On his way back he thought he heard from a house standing alone at the bottom of the rift a loud sobbing, which turned out to come from the television there.
Out of the river rift, up on the Jaunfeld Plain again, back in his south, open in all directions, he saw from the highway, at the foot of Rinkenberg’s hill, which seemed closer on this dark day, the ancient priest from the village out walking; he had recently gone completely blind, and was being led across the fields by a child, his outstretched hand on the child’s shoulder, a gesture with which the blind man continued to celebrate the Eucharist in his church, proclaiming the texts from the Introibo to the Ite missa est by heart.
My friend turned off to the east, to the village called Dob, or in German Aich, where his parishioner lay dying and at the same time a single figure stood waiting at the edge of town in front of that railroad station he had always associated with Westerns, those films he had watched in his youth, and not merely to kill time; in his thoughts he got out and waited there with Jimmy Stewart.
In the heart of the village — there still was one here — by the outdoor clay bowling alley belonging to the restaurant now no longer in operation, he actually did stop, simply to roll into nowhere the one mud-encrusted, half-rotted wooden ball lying around.
Only after that did he enter the house next door with the dying man, who was fully conscious and at first shrank into his corner at the sight of the man in black, hair and eyes also black. What calmed and strengthened him at once was precisely the odd scorn in the priest’s gaze, which certainly did not pertain to him, the invalid in the last stages. This man facing death asked for the priest’s blessing and did not want to receive it lying down, but instead got out of bed and knelt for it; and thus received Extreme Unction, this sacrament that has almost gone out of use, practiced now simply to ease the conscience of the relatives, to whom the priest in departing indicated outside the door that their father would not die during the night, but tomorrow morning — for a long time now he had had a sense for the moment. And what if he himself died now, this very evening? they asked. He was indignant. “I’m not finished with myself yet.”
Alone, heading back to his car, he found the remote village in midafternoon still permeated with the freshness of morning. In the courtyards turnips were heaped up; a pear, at eye level, felt heavy in his hand; the mountains forming a great circle around the arena of the plain stood there in a color for which the name “Wyoming blue” came to him out of nowhere. How long had it been since he had gotten away from this region, the entire year thus far. He ordered two youths who were sitting on motorbikes and talking at the top of their lungs, while repeatedly revving their engines, to turn them off, went to his car without trying to hear what they were saying about him behind his back, and himself stepped hard on the gas.
The only walk he took this day that deserved the name was on a path through the fields, back to the edge of the Dobrava Forest, his destination the roadside shrine there, from which, on his instructions, a stonemason was removing the stucco and also the postwar frescoes — in the priest’s opinion not only clumsy but also mindless — so that the little place of worship would once more have nothing to show but its medieval stonework, at least for the present.
Now he had his rubber boots on, and also a mason’s jacket and cap, and joined the silent workman in hammering away, one of them outside, the other inside, and the mason was then fired up by his employer’s encouraging shouts, growing louder and louder as the original structure became visible and began to shine through (hadn’t it originally been his, the mason’s idea?).
And later, wearing the same outfit, my friend back home in his orchard picked clean the one apple tree that had not yet been harvested, until the last glimmer of day, when, from the foot of the ladder, a man in a necktie inquired where he might find the priest here, saying the Eternal Light in the church was not working; he was a traveling candle salesman, and also sold electric ones (now preferred by acolytes as better for their lungs). “The priest is on a round-the-world journey,” my friend replied, coughing from the phlegm caused by the candle soot, which would get worse during the winter, and laughed at the salesman’s departing back, neither maliciously nor kindly, just determined to remain uninvolved, decisively unmoved, as the child of Siebenbrunn had been taught by his father the sexton.
Washed and changed and then out again! already in darkness to Rinkolach, the village at the end of beaten paths, the village through which no street leads onward.
The affiliated church there was open, except for the commemoration of its consecration, held on a Sunday in summer, only for the few Masses for the dead. On this particular evening it was for a small farmer or occasional farmhand, without any family, who had died a long time ago, from the windows of whose former cottage turkeys now looked out, being raised by the neighbors who had ordered and paid for the Mass for him. Aside from the almost obligatory stranger who had somehow wandered in and sat off to one side, these were also the only people waiting for the priest in the dim church, praying, in Slovenian, the long All Souls’ Litany, actually more a sort of invocation, close to singing, and finally, very gradually and very delicately modulating into singing. At first, after entering through the open door, he had merely stood in the background, and they did not notice him until he joined in the last apostrophe, addressed not to the saints but to the Holy Trinity, at a terrifying volume, and also in another key.
The church of Rinkolach (Rinkole in Slavic), on its patch of meadow in the middle of the village, looked from the outside to be about the size of a hall; the inside, of the dimensions of a living room, though for a large family, did not provide enough space in the middle for a so-called “people’s altar,” and thus he said Mass at a distance from the people, raised above them on the stepped platform, usually with the nave at his back, from which, to be sure, the dove of the Holy Ghost embroidered on his vestments kept an eye on the congregation.
For each sacramental act, performed alone, without an acolyte, he stretched his arms wide, summoning all his strength, as if he were doing work that required muscular effort. At the same time he moved along briskly, without prolonging any gesture; even the pauses during which he collected himself or simply waited showed him in a sort of activity. Just as he spread his arms like a weight lifter, he also snapped open the book for the reading of the apostle’s epistle, leafed back to the Gospel, jabbed, with his thick finger, at the written text, hammered, gripping the altar slab with both hands, his forehead audibly against it, fell, with a crash, to one knee, pounded himself so hard on the chest that it echoed, unlocked the tabernacle with a powerful twist of the hand, fished out the chalice with his fist, thrust it toward the congregation—“eat!”—and sawed the air as he delivered the benediction.
Once he had even disappeared in the middle, running to that narrow passageway behind the altar where the wooden structure of the altar, without the gilding, rough, in its unexpectedly mysterious form, could just as well be an old, abandoned flour mill, a part of the flour chute; he remained, as during a Mass in Russia, absent from the action out in front, which merely increased the suspense, and returned only after quite some time, again at a run, for the continuation.