People of the Book

by David Stacton

  Manglana did not know. She was afraid.

  *

  As far as anyone could tell, he did not seem to want anything. But the meal was long, there were pauses, he cooked for them himself, at a chafing dish, things not known in the Germanies, and he had lavished on them wines in dusty bottles, breathing uncorked on a sideboard, and a dark brandy, as smoky as Mysendonck’s cairngorm, with little specks in it, drowsy, full of fumes, with the bite of steel and a fuddling smoothness.

  It was a celebration. He did not say of what. He was silent, happy, and gracious. It was an evening from the old hall. He sat deliberately in half shadow, but before him was every cheap battered pewter candle sconce he had been able to find, and when he leaned forward, the flames of the candles in these made his face alternate and vary.

  Though he had asked his question many times, and never of Hannale, the one person there who was not afraid of him, he did not want to ask it again. For there was something fearsome about him, not a personal trait (he was being benign), but something in him of the unknowable itself which, do what he would, peered out through those eyes from time to time, the shadow of something nameless and so vast that even he was not aware of it. It is a thing which enters men from time to time, and which men fear more than death and hate unendingly when it appears among their fellows. It is clever but innocent, that’s what they hate. Those whom it inhabits can only ask why and as much as possible keep out of sight.

  But a child is not for five seconds afraid of such things, expects them, makes imaginary playmates out of them, and not until puberty says a lingering farewell before hurrying off, empty but relieved, to the banal enchantments of daily humanity.

  Hannale, who had never known her father, saw looming out at her, when the Magician bent forward, an expected personage, recognized him at once, and felt no need to squirm. She took him for granted. Only the disappearance of Manglana puzzled and alarmed her. Where had Manglana gone?

  To Lars the Magician was attentive; to Mysendonck, deferential, charming; to Hannale (how aware the boy was of her always), playful; to Selina, private and grave. There was the glitter of a stranger in Selina’s eyes. Even the leafiest vegetable is not so complacent as all that; with an anticipatory rustling of leaves (she was in damask as usual), she turned to Lars. They had none of them before seen this gentleman who had magic in his sleeves in his own role, that of Laird. And yet, yes (the Magician was everything), he was a Laird.

  Mysendonck relaxed, expanded, and became what Pastor Mysendonck had never seen in him, a worthy son. The Magician as Laird was what he had been looking for.

  The Magician tried to conceal his fascination, but could not. For a stranger had come to the house of Admetus, where there has been weeping, crying; and Admetus, who does not miss Alcestis so very much, or her parents either (they made no move to save her; we have so few years left to live, they said, how can you expect us to die?), would detain the stranger, and make much of him. For it is not often that men such as these come to the house of Admetus, where there are many women but few men, and the Laird senses in the stranger the concealed sinews of the awaited demigod, Herakleios. So he would detain him, rather than send him on other people’s errands.

  The Magician, who as thaumaturge followed no legend to its end but his own, drew back from the inevitable consequences of mythology, and sadly ached. The sadness came from the physical distances of time, not from his thoughts. For he had in his time walked through much evil, lost more than most men ever get, spread his mischief, expected nothing, knew the Black Man when he saw him, and yet found it impossible to believe the world evil though he knew it was, and even in his seventies (if such was his age) was delighted to have found in that jungle the small clearing of a happy day.

  Nonetheless, when one meets a decent person one is shocked. One had not known that there had been any other survivors. Stunned but alive, here they are, so we do what we can for them.

  The Magician was lying to himself, a thing he had not done for years, but then, hope may strengthen the spirit but it corrupts the will.

  Though he was not, he sat in the candlelight as awkward and playful as an old Jew who’s too heavy to prance, but the second time around he’s rich, he can afford anything, even youth. There isn’t anything as far away, as dishonest, as pleading, or as kindly as that twinkle. It is wistful and tenderly done, but he might have to flee. Instead, he makes a tentative.

  Yes, he thought, with a quick look, as was his habit, at the tensions underneath the table as well as at the charm above it, it is a family. I have searched for years, but as always the missing piece has come by chance. And he looked at Mysendonck warily, with refreshed curiosity, wondering what it was he had missed noticing, for if Lars was his friend there must be something in him.

  As Selina had begun to pout, as is a woman’s way when any man present is played up to for too long in her stead, he began deliberately to make much of her, until Manglana sank away out of those eyes. She might be a problem, Manglana. It might be necessary to distribute death again, for he had no intention to give Selina up. As he had controlled her before, so would he control her now. People live only to make each other trouble, and the best way to thwart them is to show them plainly that they cannot do it. That is the only punishment that really makes them writhe, more even than the damage they intended. It is not a pleasant truth to have to live with, but there it is. The capacity to feel an innocent pleasure is as rare as any other ability, and like most adolescent talents, including beauty, seldom survives into maturity. That dawn was false.

  Lars and Hannale were given the run of the building. They might go into the schloss if they wished to. The way to the boy was through the child. The Magician, who had a housewife’s and a sailor’s tidy skills, disappeared for twenty-four hours, and then held up before Hannale, who was in darned rags, a brocaded dress that buttoned up the back, like Selina’s.

  After the first delighted gasp, she drew away. A nine-year-old is still accessible to a child’s instinctive warnings. But she had taken to the Magician, and the brocade was a millefiori of clear-colored fronds and blossoms, curled enchantingly upon themselves. The embroidered petals felt silky under her fingers, and as downy as moths.

  “Put it on,” said the Magician. “We will surprise them.” For Mysendonck, Lars, and she were now invited two or three times a week to that meal the Magician took eccentrically, like supper, in the early evening.

  She hesitated, blushed, and put out her arm to reach for it, as though into a cage containing invisible birds with visible beaks.

  “Child, child,” said the Magician, and there lay her old dress on the floor, and he was buttoning her from behind into the new one. It had a high oval bodice, with pleats falling wide and full from the waist. She raised the skirt reverently before her, awed by such fine stuff, only it bound her movements, it made her feel like someone else. It was a grave dress, dignified and slow-moving, and Hannale was quick to move. But she did not mind, it made her feel a grown-up, she was pleased.

  But when she appeared that way in the hall, Lars was upset, and Selina tightened her lips and was not pleased.

  *

  “He meets her,” said Hannale, who did not like Selina so very much, and had seen Mysendonck skulking about a side corridor, go in, come out, and later, Selina leave the same room. It happened often. Hannale was not a sneak; but she watched people who watched her, to find out why.

  They had been at the Katzburg for over a month. The question of their leaving had not come up. It was not allowed to come up. Lars tried to talk to Hannale about it, but Hannale had never believed in Uncle Stöss (perhaps neither had Lars, but as MacKensie had said, he was a channel marker of some kind, one had to race down to him in order to tack the buoy and get back swiftly where one had come from). She was happy where she was, among men, women, sheets, beds, warm food, a pretty dress, and a certain wonder.

  She was a solitary child. So was he. Like their mother, they moved sideways to people along a paralle
l track, and had been taught young there was to be no hailing. Mysendonck’s men frightened her. The Magician was there only when he wanted to be, not when you wanted him. Selina often disappeared. And perhaps she was jealous that Lars now spent so much time with Mysendonck.

  So when Lars couldn’t find her, he soon found out where to look. She took her troubles here as at Wollin to the churchyard. She had found a side door and a scary passage, so she could get there without going around by the parterre where the robbers loitered in the daytime.

  Everything of the abbey was left except the roof, glass, and furnishings. It had two side aisles, transepts, monuments, and in the churchyard, table tombs, crosses, and lichenous stones, some cast down, a few straight, a rubble wall, a pillared entrance, the stumps of amputated columns, and a cloister either disappeared or built into the side walls of the Katzburg.

  Lars had found her there, chasing moths among the tombs—hovering dirty white ones, like shriveled sweet peas, with here and there a butterfly of a powdery blue or yellow color, with smooth red-brown bars the shade of rosewood marquetry.

  The grass in the churchyard had become straw. There was no view from here, except of the blue-green forest standing up too close. That it was so shut in and far away was why she liked it. Perhaps she could no longer believe in any security that was not a fairy tale.

  “But I don’t want to leave. Do we have to leave?”

  “No,” said Lars. He was sitting against a table tomb, with his knees up, and had taken out Mysendonck’s knife and was fiddling with it, without noticing what he was doing. “No, not if you don’t want to. Only …”

  “Only what?” She had always asked his permission for everything; she had learned he always gave it.

  “Only nothing.” And noticing what he had in his hand, he threw the knife at the nearest thing it would stick to, a decayed hardwood gravestone, with corroded green brass letters set in it, Silesian-Polish fashion. Instead of missing, it rooted there, quivering. His arm was better than he knew.

  Getting up, he walked over, wriggled out his knife, stared at it, wiped it, and put it back in its sheath.

  “A month or so won’t do any harm,” he said. He didn’t like being changed, but he didn’t want to leave Mysendonck, either. It was to have someone.

  In late October, very early, the first snow fell. But it melted and meant nothing. Apart from that, it was still a golden autumn.

  *

  Mysendonck had let Lars into his second-best secret, and shown him the Manuel. But seen through a stranger’s eyes, it was just an old painting, it didn’t seem to mean so much. Lars didn’t understand it. He didn’t want to. Nevertheless he came back to inspect it by himself one day, and was standing there when the Magician came up behind him.

  “Ah yes, young Haakon’s painting,” he said, and glanced at it without approval. He did not much like it that these two young men knew each other. “Do you know Monsalvasch?”

  “No.”

  “It is a mountain fortress, much like this one, where the Holy Grail is guarded by pure knights. Our knights are such as you have found them.”

  Going to what had once been the altar in this chapter room, he opened a monstrance cabinet and peered into the burnished, empty interior.

  “As you see, there is nothing in it,” he said tartly, closed the doors, and with a look to what was Mysendonck’s grail, was there no longer.

  *

  The cold was coming. Mysendonck set Lars to chopping firewood. They were sharp axes. Mysendonck kept all blades sharp. Going back to the curtain building, he met the Magician.

  “That is not the person to cut firewood,” said the Magician.

  “Maybe he likes cutting firewood.”

  The idea impressed the Magician as novel, but he said nothing more. He could smell the bleeding wood.

  *

  Manglana now let him lie in bed with her for so long as he wished. Of Selina and of Selina’s dresses no traces remained. That scene Manglana had to re-enact was getting longer. She sometimes clung to him, but when he asked, said that nothing was the matter.

  At first he had not wanted to leave. Now it was she who had to ask him to stay longer. She nagged him sometimes. But he had other interests. He did not always feel like staying. On a cold afternoon or a cold night, it was warm and drowsy there.

  “I hate her, I hate her,” she said, when once he had mentioned Selina.

  Sometimes she asked questions about Lars.

  *

  Lars and the Magician stood on the leads of the schloss, looking down into the ravine. It was after supper. The Magician was restless. As winter came, the stars got harder and harder, in a sky that seemed reserved. With a glance at the tower, he snapped his fingers impatiently and said, “Come.”

  They climbed the stairs and came out onto the platform, just as a small meteor swerved back into the depths of things, like a swift sure stitch (you could not see the needle), like a tadpole.

  “According to the best conjectural prognostics, the world came to an end in 1588. I was then a young man. Indeed, I can remember the great new star in Cassiopeia, in ’72. I was ten or twelve. There were certain peculiar happenings to be seen in the sky in ’88, conjunctions, meteor showers, a black rainbow, stone rain, and blood fell over the Skagerrak. What I have often wondered since is, suppose it did?”

  “Did?”

  “Came to an end. There was a bump and a jar. Two or three plates on the plate rack rocked, and the chandeliers in the church swayed. I presume they did—it was not a Sunday, there was no one to watch them. We were not told. Perhaps a tree in bloom cast off soft wet white petals.

  “Nothing about us exists, because we do not exist either. We were swallowed complete. But then, suppose, as you walked with a bucket to the well, that God changed His mind, and instead of beginning again, restored what He had taken away, with the gentlest shimmer, as the delicate mechanism was once more set into its cradle. We would not know that either, unless we happened to look at the plate rack, or be in church on Sunday with the chandeliers, or out in the apple orchard in the spring rain. It is something that has occurred to me. How often does it happen? There was Halley’s Comet in 1607, which will not be back again till even I am dead, and that will be a very long time.”

  The Magician’s life had been ripped across like a dusty bolt of old silk, and the two pieces no longer joined, you could see the seam, there was a ravel. And though he was ageless, the body he inhabited was floating down to the river’s mouth; sometimes now he had glimpses of his own childhood. It was like drifting backwards. He saw his life in its reverse of order.

  This double motion of the tidal bore will expose, when the sea has sucked the waters out beyond the usual line, the bones of what was once a man, cracked for the marrow. It is a sadness to see things which, like the intrusion of the comet, can be seen only once in a lifetime, if at all. Though the Magician was not himself a sea child, he was of sea descent. His family had both given and taken strandhugg. So he could watch Natt och Dags, Wolles, Jansens, Bjornesons, walking down the ages on strands with black sand strewn, and carborundum, a sparkle from the tar spring. They await the dawn. They scan the sea for ships. There is a wind rising, and it has ice particles in it. At that high latitude, the sky crackles all night long: ex boreale lux.

  We are all … waiting.

  One remembers painful childhood things not worth repeating, they have no importance. Why tell the story of one’s life, if one has had none? These random memories and stalking figures on the beach must have made one what one is now. But it is difficult to discover in what way. Dreadful to live this long, and not to remember every inch of it, but only these missing pieces which, since the whole is missing, too, are as exasperating as a fragment found from Sappho, or six miscellaneous phrases from the inscribed binding tape from an Orphic burial. The words are incomplete, prefix is missing, so is suffix, we cannot decipher the voices of the verb, whether active or acted upon, past, present, future, pluperfect, subj
unctive, conditional, imperative. One holds the tape in one’s hands, and yet one cannot say.

  The thought of all this going down for the last time is terrible. I must scramble aboard another generation. Selina will do, but she has no mind. I need the boy.

  “… and straightway a numberless people/ Scatter the length of the beaches and thunder, ‘The Tunny, The Tunny,’” said the Magician, staring up at the coasts and landfalls of heaven.

  Lars smiled with pleasure. It was beautiful. He could see it.

  “On the island of Sicily, which is in the Mediterranean, they care as much for the tunny as we do for the herring. It is a large fish, bigger than a dolphin. It is their livelihood.” The Magician thought of other islands, while above them there was a meteor shower tonight, its flares appeared and disappeared with the aimless vivacity of minnows, and then there were no more. He was susceptible to islands, Möen, Rügen, Wollin if you wished, Åland, Gotland, Bornholm, Samos, Lesbos, Santorin, Fehmarn, the Isles of the Dead, the Blessed Isles, the vexed Bermoothes, the tidal flats in Lübeck Bay, Lolland, Main Land, Lofoten, so many more he had not seen for years.

  But it seemed to him also that his ancestors—he could not quite make them out, it could not therefore be recent times—were leaving Holstein and moving down a pebbly shore, were leaving Schleswig, toward their boats, in no haste, but preparing to leave for the last time, and that the water, except where moonlight caught the wavelets, was black. Surely there must be—yes, you could just make him out against the headland—one small towheaded boy left to wave them good-bye, a boy with salt in his hair.

  “And not a shingle stirred along the shore,” said the Magician. It was a fragment of Sappho, exasperating, complete in itself, it attached to nothing. And yet it meant everything.

  There was here no shore. And the boy seemed to understand him, he could not accustom himself to that. For he had been locked up in himself for too long.

  “I only meant,” he said, “that the loneliest places are those places where we have so many times been, the ones that we return to.”