People of the Book

by David Stacton

  Stöss now treated Lars as though he were unclean. He must leave his weapons in the kitchen. Such things were not seemly in the purlieus of a church. Neither did he care for blood and dirty bandages (Lars’ left shoulder had been grazed: Frau Stolz washed the wound and bound it up, and saved the pink water for the geraniums; the building did not have its own well).

  Hannale, too, was often in the kitchen now. The thinner she got the bigger seemed her eyes. She had become a stare. She was glad he was with her. She did his laughing for him. These three saw Stöss only at meals, and sometimes not then. Stöss had not been one of those in favor of defending the city. The Spaniards were fanatic, but he could have hidden until they went away. He had many parishioners willing to conceal him. And he did not like the way Frau Stolz banged his tray down sometimes.

  Hannale was always up when Lars got back, at whatever hour. So was Frau Stolz. Stöss did not care for this redistribution of domestic attention. He found it improper. Sometimes in the mornings when he rose, Frau Stolz was late with stoking up the fire, and he was the Pastor of this place, was he not?

  It was a bogey. The böyg itself was not known to him. He could only groan when they pretended to be merry in the kitchen, and if it came to that, made sounds merrier than any of them felt.

  Another month went by.

  59

  The Spaniards broke down the defenses of the town at 9:30 in the morning of a Friday, toward the river walls. Their show troops were lined up, as usual, before the main gate. There, as usual, Lars watched them, and sniped when he was able, with a large finger on a smaller and smaller trigger. They were down to hand arms. Guns were running out. And the picked troops had been taken elsewhere.

  Then the sounds of street fighting came from the eastern quarter. Looking down into the streets of the town, Lars saw a few stragglers running toward the Platz. He left his post at once. There was no danger, in the general rout, of his being shot as a deserter, and he did not feel like one. He was off to defend Hannale.

  St. Anne’s was in the western sector of the town, but so ensnailed in twisting streets as to be secluded. By now the cobbles, which half an hour ago had been desolate, were ajumble with a jostling multitude. He fought and elbowed his way through, and when necessary, used the butt of his musket. The garrison was fleeing toward the citadel. The main gate had been opened from the inside. He had to use back alleys. There were Spaniards everywhere, and who could reason with a panic? When he came into the square on the Pastor’s side of the church, there were already Spanish irregulars advancing up the alley, pikes held out before them, cautiously. Ducking around the other way, he came to a small side door leading into the church. It was locked, but its hinges were old. He flung himself against it twice before they burst. He ran through two disused lumber rooms, into the church proper, across that, and got the door to the house open.

  “Hannale!”

  There was no answer. There was a sudden silence. A soldier loitered in the corridor, and the kitchen door was open. A scream came out of it. He knocked the soldier aside and ran in there.

  Frau Stolz stood by the butcher block, watched by two Irregulars. Pastor Stöss was by the dough board, looking pasty. The Irregulars had dragged a mattress ticking from somewhere. Hannale was down on that. They had been taking turns with her.

  A couple of soldiers grabbed him. He still had the Swedish favor on his arm.

  “Lars,” screamed Hannale. “Lars!”

  “Her brother?” asked the soldier who had just finished. And straightening up, he spat, took up a pike, and drove the point of it into her mouth, to stop her noise. The body heaved. It was necessary to stab again.

  After that, she died rapidly.

  “He is my son,” said Stöss.

  The soldiers grinned and let go of him.

  A sound came out of Lars. It was not a scream. It was the sound of lost everything. And it did not last long. He did not go berserk. He just stood there, with his arms dangling.

  It was not because she was a girl, or because she was dead. It was because she was the last thing unsmirched he had left. And now they had that, too.

  Dies ist ein Ding, das keiner voll aussinnt,

  Und viel zu grauenvoll, als dass man klage:

  Dass alles gleitet und voruberrinnt

  Und dass mein eignes Ich, durch nichts gehemmt,

  Herüberglitt aus einem kleinen Kind

  Mir wie ein Hund unhemlich stumm und fremd.

  Dann: dass ich auch vor hundert Jahren war

  Und meine Ahnen, die im Totenhemd,

  Mit mir verwandt sind wie mein eignes Haar,

  So eins mit mir als wie mein eignes Haar.

  (There is something inevitable no one understands,

  And too sad to be wept for:

  That everything slips through our hands,

  And that my own self came once more,

  Unhindered, out of a small child,

  Mute as a dog, strange and unprepared for.

  My forebearers were like her styled,

  And like her, lie over there

  All in a like shroud enaisled,

  And as much a part of me as my own hair.)

  There is no sadness in the German language, to match this loss.

  “Lars,” said Frau Stolz. It was the first time she had ever so addressed him. She tried to put her hand out to touch his arm, but let it drop. He could not feel it.

  He did not go near her corpse.

  The soldiers got out of there. He stood where he was, and then, kneeling, he pulled down her skirt.

  “Why?” he asked, and his face was beautiful. It was the face of someone stricken blind.

  “She was not my daughter,” said Stöss. He had not seen violence so close before. He was in shock. Only in shock could he have admitted to such a thing. “You are my son.”

  Lars did not exactly hear him. “Who would want to be your son?” he said. “Who could bear it?”

  He got to his feet slowly and came toward them, slowly. “Who could bear it?” he screamed, spread out his arms from his thighs, and walked through them. He was so young.

  “Lars,” said Frau Stolz, and ran around the bread board, trying to head him off.

  “No,” he said. He raised his fists. His voice was gentle, but it was not there any more. “No.”

  He began to run. It does not take long to end a life. He let himself out into the cloudless day. At the opening of the alley into the square, the Spanish soldiers were still advancing with their set pikes sharp and glittering before them.

  Thank God, thought Lars, and with a running leap cast himself upon the pikes, which were sharp and went swiftly through him, as they forked the body into the air.

  A knife fell out of one of his boots, with a clatter, down to the cobbles. It was Mysendonck’s knife. He had not used it. He had returned it. Du bist der Tod und machst uns erst gesund. Life is a long good-bye.

  *

  Over the city and then the surrounding woods that night, a great wind passed through the pine crowns, on its way north, toward the sea. It had been rising all evening. Now it roared. It had the solemn rush of something going home. It was a great storm, though the sky was clear. In the city it broke windows. In the forests, it lashed the trees together. It descended on the Katzburg, and raised go-devils and small puffs of dust under the Gothic arches of the graveyard there. In the wind was a voice, and the voice said: “I am a star wandering about with you, and flaring up from the depths.” It is reassuring. It is from an Orphic hymn. But Stöss did not hear it.

  The garrison had surrendered. The victors were having a feast. There was nothing to eat in the town, otherwise. The bodies of the dead had been gathered together for burial. A sanitary trench had been dug.

  Stöss moved with a bull’s-eye lantern among the corpses, plucking and sobbing, until at last he came upon his own. Over him the Coal Sack brandished invisible its tentacles. He did not see it. It had at last occurred to him that he himself was to die, and without heir
s. Worse, he had been rejected and for the last time, in the worst conceivable terms. To do him credit, he recognized that this had been deservedly, and with justice. He was a scarecrow.

  He found what he had been searching for, recognizing it by Mysendonck’s jerkin. It lay in a heap with ten others. The night air stirred its hair. It was at peace; another man would have found it lovable.

  “Looking for someone, Pastor?”

  “No,” said Stöss. “No. Shovel the lime in and cover it up,” and he knelt in prayer, and was incapable of prayer; for this we need faith, and faith he had none.

  II.xix.4: Respecting those who have been guilty of atrocious crimes, there is reason to entertain some doubt, whether the right of burial is due them.

  Saturday he locked himself up in the church. Frau Stolz saw after him. A woman always does. She even felt sorry for him. But that did not mean that she admired him.

  He was alone with that absence he called God. The world is Manichee. The reason we rush forward so eagerly to die is to escape the fact. The only glory of which we are capable is that we can never believe it to be so. So what we do to ourselves is not suicide, but self-immolation. We offer ourselves up to the ideal. There is an instant of hesitation, just before the saber pierces leather, homespun, naked flesh, the hesitation of the bride, and then the incision is made. The steel slides through us, there is a confusion in the blood, and we die spitted. The body is then shaken loose. Down we go. It is the last thing we feel. It is a luxury. Lutheran or not, it had not occurred to Stöss before that this Passion we enact every Sunday is a Passion. We are tortured because we cannot love. The passion is eternal. If we love, we cannot be tortured. But Stöss could not love: he was a coward.

  The oldest dynasty in the world is mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. There is a morals beyond morals. But what if the fathers be unworthy? Peasants do better; in times like these it does no harm to have thick wrists. O let me die soon, he said. Why should we not all die?

  But he had not the courage.

  Alone, he unlocked a wooden cabinet, took out the communion wafer box, and smashed it to the floor. It was his offering. His duty was discharged. We live by sack. We sack ourselves. The boy had God in him. I did not know.

  *

  On the next day, which was a Sunday, Stöss climbed the pulpit and preached his usual moving sermon, upon the following texts:

  Kings I.19.11: And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire: but the Lord was not in the fire: And after the fire a whistling of a gentle air.

  Kings I.8.37: If a famine arise in the land, or a pestilence, or corrupt air, or blasting, or locust, or mildew; if their enemy afflict them besieging the gates, whatsoever plague, whatsoever infirmity; Whatsoever curse or imprecation shall happen to any man of thy people Israel: when a man shall know the wound of his own heart … and shall spread forth his hands in this house…. That they may fear thee all the days that they live upon the face of the land, which thou hast given to our fathers … when he shall come out of a far country … and do all those things, for which that stranger shall call upon me.

  “No,” shouted Stöss. “No! There is no Solomon!”

  And he could not go on. He gripped the edge of the pulpit, as though it had been a ship’s rail, and in another voice, his ordinary voice, bending over that lectern carved with the Imperial Eagle of the Gospels, and setting aside his sermon, he spoke from a heart that was not in him. It was as though someone had left dangling over the lectern a bird with a twisted neck.

  “And of a sudden there rose a great wind. And it smashed the ships in the harbor. It lashed the boughs together. It brought the pine crowns down. And no man could stand against it. It blew dirt in his face. His mouth was full of it. For five days and five nights it blew, on the sixth day it passed, and lo, the earth was clean. And on the seventh day the gates of the city opened, and a woman paced out, wearing dark garments. Quietly she buried her brother, and quietly, at evening, she entered her chosen tomb. After which there was no sound in the world but the sound of men’s voices, and the flicker of torches when night fell.

  “Good people, go your ways, and pity Creon. I have no business here. I have no business here,” he said, and wept. “Pity Creon.”

  *

  Of such matters Grotius has this to say:

  II.xx.18: It is proper now to consider whether all wicked acts are of that kind, which are punishable by human laws. In reply to which we may answer that they certainly are not.

  II.xx.20: Neither are those actions punishable, which are directly opposite to the virtues of compassion, liberality, or gratitude, in the performance of which virtues natural justice allows of no compulsion.

  He was a boy … of such good character.

  60

  It happened that Oxenstierna came to Blicksberg, which once more had changed hands, on his final tour of inspection in the Germanies. And since he had always thought more of a face in the crowd than of the crowd itself, he remembered and made it his business to ask, if anyone in that place had knowledge of a boy called Lars Larsen, an odd striking boy, traveling with his sister, to whom he had given a safe-conduct to this place.

  Nobody had heard of him. For that Oxenstierna was sorry, but such things cannot be helped, and he had much else to attend to.

  As usual, at dusk, the trumpeters came out upon the towers to blow the light away. It was a sort of mortal serenade, from two towers, but it was not altogether that brass antiphony which made you shiver, for the sound brought up echoes of the unanswered question. As to what the question, and which the answer, that no man shall ever know.

  Oxenstierna went on to Wisbech. Like a man riding in a carriage, he looked out the window and there was the world. It does not touch us, but we lived there once. And there is this much to be said for the Gauleiter: he maintains order. We may hate him for that later, but we are grateful enough at the time.

  In 1636 he traveled north to Wismar, and from there took ship for Sweden, where he remained Great Chancellor for another twelve years, before becoming old-fashioned, and so falling into disgrace. He never saw the Germanies again. They no longer concerned him.

  But at Föno, in winter light, the fir trees sound in the snow like green brass. We do as we must, and then we go back whence we came. It is given to man to die where he was born, and fortunate the man who can manage that: he has come home.

  He had been a man of peace, but no one had ever questioned his ability to conduct a war, a burly man, a stoic man, and in old age, a sad and youthful one. He was happy with his woods, for never in his life, and he was often away, had he ever left Föno. Go where he would, he was always there. And so he warmed to the extreme favor of seeing a tree outside the window of his deathroom, a tree, or the surf pounding on the shores of Wollin, and pity poor devils who cannot compass their return. For somewhere there is a wind blowing. It ruttles and rootles. It digs old dreams up, and all the bitter brine comes flying back. How shall we bury them again?

  *

  At about this time, toward the end of the war, for they went on killing each other even while the final peace was being signed, the poet Andreas Gryphius, he who composed the first great German tragedy, a man from Silesia, poet, mathematician, astronomer, and responsible hofrat, wrote to commemorate the death of his brother Pauli’s daughter, the following elegy:

  Geboren in der Flucht, unringt mit Schwert und Brand,

  Schier in dem Rauch erstickt, der Mutter herbes Pfand,

  Das Vatern höchste Furcht, die an das Licht gedrungen,

  Als die ergrimmte Glut mein Vaterland verschlungen:

  Ich habe diese Welt beschaut und bald gesegnet,

  Weil mir auf Einem. Tag all’Angst der Welt begegnet;

  Wo ihr die Tage zählt, so bin ich jung verschwunden,

  Sehr
alt, wofern ihr schätzt, was ich für Angst empfunden.

  (Born in the rout, by fire and sword surrounded,

  Choked in the smoke, my mother’s hopes confounded,

  My father’s woe, I kicked my way to light,

  Only to find it was my country burning.

  So I looked at the world and bade it curt good night.

  A day was enough: so much I learned from learning.

  Put it like that, I was young when my life foundered,

  But older than old: I had left no fear unsounded.)

  For somewhere in South Germany a bell is tolling, shifted by the wind. It is Christine Natt och Dag’s bell. It has never ceased to toll.

  “Here,” says the Saga, “we came to a place where there was a lake of hammer shape and a hill, being twenty-four days’ journey from the coast. And we called this place where we had passed the winter, Vinland, for in that land there are many vines. And when spring came we journeyed back to our boats, and set out upon the seas again.”

  For we are westering. We take our strandhugg and we go. O God: we are at the ebb. We respectfully bring it to Your attention. Save us, for we cannot save You. Dies Irae.

  *

  As for the man who wrote this book, Huig de Groot, that Phoenix of Literature, after many quarrels and a last interview with the Great Chancellor, he embarked, so far as anyone knows, for Osnaburg, where the Treaty of Westphalia which was to end this war was being debated, took sick on the way, was carried toward Lübeck in an open wagon, with his beard wagging at the sky, did not reach it, and died during the night of August 28–29, 1645, at the age of sixty-two, at Rostock.

  When those words appropriate to the dying were repeated to him by Quistorpius, a pastor of that place, he said, “I hear your voice well, but I understand with difficulty what you say,” and saved them the bother of closing his eyes by closing them himself. He is buried at Delft, in the Nieuwe Kerk, among those Princes of Orange who did not greatly care for him, with the epitaph: