Grüssau Abbey
Roger McAllister didn’t technically own the warehouse on Russell Street, a nondescript concrete cube situated uncomfortably on an overgrown patch between a body shop and a vacant commercial bakery, but he was quite confident in its security. After all, he possessed the only set of working keys, and his memory held the only codes for the alarm system. He had been trading property management duties for private access for a dozen years, and if the owner ever wanted her own codes and keys, well, all she had to do was ask.
The building featured dry floors, 24-foot ceilings, and a loading dock ready for semi-trailer trucks, if ever the need arose. In a far corner of the back room, Roger McAllister had set up a small study, arranged out of various pieces of furniture that had been entrusted to his care. There was a divan, on which he would catch a couple of hours of rest on nights when “my usual rooms at the Empress” were for whatever reason not available. When the harsh fluorescents on the warehouse ceiling were turned off, and the well-stocked bookcases and the Persian rug (a late 19th-century Dilmaghani Kerman with the Cyrus Crown) were glowing under the soft light of a warm lamp or two, one could almost forget about the cinder-block walls only a few metres away and believe that one had entered into a poet’s lair, or a decadent fashion shoot, or a low-budget production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Here in this room, a privacy defined not by walls but by shadows, lounging in a nicely made armchair whose owner had sent it out for re-upholstery a few years before, McAllister would read and re-read the correspondence between Konrad Josef, the Munich bookseller, and Adalbert Kehr, the friend he had met at the Gotha Conference.
From the very first letter, Roger McAllister found himself intrigued by Adalbert Kehr—not by the young man’s predictable socialism, certainly not—but rather by his intensity, his evident studiousness, his love of antiquities—and above all by his return address: Grüssau Abbey in Silesia.
The old Benedictine abbey had been secularized decades earlier, during the Napoleonic wars, and had become, by the time Adalbert Kehr arrived, an outpost of the Prussian bureaucracy. The church itself, under a dour pastor, served the spiritual needs, such as they were, of the local farmers, while the other buildings remained largely unoccupied, except for one office, where Kehr was expected to monitor both the agricultural and the mineralogical production of the region. The local lead mines having been shuttered for more than a decade, Kehr’s duties included the preparation of weekly reports filled with row after row of zeros, a task in which his predecessor had taken much pride, working late into the evening nearly every night of the week. The study of philology has many benefits, however, including a dramatic improvement in the speed of one’s hand, and Kehr, armed with a new “reservoir pen” imported from England, found that he could acquit himself of his official charge in an hour or two each day, except for harvest season, when there was some actual work to be done. Which left Adalbert Kehr, ten months a year, with fourteen hours of idleness per day, and no one to talk to, except the narrow-minded pastor. (The parishioners regarded Kehr as something between a cop and a spy, and replied to his hearty greetings with frightened nods.)
Luckily, there was an abbey to explore. Kehr found room after room of old books, boxes, papers, records of who knows what. Most were from the last thirty years or so: in one room, Kehr found the carefully bound reports of his predecessor, looking as if they had never been read, which was sad, in a way, but only to be expected. In another room, he found diplomatic dispatches, sent from various embassies to Berlin, all dated in the months leading up to the recent war with the French—had they been moved here during the war for safekeeping? And then forgotten?
And occasionally—always, it seemed, behind a stack of the most dreary governmental reports imaginable—Kehr would find something that seemed to be older, a book in Latin, or a vellum scroll, or a sheet of music, that gave him hope that he might have found a fragment, a trace, some palimpsest of the old library of the Benedictines.
Upon his return from Gotha, Kehr found himself strangely energized, and soon assigned himself an ambitious task: he would sort and organize the contents of Grüssau Abbey. His first letters to Konrad Joseph were filled with an almost heroic sense of mission—even to the point of comparing his work, with only a hint of ironic self-deprecation, to the fifth Labor of Hercules. Soon, unlike Hercules (who managed to cleanse the Augean stables in a single day) but much like his clerical predecessor, Kehr found himself working late each night, moving, stacking, sorting, reading, and indexing room after room of documents.
In one overflowing room, he put all the agricultural and mineralogical production reports; another he filled with railroad switching schedules; and a third with proposals for sewage systems. Soon there were rooms devoted to forestry maps, overdue bridge maintenance notices, textile production quotas, and complaints about the telegraph service. In a very large room, chosen precisely for its leaky roof and moldy floor, Kehr put the malevolent investigation files of all the young men who had emigrated to America to escape the Prussian draft. He found a good dry room for the diplomatic dispatches (how he hoped they would embarrass someone someday!), a better room for the sheets of handwritten music that seemed to be scattered promiscuously among nearly every other kind of document, and he saved the best location of all, a dry cool cellar under what may have been the earliest priory, for anything that seemed older than the First Silesian War.
Even Roger McAllister, reading of these exertions more than a century later, was touched by the tenderness with which Adalbert Kehr described his reconstruction, in that secret cellar, of the Benedictine library: in a typical letter, Kehr would acknowledge, quickly, whatever Konrad Josef had told him of his busy days in Munich as a young father, radical activist, and industrious shopkeeper; decline, politely, the invitation to critique his friend’s latest attempt to reconcile Marx and Proudhon; and then fill page after page with reverential inventories of Latin bibles, illuminated manuscripts, annales, and most exciting of all, the occasional fragment of Middle High German verse.
And then, in one short letter, Kehr announced his discovery of Das Heinrichlied, a manuscript composed in musical balanced strophes, an epic poem that embodied a rare conjunction of artist and subject. An anonymous 11th-century poet of genius had sung the life and deeds of a daring hero: the legendary Henry IV, the greatest Holy Roman Emperor of the great Salian dynasty. This letter contained no small talk at all, no polite acknowledgment of what Konrad Joseph had most recently written, no awareness whatsoever that his correspondent might have a life of his own, his own world.
McAllister smiled as he recognized Kehr’s mental state: serendipitous narcissism, one might call it, the self-absorption that comes from stumbling, quite by accident, upon the very thing you didn’t even know you had been looking for.
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