That night he got up even earlier than usual, also because he had to work on his sermon for Sunday. From his desk he had a view of the back of the rectory and an orchard, which then, as was usual on the Jaunfeld, merged into meadows and fields without more ado. After morning Mass and his morning classes at the school in B., he planned to pick apples that afternoon and take them down to the cellar, without help, all by himself. And what else today? Lunch with the much younger priest of the parish on the other side of the Drau, in an inn halfway between them; another visit to a dying parishioner; an evening Mass for one who had passed away in Rinkolach.
If he looked in another direction, he could see the unmade bed in his bedroom, which would remain thus until late at night. It was cold in the two rooms, the only ones that were still lived in; no housekeeper to light the stove; and he himself did so only when company came, and even then often not.
In his sermon he wanted to challenge the Pope, in all seriousness, and that soon warmed him. For not long ago the man in the Vatican, in connection with a war in which enemy soldiers had raped and impregnated women, had called upon the women in question to love these children and bring them into the world and raise them in this spirit. What upset the priest was less the assumption that the women would carry to term these embryos conceived in violence than the command to love them. Could something like love be imposed from without, and furthermore from on high, publicly? To praise love, as the apostle Paul had done once and for all in his epistle to the Corinthians, was one thing; but to declare it a law and proclaim it as such, wasn’t that entirely different? Certainly he could well imagine that one of these women gradually, or more likely suddenly, might be seized (“surprised”? “afflicted”?) by a sort of love for such a fruit of her womb. But first of all, wasn’t that her own business, yes, her secret, and no one on the outside, not even the deputy of God on earth, could presume to approach a human being with a commandment to love. Or at most in private, as priest and pastor, like him, and then not in the form of a commandment but perhaps as a mere possibility, a little pointer.
He, the priest, was angry at his Pope for speaking of something like love in prescriptive terms, and he wanted to express that openly in his sermon (although precisely thereby his outrage would be perceived as part of a game). Wasn’t the love of a violated woman for this alien seed more the stuff of a story, a novella, than of a sermon from the pulpit? To be told only long, long after the event? Or perhaps not even in eternity? Something to keep unspoken, a matter only for the mother herself? And might not such love, in the cases in question, have long since gone silently and fervently to work, only to be desecrated by the papal edict? But was such a love even capable of being desecrated, by no matter what interference?
The greatest outburst of anger he had witnessed up to now in his life had come from a priest. It had happened during religion class, in the school in his native village, and the perpetrator had been that priest who was the epitome of gentleness, and not only in the eyes of the children. Instead of singing a psalm as usual, to put himself and the class in the right mood for the reading and narrating from the Bible, he posted himself in front of the class, at first without a word, his briefcase closed and his face disconcertingly red, and it became redder and redder as he broke into shouts so loud that they shocked even these farm children, accustomed to quite a bit from home. Every single one of them cringed, and was overcome with fear and horror, which grew from moment to moment, for the entire hour; for that was how long the priest screamed at the assembled children, without pausing for breath. At first they could make out only individual phrases here and there, like “Judgment Day,” “brood of vipers,” “end of the world,” “wailing and gnashing of teeth,” “spew forth!” and only near the end, when he began to tell a story, though still full of wrath, raging and yelling, did it become clear what this was all about: the previous day, upon entering the deserted church, he had caught one of the village children in front of the altar, thumbing his nose and sticking out his tongue at Christ on the Cross. But it was not a simple childish prank; the longer the priest raved, the more the listeners came to see it as the worst offense possible, which could lead only to eternal damnation. Although he indicated that he had recognized the blasphemer, and he was seated there among the others, he did not name him and even avoided looking at anyone in particular. Even though the last word he spoke in this hour was “Vengeance!” repeated several times, he stressed that the avenger would be someone else. And they all felt implicated; each one slunk away, sure that he was guilty of sticking out his tongue at the Lord from the shadows, and maybe even spitting at Him; even he, who later became a priest himself, and in those days was already the “child of Siebenbrunn,” the one with natural piety, had at the very least been an accessory to the crime, and from now on it was all over for him with what had been in his eyes the “greatest fun,” the Mass?
Not only a believer but also a little propagator of the faith, or one who animatedly told anyone who would listen about his faith, that was what he had been as the child of Siebenbrunn.
The church, at some distance from the village, at the foot of a hill from which, as the place’s name indicated, in bygone times seven springs had actually burst forth, next to the farm of his father, who was also the sexton, from the beginning represented for him an extension and special part of the family holdings; very early on he was entrusted with the key to it: over the centuries erosion had piled up earth around the little sanctuary, more and more cutting down the size of the door; the threshold had been raised, and as a result the keyhole was low enough for him to reach. But for a long time he kept his distance from everything inside the church, and touched nothing. It was his father alone who rang the bells, laid out the priest’s robes for Mass, changed the flowers, lit the candles. The boy did not even feel drawn to be an acolyte, and whenever he substituted for someone, finding himself unexpectedly too close to the altar, especially the gilded tabernacle, in whose hollow interior he could actually sense the Holy of Holies, he would feel like an interloper; and he became terribly clumsy, pouring wine on the priest’s fingers, spilling incense on the altar steps, and during the entire Mass was scooping up the pellets there before the eyes of the congregation.
The child of Siebenbrunn felt at home only way in the back of his church, whether during Mass, in the course of which he regularly experienced an altered state, by the “Kyrie eleison!” if not sooner, or when contemplating the old paintings, also the frescoes and wood carvings. Before he even learned to spell, he took the situations they portrayed as fact: that was how it had been, that was the only story worth telling, and even if he later found that it was not documented in the specific wording of the Bible, he continued to read the pictures from his church as piously as the Bible. It was thus a certainty that when Jesus was baptized in the river Jordan, an actual dove spread its light-radiating wings in the clouds overhead, that upon Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem a youth waved to him from the top of a tree with a palm frond, that when the Blessed Virgin breathes her last, her soul will escape from the lower part of her body in the form of a tiny child, who will in the same moment have already taken his place on the lap of the Almighty up above in the firmament.