There were six perfect crab apples on the table. Grigor had climbed the tree and picked them from the tallest branches. Now he polished them and set them in a line. It was beautiful to see how each apple was different. He sat and rested his head in his hands and stared down at the apples. They seemed to smile at him. How easy it was to see their beauty. He would need to try again with Ina.
Winter
By Yuletide, a gray hair had sprouted on Villiam’s pubis. It gave him great alarm. Suddenly he was aging. The idea threw him into a dark depression. At the same time, he felt he ought to start acting a bit more mature—the father of the son of God was a role that demanded some gravitas. Word had spread throughout the entire kingdom about the virgin mother, his wife. Letters of congratulations had arrived, each including an expectation that Villiam represent his fiefdom with perfect righteousness, as every citizen, from Arat to Yxtria, would soon make a pilgrimage to Lapvona to see the baby. This put a great strain on Villiam’s sense of self. He became more self-conscious. His self-confidence waned. He knew he ought to be more self-reliant, but he had been too spoiled his whole life to learn any dignity. He had to try to do things on his own. While in the past he would have asked the priest to pluck out the gray pube, Villiam had to do it himself now, contorting his body to find its root in the gatelike crevasse of his crotch. The self-intimacy did not delight him. He didn’t even show Clod the pube. He was too ashamed—he put it in his mouth and swallowed it. The looming exposure, having to host all the vassals and lords and every measly priest and villager from near and far, he feared, would only cause more gray pubes to appear. Soon he would look old and decrepit. Was he being punished for something? He studied himself constantly in the mirror, looking for more signs of the reaper. Any little twitch or wrinkle and Villiam went into a panic. But he had to hide his feelings. No, he couldn’t indulge in his fear around the others. Rather, he was supposed to inspire strength. Holiness. This caused him great anxiety. He threw all the servants into a frenzy, directing them to fix every little crack or worn edge in the manor. Everything would have to gleam. No longer could he request ridiculous feasts and marathons of childish entertainment simply because he was bored or lonely or hungry. There were more serious matters afoot. He hired Ina to keep watch over the nun, to be her servant and her midwife. And he would need a new horseman, someone he could trust. He had learned his lesson with Luka.
‘I need an unattractive man to run the stable,’ he told Barnabas.
‘Your cousin Jude would do well,’ the priest had said.
Villiam couldn’t refuse. He even felt a bit of pride in giving employment to someone he was related to, as if he were acting out of loyalty to his ancestors. He told this to the priest, who laughed at him.
‘Employing your cousin to shovel horse shit is nothing to boast about.’
Villiam didn’t pout or pounce in response, but rather took the ridicule to heart and let his pride pass. He thanked Barnabas for his counsel and called for Klarek to go find the man and bring him up here. ‘This is not out of loyalty,’ Villiam told Klarek. ‘I would never boast to that.’
Villiam’s self-awareness grew alongside budding self-doubt and, worst of all, self-loathing. For the first time in his life, he was not in love with himself. He had no libido left, and even his appetite for food had started to touch its limit. In early December, Villiam replaced Clod with Lispeth as his personal servant because her company was stiff and removed. Villiam thought she would have a good effect on his self-seriousness. She did not indulge him or draw his picture. That silliness was over. She didn’t laugh or clap or even really listen anytime he complained of woe or pains or worry. He felt he needed this kind of stern support.
‘Why do I feel unhappy?’ he asked Lispeth.
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘Don’t you have any wisdom?’
‘No.’
Villiam missed Clod. That he knew. And perhaps this was why Marek began to have even more appeal to him: Marek’s capacity was limited to servile flattery. The boy’s sense of self-worth was far worse than Villiam’s could ever become. So the lord used the boy as a kind of prop, a measuring stick. In Marek’s company, the lord felt more lordly. They began to spend more time together.
Marek, by turn, resorted to even more pathetic servility to occupy the space of horror that opened further and further within his heart the bigger Agata’s belly grew. He had a growing paranoia that God was punishing him. He went over his life story again and again, but he reached no enlightening conclusion about its moral. First his mother rose from the dead, but not for his sake, apparently. Then his father rose, too. Marek’s young mind could not make sense of it. Since Ina had come, keeping everyone away from Agata, and since Jude ignored him, completely obsessed now with the horses, there was only Villiam. No one else could distract him from the mysteries of his own life. He tried to look at Villiam kindly, not to think the worst of him. Hiding all indications of disgust or resentment took some exertion of will at first, but then it was natural, and he felt better. The exercise forced him to smile like an idiot at Villiam’s lame attempts at good-natured comedy, to agree with all he said.