by John Gardner
He was about to speak again—he was raising his hand to shake his finger at me. To sidetrack his ravings I leaned forward quickly and began telling about Heller’s “professor.” He closed his mouth tight and listened carefully, his heavy white eyebrows so low they completely hid his eyes. While I spoke, he turned his head, apparently looking out the window, not at me. I too looked out.
It was a violent, sternly beautiful night. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity, for there were frequent and severe alternations of wind, and even the brief illumination the lightning gave was sufficient to show the velocity with which the great black tons of cloud careened and collided. When I’d told the whole story, including as much as I remembered of the lecture on Matter and Mind, my father nodded, his eyes screwed up tight, and said, perplexingly—“Some poets get to the heart of the matter. Most just fool around with language.” I could not help but wonder, that instant, who was more lonely, more desperately helpless—the prisoner whispering in his pitchdark dungeon, or myself.
Fortunately, however, our conversation ended there. My wife came in, wiping her hands together, smiling vaguely, passing her eyes like a casual benediction over all of us. “Father,” she said, “it’s bedtime. The same for you, children.”
My father looked hard at her, thinking about whether or not to consent, then got up, stiffly, and shuffled toward the far end of our cottage, where he sleeps. Halfway there he paused, noticing his violin, and, as if he were curious, discovering some object never seen before, he bent to pick it up off the table. The children, meanwhile, had for some reason decided that they too would obey, and had started in the direction of their bedroom. They too, however, found some pretext for changing their minds. Though she still went on smiling, two lines for consternation appeared between my wife’s eyebrows. “Children, do go to bed,” she said. They did nothing, of course, and she merely put the tips of her fingers together. “They’re just like Grampa,” she said to me, and smiled, exactly like a picture of a hangdog saint. I studied her thoughtfully, saying not a word.
My father told her, raising a trembling arm and pointing, “They’re not like me at all. They’re like you.”
It was not strictly fair, of course: My wife is the soul of diligence, and she’s sensitive besides. She prays nightly; she cooks, cleans, darns our stockings for us; she has a remarkable natural feeling for music. Nevertheless, I was perversely delighted at hearing him speak so crossly to her. I closed the volume over my finger, rose from my chair, and bent down to pick up the children’s horrible scribblings.
“Good heavens!” my wife cried, staring out the window. Her face had gone white. I straightened up quickly. I had an impression, for an instant, that there was a man out there—a man in a great black coat and black boots, someone I would know, if I could make myself think calmly. But we were both mistaken, for the next instant there was nothing; it was merely an illusion manufactured by the storm. Yet, when the children squealed, an instant later, my first thought was that now they, too, had seen it. It turned out to be nothing of the kind. The little girl was trying to pull down her brother’s trousers. Without a word to their mother (I had never spent a more miserable evening), I went after the little criminals, spanked them soundly with my shoe, and put them to bed. I now felt much better. My father’s look of outrage had no effect on me. My wife’s alarm was a pleasure. I stood at the window, smiling out at the storm with satisfaction. But there was a flaw in my comfort. I could not seem to rid myself of the feeling that he was still watching us, standing behind some tree, perhaps, or peering in from the darkness of the shuddering grape arbor. I watched for some time but saw nothing in the least suspicious, neither on my grounds, nor on the rain-slick road, nor on the serpentine lane beyond the stone gateposts, rising past lindens and maples toward the old church.
4
The situation at the prison grew desperate. Though I tried repeatedly, I could get no response whatever to my knocks at the Warden’s door. It was a case altogether without precedent, and so, though I knew the risks in appearing insubordinate, I wrote to the Bureau of Justice. After two weeks, I had still received no answer. At even greater risk to myself, I wrote a second letter. I might as well have dropped my complaints into a cistern. I closely questioned the courier—a man I have always found, in the past, to be dutiful and efficient. He spoke of an iron-studded door in an unlighted hallway, a huge brass plate bearing the single word JUSTICE, and beside the door a bill of instructions, among them instructions for the delivery of petitions. These last had a deadly simplicity: Deposit petition in slot. No exceptions. I studied him, looking severe, no doubt. “Could you hear anything through the door?” I asked. “Nothing, sir,” he said, and touched his cap as if in sign that he must leave. “Not a sound?” I said. His blue, button eyes stared straight ahead. His turned-up nose was like a halt signal reared in my roadway. “Do not press me, sir,” the nose seemed to say. “It’s none of my affair.” I couldn’t help but compare the man with my troublesome friend Heller. Heller, too, knew what was his business and what was not, but he never put that knowledge in the way of his lugubrious humanity. However, I sent the courier on his way, and I did not trouble myself about sending more letters. As a matter of fact, I’d heard before of the inefficiency and corruption of the Justice people. It was one of the Warden’s chief complaints. He, luckily, had strings he could pull.
Meanwhile, we had one near-calamity after another at the prison. The cook was found murdered. All evidence suggested that the murder was the fruit of a long-standing feud between the cook and his assistant. Being unable to rouse the Warden, I took action myself, placing the assistant in confinement to await his trial. I did this, of course, upon no legal authority; but I could see no reasonable alternative.
Hardly was that ugly matter resolved, and a new cook installed, before a second crisis struck. A sizeable group of the guards revolted. I asked, in the absence of any other authority, for a conference with their spokesman. The meeting was arranged, a ridiculous melodramatic affair, since the leader of the rebellious faction was convinced—surly, double-dealing peasant that he was—that my intent was to get him alone and unceremoniously shoot him. I scarcely bothered to protest the opinion, but met him, as required, at the prison front gate, at the hour of noon, with all the guards loyal to him on one side, their guns aimed at me, and all those loyal to me on the other side, training their guns on him. Even if we’d met as friends, it would have been a dreary spectacle. The guards’ uniforms were faded and threadbare, here an epaulette missing, there an off-color elbow patch. Coats lacked buttons, trousers and boots were no longer standard; if treachery came along, it was doubtful that more than a few of the rifles on either side would fire.
Clownish and base as all this was, I sweated profusely throughout that meeting. What assurance could I have that men so disloyal would not hazard a further disloyalty, and shoot me for their sport? The rebellious guards’ demand was simple. I must double their pay. “Impossible!” I said—as it most certainly was. If I hadn’t been so frightened, I might have laughed. My opponent declared the meeting ended; he would speak no further except with the Warden himself. I found a delaying tactic: I would relay to the Warden the rebels’ demand and would meet them in twenty-four hours with the Warden’s response. With some mutterings, they accepted. The guards on each side lowered their rifles, and I went briskly back to my chambers next to the Warden’s. I did not bother, this time, to knock on his door.
As I was unlocking my own, a hand touched my elbow. I jumped. It was Heller. “Good heavens!” I said. He nodded, his bearded mask-face smiling sadly down at me, and he took off his cap.
I’d been avoiding Heller, I need hardly explain. I had given my assurance that I would speak to the Warden about his so-called Professor, and for reasons outside my control (though I could hardly admit that to Heller), I had not done it. I was certain, now, that he was here to ask what the Warden had decided with regard to his friend.
; “Come in, Heller,” I said, and cleared my throat. “I’ve been meaning to speak with you.”
He must have known well enough that that was untrue. I’d been ducking and fleeing at sight of him for a week. But he nodded, still smiling sadly, and stepped ahead of me into the room.
“Very elegant,” he said, pretending to look around for a moment, then staring at his cap. Though it was plain that he wasn’t much interested, in fact, in the elegance of my chambers, I seized on his remark to stall the embarrassing question I expected. “So it is,” I said. “In former times, the prison used to have important visitors. In those days cases were in constant review. In certain situations, the chief justices themselves would come down. But of course it’s no longer praaical. With the seat of government so much farther away …”
Heller nodded. I saw that he relished our meeting as little as I did. I too now fell silent, knowing there was no escape. We stood like two miserable children gazing apprehensively around us. I remembered my own first impression of the place. Though smaller than the Warden’s, the central chamber is enormous. Exactly as in the Warden’s chamber, the windows are long, narrow, and pointed—situated so high above the black oak floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light fall from the trellised panes to warm small patches below. Ancient, dark draperies hang on the walls. The furniture is sparse, comfortless, antique. The general effect, I felt at the beginning and I now felt more strongly, was one of oppressive, irredeemable gloom. One has an occasional, rather eerie sense of something moving in the corners of the chamber—an effect, perhaps, of cloud banks passing between the windows and the sun.
Heller drifted toward the far end of the room, hands behind his back, head tipped forward and to one side. When he came to the bust of Plotinus on its high black marble base, he paused and looked at it. I waited, perspiring, wringing my hands.
He turned and said, “Do you know why the guards want higher pay?”
“Do you?” I asked. Again I waited, rigid and official to hide my uneasiness.
“They lose everything they make through gambling. Stop the fellow who empties their pockets, and all the rest will resolve itself.”
“You’re quite certain of this?”
“I can show you,” he said.
I agreed at once, and Heller led me down the great dark stairway to the first of the lower passages, and thence to a large, communal cell which had not been in use for many years. At the back of the cell a large stone had been removed, as I saw at once by the reddish light breaking through from somewhere lower. At Heller’s direction, I stepped to this patch of light and looked through it. Below lay a window-less room without furniture of any kind, an abandoned cell whose door was directly beneath us, out of sight.
Four guards in shirtsleeves hunkered on the floor, shooting dice. It was clearly not one of those ordinary games, the kind I break up in the corridors. All four were sweating, their shirts pasted to their chests and backs. Beside each man stood a small pile of pebbles. One man’s pile was slightly larger than the others, but not significantly so.
“Keep your eye on the fat man,” Heller said.
I nodded.
The fat man—a guard named Stuart, a man with hair longer than regulations allow, and a neatly trimmed beard, small fingers like a woman’s—threw the dice several times and lost. He seemed unconcerned. On the other hand, those who took his money, represented by the stones, did not seem as cheered by their success as one might normally have expected. The others threw, sometimes winning, sometimes not. I began to feel Heller was wasting my time. He apparently sensed it. “Keep watching,” he said. I did so, mentally telling myself that after five more rolls of the dice I would insist upon leaving.
Then something happened. The guard named Stuart began to glow. Call it hallucination if you will, a trick played by the oil lamps around them, but I saw the glow, and so did Heller, whose hand immediately tightened on my arm. The fat man was glowing like a lamp-chimney. “Stuart can’t tell you himself how it happens,” Heller whispered. “All he knows is that for four or five minutes he knows exactly what the dice will do.”
He stared at the dice now, white as new bone against the lamp-reddened floor. He patted them, smacked them, fussed with them as a mother fusses with a baby. Suddenly he snapped them up and flung them the length of the room. “Five and two!” he yelled while the dice were in the air. Five and two came up. The other three gasped. Once more Stuart fidgeted with the dice, then flung them. “Hard six!” he yelled. Two threes showed. The others were trembling.
“Get out of the game, fools!” Heller whispered.
But it was impossible.
Next Stuart called out eleven and made it. Then four. Then nine. I felt a weird urge to go down to them, join in.
“Come away,” Heller whispered.
I resisted.
“Come at once.”
That evening I called the fat guard to my chamber. Simply, brutally, rapping the table with my walking stick, I gave him my imperative—which I attributed, of course, to the Warden. He would return all his winnings to those he had robbed and would depart the prison forever, or I would jail him. He expressed indignation, outrage. I was firm. He wheedled, spoke of “divine gift.” I said nothing. Heller sat across from us, toying with his pistol. Stuart whimpered, begged, called me irreligious. I read him the regulations on gambling in the prison. I did not mention that I had no authority to confine him to the dungeon. The simple truth was in any case that, authority or no authority, I would do it. At last, he was persuaded. And so the second of our near-calamities was averted.
5
Less than an hour after my meeting with the spokesman for the rebels (the second meeting by the prison gate, the meeting which resolved our differences), Heller came to my chamber, where I lay resting a moment, and, when I answered his knock, expressed a desire to speak with me. I met him more guiltily than before, since now I felt that not only had I failed to fulfill my promise with regard to “the Professor,” but had failed him though owing him a favor. When I’d ushered Heller to an old tattered sofa and had seated myself across from him, he brought himself immediately to the point—that is to say, to the first of his points. Looking sadly at his knees, he said, “Have you spoken to the Warden, Herr Vortrab?”
I could see no alternative but to confess the truth. “I’m afraid I have not. The plain fact is, I can’t get to him.”
His eyebrows went up in an inverted v, but despite that, he did not seem surprised. “He refuses to listen?”
I held back for a fraction of a second, and then came out with it. “He refuses to answer his door,” I said. I felt so curiously relieved at having unburdened myself of that dreadful secret that on an impulse I told him more: “In fact, Heller, I haven’t laid eyes on the Warden in months!”
The guard was stunned. But the next instant, to my astonishment, he laughed. “Why, then,” he cried, “what makes you think he’s there?” Almost merrily, he threw out his hands. I could hardly account for his look of joy. It was as if my revelation …
But I said firmly, “I hear him pacing.”
“Impossible,” he scoffed. “What does he eat? Does he sneak away for supplies in the dead of night?”
I had gone, of course, too far; I must now go all the way. “Believe what I say or not,” I told him, bending toward him, my hands raised, fingers interlaced, to hide that infuriating tic, “but the Warden never leaves his room—at least not by the one door I know of.”
He stared at me as if convinced I’d gone mad. At last he said, “How can you be sure?”
After a pitiful flicker of hesitation, I rose, keeping my face turned away, saying, “Come, I’ll show you,” and led him to the great studded door, showed him how firmly the door pressed down on the smooth oak sill, and directed his attention to the undisturbed dust. He studied it all with the fascination of a scientist. At last, with another queer shake of the head and that same odd smile, he said, “Apparently
it’s all up to us, then.”
I was at the point of agreeing when I sensed something left unstated in his words. He glanced at me and saw my hesitation. He smiled, more lugubrious than usual, and shrugged. “The prisoner you met—the Professor—has passed away,” he said.
I made no attempt to hide my embarrassment. “Poor devil,” I said, and snatched off my spectacles and bit my lip. “I’m not surprised,” ‘I added, merely to be saying something. “It’s a miracle he lasted so long.”
Heller nodded.
As I turned back toward my chamber, he said gently, “We must give him a proper burial, sir. We must, so to speak, put his soul at rest. He belongs in the churchyard, where he would have gone, as a Christian citizen, if it weren’t for this terrible judicial mistake.”
I saw that he was serious. I might have laughed at the outlandish idea if I did not already owe so much to Heller—and if, moreover, I had not just now placed myself in his power by my ill-considered admissions. I said, at last: “Only the Warden can order such a thing.”
He looked down, rubbed his mustache. “But it seems the Warden has abandoned us.”
It brought me to my senses. “Not so!” I said. “Listen!” Catching his arm a trifle roughly, I led him back to the door and bent my head to it, indicating by a gesture that Heller do the same. For an instant, I heard nothing. Then, listening still more intently, I caught the faint, familiar sound of the Warden’s footsteps pacing the carpet, louder as the Warden came near, then softening as he retreated to the further wall. “You hear?” I said.