John the Pupil

by David Flusfeder

  So we gathered our bags and thrust our way through the street towards the chapel, but, after we had walked the distance towards it, a tall tower of light, there was no sign of Brother Bernard.

  And Brother Andrew said,

  Perhaps he is where he left us. He might still be waiting for us.

  So we made our way back, and we returned finally to the merchant of birds, the tavern, the tripe stall. The day was hot, my body was sweating and sore under the weight I was carrying. This was not as when we had grown tired and vexatious on the road, at least then our labours had purpose. Here, we were vagabonds on a multitudinous street in the place that Cain built. And still there was no sign of Brother Bernard.

  Perhaps he has returned to the house of the scholar, Brother Andrew said.

  We could have returned there, we could have gone on again, to visit the Crown of Thorns; as we were making our deliberations, a woman gave Brother Andrew wine to drink. He told her he had no coins to pay for it. She told him she did not wish for coins from him; and by now we are wise in the world and could see what she might desire from him. He shared the drink with me and returned the flask to the woman and he thanked her and at no moment did he permit her eyes to match with his, and when their hands briefly touched as he was returning the flask I saw Brother Andrew’s body shiver.

  To the man behind the tripe stall, I described Brother Bernard, his cloak, his size, the colour of his hair, which is the most beautiful part of him, a golden brown. I asked if he had seen him. I said that an injury or calamity might have befallen him.

  The man of the tripe stall, whose produce was the most foul-smelling of all in the street, seeming to contain the odours of the slaughterhouse as well as the farmyard, the fear of the animals as they died, laughed at me.

  The calamity of Bacchus, he said. I saw that man leave the tavern in company of others. They are probably on their way to another.

  Brother Bernard has fallen into bad company. We carry the bags he has abandoned.

  We went from tavern to tavern, and each time we were directed on from another foul den where there was wreckage on the floor and bad temper in the tavern keeper’s face. Brother Bernard’s path was leading in the direction of the Holy Chapel, a profane passage towards the holiest of relics.

  Finally we were again there, at the building of light that contained Christ’s Own Crown. We had decided to resume the hunt after visiting the shrine. Brother Andrew delayed going in. He held his place, and penitents behind us complained at the delay to enter the Chapel door.

  We will find our companion, I said.

  I am not worthy, he said.

  None of us is worthy, I said.

  Each night I battle temptation, he said. And having succumbed once, the temptation is even greater.

  Blame not him who falls, I said, but who remains fallen. And the woman with the flask. You were strong enough to resist temptation there. The Devil tempts only the very good and the very bad.

  This did not console him. I fancied I saw the Crown ahead of us, in the light of the Chapel windows or maybe the windows were the receivers of light originating from the Crown, but then we were shoved aside by the penitents.

  Brother Andrew’s mouth muttered prayers. He interrupted them to whisper,

  But I liked it. I would do it again.

  We will return here after we find our brother, I said making my voice resolute. We will find him, and we will return here, and we will pray together, the three of us, and we will absolve our sins, and then we will resume our journey.

  And we did find him, when we had all but given up hope of doing so, and we did resume our journey, but we did not pray before the Crown of Thorns, and the events did not transpire as we expected them to.

  As I write this, my fingers are cramped from the pen, my head is bare to the wind, and I am hungry.

  And it is hard not to see a portent in this: we never did pray at the Crown of Thorns; we may never reach journey’s end.

  • • •

  In the tavern where we came at last to our straying brother, the maids were dressed in filthy clothes that revealed squares and triangles of flesh, a geometry of sin, and their flesh looked dark and bruised in the struggling light.

  Brother Bernard had fallen in with a company of dissolute clerics, found his place among them with their love of wine and disputation and song. Brother Bernard was beating out a rhythm on the tavern table, his weak head for learning the liturgy belied by his capacity to memorise the words of their drinking songs, his powerful voice bellowing out the chorus, I suffer much, Both day and night! Oh, Why are you telling me to sing?! And there was a delight in his eyes, a foolish happiness on his face that is normally so immobile, slack-jawed, like a beast of the field, his mouth hanging open, as I once heard Brother Luke say, but not within Bernard’s hearing, the better to catch flies; his soul was for once alive, or at least apparent.

  In the centre of it all was their leader, a degraded cleric dressed all in black, with long hair around his bald mockery of a tonsure, croaking out words of blasphemy, lament and scorn. His whole existence was a kind of leer at God’s creation: I have seen no eagle, but we found a crow, coughing, as he delivered a profane sermon to chastise a member of his band who had tossed aside a coin,

  Do not despise the half-penny! With a half-penny you can buy a loaf of bread or plenty of coal and wood to cook your meal and warm your bones, or butter or lard or oil or fat to make your peas taste good, or that hefty serving girl over there, to warm your body and your bed, or a big measure of wine, filled to the top. We drink to Paris! Where a half-penny-worth of wine would cost two pence anywhere else.

  And then he took to his feet to dance, his black cloak fluttering around him as he sailed and spun with his cup held high.

  His unholy band joined him, and serving maids, and Brother Bernard was dancing among them in a kind of blasphemous ecstasy, and I hope that Brother Andrew’s face was not a mirror my own, because on it mixed in with the horror at their shamelessness was a kind of fascination, an enchantment. I stood on a table, I preached and I prayed. I put before them the example of Aurelian who, in his lusts, danced himself to death. The Devil is the inventor and governor and disposer of dances and dancers, leading vain folk who are like thistledown wafted on the blast, or the dust which the wind lifts from the face of the earth, or clouds without water, which are carried about by winds. But the music and the song and the dancing were too strong for my words. I stood on the table, shaking from the vibrations of the dancers’ feet, my words ignored.

  The tumult subsided, but not because of anything I had done, but because the next part of this unholy service was to occur, and it was by far the worst, the blackest mockery, the words of it, blasphemous and obscene; I would shrink from relating it were it not that I have bound myself to recording all the events of our days; and should anyone happen to read this, let this serve as a warning against the unholy excesses of man and demon, which in this place seemed conjoined.

  Their leader, their crow, led what he called a hymn.

  Thrust, tongue, into the mystery

  Of the glorious body

  And lick the precious flux

  The price that Christ

  Our noble fruit of lust

  Paid spilling into the world

  And his respondents rejoined,

  Amen. Alleluia.

  In the horror of it we trusted to Brother Bernard’s higher nature to resist this foulest of blasphemies, and he was getting to his feet, I am sure to denounce the crow – and we were going towards our brother, to support him, but before the denouncement could issue from Brother Bernard’s mouth, one of the members of the debased company was on his feet, pointing to the three of us, and he said that we were the Pope’s Friars, the Pope’s Demons, and we carried great treasure we had stolen from a cathedral, and the three of us, as all turned our way, were united again, and we ran.

  Saint Francis said,

  Many sorrows and many woes will that wretched ma
n have, who sets his desire and his heart and his hope on earthly things, for the which he abandons and loses the things of heaven, and at the last will also lose these things of earth. The eagle flies high: but if she had a weight tied to her wings, she could no more fly high; so man for the weight of earthly things cannot fly high, to wit, cannot attain to perfection; but the wise man, that ties the weight of remembrance of death and of judgement to the wings of his heart, cannot by reason of his great fear go astray and fly among the vanities and the riches of this world, the which are the cause of damnation.

  And Brother Bernard said,

  That man, who you called the Crow, his followers called the Poet, he had a different gospel. He says that there was a prophet, an unhappy man named Gottschalk, who was persecuted and martyred for this faith, who taught that all is determined. Before we are born, it is fixed whether we go to heaven or hell, so it matters not what we do in this life because our path into the next has already been fixed.

  And Brother Andrew said,

  Each night I battle against temptation.

  Oh my Master. How I wish I was home with you. I should not seek to roam.

  • • •

  Saint Vitus’s Day

  Vitus’s father often whipped him because his son despised the idols of Rome and refused to worship them. He tried to change his son’s mind by offering him music and sporting girls and other kinds of delights. Then he shut the boy up in his bedroom and a wonderful fragrance came out of it. The father looked through the door and saw seven angels around his son and exclaimed, The gods have come to my house! and was immediately struck by blindness.

  They took Vitus’s father to the temple of Jove and promised a bull with gilded horns for the recovery of his sight, but he remained blind. Then he begged his son to obtain his healing, and at the son’s prayer the father saw the light again. When even then he did not believe, but rather thought to kill the child, an angel appealed to Vitus’s tutor, Modestus, and commanded him to take the boy in a boat and go to another land. While they were at sea, an eagle brought them their food, and they wrought many wonders when they landed.

  Arousing the jealousy of the pagans, Vitus suffered martyrdom when he was only twelve years old.

  We are hungry. We have lost track of the days. Like the sinning sheep that has wandered from the flock, we have lost our way.

  Saint Mark and Saint Marcellian’s Day or Saint Joseph of Arimathea’s Day

  Saints Mark and Marcellian were twin brothers who were martyred in Rome for their faith. They were nailed upside down to pillars, and their great devotion endured. Saint Joseph of Arimathea buried Our Lord and was immured inside a city wall of Jerusalem as punishment from the Jews but was comforted by divine light and fed with food from heaven.

  The woods are thick and deep and the birds mock us from their trees. We are not sure if today is a Friday or a Saturday, but we fast anyway, although we have no choice because we do not have any food.

  The Feast of the Holy Martyrs Gervasius and Protasius

  Augustine relates in the twentieth book of his On the City of God that a young man was bathing his horse in the river when suddenly a demon took him, tormented him, and threw him in the river as if he were dead. In the evening, vespers were sung in the nearby church of the Holy Martyrs, and the young man, as if struck by voices, did run into the church screaming and clung to the altar as if he were tied to it and no power could pull him away. The demon was conjured to go out of the man but threatened to tear him limb from limb if he should be banished from the poor young man’s body. When the demon finally was expelled, one of the young man’s eyes hung down his face by a thin vein, but they put the eye back in its place as well as they could, and in a few days, by the merits of Gervasius and Protasius, the young man was completely cured.

  When we see peasants in villages, they watch us. They always watch us. They look up from their work to make shrewd judgements of our condition. Are we angels or demons?, outlaws?, thieves, victims, despoilers? Might we be in the service of a powerful lord, whose men would take vengeance upon any injuries that befell us? Or are we carrying our burden as a great gift to anyone who would trouble himself to take it?

  Others watch us as the beasts of the field watch the rain, their state too unalterable for anything to be profit or wonder. They wait only for food or the slaughter man.

  One man gave us food. He knew that it was a feast day but it did not trouble him that he did not know its name.

  I have discovered why there are pages missing from my chronicle. I had stretched out to sleep, but sleep was not permitted me. When my eyes were shut, images of the past days returned unbidden to my vision, the blasphemous Crow, the Crown of Thorns in its perpetual light, Brother Andrew’s face when he whispered to me. When my eyes were open they wished only to be shut. The fire we had made for ourselves was close to extinguishing, and I watched the colours and the shapes, hoping in this way to be lulled towards sleep. And my attention was taken by a scratching that I at first took to be the sound of an animal making its timid nest in the hollow of a tree. But when I looked past the fire I saw Brother Bernard beside its dying light, certain that he was unobserved, leaning over one of my fragments with a pen that I thought had been lost, with ink that is precious to me, cutting into the page, obliterating my words.

  Saint Silverius’s Day

  I shall try to write the tidings of the day in the order in which they occurred, so that their history will be a kind of mirror of the events of the day as we experienced them, and any reader, my Father, my Master, my Lord, will be given an accounting of how these things occurred and why we reacted to them the way that we did, and in this way, perhaps our blame shall be lessened; and in this way too I might myself begin to understand why and how these things occurred.

  We had walked through the forest, and reached an abbey where once presided the logician Abelard’s great enemy. They offered us food and drink, which we accepted, even Bernard, despite his dislike of Cistercians. And in this place, Brother Bernard told me of his penitence at stealing my parchment and ink, but when I asked him to what ends he was making of them, he did not answer me. We accepted the gifts of monks and made some more ink, to replace what Bernard had stolen, and when we were done, and I was thanking the monks, Brother Bernard had stolen some of that too.

  And we had walked on, recovering our path, finding again the Via Francigena. And in our relief at finding again the right road, at anticipating the night we would spend in a pilgrims’ hospice, where the sawdust on the floor would be as welcome to us as a potentate’s mattress, we sang as we walked, like soldiers, like children, the rhythm of our words matching the rhythm of our steps, so that all was praise.

  As the sun began its descent, we reached a village. It was a village much like any other, so I have no means of warning anyone away from it. It had a few ragged fields of barley, a dead crow hanging in each field as a warning to any others of their tribe should they attempt to eat the crops, a pond, a barn, a patch of grass in the middle, within some small low habitations. The villagers were curious as we approached. They invited us to drink and to eat, and we sat in their grass that was in the middle of the village and we accepted their hospitality and tried to deflect the interest that was coming our way.

  They took us for penitents, and then they concluded that one of us had committed a great sin and the other two were his guards, and then they fell into dispute and could not agree if we were all criminals, or angels sent to direct them, or demons sent to test them.

  And I did not know then and I still do not know if their suspicion of us as demons was a game they were playing, or if it was truly felt, something caught on the wind that registers deep in the soul, because the superstition and fear of villagers can be a great and terrible potency, but their strongest men took hold of us, and they interrogated us as to our motives and our true nature.

  They had a kind of priest among them, a man with a wildness about him, as if he had stared for too long into a con
suming fire.

  Look at the demons, they could almost be ordinary men, said one of his followers.

  Except there is always something wrong about them, the wild priest said. That one is too large, that one too beautiful. In his attempt to mock the angels, he gives himself away.

  And that one?

  Too pale, too ordinary. Have you ever seen a youth who looks less noticeable?

  They proceeded to taunt us. Come on demons! one of them said. Extend your power against us.

  We are not demons, I told them.

  Prove it.

  Oh my Master, you have taught me many things, but not how a man may prove his innocence.

  They tied us up and attached the ropes to stakes of wood in the grass.

  Free yourself, demons! they said.

  We are not demons, I told them. We are men, like you.

  Because they were calling us demons, because they could make as if we were a threat to them and to their village and to their low crops, that gave them the excuse to look through our bags and there was nothing we could do to stop them. They found the treasures I had gathered and they threw them around, as if they were worthless, although some thought them proof of our sorcery, and they affected still to believe that we were inspired by the Devil to stop their crops and bring a blight upon them, but they were, as Brother Bernard shouted out to them before they stopped his mouth with foul rags, simple thieves.

  I do not know if I understand anything, if the unworthy capacities that impressed my Master are merely a trick of mimicry and memory. Numbers are shapes that I can repeat and multiply; but maybe they signify nothing outside of themselves. Without correspondence in my heart or spirit, their true essence goes untouched. My Master uses his intellect as an instrument to apprehend holy truths and deliver them to those that can use them best; mine is a performance to impress an audience, to plead, not quite to pray. Except, when I was in the witness of my harshest audience yet, harsher than my Master, harsher even than the Principal, I failed.