The Clowns of God (27 page)

“Because it seemed expedient for the good of the Church.”

“You realise that so far as my apostolic vocation is concerned, I am reduced to impotence. I believe I have a right to know when and in what circumstances my faculties may be restored, and I may be given a canonical mission.”

“I cannot tell you that. No decision has yet been made.”

“What is the reason for the delay?”

“We have other concerns, more pressing.”

“With great respect, Holiness, whatever your concerns, even you are not dispensed from natural justice.”

“You reprove me? Here in my own house?”

“I, too, lived here once. I never felt like an owner, but rather like a tenant which as events proved, I was.”

“Let’s get to the point of this visit. What do you want of me?”

“Dispensation to live in the lay state, to travel freely and exercise my priestly functions in private.”

“Impossible!”

“What is the alternative, Holiness? Surely it would embarrass you more to keep me a prisoner on my own parole at Monte Cassino.”

“This whole situation is a mess!” His Holiness winced as he moved his gouty foot on the stool.

“I offer you a way out of it. Look! Rainer and Mendelius published an honest account of the abdication. They thought they were defending me; but what was the real result?

Business as usual in the Church; and you settled beyond attainder in the Chair of Peter! If I tried to change that situation which, believe me, I have no desire to do I should make a public idiot of myself. Please! Can you not see that far from being a threat or a nuisance I may even be able to help you?”

“You can’t help me by propagating these lunatic ideas about the Last Days and the Second Coming!”

“Do they look so lunatic from where you sit now?”

His Holiness shifted uneasily in his chair. He cleared his throat noisily and dabbed at his cheeks with a silk handkerchief.

“Well! I’ll admit we’re approaching a highly critical situation; but I can’t give myself nightmares about it. I go on doing what falls to my hand each day and …”

He broke off, embarrassed by the cool scrutiny of the man he had ousted. Jean Marie said nothing. Finally His Holiness found voice again.

“Now let me see, where were we? Oh, this request of yours! If your situation at Monte Cassino isn’t satisfactory, if you do want to return to private life, why don’t we make an interim arrangement, in pet to as it were, without any documents or formalities. If it doesn’t work out, then we both have other recourse. Does that make sense?”

“Very good sense, Holiness.” Jean Marie was studiously grateful.

“I shall make sure you have no cause to regret it.

Presumably the arrangement begins now.”

“Of course.”

“Then I leave for Tubingen in the morning. I’ve procured myself a French passport and returned the Vatican document to the Secretariat of State.”

“That wasn’t necessary.” His Holiness was relieved enough to be magnanimous.

“It was desirable,” said Jean Marie Barette mildly.

“As a man without a canonical mission I should not want to give the impression that I had one.”

“What do you propose to do with yourself?”

“I’m not quite sure, Holiness.” His smile was limpid as a child’s.

“I’ll probably end up telling the Good News to children at the crossroads. But first I must visit my friend Carl.”

“Do you think …” His Holiness seemed oddly embarrassed.

“Do you think Mendelius and his family would like me to send them a papal blessing?”

“Mendelius is still critically ill; but I’m sure his wife would appreciate the gesture.”

“I’ll sign the scroll and have my secretary post it first thing in the morning.”

“Thank you. Do I have your Holiness’ leave to go?”

“You have our leave.”

Unconsciously he had slipped into the antique form. Then, as if to make amends for an unnecessary formality, he struggled painfully to his feet and held out his hand. Jean Marie bent over the ring which once he had worn in his own right. For the first time Leo XIV seemed touched by a genuine regret. He said awkwardly:

“Perhaps… perhaps if we’d known each other better, none of this need have happened.”

“If this had not happened, Holiness, if I had not reached out for support in my solitude, Carl Mendelius would now be healthy and whole in his own house!”

That same evening Anton Cardinal Drexel entertained him to dinner and their talk was of a far different kind. Jean Marie explained eagerly what he had concealed so carefully in his interview with the Pontiff.

“When I heard what had happened to Carl, I knew beyond all shadow of doubt that this was the sign and the summons I had been waiting for. It’s a terrible thought, Anton, but the sign is always of contradiction: man in agony begging to be released from it. Poor Carl! Poor Lotte! It was the son who sent me the telegram. He felt his father would wish me near him and his mother begged me to come. I was terrified that our Pontiff would refuse permission. Having gone so far in conformity I did not want a battle at this stage.”

“You were lucky,” said Drexel drily.

“He hasn’t yet seen this stuff. Georg Rainer sent it round by messenger this afternoon.”

He reached behind him to the buffet and picked up a large manila envelope filled with glossy press photographs. All of them were from Tubingen. They showed a city caught in a medieval fervour of pageant, piety and plain riot.

In the hospital Mendelius was shown bandaged like a mummy, with only his mouth and nostrils visible, while a nurse kept vigil by the bed and armed police stood guard at the door. In the Stiftskirche and the Jakobskirche, men, women and children knelt in prayer. Students paraded on the campus carrying crude banners: “No foreign killers!”

“Guestworkers, guest-murderers!”

“Who silenced Mendelius? Why are the police silent too?”

In the industrial sectors of the suburbs, local youths battled with Turkish labourers. In the market place a politician addressed a lunchtime crowd. Behind him a four-colour poster screamed the slogan: “If you want safety in the streets, vote Muller.” Jean Marie Barette studied the pictures in silence.

Drexel said: “Incredible, isn’t it? It’s almost as if they’ve been waiting for a martyr! And the same demonstrations are being made in other German cities.”

Jean Marie shivered as if some squamous creature had touched him.

“Carl Mendelius in the role of Horst Wessel! It’s a horrible thought. I wonder what the family thinks of all this?”

“I asked Georg Rainer. He told me the wife is deeply shocked. She is rarely seen. The daughter looks after her at home. The son gave an interview in which he said that his father would be horrified if he knew what was being done.

He claimed that the tragedy was being stage-managed to create a social vendetta.”

“Stage-managed by whom?”

“Extremists of the left and the right.”

“Not very specific, is it?”

“But these,” Drexel tapped the photographs spread on the table, “these are terribly, dangerously specific. This is the old black magic of the manipulators and the demagogues.”

“It is more than that.” Jean Marie Barette was suddenly sombre.

“It is as if the evil that lurks in man has suddenly found a focus in this little provincial town. Mendelius is a good man. Yet he, in his extremity, is made the hero of this this witches’ sabbath! That’s gallows humour, Anton, and it frightens me.”

Drexel gave him a shrewd, sidelong look and began replacing the photographs in the envelope. He asked, casually enough; “Now that you are free and able to be anonymous, do you have any plans at all?”

“To visit old friends, to hear what they say about our sorry world but always to wait for the hand’s touch, to listen for the voice that will tell me where I am commanded to be. I know it sounds strange to you, but to me it seems perfectly natural. I am Pascal’s thinking reed, waiting for the wind to bend me in its passing.”

“But in the face of this evil,” Drexel tossed the package of photographs on to the bureau, “in the face of the other evils that will follow, what will you do? You cannot bend to every wind or leave every shout unanswered.”

“If God chooses to borrow my vagrant voice, he will find the words for me to use.”

“You talk like an Illuminist!” Drexel smiled to take the edge off the allusion.

“I’m glad our colleagues in the Congregation can’t hear you.”

“You should tell our colleagues.” There was a ring of steel in Jean Marie’s answer.

“They will soon hear the battle-cry of Michael the Archangel.

“Quis sicut Dens? Who is like to God? For all their syllogisms I wonder how many will rise to the challenge and confront the Antichrist? Have any of the Friends of Silence denounced the excesses in Tubingen and elsewhere?”

“If they have” Drexel shrugged “we haven’t heard of it.

But then, they are prudent men. They prefer to let passions cool before they speak. However, you and I are too old to mourn over the follies of our brethren and we’re too old to cure them, either. Tell me something, Jean. It may sound an impertinent question; but the answer is important to me.”

“Ask it then.”

“You’re sixty-five years old. You’ve risen as high as a man can go. Today you’ve put yourself back to zero. You have no calling, no visible future. What do you really want?”

“Enough light to see a Divine sense in this mad world.

Enough faith to follow the light. That’s the core of it all, isn’t it? Faith to move mountains, to say to the cripple; “Arise and walk!”

“We also need some love to make the darkness tolerable.”

“Amen to that!” said Jean Marie softly.

“I must go, Anton.

I’ve kept you up too late.”

“Before you leave… how are you placed for money?”

“Well enough, thank you. I have a patrimony, administered by my brother who is a banker in Paris.”

“Where are you staying tonight?”

“There’s a pilgrim hostel over by Santa Cecilia. I lodged there when I first came to Rome.”

“Why not stay here? I have a spare room.”

“Thank you, Anton, but no! I don’t belong here any more.

I have to acclimatise myself to the world. I may want to sit late in the piazza and talk to the lonely ones.” He added with an odd humorous pathos: “Perhaps, in the last cold hour before the dayspring, He may want to talk to me. Please understand and pray for me.”

“I wish I could come with you, Jean.”

“You were made for better company, old friend. I was born under a falling star. Almost, it feels as if I were going home.” He gestured towards the lights that marked the papal apartments.

“Stay close to our friend upstairs. He is named for a lion but he is really a house-trained pussy-cat. When the bad times come he will need a strong man at his side.”

A handshake, a brief farewell, and he was gone, a lean, frail figure swallowed up in the shadows of the stairwell. Anton Cardinal Drexel poured himself the last of the wine and pondered wryly on the aphorism of another Illuminist, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin: “All mystics speak the same language because they come from the same country.”

The journey to Tubingen was a lesson in his own inadequacy. For the first time in forty years he wore civilian clothes and it took him half an hour to adjust the cravat under his summer shirt. In the monastery he had been cushioned by a familiar routine. In the Vatican his every move had been attended. Now he was totally without privilege. He had to shout for a taxi to take him to the airport, argue with the bustling Roman who claimed to have called it first. He had no small notes for the tip and the driver dismissed him with contempt. There was no one to direct him to the counter where he must pick up his ticket for Stuttgart. The girl had no change for his large banknotes, and he had never owned a credit card in all his clerical life.

In the Vatican the bodily functions of the Pope were carried on in sacred privacy. In the airport urinal he stood in line, while the drunk next to him sprayed his shoes and his trouser-leg. At the bar, he was jostled and had coffee spilt on his sleeve; and, for a final indignity, the aircraft was over booked and he had to argue his way into a seat.

On board he was faced with a question of identity. His neighbour was an elderly woman from the Rhineland, nervous and voluble. Once betrayed into speaking German, he was drowned in the torrent of her talk. Finally, she asked him what he did for a living. It took him a good ten seconds to frame the obvious answer.

“I am retired, dear lady.”

“My husband’s retired. He’s become quite impossible.

How does your wife take to having you round the house all the time?”

“I’m a bachelor.”

“Strange that a handsome man like you never married.”

“I’m afraid I was married to my career.”

“What were you? A doctor? A lawyer?”

“Both,” Jean Marie assured her solemnly and solaced his conscience with a casuist’s logic. He had indeed been a doctor of souls; and there was law enough in the Vatican to choke Justinian.

When he arrived in Stuttgart, he was met by Johann Mendelius, eager to welcome him, but somehow dour and strained like a junior officer come from his first battlefield.

He called Jean Marie ‘sir’, avoiding all clerical titles. He drove carefully round the hill roads, taking the longer route into Tubingen because, as he put it, there were things to be explained before they arrived.

“Father is still desperately ill. The explosive in the letter bomb was sandwiched between wafers of aluminium and impregnated with tiny ball-bearings. Some of these are embedded in one eye-socket, very close to the brain. We know he has lost the sight of that eye and may lose the other.

We haven’t seen his face; but it is obviously much mutilated, and, of course, he has lost his left hand. Other operations will be necessary, but not until he is much stronger. There is still a dangerous infection in the arm and the eye-socket and the range of antibiotics that he can tolerate is very limited. So we wait. Mother, Katrin and I visit the hospital by turns. Mother is holding up extraordinarily well. She has courage for all of us; but don’t be surprised if she gets very emotional when she sees you. We’ve told no one else you are coming except Professor Meissner. She’s father’s closest friend on the faculty. The way things are now, everyone in Tubingen is Eeddling some gossip or other. As soon as father recovers if e does I’m moving him far away.”