Текст книги "The Road to Jerusalem"

Автор книги: Ян Гийу

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   However, it was the larger problem that Arn had touched on that would be easier to take up just now. They would come back to the other issue a week later when Father Henri had had time to collect his thoughts and read up on it.

   "Now let's take up your second problem," Father Henri said, displaying great friendliness to Arn after he had rattled off his ten Pater Nosters. "Saint Bernard pointed out quite rightly that whatsoever is done with good intent—you know what I mean, let's skip the definitions—whatsoever is done with goodintent cannot lead to evil. In what context does this assurance have the greatest practical significance?"

   "When it applies to the crusades, obviously," replied Arn obediently.

   "Correct! But a crusade involves killing large numbers of Saracens, doesn't it? So, doesn't the commandment against killing apply here? And if not, why not?"

   "It doesn't apply because it is done, always done, with the blessing of the Holy Father in Rome," Arn replied cautiously.

   "Yes, but that's a circular argument, my son. I asked why?"

   "Because we have to imagine that the good is very good, that the good in preserving the Holy Sepulchre for believers is so much greater than the evil of killing Saracens," Arn ventured hesitantly.

   "Yes, you're on the right track," Father Henri assured him with a thoughtful nod. "But even when the Lord Jesus drove the moneylenders out of the temple he was never close to killing them, was he?"

   "No, but that could be because, through his Father's wrath, which naturally is much different from our human wrath, he used only as much force as was necessary. He actually did drive the moneylenders out of the temple. He didn't need to kill them; it's as if Brother Guilbert had—"

   "All right! Let's get back to the question at hand," Father Henri interrupted him brusquely. But behind his stern mask he was secretly smiling at how Arn had suddenly and as if by chance managed to find an almost devastating argument that would strengthen his earlier position that Brother Guilbert should have used limited force. He should have simply acted as did the Lord Jesus himself in the temple.

   "Did the Lord Jesus repudiate the soldiers, did he ever condemn them for being soldiers?" asked Father Henri in a deliberately subdued tone of voice.

   "No, not that I know of . . ." Arn pondered. "Like that part about the coin, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what . . . something like that. And then of course we have almost the same thing in the gospel of Luke, 3:14, I think . . . 'Then some soldiers asked him, "And what should we do?" He replied, "Don't extort money and don't accuse people falsely– be content with your pay." ' If the soldiers behave like honest men when they're not soldiers . . . then it's not wrong to be a soldier?"

   "Correct! And what do soldiers do?"

   "They kill people. Like the ones who came in response to your letter to the king, Father. But soldiers and kings out there in the base world, what do they have to do with us?"

   "Your question is very interesting, my son. Because you're simply asking the following: Is there a situation when such as you or I would be able to kill? I see that you are doubtful, and before you say anything foolish that you might regret I will answer you. There is indeed an exception. The Lord Jesus in his ineffable kindness of course meant that we should not kill other children of God, not even Roman soldiers, or Danish ones for that matter. But there is a people not included in the Lord's prohibition, and I think you can guess who they are, can't you?"

   "The Saracens!" Arn said at once.

   "Right again! Because the Saracens are the most nefarious race that the Devil has put on our earth. They are not human beings, they are devils in human form. They do not hesitate to impale Christian babies on their spears and roast them over fires and then eat their fill. They are known for their dissolute lives, their excessive drinking, and their constant habit of sodomy and fornication with animals. They are the scum of the earth, and every dead Saracen is a pleasing sight for Our Lord, and whoever kills Saracens has committed a holy act and is therefore assured of a place in Paradise!"

   Father Henri had gradually grown more agitated as he enumerated the heinous ways of the Saracens, and Arn's eyes had grown wider and wider as he listened to these comments. What Arn had heard surpassed his understanding. His mind refused even to picture such a scene with these detestable creatures eating roasted Christian babies from their spear points. He couldn't conceive how such devils could take the form of human beings.

   But he could easily understand that it would be a pleasing deed to God, even for brothers within walls, to kill such evil. He also drew the conclusion that there was a vast distance between the Danish riffraff that had so unfortunately turned to the path of robbery and the Saracens. In that one case the commandment Thou shalt not killwas valid without exception. In the second case it was the direct opposite.

   Although such a simple and clear conclusion had little practical importance up here in the North.

During the years Arn had not been able to sing, he had changed, just as his work had changed. The time that he previously would have spent with Brother Ludwig and the choir brothers, several hours each day, had now become time spent with Brother Guy down by the shore. Brother Guy soon taught him the methods from his home district for knotting nets, catching fish, and maneuvering small boats. For safety's sake Brother Guy had also seen to it that Arn learned how to dive and swim.

   With Brother Guilbert he had now become both a worker and a pupil. He was given all the heavier tasks in the smithies, and his arms grew in bulk almost as fast as his body shot up in height. He mastered most of the everyday smithing activities so that he could make good and marketable items. Only when it came to forging swords did he still lag far behind Brother Guilbert.

   The two mares, Khadiya and Aisha, had now given birth to three foals, and Khamsiin had grown into a stallion as powerful as Nasir. It was Arn's job to take care of all the horses from Outremer, to break the new foals, and make sure that Nasir and Khamsiin were each kept isolated in a fenced pasture so that they wouldn't mate with Nordic mares in an order other than what Brother Guilbert had determined after precise studies.

   Yet Brother Guilbert's great hope that these horses from Outremer would bring in much silver was fulfilled only slowly. The Danish magnates who came to visit primarily to buy new swords for themselves and herbs for their women regarded the foreign horses with suspicion. They thought that these animals were too spindly and didn't look like they could do very much. At first Brother Guilbert had a hard time taking such objections seriously and actually suspected that the Danes were joking with him. Then he realized that the barbarians were quite seri ous, sometimes even leading in their own animals to show him proudly how a real horse should look. Brother Guilbert grew dejected.

   Finally circumstances led him to devise a trick that did indeed work well, but which made him feel guilty and contrite. One of these Danes led in his chubby, unruly Nordic horse to compare its advantages to those of the "skinny" ones. The man extolled both his steed's strength and his speed, which far surpassed anything foreign. Brother Guilbert at once had a bright idea. He suggested that the honorable Danish knight should race down to the shore and back to the cloister, and that only a little cloister boy would ride one of the new horses. And if the honorable Danish gentleman won the race, he wouldn't have to pay anything for the sword he had just purchased.

   To his wide-eyed surprise Arn was told that he was to ride Khamsiin, and race a fat old man on a horse that looked very similar to the man. Arn had a hard time believing his ears, but he had to obey. When the two riders were ready outside the cloister walls, Arn asked Brother Guilbert, speaking in Latin out of sheer nervousness although the two of them always spoke French together, whether he was supposed to ride full tilt or take it easy so that the sausage-looking horse could keep up. Oddly enough, Brother Guilbert gave him strict orders to ride at full speed. He obeyed, as always.

   Arn was already back at the cloister when the Danish knight had made it only halfway and was down by the shore turning around.

   Then some rich men from Ringsted, who enjoyed racing horses and betting money on them, now found that the skinny horses from Vitskøl were at least good for one thing. The rumor then spread to Roskilde, and soon horses from Vitae Schola were commanding large sums of money. But that was not what Brother Guilbert had had in mind.

   The exercises Brother Guilbert was now asking Arn to try on horseback were no longer simply about balance and speed, but had to do with matters of considerably greater finesse. They spent about an hour each day in one of the stallion's pastures, riding around each other in specific patterns, backing, rearing and turning in the air, moving sideways or sideways and forward or back at the same time, teaching the horses which signals meant strike with the forehooves and jump forward at the same time, or backward kick with both legs followed by a jump to the side. It was an art that Arn liked when everything went as planned, but he could find it somewhat monotonous. At least during the obligatory practices. It was more exciting with the completely free exercises when they practiced with wooden swords or lances against each other.

   The practice on foot had become much more difficult, and was mainly about striking and parrying with swords; for a long time now, Arn had been using a real steel sword. He was still humbly convinced that he was a wretched swordsman. Yet he didn't give up; he persevered with this work in this Lord's vineyard as well. Lack of faith would have been a great sin.

   His work with Brother Guy down at the beach was quite another story. Brother Guy had finally given up the apparently impossible task of enticing the Danes around Limfjord to eat mussels. The mussel beds had been reduced to a fraction of their original ambitious size and now yielded only enough to meet the demand of the Provençal cooks at Vitae Schola.

   Brother Guy's task was not to bring in income to Vitae Schola but to spread the blessings of civilization, and he was going to do that by setting a good example. The intentions behind his work were much the same as those for the brothers who worked in farming: not to focus on selling the produce, primarily, but to inform. In that respect he had begun by failing miserably in introducing the populace to the blessings of mussels.

   But things went better with fishing gear and boat-building. When he saw the Limfjordings' fish-spears with straight tips, he went to Brother Guilbert and asked him to make some fishspears with barbed tips, which he later distributed to the fishermen. When he discovered that the Limfjordings fished only with stationary equipment inside the fjord, he began to make movable nets and bottom seines. The difference between his nets and the nets of the Limfjordings was primarily the suppleness that came from the larger mesh and thinner material that he used.

   It took Arn about a year to learn the art of tying nets well enough that Brother Guy pronounced his nets to be as good as those made by a boy from home. For Arn the work was not hard, but tedious.

   Soon enough everything began functioning the way Brother Guy had intended. The Limfjordings started coming from the villages around Vitae Schola to study with curiosity, and at first with some suspicion, how to use movable nets. Brother Guy, with Arn as his interpreter, naturally offered to share his knowledge in a Christian spirit.

   This meant that now and then Brother Guy would leave Arn alone at the boathouse on the shore while he took Danish fishermen out in the boats to show them how to place nets from a moving boat. But those who came to learn how to tie the new nets were all women, young and old, since net-tying was women's work around the Limfjord.

   And that was how Arn, whose only experience of women was what resembled a mirage in his evening prayers when he prayed for his mother's soul, now suddenly found himself almost daily surrounded by women. At first all the women, young and old, made merry at the expense of the gangly young man with the strong arms who, blushing and stammering, kept his eyes fixed on the ground so that he always showed his shaved pate instead of his blue eyes.

   Arn knew in theory how a teacher should behave, since he had had so many. But what he thought he knew about the art of teaching did not match what he now experienced, since his pupils did not behave with the obedience and dignity that befitted pupils. They joked and giggled, and the older women sometimes even unchastely stroked his head.

   But Arn gritted his teeth, because he had a task to carry out responsibly. After a while he dared raised his eyes somewhat. And then he raised his eyes unavoidably to their breasts under thin summer shifts and their happy, coquettish smiles and their curious eyes.

   Her name was Birgite and she had thick copper-red hair gathered in a single braid down her back; she was the same age as he was, and she often wanted him to show her something over again even though he was sure she had already learned it. When he sat down next to her he could feel the warmth of her thigh, and when she pretended to fumble he took her hands to show her one more time how to knot and crochet the net.

   He didn't know that now he was a sinner, so it took a while before Father Henri realized what was happening. But by then it was too late.

   She was the most beautiful creature Arn had ever seen in his life, with the possible exception of Khamsiin. And he began dreaming of her at night, so that he awoke self-defiled without having consciously done it. He began dreaming of her in the daytime too, when he was supposed to be busy with other things. When Brother Guilbert once gave him a box on the ear because he wasn't paying attention during practice, he hardly knew what had happened.

   When Birgite shyly asked him to bring some of the herbs that they had in the cloister, the ones that smelled like a dream, he assumed that she must mean lemon balm or lavender. A brief furtive question to Brother Lucien quickly decided the choice; all women were crazy about lavender, muttered Brother Lucien absentmindedly, having no idea what a fire he had just ignited.

   At first Arn smuggled out a twig or two now and then. But when she kissed him on the forehead, quickly so that no one would see, he lost his wits completely. The next time he brought her a whole armful, which Birgite, chirping with glee, at once carried off home. He watched her nimble bare feet moving so swiftly that the sand sprayed around them.

   It was in that state, pining with an absent look and gaping mouth, that Brother Guy found his young apprentice. And with that there was a brusque stop to the infatuation, because at the same time Brother Lucien, to his perplexity, had found big, mysterious holes in his supply of lavender.

   Arn was punished with two weeks on bread and water and isolation for meditation and prayer during the first week. Since he didn't have his own cell but shared one with several lay brothers, he now had to do his penance in a free cell inside the closed section of the monastery. With him he took the Holy Scriptures, the oldest and most worn-out copy, and nothing else.

   Of his two great sins he could understand one of them, but the other one he could not. No matter how much he honestly tried, no matter how much he prayed for the Holy Virgin's forgiveness.

   He had stolen lavender; that was something concrete and understandable. Lavender was a desirable product outside the cloister, and Brother Lucien sold it with much success. Arn had simply mistaken something that was gratia, such as teaching the method for knotting nets, with something that existed for income, such as Brother Guilbert's sword-forging or Brother Lucien's plants—although not all the plants, by any means. Some of them, like chamomile, were gratiaas well.

   Father Henri had also noticed this. Even though theft was theft, and thus an abominable breach of the cloister's rules, this was something that, to say the least, had occurred out of youthful ignorance. Father Henri had carefully listened to Brother Guy's view of what had happened. Yet this led to Brother Guy also receiving a reprimand since he had not taken Arn's errors very seriously, and had even slipped in an explanation that if Father Henri had seen the girl himself then the whole matter would not have seemed so mysterious.

   Arn's second and worse sin was that he had felt lust. Had he been a brother admitted to the order, he would have been punished with half a year of bread and water, and he would have been allowed to work only with the kitchen garbage and the latrines.

   In his isolation Arn now had to repent for his sin of stealing the lavender, a sin that he easily could regret sincerely. But it was impossible for him to understand why it was worse than theft to long for and dream about Birgite. He couldn't stop himself. His hair shirt didn't help, the cold of night in his cell didn't help, nor did the hard wooden bed without a lambskin or blanket. When he lay awake he saw her before him. If he managed to fall asleep he dreamed about her freckled face and brown eyes or her naked feet running quick as little kid-goats through the sand. And his body behaved shamefully as soon as he fell asleep. In the morning one of the brothers, without saying a word, would put a bucket of ice-cold water in Arn's cell. The first thing he did was to shove his shameful member into the water to cool off the all-too-obvious sin.

   And when he had to compose himself so he could devote himself to the Holy Scriptures, it was as if the Devil himself were leading him to the very passages that he shouldn't read. He could find his way around in the Holy Scriptures so well that he tried looking up verses at random with his eyes closed. And yet he found verses such as:

Love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehe ment flame.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.

   No matter how Arn tried to use his knowledge of how God's word should be read and interpreted, he could not view love as a sin. This power, which God the Father called a blessing to humanity, which was so strong that an ocean could not drown it, and no man, no matter how rich, could buy it for himself for coins of silver, this power that was as impossible to subdue as death itself, how could that be a sin?

   During Arn's second week of penance on bread and water, when he was allowed to speak, Father Henri sternly brought up the subject, since they had soon agreed about the theft of the lavender. He wanted to try to get the overheated young man to understand what love was. Hadn't Saint Bernard himself described it all as clearly as water?

   A human being begins by loving himself for his own sake. The next stage in development is that humans learn to love God, but still for their own sake and not for God's sake. Then humanity does learn to love God, and no longer for their own sake but for God's sake. Finally, humanity learns to love humanity, but only for God's sake.

   What happened in that process of development was that cu piditas, or desire, which lies at the heart of all human appetite, ended up in control and was converted into caritas,so that all base desire was cleansed away and love became pure. All this was elementary, wasn't it?

   Arn reluctantly agreed that it was indeed elementary; like almost everyone else at Vitae Schola he was quite familiar with all the texts of Bernard de Clairvaux. But as Arn understood it, there must be two types of love. It was true that he loved Father Henri, Brother Guilbert, Brother Lucien, Brother Guy, Brother Ludwig, and all the other monks. Without hesitation he could fix his blue eyes on Father Henri's brown eyes and confirm this, and he knew that Father Henri could see straight into his soul.

   But that couldn't be the whole truth . . . and so he suddenly, without being able to stop, began citing long passages from the Song of Songs.

   What was God's intention with this? And what had Ovid been talking about in those texts that Arn had read by mistake as a boy? Wasn't Ovid's text suspiciously similar to God's Word in certain respects?

   After his uncontrollable outburst Arn bowed his head in shame. He had never before uttered such an insubordinate polemic to Father Henri. He wouldn't have found it unfair to receive another two weeks on bread and water as punishment, since he had shown himself to be unrepentant.

   But Father Henri's reaction was not what he expected. He almost seemed glad about what he'd heard, although naturally he couldn't share Arn's view.

   "Your will is strong, your mind is still free and at times intractable, like something in those horses you break. I have certainly watched you do it, let me tell you," said Father Henri thoughtfully. "This is good, because more than anything I was afraid that I'd broken your will so that you would not understand God the day He calls you. So much for that. Now to why you are wrong."

   Father Henri explained the whole thing calmly and quietly. It was true that God had given human beings a lib idowhich was not shameful, and it was this that the Song of Songs, for example, talked about. The divine order behind this, of course, was that humankind had the task of replenishing the earth, and that goal was better served by the fact that the special activity required to fulfill this duty was pleasant. And in a bond sanctified by God, within the sanctity of marriage, with the purpose of begetting children, this desire was pleasing to God and not at all a sin.

   From this explanation Arn immediately drew the completely absurd conclusion that a man and a woman should wait until they found someone they loved and then have their lib idoblessed by marriage. Father Henri was much amused by this bizarre idea.

   But Arn did not yield, encouraged by Father Henri's unexpectedly tempered disposition. Because, Arn went on, if love in itself, that is, the form of love talked about in the Song of Songs, was not something evil but quite the opposite, under certain given premises, something pleasing to God—why was all such activity forbidden for those who toiled in God's garden? In short, how could love be a gross sin punishable by bread and water and a hair shirt if one was enticed by it, and yet at the same time be a blessing for humanity?

   "Well," said Father Henri, clearly amused by the question. "To begin with, one must of course distinguish between the higher world and the lower. Plato, you know. We belong to the higher world, that is the basic theoretical starting point, but I presume you want more meat on the bones than that, because you do know your Plato. Imagine then all the greening fields around Vitae Schola, think of all of Brother Lucien's herbs and fruits and the knowledge he spreads to our neighbors, think of Brother Guilbert's forging art and horse training, or Brother Guy's fishery. Observe now that I'm not speaking in metaphors but keeping to the practical plane. When you think about all this, what does it mean?"

   "We do good for our neighbors. Just as the Lord is always our shepherd, we can at least be the shepherds of humanity. We give people a better life through our knowledge and our work, is that what you mean, father?"

   "Yes, my son, that's exactly what I mean. We are like God's knowledge-bearers going out into the unknown—who said that, by the way?"

   "Holy Saint Bernard, of course."

   "Yes, that's right. We test the unknown, we tame nature, we bend the steel in new ways, we find a remedy for evil, and we make the bread last longer. That is what we do in a purely practical sense. Added to that is the knowledge we disseminate, in the same way as we sow wheat, about the Word of God and how it is to be understood. Are you with me so far?"

   "Yes, of course, but how can that . . ." Arn began, but he was much too filled with the argumentative spirit and had to restrain himself and start over. "Forgive me, father, but let me ask the question anew and from a purely concrete perspective. Forgive me if I'm impertinent, I understand all that you say about our good work. But why can't the brothers in the order ever enjoy the pleasures of love? If love is good, why do we have to refrain from it?"

   "That can be explained on two levels," said Father Henri, seemingly still equally untroubled and amused by his pupil's brooding. "Our high calling, our work as God's most assiduous servants on earth, has a price. And that price is that we must devote both our soul and our body to the service of God. Otherwise we could never accomplish anything lasting. Imagine if the brothers here had women and children in every nook and cranny! At least half our time would be spent on things other than what we now are able to achieve. And we would start looking around anxiously for property, since our children would need an inheritance from us—and that's only one thing! Our vow of poverty thus has much the same function as our vow of chastity. We own nothing, and when we die the Church owns everything we have used and created."

   Arn fell silent. He saw the logic in what Father Henri had said; he was also grateful that Father Henri had chosen to explain using base earthly examples instead of casting himself into the teachings of Plato and Saint Bernard's theories about different human souls at different stages. But he was still not satisfied; it felt as though something was missing in the logic. If nothing else, one might ask why self-defilement should be so terrible. Was it like a sort of gluttony of the soul, perhaps? Or merely something that drew one's thoughts away from God? Actually it was impossible, he admitted with a blush, to think about God at the same time he was doing that.

   When Father Henri saw that Arn seemed to have understood and at least largely accepted the simple explanations he had received, Father Henri, clearly in high spirits, decided that the rest of Arn's week of penance should take place in the cookhouses with the Provençal brothers. Still on a diet of bread and water, however, which could be a very difficult test in a cookhouse, but strengthening for the will of the soul.

The cookhouses were the most intense workplaces in all of Vitae Schola. The brothers who worked in the fields went home to vespers, the brothers who worked in the smithies and carpentry shops, those who did stonecutting or spinning, those who worked in the farrieries, the brickworks, or the barns, the monks in charge of sheep tending or beekeeping or the herb gardens or the vegetable field—all had their nightly pauses from work, and they all had time for their reading without getting behind in their daily tasks.

Yet in the cookhouses there were only two quiet hours in the

day, after midnight mass when the fires were banked and all was silent and shining clean. Long before dawn the work began again, first with the bread-baking for the day. Gradually the cookhouses were filled with more and more monks and lay brothers. The hours before the big midday meal were the most intense, with ten monks and lay brothers working simultaneously and in a great rush. Each day there were between fifty and sixty mouths to feed, depending on how many brothers happened to be away and how many guests they had. In the cookhouses Brother Rugiero de Nîmes ruled with absolute power, and serving under him were his own brothers Catalan and Luis. They however had not yet been accepted as members of the order, possibly because they never had enough time left over for their studies.

   The morning that Arn showed up for service, the midday meal was going to be lamb. So Arn's first task was go down to the shepherds and fetch two young lambs, then lead them back up to the slaughterhouse next to the cookhouses. These particular animals were not the ones to be served that day. Two lambs had been slaughtered ten days earlier and were then hung up and cured for the day's meal. They were now to be replaced in the cooling room next to the big cookhouse with two freshly slaughtered animals, which in turn would be served in ten days. Only barbarians ate uncured meat.

   Arn didn't enjoy leading the two unsuspecting lambs up to the cookhouses. He had put a leather thong around their necks and was gently pulling them along, now and then coaxing them onward when they stopped to nibble at a tuft of grass that looked particularly tasty. He thought of all the metaphors in the Holy Scriptures that depicted this very relationship between the good shepherd and his flock; right now he was truly no good shepherd.

   When he reached the slaughterhouse with the lambs, they were at once taken in hand by a sullen lay brother, who without much ado hung them up on big hooks by one rear hoof and slit their throats. While the life ran out of the lambs and the whites of their eyes rolled up in terror, the lay brother took a reed broom and opened a wooden gate to a water channel so that the blood was flushed from the brick floor into an underground drain. When this was done another lay brother came in, and using a knife each man rapidly transformed the animals into something that more resembled meat and food.

   Arn then had to take the still-warm skins to the tannery and the guts to the gut-cleaners. Then he went to the big stack of ice and dug out new ice blocks that he wheeled over to the cooling room, where the new, numbered carcasses already hung at the end of the row of calves, pigs, cows, ducks, and geese. The blocks of ice had to be placed by a flume in the middle of the cooling room so that the meltwater could run off into the drainage system. It was dark in there and cold. Arn shivered as he used something resembling holy-water sprinklers to splash the porous brick walls with cold water. The room had a high ceiling, and way at the top there were small holes that let in light and allowed all the unclean vapors from the animal carcasses to escape.