The Pop’s Rhinoceros (16 page)

Bernardo. Where has he got to now? Having emerged on the far side of the stand, crossed a shallow bog, and entered the woods proper, he was surrounded by beech trees, moving in a direction whose gist was south, but which also contained strong elements of southeast, east, and southwest. There were even hints of west, when the terrain became particularly vindictive. Distance? One hundred and seven yards.

“Come,” had sounded from within. HansJürgen pushed open the door. His summoner was bent over a table covered with papers, the monk from that morning, their leader. Simple furniture. His hand was raised and frozen in a beckoning gesture that seemed to both invite and stay his entry. He looked up at the two of them standing in the doorway. A room behind other rooms. What did he require?

One hundred and twenty-four yards south-southeast from where he sat (remembering, imagining), undirected bellows were erupting through the tangled branchwork, disturbing winter birdlife and small arboreal mammals, such as squirrels. Bernardo has encountered a thornbush.

The giant had been unsettled and difficult in the days following their arrival. Discontent had centered about his boot, its absence, Salvestro’s reluctance to fetch it, but its roots were in their idleness. The monastery was a currentless place. They heard singing come from the chapter-house. They smelled cooking as it seeped through the wall. The monks themselves would congregate at odd hours in the cloister, walk about in twos and threes, talk together in tight, unwelcoming huddles. Their own meals arrived twice a day: an unvarying diet of black bread and broth (the morning) and black bread and broth and salted meat (the evening), delivered by the same youthful trio that had brought them food on the first night. Dried fish on the Friday. Bernardo had struck up a number of halting conversations
with them, which invariably ended with his describing the food as “real rotgut stuff, thanks all the same.” The three novices seemed to find this funny.

Others shunned them completely, seeming to look through them as though they did not exist. There were alliances and private hatreds at work. He had walked down the slope to the shore one afternoon, then looked up at the gaping hole that had once been the nave of the church. He saw the clay beneath it was sodden. When summer came it would dry and crumble. A few blocks of stone showed above the water’s surface and bore witness to the earlier collapse. More would follow. He wondered if the monks were aware of, or even cared about, this fact. They never seemed to venture down here. He looked around him: the coast running northwest, gray sea, the coast running southeast. Farther: the slope of the shore steepening as it neared him, the path down which he had walked, and then, at the top of the path, a monk. The monk was watching him, and he felt suddenly that he should not be here, that he had been caught at something. He waved. The monk’s face appeared strange in some way, but at that instant he could not make it out. There was no answering wave. The figure turned abruptly and stalked off. The crumbling cliff. The collapsing church. The face, Salvestro realized belatedly, had been contorted with something close to rage. Even without the why or how, he knew then that here was the fault running through his new lodging. The sea lapped placidly at the foot of the cliff; it was this that splintered the monks into little cliques and factions. He scrambled his way up the slope, passed by Ewald’s ice-filled boat, and walked quickly across the cloister. He did not go back.

“Thank you, Brother HansJürgen.” The monk had withdrawn, closing the door behind him. There was a stool. “Sit.” Salvestro sat. The Prior bent his head to the sheets of parchment. Salvestro saw squiggly black marks, curled corners, two wooden blocks placed to prevent the sheets from rolling closed. The man before him gathered his thoughts for a second, then said, “You came back here to make mischief for Brüggeman, did you not? You used to be his friend.”

Bernardo’s boot was the Prior’s fault. The delay in fetching it. He had been preoccupied, mulling over such questions, anticipating others. There had been a second summons since that first one, and others would follow. He stood on the brittle crust of the present while the Prior’s interrogation pressed down on his head and the thin plate beneath his feet warped and shuddered. Beneath that was Then, and Then was dark and bottomless. He would sink in Then.

“No,” he had said.

“Then why did you come back?”

The Prior’s table was strewn with quills, little earthenware pots, stoppered bottles, amulets whose meaning he could not divine. Above all, papers. He had prepared a speech for this occasion, for this inevitable question, a proud speech with flourishes and intrepid expressions. He had returned to uncover Vineta, a thing no other man had done. He was an adventurer, restless and impulsive. He needed an anchor to ground his spirit, a task. The undersea city was it. The Prior would then ask if he had found the peace he sought, if his spirit was quieted and
harnessed. No! would be his answer (perhaps tearfully), and they would pray together side by side. He knew a prayer or two. He would revile his life, if necessary.

But he had barely embarked on this course when the Prior, eyeing him across the table, held up his hand as though his words were the screechings of two battling cats. “You are a liar. Out.”

He sat there rooted for a moment. “Out!” He rose.

HansJürgen was standing in the passageway, as expressionless as before. As he turned from the door to face him, Salvestro saw two other monks carrying tapers and a bowl appear at the far end of the passage. They disappeared within the first of the doors they had passed earlier. The monk turned, and Salvestro understood that he was to follow. Wan candlelight shone through the doorway ahead. The monk stopped and stared.

“What are you doing there? That is Brother Florian’s task! Who gave you permission …?”

Salvestro looked over the outraged monk’s shoulder. He saw a cell furnished much as the Prior’s was, a little larger, perhaps. The two monks were sitting on a low bed that rested against the far wall. Between them they supported a wizened, skeletal creature, a man, dressed in a stained nightshirt and thick wool stockings, whose head lolled back and whose mouth hung open. The skin was blotched and stretched tight over his bones. Even wedged between those of the monks, his arms and legs were limp. They were trying to spoon food into his mouth, but he would not or could not swallow, and most of it was spilling onto the already filthy shirt. The only parts of him that moved of his own accord were his eyes. These rolled from side to side as though trying to catch sight of his tormentors.

“Brother Florian is unfit to care for him,” one of the monks replied shortly.

“By whose authority!” demanded HansJürgen again. “Gerhardt’s?”

But the monks ignored him, simply spooning food into their patient’s mouth. When he repeated, “Gerhardt? Is that it?” the same monk looked up and said, “Since you take more pains with your ape than your Abbot, Brother HansJürgen, why do you not lead him back to his cage now? Or does our Prior plan to return him to one of his distant lands?”

HansJürgen had led him to his lodging in thunderous silence. He had lain down on the hard earth; Bernardo had filched most of his straw during his absence and now snored loudly on the other side of the beet loft. That day had begun with the two of them walking down the beach to Ewald’s boat, which seemed long, long ago. He had much to think about that night, and the following days had given him more. He had had no time for boots, but Bernardo’s complaints had eventually reached an unignorable pitch, culminating in the usual threat that “he had had enough and was off.” Without his boot this was impossible. With it, the compulsion was removed. A mind more vindictive than his own, Salvestro reflected, might have taken more pleasure in the conundrum.

He took none. He thought of the Prior. The second summons had come two days before the Quest for the Boot. Again he climbed the same steps and followed
HansJürgen past the Abbot’s door—closed this time, the cell within unlit—and along the passage.

The second meeting went much as the first. He sat on the stool. The Prior fixed him with a stare and asked, by way of variation, “Tell me how you came to assume a false name?”

He had anticipated this. “Niklot” was a common name; that was his curse. There were other Niklots. One even resembled him somewhat. Unfortunately, he was a thief. From his lair deep in the forest, this outcast would snake out in the night to lift a chicken, a few eggs—once even a young pig—from the farms and manses thereabouts, leaving himself, the true Niklot, to take the blame. This impostor would trample corn, break fences, appear out of the greenery to frighten farmers’ daughters at their bathing, throw stones at their cattle … There was no end to his devilment. No one could catch him, either. He melted away like water into sand, leaving a damp stain that the sun would dry in minutes. What was he, the true Niklot, to do? After much thought, and many unjust accusations (none proved), he had decided to change his name. Henceforth, he would be “Salvestro.”

He began this recitation with high hopes. He was establishing the fact of there being other Niklots when the interruption came.

“Enough!” The Prior was glaring at him in exasperation. “More lies. Out!”

Walking back once more to the beet loft, following the dim pool of light cast by Hansjürgen’s lamp across the cloister, he was struck by a thought. He considered it briefly. It was absurd. Once again, Bernardo had stolen his straw. Tomorrow he would again not fetch Bernardo’s boot. He lay down but could not get comfortable. The Prior vexed him. If he, Salvestro, did not know what the man wanted, how could he be expected to give it to him? An account of some sort, certainly. Something believable, consistent. It was hard to credit, but it was almost as if—and here the Thought jabbed him again—he wanted to hear the truth. And, harder still to believe, turning it over in his mind now, he, Salvestro, was almost tempted to accede, to in effect be frank, even candid, as it were, with reservations, of course, but on the whole not, perhaps, or perhaps not … an extraordinary Thought then, this, which was, at least as a possibility, to, well, actually to tell the truth. The truth, yes. Could he? Might he …? No.

The next day he considered the matter further. He wandered absentmindedly into the cloister. A group of monks were standing by the door of the chapterhouse. As he approached, one scooped a handful of water from the stoup there, ran up to him with a strange, tight face, and threw it over him. The monk stared at him as though the water had been molten lead and he should fall to the ground and shrivel to a cinder. When he did not, the monk backed away fearfully. He turned about and resumed his deliberations. So long as he did this, the Thought, by and large, left him alone.

It was back soon enough. Indeed, more insistently on the following day, and Salvestro caught himself muttering angrily to himself, “No! Stupid!” He found

himself at the edge of the field. The Thought prodded him. The Prior seemed somehow to know when he was lying. In the Prior’s eyes, he was already a liar. He kept walking. Soon he was at the herring-shed. The Thought, obviously, had been lying in wait for him. It swung out of the roof and knocked him to the ground. He struggled, but the Thought pinned him down. He wrestled, but it had him firm. He fought back, but at that it only pounded and pounded. …

Bernardo’s boot lay on the floor of the herring-shed. He picked it up. The boot, then the boat. Thoughts of Ewald, the scene rolling round again. He called on the man, got his wife. The boat, then the boot. He walked back. Bernardo stalked off in a meaningless sulk, but Bernardo would always come back. He was happy enough, for the moment, to be alone.

The Thought circled him mistrustfully. He was resolved, yet the notion that he might actually follow this course of action shook him to the core. It went against the grain. He wavered. He had faith. He doubted. He believed. It was brilliant, irresistible, inspired. …

He envisaged a voice asking questions in tones that tell him they will not be repeated, a near future voice having the Prior’s ring. Shivers underfoot; cracks snake forward and outpace him, split and peel the floor from its foundations, themselves already fallen away and sunk. Long-settled conflicts skinned this boggy earth in wood and stone, called it “Land.” Misplaced faith at best, and importunate. Soils and shy clays shrink away to leave hollows, cavities, brittle vaults that unmindful feet pound from above; the skin itself dries, grows paper thin, stretched over nothing. The catastrophe waits while, as prelude, stones tumble away one night into a void that only daylight calls the sea. Vanity scrapes at the defining rind, and that which conceals itself in the very blandness of the cell, in the coming banality of such questions—Jörg’s questions—this is a version of “Then.” They will begin, he imagines, like this:

“How did you come to be ‘Salvestro’?”

And he will answer, he imagines.

Like this.

Sunlight woke him on the shore of the Achter-Wasser. He rose and walked forward into the woods. Standing and fallen trunks, dry and dying underbrush, leaf-drifts, scrub … The forest’s victors and defeated parted ranks to admit a damp and scrawny refugee. Hungry, too: his teeth ground tuberous stems, tongue twitched and wettened, throat gulped, sap-heavy crowns burst against his palate. He pulped stringy roots, swallowed soapy juices, bolted acorns, wild garlic, a dead crow once, in experiment, and his excrement crawled with worms. He stole eggs from the farms thereabouts, a chicken, followed the banks of a great river, upstream, until the forest sucked him deeper and farther in. Scabs and rashes bloomed on his arms and legs. He shod himself in calluses. Distance was a thickening of shadows, an opacity. By the island’s measure he was ten years old walking into this place; by the forest’s, a newborn baby.

For it scoured him, and he forgot himself within it, and his memories when they came at all would come at him like appetites. He ran, jumped, clung, hung … Two holm oaks stood in a clearing opened by the deadening shade of the greater one’s canopy. The younger stood beside it, gangling as a new foal. It shot up in a dash for the sunlight, crescive and skinny-limbed. How many seasons before its elder would starve it down? The needy suck of its roots, the pump of the supple trunk … He swung, felt the bough he clung to half-bend, half-break, felt it yield, snap, and drop him to the ground, where he twisted and pulled, jumped again, and gnawed at the fibrous splinters until it broke clean away at last. He thought of the years’ growth rippling up the trunk, along the boughs, fattening like a wave. … He saw a bear once. A shambling sack of fur crashed about in the undergrowth quite near him, searching for something. Deer clattered away, smelling him. Unseen creatures twitched and bolted. Sunlight prickled the dark canopy above, and the wind when it blew was a terrible thrashing and scourging, a frightening violence from which he was immune. He cowered anyway and fled the winters, too, feeling the endless ache, the bone-freezing chill, of each season a little less than the last—moving south, as he would later understand it. By chance the forest might give out, a sky yawn open, and he would be standing at the edge of grasslands, a moor, open ground. Huts appeared as little bricks with thin plumes of smoke disappearing into the abrupt blue. He would turn back, blend with the forest’s interior stillness, disappear again. He was incurious and uncatchable and invisible and unknown. … But he liked to watch fires.