The Clowns of God (29 page)

At the hospital, Lotte introduced him to Doctor Pelzer.

She begged the good doctor to explain the medical situation to this old friend of the family. So it came to pass that Jean Marie Barette saw Carl Mendelius first in a series of X-ray photographs. The head which had once held the history of twenty centuries was reduced to a skull-case with broken jaws, a smashed septum and a scatter of opaque pellets embedded in the bony structure and in the surrounding film of flesh and mucous tissue. Doctor Pelzer, a tall, powerful fellow with iron-grey hair and a wary diagnostic eye, gave a commentary:

“A mess, as you see! But we can’t go probing for all those foreign bodies until we have the poor devil stabilised. There’s more of that rubbish in the rib-cage and the upper abdomen.

So a prayer or two would help and don’t let the family expect too much, eh? Even if we save him, he’ll need a lot of supportive therapy.”

His next view was of the living man, hooked up to the drip bottles, the oxygen tap and the cardio-monitor. The head was swathed in bandages. The damaged eyes were mercifully hidden. The nasal and oral cavities were open and motionless.

The stump of the severed hand lay like a large cloth club on the counterpane. The good hand twitched weakly at the folds of the sheets.

Lotte lifted it and kissed it.

“Carl, my dearest, this is Lotte.”

The hand closed over hers. A gurgling murmur issued from the mask of bandages.

“Jean Marie is here with me. He’ll talk to you while I go and give a little thank-you gift to the ward sister. I’ll be back shortly.”

She tiptoed from the room, closing the door behind her.

Jean Marie took Mendelius’ hand. It was soft as satin and so weak it seemed that if one pressed too hard, the bones might crack.

“Carl, this is Jean. Can you hear me?”

There was an answering pressure against his palm and more helpless gurgling as Mendelius tried in vain to articulate.

“Please, don’t try to talk. We don’t need words, you and I. Just lie quiet and hold my hand. I will pray for both of us.”

He said no words. He made no ritual gestures. He simply sat by the bed, clasping Mendelius’ hand between his own, so that it was as if they were one organism: the whole and the maimed, the blind and the seeing man. He closed his eyes, and opened his mind, a vessel ready for the in pouring of the Spirit, a channel by which it might infuse itself into the conjoined consciousness of Carl Mendelius.

It was the only way he knew, now, to express the relationship between creature and creator. He could not make petitions. They were all summed up in the original fiat: let your will be done. He could not bargain life for life, service for service because there was no vestige of self left to which he attached any importance. The important thing was the body and the agonised spirit of Carl Mendelius for whom he was now the life-line.

When at last the in pouring came, it was simple and extraordinarily sweet, like a waft of perfume in a summer garden. There was light and a strange awareness of harmony as though the music was not played but written into the texture of the brain. There was a calm so powerful that he could feel the fevered pulse of the sick man subside like sea waves after a storm. When he opened his eyes, Lotte was in the room again, staring at him in fear and wonderment. She said awkwardly:

“I didn’t mean to interrupt, but it’s nearly five o’clock.”

“So late? Would you like to receive Communion now?”

“Please, yes; but I don’t think Carl can swallow the wafer.”

“I know; but he can take a sip from the chalice. Are you ready, Carl?”

A pressure on his palm told him that Mendelius had heard and understood. While Lotte sat by the bedside, Jean Marie laid out the small golden vessels and put a stole around his neck. After a brief prayer he handed the consecrated wafer to Lotte and then held the tiny chalice to Mendelius’ mouth. As he pronounced the ritual words: “Corpus domini’, Lotte said:

“Amen’ and Mendelius raised his hand in a feeble salute.

Jean Marie Barette cleansed the pyx and the chalice with the damask handkerchief, folded his stole, put the case and the stole in his pocket and tiptoed out of the room.

As he stepped past the armed guards in the corridor he was accosted by a squat, ugly woman of indeterminate age, who introduced herself abruptly as Professor Meissner.

“We’re dining together tonight at the Mendelius house; but I told Lotte I needed an hour alone with you. Will you come to my place for a drink?”

“I’d be delighted.”

“Good! There’s a lot to talk about.”

She took his arm, bustled him into the elevator, rode the three floors down in silence, then hurried him out into the late sunshine. It was not until they were outside the confines of the clinic that she slackened her pace and began a leisurely stroll down the hill towards the old town. She was more relaxed now; but her talk was still forthright and rasping.

“You know that Carl called me in for clinical advice on your letter and your encyclical?”

“He didn’t put it that way; but, yes, I knew you were involved.”

“And you read my quotes in his article?”

<“V

Yes.

“There was one they didn’t use. I’m going to give it to you now. I think you’re a very dangerous man. Trouble will follow you wherever you go. And I understand why your colleagues in the Church had to get rid of you.”

The raw brutality of the attack left him speechless for a moment. When he found voice, all he could say was, “Well . what do I answer to that?”

“You could tell me I’m a bitch and I am! But it wouldn’t budge me from the proposition. You are a very dangerous man!”

“I’ve heard the charge before,” said Jean Marie quietly.

“My brothers in the Vatican called me a walking time-bomb.

But I’d like to know how you see the danger which I represent.”

“I’ve thought about it a long time.” Anneliese Meissner was more gracious now.

“I’ve done a lot of reading. I’ve listened to a lot of tapes from colleagues who have clinical experience of religious manias and cultist influences. At the end of it all, I am forced to conclude that you are a man with a special perception of what Jung calls the collective unconscious. Therefore, you have a magical effect on people. It is as if you are privy to their most intimate thoughts, desires, fears as indeed you are on this question of the Last Things. This subject is rooted in the deepest subsoil of the race memory.

So, when you talk or write about it, people feel you inside themselves, almost as a function of their own egos. As a result, everything you do or say has profound and sometimes terrible consequences. You are the giant dreaming under the volcano. When you turn in your sleep, the earth shakes.”

“And what do you think I should do about this dangerous potency?”

“You can do nothing,” said Anneliese Meissner baldly.

“That’s where your Cardinals made the mistake. Had they left you in power, the very weight of the office and its traditional methods would have damped down the magical manifestations. You would have been held at a safe distance from common folk. Now there is no damping effect at all.

There is no distance. Your impact is instant and it may become catastrophic.”

“And you see no good in the power or in me?”

“Good? Oh, yes! But it’s the good that comes out of disaster, like battlefield heroism, or the dedication of nurses in a pest-house” “You call it magic. Have you no other name for it?”

“Use any name you like,” said Anneliese Meissner.

“Whatever you call yourself, priest, shaman, juju man, whomever you claim to serve the spirit of the grove, the God-man or the Eternal Oneness, you’ll always be at the epic entre of an earthquake …. Here’s where I live.”

They were nearly at the top of the Burgsteige, outside an old sixteenth-century house, built of oak beams and handmade bricks. Anneliese Meissner unlocked the door and led him up two flights of stairs to her apartment, whose narrow windows looked out on the turrets of Hohentiibingen and the marching pines of the Swabian uplands. She swept a pile of books off an armchair and gestured to Jean Marie to sit down.

“What will you drink? Wine, schnapps or scotch?”

“Wine, please.”

As he watched her polishing a pair of dusty glasses, uncorking a bottle of Moselle and opening a jar of nuts, he was touched by the pathos of so much intelligence, so much hidden tenderness, locked in so ugly a body. She handed him the wine and made a toast:

“To Carl’s recovery.”

“Prosit.”

She tossed off half the wine at a gulp and set down the glass. Then she made a bald and seemingly irrelevant announcement.

“At the clinic we have central monitoring of all intensive-care patients.”

“Indeed?” Jean Marie was politely interested.

“Yes. All vital signs are transmitted constantly to the monitor room, where a senior nurse is on duty all the time.

While you were with Carl, I was in the monitor room with Doctor Pelzer.”

Jean Marie Barette waited. He could not be sure whether she was embarrassed or reluctant to continue. Finally he had to prompt her.

“Please! You were in the monitor room. So?”

“When you arrived Carl had a temperature of 103 ; a pulse rate of 120 and a pronounced cardiac arrhythmia. You were with him nearly two hours. During all that time, except for a few opening sentences, you did not utter a single word until Lotte came back into the room. By then, Carl’s temperature had dropped, the pulse rate was nearly normal and the rhythm of the heart-beat was restored. What did you do?”

“I prayed, in a fashion.”

“What fashion?”

“I suppose you could call it meditation. But if you are trying to attribute some kind of miracle… please, no!”

“I don’t believe in miracles. I am, however, curious about phenomena that go beyond the norms. Besides …” She gave him an odd sidelong glance as if she were suddenly afraid to commit herself; then she plunged ahead.

“You might as well know it; everything that touches Carl, touches me. I’ve been in love with him for ten years. He doesn’t know it and he never will. But right now, I’ve got to cry on someone’s shoulder and you’re elected, because you’re the one who got him into this mess! Carl always said you had the grace of understanding. Then, maybe, you’ll understand that for me, the fairy tale was reversed. It wasn’t the beautiful princess and the frog-prince. It was the girl-frog waiting for the prince to kiss her and make her beautiful. I know it’s hopeless and I’ve learned not to care too much. I’m no threat to anyone, certainly not to Lotte. But when I see poor Carl hooked up to those life-support systems, when I know how much stuff they’re pumping into him, just to keep him sedated and his body functioning, then I wish I believed in miracles.”

“I believe in them,” said Jean Marie gently.

“And they all begin in an act of love.”

“But love is terrible the same way you’re terrible. If you bottle it up too long, it can blow the top of your head off.

Hell! I didn’t bring you here to bitch you or tell you about my love-life.” She poured more wine and then told him:

“Johann Mendelius is in big trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“He’s putting together an underground group of students to resist military call-up, obstruct security surveillance and provide escape routes for deserters from the armed forces.”

“How do you know this?”

“He told me. His father had mentioned that I would be prepared to support an underground organisation among the faculty. But these kids are so naive! They don’t realise how closely they’re watched, how easy it is to penetrate their ranks with spies and provocateurs. They’re buying and storing arms, which is a criminal offence… It’s only a matter of time before the police get wind of what’s going on.

They may know already and be waiting until all the fuss over Carl dies down.”

“Johann promised he would show me what form his protest was taking. Perhaps he’s thought of taking me to a meeting of this group.”

“Possibly. It’s because you’re a Frenchman that they’ve named the group the “Jacquerie’, to recall the French peasants’ revolt during the Hundred Years’ War… But if you take my adivce, you’ll stay well away.”

“I’d like to keep an open mind on that. I may be able to talk some sense into Johann and his friends.”

“Don’t forget what I told you at the beginning. You are a very special man. Without knowing how or why, you make a potent magic; and youth is most susceptible to the witchcraft . Now I want you to listen to a tape.”

“What’s on it?”

“Part of a clinical interview with one of my patients. I am communicating it to you under professional secrecy as Carl communicated your material to me. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“The woman is twenty-eight, a childless divorcee, the eldest daughter of a well-known local family. The marriage lasted three years. She has been divorced for one year. She shows acute depressive symptoms, and there have been some hallucinatory episodes which are probably the sequelae of some experiments with LSD. in which she admits to have taken part during her marriage. This tape was made yesterday. It is part of a session that lasted an hour and twenty minutes.”

“And what will it tell me?”

“That’s what I want to find out. It tells me one thing. It may tell you quite another.”

“My dear Professor.” He gave a chuckle of genuine good humour.

“If you really want a profile of my character, why not start with something simple, like a Rorschach blot?”

“Because I have your profile already.” The response was curt and irritable.

“I’ve had you in my case-book for weeks now. You’re a frightening phenomenon: a resolutely simple man. You say what you believe. You believe what you say.

You live in a universe permeated by an immanent God with whom you have a direct and personal relationship. I don’t live in such a universe, but we are both here in this room, with this tape. I want to know your reaction to it. You’ll indulge me, please?”

“At your service.”

“The location is my consulting room. The time: four in the afternoon. This passage occurs after forty minutes of discursive and defensive talk by the patient.”