Lanceheim Read online

  The reason for his many, sometimes opposing, interests was not that he longed for participation; Adam Chaffinch was and remained a seeker in the literal sense of the word.

  It was only in the third year of high school that Adam let himself be lured by the church’s youth group. This transformed his life. By this stage he had acquired a broad experience of societies; he had sat in many worn-out armchairs, drinking coffee and eating soft ginger snaps and listening to jargon that was always similar and with the same intent: to create a “we” that could be placed in relationship to a “them.”

  The church’s youth group was different.

  There had been a caring atmosphere that Adam had never experienced before. Even the conversation was different. Instead of focusing on obscure details, as in other discussion groups, the youth of the church were willing to see the larger perspective. This appealed to Adam Chaffinch more than he could explain, because he was neither saved nor a believer. His former lack of faith increased the attention given to him. The others were eager to convince him, and perhaps he too wanted to be convinced. Before Christmas, Adam had already decided to apply to the theology department at the university after high school.

  The department was in one of the medieval buildings on emerald green Via Westphal, and in connection with the roll call for the new theologians, the prodeacon of that part of the city held an introductory lecture in accordance with tradition. Then as now it was Eagle Rothman who ruled over Lanceheim’s parishes and churches, and Rothman took immediate notice of Adam Chaffinch. When it was time to assign mentors, all-deacons or deacons who would guide and support the students during the five years of theology studies, Rothman made sure to assign himself to Chaffinch. The fact that one of the four prodeacons in Mollisan Town made himself available was unusual, if not unique. Adam and Rothman met once a month in Rothman’s office in the church in Obersdorf Parish in central Lanceheim, not far from the Star.

  Despite previous doubtful achievements as a student, Chaffinch easily navigated past the rocks of exams and the shoals of orals during the years that followed. Theology fascinated him, and that was all the help he needed. From the beginning it was just as clear that faith remained Adam Chaffinch’s stumbling block. This reluctance was not so much about Magnus and the creation story—the department proved to be open to interpretations and adopted a tolerant attitude within given frameworks—as about the reasoning around Malitte and the occurrence of evil in Mollisan Town. In his striving for justice and balance, Magnus had created Malitte, the lord of evil. At the same time the modern church judged every stuffed animal that was enticed by the servants of evil, judged them harshly and mercilessly, forgetful of the balance that even Magnus accepted. The conversations between Adam Chaffinch and Rothman most often revolved around this: that the Proclamations, and the church that spread the interpretations, would sooner emphasize a bad example than a good one.

  Adam Chaffinch was initiated three days before his twenty-third birthday. One month later he was appointed a deacon in Kerkeling Parish. This was a sensation. The usual arrangement was that the initiated theological students took jobs as all-deacons in one of the city’s twenty-three parishes. It might then be anywhere from five to fifteen years before a deacon position became open; these were the rules of the game, and no one protested. Adam Chaffinch was not only the youngest deacon in Mollisan Town when he took over Kerkeling Parish, but one of the youngest deacons in history.

  It went so fast that Adam himself had difficulty understanding it. The first time he opened the door to his own church was an experience he never forgot—seeing clouds of dust floating through the air of the massive space inside in streams of light that fell in through the high windows, and on the other side, so far away, the gilded magnificence of the altar. All this was his to administer, to use. It felt absurd.

  During the first service that Adam Chaffinch held in Kerkeling, however, not many recognized the searching, doubting theologian from his student days. There was only one way for a young stuffed animal to atone for the responsibility, the attention, and the good fortune that had fallen, apparently undeserved, to Chaffinch: through anxiety and guilt. In an insane attempt to put doubt behind him, the young deacon made himself hard and unmerciful. It was a doomsday voice that was heard in the church, a cold and unforgiving deacon who was not prepared to forgive sinners who did not feel guilt themselves; who was not prepared to turn a blind eye.

  The entire first year continued in the same manner. The congregation came dutifully and listened on Sundays, terrified yet uplifted. There was still a force of attraction in this furious deacon who was appointed to tend their souls. Only when he went on the attack one Sunday against Rothman, who was perceived as the most liberal of the four prodeacons at that time, did Chaffinch go too far. He received a reprimand, and it was almost as if he had expected it. After that he became more careful, but the reputation of the “angry deacon in Kerkeling” continued to grow.

  When Adam Chaffinch met Maximilian in Sagrada Bastante, there was an energy about the cub that Chaffinch had never run across before. The similes that Maximilian used fascinated the deacon. It was easier for Adam than for most to interpret them—or rather, no one else devoted so much time to them.

  Adam offered Maximilian—as you already know—a place at Kerkeling High School, and when Adam realized that I was part of the package, as it were, he appointed me as Recorder. This made a virtue of necessity, or perhaps better, granted a title to something I had nonetheless already decided to do. In addition, becoming the Recorder gave me more than an alibi: I was paid for my efforts. Don’t ask me how he had the means; a deacon’s salary is not a kebab from which to slice juicy pieces of meat.

  Then came the day when Rothman challenged Maximilian and Chaffinch in the church. After that, everything changed. The prodeacon knew that Maximilian was enrolled in the church’s high school, and demanded that he be expelled immediately. There was nothing Chaffinch could do to prevent this, and Maximilian was forced to quit a few weeks before final examinations in the second tier. I had moved, but Maximilian was still living in the church’s building on bark brown Leyergasse—I suspect that Adam arranged the matter simply by not raising the issue—and fortunately we were able to get Maximilian to understand that he would have to at least temporarily abstain from his sessions with the sick and handicapped stuffed animals. He suffered. He could help all the tragic stuffed animals he saw on the streets and squares, but he was forced to refrain.

  Adam’s frustration grew as well. With Maximilian in the school, the deacon had him close at hand, and now there was no longer a natural meeting place. Therefore Adam started something that would now come to have great significance for all of our lives: the Seminars on Faith, Hope, and Love. I realize that I do not need to say it, but I will say it nonetheless: This was my idea completely, even if I have heard differently over the years.

  Two times a week, usually Tuesdays and Thursdays, we invited five or six stuffed animals to the apartment at Leyergasse. We were meticulous about who was allowed to come, and new participants were allowed only if they were recommended by two existing attendees. After half a year the interest in the seminars was so great that we could set up a little waiting list, and then it was easier to more systematically see to it that a mixture of new and old guests created an exciting dynamic.

  It went like this. About half an hour after the Afternoon Rain, we gathered in the living room on Leyergasse. In most cases Maximilian himself was present, but we managed even when he decided not to take part. I do not know if it has been clear before, but to an outsider, Maximilian could appear to be very capricious. I, who saw him practically speaking twenty-four hours a day, knew that these “whims” occurred regularly and that the “caprices” were habits. But I readily admit that his respect for normal forms of social interaction was slight.

  Adam Chaffinch led the meetings, with a starting point in one of the similes or parables that Maximilian had given us. We sat in the living ro
om. I read out loud from the Book of Similes, and then the discussion started. It depended of course on the mix of stuffed animals, but it was seldom that everyone felt they had had their say when we dispersed at the time of the Evening Weather.

  For my part, it was only in retrospect that I took a position on the viewpoints that were knocked around in the room; during the seminar itself, all my concentration was on keeping the minutes, a record that I appended on an ongoing basis to the steadily increasing Book of Similes. Only when reading and reflecting on my notes could I fully see Adam Chaffinch’s significance and greatness. Without taking up too much room, without inhibiting the associations or lowering the level of thought, he guided the conversation in the direction he wanted. It sounds manipulative as I am writing this, and perhaps it was, but it was also necessary. Without Adam, the seminars would never have felt equally important or exhaustive. Direction was required with the openness that Maximilian created with his similes in order to bring home the point; this was Adam’s role.

  On the private front, I made several attempts during this period to repair my relationship with my parents. After I had abandoned my legal studies, I seemed to detect disappointment, not to say sorrow, in their eyes when they looked at me. I only went out to Das Vorschutz occasionally, and therefore I was very happy when Father unexpectedly got in touch and asked me to come out and have dinner over the weekend. I could not recall when something like that had last happened.

  Expectant and light of heart, I knocked on the door the following Saturday, but as soon as I stepped across the threshold I sensed unease.

  “Where is Mother?” I asked.

  Father did not answer, but instead led me into the kitchen. There the table was set for two, and judging by the folding of the napkins, it was Mother who had arranged this for us. Now I am sure that she was on the upper floor, but just then I did not think to ask.

  “Isn’t Mother going to be here?” I said.

  “We have something to talk about, my son,” said Father in his gloomiest and darkest voice, the one he only used on special occasions.

  I sat down at the table. Although I feverishly attempted to think of what I had done that might be the cause of this seriousness, my lost career as an attorney was the only thing I could think of.

  “Mother has heard talk about your…love life,” said Father.

  It was as though the air in the room ran out in a single breath. I was completely unprepared.

  “We have not brought you up to be a…a…Mother has heard that you have various…friends?”

  “Various friends?”

  Of course I knew what he was saying.

  “Mother has heard that…well…that you’ve lived with three different females the last few months. That can’t be right? No one in our family has ever moved in together before they were engaged. You know that. This is not how we brought you up,” said Father, who found it difficult to accuse me of something he thought was absurd.

  “I’m not living with anyone right now,” I replied honorably. “But Father, I would like to tell you what Maximilian has to say about love. And about living together.”

  “Answer the question,” Father said quietly.

  “Maximilian told me the story about the miller—”

  “Answer me!”

  But I couldn’t. My father was very conservative about some things, and marriage was one of them. In his mind, adultery was a crime equivalent to poaching, and Father was a forest guard. Living with a female that you hadn’t married, you were being unfaithful to Magnus and to the church. To live with three different females that you hadn’t married was, well, worse.

  “Father, let me tell the story. The miller—”

  “Enough!” exclaimed Father.

  He had still not sat down at the table, and I sensed that he would prefer not to sit down this evening.

  “Have we not brought you up to respect Magnus?” asked Father, and his voice was so loud that it would certainly reach up to the second floor. “Don’t we deserve some decent behavior from our only child?”

  “Maximilian says that—”

  “Enough! The Maximilian you worship is Eva’s son, and Eva never has…been thinking straight. Don’t come here and throw that cub’s words in my face! Why don’t you get yourself a wife?”

  “Father,” I pleaded, “will you let me tell you the story of the miller? Once upon a time there was a miller who had three daughters. The first was—”

  “Are you defying me?” asked Father, and his face was dark, ominous.

  “No, Father,” I answered quietly. “But I—”

  “Do you enjoy hurting your mother?”

  “No, Father, I…”

  Yes, every reader with even slight experience of life understands how the rest of that conversation continued. I will spare you, and only declare that I left there without having told the story of the miller, without having conveyed the idea of the goodness inherent in lavishing love upon the females in my life, and without having improved my relationship with my parents to any noticeable degree.

  It was after one of our Seminars on Faith, Hope, and Love that I finally dared asked the question. Adam Chaffinch had lingered behind to look over our financial situation together with me. It was something we did on a monthly basis, nothing remarkable and seldom surprising. Maximilian and I lived a withdrawn, planned existence. We were sitting in the living room on Leyergasse, the young deacon and I, exhausted after hours of conversation, but also fired up by the discussion that had just concluded. We lit no candles; outside the windows the sky was colored red by the sun returning home. Maximilian sometimes suffered from migraines, and that was the case on this particular afternoon. He was lying down in his room, sleeping. A year and a half had passed since the angels had wept from the ceiling in Kerkeling’s church.

  “Do you ever think about that?” I asked. “About that day, with Rothman in the church?”

  “Ever?” asked Adam. “I think about it every day.”

  “You do?”

  I was astonished. To me, Adam Chaffinch was an immovable rock. I did not know about his youthful doubt and hesitation. He did not know that his stern seriousness concealed his doubt.

  “It was then,” Adam continued in the same tone of voice, “that I finally gained my faith.”

  “Then?” I exclaimed, perhaps a trifle insensitively.

  “It was then,” he nodded, seemingly to himself. “Up until that day, that hour, I had hesitated. But then I knew. It was so simple, just as simple as those tears that fell upon us. My doubt was my faith, not the opposite of it.”

  This paradoxical assertion reminded me of something that Maximilian himself might have said, and I decided not to go into the matter further; this seldom served any purpose. Instead I took the opportunity—as Adam Chaffinch was obviously in a confiding mood—to ask the question that I had harbored for several years, but never dared to utter.

  “But is he the Messiah?” I said. “Maximilian? Is he the Savior that is talked about in the Proclamations? Is he? Because I…I believe that he is….”

  Adam Chaffinch looked at me for a long time before he answered. There was something searching, but also something appreciative in his gaze.

  “That is what only you can decide,” he replied.

  “He does not want you to be here right now,” said Duck Johnson.

  I was standing out in the stairwell, aimless, looking down at the worn brown leather shoes that I had once bought because of their amusing spike pattern.

  “He asked me to ask you to come back the day after tomorrow,” said Duck.

  I shook my head. I should have protested, argued, perhaps even yelled something. But I did nothing. How I despised my weak muteness at the moment.

  “But,” I finally forced out, “but…Maximilian and I have always—”

  “Besides,” Duck pointed out, “it will be too cramped. We were just talking about it. The apartment is simply not built for more than two animals.”

 
And with that he shut the door in my nose. Self-contempt kept me from exposing myself to further ridicule, and I left, crushed. Possibly I could have viewed this as a test; that Duck Johnson was something the inscrutable Magnus had put in my way to tear me out of the secure—and happy—existence I had finally created.

  But dismissed from Maximilian’s apartment on bark brown Leyergasse, I was not capable of that kind of contemplative distance; Duck Johnson was my rival, and inside I was furious.

  I myself had moved to banana yellow Hüxterdamm. At the time of Duck Johnson’s appearance in Maximilian’s life, the break in my studies at the university had lasted more than six years, and I no longer had any ambition to return. At first I had been enticed by the fundamental idea of the law: to attempt to distinguish good from evil in matters great and small. But with every semester that passed, I realized that this was not about good and evil at all; it was about argumentation techniques and power, patience, and hard work. If I had not had any alternative, I would surely have been interested in such things too, but weighed against the sort of seriousness represented by Maximilian, the decision was simple.

  I was not living alone.

  During the years that the Seminars on Faith, Hope, and Love were going on, Adam Chaffinch insisted that Maximilian’s schooling should nonetheless be finished. Therefore it was my task to see to it that teachers of academic rank came to the apartment on Leyergasse to help with his studies. One of these teachers, who taught theoretical philosophy and geography, was named Maria C. Terrier, and she seduced me the first time she came to visit. On the way from Maximilian’s room and out into the hall—this was a matter of a stretch of less than four meters, bordered by coats to the right and doors to the cleaning closet and bathroom to the left—she succeeded in turning my head and causing my body to quiver with arousal and terror. Her heavy, sweet perfume, mixed with the stench from the bathroom’s cracked pipe and the old coats in the hallway, is an olfactory memory that even today causes me to shiver with enjoyment mixed with fear.