His wish (the last wish, the wish to undo) can't be granted; he has to stay, and take the old porter's place. The next morning, he is told, the Knights will gather at the harbor, and board their red-sailed ships, and sail away; but Christian will have to remain alone at the castle, and take up his duties, until—perhaps—another appears, who has done what he has done, and is willing to replace him.

Many gloomy thoughts were running around in my head, about what I was going to do, and how I would pass the time sitting at this gate for the rest of my life; and my final thought was that, old as I was, and in the nature of things not having many more years to live, this anguish and my sad life would quickly finish me off, and then my doorkeeping would be at an end. On the one hand it bothered me terribly that I had seen such gallant things, and must be robbed of them. On the other I was glad that at least I had been accepted and found worthy, and not forced to depart in shame.

So after the king and his lords had bid each one good night, the brothers were conducted into their lodgings for the night. But I, wretched man, had nobody to show me where I was to go, and all I could do was to go on tormenting myself; and just so I would be always conscious of my function, I was made to put on the iron ring that the old porter had worn. Finally the King urged me, since this was the last time I was likely to see him as he was now, to remember that I should always behave myself in accordance with my place, and not act against the order. Upon which he took me in his arms, and kissed me, and by all this I understood for certain that in the morning I must in fact sit at my gate.

That's the end.

Except it isn't. The book doesn't, Pierce found, end. It has no ending; it stops, in midsentence, right there. There's nothing more but a brief statement not in Christian's own tale telling but in the book's own voice: Here are missing about two leaves in quarto, this note says, and he—Christian, the author of this tale—though he supposed he must in the morning be a doorkeeper, returned home.

What? Pierce stared at the page in astonishment.

Why was Christian allowed to go home? He should have gone on sitting by that door, from that day to this. Was the wrong that he had done not a wrong? Did his honesty in admitting what he'd done win him a pardon? If so, who pardoned him, who commuted his sentence? If the Golden King could not, who could? What other sinner came, and confessed, and took up the post in his stead? Did his author take pity on him? Or did Christian simply stand up, forgive himself, and walk away?

Like The Tempest, this so-called comedy—which started so much trouble in its time—had at its heart a dark spot, a contradiction, only made right by the assertion of a happy ending, the happy ending itself an abnegation. Ile break my staff.

Or maybe the desperate writer had only spun this twisted little sentence in order to tie the mystery up with it, shut the box he had himself left open; maybe he couldn't think how to end it, and just finished it up instead.

It seemed suddenly very important to Pierce that he know. He knew the story wasn't true. But he wanted to know what it meant. As though he had crossed the sea and come here only to learn.

De te fabula. Had he like Christian looked on Venus bare, too long or too soon, and now could never be a knight, be a brother, never find or make or effect any good thing? He looked at his palm. Was the best he could hope for just a chance to go home?

9

Rosie—I am writing this on the train from Heidelberg. I am going the wrong way, not south but north. We are going to be in Frankfurt in twenty minutes. Where G. Bruno wrote and published his last books, on atoms. There's a star next to Frankfurt in the guidebook, one of Kraft's. It was the book center of Europe

There in midsentence that postcard, of Heidelberg Castle by moonlight, was filled, and Pierce took out another to continue: Frankfurt, the river Main. Prewar, found in a train-station kiosk. He had a pocketful.

and still is. I will get off and go stand in the streets. I don't know how else to proceed. I don't understand how Giordano Bruno fits. By the time of the Winter King and the Bohemian thing he was 18 years dead and forgotten by everyone. No matter what Kraft thought. Weather is cold.

Snow fell in the streets of the Altstadt. Black Ys printed by Frankfurters’ diverging footprint and tire-tread paths through the whitened lanes and streets. A huge red church of St. Bartholomew, where the electors once met to choose their emperor, and where the chosen emperors were crowned. Rudolf II sat for hours at his coronation listening to the reading of the Capitulation, an ancient volume detailing every free city's rights, every bishopric's standing, every duchy's ancient liberties, every crown's limits and traditions and exclusions (in Kraft, this was all in Kraft; Pierce knew nothing of it himself, he seemed to know less the farther from home he got) and in all those exclusions and freedoms and restrictions, which made his empire as ungovernable as life itself, the sad young man knew how dear and how complete his empire truly was: complete, and dear, because at its center sat his own person. Its center was his own person, still and empty. If he could only be calm, and keep his seat, and not try to do what could not be done, all would be well.

Fellowes Kraft liked empires that were so old, and grown so complex, that they could be named, and belonged to, and traveled in, but not controlled: that had frontiers, but inside were limitless. Pierce thought he did, too.

Just at this early hour of the day the Dom was geschlossen. After a time Pierce returned in the gathering snow to the Hauptbahnhof to wait on a bench for the next train to the south. The cold was appalling, American cold, Minnesotan, Alaskan. In his bag, with the red guidebook and the new journal, was the only other reading matter he had, which was Kraft's memoir, Sit Down, Sorrow.

He had always known Kraft. So it seemed now. He knew Bruno because of a book Kraft had written about him, a book Pierce had at first thought was a novel too, but it wasn't. Bruno's Journey, Kraft's first, though Pierce in those days didn't notice that sort of thing either; books were books, all coevals in Bookland. Would he have been surprised if, in that year 1952, some agent of Y-shaped Time had come to tell him that he would be allied with Kraft in life and in death (Kraft's), repeating Kraft's journeys and his thoughts? He had not long ago marveled at the coincidence of his path and the older man's, and—anyway at the time—found in it a confirmation that the world held wonders: not that his own fate might be among those wonders, but that perhaps he actually had a fate, greatest wonder of all. Now he felt oftener that he rode an eternal bus, Kraft's life, which he could never get off.

In 1930 I closed my childhood like a book, and took ship for the world, Kraft's memoir began, and a closed book that childhood remained, though there were hints and phrases that revealed a little, hints that Pierce didn't think were accidental. He was without a father, had grown up alone with a weirdly feckless mother. Never married, of course, and without other relatives that he named; had never corresponded with others in the writing life, never formed literary friendships, or wasn't interested in detailing them; his best friend his dog, Scotty. There was no way to tell how he had come to write the books that he had written, why these anyway and not others; nor why they were the way they were. He did give an account of the growth of his erudition, and you could take that as an account of his heart too, maybe. Pierce, whether from pity, fear, or impatience, found it hard to read more than a page or two at a time; impatience, maybe, that the reason for his pity and fear were not being revealed, and would not be: not in here.