The Secret Cellar | Ep. 24 | The Underground River
The Underground River
Letter from Adalbert Kehr to Konrad Josef
June 1889
Konrad, understanding Konrad, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche suspects that I have gone mad.
I should have known that EFN would read my letter. Although it was addressed to you, my dear Konrad. I should have known she would detain the boy, that she would order two strong Saxon farmers (though none of us are as strong as we once were) to restrain him with ropes while she opened the letter. I was a fool to think EFN would simply send the letter on to Germany, like a compliant postmistress. Now with icy clarity I can imagine her rage at being treated as if she were a mere functionary, I imagine her rage at learning of the deaths of my wife and son in a communication addressed not to herself but to my old socialist friend in Munich. How could I have been such a fool? I suppose it’s because I haven’t spoken German for two months (except for teaching the boy), and have lost the instinct for colonial politics.
The boy returned the next day, frightened, with a note from EFN. Her tone was formal, her sympathy for my losses condescending. The waters continued to recede and a week later the rescue party arrived. But the house was empty, that damned house on the outer frontier of our new nation. Only the graves of my wife and son were well-tended. The boy can be invisible when he chooses and he watched from a nearby tree. EFN did not stoop to touch the flowers on the graves.
They did not find me and they will not find me. By the time they arrived at the house, I was hiding in this cave, beneath the ruins of the church, where the women say that the priest lived for a hundred years after the soldiers came. Yes, that is what they say — I am quite certain of the literal meaning: that a priest lived in this cave for one hundred years. (I am making steady progress in learning their language.) But of course it cannot be so. The Jesuits were banished from the new world more one hundred years ago, and I assume a priest continued living here for some years thereafter. There is a crumbling wooden cross not far from here, where an outcropping forms a kind of natural alcove in a quiet part of the cave, and I presume it marks the padre’s grave. Those are the only possible facts. As kind as the women are, they have no critical sense of history — they make no distinction between “100 years ago” and “for 100 years.”
So you see, Konrad, (in case you have been wondering, and if you receive this letter I am sure you will be wondering) I am still capable of analytic thought. I am still a philologist, a scholar, a rational European man.
The women, for their part, still practice a kind of Catholicism. They know more words of Latin than of Spanish. Each day I hear them above me in the church, singing:
O Iesu dulcis, O Iesu pie, O Iesu, fili Mariae.
… but it is their own religion now, not the Pope’s.
Konrad, I must tell you about this cave. There are passages here which lead far inside the earth. I have sent the boy to explore the depths. He squeezed through a hole; I passed him a torch, and two hours later he reported with expansive gestures on the existence of several large and wondrous rooms through which there flowed an underground river. If I sit quietly in the darkness I can hear — or I believe I can hear — the river below. At times I allow myself to imagine that all the churches in the world have caverns or chambers beneath them, and that this river meanders from church to church, from sanctuary to sanctuary, from secret cave to hidden vault, that it wanders even as far as Silesia, to the sealed library beneath Grüssau Abbey, where I so carefully concealed the original text of the Heinrichlied amid the treasures of the Benedictines.
But I know that is only a dream. I know I cannot return to my youthful enthusiasms, even were I possessed of a working dimensiomanometer. Konrad, I know there is no easy way home. I know that there is no secret underground passage between this failed New Germany and the Germany we left behind, the only true Germany, the Germany I know will one day purify itself of all the butchers of every kind and thereby reach its destiny.
Tomorrow the boy will deliver this letter. I have shown him how to affix sheets of paper to a stone with cords — in reality they are the roots of jungle plants, but for this purpose they will do as well as any strong German rope one might find on the docks of Hamburg — and I have taught him how to toss the letter, attached to the stone, onto a veranda from a distance. We have practiced as if it were a game. Throw it, I say, and when you hear it land on the wooden floor, turn and run home!
We practice like a father and son preparing for a sporting event. He is getting quite good at the task — he can toss a stone wrapped with paper from 20 meters away so softly that it hardly bounces….
I teach him to run when it lands, and I hope he does so, for I know that EFN, when she reads this letter (and I know that she will read it, though it is not addressed to her)….
No, I must teach him to run sooner, the moment the letter leaves his hand. He must escape. For if EFN catches him, I know that there will be no mercy in her heart when she reads that I have resigned my place in her great experiment, that I am no longer a stalwart citizen of her colony, this false and empty promise….
The boy is ready. I must go.
With fondest thoughts of the True Germany,
Your True German Friend,
Adalbert Kehr
Continue reading: The next episode is The Horrid Situation, part of The Secret Cellar, on MyWayToCanossa.com.
Originally published at www.daveomeara.com on May 28, 2018.
