Where Monsters Dwell

by Jorgen Brekke

  * * *

  The two of them sat on the wall that surrounded the graveyard of the innocents, as the sun slipped down behind them, each with a spade dangling alongside their legs. The beard-cutter was whistling a tune they had learned in Germany, about a ne’er-do-well who fell asleep out of indolence, only to awaken and find himself buried alive. The boy was listening to the sounds of the night.

  Then they heard the cart come clattering up to the gate at one corner of the wall. They saw the hasps of the gate move. Both of them hopped down outside the wall and stood there. As the sun disappeared completely and darkness fell, they heard the people who were working inside. They were talking about the execution.

  A serving girl had been convicted of murdering her own child, conceived out of wedlock. The rumors said that the son of her master, a rich local merchant, had gotten her pregnant. True or not, she had been hanged from the gallows in the market square that afternoon, and now two grave diggers stood chatting over her corpse as they dug a grave that matched the shallowness of their work ethic. It did not take them long, and the last part of their conversation revolved mostly around the wife of one of the grave diggers, who had apparently purchased an excellent rooster at the market. The question now was whether to employ it for cockfighting or stud service.

  When the diggers finally ended their chatter and their gloomy work, the two outside the wall heard the gate close and the cart drive off into the dark of the night.

  The wall had not been made to keep grave robbers out; it was barely taller than the beard-cutter. Its purpose was to ensure that people outside wouldn’t have to see inside. The two climbed over the wall easily and found the spot where the two diggers had covered over the corpse. They knew they would not have to dig very deep to find what they were looking for, and after only a dozen spadefuls, they struck firm flesh.

  The beard-cutter commanded the boy to kneel down and do the rest of the job with his bare hands. He began at the end where he thought the head would be. After pushing away the loose dirt, a chalk-white face appeared. The open eyes were filled with black earth. The skin was smooth and cold. The hair was black and merged with the surrounding darkness. The boy put a hand under the neck of the corpse and raised her head. He sat for a while holding the head in his hands, as if wanting to say something to the girl. He stared at the pale blue lips for a long time. Suddenly he was filled with a sorrow he had never before felt in the presence of a corpse.

  “What are you doing? Keep digging.” The beard-cutter’s voice behind him was impatient.

  The boy did as he was told. He removed the dirt from the chest, stomach, pelvis, and legs. Then they lifted her out of the grave.

  To get the body over the wall, the beard-cutter stood on the outside and pulled on a rope fastened under her arms, while the boy pushed at her feet. They finally got her over the wall and into the cart. They tied her firmly in place. Before they whipped the donkey into motion, they placed a cloth over the corpse. As the beard-cutter covered her face, the boy noticed something. She looked like his mother up in Trondheim. He stopped, wondering if the beard-cutter had noticed this, too.

  * * *

  The next morning the boy took a bath in Master Alessandro’s tub and rubbed his skin with the best olive oil. After he had dried himself off and put on clean clothes, he was allowed to enter Master Alessandro’s studio. They sat down in two soft chairs with a table between them. The boy was still thinking of the merchant’s monkeys, and remembered that Alessandro had several stories about monkeys.

  “Could you tell me about the monkey in Alexandria?” He leaned forward to take an apple.

  “Ah, the monkey in Alexandria,” said the master, rubbing his hand over his clean-shaven chin. The beard-cutter had done a good job that morning, and the master had no more beard than the boy. The master took a dried fig and studied it closely before he put it in his mouth. The boy watched him with silent admiration. Everything the master did looked so profound, as if the slightest hand gesture expressed thoughts that the boy could not begin to understand. But one day I will, he thought. One day I’ll be able to think such thoughts myself. He admired the master. Not that he didn’t look up to the beard-cutter, but the beard-cutter frightened him. He had seen his temper flare many times in the German taverns. The beard-cutter excused himself by explaining that he had too much yellow bile in his body, and sometimes he would go on a cure consisting of white bread and herbs to combat these sudden attacks of rage. But even that didn’t help. The weekend after such a diet he would have another outburst. But he had never laid a hand on the boy.

  It was not only the beard-cutter’s brutality the boy feared. He had also seen him with other boys his age. Sometimes they had taken two rooms in the inn, so that the boy had a room to himself, while the beard-cutter took another boy to his own room. The beard-cutter had never touched the boy; he was the beard-cutter’s lucky charm. They both knew that. But what would happen after they found their fortune? Would he still be able to trust him? He didn’t know.

  He knew that he could trust Master Alessandro. But it was not the master’s heart that he trusted, even though he believed the doctor had warm feelings for him. It was his mind. Someone who let his mind be master of the other organs in his body was a reliable person. He could trust Master Alessandro the way he could trust an argument he knew was valid.

  “You like that story about the monkey in Alexandria, don’t you?”

  The boy nodded.

  “You’re right to do so,” said the master. “There’s a strange sort of wisdom in that story. I met that monkey myself. The monkey in Alexandria. The monkey who could write all the letters of the Greek alphabet. I’d probably been staying a week or so in the faded grandeur of that city. The city that had once housed all the knowledge in the world. I had spoken with the city’s doctors, who excelled in many fields and spoke excellent Greek, even though they were all Arabs and Jews. It was from one of them that I heard about a first-class craftsman and merchant who was called Kinshar the Scribe. He was originally from Baghdad but lived in Alexandria. This scribe was said to own books that had come from the time before the fire destroyed the famous ancient library. And you know me,” said the master, in a way that made the boy feel proud. He did know him.

  “I simply had to meet this scribe. I got a messenger to set up a meeting with him a few days later. Unfortunately, the books turned out to be a disappointment. They were all newer copies, none of them older than a couple of decades. But I did buy some fine copies of Archimedes that I didn’t own, and which I thought might at least contain some of Archimedes’ own words. The visit to the merchant was not time wasted, however. He showed me around his scriptorium, which was one of the finest I’ve ever seen in all my long journeys. A dozen men worked there, and they produced just as many books as my friend Manutius, the printer in the city.”

  The boy knew that “the city” Master Alessandro referred to was Venice.

  “But the only reason why I will never forget my visit to Kinshar the Scribe was his foremost scribe, a monkey they called Alexander.”

  “A monkey?” the boy said with a laugh, as if he had not heard the story ten times before.

  “Yes, precisely, a monkey,” said Alessandro, popping another fig into his own laughing mouth. He went on, “This monkey was not just any old monkey. This monkey could write. The animal could hold a pen, and on large sheets of paper, he could write heavy, ugly letters one after the other in a row. He knew all the letters in the Greek alphabet, and he put them down on paper as if they were words and sentences. Yes, he had even learned to put spaces in between the words now and then. He didn’t know punctuation, so there was some distance between periods and commas. As for Manutius’s brilliant new invention, the semicolon, even the scribes down there had not yet heard of it. Nevertheless, that monkey could write. But because he was an animal, even a drunk dock worker from Genoa could think more clearly than he could, and he had no idea what he was writing. He simply put down one letter af
ter another in a wild and random order. Still, he sat there every day writing, serving almost as a model for the other scribes. One day a miracle occurred. Or at least it was what Kinshar the Scribe convinced me must inevitably happen, for, as he said, if you set enough monkeys to writing a sequence of letters long enough, sooner or later one of them will write something that makes sense. If you have an infinite number of monkeys writing down an infinite number of letters, then at some point in the insanity you will end up with a reproduction of the works of Plato or Horace. A dizzying thought.

  “What the monkey had written was only one sentence that made sense. But since then I’ve realized that it was a very good sentence. It has settled inside me. Actually, it has become something of a motto for life.”

  “What did the monkey write?” asked the boy excitedly, happy to be hearing these mysterious words again.

  “‘The center of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere,’” Master Alessandro recited in sonorous Greek. “Those were the monkey’s words. The scribe let me see them with my own eyes. He had hung the sheet of paper on the wall above the writing desk so everyone could see it. I had already seen the monkey write, and there was no doubt that it was in the monkey’s handwriting.”

  They both sat in silence for a while.

  “That’s my favorite story,” said the boy at last. Whether or not it was true, he added to himself.

  The boy did not want to play that afternoon, even though the other boys outside had made a ball from a pig’s stomach and invited him to join their game. The winner would get a cup of raisins.

  Instead he went off by himself to think. He wandered through the streets all the way to the market square, where rubbish still remained from yesterday’s execution. What he thought was this: Why had his mother sent him off with the beard-cutter? A devil was living inside him, she had said. Was that true? And what did it mean? Was there a devil living inside the beard-cutter too? Could the two of them ever find their fortune?

  * * *

  The corpse they had stolen the day before had already been placed on the rotating table inside the anatomical theater. The beard-cutter and Master Alessandro had discussed the matter for a long time and decided that the body was fresh enough to lie on the same cloth overnight. The master had had bad experiences with older corpses that had begun to decay. Large amounts of sticky corpse exudation, probably a mixture of the body’s four fluids, soured by the heat, had filled the room with a stench that made any lecture impossible.

  The boy still believed that the sun glided across the sky, even though the master had taught him that it was otherwise.

  “It is we who glide past the sun, and not the other way around,” said Alessandro, and he always added: “One day soon I’m sure that somebody will dare to write that in a book. But don’t tell it to a priest if you value your life.”

  Yet the boy could not imagine that people would ever come to view it that way, no matter how wise they became. Sometimes our wisdom is greater than ourselves, he thought.

  After the sun glided across the sky that day, the boy felt more and more drawn to the theater. He knew that it was locked with one of Angelo the smith’s unbreakable locks. But he also knew where the key was kept. It was in the fruit bowl in the master’s workroom.

  After six hours had passed, he could not stand it any longer. He just had to look at her. There was actually nothing odd about him coming home at that hour. It was the time when even busy academics preferred to eat dinner, so there was usually food on the table. But today the servants had not prepared a meal. They told him that Alessandro and the beard-cutter were eating at a tavern in town, along with those who were going to attend today’s dissection. They would all go to the theater while the sun was still high enough in the sky to provide good light. The servants had left the boy some boiled eggs, along with smoked meat and a bowl of raw vegetables.

  After eating he sneaked into the workroom and found the key in the expected hiding place. He took it with him to the backyard. None of the servants in the house paid any notice, because the boy often played down there. Sometimes he sat by the pond and gazed at the water lilies. He thought that the leaves floating on the water looked like hearts. And the carp that stuck their mouths out of the water tried to catch these hearts and tear them apart. Now he passed by the pond and walked around the new anatomical theater. The fresh lumber glistened yellow in the sun. He went over to the lock on the door. Nobody could see him from the house, because the door faced some olive trees and the red brick wall at the back of the yard. The key slipped in easily and turned.

  After opening the door he paused for a moment. He stared at the damp clay ground. The stench of decay reached him all the way out here. Then he went inside and was impressed by the way the sunlight filled the whole room.

  She lay on the table, illuminated by the sun, almost like a vision. He felt like he was looking at his mother. And as if enchanted, guided by powers that neither God nor the Devil controlled, he went over to the table. Her face was paler than paper. Like snow, he thought, and remembered the winters up north. White as the snow that covered the town, that dark and angular human world, every winter. That was how his mother’s face looked. Cold as winter itself was her skin. He put his hand on her cheek. Let his fingers slip down over the dry, ice-cold skin, down her neck, between her breasts and over her stomach. Below the hair was black as night, like the spaces between the trees in a forest. He stopped and stood there breathing hard. He thought about the people who had come to his mother’s bed before the beard-cutter came. Had they continued to come after he left, or was it for the sake of her son that she had welcomed them?

  * * *

  The shadow behind him seemed to slip into his thoughts, like mud into clear, cold water. He had not heard a sound, but suddenly he was aware of this shadow coming from all directions at once.

  Then the beard-cutter’s hand landed on his shoulder like a hunting falcon. The boy snatched his hand away from the corpse and looked up. The beard-cutter was staring at him with an expression he had never used before. Not even when he looked at an enemy across the table in a tavern after many beers. His eyes were filled with a malevolence that the boy had never seen before, except in his dreams. It was the look of a devil.

  The beard-cutter grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and squeezed hard. Holding on tight, he ushered the boy out of the theater. Outside, he let him go.

  “This is not over,” he said, and slammed the door behind him.

  The boy dropped to the ground, not knowing how he should feel. He thought that the beard-cutter’s ominous gaze had not surprised him as much as it should have.

  After getting back onto his feet, he went and sat on the bench by the pond. Soon Master Alessandro came through the gate up by the house and walked past him. He was followed by a whole parade of students, doctors, and noblemen who wanted to watch. The master greeted the boy with a tight smile as they passed. The boy nodded, but did not smile back.

  Soon everyone was inside the theater.

  * * *

  Alessandro’s property was bountiful with his own vegetable garden, a chicken yard, and a small orchard that produced olives and peaches. The house at the end of the yard was whitewashed, and between the house and the carp pond was a shed where the servants stored their tools. It took a lot of tools to keep the house and garden in order. Among other things, a tall ladder was required.

  After Alessandro and his excited entourage had vanished inside the anatomical theater, the boy went to the shed and got the ladder. The ladder was big and heavy, while the boy was small and light, and it was hard to drag it along the path all the way down to the theater. It was even harder to raise the ladder and lean it against the wall of the building. But whoever wants something badly enough will get what he wants, as the beard-cutter had told the boy many times. No matter how heavy the ladder was, it had to go up. The beard-cutter’s expression may have scared him, but not enough to stop him from climbing up the ladder.r />
  When he reached the top rung and stood on tiptoe, he was just high enough to be able to peer over the edge of the wall. He had a clear view inside.

  The presentation was already under way. The boy saw at once that it was proceeding differently from other presentations he had witnessed. This time it was the doctor who wielded the knives. Alessandro himself stood leaning over the corpse and was just about to cut open the abdomen. Every successful dissection began with an incision in the belly. The master called this point just below the navel “the center of the skin.”

  The boy gazed at the beard-cutter standing beside the master. He still wore a dark expression, but the boy doubted that he was thinking about what had just occurred between them. The boy had lived with him for two years now, and he knew him well. He knew what the problem was. Pride. What bothered the beard-cutter was that he had had to lend his knives to someone else. The boy saw them lying there, sharp and glistening, placed neatly and systematically on a little table covered in a white cloth, just behind the corpse. The beard-cutter’s only task today was to hand the master the knives when he asked for them. He had been reduced from a surgeon to an assistant. He got to follow the whole autopsy at close range, but the boy understood that for the beard-cutter, a dissection was not a visual experience. For him it was the feeling of cutting, the incisions, the cracking of bones. It was a tactile journey of discovery. A performance with the knives. It was the cutting into the body that actually meant something, not what was found inside. Wounded pride and envy. That was what the boy saw in the beard-cutter’s eyes as he stood obediently behind his teacher.

  The dissection lasted five hours, until darkness fell. The boy had climbed down when they started in on the head and the eyes. He did not want to watch that face being destroyed. He fell asleep, dreaming of a stench that filled his nostrils.

  When the door to his room was torn open that evening, it took a few moments before he grasped the reality that had descended upon him. The beard-cutter used this confusion to seize the upper hand. He bounded forward and clamped his hand over the boy’s mouth.