"Before the killing begins, the riot looks like a party." Stephen Marche

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Even if we hardly ever mention it, the story takes place during the pandemic. Our sheros find themselves in the situation described by Boccaccio in the 'Decamerone'. The author turns a country house outside Florence into the setting for a meeting of homeless people in 1348. Seven women and three men have fled from the plague to the Florentine hills. Uplifted by feelings of summer freshness and dampened by fear, they place the presence of a terrible death in the shadows of narrative art. The Italian literary edge results from the inclusion of grave oppression and ancient knowledge. The plague gives birth to Renaissance protagonists on a Roman cot.

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The Naval Air Base on Tornado Island in Maryland's Pearl Sound is not just a military airport in an Atlantic fjord. As long as the Cold War dominated world affairs, the shielded site served primarily as a listening post. Hydrophones (according to Wikipedia, "a device for converting water sound into an electrical voltage corresponding to sound pressure") were used to track down Soviet submarines and analyze the audio signatures of their activities. The Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) is subject to a high level of secrecy. The specialists eavesdropping in the ocean even work to the exclusion of the limited base public.  

"The Sound Surveillance System is an American eavesdropping system that was installed in the oceans in the 1950s to monitor Soviet submarine movements." Wikipedia

The specialists are isolated; the men and women responsible for analyzing the audio data are not allowed to interact with the unsuspecting rest of the crew.

The Bell

The sun pushes through the morning mist like a friendly thought. Over the fields lies the scent of hay, mingled with the aromas of lavender and heated dust. The church tower clock of E. strikes nine. I think about the history of the bell. It is older than the town hall. The elders used to say that when it rings, one does not hear only the hour. One hears what is true. It was cast in 1603, commissioned by a farmer’s widow named Lenka, who after her husband’s death donated a large part of her inheritance for “a bell that also wakes the dead.”

The legend went like this: her husband had been beaten to death in his sleep during a raid. From then on, she believed that the ringing of a bell must serve not only the glory of God but also the protection of people—a wake-up call against carelessness, against sleeping through one’s life. The bell was cast in Kassel and brought to E. by two oxen. It survived wars, lightning strikes, looting, and a planned melting-down during the Second World War, which it escaped only because the citizens of E., led by their mayor Gerster, carried it out of the bell tower and hid it in an attic. A crack in the mold gave it a tone the locals came to love. “Our bell does not lie,” they said.

I know the records devoted to the bell, kept in the local history museum: letters in which soldiers mention the bell as a farewell at departure; or a diary entry from 1912 in which someone describes the ringing in the fog as feeling “like the warm breath of God.” Inwardly, I bow to this ancestral superstition. The bell has crossed the threshold into eternity. It belongs to this world and the next, like the Eder, like the hills, like the wind that plays the trickster in the crowns of the linden trees.

“The first met death, the second endured hardship, and only the third found bread.”

Along the Eder tributary called the Marschbach—also the name of a district of Ederthal—live Protestants expelled from Harta in Hungary. They suffer from hereditary diseases: methemoglobinemia and Huntington’s chorea. Their settlement recalls the habitats of Appalachian moonshiners. The Kassel historian Cornelius Blattschneider writes in his Marschbach Saga: from the seventeenth century onward, Germans were settled in depopulated regions of Hungary, Slovenia, and the Banat. State policy often demanded adherence to the Catholic faith. Protestants were forced either to convert or to move on to Protestant or tolerant territories. This explains one terminus of the so-called Swabian migrations in Harta on the Danube. In 1723 the first Lutheran Germans arrived and settled on lands owned by the diplomat Pál Ráday. After ’45, 287 families of German descent were deported. Some found their way to Ederthal–Marschbach. There they were no more welcome than they had been at home.

A grandson of the pioneer generation of 1723 emigrated to Kentucky in America. He appears to have lived for a time under the protection of a First Nation. In any case, he founded more than one family and produced descendants of very different kinds. In the nineteenth century, one of his grandsons crossed the Atlantic to acquaint himself—Americanly frank—with the way of life of his forebears.

I am a late descendant of the noblewomen of Itter. Who does not know that Gepa of Itter, the vigorous widow of Gumbert of Warburg, founded in Arolsen in 1129 precisely that Augustinian house of canons which in due course became the spiritual and territorial center of the County of Waldeck. By then, Itter Castle in the Ittergau had already stood for several hundred years. I know myself to be related as well to the Schwalenbergs. A Schwalenberg and an Itter produced the first Count of Waldeck. Until the extinction of the Itters in 1356, following the assassination of Heinemann III, Ederthal quite naturally belonged to the lordship of Itter—just as Marschbach did, at the ass end of the world. Once again Mainz struck and seized what the Landgraviate of Hesse could not grasp. A few years later Otto of Waldeck briefly brought the gau under his control. Anyone paying attention will recognize the pattern. In the next round, the whole affair passed to the Philips of Hesse-Rheinfels and became an object of fraternal dispute. See the Hessian Brothers’ War of 1469.