by John Gardner
In his house, the magician closed his eyes, stopped drumming, and smiled. On the drumhead, the white stone had moved nearer to the line and was in danger of falling over. With one finger, the child moved the white stone back where it belonged. Now, though the sun was no higher than before, it was morning.
Bishop Brask said: “I had the strangest dream. I dreamed the Devil came to me and said, ‘Why should you kill me? Think, my dear Bishop! What am I but love, poetry, religion? Call them evil if you like—but don’t deny that they lead in the end to disappointment. But of what earthly value is this mortal life without them? You, you pride yourself on reason. As a child, you loved books but you came to understand that they were tricks and illusions. They told you love stories, but you looked at the world and you saw no such love—on the contrary, you saw people struggling to find the kind of love they’d seen in books, and you saw the illusion destroying marriages. Very well, you said to yourself, I’ll be fooled no longer! And what was the result? Despair! The inability to act! Books, religions, the idea of love—they’re all lies, I admit it, though I’m the father of such lies. But they give goals, shape quests: they give point to your brutal mortal striving. No doubt you’d disbelieve me if I told you God himself is a Devil’s lie. You’d suspect me of interest. Very well then, I won’t say it. But this much you’ll agree with, I’m sure: God is Truth. And what is the truth about this paltry existence and its ending?’ So he spoke, in my dream, and a great deal more in the same vein. But what’s interesting is this: at some point he made a mistake, and I knew I had him. I felt a shock as if lightning had struck me, but that instant I woke up, and whatever the insight was, it was gone.”
“I too had a dream,” Lars-Goren said. He slowly rubbed his hands against the cold and told the bishop his dream.
In Stockholm, King Gustav signed his name with a flourish and folded the parchment, then sealed it with wax. He struck the bell to call his messenger, then rose and paced. “When I was young,” he thought, but then the thought escaped him. He stopped, lips clamped tight, staring out his window at the snow.
In her house, Liv Bergquist stopped suddenly, alarmed by a voice. What it said she could not make out, though she knew. “Erik!” she called. When her son came to her, she said, “See who’s at the gate.”
The headman of the Lapps said, “Very well, we will take you to the Devil.” He shrugged, as if the mission seemed foolish to him. He had a small, wrinkled face and, on his hood, reindeer horns. All around him, the Lapps stood rhythmically nodding. In the endless snowfall, one could not tell which of them were men which of them were women, which of them reindeer. The Lapps called their reindeer “the people of six eyes.” It was a reference to their queer alertness, their attunement with the wind and snow. The Lapps did not really think the reindeer were people, for only in a limited way could the reindeer think. Between them, the Lapps and the reindeer divided all knowledge; so the Lapps believed. Lars-Goren and the bishop took their seats in the sledge, their horses tied behind. Gently, carefully, the Lapps covered the two men with skins. An old woman kissed Lars-Goren on the forehead, making a warm place that remained with him. When the reindeer started up—no one gave a signal, or so it seemed to Lars-Goren—it was as if they’d been running all along.
The Devil sat enclosed in his wings, baffled. Even with his hands over his eyes he was blinded by the brightness. “This is a very foolish thing you’re doing,” he said to himself. He spoke in a child’s voice, exactly like a child playing house. “Foolish, is it?” he said. “Yes, foolish.” He shuddered, but he could not seem to stop himself. “Why foolish?” he asked. “I’ll tell you why foolish.” “Yes, tell me.” “Very well.” “No, don’t tell me!” “No, I’d like to.” “You’re a fool! Go away!” “A fool, you think?” “A fool! A fool!” He felt forms around him. With a part of his mind he struggled to awaken, but the voices were still running, childish, idiotic, blocking out the world. “Pay attention!” cried one. “I am paying attention!” “No, fooling around! That’s all you ever do—fooling around.” He shuddered again. The line was not right. “That’s all you ever do—fool around.” But the rhythm was wrong. Now the forms were closer, minuscule disturbances around his hooves. He struggled to wake himself. “Despair, then? You, the inventor of despair, you’re caught in it?” “Nonsense!” His cheeks were freezing cold. It dawned on him that he was weeping, the tears turning to ice. “Suicide?” cried one of his voices. “Has it come to that?” With a violent effort, he opened his terrible eyes.
The magician’s fingertips drummed softly, but the sound was like thunder. The child watched in silence. The three stones moved toward the line, mighty forces in near balance.
“We call them ’six-eyes,’” a young, smiling Lapp said, his hand on the reindeer’s flank. He did not know or care that they’d been told already. He smiled as if that were enough, simply saying it; no more need be said. He too, Lars-Goren thought, was a creature of six eyes: in tune with the wind and snow, the heartbeat of the reindeer, the mind of God. It was true of course, as his son had said, it was not possible to be like the Lapps. Yet also it was true that it was good to know that Lapps existed, not dreams or illusions, real people, living at the extreme.
They had come to the foot of a great, dark mountain. The horses shook with cold as Lars-Goren and the bishop mounted. All the Lapps stood looking up. They seemed to look at nothing and everything at once, at the mountain, the blinding white sky, the reindeer, each other. It was a look he had seen before somewhere—but he had no time to think where. In the windy silence he seemed to hear his wife’s voice, distinct, right beside him: Erik, see who’s at the gate. The mountain had two foothills. Lars-Goren’s blood froze. The foothills were enormous cloven hooves.
He spurred his horse and started up. Bishop Brask was beside him, wincing with pain. “Why does he put up with it?” Lars-Goren wondered. The instant he asked it, he seemed to see deep into the bishop’s mind, as if he’d remembered the secret of the Lapps. But the insight had no words. “Very well,” he thought, “there are truths that have no words.” In his belt Lars-Goren carried a knife made of reindeer bone. Here steel was of no use. Ice would dull it, the cold make it snap on impact. He wore, today, no iron gloves, only skins; nor was he dressed in his armor. He looked like a man from the world’s first age, indistinguishable from a furry beast. In the terrible cold he found it difficult to think. He kept his mouth closed tight, lest the cold shatter his teeth. When it had begun he could not tell, but now the wind was howling. The bishop had to shout to make Lars-Goren hear “Suppose we succeed,” he yelled, “what will be changed?”
Lars-Goren could think of no answer and so rode on in silence, his head tucked down against the wind and flying ice. They were now on the flat of the Devil’s thighs, moving toward his hands, the fingers extended, huge drifts, each one higher than a horse.
“And how do we succeed?” Bishop Brask called, his voice just a whisper above the wail of the wind. “What’s our plan? What’s our strategy?” He laughed a kind of wail of despair.
Lars-Goren had no idea. He rode on, breathing shallowly. The air was like acid in his throat. When he reached the Devil’s splayed fingers he dismounted. Only when they bumped one another did he realize that Bishop Brask was right beside him.
“We’ll never make it,” Bishop Brask yelled. “The whole thing’s nonsense!”
Mother, his son’s voice called, it’s some old woman.
Without ropes, digging deep to clutch the hair of the Devil’s robe, they scaled the Devil’s silent upper arm. Hours passed. They hardly noticed, struggling for every breath. On the ice-crusted shoulder they rested.
“Lie here too long,” Lars-Goren called, “and we’ll freeze.” At once he shut his mouth again.
“You think such laws apply here?” Bishop Brask wailed back. Lars-Goren could not even see him in the swirling snow and ice, though he was six feet away.
Even to Hans Brask it was a strange business, a kind of miracl
e. He had meant to cry out from despair, as usual, and he had reason enough: he was beyond pain, numb to the heart; yet what he felt was the wild excitement of a child or an animal. He would not be fooled by it. He was a sick old man, and he knew there was no chance of getting back from here alive. Bishop, man-of-God, whatever, he had no faith in God. As surely as he knew he was alive he knew God was dead or had never existed. What was this euphoria but an animal pleasure in existence at the margin—the joy of the antelope when the tiger leaps? Yet the joy was real enough. Absurdly, for all his philosophy, he was glad to be alive and dying. It was this that his books had prepared him for: the candle flames guttering. He knew well enough that he wasn’t thinking clearly, that at home in his study he would scorn this emotion, but now, this instant, that was irrelevant, unspeakably trivial. “This is poetry, this is love and religion!” he thought. He crawled closer to Lars-Goren, filled with excitement, almost laughing, though no sound came out and his cheeks were all ice from his tears. With his mouth only inches from Lars-Goren’s ear he cried, “What a stupid fool you are, Lars-Goren! You know as well as I do that all this means nothing!” The words were thrilling to him, whatever their effect on Lars-Goren. “We’ve reasoned it all out: God and the Devil mean nothing whatsoever. We exist and we die—that’s the glory of our existence. All the rest is mere language!” He could feel, below him, the Lapps looking up with their animal stupidity, their thoughts indistinguishable from reindeer thoughts, one with the universe—meaninglessly, idiotically one—whereas he, Hans Brask, was a bursting star of intellectual energy, magnificently separate from everything, everyone. “Pride?” he yelled, “tell me about pride, pretty Jesus!” He laughed, clenching his half-frozen fists in his joy. Lars-Goren, he realized now, was not beside him. He had a vague memory, light as the movement of a hair on his forehead, of Lars-Goren’s having spoken, telling him, no doubt, that it was time to move on. That stood to reason. Everything stood to reason! Stood and fell! He laughed. Bishop Brask rose to his knees, then sank down again, laughing at his clumsiness, filled with numb joy. Now the three stones on the stretched skin of the drumhead were perfectly balanced, the black on one side, the white on the other, the gray stone balanced on the line. The magician grinned, lost in his trance, mindless. Abruptly, impishly, the child reached out and struck the drum. The gray stone leaped eastward, as if by will. In Dalarna, three men looked up suddenly in the darkness of the mine where they worked. It seemed to them that something had groaned, sinking toward the center of the earth. Lars-Goren, clinging to the ice that sheathed the Devil’s neck, seized his knife of bone.
Suddenly the Devil was filled with terror. He shaded his eyes with both hands, bending his head forward, trying to make out what it was that was wheeling around him. The Lapps! he thought. It was the Lapps from the beginning! But he could make out neither the Lapps nor their reindeer in the blinding whiteness. It was as if, for an instant, all existence had become one same thing, at the center of it a will, a blind force more selfish than the Devil himself, indomitable, too primitive for language, a creature of awesome stupidity, wild with ambition. And now all at once came a smell of Sweden into his nostrils. The Swedes! he thought, and the truth of it almost made him laugh. Of course, of course! he thought, raging. He had always known, he knew now, that it had to be the crafty Swedes.
What a fool, what a poor, stupid fool, thought the Devil, smiling in his despair. First Sweden, then the world! For it was now all perfectly clear to him: after the bloodbath of Stockholm, there were only the people—no kings, no lords, only fools like Gustav Vasa and a few threadbare bishops. There he lost his train of thought. That’s my problem, he thought. I lose my train of thought. What wonder, though, he thought, in this utterly senseless … Again he could not remember what he’d been thinking.
Something tickled his neck, a colder place on the coldness of his skin, and he raised his hand to swat at the annoyance, but then a voice came to his ears, and he hesitated. It was the voice of Bishop Brask. “Dreams, illusions,” the bishop was shouting. “It’s for yourself you do this, my dear Lars-Goren! No one but yourself! What’s your love for your children and wife but greed? What’s your love of justice, your love for all so-called humanity, but a maniac’s greed? Do you think they’ve elected you God, Lars-Goren? You’re a tyrant! Mad as Tiberius! You’d kill them all as readily as you’d save them, you know it! And if killing proves fittest, then it’s killing that will survive! How can you act, then, confronted by such knowledge? Maniac! Animal!” The voice was full of joy and rage, a kind of cackling, crackling glee. It was as if the man’s mind had gone as blank as the face of Bernt Notke’s carved statue, decadent art in all its curls and swirls—ten thousand careful knife-cuts and a face more empty of emotion than the face of the world’s first carved-stone god. I repent me that I ever made man, thought the Devil. His ice-crusted eyebrows jittered upward.
Slowly, thoughtfully, he felt along his shoulder until he came to the bishop’s little body, perched like a cockroach at the end of his collarbone. Almost gently, respectfully, he crushed it. Then he frowned. Had the bishops loud crying, right there in his ear, been a trick of some kind? When he shook his head and tried to speak to himself, he understood that his throat had been cut.
“Whatever it may mean,” said the old woman at the gate, “the Devil has been killed.”
“And my husband?” said Lars-Goren’s wife.
“In fourteen days he’ll be home,” said the old woman. “Tell him I came.” She spoke proudly, as if what she had done was a wonderful thing, a feat no one, living or dead, could conceivably rival. No one’s eyes, even the Devil’s, ever shone with more pride. Liv Bergquist winced at the sight of such terrible arrogance. Then the old woman vanished.
“So Lars-Goren has destroyed the Devil!” Liv Bergquist thought. She smiled, raising her head. She’d known when she married him that Lars-Goren was no ordinary mortal. Otherwise, she’d never have consented to be his wife. She could have had any man she pleased.
She smiled at her son, who stood with his arms folded, beaming as if he himself had killed the Devil—and he could have, she thought; he would have.
In Stockholm, King Gustav was seized by a sudden thought. “No,” he said, “stupidity!” He had a vision which he scarcely understood and, in the heat of it, tore the parchment to shreds. “Let the Riksdag decide,” he thought. “’What concerns all should have the approval of all.’” He smiled, pleased with himself. With his printing press, he’d write a letter to his people, and he would make the press available to his people for response. They’d be reasonable, he knew. They would not dare behave otherwise.
The sky outside his window was as red as blood, whether the blood of God or the Devil Gustav Vasa did not think to wonder.
“Who’ll tell the story?” said the child to the magician. “People should be told.”
“Never mind,” said the old man, smiling like a beaver. “For centuries and centuries no one will believe it, and then all at once it will be so obvious that only a fool would take the trouble to write it down.”
Now the red of the sky was fading. In Russia, the tsar, with ice on his eyelashes, was declaring war on Poland. “Little do they dream,” he said, “what horrors they’ve unleashed on themselves, daring to think lightly of the tsar!” All around him, his courtiers bowed humbly, their palms and fingertips touching as if for prayer.
And now, like wings spreading, darkness fell. There was no light anywhere, except for the yellow light of cities.
A Biography of John Gardner
John Gardner (1933–1982) was a bestselling and award-winning novelist and essayist, and one of the twentieth century’s most controversial literary authors. Gardner produced more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction, consisting of novels, children’s stories, literary criticism, and a book of poetry. His books, which include the celebrated novels Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, and October Light, are noted for their intellectual depth and penetrating insight into human natu
re.
Gardner was born in Batavia, New York. His father, a preacher and dairy farmer, and mother, an English teacher, both possessed a love of literature and often recited Shakespeare during his childhood. When he was eleven years old, Gardner was involved in a tractor accident that resulted in the death of his younger brother, Gilbert. He carried the guilt from this accident with him for the rest of his life, and would incorporate this theme into a number of his works, among them the short story “Redemption” (1977). After graduating from high school, Gardner earned his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis, and he married his first wife, Joan Louise Patterson, in 1953. He earned his Master’s and Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa in 1958, after which he entered into a career in academia that would last for the remainder of his life, including a period at Chico State College, where he taught writing to a young Raymond Carver.
Following the births of his son, Joel, in 1959 and daughter, Lucy, in 1962, Gardner published his first novel, The Resurrection (1966), followed by The Wreckage of Agathon (1970). It wasn’t until the release of Grendel (1971), however, that Gardner’s work began attracting significant attention. Critical praise for Grendel was universal and the book won Gardner a devoted following. His reputation as a preeminent figure in modern American literature was cemented upon the release of his New York Times bestselling novel The Sunlight Dialogues (1972). Throughout the 1970s, Gardner completed about two books per year, including October Light (1976), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the controversial On Moral Fiction (1978), in which he argued that “true art is by its nature moral” and criticized such contemporaries as John Updike and John Barth. Backlash over On Moral Fiction continued for years after the book’s publication, though his subsequent books, including Freddy’s Book (1980) and Mickelsson’s Ghosts (1982), were largely praised by critics. He also wrote four successful children’s books, among them Dragon, Dragon and Other Tales (1975), which was named Outstanding Book of the Year by the New York Times.
