Sitting on the floor, in the dirt, shaking, she started to cry, big tears of anguish. Crying did her good. She slowly regained control.
She stopped sobbing.
Lissy was just a sow. Nothing more. It was stupid, really stupid to be afraid of Lissy. Lissy was just a sow. A sow . . . But was there anything normal about this sow? No. Definitely not. Even so, Marlene tried to regulate her breathing and, after a while, stopped shaking. She rubbed her face with the sleeve of her sweater to wipe off the blood.
The Lissy she feared belonged to the world of fairy tales. Kobolds, witches, possessed sows. All nonsense. It was time to be Marlene the Brave again.
With a sigh, she got to her feet. She glanced at the barred window, then focused on the monolith. That was what she was here for.
She reached out and pulled off the leather sheet, releasing a little dust – actually, less than she would have expected, but it still made her cough. She half closed her eyes and took a step back.
Once the dust (and the spiders’ webs and the dirt) had settled on the floor, Marlene examined what the sheet had been concealing.
Books. Hundreds of them, a perfect stack of books piled one on top of the other, all black and thick as bricks, with the spines facing outwards. A stele of paper and glue. Marlene the Brave brushed the monolith with the tip of her finger. It was cold.
The monolith was like a gigantic version of a children’s game. These weren’t just any books, they were Bibles. She imagined Simon Keller carefully stacking all these volumes, with that same concentrated expression he had when carving his wooden animals. She imagined him with his unlit pipe in his mouth, kneeling at first, then balancing on a stepladder, piling the Bibles ever higher. What she could not imagine was the reason he had done this.
Moving gingerly, she described a circle around the mystery. Not a single book was out of place. The monolith stood solid and motionless at the centre of the maso.
Marlene left the candle on the shelf, went back upstairs to the Stube, brought a chair down with her, placed it in front of the monolith and climbed onto it.
She was petite, much shorter than Simon Keller, who was over one metre ninety, so she could not see the top of the monolith, but with a little effort, stretching her hand, she managed to take a Bible from one of the uppermost layers.
She blew the dust off it, opened it and started to read.
Voter Heini
A.D. 1471–1484
The same handwriting throughout the entire volume. Voter Heini had spent thirteen years copying this Bible. In Latin, which he must somehow have known, since the same hand that had transcribed Genesis, Deuteronomy and so on, all the way to Revelation, had added notes in the margin, which Marlene could not decipher, no matter how hard she tried, because the ink had faded.
Amazed, she closed the book and, making sure the edges of the binding and the spine aligned perfectly with those of the Bible next to it, slipped it back where it belonged.
She got down off the chair, moved it to the other side of the monolith and took out a second book. This time, she did not look through it standing up but got off the chair and sat down.
Voter Hannes
A.D. 1056–1063
Marlene remembered the beam in the pigsty and Simon Keller telling her about Voter Luis’ assertion that the maso was much older than the 1333 carved in the timber. Here’s the proof, she thought.
Voter Luis had not lied. He might have been a child killer, but the was not a liar. Voter Hannes’s Bible was almost a thousand years old.
Marlene leafed through it, timidly at first, then with increasing wonder. This particular Bau’r, now reduced to dust, had filled his Bible not with notes but with drawings. And he had had a remarkable talent. The insects – grasshoppers, bees, ants and butterflies – that decorated the pages of Exodus, Proverbs, Psalms and Judges were so realistic, they looked as if they were about to leap out and vanish into the darkness of the cellar. Beside Revelation, Voter Hannes had drawn a pregnant filly. The whole of Ecclesiastes was framed with vines. St. Paul’s Epistles were a veritable treatise on taxidermy. Deer, squirrels, ibex and a thousand other animals.
Perhaps it was Voter Hannes who had started the tradition of Vulpendingen. Who could say?
Marlene found herself picturing Simon Keller’s ancestors spending their days copying their own fathers’ Bibles. Copying them and commenting on them, century after century.
How had these Bau’rn obtained paper and ink at a time when a book was worth more than the life of a human being? Who had taught them to read and write? Was there an original Bible, a first Keller Bible from which all the others descended? Perhaps a manuscript, Marlene imagined – since the invention of the printing press was far in the future – from which the Kellers had drawn their inspiration. But how had they obtained it?
From whom?
And, most importantly, the most mind-boggling question of them all: why had they done it?
Why?
Out of faith, no doubt. And also to pass the time during those long, terrible winters. Writing and meditating were a good antidote to solitude. Marlene thought about Simon Keller talking to the pigs. Yes, that was it, solitude. She could easily imagine Simon Keller poring over the books for hours on end, trying to transcribe the faded scrawls of past Voter. Just as his father and his father’s father had done, all the way back through time, as far back as the years of the Flood, she thought, echoing the words Simon Keller had uttered.
Faith. Boredom. Solitude.
Or else it was just a way to feel that your loved ones were still alive, their thoughts surviving in their marginal notes.
Or in their drawings.
Marlene got down off the chair. She looked for and found a wooden box and made sure it was sturdy before putting it under the legs of the chair. She then got up on the chair again and searched among those books that looked less damaged.
Here it was.
Simon
A.D. 1962–1966
Just Simon. Not Voter Simon. Because Simon Keller had no wife or children. His would be the last Keller Bible, just as Simon Keller would be the last of his line. Nobody would open Simon Keller’s Bible in search of inspiration or comfort. Nobody would repeat his words the way he repeated his father’s. The Keller name would die with him.
The thought wrung her heart.
She hesitated, then decided against opening this last Keller Bible. She would have liked to, she was very curious, but she could not do it. Snooping through its pages would make her feel dirty. In a way, this book was even more precious than a personal diary. One day, it would be the only proof of Simon Keller’s existence.
Delicately, Marlene put the book back on top of the monolith and got down, feeling sad, determined to leave this place. It had been stupid of her to become so obsessed with the cellar. There was nothing down here that concerned her.
Only solitude.
She grasped the leather sheet, spread it the way she did with bedsheets and covered the monolith. Then she put back the wooden box, stuck the chair under her arm, took the candle and headed for the steps that would take her back up to the Stube. Less than two paces from them, she tripped over a king, a boar, three brothers and a shepherd playing a flute.