People of the Book

by David Stacton

  Manglana had come to him as had many others, but he had been moved to see, looking at her hand, that, unlike others, she had no life line in either palm. And glancing up, he had been startled to see, through this face of a coarse, unformed stranger, the eyes of Christine Natt och Dag staring out at him impersonally, as through a window, wicked as ever, as though to say, “Dietrich, will you remove this rather stupid child? I am encumbered. I wish to speak to you.”

  The left hand is the hand of what we are. The right hand is what we have made of it. Instead of life lines, there were two lines parallel, which were interbraided and reversed themselves. And the mount of Venus was curiously formed, like a callus, a little yellow….

  He had stared at her, astonished.

  “Yes, I know,” she said. That husky voice, the voice of Manglana, was one she used only for business. It was now a child who spoke. “What do you make of it?” Her face was as motionless as a dish of water. “What do you want of me?”

  He turned her hand over, so it rested palm down. He did not look at her eyes. “I do not know.”

  She gazed at this silly striped tent he had then, blue and silver, with cabalistic signs. “I have been waiting a long time, for someone who could tell me about that.”

  “I have never seen such a thing before.”

  “But you can tell me.” She smiled a little. “I have a goat in stew at the caravan. It is a good stew, I think.”

  They went to her caravan. The stew, though sour and thin, was good, the meat perhaps a little stringy; she had used pine nuts, with their immortal crunch.

  “Where were you born?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. The first I remember, we were walking down a road. But we were walking away…. And then I was alone. I stole things. I was ten, but tall for a girl. After a while, they paid me. My father was killed when I was eight. It was near Prague. Perhaps I came from somewhere near there. A soldier came down the road. He was a short muscular man, with black hair and a blue chin. He spoke a strange language. I know now it was Spanish. I liked the way he looked. My father fell down and did not move any more. Blood ran out of him. I wanted the soldier to take me away with him. I jumped up and down, but he would not. He wore tall very black boots, very soft, very shiny. I clung to one of them. He kicked me loose into a ditch. I began to cry. Something long and glittering stabbed at the grasses around me. It went through my dress. I screamed. Then I was scared silent. The stabbing stopped. He went away. I did not want him to go away.

  “When I got up the road was empty. He had left me. There was just my father there dead. I went down the road, it was dusty. I never saw him again. I have seen him a hundred times …” She stopped.

  “My name is Manglana. I am a very expensive woman, I assure you. I cost more than you have ever seen, with that. I cost more than a star or a pack of cards. It doesn’t matter. I live. A young soldier, with black hair, he was whistling when he met us. And then, there is my hand.” And she held it out to him, blank.

  “And have you met him?”

  “Who?”

  “The soldier.”

  She shrugged. “Yes, many times. In any army the men are much alike. But I do not charge them. It is funny, when I was a child, he seemed commanding, but he is never an officer.” She closed her hand. “I am only a prostitute. We make romances, because we have not any. It is a long road, very dusty, very dry.”

  Over her left shoulder, against the cheap lath of the caravan, painted with patterns in a Czechoslovakian manner, all burst pomegranates and fear and vague memories of the Turkish tulip, the Magician saw the citadel of Prague on its hill, heard the silver bells of Prague, and saw the river flowing interminably under the Charles Bridge. He had been there. He knew its rhythms. Without knowing what he was doing, or why, he began to elicit Christine.

  First he gave the girl the name Selina. Sometimes they traveled together, sometimes separately. But always they arranged to meet, for it is true: it is a dusty road, and dry, and one is moving away. He saw not a licensed young Spanish bravo, not a dead man, but invisible children walking behind him.

  He made a daughter of her. There was something in her that flickered but would not go out. With the rest of her, he might do as he pleased.

  When he discovered what it was that Manglana must always do, it did not matter. He had not wanted her in that way. By then (she was clever about it) they had been together a long time. So he had learned what to do, both with her and, if they lingered too long, with them. But she did not encourage them to linger long very often. She was an imaginary daughter, not an imaginary son. Daughters are easier to discipline, and much much easier to love. But it is not the same kind of love.

  And then they had had to flee Frankfort am Main, and had come upon this place. It was terrible, terrible. The road is endless.

  “Selina,” he said, “is this the one?”

  Selina smiled and shook her head. But then of course Selina would not know, and as for Manglana, he had choked Manglana out of her this once more.

  “You are a man, you worry needlessly,” said Selina, and stretched out her arms. “Help me up.”

  So he helped her up.

  III.xxi.21: In doubtful cases, a favour is presumed to continue, till the right, which it conveys, is accomplished. But not so, where all possibility of WILL in the grantor has ceased, which happens by his death. For upon the death of the person all presumption of his WILL continuing must cease: as an accident vanishes when the substance is destroyed.

  She was again, for a little while, his own creature. But equally:

  II.ii.8: Lactantius maintains that it is no mark of folly to forbear thrusting another from the same plank in a shipwreck in order to save yourself. Because you have thereby avoided hurting another: a sin which is certainly a proof of wisdom to abstain from.

  34

  Sixty-five miles northeast of the Thüringerwald, darkness had caught Lars and Hannale in the penumbra of a wood. Through boles spaced like pillars in a cistern, they could see low down a glow of rose and acid green light, and then it faded. There was much rustling. There seemed things in the branches poised to plop. They came out on a rise. Below them ground sank into a valley. At its far end there seemed to be some kind of platform surmounted by creaking, swaying shadows. Though they had met no one all day, they knew there were people here.

  To their left the large dead branch of a tree swung out into space. It seemed the roost of restive black creatures, downy birds settling in for the night. They had seen no village and no farm since yesterday. What cheese they had with them had been eaten. There was no moon. Warm fetid air rose from the valley. From somewhere far behind them came the sound of a horn, the confused echo of hoofbeats, and a whinny deep in the wood. The branch beside them, which ended over the abyss, began to tremble at the tip as though something were resettling itself. There was a murmuring.

  “Shush …”

  “Hand the child up,” said a woman’s voice determinedly.

  Lars peered above him, but could make out nothing.

  “It is Earl Haakon. Hand her up.”

  The name made Lars blink.

  “Hand her up, I say. Do you want to die?”

  “They are devils.”

  “There is no room for more.”

  “They are only men.”

  “Men are devils. No one is safe.”

  “Hand her up.”

  “They come from that wood. They make blue sparks.”

  “Hand her up.”

  Lars held Hannale over his head, and felt her grasped by hands. Going to the bole of the tree, he boosted himself into it and tried to move along the branch.

  “Not now. Sit down. She is safe.”

  He could see, dimly, that the branch, or rather branches, were crowded with people huddled in shawls, and with bundles about them. He sat down next to what turned out to be an old woman, who patted him with a sinewy hand. A watchful stir ran along the bough. The hoofbeats were louder.

  A tight gro
up of eight or ten men came out of the wood, herding among them others on foot. It was difficult to make them out, but they sounded drunk and happy. The men they were herding made no sound. One of them tried to break away, but was beaten back by an outrider. The party passed under the bough and disappeared around the rim of the abyss, toward the valley.

  The old woman, shaky anyway, shivered and played with a heavy, chinking tied handkerchief she held in her lap, on which her grip got tighter.

  Lars got up, moved along the branch, which meant crawling past several smelly hulks in clothing, and came to Hannale, sitting in the lap of a fat woman wedged in the crotch of a side branch. He sat down, and Hannale came to him at once.

  The people were tense, waiting. The woman beside him sighed. Beyond her, he could just make out the beaked profile of a man who, though shabby, seemed a cut above the others. He, too, was listening. He had a silhouette of some refinement.

  The woman fumbled in her lap and held out a length of sausage. “Eat.” She seemed angry when neither Lars nor Hannale took it.

  “Had I not spoken, they would not have dared to have you up. And I am not a generous woman. Eat.”

  Lars took the sausage, got out his knife, sliced off two hunks, handed it back, and whispered his thanks.

  “It was only because it was a child,” said the woman, and looking at her stump of sausage remorsefully, folded it back into her skirt. “I have lost two. I have also eggs. Eight. But they are two weeks old.”

  From deep in the valley came four short, gagged screams, and a yell. Fires sprang up and raced in circles, torches held by the horsemen. But from this distance nothing could be seen, and nothing heard but laughter.

  The hooked profile stirred. “Drunk,” it said. “Ghosts do not drink, madam, though sometimes scarecrows do.” It visibly winced, and Lars felt a cold metal flask, slippery and moist, thrust into his hand across the woman’s lap.

  “Scarecrows,” repeated the man, in a German that was not Plattdeutsch. “It is eau de vie.”

  From the abyss rose one reverberating soprano “No.” It died away, and then an echo brought it back. As happens on cold nights, the echo was distinct, exact, and magnified. There came a sound like the beating of feather bolsters and, once, a double chink.

  “No,” came the echo, and then more faintly, “no, no, no,” until it writhed away into a resigned sob that had not been its source. There was a recession of hoofbeats, muffled within some other wood, shamefaced.

  A relaxed stir ran along the bough and made it tremble. “It is over for tonight,” said the woman. “They like a full tree.”

  The alcohol burned him, and had the slivovitz taste of dusty plums. Lars tried to hand the flask back.

  “The girl, too, perhaps,” said the man. “It will be a long night. But it will be safe to sleep now.”

  From along the branch, already there came the sound of snoring. Lars dozed off, and must have slept, for when he woke it was foggy dawn, but golden and rising. The wood beneath them was damp. Hannale said nothing, but did not like this place. She was wide-eyed.

  The man with the hooked profile was standing below him. He had the look of the man who in any village has lived in the grange for as long as anyone can remember. Someone had got a fire going, and the woman who had given them the sausage was tending it.

  Looking about him, Lars saw that there were perhaps fifteen people still in the tree, and that bundles, mats, and wicker hampers had been wedged into it. Hannale stretched.

  The man held his bony arms up. “It is safe by day; they are night riders. Hand the child down. You will want something warm.”

  Lars handed her down, and plopped down himself. There was a smell of garlic and of wet wood burning.

  The woman was different by day. She seemed gruff. Her eyes were pursy. She handed them some kind of mess on a plate. “Two groschen,” she said.

  Lars did not have the money.

  “It is my lowest price. And I do not charge you for the sausage.” She shook the plate (it was banged pewter) under their noses, and then drew it back. “Gentlemen must beat the money tree with the rest of us,” she snapped. “There are no longer fine houses.”

  Out of his breeches, the man with the hooked nose drew a slender handful of small coins, and handed the woman two of them.

  This seemed to please the woman. “Things must be paid for,” she said, as though furious with herself, and put another egg on the plate.

  “What does she mean by the money tree?”

  The man glanced at Hannale. “You will see soon. But it is not somewhere where you should take the child. She is frightened already.”

  “I can’t leave her.”

  The man hesitated. Others were now coming down from the trees. “They were the rich peasants of my village,” he explained. “But now there is no village. I will go with you.”

  “Who is Earl Haakon?” On this subject Lars felt shy beyond hope.

  “A name you hear in this disturbed country. He is the leader of those men last night, I suppose. A renegade, like the rest of us, a soldier perhaps. There are many such in these woods. Once we lived by charging too much. Now we live by stealth. It is a war. We hanged so many that now they hang us.” He shrugged. “I was a rural justice of the peace. I kept order. Now there is no order to keep. When they have tired of it, they will create a new one. These were never traveled roads. And now the roads, too, have gone. You are not from these parts?”

  Lars shook his head.

  “Leave them as soon as you can.” He watched wearily as his peasants drifted toward the edge of the abyss. And yet it was he who had taught them to live in the tree, and so save themselves. For this, they allotted him a small place among them, and consented to take such money as he had left.

  Their conduct left him undisturbed. He was not the man to expect love from the wrong places. Instead, he did his duty; love has nothing to do with duty, though it is an unshakable obedience to Divine Order which holds us to it. You can trust the man who acts, usually against his will, for he knows it will lead to nothing, only because something must be done, by someone, and there are no volunteers.

  Sighing, he led them down through the forest after the peasants, who were trying to outdistance each other ahead of them. There was a soughing in the trees along the way. Their needles had a blue shimmer.

  “Earl Haakon means something to you, I think.”

  Lars stared down at the ground and kicked a pinecone. But this man meant well.

  “It was when I was a boy. At home …”

  “When you were a boy,” said the old man, and stopped. “Pity is a bad emotion. It is poison to the will, and leads to the miss of understanding. What is your name?”

  “Lars Larsen.”

  “And the little girl is your sister?”

  “Yes.”

  The old man looked up at the branches overhead, and at the path before him. “I was Kurt zu Althorn. Are you looking for this renegade?”

  “We are going to our uncle, at Blicksburg.”

  “Blicksburg.” The old man whistled. “But how did you get this far?”

  “We have to get there.”

  The old man began walking again. “And very likely you will,” he said, and seemed to straighten up and to feel more cheerful. It was a long way down. “I think you will find, if you encounter him, that this is not your Earl Haakon. Though this one, too, so they say, wears yellow boots. So did the Spanish troops, who brought all this about. And people change. Depending upon how much of them there was to begin with: if a lot they change little; if a little, they change much. Unrecognizably. They return to the lump. It is what the potter does with waste clay.”

  Lars, who knew at once, said nothing, but saw a hut in the snow, an eager face with a shock of black hair, and a horse being broken in a meadow.

  They came out at the foot of the cliff. The trees ended. The old man drew Hannale back and looked at Lars angrily. “Do you know a little Latin?”

  Lars nodded.<
br />
  “I thought so,” said the old man, and spoke very rapidly, with hesitations, but simply.

  “It is their new game. When things are done to men, they will do things in return. We did what we had to do. They do what they have always longed to return to. They are murderous, and they love it. Rather than rebuild the house, they go down to the cellars, live underground, and call it freedom. Then, unable to care for themselves, they let a leader arise again, over and over.” There had come the sound of shouting. “Stay here, child.” He led Lars to the edge of the meadow. “I was the leader of these people. So it was my duty to follow them.” He spoke without passion, without anything. “It is terrible to know what one has led. If one is young one can fight it. If one is old, it makes one’s having fought no longer worthwhile.”

  At the other end of the clearing was a stone platform, with over it a framework of struts, uprights, joists, and lintels. From these hung a swaying, twirling forest of dead men. The peasants scrabbled on the platform beneath them, trying to beat each other off.

  “It is what they call the money tree. Our district gibbet. Here we strung up the criminals of fifty miles. And our peasants have their own ways of hiding money—women in their vagina, men in any of the body’s openings. They have no wits, but poverty has taught them cunning and made them richer than the rest of us. Two months ago the robbers thought of this. So that is their new game. They round up stragglers in the wood at night and herd them down here, string them up, and beat them with staves until their money jingles out, mixed with blood and excrement. But some rolls into chinks, and some does not fall.”

  In the middle of the hurluburlu, the woman who had fed them slit down the back the breeches of a hanged man and pressed his buttocks apart.