“He wants to drink beer,” I say. “That’s all! If everyone could have a goal like that!”
She doesn’t hear me. She is looking at me. “Do you want to run away too?”
I shake my head.
“There’s nothing to run away for, Rudolf,” she says. “And
no place to go. All doors are the same. And beyond them—”
She hesitates. “What’s beyond them, Isabelle?” I ask,
“Nothing. They are just doors. They are always just doors and there is nothing beyond.”
The guard locks the gate and lights his pipe. The sharp smell of cheap tobacco strikes me and conjures up a picture: A simple life, without problems, with an honest calling, an honest wife, honest children, honest rewards, and an honest death—all accepted as a matter of course, the day, the evening’s leisure, and the night, without asking what lies beyond. For an instant I am filled with yearning, and a little envy. Then I look at Isabelle. She is standing at the gate, her hands grasping the iron bars, her head pressed against them, looking out. She stands thus for a while. The light grows fuller and redder and more golden, the woods lose their blue shadows and turn black, and the sky above us is apple-green and full of sailboats touched with rosy beams.
Finally she turns around. In this light her eyes look almost violet. “Come,” she says, taking my arm.
We walk back. She leans against me. “You must never abandon me,” she says.
“I will never abandon you.”
“Never,” she says. “Never is so short.”
Incense eddies from the silver censers. Bodendiek turns, the monstrance in his hands. The nuns in their black habits are kneeling in the pews like little dark heaps of submissiveness; their heads are bowed, their hands tap their covered breasts, which must never become breasts; the candles burn; and God is in the host, surrounded by golden rays, there in the room. A woman gets up, walks down the middle aisle to the communion bench, and throws herself on the floor. Most of the patients stare motionless at the golden miracle. Isabelle is not present. She has refused to go to church. She used to go, but, for the past few days, she has not. She has explained it to me. She says she doesn’t want to see the Bloody One any more.
Two nuns raise the sick woman, who has been throwing herself about and beating on the floor with her hands. I play the Tantum Ergo. The white faces of the inmates turn with a jerk toward the organ. I pull out the stops for the bass viols and the violins. The nuns sing.
The white spirals of incense eddy upward. Bodendiek puts the monstrance back in the tabernacle. The light of the candles flickers on the brocade of his vestments, where a large cross is embroidered, and is borne upward in the smoke to the great cross on which the bloodstained Saviour has been hanging for nearly two thousand years. I go on playing mechanically, thinking of Isabelle and what she has said. Then I think of the pre-Christian religions I was reading about last night. In those days the gods of Greece were merry, wandering from cloud to cloud, inclined to rascality, and always as faithless and changeable as the men to whom they belonged. They were incarnations and exaggerations of life in its fullness and cruelty and thoughtlessness and beauty. Isabelle is right: the pale man above me, with his beard and his bloody limbs, is not that. Two thousand years, think, two thousand years and through all that time life with its lights, its cries of passion, its deaths, and its ecstasies has eddied around the stone structures’ where stand the likenesses of this pale, dying man, dim, bloody, surrounded by millions of Bodendieks—and the leaden-colored shadow of the Church has reached out over the nations, smothering the joy of life, transforming Eros, the merry, into a secret, dirty, sinful bedroom incident, and forgiving nothing despite all the sermons on love and forgiveness—for true forgiveness means to accept someone as he is and not to demand expiation and obedience and submissiveness before the ego te absolvo is pronounced.
Isabelle is waiting outside. Wernicke has given her permission to stay in the garden in the evenings when someone is with her. “What were you doing in there?” she asks hostilely. “Helping to cover everything up?”
“I was playing music.”
“Music covers things up too. More than words.”
“There’s a kind of music that tears things open,” I say. “The music of drums and trumpets. It has caused a great deal of unhappiness all over the world.”
Isabelle turns around. “And your heart? Isn’t that a drum too?”
Yes, I think, a slow, soft drum, but it will make noise enough and bring unhappiness enough, and perhaps some day it will deafen me to the sweet, anonymous cry of life that is vouchsafed those who do not oppose a pompous self to life and do not demand explanations, as though they were righteous believers instead of what they are—brief wanderers who leave no track.
“Feel mine,” Isabelle says taking my hand and laying it on her thin blouse below her breast. “Do you feel it?”
“Yes, Isabelle.”
I withdraw my hand, but it is as though I had not done so. We walked around a little fountain, lamenting in the evening stillness as though it had been forgotten. Isabelle plunges her hands into the basin and throws the water into the air. “What becomes of dreams during the day, Rudolf?” she asks.
I look at her. “Perhaps they go to sleep,” I say cautiously, for I know where such questions can lead.
She plunges her arms into the basin and lets them rest there. They shimmer silvery, covered with little air bubbles under the water as though they were made of some strange metal. “How can they go to sleep?” she says. “After all, they are living sleep. You only see them when you are asleep. What becomes of them during the day?”
“Perhaps they hang like bats in great, subterranean caves—or like young owls in deep holes in the trees, waiting for the night.”
“And if night doesn’t come?”
“Night always comes, Isabelle.”
“Are you sure of that?”
I look at her. “You ask questions like a child,” I say.
“How do children ask them?”
“The way you do. They keep on asking. And soon they come to a point where the grownups have no answer and so get confused or angry.”
“Why do they get angry?”
“Because they suddenly realize that something is dreadfully wrong with them and they don’t like to be reminded of it.”
“Is something wrong with you too?”
“Almost everything, Isabelle.”
“What is wrong?”
“I don’t know. That’s just the trouble. If one knew, that in itself would make it less wrong. One just feels it.”
“Oh, Rudolf,” Isabelle says, and her voice is suddenly deep and soft. “Nothing is wrong.”
“It isn’t?”
“Of course not. Wrong and right are something that only God knows about. But if He is God, there is no wrong or right. Everything is God. It would only be wrong if it were outside Him. But if anything could be outside Him or against Him, He would be only a limited God. And a limited God is no God at all. And so everything is right or there is no God. It’s so simple.”
I look at her in amazement. What she says really does sound simple and illuminating. “Then there wouldn’t be any devil or hell either,” I say. “Or if there were, there would be no God.”
Isabelle nods. “Of course not, Rudolf. We have so many words. Who invented them all?”
“Confused human beings,” I reply.
She shakes her head and points toward the chapel. “The people in there! They have captured Him in there,” she whispers. “He can’t get out. He would like to. But they have nailed Him to the cross.”
“Who?”
“The priests. They keep Him captive.”