The Clowns of God (4 page)

“Jean Marie is my friend. I owe him at least an honest enquiry.”

“Then you’ll need a Beisitzer an assessor to help you weigh the evidence.”

“How would you like the job, Anneliese? It might give you some new clinical insights.”

He said it as a joke to take the sting out of their discussion.

The joke fell flat.

Anneliese weighed the proposition for a long moment and then announced firmly: “Very well. I’ll do it. It’ll be a new experience to play inquisitor to a Pope. But, dear colleague,” she reached out and laid her big hand on his wrist, “I’m much more interested in keeping you honest!”

When his last lecture was over, late in the afternoon, Carl Mendelius walked down to the river and sat a long time, watching the stately passage of swans on the grey water.

Anneliese Meissner had left him deeply disturbed. She had challenged not only his relationship with Jean Marie Barette, but his integrity as a scholar, his moral stance as a seeker after truth. She had probed shrewdly at the weakest point in his intellectual armour: his inclination to make more tender judgments about his own religious family than about others.

For all his sceptic bent, he was still God-haunted, conditioned to the Pavlovian reflexes of his Jesuit past. He would rather conform his findings as an historian with orthodox tradition than deal bluntly with the contradictions between the two. He preferred the comfort of a familiar hearth to the solitude of the innovator. So far, he had not betrayed himself.

He could still look in the mirror and respect the man he saw.

But the danger was there, like a small prickling lust, ready to take fire at the right moment with the right woman.

In the case of Jean Marie Barette, the danger of self betrayal could be mortal. The issue was clear and he could not gloss or hedge it. There were three possibilities, mutually exclusive. Jean Marie was a madman. Jean Marie was a liar.

Jean Marie was a man touched by God, charged to deliver a momentous revelation.

He had two choices: refuse to be involved which was the right of any honest man who felt himself incompetent or submit the whole case to the most rigid scrutiny, and act without fear or favour on the evidence. With Anneliese Meissner, brusque and uncompromising, as his Beisitzer he could hardly do otherwise.

But what of Jean Marie Barette, long-time friend of the heart? How would he react when the harsh terms of reference were set before him? How would he feel when the friend he sought as advocate presented himself as the Grand Inquisitor?

Once again Carl Mendelius found himself flinching from the confrontation.

Far away towards the Klinikum an ambulance siren sounded a long, repetitive wail, eerie in the gathering dusk.

Mendelius shivered under the impact of a childhood memory:

the sound of air-raid sirens, and after it, the drone of aircraft and the shattering explosions of the fire-bombs that rained down on Dresden.

r ‘{ ‘{ When he arrived home, he found the family huddled around the television screen. The new Pope had been elected in the afternoon session of the conclave and was now being proclaimed as Leo XIV. There was no magic in the occasion.

The commentaries were without enthusiasm. Even the Roman crowd seemed listless and the traditional acclamations had a hollow ring.

Their Pontiff was sixty-nine years old, a stout man with an eagle’s beak, a cold eye, a rasping Aemilian accent and twenty-five years practice in Curial business behind him. His election was the outcome of a careful but painfully obvious piece of statecraft.

After two foreign incumbents, they needed an Italian who understood the rules of the papal game. After an actor turned zealot and a diplomat turned mystic the safest choice was Roberto Arnaldo, a bureaucrat with ice-water in his veins.

He would raise no passions, proclaim no visions. He would make none but the most necessary pronouncements; and these would be so carefully wrapped in Italian rhetoric that the liberals and the conservatives would swallow them with equal satisfaction. Most important of all, he suffered from gout and high cholesterol and, according to the actuaries, should enjoy a reign neither too short nor too long.

The news kept the conversation going at Mendelius’ dining-table. He was glad of the diversion, because Johann was moody over an essay that would not come right, Katrin was snappish and Lotte was at the low point of one of her menopausal depressions. It was an evening when he wondered with wry humour whether the celibate life had not a great deal to recommend it, and a non-celibate bachelor existence, even more. However, he was practised enough in marriage to keep that kind of thought to himself.

When the meal was over he retired to his study and made a telephone call to Herman Frank, Director of the German Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.

“Herman? This is Carl Mendelius. I’m calling to ask a favour. I’m coming to Rome for a week or ten days at the end of the month. Could you put me up?”

“Delighted!” Frank was a silver-haired courtly fellow, an historian of Cinquecento painters, who kept one of the best tables in Rome.

“Will Lotte be coming with you? We’ve got acres of space.”

“Possibly. It’s not decided yet.”

“Bring her! Hilde would be delighted. She needs some girl company.”

“Thanks, Herman. You’re very kind.”

“Not at all. You might be able to do me a favour, too.”

“Name it.”

“While you’re here the Academy will be playing host to a group of Evangelical pastors. The usual thing daily lectures, evening discussions, afternoon bus-rides. It would be a great feather in my cap if I could announce that the great Mendelius would give a couple of lectures, perhaps conduct a group discussion…?”

“Happy to do it, my friend.”

“Wonderful! Wonderful! Let me know when you’re arriving and I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

Mendelius put down the receiver and gave a chuckle of satisfaction. Herman Frank’s invitation to lecture was a stroke of good fortune. The German Academy was one of the oldest and most prestigious national academies in Rome.

Founded in 1910 in the reign of Wilhelm II of Prussia, it had survived two wars and the mindless ideologues of the Third Reich and still managed to maintain a reputation for solid Germanic scholarship. It offered Mendelius, therefore, a base of operations and a highly respectable cover for his delicate enquiries.

The German contingent at the Vatican would respond happily to a dinner invitation from Herman Frank. His guest book was an elaborate tome resplendent with exotic titles like “Rector Magnificent of the Pontifical Biblical Institute’ and “Grand Chancellor of the Institute of Biblical Archaeology’.

How Lotte would respond to the idea was another matter.

He needed a more propitious moment to open that little surprise packet.

His next step was to prepare a list of contacts to whom he should write and announce his visit. He had been a denizen of the city long enough to assemble a miscellany of friends and acquaintances, from the crusty old Cardinal who disapproved his defection but was still generous enough to appreciate his scholarship, to the Custodian of Incunabula in the Vatican Library and the last dowager of the Pierleoni, who directed the gossips of Rome from her wheelchair. He was still dredging up names when Lotte came in, carrying a tray of coffee. She looked penitent and forlorn, uncertain of her welcome.

“The children have gone out. It’s lonely downstairs. Do you mind if I sit up here with you?”

He took her in his arms and kissed her.

“It’s lonely up here too, darling. Sit down and relax. I’ll pour the coffee.”

“What are you doing?”

“Arranging our holiday.”

He told her of his talk with Herman Frank. He enthused about the pleasures of the city in summer, the opportunity to meet old friends, do a little touring. She took it all with surprising calm. Then she asked:

“It’s really about Jean Marie, isn’t it?”

“Yes; but it’s also about us. I want you with me, Lotte. I need you. If the children want to come, I’ll arrange hostel accommodation for them.”

“They have other plans, Carl. We were arguing about them before you came home. Katrin wants to go to Paris with her boyfriend. Johann is going hiking in Austria. That’s fine for him; but Katrin …”

“Katrin’s a woman now, darling. She’ll do what she wants whether we approve or not. After all…” He bent and kissed her again, “they’re only lent to us; and when they leave home we’ll be left where we started. We’d better start practising to be lovers again.”

“I suppose so.” She gave a small shrugging gesture of defeat.

“But, Carl …” She broke off, as if afraid to put the thought into words.

Mendelius prompted her gently.

“But what, dear?”

“I know the children will leave us. I’m getting used to the idea, truly I am. But what if Jean Marie takes you away from me. This this thing he wants of you is very strange and frightening.” Without warning she burst into convulsive sobbing.

“I’m afraid, Carl… terribly, terribly afraid!”

“In these last fateful years of the millennium…” Thus the opening line of Jean Marie Barette’s unpublished encyclical.

“In this dark time of confusion, violence and terror, I, Gregory, your brother in the flesh, your servant in Christ Jesus, am commanded by the Holy Spirit to write you these words of warning and of comfort.”

Mendelius could hardly believe the evidence of his own eyes. Papal encyclicals, for all their portentous authority, were usually commonplace documents stating traditional positions on matters of faith or morals. Any good theologian could frame the argument. Any good Latinist could make it eloquent.

The pattern was still that of the old rhetoricians. The argument was laid down. Scripture and the Fathers were quoted in support. Directives were given, binding the conscience of the faithful. There was a closing exhortation to faith, hope and continuing charity. The formal ‘we’ was used throughout, not merely to express the dignity of the Pontiff but to connote a community and a continuity in the office and in the teaching. The implication was plain: the Pope taught nothing new; he expounded an ancient and unchangeable truth, simply applying it to the needs of his time.

At one stroke Jean Marie Barette had broken the pattern.

He had abrogated the role of exegete and assumed the mantle of the prophet.

“I, Gregory, am commanded by the Holy Spirit…” Even in the formal Latin, the impact of the words was shocking. No wonder the men of the Curia had blanched when they read them for the first time. What followed was even more tendentious: . The comfort which I offer you is the abiding promise of our Lord Jesus Christ: “I will not leave you orphans. Behold I am with you all days, even to the end of the world.” The warning I give you is that the end is very near, that this generation shall not pass until all these things be fulfilled … I do not tell you this of myself, or because I have predicated it upon human reason, but because it was shown to me in a vision, which I dare not conceal but am commanded to tell openly to the world. But even that revelation was no new thing. It was simply an affirmation, clear as sunrise, of what was revealed in the Holy Scriptures…

There followed a long exposition of texts from the Synoptic Gospels, and a series of eloquent analogies between the Biblical ‘signs’ and the circumstances of the last decade of the twentieth century: wars and rumours of wars, famines and epidemics, false Christs and false prophets.

To Carl Mendelius, deeply and professionally versed in apocalyptic literature from the earliest times to the present, it was a disturbing and dangerous document. Emanating from so high a source it could not fail to raise alarm and panic.

Among the militant it might easily serve as a rallying-cry for one last crusade of the elect against the unrighteous. To the weak and the fearful it might even be an inducement to suicide before the horrors of the last times overtook them.

He asked himself what he would have done had he, like the secretary, seen it, new-written, on the Pontiff’s desk. Without a doubt he would have urged its suppression. Which was exactly what the Cardinals had done: suppressed the document and silenced the author.

Then a new thought presented itself. Was not this the fate of all prophets, the price they paid for a terrible gift, the bloody seal of truth upon their soothsaying? Out of the welter of biblical eloquence another text echoed in his mind;

the last lamentation of Christ over the Holy City.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that kill est the prophets and stone st them that are sent to thee! How often would I have gathered thy children as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, but thou wouldst not! .. . Therefore the day will come when thine enemies will cast a trench about thee, and beat thee flat to the ground, and thy children who are in thee; and they shall not leave in thee a stone upon a stone, because thou hast not known the things that are to thy peace!

It was an eerie thought for the midnight hour, with the moonlight streaming through the leaded windows and the cold wind searching down the Neckar valley and round the alleys of the old town where poor Holderlin died mad and Melanchthon, sanest of men, taught that “God draws; but he draws the willing ones.”

All his experience affirmed that Jean Marie Barette was the most willing, the most open of men, the least likely to fall victim to a fanatic’s illusion.

True, he had written a wildly imprudent document. Yet, perhaps this was the core of the matter: that in the hour of extremity only such a folly could command the attention of the world.

But command it to what? If the final catastrophe were at hand, its date computed irrevocably into the mechanism of creation, then why proclaim it at all? What counsel could prevail against the nightmare knowledge? What prayer had potency against a rescript written from eternity? There was a deep pathos in Jean Marie’s response to the questions:

My dear brothers and sisters, my little children, we all fear death, we shrink from the suffering which may precede it. We quail from the mystery of the last leap, which we must all make, into eternity. But we are followers of the Lord, the Son of God who suffered and died in human flesh. We are the inheritors of the good news which he left with us: that death is the gateway to life, that it is a leap, not into darkness, but into the hands of Everlasting Mercy.