第20章 The Second Commission

She did not go back to the saint. The sleeve was still on her bench when she returned to the city, the amber varnish still half lifted, the blue waiting under it, and she stood in front of it for a long time on her first morning back and found that she could not finish it, not yet, and she covered it with a cloth and left it. She wrote her report on the Doom of Veylen, and the report was exact and sober and told the truth in the only language the trade allowed, which is the language of layers and losses and interventions and non-interventions, and nowhere in it did she write the word the ledger of the wall had used on every page. She sent the report to the heritage commission and to the bishop's office, and then she put the ledger of the wall in a box, and the box on a high shelf, and she did not take it down for a long while. The city was loud in a way she had forgotten, and she found she had to sleep with the window closed, and she woke at the hour of Matins for a month and lay in the dark waiting for a bell that was not there. She went back to the trade slowly. She took a small commission in the spring, a wall in a country church off the main road, a Saint Christopher with a damaged foot, and she cleaned it and wrote it up and it did not change, and she sat in front of it on the last day with a feeling she could only name as disappointment, which frightened her more than anything in the valley had. The winter went. She took no commission in the spring. She let the loan go on, and the arrangement for her mother go on, and she lived small and quiet and did not speak of the valley, and when Berthold asked her, in his careful way, whether the house had been as strange as the stories said, she said it had been a difficult wall and a cold winter and left it at that, because she had learned in that house that a thing spoken loosely is a thing a listener finishes for you, and she was not going to let anyone finish the Doom of Veylen on her behalf. The box on the shelf was the only thing she kept from it. She took it down on a Tuesday in October, a year after she had come home, because that was the day the letter came. It was not from the notaries, and it was not from the heritage commission, and it was not from the bishop. It was from a woman she had never heard of, at a museum she had heard of, in a city two countries away, and it was short, and it enclosed a single photograph. The photograph showed a fragment of wall. It was a fresco, and it was in the good hand—she knew the hand at once, the same hand that had made the green sleeve and the bound company and the two hands of the judge, the sure red line, the fine flesh tones laid almost to nothing. It showed a company of people standing close together, their faces turned away, and behind them the gate of a city, and over them a raised hand. It was the Doom of Veylen, or it was its twin, a wall from the same workshop in the same decade, painted by the same man for a different house of the same order in the same valley system, and the letter said the museum had bought the fragment from a collector and wanted a full examination and an honest report. She turned the photograph over. On the back, in the museum's hand, was a note that its subject had been recovered from the chapel of a second house of the Veylen brethren, four days' walk over the pass from Fernthal, in a village she had never heard of, and that the fragment was one of nine, and that the chapel had been sealed since the eighteenth century and was now being reopened. That was all. There was no figure at the edge of the photograph, and nothing in it looked at her, and she sat with it under the lamp for an hour and could not find a single thing wrong with it, and that was why her hands had begun to shake. Because there was a place in the company of the photographed wall that had been left blank, a careful oval of clean plaster where a face should have been, and it was in the same position, at the head of the turned crowd, and the plaster around it was warm—she knew it was warm before she touched it, she knew it the way one knows a face in a dark room—and the letter asked when she could come, and the letter gave a date in the spring, and the letter said that the chapel would be opened for the work, and that they hoped, as the bishop had hoped for Veylen, that she would be willing to finish what the painters had left. She set the photograph on the bench beside the box and went to the window. Below, the city went on with its ordinary evening, trams and lights and the first cold, and in the glass she could see her own reflection, and behind her reflection, faint in the window, the shape of the wall she had left in the valley, or the shape of the wall she had not yet seen. She stood there a long time. Then she went to the shelf and took down the ledger of the wall, and opened it to the last page she had written, and sat with the pen in her hand, and did not write anything for a while, and at the top of the page, where a new entry begins, she wrote the date, and under the date, in her exact and careful hand, she wrote the first line of the second account: Chapel of the Veylen brethren, beyond the pass. Condition unknown. Wall reported stable. Conservator of record: A. Steindl. She looked at it, and then she capped the pen, and left the page open on the bench, and went to pack.