The Historian (91 page)

―Helen wanted to visit the ancient monastery of Saint-Matthieu-des-Pyrénées-Orientales, and we decided to go there for a day or two before returning for Paris and the flight home. I thought her face had brightened considerably on the trip, and I liked the way she lay sprawled across our hotel bed in Perpignan, flipping through a history of French architecture that I‘d bought in Paris. The monastery had been built in the year 1000, she told me, although she knew I‘d already read that whole section. It was the oldest surviving example of Romanesque architecture in Europe. ‗Almost as old as the
Life of
Saint George
, ‘ I mused, but at this she closed the book and her face and lay staring at you hungrily where you played on the bed beside her.

―Helen insisted that we approach the monastery on foot, like pilgrims. We climbed the road from Les Bains on a cool spring morning, our sweaters tied around our waists as we grew warmer. Helen carried you in a corduroy pack on her chest, and when she got tired I carried you in my arms. The road was empty at this season, except for one silent, dark-haired peasant who passed us on his horse, going up. I told Helen we should have asked him for a ride, but she didn‘t answer; her low mood had returned this morning, and I noted with anxiety and frustration that her eyes filled with tears from time to time. I knew already that if I asked her what was wrong she would shake her head, shake me off, so I tried to content myself with holding you tenderly as we climbed, pointing out the views to you when we turned a bend in the road, long vistas of dusty fields and villages below.

At the summit of the mountain the road broke into a wide estuary of dust, with an old car or two parked there, and the peasant‘s horse—apparently—tied to a tree, although the man himself was nowhere in sight. The monastery rose above this area, heavy stone walls climbing the very summit, and we went up through the entrance and into the care of the monks.

―In those days, Saint-Matthieu was much more a working monastery than it is now, and it must have had a community of twelve or thirteen, leading the lives their predecessors had for a thousand years, with the exception of the fact that they gave the occasional tour to visitors and kept an automobile parked for their own use outside the gates. Two monks showed us around the exquisite cloisters—I remember how surprised I was when I went to the open end of the courtyard and saw that sheer drop over outcroppings of rock, the vertical cliff, the plains below. The mountains around the monastery are even higher than the summit where it perches, and on their distant flanks we could see veils of white that I realized after a moment were waterfalls.

―We sat a while on a bench near this precipice, with you balanced between us, looking out at the enormous noon sky and listening to the bubbling water in the monastery cistern at the center, carved of red marble—heaven only knew how they‘d hauled that up here, centuries before. Helen seemed more cheerful again, and I noted with pleasure the peace in her face. Even if she was still sad at times, this trip had been well worthwhile.

―Eventually Helen said she wanted to see more of the place. We put you back in your sack and went around to the kitchens and the long refectory where the monks still ate, and the hostel where pilgrims could still sleep on cots, and the scriptorium, one of the oldest parts of the complex, where so many great manuscripts had been copied and illuminated. There was a sample of one under glass there, a Matthew open to a page bordered with tiny demons goading one another downward. Helen actually smiled over it.

The chapel was next—it was small, like everything else in the monastery, but its proportions were melody in stone; I‘d never seen the Romanesque like this, so intimate and lovely. Our guidebook claimed that the rounding outward of the apse was the first moment of the Romanesque, a sudden gesture that brought in light across the altar. There was some fourteenth-century glass in the narrow windows, and the altar itself was perfectly arrayed for mass in red and white, with golden candlesticks. We left quietly.

―At last the young monk who was our guide said we‘d seen everything but the crypt, and we followed him down there. It was a small dank hole off the cloisters, architecturally interesting for an early Romanesque vault held up by a few squat columns, and for a grimly ornamented stone sarcophagus dating from the earliest century of the monastery‘s existence—the resting place of their first abbot, said our guide. Next to the sarcophagus sat an elderly monk lost in his meditations; he looked up, kind and confused, when we entered, and bowed to us without rising from his chair. ‗We have had a tradition here for centuries that one of us sits with the abbot,‘ explained our guide. ‗Usually it is an older monk who has held this honor for his lifetime.‘

―‗How unusual,‘ I said, but something about the place, perhaps the chill, made you whimper and struggle on Helen‘s chest, and seeing that she was tired I offered to take you up to the fresh air. I stepped out of that dank hole with a sense of relief myself and went to show you the fountain in the cloisters.

―I‘d expected Helen to follow me at once, but she lingered underground, and when she came up again her face was so changed that I felt a rush of alarm. She looked animated—

yes, more lively than I‘d seen her in months—but also pale and wide-eyed, intent on something I couldn‘t see. I moved toward her as casually as I could; I asked her if there‘d been anything else of interest down there. ‗Maybe,‘ she said, but as if she couldn‘t quite hear me for the roar of thoughts inside. Then she turned to you, suddenly, and took you from me, hugging you and kissing your head and cheeks. ‗Is she all right? Was she frightened?‘

―‗She‘s fine,‘ I said. ‗A little hungry, maybe.‘ Helen sat down on a bench, fished out a jar of baby food, and began to feed you, singing you one of those little songs I couldn‘t understand—Hungarian or Romanian—while you ate. ‗This is a beautiful place,‘ she said after a minute. ‗Let‘s stay for a couple of days.‘

―‗We have to get back to Paris by Thursday night,‘ I objected.

―‗Well, there is not much difference between staying here for a night and staying in Les Bains,‘ she said calmly. ‗We can walk down tomorrow and catch the bus, if you think we need to go so soon.‘

―I agreed, because she seemed so strange, but I felt some reluctance even as I went to discuss this with the tour-guide monk. He applied to his superior, who said that the hostel was empty and we were welcome. Between the simple lunch and simpler supper they gave us in a room off the kitchen, we wandered the rose gardens, walked in the steep orchard outside the walls, and sat in the back of the chapel to hear the monks sing mass while you slept on Helen‘s lap. A monk made up our cots with clean, coarse sheets. After you fell asleep on one of them, with ours pushed up close on either side so that you couldn‘t roll out, I lay reading and pretending not to watch Helen. She sat in her black cotton dress on the edge of her cot, looking out toward the night. I was thankful the curtains were closed, but eventually she got up and lifted them and stood gazing out. ‗It must be dark,‘ I said, ‗with no town near.‘

―She nodded. ‗It is very dark, but that is the way it has always been here, don‘t you think?‘

―‗Why don‘t you come to bed?‘ I reached over you and patted her cot.

―‗All right,‘ she said, without any sign of protest. In fact, she smiled at me and bent over to kiss me before she lay down. I caught her in my arms for a moment, feeling the strength in her shoulders, the smooth skin of her neck. Then she stretched out and covered herself, and appeared to drift off long before I‘d finished my chapter and blown out the lantern.

―I woke at dawn, feeling a sort of breeze go through the room. It was very quiet; you breathed next to me under your wool baby blanket, but Helen‘s cot was empty. I got up soundlessly and put on my shoes and jacket. The cloisters outside were dim, the courtyard gray, the fountain a shadowy mass. It occurred to me that it would take some time for the sun to reach this place, since it first had to climb above those huge eastern peaks. I looked all around for Helen without calling out, because I knew she liked to rise early and might be sitting deep in thought on one of the benches, waiting for dawn. There was no sign of her, however, and as the sky lightened a little I began to search more rapidly, going once to the bench where we‘d sat the day before and once into the motionless chapel, with its ghostly smell of smoke.

―At last I began to call her name, quietly, and then louder, and then in alarm. After a few minutes, one of the monks came out of the refectory, where they must have been eating the first silent meal of the day, and asked if he could help me, if I needed something. I explained that my wife was missing, and he began to search with me. ‗Perhaps madame went for a walk?‘ But there was no sign of her in the orchard or the parking area or the dark crypt. We looked everywhere as the sun came over the peaks, and then he went for some other monks, and one of them said he would take the car down to Les Bains to make inquiries. I asked him, on impulse, to bring the police back with him. Then I heard you crying in the hostel; I hurried to you, afraid you‘d rolled off the cots, but you were just waking. I fed you quickly and kept you in my arms while we looked in the same places again.

―Finally I asked that all the monks be gathered and questioned. The abbot gave his consent readily and brought them into the cloisters. No one had seen Helen after we‘d left the kitchens for the hostel the night before. Everyone was worried—‗La pauvre,‘said one old monk, which sent a wave of irritation through me. I asked if anyone had spoken with her the day before, or noticed anything strange. ‗We do not speak with women, as a general rule,‘ the abbot told me gently.

―But one monk stepped forward, and I recognized at once the old man whose job it was to sit in the crypt. His face was as tranquil and kind as it had been by lantern light in the crypt the day before, with that mild confusion I had noted then. ‗Madame stopped to speak to me,‘ he said. ‗I did not like to break our rule, but she was such a quiet, polite lady that I answered her questions.‘

―‗What did she ask you?‘ My heart had already been pounding, but now it began to race painfully.

―‗She asked me who was buried there, and I explained that it was one of our first abbots, and that we revere his memory. Then she asked what great things he had done and I explained that we have a legend‘—here he glanced at the abbot, who nodded for him to continue—‗we have a legend that he had a saintly life but was the unfortunate recipient of a curse in death, so that he rose from his coffin to do harm to the monks, and his body had to be purified. When it was purified, a white rose grew out of his heart to signify the Holy Mother‘s forgiveness.‘

―‗And this is why someone sits guard on him?‘ I asked wildly.

―The abbot shrugged. ‗That is simply our tradition, to honor his memory.‘

―I turned to the old monk, stifling a desire to throttle him and see his gentle face turn blue. ‗Is this the story you told my wife?‘

―‗She asked me about our history, monsieur. I did not see anything wrong with answering her questions.‘

―‗And what did she say to you in response?‘

―He smiled. ‗She thanked me in her sweet voice and asked me my name, and I told her, Frère Kiril.‘ He folded his hands over his waist.

―It took me a moment to make sense of these sounds, the name made unfamiliar by a Francophone stress on the second syllable, by that innocent
frère
. Then I tightened my arms around you so I wouldn‘t drop you. ‗Did you say your name is Kiril? Is that what you said? Spell it.‘

―The astonished monk obliged.

―‗Where did this name come from?‘ I demanded. I couldn‘t keep my voice from shaking.

‗Is it your real name? Who are you?‘

―The abbot stepped in, perhaps because the old man seemed genuinely perplexed. ‗It is not his given name,‘ he explained. ‗We all take names when we take our vows. There has always been a Kiril—someone always has this name—and a Frère Michel—this one, here—‘

―‗Do you mean to tell me,‘ I said, holding you fast, ‗that there was a Brother Kiril before this one, and one before him?‘

―‗Oh, yes,‘ said the abbot, clearly puzzled now by my fierce questioning. ‗As long in our history as anyone knows. We are proud of our traditions here—we do not like the new ways.‘

―‗Where did this tradition come from?‘ I was nearly shouting now.

―‗We don‘t know that, monsieur,‘ the abbot said patiently. ‗It has always been our way here.‘

―I stepped close to him and put my nose almost against his. ‗I want you to open the sarcophagus in the crypt,‘ I said.

―He stepped back, aghast. ‗What are you saying? We can‘t do that.‘

―‗Come with me. Here—‘ I gave you quickly to the young monk who‘d shown us around the day before. ‗Please hold my daughter.‘ He took you, not as awkwardly as one might have expected, and held you in his arms. You began to cry. ‗Come,‘ I said to the abbot. I drew him toward the crypt and he gestured for the other monks to stay behind. We went quickly down the steps. In the chill hole, where Brother Kiril had left two candles burning, I turned to the abbot. ‗You don‘t have to tell anyone about this, but I must see inside that sarcophagus.‘ I paused for emphasis. ‗If you don‘t help me I will bring the whole weight of the law down on your monastery.‘

―He flashed me a look—fear? resentment? pity?—and went without speaking to one end of the sarcophagus. Together, we slid aside the heavy cover, just far enough to see inside.