The Bells (21 page)

II.

I
slept among the sacks of buckwheat for several days in a nauseous fog, until, one morning, I was awakened by my mother. Or so it seemed.
Get up!
she cried into my queasy trance.
Get up! It is time! It is time!
Her call was a massive, booming ring. The instant I heard it, I knew it was meant for me—she was calling me a second time.

I leapt up like a general roused by a bugle’s call. I struggled out from the buckwheat embrace and jumped to my feet. Nausea hit me like a horse’s kick, and I collapsed again.

The heavens boomed again, and so, for my mother, I stumbled up and almost fell into the stinking water, but the boatman’s son hugged me with two bony arms. He handed me a pail, which I took, thinking it to be a tool for getting to the distant shore, but then I saw the compassion in his face. “Go ahead,” he said, helping me lift the rancid-smelling pail to my mouth, “let it out. You’ll feel much better after.”

“No!” I shouted, and pointed at the sky. “Listen!”

The boy looked at his father, who shrugged.

“Please,” I said. “Take me to the shore!”

The river was very crowded here, with barges and smaller boats, and was much narrower. We were in the center of a city. On both sides the muddy banks had been replaced by a stone quay alive with movement. The booming resounded again, even louder and more lasting, and the next round began even before the last had faded. Now it sounded like a giant’s footsteps running across the heavens.

“Hurry!” I shouted at my captain.

The fool was as languid as the current. I sprang to the bow and leaned over so I could paddle with the pail. I had nearly forgotten my nausea. The pimply boy stood beside me.

“Are you,” he asked, and tapped a finger on my temple, “not well?”

I threw up my hands. If his dull ears could not comprehend the significance of the sound, I could not explain it to him in an instant. Finally, we approached the high quay, which was crowded with more people than I had ever seen—all of St. Gall packed together in a narrow space. Men and horses and carts jostled not to be pushed into the fetid water. That boom passed again through the world. The surface of the river rippled, some men covered their ears, but not one of them looked up (though one laden mule bellowed anxiously at the sky, as if beseeching it not to fall).

We seemed close enough to the stony edge, and so I leapt, but no one had ever explained to me Newton’s Laws of Motion. As I sprang, my momentum stopped the boat’s, and so my leap was more up than out. I only just snatched the quay as I dropped past it and my legs submerged to my knees in that foul stew. I could not find a hold, and would have slipped and drowned had not that pimpled boy wrenched my shirt and helped me climb back aboard the boat.

He began a lecture about the dangers of swimming in the Donaukanal, but I had no time for this; by my calculations I had wasted several years already and had mere minutes left before that sound would disappear. And it was calling me! I leapt again, this time landing within the throng.

My brow banged against a brute who clutched a live chicken in each bulging hand, one of which he swung at me as I darted off. I ran along the crowded quay, which was hemmed in by the highest wall I had ever seen—higher than Staudach’s palace, and without a single window. The booming came from the other side of these ramparts, and so I climbed between a horse and his moving cart and toward a tunnel packed with people.

So many sounds! The one-eyed idiot’s howling, the rattle of the coppers in the leper’s wooden bowl, the creak of a warped wagon wheel, the hissing of a black cat plucked of half its fur by some disease. As I pushed through the tunnel, I heard voices more diverse than I had imagined could exist on one earth, all shouting to be heard above the din: the gargle of Hungarian, the buzz of Czech, the choke of Dutch, mesmerizing French, Italian as if someone were bouncing a ball against my head. It was dark in the tunnel, but I was the tallest in the crowd, and I saw into the meat market on the other side. I had never heard such slaughter: cleavers chopped through the thick legs of cows; blades scraped along the scales of fish; a goat squealed against a rope as it was tugged toward its murder; a woman with arms as thick as posts deboned a sheep and slapped the slabs of meat onto a blood-drenched table; a child split intestines with a rusty knife; a one-legged man sprawled in front of a mound of offal and swung his cane at birds that tried to snatch at eyes and hooves.

And still, that booming.

It was louder on this side of the ramparts. I felt it in my toes, along my back. I chased it up a wide street of palaces, every one as grand and high as Staudach’s abbey. I heard harpsichords ringing out of windows, the clink of crystal and the clang of silver. The street was laid with even cobbles. I timed my strides to the booming, leaping every fourth step so that the sound hit me as I hung in flight. I dissected its million tones. I heard the high notes in the tight muscles of my calves, and the low notes in my arms, which swung awkwardly at my sides like broken wings.

As I ran, the palaces grew larger and more ornate, the cobbles more regular, the smells less obnoxious. The street narrowed, then widened, and I saw a vast square ahead. Here every person blocked their ears against the sound, and rushed where they were going, as if trying to outrun a hailstorm. I burst out into the largest square I had ever seen, and beheld a dark building so huge it was a mountain. I looked up into the sun, toward that sound that shook my heart, and perceived a shadowy pillar that I knew I must climb. I ran inside the black mountain. I pushed aside wrinkled grandmothers, mourning widows. I knocked a general to his knees, splashed holy water upon the floor. Windowpanes as red as blood cast the pale faces pink. Except for the constant booming, my footfalls upon the black-and-white-checkered floor were the loudest sound in what I realized was a vast church. I stopped in the center of the nave and looked up at the ceiling. It was like the ceiling of a forest: looming gray pillars split into intertwining branches of stone that could have held up the sky.

I would have climbed the pillars and hung upon their branches, but then I saw a small man, and behind him a narrow door. The tired, dull look upon the man’s face recalled instantly for me the dutiful Peter standing guard so many years ago before Frau Duft’s sickroom.

Through the open door I saw a staircase. I ran, gathering speed as I crossed the church. The small man saw me coming, for his eyes widened at my charge and his tongue began to work nervously inside his mouth. He held up his hands—a bear defending his cave. Yet, a tiny bear, a cub, not half my size, and so at the last instant, as I bore down to plaster him upon the stairs, he looked absently toward the altar and stepped aside. I ducked to save my head and charged up the winding stairs.

“Sir,” he called behind me, “you cannot go there. Your ears—”

I wound up and up, my head spinning, but I had to hurry. I burst out into a square room and saw sixteen men, their backs to me, ears stuffed and bound with cloth, pulling on sixteen ropes hanging through the ceiling. They tugged until they sat upon the floor. The boom sounded, shaking all my inner organs. Then the ropes pulled taut and these sixteen men held tight and, in perfect unity, like Russian ballerinas, leapt fifteen feet above the floor. When they were at the peak, the boom resounded again.

But I gave this scene no more than a glance. I dashed up an even tighter flight of stairs, so steep I climbed with both my hands and feet.

Then I reached the top and burst out into a room with four sides open to the sky. There she was: the Pummerin, the empire’s greatest bell, cast from 208 Turkish cannons. She was twice my height. She had a clapper as long and thick as a tree trunk. The ropes of those sixteen men were wound here into a single strand that turned a wheel twenty feet across. As it turned, she rocked. She cut the air like the bow of a rushing ship. At the height of each swing, the sound bow on the inside of her lower lip slammed against the clapper and her strike tone—a perfect, strident B—boomed across that city.

I stepped below her. The clapper hung inches in front of my face. I saw that they had wrapped it in leathern padding to dampen the bell’s massive ring. I wished to tear off the padding so I could hear her as she was meant to sound, but when the clapper was struck, it jumped and writhed, and I saw that if I touched it I would quickly be wanting of fingers. But I promised then I would come back someday to set her free. The bell’s lips whooshed just above my hair. If I had jumped up, she would have snatched off my head.

I closed my eyes. The force of her wind made me sway from side to side. My jaw hung loose, my arms limp, my hands open. Her sound touched me everywhere. It tickled the insides of my thighs and shook my eyelids. My fingers buzzed. My muscles—tight from walking, from sleeping under bushes, from my loneliness—were pried apart, made again to ring. Wherever I had become stiff, she made me soft again. I admired her many tones like the infinity of a sunset’s hues. There were my mother’s bells, just waves in this massive ocean.

Her booming softened.

I opened my eyes to see that her swinging was much reduced; the sixteen men had released their ropes. For many minutes her momentum still made her strike the clapper. Then, even when she ceased to touch the clapper, a ringing lingered in her body for several minutes more, and the only sound was the whooshing of the air before her as she gently rocked—until that ceased as well, and my breath, and the city’s din far below, were the only sounds moving in the air.

Then I heard footsteps. A hand grasped my shoulder and gently turned me about.

It was the guard. I stared across his balding head, on which drops of sweat were gathering. It was several minutes before his heaving breath let him speak.

“Not allowed up here,” he yelled and moved his lips carefully for me to read, assuming that I was deaf. But I saw his lips only at the edge of my vision, because my eyes were fixed on the scene behind him. I laid a hand on his shoulder so I would not fall. He led me to the edge.

Our arms around each other’s shoulders, we peered down at a city more magnificent than any in my wildest imaginings. Wide streets, crowded with horses and carriages and people like tiny ants, led off in every direction from the square. Rectangular palaces with flower-filled courtyards were jumbled between these arteries. In the distance, high ramparts bound it all together in a many-pointed star. And beyond these ramparts, still more city, as far as the green hills in the distance.

“My God,” I said to the man who held me up. “What is this place?”

“This, sir,” he said, as if speaking to an idiot, “this is Her Majesty’s city. This is Vienna.”

And so, finally, after nearly a year of travel, I had arrived in the same city as my lover. But just then a devilish voice, silent all these months, suddenly whispered in my ear, “But how do you know she still loves you? She is married to
a man!
”

I must admit, I had not expected Vienna to be quite so big, quite so full of people who, when I stumbled into them, looked at my rags and dirty face as if I were an animal who had lost his forest. But then I closed my eyes and let the city’s sounds pass me by, and I recalled all our secret sounds of love, and my faith was reconfirmed.

All day I wandered the inner city searching for any trace of her sounds, and happily collecting others while I meandered. I turned around only when I came to a dead end, or else to one of those gates that would lead me out of this magic place. Only once did I dare glimpse what lay beyond the walls; I stumbled out of the Stubentor across the footbridge to the green glacis, that parklike field that surrounds the ramparts so Her Majesty’s troops may slaughter invaders with their guns. The silence was to me unbearable: birds chirped and two horses chewed their oats.

Back inside the gates, I marveled at the rush of people: magistrates and officers and secretaries in their carriages or on their giant horses, clerks and pages on foot. Columns of soldiers marched up and down the streets, the gaunt and haggard ones overjoyed at their return alive from the war with Prussia, their vigorous replacements downcast at their prospects for the cold winter ahead. I stood at a smallish square and in a single glance took in a waif begging for coppers, a one-legged graybeard lurching on his crutch, a minister so corpulent his stallion sagged. A lady peeked out of a carriage with a nose like an eagle’s beak. I soon learned that, provided I stayed out of people’s way—a difficult task, to be sure—no one wasted a moment’s glance on me, neither on my filth nor on the angelic face that hid beneath it.

I stood outside some of the most magnificent palaces and tried to mine the sounds from within. I heard whispers of a singing girl, of a French lesson, of the toil of maids and cooks and porters. Most of all, I noticed the amazing quiet of these stunning structures. Their hinges did not groan. The wheels of the carriages that rolled out their gates did not creak. The feet of their maids did not seem to touch the ground. When I heard voices through an open window, they were never urgent or enflamed.

I understood nothing of the city except that it was surrounded on all sides by ramparts, that it sloped slightly downward toward the stink of the markets and the river, upward toward the most magnificent of the palaces, and that in its center stood this giant black church, the Stephansdom, in whose high south tower hung that greatest bell, whose ringing was the biggest sound I had ever heard, bigger even than the ringing of my mother’s largest bell.

If I found a door ajar, I walked through it. Once I was chased out by a wrinkled woman with a cleaver in her hand, but in others I had more luck. I crept into pantries—my bounty was a loaf of bread, half a cold turkey, two sausages, three boiled carrots, and a lump of cake. Then I went still farther, up wide, curving stairs; into empty bedrooms with bulging mattresses; up, up to tiny attic rooms (one in which a young student slept, his snores stinking of spirits). I poked my head out of any high window I could find, and peered across rooftops, half hoping to glimpse my beloved locked away in a tower, half hoping to hear,
Moses! Moses!
whispered in the wind.