Bodendiek shakes the rain from his black hat. “We gave final consolation to the dying, on the battlefield—you seem to have forgotten that.”
“You shouldn’t have let it go so far! Why didn’t you declare a strike? Why didn’t you forbid the faithful to go to war? That’s where your duty lay. But the time of martyrs is past. And so, when I had to attend divine service during the war I had to hear prayers for the victory of our arms. Do you think Christ would have prayed for the victory of the Gallileans over the Philistines?”
“The rain,” Bodendiek replies in measured tones, “seems to have made you unusually emotional and demagogic. You seem to have found out that by a little adroitness, omission, distortion, and one-sided presentation you can attack anything at all and make it questionable.”
“I know. That’s the very reason I’m studying history. When we were studying religion at school, we were always being told about the dark, primitive, cruel pre-Christian times. I’ve been reading up about that and I’ve discovered that we are not much better off now—aside from certain technical and scientific triumphs which, moreover, are used principally to kill more people.”
“It’s possible to prove anything you like if you’re determined to do it, dear friend. And the opposite too. Proofs can be found for every preconceived opinion.”
“I know that too,” I say. “The Church gave a brilliant example of it when it wiped out the Gnostics.”
“The Gnostics! What do you know about them?” Bodendiek asks in offensive surprise.
“Enough to suspect they were the more tolerant part of Christianity. And all I have learned in my life so far is to prize tolerance.”
“Tolerance—” Bodendiek says.
“Tolerance!” I repeat. “Consideration for others. Understanding of others. Letting each live in his own fashion. Tolerance, which in our beloved fatherland is a foreign word.”
“Anarchy, in short,” Bodendiek replies, softly and with sudden sharpness.
We are standing in front of the chapel. The lights are burning and the stained-glass windows shimmer comfortingly in the eddying rain. Through the open door comes the faint smell of incense. “Tolerance, Herr Vicar,” I say. “Not anarchy, and you know the difference! But you don’t dare admit it! No one possesses heaven but you! No one can give absolution but you! You have a monopoly. There is no religion but yours! You are a dictatorship! So how can you be tolerant?”
“We don’t need to be. We possess the truth.”
“Naturally,” I say, pointing to the lighted windows. “There you are! Comfort for those afraid of life. Stop thinking, I’ll do it for you! The promise of heaven and the threat of hell—playing on the simplest emotions—what has that to do with truth, the unattainable fata morgana of our brains?”
“Fine words,” Bodendiek exclaims, long since at ease again, superior and mildly derisive.
“Yes, that’s all we have—fine words,” I say, angered at myself. “And you have nothing more—just fine words.”
Bodendiek walks into the chapel. “We have the Holy Sacraments—”
“Yes—”
“And faith, which to simpletons like you, whose addled brains upset their stomachs, seems nothing but stupidity and flight from the world, you harmless earthworm in the fields of triviality.”
“Bravo!” I say. “At last you, too, are waxing poetic. Late baroque, to be sure.”
Bodendiek laughs suddenly. “My dear Bodmer,” he explains, “many a Saul has become a Paul in the nearly two thousand years that the Church has existed. And during that time we have encountered more formidable dwarfs than you and survived them. Go on busily groping. At the end of every path God stands, waiting for you.”
He disappears with his umbrella into the sacristy, a well-nourished man in a black frock coat. In half an hour, garbed as fantastically as a general of Hussars, he will reappear and be a representative of God. It’s the uniform, as Valentin Busch was saying after the second bottle of Johannisberger while Eduard Knobloch lapsed into melancholy and plans for murder, simply the uniform. Take away their costumes, and nobody will want to be a soldier any more.
After the devotion I go for a walk with Isabelle along the allée. Here it is raining irregularly—as though the shadows, crouching in the trees, were sprinkling themselves with water. Isabelle is wearing a dark raincoat, buttoned up around her throat, and a small cap that hides her hair. Nothing of her is visible but her face which shines in the darkness like a thin moon. The weather is cold and windy; no one else is in the garden. I have long since forgotten Bodendiek and the black rage that sometimes wells up in me without reason, like a dirty fountain. Isabelle is walking close beside me; I hear her footsteps in the rain and I feel her movements and her warmth; it seems to me the only warm thing left in the whole world.
Suddenly she stops. Her face is pale and determined and her eyes look almost black. “You don’t love me enough,” she blurts out.
I look at her in surprise. “It’s the best I can do,” I say.
She stands in silence for a while. “Not enough,” she murmurs then. “Never enough. It is never enough.”
“Yes,” I say, “very likely it is never enough. Never in our lives, never with anyone. Very likely it is always too little, and that is the misery of the world.”
“It is not enough,” Isabelle repeats as though not hearing me. “Otherwise we would not still be two.”
“You mean otherwise we would be one?”
She nods.
I think of my conversation with Georg while we were drinking mulled wine. “We’ll always have to remain two, Isabelle,” I say cautiously. “But we can love each other and believe that we are no longer two.”
“Do you think once upon a time we were one?”
“I don’t know. No one can know a thing like that One wouldn’t be able to remember it.”
She looks at me fixedly out of the darkness. “That’s it, Rudolf,” she whispers. “One doesn’t remember. Not anything. Why not? You seek and seek. Why is everything gone? There was so much! You only remember that and nothing more. Why don’t you remember? You and I, didn’t all this happen once before? Tell met Tell me! Where is it now, Rudolf?”
The wind whirls past sprinkling us with raindrops. One often feels as though something had happened before, I remember. It comes quite close to you and stands there and you know it was just this way once before, exactly so; for an instant you almost know how it must go on, but then it disappears as you try to lay hold of it like smoke or a dead memory. “We could never remember, Isabelle,” I say. “It’s like the rain. That also has become one, one of two gasses, oxygen and hydrogen, which no longer remember they were once gasses. Now they are only rain and have no memory of an earlier time.”
“Or like tears,” Isabelle says. “But tears are full of memories.”
We walk on for a time in silence. I am thinking of those strange moments when unexpectedly a kind of second sight like a deceptive memory seems suddenly to give us glimpses of many earlier lives. The gravel crunches under our shoes. Behind the garden wall there is the prolonged blowing of a car horn like a signal to someone about to escape. “Then it’s like death,” Isabelle says finally.
“What is?”
“Love. Perfect love.”
“Who knows, Isabelle? I think no one can ever know. We only recognize things as long as each of us is still an I. If our I’s were blended, it would be like the rain. We should be a new I and unable to remember the earlier separate I’s. We should be something different, as different as rain is from air—no longer an I heightened by a you.”