The following is a contemporary retelling of a Slovenian folk tale.1
Within each successive generation of a given institution one finds some wretched soul with an inextinguishable thirst for knowledge. This kind of man will do anything within his power - no matter how limited - to sate this thirst through acts that without exception take on an obsessive quality. Making the unknown known is the central task of his troublesome life.
The abbot of the Stična monastery was such a man.2 During the wee hours, when the other monks accepted darkness as being the time for sleep, the abbot would spend his nights holed up in the monastery's library with many a burly tome spread atop the table central to the room. Shadows from candles danced in the colonnaded alcoves and in the creases of the abbot's tired face. Indeed, he knew no greater love than this, perhaps with the exception of God's.
Every morning, the abbot rose groggily, for his nighttime activities never spared him from the moaning of the first bell. He developed a habit of taking his breakfast quickly and rushing to the chapterhouse wholly unprepared to face his maker. While the other monks spent the subsequent, silent hours of their days head down in meditative prayer, their inquiries and ruminations were of a theological rather than material nature, having long accepted that what was already known of the world was more than enough -- for the world comes from God, and no one could possibly know more than Him. But the abbot's prayers asked not for forgiveness, nor for peace or humility, but for answers. Why have You made the world as such? Why is it that the willow's branches extend in reverence not towards the sky but the earth? Why does the inchworm emerge to greet the air after the rain? Why does the thrush sing such complex melodies?
This torment regarding the natural world was perhaps to be expected, as the Stična monastery stood just down the road from a deep, boundless forest, so dense only the remnants of the strongest sunbeams ever made it to the ground. There vast swaths of green alliums and ferns carpeted the forest floor and under each leaf one discovered a different insect. All known shades of moss formed bouquets in the embraces of hornbeam roots. Birds there could only be heard, so protected were they by the dark foliage, and in the equally sheltered creeks flittered the speckled bodies of salamanders. But of all the natural phenomena to be found in the forest, nothing so obsessed the abbot as the cave. The cave gaped from the karst3 like a threatening yawn. It beckoned the abbot, a grand geological gesture of the unknown itself.
The abbot devoted more and more of his walks to the cave, and when he reached it, stared down its open maw and saw nothing but nothing. Sometimes he threw stones into the mouth and listened intently, often for minutes, but no sound ever came. On Saturdays, when the Cistercians took to the gardens for their weekly reprieve from silence, the abbot would relay in great detail his findings. But none of the brothers wished to entertain this nonsense talk about the cave. They feared it greatly, offered it its due respect. Some things, dear brother, they would tell the abbot, can and should only be known by God. The deep quiet of the cave should serve as its own warning: Venture too far and you will reach an ignoble end. And rightly so, do you not think, brother? Curiosity, after all, begat the Fall of Man.4
But such admonishment did not satisfy our abbot. God, he reckoned, had created the natural world for the use of mankind, and He did so before the temptation of Eve. If the monastery already kept detailed records of man's zoological and botanical machinations by way of husbandry and horticulture -- or, for that matter, all the poisons and remedies to be found in the natural world -- why were these not seen as tempting the Devil or interfering with the Will of God, but instead as a humble indexing of God's gifts? The cave, too, was a gift, the abbot wanted to argue, but his protestations fell on deaf ears.
The abbot's fascination with the cave would become by summer an obsession, one that soon lent itself to scheming. Surely there must be a bottom to that cave, he thought, maybe even the other world. Such a belief was only ever discussed in hushed voices, usually those of peasants or women. The other world, neither heaven nor hell, but somewhere else, fully formed, unknown but not impossible. Silly as it may seem, among such superstitious folk, the other world was no laughing matter.
Eventually, the abbot's colleagues grew weary of all this mindless tittering about the cave. They decided collectively to put an end to the matter -- if only for their own sanity. If the abbot could find some poor soul willing to risk his life descending into what very may well be Hell, then the monks promised to organize such an expedition with the limited means at their disposal. The abbot knew that he himself had neither the physical aptitude (many well-fed years in the monastery had made him rather corpulent) nor the requisite bravery to accept such a daunting task.
Fortunately, it did not take him very long to find the perfect subject.
***
In the nearby town of Šentvid, there lived a stubborn, wiry peasant named Kadunjčar, who had been a thorn in the side of the monastery for some years now. Kadunjčar resided in a house owned in fief by the monks, and the monks had long wanted to get rid of him in favor of a more pleasant tenant. Their mutual animosity began when, one growing season, Kadunjčar, who was quite intelligent and curious in his own way, grew a certain batch of pears in the garden in front of his house. These pears were delicious, cultivated from trees Kadunjčar had been perfecting for many years using a peasant's vernacular cunning -- collecting seeds, planting the offspring of favored trees close together so as to cross-pollinate, taking cuttings -- all the while keeping mental notes, for he could neither read nor write.
One of the monks came round to check up on Kadunjčar during a hot September afternoon, and Kadunjčar offered his visitor some of his pears with a great deal of pride. Impressed by the taste and consistency of the fruit, the monk asked the peasant what kind of pears they were. Kadunjčar told him the truth, that they were his own special pears, a product of many successful seasons. The monk didn't understand -- what did a peasant know about botany? -- and so, thinking his intelligence was being insulted, he asked again. Kadunjčar, puzzled, told him the same thing. The monk started to grow suspicious -- after all his serf didn't live too far from Stična, where fine gardens were kept -- and this time he followed up his question with thinly veiled accusations. This was just too much for Kadunjčar, and on his doorstep the two had a virulent spat. The monk's behavior bewildered the peasant, a simple man who had offered him a kindness, and who, when questioned, responded honestly, albeit with his usual bristly demeanor. Sadly, the damage had been done. Ever since that day, the Stična monks treated Kadunjčar with a special disdain and wariness.
When the abbot informed the other monks of his cave exploration proposal, they agreed: there was no one more physically adroit and mentally stubborn in all of Šentvid than Kadunjčar. He was the only one who stood a chance going into the cave. The following Saturday, the Abbot approached Kadunjčar and offered him a deal. If he reached the bottom of the cave and came back alive, the monks would give him the house in which he lived and the surrounding fields to own outright as an allod. Kadunjčar, of course, saw the situation rather differently than the monks. He had long grown tired of his supercilious landlords and their strict ways. To be freed from tenancy represented the closest thing to personal liberation someone like him could ever expect.
And so Kadunjčar agreed. He would descend to the bottom of the cave. After all, he did not believe in the monks' fussy superstitions. The cave probably went a mile into the earth at most. Surely not far enough to lead to Hell or some other world, or whatever nonsense these monks came up with after too much time spent bereft of speech and most of life's other greatest pleasures. Kadunjčar believed in such lofty things only to the extent necessary to navigate life: he followed the Ten Commandments, went to Mass, tried to live as honestly as possible. His questions, his curiosity, dealt with matters of the everyday -- as to be expected of one who tends the earth -- not with the existential, the supernatural. God was God, and was that not enough?
Meanwhile, the abbot spent several days in the library charting out the expedition. By this point, the other monks, being unfortunately human, were themselves a little bit intrigued. They waited restlessly for Saturday, and when it came, devised a plan. It took until evening for the brothers to agree on a core solution: They would borrow the rope from all the belfries in all the churches of Stična and Šentvid, which, they figured, should be enough to get the poor, stupid peasent to the bottom of the hole. Whatever else was needed could be fashioned from various textiles lying around the village; the citizenry would surely also be interested in the outcome of this endeavor.
The monks set a date for the following Saturday. Over the course of the next week, they gathered the ropes from the belfries in Stična and Šentvid, silencing both from the passage of time. In the interim the towns lived by the sun like their forefathers. Friday evening, the brothers coiled the vast spans of rope meticulously at the mouth of the cave, tying one end to a wooden contraption they furnished in order to bear the brunt of Kadunjčar's weight.
On the day of the descent, Kadunjčar awoke to the crow of his rooster. For a moment he stayed in bed and reconsidered what he was about to do. He contemplated whether death was a possibility, and whether his freedom made for a fair wager. But the truth -- beyond his material interests and despite his protestations to the contrary -- was that deep down Kadunjčar, too, suffered from that same stubborn curiosity: What, indeed, could be found at the bottom of that stupid cave? And so that morning the peasant dressed himself in his best homespun, made the sign of the cross, and tried his best not to dwell too much on what could or couldn't go wrong. The walk to the forest was a long and quiet one and Kadunjčar, like all men about to face great uncertainty, found himself moved by a certain grandeur. He slowed his paced and took in more of the world than usual, his fingers grazing the broad leaves of the alliums, his eyes searching the canopy for the sky.
***
He arrived at the cave around eight in the morning, though no one could tell without the bell to toll it. When he approached the monks, not much was said -- even with the permission of Saturday. The deal had been made, the terms laid out in neat little script on a sealed scroll of parchment. The abbot fashioned a crude harness made from two loops of rope for Kadunjčar to sit in, and tied to the rope a small bell for him to ring, lest he encounter any distress. Should that happen, should he really give the bell a good clanging, the monks promised to pull him up without hesitation.
Kadunjčar was a brave man, but even his bravery had limits. He felt them collect in the back of his throat as he stepped towards the mouth of the cave, surrounded by the monks and the people of Šentvid who were starting to gather in trickles, inevitably allured by such a spectacle. Nothing quite attracts like the potential to come face to face with human expiration and for these people Kadunjčar's dive was not unlike a hanging, albeit one with a more open answer.
Silent as the grave, Kadunjčar braced his feet against the pourous rock and began to rappel into darkness. And what darkness it was, penetrated only by the ever dwindling light from the mouth of the cave, itself obscured by the ruddy, stupid faces of the monks looking down on him just as they always looked down on him and people like him. For the first hundred feet this thought filled Kadunjčar with spiteful resolve. But soon he became so surrounded by nothing, so enveloped in such dense, impenetrable blackness that minutes stretched into agony. These minutes themselves compounded into hours, one, two, close to three. The bell murmured unseen on its cord, and Kadunjčar's breathing, choked already by the damp air, tightened many times at the thought of ringing it and sparing himself further misery. But something stopped him. Something unknowable within told him to press on. The rope jerked and lurched as the monks lowered their vassal in once-short tugs that grew ever longer as the men above became impatient. How much deeper could the stupid cave possibly go?
Kadunjčar's heart raced. He felt it in the soft place where his ear met his neck. The only sounds to be heard in the cave were those made by his body: the breath leaving and entering his lungs, the blood rushing in his skull, the shifting of his hands as they clutched the coarse surface of the rope. It started to frighten him, this bleak reality, the fact that the rope really was the only link he had with not only the world above but with his own tomorrow. Through this simple machine - weight, rope, counterweight - he came face to face with life's fragility in a way no man could ever prepare for. And still, and still, he did not give up. With every drop, he expected the bottom. He shouted a few times just hear something other than his pounding, rabbit heart. But his shouts disappeared into empty nothing, and to his horror Kadunjčar realized that both his voice and the bell had long since been rendered useless. This only made him shout all the more.
Suddenly, one of these shouts touched something, spread over it and came back like a slap. And just as suddenly, a faint light appeared to him and grew ever nearer. The cave began to open up from below into bowed brightness, as though someone had punched a hole into the crest of a globe just to lower Kadunjčar down into its unpainted innards. But the contents of this place had color, in fact, they looked rather like the sky and the clouds. The air around him expanded. As he descended further and further, Kadunjčar peered down and saw the ligatures of a world similar to the one he came from, with patches of the same dark earth and green grass, the same graceful bows of willows caressing the surface of a broad, winding river, not unlike the river Krka. But in this world, the sun shined brighter and the fresh air tasted sweeter. The earth itself was rich and pungent with life, the soil so saturated with moisture that Kadunjčar's sandaled feet sunk into it like dough. And when they did, the rope went slack. All the way on the other end, the monks let out a sigh.
Kadunjčar dropped to his knees. He brushed his coarse fingers over dewy blades of grass, thankful to be alive and standing on something, anything firm. His blue eyes widened and, blinking a couple of times, finally adjusted to the light. Then he laughed, whether from nervousness or elation, he could not be sure. He ventured a few hundred feet along the river to where an embankment opened and from there took a long drink, so famished he was from his terrifying journey. He removed his shoes and dipped his feet in the water, watching as a few silvery minnows darted away. Kadunjčar found himself unable to believe what he saw with his own eyes, heard with his own ears. Yet it was there. Birds sang the same songs but more mellifluously, clouds formed more perfect shapes, breathing itself was easier and the water tasted clear and pure. What a world this was, he thought over and over, what a world!
These thoughts were abruptly cut short by the faint yet growing sound of voices. They were strong joyful voices, singing songs of work. Startled by the presence of others, the intruder put on his shoes and sought shelter in the fronds of a willow. It relieved him somewhat that he and the voices shared the same language. Soon, the voices were so loud that Kadunjčar knew their owners would soon notice him. He squeezed his eyes shut in fear and the voices stopped. When he found the strength to open them, there stood before him a group of reapers, tall and broad-shouldered, beautiful to the point of holiness, their blond hair catching the light, their white teeth smiling benevolently in his direction.
"Come," said one, "Come work with us." And he handed poor Kadunjčar a long scythe, which Kadunjčar took with bewilderment.
"You can speak can't you?" Asked another. Kadunjčar nodded.
"Then you can mow, too. Just three rows, that's all we ask."
Kadunjčar, who had mowed his fields hundreds of times in the bleak, thankless toil of his life, now quivered with dread. He took the scythe and swung it in uneven, messy strokes. His pupils shrunk as he watched the powerful pulls and releases of his companions, marveling at their practiced and effortless efficiency. With each wobbly pass of the scythe, Kadunjčar felt more and more wretched and ashamed. The mowers awakened in him the truth of his simple coarseness. All that he lacked, all of his flaws -- his sins, his desires, his failings, his ignorance and simpleness, his weaknesses and his petty yearnings -- came to the fore of his consciousness and assailed him without mercy. Ugly and small, he wondered what it was that so separated these men from the other world and himself. Kadunjčar could barely keep up with their pace. His mowing grew ever more flustered and erratic. How badly he wished to hide himself from this other world, from these beautiful people! The light of God Himself shined there and Kadunjčar shriveled beneath its unbearable gaze.
As soon as he thought this, there came a sharp sound, halfway between a thud and a shatter. Kadunjčar jolted, knowing by feel what he had done. In his clumsy fear, he'd struck the scythe on a broad stone and now watched in horror as the once-fine blade split right down the middle, ruined. The singing of his companions stopped. Kadunjčar could feel their eyes on his skin as they looked at him, and their beautiful faces contorted with ire. Surrounded, he cowered, covering himself with his arms. But he was unable to stop the angry blows which the mowers then rained down upon him. Time fractured for Kadunjčar as each strike connected with his body in raucous, nauseating crackles of bones and blood.
Just as he began to abandon hope, Kadunjčar's body tumbled out from under his knees. With a yelp, he felt himself sliding against the wet earth. Panicked and delirious, he fisted the ground with his hands in a vain attempt to stop the rapid succession of so many events. The mowers' faces grew smaller and smaller, their anger tempered by the spectacle of this strange man being dragged back from whence he came, rising up into the mystery of above. Then Kadunjčar realized: the monks were pulling him back to the surface! He scrambled for the rope and hoped that experience would help him endure that awful, dank blackness for God knows how long.
From the moment he left the ground to the moment he resurfaced at the mouth of the cave, which, thanks to the monks' panic, took half the time of the initial descent, Kadunjčar squeezed his eyes shut and clung to his tether for dear life. He banished all thought save for the Our Father interspersed with helpless pleading -- Please, God Almighty, let this whole thing be over with as soon as possible. Only in the final meters of his ascent did he open his eyes and see the faces of the monks and the townspeople peering back at him with a washed-out look, as though he'd died and came back a different Kadunjčar. The abbot, his own face wan, helped his vassal out of the cave and as soon as he did, Kadunjčar threw himself to the ground. He kicked off the harness and reached for the first solid thing he could grasp -- grass, rock, a monk's leg -- to reassure himself of his own safety.
After the poor peasant caught his breath, the abbot asked him with great eagerness what he had seen. This eagerness aroused a certain spitefulness in Kadunjčar, but, remembering his house and his pear trees, he relented.
"I saw a world just like our own but more perfect, more full of life. The river wound through black soil, its surface touched by the branches of willows. The sun shined brighter than it ever has here. You could taste the purest water in the air."
"And then what happened?"
"I was approached by a group of mowers, so strong and so handsome, I wondered if they could possibly be made from the same human stuff as myself. They asked me to mow with them, and I did. Watching them mow -- it was the best mowing I'd ever seen -- I became so frightened and ashamed of myself, then, Abbot, I cannot describe it. In such a fright, I struck a rock and the scythe broke in two. The men all began to beat me. Just as I believed my fate was sealed, you pulled me back up."
"You were gone so long," said the wide-eyed abbot, "We began to worry."
"Nay, I should thank you, Abbot. You saved me just in time, for surely they would have beaten me to death, if not for my crime than because I was worth nothing to them."
The abbot did not know what to do with such a fantastical story. His mind raced. Another world! Just like our own but more beautiful! But this world was no Heaven either, for the people there are filled with violence and when one is there he is confronted with his own imperfection. What could it all mean? It sounded too strange to be true. He tried to pry further, conveyed his disbelief to Kadunjčar, but the latter only became angrier and angrier at the abbot's doubtful and insistent questioning.
"I've held up my end of our bargain," he said. "I'm telling you what I've seen. Look," he rolled his sleeve up, brandishing a wounded arm, "See where they struck me? If you don't believe me, the rope is right there. You - any of you, you cowards - can go down into the cave and see for yourself."
This certainty and this sudden burst of anger from a man who woke up that morning as their serf startled the monks. They stared at Kadunjčar uneasily, realizing they'd lost their wager. The townspeople, meanwhile, were roused by this display of proof and by the extraordinary claims of their compatriot. They watched with keen interest how the monks, for whom they had little affection, would respond to Kadunjčar. In the span of only a few hours, this man had become a hero. Kadunjčar, born humble but freed from serfdom by a feat of sheer courage! Kadunjčar, who had outwitted the monks who ate well in times of famine and looked down upon simple people! Kadunjčar, the only man to ever lay eyes upon the other world and live to tell the tale! Kadunjčar! Kadunjčar! The people gathered around him in a frenzy, touching him, grasping for his homespun shirt, stroking his hair, clamoring loudly, Kadunjčar! Kadunjčar! Kadunjčar's gaze grew hazy and unfocused as he stared at the abbot, his heart bolstered by the excitment bubbling around him. This sudden and impassioned display of solidarity, fringed as it was with nigh-pagan raucousness, frightened the monks almost as much as the other world itself.
Resigned to the situation, the abbot stared listlessly into the mouth of the cave, unable to accept that in its depths lied a distant elsewhere. And yet, faced with the escalating situation, the blackened arms, and the certainty of Kadunjčar's words, the abbot had no choice but to believe. Alright, then! he shouted, and the townspeople fell silent. He beckoned for one of the brothers to bring him the roll of parchment, if only to stop a riot. What a waste of ink and wax, a charter for an illiterate man, lamented the abbot inwardly. Nevertheless, in the presence of witnesses, hands were shook and promises begrudgingly fulfilled. And thus, on that Saturday afternoon, Kadunjčar's house became his own. The townspeople, their arms around him, meandered in the direction of the local tavern. The monks returned the ropes to the belfries so that the days could oncemore be divided into twelve hours, and in the garden, the pears on Kadunjčar's trees approached the peak of their ripeness.
The abbot never spoke of the cave again.5
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