The Clowns of God (23 page)

“I

know. I gather you don’t like the idea.”

“I loathe it.”

“It’s a question of priorities, isn’t it? How much are you prepared to pay for safety in the streets?”

“Not that much,” said Carl Mendelius.

“Thank you for your help. We’ll keep in touch.”

He handed back the sketch. Lorenz folded it carefully and put it back in his wallet. He gave Mendelius his card and repeated:

“Remember! Any time, day or night. Thank you for the coffee, ma’am.”

“I’ll walk you to your car,” said Mendelius.

“Back in a minute, dear. I want to walk a while before I begin work with Georg.”

“Who is Georg?” The policeman was suddenly cautious.

“Georg Rainer. He’s the Rome correspondent for Die Welt. We are doing a story together on the Vatican.”

“Then please don’t let him print this story. There’s too much attention focused on you already.”

As they strolled up the Kirchgasse towards the Old Market, Dieter Lorenz added a brusque afterthought to their discussion.

“I didn’t want to say this in front of your wife. You’ve got two children. From the terrorist point of view kidnapping is an even better bargain than murder. It gives them a huge press and it puts them in funds. When your kids get back from vacation, you’d better teach them the drill too.”

“We’re really getting back to the jungle, aren’t we?”

“We’re deep inside it,” said Dieter Lorenz drily.

“This used to be a nice quiet town; but if you could see some of the stuff that crosses my desk, it would make your hair stand up.”

“What’s the answer?”

“Christ knows! Maybe we need a good war to kill off some of the bastards and let us start clean again!”

It was a wild sad thought from an over-worked man. It did nothing to allay the prickling fear that filled Mendelius as he walked down to the news-stand, that made him jump when a housewife jostled him and a boy on a motorcycle roared past with an open exhaust. There was no Francone now to shepherd him. Point, flanks and rear, he was exposed to the silent hunters, who carried his image like a juju doll wherever they walked.

Rainer was a fast worker, trained to meet daily deadlines with clean, accurate copy. Mendelius was accustomed to the ambling gait of an academic author. He finicked over points of style, argued over the refinement of a definition. He insisted on writing his copy in long-hand; his corrections demanded two or three drafts of typescript.

In spite of their apparent incompatibility they produced, at the end of four days, the first and most important stage of the project a twenty-thousand word version for immediate serial publication in newspapers and magazines. Before handing it over to the translator an English version being mandatory under the contracts they had it read in turn by Lotte, Pia Menendez and Anneliese Meissner. The readings elicited some frank and unexpected comments.

Lotte tried hard to be gentle but succeeded only in devastating the scribes.

“There’s something wrong. I can’t say exactly what it is, or perhaps I can. I know Jean Marie. He’s a warm man, complex and always interesting to a woman. I don’t feel him in anything that you’ve written there. It’s too detached, too. I don’t know! I’m quite uninterested in the character you’ve described! I don’t really care what happens to him.”

Pia Menendez weighed in with a qualified agreement and an explanation.

“I think I see what has happened. I know how Georg’s mind works. You’ve always said, darling, that you’re reporting from Rome for believers and unbelievers alike. You can’t indulge the one for fear of alienating the other. So you have to show a touch of the cynic. I think Professor Mendelius has fallen into the same trap. He’s trying so hard to be detached from a dear friend that he sounds like a censor of morals. And he’s trying so hard to be scholarly about the Doctrine of Last Things that it sounds like an exercise in higher mathematics. I don’t mean to be rude, but …”

“Don’t apologise!” Anneliese Meissner was brusque as always.

“I agree with you and Lotte. We’ve lost the man who is, after all, the centre-point, the pivot of this whole historic episode. In his discussion of a prophet Carl has abdicated poetry for pedantry. I’ve got another complaint, too, Carl! I believe this one may be very important. In your discussion of the Last Things you duck two important questions: the nature of evil, the presence of evil in a man-made cataclysm, and the nature of the Parousia itself. What are we going to see? Or, more accurately, what do the apocalyptic prophets Jean Marie among them promise that we will see? What will distinguish the Christ from the Antichrist? I’m your reader now, even if I’m not a believer! Once you open the box, I’m as anxious as anyone to see what’s inside.”

Mendelius and Rainer looked at each other in dismay.

Rainer grinned and made a gesture of defeat.

“If the readers don’t like us, Carl, we’re dead. And if we can’t move them to pity and terror with this subject, we deserve to be dead.”

“Back to the desk then.” Mendelius began restacking the manuscript.

“Not tonight!” Lotte was very firm.

“I’ve booked dinner for the five of us at the Holderlinhaus. The food’s good and the atmosphere seems to do something for Carl. It’s the only place I’ve seen him tipsy enough to recite Empedocles on Etna with the roast and sing Schubert with the dessert. Both very well, I might add!”

“I might get drunk again tonight,” warned Mendelius.

“I’m profoundly discouraged. I’m only glad Lars Larsen didn’t read this version.”

“A word of advice, then,” said Anneliese Meissner.

“Scrap your part of the piece, Carl! Start from the beginning. Let your heart speak as it did on the tapes you sent me from Rome!”

“Bravo!” said Lotte.

“And if a little drinking helps the heart to speak, I’m all in favour!”

“And what’s your prescription for me?” asked Georg Rainer.

“For you it’s less difficult,” said Anneliese Meissner boldly.

“I think you’ll do better if you stick to the history of the event, leave the interpretation to Carl and then simply swing back at the end with a straight question that makes the readers judge and jury.”

Georg Rainer thought about it for a moment and then nodded agreement.

“You could be right. I’ll try it… But tell me one thing, Frau Doctor Meissner. You’re a nonbeliever.

You deal with the sick and the deluded. Why do you care so much about this piece of religious history?”

“Because I’m scared,” said Anneliese Meissner curtly.

“I

read the omens in every newspaper. I hear the distant drums and the mad trumpets. I think we’ll have our Armageddon. I dream about it every night and I wish I could find a faith to comfort me in the dark.”

The air was still soft with summer. The Neckar flowed tranquil under the willows, while the lovers plied their lazy traffic of punts and row-boats under the windows of the Bursa and the Old Hall, where once Melanchthon had taught and the great Johannes Stoffler had lectured in Astronomy and Mathematics and designed the Town Hall clock.

The Holderlinhaus was a small antique villa with a round tower that looked across the river to the botanical gardens.

Friedrich Holderlin had died there in 1843, a sad, mad genius overshadowed by his contemporary Uhland, in whom, as Goethe had prophesied, the politician would gobble up the poet.

The alleys were quiet now, because the University was still in recess; but the restaurant was busy with a dinner party for staff from the Evangelical Institute and another for a group of actors in town for rehearsals at the University theatre.

Mendelius presented Georg Rainer and Pia to his colleagues, and as the meal went on and the wine flowed, there were constant exchanges of talk between the three tables.

As the well-known correspondent of a famous newspaper, Rainer was the centre of attention and Mendelius noted with admiration how skilfully he drew the scholars into talk, baiting them with scraps and snippets of information about the Roman scene. Finally, in a sedulously casual aside, he asked:

“Has any of you ever heard of an organisation called the Friends of Silence?” He did not use the original French phrase but the German one: “Die Freunde des Schweigens’.

He was talking to the academics; but a response came in startling fashion from the actors at the other table. A tall, cadaverous young man stood up, and in a ceremonious announcement introduced himself and his troupe.

“We,” he told them, “we are the Friends of Silence. To understand us, you must be silent, too. We will, in silence still, tell you a tale of love and fear and pity.”

And there, in the old room, where poor Holderlin had tried to grasp the last tatters of his dreams, they played out a mimed version of the man who lost his shadow and the woman who gave it back to him again.

It was one of those strange, spontaneous encounters that turn a sober evening into a magical event, that went on with wine and singing and tale-telling until Master Stoffler’s clock struck two in the morning from the tower of the Town Hall.

As they were saying their good nights an elderly colleague from the Institute tugged at Mendelius’ sleeve and volunteered a suggestion.

“Your friend Rainer really didn’t get an answer to his question. We were all distracted by those talented young people. You take the Review of Patristic Studies, don’t you?

There’s an article in the April issue on the Discipline of the Secret. It makes a couple of references that may help his enquiry.”

“Thank you. I’ll look them up in the morning.”

“Oh, and there’s one more thing, Mendelius …”

“Yes?” He was anxious to be gone. Lotte and the others were already drawing away.

“I heard about your stand on the question of student surveillance. I agree with it; but you should be warned; the President is less than happy. He claims you affronted him.

My guess is he’s scared of a faculty revolt which is the last thing he needs before his retirement. Well… good night, my dear fellow. Walk carefully. A man can break an ankle on these damned cobbles.”

At three and at four in the morning Mendelius was still tossing restlessly between sleep and waking. At five he got up, made himself coffee and settled himself at his desk with the April edition of the Review of Patristic Studies. The edition had been published before the abdication and clearly had been in preparation several months before.

The article on the Discipline of the Secret was datelined “Paris’ and signed by someone called Jacques Mandel. It dealt with a practice in the early Christian communities called disciplina arcani. The phrase itself was not coined until the seventeenth century; but the discipline was one of the earliest in the Christian community a mandatory concealment of the more mysterious rites and doctrines of the Church. These were never to be mentioned to the unbeliever or even to aspirants under instruction. Any necessary reference was to be made in cryptic, enigmatical or even misleading terms. The most famous example of such language was the inscription discovered at Autun in 1839: “Take the honey-sweet food of the Saviour of the holy ones; eat and drink holding the fish in your hands.” The word ‘fish’ was an anagram for Jesus Christ, Son of Saviour. The ‘honey-sweet food’ was the eucharist.

The first part of Mandel’s article was a scholarly assessment of evidence on the practice and the resulting scarcity of early Patristic evidence on doctrinal and sacramental matters.

However, there was nothing new in it beyond one or two curious sidelights on the Synod of Antioch, where the orthodox condemned the Arians for admitting catechumens and even pagans to a discussion of ‘the mysteries’. Mendelius found himself wondering why the writer had taken the trouble to write a rehash of such old material. Then suddenly the tenor of the writing changed. Jacques Mandel, whoever he might be, was using the Discipline of the Secret as a text on which to hang a very modern argument.

He claimed that within the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, there existed a powerful group who wished to stifle all debate on doctrinal matters, and impose a twentieth-century version of the Discipline of the Secret. He pointed to the suppressive action taken against certain Catholic theologians in the seventies and early eighties and the rigorist attitudes of certain contemporary bishops in France and elsewhere. He wrote:

One has heard that there exists a clandestine fraternity of these bishops, who have high friends in the Curia, and are able to bring great pressure to bear even on the Pontiff…

So far, Gregory XVII, himself a Frenchman, has navigated successfully between the rigorists and the innovators; but he makes no secret of his disapproval of what he calls ‘a freemasonry of senior clerics, the friends of silence and of darkness’. The author has seen a copy of a letter from the Pontiff to a senior Archbishop in which these terms of censure are used.

They were blunt words for such a sober and specialist journal; but Mendelius understood their import. Jacques Mandel was flying a kite to see who would shoot at it or who might salute it. But, clearly, he had information that explained much of the background to the abdication.

Long before the vision and the abdication, Jean Marie had been under enormous pressure. The possibility of schism had been real. Bishops were powerful men both in the religious and in the secular orders. In the one they were leaders of large congregations. In the other they were a discreet but potent force, controllers of a confessional vote on contentious issues.

In the outcome because the Cardinals would not have moved without majority support from the Bishops they had proved strong enough to topple a Pope.

In the light of this new information, Georg Rainer’s story of surveillance and pursuit made a certain grim sense. Not all clerics were divorced from politics. Not all were strangers to its more violent practices. History was full of shabby deals made by high men for holy purposes. And, sitting in his own high place, Jean Marie knew the mischiefs that could be concealed or condoned under the Discipline of the Secret or within a confraternity of silence.

Mendelius marked the relevant passages in the article and scribbled a memo for Georg Rainer.