第17章 The Face That Turns

They read the names on the morning of the feast, in the church, before the Doom, and it was the strangest liturgy the house had ever kept. The abbot read the office first, and then he stood aside, and Aloisia stood where the reader stood at the lectern and opened the register to the year 1721, and she read the eighteen names that Ansfrid had recovered, and then she read the nineteenth, and the nineteenth had no surname and she read it twice, the way one calls a child by its whole name, Ursel, Ursel of Brantau, so that no one could say it had not been said. The brothers stood in their places. Vlasta stood at the back with her hands folded. Brother Notker stood nearest the wall, where he always stood. She had expected the wall to change, and it did not change, or not in any way she could see at first. What changed was the light. As she read the last name, the morning moved on the high window behind them, and the grey light came down the nave and crossed the congregation and reached the wall, and as it reached the wall it found the company, and where it found them the figures seemed to lean very slightly forward, all together, the way a field leans in a wind, and the turned faces were turned a little less, as though the company had begun, at last, to turn toward the room. She read the names again, from the beginning, as the abbot had asked her to, aloud and slowly, and the light moved, and the crowd on the wall moved with it, and the tall one at their head turned its finished face to the nave and looked at them with a face that Aloisia had not been able to name in the dark and could name at last, and did not want to, and the name she did not want to say came out of Brother Meinrad instead, in a whisper, from behind her, and the whisper was, Notker. It was his face. It was the young brother's own face, painted by no hand, on the body of the figure that had stood faceless at the head of the hidden company for three hundred years, and Notker, standing in his place nearest the wall, heard the whisper and looked, and his own face looked back at him from the plaster, and he did not cry out or fall or run, and Aloisia would remember that afterward as the worst of it, the way he simply stood and looked at himself and understood. He said, quietly, so that only she could hear, It kept the number in my hand. I gave it the number. I gave it my hand every night, and it has been keeping my place, and now it has my face, and the account is one off, and I know which one. She said, Notker. She said, Come away from the wall. He said, I was here when it happened. He said it the way Leuthold had said it, in the dark, barefoot, in that mild absent voice, and he looked at his hands again and then he looked at the company and said, I do not want to be counted before I have been buried. Hartwig was not there to see it, because Hartwig was dying in his cell, but the four remaining brothers were, and none of them moved. Meinrad crossed himself. Volkmar wept without hiding it, the way a man weeps who has forgotten that anyone might watch him. The abbot stood with his hands at his sides and his lips moving, and Aloisia could not tell whether he was praying or counting, and afterward she thought it had probably been both. Vlasta, at the back, said one word under her breath in the dialect of the valley, and it was the same word she had used about the road at the beginning of winter, and it meant, more or less, I told you so, and it meant, more or less, God help us. And then he turned and walked out of the church, quietly, as a brother walks out of the church at the end of an office, and no one stopped him, and the bell was still ringing the feast, and the light went on moving across the wall. Nobody followed him, and that was the thing she could not forgive the house for afterward, and could not forgive herself for, though she had been the only one of them who had tried. The feast bell rang on into the morning. The office came apart by inches, and the abbot, who was older than all of them and had known it would come apart, finished what was left of it in a voice that did not falter, and the brothers went to their places, and Aloisia stood alone at the lectern with the register open in front of her and the names still on the page, and the wall above and behind her kept Notker's face and turned it, with the slow movement of the light, toward the door he had gone out of. They found him an hour later on the path above the house, in the snow that had begun again, face down, and there was no mark on him and no reason in him to be dead, and Vlasta, who had nursed two husbands and four children into the ground, knelt by him and closed his eyes and said, in the plain way of the valley, There is the place, then, and it is filled. And when they brought him back and laid him in the church, the wall's company did not grow by one. The wall's company had already grown by one, the morning before, before he died. It had grown by his face. Vlasta took the boy's body and washed it herself and would let no one help her, and when Aloisia came to the cell she was combing his hair with a wooden comb and talking to him in the low steady murmur she used for the sick and the dying, and what she was saying, Aloisia understood after a moment, was not prayer. It was a list of names. She was counting him into the ground in the only way she knew, out loud, so that he would not go uncounted, and she kept it up for an hour, and Aloisia stood in the doorway and listened and would not have interrupted her for the world. The prior Hartwig died the same day, in his cell, without ever speaking, and the house was six. ---