The Pop’s Rhinoceros (8 page)

Jörg watched and waited. At length he gathered the brothers and novices in the chapter-house and had the Abbot carried from his cell. It was spring, and they were exhausted. Despairing faces turned to him from their seats. Brother Gerhardt would look away furiously as he spoke, all his efforts come to nothing. He would never be Abbot; that, at least, had been settled. Jörg spoke and heard his words roll and spring like acrobats in the interior of the chapter-house, beguiling and purposeless. Old and young alike listened in silence to their mission. They did not understand. The islanders? How were the islanders able to help? Bright words dancing and tripping on their brows, a diversion for them, a novelty. The first of their several new worlds. He strode up and down, haranguing and cajoling, spreading his arms, pointing, addressing each in turn, drawing them in. He described the perilous state of the church, the collapse of the church’s foundation, their labor and its failure. But as the walls of their circumstances rose like a prison around them, he drew upon their stones a different vision: of great plains and
rivers, pasture dotted with fields of barley, high snowcapped mountains, and bustling, crowded cities. The world without the monastery. He looked about them, but their faces were blank and uncomprehending.

They would not understand, not when he sent them out through the gate-house, nor when they returned, still baffled, with stories they muttered amongst themselves of the islanders’ reluctance, their malformed speech and strange customs. They were adrift, unanchored in this wider world, undermined in their own. Brother Gerhardt resisted utterly and would spend that year rebuilding his raft at the foot of the cliff. He toiled alone but was watched by his fellows, who saw in his futile efforts a last door closing on their former existence. Every day of their excursions was taking them further from their familiar paths, of worship, contemplation, and building. Always building. Through it all, their Abbot never uttered a word. They sat him in his cell, overlooking the sea, where he remained, gazing out over his old enemy like an aged, defeated commander.

Jörg would question them on their return and they would tell him of the beech forests and marshes, little ponds and lakes that dotted the island, the slopes of tussocky grass that led to reed-beds and weed-fringed shelves of gluey black mud. Beyond them, always, the sea. The islanders, he insisted. Tell me of the islanders. They spoke of rebuffs, evasions, children running shouting across the barley fields, figures disappearing below ridges at their approach. Women hiding under tables. He needed more, and better, pushing them out through the gate-house until they brought back snippets of conversation, vague tidings, the flotsam of life amongst the islanders. Ronsdorff’s honey was better than Ulrich Meister’s. Otto Ott had a liar’s face but was honest. He demanded more. Stenschke’s daughters had all married well. They bossed their husbands. Old man Stenschke was mostly lucid but going mad. Sometimes he walked about naked. Better, thought Jörg.

He began to ask for news and learned that the fishermen he had seen in the aftermath of the disaster were Ewald Brüggeman and his underling, Wilfried Ploetz. The other boats were beached on the Stettiner Haff, across from Wolgast or else from Wollin. A daughter of Werner Dunkel’s was pregnant, but no one knew by whom. Wittmann, perhaps, or Peter Gottfreund, but the brothers were more inclined to Haase. When half a dozen of them returned drunk on Riesenkampf’s beer, Jörg shouted and raged but knew his work was proceeding. And when he closed his eyes on the night of the Quinquagesima feast, heard the brothers chatting amiably, the islanders chatting back as they stuffed their stomachs and slapped one another on the shoulder, listened there to the easy commerce of monk and laity, he thought the first part of his task might almost be complete.

Jörg rose and slipped quietly past the monks carrying empty tureens, out into the cool of the cloister. The night was almost clear, only thin shreds of cloud silvering the harsher white of the moon. He walked carefully over uneven stones past the dorter to the cells. The Abbot sat as he always did, in silence, eyes fixed on
the dim play of moonlight bouncing off the waves. Jörg knelt by the side of the chair, allowing the room’s silence to gather for a minute or more. The Abbot’s breath rattled. He had urinated where he sat. “Am I right?” he whispered. “Do you believe me right?” But the Abbot made no sound or sign. Jörg sighed and rose. He had not come for sanction. The chests he sought lay on the far side of the cell.

Sent by Abbot Hugh de Fosses in the year of Our Lord twelve hundred and seventy-three to found a monastery on the isle of Usedom, we arrived on these shores on Saint Martin’s Day of that year. Much toil awaited us. …

The hasty characters had almost sunk into the parchment. Jörg had to squint to make them out as the first Abbot’s chronicle told him of collapses and repairs, subsidence and restorations. He shuffled through the leaves, but they were unvarying, the events relentless, and though after a few more pages the chronicle simply stopped in midsentence Jörg knew that its story continued, sunk invisibly within the parchment, the chest whence it came, the stones of the cell that surrounded him, and the fabric of the monastery that had soaked up their efforts as the parchment had the ink until they were only gray-robed ciphers, illegible in the church’s mere continuance. Its collapse had saved them.

Jörg reached across the Abbot to his desk and quickly cut a quill. The Abbot had not touched his accounts since the night of their catastrophe. Jörg moistened the ink-cake with his spittle, scraped the quill in the well, and scrawled quickly,
When their church collapsed, the monks of Usedom were sent by their Prior to mingle with the people of the island. Much bafflement awaited them. …
And there the ink ran out, so he stopped. He had not come here to write his own
Gesta Monachorum Use-domi
. His thoughts swept wider than Usedom, further and higher. Father Jörg reached within the chest for the books that had lain undisturbed beneath the chronicle since the days of the very first Abbot. The library they were to have founded had never been built. One after another he lifted them out, wiped the mold from their covers, and placed them carefully on the floor. The Abbot ignored him as he staggered under the weight, never turned as the door swung shut, only watched the sea where black waves and white moonrays seemed to play together, waiting for daylight to blend them to gray.

In the weeks that followed, the brothers were to find their island excursions inexplicably curtailed. Ulrich Meister’s pigs had been fattened on acorns, and Brother Walter had hoped to help with the slaughter. Brüggeman had told Brother Florian of wild greengage trees somewhere on the far side of the island, ideal for grafting, but the far side of the island was hours away and by order of Father Jörg every monk was to return to the monastery by midday. Brother Gundolf had taken up fishing, and Brother Volker was breeding bees with Stenschke. Brother Heinz-Joachim was charting the ponds of the island, Brother Joachim-Heinz the woods. All these activities would now have to wait. Brother Georg felt the lack of his circuitous morning walk around the peat-bog to Haase’s manse, while Brothers Wilf, Wolf, and Wulf came to miss their tricornered chin-wags
with Riesenkampf’s wife. Already, from within their hesitant footsteps and bewildered trampings new measures had emerged. Brother Bernd worried over Riesenkampf’s ox rather than the crumbling casements of the dorter. The cycles of service and labor had expanded to encompass the island and its denizens, and now their ambit was narrowing, drawing them back, returning them to their church. The brothers found themselves surprised at their own disappointment, resentful once more of their Prior, who spent his days closeted in his cell and his nights the same. Brother HansJürgen brought him his meals and was told to leave them at the door. Mucky yellow light seeped out as he burned tallow candles until dawn; alone in there, unguessable, under siege from their unframed questions.

He read, breathing in damp and the chalky smell of mold as he slid his nails under the pages and bent his head to the fading script. The candles’ thin convections sent the musty years spiraling about his cell. He coughed, scratched, rubbed his eyes, reached the end of one book, and picked up the next. The days began to lengthen, and outside, on Usedom, the harvest began.

Tar barrels burned for Saint John on the mainland, sending up thick black smoke columns in a lazy slant, high into the dispersing air. The islanders cut their corn with long-handled scythes, their women gathering and sheaving behind them. Old gods marched ahead of the harvesters, Roggenmühme scaring the children, who ran shouting into the cool of the beech woods. They picked berries and stripped bark from the oaks for tanning. Ronsdorff scraped the honey from its combs, and Haase gathered resin from the fruit trees. Dunkel’s daughter gave birth to a girl who howled in the thick summer heat.

All through the harvest, Jörg squinted, sneezed, and read on. He sweated, and sometimes the characters would swim on the page as he bent his head to the book. His orbits swung out beyond the island and mainland to the countries at the ends of the earth. He frowned and worried. His days were filled with heat and distance; his nights with dreams of strange animals. On Saint Lambert’s Day he called Brother Herbert and told him to plaster the wall of the chapter-house; on Saint Sequanus’ Day, to paint it. He thought of spiny-backed dolphins leaping over ship masts in the waters of the Euxine, of enormous sea tortoises, of elephants tramping the plains of Africa guided by the light of the stars, and the single-horned asses of the Indies. Their stupidity, their fierceness. Sometimes he wondered idly what these creatures might look like, but his dreams gave him only shape-shifting and fakery. And the brothers were impatient, Gerhardt stirring them up. They did not understand—how could they yet? All in time, he thought, and heard the sea’s clepsydra washing away the clay. Seconds ticked in the cliff’s subsidence, days in the lazy swipes of the tide.

When the paint and plaster had dried, he gathered the brothers in the chapter-house. Twenty-nine pairs of eyes fixed him from the tiers of the gradines. He stood before them, holding a baton. Behind him, marked upon the wall, was a circle and within it a T, which divided it in three. He thought of their widening
circuits about the island, their commerce with the islanders. Perhaps this was their limit, and here was where their impetus would stall. Here was the challenge that Usedom had thrown down, the same but writ in letters the size of continents, bellowed babel-tongued and louder than the ears of man might stand. Would their curiosity help him now, draw them further, take them with him? Twenty-nine baffled faces watched him carefully while he traced the circumference of the circle, then tapped the three areas within it. They awaited his explanation.

“The world,” said Father Jörg.

To the north, Rügen’s chaotic shorelines straggled in and out, intersecting and breaking, forming tenuous capes and headlands within a jumble of spits and bays. Balkers stationed on the distant cliffs were dancing insects, directing the fishermen west. Tiny rowboats were rounding the thick nub of Stubnitz on their way to Cape Arkona. South, offered the flat sweep of Usedom’s seaward coast, its sheer extent broken in half by Vineta Point—what remained of it—the ruin of the church atop. He tugged on the nets, and Brüggeman lifted himself to free them. His employer was distracted, preoccupied. Ploetz cast. They were off the coast at Greifswald, half a league out from the Oie. The net arced out over the side of the boat, the impact slapping on the surface, spattering seawater like the briefest, most local of rainshowers.

Submergence then, disappearance and unseen distortions. Nets trace the motions of an invisible sea: twisting, curling, pulling pocks from the lattice. Sea-heat and sea-cold, rolling convections and subsurface currents collide and recoil, mingle and subside. The buffered thud of water masses percuss the sea-depths and merely add to the turmoil. Moving water needs ciphers and signals; scraps of reed, shells of whelks, flotsam, sea-grass, a waterlogged spar. Or a net. Water has its own kind of darkness, its endless equivalence. Brine too needs its badges of state. It sinks, this net, silently and stressfully, the banner for an army of armies. Every competing stipple and thrust, swell and outflow, diving seiche and deepwater stillness means a ripple, a jerk, a new twist to its fabric. Mere descent means the weights tied at its edges; but everything else, every twitch and shudder, ripple and yaw, means the sea. It is the servant of too many masters, this diving sea-flag, waving downward into the fish-filled depths. Its meshes open like a battery of mouths, wide to swallow herring.

Which scatter, mostly. Flight from nets is an instinct strong in herring. The shoal hangs decked in the fathoms, layer upon layer, row upon row. The very last of the autumn fry vibrate the surface waters; below them are the fattening sprat. Herring flesh muscles itself with the years, moving down through the layers little by little: all herring tend to descend. In the midst of the shoal are the full-grown fish, millions of them, billions of them, spawning, feeding, slowly sinking. Many never see the open waters, surrounded by the colony from birth to death: they are
their own landscape, a herring-sea. Plankton and spawn are the currencies here, but below, farther down in the lightless depths, a different commerce is carried on. From far beneath the shoal come the sounds of crustacea being cracked, of fish spines being crunched. Of the eating of copepods and sticklebacks. Of herring feeding on herring. Dark-backed bodies twist in the darkness and swirl about near the bottom. They rarely rise. As sprat, these demersal predators passed from a diet of plankton to a diet of fish, ate themselves huge, and sank. Now they swim the deepest waters. They look like herring and would taste like herring, though they are seldom caught. Contact with each other is avoided—not much unites them; even together they are alone—and their swimming is a graceless business of lurches and lunges. They are giants to the sprat, monsters to the shoal. Shunned and feared by those above, these nightmare fish are cannibal herring. As the net descends they feel the waters twitch. The shoal breaks up, shooting side-ways, upward, downward… Downward is good. The cannibals stir, then circle up slowly. The waters pop with aimless herring-panic, lone slivers of silver darting back and forth, lost in these depths. The cannibals cruise, picking off the stragglers and gulping them down. The net hangs above them, hovering and waving, but they are gorged and torpid, barely noticing as it balloons and starts to rise out of sight.