by John Gardner
2
I can find no escape from this dread that has come over me. I have walked from end to end of this place so calming to my soul at other times: I have tried to lose myself in the majestic schemata of stained-glass windows, the gargoyles’ brute anguish, high above me, or the nobler beauty of groups of monks in silent fellowship, their white cassocks sharp against the dark of groves or shadowed hillslopes, like delicate white flowers in cedar shade. I have considered the old, symbolic walls, the ascent of shaft on sculptured shaft toward finials blazing in the sun’s last light. Image of the whole world’s hunger for God, this gem of abbeys. I have fled like a tortured ghost from one green courtyard to another, have stood on the bridge looking out on the mirror-smooth lake where two old monks sit fishing and a heavy old serf, a lay brother, black-robed, sits sleeping at the oars. Swans move, silent as grace, toward the darkening shore. I have knelt in prayer at the place where the river divides in three, in the shadow of oaks and walnut trees, but no prayer came, my eyes were too full of black arches and pilings, the dark, honed oblong of the infirmary, home of the dying. My eyes go, sick with envy, to the third-floor room of scribes and illuminators, the room where, not long since, I was master. Pride, envy, wrath … My soul is bloated, weighed down, with sin. It fills me with panic. He has only begun on me! In a matter of days … I pray for understanding. If I could grasp what drives him, I could elude him, I think. I could pity him, look for the good his hostility toward me obscures. I could feel charity. Is it envy that drives him? Envy of my skill, perhaps? Intuition would leap, cry out yes! if it were so. I remember when he looked at the Phoenix with which he makes fun of me now. A design as perfect—I give thanks to God—as anything I’ve done. Interlace so complex as to baffle the mind as God’s providence baffles, his mysterious workings, secret order in the seemingly pathless universal forest. Twelve colors, the colors of the New Jerusalem. And in the feathers of the bird, ingeniously, almost invisibly woven, the characters RESURREXIT. Brother Nicholas studied it, holding the parchment to the light, at arm’s length, frowning. I could see that he understood its virtues—the reverence, the integrity of mind and emotion, the tour de force technique. Then he turned to me, gave me a queer, bored smile, and handed the parchment back. It was not feigned, that smile. One knows what one knows. He whispered, “Excellent,” and I saw that what he said he meant, but also that the excellence was a matter of total indifference to him. Then if ever I might have spoken! A man cannot be a master artist if he lies to himself, settles for illusions; and I do not fool myself that my vow of silence is as important to me as God’s gift to me of skill. But I said nothing. If I were to break the vow, it should be in the name of another man’s need, not my own. I had known from the first time I heard him whisper that one clear possibility was that Brother Nicholas was reaching, in devious fashion, for help. If he mocked religion, mocked all divine and human values, it might be with scorn born of anguish. I was by no means sure that he wasn’t a far better artist than he seemed. It was perhaps despair that made him careless, indifferent. What if I, a fellow artist, was his soul’s last human hope? What selfishness, then—what spiritual cowardice— that I refused him what he asked, a companionable voice! But the choice was not by any means that easy. Far into the night I would pace in the black of my windowless cell, from bench to wall, from wall to bench, wringing my fingers, straining for clarity, wrestling with the problem. I would pray on the cold stone floor until my knees felt crushed—they could hardly support my weight, next day—and still no certainty came. This was the thing: None of my brothers is free from sin, any more than I am, as I’ve always admitted; but how lax our order has grown in these, the world’s last days, is alarming to me. Many brothers here keep hounds and hawks, though all the councils have forbidden hunting, causa voluptatis, as a mortal sin. They not only go out with hounds and hawks, they mount horses and join in noisy, drunken hunting parties, chasing headlong after rabbits and deer and outrunning the hounds themselves. They show no shame about feeding their packs from the possessions of the poor, so that slender greyhounds fatten on what might have kept children alive. They know well enough how little I approve, and how little I favor their costly meals, their wrestling matches, their frequent absence from prayers, their indifference to the chants. Though vengeance is the Lord’s, I know, not mine, I can’t very well keep secret my irritation, nay, scorn. I fight for humility, but surely it is true that either you believe in the code and traditions or you don’t, and, if you don’t, you ought to get out. And so the question is this: How can I be sure that Brother Nicholas pursues me from need of me, not from hatred of what he thinks my foolish, old-fashioned rigidity? How can I know he hasn’t sniffed out the anger certain others feel, know that his purpose is not, in fact, to play their master of the hunt? How do I know it’s not barbaric joy that drives him—the joy of the kill? I can say this: He whispers to me of freedom. He tells me he’s freed himself of all restraints—religions, philosophies, political systems. He tells me he means to so use up life that when death comes it will find in him nothing but shriveled dregs. He looks in my eyes as he says this (it was weeks ago, but I see the grim image more clearly than I see the abbey spires, now dark in the shadow of the mountain). You understand this, he whispers. You’re a man of keen intelligence, though afraid of life. I do not answer, but my heart beats quickly. “You’re wrong,” I would tell him. Not wrong in mere doctrine. Even if there were, as he claims, no Heaven or Hell, he would be wrong. A terrifying error. So this: Suppose it’s zeal that drives him, the passion of a mad ideal. If so, he will be merciless. My vow of silence will be a minor detail. Having broken down my defenses there, he’ll press on, break down my further defenses—teach me gluttony, lechery, sloth, despair. He’ll hammer till I’m totally free, totally abandoned. I cannot know, nonomniscient mortal that I am, whether his pursuit of me is a devious plea or a murderous temptation. And even if it is indeed a plea, I cannot know that the plea won’t press me further and further, exactly as demonic temptation would do, and in the end demand, absurdly, my crucifixion, last proof of love, complete forgiveness. And so I cling to my creed, my rules, my traditions. If God is just, despairing man’s cry will be answered. If not, what hope for any of us? So I reason it through for the hundredth time, and am no more satisfied than ever. Like a man hopelessly lost in a wilderness, I search the darkening sky, the pitchdark woods for some sign, and there is none. In the abbey they are singing Compline now. Who would guess from the sweetness of their voices that they are mere men, fallible and confused and perhaps at times terrified, like me? Dear Lord, I whisper … But I find myself moving, plunging back toward the bridge and across it and up the wide stone steps toward the chancel door, hardly aware what it is that I’ve decided. I wait there, listening. It scarcely bothers me that I’ve missed supper, missed the service. Compline ends. For a few moments longer they will kneel on the floor in silent prayer, then begin to get up, one here, three there, then more, padding softly away to their beds. The confessor will be last to leave, as is right and traditional.
3
I am surprised at how patiently he listens tonight. I pour out my sins, worst of all, my faithless terror. Strangely, the fear does not diminish, here in God’s sanctuary. Behind me, beyond the confessional door, the great room is dark except for one red flame above the altar, the burning heart. I cannot see where the ornamented columns attach to the ceiling: For all my eye can tell, they may plunge upward forever, into deepest space. “Father,” I whisper, “I am afraid. I believe in the Resurrection, believe that God has redeemed us all, made mankind free— all these things I’ve believed since childhood. But I seem to believe them only with my mind. My heart is full of fear.”
His voice is gentle, mysteriously patient. I would feel better, somehow, if I could see his face—lean on his humanness until my trust in God comes back. I have a childish fantasy that he might not be a man at all but an angel or demon, perhaps a fox with slanting eyes. I have done too much drawing, too m
uch looking at drawings; my mind is infected by shadows from dreams. He says gently—the huge room echoes around him from window to window and beam to beam: “You believe Brother Nicholas is the Devil.”
“I do,” I confess. “It’s madness. I know that. And yet I need some help against my fantasy.”
“I understand, my son.”
“Father, I haven’t imagined these things. I realize it’s difficult for you to believe, but he does whisper. Constantly. It’s like a serpent’s hiss—he means it to be, to frighten me. And he follows me. There’s no denying it: He followed me out into the fields. He follows me everywhere, teasing, tempting, tormenting me …”
“I know.”
I look up, startled, at the black curtain. The room grows ominously silent. At last I whisper, “You know?”
“I know, yes. I have thought and prayed on this matter of yours, and I have watched. I witnessed it myself this afternoon.”
My heart races, full of joy. Only now do I recognize that I have actually begun to doubt that Brother Nicholas whispers. “He’s not homosexual. That’s one of his acts. One more trick to destroy me— a way of forcing me to wrath. He’s cunning, Father, and shameless. He believes in nothing.” I tell what he’s said to me of freedom. Behind the dark curtain the confessor seems to listen. I tell him of the lunatic joke about the Phoenix. The confessor stops me.
“But that’s absurd,” he says. “Surely Brother Nicholas knows you take no stock in dead mythologies!”
“Exactly! But you see, that’s his cynicism. It’s like a certain kind of madness, but it isn’t madness. Sometimes madmen, to avoid the dangers inherent in human contaa, will retreat to gibberish. They communicate yet don’t communicate. So Galen writes, and many other ancients are of the same opinion. But it’s not fear of human relationships that drives Brother Nicholas. It’s scorn, Father. He speaks, as if earnestly, of things he knows to be nonsense, and thus he mocks all earnestness, exactly as he mocks all love in his feigned homosexuality.” I wait eagerly for his reaction. I’m not sure myself that I am right. It seems a full minute before he answers.
“Scorn,” he muses. A tingle of superstitious terror runs through me. I fully understand only now how dangerous my enemy is. My confessor says: “But wait. Perhaps we’re proceeding too quickly. He told you he was going to murder the Phoenix—told you he would leave the monastery tonight, after everyone was asleep.”
“Yes, he said that.” I do not grasp what my confessor is driving at.
“And if he does leave?”
“Why should he? He knows perfectly well—” But a chill in my spine tells me that my confessor is on to something.
“If he does in fact leave, what will it mean? Is it possible that his absurd warning is in some way a code? Could he possibly have meant—” He pauses, thinking. I wait. I am afraid to make the guess myself. “There are numerous possibilities. If he’s as satanic as you think, he may mean he’s resolved to kill some child or virgin—a Phoenix in the sense of unique innocence and beauty. Or he may mean the Phoenix as figure of man’s immortal soul—his own, perhaps … or yours. Then again, the Phoenix may be a symbol of Mary, as we read in Jerome, or of Christ Himself, as in the poem we ascribe to Lactantius. But what he can intend, if that’s his meaning—” He pauses again, and his silence, as he thinks the question through, expands in the room, makes the shadows seem darker—crouched animals, demons with burning eyes. I concentrate on the curtain between us, black as the pall on a coffin. “Our best course, no doubt, is to wait and see if he leaves.”
I snatch at it. “Yes!” But I know, instantly, that it’s a hope of fools.
“If he does, of course, you’ll have a terrible choice to make.”
I am suddenly aware that I am bathed in sweat, as if I’d been hoeing for hours in the sun, except that the sweat is cold. “But there’s this,” I say. “It would be a violation of rule for me to leave the monastery. If he makes me break one rule, he’ll make me break another. Rules are my only hope against his nihilism.”
“True, if it’s nihilism. On the other hand, as you’ve suggested, if all his acts are a devious plea for help—if his terror in an abandoned universe is as great as your own this moment—then surely you’d be right to break the rule. It would be the act of a saint, a soul whose purity is beyond the rules that protect and keep the rest of us.”
For an instant it seems that he too is a tempter. I have seen no visions, worked no miracles. “I am no saint, Father.”
He seems to consider it.
I try to think, make out what he is telling me. But all the time, despite all his kindness, my dread is building, a monster independent of my conscious mind. I whisper, suddenly remembering: “There’s no slightest sign that his behavior is a plea, Father. All the evidence points—”
“You forget, my son. He told you, when he said he would murder the Phoenix, ‘I give you my word, you’re the only man who can save it.’ Surely that means you can save it, whatever the meaning of the symbol.”
