Chapter 11 The Renewing

Brother Ansfrid showed her the lime store on the last day of the month. It was a low room off the undercroft, dry and cold, and in it stood three great wooden bins of quicklime, slaking slowly in the dark, and a rack of tools that had not been touched in a century: broad brushes of horsehair, wooden floats, a copper pail, a set of leather gauntlets gone stiff as boards. This was the equipment of the renewing, and it had been waiting for a generation for a hand to take it up. The custom, he told her, was older than the wall. Every so often the house grew afraid, and the house took the lime and washed the Doom pale until the figures ghosted and the wall went quiet, and then the house slept. The lime held for a hundred years, or two, and then the damp and the years and the little lives of the salts took it away, and the figures came back, first in a patch, then in a hand, then in a whole crowd, and the house woke, and the house grew afraid, and the renewing came again. She asked him how many times it had happened. He said, More than the custom allows. She counted seven veils in the wall's cross-section, under the paint; the custom said three. The house had been afraid seven times in three hundred years, and each time it had covered what it could not bear to see, and each time the covering had failed, and each time the figures had come back a little more numerous than before, because the count had been interrupted and had begun again from where it left off, and where it left off was always higher than where it had been. She asked what the count was for. He said, The ones who were hidden in the chapter house were never given back to the record. Their names were struck from the annals. Their bodies were never found and never buried. And a person who is not counted cannot rest, and a place that is not counted cannot close. Emmerich made the wall lie so that the house would not have to count them, and the wall has been counting them ever since, and the count cannot finish because the wall does not have their faces. It has only their bodies. It has been holding a place for a face, one face, the face of the one who was neither one of them nor one of the house, and that place has been open for three hundred years, and it is nearly full. She said, Ursel. He said, That was her name. He said it the way a man says a word he has been carrying a long time. The girl of the valley who saw the arrangement made. Emmerich could not let her go down the mountain and speak, and could not count her among the hidden, because she was not one of them, and could not bury her, because a burial is a counting, and so he did the only thing left to him: he had her painted into the wall with no face. He made her a person with no face, so that no one could ever count her, not in the annals and not in the picture, and he put her at the head of the hidden company so that she would stand in the record and not be in it at the same time. And that, he said, was the sin of the house. Not the hiding. The hiding was fear. The face was cruelty. She went out into the cloister and stood in the cold and breathed until her hands stopped shaking. The snow had stopped; the sky over the valley was the color of an old bruise, and the mountains stood around the house at three sides, and the pass was white and closed, and there was no road, and there were six weeks until the feast of Saint Veylen. That night Brother Gotthard died, without waking, with his face still turned to the wall of his cell. The brothers kept the vigil by turns, and the bell was tolled once for each hour, and Aloisia could not sleep and went to the church, which was the only place in the house that felt, to her, like a room where the truth was kept. The Doom stood in the dark. She raised the lamp. The company of the hidden had all turned. Ten or thirty of them, she could not tell, but where their faces had been averted to the left, into the dark beside the judge, they were now averted toward her, toward the church door, toward the nave where the living stood—not looking at her, because none of them had a face to look with, but turned as a field of flowers turns, all together, to the way the light had gone. And at their head the tall one stood in its oval of pale ground, and the mouth had closed into a line, and the line had curved, and the place that had been kept open for three hundred years was no longer quite empty. The abbot found her there at dawn. He looked at the wall a long time without speaking. Then he said, Six weeks. I will not ask you to believe anything. I will ask you to finish. She said, On one condition. He said, Name it. She said, When the wall is clean, we open the chamber. All of it. You, and I, and the ones who are left. We open it and we count what is there, and we write their names in the annals, if there are names to write, and we give them back to the record. Whatever the wall has been doing for three hundred years, it has been doing it because the house would not do this. I will not finish the picture so that you can veil it a third time. I will finish it so that the count can end the way a count is supposed to end. By someone counting. He was silent a long while. Then he said, The prior will refuse. She said, The prior is not the abbot. He almost smiled. He said, No. He is not. He looked at the wall, at the turned company, at the tall one with its half-made mouth. He said, Finish the wall, and I will open the door. And God forgive us both. ---