“The abbot is a fool.”
“The abbot has been kind to me,” I said, with anger in my voice. “He has made me a novice. I shall one day be a monk.”
Ulrich opened his mouth to speak, but then he stopped. His face twitched as he considered what I had said.
“That is … fortunate … for you,” he said, but I heard in his hesitation that he was disguising what he truly thought. “You plan to stay here, then? Forever, in this city?”
“Where else do I have to go?”
I saw surprise on the blind man’s face, but he quickly stifled it. “The abbot is very generous,” he said. “This is a difficult world for those like you. The abbey can offer you much luxury.”
“I do not desire luxury. I merely wish to be left alone.”
“Good,” he said. He nodded. A trembling hand reached out and found my sleeve, but so lightly I could have pulled away. With his other hand he patted my arm, like an uncle might, one who was unused to children. “Moses,” he continued. “Let me offer you then the one thing the abbot cannot. Then you will have all that you desire. You will forever be content.”
“What could you offer me?”
“Sing,” he said very quietly.
I jerked my arm away and took several steps back.
“Please listen,” he said quietly, struggling to control his fervor. He shuffled toward me, trying to regain his hold. “Please sing here. Here in this house. At night, instead of wandering the streets. I will not tell you what to sing. I will not speak. I will only sit and listen.”
I opened the door.
“Please, Moses. Sing,” he whispered like a prayer.
I turned to look at him for what I hoped would be the last time. Then I said, “How can you ask that?”
“Moses!”
“You ruined me.”
“I … I … had no …” He could not finish.
“I will never sing again,” I said. “Not for you. Not for anyone.”
IX.
I was the city’s silent ghost, haunting the streets and houses, collecting every sound but my own, for I made no sounds. I was as content as I had been at any time since the exile of my friends. I had come to terms with my plight, accepted that God had not intended the gift of joy for those with my imperfection. I was just nineteen years old, but I had already given up on the world. And I would still be there today—an elderly, silent ghost—if an angel had not brought me back to life.
My resurrection came by surprise. One early morning, I slid along the abbey’s roof back toward my window, careful not to make a sound. I softly touched my foot to my windowsill and crouched, ready to drop onto my bed. I blocked the starlight from the room.
As I cast this shadow across my floor, I heard a sigh. It was so quiet that most would not have heard it, but to me it was as instructive as a portrait. I recognized the lungs that pushed the air, the throat that molded its intent.
I did not move. I could not have been more frightened if I’d heard a lion standing there.
“Moses,” she said. “Is that you?”
I did not answer. I crouched on my windowsill and tried to blend in with the night. She stepped across my room. She wore a black cuculla, just like mine. But her hood was down. In the darkness, I could see only the outlines of her face, the gleam of her golden hair.
I climbed down onto the bed, stepped down to the floor. The top of her head reached my chin.
“Moses?”
I listened to her breathe. Her exhalations were damp and warm.
“Won’t you speak to me?”
I heard her bite her lip.
“What a fool I am,” she said. “I am so ashamed.”
She turned to go. I listened to her shoes upon the floor. I heard the fabric rustle across her back.
“Wait,” I whispered, as softly as that tiny boy.
She turned. She waited. I did not speak. I tried to hear her heart. It was too faint to hear from across the room, but I was too frightened to take a step.
“Wait,” I said again. “Do not go.”
For several seconds we just stood there in the dark.
“Do you have a candle?” she finally asked. “A lamp?”
“No.”
“How do you see?”
“I do not need to see.”
“I want to see your face,” she said. “For five years I have seen nothing more than your eye and some fingers through that awful gate. You have grown so much taller.”
I closed my eyes and wished the world would freeze but leave me with her sounds.
“Do you not want to see me?” she asked.
“I saw you,” I replied. “Every time we spoke. And last year, too. In the church.”
I heard humiliation seize her breath. After several seconds she spoke. “If you were there, why did you not answer me?”
I did not answer now because I could not tell her the truth.
“I wanted to see you,” she said. “I want to see you now. It has been so long. I have always thought that you were my friend. My only friend. Have you forgotten me?”
“No,” I whispered. “I have not forgotten you at all.”
She moved lightly across the floor. I cowered in my hood, so she would not see my face, would not read my imperfection in its smooth curves. She was only inches away. I could hear her heart now, like a drum. Each beat shook some withered part of me alive. I suddenly noticed how small my attic room was, how my head almost brushed the slanting ceiling. If I had reached out my arms I could have touched both walls. My tunic was suddenly so tight I could not breathe.
“Can I see your face?” She reached up a hand and touched my hood. I took her hand in mine so she could not uncover me.
“Please do not,” I said. When I let go of her hand, she released the fabric, but her hand stayed near my face.
“I should not have come.”
Her breath had changed. It was even warmer now; her throat was tighter. She swallowed.
“Months ago I stole this robe from my father’s factory. I thought, I’ll disguise myself in it. I thought, I’ll go see Moses. I found this. Do you remember it?” The crackle of unfolding paper. I could see little in the darkness; it was some kind of drawing. “The X still marks your room.”
I recalled those two naïve children chatting in the hallway. How I wished we were there again!
“Moses,” she continued, “when I lie in bed and try to think of one happy thing in my life, I think of you. Once a week, every Thursday, Karoline visits her aunt in Bruggen. The house is so empty—I can do as I wish for once. I always think: but what is it that I wish to do? Twice, I’ve come as far as the church before turning back, this robe beneath my arm. Tonight I could not stop. I climbed that grating. I don’t think anyone saw me, but in any case I do not care. Moses, how could I not come?”
We stood like that for several seconds, her hand still raised before me, as though she meant to bless me. Then, with a ragged inhalation, as if she could not resist the urge, she reached forward and her finger touched my chin. It traced the line of my jaw. She laid her palm against my cheek, then moved her fingers across my lips, and I felt my warm breath reflected by her fingers.
“My God,” she whispered. “I am such a fool.”
Both our hearts were racing. I heard the moisture of her mouth as she swallowed again. Her hand reached behind my ear. Fingers ran through my hair, and then she was pulling my face toward hers, and I felt her lips touch mine. My lips did not respond to hers, but my ears heard every note of the kiss: the parting of her lips, their soft tug on mine, their release.
She stepped back in shame. But as she began to take another step—perhaps even to run away forever—my arms rose. One hand held her shoulder, the other her hip. I did not embrace her, or even draw her toward me, but simply held her, as if I held a fragile treasure in my hands.
She exhaled, and then breathed in and out again. Each heartbeat, almost identical to the last, was a new and beautiful sound to me, and I foun
d myself slowly moving closer, my arms snaking around her back to bring her sounds to me.
She sighed, and the gentle humming in her lungs sent a shiver of ecstasy up my back. I pulled her even closer. The softness of her breasts pressed against my chest, and below, her ribs touched mine. When she sighed again, the vibration passed from her body and into mine, and I felt her in my lungs. She pressed her cheek against my shoulder, her head under my jaw. Now each sweet exhalation was captured in my neck.
I could not stand it anymore. I began to sing a single note, softly at first, but I could barely resist using all the power of those lungs. It had been so long—more than three years since I had sung. The familiar tingle of the note spread outward from my neck, into my chest and jaw, until I was ringing once again. The song passed directly from my chest to hers. My voice was still a whisper, but I heard the resonance of it in her neck, in the muscles of her back, as if she were a bell I had gently tapped with a mallet of the softest felt.
I sang more loudly and held her more tightly. I lay a finger on each rib of her back, so I could feel my voice as it passed through her.
And then I heard a footstep in the hallway. I cut off my voice, as if a hand had grabbed my throat. Someone had heard me singing and was standing in the hall, just outside my room.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered.
“Someone’s there,” I said.
Whoever it was took two more steps toward my door, and waited. I held my finger to her lips.
After several seconds, the footsteps retreated down the hallway.
“Come with me.” I led her toward the window.
“Up there?”
“I will hold your hand.”
I climbed out, and then lifted her up so her feet were on the sill, and she could look down to the cloister. Her hand tightened around mine. It was a moonless night, so my face remained safely in shadow. The city was pure blackness beyond the white abbey. The fountain in the cloister babbled. The wind rustled like thin silk drawn over the roof. A pigeon hooted. A cart rolled down a distant street.
I helped her crawl to the peak, and then we stood, hands in hands, and I walked backward and she forward, her lame leg shuffling. We slid down the tower, past the abbot’s windows, and crept along the wall to descend into the city. Haus Duft was the one place I could surely find, for I had visited it almost every night this past year, though I had not entered it. I led her through the dark streets, guiding my way by the tone of my feet upon the cobbles, and the murmur of the wind. We did not even whisper—not, I think, because we feared being overheard but because both of us felt this was a dream, and any noise would startle us awake. She held my arm lightly until we reached Haus Duft, a black shadow in the night.
I stepped behind her, held her arms below her shoulders, and whispered in her ear. “At this spot,” I said. “In one week. I will be here.” With a gentle push, I led her to the house’s garden gate and then released her.
She turned around once more, but I was gone. I had vanished like a ghost.
X.
The night after Amalia’s visit, I stole away to Ulrich’s house. I used the key he had placed in my pocket. I did not knock. At first, from the utter lack of human sounds, I was sure the old man had died from his rotting flesh, but when I entered the room, the glowing coals in the stove illuminated the former choirmaster at the table. His empty eye sockets pointed down at his hands crossed before him. His festering skull was bare.
He did not react, but I was sure he heard me. He made no more sound than a corpse. I had brought a candle, and I lit it from the coals. Then I climbed the stairs. He did not move his head.
A layer of dust on the fourth step indicated the reach of Ulrich’s fastidious neatness. No one had climbed this far in a year or more. On the next floor, a long hallway was littered with chairs, rolled up rugs, broken picture frames, shattered vases, and a pile of tarnished silver, all of which blocked the four doors leading off the hallway. Upon closer inspection I found the chairs and rugs and frames were also soiled by many stains. Dirt? Blood? I gagged and quickly backed away from the revolting mess, following the dusty stairs to a final story, where they terminated on a landing with a door. I opened it.
This space below the roof was a single long room. The ceiling sloped down so that my head just grazed the beams as I stepped to the broad windows at the far end. Dust covered every surface.
An unlit stove stood by the door, and there was an old bed near the window littered with yellowed books and papers. In the center of the room stood a rectangular table, at which ten guests could have comfortably dined, had it not been caked with grime and covered with jars and other refuse. Studying it more closely, I found various knives and brushes strewn across the table, and saw that the glass jars were filled with paints—mostly open to the air and dried out, but some still sealed, and in these jars, the paints had settled into layers like specimens of sand. On the walls, unframed canvases covered every square inch of space. More paintings were stacked in the corners, likely a hundred of them in all, some as large as the portrait of Staudach hanging in the abbey’s library, some as small as the tiny icon of Mary that had always hung above Nicolai’s bed.
They were portraits. Each pictured only a single face, and I could tell immediately the same hand had painted them all. The lines were careless, yet as I waved my candle in front of the canvases, I immediately felt a familiarity with these pictures—more than most real faces had ever given me.
One woman’s face I found often repeated: here large, there in miniature, here in a ball gown, there, at the end of the room by the bed, in nothing but her pale skin. On this final canvas she sat in a chair, in a formal pose unsuited to nudity. I stared at her naked body. This woman—no, this picture of this woman—caught my breath. I heard her. Was it her voice or her breath or the gliding of one smooth thigh against the other? I heard all of those sounds in a rush of noise that passed through me like a gale.
I looked over my shoulder. Was she with me in the room?
But I was alone.
Soon the room seemed noisy. With each glimpse, each painting whispered to me. I removed many of them and turned them so they faced the wall, but I left three portraits of this enchanting woman’s face, and the one of her seated naked.
I threw the jars and brushes to the street below. The jars exploded in multicolored splats. Candlelight appeared in the houses across the street, and I heard one woman shriek, “My God! The ghost!” Shutters were latched and doors chained. I aimed the jars at the shutters themselves, leaving green and blue streaks on the houses across from Ulrich’s. One stray, red jar stained the fountain bloody. Soon I had cleared the room of all but the paintings, the long table, and the bed. I beat the mattress until the room was hazy with dust.
I had intended to ignore Ulrich, but back downstairs I noticed the anatomical perfection of his ears, so conspicuous amid the wreckage of his face. Suddenly, he raised his head. I found myself staring at his empty eyes.
“He was a tailor like his father,” Ulrich said. “He never told them he was painting their faces. Only his wife knew. But then she died.”
Dead? I thought, knowing instinctively that Ulrich spoke of the woman in the paintings. How can she be dead?
“She died in childbirth, and took the child with her to the grave. He did not cry at the funeral, I was told. They all thought him heartless.” Ulrich’s empty eyes twitched as he spoke. “After the funeral, he came home, here, alone, and he cut into a vein. He took one of his brushes and painted her picture with his blood. Not on a canvas, but here, in this room. On the walls, on the floor, on the windows.” Ulrich turned his face as if he could see the remains of the blood. “They found him on the floor covered in blood from head to foot, the paintbrush still in his hand. They said her ghost had made him do it—angry that he had not cried for her. No one would clean the blood.” I looked for traces of the painter’s blood on the floor and walls, but every inch of the room had been scrubbed immaculately. “They t
hink her ghost still lives here. When I asked after the house, his father’s agent begged me not to buy it. Said it should rather be burned. It cost me nearly nothing.”
Ulrich’s empty eyes pointed at my face. “I thought it would be no trouble. I had time to clean—all the time in the world. What I could not see could not disgust me. But there is so much blood. No matter how much I clean, I can still smell it rotting. I feel it lodged in the creases of my fingers.” He held out his dry, cracked hands toward my candle. They were as white as the patches on his face.
“Have you seen his pictures?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Was she beautiful?”
“Yes.”
Ulrich nodded slowly, deep in thought. “Do you know why he did it?”
“He loved her,” I said.
Ulrich gave an empty chuckle without smiling. “You are like the abbot,” he said. “He wanted us to love God, but instead he built a beautiful church for us to love. He let you sing, and we loved your song. Moses, we love what we see, what we hear, what we touch. A beautiful woman’s body in candlelight. The sound of your voice.
“But then those things are gone,” he continued, “and we are emptier than before. If that is love, then love is our curse. Love is like the blood that dripped from that painter’s vein, Moses. We lovers are all fools. Better we should all seek that thing we love and destroy it, before it is too late.”
XI.
From the broom closet on the second floor of the abbey, I stole all the tools I needed to dust, sweep, and mop that attic room until the specks of paint, which dotted the floorboards like scars of some incurable disease, shone like Staudach’s gold leafing. I stole sheets, feather beds, pillows, and tablecloths from the abbey. Soon that attic room was fit for lovers once again.
Twice I came in the night to find Ulrich on his knees, scrubbing at a stain he imagined on the spotless floor. I merely stepped over him. I did not interrupt his work.
A week later, the night of our rendezvous, was cold and rainy—October’s worst. I sneaked through the tunnel in the stables as soon as the city was quiet enough that I could slip from shadow to shadow unseen. I stole to Ulrich’s house and lit the coal in the stove. Then back into the wet night, where for two hours I circled Haus Duft, watching as the lights in the windows were gradually extinguished, until, when the abbey’s clock tolled midnight, Haus Duft was a solid black edifice on every side.
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