People of the Book

by David Stacton

  *

  The Magician went into the churchyard. He was unaware of any wrongdoing. This death, though regrettable, had been necessary. He was now prepared to forgive. A light snow had mixed softly with the falling earth. Next year there would be grass.

  “Come to the schloss, boy.”

  “No.” Hannale had not told him of her part in this, nor would she ever. But it was as though they had become strangers. He stood there leaning on his spade, with the snow on his hair. “We are leaving. You made me kill him.”

  “Nobody else could have killed him,” said the Magician. “He would not have let anybody else kill him. It is necessary to give permission, always, even in a dark alley.”

  “But why?”

  “He wanted to leave. And no one leaves me.”

  Lars flung his shovel impatiently against a table tomb, where it clanged and threw off rock splinters, for the stone was old and weak.

  “Old man, you’re being left.”

  The Magician sighed and leaned against the same table tomb.

  “You do not understand. I am over seventy, and you are the third person I have met I could talk to. One of them”—he looked appalled—“was a very old woman I knew when I was a child. She is now long dead. The other, too, has been dead for many years. He was our groom. Boy, I will tell you something I have told no man for thirty years. I am Graf von und zu Glasberg. When I was a child I was called Dietrich. I am the last one. It has steep sides, I assure you. One can see one’s self in it. It is a little hill in Holstein. The damp was so thick you could not see yourself in the morning, you had to wait until afternoon. But we had always been there. We had a schloss in ruins, three villages, a manor house, and forty-nine Jews. They are named after me. Also a house in Lübeck. I look like an old rabbi and I know the stars. Have you ever seen a blond Jew? In this world the devil changes sides. He is first into bed at night and first out in the morning. I would like to see cloud shadows over the sea again, and hear the wail of gulls and the buoy clanging to mark the channel. No man was ever selfless from unmixed motives. It is an irrational thing.

  “It is dreadful to be the count of a small comty. At night you look at the stars and know what power is. By day you can see your borders from your bedroom window. You are the sun of a planetary system of no eminence. Every time a comet comes by, you wonder who sent it, you want to grab it by the tail; it is God’s mercy and a hand from heaven, to jerk you up out from your own dark. There are some fishes long for the air that kills them. A surface tension is all that keeps us afloat.

  “There were wars before this one. I died in those. I had a sickly boy and a healthy daughter. They died in those, too. My wife was murdered, my son was spitted on a pike, the girl, thank God, died of a fever. My lands were burned, my Jews dispersed. The King of Denmark claimed my goods, that devil Wallenstein took them. In my time there have been many wars. I had a telescope. I had studied alchemy. I was the last of my family, and I no longer cared. It was such an old family. We were far, far older than our trees, and those they had cut or burned down or blasted where they stood. So I shouldered my bundle of mischief, and began my traveling.

  “My mind pulled through. I did not. It must have been a mind of almost unimaginable strength, for though shaved away daily, there is still a hot lump of it left. I take no pride in that. It has destroyed me. It must have come from somewhere else. It was Loki’s gift. It was the gift of that horrible old woman.

  “I have done everything. I have been everywhere. I have been many men. I have been beyond time. The Natt och Dags and I, we never died; our bodies died, we are ourselves beyond dying. We walk through war, and bring after us pestilence. But unlike the living, we have never lost hope.

  “I made of that poor girl a dead being. She is not one of us, but she looks like one of us. I control her. You are one of us. You are the next Natt och Dag, found when even I had given up hoping. I was a strong mind in a weak man. I failed.

  “You may have anything. A ship if you want it, the best ship. You can have fleets. You can be captain. I ask only that you come to Glasberg, so someone may plant new trees in Glasberg, so we may still be there. I have a schloss I have not seen for forty years, power, prerogatives, villages, land. I even have a beach. I will get it all back again. I will even take care of the girl. I am a poor old man, but I know how to make men rich. I will make you rich. I will settle Selina. I will give up my load of mischief. You can have all. You can have more than all. But I have been alone for forty years. You will marry and have descendants, and then, if you wish, I will die, and you can put me with the others, where I belong.

  “Come home and see your villages. Let there be one more Natt och Dag of the Holstein branch. Let old places that have wild roses growing in their yards be again, and light bonfires on the shingle again, at night, to please children.

  “When I was a little child (it was in 1567), I was driven, the last of us, in a sort of farm wagon we had (it was a ceremony in our house) down to our villages, and they threw clove-scented pinks around me, and the Pastor came out to bless me at the church. It was not because I was the new gentry. It was because I was the new them.

  “Between the shingle and the cliff road, there was a hedge of sea roses, single-petaled, yellow. Will you not come home? You are the only I have met possible.”

  Unnoticed by either of them, he had begun to weep. For feeling of that kind makes no sound.

  “I am not a Natt och Dag.”

  “You will be, if I make you so.”

  “You can never make me so.”

  “And why should I not?” snapped the Magician.

  “Because you killed my friend.”

  “He was a lout. He would have interfered.”

  Lars did not deny it. “So am I,” he said, and took comfort from borrowed clothes, except they were not borrowed. They had been given him, in a hut in the snow, five years back. And he left that graveyard with Mysendonck’s heavy swift clatter, an inheritor, walking in his shoes.

  *

  No one should see those quiet moments in which we take our farewells of those already gone. Lars wandered around Mysendonck’s room, looking at things never worn, at things often worn, and taking out that knife, rubbed it clean. It had been a gift. It was now a companion.

  “I don’t want to leave,” said Hannale. “I like it here. I want to stay here.” But she heard in her big brother’s voice the awful judgment of a total stranger, saying:

  “Hannale, we’re leaving.”

  It always comes to that: once they are adults, they give orders.

  “And take off that dress. I want to see nothing from here. I’ve killed once. I can kill again. I’ll kill you clothes. You can have anything you want.”

  Since she knew something she must never tell him, she took off those clothes. The next day they left, leaving that waiting grave behind them. It would have been foolish to take such a man flowers, even boughs of evergreen, though he would have smiled and grown bashful and have liked them and stuck them any which way in a jar.

  *

  The Magician was packing. He knew his robbers.

  “It is no longer safe. When they are tired of killing each other, they will come for us. And we do not belong here any more. It is a dead building. But it was my second visit to the House of Life, my second and my last. I am only seventy-six but I do not have the courage or the love to die. So I am condemned to live for twenty years, for thirty years, for forty years. It is my punishment. And as you see, you must stay with me.”

  Peering at Selina sadly, he saw there waiting for him, and for her too, the human skull of Christine Natt och Dag. As for Manglana, she too had died. She could only now repeat the eternal approach of that Spanish soldier down that endless road.

  Shouldering his load of mischief, the Magician led the way out through the outer courts, down the meadow toward the wood, and disappeared again.

  *

  They went their separate ways. Behind them the Katzburg was unchanged, unaf
fected, impersonal, patient, waiting. They did not look back. Nobody ever did. But there would be others, for everyone comes to the Katzburg in time. It is like an empty church. The building sighed.

  On the way to the wood the Magician had seen something dully glittering below him. It was Hannale’s kaleidoscope, which had broken as it fell. Its rocks and chips of glass were scattered on the snow. It was now useless for the making of images.

  The Magician did not stop, but nonetheless he thought, I would have liked her to keep that. It was to help her. For despite his gamble, he was a compassionate man. An autocrat does as he must, but that does not mean that he is not sorry. He and Manglana went back to that wood from whence they had come.

  Behind them, months behind them, there descended into Mysendonck’s rotting body the probing white filaments of a paper narcissus with a tart sour pithy white bulb and a flaking mahogany skin. And over the earth come spring there passed a smile, and the flowers were early.

  II.i.40: There is another right, which is that of making use of the property of another where such use is attended with no prejudice to the owner … in the Seventh book of Plutarch’s Symposiacs, we find an observation, that when we have provisions more than sufficient for our own consumption it is wicked to destroy the remainder; or after supplying our own wants, to obstruct or destroy the springs of water; or after having finished our voyage, not to leave for other passengers the seamarks, that have enabled us to steer our course.

  Was uns gesenkt in tiefe Traurigkeit,

  Zieht uns mit süsser Sehnsucht nun von hinnen:

  Du bist der Tod und machst uns erst gesund.

  (What once we dreaded now we long to save,

  A sweet longing draws our life in,

  For eternal death brings no hurt to us,

  And you are my death and make my life whole,

  For you are my death, and so complete my soul.)

  PART IV

  46

  SOME OF THIS Lars told Oxenstierna, and some he did not.

  Descending out of the Katzburg woods, they had been caught up into the terrified fleeing from Swedish losses toward Mainz. With the rest of that crowd they had been forced into a refugee camp, which was like being put in a cloister during plague, with the dance of death all over the walls. It is done with the best of motives, and it will kill us. It is most certainly not done for our own good, though such is always the excuse. He had gotten them out of there and stolen Hannale a cap off an almost dead man, for Hannale was all he had left. The kaleidoscope was lost. Now they were here.

  He must get to Uncle Stöss, he said, he must get to Blicksberg. He mentioned Mysendonck not at all; the last thing we explain to others is the meaning of our own dead, for so long as we live, they are not dead. Even to Hannale on this subject he had said nothing, nor would he ever.

  The Great Chancellor, who was not beyond pity if the thing stood before him, looked at the kitchen sideboard, on which was arranged what the Dutch would call a pronk still life, platters, plates, goblets, saucers, beaten of silver and pewter, with brass keloids their only adornment, and one or two Venetian beakers among them, knobbed against clear with green glass tortured into meringue by the blower’s tongs. This country was too heavy, not in the Swedish way, weighted sessile yet lighthearted in the sun, but as though it must find its young growth down in the dark and never surface until it was by darkness formed.

  He did not like it, but the Great Chancellor was enough of a man, and had seen enough of life and had felt it enough, to love youth in any shape or form. Some men would destroy everything that longs to live, simply because they took no care to keep their own youth from flickering out. But just that they die does not mean that we need forget the singular benison of well-loved things long ago. Their memory is all that keeps us going, and when we grow tired and are napping, licks our face like a dog that wants its walk.

  Already, and it was not yet four years, Oxenstierna found himself saying, “In the time of our late master, the Great Gustavus …“It was a convenience to have him gone, but O to see him again. That’s what we live for. Well, of that no mind.

  It is not so easy to be a statesman. People speak of Machiavelli as though he were a wickedness. In truth, he was neither good nor bad. He is perhaps a little elementary, and then, of course, he had no real power, he had to obey others, so he was somewhat limited; he was an idealist, who in The Prince describes a power he never had to wield, and so never knew the weight of. The Comments on Livy are better, but seldom read. They lack a hero.

  Unfortunately your idealist would destroy whole peoples in another man’s name, shirks the responsibility himself, foists it off on Principle, and worships no one made of flesh and blood. There is therefore more treachery in him than in any traitor, who is not flesh for a name, but one man only and that to his own profit. A limited evil does us less harm than ten men working for the general good. How spineless and despicable they are. They have no hands. They would turn us out, but they refuse to turn to.

  Which was to say no more, than that in January last Oxenstierna had finally been able to dispatch Grotius to Paris, as Ambassador. In his view, a scholar was nothing but a cloak, a pair of breeches, and a bundle of books. Of all three he had gotten himself rid.

  It had not been easy. Grotius had raised objections, most of them to be found in his second book (the passage fell open naturally), to wit:

  II.xviii.3: We have an instance of the second kind, where the objection is made to the PERSON sent on an Embassy, in the case of Theodore, who was called the atheist, and whom Lysimachus refused to receive in the character of an ambassador sent from Ptolemy, and the same thing has frequently happened to others, against whom peculiar motives of aversion have existed.

  I am a great man, Grotius’ manner seemed to say, therefore I am hated. It was an alternation between fear and hubris. If you watched carefully you could see the pendulum move:

  II.xviii.1: To offer violence to [ambassadors] is not only an act of INJUSTICE, but, as Philip in his letters to the Athenians says, is acknowledged by all to be an act of IMPIETY.

  Well, well. What would we do without Philip and the Athenians? Greatness has its toys, but they are never big enough.

  Well, well. I tell you this: we should have put our business forward infinitely the better, and ten times the more expeditiously. For their guardians must ever stumble over the tiny toys of little men, who leave them always in a litter on the nursery floor. Too honest to set traps, they nonetheless feel no dismay when we spring them. Our discomfiture then is almost as precious to them as the natural nourishment they feel too fine to take. It is a starveling’s world. Too weak to bite, they gum their Principle, and booby-trap the real world with their intellectual toys. They cannot kill; their purpose is to hinder. They are a nuisance, but not to be feared, for no mighty hunter yet emerged from the setting of traps, no myth, no legend, no hero, no great destruction or general raising of the common weal. They are no part of the soul’s great pilgrimage, and when they die, leave no cairns behind. They will not be worshiped, for they worshiped nothing, no rag, no bone, but only Principle. They are not fit to keep an inn on the route. They live by scavenging.

  For Grotius (to give him credit, he was not young, Holland is damp, arthritis comes upon us, it was a hard winter, as hard anyway as the last five, the roads were alternately muddy or frozen) had taken eighteen days to reach Metz, whence he sent back word he was suffering more in mind than in body (he meant even more), and did not cross the frontiers of France until February 7th, where no one would receive him; for though Oxenstierna ran the governments of Sweden and the Germanies, and was Chief Regent to the girl Queen Christina, Gustavus’ child, besides, to the French, Grotius’ were not royal credentials, hauteur being almost as good as power when it comes to dealing with men who have none, and frequently better. Grotius was ruffled. It was not until March 2nd (a Friday), that he was allowed to make his state entry into Paris, and then only because the Court was not in Paris, but at Senl
is.

  It was a nuisance compounded. People who ask us favors never know what is already on our minds. Oxenstierna looked at Lars’ legs and admired them. Young men show their legs, good or bad. Old men don’t, though when they do, it is sometimes a sturdy, handsome, reassuring sight. Grotius had spindly legs. But these great scuffed callow boots—who was the lad emulating? If we must have great men, Oxenstierna much preferred, being a realist, and so soothed best by a pretentious, learned fantasy:

  II.ii.2: Cicero has explained in his third book, on the bounds of good and evil, by comparing … the world to a Theatre, in which the seats are common property, yet every spectator claims that which he occupies, for the time being, as his own. A state of affairs, which could not subsist but in the greatest simplicity of manners, and under the mutual forbearance and good-will of mankind. An example of a community of goods, arising from extreme simplicity of manners, may be seen in some nations of America, who, for many ages, have subsisted in this manner without inconvenience.

  He might be my son, thought Oxenstierna, touched. Beside them Hannale slept snug as a mouse in a box of tatting. His attention was caught again by those enormous boots, but we learn better than to ask too many questions of those to whom we have taken a liking, or with whom we feel, despite the differences between us, a sudden affinity.

  The Great Chancellor had an extensive mind. Nobody could ever be sure of what he might or might not pull out of it, for it contained both theory and minutiae, anything he could put to use, and the uses were as effective as sometimes they were unorthodox.

  For instance, there was a great demand for the works of Theophrastus Bombastus, who had prophesied that a Lion would come down from the North and beat the Eagle, and Tycho Brahe had predicted the same thing. Since 1620 the Germanies had recognized Gustavus as the Lion, and true to Brahe, he had died in 1632. Taking his hint from both of them, Oxenstierna had seen to it that a riksdaler was struck, bearing a crowned lion and the motto: ROBORE DIVINO CORONATUS VINCET LEO. Thus any man could see in the palm of his hand, so soon as you paid him, that the Lion was not just Gustavus, but Sweden. Relevant citations could be provided from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel and Esdras; the Book of the Apocalypse was popular; the Austrian Emperor was not only the Eagle, but old 666 himself. In addition, Johannes Magnus had delighted everyone with proof positive that the Swedes were the oldest nation since the Flood, being descended from Japhet’s son Magog, and having sailed the world under Berik, 2,493 years later, to provide the Emperor Augustus with a wife, and to conquer Denmark, England, Spain, the Germanies, France, Italy, Asia, Africa, Constantinople, and so forth. Under Erik I they had fallen away from Christianity, but here they were back again. One did not have to believe it, but many did, and at the Great Chancellor’s instigation, the Government Printing Office provided stack after stack of both Magnus and Paracelsus, with regularity, dispatch, and gusto.