The Bells (14 page)

I backed away from him. I felt like an animal cornered, as if I could already feel the jaws around my neck.

Nicolai pounced. His huge body pressed me up against the wall. He stank of wine.

“No!” I yelled. I shook my head furiously.

“I am sorry, Moses,” he said. “I need to know for sure.” He pulled up my shirt.

I tried to push him away, but he was too strong. I felt his hands at my underclothes, and as I squirmed in his grasp, he tore them away, and suddenly I was standing there exposed. Neither monk moved for a long moment; then Nicolai released me. He held out a shaking hand, as if begging me to pardon the assault. His breath was ragged. He clenched and blinked his bloodshot, bleary eyes as though fighting for his fogged, drunken vision to obey him.

Remus stood behind Nicolai. He put his hand on the taller man’s shoulder. “Nicolai,” he said. “You must—”

Nicolai batted the hand away. He took several slow breaths. Then he looked deep into my eyes. Though I knew the anger there was not for me, I found it terrifying. “Who did it?” he whispered.

“No, Nicolai,” Remus said, as calmly as he could.

“Moses, you must tell me. Tell me now.”

Remus grasped Nicolai’s arm with both his hands. In all our time together, I had never seen him hold Nicolai like that. “Please, Nicolai,” he said. He shook the arm. “Nicolai! Please!”

Nicolai suddenly grabbed me by the shoulders. “Ulrich? Was it Ulrich?”

“Nicolai, don’t,” Remus pleaded. “Not now. Tomorrow. Do nothing rash.”

Nicolai shook me as if I were weightless. “Tell me, Moses!” he roared.

Remus’s eyes were wet. “Please, Moses,” he said. “Do not answer him.”

“I vowed to protect him,” Nicolai shouted at Remus.

“It is too late,” Remus said to me.

“Tell me,” Nicolai said. In his eyes was a rage I had never known could exist in this kind man.

I looked from Remus’s pleading face back to Nicolai.
Please
, their eyes said.
Please
.

“Ulrich,” I said.

Nicolai nodded as he backed away. Remus clutched his sleeve and begged him to stop. Nicolai turned and, with a single, effortless shove, pushed his friend to the floor. Nicolai opened the door, stumbled slightly against the doorframe, and then was gone.

We rushed after him, but though he had drunk so much, he ran quickly through the darkness. He stumbled and fell down the top half-flight of stairs, but was soon on his feet again. His steps echoed through the abbey’s halls, and by the time we passed the first floor, other monks were peering out their doors.

“It is nothing,” Remus said, waving them back, but that merely convinced them to follow. There was a pounding from the ground floor. We arrived to see Nicolai rushing at Ulrich’s door. He bounced off it with a crash, took three steps back—a deep breath—and roared as he ran for it again. He smashed it with his shoulder, tearing it off its hinges. Nicolai stomped into the room, which was lit by a single candle.

Ulrich was expecting this. He had been waiting for five years, and he was already trying to flee. The old man was at his window, gingerly mounting the sill so he could jump down into the dark cloister. But Nicolai was already there, and instead of pulling the choirmaster back into the room, he grabbed him—one hand on his tunic and one seizing the sparse hair on the back of his head—and heaved him through the open window.

Ulrich screamed as he flew. It was an empty, soulless scream. He hit the ground, and I heard ribs cracking, like the splintering of a violin. He wheezed as he gasped for air.

Giant Nicolai followed him through the window. He toppled off the sill as he reached with one foot for the ground, but he was soon on his feet again. He stumbled above the broken man and began to kick him. Ulrich tried to crawl away, but Nicolai’s first kick broke his left arm. He fell forward. His face pressed into the grass. He groaned with each blow.

There were monks staring down from every window. Blood seeped from Ulrich’s mouth. He spat as he tried to breathe.

I watched from Ulrich’s window. I did not avert my eyes. The kicks and screams did not give me any joy—shame was rising up from deep within me, shame that had simmered unseen since Rapucci told me what he had done to me. Shame, because though I did not even understand fully what I had become, I knew it was terrible, terrible enough that this man deserved to die for it.

Beside me, Remus was half out the window, pleading for Nicolai to stop, but the giant only paused to wipe away his tears. Nicolai buried his face in his hands and roared. “Just a boy!” he yelled. “He was just a boy!” And then he kicked the crawling, crying Ulrich again—jolts of pain for every future joy this man had stolen from me. Blood bubbled from Ulrich’s mouth as he begged for forgiveness, but Nicolai had none to give.

Four soldiers ran across the cloister. Two held lamps, and the others drew their swords. But when they saw it was not some thief, but only Nicolai, the kindest of the monks, they froze, unsure of what to do.

They shouted at him to stop, waved their swords, but he did not heed them; he could not. One soldier stepped forward and raised his sword, but then he let it fall again. Then the two armed men dropped their blades and all four grabbed the huge monk’s arms. They grappled with him, while bloody Ulrich tried again to crawl away. The monks all yelled for Nicolai to stop. “For the love of God, you will kill him!” Now the abbot had come, too. He stood at an open window, yelling down at the soldiers, “Stop him! Use your swords if you must! Stop him!”

But still Nicolai was not done. He struggled with the guards, roaring like a madman. He freed one arm, and instead of using it to beat them back, he took one of the soldiers’ lamps and lifted it above the struggle, high above his face. His eyes were lit like two drops of fire. I knew this fury was for me, for my shame, the shame I had secreted away these many years. And though everyone—Remus, the monks, the abbot—was screaming around me, I was silent. I did not ask Nicolai to stop.

He hurled the lamp at broken Ulrich, who had given up on escape. The lamp smashed on the ground, and for a moment Ulrich’s face was wet with oil. His eyes stared at me in horror. And then, before he could bat out the flame, his face reddened, and then my teacher burned. He screamed.

V.

“H
e wishes forgiveness.”

Remus spoke for the silent Nicolai once we were alone with the abbot. It was well past midnight now, and the frenzied clerk had lit but a single candle before fleeing from the scene. Placed on Staudach’s desk, the flame gave the small abbot a supernatural height. The shadow of his head was huge on the wall and ceiling behind his desk.

“Forgiveness?”

Remus nodded.

Staudach shook his head nervously. “Not from me.”

I heard monks chanting in the church, praying for Ulrich’s soul, and for Nicolai’s. No one would sleep that night. We had all watched Ulrich beat his face with his hands, trying to smother the flames that melted his eyes and skin. None of us had helped him. We merely watched in shocked silence until the flames were out and he lay still on the ground. Then four monks carried his smoking body to the fountain and doused him until the water was red with blood.

“If he dies, you will be hanged,” Staudach said.

Though Nicolai stood proud and defiant before the abbot, his breath was shallow, fear in the quivers of its flow.

“Surely, Abbot,” said Remus, “even if there is no room for forgiveness, still there can be mercy.” Remus stood in front of us at the desk, his moist eyes glinting in the candlelight.

“Mercy?” Staudach shook his head, and the movement was repeated ten times larger in the shadows behind him. “I cannot give mercy to those who wish to destroy this monastery.”

“Do not kill a kind man in our name.” Remus’s voice trembled, as did his hands, half raised in supplication.

“A kind man, you say?” The abbot leaned forward and the shadow of his head doubled on the wall. “Dominikus, a kind man does not beat his brother. A kind man does not set fire to his brother.”

“He deserved all that and more,” Nicolai said from the shadows. His voice was quiet, but sure.

Staudach turned his eyes to Nicolai and examined him in the dim light. He spoke sharply. “What crime could possibly deserve what you have wrought?”

Nicolai looked blankly at the abbot, but he did not answer.

“Speak!” Staudach ordered.

“I broke an oath.”

“You have one vow, and that is to me!” Staudach roared and slapped his desk with a palm. I shrank away. The abbot looked at Remus and then at Nicolai. “Now, which of you will defend this wickedness?”

“You have already pledged to kill me,” Nicolai answered. “I will not say.”

The cold eyes shifted to the smaller monk. “Dominikus then, speak.”

“No, Abbot.”

“And you,” he finally said to me. “Why are you here? What do you have to say?”

Though I was so much taller than the abbot, I still felt like that tiny child who first stood in this office years ago, the runt he had wished to banish from this very room.

“Speak!”

We were silent. The candle sizzled. Staudach breathed. He looked at Nicolai. “Then you leave me no choice,” he said.

Nicolai’s hands were shaking.

“He had me castrated,” I said.

I felt his eyes slide slowly over my every feature. On his face, first disbelief, then horror. He finally understood why my voice had held so very long.

“Castrated?” he whispered. My friends stared at the candle burning on the desk.

“Where?”

They did not reply.

He turned to me. His throat was tight; he struggled to exhale. He coughed his words: “Speak! Where! Was it in this abbey?”

I so wanted to be strong, but my knees shook as if the ground itself twitched beneath them.

The abbot rose up and loomed over the candle. “You are a castrate? A eunuch?”

I nodded. The abbot’s face was as white as the stone of his church. His pectoral cross glimmered in the candle’s glow.

“For how long?”

“The inauguration of the church.”

“But that was five years ago,” Staudach said, terror growing in his voice.

I nodded.

“God have mercy,” he whispered. For several seconds he did not move at all. He stared past us. “Death to the castrator,” the abbot recited. “Excommunication to all those who aid. That is the law. My law. The pope’s law.
It is God’s law.
” As if realizing his voice was rising, he cleared his throat and whispered again, “A boy castrated. In my abbey!” Color returned to his face. He glared at Nicolai. “I never wanted him here. I tried to send him away, but you would not let me.

“While the Nuncio slept here? Eighteen abbots! They heard you sing! They will think I ordered it. That I held the knife. They could excommunicate me. Me!” The abbot grasped the cross hanging at his chest.

“They never need to know, Abbot. We will leave,” Remus said, stepping forward. “Tonight.”

“Yes,” said Staudach, nodding, looking through Remus at some distant shadow. “Yes, you must. You and Nicolai both.”

“And the boy.”

“No!” said Staudach. He reached out as if to grab me. Nicolai clasped my sleeve and pulled me back. “No, he must stay here,” the abbot continued, pointing a single, shaking finger at Nicolai and then Remus. “You, you both must leave. You are exiled. If you place a foot on abbey lands again I will hang you for murder and for castration.”

“Madness,” Remus said.

The abbot nodded, his finger now aimed at Remus’s chest. “For both those crimes you both will die, if you ever return here or to any monastery in the Confederation.”

Nicolai spoke. “I will not leave Moses here.”

“You will!” The abbot strained across his desk.

“I would rather die.” Nicolai slowly approached the desk, and I thought that he would overturn it. Staudach shrank back and fell into his chair. He whimpered and held up one hand as if to protect his face. Nicolai grasped the edge of the desk.

“No,” I said. They all turned in surprise. “No, Nicolai. You must go.”

Nicolai shook his head. “No, Moses. I will not. Not without you.”

“I have ordered it!” the abbot yelled.

With the candle behind him, I could not make out Nicolai’s face, nor Remus’s next to him, though between them I saw clearly the abbot’s scowl. For years, this is how I would remember them: their silhouettes standing bravely between me and the abbot, willing to die rather than abandon me.

“Nicolai,” I said.

He turned and grabbed my shoulders. “I will not leave you with him,” he said, his voice now deep and resonant, as fearless as his chants.

“You must,” I whispered, my voice a thousand times weaker than his. “You have no choice.”

“I would rather die,” Nicolai said.

“And then I will truly be alone.”

Nicolai shook his head. He was close enough now that I could see tears filling his eyes. “Moses, I vowed to protect you.”

“Someday I will follow you,” I said. “I promise.”

Remus was at my elbow. “We will go to Melk,” he whispered into my ear so the abbot would not hear. “In Austria. You will always have friends as long as we are alive. We will be waiting for you. Come.”

I nodded at him, biting my lip. Remus took Nicolai’s arm, but the bigger man shrugged him off. He shook his head, his eyes wide.

“Nicolai,” I said. He seemed to shatter, and suddenly we were embracing. Now, eight years after he had pulled me from that river, my head reached above his shoulder, and when he held me, I felt his warm tears on my brow.

“I am so sorry,” he said.

“I … I will come and find you,” I whispered back. I grasped the fabric of his tunic in my fists. He hugged me and I knew that he would never release me unless I let go first, and so I pushed him gently away. Then Remus conveyed him to the door, and without looking again at the abbot, they left. Later, I would visit their cells and see that they had not even paused to collect their things. Nicolai did not make one last prayer in that church. Remus did not take a single book.

Neither man would ever return to St. Gall or to the Swiss Confederation.

I remained alone with Abbot Coelestin Gugger von Staudach. He stared at the candle on the table, its flame glowing perfectly like the world he always longed to realize in this abbey. After several minutes, he looked up at me. His eyes had lost their coldness, their hatred.

“Come here, my son,” he said. He nodded kindly, as if to say,
It is all over now
.

I hesitated only for a moment. Though I found him repulsive, I had no one else in the world now. I walked around his desk and stood beside him in the light of his candle. I bowed my head. His eyes moved across my face, down along my tall, thin form.

“You wish to go with them, do you not?”

“Yes,” I said.

His eyes looked deeply into mine. “Moses, do you know what you are?”

I did not answer.

He regarded me carefully in the candle’s flicker, his gaze sliding across each feature of my face, then he nodded gravely, as if he were the bearer of terrible news. His voice was calm and measured once again. “My son, you are a eunuch. You are not a man. Nor are you a woman. You are a creature that God never intended to create, and so you are destined to remain outside God’s design. His law says you cannot marry; nor may you become a priest. This is not cruelty. I expect if you are sincere, you see why it must be so. Moses, your body will not let you be a father. You are weak—a woman’s muscles on a man’s heavy frame. You cannot work the fields. And your mind is also weak. You will never know manly reason. Did your friends tell you this, Moses?”

I shook my head. Though I had never heard those things said before, I had always feared them.

“They want to help you, but they cannot. They have no roof to sleep under.” He waved his hand dismissively. “No abbey will shelter them, for they are sodomites. Any abbot will easily read sin in their faces, as I have, and will turn them away. You could follow them, and you would starve together. Only they are men, Moses, and you are not. People will laugh at you outside these walls. Here we have been deceived by the slow progression of your condition. Only now do I see it clearly in your form. You are an accident of nature, a product of sin rather than of grace.”

The abbot looked past me, searching for a solution to my existence in the dark corners of his office. He shook his head. “This is so unfortunate, Moses,” he said. “So unfortunate. This world was simply not made for those like you.”

I felt a great weakness extending from my center, a vibration that threatened to bring me to my knees. Everything he said was true. How could I deny it? In the abbot’s worried face, for the first time, I saw that perhaps he was not so cold and heartless. He was merely a man who worked so hard to put the chaotic world into order. One hundred thousand people depended on his guidance, and now, here he was, hours before dawn, caring for one single soul alone.

His eyes appraised me carefully. “Moses, I cannot keep you here against your will. I will not. The abbey is not a prison. What I said before—that they could not take you with them—I said that for their good and for yours. But now that we are alone, you must make your choice. Go, if you wish; you may still find them. Go and tell them that they must care for you, that they must take you with them. They will not deny you. They will find a way to feed you, they will find a way to care for you, even if it means they will suffer for it.”

The abbot was silent. He watched me carefully.

Go? I wanted nothing more. With my friends departed, I already felt the lonely emptiness of the abbey creeping into every room. And out there, two friends who loved me.

Still, the abbot did not speak. His measured breath flowed in, out, in, out.

“I will allow you to stay here, Moses,” he finally said. “Those in this abbey have done you a great wrong, and so I shall do what I can to correct it. If you choose it, I will grant you what I denied you years ago: the chance to become a novice and, one day perhaps, a monk. You shall keep your cell. We shall continue to provide for you. I will see that you damage no one with your weakness. No one must know of your imperfection. I alone will know. Moses, I hope you see there is nothing more that I or anyone can offer you.”

I pictured Nicolai and Remus, not as I had met them—on the finest stallions, Nicolai with enough abbey coins in his pockets to toss at beggars on the road—but as they were now: stealing through the city, on foot, pockets empty, Remus without a single book to read. How long would Nicolai’s strident certainty endure? One day? One week? He had never walked a mile in his life. Would they be the beggars now? Surely they had enough burdens without another, without, as the abbot said,
an accident of nature
to carry with them. Nicolai had done so much for me already: for me he had been exiled from his home.

“Moses,” the abbot said. “You must choose.”

My nod was slight, but sufficient.

“Good. But you must promise me something, too, Moses.”

I looked into his narrow, shining eyes.

“You must promise never to sing again.”