People of the Book

by David Stacton

“She is the richest of us,” said the old man, turning back toward the wood. “The others are drunk, but Baba Holtz is cold sober. Her children are dead. She has no heirs. No more have I. It is a mania.”

  The corpse had had loose bowels. Baba Holtz was down scrabbling and kicking in the excrement, with the rest of them.

  “Don’t go,” said the old man.

  But Lars had already gone. He had Hannale to provide for. He was driven to it. He sprinted across the field and up to the platform. It was so dreadful a thing, he had to do it, to get it over with. Such are the forms of exasperation. But he was too late. They were leaving already. Somebody trod on his hand. Only Baba Holtz sauntered away without hurry, wiping her palms.

  Hannale broke away from the old man and toddled across the field after her brother.

  Battered to his knees, Lars leaned over the side of the platform and retched. Then, seeing the glint of something, he scrabbled it out. And soon he found others, twenty coppers and one schilling. He looked up at the dead men’s dirty feet, circling pendulously above him. Some were swollen with gases. Some were decayed. Some were fresh. And, furious, standing up, sobbing, he picked up a stick and began to beat them, beat them, beat them.

  Baba Holtz stared back at him with a cruel and satisfied expression, for she did not like gentlemen.

  “Lars.”

  The old man, who had followed, snatched Hannale away and turned her head in toward his knees. Above them the gallows tree rustled.

  “I would have given you every penny I had,” said the old man. “Oh boy … boy.”

  Lars raised his hands helplessly. They were befouled.

  “There is a stream nearby,” said the old man. “Lower your arms. There is a stream.” And tears welled unwonted from his fallen eyelids. “I had once a boy such as you.”

  He looked away.

  35

  That spring Old Ox Brow, for such is the meaning of his name, appeared before the Diet of Frankfort, with as much pomp as he could lay on, in a coach drawn by six horses (the number is that of a supreme temporal ruler), paced by German princelings walking before and beside it like lictors, proceeded by trumpets, in the manner of the regal Laudes of the Dark Ages. It was his intention to appear as the Supreme Overlord of the Germanies. His purpose was to impose, therefore he imposed.

  His soft shoes slashed at the tips suggested pads and claws. His fur-trimmed robe gave him enormous shoulders. Across his breast hung draped the gold chain of a commander, massive, plain, and like a shackle. He was bareheaded, as token that he feared nothing, and he feared nothing. But there was contempt in his face, and he had much to think about. Not until Nemesis is already battering down the doors, do men abandon pomp. They may not be able to find eggs, but they can find banners.

  It was to the Swedes the worst year of the war. The one trouble was the French. They have two coasts, but they are not mariners. They live to suck others down. They launch nothing. They man no pumps. They wait for the flotsam to wash in.

  The other trouble was our German allies. They are a people always waiting. If you march by in panoply they applaud until you have passed. If you come back with the same panoply, they will applaud again. If you come back beaten, they will kill you. In this they do not differ from any other people, except in being totally unashamed of it. They obey orders too readily to be loyal to any but the orders themselves. Who gives them matters nothing to them.

  But though I can give an order, I cannot bark it. Therefore I cannot make these people jump. They wait to be given an order. They wait to be shot. They wait to be told whom they may themselves shoot. They are incapable of revenge; instead they punish. They punish anyone who does not give them an order. The thing they punish is what they take for weakness. Sometimes it is; sometimes it is not. They have no moral. They speak of ethics, but refuse to act, except under orders. That is not moral.

  For the great moral peoples of Europe have been the seafaring peoples, the voyagers, always. Moral talk is not the same as moral acts. All else is a self-indulgent quibble in a cabinet, and does not signify. Seafarers do not quibble; they leave. They do not wait, they appoint a leader. They do not shoot each other in the back, but from in front. They do not fear their neighbors. They do not fear to be enslaved. They found autarchies and aristocratic states, an Iceland, a Sicily, the enclaves of the western lands, the Kingdom of Dublin, the Earldom of Main Land.

  This is because freedom, horrible, glass-green, heaving, inimical, fascinating and lovable, pounds against their coasts day and night. It is immense. Nobody knows where it leads to or what it contains. So the natural impulse is to launch a boat.

  Whereas the landlocked feel a terror when they wander as far as the shore, and see for the first time that the certain has an edge. To those who live along the littoral it is not an edge, it is an opening, exhilarating, unknowable, treacherous, heroic, beckoning, always the same because never still, to be loved because it is not lovable, trusted because it is capricious, hated if need be, and returned to always. Peoples go to the sea not to abolish but to experience the unknowable, and the Pilgrims of the Sea have not come all this way just to ask for favors.

  Having no wish to die, the sea peoples have no fear of death, and therefore take for granted the spiritual condition of mankind. Like death, it is a fact. One does not fear facts. The spiritual is nothing but a muscular understanding which arises from those actions which permit the voyage. It does not need a name. Your landsman refuses to recognize that contrary winds, the doldrums, and brisk breezes come not from God to try our temper, but are merely encountered because we have decided to try the uncertainties of His. Your man of land sees the hand of God, like the hand of his neighbor, raised against him. There would be no greater impiety. For it is not raised against, or for, anyone or anything. It is merely there, and can be dealt with or not, as the case may be. We would do better to get on with the voyage.

  Thus Richelieu, who saw the hand of God in everything he did, made it his effort to raise a mutiny. Oxenstierna, who wanted Pomerania for practical reasons only, put down the mutiny and rode out the storm. The stars are useful to steer by, but they know us not. On the contrary, it is we who know them.

  And what is a storm? A storm is a reminder. It may kill us physically, but so long as we remember that it is nothing but the ripple of the unknowable, it will never kill us spiritually. For the soul, like the body, is strengthened by exercise. A storm is overwhelming, but it is not frightening. We do our best and pray, but the common sense of navigation is what helps. Men, when they are in danger, do not pray to anything. They just pray, mostly that they can extricate themselves, not that anybody else will.

  The sea has its modes of self-expression, like any other living thing. The most terrifying is the bore. The sight of a bore in the distance, rising to its omnivorous crest and smoothly rushing across a quiet sea, makes us lick our lips, glad this time it is not for us. Until such time as it is, a storm will do.

  Richelieu was like the Black Man in this (for such men rise in the world all at once, like mushrooms) that he cared for no one. He drove the pack before him. There was no other way to keep out of the dogfight, and it was a dogfight now. Richelieu, with his customary prudence, had made use of a neighbor’s bear pit. So Oxenstierna’s pomps and lictors availed him not much. But harried, he refused to be hurried. Surrounded by mongrels, he refused to be pulled down.

  The climax of the Diet was a full service after the Swedish rite, Högmässa, sanctus, confession, Lord Have Mercy on Us, Gloria, Epistle, Gospel, Sursum Corda, and of course a sermon. One’s attention shifts from pulpit to altar and then back again. The one says one thing; the other says nothing.

  There was a fine old organ in the church. The meaning shifted from manual to manual, and yet the thing interpreted was always the same, and remained in the pedal despite variations.

  Oxenstieraa knew no more of music than that he had sung part songs with his family at home. But that is to know more than never to have sung in concert
one’s self. No rite has meaning unless we partake of it. It can exist, we can partake of it, only because it rests upon a cantus firmus, it is built upon a system of agreed-upon truths. So man’s meaning arises from certain basic and agreed-upon events. God fights with god, and God has failed. Man fights with man, and man has failed. My sons fight me, or else they ask me favors, therefore I have failed. The furnaces and smelters of the Kopparberg glow night and day. Where does all that copper go to? Great Gustavus is dead. The Black Man is dead. My daughter is dead. What, then, can we build upon? What remains of the heaven shout when the chorale ends and we leave the church? What remains of man, to whom nothing remains for long?

  Perhaps only what he has done. We can do what we do, because our fathers learned how to do other things before us. History then is man’s myth. We all come to our memoirs in time. History is our cantus firmus. We can build upon that. For though men forget many things, they know also that they have been here before, that they have done this before, that, alas, they act as men. They have souls. If they have not souls, they are not men, but some vegetable thing to be uprooted. Good and evil, major and minor, pentatonic or to the diatonic, men and men’s souls are modes, the Dorian, the Lydian, and the Mixolydian. History is man’s myth. Out of it arise the great chorales of spiritual grace, the cantatas of order, the harmony of the world, the subtleties of dissonance, meter, rhythm, modulation. Out of repetition arises variation. Variation, if prolonged, repeats itself. It is the music of time, which laps like water in a velvet cove as we row for the far shore.

  The meaning we give to things is not the meaning they have. The true meaning is the one that arises out of the thing as it is done. This one learns from singing the piece in concert, at home, from a part book with square notes, printed for a square table. If we did not sing our own part, there could be no concerted effort. Nonetheless, it is sometimes an effort. The service was over. Oxenstierna, with his disloyal lictors, as handsome and self-destructive as Brutus, left the church and scanned the road.

  It was a time of disorder, riot, defeat, loss, survival, plague and pestilence, of men who had turned their coats so often they no longer had a lining, of spies and counterspies. But the worst thing to come down that road is not pestilence but ourselves, retreating in disorder.

  Shielding his eyes with his hand, from the declining sun, from the insincere applause, Oxenstierna got into his coach, folded his hands in his lap, and said to himself, “I think not.”

  For there is always order. Benevolence is a sort of order. And so is precedent. Fortunate the man who somewhere in his life has found someone to live up to. Fortunate not only in his chance, but in his heritage, for the ability to admire is not of universal occurrence; it requires breeding. It requires a bone certainty that one is part of man’s myth, not etiquette, not manners, indeed it sometimes obliges us to shout, but kurteis.

  We are ourselves the gods. Beyond that, there is nothing to say, except that no man ever first put to sea to find islands. He went because the lap of the unknowable against the shore was calling him, and because he was young. Even Richelieu, to judge by engravings, had once been young; and so he commands our respect. The Black Man can never win. He can only kill us.

  Through the window of the coach, Oxenstierna bowed graciously, and wondered idly who would be the next poor devil to try to shoot him, for in the presence of greatness, men reserve the right of assassination. And do I not carry Gustavus about with me?

  It cannot be done. At the last moment the idiot’s hand always shakes. He had no idea we were so different a creature. Those hired to stab us in the back are, of course, another matter. If he has tried to shoot us from in front, there must, after all, be some good in him. Therefore he cannot quite do it. In the others there is not.

  He had enjoyed to hear the organ. It is the sound of man. One did not get the chance often these days, for most had been dismantled so that more munitions might be made of them.

  He enjoyed this, but did not want to think about it. For in his nonage he had wrestled with animals; and then something else had occurred….

  *

  Mysendonck’s feelings were not known to him. Sometimes he had a glimpse of icebergs off Ultima Thule, sometimes he saw white nights, but it was never for long enough, and then he drifted the other way. Sometimes he thought he knew what he felt. And then it eluded him. It was a glitter glimpsed through mist. This was an agony to him. He could fight his way up toward the light, but not reach it. A lack of self-knowledge kept him down.

  And yet he had had moments of selflessness, watching pebbles while squatting in a stream, peeling an apple, breaking his first horse while that odd boy, Lars, watched. He had broken horses since, but it was never the same. Because it was not, he broke them each time with less gentleness, and then with cruelty, but always in a meadow, at dusk, always the same way, and always the same horse, a new example of his first. Each year this became an inch or two more terrible. He would have liked to explain, but he didn’t know what and he didn’t know how.

  As he lay here now, aching and afterwards, he hoped she would let him stay long enough so he might pass over to some other self, and so be free of the competent small dandy of despair, with a dangerous strut, into which his life this far had poured him. For he did not really want to do these things. There must be some other way.

  36

  “But we are spies,” said Manglana. “Nothing but spies. I thought you knew that.” And she fell to laughing. “How else would we earn our living?”

  She let him stay longer now, but never for very long. The bed was as big as the world, mountainous, with a slippery eiderdown, and intimate and endless as the darkness of the blind. He liked to drowse there. He liked to float through space as though buoyed by water, with overhead the ripples reflected on the roof of the cave. Here they were green. Here they were orange, because of the fire. The baldachin above them was black as a platform in a tree.

  He did not understand where Selina went. He did not understand what Manglana was. It was the lady he wanted; but the crazy slut suited him better, though she reminded him of something he did not want to remember and could never forget; for it was no part of Manglana’s ritual act that pleasure should be without pain. She fought and bit and scratched. She had to be raped each time. She demanded to be violated, and was herself violent. He had already scars and bruises.

  Some better Mysendonck had gotten lost along the way. This battle in bed reminded him of a vision he had, of himself bloody, keeled over on his knees, in a field at dusk, fallen in a game that had gone on without him, alone; a spurt of blood came out of his mouth, he was suffocated, but the hurt had nothing to do with the pain. And looking up, he saw enormous arches. He was at the bottom of a trough.

  He had gone now twice to see that varnished painting in the council room upstairs. It was a picture in the style of Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, of the martyrdom of the ten thousand legionaries, each killed in a different way, a man’s picture, full of muscular sadness and the erotic exhaustion of death. The figures had those eyelids, to be found mostly in the Portuguese school, which are curled slits, slightly turned up at one corner, the eyes of those who have enjoyed their dying. Mysendonck as a child had been more afraid of the crucifix on the wall behind him than of Pastor Mysendonck, his father. It was the only thing he feared more.

  *

  He was a strong lad, sharp-eared and quick on his feet, and as wild as they were, but he had had to make his way among toughs. So it had happened that once, but only once, he had been taken by some bravos among whom he was posturing, and austerely beaten; perhaps because he was handsomer than they were, had more address, and they could not stand that; perhaps because they were bored and he would do as well as another, perhaps better, for he seemed to want to be one of them.

  He had struggled and fought back, until four of them held him and the others went to work. Pain comes in three stages: to begin with, there is none; then it hurts; later it establishes its rhythm, one listens to i
t, the pulsation enjoyable. He had enjoyed to be beaten. He went limp in order not really to be injured. He knew this was what he had been trying to escape from, and it is like a man disoriented in dark woods, what we escape from is what we come to, panic has brought him full circle.

  He was silent, and in order to make him scream, they began to kick him vigorously. Looking up from among these thrashing legs, he knew that he wished to die this way, not because his will was broken but because there was no other way to get free. Our only way out is to be cut down. There is no other way to stop us. And even that privilege must be fought for.

  It is the release to be achieved only when the feared has happened; not a thought but a sensation, and freedom of that kind is terminal. Totally free of himself at last, he began to scream. He was a solid, powerful, well-built boy, with large, closely knit bones, a jaw they could not smash without some instrument—heavy boots were not enough—and you cannot break the same nose more than once on the same evening. He was no longer a person, which had been their aim, he was now a scream, and he went on screaming, the only thing from which they derived any erotic pleasure, for half an hour. Had they known it was freedom for him too, their pleasure would have been spoiled.

  After half an hour he became unconscious. In the best and friendliest of spirits, they chucked the body through the nearest doorway, which was that of a small dower chapel attached to an abandoned house they had been looting, and much invigorated and feeling a foot taller and much more nearly human than they had before, went baying after a fresh one, though they could not hope to find so good a victim again, and it is much better when it is someone not entirely a stranger, and a cut better than you are.

  *

  He must have opened his eyes long before finally becoming conscious again, for he had a vision of solidly built naked athletes, struggling up out of darkness to crucify the strongest among them. The more the strongest among them writhed, the more the others could hold him down. But they had gentle, affectionate smiles on their heavy lips, and as each one was nailed up writhing, he said, “Thank you.” Another among them was then pulled down, and always more were arriving. He could smell them as they jostled each other. They hung heavy from their wrists, luxuriously smiling, their chests glistened and stuck up, they writhed as they were beaten, but below their waists there was only weakness, a long and drowsy weakness, which sometimes twitched.