The White Dominican (3 page)

At these last words, which I had spoken very softly, so that none of my classmates should hear, for I was afraid, the Chaplain stepped back in horror and made the sign of the cross.

That very same night was the first occasion when I left the house in some inexplicable manner and without being able to explain how I returned home. I had gone to sleep in my nightshirt and had woken in my bed in the morning, fully dressed and with dusty boots on. In my pocket were some alpine flowers, which I suppose I must have picked in the mountains.

It happened again and again, until the supervisors in the orphanage found out about it and beat me because I could not say where I had been.

One day I was sent to see the Chaplain in the monastery. He was with the old gentleman who was later to adopt me, and I guessed that they had been talking about my nightwalks.

“Your body is not yet ripe. It must not accompany you. I will tie you down”, said the old gentleman as he lead me by the hand, with an odd gasp for breath after every sentence, to his house. My heart was fluttering with fear, for I did not understand what he meant.

The door to the old gentleman's house was made of iron and decorated with huge nails; punched into the metal were the words: Baron Bartholomew von Jöcher, Freeman and Honorary Lamplighter. I could not understand how a nobleman came to be a lamplighter. Reading it, I felt as if all the miserable knowledge they had taught me at school were falling from me like scraps of paper, so filled with doubt was I, that I was incapable of thinking clearly at all.

Later, I learned that the Baron's line had been founded by a simple lamplighter who had been ennobled, though for what I do not know. Since then the coat of arms of the Jöchers has shown, along with other emblems, an oil-lamp, a hand and a pole, and from generation to generation they have been Freemen of the town and received a small pension, irrespective of whether they perform the office of lighting the street-lamps or not.

The day after my arrival the Baron commanded me to take up the duties of lamplighter. “Your hand must learn the task your spirit will later carry on”, he said. “However low the occupation, it will be ennobled when the spirit can take it over. A task that the spirit refuses to inherit is not worthy of being performed by the body.”

I gazed at the old gentleman in silence, for at that time I did not yet know what he meant.

“Or would you rather be a merchant?” he asked in a friendly, mocking tone.

“Should I put the lights out again in the morning?” I asked shyly.

The Baron stroked my cheek. “Of course; when the sun comes, people need no other light.”

Occasionally when the Baron talked to me he had a strangely furtive look; there seemed to be a mute question lurking in his eyes. Was it “Do you understand at last?”, or did it mean “I am worried that you may have guessed”? At such times I often felt a fiery, burning sensation in my breast, as if the voice that had shouted the name of Christopher to the white monk at my confession were giving some answer I could not hear.

The Baron was disfigured by a huge goitre on his left side which was so big that the collar of his coat had to be cut open down to the shoulder so as not to hamper his neck. At night, when it was hanging over the back of the armchair, looking like the body of a man who had been beheaded, the coat often caused me a sensation of indescribable horror. I could only free myself from it by thinking of the friendly influence the Baron radiated through life. In spite of his affliction, and the almost grotesque sight of his beard sticking out like a bristly brush from his goitre, there was something uncommonly fine and delicate about my foster-father, the child-like helplessness of someone who could not hurt a fly, which was even intensified on the infrequent occasions when he put on his threatening look and stared at you severely through the thick lenses of his old-fashioned pince-nez.

At such moments he always looked to me like a huge magpie, squaring up to you for a fight, whilst its eyes, on the look-out for the slightest danger, can hardly conceal its fear, as if it were saying, “You wouldn't have the cheek to try and catch me, would you?”

The house of the Jöcher family, where I was to live for so many years, was one of the oldest in the town. It had many storeys, and each generation of the Baron's forebears had made its home in rooms one floor higher than the previous one, as if their longing to be nearer to heaven had grown ever stronger.

I cannot remember the Baron ever entering those older apartments, which stared out onto the street with blind, grey windows; he and I occupied a few bare, whitewashed rooms high under the flat roof.

In other places, the trees grow up from the ground and people walk beneath them; we had an elderberry tree with fragrant white flowers growing high above us on the roof in a rusty old iron tub originally intended to gather the rainwater, the outlet of which was now blocked up with earth and dead, rotting leaves.

Far below, a broad, waveless river, grey with water from the glaciers, ran along the foot of the ancient pink, ochre or light-blue houses with uncurtained windows, and roofs that looked like moss-green hats without brims. It flows in a circle round the town, which is like an island, caught in a noose of water; it approaches from the south, then curves to the west before turning back to the south again, where it is only separated from the spot where it began its embrace by a narrow neck of land, on which our house is the last building; finally it disappears behind a green hill.

You can reach the other, wooded bank, where sandy slopes tumble down into the water, over the wooden bridge with planks the height of a man on either side and a floor of rough, bark-covered trunks, which tremble when the ox-carts cross it. From our roof, we can see far out into a landscape of fields and meadows where, in the hazy distance, the mountains hover in the air like clouds, and the clouds press down upon the earth like heavy mountains.

From the middle of the town there rises up a long, fortress-like building, which now serves no other purpose than to catch the glare of the autumn sun in fiery, lidless windows. In the deserted market place, littered with the huge umbrellas of the stallholders lying like giants' toys forgotten among piles of upturned baskets, the grass grows between the cobbles. Sometimes on Sundays, when the walls of the baroque Town Hall are scorched by the heat, the muffled tones of a brass band, borne along by a cool breeze, come out of the ground, growing louder as the door of the Post Inn, usually referred to as Fletzinger's, suddenly yawns wide and a wedding procession in colourful costume sets off with measured steps for the church; beribboned young men wave their festive wreaths and, at the head, is a band of young children with, far in front and nimble as a mountain goat in spite of his crutches, a tiny, ten-year-old crippled boy, bubbling over with joy, as if the happiness of the occasion were for him alone, whilst all the rest behave with due solemnity.

On that first evening, when I was already in bed and about to go to sleep, the door opened, and I was seized with fear once more, for the Baron came up to me, and I thought he was going to tie me down, as he had threatened. But he simply said, “I want to teach you to pray; none of them know how to pray. We do not pray with words, we pray with our hands. People who pray with words are begging. We should not beg. The spirit knows what we need. When the palms of our hands touch each other, the left and the right aspects of man are closed in a chain. Thus the body is bound fast, and a flame rises free from our fingertips as they point upwards. That is the secret of prayer; nowhere is it written down.”

That was the first night when I walked without waking the next morning fully dressed in my bed and with dusty boots.

Our house is the first in the street which memory tells me is called Baker’s Row. It is the first and stands alone. On three sides it looks out over the open countryside, from the fourth I can touch the wall of the house next door if I open the window on the stairs and lean out, so narrow is the alleyway that separates the two buildings.

The alley between them has no name, it is no more than a steep passageway, a passage that is probably unique in the world, linking, as it does, two left banks of a river with each other; it cuts across the neck of land surrounded by a noose of water on which we live.

Early in the morning, when I set off to put the lamps out, a door opens in the neighbouring house and a broomstick appears and brushes wood-shavings into the river, which then carries them on a journey right round the town, to wash them, half an hour later and scarcely fifty yards from the other end of the passageway, over the weir, where it takes its thunderous leave of the town.

This end of the passageway joins Baker’s Row; on the corner, above a shop in the neighbouring house, hangs a sign:

It used to say, “Joiner and Coffin-Maker”, which you can still clearly see when it is raining and the sign is wet; then the old writing shines through.

Every Sunday Herr Mutschelknaus, his wife Aglaia and his daughter Ophelia go to church, where they sit in the front row. That is, Frau and Fräulein Mutschelknaus sit in the front row; Herr Mutschelknaus sits in the third row, in the corner seat, beneath the wooden statue of the Prophet Jonah, where the darkness is deepest.

How ridiculous it all seems to me, after all these years, how ridiculous and how inexpressibly sad!

Frau Mutschelknaus is always enveloped in a rustle of black silk, from which her crimson, velvet-covered prayer-book shrieks out like a Hallelujah in colour. She lifts her skirts a respectable inch to reveal her little pointed boots of matt-black, elasticated prunello as she cautiously negotiates every puddle; under the pink powder on her cheeks a dense network of fine purple veins betrays the approach of middle age; her eyes, usually so expressive, are modestly veiled by their carefully mascara’d lashes, for when the bells call mankind to appear before their God, it is not seemly to radiate sinful feminine charm.

Ophelia is wearing a flowing, Grecian garment and a band of gold round the silky, ash-blond locks that fall to her shoulders and are crowned, as always, by a wreath of myrtle. She walks with the serene, unruffled gait of a queen.

My heart always beats faster whenever I think of her.

When she goes to church she is always heavily veiled, and it was only much later that I saw her face with the large, dark, dreamy eyes, which contrast so strangely with her blond hair.

Herr Mutschelknaus, in his long, baggy black coat, usually walks a few paces behind the two ladies. Whenever he forgets and walks beside them, Frau Aglaia immediately whispers to him, “Half a step back, Adonis.”

He has a long, thin, mournful face with sunken cheeks, sparse, reddish facial hair and a beak of a nose jutting out in front; his convex forehead merges into a bald pate which, with its fringe of moth-eaten hair, makes him look as if he has thrust his head through a mangy pelt and then forgotten to brush off the bits of fur. On every formal occasion Herr Mutschelknaus dons his top hat and has to wedge it on with an inch-thick pad of cotton wool between the brim and his forehead. On week-days he is never seen; he eats and sleeps in his workshop on the ground floor. The ladies of the family occupy several rooms on the third floor.

It must have been three or four years after the Baron had taken me in before I realised that Frau Aglaia and Ophelia and Herr Mutschelknaus belonged together.

From first light until after midnight the narrow passageway between the two houses is filled with a monotonous hum, as if there were a restless swarm of bumble-bees somewhere deep underground; when the air is still, the soft drone reaches us in our rooms high above. At first it attracted my attention, and I felt compelled to listen when I should have been learning my lessons, without it ever occurring to me, however, to ask where it came from. We do not look for the causes of constant phenomena, we accept them as a matter of course, however unusual they might in fact be. It is only when our nerves suffer a shock that we become curious – or run away.

I gradually became accustomed to the noise, as if it were a ringing in my ears; so accustomed, indeed, that whenever it suddenly stopped at night I would start from my sleep, thinking someone had hit me.

One day, when she rushed round the corner with her hands over her ears and knocked a basket of eggs out of my hand, Frau Aglaia excused herself by saying, “Oh, goodness me, my dear child, that’s what comes of all that dreadful joinering by my … my breadwinner. And … and … and his assistants”, she added, as if she had let out a dire secret.

‘Aha, it’s Herr Mutschelknaus’ lathe that makes that humming noise’, I deduced.

It was only later that I learnt – from Mutschelknaus himself – that he had no assistants at all and that the ‘& Co.’ consisted of himself alone.

One dark winter’s evening, when there was no snow, I was just raising my pole to open the glass of the lamp by the corner, in order to light it, when I heard someone whisper, “Psst, psst! Herr Dovecote.” Standing beckoning to me from the alleyway was the carpenter, Mutschelknaus, in a green baize apron and slippers with tiger’s heads embroidered in coloured beads.