Chapter 19 The Doom of Veylen

Nothing happened. That was the thing she could never explain afterward, and the thing she had stopped expecting to explain. She came into the church at eight, at her fixed hour, and the Doom stood in the grey light exactly as she had left it. The judge with the face of Emmerich. The blessed entering the city. The company of the hidden, dense as wheat, their faces turned, Notker's face at their head. The mouth of hell. The blank place beside the tall figure, still blank, still an absence of the painter's own making. She photographed it from every station, in raking light and ultraviolet and plain, and then she photographed it again at noon and again at evening, and the wall was the same in all of them. The ledger of the wall closed that day with no entry. It was the first day in two months she had no change to record. She kept the vigil at eight each morning for a week, like a woman testing a fever that had broken, and the wall did not change, and the company did not grow, and the place that had been kept open for three hundred years stayed open, empty, and quiet. Whatever the count had been, it had balanced, or it had stopped, and she was a conservator and could not tell the difference and would not pretend to. She wrote in her report: No further alteration observed in seven days of fixed-station documentation. Wall stable. The record of the wall is now complete and legible. The interpretation of the record is not a matter for a conservator. They buried Brother Notker and Prior Hartwig in the frozen ground under the pine, and the abbot read the names of both, and then he read the nineteen, and then he read the six living, and the bell tolled for each name, and it tolled for a long time, and the sound went down the valley and came back off the far wall of the mountains, which is the way sound behaves in that place when the air is still. The house did not last the year. There were six of them when the snow melted and five by the summer, and the abbot wrote to the bishop and asked for the house to be dissolved and its few monks dispersed, and the letter was the last thing he did that mattered. The chapter house and the passage beneath it were opened and recorded, and the bones were taken down the valley and buried in consecrated ground at Brantau with the names read over them, and it took two days, because there were more names than there were names, and some of the dead had only ever had one, like Ursel, and the priest at Brantau read that one at the head of them all. The heritage commission's report, which she read a year later, described the Doom of Veylen as a provincial Last Judgment of the late fourteenth century with overpaint from the Restoration, and mentioned in a footnote a later alteration to the left quadrant of uncertain date, and did not mention the blank face at all. Aloisia read the footnote twice and put the report in the box with the ledger and did not write to correct it. Some things do not enter the record because the record is not built to hold them, and a conservator learns, or fails to learn, to tell the difference between a silence that is a lie and a silence that is only the shape of the truth. The Doom of Veylen was left in place. A heritage commission came up the valley in the autumn, three men and a woman with forms and cameras, and they stood before the wall and were impressed by it in the way of people who are impressed by old things, and they asked Aloisia, as the conservator of record, whether the wall was stable. She said it was. They asked whether further treatment was recommended. She said, with a care that cost her something, that no further treatment was recommended. She said the wall should be kept dry, and cool, and above all looked at, regularly, by people who were willing to keep looking, and that the record should remain in the annals where the priest had copied it, with the live names beside the dead. They wrote this down. They thought it was a conservator's ordinary fuss over humidity and light. She did not correct them, because there are things you cannot write in a report, and one of them is a warning that a wall needs to be counted. She left the valley in the first week of October, a year and a day after she had come up it, and the abbot, who was still there and would be there until the end, walked her to the gate. He was small in his coat now, and he had the look of a man who has set down a weight and is not yet used to standing straight. He said, You never asked me why the house waited three hundred years and then hired a conservator, and I never told you the whole of it. She said, Then tell me. He said, Because we needed someone who would look at it and not believe it. He looked up at the abbey, the roof and the bell and the washing in the upper window, the last ordinary signs of a house that was ending. He said, A believer would have seen God in that wall. A coward would have seen the devil. You saw neither. You saw a picture with a missing piece, and you finished the picture, and you left the piece out, and that was the only honest thing anyone has done in this valley since 1721. He said, That is why it stopped. Not because you counted. Because you were true. She said, That is a theory and I cannot test it. He said, I know. He said it almost fondly. Then he opened the gate for her, and she went down the road, and she did not look back at the wall, and she counted the turns of the road only because counting was by then a habit, and she got to forty-one before she lost the thread. ---