The Bells (25 page)

Alas, this never was to be. The carriage’s curtains were always closed, and no brilliant blue eyes ever peeked from between them. Sometimes at night I stole to the palace and examined the exterior for some new method of stealing in. But I found it better sealed than any house in St. Gall. One night I tried to climb the walls to see if an upper window could be forced. When I was twice my height from the ground my fingers failed. In the morning my ankle was blue and swollen.

Every day, at midday, for two blessed hours, my master sang. Mostly he practiced from Gluck’s new
Orpheus
, repeating the arias and recitatives again and again until he found that precision for which he was renowned. Sometimes he chose other arias, often from Handel, which he wished to keep sharpened so they would be available if he needed a weapon in his hunt. I lay upon my divan and listened to his extraordinary phrasing filtering throughout the house. I committed the music to memory while humble Boris brought me tea and cakes. “Yes, sir,” he said when I asked for another cup. “No, sir,” he said when I asked if he’d sit and drink with me. In just several days, I had gone from a peasant wretch far below him to a second master distantly above.
Camaraderie
, said his every detached look,
we shall never have
.

Guadagni’s singing still touched me deeply, but soon the arias moved me in the form they should have taken—would have taken—if I had sung them. My well-trained ears recognized Guadagni’s deficiencies, which were in fact many, and so what I finally heard was a murky amalgamation of his song and the song of my imagination. I would have sung them myself, perhaps even been imprudent enough to show Guadagni that I could sing, but though my ears captured the sounds, the transfer to my lips and tongue would take time. I needed to learn Italian, to read it so I could grasp its forms and meanings. Yet my only teacher kept this from me. I would need to find another.

Then one day I did: a wolf sulking in a corner.

VII.

I
was walking in the Innenstadt, lost in those labyrinthine streets. I had lurked outside the Riecher Palace until noon when I decided to attempt a more direct route home. Now I was so lost I had certainly already missed my master, off to dine with a princess and her sister. I hoped for a familiar landmark, or even cunning Lothar, but the street was empty—or nearly empty, for a single man was waiting in a doorway with a book held close to his face. I could see nothing of his skin except for his hairy hands. He wore clothes that would have been respectable, but they were rumpled and fitted his thin hips like a sack drawn tight about his waist. I paid him no heed, until I passed by him, at which point he gave a throat-clearing cough and slurped his air like it was a liquid.

This sound!

It filled me with such joy, like the sun bursting through the clouds in cold winter. I tore the book from his face and leapt upon him. He thought me a thug and tried to beat me back. But I held him tight.

“Remus!” I cried. “It’s really you!”

It was my friend! That ugly scowl! That tousled hair! That twisted nose! I called his name again in joy. That name, which only two people had ever used to address him, was like a spell. The scowl melted. The face that was never happy nor sad was suddenly both at once, and he pressed his face into my collar. I sobbed into his disheveled hair as if I had a lake to draw upon for tears.

“Moses! You are here!”

“And you as well!” I said. “In Vienna!”

“At Melk they would not have us. Staudach must have sent a letter. We tried to send you messages, but I fear they were intercepted.”

“They were,” I said.

“Thank God I found you now! The world is so huge!”

“There is so much to tell you!” I said.

“Look at your clothes,” he exclaimed, pushing me away so he could take in my brocaded coat, then hugged me close again. He was older—with his gray hair, there was no doubt of that—but I was sure he had never looked so good. For once there was color in his face.

“And Nicolai! Where is Nicolai?” I looked around hopefully, as if I expected him to leap out from a doorway singing a merry ballad.

Remus’s smile hardened. He nodded gravely. “He is here,” he said.

His tone alarmed me. “Remus, what is wrong?”

Remus looked up and down the street, and the old Remus, who would not look into my eye, was back. “Nicolai is much changed. He is ill.”

“Ill?” I said, unable to believe that any sickness could infect the bear. “But he will soon get better?”

Remus shook his head and looked away. He was silent.

“Tell me, Remus. I am his friend.”

Remus nodded. “I promise to tell you all. But first, it is best you see him. Judge it for yourself. Seeing you will certainly cheer his spirits.”

“Then he has not forgotten me?”

“Forgotten you?” Remus laughed, and it was so sharp and sad—I could not recall ever having heard the man laugh—that it disturbed me. He put a hand on my arm, and turned me down the street. “No, he has not forgotten you. Come, I am waiting for my student to open his door, but he has been out drinking and will not wake up to learn his Latin. He will not tell his father, and so I will be paid. No one loses, except Saint Augustine.”

These five years had changed Remus. He strode quickly, and did not hesitate as he led me left and right through the winding streets. “This belongs to Prince Lainberg,” he said, pointing at a palace with dusty windows. “And that monstrosity,” he shook his head at a new palace with marble horses rearing from each corner, “belongs to Count Kursky. That one, Prince Barhainy; there, Count von Palm.”

“How can there be so many princes and counts of just one city?” I asked him.

He laughed. “No, Moses. Not one city.
One empire
. And even for that there are too many. Some rule land far away; some actually occasionally visit there. Others couldn’t find their estates on a map. Still others have no land at all, just the title. People will do so much to be a count. And so now, when the empress needs money for her war, this city is bursting with them.”

Remus led me out of the palace gate and across the green glacis for the first time since I had arrived in the city. We left the stone palaces of the Innenstadt behind for the half-timbered houses of the Vorstädte. Here the streets were narrower, the human sounds less refined: children ran about without shoes while their mothers scolded them from open windows; men spat in the street rather than dirty a spittoon; cows were allowed to forage in mounds of refuse piled in the street instead of being tied up in a yard.

Remus led me to a part of the city that I could identify by its most infamous sound: the urgings of the ladies beckoning from the doorways and windows of the decrepit taverns that lined the main street of the quarter. Remus saw me staring in mortification at each waving dame. “Welcome to Spittelberg,” he said. “Our home for the past three years. Indeed, there is no better place for us, for there is no place on earth farther from Staudach’s abbey.” He waved his hand at the street in proof of what he claimed. Women threw buckets of dirty wash water directly in our path. Men pushed handcarts laden with sour-smelling cabbage. Above all, the streets were full of children. They poured out of the houses, screamed from open windows, poked sticks into the rotting scraps along the street. In the late summer warmth, few wore shirts and none wore shoes. One young girl sat upon and tickled another, who must have been her younger sister, for they both had flaming reddish hair. Four boys stood on the mound of a collapsed tavern and shouted about the rules of a game I could not understand. “He’s tapped,” one yelled. “Three stones! Three!”

Remus’s hand touched my elbow, bringing me back to him. “It wasn’t always so. A hundred years ago, traders from the south and east stopped here when they came to the imperial city. This muddy street was paved with cobbles. These gray taverns were brightly painted. Wagons jammed in every courtyard. But the Turkish army laid siege here, for eight months in 1683. They took everything of value, and destroyed most of what was not.” Remus gestured at an abandoned tavern. Nothing remained but the drab façade. On the other side of the vacant windows several dirty boys were smashing the rubble into dust. “Just stay out of the lanes at night,” Remus continued. “And if you have any coins, watch your pockets.”

We came to several lanes leading up a hill, and at the corner of one of these we stopped before a house of just two floors. It was in better care than many of the houses in the quarter, though it leaned slightly to the side. The ground floor was some kind of public house, with a single word printed above the door:
Kaffee
.

“In here,” Remus said. The sole room was crowded with men on benches. They all drank the same steaming liquid, with a pungent, earthy smell. It seemed a magic brew, for they were all possessed by the same wide-eyed vivacity. They pounded on the tables and spat urgent monologues into each other’s ears. At the back of all of this, a raven-haired man played the sorcerer; he ground beans, as black as death, into a fine powder before mixing it with steaming water from a samovar.

I followed Remus to a staircase at the back. My friend stopped and put a hand on my shoulder. “Do not be alarmed,” he said, alarming me. “There are good days and bad ones.”

We climbed the narrow, winding stairs. Remus opened the door and bade me pass into their three rooms: a parlor, and a separate bedroom for each man—all added together, still smaller than Nicolai’s cell at the abbey. In the parlor the ceiling continued to the beams of the high, slanting roof. There was an empty fireplace against one wall. Thick curtains covered the three small windows, so only a dim, indirect glow illuminated the room. Stacks of books were piled on the tables and on the floor along the walls. The close air smelled like drying hay.

Someone sat in an armchair, his back to us, but he was such a large man that even in the dark I could see it was my friend.

“Nicolai!” I said with all anxiety gone from my voice. I crossed around the chair so I could examine his face.

I have since seen that hideous visage in dark corners of so many cities: its swollen roundness; the traces of sores that have long since healed into scars; the soft, deformed nose, as if its cartilage has been eaten away by maggots. He was still a large man, but now he was round where before he had been square. His hair and beard were gray, and his skin was pale.

“Who’s there?” he asked. His eyes pointed toward me, but the flutter of his eyelids betrayed their failure. I must have seemed a shadow to him.

“I will open the curtains so you may see for yourself,” I said, trying to keep my voice warm and firm.

“No!” he cried as I reached for the drapes. Remus shook his head and whispered that Nicolai’s ruined eyes could not bear the light.

And so I knelt at my old friend’s side, held his arm, and brought my face so close to his that I perceived the spongy pallor of those syphilitic gummas beneath his skin. His eyes struggled to focus on my face. Suddenly he inhaled. He raised a shaking hand to touch my cheek.

“Can it be true? Remus, tell me this is real!”

“Nicolai, it is really he. Moses has come to Vienna.”

“God bless us!” Nicolai cried and took my head in both his swollen hands and drew me to his chest. He sobbed onto my hair, and I cried onto his chest, and then he lifted my face so he could look at me again. He studied each of my features with those clouded eyes until he had them memorized.

“You have grown as beautiful as I have grown ugly,” he said.

I did not know what to say, for indeed, he could not have walked down the street without people staring at him as at a monster. I, however, felt no repulsion, and I told him so.

“I have deserved all this and more,” he said.

“Nonsense,” I said. “That is nonsense.”

Nicolai looked at Remus and then back at me. “I have nothing to do all day but sit here and think how I have failed the only two friends I ever had.”

“Nicolai,” said Remus sharply, “do not begin this now. Not yet. Let us be happy today. Moses is finally back with us.”

“And I have wanted nothing more than that,” said Nicolai, tears appearing in his eyes, “so I can tell him how sorry I am for what I did. For what I failed to do.”

“Failed?” I said. “Nicolai, you were a father to me. You saved my life! I have never blamed you for anything.”

He shook his head. “I never should have left you with that man. We should have left the abbey years before. The world was open to us, and we missed our chance.”

“Nicolai,” Remus begged, “not now. You will—”

“We should have left!” Nicolai roared at his friend and then covered his eyes with his soft, swollen hands. Remus bowed his head.

Nicolai’s hands soon moved from his face to his temples, and I heard his breath constrict as a headache came upon him, as those soft growths within his brain became engorged with blood. A dismal whining emanated from his tightened throat, like the heaves of a choking man.

I took his arm and tried to soothe him. “Nicolai, is there something I can do?”

But Remus knew the only cure, and he went to fetch the tincture of laudanum that had become Nicolai’s only relief from the pains. My touch had no effect other than to reopen Nicolai’s eyes. One of his hands left his temple and clutched my wrist so tightly I feared he would crush it.

“Please forgive me,” he said.

“There is nothing to forgive.”

Then Remus was there, pouring the tincture into his mouth. Nicolai lapped it eagerly. Soon his eyes had faded even more, and then they closed. He slumped in his chair.

Remus and I stood face-to-face beside our friend for several minutes, then Remus lifted a pillow and propped Nicolai’s drooping head. His hand lingered on his friend’s cheek, as much a loving gesture from the man as I had ever glimpsed.

Remus smiled sadly. “It is good that you are here, Moses,” he said.

I embraced him. His body was tense, unyielding to my touch, but his hand on my arm did not release me for several seconds. As he did, he wiped tears from his eyes and looked away, as if ashamed. I led him to the small, cluttered table. He sat in one chair and I took the other.

For several minutes neither of us spoke.

“Forty-five years,” Remus suddenly began. “It is almost hard to fathom. He spent more than forty-five years in that abbey, and for almost all of them he spoke of leaving. It was a miracle they even took him in—this child left in their church one night. The abbey has never been an orphanage and yet, for Nicolai they made an exception.

“When I first met him he was already a giant. He was the only novice who would speak with me. I found his yearning for the wider world so irresistible—we must have talked about seeing it nearly every day for thirty years. Thirty years! And always, at the end, it was always on my account that we stayed—my books, my need for quiet. We never even left the city. And when we finally left, went to Rome, every day, from the very first, I wanted to turn back, even though I loved every minute of it. God, I was so happy at the Vatican! But I told him every day, ‘Nicolai, we must go home,’ I said. ‘I want to go home!’ ”

Remus placed a hand against his mouth. He took a deep breath before he continued.

“You see, I never comprehended our situation. I was such a fool. It was only when they turned us away at Melk that I suddenly understood: we had stayed at the abbey
for him
, not for me. That day, as we walked down to the Danube after being turned away, I was seized with terror. ‘Nicolai, we must go back!’ I cried. ‘Back to the mountains. Some monastery will take us in!’ I would have gone anywhere, to any rotting sty that called itself an abbey. No books? I did not care. I would have lived with him in a secluded cave. ‘We’ll find another abbey,’ I said. ‘Staudach can’t have written to them all.’ ‘Nonsense,’ he replied. ‘Don’t you see! God has sent us to Vienna! We are free! Finally free!’ Moses, these words were like a curse to me, a sentence passed.”

Remus was silent for several seconds. He looked me in my eyes. It may have been the first time in my life I had looked so deeply into his. The tears seemed so out of place on that grim face. “He made me lose my faith in God, Moses,” he whispered, leaning closer. “That same holiness for which I worshipped him from the first day we met—when I was fifteen, and my father paid to have his stunted son put away for life in the abbey—that same holiness summoned the devil in this city. He killed a man. Do not tell him. He does not remember. A man had called a whore a whore, and then spat in her face. Nicolai threw this man into the street. One kick was all it took to break his neck. Everyone cheered and bought him drinks while I dragged the body to the river.