The Pop’s Rhinoceros (118 page)

It is the present writer’s purpose to conclude the account, which ends as it began on the island of Usedom, for, as it was the wish of Father Jörg to be buried there beside his Abbot, so he was conveyed there, as he had been many years before by Salvestro. Father Jörg never spoke Salvestro’s name in the years after his final departure from the island. His habit was ever to shoulder the burden of guilt himself, although it would accord with his character if he intended by this last return to recall that other and more difficult one
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He stopped there and laid down his pen. Outside his window he could hear the distant town bells tolling the end of the market, footsteps and voices in the nearer cloister. It was the hour when, had he been alive, Father Jörg would be ushering the novices through the door of the chapter-house for instruction in geography. Brother Jörg, he corrected himself. He had never accustomed himself
to his Prior’s insistence on this mode of address. Five days before, standing before Jörg’s grave in the August heat, he had looked out over the flat gray sea and wondered why the Prior should have wished to be buried in the very ground that had caused him so much hardship. For it had all begun with the earth, he realized, which had failed Jörg as surely as it had failed his church. The priest, an unlettered clerk from the church at Wollin who mumbled the words to conceal his ignorance, droned his way through the rite attended by himself and the gravediggers. They were all the company. It began with the earth, he thought to himself, but it had ended with the sea and the journey to that sea from Rome.

He remembered carrying the chest to the gate at the Piazza del Popolo. He remembered the two of them appearing when he had all but given up hope, and then the journey, which was a scattering of memories bound together by the cold. They had traveled with whoever might take Salvestro’s outrageous stories of his adventures in lieu of payment for their passage: a company of pilgrims returning to Trentino, a Moravian printer traveling to Nuremberg, others beyond the mountains. Carters, drovers, boatmen, and when there was nothing else to be done they would walk, Salvestro supporting Jörg, the winter seeming to deepen with every step taken north. They had reached the island on the Eve of Saint Rupert and found there a wasteland of ice. They had believed, or perhaps only hoped, that Salvestro would turn back then, but it was their strangely cheerful guide who had led the two of them across the ice to their church. He and Jörg had prayed together. Salvestro had built a fire and then had gone out in search of more wood. They had been strange hours, as he remembered. A kind of limbo. He did not know how long they had prayed or when they had stopped. They had sat there alone, waiting for Salvestro to return, the same realization dawning on them both. Outside, the light failed, and when it was dark they had understood that whatever purpose outside themselves their guide had had in returning here it was being fulfilled now.

But Salvestro’s purpose confounded him now. For many years afterward he had believed he had understood it, that he knew why the man had come back. Or for whom. There is one I seek here, Salvestro had said. Or one who seeks me. … They had looked out over the frozen sea, which glowed a dull white in the moonlight, but when the priest had bade him farewell and left him there alone at the grave, he had decided to seek out the man who might confirm it, for who else on the island might Salvestro have come back for? Unfamiliar faces had greeted him suspiciously at the man’s dwelling and directed him along the foreshore and through the beech woods. Bonfires were burning in honor of the Baptist, and no one was at work. It had taken much of the afternoon to find the foul pond, the ramshackle shed beside it. But the old man who lived there stared at him dumbly, like an animal, and would not answer his questions.

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
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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
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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
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