Jörg had first heard the shouting that night. A line of torches had formed along the beach. He remembered the strange shapes and figures formed in the ice of the frozen sea. The torches were being held up by the islanders, who were all facing out from the shore. Salvestro was on the ice, shaking his fist at them. The monk picked up his pen.
The church of the monks of Usedom still stood that night, though much damaged. No boat or boatman was needed, for the water was frozen over and might be crossed by walking. The last two monks had not thought their guide would cross the water once he brought them in sight of the island. Many years before, in the darkness of their superstition, the inhabitants of that place had drowned his mother as a witch. They feared her son, for he was a heathen and different from they, and it was certain that they would come for him.
When Father Jörg was laid to rest, and the clerk was gone, it suited the present writer then to seek out an old man who lived alone on the island, for he and Salvestro had been friends once. Salvestro had let it be known that someone awaited him on his return to the island, and in consequence for many years the present writer believed it was this man who lived alone in the herring-shed. These matters were the subject of the questions put to the old man, of which he affected to understand nothing, even though the accents of Brandenburg are not so different from those of Usedom, and the events of that night are not so distant.
He stopped again. There had been the torches, and Salvestro on the ice, gesturing at them. That was the the image that had stayed with him, with which he had wrestled. Salvestro was not shaking his fist. He was waving or beckoning to them. The islanders carried clubs and scythes, and they waited for him in silence, not daring to follow him out there. It was as though he were mocking them, for they feared the sea off Vineta Point, as they always had, and they feared what lay beneath it. They feared Vineta. The shouting Jörg had heard had been Salvestro’s. He remembered watching for a long time. Eventually Salvestro dropped his arms. He turned and began to walk away, out onto the ice, growing smaller and smaller until the darkness swallowed him and he could be seen no longer. The islanders had waited there through the night as though, in their ignorance and superstition, they thought he might appear again out of the darkness. He had watched and waited with them. But Salvestro had not come back. And he had not come back to the island for the creature in the shed. He did not know how to write this.
Now the church of the monks of Usedom is gone. Perhaps it fell entirely into the sea, or sank into the poor earth, or simply crumbled into dust, although several cottages have risen in the years since that night, and some fine new walls, built of a dressed stone which appears familiar to these eyes. The monks of Usedom are no more, and the last Abbot and Prior lie side by side in their graves. May they rest in peace, and Salvestro, too, wherever he lies. His people were drowned many years ago when the heathen city of Vineta was torn from the island and sank into the sea. It was from those waters that the monks of Usedom first plucked Salvestro, and it was to those same waters that he returned. The islanders drove him out onto the ice where the cold overtook him or the ice broke beneath him. Now only I, HansJürgen, remember him. He was the last of his kind, just as I am of mine. Let this remembrance be the last of the deeds of the monks of Usedom.
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 89