The Pop’s Rhinoceros (20 page)

The weeks now are inclement and interim. Winter strips its sopping tarpaulins off the frost-bruised sods and tender soils, scrapes gray muck out of the sky in the form of rain. Brief warmths blow in off the mainland, lose much of their heat in the waters of the Achter-Wasser, reaching Usedom as tokens of an advancing, still distant spring. The sky is undecided on its blueness, retracting it with bewildering haste to be replaced with rain and unhappy birds: chaffinches, robins, swifts, noisy crows, which scatter up and drop to find shelter amongst the bare branches and battered-looking evergreens. The raindrops make a noise like
Sploo-ot,
perhaps a little softer. Afterward there is fitful sunshine, dazzling and worrisome.

“Why do you take his part in this business? His mind has failed, which you know better than any of us, Brother.” Gerhardt spoke mildly but bluntly.

“His soul is battered from without, taking the brunt for all of us. …” Hanno indicated vaguely toward the far end of the chapter-house, to the church, which had begun once again to drop fragments of its substance into the sea now that the preservative winter freeze had ceded to a destructive thaw, ice-riddled cements cracking and plunging downward, meltwaters sheaved among the blocks pushing lines out of true. Cherubic effigies break ranks, peer out over parapets, pry themselves loose, fall… The weather is always relevant.

“Saint Christopher himself would have buckled, taking on such a burden,” added Georg.

Their faces were close to his, stubbly like roughly cut corn, red with cold. They had cornered him here in the chapter-house, where he had come to gather his thoughts alone and to pray, perhaps.

“He is unsound, our Prior,” said Gerhardt. “There it is, HansJürgen.”

They had sought him out, as he had known they would. Catching sight of them across the cloister, advancing out of the dorter, rounding unexpected corners, this or that face—the number of Gerhardt’s supporters who might be termed close had grown through the winter’s whispers and huddles—had sent him on suddenly remembered urgent business in the opposite direction. He did not want this.

“No,” he said.

“The brigands, though,” Gerhardt murmurs, shaking his head. “Here in our midst, served by novices. …”

“We love you for your loyalty, HansJürgen,” said Georg. “You have no enemies here.”

“Our Prior has not been honest with you about them,” Gerhardt went on.

“The islanders know more than they would readily tell, about the smaller one. …”

“Salvestro,” said HansJürgen. “He is contrite.”

“I have spoken with the islanders, as I say. It is not a pretty tale, though the victim lives. They know what must be done even if we ourselves cannot. When our Prior falls beneath the heathen’s spell and our Abbot sickens at his presence …” His voice wandered into some region of sadness, already mourning, inaudible. “None here are innocent,” he murmured.

“Will you stand with us, Brother?” asked Hanno.

Or against us?

“If there were some design in his plotting, if there were a purpose discoverable in his giving sanctuary to these outsiders …”

If? It seemed to HansJürgen that the winter had driven his Prior deep within some cave of private purpose, that every time he escorted Salvestro from the beet loft to the cell at the far end of the passageway, its denizen would look up in blank abstraction, an engineer at work on some fabulous contraption whose arm reaches blindly for the one tool needed and has eyes for nothing but the monster that consumes him. To Hansjürgen’s suggestions that he take up services once more in the chapter-house, or that he speak with his restive monks, he returned bland, acquiescing nods and did nothing. To his reports of his fellows’ various derelictions and slacknesses, he offered sad shakes of the head. The Abbot interested him more, if only because his death would raise the question of who was to assume the mantle and, HansJürgen suspected, were that question to be asked, its answer would not favor Father Jörg. On several nights HansJürgen had come upon him squatting on his haunches by the invalid’s bed, gazing impassively into the imbecilic face that seemed not to register his presence—or anyone’s—the two of them awaiting some sign or event. Jörg scribbled on a kind of chart, which he would snatch up quickly if HansJürgen approached, shamefaced at its contents or their implication, or the impression of secrecy itself. He kept it hidden behind his bookcase. HansJürgen had seen it. A map. It told him nothing.

Not “if,” then, but “what.” For Gerhardt had been right to aim his sharp face at the vagabonds lodged at the Prior’s behest (and no one else’s). There was little else to do in winter but become accustomed to unpleasant realities, yet they unsettled the younger ones and aroused deep suspicions and resentments in the rest even now. Gerhardt’s hand had rested on his arm as he rose to leave, their cajoling turning to thinly veiled threats. He looked down at the tracery of little scars on his fingers as the monk asked him finally, wonderingly, whether he was truly with
them,
“them” being the beet loft’s creatures and their Prior, too. He wanted to shout that no, no, he was not. Never had been. It was too late somehow, striding out like a mad old saint into a pointless martyrdom to be alone with God. Was Gerhardt right? Jörg?
Do not presume. …
Do not despair. …
A thief would steal him, bind him, and carry him off. But which thief?

And when? There would be no angels or trumpets.
And the sea will give up its
dead. …
Not that, either. There was the soft tocsin of the church’s crumbling, the gravelly breaths of its Abbot, the noiseless sundering of the monks, like two islands whose coasts had fitted, bluff socketed to inlet, headland to bay, now floating apart to create a marvelous channel, a gulf, an expanse of new sea that widened until only the eye of God might compass them both.

As the quick rainshowers of Usedom’s spring ceded to the more familiar drizzles and fogs, HansJürgen found himself seized by an obscure wanderlust. The winter caged him. Vegetable plots and fruit cages should be turned over and repaired, the roof of the dorter needed patching, too, but… But he too was seized with the sloth, the sense of indirection, that had come over all his brothers and found himself unable to muster the vigor to galvanize and organize a work-party. And even if he did, who would join it? In the cloister, Henning and Volker would still seek him out and greet him; Florian, too, and Joachim-Heinz. Heinz-Joachim? Perhaps. But who after these? Only novices.

So he walked the island alone, striking out toward the north and west, following the shore for a mile or two before turning inland, through beechwoods that brought him to the near shore of the Achter-Wasser—a little above Ploetz’s hovel—where his pace slowed and he skirted the island’s margin at a dawdle, looking over at the mainland’s wooded foreshore and seeing the smoke plumes of unseen fires rise into the sky. Then he turned once more into the woods. The path here served as a watercourse after heavy rains, rising gently with the land, then curving east about the slope’s contour. When the woods gave out he found himself traversing little plots and fields worked by the islanders—the path threaded a diplomatic passage between them—then the huts and outbuildings of the workers themselves: Ott’s, one of the Wittmanns’, others belonging to he knew not whom. The route grew familiar as the weeks went by, seeming to welcome him with little bouquets of early snowdrops, then bluebells, the frost-hollows slowly giving up their morning dusting of powdery ice. Splashes of shocking green spread among the trees’ black branches. After the winter confinement, his solitude was strange, strangely calming and then strangely broken.

It happened three times. First with Ott, then with two others whom he did not recognize. He would be taking the path through the fields when a distant figure would disentangle himself from some task—fence-repairs, brush-clearing— rise and walk briskly toward him, taking the long arching strides that the sticky mud demanded, an arm raised in greeting until not only the figure but the face too came in clear view. And at that point the figure would come to a halt. He thought each time he could see puzzlement on the thick features or vague alarm, confusion. Something, but whatever it was, the man would then turn and walk back to his task without looking back, and he, HansJürgen, was left with a sense of incompletion, a strange unease, as though his would-be accoster had told him something in a language he could not understand. Something vital that he had missed.

He would stand there for a minute or two, then continue, tramping the last
two miles to the seashore and follow it back up the coast to the monastery. Odd stunted trees were dotted along the shore here. A carpet of neatly cropped grass draped the low humps and gentle troughs up and down which he paced, the smooth green surface forming a raised strand. The resentful sea foamed weakly below and out of sight. He kept clear of the edge.

It was on this final stretch of his circuit, a cold early March day, that he saw himself, or so he thought for a split second—the light gray habit, the man’s build similar to his own. He was ahead, quite tiny in the distance, at the margin of the island’s grassy apron, about to make the last short climb up the point and disappear within the muddle of buildings that was the monastery. But, as he watched, the figure turned to the right and finally vanished not into the monastery, but behind the point. HansJürgen gained the same place a few breathless minutes later, already certain that this was the man the islanders had expected and thought themselves greeting before his own features told them of their error.

A cluster of outbuildings—most now abandoned—were set back a few yards from the edge. One could continue between them and the edge to the transept whose cracked wall blocked the path finally. HansJürgen rounded the corner of what had once been a wood store. The wood itself had long been sunk in efforts to buttress the church. Stringy grass, patches of mud, blocks and fragments of stone, and the vagabonds’ boat. It had lain here through the winter. Someone was hunched over it, scooping at the standing water inside. He moved nearer, puzzled, the clothes wrong, something wrong. The man heard him and turned. It was Salvestro.

One night he heard airy voices singing, and their sound was like golden threads, coppery red in the dark of the beet loft.

“Christ is born,” Bernardo muttered grumpily. He had been sleeping.

“What?”

“Christ,” his companion repeated, then added, “You heathen.”

He looked up in surprise, though the loft was dark. Heathen—that was the epithet bestowed on him by Gerhardt’s men, the little conclave he gathered about him each morning in the cloister. HansJürgen too was a kind of focus in the muted resentments of the monks. Gerhardt stared at him glassily while his lieutenants scowled and brushed past him in heavy silence, but the current of these hatreds ran over him to other destinations. Heathen. That particular fragment of alluvial grit had formed its pearl in Bernardo, who cherished it, while the stream itself ran on, bitter, its surface dark and glossy, debouching over the Prior, who was hardly seen in daylight, over the church, or its disrepair. Or the place itself; the whole island? It was undivinable. He thought to ask the Prior. Their meetings had grown almost fraternal—he would sit without being bidden and sometimes bring the evening to a close by yawning and, asked if it was not perhaps time to
sleep, would nod, rise, and make his way back to the beet loft unescorted. He thought to ask but somehow never framed the question.
Tell me, Father, why is it that your monks hate you?
… No. Impossible. The Prior was a low humped boulder, half-concealed and worn smooth by the turbid waters about him, well bedded in and offering no purchase to their lather.
Because, my son, I took in two murderers. …

The place, then. The place itself. Nothing worth stealing in it, nothing not nailed down, anyway. Crumbling, a lot of it. They all hated it, though in different ways, and their feuding was a muffled business, all straw padding and blunted swords. He didn’t understand it and awaited the coming spring, thinking vaguely that east might be a good direction, thinking too of the barrel, which rested in an outhouse with the rope, of Ewald’s boat, leaned carelessly against the outer wall of the church and still icebound (albeit from within), of Ewald himself.