The Castle and the Plague

Friedrich did not write. Not one letter, not one note, not even a scrap of paper. During the first few months I was unsettled; it was unlike Friedrich to treat me thus. Even during his residence at the Archbishopric, he had a few lines for me every month, though I was but a child then and undoubtedly a woefully inadequate correspondent. Perhaps it was due to my acute awareness that grown men, brothers or otherwise, did not write to their juvenile female family members, that I received his letters with such excessive gratitude, seizing upon them as a sign that unlike Bertram, Friedrich not only acknowledged but even chose to remember me; that unlike my father, Friedrich felt some appreciation for my existence; that this appreciation was so undeniably present in his mind that he would take the trouble to sit down at his table and write a few serious, affectionate lines to me once a month, just as he sat down at that same table to write letters of business for the Archbishop, letters that were carried on silver plates through halls inlaid with gold, letters that passed under the scrutinizing frowns of barons, princes, or even the Emperor himself. To think that I should receive letters sealed and folded by the same hands, lined with the same handwriting that daily blackened the pages of imperial correspondences, was more than enough reason for me to swear in my inmost heart that here was someone for whom I would be willing to do anything, anything at all, because to him I was alive; to him, I was a worthy correspondent.

My love was disproportionate, but perhaps it was only to be expected of me. Childish affection is wont to flow in multiple channels, but since in my earliest days I had been cut off from almost all of them, I gathered the scattered streams into a flood; there were those whom I did not love, but those whom I loved, I loved with redoubled force.

Affection for a mother and a father was equally impossible for wildly different reasons; in the former, all affections had been extinguished in one breath, while in the latter it had perhaps never existed. Affection for my nurses was long forgotten: they had either been dismissed years earlier or had died. Affection for Bertram or Francesca could never find a foothold: they were stranger to me than the stones of this Castle. Affection for Madame Lorenza, my music teacher and constant companion, was very much alive, but it was not without limits. When the pupil marries or becomes accomplished enough to dispense with the teacher’s services, the latter is bound to move on to the next nobleman’s house to oblige the next nobleman’s daughter, and all previous ties are accordingly severed.

What channels were then left for my stream? There was Laureta, but when Laureta sat tending to her person, or when she declined to take part in my less elegant pursuits, it was Friedrich who became my companion. We used to sit, hidden in my room, imitating the exaggerated manners that Bertram had learned while fulfilling his role as Baron M—’s retainer at court; once or twice (such audacity must be credited to Friedrich) we even parodied Father’s scowl. At another time we succeeded in sneaking food from the servants’ kitchen without being discovered. We pranked the footmen and set ants on the doorkeepers. Even Laureta occasionally became the object of our amusement; during one especially dreary week, when Father was engaged in business, we went so far as to place a toad on the chair where Laureta liked to sit. As distant as it now seems, there was a time when we laughed and cried together, when the solidarity born from our shared plight was so fortified with mutual trust that we did not hesitate to defend each other. I would face Bertram’s anger by telling him that it was I who stole his keys when it was really Friedrich who took them away, and Friedrich would dress up as a manservant to trick the maid whose duty it was to have me “on the block” to save me another hour of pain at the risk of earning it triple-fold himself.

Built on these rather flimsy foundations, I nevertheless felt that the walls of our friendship were unassailable. Bertram may laugh at it; Father may treat it as naught; even Laureta may mock us for having no better sense than to build camaraderie on "a mutual feeling of guilt and shame,” but I had no doubt that our walls would never be scaled or taken from without. Little was I prepared for it to be dismantled from within.

When Friedrich finally returned to Kleveden from the Archbishopric during my sixteenth year, he did not greet me with the joy that I felt upon seeing him, but merely smiled and said: “You have grown taller,” before following Father into his study and being closeted there for well above an hour.

“He is busy,” I said to myself by way of consolation; “he is an important man now, he is the Archbishop’s aide; he must have many things to discuss with Father. He will talk to me when he has time to spare.” But he did not. When I joined them for a late meal, he remained silent, brooding over his food without summoning up an appetite, and soon begged to retire early. “He is tired,” was my next excuse; “he has been traveling. He will be better disposed to conversation tomorrow.”

The following day he did indeed visit me during my lesson with Madame Lorenza. He asked after my health and Madame’s; he asked after my progress; he asked, even, if I had received any news of Laureta. But his questions were the questions of a visitor, of a stranger acquainting himself with a household for the first time. I could see from the shadows on his brow that he was preoccupied, that he gave no more heed to our replies than what common politeness required. Never once did he approach what I had hoped he would say: “Madame Lorenza, would you excuse us? I would like to take my sister out for a turn in the garden. I have not seen her in three years.”

This brief meeting established the pattern of all my encounters with Friedrich after his return: short, trivial, ritualistic. Never once did he mention his letters to me; never once did he make me his confidant as he had so often done before he went away; never once did we breach formality and revive the atmosphere of conspiratorial mischievousness that in those early years we had somehow managed to conjure up between us, even in this place, so utterly intolerant of light and laughter. In my inmost heart I could not accept that the young man who returned to Kleveden was Friedrich; Friedrich was still roaming somewhere in the world, and a stranger had returned in his stead, a stranger who did not consider it worthwhile to offer me his brotherly conversation, much less his brotherly love. So it was that I was unsurprised by the absolute silence that passed between us during his sojourn in Florence, though of all the silences in my life it was the hardest to bear, because I had somehow lost his confidence and because I had hoped that his voice, however distant, would break a different sort of silence in my life—a silence imposed on me who had no means of escape.

After his departure, only Madame Lorenza and I remained to sit at table with Father every evening (Laureta had been married a few weeks previously). On these occasions, silence crashed down on me from the dark corners of the lofty ceiling, for Father made it a rule to talk as little as possible to those who were not his equals, and lesser persons never dared to speak amongst themselves in front of him. I did not object to this arrangement. With Father, silence is always more pleasant than speech.

But our silence was punctured by sounds that became more and more unnerving as the evening drew on: the sound of flesh being stripped off the fowl, the sound of a spoon scraping against his bowl, the sound of his glass clinking against the plate, the sound of his unrestrained chewing, the sound of wet fruit falling from the corners of his mouth onto the table. Each evening he would eat as though oblivious of our presence, and after eating, would tear open the letter Friedrich punctually sent him every week, tightening his heavy brows as he scanned the page, whilst his lips remained stubbornly shut. I was certain that Friedrich’s letters carried news regarding Bertram, the Papal court, or the affairs of the Archbishop whom he still served. I was equally certain that Father was aware of my interest in the contents of these letters, which prompted him to never speak of them to me. For that same reason, once he finished reading, he would fold the pages up with unwonted care and place them in an inner pocket, where I would have no chance of perusing it, as he had once found me doing with a letter he carelessly dropped beside his plate, an event which earned me a broken back for two weeks.

What especially aggravated him, I believe, was not the act of reading his letter but my ability to do so, because that ability was born of disobedience. For years Laureta and I had eavesdropped on the boys’ lessons, or had them recited to us by Friedrich; what few pieces of paper passed Friedrich’s hands passed ours also. It was rather late in the day—in my twelfth year, in fact—when Father caught Laureta and me reading and writing off guard. By then there was nothing he could do: Laureta could not be put “on the block” because she was to be married, and physical punishment, however severe, could not blind me.

Undoubtedly it pleased him then, to read Friedrich’s letters in front of me without ever letting me see a single line, for now I know that among those letters were some that were addressed to me; as if my father, in his inability to remove my eyesight, had decided to remove all words from me instead. I was angry, not only with him but also with Friedrich. Every time I glimpsed my brother’s handwriting, I felt convinced, however unreasonably, that his silence was part of Father’s plan to punish me for my years of disobedience, for sitting at locked doors and plucking the apple he had forbidden me.