The White Dominican (11 page)

Could I look into his dying eyes?

Could I drag his body out into the alley and throw it into the water? And then, my hands soiled with blood for the rest of my life, could I ever embrace Ophelia and kiss her again?

Could I, a murderer, look my dear, dear father in the face, that kindly face?

No! I would never be able to do that, I can feel it. The dreadful deed must be done, and I must carry it out, that I know, but I will sink to the bottom of the river with the dead body.

I pull myself together and slip over to the door. There I pause, before I grasp the latch, and clench my hands together as I try to scream a plea to my heart, ‘Lord, who has mercy on us all, give me strength.’

But these are not the words my lips pray. My spirit cannot command them, and they whisper, “Lord, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.”

Then the deathly hush is shattered by a reverberation of brass, tearing the words from my lips. The air quivers, the earth trembles. The clock in the tower of St. Mary’s has bellowed out.

In all the life around and within me, it is as if the darkness has turned white.

And, as if from the far, far distance, from the mountain that I know from my dream, I hear the voice of the White Dominican, who confirmed me and forgave me my sins – my past as well as my future sins – calling my name:

“Christopher, Christopher!”

A heavy hand lands on my shoulder.

“Murder most foul!”

I realise it is the grumbling bass voce of Herr Paris, the actor, that is echoing in my ear, soft and muted, full of menace and hatred, but I do not resist. Unresisting, I let myself be dragged into the lamplight.

“Murder most foul!”

I can see him foaming at the mouth. His swollen toper’s nose, his flabby cheeks, his chin, gleaming with spittle, everything about him is bobbing with triumph and devilish delight.

“Mur–der–most–foul!”

He has grabbed me by the chest and shakes me at every syllable like a bundle of empty clothes.

It does not occur to me to resist him, or to tear myself free and run away. I have become as weak as some tiny creature at the end of its tether.

He interprets it as guilt, I can see by his expression, but how could I utter even one word? My tongue is limp. Even if I wanted to, I could not describe to him the devastating experience I have just been through.

He keeps shouting at me, then barking hoarsely in my ear, like a madman, foaming at the mouth, clenching his fists in front of my face; I can hear and see it all, but it has no effect on me, I am paralysed, hypnotised. I realise that he knows everything, that he saw us get out of the boat, saw us kissing, that he has guessed I was going to kill old Mutschelknaus, “in order to rob him” as he keeps on shouting.

I do not defend myself. I am not even shocked to find he knows our secret.

I am like a bird that has forgotten its fear in the jaws of the snake.

Fever is hammering at my temples; the boundary between the inside and outside world is as blurred as that between the sea and the sky. I am drifting helplessly on the surging breakers of my blood, now torn down into yawning funnels filled with the blackness of deepest unconsciousness, now floating in a blinding light, flung upwards towards a white-hot sun that scorches my senses.

A hand is holding mine tight. When my eye lets go of it and, tired of counting the myriad tiny holes in the lace cuff from which it protrudes, makes its way up the sleeve, I have a hazy sense that it is my father who is sitting at my bedside.

Or is it only a dream?

I can no longer distinguish between waking reality and my imaginings, but whenever I feel his eye resting upon me, a tormenting sense of guilt forces me to close my lids.

How has it all come about? I can no longer remember. The thread of memory has torn at the point when the actor was shouting at me.

There is only one thing I am clear about: at some time, somewhere by the light of a lamp, I wrote out a promissory note at his order and signed it with my father’s forged signature. The writing was so like his that, as I stared at the paper before Herr Paris folded it up and put it away, I thought for a moment my father had signed it with his own hand.

Why did I do it? It seemed such a natural thing to do that even now, with the memory of the deed tormenting me, I cannot wish it undone.

Is it only one night that has passed since then or a whole generation?

I feel as if the actor had vented his spleen on me for a whole year of my life without ceasing. Then, finally, my lack of resistance must have made him realise there was no point in continuing his rage; somehow he must have convinced me that I could save Ophelia by forging the signature.

The only ray of light penetrating my feverish torment is that I am certain I did not do it to save myself from the suspicion of intent to murder.

How I managed to make my way home, whether it was already light or still dark, is a complete mystery to me.

I have a vague picture of myself sitting by a grave, weeping in desperation, and from the scent of roses that flows over me whenever I think of it, I almost believe it was my mother’s grave.

Or does it come from the bouquet of flowers there, on the counterpane?

Who can have laid it there?

‘My God! I must go and put out the street-lamps!’ The thought is like a whiplash on every nerve-end. ‘Is it bright day-light already?’ I try to jump out of bed, but I am so weak I cannot move a muscle.

Wearily I sink back into the pillows.

‘No, it’s still night-time’, is the thought that comforts me, for my eyes are suddenly plunged back into deepest darkness.

But immediately afterwards I can see the brightness again and the rays of the sun playing on the white wall. And once again I am overwhelmed by the idea that I am neglecting my duty.

I tell myself it is a wave of fever sweeping me back into the sea of delirium; but I am powerless to stop a familiar, rhythmical hand-clapping rising, like something from the dream world, and beating, ever louder, ever clearer, against my ear. Night and day alternate in time with the rhythm, faster and faster, night and day without any transition, and I have to run, run, to be in time to light the lamps, put them out, light them, put them out.

Time is rushing after my heart, trying to catch it, but it manages to keep its pulse one step ahead.

‘Now, now I am going to sink beneath the tide of blood’, I feel. ‘It is flowing from a wound in old Mutschelknaus’ head, pouring out between his fingers like a torrent as he clutches at it with his hand. Any second now I will drown in it.’ At the last moment I grasp a post that is fixed into the embankment, and hold on tight. As consciousness recedes, I clench my teeth in response to my one remaining thought, ‘Keep a firm hold on your tongue, otherwise in your delirium it will reveal that you forged your father’s signature.’

Suddenly I am more awake than ever I was by day, more alive than ever in a dream. My hearing is so sharp that I can hear the faintest sound, whether near or far.

Far, far above in the treetops on the other bank the birds are singing, and I can clearly hear voices murmuring their prayers in St. Mary’s.

Can it be Sunday?

Strange that the usual roar of the organ cannot swallow up the whispering in the pews. Strange that this time the loud noises cannot harm the soft, weak ones.

What are those doors banging in the house? I thought the other floors were uninhabited? That the rooms below were filled with nothing but dusty old junk?

Is it our ancestors who have suddenly come to life?

I decide to go down. Why shouldn’t I, I feel so fresh and full of vigour? Immediately I remember: to do that I would have to take my body with me and that is the difficulty; I can’t go down in the broad daylight to pay a visit to my ancestors in my nightshirt.

Then there is a knock at the door. My father goes over, opens it a little and says through the crack in respectful tones, “No, grandpapa, it’s not time yet. As you know, you can only come to him when I have died.”

This is repeated nine times in all.

When it is repeated the tenth time, then I know that it is our Founding Father outside. I know that I am right by the deep, respectful bow my father makes as he opens the door wide.

He goes out, and by the slow, heavy tread, accompanied by the tapping of a stick, I can hear that someone is coming to my bed.

I cannot see him, for I have my eyes shut. There is an inner feeling which tells me I must not open them. But through my lids, as clearly as if they were of glass, I can see my room and all the objects in it.

Our Founding Father pulls back the covers and places his right hand on my neck, the thumb sticking out at right angles to make it like a set-square.

He speaks in a monotone, like a priest saying the litany, “This is the storey on which your grandfather died and awaits the resurrection. The human frame is the house in which one’s dead ancestors live.

In some people’s houses, in some people’s bodies, the dead awake, before the time is ripe for their resurrection, to a brief, spectral life. Then the rumours fly of ‘haunting’, then the common herd talks of ‘possession’.”

He repeats the process, placing the palm of his hand with the thumb outspread on my chest. “And here your great-grandfather lies entombed.”

And so it continues, down the whole of my body, over stomach, loins, thighs and knees, to the soles of my feet. When he places his hands on them, he says, “And this is where I live. For the feet are the foundations on which the house rests; they are the root joining the body of your person to Mother Earth, whenever you walk.

Today is the day following the night of your solstice. This is the day when the dead within you begin their resurrection.

And I am the first”

I hear him sit down by my bed and from the rustle of pages being turned from time to time I guess that he is reading to me from the family chronicle, which my father mentions so often.

It comes to me in the tone of a litany, which lulls my outward senses but excites my inner ones to increasing, sometimes almost unbearable wakefulness:

“You are the twelfth, I was the first. We start counting with ‘one’ and we stop counting with ‘twelve’. That is the secret of God’s incarnation.

You are to become the top of the tree which sees the living light; I am the root, which sends up the forces of darkness into the light.

But you will be I and I will be you when the growth of the tree is complete.

The elder is the tree that in Paradise was called the tree of life. Even today legend has it that it possesses magic power. Cut off its top, its branches and its roots, plant it upside down in the earth, and lo! what was the crown of the tree will become a root, what was a root will put out branches, so completely is each of its cells imbued with the communion of ‘I’ and ‘you’.

That is why I have put it as a symbol on the coat of arms of our family. That is why it is growing as an emblem on the roof of our house.

Here on earth it is only a token, just as all forms are only tokens, but in the incorruptible realm it is the first among all trees.

Sometimes in the course of your wanderings, both here and on the other side, you have felt old: that was I, the foundation, the root, the Founding Father, that you could feel within you. We are both called Christopher, for you and I are one and the same.

I was a foundling, just as you were; but in the course of my wanderings, I found the great father and the great mother, losing the little father and the little mother, you have found the little father and the little mother, but not yet the great father and the great mother.

Thus I am the beginning and you are the end; when each has penetrated the other, then shall the ring of eternity be closed for our family. The night of your solstice is the day of my resurrection. As you become old, so I will become young, the poorer you become, the richer I will be …

Whenever you opened your eyes, I had to close mine, if you closed yours, then I could see; thus it was until now. We stood facing each other like waking and sleep, like life and death, and could only meet on the bridge of dreams.

Soon all that will be changed. The time is approaching: the time of your poverty, the time of my wealth.

The night of the solstice was the watershed.

Anyone who is not ripe will sleep through it, or will wander the earth, lost in darkness; his founding father must lie entombed within him until Judgment Day.

There are those – they are the presumptuous ones – who believe in their body alone, and commit sins for their own advantage, the ignoble, the ones who despise their family tree; the others are those who, for the sake of an easy conscience, are too cowardly to commit a sin.

But you are of noble blood, and were willing to commit murder for the sake of love.

Doing good and doing evil must become the same, otherwise both will remain a burden, and one who bears a burden can never be a Freeman.

The Master whom they call the White Dominican has forgiven you all your sins, even your future ones, because he knew how everything would come to pass; but you deluded yourself into thinking it was in your power to commit a particular deed or not. He is, from time immemorial, free from both good and evil and therefore free from all delusion. But those, like you or I, who still delude themselves, load this burden or that on themselves.

We can only free ourselves from it after the manner of which I have told you.

He is the great crown of the tree that is to come, arising from the great source-root.

He is the garden; you and I and others of our kind are the trees that grow within it.

He is the great wanderer and we the lesser.

He descends from eternity to infinity; our path takes us from infinity up into eternity.

Anyone who has crossed the watershed has become a link in a chain, in a chain formed from invisible hands that never let each other go until the end of days. From that point on they belong to a community in which each one has a mission which is destined for him alone.