The following Sunday the priest feels compelled to deliver his gluttony sermon. His gluttony and Rungholt sermon.
“Five hundred years ago, the island Rungholt had gold and treasures from around the world that arrived on ships from tropical countries. On the docks, people could buy whatever they wanted. There was such excess on Rungholt that, soon, the people had no wishes left. Nothing to wait for.”
The St. Margaret Girls, who’ve grown up waiting for nearly everything, are mesmerized.
“Excess led to gluttony … led to malicious pranks … led to godlessness. I’ve been researching Rungholt for decades,” he says, but leaves out that he’s been searching the wetlands for treasures from Rungholt. “You see, in January of 1362, some drunk farmers forced Schnapps down a pig’s gullet till it fainted. Then they tied a white bonnet to its head and put the pig into a bed.”
A few scoffers and whisperers giggle.
“They covered the pig with a blanket.” The priest gathers an imaginary blanket to his neck. Feels the urgency in his voice, likes how the momentum of this urgency makes him feel taller. He’s on Rungholt this very moment, trying to stop those drunks from mocking God. “They sent for the chaplain to give last rites to a dying woman, but when he folded back the ruffles of the bonnet, he screamed and refused to give last rites to a drunken pig. He crossed himself and ran away. But these farmers were so irreverent and demented that they chased him and poured beer into the silver vessel where he carried the consecrated communion wafer. They laughed at him. ‘Now your God is drunk too.’
“Again the chaplain got away and hid in a church where he begged God for revenge. And God said, ‘Enough! Enough!’ And did what He had done before to punish humans. Sent the flood. Die Sintflut. Except there was no Ark. Now those of you—” The priest peers at the St. Margaret Girls in the tight rows below the pulpit. “Those of you who are newcomers to Nordstrand would like to know if anyone survived.”
The new Girl from Berlin slumps forward. Heavy odors make her queasy. Incense. Liver. Camphor. For her the fainting is not staged; but it is lucky for those Girls who get to support her by her arms and—genuflecting and crossing themselves—usher her from the church into the moist spring air.
The priest waits until the church door slams. His eyes come to rest on the raised faces of the St. Margaret Girls. “Only the priest and two girls survived. The flood took everyone else.”
But Sister Ida is not about to let him frighten her Girls with a sermon that assigns all blame to humans and all power to God. After Mass, she takes her Girls for a walk along the Nordsee. They skip ahead of her, chase mosquitoes as if they were butterflies, collect pieces of driftwood. She purses her lips and blows upward, a childhood gesture to cool her face or drive off insects. Once again it startles her that her hair does not lift with her breath. That stiff wimple— Will I ever get used to that wimple? Or to the shape of my soul?
“Pure,” she was taught as a child, “will happen at your first confession. And the day after you’ll wear the white dress of communion to celebrate the shape of your soul. It will be the happiest day of your life.” But the happiest day did not come: not when she received first communion; not when she took vows. Not until she met Sister Konstanze with her willful chin and her soft curls, though she didn’t see the curls beneath the wimple, of course, not until they peeled off each other’s wimples while sitting on the edge of Sister Konstanze’s bed.
“Girls.” Sister Ida tugs at her starched wimple. “Today we’ll build a driftwood Jesus, except—” Her voice gives out, and she taps her throat with two fingers. “Except none of the anguish, none of the agony.”
The Girls skip away to find bits of wood shaped like body parts that have been washed ashore: arms; thigh bones; the curve of a belly. One Girl says she can hear the bells of Rungholt, but then she’s always the first to hear or see something—even the first Girl to refuse signing the adoption agreement.
“I hear the bells too,” another Girl shouts.
“Bells made of gold.”
“I can hear them now.”
The Girls are exhilarated by the gold and jewels beneath the surface of the Nordsee. With riches like that, you can take your baby and a story of a dead husband and move to a town where no one knows you, start your life anew.
“—hire a nursemaid—”
“—and a cook—”
“—a coachman, too—”
“—a seamstress—”
“—a housekeeper, of course…”
They yank a frayed fishing net from the mud. Help Sister Ida drag two bleached logs from the sea across the dike. “They’re for the cross,” Sister says.
They lash the bleached logs together, the short log across the long log near the top. When they set out for more driftwood, they find a cold fire and pull chunks of blackened wood from the sand: three shaped like feet, one like a shoulder blade, several kneecaps, a ribcage, six ears.
For the sake of authenticity, Sister Ida invites Sister Konstanze to lecture on human biology while she and others arrange driftwood pieces into a spine, a neck, two ears, a collarbone …
Assembling the Jesus takes six days.
“A genuine act of creation,” Sister Konstanze declares.
Sister Ida nods. “Now we rest.”
“As it must be.”
Sister Hildegunde paints rain and after the rain, her colors more intense in that first light upon wet—sand luminous, roofs shimmering. She’ll cover a large canvas with broad strokes that capture vastness rather than precision. Horizontal strokes, deliberate strokes that have a passion and no borders. That cross her eyes, causing her to concentrate on turning her eyes to the side. As she finds new depths in her technique, it’s exhilarating to demonstrate to her students what she is learning for herself.
“Not every detail needs to be shown.”
“Be the blank canvas.”
In the lobby of the St. Margaret Home hangs a new painting of a tiny St. Margaret Home beneath a downpour thick as a waterfall; and yet already light presses through. Sister is mesmerized by horizontal lines—between rough waves and flat waters; between vast sky and vast land—lines that are defined by the uncertainty of shifting where one ends and the other begins, widening, narrowing, and on that line Sister Hildegunde depicts evidence of humans: boats smaller than pebbles; buildings lower than dice; windmills delicate as legs of fleas.
Parishioners like to show Sister Hildegunde their Hochwasser treasures.
“We have a painting of Hochwasser with tiger teeth and tiger claws.”
“… a bowl with a picture of Hochwasser and a sunset.”
“… Hochwasser and roses.”
“My Opa has two carvings of shipwrecks on the backs of whales.”
“Kitsch,” Sister Hildegunde tells her students.
The students laugh.
“Hochwasser has inspired people over centuries. Pictures and carvings and painted porcelain. Some of it is art. But most of it is Kitsch.”
“How can you tell Kitsch?” her students want to know.
“You learn to recognize it.”