The Bells Read online

  Then the cheering began. Hands rose toward heaven. Fists shook. Tears flowed. They had done it! The Loudest Bells Ever had been rung!

  God’s kingdom on earth was safe!

  The crowd retreated slowly down the hill. When someone yelled, “Ring them again!” there was a collective cringe, and soon began a stampede—men, women, children, dogs, and cows ran, slid, rolled down the muddy hill and hid behind the decrepit houses as if trying to outrun an avalanche. Then there was silence. Several heads peered around the houses and toward the church. The Kilchmar cousins were nowhere to be found. Indeed, soon there was no one within two hundred paces of that church. There was no one brave enough to ring the bells again.

  Or was there? Whispers filled the air. Children pointed at a brown smudge moving lightly up the hill, like a knot of hay, blown by a gentle wind. A person? No, not a person. A child—a little girl—in dirty rags.

  It so happened that this village possessed, among its treasures, a deaf idiot girl. She was wont to stare down the villagers with a haunting glare, as though she knew the sins they fought to hide, and so they drove her off with buckets of dirty wash water whenever she came near. This deaf child was staring at the belfry as she climbed the hill, for she, too, had heard the bells, not in her vacant ears, but as we hear holiness: a vibration in the gut.

  They all watched her climb, knowing that God had sent this idiot girl to them, just as God had sent them Kilchmar, had sent them the stone to build this church, and the metal to cast the bells.

  She looked upward at the belfry as though she wished that she could fly.

  “Go,” they whispered. “Go.”

  She does not hear them urge her on. But the memory of the bells’ peal pulls her to the doors and into the church, where she has never been before. There are shards of glass on the floor—the shattered windows—and so she leaves bloody footprints as she climbs the narrow stairs at the back of the church. On the first level of the bell tower, the three ropes hang through the ceiling. But she knows of ropes, and knows this magic is not from them, that they direct her farther up, and so she climbs the ladder and lifts the trap with her head. The sides of the belfry are open—there is no railing to stop a fall—and she sees four different scenes: to the left, blank cliffs; in front, the valley winding upward toward Italy; to her right, the snow-covered Susten Pass; and when she climbs through the trapdoor, behind her, her audience gathered around the homes like maggots swarming rotting meat.

  She walks beneath the largest bell and looks up into its shadows. Its body is black and rough. She reaches up and slaps it with her hand. It does not move. She does not feel a sound. There are two copper mallets leaning in the corner. She lifts one of them and swings it at the largest bell.

  She feels it first in her belly, like the touch of a warm hand. It has been years since anyone has touched her. She closes her eyes and feels that touch radiate down into her thighs. It travels along the tracks of her ribs. She sighs. She hits the bell again with the mallet, as hard as she can, and the touch goes farther. It snakes around her back and up her shoulders. It seems to hold her up; she is floating in the sound. Again and again she strikes the bell, and that sound grows warmer.

  She rings the middle bell. She hears it in her neck, in her arms, in the hollows behind her knees. The sound pulls at her, like warm hands are spreading her apart, and she is taller and broader in that little body than she has ever been before.

  The small bell she hears in her jaw, in the flesh of her ears, in the arches of her feet. She swings the mallet again and again. She lifts the second mallet so she can use both arms to pound against the bells.

  In the village, at first, they cheered and cried at the miracle. The echoes of pealing returned from across the valley. They closed their eyes and listened to their glory.

  She rang the bells. A half hour passed. They could not hear each other speak. Some yelled to be heard; most just sat on logs or leaned against the houses and pressed their hands against their ears. The pigs had already been roasted. The casks of wine had been tapped, but how could they begin the feast of victory without a blessing?

  “Stop it!” someone shouted.

  “Quiet!”

  “Enough!”

  They shook their fists at the church.

  “Someone has to stop her!”

  At this demand, everyone looked shyly at his neighbor. No one stepped forward.

  “Get her father!” they yelled. “This is a father’s job!”

  Old Iso Froben, the shepherd whose wife had given him this one, malformed child after twenty years of marriage, was pushed forward. He was not more than fifty, but his eyes were sunk, and his forearms, the fleshless stalks of a great-grandfather. He rubbed the back of his hand across his dripping nose and gazed up at the church as if he were being sent to slay a dragon. A woman came forward, stopped his ears with wool, and then wrapped dirty trousers around his head, tying them at the back like a turban.

  He shouted something at the man next to him, who disappeared into the crowd and then, moments later, returned with a mule whip.

  So many times I would overhear the story: Brave Iso Froben struggled up the hill, one hand keeping the trousers from slipping over his eyes, the other on the whip. The steep path had been so muddied by thousands of eager feet that he slipped often, skidded two steps backward on his knees, clawed himself to his feet again. When he reached the church at last, he was covered from head to toe in mud. The whip sprinkled specks as it swung in his hand. Even with the wool in his ears and the trousers around his brow, the bells clenched and shook his head with each new ring.

  The sound only grew louder as he entered the church and climbed the stairs, which seemed to shake beneath him. He held his palms over his stopped ears, but it did no good. He cursed God for the thousandth time for sending him this child.

  At the first level of the belfry, he saw that the ropes were still, and yet the bells rang. He saw black spots before his eyes. As the world began to spin, he suddenly understood: These were not God’s bells at all! They had been tricked. These were the devil’s bells! They were all the devil’s fools. They had built his church. They had cast his bells!

  He turned to run down the stairs, but then he glimpsed above him, in the cracks between the ceiling planks, the dancing of tiny, devilish feet.

  There was courage left in that meager, withered frame. He clutched that whip as his sword. He climbed the ladder to the belfry and pushed open the trapdoor just far enough to peek.

  She leapt. She twirled. She swayed and stretched. She swung the mallet and hung in the air as it impacted. The bells seemed to toll from within her, as if the bells she struck were her own black heart. She pranced along the edge, an invisible hand guiding her back to safety. She rang the largest bell: a sound like nails driven in his ears.

  The pleasure glowing in her eyes was the last proof Iso Froben needed: his daughter was possessed by the devil. He threw open the trapdoor and clambered through. The aged man was a warrior. He whipped the devil-child until she lay on the floor of the belfry without moving. Soon the bells’ tolling was but a gentle ringing in the air. Cheers erupted from the village far below him. His daughter whimpered.

  He dropped his whip beside her and then descended. He passed through the celebrating town without pausing, and was never seen in Uri again, and so, after Kilchmar, he was the second, but not the final, victim of the bells.

  Back in the church, only after dark did that child move. She lifted her head to make sure that her father was gone, and then sat up. Her clothes were bloody. The gashes in her back burned. Her dead ears were blank to the revelry in the village below. She took her mallets and opened the trapdoor.

  Tomorrow, she thought as she looked up at the bells. Tomorrow I will ring you again.

  The next day she did ring them, as she did the day after that, and every morning, noon, and night until her death.

  This child was named Adelheid Froben, and I, Moses Froben, am her son.

  I
I.

  My mother had a filthy nest of hair, knots of iron muscle in her arms, and, for me alone, a smile as warm as August’s sun. By the time of my birth she had been living for some years in a small alpine hut adjacent to the church. No, that is inaccurate. My mother lived in the belfry. She came to the hut only when the belfry, exposed to the mountains’ bitter weather, became too cold, or too full of snow, or when she had hunger for the cheese rinds and cold gruel the villagers left for her, or when the summer lightning storms swept down the valley and struck our belfry—they often did, the bells ringing as if tolled by ghosts. Though she was filthy, and never washed herself her entire life, every week she scrubbed me from head to toe in the frigid water of the stream. She fed me from a wooden spoon until I was full to bursting. I did not then know of how other children played and laughed, how they pretended to be kings and soldiers, how they danced and sang songs together. I wanted nothing more for my life. I wanted only to sit there, my four-year-old legs dangling over the edge of the belfry. To look at the mountains. To listen to the beauty of the bells.

  And so the villagers’ oversight does not surprise me. A boy seemingly oblivious to bells that burst eardrums at fifty paces? A boy who never speaks, whose feet do not even seem to rustle in the grass, who never makes any noise at all? A child who ignores even the furious yells of Father Karl Victor Vonderach? There is no other explanation. That child is deaf. He is as stupid as his mother.

  And yet, approach this boy who sits on the edge of his world, who stares blankly at a scene that only God could have created. It is early summer, and the Alps are so verdant that one envies the cows their grasses, and would like to stoop beside them and feast until green drool dribbles down one’s chin. High above, patches of snow remain in hollows and underneath cliffs. The distant, greener peaks to the north are infested with dots of grazing sheep like lice upon a beggar’s head.

  This boy listens. All three bells are ringing behind him, and he hears the strident strike tones, the myriad part tones. A bell is a tower of tiny bands, stacked thinly one upon the other, and each of these bands rings a different pitch, just as a thousand shades of paint shine slightly different hues. In his mind, he lays out these notes like other children their collection of toys. He fits part tones together so they make him smile or grit his teeth. He finds the tones that the hawk uses in his cry. He finds those that compose thunder’s rumble and those of the marmot’s whistle. He hears the notes that he himself uses when he laughs. The bells are loud, very loud, but they do not hurt his ears. His ears were formed around these sounds, and each massive ring just makes his ears that much more resilient.

  There is the sound of his mother’s inhalation as she draws her mallet back; the sound of her exhalation as she brings it forward; the rustle of her tattered robe against her bare leg; the creak of the bells’ rusty bearings; the whistle of the warm wind through the chinks in the roof above his head; the lowing of the cows in the field below the church; the tearing of the grass as the cows graze; the cry of the buzzard above the field; the rush of the snowmelt that pours down the cliffs.

  He also hears that the water on the cliff is many waters: it is stones being dragged and rolled; it is drips exploding into drops; it is the giggle of a bubbling pool; it is the laughter of the cascades. Each of these he can pry from the next: the part of his mother’s lips, the rush of breath in her nose, the air that whistles past her tongue. In her throat, she groans. Her lungs croak open. Like a baby exploring an object with its fumbling hands and mouth, he grasps at each sound until he sighs, Yes!

  This is not magic—I promise you as your faithful witness. He cannot hear through mountains or to the other side of the earth. This is merely selection. And if this boy, at four years of age, can do so little—neither speak, nor write, nor read—the selection of sounds, the dissection of sounds, is something he can do like no other. This his mother and her bells have gifted him.

  And so the boy sits on his perch and dissects the world. He selects the bells, hears them as a whole, dissects their pealing, and then places them aside. He grasps the sound of the wind. He hears in wind what we see in waves of water: a multitude of currents, chaotic and yet ordered by some law of God. He loves to listen to the wind cut through the holes in the roof above him, or whip around the corner of the tower, or flutter through the long grasses in the meadows.

  And though he delights in any new sound, he soon learns that sounds are not only something for him to love. He learns that the whistle of the wind through the chinks is duller if rain is coming. He dreads the dragging feet of the first worshippers on Sunday morning, because it means that soon his mother will flee to hide in the caves above the church until, hours later, she reappears only as Father Karl Victor’s silhouette disappears back into the village. He hates the sound of her cough, because it means that she will grow sick, as she does every winter, and her eyes will fog, and she will walk as if asleep.

  When he is five he begins to wander, less skittish than his mother. He dissects the village: The winds that creak among the wooden houses. The tinkling of wash water and animal urine out of the stalls and down the slope. The creak and grind of wagon wheels on the stony tracks. The dog’s bark, the rooster’s cackle, and, in the winter, the cow’s lowing and the sheep’s moan, as if a madman is caged in every stall.

  He is overwhelmed by the sounds of men; breath, sigh, groan, curse. They scold and cry and laugh, and each of these has a million forms. But the shelves of his memory have no limit. Now there are words to speak—and he carries these back to the belfry. As his mother rings her bells, he jabbers, yells insults at the sky, spits prayers into his fist so he sounds like the village farmer who bit off half his tongue.

  Of the sounds he hates, chief among them are those of Father Karl Victor Vonderach: his limping step; his wheezing breath; the swishing and mashing of his lips, like a calf at a teat; the slam when he opens the great Bible on the pulpit; the clunky turn of the key in the empty offertory box; the groan when he leans over and clutches at his back; the exhalation when he looks at my—

  How your sounds gave you away, Karl Victor! With my ears, I knew enough at six years to condemn you to the eternal fire! I knew the pop of your eyes when you squeezed them shut, the bubbling of phlegm in your throat when you preached on Sunday in our church. I heard your hateful mumbles when you looked down at your flock. And when you hiked up on other days—when I heard in your eager wheeze that you were not on an errand of God, when you called for my mother, banged on the door of our hut at night, or even, when you could not hold back, in the light of day—even though she did not hear you, I did. The cries that poured from her unlearned mouth, which to you sounded like the babbling of an idiot—those cries were the clearest of all pleas to me.

  III.

  The villagers said my mother was not of sound mind. She was skittish, had a wild look; she was dirty, and cried or laughed at nothing. She hid from them in caves; she sometimes went without clothes; she raised her son in a belfry; she ate with her hands; she cared for nothing but her child and the ringing of her bells.

  Several times I watched my mother climb onto the rafters of the belfry so she could creep along the headstock of that middle bell, then hang down and wrap her legs around its waist, hugging the crown with one arm while she beat the dampened bell with her mallet. One day, she stacked a tower of logs beneath the largest bell and stood inside it, so the crisscrossing waves of sound tickled every fiber. She stole a braided horsehair bridle, tied one end to a headstock and the other to her waist. She swung amid the bells, closed her eyes, and, I believe, fantasized that she was one of them.

  Another time, she coated the bells with mud and struck them. She held a flaming torch to their lips and struck them. She struck them with her hand. With her skull. With a cow’s femur bone. With a crystal she found in her cave. With the Bible she took from Karl Victor’s pulpit (and then threw it in the mud when the dampened ring did not suit her). Sometimes she sat serenely in the corner and rang a bell b
y pulling the bell rope rhythmically with one hand. But always, in the end, she returned to her dance: she leapt and swung the mallets and closed her eyes as the waves passed through her.

  As my mother rang her bells, she tuned the fibers of her body as a violinist tunes his strings. There in her neck, she rings faintly with a part tone of the middle bell. There in her thighs, with another. In the bottom of her feet, I heard the strike tone of the smallest bell. Each tone, ringing in her flesh, was itself the faintest echo of the vast concert. I cannot remember my mother’s face, but I remember this landscape of her sounds. And though I have no likeness with which I might recall her, when I close my eyes and hear her body ringing with those bells, it is as though I have a portrait in my hands.

  They would have stolen a normal child and put him to work under the guise of charity. But I was allowed to stay with my mother because they thought I was as deaf and mad as she. Sometimes I watched the village children playing and wished I could join, but they threw stones at me whenever I came too close. We lived for eight years in the belfry and the hut, never working (except for the bell ringing, which for both of us was a reward, not a task), never so much as cooking, though the villagers’ meager meals of charity we soon dispensed with.

  As a master of sounds, it was little trouble for me to slip into a house in the village, listen until I was sure the pantry was empty, snatch a choice sausage, slide past a door (behind which a husband and his wife were deep in a conversation about the neighbor’s cows), steal a fresh loaf of bread cooling by the hearth, and be gone without making a sound. Though I remained a tiny thing, I developed a taste for legs of lamb, for half-cooked bacon, for eggs sucked from out their shells. By my eighth birthday, I had stolen eggs from under hens, pots of stew from hearths, and whole wheels of cheese from cellars. Sometimes I listened to other mothers telling stories to their children before the hearth, or watched a playful son climb into his father’s arms. Once, in the evening, sneaking into a house, I came upon a mother soothing her son who could not sleep, for his friends had told him that Iso Froben’s ghost haunted the town. The father sat exhausted at a table. “It’s him that stole the ham,” the boy told his mother. “And the Eggerses’ cheese, and the cauldron from—”