The God of that Summer by Ralf Rothmann & Shaun Whiteside

Author:Ralf Rothmann & Shaun Whiteside [Whiteside, Ralf Rothmann and Shaun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

The times grew harder, and they who thought they had nothing left to lose, while famine persisted and pestilence laid people in the earth, lost even more. The author of these lines had barely the strength to continue with his chronicle of woe, as ailing physics stirred his medicine. But the misty phantom of his vision floated always before him, the little flame above the water: it was his ideal. The chapel, God help every last one of us, belonged in the village, and as wise Euripides has it: many obstacles – many ways. Because anyone who believes that a dream can be buried, let him slip into the bower of night and steal the shoes of sleep!

Since the effort to win the carpenter Johann Bubenleb for the plan had foundered on his reluctance, it would have been apt to seek enthusiasm elsewhere, a sturdy young man who knew how to swing an axe in return for a strong drink. Meanwhile a sacred task had to be performed by someone with not only strength but also skill, which is not to be disdained. In fact it needs a clear mind, in which the work is determined before the first blow, indeed before the existence of the nail, still glowing as ore in the seam. Whereby it is relatively unimportant whether the man is too old or too weak to brace a beam. God forgives the pious bricklayer a crooked wall.

In the weary eyes of the goatherd Johann Bubenleb, now, wrapped in his cloud of pipe smoke, the writer had seen this spirit. Slumbering within it was a promise; he knocked on the goatherd’s door to reawaken it, and the man let him in, offered him a chair and said, not without a chuckle: Bredelin, old Merxheim! Your stubbornness is strange at a time when the earth is full to the brim with armies raging furiously with one another and appealing to God and dedicating their burning banners to the Devil. It is hard to imagine anyone today doing anything without a desire for bread or self-advancement, particularly bringing things into order. What good, he asked frankly, was a prayer-house in the village, when all had ceased to pray?

The pipe crackled, the goats tugged gently on the sackcloth which poverty had declared should be his garb, and the chidden fellow sighed with care: you are probably right, Master Bubenleb, forgive a dreamer his dream, but the idea had come to me that a man should do something that gives his earthly span a value for ever. Something that might be nothing to other human beings, but everything to God. To put it another way: what use are books in times when no one reads? They are dead paper, nothing more. And yet they keep the mystery alive.

The old man shook his head. You have something about you of the hidden priest, he murmured, and his voice sounded dark with smoke: fever or hunger have given you a picture in your head, you posturing penman, to which lunacy has added colour.

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