The White Dominican (18 page)

He took me by the hand and entwined his fingers in mine in a strange clasp. “This is the way”, he went on softly, and I could hear that he was having difficulty breathing again, “that the links in the great invisible chain are coupled. Without it, there is little you can do, but if you are joined to it, then there is nothing can resist you, for the powers of our Order will help you, even in the farthest corners of the universe. Listen to me: Be suspicious of all figures that come to meet you in the realm of magic. The powers of darkness are well able to feign any shape, even that of our Master, they can even imitate – in physical terms – the handclasp that I showed you, in order to lead you astray, but what they cannot do is remain invisible at the same time. The moment they were to attempt to enter our chain as invisible beings, they would dissolve into atoms!” He repeated the handclasp. “Remember this clasp well. If an apparition from the other world approaches you, and even if you should believe it is I, always insist on clasping hands. The world of magic is full of dangers.”

His last words turned into a death-rattle, his eyes became veiled and his chin slumped down onto this chest. Then his breathing suddenly stopped. I took him in my arms, carefully carried him to his bed and kept watch over his dead body, until the sun came, his right hand in mine, the fingers intertwined in the clasp he had taught me.

On the table I found a message, which said:

“Have my body buried in my official robes, together with the sword, alongside my beloved wife. The Chaplain is to read a mass for me. Not for my sake, for I am alive, but to reassure him. He was a loyal, considerate friend.”

I took the sword and looked at it for a long time. It was made out of the reddish mineral called haematite – the name means bloodstone – such as you often find in signet rings. It appeared to be of far-eastern workmanship and very ancient.

The dull, red hilt had very cunningly been made in the form of a human body. The arms were half outstretched to form the guard, the head was the pommel. The features of its face were unmistakably Mongolian and were those of a very old man with a long, sparse beard, such as you see on the pictures of Chinese saints. On his head he wore a strangely shaped hat with earflaps. The legs were only indicated by engraving and merged into the sharp and shining blade. The whole was of a single piece, either cast or forged.

As I held it in my hand I had an indescribably strange sensation: it felt as if streams of life flowed out from it. Filled with awe, I placed it beside my dead father again.

Perhaps it is one of those swords, I told myself, of which legend says that they were once people.

Once more months have passed.

The evil rumours about me have long since gone silent; the townsfolk probably think me a stranger, they hardly pay any attention to me, so long have I lived a hermit’s life with my father, up there beneath the roof, far from any contact with them.

When I think back to that time, I find it impossible to believe that I did indeed mature from a youth into a man within those four walls and completely shut off from the world outside. Certain indications – for example the fact that I must have bought new clothes, shoes and suchlike things somewhere in the town – suggest that at that time my inner insensibility must have been so profound that everyday occurrences made no impression at all on my consciousness.

When, on the morning after my father’s death, I went out into the street – for the first time in years, as far as I was aware – to make the necessary arrangements for his funeral, I was astonished at how much everything had changed. There was a wrought-iron gate across the entrance to our garden; through the bars I could see a large elder tree where I had once planted the branch. The seat had disappeared and in its place, on a marble plinth, stood a gilded statue of the Mother of God, bestrewn with wreaths and flowers. I could not think of the reason for this change, but to me it seemed like a holy miracle that the spot where my Ophelia was buried should now bear a statue of Mary.

When, later on, I met the Chaplain, I hardly recognised him, so old he seemed to have become. My father had visited him occasionally and brought greetings from him, but I had not seen him for years. He, too, was very surprised when he saw me, stared at me in bewilderment and refused to believe it was me.

“The old Baron asked me not to come to his house”, he explained. “He said it was necessary for you to remain alone for a certain number of years. Although I could not understand his request, I respected it.”

I felt like someone returning to the town of their birth after a very, very long absence. I met grown-ups whom I had known as children; I saw serious faces which had once been wreathed in youthful smiles; girls in the springtime of life had become harassed wives.

I cannot say that the feeling of being frozen numb inside left me at that time, it was just that something extra had been added, even if only a thin deposit, which allowed me once again to see the world around with more of a human eye. I assumed it was a breath of the animal life-force which had come to me as a legacy from my father.

As if he had an instinctive sense of this influence, the Chaplain developed a great affection for me and often came to visit me in the evening. “Whenever I am close to you”, he said, “I feel as if my old friend were sitting before me.”

As occasion presented itself, he told me the details of what had happened in the town during those years. It is part of that period that I now want to recall from oblivion:

“Do you remember, Christopher, that once when you were a little boy you told me the White Dominican had heard your confession? At the time I wasn’t sure whether your imagination wasn’t playing tricks on you, for what you told me seemed beyond belief. For a long time I wavered between doubt and the assumption that it might be some kind of demonic spirit or, if that sounds better to you, some kind of possession. Today, of course, when such unheard-of things are happening, there is only one explanation for me: a time of miracles is approaching, here in our town.”

“What are all these things that have been happening?” I asked. “As you know, I have spent half a lifetime cut off from the world.”

The Chaplain thought for a while. “It is best if I tell you about the most recent period first, otherwise I wouldn’t know where to begin. Well, it all started when more and more people claimed that at the time of the new moon they had seen with their own eyes the white shadow that our church is, according to legend, supposed to cast. I spoke out against the rumour wherever possible, until I myself – yes, I myself! – witnessed the phenomenon! And then … it always moves me deeply when I talk about this … but enough of that: I saw the ‘Dominican’ himself. Do not ask me to describe it; for me it is the most sacred experience imaginable.

“Do you think the Dominican is a man who possesses special powers, or do you believe, Father, that he is a kind … of ghostly apparition?”

The Chaplain hesitated. “To be perfectly frank, I do not know. He appeared to me in the robes of a pope … I believe, yes, I firmly believe I was seeing into the future, that I had a vision of the great pope to come who will be called “flos florum”. Please do not ask me any more. Later there was talk that Mutschelknaus the carpenter had gone out of his mind with grief because his daughter had disappeared without trace. I followed the matter up and went to comfort him. But – he comforted me! I soon realised I was dealing with one of the blest. Today everyone knows that he can work miracles.”

“Mutschelknaus can work miracles?!” I asked in astonishment.

“Yes. Didn’t you know that our little town is well on the way to becoming a place of pilgrimage!” exclaimed the Chaplain in wonderment. “Goodness me, have you been sleeping all this time, like the monk of Heisterbach? Haven’t you seen the statue of the Mother of God in the garden below?”

“Yes, I do know that”, I admitted, “but what is the reason for it? Up to now I have not noticed many people making a pilgrimage to it.”

“The reason for that”, the Chaplain explained, “is that at the moment old Mutschelknaus is wandering about the countryside healing people by the laying on of hands. The people are following him in hordes. That is why the town is almost deserted just now. He is coming back tomorrow for Lady Day.”

“Has he never told you that he attends spiritualist séances?” I asked cautiously.

“It was only right at the beginning that he was a spiritualist, now he keeps well away from them. I think it was a transitional stage for him. It certainly is true, unfortunately, that the sect has spread enormously. ‘Unfortunately’ I say, and I have to say it, for how could the teachings of these people be reconciled with those of the church? On the other hand I do ask myself which is better, the plague of materialism which has seized humanity, or this fanatical faith that has shot up all of a sudden and is threatening to consume everything else? We really are stuck between Scylla and Charybdis.” The Chaplain gave me a questioning look and seemed to be expecting me to answer, I remained silent, my thoughts had returned to the head of the Medusa.

“One day”, he went on, “they called me from the church. ‘Old Mutschelknaus is going through the streets, he has raised a man from the dead’, they were all crying excitedly. It was a most strange happening. The hearse was being driven through the town when the old man had ordered the driver to stop. “Bring out the coffin!” he had commanded in a loud voice. As if they were hypnotised, the people obeyed without hesitation. Then he himself unscrewed the coffin-lid. In it was the corpse of the cripple, you will remember him, he always used to hobble along on his crutches in front of wedding processions. The old man bent over him and said, using the words of Jesus, ‘Stand up and walk.’ And … and …”, the Chaplain was sobbing with emotion, “and the cripple woke from the sleep of death. Later I asked Mutschelknaus how it all came about. I have to tell you, Christopher, that it is almost impossible to get anything out of him; he is almost permanently in an ecstatic state, which is getting worse by the month. Nowadays he gives no answer at all to questions; then, at least, I managed to get a little out of him.

“The Mother of God appeared to me”, he said, when I questioned him. “She rose from the earth in front of the seat in the garden where the elder tree grows.”

And when I pressed him to tell me what she looked like, he said, with a blissful smile, “Just like my Ophelia.”

“What gave you the idea of stopping the hearse, my dear Mutschelknaus?” I went on. “Was it the Mother of God that ordered you to?”

“No, I knew that the cripple only looked dead, but wasn’t really.”

“How could you know that, not even the doctor realised?”

“I knew because I was almost buried alive myself’, was the old man’s strange reply. I could never make him see how illogical his explanation was. “Something you have experienced in your own body, you can recognise in others. It was a great mercy the Virgin showed me that they tried to have me buried alive when I was a child, otherwise I would never have been able to know that the cripple wasn’t really dead.” He repeated this in all possible variations, but although I tried to pin him down, he never got to the heart of the matter, we kept talking at cross purposes.”

“And what happened to the cripple?” I asked the Chaplain. “Is he still alive?”

“No, that is the strange thing about it, he met his death in that very same hour. Because of all the noise from the crowd, a cart-horse shied and bolted across the market-place, knocking the cripple to the ground; the wheel broke his spine.”

The Chaplain told me of many more remarkable cures performed by the old carpenter. In vivid words he described how the news of the appearance of the Mother of God had spread throughout the region, in spite of the mockery and scorn of those who called themselves enlightened; he described how many pious legends had arisen and how, finally, the elder tree in the garden had become the focal point of all the miracles. Hundreds who had touched it had been made well, thousands who had lost their faith had repented and returned to the fold.

By this time my mind was only half on what the Chaplain was telling me. I seemed to see, as through a magnifying glass, the tiny, yet so powerful gears of spiritual history mesh. The cripple, in the same hour brought back to life and then delivered up to death: could there be a more obvious sign that a blind, equally deformed and yet astonishingly effective, invisible power was at work? And then the old carpenter’s explanation! On the surface childish and illogical, but below the surface opening up depths of wisdom. And how miraculously simple was the way in which the old man had escaped the snares of the Medusa, the delusions of spiritualism: Ophelia, the idealised image to which he was attached with all the power of his soul, had turned into a saint, full of grace. She was a part of his self that had separated from him and was rewarding him a thousand times over for all the sacrifices he had made for her, was performing miracles, bringing enlightenment to him, drawing him up to heaven and revealing herself to him as the divinity. The soul its own reward! Purity of heart: a guide to a state beyond the human condition, a channel for all healing power. And like a spiritual contagion, his faith, which has taken on living form, has even infected the mute creatures of the vegetable world: the elder tree makes the sick well again. There are, however, still certain puzzles, the solution to which I can only vaguely guess at. Why is it that the place where this power has its source is the one where Ophelia’s bones have been laid to rest, rather than any other? Why is it that this tree, which I planted with the inner sense that in so doing I was enriching the world of life, why is that particular one chosen to be a focal point of supernatural events? It was for me beyond doubt that Ophelia’s metamorphosis into the Mother of God must have taken place according to similar magic laws as happened at the spiritualist séance. But then what has happened to the deadly influence of the head of the Medusa, I asked myself? In a philosophical sense, were Satan and God, as the ultimate truths and paradoxes, the same, destroyer and creator one and the same?