The Bells (11 page)

II.

A
s the pain and fever disappeared, so did my testicles. After a week they were hard kernels. A few days later, I woke up and did my customary reach below the covers—then sat up quickly. I was empty.

It was a simple feat, and it is still done each year by both surgeons and barbers to thousands of boys in Italian lands. Doctor Rapucci had cut the twin forks of my internal spermatic artery. Starved of what they needed to live, my testicles died, and were consumed by my own blood. I noticed no other change, neither in body nor in mind. My voice was as fine and brilliant as it had been at the inauguration, and so, while singing, all I noticed was the sudden lack of those two tiny bells ringing between my legs.

I felt the same. I did not grow wings. I did not grow tall and broad like the musico Bugatti. Yet I knew Rapucci’s operation had not failed—Ulrich’s pitying glances told me as much.
You do not mean a castrate? Not a half-man!
Staudach had said when Ulrich wished for a musico to sing in his church. I could not fathom what I was, nor what I would become, but I knew that it was something I must hide. I bathed only in the middle of the night, a towel close at hand. I locked my door when I changed my clothes. I never asked Nicolai the purpose of those organs I had lost. I held my secret close, hoping that I could merely forget that awful night and its consequences. For several years it seemed that I could do just that.

About two years after the church was finished, Frau Duft’s condition worsened noticeably. It seemed to me that her bones were growing. Her skin tautened, and her chin and eye sockets grew more prominent. Each breath came as though with the help of some invisible hand that crushed the air out of her. Her voice was a whisper, and that warmth she had always spread now cost her so much pain.

Energetic Herr Duft grew sullen. Amalia, who loved that sick woman more than most girls love mothers who can dance and chat nonsense all day, answered her father’s anxiety with charm, and attended to the man. “But why did Alexander do everything Aristotle asked?” she’d say. Or, “Moses says he’d like to see the heads,” and then she’d poke me until I nodded, even though those vats scared me so. Herr Duft was only roused when he spoke of the fortunes he earned with such ease, or when he discussed his plans to expand his reach eastward, through his correspondence with a Viennese fabric magnate with whom he intended to conquer the fabric-wearing world.

One night as Remus and I arrived in the parlor, Duft was staring out the window, his face gray (which was extraordinary for a man whose standard hue resembled uncooked beef). Amalia stared blankly at a book before her eyes and made no attempt to revive him, nor did she even greet us.

Karoline suddenly swept into the room, as if she had been lurking outside the door, waiting for us to enter. “Not tonight!” she said glibly, as if speaking to two naughty children. “The lady is doing awfully bad. The doctor fears she might die.” The heavy woman bounced from foot to foot, a clumsy but jubilant dancer. In her eyes I could see she had already begun to dream of the New Frau Duft: more refined, more fertile than the last. She shooed us out the door with a few flips of her wrist. I retreated, but bumped into Remus. Normally he rushed out of the house like a hound released from his cage, but when I looked up, I saw a stubborn anger on his face.

“You jackal,” he muttered, just loud enough for all to hear.

“Pardon me?” Karoline Duft asked. But Remus had turned his gaze to admire the blank wall. The severe woman looked down at me, as if I might offer an excuse.

Amalia stared at Remus in admiration.

Suddenly Duft stirred. He seemed to see me for the first time. “Come next week,” he said weakly. “She will be better then. With no doubt.”

I nodded.

The man stared at me earnestly, as if we were the only ones in the room. “Moses, we just need more time.”

Remus laid a hand on my shoulder. We began to back toward the door.

“Voltaire had smallpox once,” Duft suddenly said. He stood up and took slow steps and stretched out his hand, stalking me. “Almost killed him. You know what he did? He drank a hundred and twenty pints of lemonade. It cured him.” Duft looked at the ceiling and rubbed his lips. I worried he would begin to cry. His voice grew even more feeble, cracking from time to time. “I made her try that, too. But she has not got smallpox, and it only works if you have smallpox. If only she did. Then we would at least know how to fix it. But that’s it. Don’t you see? Every disease has got a cure to match. Only, the diseases and the cures are all mixed up.” He stirred the air up in front of his chest with his hands. “Infinity of diseases. Infinity of cures.
All mixed up
. Even with a society of Aristotles, it would still take forever.” He finished his speech so close to me that I heard his toes scrunching in his shoes, which almost touched mine. I nodded up at him.

“Why would God do that?” he whispered down at me. “Why? Why give us a puzzle that is so hard to solve?”

I wished Nicolai were there; he would have had an answer. He never lost sight of the beauty of the world, no matter how obscured was God’s great puzzle. But Nicolai was not there, and so Remus laid a hand on Duft’s arm, as if to say,
Yes, you are right. It isn’t fair
. Then Remus pulled me back, and we retreated down the passage. I watched Duft’s silhouette, unmoved, standing on the threshold, as if he planned to wait there until I returned.

Amalia was no longer the little girl who had held my hand in the dark passages. She was taller; one could glimpse the coming woman in her face. But to me she was as kind as ever, for despite the garden parties and lunches with the best of St. Gall’s other Catholic girls, I was the only true friend she had in those years. We still lingered in the passages every Thursday on which her mother’s health allowed us to visit her. One day she said sadly to me, “Moses, you’re so lucky you’re not a girl. I hate them. Every girl I’ve ever met.” She bit her lip and tugged at a loose thread on my sleeve. “I never want to see them, but Karoline makes me go. Yesterday I went all the way to Rorschach just so they could insult me.” She stuck out her lip and affected a squeaky voice, “
I’m so sorry for you, Amalia. It must be so awful to have a limp. However do you stand it? If I were you I’d just hide in my room all day.
” Her cheeks turned red; she was still humiliated by the memory. “It’s the boys’ fault. It’s not as though there are too few of them, but these girls act like there’s a thousand of us and just three suitable matches in the world. We can’t even get married yet, but all they think about is marriage.”

We took several steps and Amalia rubbed her arm absently against mine.

I looked up at her. I dared to speak: “Will you get married?”

Amalia laughed at my serious face. “Of course I will, stupid. Do you think I want to live forever with that witch? I’ll marry.” She nodded, and stared dreamily down the passage. “But he’ll be rich. And dumb. He’ll just ride about on his horse and hunt or whatever it is grown men like to do,” she said. “He’ll do everything I say.”

She dreamed of escaping her prison. One day she withdrew a folded sheet of paper. She unfolded a meticulous drawing of the abbey. “I copied it,” she said proudly. “Every window, every door. It will be my map, for when I visit you.”

“When will you visit me?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, “most likely next week. Certainly before the month is out. Draw an
X
on your room so I know where to find you.”

“But they won’t let you in,” I said. “You’re a girl.”

“I’m a
Duft,
” she said severely.

I studied the monk’s dormitories, found the little windows in the roof, and counted carefully from the end.

“That is mine,” I said, and with her pencil drew an X.

The next week I asked her why she had not come. “I was so busy,” she said. “Next week I should manage it. Wait for me in the evening.”

I did—every evening for many months, but she never came.

A time came the following summer when extended clear, dry air made Frau Duft’s state improve, and I sang to her each week. Then the autumn rains arrived, and once again her condition worsened. For two months I did not sing for her at all. I was again a legitimate choirboy, though I would have preferred the furtive concerts for the two Duftesses to any venue in Europe.

Then one morning, one of the soldiers who guarded the monastery gate appeared in our practice room.

“Moses the choirboy must come with me,” he said to Ulrich. “The abbot orders it.”

I was terrified. But Ulrich dismissed me to go with the soldier, and instead of the abbot, I found Karoline Duft waiting at the gate.

“Come,” she said, and turned on her heel. I walked behind that cone of a woman through the crowded market, which opened for her like the parting of a sea. She said nothing until we had left the busy streets.

“The doctor says she will die,” she said, as if she were merely talking about an aged mare whose time had come. “She has asked for you, and he has not refused. I disagree, but he has lost his sense.” She walked faster, and I nearly had to run. “A Duft without his sense is not a Duft. That woman has been in bed for seven years. She has but stalled our advance and consumed our wealth. And now she wants a concert.” She stopped short and my head bumped her soft behind. She looked down at me. She sniffed. “I suppose you will want your fee.”

I had no idea that singers could be paid to sing.

“And you will get it, I am sure. One blessed abbot, and so many souls to burden him. How he bears it, I do not know!”

I was so accustomed to guiding Remus down the streets that when I heard that butcher’s chop, I laid my hand on Karoline’s wide hip and pushed.

She yelped and slammed her palm into my ear. “You disgusting child!”

I rubbed my ear as we turned the corner. She massaged her hip as though my touch had burned her. “It is bad enough that this city is full of Reformers. Now even children are molesting women. How could Willibald find a new wife here? He will have to go far away. To Innsbruck. Or Salzburg. I must write a letter tonight.”

She turned to shake a finger at me.

“You are a choirboy. You should be the best of all of them, and look at you. In two years you will be looking Amalia up and down, even with her deformation. And she will probably smile back, knowing her.” Karoline shook her head in disgust. “One child! And a girl!”

We arrived at Haus Duft, and I entered for the first time through the main doors into the palatial entrance hall. It was a high, two-storied room with a wide double staircase and a huge area of plastered wall, which must have hidden masses of that echoing limestone, because this entrance hall seemed to be the auditorium for the stage of Haus Duft; myriad canals of sound converged in this lobby. The nurse Marie yapped in French to some victim. A piglet squealed. A mop slurped into a bucket. A cleaver split a bone. Two scullery maids chattered. The wind moaned along the roof.

Karoline Duft climbed halfway up the stairs, leaving me dumbfounded at the bottom, immersed in the sounds around me. She turned and snapped down at me. “Close your mouth. You look like an idiot just standing there. Have you never seen such riches before?”

I suppose she meant the thick carpets, oak furniture, and second-rate portraits of Dufts on the wall. For a choirboy from the church of St. Gall, these were mere trifles.

I followed her down ever-twisting hallways, until dutiful Peter came into view, slumped at his station.

“Moses!” He stood like a sentry greeting a general, then realized he had forgotten to record my arrival, checked his watch, and wrote my name before returning to attention. He offered me a charcoal mask.

“Then Science has not yet resigned!” he said. “I knew you would come again. Just in time, too. The doctor says all we can do is pray, but we do not simply pray here in Haus Duft.”

“We certainly do!” Karoline snapped.

“I mean,” said the faithful scribe, as if noticing the ugly pear for the first time, “Science is our way of praying.”

“If there were more prayers and fewer Sciences in this house,” said Karoline, “we would not have all these troubles.”

“Yes, madam,” said Peter. He looked terribly uncomfortable, so he scribbled in his margins, as if he had a very important sum to work out.

“Well, go in,” Karoline said to me. “Do not wait for me; I will not risk my vibrant health.”

Peter flashed me one final, hopeful look, as if to cheer for Science. Or Music. Or both.

Amalia sat on one side of her mother’s bed, Herr Duft on the other. His eyes were filled with tears, but he wiped them away, rising from his chair as I entered. He came to me quickly and tousled my hair. Afterward, his hand remained on my head as if he had forgotten he had placed it there. We stood like this for a minute while he stared glassy-eyed at the door behind me. Amalia sat in her chair and did not look at me either.

“We failed, Moses,” Duft finally said. “We tried, but we failed. We did not get enough chances, that’s the problem. It’s unfair, the way it is. Disease getting all the chances it wants, and we getting so few. If it were the other way around we would stumble on the solution one way or another. However, I do thank you for trying. A noble job you have done.”

Amalia looked at her mother’s unmoving form in the bed. The sick woman’s breath could not even make the coverlet rise and fall.

Duft continued. “Earlier she asked for you, but that is over now. The doctor says there is no more use for hope. We brought you here for nothing. You may—” His words were suddenly choked off. He covered his mouth, and I saw that his discharging of me was the flag of his surrender, perhaps the first time in seven years when hope had not inflated him to futile action.

I listened to Frau Duft’s breaths: quiet and short. Then I looked at my friend again. My vibrant Amalia looked hollow and fragile, and I realized that when this woman was finally gone, the girl’s loneliness would be complete. She would have no one left to hold her hand and stroke her hair, nor would she have a friend with whom to boast and dream, for my position at Haus Duft would expire along with her mother.