The floggings were due to take place the next day, and everyone in the camp was tense, most with apprehension, but a few with excitement. Molebacher, Drozde knew, would be of the latter persuasion. She had seen him at floggings before. He took a kind of grim delight in the spectacle of it, engaging in macabre speculation over who would die, whose wounds would become infected, who was most likely to faint from the blows. Drozde hated it, and she would be damned if she was going to spend any time in his company tonight. She went out to the tents instead, in search of the other women. But Ottilie was with Frydek, and Libush (who had a dozen relationships to service to Drozde’s one) was nowhere to be seen.
There were campfires a-plenty, and Drozde would have been welcome at most of them, but where the company of the other women would have been restful, that of the soldiers was likely to be boisterous and tiring. It might be enjoyable, but it was unlikely to distract her from the matters that were pressing on her mind, most of which related in one way or another to Pokoj’s invisible household of phantoms.
She needed to see them again, and to put her questions to them. Ermel’s story had finally convinced her of that. So she went back into the house, intending to go directly to the ballroom. She found Magda first, sitting in the love seat under the stairs, her ghost kitten curled up against her as she stroked the fur of its neck. The girl jumped up, and the kitten mewled in faint reproof as she tucked it under her arm.
“Shall we go in, milady?” Magda asked. She put on a haughty voice, holding out her crooked elbow to Drozde as though the two of them were old society ladies out for a stroll on the streets of Wroclaw.
Drozde fell in with the game, though it went against her mood more than a little. They walked on together, the woman putting on a gentlemanly swagger while the dead girl held up the train of an imaginary dress. “Tonight we talk on my terms, though,” Drozde said, feeling the need to assert herself. “No stories until I say so. And I won’t say so until I’ve had some of my questions answered.”
“All right,” Magda said quickly. “I promise we’ll try. Unless it’s something . . . you know. Something we can’t talk about because we promised.”
“As soon as we come to something you can’t talk about, I’m leaving,” Drozde said grimly.
The ballroom was already full when they arrived, but the echoes raised by Drozde’s boots reverberated as loud and hollow as if she were the only one there. Ghost bodies did not muffle sound, and ghosts packed in together did not breathe or sniff or shuffle. Only when Drozde was right in the midst of them did they raise a murmur of welcome.
“Well,” Drozde said, “and good even to you too, all and some.”
“Shall I be first?” whispered a tall and stately man at her right shoulder.
“No,” Drozde said. “Not tonight. Tonight it’s my turn.”
Sighs and susurrations arose from all sides—expressions of wonder and excitement. “Drozde’s story!” the ghosts exclaimed. “Drozde will tell her story!”
“Not Drozde’s story,” she corrected them. “Drozde’s questions. Afterwards, if you’re still hungry for a story I’ll tell you one, but first there are things you have to tell me. Otherwise I’ll stop coming here and talking to you, and from what Magda said you wouldn’t want me to do that.”
Profound silence greeted her words, but the faces of the ghosts showed alarm and hurt. They took the threat seriously, and it didn’t leave them unmoved.
“There are things we’re sworn not to say,” Meister Gelbfisc pointed out. “But that’s not the worst of it. If the questions are about how we know you, and when we spoke to you before, then our answers will seem like nonsense to you.”
“Those are my questions,” Drozde said. “And I don’t see how the answers will be nonsense unless they’re lies.”
“But if we try to tell the truth about things you’ve never known and never heard of, it will seem like lies. Most of what has happened to us since we died has been very different from what we knew in life. But the language we use is still the same. There is no tongue of the dead that we can learn, to speak about the doings of the dead. Perhaps there should be. But until there is, anything we say will be like . . .” He paused, searching for a simile. “It will be like a boot many sizes too big for you, that you put your foot into and try to walk in anyway. And feel with each step both how foolish you must look as you walk and how hard it is to walk at all. And if someone asks you to dance . . .” Gelbfisc shrugged eloquently. “Disaster.”
“But I’m not asking you to dance!” Drozde almost yelled. “I’m only asking you to explain something to me. Something that ought to be simple. You welcomed me into this place like a friend. Spoke as if you knew me. Used my given name as easily as if we’d all grown up in the same house.”
“We did,” Magda said. She was looking at the kitten again, head bent low over it, and the words were almost too low to catch.
“And that,” Drozde said, pointing to the child, “is what I need you to explain. How can you know me when I don’t know you? How can you tell me that I was here before when—my oath on holy Jesus—I’m certain that I never was?”
The ghosts’ response to Drozde’s words was curious and somewhat frightening. They multiplied . For a few moments as they murmured among themselves their numbers grew and grew, but without anyone either entering or leaving the room. It was as though each of the dead men and women was present many times in different parts of the room. Then they coalesced again, and Meister Gelbfisc turned—not to Drozde but to Magda—with a brisk smile.
“We think she should hear about the torc,” he said. “From first to last. And then you could perhaps show her . . .”
“Yes!” Magda set Amelie down so she could clap her hands. There was no sound when her palms met—and the kitten, once out of her grip, attenuated and dissolved into a ribbon of kitten-textured air. But when the girl bent again and touched it, it resumed its former shape and clambered daintily back into her arms.
Gelbfisc turned to Drozde, hands clasped formally over his chest. “This may further provoke you, madam,” he said, “but I must take that risk. The best answer we can give to your questions must once again take the form of a story.”
Drozde uttered a bitter oath.
“But it is not the story of any one of us,” Gelbfisc assured her hastily. “And it’s not for ourselves or each other that we tell it. So we’ll tell it plain and spare, and then when the story is done we will show you something that may help you to understand how we live.”
“And answer my question?” Drozde demanded.
“And in part, within the limits of a solemn promise we all of us made, answer your question.”
Drozde breathed hard. “Very well, then,” she said. “But if I don’t like the answer, I won’t come back.”
A silence from all around, and then a shrug from Gelbfisc. “Even that,” he said, “though it’s not phrased as a question, is hard for me to answer. The things we know are sometimes a burden—the things we can’t know, a bigger burden still. But that’s in the nature of what we are. Step forward, Petra Veliky.”
A ghost advanced out of the silent assembly to stand before Drozde. A woman, young and strong, with broad shoulders and an angular face. Her left cheek was pocked, the right one clear, but despite this asymmetry, there was a certain beauty in her dark eyes and her full lips. She was no more than five and twenty, Drozde thought, possibly younger. She wore a peasant’s smock, but a sword hung at her waist. Her clothes were like a man’s clothes, shirt of sack and leggings and boots of leather.
“I am Petra Veliky,” the woman said. “Of Praha.”
Petra Hiskil I was too, but my maiden name is the one I choose to go by. I lived a short but a blessed life, because I heard the word of Jan Hus and accepted it into my heart. If all of you could do the same, you would better bear the burdens you sometimes complain of.
Hus taught us that the lowest peasant who lived in virtue would be a great lord in Christ’s kingdom—and the lords would be lower than dogs, because they wallowed like pigs in wealth made by the labour of others. And the lowest of the low would be the priests and bishops, because they’d used the word of Christ only to make themselves rich when they should have used it to light the world.
But Hus died, burned by order of the pope because the pope hated the truths he spoke. And Žižka, who was Hus’s shield and spear, died too. Then we became Taborites and followed Kanis and Pelhrimov, who burned with a righteous fire. It was a strange time, with many madmen claiming to be prophets and many murderers wearing the robes of saints. The land was afire, the spires and the steeples awash with blood and the dogs dining daily on bishops and barons—but we, we alone, held to the pure word.
All things we shared, and nothing owned. We lived as Adam and Eve had lived in Eden, and as men and women will live again when Christ returns. Unless Hus was Christ, which some of us thought. Perhaps Christ comes to every generation, and is killed again and again until his time comes.
Three crusades the church sent against us, and every last one of them left their bones in the fields and forests of Boheme. We did not spare them, but left God to sift their souls for any grain of good. And there were, besides, counts and princelings who attacked us either because they were blind enough to see our freedoms as sin or because their priests told them so and they were too cowardly to think for themselves.
We always gave better than we got. Kanis had a teaching, which was for a hard word give a blow and for a blow give sword and fire. Our neighbours had to learn that we were holy and not to be touched. So we went against them often, and when we did, whether to punish them for raids against us, or to strike first against those who were screwing up their courage to raid, we had a name for what we did: spanilé jízdy, the beautiful ride. Most times it would be a mass of us, but sometimes only a few. And once—only once—I rode alone.
It was against another teacher, Domazlic, who called himself Hussite and Adamite and Taborite and many things besides. He was none of those, but he was a great fighter and had hurt us numerous times when our foragers met his—for we did not farm but lived off what the land would give us, and that mainly meant stealing from the farms of others.
Domazlic, as I say, had done us harm, and Kanis had decided that he must be killed. But his camp was too well defended to fall to a raiding party, and we would lose a great many warriors in trying. So he said I should go into Domazlic’s camp—he called it a village, but it was only shelters made of woven twigs in the middle of a wood—and pretend to be one of his followers. Then I should entice him to lie with me, and kill him while he slept.
I agreed to do this. I said we shared everything, and that meant our bodies too. Marriage as the church knew it was a sin, not a sacrament. So I thought nothing of using my sex to bring a man low. If anything, I thought it made me more like our mother Eve, who, when she persuaded Adam to eat the apple, surely used more than words.
And Domazlic was a man of strong and promiscuous desires, so the plan worked well. I walked into the camp without challenge, and walked into his bed not more than seven nights after.
When he was exhausted from enjoying me—and I nearly as spent as he!—he fell into a heavy sleep. I had not brought my knife into the tent, because he might have guessed my purpose, so I used his own sword to kill him, driving it downwards into his throat at an angle so that if he woke before he died he wouldn’t be able to cry out.
I wept afterwards. It was strange. I hadn’t known Domazlic, but his lovemaking had been sweet and fierce and I was sorry that he was dead. I wanted to remember him, so I took from around his neck a torc of gold that he wore. It was a beautiful thing. Probably it came from some great lady’s jewel chest, but the metal was thick and solid and it looked as well on a man.
I took it to remember him by, as I said, and it was all I took from the place. I slipped from his tent before the moon was down, and was gone. What his people thought when they found his body I know not and care not. I’d done my work as God willed it and despite the sadness I was mostly at peace.
But nothing went well for me after that—and particularly in my dealings with men I seemed dogged by misfortune. Every man I had an eye to went for some other woman, or used me and then left me, or worked me ill in some other wise. Much woe I had, until I met Prokop Hiskil and swore to him at an altar made of a sword crossed with a sickle, which was how we Hussite women were married.
But Prokop beat me near to death and left me in my blood when we’d been together only seven months. There was a baby inside me and he came premature because of the beating, so small and so sickly I was sure he’d die. I knew then that the torc I’d taken from Domazlic was cursed—which meant that Domazlic had had the powers of the devil and I’d been very right to kill him.
I prayed for guidance, and Hus himself came to me in a dream, with Jesus by his side. He told me to take the torc back to where it belonged and leave it there, and I’d be free of the evil.
Well, I had no idea where Domazlic had been buried, and his followers were no more. They’d disbanded as soon as they found him dead. But I knew where I’d killed him, and I believed I could find the place again.
So I put myself on the road, and I walked for many weeks—back to the valley of Glogau and the woodlands where the Domazlici had made their home. I arrived there in the middle of a windswept and blasted night, a night of storms, when only fools and cutthroats walk the roads—but then I was a cutthroat, of course, so that was meet. The Domazlici had built a shrine to their dead leader at the edge of the path, and it was still tended. I almost left the torc there, but it felt wrong to do that, as though I was making an offering to Domazlic, which I had no desire to do.
While I hesitated, wondering what I should do for the best, the moon came out of the clouds for a moment and I saw a place close by where the ground had been cleared for building. In fact, the building had begun. Coming closer, I saw foundations dug, stacks of cut stone, ropes and wood for scaffolding, all that was necessary for a job well underway. And from the shape of the foundations, which was a cross, I guessed that this was to be a church.
I buried the torc at the centre of the cross. If it did have the power of the devil in it, the devil would not like his new lodgings much and might have the courtesy to leave me alone in future.
But as I turned to leave, something came down out of the sky and hit me on the shoulder with terrible force. I fell, and it pinned me to the ground as a dog bears down a rat. It was a tree, toppled by the wind. I could not get out from under it and its great weight prevented me from drawing enough breath to fill my lungs.
Before the night was over I was dead. And saw the church built, and the abbey around the church, and the house rise where the abbey fell, and the wheel of time turn as God has decreed. For the Bible tells us that we will wait in our flesh until the Judgement comes, and this thin weave of nothingness I’ve become is in reality the very subtlest of flesh.
The girl was done with her tale. She stepped back, and Meister Gelbfisc acknowledged her efforts with a nod of thanks.
“Rupit Zelzer,” Gelbfisc said. “Will you speak next?”
“I will,” said a man at the back of the room. He came forward slowly, with many nervous glances to either side. “Though I wish to state for the record that I don’t believe in curses.”
“Nor in anything else, neither!” someone exclaimed, but whoever it was they were shushed and scolded with ”Drozde!” “Drozde’s rules!” and the man was not heckled any further.
He was a strange fellow, Drozde thought. Tall and well built, as far as that went, but with a rheumy eye, a slouching shoulder and a lugubrious air. He wore a suit of indeterminate brown, and his hair where it remained was of the same colour. But the top of his head was bald, like a monk’s tonsure.
“Yes,” the man said defiantly, though the tremor in his voice undermined the words. “It’s true that I despise superstition. And it’s true that the faith I had in life I largely lost. So you could say, if you wanted to, that I believe in nothing. I prefer to say that I believe in man. In all men. And in one woman.”
He bowed to Drozde, the gesture awkward and uncertain. “Not this woman,” he added, “though obviously I have the utmost respect, the utmost gratitude, the very . . . yes, a profound regard. But she is not my religion, and she never was. My religion was Simona Kaiser.”
“You’re meant to be telling her about the torc!” Magda admonished the man impatiently.
He gave her an austere and contemptuous look. “I know my brief,” he said.
My name, as you have already heard, is Rupit Zelzer. I was born in Ostrawa. And my country, Czechoslovakia, was born in the same year I was, the year when the great war ended.
I grew up in what everyone assured me was a new world. The war that was gone—there would never be another like it. So what would the peace be like? Unimaginable! The rebirth of humanity, without need for religiosity or miracle.
My parents were members of a new political faction that valued equality and the rights of the common man, and I became one too. It was not that they indoctrinated me. It was just that I could see, with perfect clarity, what the future would be like and what my part in it must be. I saw the inevitability of progress towards the perfect worker state. I wanted to be one of its midwives.
But there was another war, even darker and more terrible. The world sickened, and that future died before it was even born. There was a monster at our borders, risen to power through disgrace and treachery, and he swallowed my country in two bites. His forces marched through the streets where I had played as a child, and his soldiers took the place of policemen on our corners.
We were captured without a fight because of the cowardice of our allies, but in my heart I was already preparing for yet another war, which would be a war of humanity against the dead weight of profit. And that thought sustained me through the years of darkness when the tyrants ruled us. They killed my parents, and my older brother—the defining tragedy of my life. They would have killed me too, for my political affiliation alone, but friends helped me to go to ground in Praha, and I lived there under false papers for the duration of the war.
When Berlin fell, the wheel turned and my faction came at last to power. Old scores were paid. Many of German and Hungarian descent were killed, and many more fled into exile. This may seem harsh, but you must remember that these were almost all people who had supported the monster’s regime without qualm or question when they were under his rule. They drew their ruin down upon themselves.
But if the peace brought us catharsis, it did not bring us stability. There were demagogues and fifth columnists in the national assembly who spoke out against the rule of this new, better order. They had to be purged. And then there were rabble-rousers who said that the purges were evidence that Czechoslovakia was not a democracy. It was a hard time. I wanted nothing but good for all my countrymen, but many of them resisted the gift. It was time—long past time—for social justice, but it seemed that social justice must be administered like medicine to those who would thrive by it, but, like children, feared its taste might be too bitter.
A hard time, yes, but for me it was when hard striving brought sweet success. I rose in the ranks of the new regime, becoming a member of a committee whose remit was the proper management of those assets left behind by our enemies as they fled, or confiscated by the state from dead ones.
As part of this work, I came in the spring of my thirtieth year to the Mander glassworks in Glogau. Here. To this house in which we now stand. The Manders had left the country over a decade before and were rumoured to be living in Argentina. They had left the glassworks in the hands of a manager, a certain Vramt Kaiser, but he had just been arrested on charges of collaboration during the war. The state was de facto owner of the glassworks now, and did not want the asset to be wasted. I was to manage it, with the aid of my secretary Mikhal Tuss until a worker could be trained to take on that role.
The glassworks was not what I was expecting. It was already running on collectivised lines, the workers dividing all tasks between them and taking an equal share of the profits. Unfortunately, while I stoutly approved of this in principle, I was obliged to make the place run profitably in order to justify my presence, so I returned the glassworks to a more conventional form of organisation, placing all the workers on fixed salaries and rationalising the use of their time within defined hours instead of allowing them to come and go as they pleased (which seemed to be the system that was then in place).
Another surprise to me was that the workers were all women. I now know that Anatol Mander had arranged things in this way, seeing the glassworks as a means of allowing women widowed by war or accident some degree of autonomy. An unobjectionable goal, but since my brief was to expand production I immediately recruited a large number of men—war veterans, mostly, and desperate for any kind of work at all. Their ready availability emboldened me to lower the wage I’d only just set by three crowns a week.
At the same time I instituted a rule that there should be no talking on the workshop floor. The women were accustomed to sing while they worked, or on some days to tell each other folk tales. These bloodthirsty narratives always started in very much the same wise. “A man wandered into the woods, and lost his way . . .” Then there would be a fairy or an ogre or a troll and everything would go extremely badly for the poor traveller.
The women were unhappy to lose their songs and their stories. They disapproved of my policies altogether, and some of them complained to me about them. Or rather they did not complain themselves, but deputed a spokeswoman to do so on their behalf. This was one Simona Kaiser, the daughter of the man who had been the manager before me.
And when I looked into her face, I was lost.
I’d never known love before. To be honest, I’d never even thought about it. It seemed something of a regressive idea, a myth to replace the older, failing myths of religion and douse the flames of revolution. Men and women pledging allegiance to each other and making each other the centre of their lives, when they ought to declare their kinship with the wider mass of humanity.
But now I knew that love was real—real enough to cripple me. Simona Kaiser’s beauty cut across my life like a shaft of sunlight across a drab landscape, making everything that was murky clear and resplendent.
Many would not have thought her beautiful. She was as big and well-muscled as a shire horse. But her dark eyes blinded me, and her ruddy face superimposed itself on everything I saw. Even the smell of her sweat, which at the end of a shift was acute, caused my head to swim.
Yet it was difficult. Almost impossibly so. I was Simona’s superior, and obliged to keep her at a distance. Moreover, she hated me. She argued that all the changes I’d introduced were bad, and that I was ruining the factory. I tried hard to keep my patience and explain my thinking to her, the more so because of my tender feelings, but I could not make her understand the difference between the selfish striving for one’s own profit and the joy that was to be had in striving for the betterment of all.
“The betterment of all!” she scoffed. “I see our beloved leaders getting bettered. I don’t see it happening to anyone else!”
This was counter-revolutionary talk, and in theory I was obliged to report it. I didn’t do so. But neither did I allow myself to weaken on the core issue of the running of the glassworks. Everything I was doing was in the interests of improving production and making it a vital contributor to the new nation’s wealth and standing. If I succeeded, the benefits would flow to all.
But production did not improve. Alarmingly, although I had almost doubled the workforce, I had not managed to increase output by even a small fraction. In the first quarter of the year it even fell back slightly. I felt that the secretary, Tuss, was watching me closely and very probably reporting back to my superiors on my achievements. He had no responsibilities at all, of course, and so could afford to be as censorious as he wanted.
I tried to enlist Simona as an ally, promoting her to forewoman and asking her to work with me to improve the glassworks. I was falling further and further behind on my targets, and was almost at my wits’ end searching for ways of reporting an increased profit. I could lower wages still further—the economy as a whole was so depressed, I didn’t see any likelihood of my workforce leaving en masse—but that would make her hate me even more, and might in any case have a demoralising effect that offset the immediate gain.
If only people could be made to work for love of their fellow man, as I did, then there would be no limit to human progress. But most people are inclined to follow selfish motives, and so they put chains on themselves without even knowing it.
Simona suggested a new furnace, capable of being raised to a higher temperature. I quailed at the thought of such an expense, but I did it to please her. I might have saved the money and spared the effort: she seemed to like me no better for it. Tuss, for his part, pursed his lips and shook his head when he saw the invoices. The cost of the furnace was equal to a whole month’s profit.
But in a sense that decision did change everything. It was just that the change was not one I could have foreseen. The workers who came to install the furnace began by taking up the floor in the blowing room and breaking into the existing foundations. Then they took away most of the material they had excavated, intending to return a few days later and set the furnace directly into the new and deeper foundations they intended to lay.
That night, wandering the glassworks alone and disconsolate, I found myself in the blowing room, staring at the deep pit that had been dug there. It seemed a fitting symbol for my emotions at the time. Most of the room was in darkness, but a bright, full moon laid a single bar of light down its left-hand side, and I saw there, picked out by the light, a small object of a different colour to the surrounding dirt—an object that seemed to pick up the light in a startling way.
I descended into the pit and dug out the small, bright thing. I found myself staring in astonishment at the golden torc you have already had described to you. It was still lying where it had been buried by Petra Veliky seven hundred years or so before.
I knew little about the buying and selling of gold, and still less how to assay its quality. But the solid weight of the torc, and the way its unspoiled brightness could be seen through the crust of dirt upon it, convinced me that it was pure and of enormous value. Probably more than enough to meet the cost of the furnace and allow me to show a profit on the quarter.
But I found myself thinking of another use to which it could be put, and once the idea had come to me I couldn’t push it away again. I hid the torc under a pile of boxes in a corner of the room, and the next day I approached Simona, with great trepidation, to ask her for a meeting.
“You’re meeting me now,” she pointed out, in a tone that was not encouraging.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. I meant, though, outside of working hours.”
Simona stared at me as if I were speaking Greek. “What hours?” she demanded. “What for? What do you mean?”
I meant that we should talk that night, I told her. And no, I was not trying to debauch or compromise her. It could still be here at the glassworks. All I wanted was a little privacy, to ask her something that was of a slightly delicate nature. And to make her—I stumbled over the word—a gift.
Simona agreed at last, but without enthusiasm. And having agreed she avoided me for the rest of the day, as though she had to fortify herself for the coming interview by fasting from my company.
The day seemed like a month to me. I had told Simona to return at ten in the evening, two hours after the glassworks closed its gates. It seemed a safe enough margin, but Tuss worked on until after nine, and finally I had to send him away by telling him I needed to lock the gates.
I retrieved the torc, took it to my office and waited impatiently there for Simona to return. At a quarter past ten I was still waiting. But finally I heard her footsteps—the only sound in the empty building—coming towards me along the main corridor. I surged to my feet and ran to meet her halfway.
When she saw me coming she stopped, and even backed away a little. I realised that I must look somewhat wild, and remembered that she still had no idea why I had asked her to come.
I began to explain, but it was as though my words fell over themselves as they left my mouth. I was reduced in moments to a stammering wreck.
But the one thing that came out clearly was that I cared for her. And I saw her surprise as she realised that; then her perplexity as she considered what it meant. Though she did not speak, her face softened. I think it had not occurred to her until then that I might have human feelings, still less that I might have them for her.
Encouraged, and daring to hope for a happy outcome, I held out the torc. After a moment’s hesitation, Simona took it from my hands. “What’s this?” she demanded.
“An antique,” I said. “Of enormous value. It’s for you. Well, for us.”
Simona blinked. “What?”
“I thought that we could sell it. There are black market dealers in the taverns on Pohranicni who would give us a huge sum. Obviously we would have to break it down into smaller pieces and sell a little at a time. We could use the furnace here to melt it, and pour it into thimbles to make nuggets. You see?”
“No,” Simona said, bluntly. “I don’t see.”
I tried to put my plan into simpler words. “If we sell the gold, it will fetch enough money for us to live like kings. We could go to England or France or Spain and have a life together. A good life, in which you’d never have to work with your hands again.”
Simona had been staring at me all this time, and her expression had changed again into something I found very hard to read. “Isn’t working with your hands meant to be a good thing for a communist?” she asked me.
“It’s . . . Yes, of course!” I stammered. “Of course it is. But here in the republic, with me a servant of the state and you a worker under me, it would be difficult for us to be together. With the money we got from selling this—”
She waved me silent. “You wish to escape from your life here?” she said.
And though it was not that simple at all, I nodded.
Simona returned the nod. “Yes,” she said. “Very well. I understand now. But you should try the necklace on first, Herr Manager. I think it would look good on you.”
She put one hand on my shoulder and spun me round, pushing me hard up against the wall of the corridor. For a woman, she was incredibly strong. With her other hand she slipped the torc around my neck and pulled it tight against my throat.
I struggled, but I was not strong enough to break Simona’s grip. Pushing with one hand on the back of my head, and pulling back with the other so that the torc bit hard into my windpipe, she succeeded in strangling me.
Secretary Tuss found my body the next morning. He contacted the governors of the region and told them I was dead. It was a nine days’ wonder. Every man and woman at the glassworks was questioned at length. Simona kept her nerve admirably, and said like everyone else that the last she’d seen of me was at eight o’clock when the shift ended.
Nobody was ever charged, and nothing came of it. There were far greater tragedies at that time, and far greater scandals. The death of one minor official wasn’t going to make the world stop spinning.
There was, though, plenty of gossip about it on the shop floor. One woman said she thought I’d been murdered by enemies of the regime. Another was of the opinion that the regime itself had done away with me in one of its internal purges.
“What do you think happened to the manager, Simona?” the next woman along the bench asked her.
Simona chewed the question over for a little while.
“I think he wandered into the woods and lost his way,” she said at last. “That can happen to anyone.”
There was a thoughtful silence after Zelzer had finished his tale, but there was no applause. The story had been told to illustrate a point, Drozde realised (though she was far from clear what the point was), and that changed the occasion and the required etiquette.
“It was the torc,” the woman Petra said. “It was cursed, as I said.”
“It was not the torc,” Zelzer replied. He sighed deeply. “I had shown Simona that I was a man, and she was prepared—for a moment, at least—to see me in that light. But then I showed her that I was a greedy hypocrite, prepared to give up all that I believed for a life of ease.”
“It was cruel,” said a little bearded man who might have been one of the monks from the old abbey.
“No.” Zelzer shook his head firmly. “It was not cruel at all, but kind and compassionate. She killed me to save me from my own weakness. I have taken it as a sign that she did have some feelings for me after all.” His gaze had been downcast, but now he raised his head and looked around him defiantly. “I think my story has a happy ending.”
Magda tugged at Drozde’s sleeve, and Drozde felt the movement. Startled, she looked down.
“Now I have to show you something,” the little girl said. “Come on.”
They went back along the dark corridors and left the house again by the back door. There was an iron shoe-scraper on the top step that Drozde hadn’t noticed before. She wouldn’t have noticed it now, except that Magda pointed to it and told her to bring it. Unwilling to argue (her voice might be heard where Magda’s would not), she did as she was bidden.
The moon was down now and the night was dark, but Magda was, if anything, more clearly visible than before and it was easy for Drozde to follow her.
In the ruins of the abbey Magda walked back and forth for a little while until she found a spot next to a mossy stone whose sharply angled sides made it clear that it had once been part of a wall.
“Here,” she said at last. “Dig. The shoe-scraper is like a little spade, only it’s wider and blunter and hasn’t got a proper handle.”
Drozde was far from keen. “What if someone sees? They’ll think I’ve lost my senses!” she protested.
The dead girl scowled at her, hands on hips. “You asked the question!” she said. “And then you said, ‘If you don’t tell me I’ll go away, ner, ner, ner.’ Well, we’re trying to tell you, Drozde. But you’ve got to help!” She held up her phantom hands and waved them, head cocked sarcastically. “Or do you expect me to do it?”
Drozde dug.
It took half an hour, and the narrow hole she made was excavated to a depth of two feet before she found what was buried there. With a trembling hand she drew it out.
It was too dark to see clearly, but she traced its outline with her fingers. A curve of hard, cold metal, as thick as her thumb, which did not quite close into a loop but terminated in two irregular bosses that were twice the thickness of the rest.
“My God!” she whispered. The words seemed forced out of her, and after them nothing else would come.
“Simona Kaiser puts it back where Mr. Zelzer found it,” Magda said. “Then a builder digs it up again when they start to turn the old abandoned factory into a hotel. But that’s not until my time. Well, almost. Almost my time. In my time it’s sitting in a glass case in the little museum we’ve got, with some of the pictures from the gallery upstairs and some relics from the abbey. And there’s a card that tells how it was found and that it’s probably a thousand years old but nobody knows who made it or what it was doing there.
“Do you understand, Drozde? This is your lifetime we’re in right now, because you’re still alive. And you lived a long time after Petra buried the torc—so long that the church they built on top of it has all fallen down again—but a long time before Mr. Zelzer finds it under the floor of the factory. Before Simona Kaiser kills him and then puts it back where he found it because she doesn’t want to be rich but only to keep her job and do the work she’s happy doing.”
“I . . .” Drozde tried to speak. She felt as though the world was spinning under her feet and she might fall headlong. But the sickening spin she felt, the sense of movement, was not fast at all; it was something that played out over centuries, and if she once lost her footing she was afraid she might never stop falling. “Magda! Tell me, when were you born?”
“Two days after the millennium. January the second, 2001.”
“No! Tell me the truth!”
“That is the truth, Drozde.” The little girl’s tone was reproachful. “I wouldn’t tell a lie to you, because I love you.”
“Dying is not so very different from being born,” said another voice. It was Gelbfisc. He stepped into view, walking unhurriedly through the remaining wall of the ruin to stand at Drozde’s side. He looked at her with something of concern in his face. Unless it was pity. “Do you believe, madam, that the soul is eternal?”
“I . . . I hadn’t thought about it very much,” Drozde said.
The Jew shrugged. “Not many of us ever do,” he said. “And when we do, we mostly miss the point. If the soul is eternal, where does it live before it enters into us?”
“I have no idea.”
“Why, in eternity, of course. And when we die, where does it go back to? Eternity again. That’s still where it belongs. But before birth the soul had no name, no memories, no sense of itself. All things were as one to it. After death . . .” Gelbfisc spread his arms. “Why, after death, the soul is the man, the woman, the child it was when it lived. All that’s left of us. Like the lizard of Afric in the story, it has taken the colour of its surroundings.
“That’s what we are, madam. Poor, unhoused creatures, delivered out of time in a second birth that was more painful than the first. Lost in a maze, although the maze has no walls. And though we seem to be tethered to the place of our death, we are free to roam when it comes to the time before and the time after. Only imagine! There is no before and after for us. In eternity nothing comes first and nothing comes later. It all happens at once. And so the time when we walked the world alive, in our flesh, is like a single room in a house that has a thousand million rooms. When we find it we are happy to see it again, or else appalled. Were the walls really that colour? The space so narrow? But most of our time we spend elsewhere.”
Drozde shuddered and hugged herself, overwhelmed. Magda stroked her hair and whispered reassurances she didn’t even hear. “Horrible!” she whispered. “Horrible!”
“Yes, horrible. That’s the word. And the horror enters into us, and breaks us, like a robber’s crowbar wedged into the jamb of a door. We lose ourselves slowly, become grey shadows and fading echoes. You’ve seen ghosts that are like that, I think? Ghosts who have lost what I can only call the self of themselves. The haecceitas, the thisness. Ghosts that become only words or gestures, or less than that, a slight prickling of the skin as you walk into a room.”
Drozde nodded without speaking. All the ghosts she’d met before Pokoj had been of that kind.
“But then someone came,” Gelbfisc said, “and taught us a new trick.”
“Stories!” Magda spoke the word as though it were the answer to a riddle. As though she was saying, It’s so simple. Don’t you feel like a goose that you didn’t guess it?
“When we tell ourselves, we become stronger and more certain in ourselves,” Gelbfisc said. “It is, almost, a kind of magic. But where magicians are supposed to charm spirits into a circle, we charm our own spirits back into ourselves. We keep ourselves close. We do not fade. The one who came—it was as though she lit a fire for every one of us, and so long as we keep the fire tended we can be warm and safe there for as long as we want to. And because that is such a very great gift, because it saved us from the cold and the dark, we honour the one who gave it.”
“I didn’t!” Drozde shook her head violently. “I would know if I’d . . .”
“You would, yes. But for us, no before and after. She always comes. We always honour her. We like to be close to her, because of the strength she gives us. And if in our thoughtless chattering we’ve brought her any pain or unhappiness, we beg her pardon. Truly we do.”
“Yes,” Magda said contritely. “We’re sorry, Drozde. But you said you had to know, so we told you. Please don’t be sad. None of it is as sad as you think it’s going to be, even when the horrible old colonel—”
“Enough,” Gelbfisc said, but he said it very gently. “No more for now, child. Give her some peace.”
“When the colonel does what?” Drozde demanded. But the ghosts were already fading, Magda with a smile and a wave as though—underneath the terrible weight of these revelations—everything that had happened was still part of a game, and the only thing they’d forgotten was to tell their new friend the rules.