DR. GOTTSCHALK had booked Mitzi into the hospital for tests and X-rays before the operation, and they’d marked the day on the calendar in Clara’s kitchen. She and Mitzi were aware of it even if they never spoke of it. But it was on the weekend before the trip to the hospital that Mitzi mentioned the churchbells.
“I hear them all the time,” she said. “I hear them but I’ve never seen them.”
“We should have done that years ago.”
“Well, I didn’t think of it years ago. I’d like to see them.”
“It’s up steep and narrow stairs,” she said. “And you can hardly walk on level ground.”
“Can hardly walk? I beg your pardon. Look at me. I can walk very well with canes. It’ll just take a bit longer.”
She agreed to go with Mitzi to speak to the priest, and Father Hofstätter looked at Mitzi standing there on the stone floor in the church annex, trying not to lean on her canes.
“Mrs. Friedmann,” he said. He shook his round head. “The problem is the length of time it would take you to climb the stairs. Even just half-way up the tower the bells are very loud.” He brought up his hands and made them tremble close to his ears. “As you know they ring every fifteen minutes. It’s automatic these days, for years now, actually. A radio signal triggers an electric mechanism.” He pointed up. “From space. Imagine.”
“How long would it take me?” Mitzi asked.
“I don’t know. But longer than fifteen minutes. Even I can hardly go up and down within fifteen minutes now. The serviceman from the satellite company can do it, but he is young and fit and he’s used to it.”
“My friend Doctor Herzog here,” said Mitzi. “She saw them when she was young.”
The priest smiled. “So let her tell you about them. Nothing has changed. The beams and the bells are the same, but instead of ropes we have the satellite signal now.”
They walked back to the house. Halfway there the bells rang eleven o’clock. “The first one,” she said. “This one is no bigger than your hat. The vesper bell is even smaller.”
They stood on the sidewalk and a group of kindergarten children led by a young woman swirled around them like a river.
“And this one,” she said. She held up a finger. “Just listen. It’s very big. Bigger than my desk.”
Mitzi stood listening. Her lips moved with the number of bell strikes. “That big,” she said then. “Imagine.”
THE NEXT DAY she was back in Father Hofstätter’s rectory. He stood up from the chair by the desk and folded his hands in front of his stomach.
“Doctor Herzog,” he said. In St. Töllden everyone had always called her by her maiden name. “So soon again.”
“Father, I realize what I am going to ask for may be inconvenient. It may even cost money for the technician, but I am prepared to pay for the service call.”
He stood waiting. Behind him they were both reflected in the new climate-controlled glass case along the wall that held the leather-bound books with the history of the parish since the early Middle Ages.
“What I am asking,” she said, and she reached into her coat pocket and took out a one-hundred-euro bill and unfolded it for him to see. Father Hofstätter looked at the bill. He looked back up at her.
“I’m wondering,” she said. “Father, would you mind calling the technician and asking him to shut down the bells for as long as it takes Mrs. Friedmann to climb the stairs and come down again? Is that possible?” She offered the bill. “For the service call.”
The priest hesitated. He took the money and slipped it under the flap of his jacket pocket.
“Well,” he said. “It’s an unusual request, but I think it may be possible.”
And so, a few days before the appointment with Dr. Gottschalk, she and Mitzi, accompanied by a young girl ministrant in a red surplice, climbed the stairs to the bell tower. The ministrant had blond locks and a button speaker to her cellphone in one ear. She was quick as a squirrel. She clicked light switches and she held a flashlight for them to see the oaken treads worn thin over time. On the way up she kept stopping and observing them bright-eyed over her shoulder.
“Take your time,” Clara said over and over to Mitzi. “Always one hand for the railing and the other for the cane. One step at a time.”
“Sorry to be so slow, dear,” Mitzi said to the girl. “It’s very good of you to do this for us.”
“No worries,” said the girl. She took her cellphone from her pocket and looked at the display. This while Mitzi stood resting, leaning against the handrail and the stone wall nearly as old as Christendom itself.
Eventually they did reach the top, and here was the bell chamber exactly as she remembered it. Except that on the south wall, lugged into the stone, was a dish to receive the radio signal for the bell timer. Mitzi stood breathing deeply, taking in the room, the enormous timbers and joinery; the ironwork and the bells in their bell tree, arranged not by size but by pitch.
“My,” said Mitzi. “Imagine.”
They looked out the small arched windows over the town, the warren of tile roofs edged in copper for snow to melt from eaves; the tower at the end of the once-gated market square; the ten-foot sundial high on the south wall of that tower.
The building that had once been her father’s museum was now being used for social housing. Its contents had been moved years ago to the site where the dig had been, and the Roman villa there formed the centrepiece of a new museum and of the town archives. In those archives the key contents of her files would have their own display wall behind glass, the archivist had promised. Her father’s name was engraved on a plaque near the door.
“And what’s that out there?” said Mitzi. “Are those the new suburbs?”
“Yes,” she said. “And subsidized housing.”
The ministrant stood thumbing her cellphone. “Whenever you’re ready,” she said without looking up.
“Are you ready to go?” she said to Mitzi.
Mitzi nodded, and they began the slow descent. The girl first, then Mitzi, then Clara.
SHE KNEW it was from her mother that she had her love of churches. But churches as works of art: no priests, no sermons, no people to distract from just these great vaulted spaces full of peace and art and timeless yearning.
“Chambers,” her mother had once quoted Rilke more or less accurately in the Benedictine Abbey Church at Lambach, “in mimicry of the human heart and, like it, forever waiting to be filled.”
The fabulous Benedictine Abbey at Lambach was one place where young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had walked, as had schoolboy Hitler, when his name was still Schicklgruber and he was just another village lout looking for trouble. And while Mozart had been inspired there to compose his bright Lambach Symphony in G-Dur, young Schicklgruber it was said had seen there for the first time the ancient sun rune set in stone; the crooked cross. The firewheel obliterating all in its path to make room for a new order.
ALBERT’S ASHES had come from the crematorium in a small brass urn with his name on it. Albert Bertolt Leonhardt, and the dates of his birth and death.
At the grave Father Hofstätter uttered a few words in Latin and swung his censor over the frozen ground while the stonemason placed the urn in the wall niche and cemented the glass window shut. She, Mitzi, and Emma in dark clothes and hats stood by the grave. Albert’s name was on the marble tablet now too.
She slipped Father Hofstätter a twenty-euro tip and the stone mason a ten, and then she and Mitzi and Emma went for a coffee at the new restaurant by the post office.
“Have you heard from Willa?” said Emma. “I rarely do.”
“Yes. By email. She’s fine. That trip to Nairobi probably won’t happen.”
“So we won’t see her until – whenever.” Emma sat sipping her latte, her eyes on her mother’s face. Clara reached across the table and Emma set down the cup and took her hand. She gave a squeeze and let go.
Light came in soft and even through the half-curtains, and in the background the espresso machine chortled. A little girl with black hair in braids said something in Turkish and a woman answered patiently in that language.
IN THE MORNING of the day before the appointment, Mitzi came to visit. While Clara cleared her desk and shut down the computer, Mitzi made coffee. Clara was roughly one-third into the translation of the English novel. She’d been working on it steadily, a certain number of pages each day.
They sat on the old elbowchairs in the study and Mitzi said, “None of your girls wants the salon, am I right? Or even one of Emma’s kids. They’ll think it’s beneath them.”
“Your hair salon? What brought that on?”
Mitzi took her time. “The hair salon, yes,” she said then.
“Maybe. Have you asked Josephine? She’s the younger one of Tom’s kids.”
“Josephine, yes. I did, last fall. She told me she wanted to be a fashion model.”
“She worked in an office for a while. Emma says she’s on some kind of social assistance now, some government program. Maybe ask her again.”
“Once they’re on that …” Mitzi waved a hand.
“You could still ask her. Or Emma. Or Tomas. Well, no. And Emma likes teaching.”
They were sitting in the corner away from the desk with the computer. The sun was on the other side of the house, and pale blue light came down from the sky in the window. It fell on Mitzi’s shoulder and on her cheek, and in this light Mitzi’s dear old cheek looked like a wrinkled peach. Her hair was snow-white with just a faint blue cast.
“What’s this about?” she said. “That question about the shop. They do these operations all the time now. Doctor Gottschalk says the risk is negligible.”
“I know. So listen: Magdalena, the woman who’s running the salon for me, has been loyal since day one. She works hard and she’s a single mother. The clients like her and she’s good with the stylists. She runs the place and I’m never even there.”
“I know. You’ve said so.”
“Do you want it?”
“What? Your salon? Mitzi-dear. I’m speechless.”
“Do you want it?”
“I’m not a hairdresser, I’m not even a businesswoman.”
“You could just run it. Own it.”
“No, I couldn’t. I like what I do and I plan to do it for as long as I possibly can. This.” She waved at the desk. “For what it’s worth.”
Mitzi sat looking at her. “I know,” she said. “I’m asking because this afternoon I’m seeing the lawyer.”
“Ah. The lawyer. I see.”
There was a long pause. Cars passed in the street below and not far away the ten-o’clock bus honked its horn at the blind corner with the traffic mirror.
Eventually she said, “Do you want me to walk there with you? To the lawyer?”
“If you could. I’d like that. If you can take the time.”