Group Portrait with Lady (47 page)

From this moment on there could be no further doubt that the journey to Rome had been worthwhile, this compulsion to breathe a Yes having given the Au. some insight into a highly sophisticated, celibate-platonic eroticism such as Sister Cecilia had no more than hinted at. Even Sister Klementina seemed conscious of having gone a shade too far; she withdrew a good deal of the intensive charm of her eyes, her—there is no getting away from it—rosebud mouth took on a sour little twist, and the Au. reacted to her next remarks as to a deliberately administered psychological cold shower. She said—and far from not fluttering an eyelash, her eyelashes (which, surprisingly and soberingly, were short and straight, rather like little brooms) fluttered considerably as she spoke:

“Incidentally, nowadays when we discuss the problems of
The Marquise of O
_____ our pupils coolly come back at us with: ‘She should’ve taken the pill, even if she was a widow’—in this way even the lyricism of a writer of Kleist’s eminence is dragged down to the level of a cheap tabloid. But I won’t digress. The bad part about the Ginzburg case is not, as you might suppose, that miracles are being contrived. On the contrary: we can’t get rid of the miracles. We can’t get rid of the roses that bloom in midwinter where Sister Rahel is buried. I
admit we have prevented you from talking to Sister Cecilia and Scheukens—who, by the way, has been excellently taken care of, you don’t have to worry about him—but not because we are manipulating a miracle, rather because the miracle is manipulating us, and we want to keep news-hungry outsiders away from it, not because we desire the beatification process but because we don’t! Now do you believe what you promised to believe?”

This time, before answering, the Au. gave her a thoughtful and “searching” look: Sister Klementina suddenly looked so—there is no other way to express it—haggard, upset, she adjusted her coif, thereby causing—unfortunately this also is true—a wealth of auburn hair to become visible; she fished another cigarette out of the package, this time with the weary routine of a chainsmoking co-ed who at four in the morning realizes in despair that her paper on Kafka which she is to read six hours from now is a complete mess.

She poured some more tea, added milk and sugar in exactly the proportions preferred by the Au., even stirred it for him, shifted his cup closer to him, and looked at him—there is no other word for it—imploringly. Again one must visualize the situation: late on a sunny afternoon in spring. Rome. Scent of pines. The sound of cicadas dying away—church bells, marble, leather Morris chairs, wooden tubs with peonies just coming into bloom, everything positively vibrating with that Catholicism which now and again sends Protestants into raptures; the sudden wilting of Klementina’s beauty, only a few minutes before in full bloom; her sobering remark about
The Marquis of O
—. With a sigh she turned to the green box and took out paper after paper, little bundles secured by paper clips or rubber bands, five, six, ten, eighteen—a total of twenty-six: “A report for each year, and always the same: roses suddenly sprouting out of the ground in December. Roses that don’t begin to fade till roses normally begin blooming! We have gone
to the most desperate lengths, lengths you might even feel were macabre, we have exhumed her, transferred—er, her remains, which were unquestionably in a state of decay corresponding to the time of her death, to other burial grounds in the convent; then, when those terrible roses started blossoming there too, we exhumed her again, put her back where she came from, exhumed her once more, had her cremated, placing the urn in the chapel, where it is true to say that there wasn’t even a speck of Mother Earth anywhere near: roses! They came welling up out of the urn, grew rampant all over the chapel; back into the earth with her ashes—and again: roses. I’m convinced that if the urn were dropped from a plane roses would grow out of the ocean, out of the desert!

“So that’s our problem. Not telling the world but keeping it dark, that’s our problem, and
that’s
why we had to keep you away from Sister Cecilia, why we had to promote Scheukens and make him manager of a big farming estate near Würzburg, that’s why we are worried about Mrs. Pfeiffer, not because she disputes the—er—phenomenon, but because, judging by what I know of her from the additional information you have now given me, she would most likely regard it as perfectly natural for roses to blossom from the ashes of her friend Haruspica, year after year around the middle of December, a dense, thorny rose thicket such as I have never imagined outside of Sleeping Beauty. If only all this were happening in Italy—in this country we’d have nothing to fear even from the Communists, but in Germany! That would be a regression into Heaven knows what century. What would become of liturgical reform, of recent demonstrations of the physico-biological plausibility of so-called miracles! And besides: who could guarantee that the roses would go on blossoming if the affair were publicized? What kind of fools would we look like if they suddenly stopped? Even quite reactionary circles in Rome are advising us, with due courtesy, to close our files. Botanists, biologists,
and theologians have been asked to inspect the phenomenon with assurances of absolute discretion. Do you know who it was that claimed to be moved by it, who introduced the supernatural element? The botanists and biologists, not the theologians. And think of the political dimensions: from the ashes of a Jewish woman who converted, became a nun and was promptly banned from teaching, who then—let’s face it—died under highly unpleasant circumstances—from the ashes of this woman, roses have been blossoming since 1943! It’s like witchcraft. Magic. Mysticism. And I, I of all people, I who have been outspokenly critical of Benn’s biologism,
I
am saddled with this file! Do you know what an eminent prelate said to me with a chuckle on the phone yesterday? ‘Paul supplies us with enough miracles, please don’t give us any more. He is all the Little Flower we want, we don’t need any more flowers.’ Are you going to keep quiet about it?”

Here, instead of nodding, the Au. shook his head vigorously, reinforcing this movement by a clearly enunciated “No,” and because Klementina now smiled, wearily, and with the aid of the empty cigarette package swept the butts from her saucer into the Au.’s to consolidate them with his, then, still wearily and again using the empty package, swept the smokers’ traces into a blue plastic wastebasket, then, smiling, remained standing as a sign that it was time to leave, the Au. is not sure whether the purpose of denying a miracle is not in fact an attempt to contrive that miracle.

Klementina, chatting about books, accompanied the Au. to the gates. It was quite a distance, nearly a quarter of a mile across the extensive grounds. Cypresses, pines, oleanders—all familiar enough. When they reached the street, with the view of the gold-red Eternal City, the Au. handed Klementina his unopened reserve package of cigarettes, and with a smile she hid it in the sleeve of her habit, tucking it inside the shirtlike garment whose elasticized cuffs rendered it suitable for hiding
more than cigarettes. And here, while waiting for the bus that was to take him into town in the direction of the Vatican, the Au. felt the moment had come to break the platonic spell; he drew Klementina between two young cypress trees and kissed her with perfect naturalness on the forehead, the right cheek, then on the mouth. Not only did she not resist, she said with a sigh: “Mm, yes,” smiled and was silent for a few seconds until she in turn kissed him on the cheek and said, as she heard the bus approaching: “Come back—but please don’t bring any roses.”

The fact that the Au. found this journey worthwhile will be readily understood; his desire not to delay his departure and thus avoid thrusting a variety of people into conflict-situations may be understood with equal ease; and since the principle of making haste slowly did not apply in his case, he chose to return by air—inwardly racked, as he still is, by the problem of whether (and if so, to what degree) professional and private interests had combined (in terms of expenses) in this trip, and furthermore racked, if only partially, by a problem of both professional and private dimensions: had K. been subtly angling for publicity for the Gerselen miracle of the roses, or had she, with equal subtlety, been trying to prevent it? And, assuming he managed to interpret from the expression of the woman he now loved which it was that she wanted, how was he to conduct himself: objectively, as dictated by duty, or subjectively, as dictated by inclination and the desire to please K.?

Preoccupied with this quadruple problem, on edge, or perhaps one should say irritable, he found the winter of his own country,
following immediately upon the Roman spring, indeed hard to take: snow in Nifelheim, slippery streets, a bad-tempered taxi driver who was forever wanting to gas, shoot, kill, or at least beat up somebody, and—a sharp disappointment—an unfriendly reception at the convent gates in Gerselen, where he was turned away with a few brusque words by a grouchy old nun who remarked cryptically: “We’re fed up with journalists!”

However, there was nothing to stop him from walking around the convent walls (total length approximately five hundred yards around all four sides), he could still look at the Rhine, village church closed (where the altar boys had served who had once gone into ecstasies over Margret’s skin). Here Leni had lived, here Haruspica was buried, dug up, buried again, once more dug up, cremated—and nowhere, nowhere a gap in the convent wall! He was left with the village inn, and, once inside, the atmosphere was a far cry from the peaceful somnolence of Alfred Bullhorst’s village. No, here it was noisy, the Au. was eyed suspiciously, here he noticed strangers of an unmistakable category: journalists, in fact, who, when he asked the innkeeper at the counter for a room, chimed in like some mocking chorus. “A room in Gerselen, today! And maybe”—the mockery was intensified—“maybe even a room with a view of the convent garden, eh?” And when he naively nodded, a regular howl went up, a Hahaha and a Hohoho from smartly dressed men and women who, when he was taken in by further mock-friendliness and confirmed that he did indeed want a view of the snow-covered convent garden, finally accepted him into the ranks of the simpletons, became more friendly and—while the innkeeper poured and tapped, tapped and poured, put him wise: didn’t he know what everyone was talking about?—that in the convent garden a hot spring had been discovered that had caused an old rose bush to blossom; that the nuns, invoking their rights to control their own territory, had screened off the spot in question with
their own hands; that, because the door to the church tower was locked, someone had sent to the neighboring university town (the very one where B.H.T. had had his tête-à-têtes with Haruspica! Au.) to borrow a seventy-foot extension ladder from a demolition firm in order to “sneak a look at what the nuns were up to”?

Now they were all crowding around the Au., who no longer know whether he had been naive, and if so to what extent—the people from UPI, from dpa, from AFP, and even one representative of Novosti who, together with a CTK man, was determined “to tear the mask from the face of clerical Fascism and expose this election gimmick of the Christian Democratic Union. You know,” went on the Novosti man, otherwise a nice enough fellow, as he held out a beer to the Au., “in Italy the madonnas shed tears during election time, and now the latest thing is for hot springs to emerge in convent gardens in the Federal Republic of Germany, roses grow where nuns were buried, nuns, so they would have us believe, who are supposed to have been raped during the Soviet occupation of East Prussia. Anyway, it’s being claimed that this business has some Communist angle or other, and what else can Communists have done to nuns but rape them?” The Au., better informed than most of those present, having five hours previously (a view of Rome spread before him) kissed a cheek that was anything but parchment-skinned, decided to capitulate and await the newspaper reports. It was futile to continue a search for the truth here. Had Leni in some twisted way been mixed up in the story, had Haruspica been transformed into heat? He left the inn, and just as he was closing the door he heard the mocking voice of one of the women journalists starting up the old carol: “Oh see the rose that’s blossomed!”

The very next day, in the morning edition of the newspaper already quoted, he found a “definitive report”:

“The strange occurrence, sarcastically described in the Eastern European press as the ‘Gerselen Hot Springs Miracle of the Roses,’ has turned out to be due to natural causes. As indicated by the place name itself, in which the word ‘geyser’ is concealed (Gerselen may at one time have been called Geysirenheim), there were hot springs in Gerselen as long ago as the fourth century A.D., which explains why during the eighth century the place was for a time the site of a small imperial residence that was maintained until the springs dried up again. The nuns have emphatically stated, as we have been informed in an exclusive interview with the mother superior, Sister Sapientia, that they have never at any time thought in terms of a miracle and have spread no such reports; that the word may quite possibly have found its way into the reports via a former pupil whose connection with the long-standing Gerselen high school can only be described as ambivalent and who at a later date was associated with the German Communist Party. The fact of the matter is, she went on, that, as has meanwhile been confirmed by experts, the eruption—unexpected, she must admit—of some hot springs had indeed caused a number of rose bushes to bloom. Nothing, nothing whatever, declared Sister Sapientia in the down-to-earth manner of a modern, open-minded, and enlightened member of a religious order, permitted the assumption of any supernatural element.”

While he did not hesitate for a moment to tell Margret about the miracle of the roses and the hot springs and the story behind them (she was all smiles, believed everything, and urged him not to neglect Klementina), and even exposed himself to the acerbic ridicule of Lotte, who naturally said it was all a fraud
and relegated him to the embarrassing category of nun-chasers (“And I mean that literally as well as symbolically.” Lotte), the Au. hesitated to acquaint Leni with the strange happenings in Gerselen or give even an outline of the state of his investigations in Rome. B.H.T.—the Au. felt—also had a right to know the effect being attributed, after twenty-seven years, to the ashes of the Sister Rahel whom he had unquestionably held in such high esteem. Meanwhile geologists of repute, supported by a number of prospectors from an oil company that had no scruples about exploiting the affair of the miracle of the roses for publicity purposes, had expressed their unshakable opinion that the event was of “exclusively natural origin,” yet a section of the Eastern European press still clung obstinately to the version that the “Gerselen electioneering support for reactionary forces” had “collapsed merely because of indefatigable pressure from socialist forces, and it has now retreated behind the opinions of pseudoscientific experts who are entirely subservient to capitalism. This is but one more proof of the extent to which capitalist science can be manipulated.”