And the child of Siebenbrunn told these stories to others for years and years, including to those who passed through that desolate place by chance. He invited the other person, the adult, into his church, so to speak, positioned him in front of the pictures, and recited and intoned their stories from the background, in a voice that emerged from an uninterrupted conversation with himself, which simply happened to become audible from time to time. He believed without reservation and serenely in these pictures — there could be no greater serenity — and lived in a continual state of joy, perceptible also to outsiders. Nothing could shake the faith of the child of Siebenbrunn; it was innate. With its first mirroring in the pictures of faith, life “was manifested,” as it said at the beginning of the First Epistle of St. John, a saying he later adopted as his motto. With him, at any rate, a loss of images remained impossible.
Or perhaps not? That “life was manifested”: did it not apply to “the Word” rather than to images? Had he, the priest, kept joy alive for himself? “Not really” (he now thought, in the middle of morning Mass, at the admonition “Lift up your hearts!”), “or at least not always.”
Did the child of Siebenbrunn still exist? Where was he? And what had become of him? No, nothing could become of him other than what he already was in the beginning! But then how did it happen that nowadays, if he returned to the area of his childhood at all, he tended to avoid his Siebenbrunn and instead sought out the church in the neighboring village, which was almost devoid of pictures, a church that had Job as its patron saint?
Not once had the child imagined in those early days that the priesthood would be anything for him, although that gentle and hopping-mad local priest had had an eye on him in this respect for a very long time, and then even treated him openly as one of the chosen, for instance because in catechism class he had answered the question as to where the Blessed Virgin had carried her son after the Immaculate Conception, not as the other children did with “in her belly,” but with “under her heart.”
Only a kind of yearning, unspecific, also undimmed by any troublesome hopes, was there. No question but that he would become a farmer right after finishing school, since his parents had both died young and his sister could not run the farm alone. Thus he lived for a decade, and then also fell in love with a girl, in fact from the village of Job, and the two wanted to marry. That he was always slightly absentminded did not trouble the young woman; she liked him that way.
What finally brought him to the priesthood was a lecture by an agrarian engineer for the young men of the area, given at the local community center and sponsored by the Agriculture Bureau. The title: “A Vocation for Farming.” First of all, it dawned on him that he lacked all the characteristics of a future farmer: unlike the others around him, he did not feel at all attracted to the fragrance of livestock; nor did his heart swell at the thought of ripening crops; nor did working outdoors make him happy or even proud; instead, he went about his work as if it were a sideline, like any day laborer, and his thoughts were usually somewhere else entirely.
Once he recognized his lack of vocation, he was seized with a burning restlessness. Instead of to his priest, he turned to the agrarian engineer, whom he looked up in the city of K., to tell him about his fatal lack of interest in farm work. To this day he thought it must have been simply the way he told the story, imploringly, that made the technical expert ask out of the blue whether he had ever considered becoming a priest.
The moment had come. At last he knew what he had to do. Yet he would have kept on farming if it had not also happened that his fiancee understood him instantly—“with glowing eyes!” as he told us — and even encouraged his plan, and that his sister around that same time met a man with whom she would run the farm.
In the beginning he, already an adult, attended a boys’ seminary, where he sat in the back and off to one side at a single desk, avoided by the adolescents and mocked as a “manure farmer” (although as a rule these children’s parents were farmers, too), and then he transferred to a special school for those called late to the priesthood. There he noticed that all the men, from the most varied walks of life, had at least one thing in common: like most ordinary priests, they had experienced while still children something like a summons or a vocation; except that they, unlike the others, had not felt that it applied to them, and had instead followed a course previously laid out for them. And to find their way to the priesthood they had all needed a second impetus, much later, well beyond their childhood. Things became clear to them and the picture came into focus only the second time around. They had had to rely on that second manifestation of life, which thenceforth remained immutable for them in a way that hardly anything did for the other priests — weren’t they, the latecomers, the ones most likely to stay with it for the rest of their lives?
After saying morning Mass, a silent one, in which his lips moved and no word was audible, it seemed to him as though he had taken a breath that would last him all day.
He went, in mufti except for the stiff white clerical collar, which, unlike his fellow priests, he never dispensed with in public, out of the parish church and across the already heavily traveled highway to the Inn on the Bend (on the long since straightened curve) for his café au lait, shoved across the counter to him without his having to order, stood there among the handful of workmen out early, men of few words, clearing his throat like them, and skimmed the already wrinkled newspaper, unmoved by even the most terrible events in the world (just as “his” dying parishioners never haunted him, even in dreams; once out of the sickroom he never returned to them in thought, and also calmly said so to anyone who wanted to know). According to the paper, a recent survey showed that the majority of the population considered priests useful to society, even if they seemed to have disappeared almost entirely from public life; except that, the article went on to say, in the eyes of most people they no longer spread happiness or tidings of great joy.
Then he set out in his forester’s vehicle, whose back seat had been removed to make way for a duffel bag, a pair of rubber boots, the slice of a tree trunk, all lying loose like the few tools and apples, which during the trip overland to the secondary school in B. caused a constant rattling and bumping.
It was a dark day, one on which small things showed up as if lit from within, and the world, with the sun in hiding, lay open for a new beginning; the rattling of the tools behind him provided a musical accompaniment. It made him think of the painting by Brueghel in the Museum of Art in Vienna, his first picture outside of a church (seen on the only field trip taken by the latecomers, otherwise always penned up in rural Horn, in Lower Austria), which had filled him with as much astonishment as the portrayals of the Gospel in Siebenbrunn, perhaps also because of its title, but who had given it that name?: “The Dark Day.”