After being nursed for several months Wallenstein began to recover. His skin ulcers healed, his fingers uncurled and his eyes cleared, he could hear through one ear and control his bowels and spittle. He still lacked the other ear and nothing could be done about the nose eaten away by ants, but the daughter cleverly carved a wooden ear for him and a lifelike wooden nose, which were held in place by a thin leather thong tied at the back of his head.
The herbal remedies had a remarkable effect on Wallenstein’s maladies save for one, a high fever of unknown cause. Wallenstein was running a steady temperature of one hundred and three degrees and would do so as long as he lived, yet for some reason he was capable of sustaining this feverish new condition. What worried mother and daughter alike was the way he talked upon emerging from his coma.
For it seemed that after completing the greatest forgery in history, Wallenstein had inexplicably been converted to the very heresies he had meant to correct. Twice before he had committed himself to extreme religious positions, once to the silence of the Trappists and later to the even more severe silence and solitude of a desert hermitage.
Now came this third upheaval, an absolute belief in the stupefying contradictions of the Sinai Bible he had nearly died rewriting. And since he felt he was living’ at the end of time, he was convinced he had to recite the entire text of the buried original lest its striking confusions be lost forever.
Thus did Wallenstein plunge from utter silence into utter volubility, talking and talking as if he could never stop.
When he awoke on the straw in the morning some of what he said was still comprehensible. As he sat up in bed he had the habit of shouting I am that I am over one shoulder, the shoulder below the wooden ear.
And then as if to reinforce this notion, or perhaps simply because he couldn’t hear through that ear, he would turn his wooden nose to the other side and shout with equal conviction over the other shoulder He is that He is, these primal announcements often repeated a dozen times before he was satisfied with their authenticity, whereupon he would leap from bed ignoring the breakfast laid out for him and go striding off naked through the barren ruins of his ancestral castle in search of the innumerable shifting characters once imagined by a blind man and an imbecile, inevitably finding a crowd of their faces in a collapsed wall and stopping there to harangue the blocks of stone tirelessly for the rest of the day.
Or he would lecture a tree for weeks, the crumbling castle and its wild grounds having become a mythical land of Canaan whose dusty waysides were thronged with shepherds and priests and cobblers and traders of every description, not to mention the forty thousand prophets rumored to have sprung from the desert since the beginning of time.
Darkness and snow, autumn and winds, spring and rain and the heavy heat of summer, nothing could keep Wallenstein from preaching his inspired message to the rocks and trees and bushes he mistook for the multitudes swirling through his brain, Isaiah and Fatima and Christ listening to him and munching olives, Joshua and Judas and Jeremiah listening and sharing a wineskin, Ishmael and Mary holding hands and listening, Ruth and Abraham sitting on the grass and listening while Mohammed’s flying horse hovered overhead and Elijah and Harun al-Rashid eagerly pushed forward, everyone surging around him intent on not missing a word that fell from the lips of Melchizedek, legendary King of Jerusalem.
For Wallenstein now realized who he was. This secret of antiquity had been well kept, but he knew, so down the open galleries of the castle he marched casting blessings and warnings, raising a hand in hope or instruction, arms spread wide as he assayed meaningless proverbs and retold in an impressively loud voice, to no one, the thousand and one dreams tumbling through his mind.
As his body healed these verbal seizures increased in eloquence and speed, the words coming so fast there was no time to form them anymore. Powerful tirades were delivered as mere noise. Whole sermons were encapsuled in half a breath, where they disappeared before being uttered, the unspoken syllables solidly entangled and indistinguishable.
Until the slightest sound from the outside world, even his own footstep, might cause him to forget where he was. When that happened he thrust his wooden ear forward timidly and for a few seconds it seemed he might be lost, driven back once more to the profound silence of that tiny cave he had known near the summit of Mt. Sinai.
But then just as suddenly he was all smiles. A hundred faces appeared in a rock, a thousand faces lined the trunk of a tree, a new sea of admirers surged around him.
Wallenstein straightened his wooden nose and adjusted his wooden ear. He was ready. Forcefully he launched himself into an even more incoherent monologue.
Sophia, the daughter, was eight years old when Wallenstein returned to the castle. Having always lived as a recluse in its ruins and never really known anyone but her mother, she had no reason to consider Wallenstein insane. Her mother had a bloated body and never spoke, Wallenstein had wooden features and never stopped speaking. Such was the world for Sophia, who was humble and retiring by nature. Gradually she came to love him as a father and he was able to feel her tenderness despite the swarms of hallucinatory events clamoring for his attention.
When she was old enough she tried to teach herself the intricacies of business in hopes of repairing the castle to make his life more comfortable. Money could still be borrowed in his name but the moneylenders were shrewd and she was often humiliated.
Sophia the Unspoken she came to be called in the villages, because she never said more than a few words at a time. People thought this was due to shyness but actually it came from a simple and gentle fear that too many words on her part might somehow reveal the joyful secret of her new love, and in so doing, in some unexplained way, cause it to go away.
At night she cried alone in the castle, the next day she went back to face the moneylenders, in time learning to manage the investments. Painstakingly she paid off the debts on the castle and bought back its farms and villages, so that eventually the Wallenstein holdings were as extensive as ever.
While Sophia was still young her mother’s kidney stones finally burst through the organs and she died, leaving the adopted father and daughter alone in the castle. Almost at once they became lovers and remained so for twenty years. During that time, moved by a physical contact he had never known before, Wallenstein had moments of lucidity when he was able to recall the original Bible he had found and describe its wonders to Sophia, recalling as well the forgery he had made.
I had to do it, he whispered, I had no choice. But someday I’ll go back and find the original again.
His voice cracked when he said those words and he began to cry helplessly in her arms, knowing he would never go back because the moments of lucidity were too rare, too brief, for him ever to do anything important again.
The Armenian Quarter? he said with hope. It’s there where I left it. I can find it again can’t I?
Of course you can, answered Sophia, holding him tightly and wiping away his tears, her simple love no match for the memory of nineteen years in the Holy Land and the terror of a mountain cave, the scars in the dirt floor of a basement hole in Jerusalem.
You can, she said, you can you can, she repeated desperately as she felt his body loosen and he drifted away in her arms, the sorrowful cast of his face already lapsing into an imbecilic grin.
After twenty years Sophia became pregnant. She didn’t want to have the baby but Wallenstein pleaded with her and finally she agreed. She also agreed to name the child Catherine in honor of the monastery where he had discovered his new religion.