The Pop’s Rhinoceros (10 page)

He sat before his opened books while the candle on his table filled the cell with tallow smoke, seeing nothing, engaged in nothing more than listening for Brother Hansjürgen’s footsteps. If his lectures had diminished in passion, it was from distraction rather than neglect. His thoughts were elsewhere, not yet fixed, gathering and forming anew. Charters and grants that had swapped the monastery between simonical and pluralist and absentee prelates centuries before lay scattered and unread before him. His church lay somewhere in the transactions they hinted at, unanchored, lost, wrecked. When the monk arrived, Jörg would ask simple questions, feign near indifference at the answers, then charge his envoy with discovering more. If Brother HansJürgen suspected more than idle curiosity, he betrayed no sign of it. The ruffians had arrived by boat from the mainland and were camping out in a herring-shed of Brüggeman’s. They had fought with the Spaniards, it was said. The darker-skinned of the two was a giant, standing more than a head above his companion. They were engaged in some practice involving a barrel, in the pond behind the herring-shed. One of the Ronsdorff boys had seen them.

“A barrel?” His casual query drifted with the tallow smoke. “I would know more of this, Brother.”

So HansJürgen had persisted with his quest, tramping the length and breadth of the island, rain and shine alike, echoing his master’s questions. The barrel, it seemed, was intended as a vessel. The smaller of the two would climb into it, whereupon the giant would lower it into the pond. They had constructed a kind of crane for this. But inquiring beyond these bare facts, he came up against an odd resistance, a calculated vagueness. His normally garrulous acquaintances feigned ignorance or disinterest. If there was a purpose behind the vagabonds’ exercise, he could not discover it. And as to the islanders’ reticence, he garnered only impressions of a baffling anxiety.

“I believe,” he said after Jörg had approached him on the latter question from several different angles, “that the islanders are in some way afraid of these men.”

“Afraid? A whole island of able-bodied men afraid of a pair of vagabonds?”

“It is an obscure kind of fear. I cannot fathom it.”

And then, inevitably, “Plumb deeper, Brother. Reach the bottom of this mystery.” Jörg paused and considered the turn of events. “Talk to Ewald Brüggeman.”

Hansjürgen’s sandals clacked on the stone floor, strummed on the flagstones of the cloister, fading until Father Jörg was left alone with his speculations. The barrel bothered him. So wrenched from its normal usage (wine or tar—no, herring—whose else could it be but Bruggeman’s), it betokened purposes outside the island’s limited ken, his own, too, truth to tell, which was part of his fascination with this pair of ne’er-do-wells, these outsiders. What on earth were they doing with such a contraption? Lowering each other into ponds. And a crane! He wondered if Brother Gerhardt had learned of these rival engineers. His fingers tapped on the page as he turned these thoughts over. They led him nowhere. The candle was guttering, spilling yellow wax across the table in a spreading, congealing pool. It was almost time for Nocturns.

End of autumn drizzle turned paths hard-packed through the months of summer by the tramping feet of the harvesters to straggling mires and glutinous shallow ditches. Puddles gathered and sank into the island’s softening substance. Mud spread. Weather-afflicted, vaguely caught up in the penumbra of the island’s anxious silence, Jörg’s proxy marched purposefully through pools of standing water, leaf-mulch, decrepit oak and beech scrub. Brother HansJürgen skirted the edge of the Achter-Wasser—drab, boatless, wind-jarred—before veering back toward the seaward shore and the copse of brine-stunted alders that marked the limit of Ewald Brüggeman’s manse. A fire was burning, its smoke rising out the chimney in a column that would break and disappear as gusts blew in off the sea. He shivered, approached, and knocked.

“Out there.”

Mathilde Brüggeman’s surly countenance was not about to invite him in. She stood there, blocking the doorway, with her thumb pointing back over her shoulder. Out there. She meant the sea. She meant “Not here.” And go away. His unwelcome questions withered in his throat. Brüggeman’s children had been playing by the fire. They stared up at him from within the room, frozen and openmouthed. The door was closing before he turned his back. He walked around to the back of the house, thence down to the shoreline, and sat himself down to wait.

Spiky wavelets bristled landward and boiled away in the shingle of the beach. A mizzle swirled in as the gusting wind scooped at the water’s surface, and soon his face was sheened with moisture. An hour must have passed. A mile down the coast he saw the cantilevered church, perched improbably on the brink of the cliff, pitching forward. Wintry gray skies seemed to grudge the earth below its measure of daylight, and soon the church was fading, merging into a murky half-light that draped the whole island in its fog. Sea, land, and sky bled into one another to reach a dull equivalence, and the monk squatting on his haunches on the
beach shivered in his habit as he scanned the horizon for Brüggeman’s boat. The intruders must have sought his permission, or extracted it somehow. Why Brüggeman? There was no shortage of greasy, evil-smelling ponds on Usedom. Something bound Ewald Brüggeman to these men, something untold, lying somewhere in the island’s silence.

Something white out there. A sail? Yes, and barely fifty yards out. More audible than visible as the wind sucked and slapped at the canvas. Brüggeman and his man were both hunched toward the stern. HansJürgen rose to his feet and waded out to help the fishermen drag their craft ashore. Both were soaked to the skin and shivering violently. Brüggeman was scolding his helpmate for some obscure mishap—Ploetz, a sickly-seeming individual, who offered no defense against his employer’s halfhearted remonstrance. A thin catch was offloaded, and HansJürgen waited for the opportune moment to begin his interrogation, ladling herring from the bottom of the boat with the two men. Brüggeman betrayed no surprise at his presence. Ploetz kept looking across at him but said nothing. With the nets unraveled, pleated, and laid across the boat to dry, Ploetz gave his master the merest salute and disappeared over the brow of the slope. The two of them were alone.

HansJürgen seized his chance, immediately launching into a string of questions as Brüggeman lifted his single sack of fish, hoisted it onto his shoulder, and strode briskly up the beach. The monk followed, his queries growing more urgent. Brüggeman had yet to acknowledge his presence, but now he was waving him away, it was far too late, almost dark, and the monk would lose his way unless he set out for the monastery now. He was cold, too—listen, could HansJürgen not hear the chattering of his teeth? He was frozen, famished, finished for the day, and had no use for questions. Not now. Tomorrow? No, not tomorrow, either. Tomorrow he was off to Stettin, and the day after that he was back on the boat, and anyway there was nothing to tell. He was soaked through, see? He was shivering, too, and now he was at his own door, where, HansJürgen knew, they would certainly part company with nothing learned at all except Brüggeman’s brittle irritation, a nervy brusqueness he knew too well would produce no more than the same clumsy half-truths and ill-rehearsed evasions he had been hearing the island over the frustrating fortnight past. Mathilde Brüggeman’s stony glare, the same openmouthed children, as though all three had waited motionless for his unwanted reappearance to unfreeze them. Ewald Brüggeman ducking beneath the brawny arm of his spouse and the door banging shut in his face. Nothing.

He stood there for a few moments more, listening to the urgent muttering within, which faded as they moved away from the door. He had discovered nothing at all. The drizzle turned abruptly to rain, and the monk turned to retrace his steps back across the island. It was almost dark, and several times he slipped on the treacherous path. Brüggeman’s concern had been no more than a diversion, but, caked front and back with mud, now soaked himself, and alone in the dark, HansJürgen began fervently to wish himself back at the gatehouse of the
monastery. His teeth began to chatter, and all this to learn only what he knew already—that the fisherman was frightened, perhaps of the soldiers themselves, perhaps of something else entirely. He lost his footing again, fell heavily, and groaned aloud. The rain fell steadily. He had almost crossed the island at its thinnest point, and once he reached the Achter-Wasser the way, he knew, would be easier. He heard a movement somewhere away to his left and looked about but saw nothing and no one. He continued, stumbling, then heard it again. This time he shouted. There was no reply. As he reached the edge of the wood, the monk halted and looked back into the darkness. When he turned again to continue, he started and cried out in shock. A man was standing not ten feet from him, sheltering calmly in the lee of a beech trunk.

“Told you he was off to Stettin tomorrow, did he?” the figure said. Shaken, squinting against the dark, the monk could only nod his confirmation.

“Lost his head then, didn’t he? Nothing new there,” the figure continued in a sarcastic tone as he moved nearer the monk. “Since when was there a fish market on a Sunday, eh? Bloody stupid! You want to know the truth of it? That what you’re here for, monk? He’s scared. That’s all you need to know about Ewald Brüggeman. He’s scared out of his wits!”

It was Ploetz.

The rain would stop an hour before dawn. Brother HansJürgen staggered from Ploetz’s hovel as first light pushed its cold gray fingers into the mass of night. Gormitz hauled itself clear of the bay’s sluggish surface, and the first birds chirped shrilly against the receding gloom. He was fuzzy-headed, glassy-eyed. He had listened through the night to Ploetz’s caustic drawl, snatching the facts he needed from a looping litany of injustices and scorn for his weak-headed employer. Oddly, he felt an increasing sympathy for Ewald Brüggeman while, without Ploetz’s dismal little hut, the rain fell in sheets and dripped through the holes in its roof. The fire had smoked, spluttered, and fizzed. Come his departure, he was no drier than before.

“Ploetz?”

Father Jörg was still asleep when he reached the monastery. The monk shook him gently by the shoulder.

“Wilfried Ploetz. Brüggeman’s man, on the boat.” The Prior rubbed his eyes and rose from his pallet. The boat, of course. He had seen this Ploetz, though at distance, the morning after the collapse. Jörg listened intently as the monk told him the substance of the last five hours in as many minutes.

“So they drowned her for a witch, and now the son returns. No wonder they are frightened. How did he escape?”

“They set him ashore that night. The giant they do not know, but he frightens them. Brüggeman especially. He believes they are here for him. It was his father, Ploetz’s, Stenschke, and another man, Ploetz thinks he came from Rügen.”

“Old Stenschke?”

“The same.”

Jörg pursed his lips. “The sins of the father. If Brüggeman is fearful, why is Ploetz not?”

“Brüggeman and the witch’s boy grew up together. The bond was stronger, the cut deeper, perhaps. When they arrived, it was to Brüggeman they went first.”

“But for shelter, which was given them.” Jörg paused and thought again. “I do not believe these men have come for revenge, Brother. Do you?” HansJürgen shrugged, undecided. “The barrel. The pond. The crane. That is why they are here,” he stated with sudden conviction. “Nothing you have told me explains these things.”

“Ploetz knows only that the barrel is intended for a vessel, that they climb within it and sink it in the pond. And that they have the loan of Brüggeman’s boat.”

“His boat? Brüggeman’s charity knows no bounds.” The Prior paced slowly across the cell to the embrasure. A listless wind was gusting in. Sea fog thickened and thinned in accordance with the fitful breeze, opening to show him short-lived vistas of near dead water. The clouds looked waterlogged, too heavy to do more than lurch and come apart over the sea surface. A barrel would be a clumsy vessel, even in a pond. The mildest sea would sink it in a moment. And with a boat, what need for it at all? They fitted together somehow. Some greater contraption awaited the conjunction of these lesser ones; a larger beast, shy and elusive, lurking somewhere in the recombinant clouds. Beyond him.

“And when is this loan to be made, Brother?” he inquired, still gazing out the window. “When is Brüggeman’s charity to be put to the …”

But his voice fell away, and he did not need to hear the monk’s answer. Dimly, then more definite, covered and uncovered by the slowly swirling clouds, lolling with its badly loaded cargo and the antics of its handlers, Brüggeman’s boat emerged out of the fog before his question could be framed. A hundred yards out, no more, and aboard were the giant, his companion, a barrel, and what appeared to his straining eyes as an enormous coil of rope. Jörg stared in silence as submerged thoughts rose and broke the surface. Drifting fog thickened and thinned about the lurching vessel to throw weird shapes and images into his wondering mind’s eye: a crumbling fortress, dissolving islands, the emergent features of a massively figured animal eyeing him out of the gloom, towering, graying, and then gone. Contraptions and misdirections, ill-conceived and failing vessels floating off Vineta Point.

“Fetch Brother Gerhardt,” he snapped to the waiting monk, who hesitated, startled by the turn of events. “Quickly, Brother!”