this minor disaster, he noticed now, the greater scaffold was not only sinking, but leaning, too, outward, away from the flaking clay of the cliff toward the ever more vigorous sea. This would be their final day before the boat was covered, before the year wheeled about and spring returned with calmer waters, a warmer sun, and boatloads of newly grown herring. It was growing rougher and colder. The gray-clad bodies were still at their labor. As the sun began to sink, the fishermen hoisted their sail, let the boat swing about, and left the monks to their hopeless engineering, their church to the coming bad weather.
There was little to do through the drab winter freeze, no fishing, no work, little reason to do more than cut wood, build fires, eat sparingly and carefully, wait for the coming of spring. Gray skies rolled north over Usedom, broke up over water, and let the sparse winter sunlight waste its warmth in the sea. It rained. It froze. In the offshore waters herring hung motionless in the clay-stained waters, lidless eyes set in slick fat bodies, mouths opening and closing, feeding on the fruits of the sea. Salmon raced east like an army of knights in glistening mail. On the island, nothing set these days apart but the arc of a struggling sun.
Then, with the drip of melting frost spattering the floor of the forests, bird-song, the squawk of goosanders and gulls breaking the stillness of the air, the frigid days would seem to unfreeze, to swell and grow warmer with the strengthening sun. And it would seem to the islanders, rising, yawning, cracking their joints, setting out once more for their manses—repairs are waiting, there is ground must be broken—that along with its usual shoots and crescent growths the spring had brought a hybrid to flower, the result of unnatural conjunction. Something unheard of and troubling; an unaccountable nearing of a dependably distant landmark. The monks.
Before long, every man, woman, and child on the island had a tale to tell of monkish visitation. They would appear from nowhere at any hour of the day, alwaysin a group, mumble a sentence or two, then move on to the next reluctant islander. The greetings were uttered in odd, stilted accents and seemed to serve no purpose at all. “How fare your wife, your sister, and her friends?” “Your father and mother are well?” “Well plowed, plowman!” Some strange animation seemed to grip them as they uttered these phrases, a weird fervor that drove them to rove about the island in this unprecedented fashion, engaging people in halting intercourse and interfering with their tasks. It was suspicious and unwelcome. What did these wakened sleepwalkers want?
Tithes, in the opinions of some, lay behind this outflux of monks. Tithes were left at the gatehouse on feast days: a chicken, a ham, half a bushel of wheat. But since the monks never left the confines of their monastery, save to work at their garden or harvest their fields, since the topsoil was thin and the summer months short, the livestock scraggy, the hens often broody, the oxen hungry, and the barley grew short, and since the islanders preferred to eat rather than not, tithes had tended to shrink. Tithes, then, or rents, or some other form of debt, or their sinfulness in general drove the monks to this lackluster crusade. Yet tithes, rent, and sin figured little in their bizarre interferences, which grew less bizarre as the months wore on and the brothers became positively fluent. “How’s the family, Haase?” or, “Your furrows look like eels, Riesenkampf!” Which they did, his ox being blind in one eye. Some islanders chose to hide beneath a touch to the hat or a wave and swift retreat. Others engaged in plodding conversation, offered them beer and sometimes ham. By late summer the children were steeling themselves to throw rotten pears, their mothers to apologize, their fathers to hail these singular fellows as a matter of course while they wandered about the
There was little to do through the drab winter freeze, no fishing, no work, little reason to do more than cut wood, build fires, eat sparingly and carefully, wait for the coming of spring. Gray skies rolled north over Usedom, broke up over water, and let the sparse winter sunlight waste its warmth in the sea. It rained. It froze. In the offshore waters herring hung motionless in the clay-stained waters, lidless eyes set in slick fat bodies, mouths opening and closing, feeding on the fruits of the sea. Salmon raced east like an army of knights in glistening mail. On the island, nothing set these days apart but the arc of a struggling sun.
Then, with the drip of melting frost spattering the floor of the forests, bird-song, the squawk of goosanders and gulls breaking the stillness of the air, the frigid days would seem to unfreeze, to swell and grow warmer with the strengthening sun. And it would seem to the islanders, rising, yawning, cracking their joints, setting out once more for their manses—repairs are waiting, there is ground must be broken—that along with its usual shoots and crescent growths the spring had brought a hybrid to flower, the result of unnatural conjunction. Something unheard of and troubling; an unaccountable nearing of a dependably distant landmark. The monks.
Before long, every man, woman, and child on the island had a tale to tell of monkish visitation. They would appear from nowhere at any hour of the day, alwaysin a group, mumble a sentence or two, then move on to the next reluctant islander. The greetings were uttered in odd, stilted accents and seemed to serve no purpose at all. “How fare your wife, your sister, and her friends?” “Your father and mother are well?” “Well plowed, plowman!” Some strange animation seemed to grip them as they uttered these phrases, a weird fervor that drove them to rove about the island in this unprecedented fashion, engaging people in halting intercourse and interfering with their tasks. It was suspicious and unwelcome. What did these wakened sleepwalkers want?
Tithes, in the opinions of some, lay behind this outflux of monks. Tithes were left at the gatehouse on feast days: a chicken, a ham, half a bushel of wheat. But since the monks never left the confines of their monastery, save to work at their garden or harvest their fields, since the topsoil was thin and the summer months short, the livestock scraggy, the hens often broody, the oxen hungry, and the barley grew short, and since the islanders preferred to eat rather than not, tithes had tended to shrink. Tithes, then, or rents, or some other form of debt, or their sinfulness in general drove the monks to this lackluster crusade. Yet tithes, rent, and sin figured little in their bizarre interferences, which grew less bizarre as the months wore on and the brothers became positively fluent. “How’s the family, Haase?” or, “Your furrows look like eels, Riesenkampf!” Which they did, his ox being blind in one eye. Some islanders chose to hide beneath a touch to the hat or a wave and swift retreat. Others engaged in plodding conversation, offered them beer and sometimes ham. By late summer the children were steeling themselves to throw rotten pears, their mothers to apologize, their fathers to hail these singular fellows as a matter of course while they wandered about the
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