The Bells Read online

  The two monks looked into each other’s eyes. “And what if we never leave the abbey for the rest of our lives?” Nicolai asked.

  Remus did not reply. He held out his empty hand until Nicolai passed back the book. He opened it again. “I hope it will be so,” he said, and began to read again. He kicked his horse and it ambled past us.

  Nicolai called after him. “You are so dull. I am talking about Venice, Remus. The most beautiful city in the entire world. And we just let it pass us by.”

  Remus spoke into his book. “It will be dark soon.”

  “I think I could find peace there,” Nicolai whispered, almost to himself. When I looked up, I almost believed the giant was about to cry. He looked down at me, and we smiled at each other. In my face I hoped he saw, But Nicolai, I will go! It seemed I gave the big man courage, for he kicked our horse and we drew even with Remus again.

  “In Venice it will all be different.”

  “Don’t be such a fool.” With a snap, Remus turned a page. “Forty years a monk and still such idolatry. Just another excuse.”

  “Then take me there; then I won’t have any more excuses left. I will stop bothering you.”

  “You will find another reason for your discontent. Everyone always does.”

  Nicolai stopped our horse again. He shook his head. “You, at least,” he muttered, “don’t need excuses to be unhappy.”

  Remus closed his book and looked over his shoulder at Nicolai. I thought I saw a smile—a flash of affection—break that scowl, but then it was gone. “Nicolai, do not stall in what we long ago agreed upon.”

  Nicolai looked back for a moment more, as if he could see the fork toward Venice, which was in fact hundreds of miles behind us on the other side of the Alps, and then he turned toward his home and spurred on his horse.

  “My dear Moses,” Nicolai said to me one particularly beautiful morning, soon after we had mounted. “There are monks and there are monks. I am a monk. Remus here is a monk, and Abbot Choleric von Stuckduck is a monk. We chant the same chants, pray the same prayers, and drink the same wine. We are of the same flesh, one could say.” We were passing from forest to pasture and back again, slowly climbing away from the vast lake glittering behind us. Nicolai reached out his hand and brushed the saplings alongside the track. “Our souls, too, Moses, should be the same, right? But no, Abbot Stuckduck’s is a shriveled dried-out thing, and mine is fattened like a pig.” He thumped his round gut. “And so one of us must be on the wrong path, as the little man so likes to say. But what we’d all like to know is who is right and who is wrong?”

  He poked a huge finger into my knee. “It’s my heart against his head, Moses. He’d say as much if you asked him, though I wouldn’t if I were you.”

  For several minutes none of us spoke and Nicolai hummed some Italian march. He reached down and snatched a dead branch. He swung it at the brambles growing along the track. “You see, Moses,” he continued suddenly, “I’ve got a lot to lose. I love so many things. Too many, the abbot would say. Too much. Shed a little love, he’d suggest. Cure yourself of that sin. But that’s exactly what I’m afraid of, don’t you see? That’s exactly my biggest fear, what keeps me awake every night. What I fear is this: I’ll wake up the next morning and everything is just the same, the world is the world, but all the love I feel for it has vanished, and I realize that all along my love was only a disease—like smallpox of the soul.” Nicolai looked at his friend riding beside us. “Could that happen, Remus?” Remus did not answer, so Nicolai prodded him in the ribs with the branch.

  “Yes, it could,” Remus grumbled. “It probably will tomorrow.”

  Nicolai raised the branch, hesitated for a moment, and then swung it at the other horse’s thigh. The horse darted forward, Remus grabbed his pommel and just barely managed both to stay in his saddle and to keep his book from falling into the mud. I put my hand in front of my mouth to mask my laughter. When Remus was stable again, he turned angrily to Nicolai, but Nicolai held up a hand. “You’re just trying to hurt me, Remus. You don’t even believe what you say.” He swished the branch through the air like a sword. Remus cringed.

  Remus seemed very ugly to me then, and I wished he’d ride farther on. I did not understand what Nicolai meant, but I liked listening to him talk. Nicolai must have seen me cross my arms in displeasure, because he put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t let his grumbling trick you,” he said, “he’s not half as mean as he wants you to believe.” And then he leaned closer still, and spoke low so the reading monk could not hear. “That wolf believes in love as much as any man in the world. As much as I do. I’ve heard him whisper that he does, just as I, too, have whispered it, just as you will one day whisper to someone, when you feel that flash, as two halves become one.”

  Suddenly Remus’s book was closed. He stared angrily at Nicolai. “Careful whom you tell your secrets to,” he said.

  Nicolai reddened, but then he shrugged and splintered his branch on a passing tree. “Don’t worry, Remus,” he said. “We can trust Moses with our secrets.”

  VII.

  Abbot Coelestin Gugger von Staudach turned out to be a small man whose most distinctive feature was his giant forehead, which took up over half the canvas of his face, and behind which must have pulsed a massive brain. “A peasant novice in this abbey?” he asked when Nicolai explained why he had brought this child to his office. “An orphan novice?”

  Nicolai nodded eagerly. Remus looked at the polished oaken floor.

  The abbot stood up from his long desk. Like Nicolai and Remus, he, too, wore a black tunic, though over it hung a black, hooded robe. A golden cross shone at his chest, and as he approached me, I stared at the red stone glimmering on his finger. I would have backed away, but I was already cowering up against a wall. He peered at my bare feet, at my dusty clothes, at the smudges Nicolai had not washed off my face. He sniffed.

  “Surely not,” he said.

  “He’s quiet,” said Nicolai. “He’s … he’s small.” Nicolai spread his hands as if to show the size of a modest fish.

  The abbot stared down at me. His breath was shallow, and rushed mechanically like bellows at a forge. In, out. In, out. Until now, every sound I had heard in the enormous world—from the blast of soldiers’ muskets to a woman singing at her window—I was sure I could trace back to the endless depths of my mother’s bells. But I was also sure that somewhere in this world, the sounds of my father, torn apart and scattered in the flood, also were preserved. The moment I heard this breath, I knew from whence this man’s sounds had come.

  We had traveled through the abbey’s lands for the final four days of our journey, for the Abbey of St. Gall was the vastest and richest in the Swiss Confederation. Its abbot answers to no man, Nicolai had explained to me as he swept his hand to indicate the rolling hills, neither king above nor republic below. When we entered the gates of the Protestant city, which surrounded the abbey like a shell around a nut, I gasped. The streets were wide and paved with even cobbles, the high half-timbered houses blazing white. The men and women of the city were tall, beautiful, and proud, with woolen and linen costumes, frills of airy muslin. The sounds of industry filtered from every cellar, every lane: the creak and slide of the loom, the clang of silver and golden coins, the rumble of carts laden with bolts of sun-bleached linen. As we penetrated the city, the houses grew only higher, more majestic: white stone buildings like the cliffs above my mother’s church.

  Finally the three of us had reached a gate guarded by two soldiers, who stepped aside at the sight of the two returning monks, and we passed into the vast Abbey Square. Nicolai reached out his hand to touch Remus lightly at his elbow, just two fingers and his thumb on the fabric of his tunic. The touch remained an instant, as the men regarded their home for the first time in two years, and then Remus turned to see me watching them.

  He jerked his arm away.

  The square had space enough for ten thousand souls. It was bordered by three vast wings of cream-colored stone
, each as grand as a palace, with so many windows, every one as high as the door on Karl Victor’s house. And in the middle of the space was an enormous pit in which two dozen men were raising walls of massive blocks of stone. Nicolai touched my shoulder and pointed toward the pit.

  “Look, Moses,” he said. “They’ve begun—in a few years that will be Europe’s most beautiful church.”

  I nodded, though the enormous hole looked nothing like the church I had known. Nicolai took my hand and led me into the vast square. Some perfect beings must inhabit this palace, I thought, and I hoped they would let me sleep here on the grass.

  But in the abbot’s chamber, as he glared down at me, I finally understood my position. He was, indeed, the perfect being, and I was merely a stain that must be wiped away.

  “The orphanage in Rorschach,” he said, and nodded with a grunt.

  “No!” said Nicolai, surely louder than he intended. Remus cringed. The big monk stepped forward and the wooden floor creaked under his massive feet. Remus tugged a warning at his sleeve, but Nicolai shook him off.

  “He can stay with me,” Nicolai continued.

  The abbot’s displeased gaze rose from my face to Nicolai’s.

  “In my cell. He can be my servant.”

  I pictured myself carrying Nicolai’s wine, putting on his shoes, rubbing his shoulders when he was tired. For a home in this magnificent place, I would do all that and more.

  “Monks do not have servants.”

  “Father Abbot,” said Nicolai, and smiled as if the abbot had made a jest. “Where is your heart?”

  The abbot cast one more reproving look my way. This is all your fault, I understood his eyes to say, all of it—your dead mother, your evil father, the dirt your calloused feet leave on my pristine floors. And I did feel sorry—had I had the courage to speak, I would have asked for his forgiveness for everything, and then I would have begged him not to send me away, because Nicolai was now the one person left in the world whom I trusted, and I did not want to be taken from him just as I had been taken from my mother.

  But of course I said none of this. I was too terrified even to stand upright.

  And then the abbot approached Nicolai. He was not old, but he moved as if every step he took on our behalf were a burden. Nicolai slouched to meet his glare.

  “I will have you back at this monastery, Brother Nicolai, because I must, though I know you do not share our path. It is a difficult path. Some are destined to wander. I hoped that you would wander farther. I hoped, these two years, that you would not return. But return you have. You will see, that in the time you have been gone, here at this abbey we have progressed.” He gestured through the window to the workers in the pit, then moved even closer to Nicolai, glaring up at him. Nicolai cocked his head as if to hear a secret. “I advise you to look for this progress, Brother Nicolai,” the abbot said. “Look for it in your brothers’ faces, in their works, in the sermons that we preach, in the songs we sing. Look for it in the new church we are building. And do not simply look, Brother Nicolai, but consider. Do you have anything to contribute to this beauty? To the culmination of God’s will? Or do you impede it? Are you standing in the way of what God has destined for this abbey?”

  Nicolai opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and then looked at Remus as if to gain a hint as to which of the several questions he was meant to answer. The abbot shook his head and grunted. He turned away and waved a hand as he went back to his desk. “You may stay here, if you wish,” he said. “You may leave—choose that, and I will give you gold to take with you.” Then the abbot turned back again. He raised a finger at Nicolai. “But if you wish to stay, do not obstruct us. And know that I am watching, am waiting until I have reason enough to bar you from this abbey, and to send letters to every abbot within five hundred miles so you will never again receive a drop of abbey wine.”

  The room seemed to spin a bit. I realized I had forgotten to breathe. I took several careful breaths as the abbot’s eyes stayed fixed on Nicolai’s. Nicolai looked from the cold eyes to the abbot’s pointed finger and back again. The giant monk looked so meek and kind. For a moment, I almost believed that he would take the small abbot in his arms and embrace him. Could he melt that frigid stare? Nicolai glanced briefly at Remus, as if offering the bookish monk a chance to resolve this slight misunderstanding between brothers. But Remus said nothing. So Nicolai cleared his throat, and a look of uncertainty flashed across his face.

  “F-father Abbot,” he began.

  But the abbot held up a hand and said slowly, softly, “Take this boy to the orphanage in Rorschach, or depart.”

  …

  Remus led us in single file back out to the Abbey Square.

  “It could have been worse,” Nicolai said when the porter had closed the great door behind us. I made sure to stay as close as possible to Nicolai’s giant legs so no one would snatch me away. “He did not mention that we were late returning, or that we spent all his money and borrowed more in his name, or that you angered every monk in Rome with your wisdom of the Scots, or that I lost—”

  “I have told you before,” Remus said, “ ‘Father Abbot’ is redundant. It means ‘father father.’ ”

  “He likes it.”

  “He likes you to sound the fool.”

  Nicolai snorted. “He will see to that one way or another.”

  For a moment the two monks gazed at the pit out of which the new, perfect church was rising, as if it were the source of all our troubles. “Well, then, Socrates, what shall we do?” Nicolai asked. I turned toward the wolfish monk, realizing that this unattractive man was my second best friend in the world.

  “What shall we do?” Remus repeated.

  “You must have an idea.”

  “Nicolai, an orphanage.”

  “The orphanage,” corrected Nicolai, “was Stuckduck’s idea. I will not send Moses to a workhouse.” He smiled and winked down at me, but I could not bring myself to smile back.

  “Nicolai, it’s the only solution.”

  “We’ll just have to wait, then,” said Nicolai. He shrugged and patted me on the head. “Give God a chance to find another.”

  Nicolai’s cell, on the second story of the monks’ dormitory, was paneled in oak. A desk, two chairs, a divan upholstered in brown velvet, and several low tables were placed around the edge of a woolen carpet, which, when I stepped on it, warmed my bare feet like stones placed around a fire. At one end of the room was a massive bed and wardrobe, and at the other, a fireplace. Nicolai held me up so I could see myself in the mirror above the marble fireplace—clearer than the clearest puddle. When he caught me admiring the two silver candlesticks on the mantel, he took one down and gave it to me. “It’s yours,” he said. “One is enough for me.” I thanked him, but then, when he turned around, shyly placed it on a table.

  Nicolai slowly unpacked, laying out for my inspection each of the treasures he had acquired during his travels: a pearly shell, a leather wallet stuffed with tickets from the many operas he had seen, a wooden flute he told me he would one day learn to play, a lock of yellow hair that made Nicolai’s neck flush red when the golden ends glinted in the sun.

  He unrolled a watercolor and asked me if it was not the most beautiful picture I had ever seen. I gasped at the image of Venice’s Grand Canal. I hadn’t known any place on earth could be so colorful. Nicolai propped it on his table. We stared at it for several seconds, and then he turned toward me, his face suddenly very grave. “Moses,” he said. “It is very important that you not be seen by anyone but Remus. This is not forever, but we must give God time to tell us what to do. If you hear a knock, you must hide in there.” He pointed at the wardrobe and then had me practice lying very still inside it.

  That night, I slept on the divan. Nicolai snored in his bed. In the morning, a knock at our door came at a quarter to four, and Nicolai roared himself awake as if to scare away the devil sleep that pinned him to his bed. At four he was in the provisional wooden church for Matins and Lau
ds. I heard his voice rise up above the rest. So it went for several days. I heard that he alone was never late for these early morning chants, that his sonorous voice never wavered. As I lay on my divan listening to the sleeping city outside our window, I heard Nicolai’s brimming voice as if the chants were always fresh creations of his mind, not recitations of works centuries old.

  Prime, then Low Mass, then Terce, then High Mass, then Sext—it all lasted until half past ten in the morning. Then came the midday meal, from which Nicolai brought me what he called scraps, but to me they were the greatest feasts ever imagined: thick slabs of succulent lamb or beef, smoked pork, blood sausage, cheese, grapes, apricots, apples, almonds. He hid these treasures in his pockets and placed them on my lap for me to devour. As I fed, we sipped from a jug of wine, of which each monk was allowed two mass per day, but Nicolai took somewhat more. “My girth,” he said, banging his stomach, “requires it. The two-mass rule is for people of Stuckduck’s stature.” At three, Nicolai left for Vespers, and again his chanting rose up above the city. He would appear once more at the door just before seven, rosy from supper and wine, and leave me another feast to dispose of alone while he chanted Compline, which, under the influence of his satiation, reached the highest elation of any of the Offices.

  At eight the monks retired, which meant that Nicolai returned, often with Remus, or, if not, with a loquacious tongue that spoke or sang until the night grew dark. Sometimes another monk knocked on the door, curious to see with whom Nicolai was speaking. If he had drunk only his allowance, he would call out that he was a lonely monk who liked to speak to the walls sometimes, but if he had drunk more, he would roar at the door, “Go away! The prophet Moses speaks with me alone! Be gone, you fool!”

  I thought every day of my mother, and wept so much I stained Nicolai’s divan with my salty tears, but I did not regret my confinement, since it was not unlike my former life in the belfry. I did not grasp my new peril as I listened to the distant city, to the monks chatting in their cloister below, or to the stonemasons chiseling at the blocks of stone in the walls of the new church. There was a new sound as well, that was a mystery to my ears. I went to the open window, like a dog following the scent of meat. When the air was still, I blocked out every other sound and tried to grasp it, but this new sound was too fragile to be held like other sounds. My hold on one part slipped away, and its other parts vanished, too. The strands of this new sound were built upon each other, like a gathering of poppies on a hillside viewed from a distance; the single blossoms are invisible, but in combination, they light the hillside red.