The Fisherman (27 page)

They don’t travel far, for which Jacob is grateful. As the bank they’re walking slants upwards, the mossy earth that covered it gives way to rock made slick by the water’s spray. Although Jacob is aware of something in the creek’s tumult, he’s too busy concentrating on where to plant his next footstep to pay it much notice. (Later, he’ll tell Lottie he had the impression the water was full of white bodies. “Like fish?” she’ll ask. He’ll shake his head.) But even as he leans forward to maintain his balance, all the while watching Rainer above him, pinwheeling his arms to keep from toppling backwards, Jacob hears a voice speaking to him.

His words a whisper in Jacob’s ears, Angelo, the man he struck down with an axe, asks him what he’s doing here. Doesn’t he have a wife to kiss, children to embrace? Doesn’t he live in a nice house, work at a good job? Why, then, is he here, in this place? Has he grown tired of his pleasant life? Does he want to know what Angelo knows? Would he like to raise his eyes to the sight of his companion’s axe flashing towards him? Would he like to feel its edge bite deep into his flesh? Would he like to know the shock that stuns his brain, so that all he can do is stare at the wooden handle of the tool that has killed him, while the blood spills out of him? He could not say his prayers, Angelo continues, could not make a final Act of Contrition. He could only sit there as his thoughts spiraled down a black drain. Even after his heart had stopped beating, he did not leave that place. He remained, watching, as Jacob and the rest of their companions stood around his corpse. He saw Jacob excused of his murder. He witnessed their half-hearted attempt at a funeral, their flight before the black ocean’s rising. He could not escape the water that rolled over him, that picked up his body and carried it far, far out, to the lightless depths where white demons sport amidst the coils of their great and terrible master. He was damned, Angelo says,
damned
, and he will be happy to share his dark eternity with Jacob: all he has to do is fling himself into the water to his right, and Angelo’s new companions will bring Jacob to him, directly.

For Jacob Schmidt, one act has haunted him these last years, and that, of course, is Angelo’s death. If it is a crime—and how, Jacob thinks, could it be anything but?—then it is as perfect a crime as any ever committed, since it happened in a place to which there would appear to be no chance of anyone ever gaining admission. Not to mention, Angelo’s body must, as his voice insists, have been washed out to sea by the wave pushed up by the great beast’s writhing. Even without any evidence of his act, however, Jacob has continued to carry the burden of it. For the longest time, afraid of the response it might provoke from her, he kept it a secret from Lottie. All through their courtship, the early years of their marriage, the births of their children, Jacob locked away the axe swing that claimed another man’s life, his stutter a convenient excuse on the odd occasions the impulse to confess pricked him. Only when their oldest girl, Greta, was so sick with scarlet fever that the normally cheerful doctor had grown serious and quiet did Jacob reveal his past deed to his wife. Half out of his mind with worry, he’d convinced himself that his daughter was going to be taken from him as a punishment for the life he took, years before. At first, Lottie had no idea what Jacob was babbling on about; once she understood what he was saying, she said, “But my father did not condemn you?”

He didn’t, Jacob admitted.

“Then that should be enough for you,” Lottie said. “Now come help me with our daughter.”

Greta survived her bought with scarlet fever, and while Jacob might have taken that as a sign that the powers-that-be weren’t interested in collecting on his past misdeed, he has not. He’s spent too much time brooding over it for him to be able to release it so easily. Angelo’s voice, here, his litany of reproaches, makes perfect sense to Jacob. It wasn’t his child whose life would be required: it’s his. Jacob is of an age that still believes the taking of your own life is a guaranteed route to eternal damnation, but what else was he expecting? He steps towards the water.

In so doing, he collides with Rainer, who’s come to a stop in front of him. Together, the men almost tumble into the raging stream, which suddenly strikes Jacob as a bad idea. He hauls himself and his father-in-law back from the edge. He’s expecting a correction from Rainer, a “Watch where you’re going!” but the man’s eyes are full of tears. Rainer drags his sleeve across his face, and resumes scaling the incline. Jacob follows.

Already, they’ve reached the top of their climb. Here, the shelf runs level for at least fifty yards. Angelo’s voice has returned, but it’s delivered no more than a half-dozen words when, over his shoulder, Rainer says, “We don’t speak of our life in the old country so much, do we? Sometimes, it seems as if it was a play in which I was cast, along with Clara and the girls. It happened—you could not say it was not real—but it had nothing to do with what our lives were to be. Or, not so much nothing as…” Unable to find the exact word, Rainer substitutes a shrug. “While I was in Heidelberg, at the University, I had a colleague named Wilhelm Vanderwort. He was a philologist, too. I would call him a friend, but that would not be accurate. We had great respect for one another, our work; our conversations were cordial. But we were too much in competition ever to be true friends. Our interest was the same: the languages that came before those we know, the tongues that lay beyond the beginning. Wilhelm was fond of saying that, once his work was finished, he would be able to tell what words Adam and Eve had spoken in the Garden. He had a habit of delivering such pronouncements, which went over well with his students but made his colleagues shake their heads. He was brilliant. With a difficult passage, he was capable of leaps of understanding that would light up the text in new and startling ways. What he was not so good at was the slower work, the careful analysis that made his insights possible, and that built on them, afterwards. This was my strength.

“Our relation might have remained as it was—the tortoise and the hare, I thought of it—but, almost by accident, an old book came into my possession. Mostly, it was written in Middle French, in which I had little interest, but there were passages scattered throughout its pages in a language I had not seen before. The French portions claimed these were examples of exactly what I had been searching for, a tongue from prehistory. I dismissed the idea as ridiculous, but none of my research could find any other instance of these particular characters having been used. In and of itself, this proved nothing. They could have been a private code. But there were…” Rainer waves his hand, “things about these passages that caused me to doubt this. Anyway, the point is, I showed them to Wilhelm and asked for his assistance in translating them.

“At first, he believed I was playing a trick on him. I had to show him the book to prove I wasn’t. He was equally certain the passages could not be what the book said they were, but he was intrigued by the challenge they offered. The book presented what it said were faithful translations of the first half of each selection, leaving the remainder for whoever was interested enough to complete. This gave us something to work with, a key—though a key that was missing some of its teeth, and in danger of snapping off in the lock. We treated the matter as a puzzle, half a joke. We talked about writing a paper on a hitherto-unknown instance of a secret medieval code.”

To either side of Jacob and Rainer, the ridges that have dropped so starkly to the water’s edge lean back. Ahead, the stream curves to the right. Rainer says, “Everything changed when I obtained another book, this one rarer than the one with which we were working. I leafed through it, and found myself looking at a fresh example of the language Wilhelm and I had been laboring over. It was as if I had been struck by lightning. I rushed out of the house to find Wilhelm in his office at the University and show it to him. It appeared we were onto something of genuine significance.

“How significant, we did not appreciate until we began our attempts to speak what had until now been confined to paper. The second book had provided us with a great many clues as to how this might be accomplished, along with cryptic warnings about the need for care in doing so. We dismissed these as rhetorical flourishes inserted to lend the text a more ominous character. We were wrong. The first word we tried to pronounce was ‘dark.’ It was among the most common of the words we’d encountered, and we felt confident we had its pronunciation settled. Although we scoffed at the second book’s warnings, we waited until a Sunday when my family was safely asleep to attempt our experiment. We shut the door to my study, and uttered the word.

“The room was plunged into blackness. I did not understand what had happened; I thought something had gone wrong with the lamp. This did not explain why the hall light was not visible at the bottom of the study’s door—or, for the matter, what had become of the city lights outside the window. The blackness was so complete, we might have been in a deep cave. I stumbled around, searching for the lamp, crashing into my desk and spilling books and papers onto the floor. A kind of panic was wrapping its hands around my throat; I was finding it difficult to breathe in this darkness.

“Then Wilhelm Vanderwort spoke a second word, and light, wonderful, rich, creamy light returned to the study. You will have guessed the word: it was ‘light.’ We had disagreed about the placement of the stresses in it, but it appeared Wilhelm’s interpretation was correct. As soon as the study had become dark, he had apprehended what I had not, that the word that had passed our lips had done this. This was no language such as we had known, in which a word points in the direction of its object. Instead, this was a tongue which was woven into—into everything,” Rainer sweeps his hands around him, “so that to name something was to call it forth.

“To you, who was part of the business with the Fisherman, this will not sound too strange. To us—well, you can imagine. This was more, much, much more, than a pair of university scholars had expected, ever. Our aspirations had been for a certain, limited fame within our community—to be one of those figures who excites the admiration of his juniors, and the respect and envy of his peers. Now…”

They’ve reached the place where the creek swings to the right. Rainer leaves the bank, heading for the rows of trees in front of them. He and Jacob walk in amongst their ranks a good fifteen, twenty yards, until they arrive at a low wall of the kind common in these parts, flat stones of assorted dimensions dug from the earth and layered together. Rainer turns and seats himself on it. Jacob remains standing. Rainer says, “Through the merchant who had provided the books for me, I made inquiries. Eventually, Wilhelm and I were put in touch with a small group of men who were familiar with the language we had begun translating, and more, besides. They were impressed with what we had achieved on our own, enough to accept us as…apprentices, you could say. There was a great deal to learn. There were other tongues, more ancient—and more powerful—still. There were histories of the peoples who had employed these languages, their beliefs, their customs, their rises and falls. There were maps of places that lie beside, below, the one we inhabit; there were accounts of their denizens.

“In our new passion, Wilhelm and I were as competitive as we had been in our previous one. Each of us did his best to show up the other. We spurred one another forward, faster, ever-faster, till we were standing in front of a large door set in the wall of a deep basement in one of Heidelberg’s newer buildings. You would have recognized the fellow with the iron ring in his mouth: we saw his likeness on the door of the Fisherman’s big house. One of our instructors took hold of the ring and pulled the door open. The basement was at least twenty feet underground, but when we looked through the doorway, we saw an alleyway. Wilhelm strode out of the basement into the alley as if it were the most natural thing. Trying to act as if I shared his calm, I crossed after him. We had come to…

“There are cities built along the shores of the black ocean. This was one of them. It was neither the largest nor the oldest of these places, but it was of sufficient size and age for our instructors’ purposes. They had set us to a task—a kind of examination—to determine if Wilhelm and I were ready to proceed to the next stage in our learning. Our mission was simple: we were to make our way to the other side of the city, where we would find its necropolis. There, we were to locate a certain grave, and pluck from it a flower we would find growing in its soil. This was not as easy as you might suppose. Not only was the flower rare, it was regarded by the city’s populace as the soul of the priest who was buried under it. To remove such a plant was considered a mix of heresy and murder. The streets were full of police, tall shapes dressed in black cloaks and wearing masks fashioned to resemble the curved beaks of birds of prey; they were armed with long, curved knives, which they would use without hesitation on any they caught engaged in a criminal activity such as ours. The geography of the city was strange, contradictory. Streets ended unexpectedly in blank walls, or climbed bridges which came to a stop high in the air; they arrived at circular courtyards from which a dozen alleyways branched out. We had to guide ourselves by the stars burning overhead. These were not arranged in the familiar constellations. Here, the images they drew had been given names such as the Rider, the Staff, and the Garland of Fruit.

“We succeeded. It was a difficult journey, which brought us frightfully near the figures in the bird-masks, but we found the plot of earth and the moon-colored flower rising from it in a slender arc. I removed it, Wilhelm concealed it in the folds of his jacket, and we navigated back to the alley whose end returned us to the basement in Heidelberg. We were exhausted, triumphant, and we passed what few hours remained of that night in celebration with our mentors. One of them had left with the flower, but the others were happy to share an assortment of very fine liquors with us. As dawn was breaking, we staggered off to our homes, shouting old songs, flushed with self-importance.