The Pop’s Rhinoceros (24 page)

The Prior stopped. His demeanor had changed, his words seeming to gain weight in the silence that followed. Gerhardt broke it. He stood, and the monks swiveled on their seats to see what he would say.

“Such a city, and such a King. Where are we to find them, Father? How are we to reach them? Why should they avail themselves? We have our salvation. Here”—he held up his hands—” and here”—he gestured to the monks—” and here”—his arms flew out to indicate the island. “You would send us in search of a fool’s paradise when it is our own garden requires tending, our own walls rebuilding, our own foundations relaying.” A murmur had got up amongst the monks. Some were nodding at these words, others simply staring. Heads turned now to Father Jörg, who spoke more sharply.

“It may be, Brother Gerhardt, you have gazed too long on wood and clay. Head of one, feet of the other, when our church falls into the sea you will prove most ambiguous, both floating and sinking as you will. I have watched you, and waited for you. I have seen you labor and mix your sweat with the sea. I have seen your scaffolds fail, your ropes snap, and so I have sent you and your fellows across the length and breadth of the island to learn the customs of the people here. I have told you of the stranger peoples and more distant lands that we may find beyond these shores. And I have found guides to lead us through them. …” At this, the monks began to stir. They looked to one another, then around the chapter-house as though the men they sought might be perched aloft in the rafters.

HansJürgen saw Gerhardt’s face soften for an instant, the merest hint of a smile pass across it to be replaced with a glare.

“The heathens!” he exclaimed. “He means the heathens. You would have us guided by soldiers and murderers!” Father Jörg was trying to ask whom Gerhardt might otherwise suggest, but the monks had caught their brother’s tone. HansJürgen heard “No” muttered up and down the gradines as the brothers saw shock fill the faces of their fellows. The Prior was talking of foundations, of collapse, of their ruin if they stayed.

“Alone, we have no means, no hope,” he pleaded. “There is only one who may help us found our church on rock. …” But his words lacked their earlier weight and chased weakly after his audience. Gerhardt pointed to him and spoke in acid tones that rang though the hall.

“I say with Jeremiah, O the hope of Israel, the savior thereof in time of trouble, why shouldst thou be as a stranger in the land, and as a wayfaring man that turneth aside to tarry for a night? Are you savior or wayfarer, Father? Would you have us save our church or leave it?” Gerhardt’s voice had become a shout. Some of the monks were thumping on the floor with their feet. Father Jörg’s eyes blazed and his cheeks were flushed.

“Your rebellion is as Korah’s revolt against the Prophet, whom he would leave to journey alone. Your hot words too are as his, and I say with Moses, It came to pass, as he made an end of speaking all these words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them. And the earth opened her mouth and swallowed them up.” The two men stood staring at one another. HansJürgen looked from one to the other, then, rising gradually all around him, the questions began. Why must they go? Where would their travels take them? What would await them at the journey’s end?

“An authority higher than mine,” Father Jörg replied. “An army as great as the Lion’s, but armed with trowels and spades, with plumb-lines and angles. …”

“With coxcombs and motley, with bladders nailed to sticks,” Brother Gerhardt broke in. “More fools to lead the fools you will become in following this one.” His scorn was naked, paraded before the brothers, who shifted awkwardly in their seats and rumbled their doubts and fears, and more questions. Hours spent in the freezing winter sea hauling on Gerhardt’s ropes and beams, or plumbing the bottomless mud that would crust them to the waist as they tramped up the slope to the church, fed their whispers of disbelief. Had their own efforts now sunk to nothing in the clay? How might these masons find the solid ground they themselves had failed to discover?

“The church itself must be moved entire. Stone by stone, beam by beam …” Father Jörg said flatly, and the monks gasped.

“Why not the island?” Gerhardt scoffed. “Tree by tree, sod by sod, or the sea in which it sits, or the world you drew so prettily on the wall behind you?” The brothers murmured their assent, “Why not, why not…” and still the questions came, rippling through the ranks and breaking as sudden crests of sound
above the general murmur. Scornful questions and doubting questions. Curious questions.

Of course, HansJürgen thought. Their trampings about the island had nothing to do with custom, everything with curiosity. Beyond the monastery was the island, but beyond the island, what? He sat hunched in the gradines and listened as the whys of the doubters contended with the hows of the curious, why and how, why and how, running and tumbling through the lines of the monks, Jörg and Gerhardt battling through their proxies, but the Prior was losing. He could feel it, hear it. The balance was tilting, tipping, pouring weight behind Gerhardt’s contention that they should stay, and the questions were growing, widening, and deepening, becoming the pit they would all fall into unless he acted now against the gathering whine of doubt, which grew louder and louder, until he stood and heard a single clear voice cut through the babble and reduce the monks to an abrupt expectant silence, and the voice, he realized suddenly, was his own.

“How?” said Brother HansJürgen. “By faith. And why? Because our Prior asks it of us. I say with Paul to the Hebrews, By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he would after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise.” The monks had all turned to look at him. He saw his words register on their faces, then drew breath and said, “For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”

The monks looked down at their laps, all except Brother Gerhardt, who stared across the chapter-house at Brother HansJürgen and wore on his face a look of unconcealed disgust.

Father Jörg cast his eye over the heads bent before him. The hall was utterly silent. He thought of this place on the night of the collapse, himself padding about the gradines, thinking on the sermon he would deliver to the monks at prayer in the church. There was a darkness in the semilight, a latent clatter in the soft footfalls of his round. Soon the monks would finish their devotions and file out to take their places before him. But the splintering beams, the stones splitting on the floor of the nave, the clay sagging under them all… He would take two winters to find them in the moment under this moment, but here they were, gathered together as they should have been before. A city which hath foundations. Had HansJürgen somehow divined his purpose? The monk was still on his feet, glaring his defiance at Gerhardt.

“Who will journey with me?” Father Jörg asked simply of the heads bent down before him. And with that he clasped his hands before him and, looking neither to left nor to right, walked slowly between the tiers of benches to the doors and out into the cloister.

For a long moment no one stirred. Then HansJürgen looked away from his adversary across the hall and began to edge his way out. Wilf stood to let him pass, and Wulf, who sat on the end of the row, moved out, then found Wolf doing
the same. He continued down the steps to the floor, hesitated as though not at all sure how he had arrived, then walked toward the door, followed by Wolf, then Wilf, and last of all, silently urging them forward, HansJürgen himself. There was a second pause, and then the tier below followed suit, then the tier above, led by Joachim-Heinz. Gerhardt looked about wildly.

“What! You would follow these fools, these …”

HansJürgen barked from beyond the doorway, “You have said enough, Brother!”

The noise jolted them. Heads came up and eyes blinking as though awakened from sleep saw gray habits walking toward the doorway. On both sides of the hall, monks began to rise and shuffle along the rows to join the band gathering outside in the cloister. At the last, Gerhardt was left standing alone.

“So, Brother Gerhardt,” HansJürgen spoke when the last man had passed beneath his arm, “will you stay or will you come?” But that question had already been answered. He waited while the monk shuffled slowly along the empty row, past the empty seats, his slight movements amplified now by the deserted hall’s echo, until he too bowed his head beneath Hansjürgen’s arm and HansJürgen pulled the door shut behind him.

Father Jörg moved among them, laying his hand on a shoulder here, clasping a hand there, murmuring greetings and meeting gazes. He was a ransomed commander reunited with his troops. They formed themselves about him in a rough crescent, and a hard, cold sunlight beat down on the stones of the cloister. Come nightfall, the puddles that gathered in the hollows of the cobbles would freeze once again, but for now they were sheets of glaring light and the mirrored blue of the sky. A weight seemed to have lifted from the monks, who stood at ease, stretching and blinking, settling into their decision. Then a voice came from the back.

“Father, pardon me.” A young voice, and Jörg craned his neck to find the speaker. “Here, Father.” It was Heinz-Joachim. He nodded for the monk to go on.

“Father, I wondered, when you spoke of the city of towers and churches, the city we shall journey to, I wondered which city this would be—”

“And I, Father, I too wondered this,” a second voice broke in. It was Joachim Heinz. “I wondered too as to the King, the King we will petition. Forgive me, Father, but how is this king called?”

He recalled their terror, their huddling together on the floor of the chapterhouse while the stricken church bellowed and shuddered from its wounds. They had climbed from the wreckage, but slowly, becoming trepidant pilgrims about the precincts of the island, restive schoolboys on the gradines they had left behind now to follow him. He was invested in their raiment, crowned with their new horizon, a racing halo whose penumbral rim of gold sped west over the ragged marshes and brackish lagoons, out into the freezing black Atlantic, east to the thin soils of the plains and mountains tufted with scrubby grass and blasted pines, north where the winter will be bitter this year and the next, where men will
stand dumbstruck at the sight of wolves crossing the frozen northern gulfs while ice creeps farther down the shoreline to rime even the coast of Usedom; no matter, they will be long gone by then, and this moment, when Jörg turns to answer his questioner and, sitting unnoticed behind all the monks, Salvestro whispers to Bernardo, “This will be good,” this will be part of the clutter of a past to which none will return before the sea-ice has become water twice more, groaning and cracking in the frail warmth of spring as though some beast were trapped alive beneath it. They are men without shadows. Their thoughts have already left this place and are chasing forward, leaping rivers, scaling mountains, traversing the plains that divide them from their arrival. The monks gasp as the city’s ruler is named, and then the city itself gives them the bearing. The journey is tugging at their feet. They are a tiny army, no more than a vanguard, standing in silence at the limit of the point. The city they came for is so close, a matter of fathoms away, but ahead lies the grayness of a saltless, tideless sea, which brings them up short, and the church to be built here will never make of this rejection a journey’s end: they must go on. They are heirs to the Lion’s error, but now that error will be redeemed. They will turn and tramp back across the island, these swordless soldiers of Christ. They will cross the Achter-Wasser and head south because the ice long ago unlocked a sea and a city sank beneath it, because the Lion’s march could not be halted and their church would prove a fragile bulwark. Because they are unhoused and Vineta will not have them. “Rome,” said Father Jörg.

Aslow flood is moving up to the barricades. In the east, an invasion is under way. The ground is prepared, shuddering and waiting below. The vault of heaven is tented and empty, its commanders fled. A central pivot soaks pressure out of the enemy camp: finitude and light take a toll, but there is no sudden breach, no obvious horde to overrun the gates of these high spaces. Seepage and calm marshal the invader’s open declaration, and the sky is a broad, undefended front. Clouds hanging in the field of operations might be giants, huge animals, ships, engines of God. The night is blind and cannot see the erosion of its edges. The sky is cut and angels cannot close the wound. This is a battle without surprises: another dawn is rising over the city.

God’s face is made of light. Light rears in a tangent above the curving earth, a gathering wave of gray becoming blues and yellows and pinks. All about the eastern horizon the night is breaking down. The advance is cautious, but all resistance has disappeared. The encircled camp is deserted, its black defender already dead of fever and the body consumed. Or concealed somewhere where the light is unable to find it. The sky is quartered, but the body is nowhere here. Uneasy light drenches the high, featureless vault. Clouds burn away. Empty sky. The night is in hiding, waiting for the slow moment when it will return its defeat in kind. For now it is sunk and drowned. The light wheels and turns. The earth is a dark haven from the sky’s unending wars, a place for the defeated. Then the wave breaks and the light descends.

There is a city here, a stony purple bruise that wells out of the ground to meet its invader. Scarred targets, outcrops, and promontories mount the air as the vessels burst and pump upward out of the earth. This city fell from heaven into a sea of darkness; air flayed the light from its bones. Scarred and healed a thousand times, floundering and reaching up to empty heaven, darkness pours off the city’s surfaces and crevices, down its walls, through its streets, alleys, lanes, and out its gates. A dark sea drains and flies away. The seabed is land suddenly, and now light touches the first of its outposts, its highest points, which are old hills spattered with ruinous arches and towers: the Palatine, the Aventine, the Capitoline, the Coelian, the Esquiline, the Viminale and Quirinale. Across the river whose bend this city abuts, the long hump of the Janiculum emerges out of the earth’s shadow. Sunrise.