Where Monsters Dwell by Jørgen Brekke

beard-cutter had struck up a conversation with one of the beggar lads who cadged money from visitors to Piazza San Marco. The lads were not the only charlatans in Venice. Visitors to the city were swindled out of money at every turn: by the merchants, the barbers, and the innkeepers. But the little boys who begged and searched with their nimble fingers in coat pockets and bags were still the ones who did the least for the money. They were more reviled than the Jews, that tormented people who were locked up behind walls in the cannon foundry, Ghetto Nuovo, at night. The beard-cutter liked to talk to the beggar lads. It had not taken him long, nor did he have to spend many small coins, before he had talked one of them into helping him.
    “So you really want me to do it so that he sees me and follows me?” the lad asked after the beard-cutter had explained the task.
    “Yes,” the beard-cutter replied, giving him an extra coin. “I hope you’re fast on your feet.”
    “Fast enough,” said the lad, taking the coin.
    *   *   *
    “Tell me again what’s inside of us,” said the boy, as they ate a breakfast of olives, cheese, and sour bread. He still remembered that night in Germany. They had stayed in a little hut on the outskirts of town, and one evening the beard-cutter came back dragging a dead witch he’d thrown into the river at dawn. He fished her out of the water himself. That was his job. But this time he hadn’t taken her away from town to bury her outside the churchyard. He hid her in the woods all day, and in the evening he brought the witch back to their hut. If anyone saw him, he was risking being drowned himself, or maybe even burned alive. Then he sent the boy to bed, while in the light from only two tallow candles, he worked on the dead body all night long. The boy could not see much from the bed, where he was pretending to be asleep, but he heard and smelled everything in the room—the stench that grew worse with each incision and the crunching sound of knives cutting through bone. The boy had never felt so alive. The next day, when the witch was finally buried behind the church, where the path to hell was the shortest, he asked the beard-cutter why he had done it. Why had he risked his life to look inside a human being. But he already knew the answer.
    “I simply had to see it with my own eyes,” replied the beard-cutter. “There’s a whole world in there.”
    But the beard-cutter had not buried all of the witch. He had kept her skin, preparing it and placing it at the bottom of his sack.
    Now, as they sat in the dawn light in their lodgings in Venice, the beard-cutter chewed his bread slowly. The boy noticed the first gray hairs in the man’s coal-black beard. His eyes were still clear, while the rest of his face had a heavy, fatigued look that vanished only when he was most excited, as he was the morning after examining the witch.
    “There’s a lot of blood,” the beard-cutter snapped, the way he did when he didn’t want to talk.
    “And the blood is stored in the liver, isn’t it?” said the boy.
    The beard-cutter nodded.
    “And from there it rises up to the brain?”
    Again the beard-cutter nodded without a word.
    “And the heart is where the soul resides, right? Is that where God lives?”
    “God lives everywhere,” said the beard-cutter. Finally the boy had made him want to talk. “God lives in all the body’s four humors, even in melancholia, the black gall. God lives in the liver and the kidneys and the heart. But people say that the blood is the life force itself. When a wounded soldier dies on the battlefield it’s because the life force seeps out of him. But it doesn’t mean that he will be abandoned by God.”
    The liver, the kidneys, the heart. The boy listened to these words as though they were the names of angels, living beings he had never seen. But he knew that they also belonged to this world, that they were inside everyone and gave life in ways that were still