that had been first her father’s and then her husband’s.

  Her life as appraised through this inward eye had been a stone passageway with many windows but not one portal leading out. Horwendil and Amleth were the twin proprietary guards of this passageway and heavily barred death was its end. Death, the end of nature and the opening, the priests of the Crucified God claimed, to a far more glorious world. But how could any world be more glorious than this one? Its defining light, its countless objects and perspectives, its noises of life, of motion. The children of peasants lined the village roadsides to see the colorful royal party pass. Destined to succeed their parents in thrall to these strips of land owned by others, they were momentarily liberated to childish gawking and guileless cheers. In the dappled sky a flock of starlings harassed a hawk, dipping and scolding and diving upon him while the lone predator pathetically ducked and mewed.

  Feng pulled his horse, a slender black Arabian exotically caparisoned in a Genoese saddle and bridle, close beside her skittish mount. “My brother is good,” he said, as if looming in the eye of hers turned inward. “A good man. Earlier, he was a good boy. Always testing his courage, going onto the heath alone for nights at a time, hardening his warrior spirit with little mutilations, quizzing my father about battle and how to be the intrepid leader. I believe at times he bored the old man, actually. Gerwindil was a godless brute who never did anything on less than three goblets of mead. His most heroic exploits were carried out in such an alcoholic frenzy he had to hire bards to describe to him what he had done. In theory he was a Christian, but in truth he had no idea what it was all about, or who the Jews had been, or what Eve’s sin was. His idea of religion was a ring of big stones and ripping out the guts of a dozen prisoners of war. But he had bowed to the conversion craze and let the priests into Jutland; the castle teemed with priests, and my brother and I got the brunt of their instruction. Neither of us could quite believe what they said, but we believed enough to make us triste.”

  “Are you triste?” Gerutha asked, less in flirtation, she told herself, than out of curiosity—itself a form, perhaps, of flirtation. She was curious about Feng, why he kept fleeing Denmark.

  “Not when a certain lady is in my eyes,” he said.

  “A certain lady?” Gerutha’s blood quickened with jealousy: Feng had found a successor to the lovely Lena of the Orkney Isles. Horwendil would never be capable of such abstract devotion. What he could not directly hit, fuck, or outsmart had no existence for him.

  “Who must go unnamed.”

  “Of course,” she said. “That is part of the rules. But does she know, this certain lady, of your devotion?”

  “Yes and no, I think. Also”—pointedly changing the subject—“my tristesse lifts when I am in a city I have never been in before. But I am running out of cities, unless I venture as far as Byzantium or risk disguised trespass in the Khanate of the Golden Horde.”

  They had passed into the terrain of Horwendil’s estates, and she could see, at the end of a lane lined with leafless poplars, the manor house, Odinsheim, where she had been brought on her wedding night and not until mid-morning been made a woman. Several of their party now left them, to gather information for the King, on the harvest and his rightful portions. The rest proceeded on to Feng’s manor house, Lokisheim, which Gerutha had seen from afar but never before from within.

  The façade was as wide as Odinsheim’s but lower by a story, and of exposed timber and nogging instead of more costly, rarer yellow brick. Within, servants could be heard scurrying like mice at the scent of the cat. But they had put off lighting the hearth fire too long; the cold logs sputtered and smoked. The house’s interior bespoke a certain military order imposed upon the gaps of neglect. The walls and open cabinets displayed souvenirs of Feng’s sallies across Europe: a curved sword with a bejewelled hilt; a brass device of spheres within spheres, the innermost globe pricked with the arcane pattern of the stars; two tall halberts crossed above a crudely carved coffer with rope handles and iron clasps in the shape of leapin
g fish.

  “A Burgundian gisarme, and a glaive of Bavarian workmanship,” Feng explained with nervous briskness, having seen her eye taken by the halberts’ intricate curves, the lethal barbs. “The Germans of Bavaria have learned the tricks of the Italian north. These curious chairs are Venetian.” He picked one up and snapped it shut like a pair of shears, and then open again. “They fold, the slats interleaving, a bit like the threads of a loom. There is all sorts of cleverness abroad, and less and less trusting to God. We Danes are a backward lot; the cold keeps us fresh but stupid.”