People of the Book Page 4

  *

  For some time now the town had been full of soldiers. They were an Imperial rabble, directed there by Wallenstein, the warlord, who fancied himself Admiral of the Baltic Sea. Hannale was told to stay indoors and to avoid these men.

  The widow Larsen’s house, from the front or seawall side, was a stoop, a door, three windows on the ground floor, red geraniums, and a loft above, but at the rear the building was much larger, with a warehouse on the left, the kitchens and a small stable on the right, and a barnyard in between, facing the slight emerald rise of an open field.

  Hannale and Lars slept together in a big flock bed in the loft, which had a window overlooking the yard. The soldiers had license to forage by night, because they would have done so anyway.

  Waking up and hearing something outside the window, Hannale went to look, and saw a tall black stranger gathering chickens. The roost was a series of poles under an overhang. He was quiet about it and wrung their necks while they were sleeping. He then went off into darkness, holding three in each chapped hand by the neck, so they dangled down like bunches of sea kale.

  The Imperial troops were in self-explanatory tatters. This man had big hard naked calves with the sort of dry, shiny, taut skin that looks like cracks on porcelain; there was a piece downstairs, from China, from far away.

  She went back to bed and told no one. Children are not afraid of the things we think will frighten them; they are afraid of the things they will be afraid of when they grow up. They sense that they will see them later.

  Some children know this. So they want to grow up fast, take over what they are going to be like as though it were a new set of rooms, and face the beast down. The others dig their heels in, and determine to be five forever. It takes someone who will never stop growing, to face the future with a sane refulgent phoenix curiosity.

  She still went down to the dock every evening. She fretted unless she was allowed to go. She was upset about something these days, not even Lars could get out of her what. She was a contrary child.

  The stranger she had seen in the barnyard was also on the dock. Because she stared at him once too often he smiled at her, and she did not like this because he was not her father, he had a black beard. He tried to reassure her, but she got up immediately and toddled along the pier back to the house. Later he caught her peering out at him through a rippled pane of glass, for the windows had small blank squares which time had turned amethyst. She looked so far away, she made it plain that no one liked the Spaniards here. That is what he was, a young Spaniard, with the panache of that race, but also with its look of loss.

  Next afternoon, when he came clomping awkwardly down (it was one of his duties to unload supply boats), she came up and tugged at what was left—and that greasy—of his wide striped hose. He smiled down at her out of a blue beard. He was a decent man in that army, though harsh in his own way, to relieve his feelings. She had already cast him off once. What did she want to cast him off for this time?

  “You stole our chickens,” she said. It wasn’t an accusation. It was a statement of fact. She wished it explained.

  He was only a boy himself, otherwise he would not have been a volunteer. He saw the matter was serious to her, and therefore knew better than to smile.

  “Yes.”

  Her face unclouded at once. That’s all she’d wanted to know. To a child, once a thing is named, that’s the end of it. It doesn’t have to be bothered about any more, one can go on to something else.

  He was delighted she didn’t hate him any more. He stuck out his big hand.

  “Come,” he said, in bad Plattdeutsch, “I’ll show you something.” She allowed her hand to be taken. If a hand is held out, you have to put something in it.

  He led her up the stone jetty, to a small shed to one side of it, near the shore end, in which fishermen used to keep gear, but it had been requisitioned like everything else. He felt gay, for he was an innocent young man. Brutality generally is. He wanted to show her something he often came to see, and which no grown-up would have understood.

  The army had been raised, and was paid, by Wallenstein, an ambitious Bohemian, but the one man on the Imperial side massive in ability. He was richer than the Emperor and planned to give him presents. To prove himself Admiral of the Baltic, he wished them to be exotic ones. It was on one of these stored gifts that the soldier had stumbled. The shed was old and dark, it stank of fish oil, and it had a hole in its roof. The door creaked open and he showed her in.

  In the center of the shed, under the rip in the roof, stood a dulled iron cage, of the size and sort sometimes used to keep defendants in during a trial. Inside the cage two taut white maculated blurs prowled back and forth. One of them opened its mouth, like a shark’s in miniature, and yowled. So that was where the yowling came from. She had heard it at night and wondered. But what she really wanted to know she never asked.

  It was luxury alive, as rapacious as opulence itself. Hannale stood where she was and let her breath out. He told her they were snow leopards, from the other side of Russia, where there were mountains nobody had ever seen, beyond Turkestan, toward Tibet. Their fur was spiky and full, but soft spiky like a chrysanthemum, and dotted here and there with wriggly brownish-black double spots. Hannale was filled with a warm, delighted awe.

  Each leopard had a wide leather collar, studded with sharp steel spikes. The shed had a ruttish, feral smell. She was entranced.

  “Yes,” said the young man. She did not think of him as a soldier any more. He was the man who kept the magic animals. His name was Ramón. He was Catalan.

  She came to the shed every day after that, and did not even tell Lars. Nobody paid her any mind. With soldiers billeted in the village and stealing what they couldn’t pay for with bad coin; with the danger Lars might be kidnapped into the army, despite his age; with horses and sheep to hide and nowhere to hide them (Mysendonck’s white horse had been put down in the undercroft, where it whinnied during the sermon); there was neither time nor wish to worry about what a small silent girl was doing: she was too young to be raped.

  There was a feeling in the village that the worst was yet to come. Nobody mentioned it, but you could smell it. You could see it sitting beside the chimney at night, flickering among the company huddled there to keep warm, and drinking its own ale.

  It was a bad summer. The night dews were heavy and turned to frost quite young. The geraniums went black in the leaf. These widow Larsen would pluck off in the morning, raveling an old bloom between her fingers as was her habit, for she liked the crushed smell, and made her own infusions.

  Indeed she had many domestic arts. They were what she lived for. She had married to have the house, that and for other things, and knew how to make it shine. When she looked at the black and white tiles in the hall, she regretted nothing.

  Almost nothing. Every time she saw an apple bough in bloom, her lips got tight. She had not liked her husband. She would not have liked any husband.

  What she liked was to go up to the loft, which was always pungent with smoke, to inspect the cured hams, the cheeses, and the meat laid down in vinegar crocks, the salt herring and rollmops neatly folded into their brine with peppercorn and bay leaves, the sausages ripening in their guts, and all the good things of this world made to taste, but which she admired best to hoard by number.

  The cellars, the storerooms, the loft, the drying flats, were her jewel box. There she placed pale green speckled pears, tough as wood, which would ripen in the musty darkness until their flesh was softly mottled as an oyster. In late fall and early winter there was the stench of warm apples. She made her own cider, hydromel, and beer. She was famous, among those who had tasted it, for her porter. Smoked eels hung in rings, succulently mummified. She made the best cobblers on the island. There were crocks of conserve, of wild gooseberry, strawberry, lingonberry, plum, and ten or fifteen stone jars of quince, slightly crystallized. She concocted those jams in which the fruit pulp is mixed with nut meats, heavy, dark, and with
a crunch. The cheeses ranged from mocha-colored goat, to big bland wheels of forty weight, piled in the dark to age.

  She was not greedy. Her own tastes were sparse. But just as a wealthy Dutch merchant’s wife must have her engraved silver tea canister and sugar castor, so must she have these things, because they were what a respectable woman had to have. Or so she believed.

  There was no flaw in the widow Larsen. She was annealed. And yet you sensed something.

  So did her children.

  II.xx.29: Scarce anyone does a wicked action without some motive, or so far strips himself of the nature of a man, as to delight in such acts from pure malignity.

  On the night Wollin was fired in order that Gustavus Adolphus should not have it, the town was at church, listening to Pastor Mysendonck expatiate upon the attractions of Hell. On this subject he was considered an authority, but if somebody had crossed him so recently as Saturday morning, the pyrotechnics flew spectacular. “Our virtues and vices spring from much the same sources,” says Longinus in Robortello’s Basel edition of 1554. He read that author for the benefit of his Greek, and because he had come by the volume cheaply. The source, to his mind, was Hell. He thought his son a wastrel, his daughters lilies of the field, his wife a whore, and the world a wicked place. If his noonday milk soup was scorched, he would damn the world for an hour and a half, with gusto and zeal. This Sunday his soup had not only been scorched, but burnt. It had had scruts in it.

  He had gotten up to the tortures in store for the fribble and the wanton (his daughter had been seen walking out with Schmidt’s son—“And what’s the harm in it, they are to be married in August,” said his wife, but it was his favorite daughter, the one he had trained to read to him), when the white horse in the undercroft began to scream and kick the walls.

  The church stood a hundred yards from the village, on a soft chalky bump, the only eminence thereabouts, the doors toward the town, the apse toward the Baltic. It was a low stone building with small windows, and had the acrid seaweed odor of shore chapels anywhere.

  The entrance to the undercroft was by a flight of steps in the middle of the nave, surrounded by a low stone wall. The steps ended at a wooden door which had been set to open outward. There was a fractured crash, the door bounded against the wall, and the mare clattered up the steps and began to gallop around the chapel, knocking away rush-bottomed chairs, scattering the congregation, and giving the pulpit a sound thwack with her hind legs.

  Nobody screamed, but there was a scramble for cover. Someone had the sense to open the doors, and the horse streaked out that way into the night, whinnying shrill. It was the last they saw of it.

  Heat came in through the door, and the reflection of flames flickered over the whitewash of the porch. Through the doorway could be seen the town, framed, burning. Fire came out of windows shuttered two hours ago, like curtains blown straight up. There was a glitter on the sea. The Pastor swallowed and stared like the rest of them. Over the smoke of the heavy summer evening, they could now hear the crackle and the roar, and that dark mass on the horizon, a castle belonging to the Elector of Saxony’s sister, the one if absentee grand person in these parts, was dark no longer, but had flames for turrets. The water was a clutter of small boats, an impromptu armada of the Imperial armies fleeing.

  Frau Larsen was at church with Lars and Hannale. She left the children and went to save what she could. Here and there a brand shot out of a building, as though from a temporary volcano, and since it was a dry summer, fired the grasses. Her skirts, trailing through some of these burning bushes, began to smolder. Lars followed her. Neither of them missed Hannale. She wanted to save what she had most use for.

  Since children move through adults the way an Indian tracks through trees, there was no one to stop Hannale. The Imperial troops had left their movables, their baggage wagons, gun carriages, armaments, and even most of their stolen horses behind. These added to the confusion among the villagers.

  It did not take Hannale long to reach the house. The geraniums had bloomed vermilion to the loft, whose permanent fixed crane was flaming. The glass had melted from the windows and flowed down over the window boxes in vitreous pools, mixed with lead. The wet cobbles of the quay had a shimmer to them. The fire had made the leap to the fishermen’s shed, and was now gnawing away at one end, which it held in its paws, like a cat. Hannale ran down the wharf, lifted the latch, and stepped inside.

  Ramón lay flung on the floor. The cage was open. He, too, must have tried to set the leopards free. Exacerbated by the smoke, they had ripped his throat out as they shot by. His face looked surprised. His blood was already black.

  The leopards cowered up in a corner, as far away from the fire as they could get, and confused by the girl’s appearance, the door, the fire, gathered themselves trimly together, with a coiled hesitation in their paws as they footed for the proper balance, and leapt through the hoop flames had made in the far wall, in a blizzard blur, to fall misfortunately into the tidal slops.

  Hannale had the time merely to see her first corpse, not to think about it. She would think about it later. She ran out the door to see the leopards haul themselves wet and snarling from the froth, shake themselves on the shingle (it was low tide), and then bound up the jetty wall and streak for the fields. She followed.

  They had gone toward the church, but were not there when she clambered up the hill. The church was empty except for a fresh plop of horse dung on the floor, near the font, whose lid had clattered off.

  She was not surprised. It is like everything else in this life. Once you have eaten the apple, you no longer have it. If you see anything you like, never speak and never show it. If you do, it will go away.

  When she needed help she went to Lars, but Lars was not here. Seeing suddenly the torn neck of the dead soldier in the hut, she plumped down beside a table tomb in the churchyard and began to cry. Something happens to people and then they can’t move any more. Therefore she must be careful to move slowly, otherwise it might happen to her. For it was always sudden. It is not true to say that children cannot reason. They reason every day, only not with the mind, and on insufficient evidence. But that does not mean they are always wrong.

  The only tantrum she had ever thrown was when she had come in one day and found the pendulum of their clock standing still. “Will the pendulum stop when I go to sleep?” she’d asked after the locksmith had fixed it. All night she felt for her heart, said nothing next day, but got granted to her the privilege of pulling the counterweights up, which she always did a day before it was necessary. Frau Larsen thought it was a whim. It was not. It was self-defense.

  Leaning against the carved hulk of Mies Holzschnitter (obiit 1585, aetatis suae 64), she went on crying tearlessly, her eyes as wide and as red as those of a newborn chicken. She did not know that she was motionless.

  *

  In the village Lars and the widow Larsen had nobody to help them; she would not ask for help, not she; and since they were in the barnyard at the back, no one could see them.

  In the center of the barnyard was the well. The warehouse on the left side of the house could be saved. It was built of stone and had no direct entrance to the house. By dousing the roof down with buckets of water, and by hacking away part of the roof timbers and letting the slate fall in to make a gap, it was possible to leave the fire to the house only, though on the other side of the court it had spread to the kitchen offices wing.

  This done, Lars remembered Hannale. He came down from the roof and threw his bucket on the ground. The widow Larsen appeared at a window of the kitchen offices, her face smurched with soot, her usually immovable hair out of order, staggering under the weight of a cheese. This she cast out into the yard, and followed it with a volley of smoked eels and Polish sausages.

  “Help, boy, help,” she snapped.

  “I can’t find Hannale.”

  “Let the dratted child find herself. We’ve got to eat. She’ll come home when she’s hungry.” She disappeared and ca
me back with another cheese. She was taking the cartwheels first. Smarting tears streamed down her face, and flakes of ash caught on them, as though into a mustache.

  But Lars had gone.

  *

  Nobody seemed able to answer questions. He did not know about the leopards, so he did not look there. But he looked everywhere else, even along the mud flats, though the tide was on the turn. He went up to the church because it was on high ground, he could see from there. In the bay the small boats had long since gone.

  He knew she liked the Holzschnitter tomb, and that’s where he found her. He sat down gently, for he knew her moods though he did not understand them. After a while she went to sleep beside him. Neither one of them wanted to go back.

  He sat there for a long time, towheaded, lost, and watched his world burning. Since he had no knowledge of any other, and had not been taught how to inquire for one, cap in hand, it was also his security that burned. From here he had planned to sail, when he was old enough, on the family boat.

  And now there were no boats. It seemed far away. The roofs were beginning to cave in. Hannale, who had the art of intertwining, slept heavily and could not be moved, and besides, there was nowhere he wanted to go. Out to sea there appeared a series of small fires, on yardarms and sprits, burning in sand buckets. It was the Swedish fleet, approaching.

  3

  II.i.1: The principle drift of our argument rests upon those justifiable causes, to which the sentiment of Coriolanus in Dionysius of Halicarnassus particularly applies, he says, “in the first place, I beseech you to consider how you may find pious and just pretexts for the war.” II.i.2: St. Augustin, in defining those to be just wars, which are made to avenge injuries, has taken the word avenge in a general sense of removing and preventing, as well as punishing aggressions…. A just cause then of war is an injury, which though not actually committed threatens our persons or property with danger.