But the wild Queen and the fat Prince went strolling for hours in the spacious park behind the castle; the servant who followed them reported only that they rarely exchanged a word. She read every cry and every hope from his tired eyes, his face; she branded herself in his mind with a steadfast gaze, reduced him to humble tenderness before her. No bush was so quiet that its rustling did not disturb them as they listened in on each other, metamorphosing. One evening, as they walked up from the garden into the music room, a long mutter preceded them through the hallways. They glided through the halls as though wrapped in blankets. The double doors opened onto a little circle of people, and the Queen and Prince Consort stepped in across the reflective parquet, without masks, like ghosts, looking like the vanished pair, the Count and the Countess. The black wildness of the dead flashed out from the eyes of the severe Queen; a stooped sorrow lay over the melancholy calm of the Prince. The clean-shaven court chaplain sighed: The two were clearly suffering heavily from their past. The Mongoloid half-breed, the court physician, pursed his lips and lowered his chin onto his white shirt-front, fixing the pair with his eyes; he was shocked less by the strange way the past was working upon them than by the way they forgot the present, the moment. This made him seriously fear for both of their lives.
The pair had to sit next to each other at every moment, whisper to each other at every moment. The Queen neglected necessary government business and delegated important functions to the old men of her privy council; she canceled official receptions, did not appear at the court meals. One morning, she hurried down the narrow hall to his room in a snowy dress; the black blaze in her eyes had faded, she tore open the doors of his armoire with jittering hands and rummaged, rummaged, lying on the floor, among his things, while he consoled her. Murderous clutches of her fingers shredded the blond wig, crumpled and tore to pieces the doublet smelling of lilacs. She had an old, deep bite wound on her left upper arm. She stood up, took a bare Persian dagger from his table, sliced the scar out of her flesh, and pushed aside the cloth he wanted to use to stanch the gushing blood. She threw herself onto the floor, in convulsions; punched herself in the mouth, the breasts; pleaded: “You have to go there, you have to kill the child. It isn’t mine, it is a living lie. If you care about me you must kill the child. I can’t do it.” Then they gave a start in despair, looked searchingly at each other, touched each other’s faces gingerly with their fingers. His head was draped over her shoulder; she sobbed inconsolably.
Their tears flowed for many long days. By the time they next went back to the spacious park behind the castle, brightly colored fall had arrived without their having noticed. A thick veil had fallen over the faces of them both—the wild Queen, the melancholy Prince. A deep, unapproachable silence strode around them like an armored watchman. They set out on the hunt, they shot the crying partridges in the unkempt fields; laughing, glowing, they rode back alongside each other. But anyone who saw them riding home in the dark could tell that the same reticence hung over their faces as the glittering, spiderweb-thin garment that flowed over the mermaids’ bodies, phosphorescing with the fall of night. One day, to the court’s astonishment, they separated. The Prince Consort vanished without anyone knowing where he had gone. When he returned, after three days, he explained calmly that he had carried out a secret mission for the Queen; those in the inner circles were dismayed and upset beyond measure. A rumor started circulating in the country.
Until, one day, both of them left the country altogether. While the military stayed in their barracks in the capital, the police worked feverishly, and the cabinet met, a steamer put off from the coast, where it had been anchored for a week. Only a small team of men reverently greeted the foreign Queen and the Prince, who went for walks on deck, both wrapped in white cloaks. The ship sailed for five days over the ocean, then dropped anchor near a small island; a boat put the foreign Queen and the Prince on land.
It was an island on whose shores only poor fishermen lived; there was a small village miles away, on the other coast. What happened between the young Queen and the melancholy Prince during that time, among the fisherfolk on the little island in the blue ocean, is difficult to tell in words—that they sat at the foot of the white chalk cliffs, or farther back, under the tall palm trees; that they barely let each other out of their sight for a minute; that the Queen, increasingly pale, only rarely let her sobbing head fall onto her chest, and the Prince held his forehead in his hand. Her gaze wandered back and forth between the sea and his countenance; when he didn’t see the blue water, he didn’t know if he was looking into her eyes or into himself. No matter how tightly they held each other, how deeply they kissed, the pair’s melancholy, their common fear, was never-ending.
Sunsets blazed out across the smooth ocean. They sat beneath the cliffs for days in their white cloaks. Only now and then did they stroke each other’s hands. Their gaze was fixed on the glittering, boundless water. Their quiet faces brightened. The sea breathed an immeasurable calm, which spread across the shore, absorbed into itself the beach, the pebbles, the mussel shells, the cliffs, and brushed against their foreheads.
Until, in the morning, the yellow sun shone over the little beach. Then the pebbles rattled, the delicate little stones rang. The purple cloak of the wild Queen dragged across the sand. She walked in solitude, in full regalia, slowly toward the blue sea. On her blond hair she wore the golden crown. From her severe shoulders fell the purple cloak with its wide brocade. Her slender face was smooth and sweet. Thus the young Queen walked alone in the shimmering air across the fine sand toward the blue sea. Two gray seagulls waddled in the sand behind her, following the Queen’s every step.
The melancholy Prince climbed down a white bluff, bareheaded, in a blue velvet cloak; his black breeches were sheer satin, the buckles on his shoes silver-white. He carried a long scepter in his right hand.
The sparkling ocean beat with nary a wave as the pale young Queen and the quiet Prince marched into it from the island. The waves rocked; the wind caressed the happy sea with open palms. The gulls flew close to the coolly whispering surface.
Up on the glittering surface of the water, the ball of a scepter and a golden crown were swimming next to each other.
SHE WHO HELPED
IN NEW YORK, around the middle of the nineteenth century, the trial of a manufacturer named Grasso excited tremendous interest. People talked about the mysterious situation and its frightful surrounding circumstances for months. The war against the Southern states broke out before the sensation had died down, and, by the time the war ended a year and a half later, the memory of the incident had been extinguished. The details can now be reconstructed only in part. They have been overgrown by the weeds of mythic ideas; they make us marvel at the unbelievable things a person can encounter, and the smile on his lips with which he can pass them right by so that everything goes on just like before.
Toward the end of the fifties, on the outskirts of New York (the area has now been fully incorporated into the city), there was a flourishing funeral parlor. The owner, Grasso, had emigrated from Italy with his wife five years before. Having tried in vain to make a living as a hotelier, he then became a carpenter, making so much money that he acquired an old coffin warehouse. At the time, the city had barely 200,000 inhabitants. Before long, the Italian had gotten his hands on the entire burial industry—only a few isolated contracts, usually official ones, from civic or military hospitals, continued to go to other companies. His competitors rapidly went out of business. Not even the desperate defenses of the best-funded firms could resist Grasso; everything effortlessly came his way without his needing to make a fuss.
Only later, during the investigation of the case, did it come out that Grasso himself had played absolutely no role in the success of his business. The boom actually began, rather precisely, with the arrival at the firm of a young employee by the name of Mike Bondi. His origins were completely unknown, but people noticed that he spoke Italian with his boss. He was said to be aroun
d twenty years old when he was hired. But everyone was convinced that, in the fifteen years he spent with the firm, he had not aged a bit. Photographs later found in his possession, showing him arm in arm with Mr. Grasso, surprisingly proved that this person apparently stood motionless in the stream of time. Not a line in his delicate boyish face had grown deeper; his deep black hair still fell across a low white brow. Indeed, even his clothes—it is a little ridiculous to have to say it—seemed invulnerable to time: No one had ever seen him buy new ones; he always wore a black suit and a loose coat of fine material, with shiny buttons, in an old-fashioned cut, the kind people might have worn decades earlier. At the questioning during the trial, no one knew where Bondi spent his nights either; sometimes he seems to have stayed at the office, but usually he drove off to St. Floridan in a small wagon he owned, along the old country road, and completely disappeared for hours. But all this is uncertain, and actually belongs to the realm of legendary ideas I spoke of earlier.
Mike had a slim figure; he always wore a soft felt hat and carried a thin walking stick. His gait was soft and slinky, even sneaky. There is nothing to say about his eyes because no one had ever seen them. He always kept his eyelids lowered, and whenever anyone talked to him his eyeballs turned this way and that behind the delicate skin of his eyelids. His thin lips often tensed into a lovely, meek smile. His voice was indescribably gentle and melodious; this partly explains, perhaps, Mike’s extraordinary influence. For what he said was simple, entirely businesslike; he rarely spoke, and when he did, apart from business matters, it was only about trees, roots, fields, and animals, things generally of little interest to city dwellers.
Good fortune went with him. It emerged that Mike Bondi used to take daily walks through the streets of New York followed by a tall Borzoi hound—an enormous white beast that strode along on its legs as noiselessly as Mike on his, and looked around with empty eyes. Mike Bondi would go up into the apartments of the sick and talk to them. No one resisted him; the sick would ask for him even before they summoned the priest or the doctor, and they were grateful to him for the minutes he filled with his meager words. He left these people calmer, freer of pain, but they all died, as came out in the inquiries at the trial—they would die after no more than a week, in great peace, without anyone being able to help them. Seeing him even once made people feel an almost inexplicable trust in him, and when their illness took a final turn for the worse, they asked for him as though in the grip of an inescapable addiction. He didn’t come near their person, did not give them anything, did not touch them. All of this came out during the trial.
Mike Bondi was not friends with his boss’s wife. Mrs. Grasso loved passionate men, but, jealous as all unfaithful women are, she was glad that her husband would rather spend time with Bondi than with girls. When coming home late at night, heart still pounding from a tender encounter, she would throw her arms around her husband’s neck when she saw him strolling down the dark streets arm in arm with his odd and quiet colleague.
One day, as spring drew to a close, the young wife of a legal adviser named Mr. Martin died suddenly in an apartment next door to Grasso’s warehouse. The widower, left with two small children, could not bear to part from the dead woman, and, in the anxious night after her passing, the idea came to him that he should remove the body from the deathbed and lay it out on a bier with his own hands, as beautifully and sumptuously as he could. He grew animated and, around eleven o’clock, he got out of bed, got dressed, and went downstairs to see Grasso, with whom he was old friends. The warehouse doors were shut; a dull red light quavered through the cracks in the blinds and lay in thin lines on the pavement of the street. Mr. Martin opened the large front gates, stumbled across the pitch-black courtyard, and, through a side door that had been left ajar, reached the long corridor that led directly to the warehouse. The curtain to the warehouse rustled softly. His eyes had trouble adjusting. Against the walls, in the aisles, under low arches were stored the coffins. They stood open. They stood there not expectantly, not greedily—with a mysterious emptiness, sunk in on themselves, and only a few of them sighing and yearning. And in the dull red flicker of a lamp, Martin saw a movement back in the recess, heard whispering. Grasso was kneeling there in front of a coffin, out of which rose two white arms with lace sleeves sliding back down them. Grasso bent his head lower, pressed his face into a woman’s flat chest. He murmured, “Bessie,” and many other things, very softly; she answered, “Ernesto,” laughing and crying at once; she had a very sweet voice.
Martin’s heart was in his mouth; he stepped back, shocked to the depths of his being, and forgot his mission. Before he knew it he was lying in his bed. He dressed with the dawn and ran to see Mrs. Grasso, who was standing half dressed in her kitchen. Amazed at the early visit, she wrapped a shawl around her.
At first she didn’t believe it, and she looked closely at her neighbor, thinking he must be deranged from the death of his young wife. But then she stopped her scrubbing, hurled the coffee grinder onto the stone floor, bit herself hard on the left forearm, and rummaged around in a drawer for a sharp kitchen knife that she stabbed into the wooden wall of the kitchen again and again, screaming. She wanted to know who the cheap tramp looked like, and whether Martin really had so little compassion that he couldn’t even venture a guess. After some loud and unrestrained sobbing, she stood up, resolute, and said she would find everything out for herself that night. And with a self-assurance that left Martin speechless, she flung open the apartment door, called her husband in, and told him, while looking out the window and braiding her thick black hair, that Mr. Martin here had just told her that her mother in Starton, a suburb, was sick; she had to go see her at once, for two or three days. Then, without a word, the three sat down at the coffee table in the living room, where Mrs. Grasso repeatedly produced a violent shudder and one time dropped her cup on the floor. Mr. Grasso offered the opinion that that meant good luck for her mother.
That night, around ten, having spent the day at Martin’s apartment taking care of his small children, she slipped across the dark street into the courtyard. She saw Grasso through the open window, sitting on the sofa alone in the lit living room and staring into space with a sad face, sunk in thought. The sluggish man moved his lips; his wrinkled face sagged; when he looked at the window, his swollen eyes were swimming with tears.
She lay in a narrow coffin right next to the door. Her teeth chattered; her hands shook so much that she could barely keep hold of the kitchen knife. A little before eleven, footsteps came down the corridor, soft and stealthy; the curtain rustled slightly. A little light flickered and she recognized Mike Bondi at once. She had seen him a thousand times—she knew his slightly stooped posture, the hair smoothed down over the low white forehead, the lowered eyelids. But now his noiseless steps filled her with horror. She felt faint. That was not how a human being walked. She had to press her whole arm against her mouth so as not to scream.
He put out the light with one finger as he passed her. She closed her eyes, and when she opened her lids she could no longer see Mike Bondi. But where he had just been walking, the darkness glowed white and a stooped skeleton slowly, noiselessly walked on. Death incarnate was shuffling by. She could still see the glow above a coffin he had leapt into. Then Mr. Grasso’s heavy footsteps resounded through the vaults; he walked past his wife, who was struggling not to faint, and lit an oil lamp. Mrs. Grasso stood up, knife between her teeth, and followed him, clinging to pillars and walls at every step.
The big man dropped to his knees in front of the coffin into which the specter had leapt; two white arms rose up to meet him; recoiling, she saw the open coat and the flat, girlish chest into which a wrinkled wet face burrowed. She saw the girl’s face of Mike Bondi rise up in silence; saw, shrinking back toward the door, how Mike pulled the broken man toward her with tender words of farewell, how they embraced. She had the strength to drag herself back to the kitchen. For two hours she lay there, insensate. She spent the rest of the nigh
t at the police station, where they thought she was sick. Only on the following morning, when Mr. Martin the legal adviser was fetched, did two officers go to the apartment with her and arrest Grasso and Bondi, neither of whom resisted.
In the interrogation that followed, Grasso said absolutely nothing. A physical examination of Bondi showed that they were dealing with a twenty-year-old woman. They could not discover who she actually was. Only at the hearing that took place three weeks later in Grasso’s vault did she talk. She said up front that no one would believe a word she said, then told them that her name was Bessie Bennet, from Senn Fair, near New York. She had lived there eighty years ago. When she was twenty, she was stricken with consumption and sent to the hospital. She was unspeakably loathe to part from life. She said she struggled against death in a way few others did, simply not willing to believe that she had to die just because of a damaged lung while she was still bursting with the desire to live. Then the unknown power, whose name she could not speak, she said, stood up from its throne and made her into a servant of Death. She was allowed to return, but not to the dance. She was allowed to kill, in the name of the merciful power, anyone who wanted to go; to take away their foolish fear of dying, ease and comfort them, and bring them to a speedy end. She was sent among mankind as one who helped and she brought a kind and peaceful death. She had fallen in love with Grasso, but it was good that they part now because otherwise she would soon have to die forever for him.
They confirmed that a Bessie Bennet had lived in Senn Fair about a hundred years before and died in the hospital there when she was twenty; her corpse, though, had conspicuously disappeared on the way to the autopsy. Two nurses were fired for negligence, despite their protestations of innocence, and all subsequent investigations proved fruitless.
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