Gertrude and Claudius

by John Updike

  “Perhaps they thrive best apart. Cubs cannot share the same den for life. There is a safety in distance, and a purity that leaves the loyalty untested, for brothers and lovers both.”

  “Who speaks of lovers?” Gerutha asked. “I will miss a friend and brother newly acquired—a brother-friend and falcon-lover.”

  “We belong to those who handle us,” Feng said and, snapping his head aside as if in irritation, signalled to Thord that they must depart. Thord undid Jochebed’s leash and creance and reattached to the gyrfalcon’s jesses the bells whereby no motion of hers throughout the day and night would go unnoticed, and her handler could be always beckoned. The old man’s eyes, it seemed to Gerutha, had been buried gleaming in the creases of his weathered face, over the years erased in deference to the haughty, oversized stare of hawks. Her heart went out to the boy, Ljot, consigned to grow old and bent, wrinkled and brown, in service to a race of ungrateful raptors.

  Lord Christ, Feng thought, this love of her is eating me alive. Craving for Gerutha gnawed on him in the night, glimpses of her burned into the back of his brain as he shifted and twisted on his vagabond’s pallet—a certain way she turned, a certain way her face would be tilted when she turned, turned at the voice of some other and not aware he was watching (or was she?). Her loose and gauzy hair, self-haloed by its own stray strands, would slightly lift, a wife’s fair reddish hair it was an indecency to see, but that he was the brother of her husband and thus allowed to enter their apartments as they broke their night’s fast, she in an unbelted gown not so long it hid the bareness of her feet, a pink bareness implying an entire body flushed still with the languid heat of sleep just shaken off, pink on the sides and white in the toes and at her bare heels thickened to a tallowy tint, Gerutha’s whole body a flexible candle carrying the pale unconstrainable flame of her hair.

  Horwendil would be there, already dressed to go hunting with that foppish rude brat Amleth or else in velvet garb of state for the entertaining of some ambassador or dithering clerk of the exchequer, quite ignoring the female treasure demurely silent at his elbow, her lips daintily embracing from off the sharp point of her knife bits of sautéed wild boar or of a trencher soaked with poached quail’s eggs, her husband babbling pompously away to impress his brother about the Norwegians or the Polacks or the Novgorodians nibbling away at some wretched marshy border or treacherous sea-route, his voice bloated with kingship. Unused to contradiction, it would hollowly roll on: “And the merchants, the merchants, Feng, are such tiresome rascals, they flourish on the security the state creates, they use our roads, our harbors, our safe cities, and must be taxed, but they hide their wealth shamelessly, tucking it here and there where no accountant can find it! In the days of our father, Feng, wealth could not hide, it was out in the open, crops and lands, the cottages of the vassals and the villeins, grazed pastures and stocked barns, the king’s agent could tot it up at a glance, but now wealth creeps, it oozes from place to place invisibly, in the form of numbers, numbers written in ledgers, it is easy to blame the Jews but, mark me, others than the Jews are willing in this rotten day and age to handle the dirty business of usury, to laugh at damnation, to strike the phantom balance of debit and credit and make it stick from town to town, port to port, so the cords of loyalty that in our father’s day bound thrall to lord, lord to king, and king to God were of no account, so to speak, even the languages whereby hill-dwellers and valley-dwellers once knew one another apart now dissolved in the language of figures—figures, my dear Feng, invented by the Evil One himself in the guise of Muhammadans and brought back by the Crusaders with many a fatal case of pox caught from some olive-skinned whore. A merchant’s wealth, damn it to Jesus, is slippery as a snake: it shows itself nowhere but in the furnishings of his bedroom and the amount of silver and gold he hangs upon his fat strumpet of a hausfrau!”

  There was, always had been, in Horwendil’s discourse a rambling licentiousness, a furtive braggadocio as his tongue could not forbear touching his mind’s underparts, the women he had spread open as part of a raider’s privilege, even Sela, whom Feng had ineffectually begged be spared, exiled to an island or ransomed back to the Norwegians, but whom Horwendil had to have, though she scratched and fought like a Valkyrie. Thus stained and self-disgraced by many an easy triumph over a fair and helpless creature, the King obliviously droned on, the grease of his breakfast meats gleaming on his beard, his belly as swollen as that of any merchant he schemed to rob. That such a bulky human pig could with the blessing of the Church pollute Gerutha whenever his lust bid maddened Feng to the point of murder. She formed for him in her graceful affirmative bearing a luminous window into a purer world. When he looked at her his soul winced as light poured in. She would move from the shared breakfast table to her personal table by the window, with its oval metal mirror, and brush out her hair, her back arched in the supple morning gown, her pointed pink elbow slipped from its wide sleeve in the uplifted rhythmic motion, her pale coppery hair crackling and spraying in a thousand fiery ends. Feng’s mouth would go dry in such near presence of her untouchable flesh.

  That her body had an underside of concupiscence she herself had admitted in playful conversation with him. Lightly she spoke, in the conceits of courtly love, of lower parts, which the upper merely served. This touched his sensitive quick, and had been intended to. But he knew that she, with that skill of women which conceals from them their own purposes in too much distinctness, meant mostly to agitate a communion of spirits from within the impregnable castle of her position as royal wife and mother. She was thirty-five, at her peak of ripeness. As long as she could bear the King another heir, it would be extreme treason and an affront to Heaven were any other Dane to lie with her. The royal blood was sacred, God’s blood on earth. And Feng’s devotion included a self-protective austerity, an abstractness. He did not picture her underparts, nor the licentious poses that open a woman, like a mare in the stud yard, to penetration. The amused play of her mouth and eyes, the casual music of her considerate voice, a glimpse of her bare feet and rosy morning languor were to him amorous nutrition enough: at this delicate stage the image of more would have revolted him. Like a falcon, love was kept best at hunger pitch. What we love, he understood from the poetry of Provence, where his restless freelancing had more than once taken him, is less the gift bestowed, the moon-mottled nakedness and wet-socketed submission, than the Heavenly graciousness of bestowal—the last gown lifted and the dark frank frontal stare in the bedchamber challenging you to appraise highly enough this gift torn from Eden’s shadows.

  Gerutha he could hardly appraise higher. He loved her good sense, her forgiving gaiety. Passed young from father to husband, oppressed by a husband whose virtues would appeal to a father, she knew her life had skipped something in its stages, but she did not nurse the grudge. So kind she was, so clear-sighted and natural. “Nature” was one of her words, which she used as women of other languages spoke of der Gott, le bon Dieu, Iddio, Dios. Feng loved the way that, even as her level gray-green eyes assigned everything its fair weight, her generous lips and the tiny muscles around her lips played together, as if words all had a joke in them which she could not help tasting. When she pronounced his name, she let the “ng” linger in the air, so as almost to create a second syllable. Her own name too, the rare times he heard it issue from her lips—for our names are used for convenience by others but figure marginally in our own minds, which know ourselves as an entity too vast and vague to name—was softened to “Geruthe.”

  Every inflection of her speech, thought, and movement seemed to him breathtakingly perfect. Even the upright little gap between her teeth was a perfection, a sweet surprise when she smiled. Sas betas dens, he remembered from a poem by Bertran de Born. Vuolh sas betas dens en dos. I want her beautiful teeth as a gift. A woman to be exalted by love must have a flaw, a weakness, and Gerutha’s, as he saw it, was her malleability, a passive lax streak that had allowed her father and then her husband to have their way. Her affection for na
ture had bred in her a fatalism, a propensity to surrender. She would surrender to him, too, if pressed. He felt that. And she should be his because only he saw her. His brother had gone blind in his kingship and had always been thick, a dealer in broad, approximate, merely useful truths.

  For Feng to live with Gerutha beside him would be to bathe daily in the radiance from which now he must keep averting his eyes, though her afterimage burned at the back of his brain. She would turn the lead in him to gold, lift from his heart the dark Jutish stain it had taken early. And—hardly to be considered, but a fact—she would make him a king. Denmark and Gerutha would be his together. So grand a possibility hovered a few feet away, as he stood cravenly attending in the shuffle of his brother’s court. Feng’s desire, when it took him from behind, was so strong his knees would threaten to buckle and his head would pound with impatience.

  As the craving within him raged, his brother passed from contemptible to pitiable, hateful to helpless. Horwendil knew nothing of how his immeasurable treasure burdened him with risk. He had no idea, or at most a passing, frivolous idea, of his brother’s lovesick envy. Feng must remove his dangerous envy from the realm of this wooden-headed monarch—defenseless in his pomp, unsuspecting in his fraternity. The ghost of their father, Gerwindil, watched. A shred of conscience tied the wicked brother’s hands. Feng went south to serve again the Emperor’s theoretical liegemen the consuls of Genoa, and farther south still in that service, and then east as emissary to Genoa’s ally, the porphyry-and-ivory throne of Byzantium.

  By way of farewell he had bid Thord carry Bathsheba, her eyes unseeled, to the Queen at Elsinore. During a dozen years of adventure, of farther hardening, Feng now and then wondered how his gift had fared. Pinned inside his undertunic of coarsest and most durable linen, he carried everywhere the soft brown breast feather she had handed him, as pledge and irritant.

  II

  THE KING was irate. “But what can the boy still be studying at Wittenberg?” Horvendile asked. “He is twenty-nine! I am all of sixty, with aches and pains and spells of irresistible lethargy. It is high time Hamblet came home and studied kingship.”

  Geruthe kept brushing out her thick hair, which in the half-light of this gloomy winter morning emanated a coruscating halo of static phosphorescence as she brushed. Some sparks were blue, and others yellow and remarkably long as they leaped from where with her brush of stiffest boar bristle she sharply pulled taut an extended coppery strand. The more she brushed, the more filaments stood up all over her head. “I think he finds us unsubtle,” she said. “We drink too much. We eat crudely, with hunting knives. We are barbarians, compared with his professors down there.”

  “Unsubtle! What does he think life is—a theatrical performance to be minced through by boys in women’s clothes?”

  “He doesn’t talk to me about what he thinks,” she said, “or indeed about anything. But I understand from what Corambis has let drop of what Laertes tells him, there’s a ferment going on in cultivated circles to the south, various bits of ancient knowledge the Crusaders brought back, the Arabs and the Byzantine monks have been transcribing them for centuries but nobody read them, something about a new way of looking at the world scientifically, whatever that is, letting nature tell us about itself in little details, one after another, as if women and children and millers and farmers haven’t been doing that all along. Instead of taking everything on faith from the priests and the Bible, I mean. Instead of arguing from first principles, you deduce your principles from a host of observed particulars. I’m sorry, I’m not making a great deal of sense; it’s still too early in the morning, my dearest.”

  “You confirm my worst suspicions. My son is down there on the Elbe learning how to doubt—learning mockery and blasphemy when I’m trying to instill piety and order into a scheming, rebellious conglomeration of Danes.”

  “What else did Corambis say?” Geruthe mused, as colorful electricity played about her head. “Something about man being the measure of things, which makes a kind of sense, really, since men and women are right here all around us while God, though we can all feel He’s here somewhere, is a lot harder to observe. Still, you can’t help wondering if people are ready to be the measure of things. We can hardly measure ourselves. We are the only animal that makes mistakes.”

  “We must get Hamblet back, or the regional thing will choose another when I—if I were to— As I say, I have these uncanny spells of fatigue.”

  “Normal aging, merely, darling. I too need a nap more than formerly. You’ll live another twenty years at least,” his wife told the King, whipping an especially impressive blue spark from her long hair, as if the thought were not entirely soothing to her. “You Jutes are tough as nails. Look at your brother. Five wounds in a Turkish ambush, and still he moves like a panther, with a bear’s thick head of hair.” It soothed her to mention Fengon, lately returned from his lifetime of knightly exile, and suddenly very attentive to those who lived in Elsinore. His scalp and beard, becomingly sprinkled with gray, flourished, whereas Horvendile’s curly pale locks, once so spectacularly Nordic, had thinned touchingly above his brow and at the back of his skull. His skull showed its mineral hardness, its marmoreal gloss.

  “Yes,” he said loudly, stalking about and summing up: “My rogue of a brother returned and hanging as close about the castle as if he smells his future here, and Hamblet, who should be in residence cutting a successor’s stalwart figure, impressive and engaging yet not too much so, off instead in Wittenberg wasting his days in fruitless logic-chopping and his nights in whorish follies that might not disgrace a nineteen-year-old but sit sluggishly on a man ten years older.”

  He was in his storming mode, like a sheet of tin shaken behind the stage to signify thunder. Geruthe touched the back of her teeth with the tip of her tongue, not wishing to speak too hastily to this husband of such ponderous and firm impulses. She was conscious, more and more, of guarding and directing her exchanges with him, once so spontaneously confiding, even though he often gave her back but a grunt. “I do not think,” she said, “that our son has much taste for those crass pleasures you rather enviously indict him for. As he grew, his induction into the mysteries of nature seemed to be, as far as a mother could observe, attended more by wonderment and disgust than by delight. He does not delight in females as such; he has enough of the passive principle in himself so as not to be uncritically attracted to it in others. Only through a very young and delicate vessel might Hamblet’s fastidiousness be overcome. I have in mind—as I have mentioned, my lord—Ophelia. She is seventeen, the very age at which I was wed, and during his infrequent visits to Elsinore the Prince has paid increasing notice as her bloom has become conspicuous. This summer past, I believe, their relation advanced beyond that of a chaffing older cousin to his painfully shy and undeveloped adorer. She has become a beauty, with a sweet and impish wit, though still shy, as a maiden should be.”

  Horvendile said, marching about their bedchamber as if in blind pursuit of a way out, “She is not merely shy; she is fey. Her brain holds a crack any ill circumstance might jar agape. Further, a prince should wed a princess and thus enlarge the throne’s connections and influence. To marry the daughter of one’s Lord Chamberlain is unhealthy political incest. Corambis has so long flattered our ears with his counsels I have been considering his dismissal—to be phrased, of course, as his well-earned and well-rewarded retirement, perhaps to the little lodge by Gurre Sø, to whose enlargement and reroofing he has devoted so many trickles from the royal purse.”

  This was unpleasant news to Geruthe, who saw Corambis as her ally, in an Elsinore that felt colder than formerly. She hid her surprise, protesting only, “Corambis advised not just you but my father, Rodericke. He is a living link to my girlhood, and the simple hearty days when the Norwegians were freshly humbled.”

  “Exactly. He has grown too accustomed to basking in the King’s power. Long proximity to the throne breeds envy and presumption. His scheme of making his frail daughter,
no sturdier than her mother, the next queen, depriving me of all possibilities of an advantageous alliance, I find treacherous. There are princesses east of Novgorod who would bring a dowry of Asiatic scope, in amber, furs, and tundra emeralds, to a Western alliance. Hamblet’s attachments are not sentimental affairs, but matters for deliberation in the most dispassionate counsels. Never trust an adviser with a marriageable daughter.”

  Geruthe now put down her brush to turn away from the mirror and say to her husband’s face, “It is not any scheme of Corambis’s or mine. It is a natural trend we both have noticed, without our encouraging it—Hamblet’s fondness for this flower budded in his own court, while he has been mostly absent. On her side, how could she not be fascinated by our royal adolescent, as he matured into so arresting and expressive a man, preeminently eligible and yet not spoken for? But she is docile, and will leave off all hopes, if her father so directs.”

  “Let him so direct, then. She may be your age of espousal, but you were no pallid invalid, shrinking into your father’s shadow at a frown.”

  “When it mattered, I was,” Geruthe retorted, her face growing warm, “as you well remember, having benefited by my surrender. Ophelia has more mettle and sense and reserve of passion than you have ever deigned to credit. She will breed stout progeny, my instinct tells me.”

  Horvendile looked at her with those phlegmatic pale eyes that sometimes saw discomfortingly much. “Your instinct serves your desire, my dear. You read your old self into her, and would harmonize our only heir to an imaginary echo of your girlhood. Geruthe, do not seek in this brittle maid the means to your own late fulfillment, and the conquest of your own son. Tools twist in our hands when we misapply them, and give us a wound.”

  Geruthe set down her brush with a smart click on the dressing table of briarwood and oak, where her aids to beauty—scarcely needed, though she was forty-seven—were arranged: the brush of black-tipped boar bristles, two ornate combs of ivory, an iron tweezer for the unwanted hairs that broadened her eyebrows and crept down her rounded temples, four toothpicks of which two were ivory and two were gold, some alder twigs whose ends had been soaked and beaten to form fibrous brushes for keeping her smile bright and the toothworm away, a soapstone jar of ground henna powder and another of lapis lazuli with which to smudge her cheeks and eyelids on days of public ceremony, talc to suppress any coarsening ruddiness of complexion, and a “sweet coffer” of fragrant cedar holding perfumed unguents for softening her complexion and easing wrinkles from the skin around her eyes. She spied in her oval metal mirror a face with still a girl’s moist fullness, rosy at this moment with anger and startled guilt. She said to Horvendile, “I am merely offering thoughts on the matter that my lord himself raised—how to interest Prince Hamblet in this court and his own royal destiny. I am sorry that my motives appear so twisted, when to me they feel so straightforward and kindly meant.”