The Confession of Voices

First, a woman spoke through his mouth. Ostap the cantor stood in the inn, clutching his throat, and the voice was pleading: "Don't beat him, master, he's still small." Then a child's sobbing tore out of there, a dry old man's laughter, and a lordly phrase that should long ago have been buried in the earth along with the bones. Only after that did Ostap look at me and whisper: "The words are not mine."

It chilled me to the bone. Ostap pressed his palm to his throat, as if some small wet creature were stirring in there, and said, now in his own voice: "I must tell it while it allows me." I moved the candle closer and understood: before me sat no drunkard and no man possessed. Before me sat a man whose throat had become a window for other people's voices. I sat down across from him, so close that only the trembling of the candle remained between us.

The light fell on his face from the side and made his mouth dark, like a crack in a door. Then he began his story. I was the cantor at the old church, and I thought I knew how a word should sound before God. I read the psalms, kept the church records, sang at the service, and taught my voice to obey the fear of the holy altar. And three summers ago I was called to the manor: to read the papers of the late lord - a will, letters, debts, and one confession.

The messenger said they needed a man with an obedient church voice. Not a scholar. Not a judge. Not one who invents words, but one who gives them a body without too much will of his own. I could not understand that strange request. Nor did I yet know that there are words that do not want to be read, but want to be spoken again. At the manor everyone was polite the way people are polite at the bedside of a man with the plague. The serving girls did not name that place.

When they had to mention the door under the storeroom, they lowered their eyes and said: "down there." The steward would correct them: "The lower storeroom." But he pronounced it as if he were not saying a name but setting a lid on a coffin. Even the dogs under the porch did not bark. They swallowed the sound, as if afraid it would come back to them with someone else's teeth. I was given the dead man's papers.

The paper was thin, damp to the touch, and it clung to the fingers as if it had just been pulled not out of a chest but out of someone's mouth. Every sheet seemed to remember the hand that had lied over it. And the confession was sealed with black wax. Toward evening came Erazm, the physician of the manor: dry, clean, like an instrument for bloodletting. He handed me the key. The key smelled of wax, of sour human breath, and of cold iron.

Erazm said that the lord had taken an interest in the nature of the word. Sound, he said, does not die when the lips close. It only seeks a darker place where it can lie and ripen, like medicine in a vial or poison in a liver. I answered with a psalm, for that was how I had learned to guard my insides. Erazm's face did not stir.

Then he showed me a note in the will. It said: the last confession must not be carried out of the lower storeroom. It must be read by a man with a church voice in the very place where it is locked away. "The paper can be carried out," said Erazm, and pointed at my throat... "But the word does not always follow the paper." And so I found myself on the stairs beneath the storeroom.

The stone there was damp, almost white with old dust, and the air left in the mouth a taste of raw flour and of stale water that had stood in the dark for years. The door below was locked with an iron hasp. A black cord had been threaded through it, and the knot was sealed with wax bearing the lord's mark. I pried the seal up with my finger. The wax cracked, came away from the cord and fell at my feet. Then I put the key into the lock.

Beyond the door stood shelves, chests, scrolls, sealed vials, and a large dim glass, like a mirror that had long since stopped showing faces. First I heard whispering in the walls. Not real voices. More like spoiled breathing: unspoken prayers, dying phrases, curses, betrayals, oaths, a child's "I don't want to," an old man's "forgive me," a short "guilty." Under my tongue words began to stir, like insects.

I began to read the dead man's confession, but the first line fell apart like a body in fever. Instead of "Lord, have mercy," out of my mouth came: "Don't beat him, master, he's only a child." The voice was a woman's, and so close it was as if that woman stood with her forehead pressed against my teeth. I bit my tongue until it bled. The blood tasted of ink.

Erazm was writing it down without looking at me. "A man," he said, "is not always the master of his own voice. Sometimes the mouth is only a window." I clenched my teeth, but through them crawled a dry laugh, a child's prayer, then an old man's oath, then an order to hang a man before dawn. My throat became a narrow passage, and from the other side those who had been given no word in life were already pressing in.

Then Erazm slid the dim glass forward. In it I did not see my face. There were only lips: a child's, blue ones, split ones, toothless ones, a woman's, pressed together until they bled. They moved without faces, like fish under the ice. And not one of them asked for deliverance. They asked for a mouth. Then I understood: the confession was not a repentance but a lock. On the last line the words stood black: "I did not repent. I only kept silent."

Those were the lord's words. The key. I spoke them aloud, and behind the dim glass all the lips opened at once, as if they had heard their name. The shelves trembled. The sealed vials chimed from within. And I understood: it was not a reader they needed. They needed only his throat and his mouth. They let me go at dawn. Since then I am afraid to drink water, for it soaks the words loose in my throat, afraid to eat bread, for it pushes them out.

I can stay silent for hours, but silence is only a room. And beyond it, something between my lips is choosing whose voice to answer with the next night. Ostap fell silent. For a long time I was silent too. But on the table, where he had gripped his mug, there remained a black wax seal. On it was not the lord's mark, but the print of a tongue, like the wet trace of a word. Ostap went pale. "It was not on me," he whispered. I covered the seal with an empty mug.

And then, out of the darkness, came a thin, biting voice. Not Ostap's. Not mine. "Do not open it," it said. And a moment later, more quietly, it added: "I have already found someone to speak through."