The Submerged Cathedral Page 11

  Martin used to think medicine was about knowledge, and faith about ignorance. Under the weak Australian winter sun, all intellect sunken away, he wonders why Christian men have not believed in that foreign word, karma.

  At the end of the day he can’t lift a teapot. His shoulders burn. It is more difficult still to kneel in the abbey, with the smell of the animals’ cut organs uncleaned from him despite the scrubbing. Once again he does not know why he is here. If he has ever had a reason that is speakable.

  The next morning he must do it all again. He is hungry, in time with the stomach squirls of Matthias next to him. In the abbey he abandons prayer. Lets out his stomach, rests his head on his empty folded hands and listens to the shrieks of the cockatoos slinging themselves across the white sky outside, and waits quietly for that other possibility. Belief.

  Anthony watches Martin through the early years, his hands unspeaking still, his wanderings up through the bush to the ridge. At the desk beside him in the scriptorium in the evenings Anthony reads Genesis again, but some nights the words evade him and he uses the stillness to look around at the other men. Turning pages with fingers calloused from shovelling, or milking, or holding fence posts or sledge-hammering them in. Fingers clasping over the knuckles of their own other hand while they wait for God to answer them from the paper. And sometimes two cupped hands will make a private cradle for a young or old man’s face, just resting there a while from exhaustion or confusion or homesickness, a cradle latticed with dark and flesh-coloured light, and all the things that writhe slowly through the hours of a monastery’s day.

  Yet at times he has watched it grow: an understanding of a reason to be here, settling into a man like peace. It is in the warmth of one man’s hand on another’s shoulder while they carry firewood, or in one slowing his footsteps to walk in time with his friend. When Anthony feels his own reason to stay, it is like swimming. And it is the rhythm of the swimming itself, not how far it takes him, that gives him certainty.

  As Anthony works in the infirmary’s laundry, boiling the sheets, he daydreams about the Tree of Knowledge, as he used to when a child.

  What a tree that must have been. Vast, and stretching skywards, gold-encrusted, and lava flowing down it, and hanging in its branches visions of all human history’s ideas. What a cacophony! With the birds, and insects climbing in and out of all invention. Think of it: the Eiffel Tower, and now rocket ships, and electricity, and the telegraph, and inventions of every other kind – radio waves, and cosmic photographing instruments. And it must have spread the size of a continent, at least, to hold all human knowledge in its limbs.

  The water boils. Anthony pokes the sheets under with a stick, and thinks of all the languages of the tree, and all Leonardo’s art, Picasso’s, and all of New York City, the ships to get there, all the wars and all religions of the world sprouted there on its limbs. And trigonometry, and Marie Curie’s spectacular hatchings. Yes, and DNA helixes, and antibiotics, and my God, did they see atomic explosions, Hiroshima burning, in it? In this tree, the tree of all knowledge?

  And those two poor new-made fools standing beneath it, bamboozled.

  He lifts the sheets out with the stick, steam filling the room. Thinks of Martin breathing next to him in the scriptorium, head bent over a book, frowning.

  Anthony hefts the steaming sheets into the wringer. It does not concern him that none of them will ever know anything. He thinks bamboozlement is a sort of grace.

  Twenty-One

  A CROP DUSTER DRONES overhead, on its way to who knows where, dropping fertiliser or something else to rain down on the land. At the water pump Martin is sweating, though now in the midst of a year-old drought the air is drier than ever. Anthony has told him there is a mouse plague in the northern states. The plane scours the sky overhead, above these times of famine and plague and strange raining air.

  Those years ago when he worked in Sydney the city was scandalised one silver afternoon by a harebrained pilot flying his Cessna under the Harbour Bridge on a dare. ‘Just like drivin’ a car,’ the young man drawled later, when he’d landed on a Griffith farmer’s airstrip. Grinning for the local paper with a piece of rice stalk sticking from his mouth and braces holding up his trousers. The rice-farmer clapping his back and laughing. ‘The best pilot since Pontius,’ said Griffith farmer Mr Alex Downey, read the caption.

  Anthony has told him there is only one novice entering this year. ‘A different kind of drought,’ he had said, peering at a yellow dishcloth in his hand after wiping dust from his dark glass bottles over the sink.

  Martin had not answered, but returned to his rosary, counting the years and the months and the days he has been here. Wondering about the shape of the world now beyond the boundaries of this particular knobbled blur of earth.

  He remains fearful of the gloom of the dormitory in which he still wakes amid the muffled noises of the sleeping men. Most remembrances have long ago begun to fail him. Sandra’s face, and Ellen’s, have turned opaque. The road to the mountains house has become any road he ever drove. Even Jocelyn’s face fades in and out sometimes. But this other unwanted image still rises clear and strong. A perfectly formed dead child held naked in his hands, glistening and warm from his mother’s slowly breathing body. Over the years in his dreams that weight has become a stone, or water, or seaweed, or earth. Anything but that sweet wet armful of someone else’s lifeless child.

  He takes this memory with him when he visits the old hillside grave, buries it there with his prayers every time.

  Twenty-Two

  LENTEN WINDS COME sailing over the paddocks.

  Thistling for the seventeenth day. The mattock thuds into the earth, he levers it with calloused fingers and palm-flesh, the musty blade tears at the stubble’s roots. Thuds, then tears. Thuds, then tears. Thuds, then tears. Takes a step. Thuds, then tears.

  More than four years here and he thinks he may be beginning to know the edges of a vast god.

  In the evenings he climbs the ridge to history, to the baby’s grave. Gets to his knees and sits there on his haunches, enclosed among the trees and breathing in the earthy air. He thinks he may have learnt what it means to pray, here. But still he asks the air for the thing he knows he cannot have.

  Coming down the hill he sees young Frank, sweeping the porch, watching him. He tries to catch Martin’s eye as they file into the abbey.

  Martin ignores him. This new boy is particularly annoying, he moons around after one brother then another, flattering them in schoolboy whispers, offering bits of gossip. No doubt he has been thrilling the others with news of Martin’s wanderings in the bush, despite the abbot’s latest warnings.

  Days later, chipping weed from the paddocks, Martin sees Frank bobbing nearer to him across the dead flat. He keeps working, silent. The boy is at his side, smiling, dropping his mattock lightly to the earth, moving about in a mime of work.

  His fingers flicker, signing to Martin that he wishes he had a secret place to pray like that. The dark band of the bush ridge rises up behind Frank’s sweep of arm. Martin stares. But decides the boy is all speculation and false humility, and ignores this invitation.

  He straightens up to toss the thistles into the barrow.

  Frank leans in, turning his head to look Martin in the eye, whispers, ‘I envy you.’

  Martin breathes, turns from the barrow, closes his eyes. Swings the mattock high, and it comes down cutting hard into the earth. Oblivious, Frank is still talking: he cannot be as true a brother as Martin, he has too many doubts, is not as strong in his faith.

  Carefully swinging the mattock, Martin begins therosary, loudly, inside his head. He straightens, meets Frank’s gaze and stiffly gestures silence, work.

  Frank smirks and nods, twirls the mattock pole in his hands. And then, keeps on: he cannot speak to the abbot on this matter, prayer does not help. ‘You could help me, though, perhaps, if we could talk.’

  Martin, all quiet fury now, lifts dead thistles with his hands into the barrow.
And then lifts the barrow handles, pushing it striding over the paddock away from the boy’s whining voice.

  Frank smiles after him with his pale blank face, then the smile falls away, and he turns, listless, back to his mattock.

  At Vespers Martin sees him across the gold light given off by the pine pews. Closes his eyes, prays the stupid boy’s face from him. Opens his eyes and sees Frank open-mouthed, singing about him like a child. Feels tightening in his jaw.

  Another afternoon, at the henhouse, stooping in under the roosts for the eggs, Frank starts up. ‘It’s a sin, I know. But really it’s just admiration. I don’t understand how that can be a sin?’

  Martin mumbles to himself about the eggs. He turns and chickens flail upwards. The dusty air.

  Handing the warm eggs over to the young brother he sees the raised, adoring face.

  ‘I mean, it’s a good thing, isn’t it? I can learn from watching you. Everything being so easy for you. In the nicest way.’

  Frank is confidential, twittering, flirting. He’s fucking blushing.

  Martin knows that any god should strike him dead for what he does next, does not care. The witless Frank held swaying in the chicken wire, the smoking air, Martin’s snarling into the boy’s face – hears the years of silent rage in his own voice: ‘EASY! Just fuck off, you pathetic little shit. Go home.’

  Poor Frank’s mulleted face, his stupid child’s eyes springing tears, sprawling in the chicken dirt, the dropped eggs broken yellow pools in the dust, his habit rucked above his adolescent knees.

  Martin spends hours in silent shuddering, begging forgiveness down on his knees, in private, in the church. Wishing away the words, the hands round the boy’s thin shoulders. Knowing Frank will never forgive him, Jesus, God will never forgive him.

  He has wasted four years, was getting so close.

  And now what?

  Frank, sniffily, comes to him months later. Says he has found it in his heart, with God’s help, he draws it out, the abbot has helped him … to forgive him. And Martin gets down on his knees in the grassy dust, kissing the hand of this silly boy who may be his salvation.

  Twenty-Three

  THE VEGETABLE GARDENER, James, is angular and large-footed in his steel-capped black boots, an older hand even than Martin, who has been sent here to obey his directions.

  It seems he is too proud, is spending too much time alone, he has been seen again walking the ridge, the novice master (that sniveller) has told him. And so he stands at the garden gate, waiting to be communal, and humbled.

  In the refectory, where boredom and silence make hungry men lose their manners, he has watched James. Because in a silent place even chewing becomes an activity. And staring. They all do it, except the odd new arrival who remains polite for a few weeks, until the silence gets to him and he too makes his body’s facilities become interesting. Martin can register every movement of his own eyeballs now, he counts them, maps the path of his shifting iris, sometimes makes himself giddy in this cartography. Or he takes his own pulse, the only shred of ritual left from those long ago days when he thought his hands could heal.

  Across the tables he has watched them all. Anthony, that talking infirmarian, gabbler, who eats too fast, looking about him as though willing someone to speak. Matthias, who works on his chewing as though it is a job, staring at the breadboard, his great filthy fingers curled in fists around his knife and fork. He eats with his mouth open, breathing in disgusting catarrhal snorts. It was in the refectory that the realisation came one day, some time back, that this life had acquainted Martin with hatred.

  He has his refectory portraits of them all. And James picks out his bread with too much care, he smiles, his fingernails are clean. He makes Martin feel decayed.

  Now in the autumn air, leaning over the garden gate, Martin exhales, closes his eyes. For the thousandth time he thinks of leaving. Of finding his way back to Jocelyn and the garden in her head. And then, instantly, as always, of the sickening truth of her being lost, not wanting him.

  James’s hand is on his arm and the smooth neck of a garden fork slapped into his palm.

  Obedience, humility, perseverance. Hate your own will, wrote Benedict.

  James directs him to dig up the far garden bed and prepare it for planting; it has been untouched since last summer. At first he uses the fork, but after a time he can see the only way to remove all the weeds is to use small movements with the fingers, grasping the base of a weed. After its turning, the soil is soft, the weeds come easily away. Pick, pick.

  He watches James at another bed from the corner of his eye, on his hands and knees, dibbing holes for seedlings.

  There is nothing masculine about this duty here. Pick, pick.

  Except the silence, perhaps.

  But then the graziers on nearby properties are allowed large gestures, shouts, curses, kicks even, at a dog or a gate. They swagger, they flap their hats at flies, at the sun, and sweat sheens their skin. Despite the hats they are red-and rough-skinned, their hands, even wrists, thickened with callouses. He shifts and kneels again in the soil, his hands beginning to perspire in the welder’s gloves. Pick, pick. The straw hat has become heavy. He crouches and removes the gloves. He kneels forward again, plucks at weeds with his fingers, thumb and forefinger, lifting and sinking as though he is sewing, embroidering the earth with the gestures of a woman, or a surgeon.

  When he studied medicine he had practised his sutures in the furniture of his house. An old girlfriend had stood outside one night, watching through the window at the movements of his wrist and hand as he knelt on the couch. Like a ballet, she had said. His chairs, couches, cushions, curtains, all sutured with transparent thread to his shining future.

  He looks up to see James sitting on his haunches, watching him. Their eyes meet and then each turns back to his work.

  He tips a barrow of sheep shit into the soil, fetches the fork again. Foot on iron, forces it into earth, and lifts and turns the soil clods.

  Sexual need runs through this place sometimes like a shiver. His own desire has become a weed through his sleep. He has dreamt of that old girlfriend, of the needle in his fingers. He dreamt he sewed her to himself. In the morning he realised he had ejaculated in his sleep. Is not ashamed, they cannot make him that. But his need wearies and bores him. Our Father, Who art in heaven. It is common, he knows; these thoughts happen to everyone.

  But still, after all these years, during these needy nights it is mostly Jocelyn in his bed.

  He pushes the thought away, again puts a foot to the iron shelf of the fork. Whispers the prayer inside his head, begins again. Reminds himself that every minute here – in the garden, the chapel, the library – each second is a point in time further from her, from that day. He welcomes it.

  All things pass.

  Twenty-Four

  BEHIND THE BUILDING is the view from the verandah – the pale valley, the dark velvet ring of reeds and rushes around the dam. It is not visible to him. He walks, circling the rose garden, watching the grey cement path and the appearance, disappearance, appearance of his black boots from beneath the skirts of his habit. The roses list over the dust-dry earth. The doubt, always only just dormant, rises through him like a temperature. Is it possible to believe in something one cannot understand?

  He walks. He wishes he could see the valley. He watches the same tough straggle of rosebush as he passes it. He sits, for a while, under the awning covering the cloister walk, reading. Or rather, tracing the pattern of marks of ink on the page with the movement of his eyes, comparing the way some letters bleed more heavily into the paper than others. H, for example, seems to sink more thoroughly into the paper than A. He breathes, slowly, this dry air and the heat of the place contained in this breath. Then in this breath.

  He thinks of Jocelyn’s fantasised garden, of her somewhere – still in England? In Europe? – standing amid a field of plants, without him. Forces his mind away from this, yet again, and stands. He shakes his head quickly, violently
, as he used to do when driving long distances to keep himself awake. He walks, tries to turn his mind to God. Whatever this word might mean.

  Later, as he’s walking up the hillside to the old grave with the letter in his pocket, he wonders why he has written it. He has long ago understood there are some things for which forgiveness is not possible. He did not ask for it.

  Dear Jocelyn. Her written name so unfamiliar now, only her face unforgettable. Are she and Ellen together, still, with Sandra? He imagines Sandra. She would be much older now, though it is impossible for him to say how many years have passed. Does she remember him, the doctor who let her brother die?

  He has said barely anything in the letter, only where he is, and sorry, and something Anthony told him, from the Song of Songs.

  The season shifts again and it is hot, and the sheep start, then stumble away across the stony ground as he walks up the hill. One bleats a guttural, low groan, some others repeat the sound in another key.

  The fence around the little grave is rusted in parts. He has not been here for some months, since the day he wrote to her. He will paint the fence soon. He climbs over it and kneels on the cement, begins grasping at the base of the weeds around the grave, then starts to heap them in the centre of the cement. He makes a rosary of the weeds. Hail Mary full of Grace, aloud, ‘The Lord is with Thee,’ digging the roots out with his fingers. After some time the words themselves become soothing.

  The letter was sent many months ago and nothing has come back. He is not surprised. He had written only a guessed-at street name, a London suburb, remembered from those old blue letters from Thomas.