The Bells

by Richard Harvell

  “Yes, we do!” I said. I took the chest from beneath my arm and set loose the lid. The gold glittered in the candlelight.

  “My God,” whispered Remus.

  “What is it?” asked Nicolai, trying to focus his eyes on the gold. “Is it on fire?”

  “Moses and Amalia have a fortune,” Remus told him. “More money than you’ve touched in your lifetime.”

  Nicolai gasped.

  “We will buy a coach,” I said. “We will build Nicolai a bed inside it.”

  “You see, we need you,” Amalia explained. “Here in Austria, you must be our disguise. And in Italy, no one will believe that Moses is my husband.”

  “I will be your husband!” Nicolai said.

  Now Amalia did blush.

  “We were thinking,” I said, “that Remus could be her father. Her husband, we will say, is away in the war.”

  “I could be an uncle, then.”

  “We thought you could be a patient,” Amalia said. Then she looked at Remus. “My father’s patient.”

  “A rich patient, then,” Nicolai said.

  “A rich patient,” I confirmed.

  Just then we heard footsteps on the stairs. Remus looked toward the door, blood draining from his face. Nicolai reached out a long arm and herded Amalia and me behind him, squaring himself against the threat coming up the stairs.

  But I just smiled: my ears heard more than theirs. When the door finally opened, and Nicolai lumbered forward in attack, the invader barely reached his waist.

  Tasso’s face was red and coated with sweat from running through the city. He rubbed his paws together in relief when he saw me.

  “Guadagni is looking for you!” Tasso said between breaths. “He jumped out of the shadows as I was sweeping up the stage. Grabbed me by the throat. Said Durazzo would banish me from the theater!”

  “What will you do?” I asked.

  The little man smiled and shook his head. “I kicked him in the shin and laughed at his threats,” he boasted. “I heard Durazzo himself congratulate Guadagni. The superintendent said that what you sang was the greatest song ever sung in the empress’s theater. They think it was he, so Guadagni can’t say a word! But he asked me where you were hiding. I said you are his student; he should know.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “And I’ll kick him again tomorrow,” Tasso boasted.

  Amalia took my arm and stepped out from behind Nicolai. Tasso jumped. “But that means we must both stay hidden until we can leave the city,” she said to me.

  “Tasso,” I said. “This is Amalia.”

  The little man looked her up and down. When his eyes fell upon her rounded belly he let out a squeak with an intake of air. We had told him nothing of our plan, and he turned to each of us now with looks of rage such as I had never before seen on his little face. I feared for a moment that he would go himself to seek Guadagni and Countess Riecher.

  He swung the door closed behind him; it clattered against the misshapen frame. He shook his head at each of his friends and then he stepped to Amalia’s side and clasped her wrist. His head just reached her elbow. He raised her arm and, taking it in both hands above his head—like a waiter carrying a platter—he led her first toward the door, then bent around Nicolai, past a stack of books, between two upturned coffee cups, and around a dark stain on the carpet, until he had positioned her before Nicolai’s armchair. Then he turned back to us. We had not moved. He scowled. “Get over here,” he spat. “Right this minute.” He pointed at the floor beside her. When I arrived, he helped me lower her slowly, gingerly, into the comfort of the chair. He removed her shoes and ordered, “Rub her feet.”

  Tasso nodded as I provided the outlines and Nicolai the color of all that had led to our current state and all that was to come. The little man’s head lowered as we spoke, so when we finished, it was as if he were asleep. For a moment we were silent, perplexed.

  It was Amalia who understood. “Tasso, will you come, too?”

  He looked up at her. “I might,” he said.

  “But Tasso,” I said, “you would not leave the theater!”

  He shrugged. “There are other theaters.”

  “That there are!” said Nicolai, throwing out his arms. Remus cringed as Nicolai’s fingers grazed his ear. “And we shall need someone to drive our carriage! Tasso, can you swing a whip?”

  “Horses are violent, stupid beasts,” he said. “But I know how to drive them.”

  So it was settled. We would stay in Spittelberg for a month or two—only long enough for the baby to be born—and then, in our disguise as patient and his entourage, we would travel together across the Alps to Venice. We cleaned Remus’s boxy room of books and dust, so Amalia would be comfortable. It was nearly dawn before I lay down beside her on the bed and we stared into each other’s eyes.

  “You’re alive,” she whispered for the hundredth time that night. She ran her hand through my hair and studied every feature of my face. “When I dreamed of you I had to dream of that little boy, or else a shadow. I should be angry: you lied to me for years, you fool.”

  “But I …” I began, and though she gave me time to speak, I could not find the words to name my excuse, or the nerve to utter them. When I finally averted my eyes in embarrassment, she smiled and pulled my face to hers.

  We finally fell asleep. I slept beside her in the narrow bed until I rolled off onto the floor, where a blanket awaited me. So it was every night. The room had no decoration except a single small window, so the next day Nicolai hung a cross above the bed, and Tasso appeared with silken curtains, which he had made from costume scraps he salvaged at the theater. Remus slept on the divan; his snoring kept us all awake, but we did not mind, for, as we lay awake, we dreamed of our happy Venetian future: gulls crying above canals, gondolas bumping on the quays, echoes of opera in the air.

  XVII.

  Remus and Tasso found a decrepit stagecoach rotting behind one of Spittelberg’s decrepit taverns. I went with them to view it, and I was greatly discouraged by its disrepair: only one wheel that was round, flecks of peeling paint, no glass in the windows.

  “We need the gold only until we reach Venice,” Remus pointed out. “Afterward Moses will sing. Why not buy something more … intact?”

  “Something newer?” I suggested.

  Tasso looked up at me, and then at Remus. He shook his head. Then he swung the door back and forth on its one remaining hinge. It whined like a drunk soprano. “No,” he said. “We’ll take this one,” he said. “Go and pay the price.”

  Tasso was a genius. Remus and I were merely his dim-witted stagehands as he built onto the still-stable frame the most convincing doctor’s coach ever forged. When finished, it was massive and dark, with small windows hung with gray curtains. Inside, we installed a large bed on springs for Nicolai, a curtained one for Amalia and her baby, and six hooks for hammocks, should we not find a tavern any night along our journey. Tasso nailed a small stove to the floor and bored a hole in the ceiling for a chimney. Despite the carriage’s bulk, on its new leaf springs the ride was as smooth as on a feather bed. The large wheels I painted black and gold.

  When Tasso mounted to his perch, Remus pointed out a curious illusion: the little man appeared normal-size and the massive contraption seemed twice as large as the empress’s grandest coach. We bought the four largest, tamest gray mares we could find, and boarded them at the tavern with the coach until we were ready to depart. Straining his eyes in his chair, Nicolai painted a sign that read: “Dr. Remus Mönch: Beware of Terrible Diseases.” We hung the sign on the coach’s door.

  We bought Amalia peasants’ clothes, and dirtied them with charcoal, so she would not raise suspicion. In the early mornings, when we did not so much fear a sighting, Amalia put on her cloak and we walked about to breathe the fresh air. I led her around mounds of rotting cabbage. We talked about our future: of Italy and its cities; of Paris and distant England; of the greatest opera houses in the world, whose names we recite
d to each other like magic spells: Teatro San Carlo, Teatro della Pergola, Teatro San Benedetto, Teatro Capranica, Teatro Comunale, Teatro Regio, Covent Garden, die Hofoper. Children were our only companions on the street. As soon as the sun was up they climbed into the windows of the abandoned houses, skipped down the lanes, were shooed out of doors by their mothers. Older children towed chains of younger siblings behind them. As the children raced around us, I found myself examining every smiling face. Would ours be like him? Or like her?

  One day Amalia told me she wished to take a short journey into the city to purchase a gift for Nicolai. The day before, she had borrowed the numbered strip of linen Tasso used to measure lengths and wound it around Nicolai’s head, scribbling figures on a scrap of paper. She tied her hair back with a scarf and smudged her face with ash until she appeared some serving wench, and we traveled through the palace gate to the Fischmarkt, where she told me to wait in the carriage.

  She disappeared into a shop, with a sign that read, “Linsen.” The stink of fish wafted on the chilly air and made me nauseated. I looked up and down the street for Countess Riecher’s ogre or some other spy who would steal my love away. An old man pushed a creaking cart piled high with greasy lumps of soap. A dirty boy held drooping broadsheets in his hand and shouted, “Defeat in Silesia! War surely to end!” Another woman entered the lenses shop with a thick cloak about her ears, and I was suddenly convinced it was Countess Riecher herself. But just as I summoned the courage to confront her, Amalia came outside, her rosy cheeks looking very satisfied indeed. She held a small package underneath her arm.

  That afternoon she unveiled her gift: a pair of round, smoky lenses hung on wire frames.

  “Sit still,” she said to Nicolai as he tried to reach out and feel the contraption with his clumsy hands. “Let me put them on your face.”

  His eyes became two black ovals, with strips of black leather around them to block out the light. Nicolai cooed, even though in the parlor’s dim light he surely could not see a thing. He stood up. Amalia drew back the curtains. The late afternoon light streamed in, and for the first time in several years, Nicolai did not recoil.

  He gasped with delight and waved his hand before his face, as if the lenses enabled him to see spirits flying about the air that were invisible to us. He stepped to the window and stood there as a massive silhouette, his arms outstretched to embrace the streaming sun. “A miracle!” he said.

  A miracle it was not, just another gift of Science, and neither was it the perfect solution. When he wore the glasses, he could see only as well at sunny noon as others could see at midnight. “No, no,” he replied to Remus’s assertions that he was deceiving us. “I can see as well as I ever could. Like a bat.”

  Amalia shrugged and whispered to me, “It’s just smoky window glass. But why tell him?”

  Nicolai cavorted about the apartment as if he saw every pile of Remus’s books, every table, every cup of coffee or wine, and so when he upended these, which he often did, he’d exclaim, “Oh, so clumsy. I’ll have to be more careful of my fat feet in the future.” He ordered Remus to accompany him while he strolled about the quarter. “Even ugly monsters,” he said, “shock no one in the company of expensive doctors.”

  When her baby moved, Amalia placed my hand on her body so I could feel it, too. When the baby was long silent, and I saw her gently prodding, hoping to awaken some sign of life, I drew her hand away and pressed my ear to her belly. I listened to the miniature heart beating twice as quickly as its mother’s. One day, as I sang for her an echo of the heart, thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump, she took my head in both her hands and pulled me to her face until our noses touched. “Moses,” she said. “He shall call you Father.”

  I blushed and turned away, but was secretly thrilled by the idea. Father, I repeated to myself the next time I was alone. Father.

  From then on, every day when I sang to Amalia I sang as much to our child in the womb. I secretly hoped that my voice would penetrate to its tiny ears as the sound of my mother’s bells had penetrated to mine. Could I be as much a father to this child as the bells had been to me?

  One night, dressing for bed, I stood before Amalia in our cramped room. She studied me in the candlelight: my long arms and round chest. In the cold air the skin of my hairless stomach tightened into the dimples of an eggshell. Her eyes fell momentarily on the bandage I still always wore around my middle, and then quickly flickered to my face. But I had caught that furtive glance, and as our eyes met, she blushed.

  I unwrapped the bandage. The cold air chilled the damp skin below. I could not bring myself to look down; that shame would have been too much. But Amalia did not avert her eyes. She held out her hand, and naked, with tremendous relief, I climbed beneath her blankets. She nestled in my arms.

  “Amalia,” I blurted after several minutes.

  “What is it, Moses?” I heard in her confusion that she had been asleep.

  “I will not let it happen to him.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If it is a boy—our son. I will not let it happen to him as it did to me.”

  “Oh, Moses. Don’t be silly. Of course it won’t.”

  I soon heard in her lengthening breath that she had faded back to sleep, but I lay awake for many minutes.

  I would protect him—or her, son or daughter, it did not matter—I would protect that child from the evil that had befallen me and all the other evils that lurked in the world. But I would never mention it again, not even to Amalia. It would be my secret pact: If I could do it—if I could be a father to this child growing in her belly—then my shame about my own imperfection would finally fade away to nothing. Though I could never unbreak what had been broken, I would stop mourning all that I had lost.

  And so we went into cold November. Our days seemed so light and easy; we almost forgot that there was anyone or anything in the world to fear. We forgot that we shared a city with people who hated us very much, for Spittelberg was our haven, and the men and women who populated these streets were as distant from the Riechers’ soirées and Guadagni’s concerts as dirt is from the sky.

  XVIII.

  “Something is different, Moses,” Amalia said one morning. She had grown fully round, and her swollen fibers dampened her body’s ringing. Her limp was visible even when she shuffled slowly along the floor. Now she stood, and her thin gown washed over her belly like a cascade over rocks. I saw that the bulge of her child had dropped.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. She placed her hands alongside her belly. “It does not hurt at all.”

  But that afternoon, the hurt began—a dull, creeping pain. I heard it in the sharpness of her breath as she moved. “I am fine,” she kept telling us as we stared in dumb terror. Remus, Nicolai, and I sat before her in the parlor. I asked Amalia if she would like some tea, or apples from the fruit seller, or for Remus to read aloud to her, or for Nicolai to tell her again how life is in Italy, or—

  “Just hold my hand and ask me no more questions,” she said. But then she huffed like someone was pressing a hand on her gut. She propped up from the chair on extended arms and raised her belly, as if she were trying to lift her baby toward the ceiling.

  I tried to help her lift it.

  “Let go of me!” she yelled between gasps.

  Remus jumped up and backed toward the door. “I’d better get Tasso,” he muttered, and rushed out faster than I’d ever seen him move.

  When Tasso arrived, the stagehand ran up the stairs, leaving Remus far behind. The little man was the oldest of thirteen children; birth had been as much a custom in his house as Lent. He rubbed Amalia’s hands between his paws and told her it would still be many hours before she delivered—we would wait before sending for the Hebamme. “Stand beside her,” he ordered, “hold her hand.” I did as he said. The room began to spin.

  “For God’s sake, Moses,” Remus said, “you have to breathe, or else you’ll faint.”

&nbs
p; Amalia rubbed the back of my hand against her hot cheek. “Moses,” she said, “you mustn’t worry. It will be fine.”

  But I did worry. My ribs refused to expand, and I could breathe only by raising my shoulders. I chewed my lip until it bled. I swooned to one knee; Remus brought me a chair. Then Amalia was rubbing my hand.

  “Are all his kind that frail?” I heard Tasso whisper to Nicolai.

  “No, no,” Nicolai murmured back. “He’s always been like this. Even before he was … well, you know. I suppose it was rather his childhood in the mountains—living too close to the sun.”

  Tasso studied me and nodded.

  After several hours, Amalia’s pains grew stronger. “I think,” she said, gasping, squeezing her eyes shut, “I might like to lie in the bed.”

  We all jumped up, but Tasso nodded to me. “Only you.” So I helped her to her bed as Tasso scampered down the stairs and into the street to fetch the Hebamme.

  “Sing for me, Moses,” Amalia said. I knelt beside her and chose one of the sacred songs I had performed for her mother, and suddenly I could breathe again. She closed her eyes, and her toes moved up and down as she worked my voice through her swollen legs. She sighed as it vibrated along her back and loosened her gut. Her breathing slowed, and she opened her eyes again and smiled. This is all I ever wanted, her look said to me, and as I knelt there in that cramped room as if singing a prayer, with the din of clinking coffee cups through the flimsy floor and the acrid taste of wood smoke on my tongue, I realized what a gift I had received. Let the future come! I thought, as proud and hopeful as I had ever been.

  Then, as if she had seen a hostile ghost looming behind my head, her eyes widened and her face tightened. Her body lost my voice, like a hand muting a violin’s strings. She reached below the curve of her belly and gasped.

  In thirty seconds it was over, but flashes of the anxious girl I had met so many years ago were closer to the surface now. “Oh, Moses,” she said, “this will hurt.” I placed a cool towel on her brow, and searched for words to comfort her, but I was lost.