The Prophet part 1

I was walking back from Zierenberg with a loaf of bread in one hand and two slices of rhubarb cake in the other when I saw him shuffling along the lane towards me. Not walking, but not quite running either - an awkward, clumsy, tottering kind of movement. As I came closer I saw he was young, perhaps in his twenties, and had Down's Syndrome. How did he come to be jogging along this quiet lane by himself in jeans and t-shirt?

He stopped when he reached me, grinned, uttered some gutteral noises with friendly urgency, but I could not make out his meaning. He pointed at me, at himself. I asked if he wanted the time. He shook his head. He pulled out his wallet and showed me it was empty. "Money?" I said. "I'm sorry, I can't give you any." He shook his head again, in disappointment or because I had failed to understand, then looked back the way he had come. A red car was creeping towards us. Without a word he took off, continuing his hectic half-run towards Zierenberg.

As the car reached me, the driver stuck his head through the window. "Did you speak to him?" he called.

"I tried," I said. "Can he speak at all?"

"Are you from England?" he said.

"Yes."

"On holiday?"

"I'm spending the summer in Friedrichsaue."

"Just a moment!" A tractor was approaching, and he pulled his car to the verge to let it pass. He climbed out to continue our chat, a slightly scruffy man of retirement age and average height. The young man with Down's Syndrome, it transpired, was running to lose some weight, and he was the social worker who cared for him. He peered down the road. "It's all right, he's waiting for me at the bottom."

He asked me why I was here. I told him I was a historian and his eyes widened. "Ah! Come and look at this." He went to the boot of his car and opened it. A pair of sheepdogs sat inside, panting happily in the heat. "Don't be frightened," he said, rummaging in a pile of boxes and books. He continued to address me in a mixture of pidgin German and pidgin English that proved to be more confusing than had he chosen one or the other. "You are a historian; you study the past. I study the future."

I looked at him quizzically, understanding his words but not quite his meaning. "Here," he made a cross with his hands, "Das hier ist heute. Today. Verstehst du? You study yesterday. I study the... Zukunft. Tomorrow. Prophezeiung. You understand?"

I was confused. You must appreciate that one rarely meets self-proclaimed prophets these days, at least not on quiet country roads in rural Hesse. I heard the unfamiliar word Prophezeiung and thought it might have something to do with profit, and that he was perhaps involved in future economic forecasts. Things became clearer when he pulled out a historical and archaeological encyclopaedia of the Bible. "Es ist alles da drin," he said, stabbing at the cover with his finger. "All in there."

I nodded carefully. So he was a prophet, but not affiliated to any church, nor a Jehovah's Witness. He insisted several times that he was a Wissenschaftler, a scientist. Everything came down to Pi, it seemed. This precious number contained the secrets of existence. We were destroying God's earth and the day of reckoning was near. "When I grew up here," he said, "you could walk through the countryside and see horses and cows, smell the flowers in the air. There were so many flowers!" He breathed in deep from the memories, eyes closed in a moment of private ecstacy. "But now - look; where are the horses, the cows? Gone."

I was tempted to point over his shoulder at a flock of sheep grazing contentedly on a nearby hillside, or mention that three horses lived in a paddock in Friedrichsaue not two hundred yards distant. But he was already moving on. "Chemicals have destroyed everything," he exclaimed. "They spray them everywhere. Before, we lived in harmony with nature. This, see this -" he pointed at a large pile of manure by the side of the road "- this is good. But it's so little. Everywhere else are chemicals, and they've destroyed nature, killed all the flowers."

By this time the young man, tired of waiting, had shuffled back up the lane and climbed into the car. The prophet had a fair point, I thought, and felt some sympathy for him. He pulled out a small Bible and showed me the Book of Revelation. "This is the key," he said. To illustrate the point he pulled a loaded keyring from his pocket. "Here, this is the key to a house, but the Bible is the key to here," pointing at his head. "You eat bread, don't you?" he continued. "Well, bread sustains the body, but that isn't enough. You need more. The Bible is bread for the soul." The arms trade, the drugs trade and the mafia were the forces of evil that were driving the world to destruction; the Vatican was complicit; the Arabs and Israelis would launch nuclear Armageddon and usher in the Day of Judgement.

Quite where Pi fitted into this I wasn't sure, though we stood there under the hot sun and spoke for half an hour or more. He said he was formerly an engineer, so he understood the importance of Pi to mathematics. He saw no reason why it should not be equally fundamental to the meaning of life itself. He handed me a clutch of glossy pamphlets with titles like 'The Forgotten Secret', 'Are You Ready for Day X?' and 'The Ten Commandments of God'.

"I promise I'll read them," I said.

"Don't read them," he urged. "You need to study them."

"All right." Then I ventured, shaking my head: "But I must say I'm sceptical."

I was surprised by his reaction. "Good!" he exclaimed. "That's good! I was sceptical too. But everything is in there."

The young man with Down's Syndrome had climbed from the passenger to the driver seat, and was hanging his head through the window, making weary noises. The old man seemed not to notice. I said I needed to be getting on home. As we parted, he told me where he lived - second house on the left as one enters Zierenberg - and invited me to pop in for a chat whenever I liked.

He drove away in one direction, I walked off in the other. He was right that one needed more than bread alone. But I had two slices of rhubarb cake as well.