More from ASCHENBACHS MISTAKE Although the maps would have marked it as officially part of mother Russia, for several hundred years the church has been known only by its Estonian name: Kullamaa Kirik. It stands alone in that flat landscape, not so far from the castle Koluvere Piiskopilinnus, the name of which you have already heard and will hear yet again. Inside, the church is quite plain in comparison to the grotesque wealth one sees over and over again in European churches: the walls the color of plaster and the benches painted a pale green. There are no golden candlesticks or huge portraits of saints on the walls. It is only a country church and nothing more. The pulpit is on the south wall, its base lifted only slightly above the backs of the nearest benches. Indeed, with some effort the clergyman who stood upon its platform might well have reached down and touched the head of the nearest parishioner. But the clergyman is not why we have come. What we have come for lay just below the pulpit, for there is a stone rectangle boxed off with an iron rail there on the floor of the church and behind it, upon a small stone plinth, cast in an iron plate, reads the following: Hic jacet in pace Augusta Carolina Friderica Luisa Ducis Brunsuicensis-Guelferbytani Filia Friderici Guilielmi Caroli Ducis Vurtembergensis et Supermi Praefecti Viburgensis Uxor Nat. d. III. Dec. MDCCLXIV Denat. d. XIV. Sept. MDCCLXXXVIII When I visited the churchyard I could see from the map beside the parking lot that she lay inside but the heavy doors were locked and chained the day I stood before them. When I pulled and pulled upon those doors, the chains rattled through that great empty room, through those iron rails, down through the stone and the dirt and into her bones. Her voice was so quiet, not even a whisper, not even a breath. Come to me, she said. And I banged my weak fists against that door again and again but no one came to unlock them and eventually—there is, alas, no other way to put this—I gave up and drove back to Tallinn. I spent the next few hours wandering the Old Town and ate borscht at a dark restaurant a full story under the earth and then returned to my room, where I lay wide awake through the endless white night. Sometimes I thought I heard her voice but when I peeked out through the dusty blinds the street was silent: a few parked cars, dark windows, empty doors, all caught in that gauzy quarter-light of an endless summer twilight.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 01:45:10 +0000
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