The Blood Moon over Saint Verena

I arrived in Saint Verena at the hour when the mountains cut the light into pale slivers and the lake gathered them into its patient mouth. The train left me at a platform no wider than a pew; behind it stood a timbered station with shutters the color of dried figs and a clock that had lost the habit of telling time. I stepped down with my valise and a satchel of notebooks, and at once the breath of the place folded over me—wet wood, peat smoke, the iron hush of water. The town clung to a slope as if it had crept there in fear, roofs pressed together, chimneys huddled, streets that narrowed into ribbons between stone facades whose windows were forever not quite open.

“Your name?” asked the porter, a man with a beard packed as tightly as kindling.

“Elias Morven,” I said. “The room at the Gasthof Adler—and a key to the D’Arques property if it can be arranged. I wrote ahead.”

He regarded me as if I had confessed to some minor sacrilege. “You’ve chosen a poor week to visit, Herr Morven.”

“Yes,” I said politely, “so I am told.”

He made no move to lift my valise. Instead he nodded toward the lake. “The Red Night is nearly upon us.”

I had encountered the phrase in folktales that rarely survived a footnote. In the sermons of forgotten monks it signified the Lord’s displeasure; in the marginalia of a seventeenth-century alchemist it meant a favorable hour for the extraction of essences from sorrow. A scholar can live comfortably among such ghosts. I had come to test them against the stubborn matter of earth and brick, to see what remained when the stories were drained of superstition and left to dry like flowers between pages.

Still, there are tones of voice that do not invite argument. “How many nights until the moon?” I asked.

“Two,” he said, lifting the valise after all. “Two, and then best to bolt your shutters and pour your wine inside the wall.”

We crossed the square, and I had my first look at the church: Saint Verena with her blindfolded statue over the door, one hand on a loaf of bread and the other on a sword, as if charity and judgment had made their truce here. The bell lifted its tin cough and was silent again. Beside the church stood the priest’s house, its garden a braid of rosemary and dead roses. Farther down, the shoreline shifted a little, as if something under it had just turned in its sleep.

At the Adler I was met by a woman whose apron had seen more grief than flour. “You’ll want hot water,” she said, “and something to steady your bones. The wind takes liberties with strangers.”

“I am not certain my bones require steadying,” I said, but I accepted the schnapps with gratitude. Its heat moved through me like a lantern set on a windowsill.

She studied my face with that kind of wary hospitality one reserves for people who eat their meals with knives. “You are the historian? The one who sent letters about the old family?”

“The D’Arques, yes,” I said. “I study the narratives communities tell when reason grows thin. It’s only a narrative if there is someone left to tell it.”

“And if there isn’t?”

“Then we reconstruct,” I said. “We let the stone speak.”

At the name of the D’Arques she made a quick sign with her right hand, more habit than conviction. “You would do better to let the stone lie.”

“Your porter said the Red Night—”

“Will pass, as all things pass,” she said, too quickly. “I will send word to Herr Kappel, who keeps the keys for the manor. You will not go alone.”

I washed and ate a supper of trout that had the chill of the lake still in it. Through the dining room windows the evening sharpened itself; the sky darkened in neat bands, and where the light gathered last it gathered over the water. The few other diners sat with their chairs turned uncertainly away from the panes. I felt like a man with his back to a door he has been warned will open.

Later, in my small room under a slanted roof, I unpacked my notebooks. The ink bottle traveled wrapped in a child’s scarf—a relic that belonged to no child I had ever known but which had survived two continents with me and a war I had been clever enough to avoid. I set the bottle near the window and wrote by the curl of it, lines that were supposed to be observations but were already turning into a kind of prayer. Outside, someone went by in wooden shoes with an impatience that made the boards scold. Somewhere farther along the row of houses, a violin sawed two notes over and over, either rehearsing courage or mourning the lack of it.

I slept and dreamed of a hallway that tilted downward, of a lamp that refused to be lit, of a girl standing ankle-deep in black water, her hands held out as if she carried something invisible and heavy. When I woke, the sound of the lake had found its way into my room: a soft licking, like a tongue learning a word.

In the morning I walked to the market. Old women sold apples whose skins were mapped like old men’s knuckles. A boy with a harelip whistled a tune I nearly recognized. I bought a roll and asked for the way to Herr Kappel. The woman who wrapped my bread told me, but as if she were giving directions to a funeral.

Herr Kappel kept an office above the cooper’s yard. He wore a suit too well-cut for a town this size and fingers that had never learned to be ashamed of counting. He produced the keys to the D’Arques manor with a flourish that made me wonder whether anyone had ever returned them. “A beautiful property,” he said. “On a clear day you see the ridge to the east as if you could climb it with your eyes.”

“And the last tenants?” I asked.

He smiled without parting his lips. “The last who paid were the D’Arques themselves.”

“I understood they had… left the town.”

“Oh,” he said, “they left. Each in their manner.”

I pocketed the ring of keys, heavy as iron bread. “I should like to see it today.”

He glanced at the window, which showed a strip of lake like a slit throat. “Today,” he said, “the weather keeps its counsel.”

We followed a road that narrowed into a ribbon then into a footpath. It led through stands of beech that made a gray cathedral of themselves, their trunks close and undecorated, their leaves gone to parchment. Down in the hollows the frost had not yet learned to let go. Herr Kappel spoke only to point out things that could be bought: the trout rights, the meadow, the timber. I could not help thinking of someone who takes you to a graveside and tries to sell you the marble.

Then the trees opened and there it was: the D’Arques manor, set a little back from the lake as if it had once stepped forward and then thought better of it. Three stories, the third tucked warily under the roofline. The stone was local, a pale granite gnawed by weather. Ivy had climbed it but then abandoned the attempt, leaving little black fingers where it had once held on. The windows blinked in the thin light. A balcony whose balustrade had slumped like an old mouth. And the front door, a dark oval bitten out of the façade, with ironwork on it that had been chosen by a hand that loved both flowers and cages.

Herr Kappel stopped two paces shy of the steps. “You have the keys,” he said, as if this were a complete argument.

“You aren’t coming in?”

“I don’t transact indoors,” he said. “If you wish to walk through, suit yourself. I will be here when you return. If not—” He shrugged. “The key will be wherever you drop it.”

I climbed the steps. The first key I tried turned on a resistance that reminded me of a muscle remembering how to be used. Inside smelled of iron, damp ash, and that brittle sweetness houses learn when no one sleeps in them. Dust had embroidered every ledge. The entrance hall was hung with portraits, their varnish cracked into maps of rivers, their eyes busy with opinions they would never voice again. A staircase forked deliberate as a tongue. At the far end, a pair of doors held themselves nearly closed, as if to say that a room was not the sort of thing just anyone could visit.

I walked through the rooms with my notebook open, writing the way people light candles in a church they do not attend. The dining room had a table long enough for ten and a stain near one end the shape of a map I could not place. The library faced the lake; the shelves were narrow and particular, made for the sizes of books one family had believed in. On the mantel a clock had stopped at a time I refused to read twice. And above it, the portrait I had come to see: a girl of perhaps nineteen in a dress the color of first ice, her dark hair braided like two promises and wound at the neck. Her hands were not folded. They were arranged, deliberately, as if they had been told what to do with themselves and had obeyed against their better judgment. The plaque beneath gave the name I already knew—ISOLDE D’ARQUES—and a year that belonged to the century’s wounded middle.

Something in the painting interfered gently with the room. Not the eyes, though they had been given that painterly trick of following the viewer; not the lips, which were too carefully undecided. It was the background: the hint of a window, and beyond it not the lake but a suggestion of red light, as if sunset had been persuaded to sit for the portrait too.

I felt the presumptuous hand of interpretation nearing the canvas like heat, and I stepped back. There is a danger to scholarship when it decides it deserves to be loved.

From the library you could step onto the balcony. The balustrade held, despite its slouch. The lake lay below, as undecided as glass. A breeze came up from nowhere and arranged the water into a few careful ripples. I could hear Herr Kappel cough discretely at the foot of the steps, the sound of a man practicing patience the way another man might practice scales. The mountains were not stern so much as occupied with something else.

And then, as if some hidden hinge had been loosened, the light altered. It did not darken; it concentrated. The sun had found a cloud willing to entertain it. Across the gray surface an unfamiliar pigment moved, thin at first, like wine mistakenly added to wash water. I leaned on the stone.

Do not think of omens; I didn’t. I thought of optics. Of particles, of angles, of dust in the upper atmosphere, of how a scholar’s safety lies in ratios. But the effect did not consult me. The faint stain thickened until it was a band of crimson that crossed the lake from the far shore to the one below my balcony, as clean as a blade. It trembled, as if it were not a thing seen but a thing said. And in the heart of it, not more than twenty yards from shore, a vertical form—a woman, in a dress whose every fold remembered water. She did not stand on the surface. The lake stood under her. Her head was turned toward the house, and although I am not a man to swear to miracles, I will tell you that she was standing on the stripe of red and that the wind had either forgotten her hair or was very gently, very fondly, arranging it.

I might have spoken her name. Or I might have made a sound that had no letters in it. The balcony stones recorded whatever I said and told no one, because that is the good sense of stone. Down by the steps, Herr Kappel cleared his throat a second time, and when I looked at him, he had his hat off and against his chest the way people hold silence inside their clothes. When I looked back at the lake, the band of red was only a bruise on the water, and the woman had become a relationship among waves.

We pretend we are faithful to what we see. More often we are faithful to our desire to see it again.

I closed my notebook without having written the only thing worth writing. In the hall I paused before Isolde’s portrait. No change: the undecided mouth, the careful hands, the red suggestion behind her shoulder that might have been sunset or a painter’s habit. But a small, impermissible sensation had taken hold of the room—as if the air had been recently read aloud to.

Outside, the bell of Saint Verena lifted its cough and found voice. I set the heavy key ring on the table and separated the one I would keep. “Two nights,” the porter had said. If I had known how long a pair of nights can be, I might have chosen another town or another century. As it was, I stood at the threshold of the D’Arques house and looked back at the lake, which looked back at me with the old patience of deep water, and I bowed—because at some point, even a scholar remembers that doors have their etiquette, and that a lake is the oldest door of all.