They looked up and saw crosses rising on the palisade; the gates were opening, and striding toward them over the glacis was a figure in full pontificals, Adalbert, Bishop of Pomerania, his every footfall dragging the conflict away from them into some haven of confusion and twisted purpose—an enemy they never understood—untwisted as Stettin’s conversion to the cross some hundred years before. They have converged on the point where opposites meet and cancel one another. A foretaste, the unhelpful rehearsal of this situation on the cliff where they found their purpose tangled once again, darker this time and inextricable as ever. They were masters of the island, and their goal as remote as ever. Where could they go from here?
The truncated limb of the point ended in a sheer drop, a clay-red rawness prickling with blood, and beneath lay only the water’s endless and opaque balm. Somewhere below its surface was the city they had come to sack, the temples to raze, men and women to cut down, children’s heads to dash against vanished walls, all disappeared, sunk out of reach, still to be done. The wound never bled. They were alone, and every man foraging in his soul found an appetite only sharpened by the stark disappearance set before them. A promise had been made, but the victory was ill defined and beyond them, in some inconclusive region of convections and sluggish movement. The last ditch should have been the city and every life within it, never this yellow-gray monotone, this limitless vista of nothing. A promise was made, and broken. Never the sapping extent of the sea.
They would build a church. They would carry stones from quarries as far away as Brandenburg to build this monument to their bafflement. They spurned the local sandstones and sent south and east for granite. Full-laden barges plied the Elbe and Saale for five summers until the foreshore of the island was paved with gray-black stone. Wagons loaded with toises cut to the length of a man a hundred miles hence crept laboriously about the Achter-Wasser, across the island to the limit of the shortened point. Foundations were laid which sank in the soft earth until piles were driven underneath and the creeping collapse arrested. Wooden outbuildings, hasty sheds, and shacks straggled inland from the site. The lodges of the stonecutters and masons spread until they cut the road to the works, were demolished and rebuilt nearer the beech copse. A stables was thrown up, and dormitories for the laborers. The smithy sent the tannin-reek of oak chips billowing into the sky while nails, pegs, tie-bars, horseshoes, ironwork for the carts, and tools for the workmen piled up at the back of the forge. Caskwood, roof-beams, rough planking, and scaffold poles lay stacked in depots next to the tiles. Workshops were built, and wheel-hoists. Ropes were measured and cranes constructed. The laborers dug their trenches with ease in the island’s soft substance. In spring, the carpenters arrived.
Not stone but wood will form the first of this structure’s guises: the skinless skeleton of a church. Groin-vaults, arches, towers, and walls rise from the foundations through the inference of scaffolding and lathes, a trellis for the church to grow into. The site is crowded with workmen: a hundred, then two, more when the work is at its height. Mortar makers grind lime in pestles, hands scarred white from the burns, sand, gravel, water, stiffening to the paste the mason’s trowel can spread and layer; the stonesetters wear gloves and their scars are different, crushed fingers, jagged and crudely healed cuts, bruises welling under the thumbnail, calluses hard as bone. Treadwheels turn and the stones are raised. Hardcutters saw at the facing blocks, sanders sand, plumb-lines swing and fall. Soon, elevations rise off the plan and the walls begin to climb skyward.
Two winters pass. Two towers face the sea. Roofers scramble across the beams and hammer pegs to hold the tiles. Ribs are being carved to replace the caskwood supports within the nave. The last year has been a year of haste. Now the laborers are slipping away, the masons tamping down whichever stone comes easiest to hand. Work will begin at Strassburg within the year, five hundred miles south from this eerie, deserted place: no easy journey. Plasterers work from before dawn till after dusk. A window is cemented inside out and left. Statues are misplaced. The priest to consecrate this church arrives by boat from Lübeck and speaks before the altar of victories over the pagan, of abundant seas and fertile lands. Winds blow off the water, find the unplugged eaves, and whistle in the echoing roof-space. Plaster dust rises off the floor. Twenty workmen listen in silence while the prelate battles with the wind. They watch him leave, then leave themselves. The church stands silent and deserted, empty on an empty island.
It was the decision of distant bishops; they could not have foreseen the indifference of Flemish and Saxon settlers to herring. Boats and nets are alien tools in hands used to the ax and plow. There is the border to be reckoned with, too: the very shoreline is under dispute. From the east, Boleslav will move his squadrons across the Oder to challenge the Lion’s crusaders, and God will be claimed by both. There will be meetings between Bohemian and Saxon bishops at Stargard and Hamburg, but the ragged coast about the mouth of the Oder resists the compromises drawn up in their ill-tempered conferences. About the Trave, islands seemed to loose themselves from the foreshore and drift ambiguously into the sea—discrete landmasses, sandbars, shoals, tiny peninsulas cut and rejoined and cut once more—the confusion baffles their efforts to apportion it until the whole morass is dispatched south, to Rome for elucidation, and sent back with the Pope’s blessing and acceptance of their gift. Further ill-tempered conferences: they had not foreseen this particular solution; more, they resist it utterly. The decision stands. The Holy See will create the missionary diocese of Kammin to minister to the heathens’ needs and collect their tithes. There is a Bishop, it is rumored, but he is not seen at Kammin, Wollin, Stettin, across the Oder, and east as far as Stargard, nor even on the island that lies like an ill-fitting stopper in the mouth of the estuary: Usedom. Yet he must have existed, his permission would have been needed. The monks who were to take up residence in this place must have sought him out and found him somewhere. In name at least if nothing more, this was, after all, his church.
They crossed the Achter-Wasser in boats hired farther down the Peene. They came from Prémontré in the forest of Coucy and spoke neither the glottal dialect of the Flemish nor the guttural accents of the Saxons, let alone the gibberish of the Slavs. They retraced the steps of the Lion’s army, the toings and froings of the workmen who followed, north across the island until they reached the site of their new home, the church built to mark the Saxon triumph. They brought chalices, missals, psalters, breviaries, copes, crucifixes, and censers. Their Abbot bore a chest filled with books wherein he carried hopes of a library, together with the implements and parchment to add to it. Their thoughts were of a famed and feted foundation, the beginnings of a northern Rome. It was Saint Martin’s Day, and brilliant winter sunshine pierced the canopy of beeches. A psalm echoed among the tree-trunks, and their hearts were filled with happiness as the monks broke through the scrub. They saw the ground rise and narrow, and at the limit of the point they found their church.
It was a shell, a tomblike accumulation of stone sticking up like a single rotted tooth with its substance eroded, its lines awry, and the whole structure frozen in a seeming stagger as though it were lurching toward the sea.
The masons had worked through the winters without troubling to cover the stones in straw. Now the frost had cracked and flaked them. Some had been laid across the grain, and those nearest the foundations had crumbled under the weight of those above. The walls bulged out and the roofline sagged. Winds blowing in off the sea had lifted tiles so within this echoey shell rainwater stood in stagnant pools. The plaster had drawn damp out of the air and fallen off the walls in slabs. Fragments of mortar lay scattered on the flagstones of the floor. On the seaward side, one of the towers leaned alarmingly toward the overhang. Its piles had sunk at the corner and the foundations disappeared into the clay. Thirty white-robed monks and their Abbot slung back their cowls to view the church that was their home. They climbed the stairs of the one sound tower and cast their eyes south and east across the de
serted island, saw peat-bog and beech copse, mixed forest and scrubland cut haphazardly with tiny streams, minuscule islands standing off the landward coast. To the north, the sea. Their own presence was the result of distant, protracted debate to which they had never been party. They had not been told the island was deserted, their church a new-built ruin. Their Abbot felt his heart being fingered by despair.
They set themselves to the work of rebuilding their crumbling domain: mixing new mortar and plaster, repointing the walls, resurrecting the smithy to forge claw hammers and roof-pegs, replacing the tiles, cutting timber to buttress the leaning tower and the western wall of the church, which leaned, too, as did the south, though less, and the east, though less still, and the north, which they only suspected. They ordered stone from the quarries of the Uckermark, built a dorter and the beds to fill it, a refectory, a kitchen, infirmary, and chapter-house to enclose a cloister behind the church. They drained water from the nave, watched it seep back, drained it again, and again, finally lifting the flagstones to discover them laid on bare ground more resembling mud than earth. So they dug drains, and more drains, culverts and a channel for the reredorter. Still the floor of the church sagged, as though it were fashioned from planks floating in a lake of liquid, and the arches of the bays sank under the load of ill-conceived masonry.
Their Abbot began a history of their works on the island, Gesta Monachorum Usedomi, a rough account scratched out in a cursive hand, which he would write by candlelight in the hours between Lauds and Terce.
Sent by Abbot Hugh de Fosses in the year of Our Lord twelve hundred and seventy-three to found a monastery on the isle of Usedom, we arrived on these shores on Saint Martin’s Day of that year. Much toil awaited us. …
The monks planted vegetable gardens, barley fields, and plum orchards. The first settlers arrived and they collected rents, but the tower still leaned, the whole place sagged, and the Abbot watched his income dwindle and disappear into sodden foundations, collapsing roofs, and all manner of improvements that somehow failed to improve. His Gesta Monachorum Usedomi grew to become a never-ending list of building works, and when the Abbot noticed that he had written This week was spent by the brothers relaying the stones of the cloister three times in as many months and Straightening one corner of the chapter-house has pulled the others out of true five times, then he gave up his history and consigned it to the chest containing the books intended for the library, which somehow he never found the time to unpack. He felt the same fingers of despair tighten about his heart and began to believe that even the task of maintaining their church was beyond them. The Lion’s endowment was long spent, his monks exhausted from their labors—surely Norbert himself had not intended his order to dissipate itself in such labors? He sent to Magdeburg for help but received from the Archbishop only a message de scribing Usedom and its monastery as “peculiar”: meaning subject not to his jurisdiction, but to that of the diocese of Kammin and its Bishop, if there was one, and if not, then to the Curia and thence the Pope; meaning no. His absences at the annual seminars of abbots at Prémontré were noticed but not discouraged.
The Abbot wrapped his isolation about him like a cloak. At dawn he would absent himself from the chapter-house and climb the easternmost tower to watch the sea fogs roll over the foreshore, engulf the island, and be burned away by the midday sun. He sought God in a desert of water, this puzzled stylite, but saw only the Hansa cogs sailing to Gdansk and the mouth of the Vistula. The sea itself remained unchanged, a contemptible sea, weak tides, brackish, yellow near the coast. Fishing boats toiled from nearby Rügen and sometimes landed in the cove on the far side of the island. He should levy something. The settlers minded their pigs, goats, and barley fields, tended beehives and chickens. Every Quinquagesima Sunday past they had laid the refectory for a dinner of salted pork, but no one ever came. The settlers spoke a tongue his monks could barely understand, and vice versa. Their fields and farmhouses dotted and parceled out the island, but most of it remained forest, swamp, and scrub. Some of the original inhabitants were rumored to live still in the woods, survivors of the Lion’s zeal, and the storm, and the city’s disappearance, which was why the church was built, or why it was built so badly. Yesterday the roof of the chapter-house fell in; tomorrow the kitchen chimney pot would follow it. It was the pieces of a church.
He descended, resigned to imperfection and its toil, as others would resign and descend. Oblated infants would pass from the gatehouse to the choir, from the choir to the order, from the order to the infirmary, and thence to the cemetery, which lay to the east of the gatehouse. The lines of graves would lengthen until the bodies of twenty-three abbots lay side by side, each worn out by the struggles of the soul and the battle against their church, which tilted farther toward the sea with every successor to the office until a cup placed on the floor of the nave would roll its length unaided and continue into the presbytery. Winter squalls would eat away the foot of the cliff, prising free the shoring timbers and carrying them out to sea. The monks would descend in their wake to rebuild the buttresses, and it was then that they would find the true foundations of their church: rings, goblets, silver chains, and bracelets, the glittering detritus hauled by the storm from the city beneath the sea. The cliff was shored anew and the benison carried to the Abbot; almost a casket of it now. But the church continued to lean, an inch, two inches a year, until the bells found their own notion of perpendicular jammed fast against that of the towers and fell silent.
The island was no Rome, or Jerusalem, or Santiago de Compostela. No pilgrim routes had swept the alluvia of cathedral lore to accumulate on Usedom. No Abbot Suger was willing to clad his soul in stone on this remote outpost. Perhaps some imperfect prevision of Strassburg’s facade found its echo in the lurching towers, of Ebrach’s groin-vaults in the malformed bays of the nave, but for all its faltering three hundred and threescore years it remained a hasty gesture of permanence, a conclusion stamped on molten ground, on the Lion’s thwarting, his bafflement at the disappearance set before him.
And now, as before, the Prior of this monastery dwells overlong on bafflement. He is alone in this meditation, and the thought is unconfessed, welling un-stoppably in the hours of darkness. It has been with him a year or more. He sees the rotations of the monks through their services, the ceaseless rolling maintenance, their severance from the incomprehensible islanders. He hears the unvoiced rage of the Lion and his ragged, long-dead army. He traces the dwindling circle of minor acts and observances, repetitions and services, nearings, evasions, and returns. Their routine appears the cement of a permanent church, a mortar laid down long ago, too quickly mixed and crumbling invisibly between the stones. He lights a second candle and pushes the cowl from his head. He hears his brother monks shuffle to the church. Only he can see it, waiting for them all while they spiral toward its center, while their devotions run their course.
Nocturns and Lauds are the offices of night; lanterns and candles move up and down the nave in their pools of light. The cantors chant and the Lauds of the Dead ring out through the church. He hears the Lion’s rage in a plainsong rising to the resonant vaults, an echo redoubled in the darkness above their heads. Monks and novices shuffle from the church to the chapter-house, to the refectory, to the church, to their beds in the dorter. Terce follows Lauds as day follows night, then Sext and None. The bell should have tolled for Vespers next, but the bell is stilled, the towers lean, bell-pulls snag on the crumbling stones: clay is no foundation on which to build a church. Compline is sung before dusk. Masses are sung after Terce and Sext, then work in the gardens or the fields, on the fabric of their crumbling church. Ropes have been strung from the porch to the altar, for the tilt is visible, palpable, and walking up the nave is a struggle. The rhythm of the day is a changeless round. Cantors chant, he hears the choir sing out, but clay is colloidal, a yielder to load, and the church is a load, hence the tilt, hence the ropes. The Lion’s gall drips from the ribs, works channels under flagstones, suffuses the st
ructure. The choir sings out and Nocturns is the first of the offices of night and it is dark in the church, only pools of light, yet the change is waiting, only difficult to see. Clay is a sediment and not yet stone. Henry the Lion rages at nothing but the city’s failure to remain. The prior hears a different music dripping through the stones, a corrosive music of rage and thwarted purpose. Voiceless in face of the city’s disappearance, stopped up by the church’s crumbling plug, he listens for its leakage, hears the drip of its return.
Lauds: the Prior fails to attend. A plainsong reaches him at work in the chapter-house. He hears the choir sing out and bends his thoughts to the lesson. Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church. … He hears the voices fall quiet and the murmur of the sea slide from under the monkish song. Father Jörg knows the sea is weak, rising inches through the year from neap to spring. Yet their timbers shift out and come loose from the cliff. He feels shudders that others do not feel, suffers nameless fears. There is a devil in the sea with an unseen face. And upon this rock… The church is a fort, he will tell them that. But a faltering fort, an ill-manned garrison at the edge of the world. He will preach vigilance, and wariness, and labor—he always does. But the moment is near, the collapse is waiting. Nameless fears shared by no one else. They will not understand, and so he waits through the nights, listening, holding his breath. He stands in the center of the chapter-house, rapt in his thoughts, drifting between the lesson and his private fears, and then, quite suddenly, he lurches.
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 4