Hamlet Read online

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” Horatio asked him.

  He was lying on Hamlet’s bed.

  Hamlet was sitting on the stone floor, in a corner, the corner farthest from the door. The prince was eating strawberries. He smiled. It was the first time Horatio had seen him smile since the funeral. Hamlet traced a line on the stone with his finger. He looked down, watching the invisible line. “I don’t believe in floors,” he said. “I don’t believe in lines.”

  “But do you believe in ghosts?”

  “I don’t believe in walls or ceilings. Or stone. I don’t believe in people. I don’t believe in strawberries.”

  “But ghosts?”

  “I don’t believe in anything you can see or touch or taste.”

  “So you do believe in ghosts?”

  Hamlet smiled again. He wriggled on the hard floor. His eyes, his gray eyes, lifted and met Horatio’s. “My bum’s getting sore. Let’s play football.”

  They played one-on-one for a while, on a vast grassy area across the river. Toward the trees the frost remained from the night before, cold and hard and beautiful. Soon a couple of officers’ sons drifted toward them, looking hopeful. Hamlet invited them to join the game, and, full of thanks, they rushed in. At first they were too nervous of Hamlet to mark him closely, or to tackle him, but gradually they forgot that they were playing with the crown prince of Denmark, and the little match started to flow.

  Afterward, on their way back to Elsinore, Hamlet and Horatio stopped near the footbridge to look down into the river. The water, swollen by the heavy rain and melted snow of a false spring, rushed past. It had the gray-green-fawn color of a giant snake. Hamlet stared down the steep bank, wondering how it would be to lose his footing, to fall into the fatal flow and be carried to the ocean.

  He threw in a piece of bark and followed it with his eyes as it swirled away. Horatio laughed. “Watch this,” Hamlet said. He flicked a flat stone across the water. It skipped three times, then sank violently.

  Horatio picked up the football. The boys crossed the bridge. Every few steps Hamlet spat into the torrent, watching the pitiful sparrow of his spit lose itself in the spume.

  They swung right and walked up the hill toward the castle. Elsinore dominated everything. The shadow of the great gray wall came down the slope to meet them. Hamlet’s white hair stood out like a splash of snow. A swallow flew out of the shadow, swerving as it saw the two boys. To their left, the cemetery, stretching away toward the lake, looked bleaker than ever.

  Hamlet hugged himself against the fierce cold. Horatio nodded at the white picket fence, the endless rows of crosses. An occasional headstone or small mausoleum was the only interruption of the monotony. The gentle slope of the ground made it difficult to see where the land ended and the distant water began.

  Horatio squeezed the football with both hands. “Have you been back here?” he asked. He looked away nervously, though, as soon as he said it. How would Hamlet react? At the best of times, it was difficult to reach the prince’s heart, to find his feelings, and this was not the best of times.

  Yet Hamlet answered easily enough. “No, I haven’t been back.”

  Horatio cleared his throat. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be here for the funeral.”

  “You made it to the wedding.”

  “It wasn’t long . . .” Horatio didn’t finish the sentence. Hamlet glanced at him, then gave a grimace that could have been another smile. Horatio was used to the expression; he remembered it from when they played football on Saturday afternoons. They had never won a game.

  “It wasn’t long between the funeral and the wedding — is that what you were going to say?”

  “Well, I guess if your mother is, you know, happy . . . I mean, it’s good that she’s got someone. . . .” Horatio, red-faced, cursed himself for starting this conversation. The boys moved a little farther along the path, toward the small open gate in the side fence. Tucking the football under his arm, Horatio bounced the flat of his hand on the top of each picket.

  “Oh, she had a good reason for getting married again so quickly,” Hamlet said.

  “She did?”

  “Yeah. Oh, definitely. It was to save money.”

  Horatio stopped in his tracks and stared at Hamlet. His friend had startled him again. “To . . . to save money?”

  “Yeah. See, she recycled the flowers. Grabbed them off the grave the day after the funeral and carried them up the aisle for the wedding.”

  Horatio laughed uneasily. As usual he could not think of the right thing to say, so he went back to facts, to mathematics. “How long after the funeral did she get married?”

  “Two months. Two months, six days . . . plus, say, two and a half hours.”

  “I guess that is pretty quick.”

  “She would have used the leftover sandwiches, but they were drying out a bit.”

  “Those flowers must have been tougher.”

  Swerving, Hamlet avoided the gate and led the way toward the northern end of the cemetery. He called back over his shoulder, “Do you ever go and visit your mother?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t visit my father. Anyway they’re going to move him soon. They’re building that enormous sarcophagus thing over there. But I don’t think people are in their coffins. They escape before the lid’s screwed down.”

  The two boys stopped short of the foreigners’ section and leaned on the fence. They gazed at the first row of headstones. The branches of a black tree cavorted in the wind. In this direction the outlook was painfully flat by Horatio’s standards; he had to glance back over his shoulder, at the mountains in the distance. His family came from the hills.

  When he looked at the graveyard again, a man with a shovel on his shoulder was walking down the gravel path, past a row of fresh mounds. Perhaps he buried my mother, Horatio wondered. He looks so old. Would he have been too deaf to hear her fingers scratching on the lid? His nightmare was that his mother might have been alive when she was buried. He liked Hamlet’s idea that people escaped from their coffins.

  He paused opposite her grave. It was directly ahead of them, in the second row.

  Hamlet interrupted his thoughts. “Perhaps they’re together now.”

  Horatio twitched, trying to respond. “Do you think there’s a heaven? And a hell?”

  “If there’s one, there must be the other.”

  “So you believe in them?”

  Out here in the cold, clear daylight, Hamlet’s answers were more natural. “I don’t know. I suppose I do. My family’s so religious. They have to be.”

  He picked up a handful of gravel from the path. Hunching his neck and shoulders into the collar of his coat, he started pinging pebbles against headstones. Suddenly Horatio caught his hand with a strong grip.

  Hamlet, unaccustomed to being touched, looked down at the white knuckles on the pale skin, the fist that held him so tightly. Then he realized. “Was that your mother’s grave? I’m sorry. I meant no disrespect.”

  As Horatio released him, Hamlet added, “You’re getting some muscle.”

  They turned to walk on.

  “You’re strange,” Horatio said.

  “I’ve had two fathers in four months, my uncle’s suddenly my stepfather, my mother’s my aunt-by-marriage, my cousins are my stepsisters. You think I should be normal after that?”

  “But you’ve always been strange.” Horatio meant no disrespect either, but later he remembered saying it and was shocked at his boldness. To the crown prince!

  They picked their way through the clods of mud and the holes in the ground, skirting the piles of muck and frozen human dung. The land around Elsinore was thinly grassed, and the moat dark and smelly. A dead swan floated near the bridge. Yet the grimness of the scene was relieved by the deep green of the pi
ne forests and the intense white of the snow-capped mountains. From this direction, in this light, the lines of the castle seemed milder, giving it the air of a benign but shabby grandfather. The stone walls, weathered by rain and wind, were a soft gray. Horatio, son of a noble penniless family, eight years old when he arrived at Elsinore with his mother, he to be a companion for the prince and she the queen’s lady-in-waiting, now thought of the ancient building as home.

  They entered under the shadow of the portcullis. The gargoyles dripped like boys with runny noses. Vivid in red and orange, the guards raised their spears in salute. It seemed to Horatio that there was something sulky about them these days. Hamlet’s father had been strict, but the soldiers respected him, and from respect for the father came respect for the son. Under the new king, Claudius, standards were slipping.

  The place was very quiet. A couple of servant girls went by, carrying bags of scraps from the kitchen. The girls nodded respectfully to Hamlet and giggled at Horatio. Laertes, son of the king’s chief adviser, had told Horatio that two of the kitchen girls were “easy,” and he wondered now if these were the two. The plump one would be nice to kiss. But the other was lithe; her breasts looked firm, just the right size for his hands.

  A greyhound loped behind the girls, following the scent of guts and bones in the bags. We should have taken Hamlet’s dog with us, Horatio thought, knowing the creature was probably in its pen in the kitchen garden. Sometimes Hamlet seemed to forget the dog for days on end; Horatio loved dogs and wished he had his own.

  One of the king’s secretaries, smoking a pipe, stood talking to a man who had both arms folded and looked cross. They ceased their conversation and bowed to Hamlet, who frowned back at them. They ignored Horatio.

  Neither boy spoke again until they were at the other side of the main courtyard. Horatio was about to suggest a game of billiards. But Hamlet said, “See you tomorrow,” and went through the door to his own quarters.

  Horatio nodded his reply too late: his friend was gone.

  Three weeks after this, Horatio and his cousin Bernardo stumbled into Hamlet’s bedroom in the middle of the night. The long climb to the prince’s apartment, up the difficult winding staircase in the cold air, left them both panting. Several times they had been forced to stop and hold the candles away from their bodies so their breath would not put out the brave little lights.

  Why does he sleep up here? Bernardo wondered. He could have almost any room in the castle.

  Bernardo, a farmer’s son, understood only the practical. The bedroom should be close to the barn. A view was useful if it showed a storm approaching. When a pig had to be slaughtered, you sharpened your knife.

  He was already churned up and confused by the night’s events, which were outside the realm of his experience, beyond the limits of his imagination. The rush up the stairs gave him a pain in the stomach.

  Horatio did not knock, just pushed open the door. It whined and groaned. They tiptoed into the room.

  Hamlet, asleep, was curled up like half of a puzzle. A large black dog took up the other side of the bed. The dog lifted his head, gazed at Horatio for a moment, then lay back down. But his eyes stayed open, and he continued to watch the intruders.

  Horatio hesitated. “Do you think we should wake him?” he asked.

  “Do you think we should be here at all?” Bernardo asked, trying to stop shaking. But when Horatio didn’t answer, he added, “Go on.”

  Bernardo was just inside the door. Horatio was closer to the bed. But Horatio still hesitated. He didn’t know how to do it. He wanted to stroke Hamlet into gentle awareness but thought it would look too much like love. Instead he shook Hamlet’s shoulder roughly, as if he were angry.

  Hamlet sat up so suddenly that the other two stepped back in surprise. The dog sat up with him, blinking and shaking its head. “What?” Hamlet shouted. His white hair was awry, and his eyes stared at them but saw nothing. Then he focused and became awake. “What the fuck do you want?”

  Horatio laughed at the swearword.

  “Sorry,” said Bernardo automatically.

  “Well, what are you doing in here?” The prince frowned at Bernardo. “Who are you, anyway? Are you Bernardo?”

  Both Horatio and Bernardo nodded.

  Hamlet brushed back his hair, and in the dim light of the two candles they saw his eyes, normally so pale a blue that they merged into gray, becoming sharper, glistening like a fox’s. “What’s happened? Something’s happened.”

  Again words deserted Horatio. “I don’t know how to say it,” he confessed.

  “I’ll tell you,” Bernardo said, stepping forward.

  Hamlet wouldn’t take his gaze from Horatio. “I want you to tell me,” he said, like a small boy.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Yes.”

  The sharpness and quickness of the reply startled Horatio even more. “You . . . you do?”

  “If it hurries you, then, yes, I believe in ghosts.”

  The dog slipped off the bed and slunk out the door to sit on the landing outside. Horatio sat on the end of the bed. Bernardo sucked in his breath at the daring of it, at the casual relationship that existed between the two. There were rumors about them, but Bernardo was not able to tell the truth from the queer tension that he felt in the room.

  Hamlet was watching Horatio closely. The prince wore no top.

  This room’s so cold, Bernardo thought. He’s tough all right.

  “I didn’t believe in ghosts. Never have,” Horatio said. He paused. “And now I do.”

  “So are you saying that you’ve seen a ghost? Tonight, I suppose? Otherwise you wouldn’t have woken me.”

  Horatio stared at him. The flickering light of the candles in the dark, drafty room made the prince’s face almost demonic. Through the cloverleaf window in the stone wall, Bernardo saw one distant star. Then it went out.

  Hamlet was staring back at Horatio.

  At last Horatio said, “We think we saw your father.”

  For a moment Hamlet did not move, did not break his gaze. Then he leaped from under the blankets. With incredible athleticism he turned in midair, like a white cat, and landed facing Bernardo, who hastily backed into the corridor. He found himself next to the dog, which was standing now, hairs bristling, as though it understood perfectly.

  Hamlet came to the door. Bernardo stared into his terrible eyes. He felt the eyes were talking to him, not the voice. He heard the words, “Did you see him too?” and he nodded.

  Outside, the air hung with cold. The three boys scrunched along the terrace, in front of the throne room. Hamlet’s dog loped close behind. The frost on the grass was so thick it could have been mistaken for snow.

  “Maybe we’ll see his footprints,” Horatio whispered. His words left his mouth in a balloon of steam and floated away across the lawns.

  “Ghosts don’t leave footprints,” Bernardo whispered back.

  “How would you know?”

  Hamlet had put on a white singlet to match the white britches he slept in. Dressed in nothing more than that, a black cloak, and a pair of long black boots, he led them down the steps and along the path to the fountain of Neptune. Its water was frozen in a silent arc. A melancholy clock in the distance was striking, too many times for Bernardo to count. As he listened, the gongs started to sound out of tune and irregular, warped, vaguely disturbing. He hurried to catch up with the other two.

  They were in the vast main courtyard, ten thousand meters square. Looking down on them were the closed and curtained windows of the royal apartments.

  “Was it here?” Hamlet asked. It was the first time he had spoken since they had left his bedroom. His voice was croaky. The dog forced its way past the two boys and pressed in against Hamlet’s legs. Horatio nodded.

  Bernardo gazed around at the tall, dark, silent buildings. “What’s the dog’s name?” he asked, looking down at the creature, which resembled a short-haired wolf.

  The other two stared at him as if
he were crazy. Neither of them answered. Bernardo blushed. The night was so still it might have been a painting. Then a large bird flew across the painting, its wings beating like sword blades. From upstairs somewhere came a thud, a door or a window shutter perhaps, but too far away to worry the boys.

  “He mightn’t come back tonight,” Horatio whispered, after fifteen minutes had passed. All three of them were turning into ice.

  But just as he said “tonight,” Bernardo grabbed his arm. “There he is.”

  The boys huddled closer as the figure approached. He wore a full-length cloak, brown, heavy. His head was bare. Long silver hair blew wildly as though there were a strong wind, but the castle flags hung limp, and the leaves on the trees stayed undisturbed.

  The man’s facial features were hard to discern. He had two eyes, a nose, a mouth. No beard. His face was thin. As he passed a garden seat, it seemed that he saw them. He stopped between a pair of huge stone lions and stared at them. He was about fifty meters away.

  The black dog whined dolorously and sat on Hamlet’s feet.

  “Is it him?” Horatio asked Hamlet. “It is him, isn’t it?”

  Hamlet didn’t answer, just nodded. A full minute later he said, “I think so.”

  Bernardo gazed in rapture. He forgot to be scared. Here was one of the greatest events in the history of Denmark, surely, and he was intimately involved. Despite his confident words to the prince, he had not been sure of what he had seen before. But if it were Hamlet’s father, it was a ghost, and he, young Bernardo, son of a farmer from outside Gavatar, visiting Elsinore to spend a few months with his cousin Horatio, was witnessing what perhaps no one in the world had ever seen.

  When the man made a motion with his arm, Bernardo jerked backward as though he had been struck.

  “What does he want?” Horatio muttered to Hamlet. They both ignored Bernardo.

  “He wants me,” Hamlet said. “Always did.”

  The man motioned again.

  Hamlet shook Horatio free and started walking toward the two lions.

  “Come back,” Horatio hissed. “Come back.” He ran a few urgent steps after his friend. “You don’t know what he’ll do. He could kill you.”