Illuminated (19 page)
Authors: Erica Orloff
The driver pulled onto a wide dirt drive, between two stone pillars, until at last we were outside the Gothic-style castle monastery. Two spires with needlelike points rose up. Windows seemed to peer out from stone like silent sentinels guarding the gardens surrounding the castle, with rows of yew hedges forming a green wall around it.
I climbed from the car and took August’s hand as Harry and Etienne led the way to the massive wooden door, which stood twenty or twenty-five feet high.
Etienne pressed a button, which made a sound like an ancient bell. A voice spoke out from an intercom, and Etienne replied in French.
After he spoke, he said to Harry and us, “We will be shown in.”
A short time later, the door swung open and a plump elderly woman in a simple housecoat and apron motioned us in, identifying herself as the monastery’s housekeeper. She led us into a huge hallway the size of a ballroom in width, with marble-slab tiles and a ceiling as high as a cathedral’s.
My shoes echoed as we walked along the stone floors. Simple beeswax candles burned in sconces on the wall, for though it was midday, the interior was dim because the massive hallway had only one set of windows at the far end.
The housekeeper stopped at a doorway. Next to it was a simple brass plaque. ABBÉ BRUNO
.
.
She knocked, and a booming voice called out,
“Entré!”
“Entré!”
The housekeeper bowed her head as the four of us entered Abbé Bruno’s office.
The man sitting at the immense wooden desk had the appearance of Santa Claus, with a thick white beard and white hair, though his circled a bald pate. He had on simple brown robes and a white collar, and when he stood to shake our hands, I saw he wore plain brown sandals.
Etienne made introductions, and Abbé Bruno gestured to chairs and two couches that circled a huge stone fireplace on the other side of his office.
He moved from behind his desk and lumbered over, rocking slightly from side to side as he walked, and huffing out of breath.
He didn’t so much sit in his chair as collapse into it.
“Well . . . I will speak English. Maybe not so well. You have come about Heloise
et
Peter Abelard,
non
?”
et
Peter Abelard,
non
?”
Harry nodded. He explained about the book, the auction, his position with the auction house, and the belief, tentatively forming and growing stronger, that A. might be Astrolabe.
Abbé Bruno listened to Harry, joining his index fingers beneath his chin and nodding from time to time. When Harry finished talking, Abbé Bruno didn’t say anything for some time.
Finally, he whispered, “I have a story to tell of Heloise.”
I leaned forward on the couch, feeling the hair at my nape rise.
“Before she was abbess of the Paraclete, she was a prioress at Argenteuil. But she and the nuns were turned out—their order would have scattered.”
“Why were they turned out?” I asked.
“Oh . . .” He laughed. “The monks wanted their convent space, in a matter of simplifying things. Abelard’s monks wanted the convent. So then he arranged for her to go to the Paraclete, where she became abbess. Now, going back in time, one of the monks of this order of Abelard had a sister who was a nun at the Paraclete.
Harry shook his head. “It’s always fascinating to me how old history is here, when we upstarts in America have only been around for two hundred and twenty-five years or so. Give or take.”
Abbé Bruno laughed, slapping his belly. “Yes. We have stone in this building placed a thousand years ago . . . And so it was that, through history, we possessed what some of us thought was a manuscript from the Paraclete. Passed from sister nun to sister nun, to brother monk to brother monk. Through time.”
“Was the manuscript Heloise’s?” Harry asked. “The Book of Hours? Was it hers?”
He raised a finger. “Ah, we might think so. But here’s the mystery. During World War II, we were occupied by the Nazis. And at that point, the Book of Hours disappeared.”
Etienne gasped. “You mean?”
“Indeed,” said Abbé Bruno. “If you possess the manuscript, it was likely stolen by the Nazis.” He spat the word. “From there, you know, anything could have happened to it.”
Harry leaned back and studied Abbé Bruno skeptically.
“I see how your mind works, my clever man.” Abbé Bruno wagged a finger as thick as a sausage at Harry. “I was too young to have seen the manuscript with my own eyes. Avignon was freed from Nazi control in August 1944. I was just a tiny boy—three years old. I had not yet heard the gentle knocking on the door of my heart of my Father in heaven, telling me to dedicate my life in service to him.”
“Do you know anyone who saw it? Anyone who is still here?” Harry asked. “We need to have hard proof.”
“Brother Pietro, he is eighty-five. He saw it. Still has all his faculties intact.”
I looked at August. This was it. The realization of all we had done this summer, of it all. The trip to Miriam’s, the trip over the ocean, the research and digging, all the work Harry and Professor Sokolov had done.
“Can we talk to him?” August asked.
“I will arrange it. He works, still, in the kitchens, baking bread. I will ask that he come to my office. In the meantime, I will have our housekeeper bring us some warm bread, some cheese from the farmer up the road, and perhaps a bottle of wine for us adults,
non
?”
non
?”
“Oui!”
Harry agreed.
Harry agreed.
Father Pietro was as hunched and thin as Abbé Bruno was round and jolly. He shuffled into the office as we were finishing our cheese and bread.
Abbé Bruno helped him into a soft chair, and he spoke French in a tremulous voice. Abbé Bruno translated for us, slowly.
“I hear . . . you want to know about the book.”
“We do,” Harry said softly. “Very much so. We’ve come all the way from New York City to ask about the Book of Hours.”
“I have seen it. One time.”
My heart fell a little. One time. Over sixty years ago. How could he possibly remember?
“The war made things very difficult. I had never been anywhere except my father’s small farm. When my father died, I worked the farm. Then the Nazis came. And my mother and sister were killed in a bomb. I was all alone, starving, frightened. But the brothers here took me in.”
He stopped and shut his eyes. I thought he was falling asleep, but he opened them again, the whites of his eyes rheumy and moist, and continued. “I did any job that needed doing. I swept the floors, and I made soup in the kitchen. It was wartime—there were no eggs, no meat. We ate a lot of watery soup. Some bread. Anything good—any meats or fresh vegetables—went to feed the Nazis.”
I listened to history unfolding before me.
“The Nazis, they did not respect the churches here. They did not respect women and children. They did not respect the old people. They did not care that people were hungry and dying. We began to fear that they would overrun this very monastery, that we would have to protect it from them. And then one day Brother Simeon came to me.”
The old monk’s voice lowered further, as if he was still keeping this secret, sixty years later.
“He said that the monastery was the hiding place for a very special Book of Hours. He told me it was passed from a sister in the order of Paracletes to her brother, a Dominican monk. And so it was passed, from brother to brother to sister to brother, for safekeeping.”
“Did he tell you it was Heloise’s?” I asked. Abbé Bruno translated, and the old monk nodded.
“He said it belonged to the wife of Peter Abelard. And that she was a nun. I did not know the story then. I knew the name of Abelard, but that was it. I was not a scholar here; I was just a boy. I knew the book was special.”
August asked, “Did you see it?”
“I did. He showed me. I was a young boy from a farm. I had never seen anything so beautiful in all my life. He had it wrapped in five pieces of woven cloth to protect it. He unwrapped one, then the other, then the other. Finally, he showed me the book. The pages were edged with gold. I think it was real gold. And the lettering was so neat. At the time, I could only write my name. So even though I could not read the letters, I could tell they were written with great love. Great care. Each one the same height as the letter next to it.”
Harry leaned very close to the old man. “This is very important. Do you remember what the picture was on the first page? Do you remember anything about it?”
“I remember two things. One, that there was a beautiful pheasant on one page. I had never seen anything so beautiful, each feather painted and colorful. It looked, I thought, like a real pheasant.”
“And the other?” August urged.
“Brother Simeon showed me two pages. On one was a man, kneeling, by a harp. The other, on the face page, was a woman with a halo around her head. She was supposed to be the Blessed Mother.”
“Supposed to be?” August asked.
The old man leaned toward us and showed us his two hands, then pressed them together—palm to palm.
“The man with the harp was Abelard. The woman—she was not the Blessed Mother. It was a likeness of Heloise. Pressed together, they were one, for eternity. Together in the book.”
I felt as if every single nerve was on fire. “Uncle Harry, do you know if those two pages are in the book?”
He shook his head. “I’ll call New York, but honestly, I’ve been through it over and over again, and this image is not ringing a bell.”
“No,” I jumped up. “It has to be the book. We’ve come all this way.”
Abbé Bruno looked equally disappointed. “We were hoping to get our book back. To honor it. A museum piece. A part of our history lost to the Nazis.”
“I’m sorry,” Uncle Harry said.
Etienne, too, looked devastated. “I do not recall those pages, either, when Miriam and I saw it. I’m so sorry. Abbé Bruno, Brother Pietro, you have been so generous with your time.”
Dejectedly, we stood, ready to leave.
Abbé Bruno said, “Do not give up your search. Sometimes, the most wonderful of blessings is around the next corner, merely hidden from view. Romans eight, verse twenty-eight, ‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose.’”
I nodded, trying not to cry, trying to conceal how much my heart hurt at that moment. If it wasn’t the book, then August’s and my dreams were just made up. We were kidding ourselves that fate had brought us together, fate and ghosts. Instead, we were just two people who really liked each other. Nothing more. Nothing less. And certainly nothing mystical.
The housekeeper came to show us to our rooms. Mine was separate from the men’s, on a different floor. It was as spartan as I imagined Heloise’s might have been, with a simple wooden bed frame, constructed from unpolished wood and roughly hewn together, covered by a thin mattress. A plain white coverlet and white sheets adorned it. A wooden crucifix hung on the wall above the headboard. Next to the bed, a simple wooden table, again unpolished, served as a nightstand. On it sat a Bible in French. A small scatter rug covered the floor by the bed. It looked woven of simple rags.
No radio. No TV. No mirror. One outlet on the stone wall, and a small armoire to hang clothes. A single lamp with a plain shade stood on the night table. A single, small window that overlooked a courtyard, was high on the wall—above my head.
At dinner that night, Etienne, Harry, August, and I were positively depressed. None of us spoke. When it came time to say good night, August barely looked at me or acknowledged me. It hurt, not even having the comfort of him next to me.
After dinner, we had little choice. We each went to our simple rooms. Sun set, plunging the castle into darkness, save for the weak beams of my lamp. I washed in the bathroom across the hall from my room and went back into my room and changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt for bed. With nothing to do, I decided to work on my letter to August for the night we were to go to the tomb.
I had brought hotel stationery with me. But each time I tried to start the letter, I hated what I wrote. I kept writing, scratching out, writing, and scratching out. Finally, I crumbled the paper, and feeling tears in my eyes, scrunched down into bed and soon fell into a fitful sleep.
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