“Niklot? You mean the Savage?” Ploetz’s voice was incredulous. “But they drowned him! How can he … What does he want with the boat?”
Ewald was shaking his head now, saying, “The other one is a giant. I don’t know what they want with the boat. I don’t know why they came here. I don’t know what they want with me. …” His voice died away.
Terrified, thought Ploetz.
Aloud, he said, “You should have told this before, Ewald. Our fathers knew what to do with his kind, didn’t they? … Eh, Ewald?”
He would tell them of the world beyond Usedom, of Europe, Asia, and Africa, which lay joined together in the midst of an illimitable ocean. The center of the world was Jerusalem. To the south, in the desert wastes of Africa, lay the torrid zone, so hot that no man might cross it. To the east, in the Indies, were manticores and elephants, single- and double-humped camels, serpents that swallowed donkeys. Summer and winter came twice a year, and on the easternmost edge of the world were the Serians, who made silk and bartered it in silence.
“How?” asked Brother Joachim-Heinz.
“I do not know,” replied Jörg. He considered briefly. “Hand signals.”
His diagram had grown cluttered as he marked in the islands of the Middle Sea: Sardinia, Sicily, Corsica, Candia, Nigropont, and Pharos. East, and the world breathed harder, tides grew stronger, rushing past Icaros, Melos, Carpathos, and Rhodes to dolphin-filled Hellespont, where Christendom faced the Indies. Thrace was where the fearsome cranes drove the Pygmies from the third coast of Europe. Every winter they flew east carrying stones for balance, led by one bird, then another, as their exhausted chieftains fell from the sky. On the island of Ortygia the quails would arrive in autumn, cluster in a flock, and fly low across the sea. Nothing would deflect them, neither sails nor boats, which would be shredded or capsized, such was their fury. Even the goshawk would be turned aside, the leader flying wide to offer himself in sacrifice that his fellows might alight in safety. …
“I see it!” Now Brother Volker had leapt to his feet. Jörg inclined his head. “The mystery of the quails is very simple to penetrate: the quails are souls who fly alone in their confusion. Only together can they find the true path. Their leader is Christ, who sacrifices himself that the rest might be saved and the boats and sails are their travails on earth, which they must pass through to reach the heaven of the island. …”
“Heretical nonsense!” Brother Georg rose from his seat. “Heaven cannot be on earth. The quails are sinners led astray by their prophet, a false prophet justly slain by the sword of the church. That is the true meaning of the goshawk.”
“Surely not,” riposted Brother Bernd. “Surely the goshawk is a test, and the quail which flies too wide has strayed too far from the path. …” Brother Walter nodded sagely. Brother Hanno disagreed. Brother Christoph thought it ridiculous and Brother Harald clearly true. Soon everyone was debating, disputing interpretations, constructing hypotheses, and quoting the Psychomachia at one another. The island was a paradise, an Eden, a second Promised Land. Or a fleshpot, a Sodom, a hell on earth. The quails meant angels to some, agents of the Devil to others. Saints, thought Wulf. Sinners, thought Wolf. Wilf did not know.
“No! No! No!” shouted Jörg. “Can you not understand? The quails do not mean anything. They are, quite simply, quails!”
But they did not understand. They sat blankly, baffled in the chapter-house while he told them of Scythia, where the blue-faced Tartars wore the skins of their enemies as clothing, where the white-haired Albans of the coast trained dogs to bring down bulls and lions, even elephants. The brothers’ response was to talk of popes converting Ostrogoths to the service of the Church. The bulls were tyrants, the lions Moors, the elephants were other tribes of the East. When he told them of the elephants of Mauritania guiding hapless travelers out of the wilderness, the elephants became Moses, horned on Mount Sinai, and when he spoke of the same beasts marching in the armies of the Indies, then they were the Pharaoh’s armies that pursued Moses and were drowned. Jörg grew vexed.
“The elephant is a beast of surpassing size,” he told them. “He is as large as a house and has the tail of a rat. He has a hide of armor, but his belly is soft and his enemies will always attack him there. He eats trees, stones, but loves oats above all else. Crossing seas, he will not go aboard without firm pledges to return and can only be tamed with malt beer. His enemy is chiefly the dragon, which sucks the coolness from his blood till the scaly beast be bloated, and many times the elephant will fall upon it and thus it bursts. This is the nature of elephants.”
But he had lost them. He traced the lands of Ethiop, Numidia, and Egypt, described the rivers of Oxus, Indus, and Ister. The brothers took them for ciphers, symbols, abstractions. The terrible camelopardalis was a figure of rapacity, the chameleon an emblem of apostasy. He talked of parrots, popinjays, tigers, and tapirs. Then he would wait for Brother Bernd to rise, or HansJürgen, or any of them.
“Father, the tapir then would be a beast connoting lust?”
“The tapir is simply a tapir,” he would intone. “It is a pig with hooves and lives beyond the isle of Taprobane.”
There would be a short silence then, and following it, a brother would venture, “Taprobane, I believe we determined, would represent a false and beguiling paradise, not the earthly Paradise of the legends of the East, but a jewellike imitation to tempt men from …”
“No,” said Jörg
“… the path of righteousness.”
“You are on the wrong path entirely. It is not a point of doctrine, but an island. This is the world wherein we live.”
Privately he knew it was not so. For all their trampings about the island, their accustomed contact with the islanders, his monks remained locked within their church. Bent within its round they saw no farther than its walls, and now the church was failing, its foundations giving way beneath them all. He imagined it pitching slowly down the cliff and sliding into the sea with his monks perched atop like so many bickering commentators:
“Fear not, brothers! Our church is meant for a second Ark, which we will sail to the Ararat our Lord has raised for—”
“No, no. We are all Jonahs and our church is the whale sent to pluck us from our fellows.”
“Nonsense! The Lord has cast us from his garden as sinners. Feel. This water is very cold, is it not? Brothers? Brothers! …”
In his own darker moments Jörg would envision the day of the church’s conception, when Henry the Lion, his margraves, and their armies stood together at the limit of the point, baffled, frustrated, suddenly arrested when they needed above all to continue, forward over the cliff into the steely gray waters below. Their church was a dam, the final halt for an army of dead men. Still they pressed forward, driven by the need to finish what they had begun, which had led them too far and would not stop, farther into Vineta’s oblivion. Yes, Jörg too would be there as they careered down the cliff, adding his voice to the pointless debate, “We are crusaders, Christ’s soldiers, sent to finish what was begun, to break the stalemate of Henry’s thwarting”—bleating his own doubtful gloss while the nef pitched forward, its splintered prow breaking the surface, and the cowled mariners squabbled aboard their sinking ship of fools. He saw such battles play their havoc across the faces of the brothers as they filed past him out of the chapter-house, fought his own in the secrecy of his call, endured them, won them, watched them return. Brother Gerhardt watched him from his place on the gradines, contributing nothing, waiting for his failure.
He persevered, leading them in a flattened loop about the shores of the Middle Sea from Pontus to the pillars of Hercules, thrusting inland, chasing vistas of burning sand and blistering heat, lands of perpetual ice where the sun would rise but once a year and a single night outlast the winter. He drew paradises of lush green grass and restorative fountains, infernos of blazing black rivers and fire-spitting mountains. His voice grew louder, his gestures wilder, as he traced the world’s extremities. Their
puzzlement only deepened. Each day they gathered dutifully after Sext to hear him rant of monsters and marvels, listening in near silence, their occasional comments as wrong-headed as ever. Each day he would notice a few more avert their eyes from his own as they left for their chores or some errand about the island, he would see the grin beneath Brother Gerhardt’s impassive features broaden, and alone in his cell his own doubts gathered force. He needed their curiosity, at least. His plan was going awry, foundering before any one of them had set a foot beyond Usedom’s shores. They were blind, or would not open their eyes. They would stumble and fall. He returned to his books, poring over them until the candlelight ringed his eyes with strange aches and the characters clouded and merged. He could not find what he needed, and the brothers were whispering, conferring amongst themselves. He had pressed their faces against the island until they could not help but accept it. Beyond it, they understood nothing.
Autumn came, and the festivals of thanksgiving. Coppery beech leaves drifted on the forest floor, and approaching winter began to suck the sunlight out of the sky. His lectures continued through the shortening days while the islanders turned to the mending of fences, digging of ditches, their women to preserves for the months ahead. The island’s pulse beat slower, and Jörg too found his turning thoughts slow, as though he were not yet resigned to the failure that was their conclusion. He could see no way forward but could not bring himself to stop. The brothers were a weight he could pull no farther. He was emptied and all but stalled. Then, on Saint Bruno’s Day, with the sea and sky meeting in gray equivalence on the winter’s drab horizon, Brother HansJürgen climbed slowly up the steps to his cell to inform him that two strangers had arrived on the island, soldiers, in flight from a war far away to the south.
Jörg nodded slowly at the distraction. Soldiers and a distant war. What of it? But then his thoughts quickened. His mind jumped and began to spin. Of course, he thought, yes. A thousand times yes. His heart began to pound as the thought gathered force. Behind him, in the semilight of the doorway, the monk waited patiently for his response. These vagabonds might prove his deliverance, prayed for even unknowing, the makeweight for all their shortcomings. When he finally spoke his voice was neutral, casual seeming, and bled of all intent. “Concerning these new-come ruffians,” he said, “I would have you find out more, Brother.” HansJürgen nodded acceptance of the commission, turned, and left the Prior to his studies.
In the days that followed, the monks would note in Father Jörg a moderation of his choleric humor, a most welcome calming of those passions that had led him to bellow the names of distant islands and peoples, to beat upon the wall with his stick, and even to galumph up and down the chapter-house in imitation of the manticore—a figure denoting promiscuous gluttony, as they recalled. When he told them of the tree-living Hyperboreans—who signaled, they decided, the state of the eremitic soul in its passage from earth to heaven—it was in quiet, casual tones. And when Jörg described for them the thirstworm and sleep-worm of the deserts beyond the Nigris, their conclusions as to the meaning of these serpents—obviously, drunkenness and sloth—went unchallenged but for a murmur that those actually bitten might differ from this view. They took his calm for resignation, a sign that he would soon give up his lectures altogether. From his post in front of the chapter-house wall, he noted a softening in the serried faces of his monks. He fancied he saw the first hint of condescension in Brother Gerhardt’s increasingly elaborate salutes. They were marking time, merely waiting for his madness to run its course, and believing he was doing the same. Wrong.
He sat before his opened books while the candle on his table filled the cell with tallow smoke, seeing nothing, engaged in nothing more than listening for Brother Hansjürgen’s footsteps. If his lectures had diminished in passion, it was from distraction rather than neglect. His thoughts were elsewhere, not yet fixed, gathering and forming anew. Charters and grants that had swapped the monastery between simonical and pluralist and absentee prelates centuries before lay scattered and unread before him. His church lay somewhere in the transactions they hinted at, unanchored, lost, wrecked. When the monk arrived, Jörg would ask simple questions, feign near indifference at the answers, then charge his envoy with discovering more. If Brother HansJürgen suspected more than idle curiosity, he betrayed no sign of it. The ruffians had arrived by boat from the mainland and were camping out in a herring-shed of Brüggeman’s. They had fought with the Spaniards, it was said. The darker-skinned of the two was a giant, standing more than a head above his companion. They were engaged in some practice involving a barrel, in the pond behind the herring-shed. One of the Ronsdorff boys had seen them.
“A barrel?” His casual query drifted with the tallow smoke. “I would know more of this, Brother.”
So HansJürgen had persisted with his quest, tramping the length and breadth of the island, rain and shine alike, echoing his master’s questions. The barrel, it seemed, was intended as a vessel. The smaller of the two would climb into it, whereupon the giant would lower it into the pond. They had constructed a kind of crane for this. But inquiring beyond these bare facts, he came up against an odd resistance, a calculated vagueness. His normally garrulous acquaintances feigned ignorance or disinterest. If there was a purpose behind the vagabonds’ exercise, he could not discover it. And as to the islanders’ reticence, he garnered only impressions of a baffling anxiety.
“I believe,” he said after Jörg had approached him on the latter question from several different angles, “that the islanders are in some way afraid of these men.”
“Afraid? A whole island of able-bodied men afraid of a pair of vagabonds?”
“It is an obscure kind of fear. I cannot fathom it.”
And then, inevitably, “Plumb deeper, Brother. Reach the bottom of this mystery.” Jörg paused and considered the turn of events. “Talk to Ewald Brüggeman.”
Hansjürgen’s sandals clacked on the stone floor, strummed on the flagstones of the cloister, fading until Father Jörg was left alone with his speculations. The barrel bothered him. So wrenched from its normal usage (wine or tar—no, herring—whose else could it be but Bruggeman’s), it betokened purposes outside the island’s limited ken, his own, too, truth to tell, which was part of his fascination with this pair of ne’er-do-wells, these outsiders. What on earth were they doing with such a contraption? Lowering each other into ponds. And a crane! He wondered if Brother Gerhardt had learned of these rival engineers. His fingers tapped on the page as he turned these thoughts over. They led him nowhere. The candle was guttering, spilling yellow wax across the table in a spreading, congealing pool. It was almost time for Nocturns.
End of autumn drizzle turned paths hard-packed through the months of summer by the tramping feet of the harvesters to straggling mires and glutinous shallow ditches. Puddles gathered and sank into the island’s softening substance. Mud spread. Weather-afflicted, vaguely caught up in the penumbra of the island’s anxious silence, Jörg’s proxy marched purposefully through pools of standing water, leaf-mulch, decrepit oak and beech scrub. Brother HansJürgen skirted the edge of the Achter-Wasser—drab, boatless, wind-jarred—before veering back toward the seaward shore and the copse of brine-stunted alders that marked the limit of Ewald Brüggeman’s manse. A fire was burning, its smoke rising out the chimney in a column that would break and disappear as gusts blew in off the sea. He shivered, approached, and knocked.
“Out there.”
Mathilde Brüggeman’s surly countenance was not about to invite him in. She stood there, blocking the doorway, with her thumb pointing back over her shoulder. Out there. She meant the sea. She meant “Not here.” And go away. His unwelcome questions withered in his throat. Brüggeman’s children had been playing by the fire. They stared up at him from within the room, frozen and openmouthed. The door was closing before he turned his back. He walked around to the back of the house, thence down to the shoreline, and sat himself down to wait.
Spiky wavelets bristled landw
ard and boiled away in the shingle of the beach. A mizzle swirled in as the gusting wind scooped at the water’s surface, and soon his face was sheened with moisture. An hour must have passed. A mile down the coast he saw the cantilevered church, perched improbably on the brink of the cliff, pitching forward. Wintry gray skies seemed to grudge the earth below its measure of daylight, and soon the church was fading, merging into a murky half-light that draped the whole island in its fog. Sea, land, and sky bled into one another to reach a dull equivalence, and the monk squatting on his haunches on the beach shivered in his habit as he scanned the horizon for Brüggeman’s boat. The intruders must have sought his permission, or extracted it somehow. Why Brüggeman? There was no shortage of greasy, evil-smelling ponds on Usedom. Something bound Ewald Brüggeman to these men, something untold, lying somewhere in the island’s silence.
Something white out there. A sail? Yes, and barely fifty yards out. More audible than visible as the wind sucked and slapped at the canvas. Brüggeman and his man were both hunched toward the stern. HansJürgen rose to his feet and waded out to help the fishermen drag their craft ashore. Both were soaked to the skin and shivering violently. Brüggeman was scolding his helpmate for some obscure mishap—Ploetz, a sickly-seeming individual, who offered no defense against his employer’s halfhearted remonstrance. A thin catch was offloaded, and HansJürgen waited for the opportune moment to begin his interrogation, ladling herring from the bottom of the boat with the two men. Brüggeman betrayed no surprise at his presence. Ploetz kept looking across at him but said nothing. With the nets unraveled, pleated, and laid across the boat to dry, Ploetz gave his master the merest salute and disappeared over the brow of the slope. The two of them were alone.
HansJürgen seized his chance, immediately launching into a string of questions as Brüggeman lifted his single sack of fish, hoisted it onto his shoulder, and strode briskly up the beach. The monk followed, his queries growing more urgent. Brüggeman had yet to acknowledge his presence, but now he was waving him away, it was far too late, almost dark, and the monk would lose his way unless he set out for the monastery now. He was cold, too—listen, could HansJürgen not hear the chattering of his teeth? He was frozen, famished, finished for the day, and had no use for questions. Not now. Tomorrow? No, not tomorrow, either. Tomorrow he was off to Stettin, and the day after that he was back on the boat, and anyway there was nothing to tell. He was soaked through, see? He was shivering, too, and now he was at his own door, where, HansJürgen knew, they would certainly part company with nothing learned at all except Brüggeman’s brittle irritation, a nervy brusqueness he knew too well would produce no more than the same clumsy half-truths and ill-rehearsed evasions he had been hearing the island over the frustrating fortnight past. Mathilde Brüggeman’s stony glare, the same openmouthed children, as though all three had waited motionless for his unwanted reappearance to unfreeze them. Ewald Brüggeman ducking beneath the brawny arm of his spouse and the door banging shut in his face. Nothing.
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 7