People of the Book

by David Stacton

  “The door we used to have. It has to be the front door.”

  He had to agree you can’t let the New Year in the back way. But the front was in ruins and boarded up from the outside. If he used some sort of ram …

  This past six months had made them solemn. They became children again.

  “How will we know when?” asked Hannale.

  “There’ll be a shout from the village.”

  So they giggled and he went to find a ram. He crept through the charred hall to test the wood, to see if it would give. It would.

  A shadow came out of nowwhere.

  “I will have no celebration in this house,” said Frau Larsen.

  From the village came a cozy shout. At the rear, Hannale pushed the pots and pans down through the loft opening. They fell clattering into the darkness below. Lars charged against the boarded door and smashed through it. There was a glimpse of the ice out to sea, and wet air poured in.

  Frau Larsen trembled, and pursed her lips.

  “You can board it up again tomorrow,” she snapped. Nonetheless, the New Year had gotten in. When he got back to the loft, Hannale was at the window, staring through their remaining four panes of warped glass and weeping soundlessly. He took her to bed, warmed her, and asked her what was wrong.

  “I was watching my star.”

  He considered this. It was important. “Which one?” From their pallet they could watch upward through the window. The constellation in view was Cassiopeia. “The bright one?”

  “No. That one.” She pointed vaguely. “I can see it sometimes.” It could have been any one of the steady, reassuring ones which have no name. “When I’m grown up, I shall go there, I expect.”

  “Of course you shall.” He waited a while, listening to her heart. “What’s it like?”

  “It’s black. And there isn’t anybody there, except …”

  “Except what?”

  “I’m glad you opened the door,” she said drowsily.

  “So am I.”

  “There’s a black plush rabbit up there,” she told him, when he was drowsy. “It likes me. Its fur sparkles. It hopped out of me once. I hurt all over, and I pushed and I pushed, and there it was. But it ran away. I was so sad when it went away. But it’s there.”

  He had only half heard her.

  “That’s why I’m not afraid of the dark,” she said, afraid to look at it, and looking at the star instead. She did not like the bright ones. And she thought about her black plush rabbit, who would always take care of her, and was so big and warm, and who knew where the diamond bushes grew and the crystal water, and the fields made of green silk, and the crewel embroidery trees.

  “Nobody is,” he said, half asleep. He was not old enough to be a father, but he did his best. Everything was gliding and flowing by him. He needed her, too. He could feel her breath on his cheeks. “Und dass mein eignes Ich, durch nichts gehemmt, Herüberglitt aus einem Kleinen Kind mir wie ein Hund unheimlich stumm und fremd.”

  It would have been friendly to have had a dog.

  Next morning Frau Larsen told him that there was no need to mend the door, that in a few days they would be leaving Wollin, and that she would need his help. She implied that he had never given it. Then she left him.

  III.i.7: A stratagem of a positive kind, when practiced in actions, is called a feint, when used in conversation it receives the name of a lie or falsehood.

  On the 4th of January some peasants who had gone over toward Usedom to hack holes in the ice in order to catch fish, while one of them was looking for bracken to throw on a fire they had built on the far bank, found two feet sticking out of an old drift, dug the corpse out, out of curiosity, and found the body of a man of about fifty, fat but smoothly preserved. He had been stabbed in the back and then beaten. Though the nose was broken and the jaw smashed, the dead man was found to be a member of the Stettiner gentry who had disappeared some three weeks before, riding out from his estate on a white horse with a dirty mane.

  When Lars heard of this he flushed and looked down at his boots. The man had been savaged. It is not thus Earl Haakon went to the wars. The hatred he had not known about, for he had no hatred in him. It must be a substitute for something. Himself, either he loved or he did not.

  *

  They were to leave of a Thursday. Lars did not want to go, but he had no choice. He had found out that Frau Larsen had been selling everything they owned here. He did not find that out from her. He found it out from the new owner of their fields. She had also sold her interest in the boat. The boats were ashore for the winter, while workmen scraped the bottoms and calked seams. He saw a lot of such hornyhanded people. He sat there drumming his hands on the stool between his legs, and they let him learn things by showing him how and laughing at him when he did them wrong. Among them he learned that the boat had gone, too. It was as though someone had removed the floor beneath his feet. He looked down and saw himself about to fall. After that he did not sit with the sailors any more. He went for long walks instead.

  This last night the sea was calling him. Hannale did not stir. Perhaps she was too young to miss places. Getting up, he gathered c clothes and left the house carrying his skates. Outside, he walked on the frozen sand for a while, but he knew where he was going.

  It was not a dark night. Wollin was too far north for it to be so. There was always a light in the sky, though look where you would, you could not tell where it came from. It made dark positive and reversed the stars, making the sky seem more than ever a barrier between us and some bright place.

  The prairies of the ice sea are worse than any others. Lars knew all about that, for Mysendonck taught him Latin out of Pliny Secundus: “Moreover, that none of the inhabitants there are seen all day long: all is still and silent, like the fearful horror in desert wilderness: and as men come nearer and nearer unto it, a secret devotion ariseth in their hearts, and besides this fear and horror, they are lifted up above the clouds, and even close to the circle of the moon.” The ice sea is as though the bottom of the ocean had been hydraulically raised and lay exposed and awash, littered with the detritus of those the sea has taken.

  The moon was behind him, casting long blue shapes across the ice. Lars put on his skates and sailed forth into a steel freedom. It was as though Peter Schlemiel had asked one last dance of the shadow he no longer owned, which was why all men were his enemy; together both waltz happily in an empty ballroom.

  He flew through space like a sweep of swallows, in arcs, in curves, always ahead of himself, and since the ice was not smooth, an arc was broken by a gathered jump, a curve bent back angular.

  He could have swept to Denmark had he wanted to. It was so cold there was a crack and boom to the air, and besides, the ice sea is never wholly silent. Lars realized he had gone beyond his endurance, he had outstripped himself, and so was free and exhilarated in the thin air. He could see beyond himself; and the skates carried him even farther.

  The truth of the world is seventy fathoms down, and has risen in this white and frozen form to buoy us up. In winter you may therefore skate upon the bottom of the sea, and nod to whom you will of the long-drowned.

  The ice sea is haunted by dead sailors, men washed overboard, those who went down with their ships, lost treasure, by the majestic hulk of the flagship Vasa, which was not sunk, it just descended, and by those who have experienced the Kraken. It is a company of awesome friends.

  From time to time Lars caught sight of Wollin crouched by the shore, on the other side of the island. It looked small and far away and unimportant. Then it disappeared, and he was alone with the glaucous ice, in a world of invisible shrouds and invisible rigging.

  It was between two and three in the morning. Venus was the color of green apples, and Orion lay on his side, but would be getting up again in a month or two. The moon was a cataract in a watery sky. He had passed the first sandbars, around which the ice scabbed green like the edges of a sore and had much the same gangrenous smell. For winter is a char
nal house, and has its own diseases. Less dishonest than a hospital, it cleans its own wounds.

  His goal was two miles out. Here the molar grinding of the ice had somehow shoved up a cliff from the bottom, on which the complete skeleton of a sunken boat rested. It must have been submerged for years. It was encrusted with sea things and urslime, both of which the air had sered and the cold killed.

  Strange things come up with the ice, mostly your dreams, frozen. This was his ship, the one he had wanted to sail on, the one Captain Larsen had sailed on. The hulk was so rimed that he could go aboard in his skates. He had circled it before, but not boarded it. But just as swimmers on the last day of their beach insist upon taking a ritual dip, as a charm to bring them back next year or to leave something of themselves in a place where they had been happy, so did he have to go aboard now. Nothing is ever easy for us, really, and saying good-bye is worst of all.

  “Father,” he said, leaning over the side. “Father, are you here?” Whether he wished to evoke that ghost or not, he did not know. It was just something he could not resist doing. And it did seem to him that he saw faces peering up through the ice. Ghosts can be difficult, but he needed help, and to him this ghost had always been warm. But ghosts are tied to places. They cannot come with us when we leave. And though it was solid enough now, in open weather this was a treacherous swirl in the sea, lying in wait, heaving and hungry, when you thought the dangers were farther out.

  A solitary gray bird hopped twice and then stood motionless to watch him. It was joined by two more. In cold winter sea gulls have to bear more snow on their heads than public statues. There was no answer from the ice, only somewhere not too far away a boom in it; and the sky was beginning to seep green at the edges.

  He skated back toward Wollin, while the pale light followed him and gave him back a shadow again. He would need it. He had far to go.

  *

  The wagon was already before the house. Frau Larsen watched his coming in from the sea, and tightened lips by nature narrow. She had seen people come from that sea too often before, and did not like it. By birth she was an inlander.

  She had gotten a carter’s horse from somewhere. Its hoofs were wrapped in rags against iced roads. She was packed and had her letters of credit in a brassbound box. They were, in this disturbed time, the safest form of money.

  He got aboard. He had thought Hannale would be upset, but she didn’t seem to be. Her eyes were shiny, and besides, she had Selina invisible beside her. Hannale was too young not to look forward to adventures.

  “Will there be leopards?” she asked. He was bewildered, but knew better than to say no or to ask why. He always knew when she was serious.

  “Perhaps.”

  “There must be,” she said, as though confirming the existence of God. And she did not look behind her once.

  The curve of the road brought them a view of Wollin. It was their last. They were now leaving the snug safe Plattdeutsch towns under the horizon forever. But they did not know that.

  “Are we going to my uncle?” asked Lars, after a while.

  “No,” said Frau Larsen, and drove the horse and wagon capably out onto the ice of the Stettiner Haff, following the track taken by Earl Haakon.

  II.xxi.12: Every reasonable creature ought to be left free in the choice of what may be deemed useful or prejudicial to him, provided another has no just right to control over him. The case of children has no connection with the question, as they are necessarily under the discipline of others.

  The town in which she had decided to take refuge from the world was Frankfort an der Oder, a river which empties into the Stettiner Haff, though that had had nothing to do with her choice. Like many people more concerned to save their property than themselves, Frau Larsen had not chosen well.

  For the first time in his life Lars panicked. For how can we tell where we are, without a landfall, a hurst, a snug harbor, or the sure currents of the sea? Go inland, and it is you who become anonymous. You are swallowed up without a chart. But he knew better than to ask questions. One did not ask Frau Larsen questions.

  6

  There are many women like Frau Larsen, but few of them are ever caught out. Their husbands are driven mad, but can’t say why. People know something is wrong, but can’t say what. Their children hate them, but can’t say why either, though they know why. And even that hatred crystallizes like jam made the wrong way, turns to pity, and crunches like glass in otherwise sweetness.

  There is no name for the disease from which Frau Larsen suffered; her madness was inalienable, for madness is nothing but the imitation of life. Those who, like Frau Larsen, imitate the dream are much more dangerous should they ever wake, and much more destructive because they won’t, than are the mere identifiable mad.

  She was good-natured, good-tempered, easygoing, she even had a sense of whimsy, but she was totally indifferent to all human connection, and totally ruthless to anything that interfered with the dream, though she did not know it was one. She thought reality merely a distasteful illusion, made up by men. She was her father’s child. Such women usually are.

  Frau Larsen was not going to Frankfort an der Oder by caprice. Nobody ever goes anywhere by caprice; scratch and you will find the reason. Her reason was that she felt her marriage had been a failure. She would have felt any marriage a failure. Marriage interrupts the dream. It had failed because the Imperialists had fired the house. It had failed because it had failed. Nobody had ever understood her. She had meant well. What had gone wrong? It had most certainly not been her fault. Nothing was her fault. Such women scare love away. They frighten the neighbors, and since they are tip-lipped, when they die they leave nothing behind them but a question. If they are forced to an unpleasant action in order to protect themselves, they ascribe it to someone else. They are accumulating merit, not with God, but Father. They know everything they do is being watched, they are sure of it, and that everything done against them counts in their favor. They are a Protestant breed.

  Frau Larsen admitted to no evidence. She had once allowed it to be assumed that she came from South Germany. It was believed, for her manner suggested suites of vaulted rooms, that she had been impoverished by the passage of the war. Otherwise nothing was known about her, except by a few husbands, who had not told their wives, for men are more merciful to women than women are, and besides, Larsen had been a respected man, and so no one was apt to blab about him.

  Captain Larsen, so he spelled the name, having alienated himself, had been no blabberer either, but once or twice a year, and he was careful that this happen not in Wollin but in some port down the coast, he let himself get stone drunk. It is one of the two ways in which the Swedes permit themselves a holiday from self-discipline. The other is suicide.

  Whether to go down with one’s ship be suicide or loyalty remains moot. When one gets beyond forty, one begins to walk hand in hand with death, that’s all, and it is good to have a friend again. In high latitudes the death of the young is the storm’s rape. But the quiet seductions of friendship, though less erotic, are more enduring.

  Everyone in Wollin those last seasons knew that Captain Larsen was going to die. You could see it in his face. He wanted to. He had always been decisive, and his face now had the repose of someone who has made up his mind, without fuss, without fear, without hope. This gave him a new ease and people liked him the better for it. They had never questioned his authority, and accepted that in this, too, he had acted wisely and as was right. It was strange. He had no roots here, and yet he was the man whose conduct they remembered when their own crisis came upon them. His was the dignity of folded hands.

  When he got drunk, it was in the same stolid manner. He did not shout. He never fought. He smashed glasses. The heap of shards glittered in the embers of the fire, his Fafnir’s hoard of self-control, magic stuff, worth nothing in the light of common day, but here a treasure. He pushed out a few hard-come-by phrases as though they were scraps of paper with writing on them, held through the
prison bars to the world outside. From these you might have reconstructed a lost life. But nobody wished to; they went down with him.

  And yet it was as his fellow fishermen thought: the marriage was not good. He had waited too long to marry. He would have done better with someone from his own village. But he had gone off to make his fortune first, and after twenty years it was too late and the village far away. So he had come here, and when he was forty and on business up the river, at Frankfort an der Oder, a woman had caught his eye. It was the way she carried herself. Like him, she was an outlander.

  Since his manner was fatherly, and she would never trust the young again, she accepted him. There was no bargaining on either side. There was, however, an inconvenience. Captain Larsen completed his business and returned to Wollin. Seven months later his bride joined him, and the village was surprised; it had not known he had a wife, but here was the child, a sensible, towheaded, quiet, sturdy child who did not cry. They took up residence in that house which was a copy of a house he had seen many years before, in Södermanland, on a snowy evening. The firelight flickered across the black and white tiles of the entry hall, here as there.

  She was house proud. She ran his home well. Five years later a daughter was born to them. Everything was as it should be, but it was not a home. He was good with the boy, who was a fine little fellow. He did everything a father should do. But his heart was not in it. And the daughter would be like her, he supposed.

  A few weeks later he was lost at sea, with his ship, and those one or two people who would have liked to know him better said publicly it was a shame, but alone on deck, when they thought of him at all, sighed and thought, What a mercy, and left Frau Larsen, even more than before, alone.

  She had never shown either anger or bafflement. She did her best to praise to the children their late father. But she felt cheated, and we are better than these people, she said to herself, though she was not sure about the children. She was gracious if they brought other children to the house, and glad when they didn’t do it any more.