The father of the luckless tutor was a priest. That wasn’t so bad. Luther hadn’t yet nailed up his Ninety-Five Theses and the Holy Mother Church wasn’t in an uproar. He had numerous children. He gave last rites to victims of the plague, then he opened their veins, which only brought on death quicker.
It was a quiet time for the Black Death. Bubonic plague was on the wane, the worst outbreaks were occurring farther south, but then he got infected anyway from the blood of the sick. It was not unexpected — almost no one who was involved with victims of the plague survived. He prepared to die with something close to relief. At his bedside there suddenly appeared an old, old man, one-eyed and one-legged, and weather-beaten, who placed a heavy hand on his shoulder and whispered incomprehensible things in his ear. It was as if he had lost the power of human speech. Muttering and hopping, he went on his way.
The father of the priest was a farmer, prosperous, with a lot of land. He was a man with a happy disposition, without ever knowing why. He liked playing with his children. Many of them died, and when he stood at their tiny graves, he thought it would be sensible not to give one’s heart too soon.
He never left his property. He paid his taxes to the authorities without complaint. Sometimes people came by who were from other places and wanted to go who knows where, but they seemed to him to be as unreal as ghosts. One time an old man appeared who had only one eye and only one leg, and who insisted the two of them were related. He stayed for several weeks, eating copiously and frightening the servants at night with his screams. Then he hobbled away on his crutches.
One night the farmer was overcome by a feeling that he’d been cursed by someone, so that he was too afraid to look anyone in the eye, not his wife, not his servants, not his children. For a time he was plagued by lust, but he knew he must resist, in order not to end up in hell. He failed to resist. Then he resisted for a time. Then he failed to resist again. When he was dying, he wept a lot, for fear of hell. His oldest son, who had just been ordained as a priest, would dearly have liked to know how his father’s soul had fared, but his father never came back, and no one knew.
His father too was a farmer. He never left his landholding. Occasionally people passed by who came from other places and were heading for still other places. He wanted none of it.
His father too was a farmer. He never left his landholding. Occasionally people passed by who came from other places and were heading for still other places. He wanted none of it.
His father too was a farmer. He never left his landholding. Occasionally people passed by who came from other places and were heading for still other places. He wanted none of it.
His father too was a farmer. He never left his landholding, and he didn’t understand why people got on the road, as if trees, hills, and lakes weren’t the same everywhere. He tilled his fields, made sure he never saw his sisters, died young, and never came back.
His father too was a farmer. He never left his landholding and had many children. Two of them came into the world in one go — they were girls, and they resembled each other so exactly that they seemed to be one and the same person. The work of the devil, he cried. Even the priest said there was no good explanation for it, and his wife called on the grace of God. But he couldn’t bring himself to drown them. So the girls grew up and married farmers in the village nearby. He gave them generous dowries. Their children looked nothing like one another.
His father was a traveler, a magus, a puller of teeth, and a con man. He had fled the plague, and in Cologne he had taken flight before a huge crowd and soared three times around the as-yet-unfinished cathedral. Later people told all kinds of stories about how he’d faked it, but in reality flying isn’t hard, provided you are devoid of either scruples or fears, and you’re crazy besides. Somewhere near Ulm he was accused by a merchant of having stolen money, which was true, but he also knew you just had to be able to run faster than the idiots on your tail, and nobody would be able to threaten you. In a village under particularly high trees he fathered a child. He never saw it, but then he’d never known his own father either.
And so his days passed. Some said he had been killed in Palestine, others that he had ended on the gallows. Only a handful later asserted that he was still alive, for you could kill almost anyone, but not someone like him.
His father was the son of a mercenary who had overcome an unwilling woman by the side of the road as they campaigned. As he held her, she understood that God would not help her, because hell was no future thing, hell was now and hell was here. Suddenly the mercenary realized that things were wrong, and he let her go, but it was already too late, and he ran away and forgot. She abandoned the child in the stable as soon as it was born, and she forgot it too.
But the boy survived. He survived the miasma of the plague that swept through the land, he survived pain, he survived typhus, he did not want to die, even when nothing held out the promise of life, and there was almost nothing to eat; he survived even when there was nothing but vomit and flies, he survived, and if he hadn’t, I would not exist and nor would my sons. There would be others in our place, others who regarded their existence as inevitable.
He grew up, became a blacksmith, found a wife, started a little business that was soon destroyed by fire, then became a groom. He sired eight children, three of whom survived. Soon thereafter he was run over by a wagon, lost a leg, but didn’t die, although the gangrene also affected his brain. He dreamed that the devil came to him, and he asked the devil for a long life; the devil went back to hell, and soon after that the fever broke.
One morning, weeks or perhaps years later, he woke up with confused memories of cards, wine, and open knives. He didn’t retain many memories of the night before, the world seemed somehow smaller, something was missing, and as he reached up past his nose, following the path of the pain, he realized that an eye was missing. At first for a brief moment he was shocked, but then he laughed. What a good accident it was that that was all that happened to him, and nothing worse, for men had two eyes. Only one heart, one stomach, but two eyes! Life was hard, but sometimes fate was kind.
DUTIES
I’ve already been hearing the sobbing for some time. At first it was a sound in my dream, but now the dream is over and the sobbing is coming from the woman next to me. Eyes closed, I know that the voice is Laura’s, or, rather, that suddenly it’s been hers all along. She’s crying so hard that the mattress is shaking. I lie there motionless. How long can I pretend I’m asleep? I would love to give up and sink back into unconsciousness, but I can’t. The day has begun. I open my eyes.
The morning sun pushes through the slats of the blinds and draws fine lines in both carpet and wall. The pattern on the carpet is symmetrical, but if you look at it for a long time, it captures your attention, gripping it until you can’t shake free. Laura is lying next to me in perfect peace, breathing silently, sound asleep. I push back the blanket and get up.
As I’m groping my way down the hall, the memory of the dream returns. No doubt about it, it was my grandmother. She looked tired, worn out, and somehow not complete, as if only a portion of her soul had managed to force its way through to me. She stood in front of me, bent over, leaning on a walking stick, with two ballpoint pens sticking out of her bun. She opened and closed her mouth and made signs with her hands; she was determined to tell me something. She looked unutterably weary, lips pursed, eyes pleading, until in the next moment some change in the dream washed her away and I was somewhere else, surrounded by other things. I will never know what she wanted to tell me.