Authors: Carl-Johan Vallgren
Somebody spoke: “What’s going on, what’s all the noise about?” But the boy seemed not to hear. Just went on hammering the door with his head and feet. All around him he heard people’s thoughts:
hideous child . . . so deformed . . . should never have been allowed to be born . . .
In the midst of all this commotion, Madam Schall arrived. Someone thought:
the bidding’s over, young cripple. The girl’s already been sold. One hundred and eighty gold marks! For a price like that one could stay here a whole year, loving and breakfast thrown in
.
He continued beating at the door until the key turned on the inside.
Never would he forget the look of the man who was yet to have the last word in his life’s drama: the searching blue eyes, the moustache glistening with sweat, the well-pressed velvet coat, the unbuttoned breeches. The man looked at the crowd, one by one, coldly. Finally his glance fell on the deformed boy.
“What kind of a freak is that?” he asked, turning to Madam Schall. “Is this a brothel you’re running or a madhouse?”
“I beg your pardon, Herr Court Magistrate,” she answered. “But the boy was carrying on so, we were afraid there had been some accident.”
Through a crack in the door Hercule saw Henriette. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, still clothed, her face white as a sheet. This time, he told himself, I’m not too late.
“Be sure to lock that animal away and leave us in peace.”
The gathered crowd withdrew to the salons and private rooms, and Madam Schall apologised for what had happened. She would look after the boy, she said; he had recently been ill and was not quite recovered. The man with the moustache nodded and made a gesture indicating that he wanted to shut the door. But at that moment Hercule forced his way into the room.
A new uproar began. He clung to Henriette, who had started weeping heart-rendingly. Once again people came running to see what was going on. Madam Schall tried to tear him away from the girl. But then, as if paralysed, a deathly pallor on her face, she stopped short, as if afraid she was going mad; for she heard a voice, like a ghost inside her, which she knew to be Hercule. The voice said clearly,
He’s the one who cut off Magdalena Holt’s breast!
Above the murmur of voices and Henriette’s lamentations the magistrate yelled, “Get that damned abortion out of here before there’s an accident!”
But even if Hercule had been able to hear such ruthless language it wouldn’t have affected him. So focused was his mind on saving Henriette that he didn’t even notice the violent kick that landed on his back. But Madam Schall – still shaken by the haunted voice that had spoken up inside her and which she was sure was inspired by the Holy Ghost – did notice it, and put an end to the tumult by thrusting the official personage to one side.
“Enough!” she said, in an icy-cold voice acquired over a lifetime spent on the brink of disaster. “Herr von Kiesingen may collect his money from my office. The girl is no longer for sale!”
Less than a week later, the establishment was closed down. No amount of protesting availed. No petitions from influential gentlemen who had been protecting Madam Schall’s activities for years. No pleas for mercy. The order to raid the place had been made by Klaus von Kiesingen, president of the Königsberg Divisional Court of Appeal.
Madam Schall herself was put on the first boat to Tallinn, where an elderly admirer had paid a small fortune to have her acquitted from the charges of procuring. Several of the girls were interned in the notorious Danzig spinning house, where more than one of them died of its hardships. The others were scattered to the winds. Rumour had it that Henriette Vogel and her mother managed to escape to relatives in Saxony, though other rumours had them separated in stormy circumstances and the girl ending up in a Berlin brothel.
For our hero, years of darkness and humiliation were in store.
ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON
in the dog days Julian Schuster, a Jesuit monk in the monastery at Heisterbach in the hills of Upper Silesia, stopped at its refectory window, and, unable to conceal an expression of profound surprise, looked around him. What had drawn his attention? Not the small crowd that was settled outside the monastery gates hoping to witness a miracle. Not the two novices sitting in the yard, absorbed in Loyola’s spiritual exercises. Nor yet the abbot Johann Kippenberg, who was walking around the gallery, his forehead deeply furrowed by dark thoughts in which Schuster himself played a certain part. What had drawn his attention was nothing he could even see. It was a voice, a voice that seemed to be speaking inside him, in a way he had never experienced before.
To Schuster it sounded like the voice of a confused boy. And he wondered whether it wasn’t his own voice, speaking from some murky recess of his mind.
How long
, the scarcely audible voice said,
have I lived in the valley of death . . .
Then, in a hum which made it impossible to catch any more words, it disappeared again.
“Odd,” Schuster mumbled, looking up at the abbot, who was whispering something to one of the novices. “Why does old age invariably set in with furtively talking to oneself? And as if that’s not bad enough, believing the person you pretend you’re listening so attentively to is someone else.”
Quite right. In the context of his own epoch, Schuster was already old. Though his name suggested otherwise, just like Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Order, he was of Iberian birth. But from his steel-grey lion mane, his massive body and an iron physique built up during the adventurous years of his novitiate, not many people would have guessed he was turning eighty-four.
Again he heard that voice inside himself, and even though he couldn’t quite catch what it said, he understood intuitively it was connected with some kind of loss.
A little perturbed by the merciless ravages of old age, he did his best to concentrate on the murmur of the crowd at the gates.
“They’re crazy,” he muttered to himself. “If those peasants had their way the boy would be canonised at once. This will end in a catastrophe.”
The words, with their hint of a prophecy, relieved his unrest. His thoughts were interrupted by someone speaking to him. Not the ghost-voice this time, nor yet his own, from the depths of his mass of memories, but the abbot’s through the open window.
“What shall we do, Schuster?” Kippenberg sighed. “We can’t just drive them away.”
The abbot, Austrian by birth and educated in Rome under Cardinal Teobaldi, was half Schuster’s age. During the difficult years when the Jesuit Order had been banned, he’d helped build it up on Prussian soil. Behind the gentle eyes lay an organisational talent quite out of the ordinary, which, Schuster guessed, would by and by see him one of the congregation’s leaders.
“Why not let the boy go out there to them awhile?” he replied. “It could hardly make things worse. The peasants aren’t asking for much. It’s all about some heifer that’s escaped, or a charm that’s been lost. They imagine the boy can peer into hidden realms. We can only meet superstition with knowledge.”
“We haven’t the right to,” said Kippenberg. “Not in the name of our Society. Not on monastic ground, before we’ve confirmed whether he . . .”
The abbot fell silent. And again Schuster heard the voice inside his head:
search
, it was saying, very clearly, before becoming incomprehensible again:
I must find . . .
“You know, Kippenberg,” he said, “in my youth we used to lure the Indians out of the Music State’s rainforest with an organ. To them, the savages, it was a miracle. And short of producing a miracle we couldn’t get them to believe.”
“But this lot aren’t savages,” the abbot retorted. “We don’t need to preach the gospel to them. This region is Catholic. I’m worried, and so ought you to be, Schuster. Yesterday I was afraid the mob might storm the monastery. Haven’t you noticed how the crowd has been growing daily? There are hundreds of people out there, maybe thousands . . . How is the boy anyway, is he still refusing to speak?”
“It’s not certain that he can speak,” Schuster said. “Besides which, he seems not to hear. I’ll have a doctor examine him. We can’t exclude the possibility of his being deaf.”
“It’s not possible to learn to play the organ, Schuster, if you are deaf. You must know that.”
“The handicap could have come on later in life. A result of shock, maybe. The boy could be an army child from the war.”
“What about his lights, his intelligence?”
“Strangely enough, he seems to understand almost everything one says to him. Lip-reading, perhaps. I just can’t understand why I was moved to pick him out. He’s no good at anything except playing the organ. Work helping in the kitchen is too heavy for him, and you can’t carry water or sort turnips with your feet . . .”
Again Schuster lost track of his thoughts. Since the boy had come to the monastery he’d been finding it hard to concentrate, had been affected by morbid broodings, woken up by nightmares that kept sleep at bay until the dawn light could be seen over the mountains. He couldn’t even play instruments any more; the joy had gone out of it as that boy began to delve ever deeper into the world of music. He was beset by doubt, but couldn’t understand where it came from or the reason behind it.
“I’m as anxious about him as about these recurrent sieges,” Kippenberg went on. “And you’re right, Schuster. No-one can learn to play the organ so quickly. He must have learned before they put him in the asylum. Where does he come from? That’s what we must find out.”
“Someone seems to have dumped him on the asylum steps,” Schuster said. “At least, so I was told. In the dead of night, during a snowstorm.”
“Poor creature . . .” The abbot lowered his voice. “We have every reason to worry about our novices. Only yesterday another disappeared without so much as leaving a letter of resignation. And you wouldn’t believe the things I’m being told in confession. Even our purest souls are losing their faith. Schuster, are you listening to me?”
He had broken out in a sweat. It was mid-August and the heat was inhuman. Taking a handkerchief out of his girdle pocket, he mopped the nape of his neck. A smell of freshly baked bread was coming from somewhere. The crowd’s murmurings had died down. It was true, he thought, what the abbot had pointed out: the novices were losing their faith, and this too he knew was because of the boy, though he didn’t understand how.
“Forgive me,” he said with a slight bow. “Permit me to withdraw to my room. I’ve neglected both the hours and the Mass. It is time for me to have a private conversation with our Lord.”
On his way to the dormitories Julian Schuster pondered whether there could be a link between the boy’s dumbness and the years he had spent in the asylum; and whether the explanation was to be found in the desperate harmonies he would extort from the organ pipes. It wasn’t unthinkable. Modern-day institutions defied description, and it was from among the Ratibor asylum’s idiots, those considered sane enough to carry out simple tasks, that the monastery was getting its kitchen boys. Schuster had gone there himself that April morning to find a replacement for a halfwit who had died of a stroke while preparing the unleavened bread for Easter.
Never would he forget that scene in one of the madhouse cellars. The boy was shackled like a wild beast to a hook in the wall. Beside him lay a wooden platter with leftovers unfit for the monastery’s pigs. The little bunch of straw he sat on was caked with faeces, its stench so foul it kept off even lice.
Once before, in Venice, he had seen a human monster, among the participants in a procession at Carnival time; and on another occasion, on an island in the Aegean to which the Greeks sent their poor. But never as horrific a creature as this.
“Why do you keep him chained up?” he had asked.
“He frightens the inmates,” the guard answered. But something told Schuster it was the warders who were really afraid.
Releasing him, Schuster asked himself what special plan the Lord could have had for this creation of His. The boy’s body was so deformed he did not at first notice the violent bruises, the gaping wounds, the scars, the putrefied sores where the manacles had dug so deep he could almost see bone. He had clearly been assaulted daily and Schuster breathed an Ave Maria, so upset was he by such brutality.
“What is your name?” he had asked him, in a whisper, there in the darkness. But the boy had merely shaken his head. When Schuster had questioned the management about the boy’s origins, he could only conclude that he had no history. An itinerant coppersmith was said to have found him starving to death on a country road outside Breslau, and sent him to the asylum. Noticing he lacked ear conchae, Schuster had assumed he could not hear at all; but later, when the boy had shown proof of musical talent, had supposed he couldn’t be completely deaf, or at least not from birth. Maybe this shortcoming was indeed an asset? He seemed to hear what others could not.
For almost an hour, as the crowds outside the monastery gates continued to grow, Schuster spoke in private with his God. And when the conversation was at an end, leaving him none the wiser, he remained sitting at his desk, leafing absent-mindedly through the pages of
The Golden Legend
, a text he’d been absorbed in during the past month, but now laid it aside with a sigh, and went over to the bookshelves.
For a while he stood in front of the volumes trying to pick out some work that could divert his attention from recent events: Ludolf of Saxony’s
Vita Christi
, Thomas à Kempis’
The Imitation of Christ
. But before he could select anything, weariness overcame him again. Sitting down on his bunk he looked around at the simple table, the stool, the crucifix on the wall.
The distant sound of organ music came from the chapel. It was the boy playing. When the bell rang for vespers he hardly noticed it:
prime, tierce
. . . he didn’t even register which of the hours it was ringing for.
Now he stood at the window of his cell. The crowds had settled on the slope beneath the kitchen building, hoping the boy would show himself. It was mainly young women, but there were also old people and cripples who had come believing the boy, in addition to his alleged second sight, could cure their aches and pains. By the well some children were playing. A cow strayed off to the brook. Some of the peasant families had brought along baskets with food. Enterprising local men were selling beer and pretzels. Over the last month the monastery had become a resort for pilgrims.