Journey by Moonlight

After an hour of strenuous climbing they reached the monastery. A mighty stone wall led them round the building to a little door cut into it, which was shut. They rang. After a long wait a tiny window in the door was pushed open, and a bearded monk peered out. The helpful lad explained that the gentleman was a pilgrim and wished to pay his respects to Sant’ Ubaldo. The door opened. Mihály paid the guide and stepped into the courtyard.

The gate-brother was gazing up and down in amazement at his clothes.

“The signore is from abroad?”

“Yes.”

“No matter. There is a father here who is also from abroad and who understands foreign languages. I shall tell him you’ve come.”

He led Mihály into one of the buildings where lights were still burning. A few minutes later Ervin arrived, no longer in his flowing robes but his brown Franciscan cowl. It now struck Mihály how thoroughly Franciscan Ervin had become. The tonsure gave quite a different look to the face, as if its owner had expunged from his nature every worldliness, every conceivable worldliness, and elevated himself into the air of the Giottos and Fra Angelicos. And yet, Mihály felt, this was Ervin’s true face. From the very first he had been growing towards this face. The tonsure had always been there on his crown. It had simply been hidden by his bushy black hair … There could be no doubt that, however alarming the result, Ervin had found himself. And before he realised what he was doing he had greeted him the way they had greeted the religious teachers in school:

“Laudetur Jesus Christus.”

“In aeternum,” was the reply. “But how did you find me here, where no bird flies? Come, I’ll take you to the reception room. We’re not allowed visitors in our cells. That’s a rule we enforce very strictly.”

He lit a taper and led Mihály through vast, totally empty whitewashed halls, corridors and smaller rooms, with no sign of a living soul: nothing but their echoing footsteps.

“Tell me, how many people live in the monastery?” Mihály asked.

“Six. Plenty of room for us, as you can see.”

It was most eerie. Six people in a building where two hundred would not have been a crowd. And where once there certainly had been that many.

“Don’t you get scared here?”

Ervin smiled and ignored the childish question.

And so they reached the reception room, a huge, arched, empty hall, in one corner of which stood a table and a few rickety wooden chairs. On the table was a pitcher of red wine and a glass.

“Thanks to the goodness of Pater Prior we are in the happy situation of being able to offer a little wine,” said Ervin. Mihály was struck by the peculiar way he spoke. No doubt he hadn’t spoken Hungarian for so many years … “Now for a drink. I’ll pour you some straight away. It’ll do you good to take something after the long walk.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I never drink. Since I joined the order … ”

“Ervin … perhaps you no longer smoke?”

“No.”

Mihály’s eyes again filled with tears. No, this was beyond imagining. He could have believed anything of Ervin — that he wore a spiked hairshirt under his clothing, that he would receive the stigmata before his death — but his not smoking!

“We’ve rather more important things to talk about,” said Ervin, to divert attention from this sacrifice. “But have a drink, and do smoke if you want to.”

Mihály downed a glass of the red wine. There are great myths about the wines stored by monks in cobwebbed bottles for the entertainment of their rare guests. This was not one of those but an ordinary, if very clean-tasting, country wine, its bouquet wonderfully suited to the simplicity of the empty whitewashed hall.

“I don’t know if it’s any good,” said Ervin. “We don’t have a cellar of our own. We are a begging order, and you have to take that rather literally. Now, tell me your story.”

“Look, Ervin, of our two lives yours is the more remarkable. My curiosity is by rights stronger than yours. You must tell me your story first … ”

“What is there to tell, my dear Mishy? We have no personal story. The life of any one monk is the same as any other, and you can read the sum of those lives in the history of the church.”

“But tell me, at any rate, how you came here to Gubbio.”

“At first I remained back home, in Hungary. I was a novice in Gyöngyös, then for a long time at the monastery in Eger. Then the Hungarian branch of the Order had to send a father to Rome on some business, and I was chosen because I had been learning Italian. Then, some time after I had dealt with that, I was called to Rome again, because they had taken a great liking to me, though I certainly didn’t deserve it, and they wanted to keep me there to work with the Pater Prior. But I was concerned that this might lead, in due course, to my making a career, purely in the Franciscan context, naturally — becoming the head of a house somewhere, or filling some rank at Head Office. And that I didn’t want. So I asked Pater Prior to place me here in Gubbio.”

“Why here, exactly?”