The Bells

by Richard Harvell

  The abbot recoiled as if Nicolai had burned him. “You will not!”

  “It’s not far, just …” Nicolai wiggled his hand as if it were a fish swimming toward the window. He shrugged. “I could find it.”

  The abbot’s stare was severe. He pointed a finger toward the construction in the square. “I would as soon give this church to the Reformers than have you parade about this city in the evening. You sitting in their parlor!” The abbot shuddered visibly.

  Nicolai was clearly disappointed, but he laid a hand on my shoulder. “Then I will draw Moses a map.”

  The abbot looked down at me again. “No, you are correct. He needs an escort.” His lips swished about as if he had some sour pastille in his mouth. He nodded. “Brother Dominikus will take him.”

  That evening Nicolai broke the news to Remus as we sat in Nicolai’s cell.

  “I am to do what?” The wolf clutched the two halves of his open book as though he would tear them apart. Nicolai paced back and forth in front of him. I sat on the bed.

  “Accompany him safely through the hazards of the world,” Nicolai said. His hands spread apart a jungle’s vines. He pointed. “To Haus Duft.”

  “Why me?”

  “You are the only one brave enough.”

  “What does Staudach think I am? A mule?”

  Nicolai winked at me. “I don’t imagine he thinks quite that highly of you.”

  “I will not do it. I have other things to do.” Remus leaned back in his chair. He pressed his book to his chest.

  Nicolai looked skeptical. “Other things?” Remus met his gaze with silence. “Oh, Remus, do it for Moses.”

  “For Moses?” Remus scowled contemptuously. “What does Moses get out of it?”

  We both looked up at Nicolai. Though I longed to return to that mysterious, lavish house, I was scared. I, too, would have liked to know why I should go. Nicolai waved his hand at the window. “He will see the world.”

  “The world is between here and Haus Duft?”

  Nicolai stopped in front of the window and peered out as if to examine the path to that house. He shrugged. “Part of it is.”

  “A very small part.”

  Nicolai swiped at the air, spreading Remus’s confusing fog. “Remus, he has to start somewhere. You don’t want him to grow up to be a monk like you, do you?”

  Nicolai was as close to a parent as I had those years, and his words surprised me. It was the first time I had considered any future other than a life in the abbey as a monk. Like Remus. Like Nicolai.

  Remus looked hard at me. “Why should I care what he becomes?” But when he had said it, he looked at the floor in poorly masked shame, and we all saw that he, too, had become entangled in my life.

  Nicolai smiled. “Moses,” he said, “don’t you see? Remus is afraid.”

  Remus snorted.

  “You see, there are women in that house.” Nicolai winked. “Don’t worry, I will speak with him. This is a fear he must overcome.”

  And sure enough, the next Thursday, when Nicolai had fetched me from rehearsal and scrubbed my face and combed my hair, there stood Remus, dressed in hat and cloak and carrying a satchel full of books as though we would be traveling for many days, as if running out of books were tantamount to running out of air. The first day, he carried a map in his hand and at each street corner turned it round and round as if trying to decipher its code. “These damn streets,” he mumbled. “They seem to go in circles. Why can’t they make them the same as on the map?” I followed patiently a step behind him and listened carefully. In subsequent weeks, we developed a simple pact. He held a book before his eyes and walked. When I heard the butcher’s knife, I pushed him right; the blacksmith’s hammer, left. When I heard the vendors calling in the market, I led him up the gentle hill.

  We entered Haus Duft through the same hallway that had beguiled me before. Imagine a house whose walls were daily stripped and repainted, whose pictures had been newly hung, whose staircases and doorways were added or removed at will. So it was for me in this house of ever-changing sounds. From a spot of wall where one day I heard a hand banging a table, the next week I heard pots clanging, and from another spot where one day I heard the soft whisper of a maid, the next week I heard the husky voice of Karoline Duft.

  Every week I was led to a parlor, in which Amalia always sat at a desk beside her father, for my visit invariably coincided with her philosophy lesson, the one subject her father did not entrust to the buxom French nurse Marie. What relief washed across my young friend’s face as I entered! In seconds, philosophy washed away, and those cheeks burned. She stood up from her work and greeted Remus, who held up his books to her like a shield. He took a seat as far from Karoline as possible. Then Amalia would nod at me, a dignified, proper hostess, and lead me down a passage. As soon as we were out of her father’s and Karoline’s hearing, she took my hand and slowed her gait to draw out the walk to her mother’s room, for this was the only time during the entire week that either of us was alone with another young person we could call a friend. She did most of the talking, mimicking Karoline’s severe reproaches, “That is not done, Amalia Duft, in this house,” or telling me of how she would escape—to a pirate ship or an Eskimo tribe, or dress up as a boy and study philosophy at a collège in Paris. Sometimes she stopped me in the hall, for even our dragging steps were too fast for her bursting mind. One week, she showed me a skull she said was a human’s (but that looked more like one of her father’s preserved pigs to me). The next week she presented a picture she had drawn of an African king. On another visit, she translated a bloody scene from a Greek epic her father had had her read in French.

  Gradually I began to understand that the fall that had maimed her leg had also curtailed her freedom. For example, on one particularly warm evening, after I had sung, Amalia coyly suggested to her father that she would like to see the progress on the church—she would walk with Remus and me to the abbey and return before dark. “I know the way,” she said.

  Her father was engrossed in business and had merely mumbled, “Fine, dear, that’s fine.”

  But Karoline sniffed her out. She caught us at the door. “Amalia!” she cried. “What are you thinking?”

  Amalia told her that she wished to inspect the church.

  “Sunday,” Karoline said, taking Amalia’s hand and leading her back into the house. “Sunday you may go with me.”

  “But I do not want to go with you!” Amalia snapped. She jerked her hand free.

  “Amalia,” Karoline admonished in a whisper, “have you forgotten what happened the last time you were out alone?” She looked at Amalia’s knee as if the injury glowed through the fabric of her dress. “Do you want another scar?”

  Amalia turned red in angry humiliation.

  Karoline led her niece away. “Tomorrow,” she said as they disappeared into another room, “Marie will take you out in the coach. You don’t want everyone to stare at your limp, do you, dear?”

  During our second meeting, Amalia led me through the hallways silently, her face sour. She growled slightly as she exhaled. I followed her nervously as she limped ahead of me—until she stopped suddenly in a quiet passage. “I will go no farther,” she snapped, “until you say at least six words to me.”

  I must have looked confused. She poked me in my chest and spoke slowly, as if I were a little child. “That would be one more word than you spoke to my mother.”

  I tried to speak then, I did—I heard in her plea the same loneliness that dominated my existence—but I could not. I was struck dumb. I stared blankly at the wall behind her, as if the secret text to making friends were written there but recorded in a foreign language. She waited barely thirty seconds before muttering, “Boys are so stupid,” and tugged me on.

  By the third or fourth visit, I learned that the secret was not necessarily in speaking but in listening. I smiled at the stories she made up, and laughed when she mocked her aunt. She held my hand all the time, and often crowded me agains
t the wall as we ambled, so I had to press against her. We soon found in the warmth of each other’s hands, in the rub of shoulders, and even in the occasional hug some small satisfaction of the child’s need for touch, which we both missed—me as an orphan, she with an infirm mother and a father who could not embrace without analyzing his love in weights and measures.

  When we finally reached her mother’s door, Peter always presented Amalia with two charcoal masks, a fresh sheet of paper, a quill, and ink, and asked us to peruse the day’s precious data. His attitude toward me had changed entirely since I had begun working with Science, rather than against it. “Affected by the rain?” he’d ask, and examine both my cheeks as if he could discern a swelling. “You haven’t eaten any potatoes, have you?” he said of the exotic root. “They give you leprosy, I hope you know.” He insisted that I step onto a scale, and he recorded my weight in his notes. Lastly, he always peered into my throat before giving the final nod that we could continue through the door.

  Inside, with the ceiling lamp lit, and several candles placed around the room, I could see that Frau Duft’s face had once been as beautiful as my mother’s, before the skin became stretched across bone and the eyes sank. Her smile was still warm, though, and her voice, despite her hard fits of coughing, calmed me so completely that her room was only the third place on earth, after the belfry and Nicolai’s cell, where I truly felt safe.

  Amalia placed the quill and paper on a table (she made up the data later) and sat at her mother’s side, sometimes even leaning across the bed with her head on her mother’s lap so Frau Duft could stroke her hair. For a moment, at least, they were as I always imagined mother and child should be, and not two lonely lives destroyed by disease and separated by Science.

  In that bedroom I sang some of the worst performances of my life and some of the best. For, the music we sing in our churches, though often beautiful, is not written for one ten-year-old soprano singing alone in a bedroom. Since Ulrich had no interest in helping me prepare for these private concerts he would never hear himself, as I pieced together my songs I had nothing more than the naïve artistry with which my mother had swung her mallets. I stumbled often, understanding only instinctively how to manage a change of key or the transition from a calm Gregorian chant to florid Vivaldi. What impiety I wrought in that bedroom! I tore down and then rebuilt litanies, cut Psalms in two, mingled Latin and German, mangled both languages, and all of it outside church or chapel, all of it in a small, dimly lit bedroom.

  In my later years, I came to appreciate that in Frau Duft’s room I gained the important tools I had missed in my training at St. Gall. For in sunny Naples, where boys like me trained in the great Neapolitan conservatori, where they learned arias to be sung in San Carlo or Teatro Ducale, they taught not only perfection of breathing, posture, and tone—Ulrich was the greatest maestro of them all in this regard—but also the creativity of the virtuoso. Twenty years later, in rowdy San Carlo, I would stretch an aria of just six sentences to twenty-five minutes; then, after ten minutes of applause, do it again with no repetition. But in Frau Duft’s bedroom, I was just beginning to feel how songs were written, and therefore could be unwritten, improved upon, lightened, darkened, stretched, condensed—or turned backward so they mocked themselves. With the same note, I made Frau Duft cry on one occasion; and on another, I made her smile. If I felt like singing high, fast runs and trills, that was fine. If I was in a somber mood, I could start with Nicolai’s chants from Vespers and stretch them until Frau Duft and Amalia both had glassy eyes, behind which they dreamed of a perfect world.

  When I sang quietly they were silent, except for Frau Duft’s wheezing. Then, as my volume increased, I heard my highest notes in the lamp above my head, and once that glass began to ring, I blocked out the sounds of my own mouth, seeking a slightly different timbre. It all depended on the song, or the weather, or that little girl’s mercurial moods. Her sound would join my voice like a violin’s bow gently drawn across a string, and I struggled to encourage its journeys, crafting my song around her form. She was not aware of it—she could not hear herself, for my voice was so much louder than the faint ringing of her body. She only felt it as a warmth. She hugged herself when my voice rang out. She learned with me, trained every fiber—from her round cheeks to the arches of her feet—to hear the different pitches of my song. And on rare days, when Frau Duft was most alive, I heard in the mother, too, a distant echo of the daughter.

  XV.

  Ulrich was furious. Of course, if he were sick in bed, the only medicine he would wish to have would be me singing Bach’s heretical songs, but this did not stop him from protesting the next time Staudach looked in on our rehearsal. “Abbot,” Ulrich whispered so the boys would not hear, “he is crucial to the choir. I have chosen the pieces for his voice. I cannot do without him, even for one afternoon.”

  “It is for the church,” the abbot said. “For the church.” He twisted the ruby ring on his finger.

  “Then send another boy, Abbot. Any boy. Anyone but him.”

  “What is it about this boy?” the abbot said through clamped teeth. He clenched his hands as though he would like to take me in his claws. “Duft would have no other. Of course I tried to send a proper man. And now you say you cannot spare him. Why can’t you teach the other boys to sing like him?”

  With gaping mouth, Ulrich shook his head, lost for what to say. “Abbot,” he finally muttered, childlike pleading on his face, “please reconsider.”

  “For the church,” the abbot said flatly. “For now it must be first in all our thoughts.”

  How could it not have been first in our thoughts? The perfect symmetry of the church’s double towers loomed over the Abbey Square. On sunny days, the glare of the white stone made me shield my eyes. “Half a million gulden,” Remus hissed one night to Nicolai. “Do you have any idea how much that is?”

  “You try to destroy a church eight hundred years old and build a perfect one,” Nicolai responded and took a sip of wine. Perched on his chair, his elbow raised, for a moment he was as refined as a prince. “You’d spend all that and more. Staudach probably makes those masons work for nothing more than the security of their souls. They’d make a scoundrel like you pay them double.”

  “It’s not a question of how I’d do it,” Remus said. “You’re not listening to what I say. None of the monks do.”

  “I wonder why?” Nicolai winked at me. I suppressed a giggle.

  “Every gulden from the pocket of a farmer or a weaver,” Remus continued. “Some have nothing to eat after they have paid his taxes. What will he give them in return?”

  Nicolai needed to consider only for a moment. “Beauty,” he said with a nod, as if this were an incontrovertible reply.

  “Beauty?” Remus said. He looked at me. “Beauty?”

  We both turned back to Nicolai. I’d never held even one single gulden in my hands. I wanted to know as much as Remus how beauty could be worth half a million.

  Nicolai took a deep breath and put down his glass. “Remus,” he said. “Moses. Don’t think that I like this man. I don’t. I loathe him. He’s like wine that’s drunk ten years too late. But with this church he’s got it right. Haven’t you seen it?” Nicolai pointed out the window, where even in the dim moonlight the white church shone as if candles burned within its stone. “That’s God’s work he’s doing, and though Staudach may be a fool when it comes to his fellow men, he understands God just fine.” Nicolai’s face was smooth and joyful as if he’d glimpsed an angel hovering above the church. “God is beautiful. He’s perfect. And he inspires us to be beautiful and perfect, too. We’re not, of course. And that’s exactly why we need beauty in our lives: to remind us how good we could be. That’s why we chant. That’s why Moses sings. And that’s why Staudach is building us a perfect church. For if we know perfect beauty, with our eyes and with our ears, even for a second, we’ll come that tiny bit closer to being it ourselves.” As Nicolai finished he laid a hand on his heart, and he gave
a final nod, to emphasize his sermon. I found myself nodding back, for I wanted nothing more than to be like this beautiful music that I sang, like this perfect church that was rising out of crude blocks of stone.

  “What stupid rot,” Remus said. He scowled at us both and took up his book again. “Half a million gulden.”

  …

  But Nicolai had infected me. Would this church make me pure? I watched it grow with nervous longing, month after month—the towers finished, red tiles laid on the roof. Then it was nearly complete, and news of the inauguration seeped into the abbey like the promise of a miracle. Thousands would come to the event, from the Swiss Confederation and from Austria. Staudach would bless us with a morning Mass. Then we would march throughout the abbey’s lands in a procession, before returning for the symbolic completion of the church: the transfer of the abbey’s holy relics back into the crypt. And then, when Holy Otmar’s head, St. Erasmus’s hair, St. Hyacinthus’s ribs, and many other scraps of hair and bone were again laid to rest, the day would be crowned with a song of glory: Charpentier’s magnificent Te Deum. Ulrich had sent to Innsbruck for four renowned soloists to sing the demanding parts. I was to sing in the choir.

  But then Staudach read Ulrich’s letter to the Innsbruck Kapellmeister and discovered that Ulrich intended a male falsetto for the mezzo-soprano and a musico for soprano. Staudach stormed into the practice room one evening as I rehearsed alone with Ulrich. The choirmaster had me wrapped in an embrace, his head against my chest, his hands fondling the hollows beneath my ears. When Staudach entered, slamming the doors open, he recoiled, and I tumbled off my stool.

  “You do not mean a castrate? Not a half-man!” Staudach bellowed, waving Ulrich’s letter like a death warrant.

  Ulrich sighed, but clearly he was already prepared for this argument. “Yes, Abbot. That is what a musico is. A castrato. An evirato.” Ulrich nodded at me as if I should agree with him, but my eyes only grew wide as I tried to picture this mysterious being he described.