F by Daniel Kehlmann
The Word of the Lord, I say again. Martha wobbles back to her seat. My congregation stands and sings: Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The sun is no longer dazzling, you can recognize the clumsy pictures in the stained glass: the Lamb, the Redeemer with his staring eyes, and the loaf of bread in the cross of rays of light. This church is the same age as I am, the walls intentionally crooked, the altar a raw block of granite that for some reason is not at the east end but the west, so that at Early Mass the sun does not blind the congregation, as is the tradition, but me.
The Gospels. As they were proceeding on their journey someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” My voice doesn’t sound bad; I’m good at my job. Jesus answered him, “Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.” And to another he said, “Follow me.” But he replied, “Lord, let me go first and bury my father.” But he answered him, “Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” And another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.” To him Jesus said, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.” I close the book. How appropriate, but it’s a total accident, it’s the prescribed passage for August 8, 2008.
And now the Profession of Faith. I clear my throat and declare what I wish I could believe. God, the Father, the Almighty, Jesus Christ, the Only Son of God, crucified, died, and buried; on the third day rose again, ascended into heaven; will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. The Holy Spirit, the resurrection, the life of the world to come. Yes, I wish I did.
The Prayers of Intercession. We pray for the Dominicans, that they may diligently do God’s work, for today is the Day of Saint Dominic. Hear us, we beg you. We pray for all those who search for the truth, hear us, we pray for all those who are sick, and for all who have strayed from the certainty of faith. In our seminar for the study of the liturgy, we once discussed what sense it was supposed to make to beg an omniscient Being to grant a wish. Father Pfaffenbichel explained to us that the intercession itself was not important, it could always be omitted. But he didn’t know my congregation. Two weeks minus Prayers of Intercession last year and they were already thinking God had forgotten them. Nine emails of complaint to me and unfortunately also three to the bishop and one official resignation from the church. I had to send Frau Koppel a box of chocolates and pay her two home visits to make her change her mind.
The Eucharist. The altar boy pours water over my fingers, the organ sounds the hymn, I lift the chalice with the Host. It is a moment of drama and power. You could almost think these people actually believe that a wafer is transubstantiated into the body of a crucified man. But of course they don’t. You can’t believe any such thing, you’d have to be deranged. But you can believe that the priest believes it, and the priest in turn believes his congregation believes it; you can repeat it mechanically, and you can forbid yourself to think about it. Holy, holy, holy, I chant, and actually feel surrounded by a force field. Magical gestures, thousands of years old, older than Christianity, older than steel and fire. The first humans were already fantasizing about gods being torn limb from limb. Then later the legend of Orpheus, torn apart by the Maenads, then the tale of Osiris descended into the kingdom of darkness and emerging again reassembled as a living body, only eons later came the figure of the Nazarene. An ancient, blood-soaked dream, repeated day after day in countless places. It would be so easy to declare the whole procedure of transubstantiation to be mere symbolism, but that precisely is what constitutes heresy. You have to believe it, for so it is written. And you can’t believe it. You must, you can’t. Lift up your hearts, I say. We lift them up to the Lord, they say. Dying you destroyed our death, rising you restored our life. Lord Jesus, come in glory. The altar boy rings the little bell, its sound trembles in the air, the pews creak as my congregation goes down on its knees.
I lift up the Host. It is so quiet that you can hear the cars outside. I lay the wafers down again and perform the ritual genuflection. I immediately start to sweat, it’s hard for me to keep my balance, I fell while I was doing it last week, it was dreadfully embarrassing. Hold on, Martin, keep your back straight, hold on! Shakily, dripping with sweat, I get back on my feet. Let us pray with confidence to the Father, I pant, in the words our Savior gave us.
Our Father, hallowed be, Thy Kingdom, Thy will, our trespasses, phrases polished by a thousand years of repetition, deliver us, amen. I break the Host, push a piece into my mouth, and savor the dry, salty taste for a moment. It’s not exactly God’s body, but it tastes good. The organ begins the Agnus Dei, the five members of my congregation present themselves for communion. I’m afraid of the old people, who want the transubstantiated wafer laid on their tongues, the way it was always done before Vatican II; it’s hard to lay something on a tongue without touching it with your fingertips. But I’m in luck today, three pairs of hands and only one wrinkled ancient tongue. The last one, as always, is Adrian Schlueter.
The body of Christ, I say.
Amen, he says, not looking at the Host as he does so, but straight at me, unblinking, as if he had to prove something to me. He will come back, this evening, early tomorrow, tomorrow evening, every day, he is my trial.
The organ ascends to the final chords and stops. I begin the concluding rite. Bow your heads and pray for God’s blessing.
Go in the peace of Christ.
Thanks be to God.
I hurry to get to the exit first and position myself in the incoming blast of hot morning air. Martha Frummel’s hand feels like sandpaper, and Frau Wiegner is all hunched over, her heart isn’t good and nor is her back. Frau Koppel looks well, but as lonely as ever. Frau Helgner won’t be back as often, she’s very weak. Who does this to people? I’d really like to hug them, but I’m fat and I sweat, and they wouldn’t like it. So I just shake hands and smile. They’re gone already, only one person is still standing here.
“Dear Herr Schlueter, I’m afraid I’m in rather a hurry.”
“A question of belief, Father Friedland, it won’t leave me in peace.”
I try to look at him as if I’m interested.
“The Trinity. I’ve read Tertullian. And Rahner. And His Holiness Ratzinger, of course. But I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“The Holy Ghost.”
I look at him despairingly.
“I understand the Son, I understand the Father, I also understand the difference between the Holy Ghost and the Son. But what is the difference between the Holy Ghost and the Father? Barth says God is the subject, the Spirit is the content, and the Son is the act of revelation.”
“It’s a Mystery.”
It works. He blinks. Where would I be without that word?
“It was revealed to us!” I hesitate. “Revealed” or “made manifest”? I’d better check that one out soon.
“God has said to us that it is so. We can try to penetrate it by using our reason, but reason has its boundaries. And where we reach those boundaries is where we encounter belief.”
“I don’t have to understand it?”
“You don’t need to.”
“I shouldn’t even try?”
“You mustn’t.”
His hand is soft and dry, his handshake isn’t even unpleasant. I’ve gotten away with it for today. He goes off and I head for the sacristy in relief.
The altar boy helps me to take off the chasuble. As soon as I’m standing there in my shirt, my eyes avoid my reflection in the mirror. All the same, it’s not so bad: Chesterton, that great Catholic, was well nourished too, and I imagine even Thomas Aquinas as having been round and wise.
Compared with them, I can almost get by as being lean. I sit down on the couch. My Rubik’s Cube is sitting on the arm; as always I’m happy to see it, and my hands reach for it of their own volition. The altar boy asked me recently what it was and wh
“Do you have to get to school now?” I ask the boy.
He nods, and out of sheer sympathy I lean forward and pat his head. He flinches and I immediately take my hand away. How stupid of me. A priest must be careful these days, there are no such things as harmless gestures anymore.
“I have a question,” he says. “Last week in our religion lesson. It was about God’s foreknowledge. How He knows what we’re going to decide, even before we decide it. How can we still be free?”
The gauze curtains belly, flecks of light dance across the parquet floor. The cross on top of the cupboard throws a long shadow.
“It’s a Mystery.”
“But …”
“Mystery means that it was reveal … I mean made manifest to us. God knows what you’re going to do. But you are still free. That’s why you’re responsible for your actions.”
“That doesn’t go together.”
“That’s why it’s a Mystery.”
“But if God knows what I’m going to do, I can’t do anything else. So how am I responsible?”
“It’s a Mystery.”
“What does that mean?”
“Don’t you have to get to school?”
“Excuse me.” The acolyte is standing in the doorway: a Cistercian lay brother named Franz Eugen Legner. He has small eyes and is always badly shaved. He’s been working for two months; before that he was buried somewhere deep in the Alps. He keeps the church clean, updates our website, plays the organ, and, I can’t rid myself of the suspicion, reports on me to the bishop. I’m waiting for him to make a mistake so that I can lodge a complaint about him myself—a tactical preemptive strike. But unfortunately he doesn’t make mistakes. He’s very careful.
“You know what you did yesterday,” he says to the boy.
“So what did I do?”
“Never mind. You know. You remember.”
“Yes.”
“And yet you were free. You know, and still you could have behaved differently.”
“Because that was yesterday!”
“But for God,” says Legner in his soft, hoarse voice, “there is no today and there is no yesterday. No now, no before, and no hundred years from now. He knows just as clearly what you’re going to do as you know what you did yesterday.”
“I don’t understand.”
“And you don’t have to,” I say. “It’s a Mystery.”
Against my will, I’m impressed. Sixteen semesters, two of them at the Gregoriana in Rome, and I still wouldn’t have come up with that.
Legner looks at me as if he’s read my thoughts. Triumphantly he bares his teeth. In spite of it all, I pity him. Poor, desiccated schemer, where has all your cunning gotten you?
The boy picks up his school backpack and is already out the door. Seconds later I see him shuffle past the window and down the street. I close my eyes and quickly mix up the colors on the cube. Then I open them again and start to reorder the colors.
“The stops are whistling,” says Legner. He doesn’t look at my hands, because if he did, he’d have to be impressed, and he’s not going to cede his ground. “On the organ. We should arrange for them to be repaired.”
“Perhaps the Lord can perform a miracle.” Why in the world did I say that? It wasn’t even funny. The red side is now all completed.
He glowers at me.
“Just a joke,” I say wearily.
“He could do it,” says Legner.
“I’m sure.” Now the yellow side is done too.
He says nothing, I say nothing.
“But He won’t,” I say. Now the white.
“It’s not impossible.”
“No, not impossible.”
We’re both silent.
“He could,” says Legner.
“But He won’t.”
“You never know.”
“No,” I say, and put down the cube, which is now fully rearranged. “You never know.”
I had often stood in front of the mirror coolly but angrily reassuring myself that I didn’t look bad. My face was symmetrical and well proportioned, my skin was okay, my body big enough, my chest and chin substantial, my eyes not too small, and I was also lean. So what was it?
Today I think it was all accidental. There is no such thing as fate, and for example, if I’d asked Lisa Anderson on another day, or at least asked her differently, everything might have turned out another way, and now I’d have a family maybe and I’d be a TV editor or a meteorologist.
Lisa was in my class and she sat diagonally in front of me. When she wore something with short sleeves I saw her freckles, and when the sun came through the window the light played on her smooth brown hair. It took me five days to come up with the right words.
“Shall we go to the theater? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
“Who’s … what?”
Not that I would have enjoyed going to the theater. I found it boring, it was always stuffy, and it was hard to understand the people on the stage. But someone had told me that Lisa liked it.
“That’s the name of the play.”
She gave me a friendly look. I hadn’t stuttered, and as far as I could tell, I hadn’t blushed.
“What play?”
“In … the theater.”
“What kind of play is it?”
“When we see it, we’ll know.”
She laughed. Things were going well. I was relieved, and laughed too.
She turned serious.
Granted, something with my laugh hadn’t been quite right: a little too loud and too high, I was nervous. I quickly tried to correct it and laugh the proper way, but I’d suddenly forgotten what that was supposed to be. When I realized how weird I sounded, I blushed after all: my skin tingled and went hot. In order to get past the moment, I laughed again, but this time it sounded even worse, and I suddenly saw myself standing in front of Lisa and staring at her and still laughing and watching myself standing in front of her staring and laughing. My skin burned red.
“Today’s no good, unfortunately,” said Lisa.
“But you just—”
Unfortunately, she said. It had just occurred to her. No time.
“Pity,” I said hoarsely. “And tomorrow?”
She paused for a second. Then: Unfortunately, she said, tomorrow was no good either.
“The day after tomorrow?”
Unfortunately she really had a lot on in the coming weeks.
After that I hardly even dared to look at her from behind. But I couldn’t stop her from continuing to appear in my dreams. In them she was adorable, willing, and she hung on my every word. Sometimes we were alone in a wood, then again we were lying in a meadow, and sometimes we were in a room, so dimly lit that I could barely make out the curve of her shoulders, the outlines of her hips, and the soft sweep of her hair. When I then woke up, still riddled with lust and already tormented by shame, I couldn’t come to grips with the fact that I could even have thought any such thing was happening in real life.
A few months later at a party, I fell into conversation with Hanna Larisch, who was in our parallel class. I had already drunk a second bottle of beer, the air seemed to be turning as soft as velvet, and suddenly we were talking about the cube. She had one too, everyone had one back then, but like almost all of them, she had only ever managed to sort out one side.
It was quite easy, I explained, it’s best to begin with the white layer, then you make a T on each of the four side layers, then you permute the corners, for which there are several alternatives: like this, and this, and this, I demonstrated the hand movements. The trick, I said, is to decide quickly how to rotate the corners, there’s no formula for that, it’s just practice and intuition.
She listened. The cube was at the peak of its popularity at that time, experts discussed it on TV, and magazines had articles about the people who won championships. My voice didn’t even catch when I brus
She stroked her hair back, looked at the floor, looked at me again, and now there was something stiff about the way she moved. This made me anxious so I talked more quickly. She stroked her hair again, but she didn’t say anything. And I talked. I was waiting for some instinct to tell me what to do next, but this instinct was struck dumb. How did other people know how to behave, where was it written, how did you learn it? I looked at my watch to be sure that we still had time, but she misunderstood my glance and said she had to be getting home too. “Already?” I cried, and: “No!” and “Not now!” but then I couldn’t think of anything else. We were both silent as the music blasted. Drunken fellow pupils were dancing beside us, their bodies squeezed against one another in the haze of cigarette smoke; over by the window two of them were kissing. Hanna hesitated and then left.
“Was it awful?” my mother asked. She was still awake. She usually was if I came home late. She sat in the kitchen and stirred lemon juice into a cup of tea.
“Was what?”
“I don’t know, but I can tell from looking at you that it was awful.”
She set down the spoon next to the cup as though it were liable to break. “There are some things you have to keep trying. Again and again. No matter how often they defeat you. You think it just happens to you, but it happens to everyone. It’s absurd to keep on going regardless, but that’s what you do—you keep on going.”