The Clowns of God (5 page)

It is an act of trust, an act of love, by which, as lovers do, we abandon ourselves to become one with the Beloved.

The knock at the door startled Mendelius. His daughter, Katrin, entered, hesitant and timid. She was in her dressing gown, her blonde hair tied back with a pink ribbon, her face scrubbed clean of make-up, her eyes red with weeping. She asked: “May I talk with you, Papa?”

“Of course, sweetheart.” He was instantly solicitous.

“What’s the matter? You’ve been crying.” He kissed her gently and led her to a chair.

“Now tell me what’s bothering you.”

“This trip to Paris. Mother’s still very angry about it. She says I have to discuss it with you. She doesn’t understand, Papa truly she doesn’t. I’m nineteen. I’m a woman now, just as much as she is and

…”

“Take it easy, little one! Let’s start from the beginning.

You want to go to Paris for the summer. Who’s going with you?”

“Franz, of course! You know we’ve been going together for ages now. You said you liked him very much.”

“I do. He’s a very nice young man. A promising painter, too. Are you in love with him?”

“Yes, I am.” There was a note of defiance in the answer.

“And he’s in love with me!”

“Then I’m very happy for you both, little one!” He smiled and patted her hand.

“It’s the best feeling in the world. So what comes next? You’ve talked about marriage? You want to become engaged? Is that it?”

“No, Papa.” She was very firm about it.

“Not yet, anyway. And that’s the point Mama refused to understand.”

“Have you tried explaining it to her?”

“Over and over! But she just won’t listen.”

“Try me then,” said Mendelius gently.

“It’s not easy. I’m not good with words like you. The thing is, I’m afraid; we’re both afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Of always… just that. Of getting married and having children and trying to make a home, while the whole world could tumble round our ears in a day.” Suddenly she was passionate and eloquent.

“You older ones don’t understand.

You’ve survived a war. You’ve left us! All along the borders there are rocket launchers and missile silos. The oil’s running out so we’re using atom power and burying the waste that will one day poison our children. You’ve given us everything except tomorrow! I don’t want my baby to be born in a bomb shelter and die of radiation sickness! All we’ve got is today and loving each other and we think we’ve got a right, at least to that!”

Her vehemence shocked him like water dashed in his face.

The little blonde madchen he had dandled on his knee was gone for ever. In her place was an angry young woman, filled with a deep resentment against himself and his whole generation. The grim thought struck him that perhaps it was for her and all the others like her that Jean Marie Barette had written his prescription for life in the last days. Certainly it was not the young ones who had suppressed it, but the men of his generation, the elders, the seeming wise, the perennial pragmatists, living, in any case, on borrowed time. He breathed a silent prayer for wisdom of the tongue and began softly and tenderly to reason with her.

“Believe me, little one, I understand how you feel, both of you. Your mother understands, too, but in a different way, because she knows how a woman can be hurt, and how the consequences can be longer for her than for a man. She fights with you because she loves you and she’s afraid for you. You see, whatever mess the world’s in and I’ve been sitting here reading how much more horrible it may get! you’ve had the experience of loving and being loved. Not the whole experience, yet, but some of it; so you do know what loving’s about: giving and taking and caring and never grabbing the whole cake for yourself. Now you’re beginning the next chapter with your Franz, and only the pair of you can write it, together. If you botch it, the best your mother and I can do is dry your tears and hold your hand until you’re ready to begin living again. We can’t tell you how to arrange your emotional lives, or even your sexual lives. All we can tell you is that if you waste your hearts and waste that special joy that makes sex so wonderful, it’s something you can’t renew. You can find other experiences, other joys, too, but never again that first, special, very exclusive ecstasy that makes this whole confusion of living and dying worthwhile. What more can I say, little one? Go to Paris with your Franz. Learn your loving together. As for tomorrow? How’s your Latin?”

She gave him a tearful smile.

“You know it’s always been terrible.”

“Try this.

“Quid sit futurum eras, fuge quaerere.” Old Horace wrote it.”

“It still means nothing.”

“It’s very simple.

“Forbear to ask what tomorrow may bring.” If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you’ll never enjoy the sunshine.”

“O Papa!” She threw her arms round his neck and kissed him.

“I love you so much! You’ve made me very happy.”

“Go to bed, little one,” said Carl Mendelius softly.

“I’ve still got an hour’s work ahead of me.”

“You work too hard, Papa.”

He gave her a small admonitory pat on the cheek and quoted lightly: “A father without work means a daughter without a dowry. Good night, my love. Golden dreams!”

When the door closed behind her, he felt the prickling of unbidden tears tears for all the youthful hope in her, and all her threatened innocence. He blew his nose violently, picked up his spectacles and settled back to his reading of Jean Marie’s apocalypse.

It is clear that in the days of universal calamity the traditional structures of society will not survive. There will be a ferocious struggle for the simplest needs of life food, water, fuel and shelter. Authority will be usurped by the strong and the cruel. Large urban societies will fragment themselves into tribal groups, each hostile to the other.

Rural areas will be subject to pillage. The human person will be as much a prey as the beasts whom we now slaughter for food. Reason will be so clouded that man will resort for solace to the crudest and most violent forms of magic. It will be hard even for those founded most strongly in the Promise of the Lord, to sustain their faith and continue to give witness, as they must do, even to the end.

How then must Christians comport themselves in these days of trial and terror?

Since they will no longer be able to maintain themselves as large groups, they must divide themselves into small communities, each capable of sustaining itself by the exercise of a common faith and a true mutual charity. Their Christian witness must be given by spreading that charity outwards to those who are not of the faith, by aiding the distressed, by sharing even their most meagre means with those who are most deprived. When the priestly hierarchy can no longer function, they will elect to themselves ministers and teachers who will maintain the Word in its integrity, and continue to conduct the Eucharist.

“God Almighty! He’s really done it now.” Mendelius heard his own voice echo round the attic room. Fiction or predestined fact, this, from the pen of a Pope, was the unsay able the absolutely unprintable. If the press of the world got hold of it, they would make Jean Marie Barette look like the maddest of mad mullahs, the craziest of all prophets of doom. And yet, in the context of an atomic calamity, it was a matter of simple logic. It was a scenario which, in one form or another, every national leader kept locked in his most secret files, the script for the aftermath of Armageddon.

Which brought Mendelius, by a round turn, to the third and final document: the list of those who, Jean Marie thought, would be prepared to believe his message and his messenger. This was perhaps the most startling deposition of all. Unlike the letter and the encyclical it was typewritten, as if it had once formed part of an official file. It contained names, addresses, titles, telephone numbers, methods of private contact, and terse, telegraphic notes on each individual. There were politicians, industrialists, churchmen, leaders of dissident groups, editors of well-known journals, more than a hundred names in all. Two sample entries set the tone of the record.

U.S.A.

Name: Michael Grant Morrow Title: Secretary of State Private Address: 593 Park Avenue, New York Telephone: (212)689-7611 Religion: Episcopalian Met at presidential dinner. Firm religious convictions.

Speaks Russian, French and German. Respected in Russia but Asian relations weak. Deeply aware of hair-trigger situation on European frontiers. Has written a private monograph on the function of religious groups in a disintegrating social framework.

USSR.

Name:

Title:

Private Address:

Telephone:

Sergei Andrevich Petrov Minister for Agricultural Production Unknown Moscow 53871 Private visit Vatican with nephew of Premier. Aware of need for religious and ethnic tolerance in USSR. and satellites, but unable make headway against party dogmatists. Concerned that Russia’s problems with food supplies and oil may precipitate conflict. Close friends in high military; enemies in KGB. Vulnerable in event bad harvests or economic blockade.

On the last page was a note in Jean Marie’s own handwriting:

All of the people on this list are known to me personally.

Each in his own fashion has demonstrated an awareness of the crisis, and a willingness to confront it in a spirit of human compassion, if not always from the standpoint of a believer. Whether they will change under the pressure of coming events, I do not know. However, each has reposed a degree of trust in me and I have tried to return the gesture. As a private person you will be regarded at first with suspicion and they will be much more reserved with you. The risks of which I have warned you will begin at your first contact, because you will have no diplomatic protection, and the language of politics is contrived for the concealment of truth. J.M.B.

Carl Mendelius took off his spectacles and tried to palm the sleep out of his eyes. He had read his brief with the devotion of a friend and the care of an honest scholar. Now, in this lonely hour after midnight, he must pass judgment on the text, if not yet on the man who had written it. A sudden cold fear took hold of him, as if the shadows of the room were haunted by old accusing ghosts: the ghosts of men burned for heresy and women drowned for witchcraft and nameless martyrs bewailing the vanity of their sacrifice.

In these sceptical years of middle age, prayer did not come easily to him. Now he felt the need of it; but the words would not come. He was like a man locked in darkness so long that he had forgotten the sound of human speech.

“Now, we’re really in cloud-cuckoo-land!” Anneliese Meissner munched on a pickled gherkin and washed it down with red wine.

“This so-called encyclical is a nonsense a hotchpotch of folk-lore and fake mysticism!”

They were sitting in her cluttered apartment, with the documents spread before them on the table and a bottle of Assmanshausen to keep down the dust that lay everywhere.

Mendelius had refused to let the documents out of his sight, while Anneliese had demanded, with equal vehemence, the right of the assessor to read every line of evidence. Mendelius protested her curt dismissal of the document.

“Let’s stop right there! If we’re going to debate the issue let’s be scientific about it. First of all there’s a whole body of millenarian literature from the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament to Jakob Boehme in the seventeenth century and Teilhard de Chardin in the twentieth. Some of it is nonsense yes! Some of it is high poetry like that of the Englishman, William Blake. Some of it represents a critical interpretation of one of the oldest traditions in the world. Second, any serious scientist will tell you that there may well be a term, by evolution or catastrophe, to human existence as we know it on the planet. What Jean Marie has written falls well within the saner confines of the codex. The scenario of catastrophe is already a matter of informed speculation by the scientists and military strategists.”

“Agreed. But your man still makes amish-mash of it!

Faith, hope and charity while the wolf-children are snarling at the gates! A loving God brooding over the chaos he himself has engineered. Balls, Professor!”

“What would happen if the text were published?”

“Half the world would laugh it out of court. The other half would catch the dancing madness and go waltzing out to meet the redeemer on his ‘cloud of glory’. Seriously, Carl, I think you ought to burn the damned thing and forget it!”

“I can burn it; but I can’t forget it.”

“Because you’re a victim of the same God-madness!”

“What about this third document the list of names?”

“I don’t see that it has any significance at all. It’s an aide memoire pulled out of the filing cabinet. Every politician in the world keeps records like that. What does he expect you to do with it? Trot round the world visiting all these people?

What will you say to them?

“My friend, Gregory XVII, the one they tossed out of the Vatican, believes the end of the world is coming. He’s had a vision about it. He thought you should have advance notice.” Come on, Carl! They’d have you in a strait-jacket halfway through the first interview!”

Suddenly he saw the funny side of it and laughed, a great bellow of mirth that subsided finally into a helpless giggle.

Anneliese Meissner splashed more wine into the glasses and lifted her own in salute.

“That’s better! For a while I thought I’d lost a good colleague.”

“Thank you, Frau Beisitzer.” Mendelius took a long swallow of wine and set down his glass.

“Now let’s get back to business. I’m going to Rome in a couple of weeks.”

“The hell you are!” She stared at him in disbelief.

“And what good do you expect to do there?”

“Have a holiday, give a couple of lectures at the German Academy, talk to Jean Marie Barette and people who were close to him. I’ll make tapes during or after each interview and send them back to you. Afterwards, I’ll decide whether to drop the affair or not. At least I’ll have discharged my duty as a friend and I’ll have kept my assessor honest, too!”