The White Dominican Read online

  If something like that happens in Lourdes, they say the Mother of God came to their aid.

  Who knows, perhaps the subconscious and the Mother of God are the same thing?

  Which is not to say that the Mother of God is simply the subconscious, no, the subconscious is the ‘mother’ of ‘god’.

  In the present novel a certain Christopher Dovecote plays the role of a living person. I never succeeded in finding out whether he ever actually lived; he certainly did not spring from my imagination, of that I remain convinced. I say that openly, even if there is a danger people will think I am only saying it for effect.

  This is not the place for a detailed description of the way this book came to be written, a brief sketch of what happened will suffice. In order to give that, it is unavoidable that I should talk about myself, which I will do in a few sentences, for which I hope the reader will forgive me.

  I had worked out the whole of the novel in my head and started writing it down when I noticed – but only when I read through my draft – that I had written the name ‘Dovecote’ without being aware of it. But that was not all. As the pen moved across the paper, whole sentences changed and came to express something completely different from what I had intended. It developed into a duel between myself and the invisible ‘Christopher Dovecote’ in which he ultimately gained the upper hand.

  It had been my plan to portray a small town that lives in my memory; what emerged was a completely different picture, a picture that is much more vivid to my mind’s eye than the one I had actually seen. Eventually there was nothing for it but to give in to the influence that called itself Christopher Dovecote, to lend him my hand, so to speak, to write down his story and to cross out everything that came from my own ideas.

  If we assume this Christopher Dovecote is an invisible being who in some mysterious way is able to impress his will on a person of sound mind, then the question arises, why is he using me to describe his life-story and the process of his spiritual development?

  Is it from vanity? Or to create a ‘novel’?

  I leave it to each reader to reach his own conclusion and keep my own opinion to myself.

  Perhaps soon my case will not be an isolated one; perhaps this ‘Christopher Dovecote’ will guide someone else’s hand tomorrow.

  Something that appears unusual today might be an everyday event tomorrow.

  Perhaps it is that ancient, yet ever-new insight which is beginning to manifest itself:

  Each single action here on earth

  Accords with nature’s rule;

  “I am the author of this act” –

  Thus speaks the self-deceiving fool.

  and the figure of Christopher Dovecote is only a harbinger, a symbol, the visible form assumed by an intangible force?

  Of course, the idea that man is a mere puppet on a string is anathema to the know-alls who are so proud to think of themselves as lords of creation.

  One day as I was writing, with these ideas running through my mind, I suddenly thought, ‘Could this Christopher Dovecote perhaps be something like a being that has split off from my own self? An imaginary figure that has taken on independent, if transitory, existence and which I, without realising it, have brought into the world, as is said to happen to people who believe they see apparitions and even converse with them?’

  As if this invisible being had been reading my thoughts, he immediately interrupted the story and used my hand to insert the following strange answer:

  “And you yourself, sir,” (this formal address from one so intimately related to me sounded like mockery) “you and all those humans who assume they are individual beings, are you anything other than ‘chips’ off some greater self, off the great self that is called God?”

  Since then I have spent much time reflecting on the meaning of this extraordinary question, for I hoped it might provide the key to the mystery surrounding Christopher Dovecote. At one point I thought my ponderings were leading me somewhere, but then I received another bewildering message. It read:

  “Every man is a dovecote, but not everyone is a Christopher. Most Christians merely imagine they are. The white doves fly in and out of a genuine Christian.”

  From then on I gave up all hope of ever solving the mystery, and at the same time I abandoned the idea that perhaps – following the ancient theory that human beings have several incarnations on earth – I might have been this Christopher Dovecote in an earlier existence.

  What I would most like to believe is that what guided my hand over the page is an eternal force, free, self-sufficient and liberated from all constraints of shape and form; but sometimes, when I wake from dreamless sleep in the morning, I see, between eyeball and lid, like a memory of the night, the image of a white-haired, clean-shaven old man, tall and as slim as a youth, and for the rest of the day I cannot get rid of the feeling that that must be Christopher Dovecote.

  This feeling is often accompanied by the strange idea that he lives beyond time and space, and that when death shall stretch out its hand to take me, he it will be who will enter on the inheritance of my life.

  But what is the point of such reflections, which are of no concern to other people? There follow the revelations of Christopher Dovecote, in the often fragmentary form in which they came to me, with nothing added or left out.

  Chapter 1

  Christopher Dovecote’s First Revelation

  For as long as I can remember, the people in the town have maintained that my name is Dovecote.

  When I was a boy, trotting from house to house in the twilight, bearing a long pole with a glowing wick at the end to light the lamps, street-urchins would march before me, clapping their hands and singing, “Doo’cot, Doo’cot, diddle diddle Doo’cot”.

  I did not get angry with them, even if I never joined in.

  Later, the grown-ups took up the name and used it whenever they wanted something from me.

  It was different with my first name of Christopher. That was written on a scrap of paper which was hanging round my neck when I was found one morning as a tiny baby, naked on the steps of St. Mary’s. Presumably my mother wrote it before she left me there.

  It is the only thing I have from her, and that is why I have always regarded the name of Christopher as something sacred. It has imprinted itself on my body, and I have borne it through life like a birth certificate issued in eternity which no one can steal from me. It kept on growing and growing, like a seed emerging from the darkness, until it once more appeared as what it had been from the very beginning, fused with me and accompanied me to the world of incorruptibility. Just as it is written, ‘Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible’.

  Jesus was baptised when he was a grown man and fully aware of what was happening: the name that was his self came down to earth. Nowadays people are baptised as infants: how can they grasp the significance of what has happened to them?! They wander through life towards the grave, like puffs of mist that the wind drives back to the swamp; their bodies decay, and they have no part in that which will rise again: their name.

  But, insofar as any man can say of himself “I know”, I know that I am called Christopher.

  There is a legend current in the town that St. Mary’s was built by a Dominican, Raimund de Pennaforte, from donations sent by unknown people from all over the world.

  Over the altar is an inscription, “Flos florum: thus will I be revealed after three hundred years.” A painted board has been nailed over it, but it keeps on falling down; every year on Lady Day.

  It is said that on certain nights of the new moon, when it is so dark you can hardly see your hand before your eyes, the church casts a white shadow on the black market square. That is supposed to be the figure of the White Dominican, Pennaforte.

  We children from the Home for Orphans and Foundlings had to go to confession for the first time when we were twelve years old.

  “Why did you not come to confession?” the Chaplain barked at me the next morning.
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  “I did go to confession, Father.”

  “You’re lying”. Then I told him what had happened:

  “I was standing in the church, waiting to be called, when a hand waved to me, and when I entered the confessional I found a white monk there who asked me three times what I was called. The first time I did not know; the second time I knew, but forgot before I could speak; the third time a cold sweat broke out on my brow, my tongue was paralysed, I could not speak, but a voice in my breast screamed, ‘Christopher!’ The white monk must have heard, for he wrote the name down in a book, and pointed to it and said, ‘Henceforth you are entered in the Book of Life.’ Then he blessed me and said, ‘I forgive you your sins, your past and your future ones’.”

  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 chai
n. 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.

  Chapter 2

  The Mutschelknaus Family

  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.