‘Why not. Although tonight I believe it is I who is in need of spiritual reassurance.’
‘Such enlightenment, they say, may be found—although momentarily—in both cunt and flask. Not that I would know,’ Groot finishes piously.
Depressed, Detlef reaches for the bottle again. There have been many occasions when the complexities and hypocrisies of his church have challenged his faith, but the romantic within him yearns still for the exhilaration of unquestioning belief. To be a priest of a small parish somewhere in the Rhineland, unhindered by the machinations of power, a simple shepherd of souls, this was the life he imagined as a boy; not the convoluted strategies of domination in which men are sacrificed for political gain. Even the plain language of Luther, which dignifies the ordinary man, seems attractive to him at this moment.
Is he suddenly finding his principles again, he wonders, and drains his goblet in an effort to banish any more outrageous notions. His mistress will, at least, provide a distraction.
Two hours later he is with her, the darkened bedchamber heavy with oriental musk and the scent of their bodies. He is between her thighs, pounding with a violence entirely out of character. Birgit, wrapping her legs around his back, arches herself up to embrace him further.
There is a desperation to his lovemaking that estranges her; with each thrust she is taken out of the moment and left pondering.
For the first time her lover is not concerned with her pleasure but rides his own, oblivious. With renewed fury he reaches a climax and shouts out, abandoning their usual protocol of silence. Then he rolls away, turning his back to her. She waits, taking perverse pleasure in observing the emotional gulf that seems to widen between them with each breath. When she can bear it no longer she reaches out and forces him to roll back towards her. Tentatively she nestles on his damp shoulder and listens to his wildly pounding heart.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers. ‘I am no longer worthy of your affections.’
For a moment Birgit cannot speak for the fear of loss which grips her. Feeling as if she is falling off the edge of a precipice she hesitates, searching for the right strategy.
‘My love, you will always be worthy.’
‘But where will this lead us, Birgit? There is no longer any redemption in our affection. There is nothing but a mutual indulgence of cynicism, a shared condemnation of the pretensions of our world, and yet we ourselves are the very embodiment of such artifice.’
At this she sits upright; never has Detlef spoken so plainly.
‘We have joy, wit, humour and immense pleasure,’ she replies carefully, painfully aware of the risk she takes with every spoken revelation. ‘Surely this is justification enough?’
‘I no longer know.’
Birgit, staring into the dark, wonders about her new adversary. Is it a flesh and blood woman or a sudden wave of Puritanism which has possessed her lover like a demon?
Dear Benedict,
I am still incarcerated, although the thin gruel has been supplemented with some aged mutton. I fear this concession is merely to keep me alive long enough to torture a confession out of me. I have been officially charged and know I shall be subjected to the cruellest of interrogations. I can hear the cries of the poor men who were arrested with me, but strangely my isolation is more immediately terrifying. Here in this solitude I begin to forget who I am and what I am. The perimeters of my very existence blur into the damp and the grey light in which nothing is distinct. I keep my sanity through philosophising, by working your thesis over and over.
If, as you suggest, God does not wilfully direct the course of nature then my imprisonment and probable martyrdom occur for no good reason in the greater fabric of destiny. I try to comfort myself with your argument that human beings have a biological need to believe that God acts with purpose, for they themselves are under the illusion that they act with free will.
We are ignorant of the true causes of things, only aware of our own desire to pursue what is useful to us. We delude ourselves by thinking that we are free and that all our actions are guided by what is useful to us. We even have the arrogance to think that God must wilfully guide external events for our benefit, since we cannot guide Destiny ourselves…
I know you carry this treatise further by suggesting that the Divine does not act with a purpose but that only the most perfect of God’s acts are those closest to him. By this argument I deduce that my imprisonment is too removed from God to have any meaning directly to God himself. In that case, why am I? And what meaning has my life and my death?
Such musings keep me teetering on the right side of madness…
Composing the letter in her mind to comfort herself, Ruth imagines Benedict Spinoza sitting in his small cottage in Rijnsburg, can almost see his narrow handsome face illuminated with passion and hear his low voice with its melodious Portuguese overtones.
‘Ruth…’ A familiar voice sounds softly in the dark.
For a moment she fears that the solitude has finally caused her senses to slip into hallucination. She swings around.
Rosa, her old nursemaid, clutching a candle over her head, squints blindly into the cell. ‘My child, are you in there? Or have you perished in such filth?’
In her haste to respond the midwife stumbles and falls. Rosa kneels and tries to squeeze her fleshy arms through the bars to reach her.
‘What have they done to you?’ she whispers in Spanish.
The guard, a massive youth with a shaven head, steps out of the shadows, keys rattling. He pushes the nursemaid away brusquely and opens the gate.
‘Speak German otherwise I shall have to imprison you as a spy. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?’ He guffaws and slaps Rosa good-naturedly on the backside.
‘Watch who you are talking to!’ she snaps, to Ruth’s amazement, then steps into the cell as casually as if she were entering a market stall. Shaking his head the guard locks the gate behind her.