by Iliazd
As long as the murderer had not been tracked down and disarmed, no one felt safe. But not because they were dealing with a murder. Murder itself was nonsense; who hadn’t, one might ask, had occasion to murder, if not while drunk, then in combat, at any rate? Murder wasn’t the problem; it was ill will, the degree of malice. And the degree must have been superlative, just to resolve on acting inimically against this fool renowned for his holiness, not to mention murdering him. And the peasants and workers could not tolerate such ill will in the neighborhood, all the more so for being hidden. And the patrons of the two taverns conducted their investigation so diligently that before long you could have considered the murderer’s identity established
First of all, at the end of countless scuffles over the honor of this or that village, they determined that Brother Mocius’s body had come to rest there, of all places, precisely to signal that the desecrater was present in that place. Once they’d derived this important fact, they had only to search within their own circle—making their task considerably easier. Their suspicions eventually landed on Laurence, a recent deserter, splendidly robust and daring. Laurence had just come back to the mill; he’d been hiding in the woods for a few days to mark a draft commission’s arrival in the settlement, and during his absence, they’d fished out Brother Mocius’s body. When he was deserting, Laurence had felt the need to justify himself before his comrades (he said he was going into hiding so as not to kill on command), which indicated, since manly flight requires no justification, that the young fellow had resolved to kill willfully, and the murder, consequently, was premeditated. To be accurate, Laurence was not the only deserter, and during the commission’s visit, just as during all previous visits, no one of age for conscription could be found in the village; but it had never occurred to anyone besides Laurence to voice contempt for government-sanctioned murder, so the evidence against him was unimpeachable
When Laurence’s words about murder reached Luke the stonecutter and the next meeting at the tavern agreed with Luke on every point (the engraver was rabid with joy—now nothing would delay preparing the gravestone), they didn’t arrest Laurence or even inform him of the charges raised against him; rather, the investigators, after deciding to keep their discovery to themselves, started tailing Laurence in order to ascertain just how glutted with ill will this person was and to prevent further outbursts. From that time, every step, every action was under surveillance. Was Laurence working? Someone stood beside his supervisor pretending to be a casual visitor. Was he sleeping? The window opened and someone inspected the room. When the young man went into the woods or onto the glaciers to hunt, shadows kept running from trunk to trunk and from cliff to cliff behind his back. But since Laurence didn’t do anything criminal over the course of a month, the stonecutter, the village elder, and the others came to believe that they’d bumped up against a villain not merely eminent, but also shrewd
The investigators now assumed that Laurence was only pretending not to notice the surveillance—and not to know about the charges that were hanging over him. Indeed, Laurence was supremely aware of everything and his blindness and deafness were feigned. And could he, sensitivity itself, fail to notice the constant, crude pursuit his fellow villagers had devoted themselves to? More than once, he had a mind to toss off some stunt, liven things up for his pursuers, or threaten them and demand that they leave him alone. But it seemed to Laurence that the best defense was dissimulation, and he maintained his normal lifestyle as though nothing were happening
They didn’t like Laurence at the mill, despite his fun-loving manner, his strength and agility, the fact that everywhere and always he was inevitably the hero, whether at work, out hunting, or playing games, making judicious use of his advantages and never showing off. His passion for arguing, for answering every “yes” with two “no’s,” for providing proofs, his tendency not to trust anyone, not even to believe himself, all with a dash of veiled, yet piquant country snobbishness, armed even his friends against him. Everyone thought of him as powder just waiting to ignite. If he had amassed a record of sincere sins, they would readily have forgiven him; they couldn’t excuse his perverse obstinacy and pride. And so, no matter how exciting he was to hunt with (no one brought game in like he did; once, he even bagged a snow leopard, an extremely rare, shy beast), Laurence couldn’t find any companions; no matter how fine his soloing voice, he couldn’t assemble a chorus. He hung around by himself, lived alone after leaving his parents’ home, but without becoming antisocial or feral. On the contrary, in his conduct, he was worldly, attentive, played at kid-glove manners, and although they appreciated him at the sawmill as by far the most able, they didn’t trust him: before you can blink, he’ll drop some work you can’t put on hold and take off. They were surprised he hadn’t yet run down to the city and they lavished attention on him
His desertion, by riveting him to the mountains, eased the sawmill owner’s fears, and new, less balmy days ought to have dawned for Laurence. Before he had managed to take stock of this fact, Luke’s inference made its appearance, and life instantly became unbearable. But in the same way that Laurence pretended not to notice he was being tailed, he maintained at the sawmill the air of a man doing a favor by working. There was no more deliberation, however, about calling him to order, since the stonecutter’s suspicions had ceased to be a secret held among the vigilantes
Within a month of the memorable gathering at the tavern that determined the gravestone’s subject matter, not just the whole village, but also the entire district, and even the faraway city were in on the matter. And so, one evening, when several gendarmes halted their steeds on the square in front of the village hall and the taverns, no one asked them why they had deigned to pay a visit; they were expected. They were escorting an outlandish omnibus with two passengers: a forensic investigator, already of “actual” rank (in bureaucratic terms), and his secretary. This parade made the whole population come running, despite the late hour
Usually, a visiting investigator’s duties were limited to formalities, for he came only in response to rumors of crime that had reached the city (he was never summoned; the local population never knew anything about any of it), and since the criminal would have vanished long before the bureaucrat turned up (in reality going off into the mountains or being hidden by someone), the investigator would interrogate the locals: the elder, the tavern owners, and a few others he felt like conversing with. The secretary would produce some inscrutable thing on paper, those interrogated would subscribe their marks—some two crosses, some three—the investigator would spend the night in the village hall, following a splendid dinner with those he had questioned, and would go back where he came from in the morning, and that would end the matter for all eternity. After his departure, it even happened that they would discuss in the tavern, with much laughter, the wanted criminal’s presence in the village hall, and how the investigator had been particularly attentive to the criminal’s sighing over the decline in morals, how the secretary had spent an especially long time recording his effusions, and how, at the dinner, the criminal had been appointed toastmaster and had brought all those present to the brink of ecstasy with his eloquence and stamina
And this time, too, the bureaucrat arrived planning to spend his time just as amiably, never suspecting that matters stood differently. Luke the stonecutter’s allegation—that, although Brother Mocius’s murder had been committed far away, the perpetrator was, so to speak, very well known to everyone, and that he was, indisputably, the deserter Laurence—was so incredible that the investigator nearly fainted. When, moreover, Luke added that the perpetrator had not gone into hiding, but was sitting right nearby, and that if he would just cross the square, he could arrest him, the investigator jumped up and shouted that it was too late to take up this matter, that he would look into it in the morning, and how dare Luke dictate how he ought to proceed, that—as it were, and so on and so forth—then threw everybody out of the room and went to bed on an empty stomach
But, while the elder was resigned to the situation, the artist couldn’t stand it. Seated opposite Laurence, Luke fidgeted for a while and then suddenly kicked aside his stool and popped up right beside the young man. All present craned their necks and froze. It was painfully quiet. Shaking, flushed, and spluttering, the stonecutter cried out:
“Come on, own up, you’re the one…”
The gendarmes pounced on Laurence. But he pulled a pistol from his shirt, fired several times at the stonecutter and the rest of them, and skipped from the tavern, hounded by their curses and volleys
Even though the wennies’ hamlet was four hours’ walk at most from the sawmill, none of its inhabitants knew a thing about the events that had shaken the village with the sawmill, not just because of their isolation, but also because the wennies, once they’d crossed the range, became deaf and blind to everything happening round about
None of them attended Luke’s funeral, dull minus a requiem, adapted for those deceased careless enough to die outside the festal week. The snow hanging over the earth was bringing the year to a close and declaring an end to the overly drawn-out tale that had arisen because of the dubious monk and the immoderate artist; and the peasants really did hasten to fill the grave, the murder provoked no commentary, and by evening, safely locked away and deprived of their taverns until spring, they had forgotten everything, as though there never had been a Mocius or a Laurence and their victims
Accordingly, when Laurence entered the unpronounceable hamlet after noon, his presence didn’t alarm or even surprise anyone. It’s true, the young man had never shown his face there before, but all the hunters knew him for a tireless marksman and master trapper, and his advent seemed accidental: He’s cutting through the hamlet, they say, on his way to do some hunting, seeing it might snow, the young sport. Needless to say, the rules of hospitality don’t permit letting anyone pass with impunity, so Laurence was obliged to sit a moment and have a drink in the first house, then sit and drink in the next, and so on. The highlanders stood on their thresholds and waited for the stranger to emerge from their neighbor’s place so they could drag him into their own. So Laurence eventually reached the wenny’s house and stayed an especially long time, asking the old man about winter trails into the mountains, about the possibility of surviving there during this season, unspooling, in a word, all the intelligence he, Laurence, lacked, but when bedtime came, he refused a berth and left for the cretins. The latter were already asleep on the ground in their stable, but the wenny children were greatly astonished (since no one ever called on the cretins, out of squeamishness) when Laurence announced he would spend the night in that very place
Laurence was wary of being rousted out during the night, since he couldn’t be certain the highlanders weren’t concealing beneath their courtesy a resolution to assault him. But he needed sleep inordinately after blundering two whole days in the woods and drinking so much now; he was also taking account of the acute possibility that gendarmes would be searching the vicinity for him (while, as it happens, the townsmen had swiftly headed home after the murder). The cretins’ stable, then, was an impregnable fortress
But when Laurence awoke in the morning, roused by his aggrieved hosts’ wailing at the sight of this outlander, he regretted that his exaggerated caution had driven him to enter the place. The filth in the stable was such that probably no animal, including pigs, was capable of surviving under those conditions. The floor was carpeted with rotting, urine-soaked hay, since cretins generally pee right where they are; a corner of the stable was set aside as a latrine, but no one ever cleaned up and it was gradually encroaching, year by year, on the open space. It was difficult to say whether the cretins were wearing threadbare woolen clothes, a kind of bag with holes for head and mitts, or were themselves overgrown with wool that brought to mind sheep’s wool. Their father, mother, and another full-grown dwarf stood and cried, their legs with huge feet set wide apart and their monstrous heads with meaty ears and eyelids hanging down, all three with a uniform growth of hair, and nothing more than her breasts flopping out in the open identified the mother’s sex. Their offspring, distinguished only by their smaller size, latched onto their parents’ legs and squealed. Fleas, despite the cold and altitude, were visibly leaping back and forth in swarms, and the hay teemed with vermin
Laurence tumbled out into the snow and nearly choked on the pure air. What abomination! That meant he’d been soundly drunk the previous evening, not to take things in. So that’s what the fabled untouchables were like. He’d gladly have exterminated them all, never mind some sort of customary rights and the legend that they protected the hamlet from avalanches, but he wasn’t likely to escape lynching twice. Laurence had heard a lot about these terribly sick people, about their limited minds and meager means of expression, but what he saw stunned him
Once the wenny found out that Laurence had arranged to spend the night with the cretins, he couldn’t get to sleep and had been standing in the snowy yard since the crack of dawn, waiting for this enterprise to end. He refused to let the flustered Laurence into his home, but tossed him some new clothes and demanded that he bathe in the icy stream and change. Since he couldn’t risk being left without shelter or friendship, Laurence acquiesced and only afterward received an invitation to enter and have a drink
The wenny’s sermonizing knew no bounds
“In all my years,” the old man wheezed, “no one’s ever thought of seeking refuge with the cretins. No one’s ever committed such a great sin. And what did Laurence go and do?
“We, the highlanders, are not bound by flatlanders’ laws, since our truth is not theirs. Flatlanders are blind and live by the belly’s mind; we live by the mind’s mind. They die, we metamorphose into trees; they see things, we see souls as well. The plain only exists so there can be mountains, and mountains to protect the pure from the unwashed. We’re hospitable, but Laurence must remember that he’s one of the unwashed
“Can you tell from the sound whether a shot has hit its mark? Predict what ravine the goats will follow down to water at dawn? See tracks on the bottom when an animal runs along a riverbed? Can you say which tree will fall first from old age, and when? Where the first avalanche will come crashing down? Where lightning will strike?
“Your knowledge is negligible, your senses dulled. How do you know your misdeeds are glorious?”
The old man stood, flushed and resplendent, exalted by a presentiment of misfortunes whose advent he was trying to ward off, acknowledging, perhaps for the first time, that he was powerless, that the years counted for something after all. But Laurence made no attempt to mount up in the wenny’s wake. And so he stuck to his ill-starred vaudeville
A really stupid story, you could say. Brother Mocius, a holy fool from the north, famous for hiking over the mountains in all seasons and boasting that he had seen and knew about wonders and treasures such as no one knows, had been grating on Laurence’s nerves for years. Recently, while hiding in the woods from the draft commission, Laurence met the monk near a large fountain and killed him in re
venge. And damned right to do it, too, since the pretender turned out to have nothing on him but some pitiful copper coins and a wooden cross. But the corpse came ashore in the village, and Laurence narrated the events that followed
“Alas, wenny. Treasures, the whole thing’s so alluring. Living in the mountains might be all right, but there’s nothing worse than living on the skirts of the mountains. Wonders, rumors, hearsay poison the imagination. For instance, they say you’ve got mercury lakes. What wealth! But can you really find your way to a lake? I walk around like a highlander, but I’m not a highlander, and no matter how much I’ve searched, I can’t find one. People talk about money squirreled away in caves and guarded by satyrs. About veins of gold in the rocks and nuggets on the riverbanks…
“I didn’t find any mercury lakes and I made no mistake in killing the monk. When you look into it, there isn’t anything at all. You hear: Treasures, treasures! But the highlanders are paupers, even though they’re supposed to know everything. For instance, you’ve lived more than eighty years, and what do you have besides a disgustingly hard existence and an eternal battle with nature? I’m coming to the conclusion, at long last, that you shouldn’t seek riches here, but on the plain
“No one here wears silk or rides a bicycle. I’ll readily agree that the flatlanders’ eyes are weak and their ears are bad. It’s not in my power to answer your questions. But what good is knowledge, this mind’s mind you talk about, if it can’t feed you better, dress you up, or hedge against goiters and labor?”
The old man listened and was transformed. His strength abandoned him, along with his grandiloquence. He kept on philosophizing. Laurence was, you might say, young, and so he was seeking out treasures. Treasures really did exist, but only as long as they went unclaimed. Find them, and they’d crumble to dust. Laurence measured out life in wealth, like a flatlander, while highlanders thought only how to put off dying as long as possible. Life existed only for attaining old age. Only then did the eyes actually begin to see, the ears to hear, and the mind to soar above the mind