The Wooden Shepherdess (17 page)

Still down on all-fours, and with hands that were quickly growing too numb with cold for the task, she explored this wall till they came on an empty shelf, and above it a sill; and above that again her fingers stuck to window-glass coated with frost.

*

Meanwhile, downstairs—and crouched on folded pads of their habits, because they never used chairs—the Reverend Mother and Novice Mistress discussed this problem-daughter of theirs: this girl who had verily taken Carmel by storm. For whether or not she stayed they had to make plans “as if.” So what about daily tasks? This being winter, all work in the garden must be ruled out (though even in summer, how could she ever be trusted to weed without pulling up plants?). And as for most normal indoor tasks.... At least, the illuminating of texts and work on vestments and altar-linen were certainly out.

“She could ... could she count altar-breads?”

“Surely—and even be taught to pack them, by feel. It's wonderful what they can learn: she might even be taught to feed the chickens, in time.” The Prioress covered her own eyes to see what blindness felt like, using her free hand to grope.

Then what about lessons? Before her profession a nun must have studied Theology, Dogma, Canon Law and Church History, also getting the Carmelite Rule and the Constitutions almost by heart: with someone who couldn't read for herself this would mean much reading aloud by her fellow-students, and much individual teaching—if scholarly standards weren't to be lowered....

“Of course they mustn't be lowered!” The Reverend Mother uncovered her eyes: “Her Instruction ought to be even stricter and drier than most: for our Daughter's principal danger lies in too much emphasis on the Sublime, on anything tending to introspection.” She paused, and her hand went back to her eyes. This blindness already had raised the girl to a more than natural pitch of nervous intensity, something quite out-of-key with the fruitful humdrum of daily monastic life as every Religious knows it. That had to be watched.... “So far as the Rule allows, she mustn't be too much alone—especially now at the start.” She paused again. “She's going to find our sense of community terribly hard to acquire, in all this silence and solitude.”

“True, Mother.” Even Carmel's Enclosure itself (thought the other) is separate not from but deeply within the created world, like a beating heart.

“Think how many girls anyhow come here supposing the only souls they have to bother about are their own! I believe I was like that myself; and for one like our little Maria upstairs, cut off from her sisters by blindness as well....”

As the Novice Mistress rose to tend the guttering candle, she tried to think back to her own novitiate. Yes, she too had been slow to discover that those whom God has joined together in Carmel are never truly asunder: not even when “there is neither speech nor language among them,” like David's nights and days, and his stars. But one thing was more important still; and the two nuns fell in a troubled silence, aware without needing words that the same thought occupied both their minds. The first thing of all to be learned in the life of Religion is Humble Obedience, for that is the source of all other graces; but how could they ever teach this to one so certain she knew God's will and everyone else was wrong? Richly endowed as her spirit was, this girl had a terrible lot to learn before she could even begin to understand what it meant becoming a nun.... As the Prioress prayed for the requisite help and strength (for this daughter's calls on her wisdom and love would be boundless) she heard the other one say: “It is no easy cross that is laid on us, Mother.”

The Carmelite's cross: that empty cross awaiting its human lodger.

Then the two nuns took their candle and climbed to the newcomer's cell. They moved, on their rope-soled shoes, with that wholly inaudible glide which Contemplatives always adopt to avoid disturbing each other on carpetless floors, and in empty echoing rooms; and they opened the door without knocking. Mitzi, absorbed, was quite unaware of them. Just as their candle's beam shone into her pitch-dark cell her wandering hands had encountered the cross hanging over the bed; and there they had stopped their wandering, feeling it over and over with longing and awe. The two women stood there in silence, and watched her feeling and feeling that plain wooden cross as if storing its feel so deep in her fingers that fingers alone ever after would call up its substance and shape of their own accord.

Loth after all to disturb her, the older women withdrew still unheard. But with troubled minds: for in Mitzi's candlelit face there was something which only increased their foreboding. Last thing tonight, at the end of their hour of meditation in Choir, they would say a silent Ave of special intention for Mitzi because of that look in her face.

Downstairs again, “Perhaps she had better be put in the laundry to work?” the Novice Mistress suggested.

The Prioress nodded. For there, with the hot smell of God steaming up in her nose from wet wool and wet cotton and bubbling suds and His touch in the silent correcting hands that were laid on her own when she made a mistake.... Where else could she better learn that a Carmelite's God is not only the God of the Choir and the lonely cell—
if
He gave her the grace to learn?

Her fingers numbed by exploring, Mitzi alternately rubbed her hands for warmth and nursed them between her knees.

As the Nuns had foreseen, shut up in her private darkness inside the general darkness she tended to find this Carmel where God had sent her essentially solitude: somewhere meant for the lonely perfecting of separate souls. A community of Solitaries.... Down in the Choir the nuns were singing the Antiphon after Complin and distant snatches reached her, even up here, of a thin unaccompanied wailing monotone seemingly better attuned to some desert anchorite's cell than a church. As if only their bodies assembled (she thought), their souls still climbed alone each one her separate Jacob's-ladder to God.

A solitude—and a silence. At eight the big bell tolled its nightly reminder that now “Great Silence” began, when no one would speak to another till after Prime in the morning. All outside sound was muffled by snow. In the Choir the Miserere was heard, as the Sisters punished themselves in the dark on behalf of a suffering sinning world and the holy souls of the dead; but everywhere else there was absolute quiet, with nowhere the tiniest sound. Not the drip of a tap, not a mouse.

Time passed, with Mitzi still blessing her blindness for making her even more wholly alone in the presence of God than the others. But then, through this outer unending silence, she started to hear from inside herself as it were a gnawing: faintly, a drip ... drip ... drip ... like a leaking out through a hole. Now that the struggle was ended, the strength she had borrowed to win it was draining out of her, going....

Then even that “air” which everything breathed and Mitzi had thought she could fly in—her wings found suddenly nothing to beat on, no God any longer there to support them. She called on her fingers to summon that sacred resource which their tips had stored up; but her fingers disowned her, and sending them groping across the wall revealed her cross itself as now no more than two joined-up pieces of wood. She wasn't in Carmel's “solitude” any longer but truly alone—in the felt absence of God.

Mitzi had learned from one earlier time like this to trust in God just as much when He wasn't there. But why must she bear yet again this unbearable separation? The time before she had still been down in the easy foothills; but now she had climbed to the point of no return with a lifelong ascent of Carmel lying in front of her, looking (as everyone said it would) too hopelessly steep and rough and dark to climb by herself alone. Yet this lost climber-in-spirit had learned already it wasn't the slightest use looking over her shoulder, back at the fading glimmer behind where He'd left her: lost sight of, He reappears only in front. Those comforting leftbehind lights below in the valley ... though long ago shining above her as guiding stars they were now but the empty shells of God, which God one-by-one had discarded unfolding before her.

A God for ever unfolding: His presence a journey—and endless. Abandoned on quick-rock shifting under her feet where she couldn't even stand still, she must choose the darkest part of the darkness ahead to climb into until it might please the Eternal Becoming to show Himself
new
....

“Abandoned?” But how could He ever absent Himself for a moment from Carmel, His Holy-of-Holies? Rather it must be she who had somehow absented herself from Him. She, who had felt so certain the will she obeyed had been none of her own, but His.... She, who had gone on insisting when Reverend Mother and all those holy Sisters had said in their wisdom “No” ... Had God all along been speaking through
them
, had she made a dreadful mistake in persisting?

She knelt by the bed determined to pray, for she must have an answer at all costs—straining in prayer every muscle her soul possessed. “Peradventure He sleepeth, and must be awaked....” Yet how could anyone pray with God not there to be prayed to? Her prayers with nowhere to go to could only echo inside the empty walls of her head; and that strength wherever it came from was now so utterly gone and she felt an exhaustion so total she dropped off to sleep where she knelt, and did it without even noticing.

*

Nine!
Now a whole hour of Silence had passed. It was time for Matins and Lauds; and the bell woke Mitzi, still on her knees. She was stiff with cold, and her underneath cheek on the blanket was numbed and creased.

She undressed and crawled into bed. But the blanket was cold; and by now she hadn't the warmth in her body to warm it. Her teeth were wanting to chatter: she clenched them, and lay as still as she could. But her neck felt especially cold and bereft: for she'd loved the hair that was shorn, treating it often like some warm pet animal when she was lonely. Moreover her head was beginning to spin with things and places and people, whirling in any order of time. The day when total blindness had finally struck her.... She saw once again that black cloud under her eyelids curtaining more and more—to the sound of sleigh-bells buffeted back by close-packed trees, and a brotherly pressure against her side like an ignorant Siamese Twin.... Then her father's droning bulk the evening before; and across the table, behind the rainbow of candles, a blur with an English voice so slurred with wine that he dropped some frightful clanger....

Then came Schmidtchen's lullaby voice—for darling Schmidtchen always came in the dark when called:

Bells, and peculiar kisses: identical-feeling clothes, and incense-and-cleanliness smells.... Bells and chants, double-counterpointing Schmidtchen's incessant circular ditty,

But now behind the Leitmotiv of that comforting voice the slow giant tick of the clock in the castle roof grew louder, the smell of fox and of human urine stronger: a cold quivering nose was thrust in her hand, while something ammoniac hung from a rope which creaked—then turned to the creaking stays of Emma Krebelmann, crooning into a smell of baby....

But bit by bit the kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria slowed, till little was left except the sensation of ghastly increasing bodily cold.

She was plunging up to her waist in the courtyard snow (in spite of the queer idea of a “presence” felt so close that she only need stretch out a hand for help—but couldn't).

Tremendous, the caged-in kitchen heat at home when anyone opened the kitchen door! But instead a shiver shook her shoulders, and soon from head to foot she was shivering.

She could see it coming—the cook's enormous ladle of ice—as a single paroxysmal shiver shook her. She jumped out of bed in her flannel nightgown, swinging her arms like a cabby: she pummeled her body and worked her limbs, she bounced up and down on the floor of her cell (but barefoot, and trying to make as little noise as she could) till her heart was bumping about in her ribs like a flustered hen in a basket: pumping the sluggish blood in her arteries back into pricking hands and feet, and even her dithering brain.

As she danced from foot to foot, she found herself looking calmly at something she never had really looked at before: at herself, from outside. Or rather (panting a bit as she bent and stretched) at God-and-herself, from outside—this minuscule Mitzi, an infinitesimal grain of sand which because it had once been lifted and swirled in the tide had come to think of the tide as her own to command.

That sensible “guardian angel” whose practical talk she realized now she had dared to despise, this girl (she thought as she got back in bed) was the one to be copied—and humbly, if ever she hoped to become remotely a Sister pleasing to God.

She gave a prodigious yawn, and settled herself for sleep.... Then was bounced out of bed by a clapper that went off outside like a ton of knights in armor falling downstairs. It was half-past five, and her first Carmelite day had begun.

Emma Krebelmann too must rise before it was light, with all those children to wake and be given their breakfasts: with ten-year-old Sigismund laid up in bed with a broken rib, and Liese and Lotte and little Ernst to be muffled in scarves and packed off to school—and likely as not Ernst's breeches to mend before he'd be fit to be seen. This morning, moreover, she'd meant to make some special coffee herself for the Baron and Baroness, ready for Gretl to take to their room when they woke.

Gretl of course was down much earlier still; and the Mistress had found the wood already blazing and roaring away in the kitchen stove, where now she stood with the whole of her mind in that savory simmering jug—till startled out of her wits by the stertorous snort (so close that it sounded inside the kitchen itself) of an old horse clearing the sleep from its nose, and a tiny jingle of bells. She turned to the window. Close outside in the courtyard the sleigh was standing, its candle-lamps paled by the growing daylight and clouds of steam hanging over the horses' heads in the frosty air.