The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  He searches through the registers of nobility in town archives, asks experts in heraldry, but can find no one who has heard the name. Finally, in a monastery library, he comes across the same book as his father had. He reads it page by page, line by line; the name Vitriaco is not there. He begins to doubt his memory, his whole past seems uncertain, but the name Vitriaco remains the one fixed point, immovable as a massive boulder.

  He resolves to erase the name from his mind and decides to head for a particular town. By the very next day it is nothing but a faint cry from afar that sounds like Vi-tri-a-co, and another road is leading him in a quite different direction. A spire on the horizon, the shadow of a tree, the hand on a milestone: however hard he tries to force himself to doubt them, they all become fingerposts telling him he is approaching the place where the mysterious Grand Master Vitriaco lives and is guiding his footsteps.

  In an inn he meets a travelling quack and for a moment deludes himself with the vague hope that he might be the one he is looking for. But the quack is called Doctor Bleedwite. He is a dark-complexioned man with small, shiny, pinemarten’s teeth and shifty eyes, and there is nothing in this world that he does not know, no place he has not been, no thought he cannot read, no heart whose depths he cannot plumb, no illness he cannot heal, no tongue he cannot loosen and no coin that is safe from him. The girls crowd round for him to read their fortunes from their palms or in the cards. People fall silent and quietly slink away when he whispers details from their past to them.

  Leonhard drinks the whole night through with him. At times in his drunken stupor he is overcome with dread at the idea that it is not a human being sitting opposite him. The doctor’s features keep on blurring and all he can see is the white teeth, from which words emerge which are half an echo of what he has said himself, half answers to scarcely formulated questions. As if the man could read his innermost desires, he brings even trivial conversations round to the Templars. Leonhard keeps wanting to find out if he has heard of a certain Vitriaco but each time, when it is almost too late, he feels deep misgivings and bites back the name.

  They travel on together, wherever chance takes them, from one fair to the next. Doctor Bleedwite eats fire, swallows swords, changes water into wine, pushes daggers through his cheeks and tongue without bleeding, heals people possessed by evil spirits, summons up ghosts, puts spells on man and beast. Leonhard has daily proof that the man is a swindler, can neither read nor write and yet performs miracles. The lame cast their crutches aside and dance, women in labour give birth the moment he lays hands on them, epileptics are cured of their fits, rats leave the houses in hordes and plunge into the river. He finds it impossible to break away from him; he is under his spell, yet thinks himself free.

  Again and again his hopes that the quack will lead him to Vitriaco die, only to blaze up brighter than ever the next minute, fanned by some ambiguous remark. Everything the mountebank says and does is double-edged: he dupes people and at the same time helps them; he lies and what he says conceals profound truths; he tells the truth and the mocking face of falsehood appears behind it; he gabbles away at random and his words become prophecy; he makes predictions from the stars and they come true, even though he knows nothing about astrology; he brews potions from common weeds and they work like magic; he laughs at people’s credulity and is himself as superstitious as any old crone; he scoffs at the crucifix and makes the sign of the cross when a black cat crosses his path; asked for advice, he brazenly flings the questioner’s own words back in his face, yet from his lips they turn into answers that hit the nail on the head.

  It is with astonishment that Leonhard sees a miraculous power revealed in this most unworthy of earthly instruments. Gradually he comes to grasp the key to the mystery. If he sees in him the swindler alone, then everything he learns from him dissolves into mere gibberish, but if he looks for the invisible power that is reflected in the quack doctor, like the sun in a muddy puddle, the mountebank immediately becomes its mouthpiece and a source of living truth.

  He decides to take the risk, puts his misgivings to one side and, without looking at him, as if he were addressing the violet and purple clouds in the evening sky, asks the man if he knows the name Jacob de –

  ‘Vitriaco.’ The other swiftly completes the name, then stands still, as if in a trance, bows deeply towards the west and, with a solemn expression and a voice quivering with excitement, tells Leonhard that the hour of awakening has finally arrived. He himself, he goes on, is a Templar of subordinate rank whose task it is to lead searchers along the mysteriously winding paths of life to the Master. In a torrent of words he describes the glory that awaits the select, the splendour that surrounds the countenance of each Brother, releasing him from all remorse, from blood guilt, sin and torment, turning him into a Janus with two faces looking at two different worlds from eternity to eternity, an undying witness to the world below and the world above, a mighty human fish in the ocean of existence, freed for ever from the meshes of time, immortal both here and there.

  Then he points ecstatically at the dark-blue edge of a range of hills on the horizon. There, he tells him, deep in the earth, surrounded by tall pillars is the Order’s shrine, a towering temple made from druid stones, where once a year, in the dark of night, the disciples of the Cross of the Baphomet meet, the Chosen Ones of the God of the Lower World who rules over mankind, crushing the weak and raising the strong to be His sons. Only one who is a true knight, a blasphemer through and through, baptised in the fire of spiritual revolt, and not one of those grovelling whiners forever cringing before the bogey of mortal sin and castrating themselves on the holy ghost, which is nothing but their own innermost self – only such a one can enjoy the blessing of reconciliation with Satan, the sole sword-bearer among the gods, without which the gulf between expectation and event can never be closed.

  The quack’s bombast leaves a flat taste in Leonhard’s mouth, his extravagant fabrications make him sick. A secret temple here in the middle of a wood in Germany! But, like the roar of a mighty organ, the fanatical tone drowns out his thoughts and he does as Doctor Bleedwite commands and takes his shoes off. They light a fire, the sparks swirling up into the darkness of the summer night, and he drinks the foul-tasting concoction his companion brews up out of herbs so that he will be purified.

  ‘Lucifer, by the wrongs you suffer, I greet you,’ is the watchword he must remember. He hears the words, but the syllables are strangely disjointed, like a group of stone columns, some a long way away from, some close to his ear. He no longer hears them as sounds, but sees them rise up as pillars forming aisles. It seems as natural as a dream where things change into others, large ones vanish into small.

  The quack doctor takes him by the hand and they walk for a long, long time, or so it seems. Leonhard’s naked feet are on fire; he can feel feel ploughed furrows beneath his soles. In the darkness hummocks swell up into vaguely recognised shapes.

  Short spells of sober doubt alternate with unshakable certainty, but the firm belief that, as always so far, there is some truth behind his guide’s promises gradually gains the upper hand. Then come strangely exciting moments when, stumbling over a stone, he is roused with a start to the awareness that his body has been walking in deep sleep, only to forget it immediately. Endless deserts of time stretch between these moments of startled wakefulness, diverting his suspicions from the present to epochs apparently long past.

  The path begins to descend.

  Broad, echoing steps hurry down.

  Then Leonhard is feeling his way along cold, smooth marble walls. He is alone. As he turns round to look for his companion he is stunned by resounding trumpet blasts, like the call to awaken the dead. He almost loses consciousness, the bones in his body vibrate, then the night is torn apart before his very eyes as the deafening fanfares transmute into dazzling light.

  He is standing in a vast, vaulted space. Hovering in the middle is a golden head with three faces. He glances up at the one facing him: it seems to be
his own, only young again. The mark of death is on it, yet the brightness of the metal, which half obscures its features, glows with indestructible life. It is not the mask of his youth that Leonhard is seeking, he wants to see the two other faces which look out into the darkness, wants to penetrate the secret of their expression, but they turn away from him. Every time he tries to walk round the golden head it revolves, keeping the same face towards him.

  Leonhard peers round, trying to discover what it is that makes the head move. Suddenly he sees that the wall at the back is transparent, like oily glass. Behind it is a figure, arms outstretched, dressed in tattered clothes, hunchbacked, a wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes, standing motionless as death on a mound of bones from which sparse blades of grass grow: the Prince of this World.

  The trumpets fall silent.

  The light dies away.

  The golden head disappears.

  All that is left is the pale luminescence of decay surrounding the figure. Leonhard feels a numbness slowly creep over his body, paralysing him limb by limb, curbing the flow of blood so that his heartbeat grows slower and slower until if finally stops.

  The only part with which he can still say ‘I’ is a tiny spark somewhere in his breast.

  With the reluctant fall of moisture from a leaf, the hours drip into a spreading pool of endless years.

  Almost imperceptibly the figure takes on the outline of reality. In the grey light of dawn the hands on its outstretched arms slowly shrink to stumps of rotten wood, the skulls reluctantly give way to dusty round stones. Wearily Leonhard pulls himself to his feet. Looming menacingly over him, wrapped in rags, features made of pieces of glass, is a hunchbacked scarecrow.

  His lips are burning feverishly, his tongue feels parched; beside him the embers of the fire are still glowing under the pan with what is left of the drugged potion. The quack has gone and with him what little money he had left. The fact hardly registers on Leonhard’s consciousness, the experience of the night is still gnawing at the depths of his soul. The scarecrow is no longer the Prince of this World, true, but the Prince of this World himself is now no more than a paltry scarecrow: frightening to the timid alone, adamant to those who beseech his aid, dressed in tyrant’s robes for those who want to be slaves and array it with the panoply of power and a puny phantasm to all those who are proud and free.

  Doctor Bleedwite’s secret is suddenly made plain: the mysterious force that works through him is not his own, nor is it some invisible force behind him. It is the magic power of the believers who cannot believe in themselves, cannot use it themselves, but have to transfer it to some fetish, be it man, god, plant, animal or devil so that it will shine back on them, its potency magnified as if by a burning-mirror; it is the magic wand of the true Prince of this World, the innermost, all-present, all-consuming ‘I’, the source which can only give, never take, without becoming an impotent ‘you’, the self at whose command space must shatter and time freeze into the golden face of eternal present; it is the imperial sceptre of the spirit, the sin against which is the only one that can never be forgiven; it is the power made manifest through the blazing nimbus of a magic, indestructible present sucking everything down to its primal depths.

  In it gods and humans, past and future, shades and demons all give up that illusion they call their life. It is the power which knows no bounds, the power which is strongest in those who are greatest, the power which is always within and never without, and immediately turns everything that remains without into a scarecrow.

  The quack doctor’s promise of the forgiveness of sins is fulfilled in Leonhard, there is not a single word that does not come true. The Master has been found: it is Leonhard himself. Just as a large fish will tear a hole in the net and escape, so he has freed himself from the legacy of the curse: a redeemer for those ready to follow him.

  Everything is sin, or nothing is sin, all selves are one common self, of that he is clearly aware. Where is the woman who is not at the same time his sister, what earthly love is not at the same time incest, what female creature, and be it the tiniest animal, can he kill without at the same time killing his mother and his own self? Is his body anything other than an inheritance from myriads of animals?

  There is no one who decrees our destinies except the one, great self that mirrors itself in countless reflected selves – great and small, clear and murky, good and evil, happy and sad – and yet is untouched by joy or sorrow, remains a perpetual present in past and future, just as the sun does not become dirty or wrinkled when its reflection floats in puddles or rippling waves, does not descend into the past, nor return from the future whenever the waters dry up or rain brings new ones: there is no one who decrees our destinies except the great, common self, the fountainhead from which all waters flow.

  What space does that leave for sin? The malevolent, invisible enemy shooting poisoned arrows from out of the darkness has gone; demons and false gods are dead, having succumbed like bats to the brightness of light.

  Leonhard sees his mother with her restless look arise from the dead, sees his father, his sister-wife Sabina. They are merely images, like his own many bodies as a child, a youth, a man. Their true life is incorruptible and without form, like his own self.

  He drags himself to a pond he sees nearby to cool his burning skin. His entrails are racked with a pain he does not feel as his, but as if it were another’s. All spectres, including physical pain, disappear in the face of the dawn of an eternal present which seems as natural to each mortal as their own face and is yet as wholly alien as their own face.

  Contemplating the gently curving bank and the small, rush-grown islands, he is suddenly overcome with memory.

  He sees that he is back in the park of his childhood.

  He has walked round in a great circle through the fog of life!

  A profound content fills his heart, fear and dread have been swept away, he is reconciled with the dead and the living and with himself. From now on fate will hold no terrors for him, neither in the past nor in the future.

  Now the golden head of time has only a single face for him: the eternally young countenance of the present as a feeling of never-ending, blissful peace; the two others are permanently turned away, like the dark side of the moon from the earth.

  He finds comfort in the thought that everything that moves must go round in a circle and that he too is part of the great force that makes and keeps the celestial bodies as spheres. The difference between the sign of Satan with the ceaselessly running four human legs and the unmoving, upright cross is clear to him.

  Is his daughter still alive? She must be an old woman, hardly twenty years younger than himself.

  Calmly he walks up to the castle. The gravel path is a brightly coloured carpet of fallen fruit and wild flowers, the young birch trees gnarled giants in bright cloaks. The summit of the hill is topped with a black pile of rubble threaded with the silvery stems of weeds.

  Strangely moved, he wanders round the sun-scorched ruins and an old, familiar world rises again from the past in transfigured splendour. Fragments he finds here and there under charred beams fuse into a whole; like a magic wand, a twisted bronze pendulum brings the brown clock of his childhood into a newborn present, the blood sweated in old torments turns into a thousand red speckles glistening on life’s phoenix plumage.

  A flock of sheep, herded by silent dogs into a broad rectangle of grey, is crossing the meadow and he asks the shepherd who lives in the castle. The man mutters something about a curse on the place and an old woman, the last person to live there before it burnt down, an evil witch with a blood-mark on her forehead like Cain, who lives down at the kiln, then hurries off on his sullen way.

  Leonhard goes into the chapel, which is hidden in a jungle of trees. The door is hanging from its hinges and all that is left inside is the gilded prie-dieu, covered in mould; the windows are black with grime and the altar and pictures decayed. The cross on the iron trapdoor has been eaten away by verdigris, brown moss
is growing up through the gaps round the edge. He wipes it with his foot and a half-eroded inscription appears in a polished strip of the metal, a date and the words:

  Built by

  Jacob de Vitriaco

  The fine gossamer threads that bind together the things of this world gradually disentangle in Leonhard’s mind. The name of some foreign architect, barely scratched on the surface of his memory, so often seen during the days of his youth and just as often forgotten, that is the invisible figure who accompanied him on his circular journey in the guise of a Grand Master calling him. Now he lies here, at his feet, changed back into an empty word at the very moment in which his mission is completed and the secret longing of his soul to return home to its point of departure has been fulfilled.

  Leonhard, the Master, sees the rest of his life as a hermit in the wilderness of existence. He wears a hair-shirt made of rough blankets he finds among the ruins of the burnt-out castle and builds a fireplace of bricks. The occasional figures that chance to pass close to the chapel seem as insubstantial as shadows, only taking on life when he draws their image inside the magic circle of his self and makes them immortal there. To him the forms of existence are like the changing shapes of the clouds: manifold and yet basically nothing but water vapour.

  He lifts up his eyes above the tops of the snow-covered trees. Once more, as in the night of his daughter’s birth, there are two stars close together in the southern sky, looking down on him.

  Torches swarm through the forest.

  Scythes clash.

  Faces contorted with anger appear among the trees, a grumble of low voices. The old, hunchbacked woman from the kiln is once more outside the chapel, waving her skinny arms, pointing out the devil’s silhouette on the snow to the superstitious peasants, staring all the time at the windowpanes with wild eyes like two green stars.