When finally Walther heaved his huge bulk on to the bed, it swayed and creaked: but still his helpmeet lay with her back towards him, as if he didn’t exist. Above the head of the bed a pious picture oozed with unction. Facing its foot, a photograph hung of a furious Tanganyikan elephant rather too much enlarged. There was nothing to read.... He blew out the candle, and lay “full of tossings to and fro till the break of day”—like Job. For it always tended to happen like this to Walther, that what had seemed so certain by day seemed much less certain by night. Now it was altogether too late he’d begun to have qualms: had their final solution of Mitzi been really the right one? His poor little Mitzi ... as if her blindness wasn’t burden enough! And now for the very first time he allowed himself to imagine what life must be like for a girl of her age, in that holy hen-coop....
If only his wife would respond He reached out an arm towards her for comfort, and touched her. At that his senses began to stir: they were sluggish enough, but surely the marital act at least might serve to distract his thoughts.... He rolled against her; but Adèle jerked away, and left him only a pillow wet with her tears.
5
Mitzi had heard that door on the world being locked, then felt them lead her along with a guiding hand on each arm. They were taking her first to the Choir for her Consecration. From there she was brought in silence (already alert, in spite of her exaltation, to notice each landmark of turning or staircase or stumble) to what by its echo-quality sounded a largish room that was filled with a gentle and happy twitter of voices, like birds. Here she heard herself being presented to each of the Sisters in turn (though with all those sacred names and identical-feeling clothes, how hopeless it seemed attempting to know them apart!) and felt her face being kissed all over by welcoming nuns.
But then the Sisters returned to the Choir, and Mitzi found herself left with a single strong young hand on her arm and a single strong young voice in her ear: for each new arrival in Carmel was given some senior novice as “Guardian Angel,” to help her and guide her and show her the ropes. This strong young voice (which had some sort of foreign accent, she noticed) was hers. Her “Angel” conducted her first to the novices’ own Recreation Room, and then to their own place of prayer (for except at Mass they weren’t allowed in the Choir). Then they returned from the Novices’ Wing to the Nuns’ own, equally freezing, part of the house.
In Carmelite convents, even at times when speech is allowed, nobody speaks in passages or on the stairs any more than one ever speaks in the cells themselves: so Mitzi kept being drawn into specially-licensed cubby-holes, called “speech-corners.” There she’d be given Angelic advice rapid-fire: for example, that underclothes folded and slept on in bed aren’t quite so icily cold to the skin in the morning. At last, however, they entered the vacant cell where a Postulant always spent her first few days as the Sisters’ guest, in their special care. Here her Angel silently helped her unpack and presently left her, in cold and darkness and strangeness, alone—with her face still covered in kisses that smelled of beeswax and incense and soap.
That Angel’s accent ... it sounded a bit like the German our visiting English cousin had spoken. “Augustin” ... Mitzi smiled, recalling his gentle voice and his strangely silent shoes; and his clothes, with their faint smell of peat-smoke.... But also that terrible time when he’d tried to read Schiller aloud (though he’d meant it kindly enough). All the same, her Angel was anyhow probably Swiss not English; and surely this wasn’t the moment—with Home and the World so newly behind her—to think about anyone out of the past? Instead she had better get down at once to discovering all she could of this cell she was housed in. She stretched out her arms to measure its length and width, and found it so small she could certainly never get lost in here! Her hands then found the hairy blanket, spread over a mattress of straw so round, being newly stuffed, that she feared rolling off in her sleep. Laid across it.... Of course, all this cold cardboard-like cloth was tomorrow’s black Postulant’s dress, with its cape. Then she knelt to explore the plain plank bed underneath, on its trestles. Below that bed, her hands found a basin with something rough folded over it—something which must be her towel.... Where then was the water to put in it? Turning too quickly on hands and knees, she nearly knocked over the tall crock of water with ice in its neck which stood by the wall.
Still down on all-fours, and with hands that were quickly growing too numb with cold for the task, she explored this wall till they came on an empty shelf, and above it a sill; and above that again her fingers stuck to window-glass coated with frost.
*
Meanwhile, downstairs—and crouched on folded pads of their habits, because they never used chairs—the Reverend Mother and Novice Mistress discussed this problem-daughter of theirs: this girl who had verily taken Carmel by storm. For whether or not she stayed they had to make plans “as if.” So what about daily tasks? This being winter, all work in the garden must be ruled out (though even in summer, how could she ever be trusted to weed without pulling up plants?). And as for most normal indoor tasks.... At least, the illuminating of texts and work on vestments and altar-linen were certainly out.
“She could ... could she count altar-breads?”
“Surely—and even be taught to pack them, by feel. It’s wonderful what they can learn: she might even be taught to feed the chickens, in time.” The Prioress covered her own eyes to see what blindness felt like, using her free hand to grope.
Then what about lessons? Before her profession a nun must have studied Theology, Dogma, Canon Law and Church History, also getting the Carmelite Rule and the Constitutions almost by heart: with someone who couldn’t read for herself this would mean much reading aloud by her fellow-students, and much individual teaching—if scholarly standards weren’t to be lowered....
“Of course they mustn’t be lowered!” The Reverend Mother uncovered her eyes: “Her Instruction ought to be even stricter and drier than most: for our Daughter’s principal danger lies in too much emphasis on the Sublime, on anything tending to introspection.” She paused, and her hand went back to her eyes. This blindness already had raised the girl to a more than natural pitch of nervous intensity, something quite out-of-key with the fruitful humdrum of daily monastic life as every Religious knows it. That had to be watched.... “So far as the Rule allows, she mustn’t be too much alone—especially now at the start.” She paused again. “She’s going to find our sense of community terribly hard to acquire, in all this silence and solitude.”
“True, Mother.” Even Carmel’s Enclosure itself (thought the other) is separate not from but deeply within the created world, like a beating heart.
“Think how many girls anyhow come here supposing the only souls they have to bother about are their own! I believe I was like that myself; and for one like our little Maria upstairs, cut off from her sisters by blindness as well....”
As the Novice Mistress rose to tend the guttering candle, she tried to think back to her own novitiate. Yes, she too had been slow to discover that those whom God has joined together in Carmel are never truly asunder: not even when “there is neither speech nor language among them,” like David’s nights and days, and his stars. But one thing was more important still; and the two nuns fell in a troubled silence, aware without needing words that the same thought occupied both their minds. The first thing of all to be learned in the life of Religion is Humble Obedience, for that is the source of all other graces; but how could they ever teach this to one so certain she knew God’s will and everyone else was wrong? Richly endowed as her spirit was, this girl had a terrible lot to learn before she could even begin to understand what it meant becoming a nun.... As the Prioress prayed for the requisite help and strength (for this daughter’s calls on her wisdom and love would be boundless) she heard the other one say: “It is no easy cross that is laid on us, Mother.”
The Carmelite’s cross: that empty cross awaiting its human lodger.
Then the two nuns took their candle and climbed to
the newcomer’s cell. They moved, on their rope-soled shoes, with that wholly inaudible glide which Contemplatives always adopt to avoid disturbing each other on carpetless floors, and in empty echoing rooms; and they opened the door without knocking. Mitzi, absorbed, was quite unaware of them. Just as their candle’s beam shone into her pitch-dark cell her wandering hands had encountered the cross hanging over the bed; and there they had stopped their wandering, feeling it over and over with longing and awe. The two women stood there in silence, and watched her feeling and feeling that plain wooden cross as if storing its feel so deep in her fingers that fingers alone ever after would call up its substance and shape of their own accord.
Loth after all to disturb her, the older women withdrew still unheard. But with troubled minds: for in Mitzi’s candlelit face there was something which only increased their foreboding. Last thing tonight, at the end of their hour of meditation in Choir, they would say a silent Ave of special intention for Mitzi because of that look in her face.
Downstairs again, “Perhaps she had better be put in the laundry to work?” the Novice Mistress suggested.
The Prioress nodded. For there, with the hot smell of God steaming up in her nose from wet wool and wet cotton and bubbling suds and His touch in the silent correcting hands that were laid on her own when she made a mistake.... Where else could she better learn that a Carmelite’s God is not only the God of the Choir and the lonely cell—if He gave her the grace to learn?
6
Her fingers numbed by exploring, Mitzi alternately rubbed her hands for warmth and nursed them between her knees.
As the Nuns had foreseen, shut up in her private darkness inside the general darkness she tended to find this Carmel where God had sent her essentially solitude: somewhere meant for the lonely perfecting of separate souls. A community of Solitaries.... Down in the Choir the nuns were singing the Antiphon after Complin and distant snatches reached her, even up here, of a thin unaccompanied wailing monotone seemingly better attuned to some desert anchorite’s cell than a church. As if only their bodies assembled (she thought), their souls still climbed alone each one her separate Jacob’s-ladder to God.
A solitude—and a silence. At eight the big bell tolled its nightly reminder that now “Great Silence” began, when no one would speak to another till after Prime in the morning. All outside sound was muffled by snow. In the Choir the Miserere was heard, as the Sisters punished themselves in the dark on behalf of a suffering sinning world and the holy souls of the dead; but everywhere else there was absolute quiet, with nowhere the tiniest sound. Not the drip of a tap, not a mouse.
Time passed, with Mitzi still blessing her blindness for making her even more wholly alone in the presence of God than the others. But then, through this outer unending silence, she started to hear from inside herself as it were a gnawing: faintly, a drip ... drip ... drip ... like a leaking out through a hole. Now that the struggle was ended, the strength she had borrowed to win it was draining out of her, going....
Then even that “air” which everything breathed and Mitzi had thought she could fly in—her wings found suddenly nothing to beat on, no God any longer there to support them. She called on her fingers to summon that sacred resource which their tips had stored up; but her fingers disowned her, and sending them groping across the wall revealed her cross itself as now no more than two joined-up pieces of wood. She wasn’t in Carmel’s “solitude” any longer but truly alone—in the felt absence of God.
Mitzi had learned from one earlier time like this to trust in God just as much when He wasn’t there. But why must she bear yet again this unbearable separation? The time before she had still been down in the easy foothills; but now she had climbed to the point of no return with a lifelong ascent of Carmel lying in front of her, looking (as everyone said it would) too hopelessly steep and rough and dark to climb by herself alone. Yet this lost climber-in-spirit had learned already it wasn’t the slightest use looking over her shoulder, back at the fading glimmer behind where He’d left her: lost sight of, He reappears only in front. Those comforting leftbehind lights below in the valley ... though long ago shining above her as guiding stars they were now but the empty shells of God, which God one-by-one had discarded unfolding before her.
A God for ever unfolding: His presence a journey—and endless. Abandoned on quick-rock shifting under her feet where she couldn’t even stand still, she must choose the darkest part of the darkness ahead to climb into until it might please the Eternal Becoming to show Himself new....
“Abandoned?” But how could He ever absent Himself for a moment from Carmel, His Holy-of-Holies? Rather it must be she who had somehow absented herself from Him. She, who had felt so certain the will she obeyed had been none of her own, but His.... She, who had gone on insisting when Reverend Mother and all those holy Sisters had said in their wisdom “No” ... Had God all along been speaking through them, had she made a dreadful mistake in persisting?
She knelt by the bed determined to pray, for she must have an answer at all costs—straining in prayer every muscle her soul possessed. “Peradventure He sleepeth, and must be awaked....” Yet how could anyone pray with God not there to be prayed to? Her prayers with nowhere to go to could only echo inside the empty walls of her head; and that strength wherever it came from was now so utterly gone and she felt an exhaustion so total she dropped off to sleep where she knelt, and did it without even noticing.
*
Nine! Now a whole hour of Silence had passed. It was time for Matins and Lauds; and the bell woke Mitzi, still on her knees. She was stiff with cold, and her underneath cheek on the blanket was numbed and creased.
She undressed and crawled into bed. But the blanket was cold; and by now she hadn’t the warmth in her body to warm it. Her teeth were wanting to chatter: she clenched them, and lay as still as she could. But her neck felt especially cold and bereft: for she’d loved the hair that was shorn, treating it often like some warm pet animal when she was lonely. Moreover her head was beginning to spin with things and places and people, whirling in any order of time. The day when total blindness had finally struck her.... She saw once again that black cloud under her eyelids curtaining more and more—to the sound of sleigh-bells buffeted back by close-packed trees, and a brotherly pressure against her side like an ignorant Siamese Twin.... Then her father’s droning bulk the evening before; and across the table, behind the rainbow of candles, a blur with an English voice so slurred with wine that he dropped some frightful clanger....
Then came Schmidtchen’s lullaby voice—for darling Schmidtchen always came in the dark when called:
Der Mops kam in die Küche
Und stahl dem Koch ein Ei ...
Bells, and peculiar kisses: identical-feeling clothes, and incense-and-cleanliness smells.... Bells and chants, double-counterpointing Schmidtchen’s incessant circular ditty,
Der Mops kam in die Küche ...
But now behind the Leitmotiv of that comforting voice the slow giant tick of the clock in the castle roof grew louder, the smell of fox and of human urine stronger: a cold quivering nose was thrust in her hand, while something ammoniac hung from a rope which creaked—then turned to the creaking stays of Emma Krebelmann, crooning into a smell of baby....
But bit by bit the kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria slowed, till little was left except the sensation of ghastly increasing bodily cold.
Da kamen all Möpse
Und gruben ihm ein Grab ...
She was plunging up to her waist in the courtyard snow (in spite of the queer idea of a “presence” felt so close that she only need stretch out a hand for help—but couldn’t).
Der Mops kam in die Küche ...
Tremendous, the caged-in kitchen heat at home when anyone opened the kitchen door! But instead a shiver shook her shoulders, and soon from head to foot she was shivering.
Da nahm der Koch ein Löffel
Und schlug den Mops entzwei,
She could see it coming—the cook’s enormou
s ladle of ice—as a single paroxysmal shiver shook her. She jumped out of bed in her flannel nightgown, swinging her arms like a cabby: she pummeled her body and worked her limbs, she bounced up and down on the floor of her cell (but barefoot, and trying to make as little noise as she could) till her heart was bumping about in her ribs like a flustered hen in a basket: pumping the sluggish blood in her arteries back into pricking hands and feet, and even her dithering brain.
As she danced from foot to foot, she found herself looking calmly at something she never had really looked at before: at herself, from outside. Or rather (panting a bit as she bent and stretched) at God-and-herself, from outside—this minuscule Mitzi, an infinitesimal grain of sand which because it had once been lifted and swirled in the tide had come to think of the tide as her own to command.
That sensible “guardian angel” whose practical talk she realized now she had dared to despise, this girl (she thought as she got back in bed) was the one to be copied—and humbly, if ever she hoped to become remotely a Sister pleasing to God.
She gave a prodigious yawn, and settled herself for sleep.... Then was bounced out of bed by a clapper that went off outside like a ton of knights in armor falling downstairs. It was half-past five, and her first Carmelite day had begun.
The Wooden Shepherdess Page 13
