“Bat your ugly eye at me, will you? You’re too young, and I’ve already had a journeyman at my threshold, as you can see. But I must get inside before others are about. The pastor says it’s unseemly for a woman in my condition to be out and about, confusing the morals of the young. So I rise early to do my chores, and hide my shame from the daylight and the neighbors. Let me pass.”
“I mean, guests in the village overnight,” he said. “Two men, two travelers?”
“You’re the only traveler we’ve seen since Lent.” She heaved the ewers and balanced one upon each shoulder. Small tongues of water splashed in her wake.
“Don’t follow me,” she said after a while. “The fools all say I’m a vessel of sin. They’ll think you’re the imp assigned to punish me. Or that I’m leading you astray.”
She reached a house with a set of steps up the side. She climbed the steps. When she got to the top, she put the pitchers on the landing so she could work the latch. Dirk stood below.
“I thought I told you to go. What, do you want a scrap of food? Am I my brother’s keeper?”
He thought she meant she would give him something. He came forward a few feet till he stood at the bottom of the steps. She lifted one pitcher of water and dashed it over him. He shrieked and tried to back away, but he wasn’t fast enough. “That’s why I always take two, one for me and one to share.” She cried with laughter. “If you want charity, gnaw like a church mouse at the door of the minister. See if he gives you more understanding than he gives me.” Slam, went the door.
12.
He stood shivering for a moment. His mind only a bowl of ice blood. But eventually he realized that if he was to go see the minister, perhaps he should clean up first. He washed at the fountain as well as he could.
13.
A woman with white hair hobbled by. She was picking over a basketful of moldy rolls, and offered him none. But she pointed out the chapel to Dirk. Locked or not, she didn’t know. The minister’s schedule was none of her concern.
The small building stood opposite the village well. A fa?ade of grey stuccoed plaster, tidy to a fault. A side door was propped open, so Dirk mounted the steps and peered inside.
His eye adjusted to the gloom, but it was hardly worth the effort. The windows weren’t visions of the Life of Christ in colors, as the old man in the waldhütte had loved to describe. Instead, panes of watery glass, slightly greened and dotted with imperfections. Between white mullions the overcast Bavarian sky was divided into rectangles of equal size. In vain Dirk looked for statues of the Madonna and Child, something the old man had described with a ferocity of feeling that almost approached anger. No statues. No paintings of Saint Paul knocked on his breeches by lightning, or Saint George and the dragon, or Saint Ursula and her retinue of eleven thousand virgins.
Golgotha; Dirk wanted to see what Golgotha looked like. And Bethlehem, and the castle of Pontius Pilate. And the tomb of Lazarus. And Christ walking on the waves.
And the Garden of Eden. Snakes and apples. Ripeness of possibility. It was a bitter blow, all this severity.
“If you’ve come for salvation, you’ve come to the right place,” said a man, emerging from a broom closet under a pulpit. He must be the minister. His forehead was big and his chin dissolved into his neck, and his hair had gotten knocked askance on the low doorsill, so he looked like the uprooted head of a scallion.
Dirk said, “Where do you keep the stained glass? I heard there were apostles and martyrs to look at, and a cock crowing by Saint Peter’s weeping eyes.”
The minister dusted his hands on the front of his Geneva gown. “Ach, seeking the propaganda of Rome? You won’t find it here, my boy. Those pictures are made by savage, deluded men. Here, the Heavenly Ghost delivers perfect peace in our hearts without such blasphemous imagery.”
“Not in mine.” Dirk didn’t mean to argue but he was famished.
“You’re just stupid and lazy, and besides, the young like to be fooled. How well I remember. I suppose you’re hungry as well as dirty? The rules of mercy apply to all, regardless of persuasion. Come along. I have a plate of sweet cakes left from last night’s dinner.”
That sounded good, so Dirk followed the minister through a passage to a set of rooms in the back. The boy clenched the knife in his pocket just in case, but the minister was beyond reproach. He laid out a small blue plate and poured a glass of milk that was only a little sour. Then he brought forward butter in curls, and pastries with gooseberry jam, and two rounds of ruddy wurst and another of soft yellow cheese. “First we ask God to bless the food, then we eat it,” he told the boy.
“I’m not a fool, I know about blessing.”
While Dirk gobbled the breakfast, the minister talked about faith. He warned against the visions of the devil. He said Dirk must beware of icons and statues. Those temptations threatened the innocent, all those Catholic paintings of naked martyrs bound for piercing. The minister had a good deal to say, and it lasted the entire meal. When both rounds of sausage, three rolls, some pastries, the milk, and most of the cheese had disappeared into his stomach, Dirk said, “Are you practicing?”
“Practicing what?”
“A sermon? I never heard a sermon before.”
“What congregation do you belong to, boy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’m steering you away from occasions of sin such as Rome in her pagan way promotes. Babylon’s fleshpots.”
“Where might I see these saints and statues and all that?”
“But haven’t I just been warning you against idolatry?”
“I should probably see them first, to know what to avoid.”
The minister sighed. “You seem to have one spoiled eye already. Don’t abuse the second. Now about that crutch you carry like a lance over your shoulder. It isn’t the right size for you. Yet you burden yourself with it. Why? Is it a weapon?”
It took Dirk a while to think up something to say. “I am probably bringing it to someone who needs it.”
“Listen, child. The stories of saints, the landscapes of those Italians and of Rembrandt, you don’t need them. They are all a crutch. A distraction. Throw those illustrations away. Throw that pike away. You don’t require it and it doesn’t fit you anyway. And I won’t harm you.”
“It’s left over from someone else’s life, but I might grow up tall enough to need it myself.”
The man laughed at that. “My name is Pfarrer Johannes. You may stay here and eat my food every day until you are sure you need no such crutch. If you like. In the meantime, let me stitch you a patch for that bad eye. Can’t imagine how you came by that.”
This is how Dirk turned into an assistant to Pfarrer Johannes, and how he came to live with him, and every morning to sweep the cold chapel clear of mouse droppings. The thrush never appeared on any windowsill. The knife-head had been struck so dumb by holiness that Dirk forgot it had ever spoken to him.
Once Dirk asked Pfarrer Johannes about the young woman with the big belly, which detail by now Dirk understood to mean “with child.” Dirk had never seen the woman again. Pfarrer Johannes hawed and hemmed but finally said, “She went away.”