People of the Book

by David Stacton

  A winter landscape in which nothing moves but a famished fox, attacked by crows, is moving. He watched it for a while. Then the crows lifted, and there was nothing in that landscape but the brief red of some berry, solitary on the bush. He went on, preoccupied and worried.

  And it is strange, too, how the crisp of this weather, despite the silence, crackles with a white music, not unlike that of the plucked instruments, the lute, the cembelo; pizzicato, the nun’s fiddle, the bass, the cello, the dulcimer; the musical glasses; they cannot be heard, but they can be seen when loose pellets of iced snow run down a bank like a glissando; the iced trees tinkle like chandeliers in dust-covered rooms; the lute stop shifts into place, and bays majestically across a black pond; and there are krummhorns, recorders, sorduns, and serpents on the edge and going deeper into the dark wood. Like tambours, like tambourines, like castanets, like a wind bell, like glanced cymbals: there is something unsaid here, that has about it the shimmer of the dead. Snowfall is the dead moving. Snowfall is the thought of sound. Winter is a séance. Voices whirl out of nowhere to the tinkle of little disks of tin. There is a sistrum summons, and the dead speak. The crust gives and the untouched snow collapses into the sudden mark of a single footprint. That’s where they stand, on the edge of a dark wood, beckoning; on the empty beach; around the wreck of a fishing boat brought up through the ice and held there, a mile out, beyond the banks.

  What is more, winter puts such a tingle in our cheeks, we go to meet them. In summer in some shadowy house in a valley, in spring on the edge of a fatal cliff, in wild rich dark places, you meet the unhappy, hungry dead, the sensuous dead, the sorry. But in winter one is aware only of the noble ones. For winter is the world’s ritual death, as involuntary, as stately, and as willing as Greek tragedy. The inevitable is the only human experience that leaves the soul incorrupt. We may turn and twist, but at the sight of it something inside us heaves a relieved sigh. When all other ways but one are closed off to us, we do not beat the walls, we go that way.

  Lars, who heard doors slam every time he skipped a stone across the ice, and sensed which ones they were, though he did not know why, followed the footsteps ahead of him, finding no rabbits in any of his snares, but only the one relentless track, which was not fresh.

  On the sea side of Wollin the sand was piled in dunes. On the side which faced the Stettiner Haff it was not. Entering the wood, he came, close to the far side, on a hut hidden in a depression. The footprints led there. There was at least a month’s worth of them. The door to the hut was held with a fresh-whittled raw willow peg. Lars took out the peg.

  The inside was dark and smelled of dead rabbit, smoked dung, human sweat, leather, lard, and blued steel, which has the stink of money too much handled.

  On the floor was a pile of brands dipped in pitch. Having his tinderbox with him, Lars lit one and held it up. The smoke was sucked through an invisible hole in the roof, sooting the snow as it passed.

  There was a pallet, a filthy cooking pot, a clay hearth, and some eviscerated rabbits, the blood congealed on their white fur, the bodies brittle-frozen. There was the glint of weapons.

  He knew what it was. It was strandhugg. All peoples who live around the Baltic know what strandhugg is. It is that practice the Vikings shared with the maritime Greeks, at first a usage, then a right, of coming ashore to take what they would by force in order to provision themselves. Sometimes supplies were even left on the shore for them, as a bribe to go away. But the word has wider meanings. Strandhugg is something you are given in order to get rid of you; it is something you take only in order to leave. It is forced hospitality, kindness shown by those who do not dare be cruel, the rights of those in passage, the obligation of settled men. It is one of the nobler forms of extortion: it speeds the unwelcome guest, it is what the good man takes from the bad one, it is a crust thrown to the unwanted. It is what the free filch from those who want no freedom, what the rootless take from the rooted; it is also a bargain struck between forthright men. Those who have not the strength must take it from the fallen. It is a right perquisite to the passage from life to death, from Bergen to Normandy, but inland it is merely plunder. One has the right to take, only in order to go on. It is an agreement struck for the furtherance of the race. All sea peoples desire to send their ships to farther shores, around stormy capes. This way it can be done. Like bread and salt, or wine and wafer, hospitality is a people taking communion. What they partake of is what they are. It is better to be killed than to be defeated. Thus strandhugg and the nobility of long voyages toward the ice.

  Here there was the glint of armor everywhere, cuirasses, helmets, lances, short swords, pikes, body armor, leather boots, hose, doublets, flintlocks, pistols, shot and powder horns. Lars knew where it had come from. It had been stripped from the Imperialist dead. It was, moreover, all gathered to the same size, for the same person. The flicker of his brand showed these things to be alive, as indeed they are. They are extensions of the hand, and call out to be picked up.

  Since he was burdened with empathy, and so curious about how it feels to be somebody else, he ran his thumb down a dirk and wanted to put a cuirass on. The dagger was Spanish work, handsomely chased. He could not see how he or these things would look, but he did want to know how they felt. He stuck the brand in a socket in the wall, and fumbled himself into a cuirass. It was not easy to do, but he managed to buckle the side straps. The cuirass was so heavy it shoved his butt out and sloped his back like that of an ape, making his arms dangle down to their long adolescent cartilaginous wrists. In order to stand straight so burdened, you reach for a musket or a pike, something to balance with. A morion puts pressure on the neck, and in a helmet (he had found one) you go as blinkered as a horse, and for much the same reasons; that is why we blinker horses. Since he felt topheavy, Lars pulled himself into some enormous yellow boots with raised heels, the show boots of some officer who had done no fighting, but they counterweighted the cuirass and sent his body into the arc of a bow. Having gone that far, he realized that our hands are naked without weapons. In short, he felt smaller than himself, but made bigger by his carapace, a dapper fellow, and realized not only that he liked it, which he did not want to do, but that one must wear the right costume if one is to kill. The right costume makes one want to kill. It shifts the body’s weight and so alters its opinions. It is a way of hiding. It gives us freedom from ourselves, just as jail frees the prisoner from his life. It takes away his desires, folds them up neatly, and gives him new ones. It abolishes that one thing all but strong men fear, the self. Moving about, Lars rattled and creaked inside this stranger. These noises kill the steady purr of thought. The real freedom is to be a slave. He looked down at himself. He was austere by nature, and here he was lost in the luxuries of death. Few men can swagger naked. They need the weight of steel boots.

  Feeling abashed, he wanted to take them off. But there was a whinny outside, a frightened gallop not far off, and someone, having seen the smoke, came tumbling in. He must brave it out.

  Young Mysendonck came in, with a broad cutting sword in his hand, as though the devil were after him and here was the devil in front.

  Lars did not know what to do with the pistol in his hand. He had forgotten it. He did not want to be run through either.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  Mysendonck looked as though he had just done something that had frightened him. The sword wavered.

  Lars let the pistol drop and fumbled at the buckle of his morion. He got it off, and stood there towheaded and astonished. This was not the Mysendonck he knew. And where had the horse come from? There was not a horse left on the island.

  Mysendonck leaned against the wall and laughed.

  “You’re so funny,” he said. “I can’t help it.” He was not an easy laugher. Pastor Mysendonck did not encourage laughter. He went outside and brought back the horse, which could just get through the door by stretching its neck. It was a white horse, though not the one which had been so mettlesome in th
e meadow. There was blood on its back. It had no saddle.

  Mysendonck gave it straw. There was not much room for it in there.

  Lars began to unbuckle his cuirass.

  “Leave it on. We are on campaign,” said Mysendonck and drew from a corner two massive saddles, handsomely mounted, which they used as stools. He was a boy, after all, though his face in the shadows looked seamed and grimy. That adolescent eagerness has no counterfeit.

  He had been hiding in this hut, gathering his stores. Some things had taken a long time to find; and others had had to be cleaned, because the corpses from which he had taken them had been dead so long. He was a loner and did not want to be alone. Not, at any rate, tonight.

  “In Norway’s land was never known

  A braver earl than the brave Haakon,”

  he hummed, and got them supper. He had no domestic skills, but it was something to eat.

  “Nine kings to Odinn’s wide domain

  Were sent by Haakon’s right hand slain.”

  Then he fetched lager. He had stolen it; everything he wanted from the grown-up world was here. They should not have taken his horse. Therefore he was going to the wars to make his fortune. Or rather, Earl Haakon was.

  Lars must keep the boots, said Haakon, who wanted so much to be generous, he would have robbed the world, and was only puzzled that in this empty world, where there was no one, who was he to be generous to? He had not yet fought, and yet here he was already, a scavenger with blood on his hands.

  It was rabbit blood, he told Lars, but snow would not rub it off, and they had no water.

  He had spent the late summer months gathering all this. It was not just an armory. It was a jumbled collection of surrogate selves, heaped up in the dark for the choosing, the cuirass from one, the jerkin from another, the swagger from a third, and a helmet to hold the brains. He wished to go pridefully to the wars. He could have used a squire.

  Lars did not want to be a squire. He wanted to go to sea as his father had done. Unlike Mysendonck, he did not want to get away, he wanted to go on to what belonged to him; but he understood, he did not like Pastor Mysendonck either. Pastor Mysendonck was a man hiding in another man’s hole, to catch flies.

  The difficulty had been the horse. It must be a white horse. And Gustavus had taken every horse in Wollin. So Mysendonck had foraged afield. He had lain in wait. Only today had he found one, crossing the ice to Usedom, where the world was richer. The rider had been alone. Mysendonck had sprung out of a thicket and pulled him down.

  “And did you kill him?”

  Mysendonck shook his head. Earl Haakon gave him a noble look. “No, I did not kill him. I felled him. In a deep snowbank. I was in a tree. Then he ran away,” said Mysendonck, as though he could still see it, and, shivering, he asked Lars to stay the night.

  Lars could not do that. He would be missed. And yet he did not want to leave. Besides, there was that crush he had, and he was foolish enough to trust people he loved and places he was fond of. It had begun to snow. The horse stamped its right hind foot. Its mane and tail needed whitening. By the time they had done that, there was a blizzard outside; it was wiser to stay. They used the saddles for pillows. The fire burned lower. Mysendonck lay there like the bewitched bridegroom laid out flat in the stable, while the horse stood as in a stall.

  “Is the Swedish King still at Stettin?”

  “I’m not going there. I’m going with the Imperialists,” said Mysendonck. It was because his father was a pastor. It was either yes or no, and some childhoods teach us to shout no, whether we believe in yes or not. Hatred is inheritable, but love skips a generation, always, or is as recessive as blue eyes and gets bred out. Mysendonck’s eyes were glaucous; he had already drowned.

  It would be wonderful, he said, and fell asleep clutching an empty pistol, as though it had been a rag doll or a dog. The horse dropped some dung. The dung steamed. And Lars, who, unlike his sister, had yet to see the face of a corpse, watched Mysendonck sleeping and then fell asleep himself.

  The horse woke them at not quite dawn. There was rime on everything; the fire had gone out; beyond the door of the hut the world was like gray flannel when it is bunched and wet, heavy as homespun, coarse as peasant sheets. In the first light, the fresh fall twinkled with stars.

  They did not speak. They lit the fire and ate. Afterward Mysendonck chose what was best and Lars helped him put it on. The saddle and the saddlebags Mysendonck saw to himself. The horse was a bony, stringy mare; the saddle was too good for it.

  “Take something,” said Mysendonck. “Please take something.”

  Lars kept only the boots he was wearing.

  With a smile that was sad but looked happy, off Mysendonck went, the horse harumphy from behind. Earl Haakon dwindled into the distance. A boy disappeared into the emptiness of a white landscape, snow, ice, and nothing human anywhere.

  Lars went back to the hut. The wood was wet and would not burn. He stared at what Mysendonck had left behind. Old clothes are as shapeless as though someone had pricked them. An empty gauntlet is picked clean as a lobster claw. Who owned this helmet, and does his family know he is dead? People leave behind them scrip and bits of paper and nothing else.

  He picked up a dagger, a beautiful, well-balanced thing. It would have been a pleasure to be killed by such a thing, it was so slim and perfect. He weighed it in his hand and stuck it in his boot (he had forgotten, he had gotten used to them so quickly, but he was still wearing the same floppy, rich, and yellow pair).

  Then, as though to tear down something he had contempt for, he kicked the whole empty army over, sending it rattling into empty corners of the hut, picked up two frozen rabbits, and went outside.

  He did not like to walk in dead men’s shoes. They weighed him down. But neither could he leave them behind. They were now a talisman, he did not know against what. What bothered him was that once Mysendonck had gone out of sight, it was as though he had never been. He wished he had fired the hut, for at night in his dreams it stood there, dark, empty, and waiting. He should at least have latched the door. As for the dagger, that he hid even from himself; and yet he kept it by him.

  II.i.5: Cato in his speech for the Rhodians, says, “Are we to prevent them by doing first, what we say they intended to do to us?” On this subject there is a remarkable passage in Aulus Gellius: “When a Gladiator prepares to enter the lists for combat, such is his lot that he must either kill his adversary, or be killed himself. But the life of man is not circumscribed by the hard terms of such an over-ruling necessity, as to oblige him to do an injury to prevent him from receiving one.”

  5

  Everyone thought him fortunate to have found such fine boots, and he agreed. But he did not like the look of them when he had taken them off, for then an unknown stranger stood in them in the shadows of the loft. They had enough natural oil in them not to be stiff in the morning. But they should not have felt warm.

  Though harsh, it was a good winter. There was a mackerel sky so fine-clobbered it was buttermilk, the clots the purple of bruised pewter, the edges finnan haddie, or the yellow ruff of a mangy old ginger cat. Such skies were seldom seen here. Frau Larsen kept out of sight. She was like an actor in a mask: his tongue wags in front, but there is a great silence behind.

  Gustav Adolf went his way unperturbed, for the ambitions of small men need not disturb us. As Richelieu said, they are dangerous only in packs. Most men in supreme position explain that they are burdened down with the cares of office, that they act only in the public good, that if they could, they would retire and read Horace in a vegetable patch. Gustavus, who had no use for cant, enjoyed every moment of everything he did. There was nothing that did not interest him, and he was kept going by the enormous joys of a practiced competence.

  Most men who make decisions make none of their own initiative. They dare not face the responsibility. Whenever an emergency comes up, you see them suddenly appear in clumps of two or three. They must talk it over first. They are getting
their courage up. Gustavus was not like that. Confront him with alternatives, like a box of jack-straws, and he chose without hesitation, because it didn’t matter. He always had his mind made up. A fool consults the oracle; a wise man considers it, but only in view of a decision already reached or already abandoned. Gustavus had the tact of a Xenophon when it came to haranguing the troops, and used it as a fulcrum to move the inert mass of men’s self-interest. So it was with Xenophon in the matter of oracles: he could find unfavorable omens for days if he needed them, and yet believed in them no less; he could find a favorable one at once if it suited his purpose, and yet believed in them no more. With fools, as was Gustavus, he was curt and peremptory.

  This insignificant northern snowball, as the Viennese called him, had become a one-man avalanche. Some men he awoke. To others he gave their dormitive to take to bedward. He could not stop to inquire which. No more could the whirlwind. He went his way.

  *

  This New Year’s Eve Frau Larsen did not celebrate the new coming, as was the custom. She left the ovens cold. These are ancient rites. It is unwise to ignore them.

  Hannale was worried. She did not ask her mother, she asked Lars. “Will she open the door?” On the stroke of midnight you must open the front door, so your luck may come in out of the cold. You must pile a charivari of pots and pans at the top of the stairs, and kick them down to beat the devil.

  They went to bed early, but they could not sleep. Hannale went to the window. Lars got out of bed barefoot and followed her. There was singing in the distance, and lights in neighbors’ houses. Something had to be done.

  He pulled on Mysendonck’s boots and began to tiptoe about, gathering what there was of iron at the top of the opening to the loft. They had no way of telling the time. He would open the door, he said.