People of the Book

by David Stacton

  Thus that excellent gentleman, Sir Thomas Roe, British Ambassador to Sweden, whom everybody loved as much for his disposition as for his good sense, except his master Charles I who had small love for a plain truth, had not found it difficult to urge Gustavus to invade the Germanies. And thus he fell into disgrace with King and Parliament, for neither Parliament nor Court approves of heroes. Of victory, yes; of heroes, no.

  Charles I was a sulky boy with adenoids. With mustaches and a pointed beard he was not greatly different. He was born to be a martyr, he had a martyr’s arrogant stupidity, and like the early Christians before him, was a bad judge of men.

  Sir Thomas Roe had been tripped into exceeding his instructions (England wished the Palatinate back, but would not pay to get it) by an admiration for the wrong virtues. Courage, vigor, enterprise, and a soldier’s grace impressed him more than parsimonious pusillanimity at home. Therefore he had to be recalled.

  Assured of an aid that England neither would nor could give, Gustav Adolf had embarked to make the Baltic safe for Sweden, to restore the Palatinate, to champion, quite honestly and when he had the time, the Protestant Cause. Colorable pretext it may have been, but pretexts look better in color. Unlike our morals, our motives are not at their best in black and white.

  Gustavus and his army stayed at Wollin for two weeks, delighted with the military plunder of the abandoned stores. Swedish discipline was better than Imperialist, but the men, particularly the Lapplanders, frightened the natives.

  Lars thus had his first and last chance to see the cause of all this, the Great King, a tall, stocky, pink-faced man plainly but handsomely dressed—“that’s good leather,” said the shoemaker respectfully, for no one knew much about Sweden—riding a white horse, and surrounded not entirely by generals, but most unusually by enlisted men as well. He was intimidating. Those shortsighted blue eyes could not see farther than five feet, but beyond thirty feet, they peered ahead for years. He had a potbelly and an onrushing stoop. He was clumsy in his movements, but did not seem to find immobility essential to dignity. He was quick. He had an enormous thatch of tawny hair.

  He was an overholder by birth. Most men who reach that position are parvenu and so lack certitude, for few are born to it; it is rarer than genius. Gustavus did not therefore need the reassurance of sycophants. When people flattered him, he did not prefer them, he looked them square in the eye. He had a liberal flow of contemptuous Latin, and a deadly grunt. He had first followed the armies at six; at ten he sat at the council table; he knew his own mind in ten languages, and in ten languages knew how to say so. He had been on campaign most of his life, and preferred tents to houses. In short, he was unacceptable. Many had spoken (in flight) of his bad manners. A particular complainer was that ardent social climber, Sir Henry Vane, who replaced Roe.

  It never occurs to the world of court and fashion, so fascinated are they by the problems of preferment in small places, that they are merely puppets. Absorbed by their audience, they are unaware of the tug of the strings behind. But the great world exists chiefly so that its overholders may go their way undetected, and do their business behind the scenes.

  Overholders hold certain things in common. Though often conquerors, they have no interest in conquest. They are wise administrators but bad bureaucrats. Having seen beyond good and evil, they are short-tempered but kind. They never tamper with justice and never appear in court. Victory bores them unless it be a missing piece. They are austere, good-humored, indulgent toward vice, and unimpressed by parades of virtue. They insist upon a state entry and themselves invariably prefer to slip in through a side door. They are fearless. They work hard but think nothing of it, for they work fast. They have two or three close friends, no acquaintances, and remember everybody’s name. If everybody turns out to be a nobody, they are the more apt to remember the name of the office. Their knowledge is extensive, their learning no more than a string of worry beads. They are dedicated men, but never bother to say, or to ask, to what.

  Overholders share in common a curious posture of the head, the back of the neck erect but the chin withdrawn. Though apt to be shortsighted and therefore impatient of detail, their peripheral vision is wider than that of most. They stare ahead but can see behind. They are apt to think, not by days but by dynasties. Statistics do not seem to them reliable, but they are masters of supply, they have the bump of location, they can find their way in a strange town, they are absorbed by maps. They travel incessantly.

  They are charismatic men. They know how to put bad men to good use. And Gustavus had the advantage, that he had Oxenstierna as colleague, Great Chancellor and supreme overlord, a man with abilities as extensive as his own, but of a complementary order. Also, he had but two capable opponents, Richelieu, who seemed to feel that chess was played on a board only, and Wallenstein, who had a black soul. Gustavus was to be hard to defeat, though easy to kill, for who can resist a man who takes our goods out of sheer good temper?

  When it is over, the overholders have made no permanent change. Yet while they are living, what a change there is. Since they are not venal, you wonder why they did it. It is impossible to find out, for they themselves have never thought to ask. There is this change, though: for the while they lasted there was order. Order, then, is what must appeal to them.

  Somewhere, at some time in their lives, somebody gave them a box. At first sight, it was an ordinary box, completely plain, with nothing in it, but made of magnificently chosen and long-polished wood. It had only one quality, which was so unobtrusive that at first it went unnoticed: it was a perfect box. Perhaps it was made of burled walnut or bird’s-eye maple or pearwood or satinwood. It is empty and always will be, because the only thing it contains is what it is. This it contains exactly.

  Though the overholder can remember the gesture with which it was given, and the gesture with which he received it, the one thing he can never remember is the name and face of the person who gave it. This is because it was not given. It was merely there one day.

  He puts it somewhere in the room and forgets it. But though the perfect is defenseless, it has one terrifying all-consuming power: since it is an absolute, it has the ability to reject from itself anything that does not belong to it. The box sits there physically coextensive with what it represents, and so numinous.

  There comes a time when passing idly through the room, the over-holder stops, puzzled. There is something wrong. On his third or fourth passage, laughing at himself for being so prissy, he switches about the ornaments. The sixth time through, he moves the box. The overholder’s one involuntary awe is offered to the perfect. If he throws out the box, he is not an overholder. If he keeps it, he is. Therefore, holding it in his hand, he gives orders that the room is to be rebuilt, he does not say why.

  People think it is merely a regal whim, he is like us after all, he is corrupt. People who dither about perfection are merely perfectionists, born to scale down trifles or to sharpen pencils all day. The box, however, is infinite, and has a larger aim and no particular dimension.

  When the room is finished, the box seems at last in its proper place. But then the room begins to abolish the house. Once the house is abolished, the new house obliterates the grounds. When the grounds have been reordered, the county comes in view. And so it goes.

  The gift of a small, polished burled-maple box, given by no one in particular on his third birthday, or perhaps merely found somewhere in a storeroom, had driven Gustavus Adolphus to Finnmark, to West Gothland, to Varna, to Novgorod, to Poland, to Riga, to the Baltic ports, and now here. It had made Oxenstierna Grand Chancellor at twenty-eight. It had overturned the House of Nobles, reorganized Sweden, filled the treasury and emptied it twice over, set the Kopparberg to smelting day and night, raised up armies, diverted rivers, changed boundaries, destroyed towns.

  It has nothing to do with Pandora’s box, it is not to be found in Greek myth. It is, as it happens, a Chinese parable. But then, if you look carefully, you will see that the overholders have a
certain oriental cast to their features, a way of squinting at things that has nothing to do with saying yes or no.

  The box has no name, and in no myth will you find any information as to where it came from or by whom it was first made. But what it does, no matter what it does, has always been called order. Nor need it always be a box. It might just as well be a polished steel cube, found somewhere in a meadow.

  Gustavus, who always listened, and when he spoke, spoke in memoranda, amused his hands during conference by piling into a pyramid some well-cast shot. When he was considering a decision, his clumsy, stubby hands would reach out and rearrange whatever was in front of them into some sort of order, without his noticing what the objects were. He was not a good chess player. That he left to Richelieu. But put any unrelated objects in front of him while he was thinking of something else, and his hands would have them related to each other in no time.

  Sometimes, coming back to his tent or wardroom, he would find them there, and if he noticed them, stare down, amused to perceive that that pipe was as far away from that pen as Stettin was from Frankfort in relation to Darmstadt. Or very likely, if there were three shot glasses placed to one side, and six in a clump farther away, this meant that he had not enough horse, but that reinforcements would arrive (across the saltcellar) one half as soon as the space between the bone-handled knife and the pewter spoon was wide. This always made him grin.

  Nobody thought this absent-minded habit odd, and nobody drew any information from it. Italians talk with their hands, but North Europeans think with them. Everybody did it. Oxenstierna did it, too. It was not a nervous habit, but an extension of themselves into more dimensions than they could conveniently occupy.

  “Very well, then. We will leave for Stettin at dawn.”

  *

  There was no one to see them go. The barges set out over the flaccid waters of the Stettiner Haff, in orderly fashion, into the dawn mist. The Swedes took most of the horses with them, including young Mysendonck’s half-broken white mare, who had been found pawing the dirt in the field where the boy had first tried to train her. And though they left behind hard money, they had taken most of the food. Only Pastor Mysendonck, a diner-out by economy, had some hidden away, and Frau Larsen some left.

  Frau Larsen became eccentric. Whether out of thanksgiving, or to throw what was left into the common maw to save it from being taken from her, she gave what for her was a feast. The Pastor, who had gone sniffing by, for he had a nose for the good things of this world even though he denounced them on Sundays, was the only guest. He had left his wife at home. On such occasions he always did.

  The leopards had been recaptured. Hannale saw them being carried down to the wharf and aboard a sloop. They looked smoke-stained, bedraggled, bewildered, and ravenous. Their fur was a scruff now. She watched that particular sloop as it disappeared toward Stettin. They take away beauty and hide it where we cannot find it. And beauty can kill, if you love it enough. So much she had learned.

  Rebuilding began at once. People must live somewhere, and it is hard to discourage a peasant, if only because he lives on the far side of hope, expects no miracle, and saves a penny a day for fifty years. In four or five generations, that will be money. He marries his daughters not to men, but to farms, fields, and pasture rights. That will be money, too.

  When the fires died down, Frau Larsen had found in the cinders several jars of pickled meat and a cracked crock in which Sauerbraten had been sitting. Most of the marinade had frizzled away. So that was their feast, the maid, herself, Hannale, Lars, and Pastor Mysendonck, with bloated raisins and the last heavy meat gravy Lars was to taste for a long time. As side dishes, there were a salad of hard vegetables doused down and spiced, creamed onions flavored with dill, some now doubly smoked eel, and her last plump duck, which had gabbled away the fire in the well, where she had hidden it against marauders. It was served up with dumplings. There was also a fruitcake drowsy with spirits.

  In a private panic of self-destructiveness, she filched food out of everywhere, and even gave Pastor Mysendonck a joined sausage, placing it around his neck like a wreath. The two ladies did not visit, but this was for his wife.

  Pastor Mysendonck belched his thanks (it was the chicken soup with gnockerle, it never agreed with him), reeled out into the night from the dandelion brandy, eight years strong, and all the same did not speak well of her. He was a vulgar, sanctimonious man, but he was also a good hater, and loved no one.

  *

  “What is Mother doing?” asked Hannale, who could not sleep under the strangling eiderdown. They are softer than petals but can kill you by folding over your nose of their own accord, while you are sleeping. She had gotten out of bed and gone to the window.

  Because the night was damp, there was still the smell of char and burnt hair. The char had the clean smell of carbonized wood, and so was only sad, but the hair smell was frightening. There was a heavy moist sea fog, so it was dark as the womb outside, much colder, and there was no moon, only a sore place in the mist. The mist irradiated from the light of a candle within it.

  The main front of the house was a brick hulk. In there the irradiation moved slowly to and fro, as though searching for someone. Once it cast the long stark shadow of a woman onto the fog. Hannale shivered and heard the floorboards creak behind her. It was Lars to ask “What is it?”

  She could not answer, so she pointed.

  Sea fog has corridors, passages, rooms, openings, and changes of temperature, like the permanent cold spot in a haunted house. These alter with the air convections. You feel safe, and then unexpectedly your tarnhelm is torn from you, and everyone can see what you have been up to.

  A long passage, like the embrasure of a deep-set window in a siege tower, opened down through the fog. At the end of it Frau Larsen was moving through what had once been rooms. She went from place to place where things had once been, just as she had done when they were there. Her manner was shy. It was impossible to tell what she was grubbing out, but whatever it was, it was not there. She was, as always, counting her possessions. She ducked her head under a fallen timber, stepped into what had been the hall, and held the candle up to a twisted frame over the mantelpiece, where once her portrait as a girl had hung. It had been the one gentrified thing she owned. Painted on a wood panel, it had blistered but only partially carbonized. The candle caught the ghost of an eye, one corner of a mouth, the nose hung down in a strip, and the light against the bubbled paint cast spidery shadows.

  “Come away,” said Lars, who had learned pity, for he had a good character, though pity will erode us sooner even than hate can do. For hate is a form of insanity and does not concern us, whereas pity eats us away like an acid burn.

  Hannale, being an incipient woman, wanted to watch. Women always watch women. To that degree, they are merciless from birth.

  They were unwanted children. They had interfered with the making of jam, the polishing of copper pots, the accumulation of sausages, and the sending away of their perhaps father, who ate those things and sometimes scuffed the black and white marble tile floors, cracked and dingy now for good. They had never shone so brilliantly as after her widowhood, though sometimes she thought she saw droplets of salt water on the squares. She had wanted to love him, but it had not been possible. That emotion in her had long before died.

  Glancing up the embrasure in the fog, she snuffed the rushlight out. She could not bear to be watched. The fog closed up the embrasure.

  She was not a bad woman, but she lied to herself with authority, for she believed everything in this life but the truth. In living itself she had never believed. Yet here it had come crashing in to destroy her. That was more than she could bear. She had never learned that dreams are only dreams, and though she slept well, woke badly. If cornered, she denied everything, in that loud choked voice she always used when called on anything, a mixture of fear and outrage. If you told her what she had done yesterday, she screamed you down for a liar. And yet she had done nothing in par
ticular yesterday. It was the same as any day.

  Like many people who have wrecked a dozen lives to save their own illusion, Frau Larsen was unaware of having done so, and thought herself kind. For those who inspire our pity seldom deserve it. A lion in its old age, a leopard in a cage, a wolf with a wounded paw, evoke our pity, and in their maturity slaughtered hundreds, and only long to have their lust again.

  Hannale felt no pity. Women don’t, for women are part of animal creation, and pity is a grievance of the mind, ambivalent as man’s desire to be above such things, combined with his certain knowledge that he isn’t.

  Pity exists to leech strong men. It is the wrong medicine for any ill, as inefficacious as a dead pigeon laid against the soles of the feet to draw out a fever. Knowing this, all men mistrust it, and avoid the quack.

  *

  Next morning Frau Larsen told Lars to board up the windows on the street side of the gutted house, and also those at the back. Her manner was evasive. She had been caught out.

  “I love my children,” she said, and took care of them, for she did not want the neighbors to see them shabby. But she took equally good care of the 24 linen bedsheets she had taken more than nine months to monogram, and in exactly the same way. They were hers, and hence never to be used. They were Sunday best, and never come Monday. She would not have gotten them down for the Great King himself.

  Children, like dogs, listen not to the words but to the tone. You may kick them if you love them, but no amount of good care or kind words will supply the deficiency. They always know.

  Gustavus had almost destroyed the dream. She had her portrait blistered to prove it. What could you expect? He was a Lutheran.

  “But kind lady,” said Pastor Mysendonck, bewildered, “you are a Lutheran yourself. And your brother is himself a pastor.”

  Frau Larsen was taken aback. “Who told you that?”