Taps on the Window

I had no weapon but my iron lamp and held it up toward the stranger to defend myself if he tried to prevent my escape. He was alone and stood perfectly still, as if trying to go unnoticed. Water from the blocks of ice was soaking the soles of my boots and came right up to my foe’s feet. He approached slowly, taking care not to slip and fall.

The hood fell back and revealed Clarissa’s face. It was one of those moments when you know the world is as it should be, believe everything is good, and trust you will always be safe. In between half-spoken words, gulps of air, and incomprehensible gestures, I managed to ask her what she was doing there.

“I wanted to see how my father spends his nights. Evidently he’s tired of learning from the living and now takes lessons from the dead.”

The bishop glowered at our hugs and kisses, perhaps worried the heat we were radiating would melt the blocks and cause him to fall.

A gust of wind extinguished the last flame, and the bishop was left alone in the dark. His performance would go on to the very end, when his head would drop, his arms would fall, and he would abandon what was left of his dignity and collapse with the ice floe. I pulled the iron door closed, and we walked toward the exit.

“What will you do, now that you know the truth about your father’s work?”

“Better yet: What will the truth do with me?”

The tombs looked like forgotten pieces in a bygone game. I asked Clarissa if her condition really did turn her into an automaton.

“That’s just my father’s imagination. He thinks his inventions and I are related, that we share family traits.”

“But the other night I saw you completely immobile, as if you were asleep.”

“Doesn’t everyone fall absolutely still, as if struck by lightning?” she asked. I was unable to reply when she kissed me. “Who could mistake me for an automaton?”

Kolm was waiting for us outside the gate but left before we got there, flicking his hand in a gesture of exhaustion, reprimand, boredom. We hurried back to Clarissa’s. Though we had witnessed something momentous, we spoke of inconsequential things—the silly conversations sweethearts have. A light was still on when we arrived.

“My father only ever works at night. One day he’ll go blind.”

I didn’t even glance at the inventor’s window; he meant nothing to me right then. I was saying good-bye to Clarissa without knowing for how long. She was part of a mechanism of appearances and disappearances whose frequency I couldn’t predict.

Late every night thereafter, I would tap lightly on Clarissa’s window, hoping she would open it, but she never came. Perhaps she was sleeping so soundly that nothing could wake her; perhaps her father had discovered her late night excursion and kept her locked away in a room with no windows. The house was dark, except for Von Knepper’s study. Night after night, I stayed away from his window. Then, when I had grown tired of waiting or perhaps because I had decided it was the last night I would keep watch, I peered in through a crack.

All four walls and several easels were covered in meticulous sketches of the bishop’s face, neck, and hands in various positions. The drawings were perfect, but the model had imbued them with a truth the artist hadn’t noticed: every detail—the shape of his ears, the corner of his mouth, the emptiness in his eyes—betrayed the lines of death.

The window suddenly opened and Von Knepper’s face appeared before me, looking pleased rather than angry, as if, on identical nights, he had kept watch hoping to find me.