The Bells (3 page)

IV.

I
n the belfry my mother saw the terror in my eyes, but when she tried to soothe me in her arms, I pushed her away. I shook my head. I took her hand and tried to pull her down the ladder. I pointed at a distant mountain—somewhere there would be a place where we could hide.

In the sadness of her eyes, I saw she understood something of what I meant, my wish to flee him and this village. But she shook her head.

I cannot leave
, she seemed to say.

And so we slept that night in the belfry, huddled under blankets as the falling night swept warm gusts up from the valley. My mother clutched her mallets to her chest. I could not sleep—only my ears would protect us in the night. I listened for an approaching step, for a hand on the ladder below us. But after midnight a wind came up, and lightning flickered up the valley. Rain began to fall. It soaked us through the open walls. My mother held me, and when the lightning flashed, I glimpsed terror in her eyes. At least twice a summer the church was struck, and I know she was thinking we should be huddled in our hut. As the storm moved over us, the bells sung a soft warning. My mother looked up, for she heard it in her gut.
Run
, they said.

She took me in her arms and fled down the ladder. Lightning crashed, the echoes rumbled in the valley. I listened for the sounds of feet trudging in the mud, but in the torrent I heard the splotch of a thousand boots, the mashing of a thousand lips. In the thunder’s rumble I heard a million Karl Victors curse. She carried me across the field to our hut and barred the door. In the occasional flashes through the cracks I saw she held a mallet in her hand.

Karl Victor came at the height of the storm, beating at our door. My mother shoved me into a corner, and though I tried to pull her down beside me, she slipped away and stood between the flimsy door and me. It lasted but three kicks. Timber snapped, and a white hand struggled through the gap and fumbled with the bar.

“Goddamn you!” the priest yelled. He limped, for he had hurt his toes kicking in the door. His boots and cassock shone with mud when the lightning flashed.

My mother leapt at him. But in the next flash of lightning he saw her coming—and without her bells she could not fight him. She swung her mallet with one hand while she clawed his face with the other. I pressed my hands against my ears as his one backhand slap dropped her to our muddy floor. I cringed and cried each time he kicked her with his boot. Then lightning struck our church with a crash and the bells rang out. Karl Victor covered his ears in pain, but the ringing only fed his fury. He kicked her again and again until she ceased to jerk in pain, and only then did he stop. She did not move.

As the storm passed, the rain slowed. The bells still faintly hummed. My mother breathed in gasps. Karl Victor stood still, listening, waiting for the next lightning strike so he could see me. I huddled in the corner, pressing myself into the wood, but then a sob fought up my throat and burst in the darkness. Karl Victor stepped toward me and kicked the wall until he found me—then he kicked harder and faster, so hard into my gut I was sure I would never breathe again. He grabbed me by the neck and lifted me close.

“You deceiving brat,” he said. He stank of uncooked onions. “I will see that you will never say a word.”

Father Karl Victor Vonderach dragged me out of our hut. I screamed and reached for my mother, who lay unmoving on the ground, moaning as she exhaled. In a flash of distant lightning I saw her bloodied face. Karl Victor dragged me by my shirt until it tore, removed his belt, and looped it around my neck like a leash. “Try and run,” he hissed into my ear as if he would bite it off. “Go ahead and try.” As gray dawn rose, we descended into the forest. He tore off a pine branch and whipped me when I swayed too far to the side, when I walked too fast or too slow, or simply when his anger bubbled over. Tears fogged my eyes. I slipped and tripped and choked on my leash.

He conducted me to the Uri Road, which was scarred with hoofprints, and my bare feet sank in mud almost to my knees. Karl Victor cursed. He looked up and down the road, but in the early morning he saw no horses or cart of which to beg a ride. He yanked at the scraps of my shirt, but that only tore it off. He took my thin arm and tugged until I felt that I might split, but the mud would not release me. Then suddenly there was a pop, and a sucking, and we tumbled, me before him. My face pressed into the cold mud, and then was lifted up by the belt around my neck. He dragged me down the road like a sack of oats, with a hand under each of my arms. When he slipped, he heaved me under him, and for a moment the world was black with mud. When he lifted me I gasped for air and clawed at my noose.

We struggled like this for what seemed hours, before we reached the hard ground of a wooden bridge across the Reuss, and he dropped me on the mud-spattered boards. I lay panting, leaning up against the bridge railing, and he wheezed and coughed and spat globs of mud in my face. The flooded Reuss flowed beneath the bridge with the anger of spring rains and melting snow, and I tried to escape into its sounds: I pried current from current, heard the thunder of churning water, heard rocks rolled downstream by the flood. But my ears forced me to return. Karl Victor ground his hands together like a tightening rope about to break. His feet beat against the ground. His teeth chewed at his lip. He growled.

I looked up through mud and tears. I perceived his face, which was crossed by scars from my mother’s nails. Blood flowed from his bitten lip. His cassock was soaked so much it clung about his legs. He grasped his hair with his hands as if he would pull it out, and he growled once more into the wind.

I have often wished I could have heard inside Karl Victor’s head at this moment. What exactly had he planned? I am generous enough to believe that he had something in mind: perhaps to take me to Lucerne and deposit me at an orphanage; to sell me to a farmer in Canton Schwyz. But this mud—this knee-deep sludge that burped and sucked and splattered—made an island of that bridge. To bring me back to Nebelmatt was impossible, for there I would spread his shameful secrets. To continue dragging me for even another hundred steps might kill us both.

His growl turned to a yell, and he kicked the bridge’s railing as he had my mother, again and again, but it was sturdy and would not break under his boot. He looked at me with red eyes, and when he spoke he spat blood into my face.

“You were supposed to be deaf!”

At that moment, I would have promised never to speak again. I would have offered to bite off my own tongue, if only he would let me go back to my mother. I would never leave our belfry again, even when the lightning threatened.

He bent over me, his face so close that his sucking, mashing lips were as loud as the river. He heaved me up by the belt, pressing me against the rail with his hip. Then he clutched my head with both hands.

“If God will not make you deaf, then I will have to do it.”

Two fingers pressed into my ears like spikes. I howled and thrashed, but they pressed harder, tunneling so far they seemed to meet inside my head. I finally knew the pain that others felt when they heard my mother’s bells. His face was all I saw. His grimace turned from white to red. He pressed his fingers harder, and I screamed.

My tiny hands pulled at his, but I could not move them.

“Father!” I yelled.

He dropped me as if I were a burning coal.

I lay on the ground and held my head, awaiting the next attack, but it did not come. He stood frozen over me, his eyes wide and startled.

I had not meant it as an accusation. In Nebelmatt they called him “Father.” I meant no more than that.

“I am not your father,” he whispered. But I did not hear the words. I heard the trembling of his voice, the clamp upon his lungs, the shaking in his hands and jaw. And I heard how that single word, which had burnt him like fire, was true.

Father? This word I knew: Fathers held their sons when they were hurt, whipped them when they were bad. They let them walk beside them as they drove cows up to pasture. I knew it well, but I had never thought it was a word for me.

“I am not your father,” he said again.

My father lifted me up. He held me up above him as if offering me to heaven. “You shall be silent,” he said.

And then with a grunt, he threw me off the bridge and into the roaring Reuss.

V.

H
ad he watched the currents swallow me? Or turned to shield his eyes from his sin? All I know is that he did not venture to confirm that his son was actually dead. He did not follow the river long enough to see me washed clean of my rags and noose, as I flailed and gasped, as one current pulled me under and the next pushed me up. He did not watch as my strength gave out, as the white of the waves turned to black, and I began to drown. He did not watch my corpse sink as my lungs filled with water. He did not repent and try to save me.

But his were not the only eyes on the Uri Road that morning. When I awoke, I heard their voices before I opened my eyes.

“No, stay back. I would not touch him anymore.”

The first voice was thin and tight, as though spoken through taut lips, but the second was deep and warm: “No need to worry. He is freshly bathed.”

“Such a scrawny thing,” said the first. “Mere bones. He must have some disease. Listen to him cough.”

“He drank half the river. And skin and bones, that’s normal here—nothing to eat in the mountains. Just grass and dirt.”

Sharp stones jutted into my naked back. The sun was warm, but the wet bank was icy. I coughed again, bringing up water and a good deal else, then opened my eyes and saw two men looming above me. I looked from one to the other, and then back again, and my first thought was that God had never made two men more dissimilar.

One was a handsome giant, with a halo of fair hair, a thick gray beard, a smile fixed upon his face. The other was smaller, pale. He chewed his lip. He wrung his greasy hands. They both wore black tunics, drawn with leathern belts. The giant’s tunic was sopping, for he had saved me from the river and then thumped my chest until I revived.

“It is Moses swimming in the Nile,” said the giant, his grin as warm as the sun. He offered me a massive hand. “Come and be our king.”

I cowered from the hand, dreading any touch but my mother’s. In any case, the smaller man quickly batted the larger’s hand away. “I said you should not touch him,” he muttered.

“He’s just a boy,” the giant said, and he bent down and clutched both hands around my ribs, his thumbs pressing into my heart. His hands were warm and soft, yet every muscle in my body tightened. He held me up like a goatherd might inspect a kid. I was entirely naked, washed clean by the river. “What’s your name?”

I did not answer. In fact, I could not answer—the villagers had only ever called me “that Froben boy” or “the idiot child.” I kept rigid and hoped that he would put me down so I could run away and find my mother. He shrugged. “Well, Moses is a fine enough name for boys swimming in rivers. Mine is Nicolai. The wolf here is Remus. We are monks.”

I looked from the one man to the next, trying to extract a meaning from this term.
Monks?
I found nothing in common between the two except their tunics.

“All right,” this Remus said, impatiently, his face screwed up as if against a noxious smell. “He is alive. Send him on his way.”

“No!” the giant cried. “Are you so heartless?” He swung me down so I sat in the crux of his elbow and forced my cheek against the wet wool of his tunic until I itched from ear to hip. His heart thumped into my ear.

“You’ve done your duty. You saved his life,” Remus said.

Nicolai’s body recoiled in shock. “Remus, someone threw him in that river!”

“You don’t know that. He could have fallen.”

“Did you fall into the water?” the giant asked me. I did not answer—in fact, I did not even hear, for I was mesmerized by the beating of his heart, so much slower and deeper than my mother’s. The heart of a bull.

“Come on,” Nicolai urged. “You can tell me. Who threw you in?”

I closed my eyes. My heart was slowing, matching itself to the measured rhythm of the giant’s. My muscles loosened and, without willing it, I melted into his arms.

“It doesn’t matter,” Remus said. “He’ll probably lie to us in any case. Watch your purse.”

“Remus!”

“You must leave him here.” Remus pointed at the grassy bank.

“Here? Naked in the grass? How can you say that? What if those monks who found me on their doorstep had left me there? Where would you be now?”

“I would be reading in my cell. In peace.”

“Exactly. And instead you are seeing the world.”

“I don’t want to see the world. I have told you that before. I want to go home. We are two months late.”

“Another day won’t matter.”

“Put him down.”

Nicolai turned his back to Remus. He carried me several steps along the bank. I opened my eyes and looked up into his face. He peered down with the friendliest gaze I had ever seen. His breath was like a warm draft flitting up a cliff. “Remus is right,” he whispered to me. “He always is, and that’s why no one likes him. But I won’t just leave you here. Point me toward your home, and I’ll help you find your father.”

I started so violently that Nicolai nearly dropped me. I looked around in a panic, worried I might see Karl Victor crouching in the grass.

“My God,” Nicolai said. “That’s it! Isn’t it? It was your father! Remus,” Nicolai shouted, rushing back to the scowling, smaller monk. “His father threw him in!”

“You don’t know that.”

“He tried to kill his own son. That means this boy is an orphan. Just like me.”

Remus covered his face with his hands. “Nicolai, you are not an orphan anymore—have not been for forty years. You are a monk. And monks cannot take in children.”

Nicolai considered this. His beard bristled as he smiled. “He can become a novice.”

“Staudach will not have him.”

“I will speak with him.” Nicolai nodded confidently. “Make him understand what is at stake. His father tried to kill him.”

“Nicolai,” Remus said calmly, as if explaining a simple formula, “you cannot take this child.”

“Remus, he was floating down the river. Sinking. He would have drowned.”

“And you saved him. But taking him with us is a responsibility you cannot bear.”

Nicolai shifted me so I was cradled in his arms, looking up at his halo of curly hair, the sky beyond. He stroked my cheek with a finger as thick as a bell rope. “Do you want to come with us?” he said.

How was I to know what he offered? For all I knew, the world terminated at those distant peaks, and every village had a Karl Victor. If someone had told me that there were but a thousand men in the wide world, I would have thought,
My God! So many!
But I saw in this face above me such a look of hope.
Say yes
, his eyes said.
Tell me you need me. I will not fail
.

I wanted to go home to my mother.

“Nicolai, listen to me, you have made a vow—”

“I can make another.”

“That is not how it works. Such vows are perpet—”

“I vow—”

“Nicolai, don’t. You can take him until we find a safe place to leave him, but don’t—”

Nicolai looked into my eyes. Such kindness. But where was my mother? Still lying on the floor of our hut?

“I vow,” he said, “that whatever happens, I will protect you.”

Remus groaned. He began to say more, but Nicolai could not hear him, because suddenly, as though my mother had felt my yearning, the bells of Nebelmatt began to ring. Nicolai and Remus both cringed as the pealing shook them to their cores. Remus hunched his shoulders and stuck a dirty finger in each of his ears. Nicolai covered one side of my head with a huge palm and pressed my other ear against his chest, but I struggled until he put me down. I stepped down to the bank of the Reuss and looked up at the mountains. My mother was alive!

I ignored the kind man who had saved me from the river. Remus tried to pull him away, but Nicolai just stood and covered his ears and watched me—the little boy who was clearly not harmed by this sound that shook the ground beneath our feet.

My mother was well enough to have pulled herself off the muddy floor and climb to her bells! She played them now so fiercely it was as though she played the mountains themselves with her mallets.

A quarter hour passed, and then the same again. Remus stuffed his ears with scraps of wool and took out a book. Nicolai just watched me—fingers plugging his ears—as if I were a wild beast he had never glimpsed before. My mother rang her bells far longer than she was allowed. It had been many years since she was beaten for such excess. Now, I knew, the Nebelmatters crouched behind their doors, switches in their hands, ready to climb to the church as soon as it was safe.

And still she played the bells. She stroked them more ferociously than I had ever heard. There was almost no pause between the strikes. Then I heard a sudden change: she had cracked the soundbow of the smallest bell. Still she did not stop.

I heard that she was calling
him
. As my father struggled back up the rocky path, drenched in mud and sweat and shame, he would have heard the pealing as a judgment resounding throughout the world. And he would have hated her for every ring, just as he hated her for tempting him, for exposing his sin with a child, and for making him a murderer. With each ring, he must have sworn that he would silence her.

She taunted him up the muddy track with the promise she would sound his guilt until he stopped her. I am sure she watched him coming, but she did not slow or soften the ringing. Tears ran down my face and I screamed for my mother. “I am here!” I yelled. “I am alive!” But even Nicolai could not hear me. She beat those bells louder still, daring my father to climb to her tower and make her stop. In this tempest, the ground rumbled and the river crashed its waves around our feet, and I closed my eyes and imagined at the center of it all, my mother pounding her bells, summoning my father.

Twenty years later, when I would first return to that valley, the legend of the priest who had saved the ears of Nebelmatt was still recounted in every tavern. They took me for a foreigner and told me of the gentle priest and the evil witch who laid siege to the town from her belfry, who rang the bells day and night until the villagers began to lose their minds. They told me how the holy priest climbed the track to that church and disappeared inside—God had given him unearthly courage. From the village, they saw his silhouette leap through the trapdoor into the belfry. She danced around him, striking her bells until his ears were blown useless by the noise. And then, in his silent world, he lunged at her, the nimble demon, as she darted among the devil’s bells. He grabbed her gown, nearly fell, tottered on the edge of the belfry, hanging on the merest scrap of fabric in his fist. He yelled for her help. She leapt at him, as if she would embrace him. Then every eye in the village watched them fall.

No new priest was ever sent for. The bells were melted back into hoes.

But on that day, standing by that river, as I screamed up to my mother that I lived, what I imagined was very different. She struck her bells so hard that there, at the center of that noise, I was sure the world began to lose its firmness, the waves of sound rent apart my parents’ every fiber. I alone, above the pealing, heard my father’s scream echo off the mountains. Perhaps this was the moment his eardrums burst. But that child was certain his father screamed because his body was torn apart by the waves.

The bells did not ring again. Was she gone? Somehow I knew she was. The echoes around me hummed for several minutes. Just as every drop of ocean water was once a drop of rain, I heard then that every sound in the world had once been in my mother’s bells: the tinkling river, the whoosh of swallows darting after flies, the warm breath of the kind monk standing behind me. She was gone and she was everywhere.

Nicolai gently coughed. He lifted me as I crumpled into his arms. With each cry and sob, he held me tighter. When Remus opened his mouth to protest, Nicolai simply showed him a giant palm. The ugly monk closed his mouth and shook his head. Nicolai carried me to the road, where stood the three largest horses I had ever seen. Remus slunk after us. Nicolai swung both of us onto the lead horse, and placed me between his massive thighs.

“Hold tight,” he said. I could not see anything to hold, and as the horse took his first rocking step, I yelled in fright and tried to leap to the safety of the ground. Nicolai pulled me back. I closed my eyes, sloshing tears down my cheeks, and tried to picture my mother’s face, but I could not hold it in my mind. Instead, for comfort, I listened to the hollow thump of Nicolai’s gentle kicks into the horse’s ribs, the slurp of the monstrous hooves in the mud, the swish of the horse’s mane. And I looked ahead, down the bleary road, and wondered how far my mother’s bells had reached.

We turned off the road at Gurtnellen, and in that town of three hundred souls, I thought we had reached the center of the universe. Men wore clothes that were gray or white instead of brown. One of them withdrew a watch, and I took its tick-tick-tick as the beating heart of some tiny pocket beast. A lady, leaving a house made of stone, opened a parasol
—whoop
—that made me clasp Nicolai’s thick arm in fright.

Remus muttered to Nicolai that a naked boy on a monk’s lap was a sight that could cause us trouble, and so, from a tailor, Nicolai bought me linen underclothes and woolen breeches. The linen was as soft as a feather, but the breeches were as uncomfortable as Karl Victor’s belt around my neck. Later, we went into a tavern and ate plates of steaming stew and drank wine. After eight or ten glasses of the sour stuff, Nicolai stood with one foot on his chair. “Gentlemen,” he said to the traders and farmers in the room, “let me teach you what I learned in Rome.” He clapped his huge hands together, dropped his chin, and, in a booming bass, sang such a silly song in a language I took for gibberish that I smiled for the first time in many days. The other men in the room cheered and clapped, but Remus turned red and, after a second song, pulled us on our way.

We slept in inns along the road. I wrapped myself in blankets on the floor, and Nicolai and Remus slept in beds. When I sniffled in the night, Nicolai always woke and curled beside me on the floor, whose planks creaked beneath him. “Little Moses,” he’d whisper in my ear, “this is a massive world, full of joys, each one just waiting for you to claim. Don’t worry, there’s nothing more to fear. Nicolai is with you now.”