The Enterprise of Death Page 22

  Awa dropped down on the other side of the wall and Manuel followed, the planks in his satchel clattering as he landed. Looking guiltily up at the monastery’s church, Manuel wondered how many candles he and his wife had given over the years, how many bright mornings they had entered the building with the rest of the neighborhood instead of jumping the wall under cover of darkness. Then his eyes settled on the small chapel jutting out of the nave and he wondered if it would be a serviceable hiding place if the monks were to hear them in the graveyard and investigate. They slunk along the wall like burglars, which was what Manuel supposed they were, even if they just intended to borrow the property. Isn’t that what thieves always said? We were just borrowing?

  Then a figure loomed out of the darkness, a short, thin figure, a figure with holes punched through it by the moonlight, a grinning skull for a head, too-tight skin clinging to its bones like a damp shift on a sweaty whore. Manuel had seen the dead walk before but he still squeaked in surprise as it stepped back to prevent him from running into it, and as the other three corpses emerged from the shadow of the wall their smell hit him. He had smelled worse, and often, but even though they stunk of little more than wet dirt and old bones he felt himself beginning to gag and clapped a hand to his mouth.

  “You were late so I got a few ready,” Awa explained, and to his horror he saw she had changed back into the moldering nun’s habit.

  “Why are you wearing that?” he hissed, the walking dead momentarily forgotten at her heretical flourish. “That’s not right!”

  “So asking me to raise the dead for you is alright, but wearing this robe isn’t?” Awa crossed her arms—walking around in both the habit and the dress without her leggings had chafed her thighs dreadfully, and to have him whine about what she had done for his benefit sat poorly with her indeed. “Monique found your servant throwing it away and saved it for me, and when I told her where I was going she surprised me with it. She said it would help me blend in, since we’re at a church and—”

  “Keep your voice down!” Manuel almost shouted, his eyes flicking to the dark building leering over the too-small cemetery. “Blend in?! In a churchyard, after dark, at a monks’ monastery?”

  “How is my wearing it here any worse than wearing it on the road or in your house or—”

  “Point.” Manuel clenched his hands into nervous fists. “Point. We should have gone to the hospital graveyard instead, with you dressed up like that. Or the nunnery across the Aare.”

  “Shall I light a—”

  “No! Don’t light anything!”

  “Fine,” Awa groused. “I was just trying to help. I didn’t know your eyes were as good as mine since you walked past where I was sitting on the wall twice before I hit you with the pebble.”

  “The moon’s all I need,” said Manuel, giving the dark building a final once-over before kneeling and opening his pack. He should have been studying the corpses, taking in every detail, but he could not bring himself to look at them until he had plank and charcoal ready. “This commission is for the Dominicans, I suppose, so they can’t object too strongly to our presence. It will probably go on the outside of the wall, though.”

  “I thought you’d drawn a lot of dead men,” said Awa, sitting on a gravestone as he set up. “And what sort of church wants pictures of them?”

  “Most of the men I’ve sketched aren’t nearly so dead,” said Manuel, picking out one of the corpses and focusing on him. Or her, the artist could not really tell. “And this is to be a Dance of Death.”

  “Oh,” said Awa, not really understanding. “You should have told me. I can have them do anything you like.”

  Before Manuel could begin telling her about revivals of medieval tropes and the significance of Death as an artistic image, the four corpses had paired off and begun to dance. The only dance Awa knew was a rather spastic Andalusian routine the bandit chief Alvarez had taught her long ago on the mountain, on the night she first sampled wine, and to keep all four at it she had to focus so intently that she did not realize Manuel was speaking until he shook her arm, breaking her reverie. By this time the dead were in step and did not need her guidance, and as the two whispered back and forth the corpses pranced around the graveyard, kicking their feet and hopping on top of tombstones.

  “Stop them!”

  “Why? You said—”

  “I know what I said! Fuck this, and fuck me for—”

  “I’m stopping them, see? All done.”

  Manuel closed his eyes tightly, then opened them and looked over his shoulder. The undead corpses had gathered around him, leaning in closely as if they expected a great speech. He jumped.

  “Just—no.” Manuel shuddered, not even the continued darkness of the monastery a relief at this point.

  “Right,” said Awa, more than a little annoyed. She had vowed never to use the undead without their permission, yet she had broken her word to herself for the sake of her friend, reasoning that it was a relatively innocuous request. Had she more time, she would have asked if any of them minded, but Manuel had told her people were executed for what they would be doing and they had best be fast and silent, and so on the off chance that she brought back their spirits only to have them start screaming, or worse, she had raised them as mindless ones. Manuel was not being particularly fast or silent himself, and Awa took a drink from the bottle she had brought. “What do you want them to do, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern? Just stand there? I thought you said model, and I thought you said models did poses, and I thought—”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I … is that wine?”

  “Schnapps.” Awa breathed a hot gust of pear vapors in his face as she handed him the liquor.

  “Are you … are you drunk?” He took the bottle and found it half empty.

  “No,” said Awa. “But I fucking will be soon if you don’t get a move on.”

  “So you can pose them, eh?” Manuel took another pull. “I hoped so. Here, hold on a moment …”

  Leaning over his bag, he removed a lump of cloth, which he unwrapped to reveal a small drum. Then he took a similarly muffled drumstick from the satchel, then a flute, then a toy scepter or club, and finally a hat. As he shook out the bits of cloth he had wrapped the instruments in, Awa saw they were linen scraps. Grinning up at her, he said, “Props.”

  Getting the corpses fitted with hat and draped with cloth was easier than having them hold the instruments properly, but a cadaver that had somehow kept its mustache in the grave while losing its lower jaw seemed more adroit than its fellows, so Manuel gave him both the flute and the drum. Awa noticed a definite change come over Manuel as he instructed her and she instructed them on how to pose, the artist’s nerves calmed more by the charcoal in his hand than the drink. Then he set to, and Awa peered over his shoulder, more impressed than ever with both his speed and skill. They drank the rest of the bottle as he worked, which encouraged him to draw wilder poses yet instead of packing it in.

  “Perfect. Think I’ll include Peter in that last one, old Falcky will get a kick out of it. Another mercenary, used to have all sorts of talks on faith and the Church and all. Wish you could’ve met him. Now stand a little to your left, and cross your hands. Perfect.” Awa did as he asked. She had relented some time before to let him sketch her, and her initial disappointment that he was doing so here, in a graveyard surrounded by the walking dead, instead of in his studio, lasted only long enough for her to finish the schnapps. He paused, and as she watched he removed a cord from around his neck and tossed it to her. “Hold it in your, your left hand. Dangle it over your right.”

  Awa picked it off of the ground where it had landed and held it up. It was the necklace with the gold crucifix she had found in his bag the night they had met, along with Lydie’s old doll. She let it hang from her hand, resuming the pose he had instructed her to take.

  “Wait … pull the wimple higher over your head, but not so much’s to cover your face. Good. Now hold the necklace tween your fingers, like it was a
rosary.”

  “A rosary? Oh, the beaded necklaces people are buried with, yes?”

  “Oh. Yes, those.” Manuel supposed people were buried with them. “Like that. Good. I’ll make it look like a rosary on the wall, no problem there. Now turn sort of toward Mustache, him with the flute and drum? Gooooood. Now look away. No, not your head, just your eyes. So face forward, eyes away? Perfect! Fuck, that’s perfect, Awa … no, don’t smile, look … concerned, very concerned. Death’s right fucking beside you, isn’t he, but you don’t want to look, right?”

  “I suppose not.” Awa fought with her face, the battle made all the harder by the admonishment to stay serious.

  “Thank you,” Manuel said at last, stretching his arms and straightening up. Awa relaxed, too, the process not nearly as thrilling as she had hoped once the initial excitement waned. “Wish I’d known you were game, I’d have had you bring another set of clothes.”

  “Tonight is a fortuitous night for Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern,” Awa said with a wink, and before he could protest she had squirmed out of the nun’s habit, revealing the hand-me-down dress Katharina had given her. Its yellow coloration looked jaundiced in the moonlight, and the red ribbon bow dangled lower than it ought to at her waist, and it was still so large that the ribbon-trimmed bodice and puffed sleeves hung down in a fashion that a less fatherly pair of eyes might have thought of as provocative. “What say you, Manuel? Another sketch?”

  “Let’s have the king pose with you,” said Manuel, gesturing to the skeleton with the hat.

  “Why is he a king?” asked Awa as she had the boneman stand beside her.

  “His crown, for one,” said Manuel, “which will look more like a crown once I’m done with it, and the scepter in his hand.”

  “Oh, that?” Awa took the toy from the corpse and waved it at Manuel. “His hands are busy, so let’s put it somewhere more visible.”

  “Busy? Visible?”

  “Here.” They had needed to affix a chinstrap around the skull to get the hat to stay on the slick bone, and Awa jammed the haft of the scepter through this strap, so it jutted up beside his crown. This pleased her immensely, and she nodded at Manuel knowingly.

  “What are his hands busy with, then?” said Manuel as he got his plank into place.

  “Me, of course,” said Awa, having worked toward this, or something like it, all evening. She still had not recounted her farewell speech to Manuel, but as they had drunk and laughed as quietly as they could in the churchyard a deep, breath-snatching guilt had come over her for even thinking of saying a fond farewell and leaving him with false pretenses. She realized that she needed for Manuel to know just how wicked she was, just how fucked up and crazy. She had tricked her friend into being her friend, had acted normal and kind instead of like the beast she knew she was.

  Somehow the words had not come, though, all night they had secreted themselves away from her tongue. In the morning she would be gone, would probably never see him again, and she owed this fine friend the truth, so that he would not miss her or remember her fondly. Then she would return to the brothel and tell Monique the same thing, and then she would be done lying to people, to friends, done with leaving out the nasty truth of who she was, of what she had done. Then she would go back south, to Paracelsus—if there was one person who would not care if she had raped the dead it would be the mad physician, who probably would not mind if she raped him so long as she disclosed her necromantic secrets.

  Manuel was staring at her, mouth wide, and then she felt the finger bones she had guided to her chest worm their way under the edge of her bodice. She smiled a crazed, too-wide smile as she looked at Manuel, and linked her right arm through that of the king of the bonemen. His skull came ever closer toward her cheek, and she batted her eyes at Manuel. Now he would cast down his plank, demand to know what was, no, what the fuck was wrong with her, and she would tell him, laughing or crying or both, she would tell him about Omorose, about what she had done to her corpse and he would hate her, he would tell her—

  “That’s perfect!” said Manuel, and then his hand was off like Omorose fleeing over the glacier, a blur on the plank, and Awa stared at him, her miserable smile losing its wild edge, and she struggled to keep in another of those damn giggling fits. She had rarely suffered them before making his acquaintance. He was some friend, she thought, as Manuel drew the seemingly lecherous king skeleton copping a feel. “Yes, keep looking at me, keep that smile. Perfect. I used to tell old Tiziano, have the girls look out of the painting, really confront the viewer, but I didn’t take my own advice, except with the smut commissions I’d do for the boys, and Tiziano, the master I had in Venetia, he’d berate me, said it was scandalous, the dirty old dog, though secretly I think he rather liked it, wouldn’t be surprised if he started doing—”

  “I fucked a dead girl,” Awa blurted out. Manuel did not say anything, but he did not stop drawing, either. She tried to keep her pursed smile but the choking wind was coming out of her lungs, catching in her throat, tearing up her eyes. “My friend, my mistress. Omorose. I dug her up and I raped her, and I didn’t ask, and her spirit, when I put it back in, wants to kill me, and—”

  She was crying too hard to see he had put his panel down, and then he gently unhooked her arm from the king and held her as she sobbed and blathered, holding her stiffly but firmly. Manuel wondered if it surprised him, this lonely, half-mad witch who had come from nowhere confessing to such a deed. This is what happens, he thought, when you consort with witches, you find yourself in cemeteries hoping the monks don’t catch you and—Fuck you, and fuck them, he thought, and held her tighter. She pulled herself together quickly, and pushed him away, wiping her cheeks.

  “It’s alright,” said Manuel, “we all—”

  “It’s not,” said Awa firmly. “It. Is. Not.”

  “Well, I think—”

  “Get a plank, Manuel, get a plank and I’ll pose, and you draw what I show you, and it will be, what did you say, less vivid, than what I, what I really did, and then tomorrow, when you’re not drunk and graverobbing and excited, then you take your little picture and you look at in the light of day, and you tell yourself then that it’s alright. You show it to your wife, and ask her if it’s alright, or anyone else. I’m a beast, Manuel, a filthy beast, and I raped her, I made her, I did, I—”

  “Shut up,” Manuel said sternly, his tone harder than she had ever heard it. “People will hear, people we don’t want hearing us. I’m getting my plank, so pick your partner and we’ll sort this out right now.”

  “What?” Awa had not been thinking, and now he was really going to make her, which was what she deserved, but—

  “Quickly, Awa.” Manuel had a new plank up. “We’re losing the moon.”

  What she deserved. Awa glanced at the corpses and had the foulest, wettest mold-swaddled carcass walk to her, and knowing it incapable of deception, asked if its spirit would mind her attentions. It would not, and so, glancing at Manuel, Awa dragged it to her and kissed it full on the mouth. Her hands groped its body, grabbed the rancid penis that mashed between her fingers, vomit competing with the sob to breach her mouth, and then Manuel pulled her away from it.

  “Awa,” said Manuel, his face in shadow, his eyes dark as ink. “That’s not what happened. That’s not you. I know you better than that, and if I require one thing from my models, be they whores or ladies, children or crones, it’s honesty. You can’t fool me. Now show me what happened, and don’t be afraid.”

  Walking back to his plank, the artist heard her retching behind him. The internal voices that sometimes had things to say, things to ask, were all silent now, as if frightened into silence by the strange, mechanical change that had come over him. His mind was as blank as the pine panel before him, and taking a deep breath, he looked up. Awa and the corpse were appraising one another, and then the cadaver made its move.

  Awa drew back, but he recognized the coquettishness of her movements, the playfulness of her retreat. Its han
ds were on her, leaving dark smears on the dress, and though he sometimes thought she was glancing at him for help, for mercy, he sat and he watched and slowly he began to return to himself.

  “Stop,” the artist finally said to himself and Awa, and both woman and partner went as still as the dead man’s heart. The corpse’s right hand was drawing Awa’s curl-wreathed head toward his open mouth for another kiss, and his left was pressed up between her legs, her dress hiked almost to indecency, only her right hand on his wrist arresting his assault. Her dress fluttered between his legs in the cold breeze that picked up across the cemetery, and Manuel began to sketch.

  “There,” Manuel said at last, the crown of the moon dipping behind the cemetery wall. “Come and have a look, Awa.”

  She broke the embrace with the corpse, whispering an apology to it and walking to where Manuel stood. Looking at the picture, she could not express what she felt. The image captured her crime perfectly, but the woman in it, her, seemed the victim instead of the perpetrator.

  “Awa,” Manuel finally said after the moon had sunk and they were enveloped in darkness. “I think with some time in the studio, this will be my finest work. I have never had a better model, and I thank you for your patience.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Awa, her voice just as stilted and dead as his. She was not sure what his drawing her had done, save strip her of the little self-respect she had managed to knit for herself from the small compliments he, Monique, and Paracelsus had paid her—and, of course, the praise of the dead, who for so long had been her only friends. The nauseating urge to kill him unexpectedly flared in her, but then he took her shoulder tightly in his hand, his breath hot on her face.

  “We do evil, Awa, that is what we are born for. We sin against one another and against ourselves, whether we mean to or not. We are born into this. There are none, none, who escape the fact that in our very nature is a compulsion to annihilate ourselves. And each other.”