The White Dominican (14 page)

For a moment a terrible stabbing pain, as if I have been pierced from head to toe by a red-hot spear, knocks me sideways against the banister; then, when I search for the pain within, I cannot find it. It has burnt itself out like a bolt of lightning.

Have I died? Is my shattered body perhaps lying at the foot of the stairs? It this merely my ghost opening the door and entering the room?

No, it is no apparition; it is me. Lunch is on the table, and that is my father coming towards me and kissing me on the forehead. I try to eat, but I cannot swallow. Each bite I take swells up in my mouth. My body must be suffering, though I know nothing of it.

Ophelia is holding my heart in her hand – I can feel her cool fingers – so that it does not burst. Yes, that must be it, otherwise I would scream out loud.

I try to rejoice that she is with me, but I have forgotten how to rejoice. Rejoicing needs a body, and I have no power over it any more.

Must I then spend my days wandering over the earth, a living corpse?

Silently the old serving woman clears the table. I stand up and go to my room. My eye lights on the wall-clock: three? It should be one o’clock at the most. Why is it not ticking?

Then I realise: Ophelia died at three o’clock in the morning.

Yes, yes; now memory returns. Last night I dreamed of her! She was standing by my bed, a smile full of happiness on her face.

“I am coming to you, my love! The river has heard my plea. Do not forget your promise, do not forget your promise”, she said. Her words re-echo inside me.

“Do not forget your promise, do not forget your promise”, my lips keep on repeating, as if they were trying to awaken my brain so that it would finally comprehend the hidden meaning of the words. My whole body starts to become restless, as if there were an order it was expecting me to give.

I make a great effort to think, but my mind remains dead.

“I am coming to you. The river has heard my plea!” What can it mean? What can it mean?

I am to keep my promise? What promise did I give?

I feel it like an electric shock: the promise I gave Ophelia that night in the boat! Now I know. I must go down to the river. I am in such a rush that I jump down the stairs four, five at a time, letting the banisters slide through my hands.

Suddenly I am alive again. The thoughts are racing through my mind. “It can’t be true”, I tell myself. “It is the most improbable story I could think up.”

I try to stop and turn back, but my body drags me on. I run down the alley to the water.

There is a raft tied up to the bank with two men on it.

“How long would a tree-trunk take to float down this far from the capital?” is the question I want to ask. I walk right up to them and stand there, staring at them. They look up in astonishment. I do not manage to say anything for I can hear Ophelia’s voice coming to me from the depths of my heart. “Do you not know better than anyone else when I will arrive? Have I ever kept you waiting, my child?”

Inside me all doubts are banished, and I can feel the certainty, as solid as a rock and bright as the midday sun. It is as if the whole of nature around had come to life and were calling, “At eleven o’clock tonight!”

Eleven o’clock! The hour I have always looked forward to with passionate longing!

The moon is glittering on the river, just as it was on that other night.

I am sitting on the garden seat, but I am not filled with my usual expectation; I am united with the stream of time, how then should I want it to go faster or more slowly?

It is written in the Book of Miracles that Ophelia’s last wish is to be fulfilled! The thought is so shattering that everything else – Ophelia’s death, her letter, the gruesome task of burying her corpse, the cruel emptiness of the life that awaits me – pales in comparison.

I am suddenly seized with the notion that the myriad stars above are the all-knowing eyes of the archangels, looking down and watching over us. I feel a boundless power close round me, flowing through me. In its hand all things become living tools; a puff of wind touches my face, and I feel it saying to me, “Go to the river bank and untie the boat.”

No longer are my actions guided by thought. I am woven into nature, its secret whispering is my comprehension.

Calmly I row out into the middle of the river.

Now she will come!

A patch of light is floating towards me. A white face, the features rigid, the eyes closed, is drifting on the smooth surface like an image in a mirror.

Then I am holding the dead Ophelia in my arms and pulling her into the boat with me.

I have bedded her deep in the soft, pure sand by our beloved seat on a cushion of scented elderflowers and covered her with green boughs.

The spade I cast into the river.

I had imagined the news of Ophelia’s death would become known the very next day and spread like wildfire through the town, but week after week passed, and nothing was heard. Eventually I realised that Ophelia had taken her leave of this earth without telling anyone but myself.

I was the only living being on earth who knew of it.

I was filled with a strange mixture of indescribable loneliness and an inner richness that needed no one to share it. All the people around me, even my father, seemed like figures cut out of paper, as if they were not part of my life but just background scenery.

I would spend hours every day sitting on the garden seat dreaming, with an almost constant sense of the closeness of Ophelia; and whenever I thought to myself, ‘Here, at my feet, her body, that I loved so passionately, is sleeping’, I would be filled with such astonishment that I was incapable of feeling sorrow.

How sensitive, how right had been her instinct when she had asked me, during that night in the boat, to bury her here and to tell no one! Now the two of us – she on the other side and I here – were the only ones who knew, and this knowledge held us in such intimate communion that at times I did not even feel her death as an absence of her body.

I only needed to imagine her lying in the town cemetery under a gravestone, surrounded by the dead and mourned by her relatives, for the thought to pierce my breast like a knife, banishing the sense of her spiritual proximity to a place beyond reach.

The vague belief people have that death is not an unbridgeable chasm, but merely a thin partition separating visibility and invisibility, would turn into absolute certainty if they would bury their dear departed ones in places only they knew of, only open to them, instead of in public graveyards.

Whenever my sense of solitude became especially intense, I would remember that night when I had laid Ophelia’s body to rest as if it had been myself I had buried, as if I were a mere ghost on earth, a wandering corpse which no longer had anything in common with people of flesh and blood.

There were moments when I had to tell myself, ‘This is not you any more. A being, whose origin and existence lie hundreds of years before yours, is slowly, inexorably penetrating your shell and taking possession of it until soon there will be nothing left of you, apart from a memory floating in the realm of the past, on which you can look back as on the experiences of someone who is a complete stranger to you.’

It was our Founding Father, I realised, risen again within me.

Whenever my gaze was lost in the haziness of the misty heavens, images of unknown regions and alien landscapes would appear before my eyes. I heard words which I grasped with some inner organ without, oddly enough, being able to comprehend them; I understood them in the same way as the earth receives and stores seeds, to bring them to fruition much later, I understood them as things which you feel that one day you will truly understand.

They came from the lips of people in foreign dress who seemed like old acquaintances, even though I could not possibly have ever seen them in this life. The words were addressed to me, and yet their origins lay a long way back; they were suddenly born from the past into the present.

I saw snowy peaks rising to the sky, their ice-bound summits higher than any clouds. ‘That is the roof of the world’, I told myself, ‘the mysterious land of Tibet.’

Then there were endless steppes with caravans of camels, Asian monasteries in deepest solitude, priests in yellow robes carrying prayer-wheels in their hands, rocks that had been carved into huge statues of the seated Buddha, rivers which seemed to come from infinity and flow into infinity; the banks were a landscape of loamy hills, the tops of which were all flat, flat as tables, flat as if they had been mown with a gigantic scythe.

I guessed that these must be regions, objects and people that our Founding Father had seen when he was still wandering the earth. Now that he was entering me, his memories would also be mine.

On Sundays, when I came across young people and saw how in love they were, how they were enjoying life, I could certainly understand what they were feeling, but inside me was nothing but cold. It was not the freezing cold which comes from a pain which chills emotion to its very core; nor was it the cold that comes from the weakening of the life-force in old age.

The sense of immense age was so powerful, so permanent within me as never before, and often, when I saw myself in the mirror, I was surprised to see a youthful face looking at me, with no sign of frailty in it; the deadness had taken hold solely of the bond that ties men to the pleasures of this earth, the cold came from regions alien to me, from a glacial world that is the home of my soul.

At that time I could not fathom the state that had taken hold of me. I did not realise that one of those mysterious, magical transformations was in progress that we often find depicted in the lives of Catholic and other saints without comprehending their depth or their significant vitality. As I felt no yearning for God, I had no explanation for it, nor did I seek one. I was spared the scorching thirst of an unquenchable yearning, of which the saints speak and in which, they say, all earthly concerns are consumed by fire, for the only possible object of my yearning was Ophelia, and I bore within me the assurance of her constant nearness.

Most events in the physical world passed me by without leaving any trace in my memory. The images from that time are like a dead lunar landscape full of extinct volcanoes without a path or track to connect them to each other. I cannot remember the things my father and I said to one another, weeks have shrunk to minutes, minutes expanded to years. Now that I am using the hand of another to review the past I feel as if I must have spent years sitting on the garden seat by Ophelia’s grave. For me, the chain of experience, by which we measure the flow of time, consists of disconnected links hanging in the air.

I know that one day the water-wheel that turned the carpenter’s lathe stood still and the whirring of the machine stopped, filling the alleyway with a deathly hush; but when it happened, whether on the morning after that night or later, has been expunged from my memory.

I know I told my father that I had forged his signature; it cannot have happened in a rush of emotion, for I cannot remember any such outburst. Nor can I remember the reasons I had for doing it. All I have is a faint recollection of feeling a certain pleasure in the fact that there were no longer any secrets between us. And in connection with the mill-wheel standing still, all that comes back to me is the feeling of happiness that old Mutschelknaus did not have to work any more.

And yet I am sure it could not have been I who felt these emotions, they must have been transmitted to me from Ophelia’s spirit, so dead to all human concerns was the Christopher Dovecote whose image I now see before me.

That was the time when the name that had attached itself to me, ‘Dovecote’, became like a prophecy from the lips of fate that had been fulfilled: I was a lifeless dovecote, the place where Ophelia resided, and the Founding Father, and the primal essence that goes by the name of Christopher.

There is much knowledge I possess which has never been recorded in books. No one ever revealed it to me and yet it is there. I assume it awoke within me during that time in which my outer form, in a sleep that resembled death, was transformed from a shell surrounding ignorance to a vessel of knowledge.

At that time I believed, just as my father believed up to the day of his death, that the soul could become richer in experience and that the life of the body could be used to that end. That was the way I had understood our Founding Father’s warning.

Now I know that the soul of man is all-knowing and all-powerful from the very beginning, and that the only thing man can do – if there is anything at all that lies within his power! – is to remove all the obstacles that hinder its development.

The most profound secret of all secrets, the most hidden mystery of all mysteries, is the alchemical transformation of external form. – This I say to you who have put your hand at my disposal, as a token of my thanks for writing this down for me. -

The hidden path leading to rebirth in the spirit, which is talked about in the Bible, is a transformation of the body and not of the spirit. The spirit expresses itself through physical form; it is constantly carving and moulding it; the more rigid and incomplete the form, the more rigid and incomplete the manner of its revelation; the more responsive and subtle the form, the more manifold its manifestation.

It is God alone, the all-pervading spirit, who transforms it and spiritualises our bodies so that our innermost, primal being does not send its prayer outside, but worships its own form, limb by limb, as if each part were a different image of the divinity residing concealed within.

The change in physical form that I am talking about only becomes visible to the eye when the alchemical process of transformation is approaching completion. Its origins lie hidden in the magnetic currents which determine the axis of our physique. It is our way of thinking, our inclinations and instincts which are transformed first of all, followed by a change in behaviour and, with that, the metamorphosis of physical form until it becomes the body of the resurrection from the Gospel.