On 21st September, at 5.30 p.m., the new basic course on the Christian faith begins at Fürstenfelde parsonage. We will devote ourselves to the subject of “Rapture” on the occasion of the Anna Feast. More information available from: heilands@freenet.de
Above the date he wrote in red marker: TODAY!!! and added a * before the T.
Uwe Hirtentäschel looks after the church, keeps it clean, encourages other people to visit it, talks to them benevolently about the faith. He provides them with candles and incense sticks, plays the saxophone in front of the altar, and after the service he leaves the radio playing, so that silence won’t seem to descend so suddenly. He takes care of the place, and that’s good; taking care of things is always good.
Hirtentäschel’s business card shows Jesus as the Good Shepherd, surrounded by sheep, holding a little lamb in his arms. If you tilt the card Jesus raises his arm and the lamb raises its head. On the back is the bit from the Gospel of St John about Jesus being the light of the world, so we must follow him and not walk in darkness.
Uwe Hirtentäschel has been saved. Either the ferryman or an angel saved him. Hirtentäschel is grateful for that every day. Every day, except when the weather is bad, Hirtentäschel puts up a folding table under the oak by the parsonage well, and serves tea and biscuits. All are welcome. Frau Schober made him a crochet tablecloth. She and Frau Steiner usually sit at his table, because they just happen to be in the area. They are both on the point of retiring, but Frau Steiner is very well preserved. She still does some newspaper delivery rounds to make ends meet, and Frau Schober sews and crochets. And then they sit at Uwe’s table in the middle of the day. There’s not much else going on at that time, the house is empty anyway, the Ossis on the midday TV program are always a bad lot and incorrigible. Only in the evening are there normal Ossis like you and us on TV, in Police Call and athletics and Wife Swap. The church oak tree provides shade in summer, and the optimism of the reformed Hirtentäschel provides warmth in winter.
Hirtentäschel puts the marker away and sets off for the parsonage. It is in Karl-Marx-Strasse, of all places, on the corner of Thälmann-Strasse. He has a small apartment and his studio on the top floor. Hirtentäschel’s latest work of art, done for the Feast, is stretched between the branches of the oak. It consists of white scarves. Frau Schober likes the scarves but doesn’t know what they are meant to be. It would be embarrassing to ask the artist in case she looked stupid. She would far rather have been able to say, “What lovely, lovely angels’ wings!” than be guessing, “Are those half-moons?” Or, “Is the white something to do with heroin?” To be honest, we don’t know the answer either, but they make a nice noise fluttering in the wind.
Uwe Hirtentäschel speaks softly and hardly ever asks questions. He wears only white or black clothes, to reflect the light and shade of his life story. He doesn’t mind showing his bald patch, and his glasses have thick lenses because he’s almost blind. That comes of the heroin. It was blinding him for years, he says, both spiritually and literally. Remarks like that show how serious his conversion is. It’s easy and pleasant to listen to someone who hardly ever tries to be funny.
Up on the top floor of the parsonage, Hirtentäschel goes on making his little figures of angels. He’s tired, but he will carve one or two more, one or two more tonight.
The village knows and likes the story of his enlightenment. He also tells it, unasked, to tourists when they stay to drink tea after looking round the church. He likes telling the story, because it was more important than anything else in his life, and because all of us — if we’re honest — are waiting for a miracle, so we like to hear about one.
Uwe Hirtentäschel was born in Fürstenfelde, and at the age of fifteen he ran away from Fürstenfelde. He describes the next fifteen years as a single moment and a never-ending trip. It had been a time full of small flashes of enlightenment in his drugged intoxication. He calls them “disorientations”: false, uncertain joys, siren songs. Sins. But then he had his great epiphany, when he was “found.” It happened in Fürstenfelde.
After years of taking drugs and addiction, Hirtentäschel passed the Woldegk Gate on his way to the Baltic early one morning, and there was the old wall, there were the lakes, there was the promenade, there was the ferry boathouse, all the same as ever, and he got out, had to get out, sat down beside the lake and drank perhaps his sixth beer of the day, and then the ferryman came by. He recognized Hirtentäschel. He recognized the boy who had just disappeared one day, leaving his parents with a thousand questions. The ferryman didn’t know about the disorientations, says Hirtentäschel, but he surely recognized his, Hirtentäschel’s, demons.
He took Hirtentäschel out on a boat trip with him and insisted on his lending a hand. As soon as someone comes back, Hirtentäschel cried, you want them doing your work for you, but the ferryman thought that was funny. Hirtentäschel rowing, all skin and bones. He found it terribly difficult. In the middle of the lake he couldn’t row any more. Then the ferryman made him promise something. He wanted Hirtentäschel to listen to him, he wanted to tell him a story. Hirtentäschel agreed, and listened, but he couldn’t concentrate, and to this day he doesn’t know what the story was about. They had reached the little island with the barn on it. Hirtentäschel got out, and as soon as he turned round he saw that he was alone, surrounded by tall grass and insects. “I called to the ferryman, but only a jay answered. I wanted to get back to the water, but the water had disappeared too, I couldn’t find the water any more, imagine that, and you’ll know what a bad state I was in.”
At this point Uwe Hirtentäschel liked to pause. Frau Steiner and Frau Schober have heard the story so often before that, at the mention of the jay, their lips form the word “jay” soundlessly, and they nod to one another, just as they did today when he was telling his story to a man who had come to dive in the lake, and they do the same with the words “gloomy” and “brittle” in the next sentence: “All was dark and gloomy inside my head,” says Hirtentäschel, “and my mind was brittle, and I saw a weeping willow with moss growing over it, soft, thick moss, so I was going to lie down on the moss, smoke a joint, ease myself out of it, but then something hit the nape of my neck, and I fell over, then something hit my back once, twice, it hurt like hell, it was doing me in, finishing me off, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. The ferryman was thrashing me! He hit me with an oar, he hit my head, my arm. I couldn’t let myself lose consciousness, I wanted to see the ferryman above me with his beard full of grass. The blows came raining down on me, my light, I thought, my protector, I thought — then it all went black.
“When I came back to my senses, I was lying naked as a blade of grass on the moss. It was dark. The half-moon hung above me, and it would have been better if it had been a full moon, but never mind that. A wind was blowing over the lake, over there was the village and the kindly church spire. The ferryman was standing in the water, in the light cast by a strange stone. He was catching fish with his bare hands. Ten or fifteen pike were lying in his boat, thrashing their tails about, dying. I was dead already. I lay down with the fish. I knew something. There was something I knew, and that was the very first time I could say, with certainty: I know. The stone shone brighter than the moon. The ferryman was an angel on earth. He had taken my old life away from me and found me a new one. That was what I knew.
“The ferryman took me back to the village. I felt no pain, there was no trace of the blows to be seen — he had healed me. I promised to serve him. The ferryman asked if I was still on a druggy trip, and where I was going to stay. I’d hoped he would tell me. Then I found out that my parents had moved away years ago, but there was a room vacant in the parsonage. The parsonage, of course. I’m still living in that room today.”