The architect

Sleep was gone as well as hunger. Getting up before the midnight mass, I was trying to overcome dizziness, pain in the creaking bones and aching joints, me – being fiifteen years old, and at these moments I felt like a real man, a great martyr, a future genius. I felt no less than Jesus Christ’s son.

The market girl should have seen changes that had occurred in my appearance, gradually being carved out in the image and likeness of Thy Lord. When I came up to say hello to her, she put a handful of nuts into my hand, without uttering a word. Having allowed myself to eat two of them on the way to the mountain, I took out a tooth from my mouth that had rolled under my tongue. The fallen molar of a fifteen-year-old, look, my Lord, what a delicate ascetic is growing out of this rough log, from this body, being recently full up and filthy.

After Holy Communion, I managed to scratch my throat so that a piece of obley jumped out onto the rainy mud and clay, while I was convulsing with colic. Prior Edward – this unexposed mystic – worried that I had been melting away during the recent months, ordered the little Miguel to keep an eye on me; and now the monastery was gathering beside the crap-house to witness my shame, my skinny face bespattered with spittle, my holey fingernails and to top it all up, the undigested sacramental bread on a slush right under their feet.

Jorge, fierce and angry, leaned over me. He snapped at my face, distorted with horror,

“So what, do you feel like Jesus’ son? Do you feel now like a man?”

Father jerked me up from my knees and told me to go to the dortǒur. The brethren condemned. You can’t help me anymore, brothers, go away. If they decided to lock me in here, I would never be able to carry on building, roofing, erecting walls, or carving figures. They will decide to break my back over the knee, dead easy, even the weakest knee, and I would fall apart alive. But if they were after breaking my will, nothing would come out of it. After all, you can always starve yourself to death. It’s white. O Lord, how white it is, and light, light is everywhere; you can hear, my heart is setting itself free from the body cage and is flying away forever, everything around me becomes white. The outlines are getting dim, and I am fading, finally grabbing at the branch, for someone’s cloak, for the air. Praise to Him! I’m almost dead now and praise you, Lord, that I’m not scared, and praise the Lord that I don’t care.

I’ll turn myself inside out just to attract their attention.

* * *

Jorge was getting older. Sometimes, he was put in bed to be treated for several weeks, and had poultry (another reason to see a girl in the market). He could no longer have fasts.

I used to read to him, sitting next to him in the fermery, while he was telling his beads. They say, there was a town, far from us, where the carvers of coral beads were bound apprentices for twelve years to become craftsmen… And there were other cities, Paris, and – Saint-Denis behind it, with its royal tomb. In Suger, the abbot was the first to create a building like Chartres Cathedral, combining the traditions of Burgundy (pointed arches) and Normandy (ribbed frame). Mylo told me that Suger had been inspired by Jerusalem – place of the divine light. He wanted to give the same light to an ordinary stone building. To do this, it was required to figure out how to make a high vault, and arrange huge windows instead of walls. “Dilectio decoris domus Dei”[2 - Latin “the House of God should be thus beautified”], this was what Suger said about Saint-Denis. I didn’t really believe in such fairy tales. I asked Mylo, “Who they were, that person named Suger and his brethren.” “Also Benedictines, like you,” the master replied…

Jorge interrupted my thoughts,

“Are you eating well now?”

“Sure! I’ve even stolen a piece of a fried duck, going along with your health guidance! Father,” I leaned over and hugged him, “what else can I do for you?”

“Ora et labora[3 - Latin “Work and pray,” Benedectines’ logo.].”

“That’s what I keep doing! Jorge… you don’t like me being a builder, do you?”

Leaning back, Father remained silent for a long time, then answered in a small voice,

“Do whatever you want. But at least, eat occasionally, please, for god’s sake.”

Chapter 4.

Jorge

The rag on the floor turned out to be a corpse. There was a wolf in a lamb’s skin in the dark. We would find him only by morning, already stiff in death for good.

I had been working with the scripts all night, trying to rewrite for a couple of hours what I had fallen behind with for a week due to hanging upside down on the Graben construction sites. The letters came out ugly and sloppy written by ink-smeared broken fingers, which had been picked up frames of future buildings, cobblestones and tiles for a week. There were scuffing steps at the entrance to the scriptorium, and I turned round by instinct. Focusing my eyes on the column shafts, I noticed that dark marble was used to enhance the effect of the ornament. There was no one to be afraid of behind these columns. Everyone was asleep, except for me and brother Miguel, petty and caulked; his forehead was burning, with his messed up hair sticking out.

“You sick?” I managed to grab Miguel by his elbow before he fell on the bench beside me.

“No… I was going to the kitchen to get some water, and I saw a light here, and then you,” he answered, hardly able to recover from broken uneven breathing.

“And I thought that you had a fever.”

The monk looked down.

“What gives you the greatest pleasure, Anselm?”

I hesitated for a moment. While the truth was piling up in my head by the last edge that separated me from everything around – scriptorium, brethren, texts, liturgies; and I was able to spit it out into a world, very clearly shaped,

“Working with stone.”

Miguel was clearly disappointed with my answer. He went back to sleep, never getting water from the kitchen. He would be back by morning, when I flew over the wall, flaunting regulations anew, prohibiting me to spend the night outside the monastery walls, and under the sun of the seasons, I would supervise the lifting of construction material with a “wolf’s paw” or “wolf”, special tongs that left biting footprints on the stone.

Shortly before this, on May 1st, several men, the merchants’ representatives wanted to discuss the upcoming fair with Jorge. It was to be held on the territory of the abbey, and we relied on it for a certain fee. However, father was too weak. His condition hadn’t improved with the coming of spring, so the prior was entrusted to distribute trade places and solve all other issues at the fair.

On the way home, I would see the future trade rows. Edward had a cunning intuitive mind and was a natural in sales, so they were going to trade everything one could wish for. Merchants would untie their bales with squirrel, rabbit, cat skins, red and grey. Fishermen would display their harvesting of barbel, sturgeon, lamprey with alose. They would bring something less sophisticated such as wafers and pies, chestnuts and figs, butter, sour grape juice, partridges and capon, all wines varieties.

On the way home, I would meet Miguel once again, running down from the mountain, with messed up hair, overexcited, all in tears. He would slap me on my chest, I would pull him back and have a look at the small, painful grimaces that had distorted his plump face, I would lead him across the bridge of the nose, asking in a deliberate harsh toned voice that became lower and lower every day,

“What’s wrong?”

Miguel would raise his eyes wrapped in a veil of tears, and tell the other truth, formed like a stone,

“The Abbot is dead.”

* * *

Once we used to play “one, two, three, let’s run down the hill!” at this very place. And he, lining down the bottom of the basket for berries, could crush me in one movement, like a bug, which he was telling me about. The bee was called a bee, and it worked for honey and wax, midges could cover the whole fist stinging it in far away places, it could be unbearably hot over there. Raspberry, blueberry, wilds of bird cherry trees, where I was hiding from him, when he could easily finish me. But he talked about beekeepers, crops, kings, archangels, plowing, Aristotle, marsh drainage, lenders, Lord, who could also crush me at any moment with one sweep. If father allowed it.

He gave me a piggyback ride instead, then put me in a cart, taught me how to drive a horse-drawn vehicle. He was happy when I began to master the language, and he never took seriously the striving for architecture. You need your eyes to be sharp to work in the scriptorium, which was smoked by candles, ground on the letters, getting blunt around the corners of the parchment. So, he mixed up carrots with garlic to make the eyes of a book copyist tenacious; and we ate, so that we could look through into the depth of the text.

Then I got stronger, stiffened, took not a feather, but compasses, took a brick, took a jedding ax, controlled the substance, and I had to wait until my father took a breath when we occasionally went to bring some water together, and he had less and less strength. Jorge fainted and fell on the flagstones.

The rag on the floor turned out to be a dead man – and these blockheads were scared to miss the service.

* * *

What did I know about Jorge? He arrived to our land from Burgos. However, there was nothing Spanish in him, but his name. When he was a little boy, it was roughest for him to tolerate hunger in the family – he couldn’t even fall asleep because of it. Jorge was once black-haired, and then I remembered him being grey.

The body was put in the church for a day so that everyone could say goodbye. Later, we would be able to find his final resting place in the cemetery marked by planted yew trees. From ancient times, high trees had been indicated the burial place, even if the sanctuary was destroyed nearby. The height has always been visual and noble. It strives up into the sky following the gesture of the father.

Jorge was going to the grave in his black cassock, taking away the secret of my origin for good. Skinny Jorge of Burgos, the blind man, the Abbot, my beloved father, rugged abbot, iron discipline, empty stomach, the gerent of the brethren and the thunderbolt of the community, a vine grower, Jorge, bony hand, Jorge, glassy eyes – our eternal head was going away into the grave pit, and we had nothing left but to pray for his soul.

All the angels and wizards, kind and evil, lit candles in remembrance of Jorge, while I could hardly stand on my feet during this nightmarish farewell ceremony, and then kept crawling, sprawling vertically along the damp wall, and climbed up, and eventually crawled up to Ed’s cell, where I was crying all night into his straw hair, felted, wet, covering his tense brain, which was sleepless, trying to figure out variants of his own rising to the rank.

If I had come across an overexcited Miguel in scriptorium, I would not have run away to Graben, but would cheat time, and Jorge would be alive again. But time could not be deceived. It was continuous like space. It belonged merely to God, hence you could just experience it.

* * *

I buried my father – there was nowhere to grow up further.

The prior called me for a conversation, not otherwise than making amends for a magic ritual that once was disrupted. Having crossed myself and taken a deep breath, I came into his cell.

“When I become an abbot,” Edward began, as if this was already settled, “the first thing I would do is take your tonsure.”