The Bells (12 page)

I, too, began to cry, for the mother and the daughter—but also for myself. Duft, tears in his eyes to match mine, nodded knowingly at me, as if he were finally prepared to begin acknowledging the presence of sadness in the world. He led me to the door.

“Please sing,” Amalia said, automatically, without looking up.

“Dear,” said Duft, “there is no use. She is not awake.”

“Please,” she said. Her voice cracked, but she did not cry. I had never seen tears on that face.

And so, against the sense of Science, I began to sing. From that small library of music in my head, I chose sections from Dufay’s
Mass for St. Anthony
, a piece written when music was still pure and clear, more like a shallow mountain stream than today’s profound musical oceans. Frau Duft had heard it many times, and I knew she loved the
Gloria
.

I sang. Duft stared at his wife’s sleeping form. Amalia covered her face with her hands and finally let fall all the tears that had built up during these years of stoic visits. I sang more loudly. The lamp above my head began to ring. Duft’s body made no sound. Frau Duft, too, was unreceptive to my voice. But Amalia cried harder, her body opened to my voice, ringing faintly like the lamp above us—a sound she could not hear, but that I hoped she dearly felt like my warm arms around her neck.

She laid her head on the edge of her mother’s bed and sobbed.

Then, suddenly, Frau Duft’s eyelids fluttered. She looked at me, and as on the first day I had sung for her, I saw again the echo of my mother in those eyes.

She reached out a trembling, bony hand to touch her daughter’s sobbing head. Amalia started, sat up, and tried to stop her tears, but there were so many, and they had waited so long to fall. This time she could not hold them back. She took her mother’s hand and cried into it, clutching the bone and skin to her wet cheek. Frau Duft could not hold her; even her eyelids were too heavy.

I sang on. My voice was strong, strong enough to hold Amalia while she cried, strong enough to fight with death. I sang louder. My arms were weightless with their ringing; my feet seemed to lift off the floor, so that I was like a bell hanging from the sky. My voice rang not only in the lamp, but louder in Amalia now, and humming in the floorboards, in the ceiling, and in the windowpanes behind the bed.

The walls of that house took up my voice and resounded. Each of those million million tiny shells filled with my voice and passed it on in a chain of song, until the whole house was singing. And then my voice reached farther: into the earth below the house and out into the sky and soon I knew I was making the whole world shake, just as my mother had rung the world with her bells. The shaking was quiet—no one but I could hear it—but everyone in the Duft household could feel it as a warmth that made them smile.

I sang even more loudly, and my voice shook off all the dirt and grime that weighed us down. It shook away sadness and disease. It shook away fear and worry. It shook the meek into courage. The sick rose from their beds. My voice shook the desperation from their eyes. It shook the exhaustion from their bodies, the disease from their lungs. We had again what we had lost.

III.

F
rau Duft did not die that day, but it was the last time she heard my voice. A week later, we sang the
Trauermusik
at her funeral.

I was never invited back into Haus Duft. My friendship with Amalia was over—or so it seemed to me in the weeks following the funeral. I did see her frequently, however, for now that her aunt’s influence in the household had increased, Amalia was taken to Mass nearly every day. When I sat among the other nonperforming choirboys near the high altar, I had no chance to approach the grating that split the nave in two; but on those occasions when I sang in the choir, after Mass I stole to the grating’s gate near the wall of the church. The gate was always locked and never used. I could hide myself if I pressed up against the stone pillar on which its hinges hung. Through the gate’s ornate metalwork I could glimpse her just behind her aunt, among the throng of worshippers passing out the door.

For several months I did no more than peer at her between two golden leaves, but then, one Sunday, I could not resist; I softly sang her name. She looked to her left, her right, behind her. Several other worshippers did as well—thank God her aunt was nearly deaf—and then she passed out the door. I did the same after the next Mass at which I sang, and once again after the next. That third time, I noted that she was walking slowly, waiting to hear her name, and when I whispered it, she turned to look straight at my eye peering through the gate.

The next time I sang, another two weeks later, I did not need to call. I heard Amalia tell her aunt that she wished to look at the plaster relief of St. Gallus, which adorned the wall just outside the gate. Karoline looked up at the statue as if she suspected it of foul play, but as her eyes rested on the face of the abbey’s patron saint, she nodded approvingly and passed out the door. Amalia stepped to the relief. If not for the densely woven metalwork of the gate, I could have reached out and touched her shoulder. She bowed her head. For a moment I doubted she knew that I was there.

Then her pious face broke into a grin. “You’ll get in trouble,” she said.

“So will you.”

“But I don’t care,” she said proudly. “I’m not afraid of her.”

“I’m not afraid either,” I lied.

She grinned again, and then fought it down. She appeared to have resumed her prayer.

“I’ll come every Sunday,” she suddenly said aloud.

“Only when I sing. Next time is Pentecost.”

“I know when you sing. I can hear you.”

“Can you?”

“Yes. Even when twenty other voices sing.”

“How do you know it’s me?” I asked.

“Don’t be stupid. I know.” She looked toward my eye. She smiled warmly. “I’ve got to go.” She strode away into the flow of worshippers and out the northern door.

On Pentecost, just as she had promised, when I pressed my eye against the gate, nestled behind the pillar so no monk would see, there she was, telling her aunt she would once again pray before the saint. An approving nod from Karoline.

“I told you I would come,” she said.

We spoke for thirty seconds, and then she was gone. The same the next time I sang, and every Sunday after that for many months. We never spoke for long, for fear of being caught, and though I saw all of her there was to see, she saw no more of me than that single eye and scraps of my black choir robe.

“Such a witch,” Amalia spat at the back of her withdrawing aunt one Sunday. “Now she says I can’t walk to church.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“ ‘Girls of your age should not walk in the streets, even with an escort.’ Should I spend my life in the house or in a coach? With her? ‘I’ll make you into a lady,’ she says, ‘
even if it kills me.
’ I hope it does. If only each smudge of dirt on my dress would take an hour off her life. She’s just angry that she’s a spinster, but that doesn’t mean she can make me the lady she wishes she had been.” Her face was red with rage.

“I think you’re a lady already,” I said.

She clenched her teeth, but laughter burst through her nose. She stifled her embarrassment. “How would you know?”

I did not reply then, but I saw every week that what I said was true: she was becoming a lady. The gold of her hair darkened slightly. She’d grown taller. My head would no longer have reached her shoulder, for I was stunted. I had gained no more than an inch a year since Karl Victor had thrown me in the river. I had so little to tell her at our visits, and she so much. “She’s been trying for years to prod him gently,” she said one Sunday in Lent, “but yesterday she finally got so angry she spoke it straight: ‘It’s time, Willibald. It is time to find a wife.’ Father was shocked! As if he had discovered a thief with a hand in his safe. He looked across the table, to me and then to her. ‘A wife?’ he said. ‘A wife? No, Karoline. I will not remarry. Never.’ And when she admonished him, he shouted—he’s never shouted like that before—‘
I shall never remarry!
Never speak to me of it again.’ ”

Amalia told me how her father had grown only richer. “Your awful abbot even visited him in our house! I would have hidden in my room, but Karoline made me sit meekly by her side.”

And then, when the next Pentecost had come and gone: “I can’t stand it any longer, Moses. I hate that house. It’s such a prison. I’ve asked my father if we can travel. Somewhere, anywhere. I would even go with Karoline, but that witch refuses to consider it. ‘Soon you’ll be married,’ she says, ‘and then you can travel to your husband’s house.’ ”

In contrast, my life didn’t change at all, even as the world changed around me. In the choir, new boys arrived to replace those whose voices had matured. Feder belonged to these who left the choir soon after Frau Duft’s death. One day, while rehearsing a new duet, and as all the other boys watched in horror, Feder and I climbed together in complex runs, and time after time, Feder’s voice stumbled and could not follow mine.

“He’s doing it wrong,” Feder snapped at Ulrich, and every boy seated on the floor nodded with wide eyes, unwilling to accept the inevitable.

“Moses sings it perfectly.” Ulrich said reprovingly. “He always does.” He smiled at me, and I cringed, for I knew that this sort of praise only made the boys hate me more.

“This time he’s wrong,” Feder claimed.

“Then you sing it alone,” Ulrich offered. We all turned to watch Feder, redness creeping up his neck, as he began to sing. The boys clenched their fists and nodded bravely, as if cheering on a horse. He climbed, his nimble tongue slicing every note, and then again, he stumbled; he could not reach the note. He forced his voice, and every boy recoiled as his voice cracked to a screech. There was silence. Feder turned to me and raised a finger, and though I cowered, he could not find a fitting insult. He stalked out of the room.

He stayed with us for several days, singing quietly at the back, glaring at me every second. On the day of Feder’s final practice, Ulrich asked me to lead the boys in scales, which were natural and distinct to me as colors are to a painter. For two minutes, the choirmaster listened as I sang and the other boys repeated after me in unison. Feder did not sing. “Continue until I return,” Ulrich said and left the room.

As usual, the hierarchy of talent crumbled the moment he was gone. For two or three scales, the boys continued to mimic my notes, but less enthusiastically, and then they began to mill about, until finally I sang alone.

My voice faltered, and I stood silent before them like a king deposed. They did not look at me, but I felt how they despised me. As the boys crowded around Feder, I was reminded that my voice, in all its perfection, meant nothing in the wider world, a world to which the high-born Feder would soon be returning, and into which someday I, too, would be thrust, helpless and inadequate.

Then Feder turned his back to me and withdrew something from beneath his shirt, conspicuously hiding it from my view. The boys crowded closer, instantly hushed by what he held. One or two looked nervously at the door, through which Ulrich would soon return, but most could not divert their eyes from Feder’s mysterious treasure. I did not dare approach the group, though of course I was burning with curiosity. I was sure what he held was proof against me.

After several minutes, during which the boys jostled like hogs at a trough, Feder turned toward me. He pressed a small piece of paper to his chest.

“Would you like to see, Moses?” he asked, and beneath his kindness, like a tympano’s faint rolling thunder, I heard a threat. But as he stepped forward, I hoped maybe here was a final act of peace. I met him halfway. He smiled and held out the paper to me.

It was a pencil sketch, greasy along the edges from being passed through so many young hands. It showed a woman lying naked on a bed, her legs wide open, a dark cave where they met. Her eyes were impossibly large. They gaped longingly at a man standing above her, from whose midriff extended a giant, bulging penis. Testicles hung beside it, like melons in a sack.

The flush crept up my neck and burned in my cheeks. The boys cackled at the shock on my face. They leaned on one another to keep from falling over as they laughed. Of course, I had heard them discussing such a scene before, but had never pictured it this clearly in my mind. Feder held the picture in front of me for what seemed like hours, but I could not take my eyes from the man, from his organ, from the black hole between the woman’s legs. Finally I pulled my eyes away and to the floor.

“Don’t you want to look at it some more?” Feder whispered cruelly.

I did. Of course I did, but I knew I could not let them see my eagerness.

“Have you never seen a naked woman before? Do you even know what that is?” Feder said very slowly, as if speaking to an idiot. He pointed between the woman’s legs, and the boys behind him erupted in nervous laughter.

I forced myself to look again at the ground. I felt their stares on me like prodding sticks. “Or maybe,” he said, and turned to speak with the boys now, “she does not interest him at all. Perhaps it is the man you prefer.”

There was no laughter now, just silence.

When I blinked, the slosh of tears seemed so loud I was sure every boy could hear my shame.

“I’m leaving today,” Feder finally said, softly enough it seemed he was speaking only to me now. “I am very happy that I will never have to share a choir with someone like you again. I had hoped, however, to be able to stay a little longer—until you finally left. I would have liked to see this abbey just once again how it used to be. Without you. Without those two filthy monks who are your only friends.”

I knew that Nicolai and Remus’s secret had long since seeped throughout the abbey. The boys had whispered about them, but this was the first time anyone had spoken of it aloud. My shame over this picture and my love for my friends erupted into anger. I snatched the picture out of Feder’s hand and tore it in half. I tore it again as he knocked me down, but then I lost the scraps as he kicked me.

The silence was broken. The boys crowded around us, and I could hear the hatred in their voices as they cheered for Feder to “kick the dog.” He unleashed the best he had. Blood flowed from my mouth until I was sure I would never breathe again. And all along, as his fury swelled beyond any reason, still I heard them jeering, “Kick him, Feder! It’s time he understands! Pay him back!”

For what?
I tried to cry.
Pay you back for what?

The next day he was gone. I remained in the abbey, the oldest, most talented, and least respected choirboy. My life, it seemed to me then, would never change.