People of the Book

by David Stacton

  Seventy-six can also fire its secret salutes over the heads of the young, a sunset gun.

  “Perhaps I was tired of vanishing.” Picking up his bow, he bounced short, pattering sounds off the floor, the walls, the vault. Beneath him the collapsed leaves rose again. It was a sweet grumbling.

  “I was once a man. I am now an atomy. I have Leukippos and Lucretius where other men have blood. I am a crackling swirl of dead leaves in an empty room. Why not? I am in the little whirlwinds spinning across the wet sea sand, venturing down from the soft shifts beyond the high tidemark. You can see them at Lübeck, in Holstein, in Schleswig, at Walcheren, at Rügen, at Usedom, along the weeping shore. I am there. They pick up small twigs, thistledown, and desiccated old affections. Oh, I can seem anything. But being is a harder matter. I have forgotten how.”

  It was not pathetic. It was designed to terrify, as though for a long time now a shadow had stood where once had stood a man, immense, indistinct, and ten feet taller. But Hannale was both a year too old and forty years too young for that kind of talk. She had seen empty rooms before. And besides, she liked the singing.

  “Sing again,” she said.

  He could still be appealed to. He commenced Mein junges leben hatt ein Ende. “And do you like that?”

  “Not as much as In Einem zwîvellîchen wân.”

  “This one is kinder,” said the Magician, “but perhaps you are right.” He stood up, leaned his fiddle against the wall, and held out his hand. She took it. He had arisen out of an absence, which he exactly filled. He was that small girl’s best thing, a kind uncle.

  “I wish to show you something,” he said, walking her slowly down the corridors. The room they entered was that room from which fire had once come, the room in which he performed his experiments. The table and shelves were littered with incorrect instruments. There was a small furnace.

  Picking up a cylinder with a turnable end, very heavy, made of brass, he handed it to her.

  Standing behind her, he showed her how to use it. “Look in this end, the eyepiece.”

  Peering down the tube, whose inside seemed endless, she saw a corridor of light, segmented like some crystal fruit into a series of impalpable divisions. Leaning at the bottom of it were some colored pebbles and flakes of no particular kind, lying inert against translucent infinity. She was disappointed.

  “You must turn the end,” he said, and reaching his long fingers over her small ones, did so.

  Immediately, with the sound of gravel in a rocker, there arose stars, patterns, hexagons, worlds and faces, no two the same for long, in snowflake colors, with gold, with blue, with green. They covered the field of vision, hesitated, collapsed, vanished, and there grew up new ones. Some she would have called back, but she could not. They consented to appear but crumbled while you held them, all from a few shapeless pebbles and broken bits of glass, which left to themselves huddled in one corner and were not beautiful. She had never seen such a thing. Held to the light, it was a carnival. Held to the dark, the shimmer went out of it.

  “It is called a kaleidoscope,” he said. “It is like life. It is like life here. Take it. It is a gift. It helps to pass the time. The pattern changes.”

  “Can I see stars with it?”

  The Magician hesitated, glancing at his telescope, trained out the window from a bronze stand. “No. It is only a kind of make-believe.”

  One does not say thank you for a real gift, and she had not had many, except for stones gathered in the tide edge. She smiled up at him.

  Wistfully he smiled back, and with a change of mood sent her away, wondering what it was really that he had put into her hands. For children do not make the same use of things as we do, and call them by different names.

  44

  Uncertainly, for it was magic of some kind, Hannale, who was alone with it, looking out toward Lars and Mysendonck, who were in the meadow, lifted the heavy tube and twisted the base.

  There was no explosion, but at once everything changed, as color refracted color, patterns emerged, and nothing was any longer what it was. The world contains mostly marvels. One has only to squint with one eye.

  *

  There was no field and no stile, otherwise it was the same field, the same day, the same afternoon to evening, and in no time at all there fell heavily around them the same dusk, a soft mantle to the shape of their emotions. To the north, a wicked old man was gripping the edge of his pulpit and harshly ranting the last of his children away, like the Wrath of God.

  Always the same horse, the same horses; there was a stable full of them already. But it was five years on, and people, when they have moved ahead five paces, have changed their relative positions, and so their tactics change too. No matter what our strategy, cases alter tactics, and tactics cases. The only choice is who moves first, and even that we owe to the black and white of chance, switched to no purpose in one’s hand, behind one’s back. And yet one usually does know which one chooses, in that instant before the fingers open from the palm. It is an end game afterwards. The board has been swept clean. On the field there remained only two boys and a white horse.

  The chess master will be along soon enough; he has so many tables to attend to, he has been delayed. He carries the world in his head.

  This horse was not so good as that of Wollin, for horses were now harder come by than men, harder to feed, had died off in greater numbers, of bloat and starvation. They lay about the land like beached whales, fed on by what had once been human beings, fighting feebly for the flesh so soon as the beast had foundered.

  Earl Haakon’s latest animal still looked gum and bones, though its sheen was coming back, and it had to be kept from gorging itself dead on the rich grass of the meadow.

  Men have forgotten how to live their own legends, and for why? It was always difficult, but the alternative is a weak pewl, and a spineless lingering. Earl Haakon now appeared mostly at night, by day you could see the Mysendonck showing through; but not now, now he had an audience back again which made him confused, excited, happy. But this rite in the meadow, it had vigor, address, and competence, but it had lost its beauty. There was the hatred in it of a man who has learned that he can never have what he wants, therefore he must break and smash it.

  That ripple under the hide was not now gaiety and spirit, but the snort and shudder of something that knows its mettle to have been made meaningless, it must give in whether it wants to or not. And so it balks. It may come to be grateful, but the faith is gone. Nothing is left but a weary patience, and so it in its turn becomes cruel.

  It was perhaps not Mysendonck’s fault. Life had forced him to change sides. But it was as sad to watch as a man with one foot missing. He has lost it in a trap he himself set and then forgot. The world is full of forgotten traps. Lars turned to look behind him. As the dusk deepened, the Katzburg seemingly expanded and grew. Torches began to flicker behind the windows of the screen. The ruined pointed vaults of the abbey church elongated and became taller, like swaying fronds of masonry. It was damp ground there. The night mists formed there first, smelling of bracken and fern.

  The look of Mysendonck’s men always loitering made him anxious about Hannale, but he could not watch her all the time. As he stood up, he saw a small blob coming out from the churchyard mist, and was relieved. The robbers avoided the churchyard as much as they did the schloss. Nobody seemed to go there.

  Mysendonck came up behind him, leading the horse, and deliberately put Earl Haakon’s arm around his shoulder, as though in search of support, and left it there. Lars found it heavy.

  Hannale joined them at the parterre and together they went into the left side of the curtain building.

  *

  Mysendonck had been eager to show them the exhausted magnificence of that place he now called home, but a certain embarrassment had fallen over him, for of course it was not really his. The sham curtain building was his, otherwise he was there on sufferance. Except for devious passages, the curtain building was not connected
either with the main block or with the schloss behind it. Perhaps the Magician had drawn an invisible line across the outer court; anyhow, when one went exploring one did so warily. So far only Mysendonck had done so above ground, for though his men went often to the cellars, at the foot of any service stairs leading up they stopped. Five steps of the darkness up there, and one went no farther.

  If the building was extensive and complex, its cellars were more so. Men have an uneasy remembrance of what they have done underground, but it is a dim one; they would rather not know those places in the world inhabited before people lived there, those places which have been lived in too long, and worst of the lot, empty fields in which something has always stood, best avoided by dark, by day the path swerves by them.

  Even in the screen building, you became aware of solid, unobtrusive doors, bolted, behind which steps led down. The men would not open them until Mysendonck went first. His domination of them arose not from pre-eminence, but because, unable to stand them any more, he had moved out and in to the other side of the curtain building, and so had to be approached, to the effect that when he appeared among them, it seemed a favor. Having accepted his right to be their leader, and therefore his superiority to them, they were conspiring against him already, for the reason they had not the guts to act without him, resented this, and blamed him for it. Only one or two among them fawned. Those were the ones in particular he could not stand, and who could least stand him. It was not his good fortune to be first among equals; for on the poor-devil side there are none, that is a pretense only the secure can afford.

  So he had had to lead them into the cellars. These extended not only horizontally but vertically, some of masonry, others carved from the rock, or air pockets opened up with chisels, or, toward the edge of the bluff, caves. There were corridors, vaults, storerooms, arcades, dungeons, twisting stairs, ramps, of different styles and periods. Here and there excavations at one level had broken into excavations at another. A break in one wall, when a torch was stuck through it, showed lead coffins scattered every which way, Babelhausen in the crypt of the abbey church, its proper entrance long turfed over. Sometimes the floors were dirt. Sometimes the dirt was damp. When you thought you had reached bedrock, you found another stair leading darkly deeper down. Sometimes a distant ray of light would lead to a window cut in the rock face, through which the trees looked far away and impersonal. Once or twice, it led to the mouth of a cave, with bird droppings and deer bones. There were rats. Somtimes there were distant crashing noises, a deer gone astray, a full-grown bear.

  Being underground, all these things seemed larger than they were. The men never went down there alone. Neither did the Magician, who had no interest in his own subcellars. Mysendonck, driven by a small boy’s thoroughness and by a restless adolescent anxiety, did. There were anomalies.

  For generations, but not recently, things had been stored down here and then forgotten. Mysendonck wandered around with a singular satisfaction. He would come on bits and tatters of old armor, rusted steel jointed shoes, heaumes, chain mail which weighed you so heavy it was as though you had gone swimming in your shirt. Some of this he tried on, some he dragged up to the light to try to scour the rust away.

  There were chests full of molder, old field chairs, standards, common cooking pots; nothing rare, but time had made it rare. Mostly it was abandoned and outmoded instruments of war. He picked up a spiked steel ball on a rod, hung with chains and hooks. It was a mace. He whirled it around in the air until it struck the wall, the hooks rebounded, he had to duck. He found old spurs with rotted straps or corroded chains, bigger even than the Swedish; they made him feel like a rooster. They were designed to the dimensions of the cart-horse Percherons of the jousting age. He was always trying things on.

  He was not a ragpicker exactly, but he went through other people’s deserted halls, wondering how it had felt. They would never tell him. They were not there to tell. So he picked up bits and pieces they had left behind them, and weighed them in his hand. Everybody does that one way or another. The benthos is littered with hermit crabs, fishes who hunt by their own light, and scavengers. The only thing they have to eat is what drifts down to them. They live at enormous pressures, do not know it, and move drowsily.

  In a side vault were mounds of church furniture, emblems, ikons, statues out of date, too pious or not pious enough, with amputated arms, the fantasticated wood-carved figures of two hundred years before, as though made of shaved steel, bony and violent in gesture. But there was nothing like the Manuel. He would have liked something like that, to rootle out and put in his room upstairs.

  In a part of the cellars which, to judge by the chiseled claws on the stone, must lie under the original schloss, but deep in the cliff, they came on shackles riveted to the walls, neck collars similarly fixed but rusted open, and what was left of the apparatus of a room in which to ask questions and to play at dangerous but inviting games. Such things have their fascinations. We may cause all the pain we wish with our hands, but that would be a personal act, and would take effort, skill, and affection. Whereas a machine has nothing to do with us. We risk nothing. It stands there glittering and waiting. What we do by means of it has nothing to do with us, and so we may do as we please.

  The robbers wished to play.

  He said no. They were a disappointment to him. He had seen himself the chosen leader of a band of irregular heroes, men who admired him as the best of themselves. But these men were not laughter-loving, brave, manly, and companionable, straightforward or loyal. When they got drunk, they puked. When they were outnumbered, they ran. When one of their comrades was shot, they left him where he lay.

  He was their leader, but it disgusted him. Not only was he lonelier than ever, but he had to remember never to turn his back. There was no part of the dream left. Whatever you stole, it was never enough, it added up to nothing, you had empty hands. He liked now only the night-riding, as always, by himself. He took to whittling sticks, said even less than he had said before, and watched.

  But he refused to let them play in front of him, if only because he sensed it was he they wished to play with. It is a universal impulse; even our betters like to drag their betters down, hanging about their feet like demons from hell, with beaks for penises.

  Often at night he would go with a candle, seeing sometimes in the distance the Magician and Selina pacing with theirs through the state rooms, intent upon being taken for ghosts. He went to see the Manuel.

  The one joyous discovery of the cellars, so far as the men were concerned, was a row of vaults broken into accidentally, containing pipes, hogsheads, and four tuns of ancient wine no looter had discovered, some of the barrels dry, some vinegar, all bitter and heavy with sediment, but some half-evaporated to a near and sugary brandy. It clotted the glass like blood, but they made expeditions every week to get it; it gave them furry dreams and a bad temper.

  It gave them courage.

  It was not too long after that, that coming upon the torture room again, Mysendonck saw new raw ropes in the pulleys, and the neck collars oiled. When drunk they came down here for their initiations, for those questions to which the only answer looked for is a scream.

  It is a way of love. We are in love with death, for he is the only one who smiles, the one who comes to watch us while we are sleeping, at cock’s crow. He is the only one who ever waits. In what remained of the chapel off the festhalle was a plump amorino whose head was a dimpled skull.

  He did not tell his men he had found the fresh ropes. They did not tell him that they had put them there. But there was about them these days a waiting, they wanted to get back down there; these things have no existence in the light of common day.

  Yet he knew his own cellars better than they did. He had found there things they had never seen, and in the upper levels had come upon his white marble dreams. It was another storeroom, full this time of those martyred saints which lie in glass windows under altars. In a St. Sebastian, case and all, he saw himself. It was
his own body he was looking at, certainly. It had the same musculature, and he often slept like that, his shoulders propped up, his head turned back against the pillow, with one hand on his chest and the other trailing drowned, and one big-toed foot extended, inquisitive, blind, in the manner of heavy dreamers who feel the massive luxury of their own bodies to be a burden.

  Holding his torch up, whose flames made the body flicker sinuously alive, Mysendonck thoughtfully scratched his golden belly and stuck the middle finger of his left hand in his navel—a gesture whereby the physically complacent do, not their thinking, but think things over; a gesture which makes me feel me, special to bigger boys, vulnerable and confiding, though they themselves do not confide—swung his body on one hip, like a Doryphorus, and swallowed hard.

  What he was wondering was: soon, soon, but where is the man to kill me? Each month, each week, each hour, is worse than the one before it. We would like to be hauled down before our body goes, like a sunset flag. But it must be by the right person.

  And there was no such person. It was, there, that he began to think of that watching boy beyond the hedge, who even then had seemed to know something of him that he did not. We do things we know not why.

  He held the torch up. Yes, he said, that is my hand, I have stubby fingers like that. He did not say, those are my arrows; but he could feel them.

  Aware of being watched, he whirled and saw, at the entrance to a stair spiraling upward through the guts of the building, row upon row of busts, staring with blinded eyes. They stopped about six steps up, but one of them, as though to advance, was alone by itself on a lower stair. It was a head of Agrippa, though he did not know that, as tortured as the Lipathae from Pergamon. Agrippa died first. “The falling out of faithful friends renewing is of love.” “In going to my naked bed as one that would have slept …”

  He turned and ran. He never went back. But he knew the statue was there, waiting, he knew those heads were there, waiting, the heads of those who put us down.