The White Dominican (15 page)

It is as if a statue of ice were to begin to melt from within.

The time is coming when the doctrine of this alchemy will be erected once more for many; it lay as if dead, a pile of rubble, a ruin which is the ossified system of India’s fakirs.

Under the transforming influence of our spiritual forefather I had become, as I said, an automaton whose senses were cold, and that I remained until the day of my ‘Dissolution with the Corpse’. If you want to understand what I was like during that time, you must see me as a lifeless dovecote, with the birds flying in and out without my being in any way involved in their activity. You must not measure me by the yardstick of human beings, who know their own kind alone.

There is a rumour going round the town that Mutschelknaus has gone mad.

Frau Aglaia has a doleful expression. Early in the mornings she sets off with her little basket for the market to do the shopping herself, for she has dismissed her servant. Day by day her dress is getting dirtier and slovenlier, the heels of her shoes are worn down. Sometimes she stops in the middle of the street and mutters to herself, like someone who is so worried they do not know where to turn.

Whenever I meet her, she looks the other way. Or is it that she does not recognise me any more? Anyone who asks after her daughter is informed curtly that she is in America.

Summer has ended and autumn and winter have passed, and I have not seen the carpenter once. I have no longer any idea whether years have passed since then, whether time is standing still or whether one single winter seemed so interminably long to me. But I can feel now that it must be spring again, for the air is heavy with the scent of blossom, after the storms the paths are strewn with blooms, the young girls are wearing white dresses and have flowers in their hair.

The air is vibrant with music.

The rambling roses are hanging down the embankment walls and trailing in the river, which carries their delicate, foamy pink sprays past each square block to the pillars of the bridge, where they adorn the rotting beams so that they look as if new life were sprouting from them.

In the garden, the grass in front of the seat has an emerald glow.

Often, when I go down there, I can tell from all kinds of tiny changes that someone must have been there before me. Sometimes there are little pebbles on the bench, set out in the form of a cross or a circle, as if a child had been playing with them; at others, there are flowers strewn all around.

One day, as I was going down the alley, the old carpenter came towards me from the garden, and I guessed that he must be the one who sat on the seat when I was not there. I greeted him, but he seemed not to notice me, although our arms touched.

He was staring straight ahead, absentmindedly, a happy smile on his face.

Soon after that we chanced to meet in the garden. Without a word, he sat down beside me and started to trace the name of Ophelia with his stick in the strip of white sand. We sat like that for a long time, and I was somewhat bewildered. Then all at once he began to mutter softly; at first it sounded as if he were talking to himself or to some invisible person, only gradually did his words become audible to me. “I am glad that only you and I come here. It’s good that no one knows about this seat, Christopher.”

I started in astonishment He was calling me by my first name?!

Was he confusing me with someone else? Or was his mind wandering? Had he forgotten the submissive formality with which he used to address me?

What did he mean by “It is good that no one knows about this seat”?

The sense of Ophelia’s presence was suddenly so close that I felt as if she were standing in front of us. The old man felt it too; he quickly raised his head and his features were illuminated with a radiant joy.

“You know, she’s always here. When I go home, she accompanies me a short way and then comes back here”, he murmured. “She told me she waits here for you. She loves you, she said!” In a friendly gesture, he put his hand on my arm, looked long and happily into my eyes and added softly, “I’m glad she loves you.”

At first I did not know what to say to that. Eventually I managed to stammer, “But – but your daughter – your daughter’s in America, isn’t she?”

The old man placed his lips close to my ear and whispered mysteriously, “Sh! No. That’s just what people – and my wife – believe. She died. But we are the only ones who know that, you and me. She told me you know as well. Not even Herr Paris knows.” He saw my astonished look, nodded and repeated his assertion, “Yes, she died. But she’s not dead. The Son of God, the White Dominican, took pity on us, and allowed her to stay with us.”

I realise that the old man is in the grip of the strange psychical state that savage tribes call sacred madness. He has become a child, plays with stones like a child, speaks clearly and simply like a child, but his mind is clairvoyant.

“How was it that you learnt all this?” I ask.

“I was working at the lathe during the night”, he began, “when the water-wheel suddenly stopped and I could not get it started again. Then I fell asleep at the table. I saw my Ophelia in a dream. She said, ‘Father, I don’t want you to go on working. I am dead. The stream is refusing to turn the water-wheel, and I will have to do it if you refuse to stop working. Do stop, I beg you. Otherwise I will have to stay outside by the river and I won’t be able to come in to be with you.’ When I woke up I ran straight to St. Mary’s, even though it was still night. It was pitch black and deathly still. But inside, the organ was playing. I thought, ‘But the church is locked, you can’t get in.’ But then I thought, ‘Of course I can’t get in if I doubt it’, and stopped doubting. Inside it was quite dark, but the White Dominican’s cassock was so snowy white I could see everything from my seat below the statue of the Prophet Jonah. Ophelia was sitting next to me and explained everything that the Saint, the great one of the White Order, was doing.

First of all he went to the altar and stood there with his arms outstretched like a huge cross, and the statues of all the saints and prophets did the same, one after the other, until the church was full of living crosses. Then he went to the glass reliquary and put something in it that looked like a small black pebble.

‘It’s your poor brain, father’, my daughter Ophelia said. ‘Now he has locked it away in his treasury, for he does not want you to torment it for my sake any more. When the time comes for it to be returned to you, it will be a precious stone.’ The next morning I felt I had to come out to this seat, but I didn’t know why. Here I see Ophelia every day. She always tells me how happy she is and how beautiful it is over there in the Land of the Blessed. My father, the coffin-maker, is there as well, and he has forgiven me everything. He’s not even angry with me any more for letting the glue bum when I was a lad.

When evening comes in paradise, she says, then the theatre opens, she says, and the angels come to watch her act Ophelia in the play The King of Denmark, and at the end she marries the Crown Prince and they are all pleased at how good she is at it, she tells me. ‘And I have you to thank for that, dear father, you alone’, she keeps on saying, ‘for you made it possible for me to learn to act the part when I was on earth. To be an actress was always my deepest desire, and you allowed me to fulfil it, father.’ ”

The old man is silent and gazes ecstatically up at the heavens.

I have a horribly bitter taste on my tongue. Can the dead lie? Or is he just imagining it all? Why does Ophelia not tell him the truth, gently, if she can communicate with him? The dreadful thought that the kingdom of lies stretches to the other side begins to gnaw at my heart.

Then realisation strikes. I am gripped so powerfully by Ophelia’s presence that I suddenly grasp the truth. It is not Ophelia herself that he sees and hears, only her image. It is a phantasm, born of his long-felt desires; his heart has not become cold like mine, and therefore it sees the truth distorted.

“The dead can perform miracles, if God wills it”, the old man goes on. “They can take on flesh and blood and walk among us. Do you believe that?” He asks the question in such a firm voice that it almost sounds like a threat.

My answer is equivocal, “I consider nothing impossible.”

The old man seems satisfied and is silent. Then he stands up and goes. Without saying goodbye. The next moment he comes back, stands in front of me and says, “No, you don’t believe it. Ophelia wants you to see for yourself and believe. Come.”

He takes my hand as if he were going to drag me along with him. Hesitates. Listens as if there were a voice in the air. “No, not now. Tonight”, he mutters absentmindedly to himself. “Wait for me here tonight.”

He goes. I watch him feel his way along the house wall, tottering like a drunken man.

I have no idea what to think.

We are sitting around a table in a tiny, unutterably poverty-stricken room: Mutschelknaus the carpenter, a little, hunch-backed seamstress that people in the town say is a witch, a fat old woman and a man with long hair, neither of whom I have seen before, and myself.

On the dresser a nightlight is burning in a red glass; above it is a cheap, brightly coloured print of the Mother of God, her heart pierced by seven swords.

“Let us pray”, says the man with the long hair, beating his breast and reciting the Lord’s Prayer mechanically. His hands are gaunt and as white as the hands of poor, anaemic school-teachers. He has sandals on his bare feet.

The fat woman sighs and sobs, as if she were about to burst into tears at any moment.

“For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever, amen, let us form the chain and sing, for the spirits love music”, says the man with the long hair in one breath. We hold each other by the hands on the table top and the woman softly starts to sing a hymn. They both sing flat, but there is such true humility and fervour in their voices that, in spite of everything, I am moved.

Mutschelknaus is sitting motionless; his eyes are bright with blissful anticipation.

The hymn finishes.

The seamstress has fallen asleep. I can hear the rasp of her breath. She has laid her head between her arms on the table. There is a clock ticking on the wall, everything else is deathly silent.

“There is not enough power here”, says the man, giving me a reproachful look from the side, as if I were to blame.

There is a creaking noise in the dresser, as if wood were splitting.

“She is coming!” whispers the old carpenter excitedly.

“No, it is Pythagoras”, the old man with the long hair informs us.

The fat woman sobs.

This time the creaking and cracking comes from the table; the hands of the seamstress begin to jerk rhythmically, as if in time to the beat of her pulse. For a moment she raises her head – the iris has disappeared under the upper lid, you can only see the white – then she lets it sink down again.

I once saw a little dog die; it was just like that. I feel the seamstress has slipped over the threshold of death.

The rhythmical twitching of her hands is transferred to the table; it is as if her life force had entered it. Under my fingers I can feel a soft tapping in the wood, as if bubbles were rising and bursting. They give off an icy cold as they burst which spreads out, hovering over the table-top.

“It is Pythagoras!” says the man with long hair in a tone of deep conviction.

The cold layer of air over the table comes alive and begins to circle; it makes me think of the ‘deadly north wind’ that my father talked of during his midnight conversation with the Chaplain.

Suddenly the silence is shattered by a loud crash: the chair the seamstress was sitting on has been torn from under her, she is lying stretched out on the ground.

The woman and the man lift her onto a bench by the stove. When I ask them whether she has hurt herself, they shake their heads and sit down at the table once more. From where I am sitting, I can only see the seamstress’ body, her head is hidden by the shadow of the dresser.

In the street outside a lorry passes, making the walls tremble; the sound of the wheels has long since disappeared, but strangely the walls continue to quiver.

Or am I deceiving myself? Is it perhaps simply that my senses have grown sharper and can perceive something they would otherwise have missed, the soft after-vibration of objects that goes on for much longer than is generally thought?

At times I am forced to close my eyes because the red glow of the nightlight irritates them; wherever it falls, the shapes swell and the outlines merge. The body of the seamstress is like a soft lump of dough; she has fallen from the bench onto the floor.

I have resolved not to look up until something decisive happens. I want to remain master of my senses. I feel an inner warning – ‘Be on your guard!’ – and deep suspicion, as if something fiendish and evil were there in the room, some awful being formed from congealed poison.

The words from Ophelia’s letter come back to me, so clearly that I can almost hear them. “I will be with you in spirit, protecting you from all danger.”

Suddenly all three of them cry out, as with one voice, “Ophelia!”

I look up to see, hovering over the body of the seamstress, a blueish cone of spiralling mist with the point upwards; another, similar one is descending, point downwards, from the ceiling, seeking the first, until they meet and join to form a hour-glass the height of a man.

Then, suddenly, like the image from a magic lantern when someone twists it into sharp focus, the outlines are clear, and there is Ophelia in person, in the flesh. So clear, so tangible is she, that I exclaim out loud and am about to rise and rush towards her. At the last moment I am pulled back sharply by a cry of fear within my own breast, a double cry from two voices, “Hold fast to your heart, Christopher!”

“Hold fast to your heart”, comes a shrill cry from within me, as if our Founding Father and Ophelia were calling out at the same time.

The phantom comes towards me, an ecstatic look on its face. Every fold of the dress is just as it was when she was alive. The same expression, the same beautiful, dreamy eyes with their long black lashes, the delicate line of the brows, the slim, white hands, even the lips are red with a living freshness. Only her hair is concealed by a veil. Tenderly, she bends down towards me, I can hear her heart beating; she kisses me on the forehead and wreathes her arms round my neck. I can feel the warmth of her body against my skin. “She has awoken to life again”, I tell myself, “there can be no doubt about it.”