People of the Book

by David Stacton

  *

  Grotius, who married well, has this to say:

  II.ii.18: Now all men have absolutely a right to do such or such acts as are necessary to provide whatever is essential to the existence or convenience of life. CONVENIENCE is included in this right….

  As usual, the words are incontrovertible. They derive both from the study, and from an examination of the conduct of men. What they do not derive from is an examination of the men themselves. They are therefore apt to have about them the irrelevance of any perfect thing. On the one hand, there is the military machinery invented by Archimedes for defense during the siege of Syracuse. On the other, there is his murder, and the fact that they did not work.

  Taking her portrait with her, Frau Larsen fled to Frankfort an der Oder. At the moment it was a warning. Later it would be a reminder of lost youth. Later still, it was myself when young, all I was able to save from the fire. She had kept her little capital. She got employment at an inn. There are not many occupations open to unattached women no better than they should be.

  There Captain Larsen had found her. She was adrift, he was adrift, there was something in her. He had a good appearance, and there is nothing wrong with a sea captain. Unfortunately, though outwardly gentle, he was strong, masculine, and did not treat with her like a father. Fortunately, he was often at sea, increasingly often, and had had the good taste to go down in it. He had let her keep her capital, and had even helped her to invest it. She did not blame him. But it pleased her that he so obviously wished the boy had been his own, and not just the girl. He doted on the boy, he used to run big chapped paws puzzled through its hair, and then, you could see it in the sadness of his face as he straightened up from the cradle, he had remembered.

  And yet it did resemble him. That was odd. There had never been any sea peoples in her family, or in that of the baker’s son, either.

  *

  Such was Stöss’s one scamper out into the world of experience. Now he scampered back, and applied to his uncle of Löbau. His uncle, who had never felt tempted to leave this world for any purpose other than an eventual, sorry, and Christian demise, agreed to have him reinstated among the Lutheran seminarists, but refused to see him, now or at any time, up to and including his deathbed, at the age of eighty-three, in 1634. He was a man not wept over, but daily missed by the 246 families of his parish, not one of them his own, three of them with by-blows long well provided for. He provided for everybody, but that did not mean he had to see them. He was what people call a good man according to his lights, and these had never failed him.

  Frau Larsen was not a vengeful woman, but she did enjoy to poke a stick at a toad, to see it hop. She kept Stöss informed of what she felt he should know. She sent those packets of money, “for the relief of a poor curate who once did me a kindness.”

  What is more, Stöss had taken the money (she had thought this probable). Unfortunately not only does talent skip a generation, so does mediocrity. Here was the boy. The blond hair he presumed to derive from her family. He did not like the look of him. Sturdy people upset his notions of the general sickness of this world, from which he was accustomed to draw off great comfort and small beer. He had a natural antipathy toward the spiritually tall. He found their dignity offensive by a full foot.

  50

  “And your mother, Frau Larsen, my sister, and her husband [Frau-Stolz was always listening somewhere] are both dead?”

  Lars nodded. Stöss, who liked to legislate his surroundings, now had the boy standing on the opposite side of his black oak desk, with that offensively colored hair close to the ceiling.

  Lars, worried about Hannale, said nothing for himself. It did not occur to him to ask why he had not been offered a chair.

  It was because he sprawled.

  Pastor Stöss of Blicksberg, that eminent conductor of souls underground, that pleader for the poor and inspirational orator on Sundays, was not the same person as Curate Stöss of Magdeburg. There was his reputation. At first he had thought this another of Frau Larsen’s unchristian jokes. But apparently the boy had come of his own accord, “because of the girl.”

  Stöss failed to see that the girl entered into it. She was another man’s daughter. But Lars was another of those things he found himself unable either to accept or to reject. Stöss was now of an age to worry about no issue. The ladies of the town, as he sat among them with a heavy linen napkin across his knees, eating too much fruitcake, teased him about a secret grief (he did not deny it, he merely smiled and grew watchful), but unable to marry him off, congratulated themselves upon his saintliness, unaware that he had the habit to kneel on marbles in his bedroom during Lent, chastise the obstreperous flesh for desires he had never felt, and go to bed without his pudding.

  He had become a martinet. The reason why he made hell-fire so real on Sundays was that he was certain it did not wait for him. He could therefore consign whole creaking carts of sinners there with an easy heart, knowing that he need never see them again. There would never be any reckoning. His own life had been as dubious as a pair of old galoshes, and now he flung the smelly things back into his congregation’s face, with parsimonious gusto. Now that he lived well, he had little secret caches of pleasure hidden everywhere. They were his winter nuts. It was quite like him that he kept this secret that the world was pleasant entirely to himself. It was not something he was prepared to share. Instead he went on eating fruitcake.

  He was inordinately fond of burnt custard with stewed rhubarb, but would not touch it for so long as Frau Stolz lingered in the dining room. If she lingered too long, he offered it cold as a mortification, sent it back to the kitchen, and she had to stay late (she slept out) to bake another one.

  She did not resent this. She took it as convincing proof of ultimate refinement. “The Herr Pastor is so particular,” she’d say fondly. “Lor’, he do make you ’op it.” His fastidiousness was useful at the market. “That there cut wouldn’t do for my gentleman.” Her children were grown up, he needed mothering, she needed someone to mother, so he was well fed on the coarse stewy simple food he much preferred. The only disappointment, to Frau Stolz, who liked to show what she could do to other women’s recipes, was that it had to be game pie Mondays, stew Tuesdays, fish Fridays. Saturdays he relaxed with a chicken, and on Sundays it was saddle of mutton and a glass of ruby after the sermon. If the inevitable order of these dishes varied, he cast his eyes up and sulked.

  “Sunday,” he said with gentle patience (there had been guests, someone had given them venison well hung, everything had come out exact), “is my day for mutton, Frau Stolz.” Few people could withstand the full tight-lipped glistening force of Pastor Stöss’s patience, a quality he pulled on with a sigh, like gloves, and snapped off much more rapidly.

  He was insatiably greedy. He counted out his comforts before he ate, gave thanks, and signed the receipt, but he had no imagination whatsoever. So much for the joys of an ample Sunday dinner: it was his mutton day. And it had to be dry. “Very good, but no pinky bits next time, Frau Stolz,” he would say.

  Grim as Medea (it not only shocked her principles, it meant stoking the oven up an hour earlier), Frau Stolz sat in a chair and listened to all the goodness cook out of it. No born cook can abide that tired, stringy smell, and the crackle was ruined. Also, he was stingy. If she wanted anything extra, she bought it herself. Nonetheless, it was a responsible, honorable position, and no one had yet been able to persuade her from it. He was her baby.

  *

  Stöss led the children into the dining room. No bell had sounded. It was his stomach told him so. He had made up his mind; which is to say, he had put the decision off, in order not to think about it.

  “Frau Stolz,” he said, “these are my late sister’s children. They will be staying here for a little while.”

  Frau Stolz, in her gossipy way, could be depended upon to take soundings in the town, and inform him of the depth, any shoals, and what his parish would think of his visitors.

 
He sat there ladling strained vegetable soup, thick and eddying as buttermilk, with parsley on it and chopped egg yolk for curds, served with black bread as heavy as that which had killed the English levies off. This was his noonday meal on Thursdays. He sat there benign, looking forward with certainty (at last) and a poor man’s greed (as always), to a hash made from Sunday’s salt-marsh mutton, invariably with red currant jelly, and with two eggs broken over it, Holsteiner style, served up with bedraggled leeks fetched out of a chicken broth and laid on a platter like scalded squid with black eyes (it was the capers).

  After the meal, Frau Stolz, who had one of those characters which need no salt, showed them to their room, and while she held the bolster up to slip the cover on, took pity on them, orphans he had said, and though she did dote on the dear Pastor, that did not mean she did not know his failings. The girl was charming. As for the boy, a glance was enough; she did him the respect of knowing he could fend for himself.

  She was a no-nonsense woman, but human after her fashion; she could be got at. She went out and left them. It seemed a strange house and they did not like it. They stood apart, eying each other.

  51

  Frau Stolz made the mistake of referring to Lars as the young master. Stöss clouded up at once. Privately and to Hannale she went on addressing him as Master Lars. The child was too attached to him, it wasn’t healthy, and must learn the proper forms. To her cronies, he was Young Master Lars, and to Stöss, “your nephew.” She was not one to repeat her mistakes. But though she would not have admitted to a kindness on her deathbed, let alone while still a walking-about person, she did her work well and with a will. She liked young people. If there was something odd in the situation, it was not the children. For the rest, it was neither her business, nor to her reputation, either to ask questions or to allow them to be asked.

  She went on her round of visits belowstairs. Following her above-stairs, two days later, Stöss was told how good he was. The church ladies were impressed, but had not known he had a sister. He permitted himself to suggest that not all members of a large family (dead now in the wars) had led equally, um, well, fortunate lives. He had not seen her for many years. “She was always the prettiest child,” he said. “She aged very rapidly.”

  That was enough. Pausing only to discover if the children had been born in wedlock (“Their father owned a coastal fishing smack. He was not very successful, I am afraid.”), they commended his charity, both to him (he smiled and dismissed it), and what counted for more, to each other.

  Later, to Lars, having gotten the rest of the story, he said, exasperated, “But my dear boy, you cannot possibly run away and leave money. It is ir-re-spon-si-ble.”

  He was not greedy in that way, but he was shocked.

  “We could not have been together otherwise.”

  Stöss said he would write to ask about it. They might stay. But they were to be charity children, he intended to make that plain. They must do as they were told, when they were told.

  II.ii.16: Nor ought a permanent residence to be refused to foreigners, who, driven from their own country, seek a place of refuge…. To drive away refugees, says Strabo, from Eratosthenes, is acting like barbarians…. Yet settlers of this description have no right to demand a share in the government.

  Stöss had lived alone so long as to have forgotten such small tolerance of other men’s habits as he had had. The children made him uneasy. He did not know what to do with or about either of them. If they made noise, he ordered them to be quiet. If they were quiet, he wondered what they were up to. Like many men who have no life at all, he was afraid of being observed. Their presence disrupted his routine. The girl seemed docile enough in the kitchens with Frau Stolz, who no doubt could use an extra pair of hands. But what was he to do with the boy?

  The children liked it here no more than Stöss liked having them.

  Except for those gray years at Frankfort an der Oder, they had never been hemmed in. Sometimes Lars thought of the Wollin coast and could have wept. He missed Wollin more here than he had at the Katzburg. Frau Stolz had a few red geraniums in pots outside the kitchen windows. Otherwise there was no green thing. And there were no animals, not so much as a kitchen cat. Pastor Stolz did not care for animals.

  St. Anne’s, the Neuekirche, reared up in the rain in the middle of a wet cobbled square, as lonely, bleak, and derelict as Rockall, and like Rockall, had neither roadstead nor harbor. It was entered directly through a doorway under the tower. A sequestered building, it had been stripped of its Popish church furniture, though not of its tombs and monuments, and looked stripped. It was lofty and large, but irregular in plan, and dominated by its square tower and steep shingled roof. Its ambulatory was wide and heavily buttressed. Not only Pastor Stöss’s rectory, but several shops were built between the buttresses.

  The rectory was dark, damp, and cold, the rooms connected by a curving hall without windows. The entry hall, which bisected the curving one, ended in a door to the church. They had not gone to church that first Sunday. Now they were ordered to attend.

  It was their second Saturday. Unable to sleep, Lars got up early. It was far here from the mountain lands of mica and white water, farther from the shore. He did not like Stöss. They had had an argument that made him like him even less. When Lars did not like something, that was the end of it. If he could, he left. If he could not leave, he got truculent. He wanted to leave now. He could not be locked up in this house much longer; it was stifling him.

  He went into the hall. A diffused light that was no light lit up the pious walls. Farther along he saw a ruddier glow coming from an open door, and in this house where no word was spoken, heard someone tonelessly but cheerfully singing a silly little rhyme that made no sense. So he went that way.

  Frau Stolz, busy at a dough board, looked up, stopped singing, said, “Oh it’s you. I had no business leaving the door open. Come in and close it,” and went back to rolling dough.

  Stepping down into the kitchen, he closed the door. It was the only airy room he had seen in this building.

  “Sunday’s tart day, but I get ready Saturday,” she said. “Sit down there.” She pointed with the roller. He sat. The kitchen smelled alive. “Though he don’t think Sunday cooking’s impious. It’s one of the exceptions.”

  It was the first human word he’d heard that week. He smiled at her shyly, and unexpectedly her face cracked and she smiled back, a spry and bouncy old woman, rolling the dough out with exact strokes. Her arms were sinewy from beating carpets with a woven wickerwork paddle the pattern of a pew end.

  “That’s raw dough,” she said, “or are you too grown-up for raw dough?” All he needed was a word, and he began to look like somebody worth encouraging.

  Easing himself on his stool and keeping his eyes on her, he took a trimmed strip and stuck it in his mouth. She eyed him right back. It was an agreement of some kind.

  “You’re not a bad boy. You shouldn’t have come here.”

  “There wasn’t anything else I could do.”

  “Because of the girl?”

  He nodded.

  “We’re old people here. It’s not where you belong.”

  He buried his head in his arms. Though he didn’t cry, he couldn’t help his shoulders’ heaving.

  The rolling pin paused.

  “Have you no friends?”

  “I had one,” he said, without raising his head. He could smell the leather get wet under his cheeks.

  “Hmmm,” said Frau Stolz, who had been considering walnut kisses, which you make by dipping the two halves of the meat in sugar and beaten white of egg, and when the oven’s right, pop them in. Children like such things.

  “I killed him.”

  Frau Stolz removed sweet cake dough from a bowl and began to pummel it.

  “We grew up together there.”

  She touched his hair with a floury hand, and went on with what she was doing. Frau Stolz had been fond of her brothers. In their years of strength they had been go
od to her, seen her married, not minded her husband too much, and come to the christenings. She still saw one of them on her day off. The others were dead. So was her father. So was her mother. It had been an easy family to grow up in. So she knew what to do.

  “That’s enough of that,” she said. “There’s a pot on the butcher board. Water my plants.”

  He got up and watered her plants. He took a good long time doing it. She went on humming. The first tray of tarts was ready for the oven. He opened the door for her. The poor lad must have had no one to speak to for years. And certainly he took good care of the girl.

  “Well?” she asked, knowing she hadn’t heard all of it.

  “My father had his own boat. I can only just remember him. I want to be like him.”

  For that was what the scene with Stöss had been about. Lars had been foolish enough to talk to him as to a male relative. Since he missed Wollin, he had talked about that. He had talked about the boat, and the beach, and his father, and did Stöss know what his father looked like.

  That sense of being cheated that Stöss had never lost now came up like vomit. “Never mention that man, or I shall have you both flung out,” he snapped, pressing his fingertips down on his desk until they separated out into pink and white. And then, remembering his piety, he gave a sweetened smile and said, with an air of mortification, “I am sorry, but sometimes family feeling is very strong. So spare me. Spare me.”

  Lars had spared him.

  Turning to Frau Stolz, he said, “The fishermen used to talk about him sometimes. My mother never did. She didn’t like it there.” He didn’t say she hadn’t liked them either: why had she hated them so?

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It?”

  “This Wollin of yours.”

  He told her, and like many people without the gift of words, when it came to something real to him, he could transfer the image: a windy day, a row of white cottages, a field, a horse, a boy he had admired, and all the bitter brine came crashing back. I despise that man. Sand rises. It blows everywhere. It gets in our hair, our eyes, our clothes. It tousles us. But the wind that brings it is a stimulating wind, and blows the world clean. It is disinfectant. It feels gritty on the palms of your hands. At night the sea turns on the shingle. When a boat puts out, you can hear the Kyrie eleison of the gulls. On a foggy morning, the sun irradiates the mist, there are little wisps over the water; it looms up as faithful as a promise kept. There are low scrub evergreens, trembling in the wind and hugging the dunes.