Jigsaw (5 page)

Early mass, daily mass, a low one with a single altar-boy in a penumbra of candles and no music, was poorly attended by pious old women and first communicants. The great occasions were the annual processions at Corpus Christi; and the Patron-Saint’s Day that wound round the church and down the lanes and round the park and château stopping under the windows of the bedridden with banners in the wind and canopies under which swayed the statues of the Madonna and Saint Johannes; everyone who could wore white and the virgins were entitled to a blue ribbon. For the run of the year the event was high mass on Sunday with not a pew in the nave unfilled. Here, too, there was strict segregation by sex and age: girls and women to one side of the aisle, boys and men to the other. If you were to be born and die at Feldkirch you would have made your first appearance in church in the front of the children’s row and moved backward as you grew up, sat in turn with the young girls, the newly married girls, the married women, the older women, until you were really old and had to sit in the back row. The same if you were born a boy. The château party had their own stall in the choir beside the altar, and we did not come in by the porch but through the presbytery garden and the sacristy. Lina came with us so far then took her place in the hierarchy. I remained alone with my father who, unlike the rest of us, did not kneel but sat in a stooping position that was to be taken for kneeling. I would have liked to have been in the ranks with the schoolchildren, but enjoyed our seats for being so close to the altar. On ordinary Sundays there were two acolytes and the vestments were green; they were violet during Lent, black on Good Friday, red and gold on High Sundays. At Easter they were pure white and gold, and there would be incense and six altar-boys. I watched their every genuflection, knew 
when they must ring their hand bells, swing the censer, carry the Book from the Epistle to the Gospel side. (I had a secret ambition to do likewise and was laying my plans.)

After mass everyone hung about the church porch; my father would go out through the sacristy and talk to the priest as he disrobed, we would then walk him home through his garden. When I say the priest I mean two men. One was Father Kaplan who had been in the parish since long before the war; emaciated, frail, old, with a noble ascetic face and transparent skin, he was a strange man to be found among us. He lived with an entire disregard for his own comfort and health, and he always said mass slowly with fervour and dignity. His sermons were severe. The village were not at ease and many were afraid of him, yet they were proud to have him. My father deferred to Father Kaplan and spoke of him with affection; to me he was the idea of what a priest was supposed to look like and be. I lived in dread of the day when I should be old enough to make my first confession to him. Now I feel that if by some not impossible chance one had ever been in his prayers that would be a good thing to have had. By the end of 1919 he left us and retired to an old priests’ home. His successor, Father Huber, could not have been more different. Spherical, rubicund, a hearty laugh and a voice chuckling away in patois. He gabbled through mass, but when an altar-boy slacked or snickered he turned and slapped his face. He shocked me to the core on the way out of the sacristy by telling my father that he was looking forward to a pork cutlet the size of a lavatory seat (he did not say lavatory, he used a village word).
His
sermons too were severe.

The most popular offices were Vespers and the nightly Rosary during May because in these we could take part. The responses –
Et cum spiritu tuo, Orate pro nobis, Dona nobis pacem
– would not be mumbled by the altar-boys or chanted by the choir but babbled in unison by the flock. If you were good at it and bold, you would be singled out to lead the prayers from a prie-dieu in front of the nave. There you intoned the
Pater
and the
Ave
or, best of all, recited the petitions of a litany in the vernacular. This exalted role was often filled by a young farmer’s wife who had acquired her much admired diction 
while in service at some country house. I aspired to be her rival. I went about boasting that I would be able to recite a whole litany without once opening my missal. It was taken up. One evening in May I found myself kneeling in conspicuous isolation, missal shut beside me, chanting in the right blend of
Hochdeutsch
and patois line after line punctuated by the thunderous response behind me.

‘Du Engel des Herrn:

‘Bet f’r oonsh!
(Patois for
Bete für uns
.)

‘Du heilige Jungfrau:

‘Bet f’r oonsh!

‘Du elfenbeinerner Turm.

‘Bet f’r oonsh!

‘Du Rose Davids:

‘Bet f’r oonsh!

‘Du Lamm Gottes:

‘Erbarme dich oonsher!’

It lasted for the best part of five minutes and it was intoxicating.

Pride before a fall. The assumptions of my social life were rather less secure than I could have surmised and two disasters soon befell me. My father, who never went out except to mass, was not unalarmed by my involvement with the village which he put down to the evils attending my having to go to school. He was not aware of quite how many hours I spent out of bounds as Lina, sensibly, covered up for me. He did not mind the information I brought home about crops and calvings but was upset by my accepting hospitality. His manners overcame his dread of anyone getting a glimpse of his collection and it was decided that I must invite my friends. I, uncertain of the acceptability of my home, asked if we might have bacon. Bacon was not expected, Lina said, she would provide cake and lemonade. So I asked my three chums, Alphons, Robert and Anton, to drop in after school. Lina turned red in the face, burst into tears and appealed to my father in a hysterical voice, Please,
Herr Baron
, don’t let her. Then it all came out. The village was talking! Parents were displeased! I had been causing scandal! Now I was about to commit the last solecism – 
for a girl to play with boys was simply not done.
My father and I were stunned, indignant, embarrassed. She ought to have warned us, Lina said, spoken earlier but she knew that Billi had meant no harm. Harm? I felt bewildered, miserable, betrayed – I had believed myself welcome, liked … What had I done? What was I supposed to have done? Lina implied something unmentionable here, some threshold of adult abyss. Then my father gave it his own twist – these were times to lie low: I was wild, I was reckless,
I invited danger
. Decisions were made and unmade – I must stop going to the village, stop going to church, I must stop going to school. We had days of this; then it cooled down. I continued at school, village outings were rationed (the gilt was off that gingerbread anyhow), a gaggle of girls was asked in to play. They came, good God, in their Sunday best and did not enjoy my toys (I kept no dolls); as we strolled in the park my boy chums appeared on the wall and jeered. I could neither explain nor apologise; I survived.

Perhaps I should say a word about our position, real and imaginary, in the neighbourhood. (As far as I can piece it together.) That rural corner of Baden, the Breisach, was full of small villages like ours and many of these had their Schloss, their manor house, inhabited by families we knew but had ceased to see. At Munzingen there was Count Kaagenegg, Baron Neveux at Bingen, the Gleichensteins at Krotzingen, the Landenbergs …Most of them farmed, Kaagenegg produced a renowned wine. Before the war they all lived, and were expected to live, in a certain style, providing custom and employment for their villagers, and an element of show with their horses (no one sported a motor car), their house colours and coronets scattered in the German fashion over the silver and the saddle cloths. Now they too felt the pinch, though none I gathered were retrenching in quite our way. Some were slightly eccentric, Neveux never spoke anything but patois and the old Baroness had actually been in prison for watering the milk. Gleichenstein having died, his widow was facing struggles, Landenberg was dabbling in splinter politics, only the Kaageneggs were still wholly rich and grand. From this world my father had made his voluntary withdrawal. He still drank a glass of wine with a farmer 
after trading in apples or wood, and now and again of a morning he called on the mayor’s wife who had been, he told me, a most handsome woman. Every six months or so he asked the priest to dinner and, after days of grumbling and groaning and responsible preparation, gave him a remarkable one. His manner was not conscious, he was gravely polite, trying to look after people regardless of their age or standing; my mother said that whenever he had been absorbed and oblivious of his many dreads, as in courtship or in stalking an objet d’art, he would become happy and animated and could show much charm. So in spite of his aloofness and his own misgivings he was personally much liked by Feldkirch. They did
not
like our new shabbiness, it deprived them of something and they couldn’t understand it – the Schloss after all was still there – they were embarrassed by the donkey carriage and my clothes, while to him it was the wise response to an age of revolution. The donkeys were the sand to my father’s ostrich head. He was wrong. They had no wish to send us to the guillotine; they missed our liveried servants.

Towards the end of my second Feldkirch winter, when I was getting on for ten, the priest reminded my father that I had not yet made my first communion. So along with some little girls of seven I was put under instruction which took place at the presbytery twice a week. We were now required to go to early mass daily and to lead an exemplary life. The opportunity had come, I thought, for my campaign to serve at mass. When I was word-perfect at the Latin responses, I began with Lina who hugged me and said that it had never been done before. I went over her head and reeled off
Qui glorificat juventutem meam
to my father. To my surprise he was impressed. He didn’t see why I shouldn’t. Father Huber said it was irregular but didn’t see why I mightn’t serve singly at low mass. I would have preferred a wider stage but was too pleased to mind. I was given the manual and practised at home, handling a censer (we had so many), genuflecting as I staggered under the weight of a large folio, in lieu of mass book, in my arms. I knew exactly how it should be done. I had watched those altar louts gape and yawn and scratch their heads and all but pick their noses, 

they missed cues and made mistakes, whereas
I
would do it with precision, quiet dignity and poise. I got as far as wearing a surplice and practising at the real altar one afternoon. Then the blow fell. Father Huber, having presumably got cold feet, asked the Bishop and the Bishop had said No.

My father said how times had changed, if any child of
his
father’s had wished to serve at mass the parish priest would not have gone footling about asking for permission. Times have changed again. Would I have been allowed to play altar-boy in the nineteen-eighties?

That fiasco, coming as it did during preparation for my first
communion
, left me more free to indulge in the doubting mood that led to what I called losing my faith. And, pray, what had been my faith? That of a Roman Catholic savage. Rather less enlightened, if anything, as my missionaries had been peasant women. They inserted into my mind a farrago of hell fire, niceties of ritual and mortal sin; they told me horror stories about the nun who broke her vows and the boy who swallowed a morsel of breakfast before taking communion. I heard little about the mercy of God and man’s potential virtue. I heard about sin and the consequences of sin – eternal damnation. I was able to grasp a logical if frightening system; something about its
cut-and-driedness
, its absolutism, even appealed to me. I
liked
order. (Though order permits less choices.) It was clear what one must not do. The Ten Commandments, the Seven Capital Sins, the Five
Commandments
of the Church. It was the latter which loomed large. The general Commandments were rather outside a child’s range – murder, idolatry, taking another man’s wife; while lying and stealing, we were told, were venial not mortal sins. The Capital Sins were too abstract, only the Church Commandments were workaday enough. Two of them, the obligation to attend mass on Sundays and to abstain from meat on Fridays had worried me already at Voss Strasse in Berlin at a time of whole if private faith. As it never occurred to anyone in that
Judaic-Agnostic
household to take me to any form of worship and as I was plainly not yet of an age to go anywhere on my own, omitting mass could not be so very bad: the responsibility was not mine. But the 
Friday meat! Here I should have stood up and refused in public, but I was not of the stuff of martyrs and confessors. So I hid the contents of the delicate chicken sandwich that was sent up to me for my elevenses and spirited the cutlet off my tray; the difficulty in the town-bound house without dog or cats was ultimate disposal. I had to retrieve the meat next day from its hiding places and swallow it myself. Now back at Feldkirch I had more serious reasons for feeling at odds with my religion: I was told that divorced people go to hell. My father and mother were divorced now, so much was at last acknowledged. Did they know about the consequences of their action? Whenever I could not turn my thoughts away from it, I went into a rebellious panic. Such rules, I told myself, were too bad to be believed.

Father Huber began the communicants’ instruction by telling us – in such an off-hand way – that we were about to enter an important stage of our lives and ought to practise mortification of the flesh. (That always had an embarrassing ring to me.) How many lumps do you take in your morning coffee? he asked each little girl in turn with a view of getting her to cut down sugar. Each whispered that she was allowed half a lump on weekdays. As we drank tea at home (gift parcels from my sister) sugarless by choice, I felt a twinge of
awkwardness
and obliged by admitting to a thinly sugared coffee bowl. My father would have approved of this, seeing it as a prudent subterfuge – ‘Don’t show the difference in your tastes and habits.’ (Poor man, I have never known anyone more transparent.) I had offered the
falsehood
because of not wanting to belittle somebody else’s treats, and because of my desperate play-acting to belong. (I went as far in that line as telling schoolmates that the man who came to plough up our lawn was my godfather.) I have long since given up the desire to conform but still prefer untruths to ruffled feelings; those miserable half-lumps of sugar prompted my first social lie.