The Bells (17 page)

X.

T
he 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 think 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.

F
rom 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.

Once I chased after a scullery maid, sneaking out on her own mission of love, but I quickly heard in the evenness of her step that it was not my Amalia. At one o’clock the rain intensified, and even though I huddled in shadows that offered some shelter, my habit soon smelled like a flock of Nebelmatt sheep.

In my memory, she enters like the ringing of a bell; all the tones of her body fill the night with sudden warmth. My teeth cease to chatter. My toes stop aching with cold. But my memory must lie, for I know sound better than that. It must have been only a hint: the scuffing of her lame leg, the turn of the key in that garden gate, perhaps the whisper of my name hushed into the night.

I did not run to her, or call to her. I was terrified. But of what? This should be the second-act finale: The lovers have escaped their respective prisons, the love nest awaits. They may embrace until the pink fingers of morning crawl across the sky! This is no time for terror!

Do not believe what you learn in opera. Love is not the mere opening of two souls’ doors. Nor is it a palliative to the troubled heart; it is a stimulant. Under its influence, that heart grows until each tiny imperfection glows with painful evidence. And the castrato’s imperfection is not tiny. I knew enough from my nocturnal wanderings to understand I was engaged in the greatest of deceits. In this unhappy world, where we are all incomplete, I had lost the gift that could make us whole again.

And suddenly, there was my other half, beautiful and limping through the rain.

Some honorable part of my soul—a part I have since tried to starve of food and light—did speak then, as I hid from her in my shadow. It told me to go back to my abbey room and seek there whatever comfort I wished in life. This part quoted the abbot’s words to me again.
You are an accident of nature, a product of sin rather than of grace. Do not burden others with your tragedy
, this voice inside me said.
Leave her in this rain. Do not share your misfortune—you shall never gain it back again
.

But another part—the ardent part who loved and yearned—said:
Her! Her! Her!
He forgot the rain, the cold. With her this close, the world was so warm.

And so, like a thief, as she called my name and sought me with her eyes, I hid from her ears. My feet made no sound as they slid across the wet cobblestones. I did not call to her. Then I took from within my habit—where I had hidden it from the rain, against my chest—the flag of my deceit.

It was a strip of soft red silk, stolen from the abbot’s private store, where one day it was to have been part of the rarest vestments. I held it in both hands as I crept behind her—matching her steps with my longer strides—until I was so close I heard the drops of rain patter on her shoulder. Any man spotting us from his window would have assumed I was about to strangle her.

I raised the silk high and then drew it tight, just as it reached her eyes.

She screamed, of course. Yet I was afraid she would tear away the blindfold and see my face, and read in my soft features all my shame. So I tightened the silk yet more, and pulled her toward me, hoping the touch of my body—which was wet and cold, and stank of sheep—would calm her.

It did not. She screamed again.

“Amalia,” I said. “It is Moses. Do not be afraid.” This was, at least, a better strategy. She did not scream, but still her hands struggled at the silk, which must have pressed painfully into her eyes.

“It is Moses,” I said again.

She ceased to pull intently at the blindfold, and I relaxed my hold.

“Moses?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It is I.”

“What are you doing?”

I chose silence. A light flickered on in the house nearest us, its inhabitants woken by her scream.

“Moses, please let me go.”

“You cannot take off the blindfold,” I blurted.

“Why?”

“You cannot see me.” The light grew brighter and then shrank to the point of a single candle at one of the windows.

“Why can’t I see you?”

“Quickly,” I said. “Someone is there.” A window began to creak open. I tied the blindfold behind her head. To my relief, she did not pull it off. I took her hand and led her up the street. She walked with her other hand out to ward off obstacles. We turned toward the narrower lanes of Ulrich’s quarter.

“Moses,” she said. “This is silly.”

Silly it was not, but how could I convince her?

She squeezed my hand, just like that little girl had squeezed my hand years before as she led me through an unfamiliar world. “There has to be a reason.”

Why did she need a reason? I would have let her blindfold me forever without a word. I could not say: If you see my face, you will see in my features that I am not the perfect other half of you that God meant for me to be. You will see I am broken, and you will not love me. I could not say: That man you see now, in your mind, that perfect man—he is the real me.

And so I said, “If you see me, I will disappear.” It was not a lie.

“But that is impossible,” she said.

“Please, Amalia. Believe me.”

She placed her hand on my shoulder, and I felt in the touch a probing, as if she were trying to see with her hands, to know me by the rise and fall of the bones of my shoulder. I squirmed under her touch.

“Are we going to walk through the rain all night?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “We are going somewhere.”

“Then I can take my blindfold off?”

“No.”

“When can I take it off?” Her hand moved along my shoulder.

“You cannot take it off.”

“Not ever?”

“Not when you are with me.”

“Or you will disappear?” Her fingers probed along the muscles to my neck.

“Yes.”

“But I thought
you
were Orpheus.”

“What?”

“You have got the story wrong, Moses.”

“What story?”

“Orpheus and Eurydice.”

“Who are they?”

“Do you learn nothing in that abbey? Orpheus was the son of a king and of the muse Calliope,” she recited as if reading from a book. Her hand explored the knobs of my spine. “A man like no other: beautiful and strong. But more, he was the greatest musician who ever lived. Eurydice was his wife,” she said. She stopped us. She turned me toward her so she could explore my neck with both her hands. “Eurydice dies, yet Orpheus tames the Furies in the underworld with his song and gets her back, but on one condition: He cannot look at her until they leave the underworld. If he does, she dies again, and he loses her forever. Is that how it is?”

“Yes,” I said, the words
A man like no other
, echoing in my head. My deceit was complete.

“Then
you
need the blindfold, Orpheus.”

“You don’t want me to look at you?” I asked, sensing a compromise.

“Of course I do. I want you to look at me,” she said. She tilted her head upward, a hint of a smile playing on her lips. “Fine,” she continued. She held my head firmly in both hands. “I will wear the blindfold. But you have to let me touch you. Stop squirming.”

Her hands began to explore where my shame was hiding: in the slight roundness of my cheeks, in my delicate nose, in my narrow brow, in my skin as soft and hairless as a baby’s. Her hands touched all of these, and then touched them again as rain made my face and her hands cold and wet. Her left hand found my throat—where my Adam’s apple should have been—and rested there.

“What are you afraid of?” she asked.

“Afraid?”

“Your heart beats as if you were afraid of me.”

I listened to my heart and tried to slow it. But it would not obey me now. I gently pushed her probing hands away and nudged her forward into the night.

Soon I heard the three-spouted fountain and was relieved that we were going in the right direction. When I stopped her in front of Ulrich’s door, she turned her head as if trying to see through the blindfold. I unlocked the door and led Amalia into Ulrich’s room. He sat at his table, with his head bowed as usual, but when we entered, his head shot up in surprise. I was worried she would hear him, but he made no more sound than the smoke swirling about the stove door.

“Come with me,” I said, as Ulrich’s empty eyes followed us across the room.

Climbing to the attic in the darkness, I was as blind as she. My right hand held her right hand, my left supported the small of her back so she would not fall. The steep stairs were awkward for her lame knee, which did not bend.

On the landing, I groped for the door—found it on my third lunge—and opened it. Warm air dried our cold faces. The glow from the stove was enough for me to see the black of the big table, the white of the bed, and the dark rectangles of the woman’s portraits on the wall.

“Moses?”

My hand on the small of her back, I pressed Amalia into the room and closed the door behind us.

Behind that door, at first, is merely silence. We face the stove, drips fall off my sopping sleeves and make puddles on the floor. I turn and look at her; the red silk blindfold, stained crimson by the rain, dangles down her back and mingles with her hair. She seems mesmerized by the heat, as if the hot coals draw her toward it.

Does she hear her aunt Karoline’s prophecies of dishonor cawing in her head?
Who is this man?
she must wonder.
Who hides behind this blindfold? Is this the answer to my loneliness? What happened to that girl who sat for so many patient hours beside her mother’s bed? Am I trying to revive that girl tonight? Or am I about to lose her?

And in my head:
My body is misery. It cannot love and it cannot be loved. How dare I lie to her? How dare I bring her to this awful house? I should pull that blindfold from her eyes—before she truly falls in love
. I almost do this.

I hear the creak of the floorboards when she shifts her weight, the regular hush of the rain on the roof above our heads. In one corner, water seeps through a hole in the roof and drips into a puddle on the floor. And I do not remove her blindfold.

What saves me from exposing myself to her—saves me from her pity—is a drop of rainwater. It collects on the wet wisps of hair by her ear and slides down her cheek, along her jaw. It must tickle, because she raises a finger, and I hear that finger wipe her smooth, wet skin, so the raindrop balances on her knuckle. And then, like a sound from heaven, she kisses that raindrop.

Her lips envelop her finger. I move closer. Her breath, still deep from the climb up the stairs, hurts me, it is so lovely. I reach out my hand and stroke her chin, where moments before her finger rescued that raindrop, and I hear her skin like a warm wind passing through grasses. I realize it is the sound of my skin, too, brushing against hers.

Her breath hardens into a sigh.

Her cold fingers find the damp skin of my neck. I shudder as they creep into my hair. She tugs so hard it hurts, and her mouth tenses as if she feels the pain, too. But then her lips relax and she is pulling my face toward hers. It is an unlearned, frantic kiss, which mingles our sounds. I feel the vibration of her moan in the tip of my tongue.

She claws at my hood as if to tear it off. I lift it over my head and drop it. Then she pulls at my tunic. As I help her lift her dress, I place my head to her chest.
Thump-thump, thump-thump
. Her hands are shaking as she loosens her corset and kicks out of those last scraps of fine white fabric. Then she wears nothing but the red blindfold. Her pale, damp skin shivers, but I look a moment more before I embrace her.

I press my head to her chest to come as close as I can to that heart, and then I hear her breath in her lungs. It moans like a wind through a giant, damp cavern, and on every inhalation it climbs higher toward a sigh.

The first chilly touch of the abbey’s fine bed linen makes us draw in our breaths, but then it is so warm, and we are floating in it, fumbling for each other. She paws at my chest as if she has never known how large a body is. She reaches for the last bit of clothing I wear—a cloth wrapped tightly around my middle, like a bandage—but I draw her hand away, for there I will not let her touch.

She gasps when my hand strays below her navel. When I kiss her shoulder she exhales. The sounds she makes seem to come from inside my head. She gasps again. My hands graze across her breasts, feel the soft curve of her belly. They squeeze the protruding bones of her hip. Her breath is like weeping as my finger traces the scar that runs from the middle of her calf upward over her knee to the soft inside of her thigh. Her hands pull at mine, but I do not need the guide because her breath, her gasps and moans, guide me. She plays me with her sounds, and I play her with my touch. And as she begins to shudder under my hands, I press my ear to her hot moan so no drop of her sound escapes me.