Читать книгу Tidings - Ernst Wiechert - Страница 5

AMADEUS WOULD NOT lie down on one of the beds which the brothers had arranged for themselves, and as he refused with a violence they failed to understand and persisted in sleeping on the floor in front of the fire, they put some cushions on the clay floor and covered them with two blankets.

When they began to undress, Amadeus took a pair of brown pajamas which the American soldiers had given him out of his haversack, opened the heavy door and left the room. His two brothers exchanged a quick, furtive glance, but they did not say anything. The light of the candle was so feeble that neither of them could read the sorrow in the other’s face . . . nor was it necessary.

When Amadeus came back, he carried the coat, which was rather like a uniform, on his arm and the heavy shoes in his hand. He looked absent-minded, and his face was shut and withdrawn, as he folded the garment carefully on a chair and put his shoes under it. He went back again and placed them side by side, so that their toes were in line with the edge of the chair. But he did it as if in a dream, and he did not hear the faint sigh with which Erasmus closed his eyes.

When Amadeus lay in front of the hearth, his head propped on his hand and his face turned to the expiring glow, Erasmus put out the candle.

“Good night,” said Amadeus in a low voice.

It was now dark and quiet, only a feeble glimmer showed in the gloom from the last sods of peat; a mouse stirred gently in the reed roof. Erasmus and Aegidius had closed their eyes and breathed deep, feigning sleep. But they were not asleep, and from time to time they opened their eyes and looked furtively at the hearth. The attitude of the resting man there did not change, only now and again he stretched out his left hand to light a cigarette at the last embers. But they only saw the dark hand with a reddish shining outline, and the hand appeared strange to them and all by itself, as if it did not belong to a living body. The body did not move, not throughout the whole night.

The narrow beam of light which the setting moon cast through the small window grew longer and fainter. It traveled slowly over the clay floor, until it reached the foot end of the shakedown before the hearth. There it faded away, and the two brothers still looked at the spot, even when nothing was to be seen but the blackness of the nocturnal room. It was as quiet as if a dead man were lying there.

Erasmus was the first who could not bear it any longer. “You are not asleep, dear brother?” he asked.

“No,” replied Amadeus gently. In the darkness of the room their two voices also sounded unreal, as if there were no living hearts behind them, but as if they rose from the depths of the earth which lay silently around the house. Such voices, submerged voices as it were, are heard sometimes at night over a swamp, and the belated wanderer stops to listen, shivering in the fog that clings to his forehead.

“I will try to tell you everything now, brother,” Erasmus went on, “the little that must be told. It is better to tell it in the night than in bright daylight.”

He did not sit up, nor did he support his head with his hand. He remained lying, his arms outstretched on the blanket, and he spoke up to where his open eyes were gazing – up into the high roof of reeds above which stood the stars which could not be seen.

“When you went away,” he said, “they were at the height of their triumph. It was the era of the flourish of trumpets. They tried time and again to get me back into the army, but I refused. As a major general I could refuse, even at that time, and besides I was certainly not in good health. The doctors called it coronary disease. I made the most of it; and Aegidius had his six thousand acres, and that was more important to them than one more infantryman’s rifle.

“We went from pillar to post for your sake, brother, but it was no use. They held what they had as if in a net of steel. Aegidius volunteered . . .”

“You are to tell only the most important things,” Aegidius interrupted quickly. “Night will soon be over.”

“Just as you like, brother, though there is nothing more important than to bare one’s breast and say, ‘Ad sum! Here I am!’ as Isaac did under the knife. Nothing greater and nothing more important. Well, they only laughed. You can exchange clothes for cigarettes, they said, but not a life for a life.”

“Brother,” Aegidius begged once more.

“It is all right,” Erasmus went on.

Amadeus stretched out his hand with another cigarette to the glowing embers, and it seemed to Erasmus as if the hand were not as steady as before. But the light from the fire had become so dim that he might well be mistaken. He waited until he saw the glowing dot appear again before the hearth.

“We had a lot of trouble with mother,” he continued. “She resented it as a disgrace, just as when father went away. Not as something wrong, brother, do you understand, but as a disgrace. Something that could only happen to a Liljecrona, because they were peasants and had no feeling for greatness. For the peasant, she said, there was only the sanctity of the pitchfork, not the sanctity of the sword. She too had fallen into ‘their’ way of speaking.

“But for us she was of some use. Because of her they overlooked many things.

“By the way, when the flourish of the trumpets ceased, she went to her relatives in the Münsterland, to a castle with a moat. There her ‘equals in rank’ live as in the time of Charles the Great.

“We stayed until the tanks came. They did not allow us to leave before. We drove the cattle together and loaded the sleighs. Christoph sat on the front one – as solemnly as if he were driving to church . . .”

“Christoph . . .” whispered Amadeus.

“Yes, he was much over seventy then, perhaps he was already eighty. But his chin was clean-shaven, and he wore the great wolfskin coat which his grandfather had worn before him. There were twenty-five degrees of frost, and the east wind swept the snow over the land.

“We drove for a whole day, and then the tanks overran us. It was as dark as in a tomb, but with searchlights playing they drove over the sleighs, over the cattle, over women and children. They went forward and backward several times. It sounded as if the wheels were rolling on wet brushwood. They fired from all the guns, because some sleighs were lying in the ditches and some tried to escape into the open fields.

“We lost each other. We ran toward a wood which showed up now and again in the rays of the searchlights. We fell down – and then we ran again. In the wood we lost each other completely. We went astray and did not find the road again, not even at dawn.

“But I found Aegidius. He had been shot through the left shoulder and was freezing to death. He only told me in the evening that he had been wounded; by that time it was almost too late.

“Then we made our way slowly until we came here. It took us nearly three months. I thought that here we would find some of those who had been with us. They all knew that they were to meet here. But there was nobody.”

“The dead rise slowly today,” said Amadeus after a while. “And probably the living too.”

Erasmus was silent, then he went on in a low, changed voice: “I was no hero, dear brother,” he said. “I ought not to have run away, unless I was the last. It all depends on where one is when one runs. But probably my mind was disturbed by the noise when the caterpillar wheels rolled over the sleighs – they screamed so, brother, they screamed so terribly – even the horses screamed . . .”

“We have unlearned there, brother, the obligation to throw ourselves voluntarily under a wheel,” said Amadeus after a while. “The wheel will catch up with us, if Laima wishes it. Even if we were sitting on a steeple.”

“But they are calling,” said Erasmus in a whisper now. “I hear them calling. Every night. ‘Herr Baron,’ they call, and sometimes they say another word. ‘Yes’, I say, ‘I am coming!’ But I do not come. It is too late; I have forsaken them. Father would not have forsaken them.”

“We do not know anything about father,” said Aegidius. “We only know that he was good. To be good and to sacrifice oneself are not the same things.”

A soft, early light fell through the window, and they heard the first cuckoo call over the peat bog. It sounded like the tone of a distant bell, as if the sacrament were being carried through the early morning. All three listened, and for the first time Amadeus sank back on his cushions, folding his arms under his head.

“How different everything is for my brothers,” he thought. “How completely different . . . Those they saw were ten or twenty, struck by war as a tree is struck by lightning. But the others, millions probably, whom they slaughtered as cattle are killed in a slaughterhouse . . . And one cannot tell them, because they might think that one measures the dead by their number. Nor can one tell them all the other things . . . Aegidius did not say either that he offered himself as a sacrifice for my sake . . . ‘Ad sum! Here I am!’ That is grand . . . but I cannot lie here and talk about it every night. There was something we found among father’s papers: ‘He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.’ Erasmus was hit in the root so that he ran away into the field. He may be destroyed by it. He still thinks like a nobleman, and he who thinks so nowadays will perish. He is the last aristocrat of the family; neither Aegidius nor myself are. He is the defenseless one. All aristocrats are defenseless today. The tank is the symbol of our time, not the sword. The tank and the whip.”

The cuckoo was still calling and Amadeus got up. He took a tin of coffee from his haversack and put it on the hearth. Then he picked up his clothes and shoes and went out.

The morning dazzled him, and he stopped for a while leaning his back against the wall of the hut. Marvelous that the earth could be so new every morning, as if it had risen from the grave after the night.

The peat bog steamed in the morning sun. The rocks in the background sparkled like liquid gold. In the stunted pine trees the spiders’ webs were glistening. Nothing moved but the first buzzard, which circled above the peat mounds. No evil had ever been here – not yesterday, not a thousand years ago. Here had always been the harshness of nature and its creatures, but it was too lonely here for the wickedness of mankind.

Only the shepherd had been here, and he had been too old for the vengeance of man. He had not been worth their while. Since they had arrested him, Amadeus, and had led him away from here, all this had remained untouched. Like a bath which the angels had prepared for all those who had risen from the dead. Also for the defeated and terrified, nay, for them most of all.

But was there a healing power in nature? Was there salvation at all in this world? Yes, if Christoph had been saved, everything would be easier. He had had “the faith.” One need not have the same faith, but it was beautiful to look at somebody who had it, somebody who needed no staff, no philosophy, but who could see the little light in the heather, for whom there were no limits between the underworld and the heavenly world, who was included in the vast circle and who could say everywhere and at each moment, “Here I am, oh Lord!” Who could also say it when the caterpillar wheels rolled over his eyes and broke his body. He need not ask, “Why did I run away?” He only said, “Here I am, oh Lord!”

Amadeus sighed and went slowly through the low wood to the small pond at the edge of the moor. The dew wet his bare feet, and the coolness of the earth penetrated to his heart. He looked around for a long time before he undressed and got into the water. The bottom was soft and sandy and only at some distance from the shore became dark and swampy.

The cuckoo was still calling, but Amadeus did not count the years which it promised him. Life was not counted by years anymore.

“One must help him,” he thought, “before it consumes him and destroys the roots. Somebody must tell him that I have seen thousands die without moving a hand. One must stop asking, ‘Where is thy brother Abel?’, because the number of brethren has become millions. Yes, probably one must stop asking at all, instead existing quietly and without any question. The asking of questions has ruined the world since the serpent first asked.”

He dressed slowly and went back. The fire was burning on the hearth, and they drank their coffee in front of the door. Erasmus had carried out the small table and three chairs. A heron flew over the moorland and their eyes followed it for a long time. It was as quiet as at the beginning of the world after the seven days of creation.

“How do you manage to live here?” asked Amadeus at last.

“Oh, don’t worry, there is always something,” replied Erasmus. “They fell trees in the woods, and not everything has been stolen from the castle. The Americans came too quickly. And the things that have not been stolen, we sell one after another, or we barter them. Jakob comes up here every second day.”

“Who is Jakob?”

“Oh, a Jew from Poland. You know, we call him Kuba, because that’s what we used to say at home. He lives in a camp a good way from here. One morning he came up here, and he maintained that he was an honest man. He only wished, he said, to swap: from the right to the left hand, and from the left to the right. Perhaps he cheats us a bit, but that does not matter – at least he comes alone.

“Besides, we have a friend among the American officers down there: First Lieutenant Kelley, John Hilary Kelley. I like his name Hilary, Hilarius goes well with our funny names. And he goes well with us too. He is always smiling, but his smile is a little sad. War does not mean the same to him as it does to most of them. He speaks German very well.”

“And what does he want when he comes up here?”

“Oh, nothing particular, you know. He only likes to sit here for a while and forget his own people. He does not like them very much. He says they no longer have any ears – none of them – but only antennae made of wire. He might very well be a cousin of ours, from another part of the family. He does not think in terms of guilt and punishment as the others do. He does not feel a victor, but like somebody who had to join in the game. And he who joins in the game will get his share of profit and loss.”

“But what is going to happen now?” Amadeus asked.

“Nobody knows, brother,” replied Aegidius. “Sometimes in history there are short intervals in which nothing happens. At any rate nothing that our eyes can see. So much happened that those happenings have to settle down first before anything new can begin. And then I shall try to find some work – a field, a flock, a plow. It is hard for me to live without a plow – do you understand that, brother?”

Yes, Amadeus understood. Aegidius had been the only one who had “done something” – all his life long. Erasmus and he himself had done nothing, and perhaps they would go on doing nothing; or at least what people call nothing.

“I cannot stay with you very much longer,” Amadeus said after a while, shading his eyes with his hand against the rising sun.

“That is nonsense, brother,” replied Aegidius kindly. “For really none of us can live without the other two. That was already the case at school, and I am sure it has not changed. You must now try to understand your fate a little. It was hard enough that father went away.”

“I can only live alone,” said Amadeus in a low voice.

Aegidius glanced at him quickly, and then he gazed over the marshes again. “The times of Orestes are gone,” he answered, and there was no doubt in his voice. “And you are not a matricide, brother. We shall play together again, Amadeus, do you hear? We shall play Mozart, and there are no ghosts with Mozart.”

“I shall never play anymore,” said Amadeus, scarcely audible, gazing at his right hand which lay on the dark wood of the table.

“Why do you say that, brother?” asked Erasmus, frightened, leaning forward. “If I said that, I who have deserted the colors . . . but you who have only suffered?”

“I have not only suffered,” said Amadeus gloomily, slowly clenching his fist. “I have killed, too, with this hand. And what is more, or more wicked, as you would say: I would kill again at any time, if one of the faces which smiled while they tortured appeared here. There something within me changed; something that I had was taken away from me – and something that I did not have was added. Nothing has been taken away from you, nor has anything been added. You have remained the same. But if somebody were to paint us now as a triptych – some great artist, who sees the ultimate, all that is really hidden – then people would be shocked at the third among us. He would be different from the other two, and people would say that the evil one was standing behind him.”

The two leaned forward and took his hand which lay clenched on the table. They took it in such a way that it lay hidden in their hands. And for the first time they noticed that he did not wear his signet ring anymore.

“Brother,” said Aegidius in his soft voice, “if this artist, this great artist, had painted all the Liljecronas in our faces – back to bygone days, and all they thought and believed and did – don’t you think that the onlooker would make the sign of the cross on seeing them? Do you fancy that you are the only one who has killed?”

“It is no consolation not having been the only one. The fact is that it was not in our nature. It is something foreign to us, and I have opened the door to it. I have allowed someone with dirty shoes to step over our threshold, and I cannot wipe it clean.”

“Tell us all about it, brother,” begged Aegidius, “now, this very first morning. You have not quite understood yet, brother, that you are with us again, that we three are together again. And that is as if we were one.”

“We are not one,” persisted Amadeus. He turned his eyes away and looked past the two faces over the moors. Little white clouds rose above the eastern horizon and began to sail up into the blue of the morning sky. The cry of the migrating cranes was heard from a distance.

Again Amadeus felt that all this might have been the same a thousand years ago. As if nothing had happened, at least not here; that it was wrong for him to sit here. As if he ought to go away quite quickly, so that all this might remain the same for another thousand years. So that at least there would be one small place in this world where nothing had happened and where nothing would happen.

“He was a Frenchman,” he began in a low voice, “small and thin and ill. A professor of the history of art at the Sorbonne. According to the lists he had long been dead – heart failure. But we had always saved him. We had falsified the list. That was possible in the last months. Then ‘the hangman’ discovered him. Of all the murderers he was the most merciless. He held a high rank in the camp. He had also invented the business with the meathook. Did you know about that?”

They both shook their heads.

“Those who had been condemned were hung by the chin on such a hook. It was a dreadful death, perhaps the most dreadful of all. We were forced to lead the Frenchman there. He was quiet and brave, but when we entered the large slaughterhouse, he looked at me once – with eyes that had drunk in beauty for a lifetime, eyes that were filled with the pictures of madonnas and cathedrals – they were so filled with that beauty that these pictures almost covered his death agony. But at the bottom of his eyes, deep below these pictures, I saw it – only I.

“All was already disorganized, because the sound of the enemy’s guns was coming nearer and nearer, and some of us secretly carried weapons. I did. When we had led the Frenchman under the beam with the hook, I asked the hangman to turn around. He turned as fast as if a serpent had bit his heel. And he looked into the muzzle of my revolver.

“His face became rigid, for he did not understand. To him it was as if the whole world were breaking into pieces. But it was still a wicked, nay, an infamous face – even in its terrible rigidity. More so than in the relaxation of his daily life.

“He looked around and he saw nothing but the end. There was no pity on any of the faces – only the end.

“He fell down on his knees and begged for his life, and we had not known that human words could come from these lips. We listened as we would have listened if a spider in its web had begun to speak. Or a scorpion. Or a basilisk. We were horrified to hear him speak with a human voice. We felt as if in all these years there had not been a deeper defamation of the image of man than this voice of his. We had thought that there would be the voice of a devil in him or the voice of a wolf, as in the pictures of Hieronymus Bosch.

“The professor begged for the hangman’s life, but we shook our heads. The others wanted to lift him on to the hook, but before they could seize him, I shot.

“I could have shot him through the heart, but I shot into his face. Perhaps I thought that with a heart-shot he might get up again, because there was a vacuum in his body where we have a heart. Nothing but an empty space. His life was only in his face, which we had seen smiling. Many, many times. And I shot into this smile.

“He sank down head foremost, but I felt that he did not stop smiling. Do you understand? He did not stop smiling. It was as if his smile were immortal. The immortal evil, and a thousand shots would not have extinguished it. It was as if I had shot into Sirius or into the Milky Way.

“I saw the others drag him away. I was certain, as I had never been before, that this man would rise again. And in his resurrection he would still have the same smile.

“The Frenchman took my hand. The left, not the right. And he said something very remarkable. He said, ‘Ceux qui restent ce sont les pauvres.’ Those who remain are the poor. It was so very remarkable, because it was the truth. One of those truths that a man can only pronounce when he has discarded all earthly things: fear, hope, hatred and perhaps love also. Ce sont les pauvres . . .

“And that’s why I must live alone.”

The brothers were still holding his hand. He did not look into their faces, because he knew there would be horror in them. He only looked at them when Aegidius put his hand in a special way over his own, and he saw that Aegidius smiled.

“Don’t you remember?” asked Aegidius in a low voice.

“What?”

“Don’t you remember when we had a cut in our hand, when we were children? And the blood was not to be stanched, and we ran to Grita? Don’t you remember what she used to say?”

“Was it . . . ?”

“Yes, that’s what it was. One of her half-Christian, half-heathen verses. She took our hand in her hands – so – and then she said: ‘Cover hand, cover death – wake up again by God’s breath.’ She herself did not know where the saying came from. Probably from her great-grandmother. A spell to speak over running blood. And it always stopped running. Always.”

“But this does not stop,” said Amadeus after a while.

“It has already stopped, brother,” said Erasmus. “It stopped the moment you told us about it. And don’t you realize that you saved a life, brother?”

“I did not save it,” replied Amadeus gloomily. “The Frenchman died of spotted typhus a few weeks later. After we had been liberated. Are you so sure that one is allowed to save one life with another?”

“I seem to remember,” said Erasmus in a low voice, “that he who died on the cross saved many lives with his life.”

“You must not blaspheme, brother,” replied Amadeus, drawing his hand out of his brothers’ hands. “Not even from love of me. Or do you think that my hand was allowed to do what God’s hand did?”

“Perhaps that’s what it means,” said Erasmus still more gently, “that we are created in his image.”

Then Jakob came. It was his day. He walked a little crooked and a little bent around the corner of the sheepfold with his half-sly, half-sad smile. “Djing dobry to the noble counts,” he said, raising his dark cap. “Djing dobry, Kuba,” replied Aegidius. “Haven’t I told you often enough that we are not counts?”

Kuba smiled indulgently and wiped his forehead with a lace-edged handkerchief. “What is a count and what is a baron?” he asked gaily. “Whether the count has seven leaves to his coronet or nine – what is the difference? When a stag has six branches on his antlers and they say that it is a stag of eight branches – that is a mistake. But when I address you as a count, that’s not a mistake. For even without a coronet you are a count.”

“Ah, Kuba,” replied Aegidius, pouring out a mug of coffee for him, “you want a ring or a bracelet, that’s why you do not mind about the leaves on the coronet.”

“If I want a ring,” said Jakob, “I wish for gold, and when I want politeness in conversation I say count.”

“We can’t give you anything today, Kuba,” replied Aegidius. “Call again in a week.”

“The gentlemen have a visitor,” said Jakob, glancing at Amadeus. “You will have to do business again, for the gentleman, your brother, must also eat and drink and have an American cigarette. The gentleman your brother has his hair cut short?”

“Our brother was in a camp for four years,” said Erasmus.

“The Holy One, blessed be he,” said Jakob in a hushed voice and raised his cap. “Now I must say prince, and not only count.”

“Leave it alone, Kuba,” said Aegidius.

Jakob drank his coffee in silence and got up. “Next time I shall bring a bottle of Scotch whisky,” he said, lost in thought. “I shall not bring it for gold, I shall bring it for nothing.”

He took off his cap and glanced at Amadeus. “If an old man is allowed to speak,” he said in a low voice, “this old man would like to say this: he would kindly beg the gentleman to let the Lord our God live in his face and not . . .”

“And not what?” asked Amadeus.

“And not the dead, sir,” replied Jakob.

“Thank you, Kuba,” said Aegidius.

Jakob bowed, put on his cap, and went away.

Later, when Erasmus carried the crockery into the living room, he found a box of American cigarettes on the window ledge. He gave it to Amadeus, saying, “That’s a lot for Kuba, really a lot.”

“I shall go out for a while now,” said Amadeus when they had washed and dried the crockery. “I want to have a good look at everything. It may be evening before I come back, but I shall come back.”

“We know that, dear brother,” said Erasmus.

Amadeus took only some bread and a field-flask of coffee with him. He walked toward the west so that he had the sun on his back, and he thought of walking all around the peat bog. These were high moors, just as in his homeland, with stunted pines and birches between the flat expanses of reed and water, and it took a couple of hours to walk around it. At the edges the woods thinned out, everywhere the basalt rocks lay in the moss, and lizards were basking on the warm stones. The sky was high and blue, small white clouds sailed over it, and flights of birds were traveling northward. There was complete calm – not even his shoes made a sound on the soft earth. Only when he passed over dry peat did his footsteps ring a little hollow.

But he did not think of death now. It was as if his brothers’ hands had covered death, as Grita had covered the blood. He felt that things were easier since he had spoken. In four years he had scarcely said a word. Nothing was changed, but he felt as if he had climbed out of a cellar.

He no longer knew what it was like to walk without goal or purpose. To have nobody behind who carried a whip or a revolver with the safety catch released. He had forgotten that there was an earth which one was not forced to dig or cart away. Earth which lay there quietly resplendent with the sun, which gave space for his feet willingly and without guile.

And now he could walk across the earth in all directions of the compass, and he could stand still and stroke the smooth stems of the reeds with his hands. He could breathe deeply without feeling a load on his shoulders. He could sit on the dry turf and wait until the lizard came out of the grass again.

In the distance the cranes still called, as they had called in his homeland. He shaded his eyes with his hand, but he could not see the birds. He could only see the sky, the space, the unlimited, silent, marvelous space. Grita would have said that on such a morning one could see God’s feet resting quietly and sacredly on a blue footstool.

He got up again and walked on, his hands folded behind his back. This too was something lovely, because for four years he had not known that one could hold one’s hands in this way unless they were fettered. Time after time he separated them and laid them together again. It was marvelous to feel how they moved.

Then for a while he thought of his home. Much was lost: the books, the music, the lovely little bricks with which one built up one’s day; and the feeling with which the roots of the heart reached down into the cool, damp depths of the familiar soil over which he had run as a child.

That was lost now. Fate had lifted him, at that time, as the wind lifts a seed pod, and some time it would drop him. If there was still life within him, he would take root, even in a foreign soil. Perhaps life was immortal, as evil was immortal. He walked on and on. His shadow was no longer behind him but at his side. The distant mountain chains in the east and west became clearer and clearer, but his eyes scarcely skimmed along their crests. All that was close to him made him happy: the waving grasses, the little pools where the clouds were mirrored. The lapwings circled round their damp hatching places, and he stood for a long time to watch their flight and to rejoice in their wailing cry. He had not seen any birds for so long.

Sometimes he thought of his brothers, but not of the victors nor of his country. No general thoughts existed for him so far. His country drank the bitter dregs of the cup, and that was right. Others had drunk them for twelve long years, and with them, bitter death.

“And not the dead, Herr Baron,” Jakob had said. Jakob’s people had been most numerous among the dead; his people had gone through the most terrible ordeal since the creation of the world. It was surprising that he could say such a thing. It was more than the small box of cigarettes which they found on the window ledge – much more.

But he, Amadeus, would have to go on carrying his dead. He who did not love could not carry the living. They need love, which carries all.

At noon he was lying at the edge of the moor. Beyond the empty, dazzling plain he could recognize the dark roof under which his brothers were now sitting. They, too, carried the trace of the years, a hard, deeply engraven trace. Aegidius was the only one of them who was not bowed down. That much Amadeus knew. Probably because he had driven the plow. He also was the only one who had been willing to sacrifice himself. He knew that the clod must be turned over. He was far ahead of them. They would never catch up with him. They were no longer enclosed together in the panels of the triptych. They had stepped out. They still held each other’s hands, but their eyes no longer looked up to God’s brow together. One of them was called by voices which died under the rolling iron wheels. The other called for the field which had been taken away from him. The third did not call, nor was he called. He was only there. The surging sea had thrown him up on the shore and there he lay, breathing heavily, and the water of the deep dripped down from him.

The dappled flecks of sunshine played between the trees. There was a smell of resin and of deserted country all around, and Amadeus’ eyes closed. His hands lay open in the warm moss, and he moved his fingers slowly to and fro. They felt neither the moss nor the earth. It was as if they felt nothing but life, naked life that only existed, that did not desire or suffer anything. Pure existence as a child feels it when he has been forgotten in the sunshine.

After two hours Amadeus got up and walked on. The light above the moorland had changed, the shadows fell differently, but it was still the same earth. An earth without human beings, without question or answer, nothing but space which opened willingly to harbor him. The red kite still built its nest in the high pine tree between the rocks of basalt, and the reed warbler called from the bog where it was deepest. They alone had preserved the burning earth from complete ruin. They alone, not mankind. There was no recurrence for them, nor any change. For them everything was still beginning: the first day, the first fear, the first love.

Amadeus walked on and on; he felt as if he were walking into eternity. He would never get tired of walking over this soft, noiseless earth as long as grass and birds were there, the light breeze, and the vast sky. As long as there were no human beings, no victors and no vanquished. Men always demand something and always stretch out their hands toward the body or toward the heart. But grass and birds did not demand anything from him. They remained in their world. He could walk through them as through water. The water closed behind him and no track was left. And thus without leaving a trace he wished to walk over the earth from now on.

The sun was setting when he returned. His brothers sat on the doorstep waiting for him, as they had done in their childhood. They had to be together before night could fall. The stars had to wait for their meeting.

He sat down at an angle opposite them and looked back over the darkening moorland. He sat on the sawn trunk of an alder tree and supported himself with both his hands on the warm bark. He was tired now and looked forward to his bed before the smoldering embers of the hearth.

“I have not met a soul,” he said. “It was beautiful.”

“Nobody passes here,” replied Aegidius. “None of those who once cut peat here has come back. If any of our people should arrive, they can start at once; peat is nearly as precious as bread.”

“Do you still think that anybody will come, brother?” asked Erasmus.

“Yes, I think so, but it’s a long way, and probably all their shoes are worn out, or they are going barefoot.”

The cuckoo was still calling and the first mist rose slowly. The evening star quietly appeared in the twilight. The frogs woke up. The nocturnal earth began to breathe gently.

“Dear brother,” said Aegidius, “we have made up our minds to do what I am going to tell you now, and we beg you to leave it at that. We understand that you must be alone for a while, and it will do you good. We have moved to the forester’s house today, it’s only a ten minutes’ walk. It belongs to us now, and they have two nice, perfectly quiet rooms upstairs. They are very comfortably furnished, better than this, and they take us in very willingly – as a sort of protection. Probably you do not know that the forester Buschan has been arrested. He is in a camp, and I think he played a more or less important part hereabouts. He was a law-abiding man, but he has probably put one foot into the swamp, and he will not get out of the mess for some time.

“We thought that we would come to see you for a while in the morning or evening. You must get used gradually even to us. You can eat with us or alone, just as you like. If you will give me your papers, I will notify the police in the village, and you will get your rations all right. The Americans look after all that.”

“You’re doing this for my sake?” asked Amadeus.

“Yes, of course, brother. But it is not hard for us to do it, you know. We shall manage very easily, and we don’t want you to sleep always on the floor. The most important thing is that you should sleep alone after all these years. We ought to have understood that at once.”

“But why do you go there?” asked Amadeus.

“It is near you, brother, and where else should we find any room? The woman was so happy that you had come back.”

“Was she?” asked Amadeus.

“Yes, really, I think she was always different from the other two. In their so-called politics, I mean. Only the daughter is difficult.”

“The daughter, of course. I forgot – what is her name?”

“Barbara.”

“All right, she ought to have been called Brunhild. But at that time one did not know all about these things.”

“Don’t you like the people, brother?”

“I know them so little. The daughter once beat me on my hand with an osier switch. I thought I would never be able to move it again. She hit with all her might.”

“Oh, but why?”

“She had a picture of the ‘great dictator’ in her hand. One of those cheap post cards, and she asked whether I had ever seen anything more beautiful in the world. Of course, I smiled, and then she hit me. I held the post card on my hand and on that hand she hit me. She was thirteen or fourteen at that time.”

“Yes,” said Erasmus, sighing. “The girls were the first to lose their heads.”

“At least she does not side with the victors like most of them,” said Aegidius. “I think she would gladly poison the whole lot in the castle. Don’t worry about it, brother. So far you have seen little of what is happening here now. And Buschan has got his punishment. The camps are no paradise, from what one hears.”

“I hope not,” replied Amadeus.

He walked with them to the edge of the wood, and then his eyes followed them. The shadow of the trees and the wisps of mist enclosed and covered them. It looked as if they would never return.

Amadeus walked back slowly and sat down again on the doorstep. The small room lay in darkness behind him. Nobody was there. He need not hear the breathing of any human being. The peat fire on the small hearth was glowing as it did last night, and as it always would from now on. It was his fire; he need not share it anymore.

He leaned his head against the warm post and clasped his hands around his knees. The evening star was now high above the horizon, and the constellations of early spring gradually appeared over the moorland. An owl hooted in the darkness and a dog barked in the distance.

He was alone; the time had now come when he would learn how to be alone. Horror had taught him how lonely he was. All those who had protected him so far had fallen to dust; gone was all comfort, all security. Man had shown what he was capable of doing when he abandoned himself to the depths of his depravity. Man had become a murderer without passion, without even being at all worried about it. A careless, smiling murderer – and the victims stood on the other side. And in between there was nothing. They might talk and write for years now about guilt and atonement, about freedom and the rights of man. But he who got power again would always do the same, even more carelessly and perhaps more thoroughly. But he who had no power was alone. Gone was the period of childhood, when one stretched out a hand to grasp another hand, that of a mother or that of the law or that of God. You could still stretch it out, but you stretch it out only into empty space. All the victims of these years had stretched out their hands to the last second while they screamed or prayed under the gallows, under the ax, under torture. Nobody had grasped those outstretched hands. Even in death they remained outstretched, open, twisted, alone.

He, Amadeus, would now remain here for a while before this hearth which warmed him, under this starlit sky which shone down upon him as it shone down on the grass and the stones. He had two brothers, and formerly they had been as one, as they had been one when they set their bows to their instruments. But at present they were no longer one. Now each of them was alone, as their father had been alone. So much alone that he had suffered himself to be “deceived.” At that time the Lord had “deceived” him, but who should deceive nowadays?

Fate had given him another breathing space, and he accepted it and breathed deeply.

A dog barked in the distance, but it was not one of “their” bloodhounds. He raised his hands and dropped them again. They were no longer fettered. The owl hooted, but it was not a human being that screamed in agony. That’s what he possessed and owned now. He had got it as a present without deserving it. It might very well not have been presented to him; he could just as well have been trodden to pieces like the others. The foot of the hangman had passed him by at a hair’s breadth. There was no law about it, no consolation, no promise.

There was no future in this evening, except the promise of other evenings to come. He knew neither how much time was granted to him nor what was being prepared for him. He had escaped and he did not know where the next trap was laid for him. He was as lonely as a wolf that slinks through the thicket. And like a wolf he strained his ears to hear whether man was about, the creature with power, the creature with the smile. And he did not know which was the more terrible.

The woman in whose house he sought refuge for a night had smiled. In the second year he had escaped when he was on a work detail outside the camp. It had taken him six months to make his preparations, and he had succeeded, because he had come to a river and had found a boat. The water left no tracks.

But he wore the striped garment and he was nearly starving. At twighlight on the fourth evening, he crept through a wood to a small farm, The farmer’s wife was alone with an old maidservant and a prisoner of war. She was young and after the first shock she smiled as a mother smiles over a child gone astray. She gave him food and a small room and stroked his hair before she left him.

In the night she called the police. They bound him while he was asleep and took him back. The woman stood at the door and watched. She did not smile when he stopped in front of her and gazed at her. She only raised her hands, as if she thought he was going to strike her.

But he would not have struck her even if his hands had been free. He only wanted to gaze at her for all the future. Not that he wanted to recognize her, only to find out what two human eyes looked like. “Thank you for meat and drink,” he said. “I wonder if you know how I shall have to pay for it.” Nothing but that. But she had put her hands over her eyes and had turned away.

They had beaten him half dead after that, and he had been transferred to a penal company for a year. For a year he had stood at the gate of hell. Pious people believed that hell was in a world beyond.

He did not attempt to escape again. He could have done so once or twice but he was afraid. Not of the flight nor of the possibility of being caught, but of the eyes of the farmer’s young wife and of the lips that had smiled.

And this fear had remained. The last and most terrible fear of all: the fear of man.

He got up and put dry wood on the glowing embers. He was shivering, and he laid his revolver near his seat by the fire.

Then he sat quietly smoking, until he heard the voices. At first he only heard one, suppressed and imploring. The other was scarcely audible, it was so soft.

The door was still wide open, and he recognized them at once as they stood at the doorstep: the forester’s wife with a careworn face and the hostile eyes of the child. She was no longer a child, she was a young girl with dark, loose hair. It would have been nice to look at her, if one could forget the eyes of the farmer’s wife.

He made an inviting gesture, and the woman came to the fire. The young girl stood in the doorway and looked angrily at her mother.

Amadeus did not glance at the woman or at the girl. He had clasped his hands around his knees again and gazed into the fire.

“Herr Baron,” said the woman, and tears choked her voice from the first words.

Amadeus nodded to show her that he heard what she said.

“I wanted to tell you, Herr Baron, how glad I am,” said the sobbing voice.

“I have been told that already,” replied Amadeus.

“He is in a camp now,” the voice went on, “and I was there once. They stand behind the wire netting. The guards are Poles, and they shoot at the women when they go too near the fence.”

“Where I was,” said Amadeus, “nobody came to the wire netting.”

“I do not complain, Herr Baron,” sobbed the woman. “But you must know that he did not do it with a light heart. I implored him at the time not to do it. God is my witness. And he said: ‘My heart is heavy, but I have got to do it. I have sworn an oath, and I must do it.’ And then he did it.”

“Many have done it,” said Amadeus. “There seemed to be no harm in it.”

“But when he is taken to court,” said the woman, folding her hands over her breast, “will you give evidence, Herr Baron?”

For the first time Amadeus turned his face away from the fire and looked at the woman. “I too shall say that I have sworn an oath, Frau Buschan,” he replied. “Exactly as he has.”

“And you will ruin him,” she whispered, staring over the fire into the darkness.

Amadeus glanced at the girl on the threshold, and then he looked again at the woman’s face. “I will neither help nor ruin,” he said slowly. “I shall only look at the scales hanging in the balance. Just as he looked on, just as you and your daughter looked on.”

“But you are a Christian, Herr Baron,” she cried despairingly.

“I am not a Christian, but a wolf,” said Amadeus in a low voice. “I have been down in the pit, and no one should speak to me.”

The woman drew the shawl around her shoulders and turned to leave. But she came back once more and bending over him she whispered, “Is it not enough that I have a daughter?”

He gazed at her for a long time. “Perhaps it is enough,” he replied in the same tone.

Then he got up and went with her to the door. The girl was still leaning against the post, as she had been all the time. He stopped and looked into her eyes, which did not avoid his glance. “You struck me once,” he said, lost in thought. “Now take care that you do not strike your mother! Grita used to say that a hand raised against one’s mother would grow out of the grave.”

Her face remained motionless, and there was no flicker of her eyelids, so he did not know whether she had understood.

The light of the moon fell over them as they went away, and it seemed as if they were returning to the dark depths of the moors, from which they had emerged for a transient hour. They did not seem to be going back to any human dwelling.