Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

A fine kettle of fish. Inquiries at my house produced the information that the two boys had gone to Holland — across the border! — with the priest. This was sensational news in a town that, apart from the occasional suicide, was unfamiliar with violent death. My aunt Hanna Hemmersbach, introduced in a previous chapter as the cook at my First Communion festivities, immediately went into action. Eye for eye and tooth for tooth! For her it was an open-and-shut case: this dreadful man of the cloth, already well known for pederastic proclivities, had lured the boys across the border into the Holland heath with the intent of purging his parricidal guilt with the blood of us two innocents. Crowds gathered at every street corner. The police were placed on alarm status. Sabers rattled, and like destiny itself, they were borne along the cobblestone streets with serious, desperate mien. Our sacrificial blood cried up to Heaven. My selfsame Aunt Hanna convinced my mother that I had been murdered. My other aunts, Aunt Mina and Aunt Lena, joined the ritual of mourning, stalwarts of automatic sympathy both of them, ambulatory dispensers of caffeinated consolation who, no sooner had they arrived in our house, reached for the coffee grinder to brew up a cup of extra-strong java for my pitiable mother, Johanna Scheifes. Lord knows, she could use it!

Born in the Scheifes cottage in St. Hubert, having spent long winter evenings as a child in the spinning room together with maids and farmhands, my mother heard frightful tales of one of her uncles, her father’s brother, who had been slaughtered in the dark of night by a crazed man. We kids were also familiar with the story, and for me it had an especially intense meaning. One day I discovered in my grandmother’s chest of drawers this great-uncle’s death certificate, printed in black and silver on hand-made paper and framed under glass. I hung it on my bedroom wall beneath the awful plaster statue of my guardian angel that I was still too cowardly to take down. I smuggled into my story the text of this document, so beautifully penned by my great-grandfather’s hand that otherwise was used to grasping only a plow, and so moving in its intimate statement. Did I say smuggled? It was only later that I realized to my amazement that this kind of creative appropriation, so common in our profession, is nothing more than a casual crossing of borders. Literature by nature lifts all barriers, not even to mention these current applied recollections of mine, in which the author is not constantly sure of the ground he is standing on. I shall therefore insert the appropriate requiem right here:

JESUS, Maria, JOSEPH! HUBERTUS! GOD!

Look down with Your grace upon this boy

HEINRICH HERMANN SCHEIFES

departed while still so young.

Our Lord Jesus Christ deemed it proper

to deliver him to the hands of the unjust

and to have him endure the agonies of death.

The deceased, born in St. Hubert on March 4, 1823, had not reached the age of 21, when, at 11 o’clock on the night of October 8, 1843, on his way from the village of St. Hubert to the Scheifes homestead, he was attacked and stabbed in his side. His agony grew worse and worse; death rose up inside him. He received the final sacraments, gazed up to his Redeemer in heaven with contrition, and on the third day after that fateful night, at around 12 noon, passed away amid his family’s prayers and the ministrations of a priest bearing the Cross of Jesus. The Good Lord will never scorn his youth, his innocence, his kindness, or his childlike love.

At this young man’s grave, his parents, overcome with grief but trusting in the abundance of divine grace, stood with their surviving four children and prayed to God that He might, in His infinite mercy, forgive the man who had fatally wounded their dear son. Thereupon they commended their beloved deceased to the prayer of the faithful:

MAY HE REST IN PEACE.

(Incidentally, God forgave the murderer. But the earthly judges strung him up on the same tree under which he committed his heinous crime.)

But now, in the third generation, once again blood was shed most cruelly and cried out for vengeance. Johanna’s children — all three of them! For rumor counted my other brother Ludwig among the victims of the bike trip to the heaths of Holland. My mother Johanna, piously accepting the inscrutable will of the Almighty, broke down completely. My father, clamorously summoned from his office desk, is reported to have said, “The principal may occasionally swipe a bottle of wine or sleep through Mass, but he wouldn’t do a thing to his father or my children.” For him the case was closed, and he calmly returned to his job, while all the relatives cursed him as mean and heartless, thus piling tragedy upon tragedy in my mother’s house. My mother began imagining, with help from the aunts, a mound of earth at the scene of the crime, topped by a crucifix inscribed with a plea to all who pass by to say an Our Father for the souls of the innocent youngsters murdered on this spot by the hand of an ignominious priest…

It was a bitter pill for the devout citizens of the town when they learned that the principal had brought these youngsters home safe and sound, except for a punctured tire on one of the bikes, that no such dire funerary monument would be necessary, and that old Severin Kremers could be proven to have died of natural causes. Many of the clergyman’s political enemies never forgave him for refusing to be a blackguard. His father’s funeral was attended by just a few friends; it was like burying a dog. Following these incidents, my admiration increased for this hated priest. A year later he was suspended from office.

It took me a day and a night to write down these reminiscences in our Tower cell. I chose the form of a framed narrative: a university student reports the events of that tragic day to his episcopal uncle and friend, events that made a lasting impression on the young man who had already lost his faith at the hands of another priest. This Prince of the Church, uncommonly open-minded and urbane for a Catholic clergyman, interjects questions to clarify certain details, while the student, in his eagerness to get the facts told, never notices that the Bishop already knows more about the case than he can imagine. At the end, the Bishop asks one of his curates to fetch the Kremers file from the archive. Only then does the student realize that years ago, in his capacity as ecclesiastical authority, his uncle had dealt with the case of the disciplined priest.

I recited my story — hot off the bidetto , as it were — and received applause. I was both pleased and crushed by the book dealer’s comment: the wily cockroach, he said, probably copied it out from somewhere, because a writer whose name is completely unknown, that is, one who isn’t a writer at all, and yet can produce such a thing within twenty-four hours — such a writer is darned suspicious unless he is willing to lift his pseudonym, in which case we should all drink a toast to him. Such was the gist of the judgment handed down by the man from Cologne. Madame Gerstenberg, too, had her doubts. “Honest now, just who are you?” What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him? It was the kind of question posed perennially by those of little faith. But only by those of little faith? Vigoleis sat in his author’s chair, blushing crimson with embarrassment. He pondered, ruminated, pondered again and re-ruminated all that he had ruminated before, and finally, as he set out to depart with Beatrice for the Tower, he made a decision then and there to take his manuscript that very night and toss it to the rats, for now it wasn’t worth the proverbial tinker’s dam. So Vigoleis copied it all out? Peeked over somebody else’s shoulder, just like a kid in my school with a worm-eaten oak tree as a symbol of Imperial education? Will he never, ever graduate from school, not even here in Spain, the land of Quixote? Over and over again, whenever he received one of his rare decent grades, his teachers suspected him of copying other kids’ work; that was their constant attitude toward him. Those sadists never realized that this pupil of theirs was too cowardly to peek at the work of kids sitting in front of him, behind him, or next to him in class. Copying is a talent we learn not for schoolwork, but for life itself.