The Pop’s Rhinoceros (15 page)

Two rivers, thought Salvestro. The Neisse and then the broad flood he had been waiting for since … Since he had fled this place all those years before and emerged from the forest and followed its banks upstream, south, away from the island and into other arms and all the years between. Island-obstructed and riven with false channels yet broad enough for all, they had found G’litcz in its tributary, run aground in midstream aboard a great raft of Bohemian oak trunks destined for the mart at Stettin, abandoned by his hirelings and squawking for help before the current should smash his vessel to ungovernable splinters. … They had shouted terms from the near bank, then Salvestro had swum out to take a line to shore, Bernardo had pulled him off, and they had continued on, the three of them poling downstream to the great confluence past Guben, where their course joined the thick muddy flood of the Oder.

There G’litcz had claimed to have lost his satchel in the river, and with it his purse. He had been a short wiry man. How could he pay them? They had watched impassively as this story spilled out a league or so short of Stettin. Salvestro had pointed to the rope.

G’litcz’s rope. A piece of glass filched from a workshop backing onto the Schmiedegasse in Nürnberg. A barrel. A boat.

“And then I thought you were dead!” Bernardo burst out suddenly, a leap in the catalog of his misfortunes that caught Salvestro by surprise and seemed to add new energy to the other’s accusations. “That was just typical, to leave me high and dry in a boat, on my own, after you promised this and swore by that and …”

While the promises he had made scattered like sinking cargoes into regions of dark and doubt, never to be recouped. Never to be lost, either. The jolts of the surface, tidal surges, and heat-sapped convections add their slack echoes and seiches to the purposeless flux below: whorls, tilting waterfronts, skittish eddies peeling off the mass that drift and disperse their entrusted vessels … Where? It’s unpredictable, to do with remote sea-motions, invisible storms, gales striking over the horizon. These are distant resolutions. A boy, bone white, diving and washed away one night. A man diving in his fool’s coat of wood and rope, finding a boy’s promises down there, the water still thick with them. An inner skin had been waiting for him, but its smooth invasion had been too cold, too final, for him to gulp down. He gulped air instead. He spilled his stomach on the deck, telling his eager friend, “Nothing. …” Nothing? Something. His clothes steamed gently as his blood’s heat dried them. There was the rope to sell. There was the boat to be returned. … What else?

“Straw,” said a voice that was suddenly not Bernardo’s.

“For bedding,” said another.

“Brother HansJürgen told us to bring straw for your bedding,” said the third. Peering in at the door were three monks, younger than the one who had conducted them here earlier, all three struggling somewhat under identical loads
of straw. Salvestro jumped to his feet. “And very welcome, too,” he said quickly. “Right here—” He indicated the floor.

Settled on their beds of straw, the two men watched the gray afternoon light drain west and disappear. Cooking smells reached them through the walls, and though Bernardo quickly resumed his complaints, his heart was no longer in it. “I never asked to come here in any case; we should have done like I said. You wouldn’t listen to me though, oh no. I told you what we should’ve done. We should have stayed with
Groot”
he finished up.

“Groot is dead,” Salvestro said then, and after that his companion was silent.

The same three monks reappeared a little later, two of them bearing large bowls filled with a kind of broth, the third a small oil-lamp. They watched by the flickering light as the two men ate hungrily and collected the bowls when they were finished. Salvestro looked up at the trio, who hovered there as though they had been charged with some task and were unsure how to go about it. A fourth, older face appeared behind them. It was the monk from that morning. Brother HansJürgen beckoned to Salvestro.

“Father Jörg will see you now,” he said.

Small ponds will freeze, but not the sea, the winter being too mild. Such snow that fell by Michaelmas fell in heavy sopping flakes that melted at the first touch of sun. The northeasterly winds blew weakly. It was a sodden winter.

They could be seen rounding the marshy precincts of the Schmollen-See or paddling the sheltered waters of Krumminer Wiek, splashing ashore at Eigholz to tramp north as the sun dipped below the dark mass of the mainland. They came in twos and threes, muddying themselves in the marsh behind Stenschke’s place, threading their way through the bare and unfamiliar woods, which thinned to beech scrub a little before the slope of the foreshore. They called on Ploetz once or twice, but he only shook his head as though to say he had worries enough already. Brüggeman’s were no business of his.

Ott, Ronsdorff, Riesenkampf, the Krumminer Wittmanns and the Buchenwald Wittmanns, Haase, Peter Gottfreund, others, too, they all turned up on one evening or another, grunted a greeting to Mathilde, and took their places around the hearth. She watched them clear their throats and spit in the flames, shifting their buttocks on the narrow benches. Their weather-scoured faces were bristly and red in the firelight. Heavy silences descended and enveloped them in an inhibiting pall. They were dour gatherings. Brüggemann could count himself lucky to have neighbors like them. He should have dealt with the matter himself.

She remembered the first sight of them. Two men had stood there, the giant behind, both silent until Ewald had appeared behind her and recognized the foremost. He had come back.

Her husband had offered them the herring-shed. Later they had asked for
food. And then a barrel. When the boat had disappeared she hoped without truly believing that this might be the final price of their forbearance and they were gone or drowned. When the monk’s knock came at their door, she had cowered, fearing it might be they. Then a voice she knew was not theirs sounded, asking who was within.

A monk stood there, a little older than her husband, tall, quite alone. “You are Brüggeman?” She saw her husband nod. She hung back, catching only fragments of what passed between them: they are with us, at the monastery … our Prior too trusting, foolish even. … The monk moved his hands quickly and surely. They were working hands, callused, with thick stubby fingers. She heard him say, “You are a good man, Brüggeman. You islanders are all good men. …” The children lay very still, but they were awake, only feigning sleep. Other children lay awake in other beds about the island. “You have just cause. Remember the Lion, Brüggeman. …”

The first of them came at dusk the next night. Their neighbors, though their relations were strained to something else now. Mathilde would pour them mugs of broth. She listened and nodded. When the fire burned low she sent her husband out to the woodpile, and his exit uncorked the bottle they had waited these hours to taste: Just a boy at the time. God alone knew what that bitch and her whelp had done to him. They had shunned him for it, as boys, that is:
Ewald did it with the Savage. …
But that was just teasing. Whatever it was that had gone on, it was no laughing matter now. If it was down to Brüggeman, it was down to them all; their own fathers should have finished the business.

Toeing the door open and peering over the faggots piled high in his arms, Ewald saw their faces turned to him, half-shadowed in the glow, and heard the familiar silence descend. He took his place on the low stool he reserved to himself and waited once more for the punctuation of grave assertions and grunts to shape the unspoken act before them:
Isn’t that right? There’s no avoiding it, eh? Eh, Ewald?
They would come to it easier with him out of the way, but he was at its heart, somehow essential. The thing they were coming to could be come to only here, sitting around his, Ewald Brüggeman’s, hearth. The closer they came to it the more he nodded. He had nodded to the monk. It was Ewald whom the witch’s boy had led into the woods that night. Now the witch’s boy was back. The monk had warned them. Now his warning had come true.

The bones of the Michaelmas goose were soup, foaming in the kettle over the fire. She had opened the door and there he was, and though her heart was in her mouth as she stammered that, no, Ewald was not at home, she had known too that there would be no further doubts that it must be done. Not here, she repeated. She slammed the door shut and waited, leaning with her back to it, listening as he left. She waited for her husband to return. She stirred and skimmed, hardly looking up as he entered, waiting for him to settle himself, holding herself in. He dipped a finger in the bowl before him.

“He was here,” she said.

“Who?”

“The witch’s boy. The Savage.”

“What of it?” Face like a liar.

“He is to return the boat. He means you to help beach her.” He nodded, and she saw that he was as frightened as herself. They had looked at each other in silence.

“Get the others,” Mathilde told her husband.

“Right, I’m going,” said Bernardo.

He watched the big man stomp off across the field, still limping. It had become a habit in the week it had taken Salvestro to muster his energies and walk the short miles across the island to retrieve his companion’s boot. Nothing had changed in the herring-shed. The pond was much as it was before, though someone had pushed over their derrick. He swung back toward the shore. There was the smoke from Ewald’s chimney, there the chimney itself, then the hut as he cleared the trees and waded through the scrub, coming to the door at a run down the slope. He hesitated there. He had put it off for a week. He knocked.

Sixty yards away, Bernardo had reached a stand of beeches and was looking about him, seemingly confused.

Mathilde had faced him across the threshold. He was thrown suddenly. At a loss as to what to say, he mumbled something about the boat. It was not why he’d called; he had expected Ewald himself. He wanted to talk with the husband, not his wife. Now he would have to return the boat, which the monks had dragged up the slope and beached against the east wall of the church. Kind enough, except that they had left it uncovered, it had filled with snow, the snow had melted to water, the water had frozen solid, and now it was filled with ice. He should have seen to it himself. He should have seen to Bernardo’s boot sooner, too. He blamed the Prior for these misfortunes.

Sixty-seven yards away, Bernardo was manhandling beech trees, which were obstructive and larger than himself. The sky was a collection of dull grays, rain possible but unlikely. Bernardo swiped at low-hanging branches, ducked, and disappeared within them.

That first night, HansJürgen had climbed two short flights of steps broken by a corner that brought them to a passage running above the cloister’s north ambulatory. The monk’s sandals clacked ahead of his own near soundless footfalls, the oil-lamp held before the monk’s chest throwing a great swath of shadow that gathered him in and drew him along behind. They passed three doors set at regular intervals in the wall to their right; a fourth faced them at the end of the passage. A rod of light tapered itself between the lower edge and the threshold’s worn sill, flickering and fanning out over the flags’ tiny pits and slopes, dying in the passage’s outer dark. He could hear the sea very faintly; any of the rooms they
had passed would overlook it. The monk had stopped. Salvestro thought to himself with sudden conviction, I have been here before.

At Prato, Groot had led him through the gates of the palazzo, across courtyards and through reception rooms echoing with their own emptiness, trumpeting abandonment. There are rooms behind such rooms, chambers dedicated to shier purposes. Deniable rooms. The summons’ aura is perfumed with a fine blend of obligation and threat that will dissipate and adapt new shapes here: a private word, a dubious proposition, the privilege of a shared secret. Privy wares are set out amongst simple, hastily arranged furniture. A sergeant had asked them if they were the Colonel’s men. He was like no sergeant Salvestro had ever seen before, fine-boned and well-spoken, a silk-and-feathers sergeant. He sensed the half-veiled distaste at this pollution of the sanctum; authority’s resentment of its instruments. What was the task they had been designed to perform for this strange sergeant’s colonel? The ritual continues with grave nods, half-truths. He and Groot are being escorted out, anointed, spat out. Days later he is fleeing a slaughterhouse, he is lying in a marsh. Remembering … Authority’s resentment raised suddenly to fury and pursuing them over mountains and rivers. Stringing up Groot by the neck. Himself running north with an imbecile in tow. …