John the Pupil. David Flusfeder

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      • • •

      You ask me to observe the world, and you are my world, so I shall begin with you.

      Master Roger is well-made. His body is strong, putting to shame the constitutions of men half his age. His eyes are the colour of the sea on a stormy spring morning. His beard is grey. He credits his strength and vigour to his diet. The purpose, he says, in eating and drinking, is to satisfy the desires of nature, not to fill and empty the stomach. He has his own elixirs of rhubarb and black hellebore, which he pounds down to a paste and adds to his meat. And I have mine, justly accorded to my age and capacities. My Master says that if I observe the regimen he lays down I might live as long as the nature assumed from my parents might permit. It is only the corruption of my father and his fathers before him that limits the utmost term beyond which I may not pass.

      Master Roger does not sleep in the dormitory. Master Roger does not take his meals with the rest of the friary. Master Roger appears at most services, space around him separating him from the rest of the Order, his voice sonorous, distinct, godly. The remainder of the time he is in his room at the top of the tower, performing his investigations.

      Our lessons are fewer, now that he is working so hard on his Great Work. But still, towards the end of each day, he will test me on the knowledge that he has poured into me, and then add a little more. I must answer his questions about mathematics and music and grammar and rhetoric and optics, demonstrate the burning mirror he has made; and if my answers are not full and prompt, if my demonstration is not performed with his subtlety and skill, if I do not speak with as much insight and wit as if he were the respondent, he beats correction into my head.

      Humbly, I observe myself. I am of smaller stature than my Master. My limbs are narrow and may not carry great loads. When I observe my own features they do not displease me, but they are not yet full. On occasion I am told by one of the older friars to walk with greater solemnity because my body, if not countermanded, tends to rise with every step.

      I am the mirror he is constructing, to reflect him back to himself.

      • • •

      Our steps are directed by the Lord. I had no choice in this, nor should I have. Who is the man that can understand his own way? But all the same, in the order of our days, in the book of our hours, as I perform my spiritual exercises, my mind wanders. As Cassian has written, we try to bind the mind fast with chains and it slips away swifter than a snake.

      Once, when I was very young, there was a traveller, a Frenchman, who visited the friary. He spoke of mountains and kings and far places and aroused my Master’s envy, but also his respect. He had visited Tartars and Saracens and travelled in carts pulled by giant dogs that had the ferocity of lions. The traveller’s skin had been burnt in eastern deserts; his right hand was missing two fingers. He made mention of other injuries but as his body and much of his head were covered by a dark cloak we could only conjecture what they might have been. When he spoke, some of his sentences fell away before finding their conclusion, and he looked silently past those assembled as if part of him were still dwelling in a far place.

      In front of me there is a map of the pilgrim way from Canterbury to Jerusalem by way of Rome. The journey does not signify an actual one, I know that. The purpose of this exercise is to lift the spirit into closer fellowship with Our Lord. Imagining myself on this pilgrim route, I walk towards the celestial city, stepping closer into the tread of the Redeemer as he laboured under the Cross.

      It is in contemplation that the Christian finds the true Jerusalem.

      Demons tempt me away. A demon of vanity drives me to demonstrate my own cleverness. Another demon pulls with his fingers at my cloak tugging me away from Our Lord, whispering to me about the false, earthly road.

      I look into the rivers, the sea, the towers of the cities. I trace my fingers along the vellum and hope, forlornly, sinfully, for an actual journey, to take bodily steps along an actual road, a strange sun on my skin, dip my feet, not my fingers on ink, into a changing water.

      The rivers and the sea are inscribed in azure. The writer who drew the map is at work most of the days, and nights, sleepless and secret, because my Master needs him for his Great Work. The map is unfinished. The imaginary pilgrim may not travel to the Holy Land because the map stops short of Rome. The sea disappears and the land becomes sky because the scribe suffers from a need to draw lines and curves with azure in the margins of my Master’s work.

      I inscribe this on cuttings of parchment from my Master’s Great Work. At the end of the day, I sweep away the shreds from around the scribe’s desk and take what I require for my own work, a humble mockery of the true work. I do not think my Master begrudges me a little ink to make an account of my days.

      Saint Abran’s Day

      Once I knew how to herd goats, to fetch water without losing a drop, to make myself small against my father’s anger. Now I have become skilled in the art of gliding through the refectory and kitchen, to pick up bread, to lean over candlesticks and slice off small segments at the base of the candles, and on through the building, to the stairs, my arms folded, hands holding my spoils in the sleeves of my cloak. Our scribe needs food to eat and light to work by.

      It is harder to gather wine and beer. When I descend into the cellar, to tiptoe past sleeping Brother Mark, to lift away two bottles, to make my return journey past the sleeping sentinel, to climb back up into the corridor by the dormitory, I am almost as anxious as I used to be, when I first followed Master Roger’s instruction to fetch food for the scribe. I know that it is not stealing, he explained to me that it is not, but still I shake, and pray. I must take two bottles, because when Brother Mark makes his accounting of the cellar, he touches each bottle in turn, chanting, sing-song, Here is master bottle and here is his wife, here is master bottle and here is his wife … His reckoning is done by remembering whether there was an even or an odd quantity of bottles on the previous day.

      The scribe bemoans as he transcribes. He is being made to work too swiftly. It is the word, not its shape, that matters, Master Roger tells him, urging him on, Faster! Faster! I have written in the Book, in a rougher hand than the scribe’s, because Master Roger did not trust the scribe to draw Hebrew characters without understanding. Maybe, somewhere, a family is missing its father, a mother her son. The scribe shapes an azure line in the margin, he cannot help himself, a turn of thin colour that suggests the tip of a wave, a leafy branch of a tree. He sharpens his pen and wipes his face and looks around, as if for escape. There is none. He is here until the Book is finished or the world has ended.

      Or if the Principal discovers what Master Roger is doing in his room. There is an Interdiction cruelly upon him. He may not write or debate or disseminate, other than sequestered in the friary classroom with his appointed pupil. The Order suspects him of novelties, which is an accusation hardly short of heresy. Yet he may exchange letters with friends and outside patrons of influence whom the Principal and even the Minister General should not seek to offend. Master Roger’s rooms are turned into a single industry. It is all done in the utmost secrecy. The Book is secret, which is maybe as it should be. In antique times, Master Aristotle composed a commentary to kingship, power and wisdom for his pupil Alexander of Macedonia. Master Roger’s Great Work is the true successor to Aristotle’s Secret of Secrets. Many evils follow the man who reveals secrets, wrote Aristotle. The planets align, the Principal vexes, Master Roger writes the words on wax tablets for transcription, the scribe cuts them into the page. I СКАЧАТЬ