by Daniel Mills
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 Müller, 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.”
Müller is shaking. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“Ah, never mind. But I believe you have something that belongs to me?”
Müller 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 Müller. He is a school-boy 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.
Müller 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. Müller 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 head. 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.
Hans Müller is among them. He wears the gaslight about him like a cloak, but I am unnoticed. The town hall is shuttered, the square deserted save for shadows and blowing trash.
The day’s paper. My father’s name appears below the headline, some words just legible for the gleam of gas-lamps on the snow. ORPHANAGE-SCHOOL CONSPIRA
CY. EVIDENCE OF LIFE INSURANCE FRAUD. A LIST OF THOSE IMPLICATED.
Father’s voice. I hear him calling to me from across the square, find him lying in the muck behind a fruit-seller’s cart, his forehead gashed open.
“Those men,” he says. Dazed. Concussed. “The priest’s boys.”
I help him up. He mutters to himself as we stumble home.
“The same as before,” he says. “His hands on me. That spoon which took my eye. Those things they called me. Nothing changes in this world, but somehow, I am changed. This time—”
SEVENTEEN
The shadows are different, deeper for the moon which fills the parlor. Herr Ostermann’s house. His wife Anna is beside me, tea and saucer cupped in her trembling hands. The sun is down, the lamps unlit. We do not speak or stir.
Ostermann is on the stair. He storms into the room and halts halfway across the rug. He stands awkwardly, fidgeting with his hat. He stinks of sweat and hair-grease and will not meet my eye.
Anna speaks. “The trial. It is done?”
Ostermann nods. “Guilty.”
“And the sentence?”
“Three years.”
He collapses on the settee. He hooks his thumbs in his watch-chain, curses under his breath. A train’s whistle sounds, shattering the twilight.
“Tell us,” Anna says.
“Anna…”
“He deserves to know what happened.”
Ostermann looks down at the rug.
“Your father is a brave man,” he tells me. “Always you must remember that. Today he showed more courage than any man I have known. He faced his accusers. He testified on his behalf. But the judge was a fiend. He is Steinfeld’s man—you may depend on it—and so too the witnesses they called. Such lies they told! Leibenhauer. That crooked priest. What a nightmare we inhabit to have such men among us.”
Anna says: “But your witness, the insurance clerk—”
Ostermann shakes his head. “Dead.”
“Dead!”
“Suicide, they say. It happened last night. The devils!”
“Friedrich,” she says, gently.
He closes his eyes. “They have seen to everything.”
Again the whistle howls down the line. The windows hum, the engine drawing near.
EIGHTEEN
The trains are at the station. August, and the young men form columns in the square. They are dressed in gray with rifles at their shoulders, flowers bound in wreaths about their necks and the town's women surrounding to see them off.
Müller is a sergeant now. He barks an order and the men fix bayonets, present their guns to the officers as they ride past, resplendent in boots and cuirasses. Von Steinfeld leads the procession, his saber bared and upraised so the sunlight pours from it. Doctor Leibenhauer rides behind. His spectacles gleam, reflective, cutting circles where his eyes should be.
Von Steinfeld calls the officers to a halt. A figure in black appears among the women. Father Johannes. He steps from the crowd and the men incline their heads to hear his prayers for victory. The horses stamp, whinny. The prayer is done. Von Steinfeld nods to Müller, who shouts the men into motion while the women, watching, weep for pride or fear.
The horses first and the young men follow, marching as though asleep with the flowers raining down before them and their mothers screaming Fatherland. The men do not break step. Their faces betray nothing as they are led to the trains and the war and all to be buried in their sacks while their fathers count the profits.
Your father is a brave man. Always you must remember that.
I sprint back to the square, up the steps of the town hall. Father Johannes appears in the doorway, but I am taller than him now. I cast him down, leap over him as he falls.
Upstairs. I follow the winding flight to the clock-tower and draw the bolt to seal myself inside. The fire-bell hangs over me, suspended in its swinging frame. Through the clock I watch the troop trains loading, hear the ocean in the crowd’s roar.
I jump for the bell-pull. Catch hold of the rope and drag it down. The bell sounds. I rise as the counterweight drops, hurtling upward, then falling with the pull as the bell strikes again, deafening, and there are voices at the locked door now, fists beating against it.
The bell sounds again and again. Blood trickles from my ears and still the soldiers file into the waiting cars like horses to the slaughter and I lose my grip upon the rope. The first of the trains moves forward, gathering speed, soundless on its rails of grease while the whole of this darkening day crashes down with me, and all is silence, sleep.
NINETEEN
“Fourteen years. You say he slept throughout that time? Until his father adopted him—and his condition improved? How remarkable. His father must have been an ingenious man. Yes, quite ingenious, though I see he has since died in prison. A shame. No doubt it was the shock of it all which caused the patient's relapse. I trust you have recovered fully, Father? Good, good. Of course it’s all very sad, but you were right to entrust him to my care. You may be aware I possess some expertise in the area of hypnosis, which is known to produce miracles in cases such as this. For isn't obedience the innermost wish of all men? To serve a master? To be of use? You really mustn't worry, Father. He will soon be well. I shall find for him a purpose.”
Arena
The sun is behind him. His shadow lengthens, sweeps the bloodied earth.
He is broad-shouldered and tall, his bronze helm flecked with crimson and crowned by a lunging sea-serpent: Leviathan coiled at the bottom of the world.
His steps are slow and regular, unhurried though the crowd roars to urge him toward me. Their voices blur into echoes, a sound like rushing water.
The fountain to which the centurion sent us. My brother accompanied me, and we carried the clay jug between us. A holy man was there, a prophet dressed in the rags of a beggar, and he lifted his hands above his head, as though to compass the sun where it sat within the sky. The crowd swelled, thickened. The blind, the broken, the diseased: their wasted bodies pressed close, their dead hands lapping at us.
We were caught up. My brother, two years younger, clung to my arm as to drifting wreckage while the holy man blessed us with a voice like a slow-moving river: tranquil in aspect, inexorable in force. The square fell silent. Even the stones listened as he spoke of the passing of this age and of a kingdom still to come.
A judgment was coming, he said. The first would be last and the last would be first: the slave become master, the master made slave. He would break our chains. We would be free.
He said: “For I am not sent to bring peace, but a sword.”
The words cut. I felt myself un-tethered, falling inside myself. Beside me, my brother wept, though for sorrow or joy, I could not tell. The kingdom was near, quickening inside of us, and from the realization we took flight, running. We reached the house and burst inside, panting—and only then did we recall the reason for our errand and the vessel we had left behind us, unfilled.
Fifteen paces, ten. He stops. Holds the sword level with his hip, the blade turned slightly so the fluid runs from it, mingling with his own blood on the ground.
Already, he is wounded. His side is pierced and pulsing, half-concealed by the buckler he carries at his breast. Its once-ornate design has vanished, battered into obscurity by his previous opponents: two net-men, both dead.
The first lies on his back near the center of the arena, his trunk slashed open across the stomach. His innards show. The second man is nearby. He has also been gutted, the right arm hacked off at the shoulder. The sinews trail from it like water weeds.
All around us the crowd jeers and thumps their feet, a jagged rhythm. Women are chanting, but I cannot make out the words. My opponent raps his sword against his buckler. The blood flies loose in drops that catch the sun like red fires winking, going out.
He bows his head. The great helm dips toward me, as if in recognition, but he doesn’t speak, and now he is in motion.
Moving with the sun. Circling the
post to which I was chained, while my brother, kneeling, scrubbed my blood from the stones.
The centurion had made his judgment: we were to pay with our bodies for the jug we had lost. Its cost had been counted against our ration and the days had passed without food and with little water until I chanced to drop the master’s helm and was whipped for it.
The day was hellish, hot. My brother went without tunic and the post-shadow fell like the rod across his back. I tried to speak, but my throat was dry, and the brush moved rhythmically in his hand, back and forth over the stones, back and forth, a soothing sound.
The sun went out.
Sight returned, and pain.
Hours had passed. It was late afternoon, the sun high and riding. My brother lay before me, collapsed. His back was blistered, scored with dark lines, and he would not move for all I shouted, crying out to him, to anyone. I screamed my throat raw but none would come for us, not til evening, and later, in the night’s agony, I watched the moonlight creep across the floor. A new kingdom, the holy man had promised, and in the thirst of my grief, I panted after it.
In dreams the heavens dimmed and turned black, the color of cooked flesh. The clouds caught fire and rained down plumes of flame like bolts of cloth unfurling. The seas boiled, over-heaving the ocean's banks, and the centurion, drowning, cried to heaven. But all were guilty, all consigned, and the sword that was promised felled all before it like fields of wheat at harvest.
He crashes toward me. His sword raised, buckler swinging. I brace myself. I drop the net behind me and grasp the trident with both hands, thrusting it out before me.