Frank Schätzing - Death and the Devil

“Exactly. For the same reason, I don’t think they’ll have spread rumors about me. So I can go to the palace and see if they’ll listen. If they don’t, then it’s their funeral—as you might say.”

He drew up his knees and tried to sound firm and resolute, but the urge to run away was almost unbearable. He felt the gray chill of fear creeping up his spine, and all at once he knew it wasn’t Urquhart or the Overstolzes he wanted to run away from but something quite different, something immensely greater, something that would catch up with him again, as it always had, and he would run away again, keep on running until he ran himself into the grave—

Urquhart was his personal demon. God had created a being for him alone, for his fear, and he had to face up to it if he ever wanted to be free.

“I have no choice,” he said. It sounded good. It sounded brave, almost dauntless.

Jaspar said nothing.

“I have no choice,” he repeated.

“Fox-cub.” Jaspar cleared his throat copiously. “Didn’t you tell me I had the choice of helping you or not? Fine words. You think they don’t apply to you, too? Of course you have a choice. Everyone has a choice, always. What is there to keep you in Cologne? What’s to stop you from simply walking away?”

Could that blasted dean read his thoughts? “And what’ll happen to you and Richmodis?”

“That’s not important,” said Jaspar calmly.

“Of course it’s important!”

“Why? Just tell yourself it was all a dream. You might find it a bit difficult at first, but if you try hard enough, Goddert, Richmodis, and I will disappear without a word of complaint into the realm of fiction. As if we were part of a story you’d heard. Delude yourself. Perhaps we are just clowns in a story. You as well! Be a figment of the imagination, Fox-cub. Figments don’t have to take responsibility.”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

“I’m getting you to save your life. Run away.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve had enough of running away,” Jacob heard himself say.

There was a rustle of cloth from where Jaspar was. He’d obviously stretched out. Jacob waited for him to say something, but there was no reaction to what he’d said. He gave up.

“All right, Jaspar,” he said wearily, “what is it you want to know?”

“Me?” said the dean innocently. “Nothing at all. I don’t want to know anything.”

They lay there in silence for a while. Jacob listened to his heartbeat. It seemed to get louder and louder until his chest resounded with hammer blows. He suddenly realized he was crying.

He was amazed and happy at the same time. Had he ever shed a tear? He couldn’t remember. Overwhelmed with sorrow, flooded with sadness, he yet felt boundless relief. Puzzled and at the same time curious, he abandoned himself to this unknown emotion. And as he sobbed and sniffled, he felt as if his grief were feeding a bright, blazing fire that gradually consumed him, while a new, unknown strength began to throb in his veins. Scenes from an old story, too long repressed, rolled past his mind’s eye, and with every image, every sound, every sensation his fear shrank a little more, giving way to the desire for a home.

Jaspar left him to himself.

After what seemed like an eternity, the tears dried up. He stared into the darkness. His heartbeat had slowed down, his breathing was calm and steady. In fact, he didn’t feel bad at all.

“Jaspar?”

There was a quiver in his voice. Not a trace of firm resolution left. He didn’t care.

“Jaspar, that time I came back—I mean when I was a boy, to my father’s house—I told you there was nothing but a smoking ruin left.” He paused. “There was something else.”

“I know,” said Jaspar, unmoved.

“You know about it?” exclaimed Jacob in surprise.

“No, Fox-cub. I know nothing, really—except that you were able to remember everything that happened before that day. Or were willing to remember. Every detail. You were a bright lad. Still are. But then one day you saw the wreckage of a house and took flight. From then on your life seems rather hazy, almost as if it was that of another person. The day before yesterday, when we talked together for the first time, I thought, if he goes on pouring out his memories like this, I’ll end up pouring out the whole of my wine cellar. Then everything suddenly ended at a few smoldering timbers, and the rest was sketched in with a couple of strokes. You saw something, didn’t you? Something that’s been haunting you to this day? You started running away when you turned your back on the burned-down shack and you haven’t stopped since. Whatever you’ve run away from over the years—constables, women, responsibility—basically it’s that shack you’ve been running away from. Even now, if you run away, you’ll be running away from that shack.”

“How do you know all this? You hardly know me!”

“I know you quite well. I can see others in you, Fox-cub. What was it you saw?”

Jacob sat up slowly and stared at the darkness. But it was something else he saw: countryside, fields, a column of smoke—

“My father and my brother,” he said.

“Dead?”

“They were lying outside the shack. It looked as if they’d been cut down. I stood there, quite a way away. I felt unable to take even one step closer. I was too cowardly to go and look them in the face. I was afraid of having their deaths confirmed. I thought if I looked away, forgot everything as quickly as possible, then it wouldn’t have happened.” He swallowed hard. “I turned around. But just as I looked away, I thought I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye. As if my father had waved to me.”

“And still you ran away.”

“Yes. I didn’t have the courage to go and look. I’ll never know whether I ran away from two dead bodies, or whether, in my fear, I left someone to die I could have helped. I didn’t want to see if they were dead, so I never saw if they were perhaps alive.”

“Do you sometimes have dreams about it?”

“Rarely. When I do, it’s the wave I see. Sometimes it’s the desperate wave of a dying man, sometimes a mocking farewell from the dead. That’s the truth, Jaspar. I left them in the lurch, and I keep on asking myself what would happen if I had the chance to go back and start again.”

“No one has that chance.”

“I know. But I can’t get it out of my mind. I wish I could turn the clock back.”

He heard Jaspar scratching his bald head.

“No,” said the dean, “that is not a good wish.”

“It is. Then it wouldn’t have happened.”

“You think so? When they wish for things like that people deny their hopes, their convictions, their whole being. It’s what indecisive and weak people wish for. Did you know that, for the whole of his life, Abelard never regretted his love for Heloise? He was cruelly punished for it, but given the chance he would always have made the same choice.”

“You keep going on about this Abelard,” said Jacob.

“I model myself on him,” Jaspar replied. “Even though he’s been dead for over a hundred years now. Peter Abelard was one of the most outstanding minds France has produced. He was humble before God, yet bold enough, when at the height of his fame, to describe himself as the greatest of all philosophers. They call disputation the clerics’ joust—he was unbeaten in it. And he seemed to love making enemies. His belief that mankind possessed free will was diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Mystics. Eventually he fell in love with Heloise, a canon’s niece who was his pupil. Forbidden love. There was a series of scandals that concluded with a punitive expedition to his house one night. The canon had him castrated.” He gave a soft laugh. “But he could not cut off their love, nor could he stop them being buried beside each other in the end. Abelard never wished he could turn the clock back, and that was the basis of his greatness. Everything was of his own free will.”