The architect. Anna Efimenko

who created them?”

      “Since when did you become a philosopher, Anselmo?” Jorge’s voice thundered over the hall. “Knowing heraldry and speaking your mind, as if you own the place?”

      “Since you’ve given me access to all the treasures of the library, Father,” I shot back.

      “All right then. In that case, you’re going to Graben to purchase cereals tomorrow morning, and Prior Edward will explain to you what should be utmost in a novice’s mind.”

      “But Jorge…,” I began protesting, making the Abbot seriously angry,

      “Don’t you dare to address me like this! Have you ever heard of humbleness? Do you think that not taking oaths allows you to do anything you like and act as a layman? Well, hurry up straight there – straight to the world, to the market, tomorrow morning, the first thing!”

      The position of the assistant to the library keeper was vacant again. And from now on, I was exiled to run errands for a light-haired magician.

      Prior Edward was the biggest mystery of our small world. Born an Englishman, he was known as Edward Kelly, and he didn’t have any ears. Without ears, he cunningly concealed the absence with his long golden locks. Some impressionable minds took him for a voodoo priest and only the glory of his position protected him from explicit condemnations.

      Once, when I was very young, we were all picking strawberries in the Black Gardens, and while playing I chased Edward. He approached the barn, and when I caught up with him, he suddenly slammed the door, catching my hand. I whimpered in pain as the strawberries fell out of my purple fingers. Edward, white as a ghost, took me to Jorge, and Jorge carried me to the fermery, where they bandaged my hand and I was banned from work for several weeks. From that day, the prior avoided me, whether that was due the abbot’s instructions or his feelings of guilt I wasn’t certain. He rarely approached me, avoiding to look at me with his deeply set brown eyes. He stayed away from us when we were working with Jorge in the monastery vegetable garden, and moved away from the others in the refectory and scriptorium.

      And now, Edward became my guide for earthly things. Strolling along the row of stalls on the market, we looked up at a great variety of goods, eyes wide open: there were tools, such as cleaving axes, wimbles, sickles; animal skins, cross-grained leather products, and fabrics for all tastes – from rough half woolen tiretaine to luxurious drap fin. They were also selling furniture, food, and cattle.

      Passaged towards the market, the prior left me to watch a festivity show of the turlupiners – wicked jokers, who turned out to be not so amusing. Edward strictly told me to stay at the show and wait for him to come back and went purchasing. In fact, he tried to get rid of me as usual. After one hour or so, watching intently the sundial on a tower wall, I heard him strolling along merrily. He rewarded my long waiting with a terracotta toy- a whistle in the shape of a partridge.

      Since then, we came down to the market every week, everything recurred.

      Eventually, I was very curious where the prior kept going. Following him at a safe distance, along filthy narrow streets, funny broken-backed buildings set on wooden frames filled with pieces of bricks, I saw my mentor getting into some rickety ramshackle dwelling with closed shutters.

      I asked an old man who was passing nearby the house. The man looked at me suspiciously,

      “A brothel, brother. You’re not supposed to know, I believe, and you’re too young, anyway…”

      Having got the answer to my main question and trying to remember the unfamiliar word, I hurried back to the square, so that Edward wouldn’t notice my absence.

      “What is a brothel?” I asked the Abbot first thing that evening.

      After that, neither the prior nor I went to Graben again.

      I was in my tenth or eleventh year when Jorge was called for some business to another town. When he was getting his things ready for a trip, he couldn’t get rid of me, as I was literally grabbed holding the flaps of his cassock, pleading to take me with him. Finally, Jorge gave up. He placed me in the cart, and the two of us set off for Chartres.

      Chapter 2.

      Chartres

      The cart creaked and groaned with its wheels swaying as Jorge and I rode southwest on and on breathing in the scent of tired fields and dried cornstalks. Ice cold water, scooped up from a creek in the palms of your hands, opened by a ladle of prayer, with a throat full of road dust filled with silver ice. Father Jorge missed a right turn to the river several times, although, he said, he had once known every tree here. Hence, we had lost our way and stopped to take a rest beside a mountain stream.

      “My eyes are not the same as before,” Jorge complained while scooping up water for the journey ahead.

      Having strayed a little, we finally discovered the right road and dismounted beside the river for the second and last time.

      Having set eyes on the Chartres Cathedral, I was blown away.

      I hadn’t seen anything like it before. The cathedral appeared before my eyes like an arrow directing itself straight up to the sky, elegant, light, and at the same time, insanely high. The facade, decorated with sculptures, looked as if it had been squeezed by strong massive towers from two sides, covered with the finest lancet tents. Magnificent, noble and exquisitely beautiful, that’s the way it appeared to be, the true House of Lord.

      “What is it?” I pulled at Jorge’s sleeve.

      “It’s a beauty, it’s not for nothing that they talk so much about it,” the abbot narrowed his eyes, looking at the solemn building. “A terrible fire happened, only the under-croft with the facade remains of the old church. And those bits would have not survived, but for the Veil of the Virgin…”

      “Is it housed here?”

      “It is, Anselmo! That’s what saved the Lord’s House. It was rebuilt on donations. They say, the inhabitants delivered stones from the surrounding quarries…

      For the first time ever I was not concerned about Jorge at all.

      How impressive the cathedral was – it could just be seen as something completely immaterial, separated from this world, from people hardened in sin. All its space was striving upward so vigorously as if the cathedral was heartily sick of mortal life; that’s why it decided to give this life up for good, to be focused only in heaven.

      Unfairly playing the second fiddle in my daily life for ages, quadrivium was embodied in this cathedral with its geometric and arithmetic bizarre configurations. It epitomized the divine order, and kept sacred secrets. The soul was going up into the sky, following eye motion. It was the universe, it was everything. It was the single line, which dominated over the entire world – the great and noble vertical.

      It could scratch, injure, or run through me.

      It struck me to the heart. From that very moment, I was convinced that I would never be a monk.

                                            * * *

      Oh, unattainable heaven, I desperately aspire to you whatever it takes.

      Growing up on the earth, I join real life only in heaven. I look tragic acting on impulse. I seem to be a poet carried away by inspiration. I throw away the reality, which I hate and see – myself! – being the House of Lord, high and beautiful.

                                            * * *

      I came to the monastery quite obsessed with this cathedral.

      Prior Ed was finally caught red handed during one of these evil moonless nights. I hunted him down in the Black Gardens sprinkling ashes on balls of wool and trampling the crucifixion with his feet. Suppressing fear and disgust, I tried