The Bells Read online

  Finally, she slowed. At the end of a long passage there was a table and, behind it, a set of closed double doors. An old man sat at the table with eyes half closed. A candle, quill, paper, and a silver watch were laid neatly on the table before him.

  “Fräulein Duft,” he recited as we approached. He wrote something on his paper. I peeked and saw that he had scrawled her name.

  “If you don’t tell my father we came, Peter,” she said, “I will bring you a cigar.”

  He continued writing.

  “Two cigars.”

  He shook his head. “Accurate data.”

  I looked at the sheet in front of him. A neat table divided it in two:

  EVENT TIME

  Cough (hacking) 20:02 (Duration: 45 seconds)

  Cough (clearing) 20:08 (Duration: 2 seconds)

  Nurse Blatt enters 20:14

  Window opened (Nurse Blatt) 20:15

  Window closed (Nurse Blatt) 20:18

  Bladder emptied on demand

  Color: Xanthic; Volume: 1/6 Mass 20:20

  Cough (hacking) 20:22 (Duration: 31 seconds)

  Nurse Blatt leaves 20:25

  Visitor (Fräulein Duft) 20:32

  As I read this list, a hacking cough came from behind the double doors. Peter looked at his watch. Amalia groaned and grabbed the doorknob.

  “Do not interrupt!” he ordered and tilted his ear. When the coughing stopped, he examined his watch. He wrote: “Cough (hacking): 20:34 (Duration: 24 seconds).”

  “We’re going in,” Amalia said. She grabbed two strips of black silk from a pile on the table.

  Suddenly the lethargic Peter was gone. Now a gallant knight seemed to have taken his place as he jumped up and clutched my arm. “No!” he said in shock. “Not him!”

  “I am admitting him,” Amalia said.

  Peter looked at her in amazement. He pulled me close and so I smelled his breath, which stank of sour wine. “She cannot admit,” he whispered.

  Amalia stomped her good foot. “We are going in,” she repeated.

  The old man pulled me closer. I tried to squirm away, but his grip was too strong. “Do not go in,” he hissed into my ear.

  Amalia grabbed my other wrist. “Don’t listen to him. Father will be pleased.”

  “Pleased!” said Peter. “Pleased with you destroying experimenting? How is Frau Duft ever to get healthy, then? Tell me that, Fräulein Duft!”

  As they both wrenched my arms, I looked from his grimace to her angry face.

  “Kick him,” she whispered.

  So I did. I kicked him in the ankle, and he yelped and released my wrist. He hopped and rubbed his foot. I was flooded with remorse, and would have helped him rub, but Amalia had pushed open the door and now she shoved me through it.

  “I’m getting Herr Duft!” Peter yelled. But Amalia shut the door, and we were alone in the dark room.

  Not exactly alone—someone else was here. It was a woman, I quickly discerned. She had been coughing, and now she breathed in ragged gasps, which filled her up, until, as if pricked, the air leaked from her lungs. There was a thin candle resting on a table, but my eyes could not see anything outside its halo. The sounds of Haus Duft were silent here. I heard neither the clanging nor the whispers of the walls, nor the city and night winds outside.

  I twitched as Amalia tied a strip of silk over my face. It smelled of charcoal.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “We have to wear them so we do not get sick. You get sick if you share breaths with sick people. Mother is sick.”

  So this was Frau Duft on the other side of the room. This frightened me, and I was glad when Amalia took my hand in hers. It was softer than any hand I had ever touched.

  As my eyes adjusted to the room, I saw a giant bed. It was so laden with blankets and pillows that, without the sounds of the breathing, I could not have been sure if one or five people lay in it. With the candle behind us, Amalia and I cast a giant shadow on the wall. I held her hand tightly.

  “Mother!” Amalia whispered. “Mother, wake up!” She began to lead me toward the bed. I resisted, but she was stronger and more determined.

  A crack appeared in the blankets on the bed. A bony hand snaked outward. The fingers were thin and white. Amalia took the hand in hers so she was a link between us.

  “Amalia,” a throaty whisper said. “What are you doing here? It’s late.” From a dark hollow in the blankets, I made out the shine of two eyes.

  “I brought someone to see you, Mother. A singer.” Amalia pulled me a step closer. I watched her, unsure of what to do. She squeezed my hand and nodded. “All right,” she whispered. “Sing.”

  I had been trained in a church choir. We sang sacred music in sacred places. Though we could be rented out for private worship, we never opened our mouths in song unless there was an altar close enough to throw a Bible at. I was not a minstrel, nor a medicine man who knew chants to cure disease.

  So I did not sing.

  “Please,” Amalia said. She squeezed my hand and pressed it to her thumping heart. “We don’t have much time. My father is coming.”

  This seemed like a reason to run, not a reason to sing. Suddenly I was frightened by this girl who kissed snakes and said there was no God. I tried to shake loose from her hand. I was almost free—she was clutching only my index finger in her fist—when the blankets shifted.

  I saw Frau Duft’s face in the light.

  It may seem improbable, but I saw my mother. For a moment I was sure that it was she hiding in those sheets, and I almost cried out with joy. Then I remembered that my mother’s face was filthy, and this face, Frau Duft’s face, was clean and pale. My mother’s skin was hard, like tanned leather, and Frau Duft’s was fragile stretched muslin. My mother’s hair was tousled and wild, and Frau Duft’s was carefully washed and tied behind her head. My mother was strong. Frau Duft was weak. But in those sunken eyes, in that straining lower lip that quivered with exertion, there was an echo of the warmth that I could only recall in my memories of the belfry. At that moment, I would have promised God to close my mouth forever if only my mother could have heard me sing just once.

  And so I sang for Frau Duft. I sang from the Gloria in Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, the piece that had tempted me from Nicolai’s room almost two years before. I had never sung in such a small room; the furniture and blankets and curtains swallowed my volume. My breath rippled through the charcoal mask, tickling my nose. I listened for that faint resonance of my voice in those two bodies. In Frau Duft’s bony form I heard only the faintest of whispers. But Amalia, who still squeezed my hand, had the gift of those who can hear without ears. Her lips were slightly parted. Her eyes were closed. She pulled back her shoulders. Like a crystal goblet rubbed with a wet finger along its rim, the faintest ringing gradually arose in her—my voice vibrating in the muscles of her neck and upper back. Is this how my mother would have heard my voice?

  As Amalia tuned herself to my song, I adjusted the pitch of my notes to her, and so it seemed I held her neck with my own warm hands. I felt, for the first time, that desire to know my voice in her, like the painter who falls in love with his subject because of the power of his own brush.

  The Gloria is written for a choir, and in the absence of other voices, I repeated myself, dove into the most beautiful of the contraltos’ notes, or invented transitions that did not exist. At moments I was silent, and we heard only our breaths: Amalia’s light and free, mine eager for air, and Frau Duft’s in pain.

  I stopped only when we heard footsteps approaching in the passage.

  XIII.

  “No one move!” Willibald Duft shouted as he ran into the room, frantically tying one of the charcoal masks around his head. He stopped—he seemed slightly disappointed to see that his trespasser was not yet four feet tall. Amalia pinched my elbow, and I gratefully slid behind her. Duft’s face slowly faded from violet to red, and he heaved in gulps of air through the mask. He looked angrily past his daughter at me, and then he walked to hi
s wife’s side, so carefully you might think he feared harming the air around her.

  He touched her cheek with the back of his hand. “Are you all right, my dear?”

  “I am fine, Willibald.”

  Reassured, he turned toward me. His eyes narrowed. “Do you know what you have done?”

  I shook my head. I hoped he would not strike me.

  “You have interfered with Science,” he said. I looked around the room, trying to spot this Science lurking in the shadows.

  There were more footsteps scraping their way down the hall. We watched the slouching Peter struggle toward the door, his face as red as Duft’s.

  “Stop!” Duft yelled.

  Peter halted just before crossing the threshold, narrowly escaping interfering with Science himself.

  “Father,” said Amalia, “we did not do anything—”

  “Did not do anything?” Duft cried. Then he glanced quickly at his wife and lowered his voice. “You cannot not do anything! The moment you breathe in here you do something! Something unknown. Perhaps unknowable.” He waved his hands, but then froze, and crossed them meekly at his chest, as if suddenly appalled by the incomprehensible consequences of their movement.

  Amalia looked proudly past her father. Even through the mask, I saw the bulge of her lower lip curled out in a stubborn pout.

  “Amalia, listen to me,” Duft said weakly. He took his wife’s hand. His daughter still refused his stare. The candle glinted in his eyes, and I saw with amazement that they were filling with tears. “I am trying to understand this, Amalia.”

  “Willibald,” said a soothing voice from the bed, “she is just trying to—”

  “Sir,” Peter yelled from the hallway, “what about the data?”

  Willibald looked toward the door. He nodded. “Good, Peter,” he said over my head. “The data must come first.”

  “The boy was just singing,” Frau Duft said. She broke into a cough. Duft looked at her in horror.

  Behind me, I heard Peter mumble, “ … eight … nine … ten …,” and then the scratch of a quill on parchment when she stopped coughing.

  “Singing!” Willibald gasped, when the coughing episode was safely recorded. He looked down at me. I knew from Feder and the boys that singing could be silly or even shameful. But for the first time in my life, it occurred to me that singing, like speaking, could be dangerous. “We have never had singing. What if you shocked her heart?” Duft glared at me. I stepped behind Amalia, lightly pressing into her back.

  “He did not shock me,” Frau Duft said as loud as she could. “It was beautiful.”

  I wanted to climb into the bed and have her wrap me in her arms.

  “I am writing ‘Disturbance (singing: possible heart shock),’ ” was the report from the hallway.

  Amalia exhaled loudly through her nose.

  “Would someone please close the door?” Frau Duft said.

  Amalia quickly obliged. I would have liked to follow her, for she had left me exposed. But Willibald did not attack; he strode up to his wife. “Dear,” he said, “we have to eliminate the accidents. Then we can find the cause—and the cure.”

  “You have said that before,” she said wearily. “So many times.”

  “But something always disturbs us,” he said. “Just when we are ready to begin the real analysis.”

  “Maybe that’s my fate. Perhaps I am not supposed to be cured.”

  “But Science, dear.”

  “Perhaps.” She spoke it so despairingly that that one word washed all hope from Duft’s face. He shook his head, but I was not sure if he meant to contradict her or fight his tears. I marveled that now he was so shaken when, hours earlier, my singing had moved the entire chapel but had not touched him at all. Amalia lingered near the door and stared at the floor.

  Duft wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and tried to speak. “This time,” he said, “I will make sure no one disturbs your isolation.”

  “No more isolation!” This time, the ailing woman’s voice was ten times as strong as her husband’s. Even Amalia looked up in surprise, but just then a new fit of coughing began. We bowed our heads in respectful silence until it stopped. The moment Frau Duft had breath again, she spoke. “When I heard this boy’s song, I remembered that this world was beautiful once.”

  I almost began to sing again right then.

  “It will be beautiful again, dear, when you are cured.”

  She shook her head.

  Amalia suddenly sprang to life. She limped toward the bed and grabbed my hand. “But maybe this will cure her!” she said.

  Duft looked confused. “What will?”

  “Him, his singing.” She shook my limp arm.

  Hope, that beast with a thousand lives, rekindled in Duft’s eyes. He looked at me with new interest. “An interesting idea. I had not thought of experimenting with sound. That will be our next line of inquiry, then. But we should start more simply. Tomorrow we will ring a chime.”

  “I do not want to hear a chime, Willibald.”

  “It is not about want, my dear. It is about sonic properties.”

  “Willibald.” Her voice was tired.

  Duft paced back and forth in a tight pattern by the bed. “It is just a start,” he said. “To collect data. Then we will add a second chime, experiment with pitch and volume, and so on.”

  Amalia dropped my hand. She growled faintly, and then, in desperation, closed her eyes and covered her ears with her hands.

  “Am I supposed to waste my life with chimes when a boy can sing like this?” Frau Duft’s voice was strong again, and it halted Duft’s pacing. “Let him come and sing for me. Do all the tests you want, but let him sing.”

  Duft frowned. “But …” He considered this for a moment, and then shook his head. “He is too impossible to grasp, my dear. A chime is a chime; it is constant. A boy changes, so his voice is never the same from one minute to next. Voltaire says—”

  “I want to hear music, Willibald.”

  Duft began pacing again, more slowly than before, as if he feared that a sudden shaking of the house might knock him over. “Perhaps Peter could learn to play a horn.” He looked toward the closed door.

  “I am dying, Willibald!”

  I started at the word. It was the worst one in the world. Duft froze. He slowly spun to face his wife. Amalia took my hand. She squeezed it, and somehow I knew she wanted me to squeeze it back. I did.

  “Please let him come,” Frau Duft said. “It will make me happy.”

  Willibald lifted his mask and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Perhaps … regimented time … durations.”

  “He is a very quiet boy. Much more quiet than Peter.”

  “We will have to start slowly.”

  “Of course.”

  “In case of negative effects.”

  “And I will be the scribe,” said Amalia, and the light in those blue eyes had begun to glow again. “I can do it better than Peter.”

  Willibald looked down at his daughter. “You?”

  Amalia nodded. She looked at me, but not warmly—it was a challenge, as if to say, See what you and your voice have done? Are you prepared?

  I looked around and saw that now they all stared at me. How had this happened? Of course I wanted to sing for this kind, ailing woman. And yet this severe and shaky man, this lavish house, this girl who made me tingle when she took my hand—I did not belong here.

  “It is settled, then,” Duft said. “I will see the abbot tomorrow.”

  He kissed his wife’s forehead through the mask. Then he pushed Amalia and me toward the door.

  “Wait,” Frau Duft said. We turned.

  “What is your name?” she said to me. My mother would have had such a kind voice, too, if she could have spoken.

  “He does not speak,” Amalia said.

  But I could. “Moses,” I said, with the voice of a mouse. Amalia’s eyes went wide. “Gute Nacht, Frau Duft.”

  XIV.

  “M
oses,” was all the abbot said when he appeared at the door to the practice room late the next morning. He spat my name as if it were something unpleasant sticking to his tongue, and the disgust remained on his face after he expunged it. Ulrich and the boys turned to me—I think I even glimpsed pity on their faces. My feet skated silently across the floor and I slipped through the door without turning my back to the abbot.

  I was sure they told him that I had sung in Frau Duft’s bedroom. He closed the door and looked down at me. His nose twitched.

  “Music,” he said, and with every sentence his cold eyes moved closer to my face, “is not a balm. It is not some doctor’s tincture. I am building a church, not a hospital! That man is a fool.”

  He jerked back up and turned to look through a window at the pristine white walls of his church. Their brilliance made him squint.

  He raised a finger and put it in my face. “If there weren’t so few blasted stonemasons in this city, it would be out of the question. But he says he has them—half a dozen he could loan me. Why is your voice worth so much to him?”

  His eyes narrowed as he asked the question, and I felt him trying to read the answer in the soft features of my face.

  A novice passed us in the corridor. He bowed at the abbot and tried to scurry past, but the abbot held up a hand to him. “Get me the monk Nicolai,” he said. The novice hurried off. The abbot’s disapproving gaze returned to me, and remained there until we heard Nicolai’s heavy steps rushing down the corridor.

  “Father Abbot,” he said, his expression concerned. He bowed with his final step. “Is there something wrong?”

  The abbot raised his long brow at Nicolai, as if to say, With those like you in this abbey, need you even ask?

  Instead, he said, very slowly, as if giving an order to a peasant servant, “Each Thursday evening this boy shall sing Vespers at Haus Duft. Be sure to have him clean and dressed to represent the abbey to this city’s finest family.”

  “Of course,” said Nicolai. He smiled down at me and tousled my hair. “At Haus Duft! What an honor!” I smiled faintly up at him. “Abbot,” Nicolai laid a hand on the abbot’s arm, “I will take him there myself.”