ONE
Her hair falls over me, black and thick like veils against the brightness of the house. Windows open, the curtains half-drawn. A smell of oil and smoke, drone of old words spoken over me in my fever. Her chest rises, falls, and so do I, til a voice breaks on our darkness and the breast is withdrawn, the veil parted. A hand traces shapes upon my forehead. Her breathing hums in the walls of her chest, a soothing sound but falling away as I am lifted, lowered. The cold—
TWO
The light. A man’s face haloed by it. He wears gold-rimmed spectacles, sports a gray-black moustache. I close my eyes. He taps at my knees, draws the needle-tip down my feet. He inclines his ear to my chest and listens.
“Good,” he says, and his finger is in my eye. He hooks the lid with his nail and lifts to expose the white. His other hand holds a reflecting glass, which he angles to the window, directing the sun into my brain. The light pierces, searing. The nerves spark and fire and the doctor chuckles.
“You see?” he says. “You hear how the little lad screams? All will soon be well.”
THREE
“And all manner of things be well.”
These words they sing and with their faces to the pulpit while Mother holds me on her knee, dressed in her frock and white ribbon and my uncle beside her in his Sunday best.
The song is finished. The priest cries to the echoes that linger and speaks with thunder of Christ’s humility. He says: “All Jerusalem came to greet Him. The people wished to make of Him a king but Christ rode upon an ass and washed the feet of his disciples. Is there any among us who would refuse the crown? No. For his humility was a thing of heaven rather than of earth and greater still was his obedience. We mustn’t forget how he allowed himself to be led without protest to the hill of his crucifixion. He went willingly, lovingly, meekly as a lamb.”
My uncle is a killer of horses. He prays, his head in his hands. Beside him Mother watches the sun swing behind the west windows, sweeping color through the glass.
FOUR
To turn the country into light.
The town is below us, the square with its shops and houses and the medieval wall encircling. The railway station with its tracks running to north and west through farm-fields gold with wheat at harvest and all glimpsed through the face of the city clock.
We are in the clock-tower, the great bells hanging over us: one to mark the hour, another to summon the fire brigade. The latter is rung with a rope and counterweight. The bell-pull forms coils all around us where Mother kneels beside me, breathless.
“You cannot know,” she says, gasping. “How I have prayed for this.”
She holds me, presses me to her chest. “Doctor Leibenhauer said it was hopeless. Even Father Johannes despaired, but I know you, Child. You are like me. The world is before you in its glory. Of course you would wish to see.”
Her eyes are open: I see myself in them, but briefly. Then the clock advances and the counterweight descends—
FIVE
The blow shakes the darks of sleep, sets points of light behind my eyes like stars exploding. My uncle looms over me with bloodied hands and there’s fluid in my mouth as at my birthing—and teeth. I swallow them, choking, and cough with the pain that rakes my throat.
“Well, well,” my uncle says, snarling. “You’re awake now, aren’t you?”
He pulls me up by my shirt-collar, strikes me again with a closed fist. I tumble backward, bruising my head so the stars brighten and nova.
My uncle leans over me. He says my name. There is red spittle on his cheeks and brow and I can see that he is frightened.
He holds her portrait in his hands. It is edged in black, the glass smeared with finger-marks: mine, his. Her hair spreads blackly on the coffin-pillow, and her eyes are closed, hands folded together, a white ribbon cinched about her wrists.
SIX
It twitches in my hands: a length of rope and the old mare beside me limping. We cross the yard together, stepping over wheel-tracks frozen into ridges and hoof-prints dusted white with frost. The horse’s head bobs, eyes downcast. Her shoes strike stone, resound.
My uncle stands with the mare’s owner, a rich man in silks and fur with a top hat and jeweled watch-chain. He is a landowner and nobleman, an officer in the army. He speaks of war and horses but my uncle is only half-listening, the pipe in his mouth, gun broken over his elbow.
My uncle finishes the pipe as we approach. He inverts the bowl, strikes it with his hand’s heel. The ashes blow to dust to catch the blowing wind, and the nobleman is quiet, thoughtful.
He asks: “This boy is your nephew?”
My uncle grunts. The pipe disappears into his pocket.
The other man dons an eyeglass. He studies me with interest. “You will know, of course, his condition is a subject of much speculation in town. My dear friend Doctor Leibenhauer has examined your nephew on many occasions. Could it be the boy is sleepwalking even now?”
My uncle does not answer. He touches his hand to the mare’s head, strokes her ears and mane. “Poor old girl,” he whispers. “One thing to be done for you.”
SEVEN
“All she did for you. For me. She was a saint if such things can be and like a saint she suffered. Her heart was weak and she was always strange, always to talking to herself or to God. She was twenty when she went to Ulm. We had a cousin there she stayed with, and she worked in a milliner’s shop. That’s how she met him. He was a writer of some kind. He took—liberties. She yielded herself, knowing no better, and was pregnant before I learned what had happened. I went to Ulm. I chased him off, her fiancé. I brought her back here, but it was no use. She wouldn’t eat. She was so frail I thought she was sure to die in her laboring through all the long hours that passed before she spit you out sleeping in the sack. She didn’t, though, and you wouldn’t wake for all she tried, til that morning she sneaked you up the clock-tower. She should never have done it: her heart couldn’t stand the strain and she was breathless and wheezing when I found her up there. ‘He looked at me,’ she said. ‘He smiled.’ It was all she longed for in this world and maybe there was more than that too but Lord forgive me I wasn’t listening. I was too scared. I could see she was dying. She couldn’t move for the pain in her chest and her breath wouldn’t come right. I tried to carry her down the steps, but she wouldn’t let you go, and you howled and kicked against her in your sleep while the bells went on and on—”
EIGHT
The rain sheets down, relentless. It pools beneath my uncle’s body where he lies face-down, unmoving. It mingles with his blood, rippling with the wind.
The stallion circles the courtyard, screaming for his shattered leg. His eyes bulge. The reins trail behind him and his prints are dark and red.
A man is shouting at me. The horse’s owner, a tenant farmer. He shelters behind the courtyard gate while the lamed horse stamps and shrieks.
“The gun!” he says, gesticulating wildly.
The shotgun is trapped beneath my uncle’s body, but I do not move to pick it up. Already the horse is tiring. His strength wanes, his pace. He falls. The breath heaves and is gone.
The farmer unlatches the gate. He sprints toward me and kneels before my uncle. Takes hold of the coat, rolls over the body.
The eyes open, staring. Rain strikes them, sets them quivering in their sockets. Lightning silvers the courtyard, but the thunder is far-off yet, too distant to be heard.
NINE
In the silence we are made to stand, sixty boys at two long troughs and Father Johannes at the lectern. He clears his throat. He reads to us from Proverbs though we are starved and sickening and the food-troughs are before us, steaming. One boy collapses, weak with fever. He is pulled to his feet and the reading is finished, the Grace spoken.
“And now I must entreat you to remain standing,” Johannes says. “Tonight Freiherr Von Steinfeld has de
igned to join us at our table. He is among the most generous of your benefactors, my boys. Let us make him welcome.”
The doors swing open to admit a man in jewels and fur: the nobleman who once brought a mare to my uncle. He smiles broadly, beneficently. He circles the room unspeaking, inspects our clothes and teeth. He pauses before the trough. He inclines his head over it, sniffing.
Charred potatoes. Stewed cabbage in shreds. He samples both, grinning wide to suck the grease from his gloves. The taste is in our mouths, the smell.
TEN
Sweetness of rot and mud: a grave opened by lantern-light, Old Heinz’s teeth green and shining. My limbs are weak for hours spent shoveling and my hands are clamped about the dead boy’s ankles. Heinz secures the armpits. Sackcloth conceals the corpse’s face, but the feet protrude, colorless, and we descend into the pit.
Father Johannes is here. He stands over us, Doctor Leibenhauer beside him. Their shadows join together, stretching to cover the open grave with its dozens of sacks under our feet like a world laid to rest in its afterbirth. We squelch, sink.
Leibenhauer says: “He is a strange one, isn’t he? His mother too. You’re a better man than I am, Father, to have taken him.”
“His condition has proved useful to us. That is all.”
“And he will remember nothing of this?”
“He is asleep. He has no life but dreaming.”
“Remarkable. And is the Freiherr aware of the boy’s involvement?”
“My dear man,” the priest says, “the idea was Steinfeld’s own.”
We lay the body down. Heinz grunts, and we climb to the lantern’s light.
ELEVEN
Then falling, not falling. The pavement strikes my knees, hard. My head snaps back, and a blond-haired boy stands over me grinning. Two others hold my arms while a third boy, younger than the others, opens my coat and fishes the parcel from inside. He hands it to the blond boy, who steps back toward the gate of a fine house. Summer’s stillness. Moonlight streams through gaps in the iron pailing and only the shadows move.
The boy rips open the parcel, whistles.
“Our luck is in, boys,” he says. “There must be fifty marks in here.”
A man’s voice: “Nearer five hundred, in fact.”
He appears at the gate behind the blond boy. He wears a silk evening jacket and smells of women’s perfume. Von Steinfeld.
“Freiherr!” the blond boy says, frightened.
“Hans Gruber, is it? Yes, I thought I recognized you. What would your dear departed mother have to say of such behavior?”
The boy looks down, says nothing.
Von Steinfeld continues: “And to think she had such hopes for your prospects. She used to speak of you, little Hans, when I had her crushed up against a wall or bent down in front of me. But I see you have not inherited her obliging nature. Indeed, you have not even apologized.”
Gruber is shaking. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“Ah, never mind. But I believe you have something that belongs to me?”
Gruber relinquishes the parcel, takes off running. The other boys scatter and Von Steinfeld slips the money into his jacket.
He takes my hand, pulls me to my feet. He watches me closely, glass affixed.
Behind him the moonlight breaches the iron pailing. It clothes him with its chill, a blaze of silver, and my eyes fall shut.
TWELVE
He opens them. Jams in his thumbs, forces up the lids. Hans Gruber. He is a schoolboy now, a favorite of Father Johannes. He wears the orphanage school’s uniform with rows of badges down the front and has taken to carrying a knife.
He produces the blade, holds it at my throat.
“You are awake,” he says. “I knew it.”
We are in the outhouse, the floor carpeted in yellowed newspapers, stained brown with filth and the light itself is muddy where it streams through gaps in the roof.
A boy of six or seven lies nearby, sobbing.
Gruber spits behind him. “Shut up, will you?”
The boy sniffles. His front teeth are in a pool in front of him, broken from the jaw. They glisten, faintly. Gruber returns his attention to me. His breath is hot and rapid.
“Listen to me,” he says. “You don’t want to tell anyone what you’ve seen here, understand? Or I might just have to tell the Freiherr you’ve been pretending all this time. What will happen then, you think? I reckon there’s plenty of room for you in that pit, don’t you?”
He sheathes the knife, pushes me away. I strike the door, plunge backward through it. My teeth snap shut, and there is blood on my lips.
THIRTEEN
“How she kissed my wounds. Her brother had taken my eye and would have taken more if she hadn’t clung to me so tightly. She pleaded with him for my life, which he granted me, just as she begged me, afterward, to let her go—and I did—though no word of hers could have served to persuade me had I known. But, then, I had no means of reaching her. She never wrote to me. My own letters were written and went unsent, accumulating for years til one night I burned them all. Until last year when Ostermann offered me a position at the paper. I knew this was where she had lived and hoped, somehow, that I might see her again. I went to the town hall first, and it was the clerk there who told me she had died. He pointed me to your uncle’s house, abandoned these four years, but the neighbors told me there had been a child, a boy—”
A pillow under my head.
Light flickers on the ceiling and there’s a man in a chair beside me. He is tall and thin, his complexion dark. He falls silent, stands to see me stir. The candle is in his hand, shining on his face. His left eye is sightless, slitted, sealed with scarring, and his nose is bent where it’s been broken, but his voice, when he speaks, is gentle, low.
“Please,” he says. “Easy,” he says. “You are safe here.”
The candle held higher.
“You are so much like her,” he says, wonderingly.
The light wavers at his breath. The clock-tower is nearby. The bells strike once, twice.
FOURTEEN
Startlingly close.
I wake with the peal to a room framed in rods and wire. Father sits opposite me. His eye fires with the gaslight inside it.
“Good,” he says. “Very good.”
In his hands he holds a slate on which some letters are inscribed. He points to these each in turn. The air murmurs in my throat, my voice, I hear myself speak the names of the letters to which he points. He nods, erases the slate. The dark closes round, a drawn shutter, and again the bells are ringing in my ears, deafening.
“Yes,” Father says. “That’s it. Come back to me.”
Hands to my face.
My head is enclosed in a steel framework. Fishing line has been drawn between each joint and pulled taut as to vibrate with every movement of my head. The line is knotted in multiple places and secured with hooks to a pair of bells which nestle in my ears. Each bell is hand-cast, perfectly fitted to the cavity in which it sits.
My head drops. The lines twitch to set the bells ringing and I am awake. My father smiles, encouraging. These words he has written on the slate:
“In the beginning.”
The months pass and I can read, write. The words are in my head, the shape of them written. The letters join one with another like light with the dark or a rope to be climbed, hand over hand, til my weight exceeds the counter and the bells sound in my ears, even as my pencil moves to catch the scattered words, to capture sound and shape before it’s gone.
“God created the heavens and the earth.”
I sleep through the day, rising when the dusk falls and Father returns from the paper. We sup on rolls and black coffee. Afterward he teaches me Hebrew, Russian. We read from Nietzsche and Freud and talk over my lessons til the sky turns gray and Father un-straps the frame from my hea
d. I sleep, awaken, sleep, and today, I am fourteen. For my birthday Father presents me with a gift, a journal.
“You must write in it,” he says. “Tell me of yourself. All that you remember.”
FIFTEEN
The sack of birth, its softness. My mother’s hair spread over me. Her warmth. Her voice. Her eyes closed in the portrait I remember, at peace where she lay within the coffin.
My uncle. The pipe-smoke on his breath. Hymns he sang, horses he shot: their screaming. His body with its broken skull, eyes quivering with the rain which dropped in them.
A boy like me. Half-dead from starvation and the priest murmuring over him. Johannes leans forward over the bed, places his hand upon the lad’s brow. Other boys like him, dozens. Their prayers in the dark and dying as Leibenhauer passes by. Graves opened in the night. The stench of bodies heaped half-rotting in the mud.
Father Johannes: “The idea was Steinfeld’s own.”
Von Steinfeld in his silks and top hat.“Nearer five hundred.”
Father exhales.
The journal is in his hands, the whole of my sleeping life made to waken in its words. He sits at the window, reading, while the clock-tower looms over us to darken the room and no sound but the turning pages, the softness of his sobbing.
The night is past: the day is near.
Father rises from the chair. He looks at me, looks through me. He shakes his head but does not speak then dons his hat and coat and slips away.
SIXTEEN
He does not return. Night falls. Spring snow turns to slush in the street and I am alone at the window with the clock-tower striking eight.
Downstairs.
The door gives onto an empty boulevard where the snow lies heavy on the lamps and telephone wires. I slip down an alley toward the town hall, reaching the square just as a group of young men in school uniforms depart from it, laughing.
THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI Page 29