Chapter 13 The Confession of Brother Ansfrid

Brother Ansfrid had been waiting, she understood later, for the right morning, and the morning after Leuthold went silent was the right one, because there was no longer any time. He met her in the archive and shut the door, which he had never done. He was shaking, and it was not the cold, and he sat down on the bench beside the old books and told her what he had told her before and what he had not. In 1721, when the visitation came the second time, the house had hidden forty-one people, or thirty-nine, or forty-three; the annals disagreed because the man who kept them in that year had been afraid to write a number. They were in the old chapter house and in the passage that ran beneath it, and Emmerich had promised them that in three days the prince's men would move on and the house would let them out over the mountain, and they had believed him, because he was an abbot and he wore the cross and he had let them in when the soldiers came. The prince's men did not move on. They returned to the valley and made the house an offer: the names of the hidden, and the house would stand; the names withheld, and the house would be dissolved and every brother driven out into a winter he would not survive. Emmerich gave the names. And then, because the prince's men had said the hidden must be delivered down to the valley for trial and the trial would end in the rope, he did the last thing, the thing the annals covered and the margins remembered. He sealed the passage. He walled the old chapter house, and he ordered the mortar set while the people inside were still in it, because that way the house had not delivered them, and had not quite killed them, and could tell itself that what happened after was the will of God and not the will of Emmerich. And then he had the girl taken. She was not one of the hidden. Her name was Ursel, she was nineteen or twenty, she was from Brantau, and she had come up the valley two winters before to serve in the kitchen, and she had carried bread down to the passage with the brothers for the whole of the three days, and she had seen the faces of the hidden, and she knew every one of them by name. When the sealing was done she was the one person left outside the wall who could speak of what was inside it. Emmerich could not let her go down the mountain and could not count her among the hidden and could not bury her, because a burial is a counting. So he did the thing that had no name, and then he had the painter's wall amended, and had the girl painted at the head of the hidden company with her face left blank, so that she would stand forever in the record without being in it. Ansfrid took from his sleeve a folded leaf of paper, gone soft as cloth at the folds, and gave it to her. He said, The names I could recover. From the margins, from a letter, from a list a brother copied and did not burn. There were forty-one, and I have eighteen, and the rest are gone. He said, Ursel is the nineteenth, and she has no surname in any record, only the name the kitchen used. She opened the leaf. Eighteen names in a careful old hand, and at the bottom, in Ansfrid's own trembling script, the nineteenth, written with a space after it where a surname should have been and was not. He said, I want them written into the annals. Not into a margin, not into a copy. Into the book, in the hand of the house, the way a name is written when a person is counted. I cannot do it. My eye has gone. My hand has gone. He held out his hand and she saw the tremor in it, and he said, What I have been afraid of, for longer than I will admit, is that the wall has been counting me too. I feel a place being kept for me in that company. It has been getting warmer, if a place in the dark can be warm, and it is closer to me than the other places are, and I am an old man and I am not ready to be a figure in a wall. She took the leaf. She took the register down from its shelf, the great book of the annals, and turned to the year 1721, where the hand changed and the entries went thin, and she found the gap the house had left, and she dipped the pen and began to write. She wrote the eighteen names. She wrote the date of the visitation. She wrote, in ink that would outlast them both, what Emmerich had done to the passage and the chapter house, and what had become of the people in it, and what Ursel had seen and what had been done to her, and she wrote, in the margin and in the body and at the foot of the page, the word Counting, which the brothers had used for three hundred years without knowing what it meant, and beside it, once, the single name Ursel, with no surname after it, a place left open where a surname should have gone. Ansfrid watched her write, and when she set the pen down he said, aloud, as though he were in church, Now she is counted, and put his forehead on the table and wept without sound. She did not write it calligraphically, and she did not hurry. She wrote the way she did everything, with the patience of a hand that had spent its life on things that could not be undone, and the ink went into the paper and stayed where she put it, and when she thought of the seven veils on the wall she thought that a book is the opposite of a veil. A veil is pigment laid over a truth. A book is a truth written where anyone may find it. The house had spent three hundred years veiling, and she would spend an hour writing, and the writing would outlast the lime, because paper in a dry room outlasts almost everything that men do. That night he came to her cell at the second hour and told her he had found something in the plan, a thing he should have seen years ago, and asked her to come to the archive at first light. She never learned what he had found. At first light she found him in the archive, sitting upright at the table with the register open before him and his one working eye open too, quite dead, his finger resting on the page where she had written the nineteenth name. ---