“I think you’re a lady already,” I said.
She clenched her teeth, but laughter burst through her nose. She stifled her embarrassment. “How would you know?”
I did not reply then, but I saw every week that what I said was true: she was becoming a lady. The gold of her hair darkened slightly. She’d grown taller. My head would no longer have reached her shoulder, for I was stunted. I had gained no more than an inch a year since Karl Victor had thrown me in the river. I had so little to tell her at our visits, and she so much. “She’s been trying for years to prod him gently,” she said one Sunday in Lent, “but yesterday she finally got so angry she spoke it straight: ‘It’s time, Willibald. It is time to find a wife.’ Father was shocked! As if he had discovered a thief with a hand in his safe. He looked across the table, to me and then to her. ‘A wife?’ he said. ‘A wife? No, Karoline. I will not remarry. Never.’ And when she admonished him, he shouted—he’s never shouted like that before—‘I shall never remarry! Never speak to me of it again.’ ”
Amalia told me how her father had grown only richer. “Your awful abbot even visited him in our house! I would have hidden in my room, but Karoline made me sit meekly by her side.”
And then, when the next Pentecost had come and gone: “I can’t stand it any longer, Moses. I hate that house. It’s such a prison. I’ve asked my father if we can travel. Somewhere, anywhere. I would even go with Karoline, but that witch refuses to consider it. ‘Soon you’ll be married,’ she says, ‘and then you can travel to your husband’s house.’ ”
In contrast, my life didn’t change at all, even as the world changed around me. In the choir, new boys arrived to replace those whose voices had matured. Feder belonged to these who left the choir soon after Frau Duft’s death. One day, while rehearsing a new duet, and as all the other boys watched in horror, Feder and I climbed together in complex runs, and time after time, Feder’s voice stumbled and could not follow mine.
“He’s doing it wrong,” Feder snapped at Ulrich, and every boy seated on the floor nodded with wide eyes, unwilling to accept the inevitable.
“Moses sings it perfectly.” Ulrich said reprovingly. “He always does.” He smiled at me, and I cringed, for I knew that this sort of praise only made the boys hate me more.
“This time he’s wrong,” Feder claimed.
“Then you sing it alone,” Ulrich offered. We all turned to watch Feder, redness creeping up his neck, as he began to sing. The boys clenched their fists and nodded bravely, as if cheering on a horse. He climbed, his nimble tongue slicing every note, and then again, he stumbled; he could not reach the note. He forced his voice, and every boy recoiled as his voice cracked to a screech. There was silence. Feder turned to me and raised a finger, and though I cowered, he could not find a fitting insult. He stalked out of the room.
He stayed with us for several days, singing quietly at the back, glaring at me every second. On the day of Feder’s final practice, Ulrich asked me to lead the boys in scales, which were natural and distinct to me as colors are to a painter. For two minutes, the choirmaster listened as I sang and the other boys repeated after me in unison. Feder did not sing. “Continue until I return,” Ulrich said and left the room.
As usual, the hierarchy of talent crumbled the moment he was gone. For two or three scales, the boys continued to mimic my notes, but less enthusiastically, and then they began to mill about, until finally I sang alone.
My voice faltered, and I stood silent before them like a king deposed. They did not look at me, but I felt how they despised me. As the boys crowded around Feder, I was reminded that my voice, in all its perfection, meant nothing in the wider world, a world to which the high-born Feder would soon be returning, and into which someday I, too, would be thrust, helpless and inadequate.
Then Feder turned his back to me and withdrew something from beneath his shirt, conspicuously hiding it from my view. The boys crowded closer, instantly hushed by what he held. One or two looked nervously at the door, through which Ulrich would soon return, but most could not divert their eyes from Feder’s mysterious treasure. I did not dare approach the group, though of course I was burning with curiosity. I was sure what he held was proof against me.
After several minutes, during which the boys jostled like hogs at a trough, Feder turned toward me. He pressed a small piece of paper to his chest.
“Would you like to see, Moses?” he asked, and beneath his kindness, like a tympano’s faint rolling thunder, I heard a threat. But as he stepped forward, I hoped maybe here was a final act of peace. I met him halfway. He smiled and held out the paper to me.
It was a pencil sketch, greasy along the edges from being passed through so many young hands. It showed a woman lying naked on a bed, her legs wide open, a dark cave where they met. Her eyes were impossibly large. They gaped longingly at a man standing above her, from whose midriff extended a giant, bulging penis. Testicles hung beside it, like melons in a sack.
The flush crept up my neck and burned in my cheeks. The boys cackled at the shock on my face. They leaned on one another to keep from falling over as they laughed. Of course, I had heard them discussing such a scene before, but had never pictured it this clearly in my mind. Feder held the picture in front of me for what seemed like hours, but I could not take my eyes from the man, from his organ, from the black hole between the woman’s legs. Finally I pulled my eyes away and to the floor.
“Don’t you want to look at it some more?” Feder whispered cruelly.
I did. Of course I did, but I knew I could not let them see my eagerness.
“Have you never seen a naked woman before? Do you even know what that is?” Feder said very slowly, as if speaking to an idiot. He pointed between the woman’s legs, and the boys behind him erupted in nervous laughter.
I forced myself to look again at the ground. I felt their stares on me like prodding sticks. “Or maybe,” he said, and turned to speak with the boys now, “she does not interest him at all. Perhaps it is the man you prefer.”
There was no laughter now, just silence.
When I blinked, the slosh of tears seemed so loud I was sure every boy could hear my shame.
“I’m leaving today,” Feder finally said, softly enough it seemed he was speaking only to me now. “I am very happy that I will never have to share a choir with someone like you again. I had hoped, however, to be able to stay a little longer—until you finally left. I would have liked to see this abbey just once again how it used to be. Without you. Without those two filthy monks who are your only friends.”
I knew that Nicolai and Remus’s secret had long since seeped throughout the abbey. The boys had whispered about them, but this was the first time anyone had spoken of it aloud. My shame over this picture and my love for my friends erupted into anger. I snatched the picture out of Feder’s hand and tore it in half. I tore it again as he knocked me down, but then I lost the scraps as he kicked me.
The silence was broken. The boys crowded around us, and I could hear the hatred in their voices as they cheered for Feder to “kick the dog.” He unleashed the best he had. Blood flowed from my mouth until I was sure I would never breathe again. And all along, as his fury swelled beyond any reason, still I heard them jeering, “Kick him, Feder! It’s time he understands! Pay him back!”
For what? I tried to cry. Pay you back for what?
The next day he was gone. I remained in the abbey, the oldest, most talented, and least respected choirboy. My life, it seemed to me then, would never change.
IV.
A year after the death of Frau Duft, I began to grow.
It was as if all of that Nebelmatt plunder, all those St. Gall lamb shanks, all that bacon, all that mutton, all that cheese, those almonds, that milk, cider, and wine, had all merely been stored away in my little body, and then, all of a sudden, I discovered all that hidden fuel and used it finally to burst my shell.
It began as a dull pain in my hands and feet during choir practice one day. The a
che remained for several weeks, then one morning I awoke to discover it had spread to my knees, my hips, and elbows, and then to all my joints. It hurt so much I could not sleep. The pain spread to my eye sockets, and I imagined my skull would split. In six months my hands and feet had doubled in size; in a year I had grown a head taller.
In the abbey, my growth was viewed with concern, like the gathering of dark clouds. “Hard times to come,” Nicolai told me one night in his cell. He told me how my voice would soon crack, and I would no longer be a soprano.
“There is no telling what will happen,” he said. “You will probably be a tenor, but maybe a bass.” He hoped Ulrich’s favor would be enough to find a way for me to stay in the abbey. Staudach, Nicolai said, might not agree to make me a novice, with no wealthy parent to be my benefactor, but he might let me polish silver until my voice developed its final character. “Then,” Nicolai said, “we can find the best place for you to begin your career.” He nodded knowingly. “Venice, most likely.”
“My career?” I asked.
“You do want to be a musician, do you not?”
I considered this. “Like Bugatti?”
“Well,” said Nicolai, as he glanced over at Remus, deep in his book, “in a way. Maybe Staudach would let me out to take you on tour. We could sing in all the greatest cathedrals of Europe.” Nicolai waved an arm as if those great buildings were lined up on his wall.
I told him I would like that.
“Of course,” he said, “the next time I leave these walls, I doubt Stuckduck will let me back in. But then we could start our own monastery—you, me, and Remus.” At this, Remus looked up from his book. He snorted, then returned to his pages. Nicolai ignored him. “One thing is sure: if you’re allowed to tour the world and become rich and famous, you are not leaving me behind!”
I smiled.
He lay back on his bed and closed his eyes contentedly. “Now we just have to wait for your voice. Be patient.”
Many nights I stood naked before the narrow mirror in my attic room and examined the body that seemed every night to have changed. I have made you a musico, Rapucci had said, and now there was no doubt. There were Bugatti’s long, delicate fingers, his broad, rounded chest, almost like a bird’s. My head brushed the slanted ceiling. Bugatti had seemed so tall to me years before, but now I was taller still, taller than all the monks save Nicolai. The novices my age had dark hairs above their lips, I had none. They had Adam’s apples jutting from their necks; mine was as smooth as a woman’s. My skin was white and pure, with dabs of red on my cheeks, but not a single imperfection, none of the pimples like the other boys. My lips were slightly plump, not unlike a woman’s, but no one would ever have mistaken this face for a woman’s face. Those eyes were so piercing they made me start each time I glimpsed them in the mirror. But still I looked every night, for I saw in the glass not a man, not a woman, but an angel.
I outgrew that church. I destroyed the choir, because even when I sang at low volume my voice made the other boys’ seem narrow and cold. In our brief encounters at the gate, where Amalia still bowed her head and seemed to be in prayer to any who might see her, I longed to hear her praise my singing. “Oh, Moses,” she said one Sunday, “my heart flutters when you sing. To think my mother and I used to have you to ourselves.” I peered through a higher gap now, looking down upon her beauty. Occasionally, she glanced up, and I saw her trying to discern my shape through the tangles of golden leaves, but she never saw my angelic form. “Touch my hand,” she said one day, impetuously, abandoning her pious bow for a moment to reach out to touch the gate. I passed two long, slender fingers through a hole and caressed the soft skin of her hand for an instant. Her cheeks burned as she hurried back to meet her aunt.
Everyone wanted to hear me sing. Even Protestants from the city came to hear our Mass. Eventually, the huge church was too small to sustain the crowds. Staudach portioned the entrance so that the wealthier worshippers, whose favor he required, would be sure of securing pews. The others jostled to stand at the back. The crowd whispered and slept and ate while Staudach preached of God’s perfection, but they were silent while I sang.
Then, in a single night, all of this, and much more, did change.
We were in Nicolai’s room. Remus was reading gloomily, and Nicolai was regaling me with visions of our future: we would travel Europe together as singer and agent. He had somehow conspired to escape the refectory that night with three pitchers of abbey wine, and having already drunk two of them, he was bleary eyed, and in the best of moods. Now his plan for me had morphed: A palace in Venice would be our home, and from there we would travel to the greatest of Europe’s stages. We would take Remus along to carry our bags, he explained, laughing and roaring so loudly I was sure every monk in the passage could hear.
Nicolai had decided that since my voice was so amazingly slow in changing, I would certainly become a tenor. “Tenors are the worst,” he said. “They dress like princes, strut around as if their every movement should make ladies swoon, which of course is the case. Everywhere they go they leave a trail of unconscious women in their wake. You cannot invite them to your dinner parties, because you’d have a pile of guests upon the floor.” Suddenly he looked very concerned. “You won’t be like that, will you, Moses?”
I shook my head.
“No?” he cried, after downing another goblet of wine. “And why not? What is wrong with making a few women faint? That is what they want. Every woman wants to faint from love at least once in her life. Men want that, too, of course, but their size makes it harder for them to swoon. I’ve only swooned once before out of love.”
“Not for real,” Remus said, looking up. “At the Teatro Ducale you were faking.”
“I was not.”
I glimpsed a suppressed grin on Remus’s face. “If you ever really faint,” he said, “the world will know. Floors are not built to withstand such stress.”
Nicolai shrugged. “He’s right. I am not permitted to faint. What I would not give to be a slender lady! Then I could collapse whenever the spirit took me! I would do it all the time.” He stood up and gave his best impression of daintiness, his giant hands before his chest like a rabbit’s paws. “I would tune my ears and eyes so sharply to beauty in all its forms that I would totter on the edge. All I would need would be a glimpse to make my heart flutter, and I would fall.” He looked at me, pretended to fall in love, put a hand to his forehead, and then swooned, carefully, gently, onto the bed. Even so, the bed frame whined. I clapped at his performance. Remus grunted.
“As it is,” Nicolai said, reclining on the mattress and staring at the ceiling, “with this frame I need to dull my ears and cloud my eyes so I do not run risks for myself and for mankind. This body is a responsibility.” He rubbed his vast gut with two giant hands.
Remus shook his head.
“Don’t worry, Moses,” Nicolai said, giving his belly a last, loving pat. “Remus worships this form one way or another.”
Remus looked up angrily from his book, no grin on his face now. “You need to watch your tongue. That wine is making it loose.”
“Oh, dear Remus, we don’t have secrets here. Not with Moses. He keeps nothing from us. We keep nothing from him.”
“Some things are better left unspoken.”
Nicolai nodded up at the ceiling. “You are right, Remus. Some loves cannot be spoken of.”
Remus frowned. “Thank you.” He shrugged abashedly at me as if to pardon the affront.
“Sometimes only song can do.” Nicolai sat up. I smiled. Remus looked pained. We both heard the energy in his voice—the gathering of a storm.
“No, Nicolai. Not now.”
“Moses?”
“Yes?” I sat up and placed my hands on my knees, an eager audience.
He poured another goblet of wine and drank it down like water, and then stood in the middle of the room. He swayed from side to side. His eyes were unfocused, but so bright and joyful. “It is time to sing!”
&n
bsp; Remus closed his book. “Nicolai, it is too late,” he said. He stood. “Moses and I will go.”
“It is never too late to sing of love.”
“Tonight it is.” Remus pointed his book at Nicolai. “Don’t give them another reason to hate you, Nicolai.”
“Hate me? How could anyone hate me for my love?”
“We will talk about it in the morning.”
“When I am not so drunk on love?”
“Among other liquids.” Remus nodded at me and beckoned toward the door.
“No!” cried Nicolai, as if I were about to betray him. He raised a finger to keep me in my chair, swaying gently behind it. “A sincere lover never backs down from a declaration of his love. Now I must sing, or else the gods will not believe in my love.”
“Please,” Remus said earnestly. “Not tonight.”
Nicolai looked at me. “Do you see the problem? If I sing they hate me; if I do not, I hate myself.” He shrugged. “It is not a difficult choice.”
He returned to his wine, poured yet another goblet, took a gulp, and stepped onto his improvised stage. Remus pulled my sleeve. I leaned as if I would get up to leave with him, but I did not. I could not.
Nicolai began extremely quietly: O cessate di piagarmi, o lasciatemi morir, o lasciatemi morir! He turned toward me and whispered: “ ‘O release me from this anguish, o let me die, o let me die!’ Don’t you see, Moses? I’m tortured by love!”
Luc’ ingrate, dispietate. He swayed wildly, his arms like branches in the wind. He sang more loudly now, loud enough that other monks must have heard him through the walls. Più del gelo e più dei marmi fredde e sordi ai miei martir, fredde e sorde ai miei martir. Nicolai put his hands over his eyes as though he wished to tear them out.
The Bells Page 14