Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(12)
So on the subject of their Christian names, Dirk couldn’t answer Pfarrer Johannes. The question was dropped.
Dirk swept the floors, washed the clear windows till they shone, took the minister’s laundry to the laundress and picked it up again. He wasn’t required to attend service, but he loitered in the vestibule, keeping a beaker of water on hand in case Pfarrer Johannes needed to clear his throat between first and second hours of the sermon. And the boy listened a little. Mostly his mind wandered. But it didn’t have anywhere special to wander to.
Apparently it was customary for Pfarrer Johannes to take in abandoned children from time to time, for no one seemed surprised to see Dirk answer the door to receive a loaf of bread, a flagon of wine, hoops of sausages in a basket. Gifts for the minister. No one asked Dirk his name, neither did they propose he ought to attend school. They probably assumed he was being educated by the good father.
Perhaps he was and didn’t know it. Once, he said to the minister, “Why do you keep me here?”
The man took off his spectacles and began to polish them. “Do you recognize kindness? Do you know it?”
“I know the word.”
“Well, no matter. None of us can see the blessed air, but that doesn’t stop us from breathing it.”
“But why do you keep me here?”
“To practice my sermons on, don’t you think?” There was a merry quizzicalness in Pfarrer Johannes’s face. Dirk gave up and went on with his chores.
He kept to himself. Of other children—for there were children in the village, of course there were—he knew little except the sound of their voices at play, in the gloaming of long summer days. He liked the sound of their laughter, but only in the sense that it had a musical cadence. Other than that, their calling and shouting in games and play sounded, frankly, stupid.
When his legs felt eager to run and join them at play, he didn’t want to. When he wanted to, his legs stayed still.
15.
Came the day, perhaps seven years into Dirk’s apprenticeship at the chapel, when a troupe of musicians entered the village near sunset. They had been on their way to sing a High Mass for the local margrave in his palace nearby, but a midday summer thunderstorm had washed out the road. Two horses had slipped into a ravine, breaking any number of legs between them. While replacements were sent for, the musicians required housing for the night.
By now the ecclesiastical situation had become clear to Dirk. Pfarrer Johannes’s congregation, small and devout as it was, saw itself beset on all sides. The village provided sanctuary for this outpost of a Swiss-inflected Calvinism. But its faithful had grown thorny and inward-looking from being outnumbered by the vast Roman Catholic population of the kingdom of Bavaria.
That evening, at the tavern, the visiting Catholic choir members and the local Protestant farmers came to some disagreements over scripture. The discussion concerned the Christian souls of animals. The pious butcher lost three teeth. The traveling kapellmeister was cursed to the fifth level of Hell. Worst of all, in the middle of the night a few of the visiting rogues managed to breach the locked doors of Pfarrer Johannes’s austere chapel.
When Dirk arrived at the side door to open up the next morning, he discovered the disaster. A bear was wandering about in a state of distress. It had knocked over candlesticks and shat upon the tiles. Maybe under cover of night someone had lured the wild creature into the chapel. Or maybe, once the doors were broken open, some woodland bear feeling the need of repentance had come for salvation. No one could say. Somehow the battered door had closed behind the bear and latched itself. The bear had spent an uneasy dark night of the soul.
After Dirk regained his footing, he circled to the front of the building. He flung open the double doors. The bear lumbered out on all fours, to begin a life of penitence and good works, perhaps, or to take the Protestant Gospel back to the forest.
Its fur coat was still usefully upon its own back. That was something.
Nursing headaches, the choir members left the village about midday, pursued by a congregation of equally muddle-headed locals. No one was bothering with mea culpa. It fell to Dirk to mop up the mess.
“This is beyond toleration,” said Pfarrer Johannes, bringing one bucket of water after another. “Filthy animals.”
“I don’t think the bear could help it.”
“I wasn’t talking about the bear.”
Dirk regarded the broken window. The shards of glass were on the floor, so the window must have been smashed from outside. Smears of blood showed that the bear had cut its paw prowling in a circuit around the pews, looking for an exit.
Then: “We all show too little tolerance for those who are not like us.”
“Do you think bears have souls?” asked Dirk. This was perhaps his first abstract question.
“It is not what I think.” Pfarrer Johannes sounded prim and tired. “It is what God thinks.”
Usually Pfarrer Johannes was comfortable being God’s spokesperson, but as he seemed taciturn today, Dirk dropped the subject. He concentrated on the task. The sky through the broken mullions, the torn hymnals, the quality of bearish odor even when a bear has been absent for several hours. It all added up to some other question, though whether it was about bears or not, Dirk wasn’t sure. Could a bear be christened? If a bear died and lost its skin, could it ever go back and reclaim it so that its cousins in heaven would still recognize it when it arrived?