The Pop’s Rhinoceros (7 page)

The news spread quickly, and by late afternoon most of the island was stationed at the beach to witness the aftermath of the disaster. Like an anvil, thought Ronsdorff. Like the prow of a ship, thought Haase. The islanders gathered on the shore by Koserow to look along the coast and view the newly shaped cliff. Perched on top, the church appeared hinged at the middle, half on, half off. Like the boathouse at Stettin, thought Matthias Riesenkampf. Like a half-broken loaf, thought Otto Ott. Werner Dunkel brought his pickax and Peter Gottfreund three shovels. From time to time, from their vantage point a few hundred paces along the shore, they saw odd stones topple from the broken bell tower or shoot forth from somewhere within the nave, as though the church were spitting pebbles into the sea. Of the monks themselves there was no sign at all.

Winter advanced and began to send the two boatmen its warnings. Waves coiled loosely in the placid autumn swell, rolled up the beach, and began unfurling frigid whites and starker blacks. Winds chilled in the northern gulfs swept south, gathered pace over open water, and whipped waves from the normally placid surface, pushing them farther out from the coast for fear of being driven aground. The days rattled and collided in the loose vaults of the season, and each morning found Brüggeman and Ploetz rowing out from the shore in the teeth of the wind and hoisting the sail to return in the evening. The catches were growing thinner, and most years, Ploetz knew, Brüggeman would have beached the boat weeks before. Yet they persisted, against their better judgment and Mathilde’s protests, while the waters grew darker and more turbulent by the day. They worked off Vineta Point. They cast and drew in the nets, soaked and chilled to the bone. They looked inland to the cliff and the scurrying specks of gray that labored in its shadow. They watched the monks try to save their church.

The first week had seen them recover the beams. As the winds blew them in, the monks had thrown lines and grappled them ashore with hooks. A depot was built and ropes thrown down from above. A tripod was raised, anchored underneath the cliff, then another, then a third. Other beams were hoisted, lashed together, and braced. A scaffold was rising underneath the jut, an enormous prop to
underpin the church. Ploetz watched as it rose upward to the overhang. It grew day by day but seemed never quite to reach. A puzzle, a conundrum, which kept him wondering at night while he drifted into sleep. He dreamed of towers being sucked beneath the sea, hungry mouths gulping invisibly beneath the waters, and he realized that it was the yielding ooze of the seabed that would defeat them; the gap between their effort and its success was widening, not closing, and their scaffold was sinking even as they built it. Still the monks persisted. They built a raft, a strangely fashioned craft with a hole in the middle, to drive in piles. Monks leaped about its deck to manhandle logs, making it lurch wildly, while small waves rocked it up and down. The fishermen watched as piles were fed down through the hole, knocked about by the raft, lost, then retrieved and inserted once again, until one was held in place for long enough to drive. Ploetz wondered what plan they had formed to free their raft from the firmly anchored beam that now stuck up through the deck. He saw their craft knocked about by the rising swell, bumping against the pile, which bent this way and that, loosening under the battery, finally coming free of the seabed’s soft mud. And above this minor disaster, he noticed now, the greater scaffold was not only sinking, but leaning, too, outward, away from the flaking clay of the cliff toward the ever more vigorous sea. This would be their final day before the boat was covered, before the year wheeled about and spring returned with calmer waters, a warmer sun, and boatloads of newly grown herring. It was growing rougher and colder. The gray-clad bodies were still at their labor. As the sun began to sink, the fishermen hoisted their sail, let the boat swing about, and left the monks to their hopeless engineering, their church to the coming bad weather.

There was little to do through the drab winter freeze, no fishing, no work, little reason to do more than cut wood, build fires, eat sparingly and carefully, wait for the coming of spring. Gray skies rolled north over Usedom, broke up over water, and let the sparse winter sunlight waste its warmth in the sea. It rained. It froze. In the offshore waters herring hung motionless in the clay-stained waters, lidless eyes set in slick fat bodies, mouths opening and closing, feeding on the fruits of the sea. Salmon raced east like an army of knights in glistening mail. On the island, nothing set these days apart but the arc of a struggling sun.

Then, with the drip of melting frost spattering the floor of the forests, bird-song, the squawk of goosanders and gulls breaking the stillness of the air, the frigid days would seem to unfreeze, to swell and grow warmer with the strengthening sun. And it would seem to the islanders, rising, yawning, cracking their joints, setting out once more for their manses—repairs are waiting, there is ground must be broken—that along with its usual shoots and crescent growths the spring had brought a hybrid to flower, the result of unnatural conjunction. Something unheard of and troubling; an unaccountable nearing of a dependably distant landmark. The monks.

Before long, every man, woman, and child on the island had a tale to tell of monkish visitation. They would appear from nowhere at any hour of the day, always
in a group, mumble a sentence or two, then move on to the next reluctant islander. The greetings were uttered in odd, stilted accents and seemed to serve no purpose at all. “How fare your wife, your sister, and her friends?” “Your father and mother are well?” “Well plowed, plowman!” Some strange animation seemed to grip them as they uttered these phrases, a weird fervor that drove them to rove about the island in this unprecedented fashion, engaging people in halting intercourse and interfering with their tasks. It was suspicious and unwelcome. What did these wakened sleepwalkers want?

Tithes, in the opinions of some, lay behind this outflux of monks. Tithes were left at the gatehouse on feast days: a chicken, a ham, half a bushel of wheat. But since the monks never left the confines of their monastery, save to work at their garden or harvest their fields, since the topsoil was thin and the summer months short, the livestock scraggy, the hens often broody, the oxen hungry, and the barley grew short, and since the islanders preferred to eat rather than not, tithes had tended to shrink. Tithes, then, or rents, or some other form of debt, or their sinfulness in general drove the monks to this lackluster crusade. Yet tithes, rent, and sin figured little in their bizarre interferences, which grew less bizarre as the months wore on and the brothers became positively fluent. “How’s the family, Haase?” or, “Your furrows look like eels, Riesenkampf!” Which they did, his ox being blind in one eye. Some islanders chose to hide beneath a touch to the hat or a wave and swift retreat. Others engaged in plodding conversation, offered them beer and sometimes ham. By late summer the children were steeling themselves to throw rotten pears, their mothers to apologize, their fathers to hail these singular fellows as a matter of course while they wandered about the island.

Apprehension gave way to novelty, novelty to grudging acceptance, but the question returned and returned. The monks had been there before any of them, the island was theirs by the Lion’s grant, and if they had chosen to shun it for the past three hundred years, why should they not reclaim it? Why should they not take long pointless walks, engage in this purposeless talk, pursue some inscrutable end? Why not? Or rather, and maddeningly, why?

Jealousy of the church at Wolgast, thought Mathilde Brüggeman. Of the better one at Stettin, thought her husband. Still the tithes, worried Riesenkampf. The rents, opined Ott, while the rest of the island thought of sinfulness, charity, preparations for the Second Coming, one, some, or all of these, or something else like them, some explanation to drag them each morning through the monastery gatehouse and send them the length and breadth of the island. It was not divulged in the ceaseless greetings, nor in the pattern of their movements: some undivined need lay beneath their cowls, behind those tight white faces and unblinking eyes.

When spring came around, the Quinquagesima feast was announced. For the first time in centuries, islanders were ushered through the gatehouse and served by the monks with slices of pork dripping with grease, steaming rutabagas and parsnips. The Prior rose before grace to commend them for their welcome, to welcome them in turn and wish them good appetite. He watched them lean for
ward eagerly for the merest hint. But the reason was not given and their earlier guesses foundered as though they were snared in a parable whose meaning would reveal them, too late, as Doubting Thomases, unenlightened Sauls, Jonahs, to each other. What had brought the monks from out their monastery? And what had ushered the islanders in? It was a test of some sort, but too obscure, so they speculated, changed their minds, disputed, and discounted their neighbors’ theories to erect more fanciful ones of their own. Confusion swamped the truth just as the sea concealed and ate into the cliff. Stationed off the coast, as the nets sank down, Ploetz would pause in his work and look along Usedom’s shoreline, past Koserow to Vineta Point. He saw the wreckage of their scaffold, the gouged-out cliff, the ruin balanced on its brink. He thought of the monks’ hopeless labor in the freezing gray waters. What else could drive them to break their isolation? What else if not the ruin of their church?

True, he could do nothing in the darkness of the chapter-house, nothing to succor them while they cowered together in the center of the floor and his fear enclosed them. That night he could only stand and wait, listening with them to the shatter of tiles, the crash of stones in the sea, crumbling and toppling certainties. The brothers held each other in their arms while Father Jörg strode about the gradines, tapping walls, stamping on floors, assuring them the structure was sound. The novices whimpered, the brothers muttered prayers, and Jörg’s mind raced forward alone.

Daylight. Ropes. Brother Gerhardt’s high wail drifting back through the nave as they haul him back from under the cliff. The damage is worse than any suspected, the red clay crumbling, their foundations sinking. Brother Wilhelm is found shuffling, lighting candles in the church. Their Abbot will not leave his cell. Jörg sees the brothers slump listlessly, stunned in the chapter-house, faces gray from the shock with no service to rouse them. Torpor pinches their souls with fingers of ice, milking them of hope. Jörg feels his impatience rising, turns and leaves, walks by the sagging cloister to the garden, and finds himself scrambling down the slope that fronts the coast. Morning fog rolls across the sea and thuds soundlessly against the cliff, a muffled hammer as he looks across at the face. At its base the clay curves steeply inward; the sea has advanced twenty feet or more. Their shoring timbers bob up and down in the tiny waves. Brother Gerhardt will want to retrieve them, to start again and raise a buttress to the overhang. Impossible. Madness—which will goad Brother Gerhardt, make him more determined than ever. Very well, very well. His notion will keep. The brothers must be won over, and the Abbot too must be persuaded. Sunlight is bleaching the cloudy air, disturbing and turning in on itself. Silent giants hover in the vapor and ring Father Jörg as he sits in the midst of his thoughts.

A mast? Yes, he squints through the fog, and there a boat, moving in toward
the coast. A small one-master floats in amongst the beams, almost beneath the cliff itself. Two fishermen are standing, staring up at the church, mouths open, faces agog. He notes their amazement. Feast your eyes, thinks Jörg. Tell your chattering wives and your curious children, your gossiping neighbors and your friends. Tell everyone, for I will need you all. Tell every soul on the island.

They held services in the chapter-house, but all through that first winter their true worship was performed in the sea. Jörg watched them labor in the freezing waters, building hoists and cranes, raising beams and joists. A raft was constructed, though it failed, and the piles they drove in the mud beneath the waves seemed never to find a foundation. Brother Gerhardt’s cell was a mass of scrawls: braces and crossbeams, buttresses and counterforts. But as his confident tripods lurched sideways and sank, his scantlings came loose and the struts fell away, as the psalms they sang grew more quiet, then stopped, the weather got worse and his fantastical scaffoldings fell into the sea, it would seem to the builder monk that he was building a staircase that sank with every step taken upon it. Looming above them as the wind chapped their faces and the water turned their fingers blue was the flaking overhang and their toppling church. Unreachable. Impossible.

Brother Gerhardt scrawled by day and night: arches, vaults, towers, columns. He needed angels to power the cranes he designed, ropes pulled by the arms of Christ, prayed for them, cursed them, and the north wall of the cloister became a mass of white, a sheer blank to which he pointed: “See! See!” There was the solution, a plan plain as day, yet all the monks saw was whiteness; an illegible palimpsest. Gerhardt’s consuming fury. He scrubbed the walls bare to the gray of the stone and pointed again. He traced fabulous arcs and soaring verticals, tremendous arches in rising tiers. “No horizontals. No horizontals, understand? Horizontals are the work of the Devil. …” But their beams and buttresses were so much wreckage in the water, and his workers saw nothing but stone the color of the sea.