The Second Bell

The bus from Würzburg put Mara 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. Mara 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 Mara 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 Mara could stop him. "Come up. I'll show you while there's light."