The Hidden Layer.
The fresco was painted in a deliberately archaizing style, reminiscent of the early Renaissance.
Saint Joseph of Cupertino — Giuseppe da Copertino — hovered above the ground, not lightly or blissfully, but in some tense, suspended instant, as though his body still remembered the weight of the earth and could not understand why it no longer obeyed it.
Heavy clouds churned above him. A bolt of lightning cut almost diagonally across the sky in a long, jagged stroke — but it was not the main thing. In the rare openings where the clouds parted, stars emerged — too clear and too cold for such a sky. As though silence already existed up there, waiting for the thunder to die away.
Below, the mountains began.
A small settlement lay hidden in a deep valley, surrounded by dark coniferous forest. Beyond it rose rocky ridges, one after another, almost to the very edge of the fresco.
I let my eyes rest on the saint.
There was no ecstasy in his face. More like bewilderment. The expression of a man who had done something he was never meant to do and now could not understand what had happened.
Beneath the fresco, an inscription had been carved into the stone. Parts of it had chipped away, but what remained could still be made out:
…astra
descendo,
mentem aperio,
Deus meus, mea spes, mea salus, mea vita,
In caelo, in terra, in aeternum.
“‘I descend from the stars, I open the mind, ’” Jürgen read.
I looked at the fresco again.
“Joseph of Cupertino?”
“Yes. A Franciscan. Seventeenth century. He became famous for rising into the air during prayer and religious ecstasy. Different people witnessed it, including members of the Church hierarchy. Eventually, they even kept him away from the public so crowds would not gather around him. In the end, he was canonized.”
“He rose. But the inscription says ‘I descend.’”
Jürgen stood in silence for a moment, then added:
“For parachutists, it is a prayer before the jump. Joseph of Cupertino is considered the patron saint of aviators and sport parachutists. Here, they read it as ‘I descend from the stars.’”
I looked more closely.
The levitating figure of Joseph really did resemble a parachutist suspended in free fall. But I took it for a strange coincidence.
“And here?”
“Before the seventeenth century, there was a fresco of Elijah here, ” Jürgen said, studying the image. “Almost identical to the icon on the side wall.”
I looked at the darkened edges of the painting. Beneath Joseph’s figure, only scattered patches of the old colors remained. They clung stubbornly to the wall, but no longer formed a pattern. It was impossible to make out what lay beneath the newer layer. The old paint no longer told a story — it only reminded us that a story had once been there.
I ran my palm over the rough surface. The plaster had been applied thickly and crudely here, like a patch over a wound. And beside it, the letters carved into the stone were cut with such precision that the craftsman seemed to have known they were meant to outlive centuries.
There was something in that roughness that felt less like an attempt to preserve than an attempt to conceal.
“After the Council of Trent, a new wave of rebuilding and redecoration began, ” Jürgen explained, without taking his eyes from the fresco. “But they did it later here, in the seventeenth century. They decided Elijah no longer fit the new canon — so they hid him beneath Joseph. A levitating Franciscan was fashionable at the time. People loved miracles they could actually see. But the inscription survived. It was carved into stone rather than painted. You can’t simply paint over something like that.”
I said nothing.
I looked at Joseph’s upturned face, and the words kept turning in my mind: ‘I descend from the stars’ and ‘I rise toward the stars.’
As though someone had deliberately placed them on opposite sides of the same movement.
I sketched the fresco and the inscription in the stone, trying to capture not merely the lines, but that strange fracture between what someone had wanted to show and what had remained.
Jürgen leaned toward the stone inscription, studying the carved letters.
“Sometimes the most important thing isn’t what you can see. It’s what remains afterward.”
He finally straightened and gave me a firm, brotherly slap on the shoulder, as though asking, Wasn’t it worth dragging you here? You see it now, don’t you?
There was a researcher’s excitement in the gesture — as though he had already found the thread and now wanted me to feel it too.
“I knew you’d like this mystery!”
After the fire — the breath of a quiet wind, I remembered Jürgen’s words.
I stepped toward the exit, but turned around just before the door.
A thin dark line had appeared in the stone beneath the fresco — as though water were searching for a way down.
We stepped outside the chapel.
After the dense silence within, the wind outside seemed almost deafening. The sea breeze felt its way across us, testing how ready we were to let go of the ground. But after only a few steps, it suddenly weakened and veered away, leaving nothing but a damp chill behind — as though it had decided we were not worth its attention after all.
We walked around the building and headed toward the airfield.
“You know, Jürgen, ” I said. “Let’s fly. You jump. I’ll watch.”
Knowing Jürgen always had a trump card up his sleeve, I waited to see what he would say.
“I saw you were translating the poems for the new song, ” he began, circling toward the point. “And I’ve already heard how it should sound. But only you can turn it into music. Up there — in free fall.”
The instructor’s name was Karl.
Short, wiry, with the weathered face of a man who had spent more time at altitude than on the ground. Without a word, he fastened the harness around me, checked every carabiner, then gave the straps a sharp tug until they bit into my body.
“Don’t talk in the air, ” he said. “The wind takes your words. If you want to say something, use your hand.”
“And if I want to ask something?”
“Then ask afterward.”
He slapped me on the shoulder.
“Afterward, anything goes.”
Jürgen had already put on his gear. He checked his carabiners himself — quickly, automatically, almost without looking. This was far from his first jump. He moved calmly, matter-of-factly, as though he were simply fastening his jacket before leaving the house.
A small propeller plane with a bare metal interior and no seats stood on the runway. We settled onto folding benches.
The door remained wide open.
The plane shuddered and began its takeoff.
Through the open doorway, light, runway, and sky flashed past — a doorway beyond which there was nothing.
I pressed myself against the backrest, bracing my feet against the floor.
“Jürgen…”
He turned.
“In the chapel, you told me about Elijah. About fire and silence. But you — what did you hear after the jump, when you were falling?”
He looked at me.
Not critically — as though he were trying to decide whether it was worth answering.
“I didn’t hear God, Viktor, if that’s what you mean, ” he said. “I heard silence.”
He paused.
“But that is no less a gift.”
I waited.
“And then — music.”
A few minutes later, clouds drifted past the open door — below us, beside us, everywhere.
The altimeter mounted on the wall kept counting the meters, but I did not look at it.
I did not want to know how thin the thread connecting me to the earth had become.
(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)