第5章 The Rule of Silence

The house ran on hours the way a mill runs on water. Matins in the dark, Lauds at first light, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline. Between them the brothers worked in the garden and the kitchen and the bindery and the small scriptorium, and the men who could still read read, and the men who could still write wrote the annals, and the man who could do neither sat by the stove and prayed with his eyes closed and his lips moving. There were nine of them, and three were older than the abbot, and one was Brother Notker, who was barely twenty and had come to the house from a valley on the other side of the mountains and had not gone home in four years. The rule of the house was silence, and it was not a silence of sullenness but of attention, as though the brothers were listening for something and did not wish to miss it. In the church they did not speak at all. In the refectory they read aloud from a book while they ate, and no one said a word about the food or the weather or the work. In the corridors they kept their hands folded and their eyes down, and when two brothers met they inclined their heads and passed, and the passing made no sound. Only Vlasta spoke freely, because she was not bound by the rule, and because a kitchen cannot be run in whispers, and she had long ago decided that the brothers' silence was a luxury paid for by other people. Aloisia, being neither of the house nor of the kitchen, was left to decide for herself how much to say. She found that she said less each day. It was not that the silence was contagious; it was that the house was quiet the way a sickroom is quiet, and after a while the ordinary human noises—a cough, a greeting, the scrape of a chair—began to feel like indecencies. She worked the Doom through the middle of the sixth day, and in the afternoon she went to the abbot in the chapter house and asked him plainly about the covered group. He listened with his hands folded. He had a way of letting a question stand in the room for a while before he answered it, as though it belonged to him now and not to her. Then he said, The house's history is not a proud one. In the last century of the old order there were quarrels in the valley, and men who believed things the Church did not permit, and men who believed things the Church did permit and used them badly. There was a visitation. There was a search. The house was young in those days and frightened of the world, and it did what frightened houses do, and afterward it made a record that was not entirely true, and the wall carries the record of the record. She asked what had been covered. He said, Certain persons. She asked if they were the men who believed the unpermitted things. He said, Perhaps. He said it without conviction, which interested her more than an answer would have. Then he said, The wall has been renewed before. You will find, beneath the paint, the marks of earlier hands. Every generation, we veil it again. Lime over the plaster, a thin wash, and the figures go pale and the house sleeps. Then the lime fails and the figures come back and are seen again for a while, and the house wakes, and then it is time, and we veil it again. Why, she asked. Because it is not good for the house to look at the Doom too long, he said. He said it simply, as a rule of health, like not looking at the sun. She asked when it had last been veiled. A little over a hundred years ago, he said. The custom says every three centuries, but the house has not been honest with the custom; the house veiled it more often than it should, whenever it grew frightened. This time the house has waited too long. The wall will not hold another veil. Whatever is under it will not accept one. So we have a choice that we have not had in living memory: to see it truly, once, and then to decide, or to try to hide it and fail. She understood then why she had been hired, and why the fee was so strange, and why the deadline was the feast of Saint Veylen. The house did not want a conservator. The house wanted a witness who was not one of them. It wanted an outsider to read the wall and tell them what it said before they chose what to do with it. That night she kept watch in the church, as she had begun to do, and before the great silence fell she saw a brother come in and stand before the Doom with his back to the benches. He did not kneel and did not pray in any way she could recognize. He stood still, facing the wall, and his lips did not move, and after a while she understood that he was counting—that his eyes were traveling across the dark crowd of the risen, left to right, the way a shepherd counts a flock at dusk. She said, softly, so as not to break the house more than she had to, Brother, what are you counting? He did not turn. He said, The ones who are there. She asked how many there were. He said, Last night there were four hundred and twelve. He turned then, and in the light from the cloister she saw that it was Brother Notker, the young one, and his face was calm and terrible. He said, Tonight there are four hundred and nineteen. And then he inclined his head to her, politely, the way the brothers did when they met in a corridor, and he went out, and left her alone in the cold with the wall. She fetched the ladder and raised it to the gallery and spent the rest of the night at the top of it, not cleaning, only looking, trying to count, and failing, and counting again. She got four hundred and eleven, and then four hundred and thirteen, and then her eyes tired and the numbers dissolved, and she came down at dawn with cold hands and no conclusion at all except the one she could not yet write in her notebook. ---