The Bells: A Novel by Richard Harvell

Author:Richard Harvell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Bildungsromans, Fiction, Coming of Age, Boys, Sagas, Historical, Singers, General
ISBN: 9780307590527
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

XII.

One night every week I was alive.

I prayed that Karoline’s ailing aunt would not pass away, and for one blissful year, at least, my prayers were answered. Every Thursday, as soon as it was dark, Amalia and I both escaped our respective prisons. I was there to grab her hand and lead her to our room as soon as the blindfold was fixed around her head. Ulrich was always at his table, his head bowed as if he were asleep. I knew he was not asleep, and that he heard our every noise. But I soon forgot him, and he was no more to me than a statue in that house.

Those Thursday nights on which Karoline had to forgo her weekly journey due to snow or some other impediment, Amalia left a note for me on a windowsill. She had given me a key, with which I slipped into the Duft garden and up against the house. I dreaded to reach my hand up to the cold stone sill; my heart ached if I found a scrap of paper there. Then I would wander the streets alone, hunting sounds that reminded me of her.

In the attic room, I lay beside her on that bed, and she would hold my ear or my hair, lay a hand on my cheek or on my chest, as if without it I would float away. “Sing, Moses,” she asked, and even though I had sworn to Ulrich in this very house that I would never do so, I found myself singing again. Whatever came to me: the Masses Ulrich had taught me and that I had sung for Frau Duft, or the monks’ chants, or Nicolai’s pastorals (Amalia laughed at my arbitrary pronunciation of the French), or Bach’s cantatas, or improvisations on all of these. Sometimes I merely sang notes that would have seemed unconnected to anyone but Amalia and me.

I watched her lay supine, and at my first notes she would gently raise her chin and arch her toes, slightly turn her feet outward, then inward and then outward again, like a violinist twisting his tuning pegs. She did not even realize she was doing this until I told her, but she did it without fail. It pleased her.

Then I always closed my eyes. We both were blinded as I pressed my ear to every inch of her skin so I could hear what rang beneath it. Her body was my bell.

She tried several times to remove the bandage-like cloth that protected my secret. But I stopped her. She thought I was protecting her chastity (for which she mounted no defense). I certainly had nothing of the sort in mind. Any forbearance was due only to my castration. There are rumors of castrati who can still commit the act of love. Don’t believe them. We are cut too early.

Amalia was the first person I ever told of my mother. “We slept on straw,” I said one night, and watched her face for repulsion. There was none.

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