The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  There was no applause as the tragedian’s head sank to the tabletop. Friedel remained seated, and so we assumed that her gesture was part of the mise en scène. But this wasn’t playacting at all. I was deeply moved by this display of emotion. Why had this artist taken leave of her stage career? When Adele finally lifted her head with a smile, wiped her brow, and with another gesture swept away everything in the room that seemed alien to her feelings, her appearance was once again almost true to reality: grey, wasted, old. The first to speak up was Friedrich. He asked us to leave his mother by herself. We crept away on tiptoe. Downstairs in the hallway we sat together for a while until Spanish guests arrived. We then decided it was time to go. But before we left for home at the “Torre,” we heard the actress’s cane tap-tapping on the floor tiles above. She called me. I followed her into her room.

  “Please don’t leave without saying something about my play! Was it so bad, Vigoleis?”

  I cannot recall verbatim what I replied to her, but in a general sense this is what I said: she, Adele Gerstenberg, had also departed without a word after witnessing our misery in the Clock Tower. Tower or stage drama—it was all the same tragedy…

  I kissed her brow and left.

  A week later it was my turn to read from the original works of Vigoleis. But what was I to read? In front of such a privileged audience it could only be unpublished material, and since my oeuvre contained an abundance of this sort of writing, my selection ought not to have been difficult. Poems? All I had to do was reach up to our clothesline. But poems are a tricky matter. When reciting them, I feel as if I’m wearing long pantaloons for crawling into a hole in the ground, while the ground refuses to reveal even the tiniest fissure for me to sink into. Prose? That’s innocuous enough—perhaps a chapter from The Cadaver Murders, or—“Beatrice, do you think that it’s proper to appear before La Gerstenberg with corpses? Ones that don’t have any historical patina to make them seem housebroken?” At the time, I was very hard at work on the manuscript for this tome. The crimes were already multiple; “Vigotrice” comprised an inseparable pair of detectives; and the super-whore, the doxy of doxies, had the name María del Pilar. But was this appropriate for the Count’s pensión? I decided to write something custom-made for this event. I wrote the history of my and my brother Jupp’s murder at the hands of a priest. Here’s how the saga goes:

  The “respectable” elementary school in my home town, the scene of my first elemental failure in education, existed under the aegis of Kaiser Wilhelm II—not in itself a fact of earth-shaking proportions, since he lent his august name to some much shoddier enterprises. For the ceremonies for the opening of the school, when I had to recite a patriotic poem, he sent his regrets, preferring to be represented by an oak tree (Quercus pedunculata) that was planted in front of the entrance, in the presence of the highest local authorities. The tree didn’t take well to the soil and perished a few years later during the Wilhelminian War, a time when perishing was the order of the day. Since a dead Wilhelminian oak is not an adornment for a Wilhelminian school, and since it might have been taken as an evil omen, the tree was secretly replaced by a hardier local species. This was of course a superfluous act, for soon afterward, the entire Hohenzollern family tree was chopped down for good.

  None of the above was in the story I read; it is only now that I’m bringing it back to mind. The story itself concerns the principal of the educational institution in question, the Reverend Dr. Kremers, who caused much trouble for the Holy Father in Rome and for my episcopal uncle in Münster. A notorious man, one who had to submit to ecclesiastical disciplining, he entered history as a behind-the-scenes accomplice and string-puller of the Rhenish Separatist movement, which collapsed in 1923 after proclaiming an independent Rhenish Republic in Aachen. I loved and respected this teacher of mine. He was an excellent pedagogue, not a brute like the other elementary drill sergeants on a staff that consisted wholly of scholarly failures. It was he who opened my eyes to philosophical questioning, to literature (insofar as this didn’t come to me through the Rhenish songwriter Hanns Willy Mertens, who was also a member of the Wilhelminian faculty), and to a cosmopolitan attitude that to this day I call my own. He had become a priest against his will, had a less than exalted opinion of his profession, and made no secret of this. For this reason, and on the basis of his increasingly audacious political activism, he was the best hated man in a town that prided itself as a citadel of Catholicism, but which at bottom was just as worm-eaten as the Arctic Imperial Oak. As soon as the first shouts of “Heil Hitler” resounded, the town capitulated, and the spurious edifice of faith collapsed soundlessly in a heap of ruins. A Catholic town expects a priest to become a hypocrite. If he is sleeping with his housekeeper, he should at least do the citizenry the favor of calling her his sister or his niece. My beloved teacher was not of this ilk; he put his trust in the Pope, who was arrogant enough to prefer scandal to lying.

  My parental home was one of the few in town that remained open to the school principal. He took frequent advantage of our hospitality, and we welcomed him warmly each time. He also appreciated our wine cellar and the box of 500 cigars into which any male guest was free to grab. I have the fondest recollections of these evenings with Father Kremers.

  My brothers and I liked to go out collecting plants and flowers with our principal. We took bicycle trips to nearby Holland, paid visits to the Missionary Headquarters in Steyl (Father Kremers was a member of the Society of the Divine Word), and explored the borderland area between Venlo and Roermond. Once in the month of May—I had already left the school—Father Kremers suggested a bike tour to Roermond, saying that he wanted to show us something very nice there. The group was to include my brother Jupp and a classmate of his named Erich. Departure time: 3:00 am. We arrived at the principal’s door right on time, but Erich was nowhere in sight. I was sent off to yank this lazybones out of bed. I swiftly pedaled to the outskirts of town where he lived and gave a whistle under his bedroom window. Erich’s father, a short, know-it-all factory manager, stuck his head out the window and cursed me and the clergyman; his son wasn’t coming. That school principal wasn’t proper company for a decent student, and I should go to the devil. Erich was what you might call a sissy, but his father, who was a tyrant, wasn’t aware of this.

  So we were a threesome for the bike trip, with Father Kremers dressed in civilian clothes. Born in the neighboring town of Dülken, home of Goethe’s Academy of Fools, he had scouted every last corner of the Schwalm valley. He knew by heart all the flora and fauna of the region including, to my particular amazement, plants and animals that were not listed in Brehm’s Guides to Nature. During this day’s exploration we agreed on a plan to write a cyclist’s handbook of local zoology, with the title “What’s Missing in Brehm.” By dusk we were near home, our baskets full of specimens. On a wooded hillside just outside of our “Town Amid the Forest,” we were met by the principal of the Protestant school, a friend of our own Catholic principal. This man handed his fellow clergyman a black biretta and a black loden coat, explaining that it would be best not to appear in town in mufti. Then he gave him the news that his father, old Severin Kremers, had been discovered dead in his bed. He advised him to change clothes in his school, which was located just outside the town limits. Rumors were going around. We boys were asked to stand aside, but we overheard enough to give us the feeling that we were becoming protagonists in a cops-and-robbers story—that Reverend Kremers, who didn’t get along very well with his father, had killed the old man and tried to escape at an early hour in civilian garb. He had, the rumor said, abducted two of his favorite students, and the group had been sighted leaving town. A third student named Erich was forbidden by his father to take part in the suspicious bicycle tour, and thus escaped certain death. The two other boys—the rumor continued—were already dead. The loathsome priest had strangled them and buried them in the forest near a large anthill.

  A fine kettle of fish. Inquiries at my house produced the informa
tion 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.

  During the ensuing night Vigoleis staged an auto-da-fé with the fruits of his addled brain. He considered it too risky to tear up the pages and throw them to the rats in the pit for post-mastication. This story of his had to disappear completely from the world. Not one fragment of it must survive f
or the winds to scatter. Copied! That was the final blow!

  Even so, this literary soirée had important ramifications. My reader is probably thinking: of course, a fight on the pilarière with Beatrice, who thinks that the process of self-mutilation has simply gone too far. Wrong. To step out on the path of Providence, we must now sidle up to Captain von Martersteig. I assure you that this will be much more rewarding than if you were to remain a mute witness to Beatrice’s despair. So let us return to the actress’ apartment, where Vigoleis is still seated in the reciter’s chair which, as a result of the bookseller’s suspicions, has turned into a court dock.

  The Captain, asked for his verdict as a fellow wielder of the pen, inquired politely if he might take a look at the typescript. He checked it over very carefully, flipping through the pages as all eyes focused on his lips—which were pressed together and refused to open. After a while, Joachim let his monocle drop into his hand and returned the manuscript to me. I was fully prepared to hear him pronounce my grade, “C minus. Sit down!”—the type of evaluation that all teachers use when they can’t keep up with their pupils. Our friend the fighter pilot started discoursing on problems of style and the neglect of narrative frames in modern literature. He even cited the famous but trite saw of Buffon, according to which le style c’est l’homme même, and as for my own style, it was—

  “Like a trampoline! Go ahead and say it, Herr Hauptmann! Or perhaps you prefer a somewhat more profound simile, such as ‘It is dreadful to cross the moor / so gloomy in the mists of heather.’ Or maybe something botanical, if that will be of help: the common shave-grass…”