The Pop’s Rhinoceros (6 page)

The Abbot wrapped his isolation about him like a cloak. At dawn he would absent himself from the chapter-house and climb the easternmost tower to watch the sea fogs roll over the foreshore, engulf the island, and be burned away by the midday sun. He sought God in a desert of water, this puzzled stylite, but saw only the Hansa cogs sailing to Gdansk and the mouth of the Vistula. The sea itself remained unchanged, a contemptible sea, weak tides, brackish, yellow near the coast. Fishing boats toiled from nearby Rügen and sometimes landed in the cove on the far side of the island. He should levy something. The settlers minded their pigs, goats, and barley fields, tended beehives and chickens. Every Quinquagesima Sunday past they had laid the refectory for a dinner of salted pork, but no one ever came. The settlers spoke a tongue his monks could barely understand, and vice versa. Their fields and farmhouses dotted and parceled out the island, but most of it remained forest, swamp, and scrub. Some of the original inhabitants were rumored to live still in the woods, survivors of the Lion’s zeal, and the storm, and the city’s disappearance, which was why the church was built, or why it was built so badly. Yesterday the roof of the chapter-house fell in; tomorrow the kitchen chimney pot would follow it. It was the pieces of a church.

He descended, resigned to imperfection and its toil, as others would resign and descend. Oblated infants would pass from the gatehouse to the choir, from the choir to the order, from the order to the infirmary, and thence to the cemetery, which lay to the east of the gatehouse. The lines of graves would lengthen until the bodies of twenty-three abbots lay side by side, each worn out by the struggles of the soul and the battle against their church, which tilted farther toward the sea with every successor to the office until a cup placed on the floor of the nave would roll its length unaided and continue into the presbytery. Winter squalls would eat away the foot of the cliff, prising free the shoring timbers and carrying them out to sea. The monks would descend in their wake to rebuild the buttresses, and it was then that they would find the true foundations of their church: rings, goblets, silver chains, and bracelets, the glittering detritus hauled by the storm from the city beneath the sea. The cliff was shored anew and the benison carried to the Abbot; almost a casket of it now. But the church continued to lean, an inch, two inches a year, until the bells found their own notion of perpendicular jammed fast against that of the towers and fell silent.

The island was no Rome, or Jerusalem, or Santiago de Compostela. No pilgrim routes had swept the alluvia of cathedral lore to accumulate on Usedom. No Abbot Suger was willing to clad his soul in stone on this remote outpost. Perhaps some imperfect prevision of Strassburg’s facade found its echo in the lurching towers, of Ebrach’s groin-vaults in the malformed bays of the nave, but for all its faltering three hundred and threescore years it remained a hasty gesture of permanence,
a conclusion stamped on molten ground, on the Lion’s thwarting, his bafflement at the disappearance set before him.

And now, as before, the Prior of this monastery dwells overlong on bafflement. He is alone in this meditation, and the thought is unconfessed, welling un-stoppably in the hours of darkness. It has been with him a year or more. He sees the rotations of the monks through their services, the ceaseless rolling maintenance, their severance from the incomprehensible islanders. He hears the unvoiced rage of the Lion and his ragged, long-dead army. He traces the dwindling circle of minor acts and observances, repetitions and services, nearings, evasions, and returns. Their routine appears the cement of a permanent church, a mortar laid down long ago, too quickly mixed and crumbling invisibly between the stones. He lights a second candle and pushes the cowl from his head. He hears his brother monks shuffle to the church. Only he can see it, waiting for them all while they spiral toward its center, while their devotions run their course.

Nocturns and Lauds are the offices of night; lanterns and candles move up and down the nave in their pools of light. The cantors chant and the Lauds of the Dead ring out through the church. He hears the Lion’s rage in a plainsong rising to the resonant vaults, an echo redoubled in the darkness above their heads. Monks and novices shuffle from the church to the chapter-house, to the refectory, to the church, to their beds in the dorter. Terce follows Lauds as day follows night, then Sext and None. The bell should have tolled for Vespers next, but the bell is stilled, the towers lean, bell-pulls snag on the crumbling stones: clay is no foundation on which to build a church. Compline is sung before dusk. Masses are sung after Terce and Sext, then work in the gardens or the fields, on the fabric of their crumbling church. Ropes have been strung from the porch to the altar, for the tilt is visible, palpable, and walking up the nave is a struggle. The rhythm of the day is a changeless round. Cantors chant, he hears the choir sing out, but clay is colloidal, a yielder to load, and the church is a load, hence the tilt, hence the ropes. The Lion’s gall drips from the ribs, works channels under flagstones, suffuses the structure. The choir sings out and Nocturns is the first of the offices of night and it is dark in the church, only pools of light, yet the change is waiting, only difficult to see. Clay is a sediment and not yet stone. Henry the Lion rages at nothing but the city’s failure to remain. The prior hears a different music dripping through the stones, a corrosive music of rage and thwarted purpose. Voiceless in face of the city’s disappearance, stopped up by the church’s crumbling plug, he listens for its leakage, hears the drip of its return.

Lauds: the Prior fails to attend. A plainsong reaches him at work in the chapter-house. He hears the choir sing out and bends his thoughts to the lesson.
Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church. …
He hears the voices fall quiet and the murmur of the sea slide from under the monkish song. Father Jörg knows the sea is weak, rising inches through the year from neap to spring. Yet their timbers shift out and come loose from the cliff. He feels shudders that others do not feel, suffers nameless fears. There is a devil in the sea with an unseen
face.
And upon this rock
… The church is a fort, he will tell them that. But a faltering fort, an ill-manned garrison at the edge of the world. He will preach vigilance, and wariness, and labor—he always does. But the moment is near, the collapse is waiting. Nameless fears shared by no one else. They will not understand, and so he waits through the nights, listening, holding his breath. He stands in the center of the chapter-house, rapt in his thoughts, drifting between the lesson and his private fears, and then, quite suddenly, he lurches.

And falls. He comes to himself as the sounds flood through his ears.

He hears the voices start up, the cantors cry out, he is right, it is true, and the church is shifting, shuddering below. He hears the clay slide out, like the ebb of a tide of a sea filled with clay. He knows the weight of the stones, the invisible loads. His ears seem to pop with the force of the din. He hears the rumble of a massive collapse, the clangor of the sack which the commander should have heard: the crack of a spine, screaming priests, and the struggle to escape. He runs to the door as the monks spill out, runs in and falls on the heaving floor. The church is moving. A terrible grating growls up from below. The church is breaking at the end of the nave. He rises to usher panicking monks to the safety of the chapter-house. The floors are shaking, tilting, breaking halfway up the church, the altar dipping out of sight. He rises and climbs forward up the nave to the line of the break. The roof gapes open and tiles rain down. Before him, the floor slopes steeply away. He watches as the far wall of the apse topples backward out of sight. Stones fall away and tumble out. The back of the church is peeled away. Down the vault of the church he sees the surface of the sea and hears the crash of the stones as they break it. He crouches there until the roof-beams begin to creak above his head. Stars prick the sky through the broken roof. Moonlight foils the pitch of the sea: different kinds of darkness with their different kinds of light. Himself, balanced between them. Even through the crash of timber and stone, tiny slaps of wavelets prickle in his ears from the water below. Stiff fluids throb and roar in his skull. There are slower convections, deeper currents. Beneath even these lies the loss that the church could not recoup.

Looking down through the barrel of the backless nave to the waters a hundred feet below, Jörg sees no more than the Lion saw. He feels his heart fill up with the dead man’s rage, brim, and spill its waste in the splintering of beams, toppling masonry, the clatter of tiles as they shatter on the broken floor. The Lion stands again on the jut of the point, sees the yellow-gray waters crawl slackly about the coast, his single coordinate invisible, unreachable, as he searches for missing walls and ramparts, lost temples and their idols, a disappeared people and all their vanished works, buildings and wide paved streets, the hum of voices, clatter of footsteps: the uncity’s clangor, of Vineta. His church is broken and the crisis is here. The moment has come again. This time Jörg knows what must be done.

A dim rumble rolled across the Achter-Wasser, through the narrow strait of Twelen, was squeezed by Gormitz and the Gnitz and funneled in a muddy roar to reach Wilfried Ploetz sleeping in his hovel. No light reached down the chimney hole, and with no birdsong or screeching of gulls to break the ensuing silence, he rubbed his eyes, yawned, realizing that dawn was hours off yet and he was fully awake. Now he would be denied his rightful rest and instead of snoring would toss and turn until dawn squeezed some light out of the stubborn autumn skies and he rose hollow-eyed to reluctantly embrace the day. Such injustices never arrived by chance: a big noise of some kind, perhaps a distant storm. He yawned and stretched. Yes, his mind was turning over, whatever it was still rumbling around in his head; unbidden, unwelcome, unexplained. Ploetz cursed.

The question still vexed him as he tramped across the island some sleepless hours later, still irritated him as he reached the Brüggeman farmhouse, knocked, waited for Mathilde to rouse her husband, Ewald, his employer, faded to an irksome itch while they dragged the boat down the foreshore, was forgotten in the tedium of disentangling nets, and might never have been remembered if Ewald had not turned the boat to starboard, heading northeast along the coast, instead of to port, where the fishing was easier. Who was he to argue? His father had never argued, and if he had, Ewald’s father would have thrown him off the boat. But the morning mists were thicker here and the waters more difficult; the nets would snag and sometimes tear.

Ewald signaled for him to cast. He threw, but clumsily, felt the water pull as the net cords grew sodden. Ewald shifted to the starboard side; he felt the boat lean over, then right herself as he hauled up the catch, the two men balancing to hold the boat true. He bent, heaved, and then the load was aboard, the bottom of the boat alive in a moment with a glittering spillage of herring and sprat. But a quarter of a barrel, no more than that. Ewald frowned, and Ploetz thought back to the moment before. To drop the nets then would tilt the whole boat; Ewald would fall and be over the side. The balance of a boat was a delicate matter.

They moved farther up the coast, and the mist grew thicker. The nets were cast and drawn in once again, both men sweating in the clammy morning air. Three more weeks and the boat would be beached for winter. Ploetz felt firm, slippy herring-bodies sliding about his ankles as he took the oars to row the next hundred yards. They would be passing Koserow by now, but the coast was invisible, still clouded out. In came the nets, out went the nets; Ploetz worked to a rhythm. An hour passed, another, and the fog began to thin. A plank floated past. Brüggeman was busy sorting herring from sprat, and the tide was inaudible, negligible, little more than drift. Neither man noticed their nearing the coast. Ploetz threw a dace back over the side, pulled some weed from the net, then stood to piss off the back of the boat. The splash of his urine was the only sound. Another plank drifted into view. Then another, and another. Soon the boat was surrounded by them. Not planks, though. Beams. A floating lumberyard all bobbing in the water. Ploetz stared, then frowned. Brüggeman was intent in the bottom of
the boat. The first beam bumped, Brüggeman started, and both men looked up. A vast dark shape loomed vaguely above them.

Their boat had drifted beneath the jut of a cliff, and on Usedom there was only one. They had reached Vineta Point.

Ploetz knew this cliff, a sheer face of clay shored with crude, massive beams and the back of the church just visible atop. But the overhang was changed, its shoring swept away, and the base of the cliff had disappeared, gouged out so the rest seemed to stand on nothing. The two men looked higher and saw through the mist, a hundred feet above, a ragged black hole pointing down toward them. It seemed to teeter on the brink, arrested and frozen in the moment of falling, a great vault tilted downward, gaping down at the boatmen like a massive stone throat. The two men were staring up into the nave of the church.