The Second Bell

The bus from Würzburg put Elias down in the market square of Kesselbach at a little after six on a Tuesday evening at the end of October, with one suitcase and the last of the light going red behind the church.

It was a small town and a whole one. That was the first thing anybody noticed in 1947, coming in from the cities: whole roofs, whole windows, a fountain with its stone saint still on top, a row of half-timbered houses leaning together over the square like old women at a wall. The war had gone round Kesselbach the way a river goes round a stone. It had taken other things. In the window of the bakery a card said No white bread until further notice, and in the window of the ironmonger's a smaller card said, in careful capitals, Still waiting for news of: Hans Rieger, Karl Zinn, Matthias Haslinger, and three more names below.

And above it all, at the west end of the square, stood the tower of St. Veit's: square and tall and grey, older than anything around it, with a wooden gallery running round all four sides near the top and a steep slate cap above that. Its clock face said ten past six. It was right. Elias stood a moment in the emptying square with the suitcase, looking up at it, the way one looks at a house one is about to live in. Somewhere up there, behind the louvred openings under the cap, was a bell. And somewhere up there was the room that came with the job, and the cot, and the stove, and the night, every night, from ten until five, all winter. A pigeon went up from the gallery and circled once and came back.

A priest was waiting under the church porch, an old man in a patched cassock with a scarf wound twice round his neck and a face like a kind walnut.

"You came," said Father Eibl, as though there had been a reasonable chance Elias would not. "Good. Good. Nobody else answered the notice, you know. Not one. Two hundred and fourteen steps, and the night, and the cold, and the pay is a room and soup." He took the suitcase before Elias could stop him. "Come up. I'll show you while there's light."

"Who rang it before me?" Elias asked, as they went in under the tower arch.

"Anselm Hüber," said Father Eibl, and smiled. "Forty years. He came up these stairs every night of his life from nineteen hundred and seven, and rang the hours, and kept the fire watch, and wrote it all down in a book, and never missed a night but the one when his wife was having their daughter, and then he sent his brother." He began to climb, slowly, one hand on the rope rail. "He died in July. In his sleep, up there, in the cot, between three and four in the morning. The baker's boy found him at five, when he brought the rolls. He'd rung three." The priest was quiet for a few steps. "He'd have liked that, I think. To go on the hour."

"Was he never lonely? Forty years of nights?"

Father Eibl considered it, climbing. "He said not. He said the tower was good company. He used to say it talked back, if you listened long enough." The old man laughed softly. "He said a great many things, Anselm. Most of them about the weather."

The stair wound up inside the thickness of the tower wall, stone worn into shallow dishes by six hundred years of feet. Arrow-slit windows let in the last of the evening, one red slot after another. At the top was a low door, and through it the Türmer's room: whitewashed walls, a black iron stove already lit, a cot with grey blankets, a table and a chair, a shelf, a hook, and a bell rope coming down through a hole in the ceiling, its end wrapped in worn leather.

Outside the window the gallery ran round the tower, and beyond it the whole town lay below in the dusk, roofs and chimneys and the river shining in its bend, and the vineyards going dark on the hills.

"The Wächterin is up there," said Father Eibl, nodding at the ceiling. "The little one. Sixteen-forty. She's the only one left." He put the suitcase down. "There used to be two."

He did not say any more about it, and Elias did not ask. In the ceiling, beside the hole where the rope came down, there was a square wooden trapdoor with an iron ring, and a ladder fixed to the wall beneath it, and the priest's eyes went to the trapdoor once and away again, as one's eyes go to a door in a house where somebody has died. They waited together while the dark came down and the lamps came on below, one by one. At ten o'clock by the old man's watch he put Elias's hands on the leathered rope, his own over them, and pulled, and the little bell spoke overhead, bright and clear, ten times, out over Kesselbach.

"There," he said. "You're the Türmer now. God keep you." And he went down the stair, slowly, and Elias listened to his steps go round and round and down until there were none.