Chapter 9 The Pass Closes

The snow came in the second week and did not stop. It came in the night and filled the road below the gate, and in the morning Brother Gotthard and Brother Notker went out with shovels and cleared a channel, and by evening the channel was gone. The third day, a truck from Brantau tried the road and turned back before the last bend, and Aloisia stood at an upper window and watched its lights go down the valley and out of sight, and understood that the house was now as far from the world as a ship is from land. The radio in the abbot's room worked, in good weather, for perhaps an hour a day. In bad weather it did not work at all, and the bad weather was the rule now. Aloisia wrote a letter to Berthold on the fourth day and read it back and did not like it, because it made her sound like a woman who had lost her nerve, and she folded it into her notebook and did not write another. There was no post. There was no wire that reached the house. There was the valley below, and the pass above, and the two ways out were both under a meter of snow. She settled into the winter the way one settles into a long illness, by giving up the argument with it. The church was cold but dry; she kept the door closed and the lamps lit and worked in two coats and fingerless gloves. The poultices took longer in the cold; a gel that would have bitten in ten minutes took twenty, and she learned to use the waiting. She rigged a second lamp from the generator cable that ran along the gallery, and the generator failed twice a week, and when it failed she worked by the high window's grey light or not at all. In the afternoons she could see her own breath in front of the wall. In the evenings she could not see the wall at all, only the faint shapes of the figures and the one blank place among them, which she had begun, in her notebook, to call by a name she did not say aloud. Two weeks into the snow, Brother Gotthard fell. He fell in the garden, where he had gone to fetch the last of the winter cabbage, and Vlasta found him half in a drift with his face gone slack on one side and his right hand curled against his chest. There was no doctor within the pass. Vlasta had been a farmer's wife and knew what a stroke was; she had the brothers carry him to his cell and pack him in blankets and hold a spoon of water to his lips, and there was nothing else to be done. He did not die. He lay with his eyes open and his face turned toward the wall of his cell, and when the brothers came to pray over him he did not move his head, and it seemed to Aloisia, when she looked in on him, that he was listening to something beyond the stone. The house changed when he fell. It had been quiet before; now it was silent in a different way, the way a room is silent when everyone in it is listening for the same sound. The brothers kept the hours more exactly than before. The abbot spent longer and longer in the church, standing where Aloisia stood, looking up at the Doom. The prior went about with his lips pressed together and did not speak to her at all. That night she heard the scraping again. She had heard it before and put it down to pipes and wind. This time she followed it. It came from the church, a slow regular sound, and when she pushed the door open with her shoulder she found Brother Notker standing before the Doom in the dark, and the sound was him: he was moving his open hand across the wall, back and forth, the flat of his palm smoothing the plaster as though he were calming an animal. He did not stop when she came in. She stood beside him and listened. He was counting, very softly, under his breath, and the numbers ran up past four hundred and kept going, and every so often he would say the number aloud as if to fix it, four hundred and fifty-one, four hundred and fifty-nine, and then go on counting. She said, Stop. He said, without turning, If we stop, it begins to fill the places no one is watching, and the places fill faster than we can count, and one night we count a face that is one of ours. Better to count it ourselves. Better to keep the number in a hand we know. She asked him whose face the wall was waiting for. He stopped then, and took his hand off the plaster, and looked at his palm in the dark as though he had never seen it. He said, The one it has been waiting for since 1721. The one that was never finished. It has no face, and the wall is holding a place for it, and the place has been getting wider. He stepped back from the wall. He said, I am not supposed to know this. Brother Ansfrid is not supposed to have told me, and I am not supposed to have believed him. He said it as a boy confesses a theft, and then he bowed his head to her, the way the brothers did, and went out. She had been alone with the wall for hours by then, and the end of the day had its own ritual, which she kept the way the brothers kept their hours: she wrote the ledger entry, she wrote down the number, and she wrote down the state of her eyes and the light at that hour and whether she had slept the night before, because an instrument that lies in the dark may still tell the truth at noon, and she had decided that she would rather know which of her readings to distrust than trust them all. The entry for that day was the longest in the ledger. Very little of it was about the wall. She was alone with the wall and the number he had been counting to, and she fetched her camera and photographed the group in the dark with the lamp, and counted the figures herself, twice, and got thirty-one, and got thirty-one again, and went to her cell and sat with the number in her notebook and did not sleep. ---