Chapter 12 The Blind Chamber

The house divided the day after the abbot agreed, and it divided quietly, which was worse than a quarrel. Prior Hartwig did not shout, because the prior did not shout. He simply stopped acknowledging Aloisia's presence, and where the brothers had inclined their heads to her in the corridors they now walked past her with their eyes down, and the ones who had brought her tea stopped bringing it, and the ones who had answered her questions stopped answering them, until she understood that the prior had spoken to each of them in the way a prior speaks, which is not to command but to remind a man of what he already fears. Only three people in the house still met her eyes: the abbot, Brother Notker, and Vlasta, who was not afraid of any of them and said so loudly in the kitchen. She kept working. Work was the one thing the house could not divide, because the wall did not care who was forbidden to speak to whom. She cleaned the lower right field to the edge of the gate of the blessed, and she began to keep a second notebook beside the first, which she called the ledger of the wall. In it she wrote, each day at eight and each evening at the office, the number of figures she could see, the number of faces averted, and any change she could not account for. The entries were dry and exact, and reading them back was like reading the log of a fever—no single number was frightening, and the shape of the numbers was. Nine days it ran, in that first stretch. Ten, ten, eleven, eleven, thirteen, twelve, fourteen, twenty-two, thirty-one. She wrote them all, and beside each she wrote the hour and the light and the state of her own eyes, because an honest woman records her instrument along with her reading, and there were days in the ledger when she was not sure the instrument was honest. In the afternoons she searched the undercroft. The undercroft was a warren of low rooms and passages the brothers used for stores, and she went through them with a lamp and a measuring tape and a copy of the old plan that Ansfrid had drawn for her from memory and from two leaves of the annals. The plan did not match the building, which is the way of old houses; there were walls where the plan had doors and doors where the plan had walls, and she learned to read the building by its own logic rather than by the paper, feeling for the thick places where a passage had been filled and the thin places where a wall had been set after the fact. She found the second seal on the fourth afternoon. It was beneath the flagstones of the old chapter house, which the house now used for storing the winter apples, and it had the same two iron staples, and the same smooth mortar signed with a cross, and the same bolt, though this bolt was older and had rusted into its socket so completely that no hand had turned it in a lifetime. She knelt on the cold floor and put her ear to the stone. The vibration was stronger here. It was still faint, still slow, still regular, but it came up through the flag like a pulse through a wrist, and with it came a very thin sound that she could not name, and that she would write in her ledger, after a long time sitting still, as: like a page being turned, very slowly, at a great distance. She looked up, and Brother Notker was standing in the doorway with a basket of apples, watching her. He set the basket down and came and knelt beside her and put his own ear to the stone, and stayed a long while, and when he sat up his face was calm and terrible, the way it had been in the church, and he said, She has been under there for three hundred years, and she has never once stopped. Aloisia asked him how he knew it was a she. He said, Because the wall has been holding a place for a she. He said it as though the grammar of it were the proof: a place with a mouth and no name. He said, The prior knows. The prior has known since he was a young man. It is why he forbade the lime to be taken down: he believes that if she is ever given her face and her name, the count will close over the house and take us, and if she is never given them, the count will go on forever, and neither one is a thing he will agree to. He took a small book from his coat, worn at the corners, and showed her. It was a ledger of his own, in a boy's careful hand, row after row of numbers going back four years, and the numbers rose and rose and never once fell. He said, I have been counting since I came. I thought if I kept the number in my own hand it could not grow past me. It grew past me two winters ago. He closed the book. He said, I am afraid, and I am not sorry to have said it to someone who is not of the house. That night she woke to a cold that had no source, and found that the door of her cell stood open and that a fine dust of snow had come in and lay along the floor in a line pointing, like a finger, to the corridor and the church. She followed it. The church door was open too, and the nave was white with blown snow at the threshold, and in the dark before the Doom stood Brother Leuthold, the oldest of them, the one who could no longer read and could no longer write and sat all day by the stove with his eyes closed and his lips moving. He was barefoot in the snow, and his palm was flat on the plaster over the company of the hidden, and he was murmuring, very softly, a string of names—not the names of the brothers, not any names she had heard in this house, a long soft recitation of names like a man counting a flock he cannot see. He said, I remember them. He said it without turning. They put them under, and I remember them, and I am the only one left who does, and I am not supposed to. And then he stopped, and took his hand from the wall, and stood there swaying, and let her lead him back to his cell, where he lay down and slept like a child and could not be woken for the office bell, and in the morning he did not know her and did not know his own name. By noon the wall's company had grown by one figure, and Aloisia, who had stopped believing in coincidence some nights ago, wrote the number in the ledger and underlined it and did not write what she thought it meant. ---