Chapter 2 The Valley

The valley of Fernthal opened slowly, as though it had been designed by someone who wished to discourage visitors. For the first hour the road ran through orchards and sloping fields where a few late sheep moved like stones in the mist, and the bus labored and stopped and took on a woman with a crate of chickens, and Aloisia watched the mountains rise through the windows and felt the air change against the glass. Beyond the village everything narrowed. The fields gave way to pine and to the wreckage of previous winters, and the road began to climb in earnest, and the valley closed behind her like a hand. The village at the foot was called Brantau, and it was smaller than its name on the map had suggested. A church with a squat tower, a shop that sold flour and nails and thread, a mill with no wheel turning, four streets that were really two. The driver stopped in the square and pointed up the valley with his whole hand. They will send someone for you, he said. They always send someone. She waited an hour in the cold, and the someone who came was a young man in a black coat with the hood up, driving a truck so old its gears ground like a complaint. He introduced himself as Brother Notker, and he was polite and shy and barely able to meet her eyes, and as they climbed he answered her questions with answers that had clearly been chosen in advance. The community was small. The community kept the hours. There was no telephone, only a wire office in Brantau and a radio the abbot used when the weather allowed. It snowed early here. It snowed late. It was easy to forget, so high up, that the rest of the world continued. The abbey appeared all at once, which she had not expected. One moment the road was a tunnel of pine, and the next it opened into a bowl of rock where the mountains stood at three sides, and the abbey filled the fourth: a long low building of grey stone with a church at its head, a cloister attached like a limb, a wall around a garden of dead cabbages, a bell tower with a bell she could not see. It was not a grand ruin and not a picturesque one. It was a working house that had grown shabby the way a large family grows shabby, by endurance rather than neglect, and there was washing strung in one of the upper windows and smoke coming from a chimney that stood badly askew. Brother Notker stopped the truck before the gate and did not turn off the engine. The abbot will see you in the chapter house, he said. Do not look at the Doom after dark. He said it flatly, the way one gives a practical instruction—like not walking on ice—and when she asked him what he meant he only said the light was bad after dark, and the wall did not want to be read at night, and then he was out of the truck and lifting down her cases, and she did not press him. Abbot Romuald was a tall man of perhaps seventy, upright and gaunt, with hands that had done rough work once and a face that had learned to be calm at cost. He received her in the chapter house, a cold room with a bench around the walls and, behind him, a small window giving onto the cloister, where rain had begun to fall in threads. He thanked her for coming. He told her plainly that the house had little and would be poorer when she was done, and that the fee had been decided not because the wall mattered to the world but because it had begun to matter to the house in a way none of them could explain. He said this without drama, as a man states accounts. Then he took her into the church. The nave was cold and dim and smelled of stone and old wax. There were perhaps a dozen benches, none of them full; a side altar with a dusty cloth; a single high window letting down a light the color of dishwater. And at the far end, above the west door, filling the wall from the floor of the gallery to the roof beams, was the Doom of Veylen. She had seen the small photographs in the folder, but the folder had lied, as photographs of a dim wall always do. In person the Doom was enormous and alive with damage. At its center sat a judge on a rainbow, one hand raised, the other lowered, his face all but effaced by soot and by a hard black varnish that had cracked into a net of rivers. Below and to either side, in ranks, stood the risen dead, some turning toward the judge, some away, and the whole crowd was so dark now that the individual figures had dissolved into each other, a crowd of shadows crowded on shadows. At the lower left a mouth of hell opened and the condemned poured into it; at the upper right the blessed stood in a city of towers. She had spent half her life in front of walls like this and could read its grammar at a glance: the traditional composition, the traditional signs, the traditional fear. But the surface was a disaster of a different order. Whole passages had been overpainted in the nineteenth century with a brown that had since darkened to the color of a liver. Elsewhere the paint was lifting in blisters the size of a palm, or had lost its ground and hung like a scab. A band of salt bloom ran across the middle like a tide stain. And in the lower right quadrant, where the blessed city gave way to the wall's edge, there was a long rectangular field of plaster that had been left plain, unadorned and unpainted, as if the painter had simply stopped, or as if something had been removed and the space closed over afterward. Aloisia stood before it for a long time and did not speak. Abbot Romuald stood beside her with his hands folded and did not speak either. Rain moved on the high window. Somewhere behind them a bell was struck, once, for an office, and a door opened and shut, and footsteps crossed the cold floor and were gone. She said, at last, that she could not promise a season. She could promise an examination, a careful cleaning of one small area, and an honest account of what the wall would allow. The abbot said, That is more than we have had in three hundred years. It was a strange answer, and she would remember it, and for the moment she let it pass. ---