“You jackal,” he muttered, just loud enough for all to hear.
“Pardon me?” Karoline Duft asked. But Remus had turned his gaze to admire the blank wall. The severe woman looked down at me, as if I might offer an excuse.
Amalia stared at Remus in admiration.
Suddenly Duft stirred. He seemed to see me for the first time. “Come next week,” he said weakly. “She will be better then. With no doubt.”
I nodded.
The man stared at me earnestly, as if we were the only ones in the room. “Moses, we just need more time.”
Remus laid a hand on my shoulder. We began to back toward the door.
“Voltaire had smallpox once,” Duft suddenly said. He stood up and took slow steps and stretched out his hand, stalking me. “Almost killed him. You know what he did? He drank a hundred and twenty pints of lemonade. It cured him.” Duft looked at the ceiling and rubbed his lips. I worried he would begin to cry. His voice grew even more feeble, cracking from time to time. “I made her try that, too. But she has not got smallpox, and it only works if you have smallpox. If only she did. Then we would at least know how to fix it. But that’s it. Don’t you see? Every disease has got a cure to match. Only, the diseases and the cures are all mixed up.” He stirred the air up in front of his chest with his hands. “Infinity of diseases. Infinity of cures. All mixed up. Even with a society of Aristotles, it would still take forever.” He finished his speech so close to me that I heard his toes scrunching in his shoes, which almost touched mine. I nodded up at him.
“Why would God do that?” he whispered down at me. “Why? Why give us a puzzle that is so hard to solve?”
I wished Nicolai were there; he would have had an answer. He never lost sight of the beauty of the world, no matter how obscured was God’s great puzzle. But Nicolai was not there, and so Remus laid a hand on Duft’s arm, as if to say, Yes, you are right. It isn’t fair. Then Remus pulled me back, and we retreated down the passage. I watched Duft’s silhouette, unmoved, standing on the threshold, as if he planned to wait there until I returned.
Amalia was no longer the little girl who had held my hand in the dark passages. She was taller; one could glimpse the coming woman in her face. But to me she was as kind as ever, for despite the garden parties and lunches with the best of St. Gall’s other Catholic girls, I was the only true friend she had in those years. We still lingered in the passages every Thursday on which her mother’s health allowed us to visit her. One day she said sadly to me, “Moses, you’re so lucky you’re not a girl. I hate them. Every girl I’ve ever met.” She bit her lip and tugged at a loose thread on my sleeve. “I never want to see them, but Karoline makes me go. Yesterday I went all the way to Rorschach just so they could insult me.” She stuck out her lip and affected a squeaky voice, “I’m so sorry for you, Amalia. It must be so awful to have a limp. However do you stand it? If I were you I’d just hide in my room all day.” Her cheeks turned red; she was still humiliated by the memory. “It’s the boys’ fault. It’s not as though there are too few of them, but these girls act like there’s a thousand of us and just three suitable matches in the world. We can’t even get married yet, but all they think about is marriage.”
We took several steps and Amalia rubbed her arm absently against mine.
I looked up at her. I dared to speak: “Will you get married?”
Amalia laughed at my serious face. “Of course I will, stupid. Do you think I want to live forever with that witch? I’ll marry.” She nodded, and stared dreamily down the passage. “But he’ll be rich. And dumb. He’ll just ride about on his horse and hunt or whatever it is grown men like to do,” she said. “He’ll do everything I say.”
She dreamed of escaping her prison. One day she withdrew a folded sheet of paper. She unfolded a meticulous drawing of the abbey. “I copied it,” she said proudly. “Every window, every door. It will be my map, for when I visit you.”
“When will you visit me?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, “most likely next week. Certainly before the month is out. Draw an X on your room so I know where to find you.”
“But they won’t let you in,” I said. “You’re a girl.”
“I’m a Duft,” she said severely.
I studied the monk’s dormitories, found the little windows in the roof, and counted carefully from the end.
“That is mine,” I said, and with her pencil drew an X.
The next week I asked her why she had not come. “I was so busy,” she said. “Next week I should manage it. Wait for me in the evening.”
I did—every evening for many months, but she never came.
A time came the following summer when extended clear, dry air made Frau Duft’s state improve, and I sang to her each week. Then the autumn rains arrived, and once again her condition worsened. For two months I did not sing for her at all. I was again a legitimate choirboy, though I would have preferred the furtive concerts for the two Duftesses to any venue in Europe.
Then one morning, one of the soldiers who guarded the monastery gate appeared in our practice room.
“Moses the choirboy must come with me,” he said to Ulrich. “The abbot orders it.”
I was terrified. But Ulrich dismissed me to go with the soldier, and instead of the abbot, I found Karoline Duft waiting at the gate.
“Come,” she said, and turned on her heel. I walked behind that cone of a woman through the crowded market, which opened for her like the parting of a sea. She said nothing until we had left the busy streets.
“The doctor says she will die,” she said, as if she were merely talking about an aged mare whose time had come. “She has asked for you, and he has not refused. I disagree, but he has lost his sense.” She walked faster, and I nearly had to run. “A Duft without his sense is not a Duft. That woman has been in bed for seven years. She has but stalled our advance and consumed our wealth. And now she wants a concert.” She stopped short and my head bumped her soft behind. She looked down at me. She sniffed. “I suppose you will want your fee.”
I had no idea that singers could be paid to sing.
“And you will get it, I am sure. One blessed abbot, and so many souls to burden him. How he bears it, I do not know!”
I was so accustomed to guiding Remus down the streets that when I heard that butcher’s chop, I laid my hand on Karoline’s wide hip and pushed.
She yelped and slammed her palm into my ear. “You disgusting child!”
I rubbed my ear as we turned the corner. She massaged her hip as though my touch had burned her. “It is bad enough that this city is full of Reformers. Now even children are molesting women. How could Willibald find a new wife here? He will have to go far away. To Innsbruck. Or Salzburg. I must write a letter tonight.”
She turned to shake a finger at me.
“You are a choirboy. You should be the best of all of them, and look at you. In two years you will be looking Amalia up and down, even with her deformation. And she will probably smile back, knowing her.” Karoline shook her head in disgust. “One child! And a girl!”
We arrived at Haus Duft, and I entered for the first time through the main doors into the palatial entrance hall. It was a high, two-storied room with a wide double staircase and a huge area of plastered wall, which must have hidden masses of that echoing limestone, because this entrance hall seemed to be the auditorium for the stage of Haus Duft; myriad canals of sound converged in this lobby. The nurse Marie yapped in French to some victim. A piglet squealed. A mop slurped into a bucket. A cleaver split a bone. Two scullery maids chattered. The wind moaned along the roof.
Karoline Duft climbed halfway up the stairs, leaving me dumbfounded at the bottom, immersed in the sounds around me. She turned and snapped down at me. “Close your mouth. You look like an idiot just standing there. Have you never seen such riches before?”
I suppose she meant the thick carpets, oak furniture, and second-rate portraits of Dufts on the wall. For a choirboy from the church of St. Ga
ll, these were mere trifles.
I followed her down ever-twisting hallways, until dutiful Peter came into view, slumped at his station.
“Moses!” He stood like a sentry greeting a general, then realized he had forgotten to record my arrival, checked his watch, and wrote my name before returning to attention. He offered me a charcoal mask.
“Then Science has not yet resigned!” he said. “I knew you would come again. Just in time, too. The doctor says all we can do is pray, but we do not simply pray here in Haus Duft.”
“We certainly do!” Karoline snapped.
“I mean,” said the faithful scribe, as if noticing the ugly pear for the first time, “Science is our way of praying.”
“If there were more prayers and fewer Sciences in this house,” said Karoline, “we would not have all these troubles.”
“Yes, madam,” said Peter. He looked terribly uncomfortable, so he scribbled in his margins, as if he had a very important sum to work out.
“Well, go in,” Karoline said to me. “Do not wait for me; I will not risk my vibrant health.”
Peter flashed me one final, hopeful look, as if to cheer for Science. Or Music. Or both.
Amalia sat on one side of her mother’s bed, Herr Duft on the other. His eyes were filled with tears, but he wiped them away, rising from his chair as I entered. He came to me quickly and tousled my hair. Afterward, his hand remained on my head as if he had forgotten he had placed it there. We stood like this for a minute while he stared glassy-eyed at the door behind me. Amalia sat in her chair and did not look at me either.
“We failed, Moses,” Duft finally said. “We tried, but we failed. We did not get enough chances, that’s the problem. It’s unfair, the way it is. Disease getting all the chances it wants, and we getting so few. If it were the other way around we would stumble on the solution one way or another. However, I do thank you for trying. A noble job you have done.”
Amalia looked at her mother’s unmoving form in the bed. The sick woman’s breath could not even make the coverlet rise and fall.
Duft continued. “Earlier she asked for you, but that is over now. The doctor says there is no more use for hope. We brought you here for nothing. You may—” His words were suddenly choked off. He covered his mouth, and I saw that his discharging of me was the flag of his surrender, perhaps the first time in seven years when hope had not inflated him to futile action.
I listened to Frau Duft’s breaths: quiet and short. Then I looked at my friend again. My vibrant Amalia looked hollow and fragile, and I realized that when this woman was finally gone, the girl’s loneliness would be complete. She would have no one left to hold her hand and stroke her hair, nor would she have a friend with whom to boast and dream, for my position at Haus Duft would expire along with her mother.
I, too, began to cry, for the mother and the daughter—but also for myself. Duft, tears in his eyes to match mine, nodded knowingly at me, as if he were finally prepared to begin acknowledging the presence of sadness in the world. He led me to the door.
“Please sing,” Amalia said, automatically, without looking up.
“Dear,” said Duft, “there is no use. She is not awake.”
“Please,” she said. Her voice cracked, but she did not cry. I had never seen tears on that face.
And so, against the sense of Science, I began to sing. From that small library of music in my head, I chose sections from Dufay’s Mass for St. Anthony, a piece written when music was still pure and clear, more like a shallow mountain stream than today’s profound musical oceans. Frau Duft had heard it many times, and I knew she loved the Gloria.
I sang. Duft stared at his wife’s sleeping form. Amalia covered her face with her hands and finally let fall all the tears that had built up during these years of stoic visits. I sang more loudly. The lamp above my head began to ring. Duft’s body made no sound. Frau Duft, too, was unreceptive to my voice. But Amalia cried harder, her body opened to my voice, ringing faintly like the lamp above us—a sound she could not hear, but that I hoped she dearly felt like my warm arms around her neck.
She laid her head on the edge of her mother’s bed and sobbed.
Then, suddenly, Frau Duft’s eyelids fluttered. She looked at me, and as on the first day I had sung for her, I saw again the echo of my mother in those eyes.
She reached out a trembling, bony hand to touch her daughter’s sobbing head. Amalia started, sat up, and tried to stop her tears, but there were so many, and they had waited so long to fall. This time she could not hold them back. She took her mother’s hand and cried into it, clutching the bone and skin to her wet cheek. Frau Duft could not hold her; even her eyelids were too heavy.
I sang on. My voice was strong, strong enough to hold Amalia while she cried, strong enough to fight with death. I sang louder. My arms were weightless with their ringing; my feet seemed to lift off the floor, so that I was like a bell hanging from the sky. My voice rang not only in the lamp, but louder in Amalia now, and humming in the floorboards, in the ceiling, and in the windowpanes behind the bed.
The walls of that house took up my voice and resounded. Each of those million million tiny shells filled with my voice and passed it on in a chain of song, until the whole house was singing. And then my voice reached farther: into the earth below the house and out into the sky and soon I knew I was making the whole world shake, just as my mother had rung the world with her bells. The shaking was quiet—no one but I could hear it—but everyone in the Duft household could feel it as a warmth that made them smile.
I sang even more loudly, and my voice shook off all the dirt and grime that weighed us down. It shook away sadness and disease. It shook away fear and worry. It shook the meek into courage. The sick rose from their beds. My voice shook the desperation from their eyes. It shook the exhaustion from their bodies, the disease from their lungs. We had again what we had lost.
III.
Frau Duft did not die that day, but it was the last time she heard my voice. A week later, we sang the Trauermusik at her funeral.
I was never invited back into Haus Duft. My friendship with Amalia was over—or so it seemed to me in the weeks following the funeral. I did see her frequently, however, for now that her aunt’s influence in the household had increased, Amalia was taken to Mass nearly every day. When I sat among the other nonperforming choirboys near the high altar, I had no chance to approach the grating that split the nave in two; but on those occasions when I sang in the choir, after Mass I stole to the grating’s gate near the wall of the church. The gate was always locked and never used. I could hide myself if I pressed up against the stone pillar on which its hinges hung. Through the gate’s ornate metalwork I could glimpse her just behind her aunt, among the throng of worshippers passing out the door.
For several months I did no more than peer at her between two golden leaves, but then, one Sunday, I could not resist; I softly sang her name. She looked to her left, her right, behind her. Several other worshippers did as well—thank God her aunt was nearly deaf—and then she passed out the door. I did the same after the next Mass at which I sang, and once again after the next. That third time, I noted that she was walking slowly, waiting to hear her name, and when I whispered it, she turned to look straight at my eye peering through the gate.
The next time I sang, another two weeks later, I did not need to call. I heard Amalia tell her aunt that she wished to look at the plaster relief of St. Gallus, which adorned the wall just outside the gate. Karoline looked up at the statue as if she suspected it of foul play, but as her eyes rested on the face of the abbey’s patron saint, she nodded approvingly and passed out the door. Amalia stepped to the relief. If not for the densely woven metalwork of the gate, I could have reached out and touched her shoulder. She bowed her head. For a moment I doubted she knew that I was there.
Then her pious face broke into a grin. “You’ll get in trouble,” she said.
“So will you.”
“But I don’t care,” she s
aid proudly. “I’m not afraid of her.”
“I’m not afraid either,” I lied.
She grinned again, and then fought it down. She appeared to have resumed her prayer.
“I’ll come every Sunday,” she suddenly said aloud.
“Only when I sing. Next time is Pentecost.”
“I know when you sing. I can hear you.”
“Can you?”
“Yes. Even when twenty other voices sing.”
“How do you know it’s me?” I asked.
“Don’t be stupid. I know.” She looked toward my eye. She smiled warmly. “I’ve got to go.” She strode away into the flow of worshippers and out the northern door.
On Pentecost, just as she had promised, when I pressed my eye against the gate, nestled behind the pillar so no monk would see, there she was, telling her aunt she would once again pray before the saint. An approving nod from Karoline.
“I told you I would come,” she said.
We spoke for thirty seconds, and then she was gone. The same the next time I sang, and every Sunday after that for many months. We never spoke for long, for fear of being caught, and though I saw all of her there was to see, she saw no more of me than that single eye and scraps of my black choir robe.
“Such a witch,” Amalia spat at the back of her withdrawing aunt one Sunday. “Now she says I can’t walk to church.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“ ‘Girls of your age should not walk in the streets, even with an escort.’ Should I spend my life in the house or in a coach? With her? ‘I’ll make you into a lady,’ she says, ‘even if it kills me.’ I hope it does. If only each smudge of dirt on my dress would take an hour off her life. She’s just angry that she’s a spinster, but that doesn’t mean she can make me the lady she wishes she had been.” Her face was red with rage.
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