by John Gardner
The room is full of fire, the demons in every dark corner are real. “I didn’t tell you that,” I whisper. With a violently shaking hand I snatch away the curtain between us. In the darkness, I can just make out his features. “Brother Nicholas!” I whisper—
He bows, solemn. “The question is, can you trust the promise I’ve given you.” He smiles, then turns, his robe silent, and he goes into the darkness.
4
I abandon hope. I have lost Brother Nicholas, though I’m by no means confident that he has lost me. The woods contain no glimmer of light—interlocked beams like a roof above me, the boles of the trees twelve feet apart. All sounds are muffled; I can scarcely hear the cry of birds or crickets, much less the snap of a twig that would tell me my enemy is near. I have no opinion what the outcome will be. I am afraid, sick unto death with fear. I have no faith that the universe is good, as I have thought. Yet I am here. I have no choice. Men hunt wild boars in these tomb-dark woods. It is pointless for me to be afraid that I’ll startle some ancient loner and be murdered by it. Nevertheless, poor shameless, mindless creature, I am afraid. There are also wolves. (If they’re circling me now, bellies close to the ground, eyes light, ears turned toward where I whimper to myself, I have no way of knowing.) I stumble on, perhaps going in circles, laboring forward through haw-thorne and oakmoss, in the absurd hope of coming on some path. But no, there is a sound. A sort of creaking, a clank, and something else. For a second I can’t place it, but at last my heart leaps: the snort of a horse! I move toward it, pushing through the underbrush as fast as I can, splashing out my arms in the darkness, groping, kicking with a sharper whimper through nettles, tangled vines like limp wet snakes. Suddenly there is open sky above me, and stars, then the darkness of trees again. I’ve come out on a grassy road, a few wisps of fog in its hollow, and fifty feet away, loping toward me, an enormous horse, steel-visored and skirted, and on the huge beast’s back, a knight. I scramble out onto the road and kneel. “Mercy!” I cry out. “My lord, help me!” The horse rears, crazy, and faster than the eye can see, the knight’s steel hand has the sword out, raised above his head, prepared to come down on me and split my skull. An eternity passes. I peek up past my hand. He’s inhuman, gigantic in his shell of steel, no expression but the pitchdark slit of his eyes and the slightly moving plume on the top of his helmet. And then, deep-voiced inside the visor:
“Who are you?”
“Brother Ivo, from the monastery.” I raise my hand to point, but I don’t know the direction.
He doesn’t believe me. “What are you doing in the woods, monk?”
“Looking for Brother Nicholas,” I say. I try to think.
“Brother Nicholas.”
I nod.
At last, doubtfully, he lowers his sword, raises his right hand to his visor and lifts it. In the darkness I cannot see his face. There might be nothing inside. (I am maddened by art, I recognize again. Perhaps his face is an evil monkey’s; perhaps it’s a death’s-head. My mind has lost control: The rules, techniques of a lifetime devoted to allegory have ruined me.)
The voice becomes less forbidding. “He’s a friend of yours?”
I try to think. I am tempted to laugh a little wildly. “I don’t know.”
I have a sense of something moving behind me. I jerk my head. The horse shies violently and rears again, and again the knight has his sword out, the visor snapped shut. I throw myself down on the ground in terror, hands over my ears. Nothing happens. Two minutes pass. I look up, cautiously. The knight is bent forward on his trembling steed, scanning the darkness of underbrush with those slanted black slits. At last he straightens up, lets the sword drop a little.
“What was it?” I whisper.
Another minute passes. He is listening to the woods. No sound but the breathing of the horse. At last he tips up his visor again and studies me. “Stand up, monk,” he says. I obey. He says, “Turn around. Over there in the moonlight. Press your clothes flat to your skin. That’s right.” It comes to me that he’s looking for weapons, a dagger, say.
“I never carry any weapons, my lord.” I look up at him, earnest. No knowing what he thinks, that shell of steel sitting huge and still as a castle in the thin, frail moonlight.
“Maybe not.” He continues to scrutinize me. Finally, with a movement surprisingly quick, considering the weight of the armor he wears, he slips the sword into its scabbard and reaches down to me. “Climb up.”
I cling to his gauntlet and lift my foot up on top of his spiked iron shoe and he pulls me up behind him. The smell of his sweat hits my nostrils, stronger than the sweat of the horse. I reach around his waist to hold on, and, faster than a striking snake, the iron palm of his gauntlet nails my wrist. I cry out, and the horse shies in terror. I nearly fall, but he holds me. He realizes at last that I had no intention of snatching the dagger he wears on his thigh, and he relaxes, though he still says nothing. He throws his weight forward slightly, and the huge horse takes three steps, then pauses, shaking like a leaf.
“There’s something in there,” he whispers, and closes his visor. We peer into the darkness. It seems to me that I see Brother Nicholas standing motionless in the blackness of the forest eaves. He stares straight at us, smiling his mysterious, scornful smile.
Nothing means anything, the figure whispers.
Faster than lightning, the dagger has flown from the gauntleted hand. We do not hear it strike, consumed by moss, dead trees, the darkness at the heart of things. Nothing means anything, the forest whispers. The knight is trembling. The face still seems to smile at us. But it is not a face, we know now—some trick of light—and the voice is not the Devil’s voice but some heavy old animal shifting in its lair, unable to sleep because of age.
“Mistake,” my defender whispers.
“It’s nerve-wracking business, knight-errantry,” I say, and wipe sweat from my forehead.
“Keeps you on your toes,” he says, and laughs. “Sooner or later they get you. It’s a hundred to zero.”
He leans forward. The horse begins to move. I cling to his waist for dear life. His strong legs are locked around the horse. We’re a strange image, it crosses my mind, floating through moonlit mist down the silent, grassy lane, plumes bobbing, steel armor on the knight and horse like the pale recollection of unreal fire.…
THE WARDEN
1
The Warden has given up every attempt to operate the prison by the ancient regulations. Conditions grow monstrous, yet no one can bring them to the Warden’s attention. He paces in his room, never speaking, never eating or drinking, giving no instructions of any kind. He dictates no letters, balances no accounts, never descends to the dungeons or inspects the guards. At times, he abruptly stops pacing and stands stock-still, listening, his features frozen in a look of vengeful concentration. But apparently nothing comes of it. He looks down from whatever his eyes have chanced to fix upon, his stern and ravaged face relaxes to its usual expression of sullen ennui. (I speak not of what I see but of what I used to see, in the days when he occasionally called me in, in the days when sometimes he would even smile grimly and say, “Vortrab, you and I are the only hope!”) After a moment’s thought he remembers his pacing and at once, doggedly, returns to it. His pacing has become a kind of heartbeat of the place. Even when I’m far from here, lying in my cottage in the dead of night, I seem to hear that beat come out of the stones, then ominously stop, then at last start up again, the old man walking and walking in his room, like a gnome sealed up in a mountain. I, his mere amanuensis, am left to do what little I can to keep the institution functioning. I pay the guards and give them encouragement; I visit the cells and arrange for the changing of straw and the necessary burials. When we lose personnel, which happens often—sweepers and grave-diggers loading up their satchels with government equipment and slinking away like wolves in the night—I go to the village and find, if possible, replacements. It’s a touchy arrangement. They all know I have no authority. They doubt that they themsel
ves have any. It seems to me at times that we have nothing to go on but our embarrassment. That and the money that still comes, from time to time, from the Bureau of Correctional Institutions. I have a subterfuge that I’ve fallen into using, though I doubt that anyone’s convinced by it. I tell the guards and supervisors that the Warden has commanded so-and-so. I say, for instance, “The Warden is concerned about the smell down here. He’s asked me to organize a clean-up detail.” At times, when morale is unusually low, I pretend that the Warden is angry, and I give them stern orders, supposedly from him. They look down, as if afraid, and accept what I say, though they do not believe it and certainly stand in no awe of me—a small, balding, fat man forever short of breath. It gives them a reason to continue.
How long this can last I do not know. Let me set down here, for whoever may follow, a full report of how things stand with us, though none of this touches on the cause of our troubles—a thing so complex that I scarcely know how to comprehend it.
Some weeks ago, finding one of our older and more loyal guards asleep at his post, and being, perhaps, a trifle edgy and self-righteous from worry, lack of sleep, and irritation at being required to do more than I’m trained to do, I stepped briskly to the sleeping man’s side and shouted directly in his ear, “Heller! What’s the meaning of this?”
Heller jumped a foot, then looked angry, then sheepish. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. He’s a small man, narrow-chested, with a thin, nervous face like a comic mask—large-eyed, large-eared, beneath the long nose a beard and mustache, and, to the sides of it, rectangular spectacles. He was obviously distressed at his lapse of vigilance—at least as distressed as I was, in fact. If I’d been fully myself, I’d have let the matter drop. But I couldn’t resist pressing harder, the way I myself am pressed.
I jabbed my face at him. “What will the Warden think of this?”
He lowered his eyes. “The Warden,” he said.
I said, “What would happen if some prisoner got into the corridor?” I came close to shaking my fist at the man. He looked past me, morose. They always know more than you do, these Jews. You see them shuffling along the roadside, hats sagging, beards drooping, eyes cast down as if expecting the worst. They tempt you to swing your team straight at them, let them know for once how matters stand. No doubt that’s what Mallin would have done—the man we had here some time ago. A nihilist, destroyer of churches, murderer of medical doctors.
At the thought of Josef Mallin, I pretended to soften, but it was really from cruelty not unlike his, a sudden wish that the accident had happened. “You wouldn’t be the first guard killed by his own reckless laziness, Heller. You know what they’re like. Wild animals! Whatever touch of humanness they may ever have possessed …”
Heller nodded, still avoiding my eyes. He refused to say a word.
“Well?” I said. I struck the stone floor with my stick and stamped my foot. The idea of Mallin, even now that he’d been dead for months, made my indignation seem reasonable. Guards had been murdered, from time to time. And there were certain men so bestial, so black of heart …
Heller’s eyes swung up to mine, then down, infinitely weary. Immediately, I was ashamed of myself, slapped back to sense and sick to death of the whole situation. I turned from him in stiff, military fashion, though I have nothing to do with the military, and started away. I knew well enough that he had no answer. No one has an answer for a question, a manner of behavior, so grotesque. But as I started up the dark, wet stairs, self-consciously dignified, full of rage which no longer had anything to do with Heller, he called after me: “Herr Vortrab!”
I stopped, despite myself. I waited, squeezing the handle of my stick, and, when he said nothing more, I turned to look at him, or turned partway. The tic which troubles me at times like these was jerking in my cheek.
“I’m sorry to have troubled you,” he said.
His foolish, weak face made me angrier yet, but for all his meekness he managed to make me more helpless and ludicrous than ever. Nor was it much comfort that in the flimmer of the lamp he too looked childlike, clownlike, absurdly out of place. The flat, heavily initialed stones glistened behind him, wet as the bedwork of the moat. He had his hands out and his shoulders hunched, like a scolded tailor. It was impossible to meet his eyes, but also impossible not to, in that ghastly place. The corridor winding through the shadow of chains and spiderwebs toward increasing darkness was like a passage in a dream leading endlessly downward toward rumbling coal-dark waterfalls, sightless fish.
“You haven’t talked to them, sir,” he said.
I stared at him, eyebrows lifted, waiting.
He raised his hands, the center of his forehead, his narrow shoulders in a tortuous shrug, as if pulling upward against centuries. “I do talk to them,” he said. “If they’re animals—”
“It’s forbidden to talk with the prisoners,” I said. I squeezed harder on the handle of my stick.
He nodded, indifferent. “Doesn’t it strike you that we—we, too, are prisoners? I go home at night to my wife and children, but I never leave the prison.—That makes no sense, I suppose.” His shoulders slumped more.
“It certainly doesn’t,” I said, though I understood. I too go home every evening to the same imprisonment. My senile father, who’s ninety, paints pictures in the garden, thoroughly oblivious to my worries; amused by them. My two small children cackle over jokes they do not explain to me, watching as if through high windows, great square bars. My wife …
“Heller, you need a vacation,” I said.
His smile, for all its gentleness, was chilling. Centuries of despair, determination to continue for no clear reason, some ludicrous promise that all would be well though nothing had ever been well or ever would be. A brief panic flared up in me.
I took a step down, moving toward him, then another, and another. The panic was fierce now, icy, irrational, a sense of being led toward ruin and eagerly accepting it. “What prisoners do you talk to?” I asked.
Again, this time more thoughtfully, he looked at me, his fingers on his beard. With a slight shrug, he turned and moved down the corridor, then timidly glanced back, looking over his spectacles, inquiring whether I’d follow. At the first turn, he lifted a lamp from its chain and hook, glancing back again. I nodded impatiently. He held the lamp far forward, at eye level. Rats looked up at us. We came to the worn stone steps leading downward to the deepest of the dungeons. The walls were so close we had to walk single file, the ceiling so low that even a man of my slight stature was forced to walk cocked forward like a hunter.
At the foot of the steps, the cells appeared, door after door, dark, iron-barred crypts. Most of the barred doors supported great silvery spiderwebs like spectral tents, their sagging walls gaudied by moisture drops that shone in the glow of the lantern like sapphires and rubies. The stink was unspeakable. Old straw, human feces, old age, and the barest trace, like some nagging guilt, of the scent of death. At the fourth door on the right-hand side, he held up the lantern, and, obeying his gesture, I cautiously peeked in.
What I saw, when my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, was a naked old man seated in his chains—seated or propped, I couldn’t make out which—in the corner of the cell. Beside him lay a pan of uneaten food and his lumpy, musty sleeping pallet. He was a skeleton awkwardly draped in veined, stiff parchment. His hair and beard, which reached to the floor, were as white as snow, or would have been except for the bits of straw and dirt. One could see at a glance that his luminous eyes were useless to him. His hands, closed to fists, were like the feet of a bird; his wrists and ankles were like crooked pairs of sticks. I could not tell for certain whether or not the man was still alive, but my distinct impression—the smell perhaps—was that he wasn’t. I thought I felt something behind us and turned to look. There was no one. A flurry of rats.
Heller called out, “Professor, you have a visitor.” The words were distorted by echoes running down the long stone corridor and bouncing from the lichen-covered walls of the
cells. The prisoner made no response. Heller called out the same words again, more slowly this time, as if speaking to a child hard of hearing. And now it seemed to me that a kind of spasm came over the face—not an expression, not even a movement of features suggestive of human intelligence, but some kind of movement, all the same. I watched in horror, pierced to the marrow by the sight of that dead face awakening. Then—still more terrible—the skull of a head turned slowly to the right, straining, perhaps, to decipher some meaning in the echoes. Heller called out a third time, leaning forward, hand on beard, calling this time still more slowly, and, as the echoes died, there came from the creature in the cell or from the walls around him a windy, moaning syllable almost like a word.
“He’s saying ‘Friend,’ ” Heller whispered, at my shoulder. Then, to the prisoner: “Professor, tell the visitor your crime.”
Again the prisoner seemed unable to grasp what the guard was saying. He swiveled his head like an old praying mantis, translucent white. But when Heller had asked the same question three times, the prisoner brought out a series of noises, hoarse, reedy grunts—his stiff, dark tongue seemed locked to his palate—and Heller interpreted: “ ‘No crime,’ he says. ‘Was never accused.’ ” Heller studied me, looking over his spectacles, trying to see what I made of it. But I had no time to consider that now. I was beginning to understand, myself, the prisoner’s noises. I needed to hear more, test my perceptions against Heller’s. I struggled against distraction. I had, more strongly than before, the impression that someone was behind us. Except when I looked closely, I was aware of a bulky, crouching shadow. No doubt it was merely a trick of my nerves; at any rate, Heller was unaware of it. I nailed my attention to the prisoner.
“Why do you call him ‘Professor’?” I whispered.
The guard looked away from me, annoyed by the question, then changed his mind. He asked the prisoner, “Professor, tell us of Matter and Mind.”
