The Letter Killers Club (15 page)

Now began a life that bore little resemblance to life. The city's many lovely and compassionate maidens gazed with sympathy and longing at the handsome Nig: his lips were cracked from love-thirst, his cheeks sunken, his eyes lackluster; he tried not to notice the girls' rosebud mouths as he went about muttering curses and complaints. But that babbler—Ing—couldn't even complain: his tongue twitched with all the unsaid words he had to swallow together with the meager meals he shared with Nig. They felt ashamed to eat in front of the famished Gni. Before breaking a biscuit in half, they would disappear behind a door or around a corner. Gni was worse by the day: by now too weak to walk, he had to be helped by his friends to put one foot in front of the other. The poor man was soon half delirious and raving about the greasy hams, sizzling sausages, and larded pullets turning with a delicious hiss on spits in his mind's eye.

Ing wasn't allowed to rave: for fear of talking in his sleep, he'd hardly had a wink.

Nig was holding up best of all. He had not given in to despair and twice, having waited for the right moment, had struck up a conversation with the sentry by the city gates. After the second conversation, he took Ing aside and said, “Listen, babbler, we may be able to open the city gates, but we'll need a golden key. We have to hurry, Gni is in a bad way. Our companion has become a burden, but even so we must save him, and ourselves too. Your whole life you have only babbled; now you must work, my friend. I'm speaking of the judge's wife. Finish the affair—or else we're all done for. Silence signifies consent. It's growing dark. I've kept an eye out: her window is always open at this hour. And there's no one about. Come on now and I'll show you—with the help of your own mouth, you odd duck—that you were wrong about its purpose.

Ing lowed with suffering, like a deaf-mute or a man with his tongue cut out, and trudged obediently to the rescue, encouraged by Nig's kicks.

He received his final instructions under the window opened wide to the night: “Now, remember: act with kisses. And if you say one word, I'll report you myself and they'll lop off your head. I'll be right here listening and keeping watch: I'm not an old nurse and I won't nod off, so none of your ways. Here's my back: now climb up. Go on!”

Ing's doomed heels teetered on Nig's shoulders, and then, after he had pulled himself up to the windowsill, landed loudly on the floor. From inside came a woman's scream, then a frightened whisper. Nig, standing on tiptoe, one ear pressed to the wall, listened hungrily. The female whisper was becoming exasperated, hitting high questioning notes; still there was no answer. A brief silence followed. Then loud reproaches mixed with tears. Another silence, slightly longer. And suddenly—a soft, muffled kiss. Nig pulled his hat down and crossed himself. The kisses were rapidly becoming more audible and sedulous. Nig stopped his ears and licked his parched lips.

First a sack landed beside him with a soft plop. Then Ing's heels were seen dangling from the window ledge, ransacking the air. Nig put his shoulders under them and in a minute the two friends were stealing toward the gate-tower where waited their previously delivered animate treasure—Gni.

Like Gni, the sack of gold coins left half its weight inside the city walls, so the runaways were not overly encumbered. Before morning they had reached a forester's lonely hut where a few gold disks afforded them relative safety and respite. Nig winked at the forester's red-cheeked wife as she fattened Gni up, stuffing him with food like a mattress with straw, while Ing, having done an honest night's work, refused to stop talking and rest: his itching tongue would not lie down in his mouth; silence, you see, is the most inexhaustible theme for tall tales.

But as soon as the three grew stronger, so did the fourth—their dispute. Each sought to construe recent events to his own advantage: opinions are like nails—the harder one hits them, the deeper in they go. Now that each of the three mouths had been temporarily separated—one from kisses, another from words, a third from food —none of the three wanted ever again to give up his point, driven in as far as it would go by pain. And since the deserted forest replied only with echoes, they decided to go on.

“And go they should,” said Fev. “But it's time that we, my fellow conceivers, turned back. I see the friends' route from here on as a dotted line: the series of encounters may be expanded or abridged, the wandering-dispute plot gives one that license; the route—from beginning to end—uncoils like a lasso, the trick is to throw it as far as it will go then catch the end in the loop. The ending here, I think, should be roughly as follows.”

Led on by their dispute, the three walked and walked till they were cut off by the sea. They turned along the shore and soon came to a port, into which and out of which ships would sail. But the sea was like glass, not a ripple, sails were sagging—the wandering dispute would also have to wait for the wind.

The sack given to Ing still jingled with a dozen coins. The friends went into an eating house. When the wine had loosened their tongues, Ing turned to the sailors with whom they had been drinking—strapping, salt-rimed lads—and said, “What, to your mind, is the purpose of a mouth?” He asked them to choose one of the three answers.

The lads scratched their heads and exchanged sheepish glances.

“Won't all three of those, what do you call them … purposes, fit in one mouth?” one of the sailors at last replied, glancing warily at the strangers.

Smiling indulgently, Ing explained, “All purposes are not alike. Causes—Duns Scotus
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tells us—are either complete, that is total, or incomplete … or let's say, for simplicity's sake, empty. Here are three bottles: two empty and one full. See?”

“Yes,” the lad replied, furrowing his brow.

“Now. Place them before a sighted man and say to him: choose. Obviously, the man will reach for the bottle with wine in it. Isn't that so?”

“That's so,” the lad echoed, his forehead beading with perspiration.

“Now close your eyes.”

The lad did as he was told. Ing noiselessly rearranged the bottles. “Take one. Quick.”

The fellow grabbed the neck of an empty bottle. There was a roar of laughter. Ing, gazing into the sailor's guiltily blinking eyes, concluded, “It's the same with purpose. People are blind: that's why their purposes are empty. It's the rare man who drinks not from an empty bottle.”

There was a respectful silence—then the oldest sailor said with a mournful sigh, “We're simple folk and unschooled: how are we to answer questions like that? But the winds blow to all ends of the earth. The calm will lift, and I'll set sail with my load of salted fish: I'll trade it for raisins and pistachios on the far shore. Come with me: maybe overseas you can trade your questions for answers.”

Meanwhile dawn had scoured the black windows with light; the three paid up and went out into the street. Not far off, her gaunt back pressed against the wall, sat a woman; her cheeks were painted the color of the dawn, but she had had no takers this night; only the morning chill, without having paid a kopeck, fumbled the strum-pet with icy fingers, forcing itself farther and farther under her motley rags.

“The poor thing's shivering,” Nig squinted, “but not with passion. What can she be waiting for?”

“Your kisses, Nig.” Ing elbowed him. “The sore on her lip has been pining for you.”

“I don't think so. Better offer her some words of comfort.”

Ing bent over the woman. “My child, if you don't rot on earth, you won't flourish in heaven.”

Gni cut Ing short with a swift kick. Then he approached the frozen creature and, scrabbling in his pockets without a word, pulled out a hunk of bread and poked it in her mouth. The woman's thin hands seized the crust and went on pushing it in to meet her frantically chewing teeth.

“Tell me, little morsel,” Gni smiled, watching with emotion as her jaws worked, “isn't it true that God made a hole in our face not so that words might pour out of it or that idiotic kisses might be planted on it, but so that man—by means of it—might know the joy of taking nourishment?”

The hunk of bread kept the woman from answering for some time. Finally the three heard: “I really don't know: in our profession, if you don't kiss, you don't eat. But you shouldn't ask me, go along the shore by that path, it leads to a cave. The cave's not empty: a wise man lives there—a hermit. He knows everything—that's why he gave everything up.”

“We haven't tried any hermits. What do you say we go?” The wandering dispute continued on its way along the winding path.

The sun had all but set when Gni, his companions lagging behind, poked his head inside the pitchy cave and asked, “What suits a mouth best: kisses, words, or victuals?”

From out of the darkness he heard: “Where does the dew come from—the earth or the sky?”

“From the sky, they say.”

Ing and Nig walked up.

“From the sky,” they agreed.

Perplexed, Gni again poked his head into the darkness: something heavy struck him on the forehead, knocked him off his feet, and, lolloping out of the cave, came to rest nearby: it was an ordinary cast-iron pot. The friends inspected it inside and out, but found no answer.

“Now you do the asking,” said Gni, clutching his bruised brow. “I've had enough.”

They moved away from the entrance to the cave and decided to spend the night: they would continue on their way in the morning. The cast-iron pot remained in the grass where it had fallen, bottom-side up.

Gni was the first to open his eyes—the lump rising on his forehead woke him. In the dawn blaze he saw sitting beside him a stranger. The stranger smiled affably and said, “Come to see the hermit?”

“Y-yes. You too?”

The stranger made no reply; hiding a smile in his wispy gray beard, he eyed the dawn-dappled dewdrops gleaming on the grass's green tips.

“I wouldn't disturb the hermit if I were you.”

“Why?”

“Because instead of an answer, you'll get this. Get hit with this, that is.” Gni kicked the cast-iron pot with annoyance. The pot rolled away, and on the blades of grass that had been hiding under it Gni was astonished to see large sprightly dewdrops trembling with iridescence.

“What the devil!” Gni exclaimed. “How did they get under that pot from up in the sky?”

“To explain what's inside a cooking pot,” said the stranger, “you needn't climb up to the sky—the answer is right here, under the pot, close to the ground. And to explain what arose in your head, you needn't wander the earth: the answer is right here, under your crown, next to the question. A riddle is always made up of its answer; answers—so it has always been and will be—are older than questions. Don't wake your companions, let them sleep: you have a long and difficult way home ahead of you.”

Picking up the cast-iron pot, the old man disappeared into the pitchy cave.

That same day the three set off on their return journey.

The good tradition of plot development requires that the outward journey be told on slow hired horses, the return on fast relay horses. So then, let's suppose that my three, having worn out a dozen soles between them, are nearly home. Their native town comes out to greet them: a young monk, hitching up his cassock to avoid the puddles, exchanges decorous bows with Ing; a girl with a swelling belly drops her bucket in the mud at the sight of Nig; haunters of the Three Kings hang out of the window, calling and waving to Gni—but the three companions, without relinquishing their staffs, walk past and on. Nig is in front: he is leading them to Ignota.

They arrive. The yard is bare except for a fresh wheel track in the mud and some pine branches scattered from gate to door. They knock: no answer. Nig gives the door a shove, it springs open; they walk into the passage. “This is the place”—but the door to Ignota's tiny room is also open; the stove bench is strewn with straw, the air is thick with incense, and not a soul. Nig takes off his hat. So do the other two. Going out in silence, the wayfarers follow the green pine needles to the graveyard. Among the crosses too: not a soul. Only a distant spade slapping the earth. They follow the sound. The mourners, if there were any, have gone. Only the gravedigger lingers: the packed earth is resisting his shovel.

“Is Ignota here?” asks Nig.

“Yes. Only if you want something from her, better come back later, when eternity's over.”

“We don't want anything from her, except the answer to one question.”

“I'm here to inter corpses, not disinter questions. And corpses, as you know, are not talkative: whatever you ask them, they won't open their mouths. No, I'm wrong,” the gravedigger grinned and gave them a sly wink. “They'll open their mouths all right, like they want a last word, only they're not allowed to say it—first their jaws are bound shut, then their mouths are stuffed with earth, so whatever word that is, the word of the dead, no one's ever heard it. Though I'd like to.”

“Blockhead,” mutters Ing.

“Why is there no cross?” asks Gni.

“Her kind don't get one,” the gravedigger mumbles, and again takes up his spade.

Crossing their staffs, the three tie them together to make a cross;
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when it has spread its straight wooden arms over Ignota, Ing says, “Yes, the land of questions keeps expanding and multiplying its riches, the many-colored land of questions blooms ever more brightly and abundantly, while the land of answers is desolate, destitute, and dismal, like this graveyard. Therefore—”

“We should go and have a drink,” Gni supplies him. “Amen.”

All three finish their story where they began it: in the Three Kings. Whew. That's all.

Fev sat breathing unevenly and hoarsely. His eyes swam back, into the fat. The president was some time in breaking the silence. “Well, your story too shall have a place in our nonexistent library.” He dipped his fingers into the shelves' black emptiness, as though considering where to put the unwritten book. “Your theme, it seems to me, is a sort of merry hearse: spinning its spokes amid the flickering torches, it dances over the pits in the road, its pied tassels and funereal frippery jouncing, and yet it is a hearse and bound for the cemetery. You may call me a grumbler, but you all, my esteemed conceivers, insist on dumping your plot endings into one and the same grave. That won't do. The art of the literary endgame requires subtler and more varied denouements. To fall into a pit is easy, to climb out of it—if it's deep—is harder. We have not flung away our pens so as to take up the shovels of gravediggers.”