Читать книгу Tidings - Ernst Wiechert - Страница 6

TIME PASSES, PEOPLE SAY. And some say that it rolls on or flies. But for Amadeus it does not pass, it only exists and he exists in it. Sometimes it seems to him as if they were both standing still, sometimes as if they were falling through space into the depths where there is neither space nor time. He and time are not two separate things, they are included in each other, and neither of them is without the other. Things were different behind the barbed wire. Time was there as the hangman or the bloodhounds were there. Not only the time which was shown by the clock on the watchtower: the time for work or sleep, the living time. But behind it, as it were, was that universal, deadly time – something that was not theirs to dispose of, something that was measured out to them. For everything belonged to the people in uniform: work, food, sleep, death. And also time. He who had spent six years there counted as little to them as he who had come the previous day. The victims were shadows without time or name. Only the others had names and time.

But now it is quite different. When the cuckoo calls in the morning, it does not seem to call only today. For it was so yesterday and will be so tomorrow, as it will be in a thousand years. And it is the same with the stars and the evening mist, or with the warm rain that from time to time passes over the moorland like a soft, gray wall. Amadeus accepts it all like a stone lying in the moss. He need not move nor is he capable of motion. He only keeps quiet when all this passes over him: the call of the bird, the mist, the rain, and the stars. He is a creature among other creatures. It is all the same whether he is gay or sad, nor are his thoughts of any importance.

Sometimes he does not know whether he is gay or sad. He only knows that he exists, and what is more important still, that the others do not exist. When he wakes up in the reddish dawn, and the morning light falls into his narrow room, he sits up in his bed with a sudden, wild, breathless movement and listens with strained attention. Like an animal at bay. His heart pounds so that the whole room is filled by it, his hand closes on the revolver, and slowly, quite slowly, the ominous dream-pictures which have weighed down his sleep are shattered: the picture of a dark, closed van, the door of which opens noiselessly to take him in, while he knows that behind the dark walls will be horror, the last, frightful horror that only man can prepare for men.

Or the picture of the young, friendly woman is there, she who stroked his hair in the night when he had sought refuge with her. She bends over him – so closely that he can see the arteries in her throat pulsing, and she smiles down on him as on an awakening child. But the smile changes slowly, terribly, and below her neckerchief something moves, something that he cannot see nor recognize – it may be an animal with a hundred legs and ice-cold eyes – such as the fathomless waters of the deepest ocean may conceal.

Many phantoms drink at his heart in the night, and what they drink is always blood. And whether they assume a thousand forms, inexhaustible as only dreams can be, behind all those thousand forms stands man. Man, who stood over him for four years, smiling and motionless, to drain his heart, and only from time to time the hand with the cup is raised to the icy lips. And the cup is filled with Amadeus’ blood, his fear, his horror, his life, and his time.

Then he falls back on his bed trembling and breathing heavily, and softly, imperceptibly, time, which he had lost while sleeping, returns and envelops him.

The cuckoo calls and the mice rustle about in the reed thatching. He is so wide awake that he could fancy that he hears the dew falling on the grass or the morning clouds sailing above the reddish moorland. Pliantly, willingly, he is drawn once more into the orbit of all created things. The light blesses him, the call of the bird, and the holiness of the early morning.

Amadeus sits on the doorstep and slowly breaks his bread. He might be the first human being in the landscape, the first and the last. Time does not exist for him. There is no time as long as “the others” are not here. He need not go down to be questioned by authorities in offices or behind counters. Aegidius sees to all that for him. And when they make difficulties there is Kelley, First Lieutenant Kelley, who arranges everything with his capable hands.

Amadeus can waste his day or fill it or leave it empty, just as he likes. The day does not dictate to him, it only gently makes him part of itself.

Generally he goes out early in the morning and comes home in the afternoon or evening. He has formed friendships on the moors, quiet friendships which need no words: with the red kite that has its nest in a high tree above the rocks, with the lizards on the peat mounds, with the quaking ground between the brown water pools on which the cranes have their breeding places, and with the sundew in the peat ditches, with the wild arum and the lady’s slipper and with the tall, yellowish orchid which stand like candles in the grass. He often picks a bunch that fills the room with a strange, intoxicating scent.

He does not read much, nor does he think much; he only exists. From the great library of their father’s house the brothers have saved nothing but “the whole of the Prophet Jeremiah.” Sometimes he opens the book in the evening by the fire, his eyes travel over the large, old-fashioned letters, and he listens to the sound of the great, imploring words which are like the primal complaint of humankind, of those beings created to suffer, born of woman and chosen for all eternity.

“The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire, the founder melteth in vain.”

Or: “Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: thou must empty the cup of thy sister, as deep and wide as it is.”

Or the word by which their father had suffered himself to be deceived before he went into the unknown.

He reads the words not as wisdom, nor even as revelation. He lets them sink into his ear as he does the voices over the peat bogs, voices which are “above the deep” and sound in the evening under the first stars: the oldest voices of the earth which is trembling with the foreboding of woe, and it matters not whether the tune of this suffering sounds in the mouth of a human being or in that of an animal.

Sometimes Amadeus opens the scores of the old music, which his brothers had saved when they saved the instruments, and he follows the lines strung with black signs and hears the sounds as they were when he was his former self. This great riddle of life: that a black sign can stand for a sound and the sound in its conjunction with other sounds can convey the mood of the heart – its sadness or its sparkling joy. A cadence can mean a girl’s lament or the dance of a young fellow though he is sad. The great riddle that the vibration of a string is also the vibration of the heart, and yet the quivering of the string is nothing but a physical law, which can be expressed in a formula, while the vibration of the heart can only be expressed by a smile of the lips or a tear on the eyelash.

But even there, even with the tunes, Amadeus is alone. Everything is for him as it was on the first day. He remembers the past, but only as in a dream. The marshes are new to him, the grass, the sky, the fire, everything. He must conquer the world anew, just as children conquer it. And he does so with infinite caution. Once he fell into a pit, and he walks as if expecting the next pitfall to await him just by his door. As a child he had known sorrow and melancholy, as all children do. But he had not known horror, and now, knowing horror, he is a marked man. His greatest pleasure is to put his hands on moss and to open and close his fingers in the sun. This is the gesture of freedom for him, of rescue, yes, of salvation.

Since Amadeus is out all day long, the brothers come in the evening. They sit on the doorstep or on the warm trunk of the alder. They had not known about the forester’s denunciation, but now his wife has told them of it. She wept and they consoled her. They do not speak of it to Amadeus, but in the twilight they search his sealed face to know whether the dead are still there. The dead have installed themselves in that face, and if they were not the dead one might say that they are installed for a lifetime.

Amadeus, too, watches his brothers. When they get up, Aegidius looks as if all this still belonged to him, and as if he would stride over the moors as before he strode over the fields. But Erasmus looks like a tree a little bent over, at the edge of a desert or on the crest of a dune from where one sees nothing but sand. He is the only one in whose face still lingers a trace of childhood: of the helplessness, the uncertainty, and confusion of those early years.

When they have gone away, Amadeus thinks most about him. He is the only human being whom he would like to help, the only one for whose sake he can forget himself for a while.

When Jakob comes, he arrives in the early morning. He just looks in on him on his way to the forester’s house. He does not come to exchange anything from “the right hand into the left.” He knows that the baron will not barter, yes, that he is so poor that he has nothing to barter – neither material things nor things of the spirit. And it is on account of this poverty that Jakob comes, especially for the poverty of the baron’s spirit.

Jakob himself has overcome everything so completely that bargaining, exchanging, and adventure give him pleasure again. Even the early morning delights him, and when he stands at the edge of the moor and the lapwings call in the distance, he can even think of his lost home, of the little village with the thatched roofs where his parents were killed more than thirty years ago in a pogrom.

His people have come through so much in two thousand years that it has passed into the blood of the later generations. At one time the sickle-wheeled chariots drove over them, then there were the crucifixions and death in the flames. They wandered and sang. Then the caterpillar chains of the tanks went over them, they suffered torture and died in the fiery furnace. They wander again and sing again. They sing and trade and sometimes they dream of the Promised Land. Once upon a time they sat by the waters of Babylon when the Assyrians ruled over them, and now they sit in the camps of the victors waiting for their fate to be decided. They have learned great fearlessness and great patience. None on this earth has greater patience than they.

Some of them are tired and some are wicked, and some are as full of hatred as their torturers were. But not many, and Jakob does not belong to those. Nature has created him without hatred, and he has remained so pious that there is no room for hatred in his heart. He has become even more pious than he was in his homeland.

“The Holy One, blessed be he, wanders again,” he says to Amadeus and clasps his hands around his thin knees. “He is wandering and looks for a place where he can rest. He looks into the faces of men and goes past. The face of the Herr Baron is not yet a place where he can rest. The face of the Herr Baron is still occupied by the dead and by himself. You must put aside all that belongs to yourself, so that the Holy One, blessed be he, can find a place to rest.”

“And you yourself, Jakob?” asked Amadeus after a while.

“I have put everything aside, Herr Baron,” answers Jakob, gazing over the moors with his melancholy eyes. “I have put aside father and mother, and I have put aside a young wife and two children whom they burned in the fiery furnace. I have made room in my face, and when the Holy One, blessed be he, wants to visit me, he can visit me or not visit me – just as he likes.”

“And how did you do that, Jakob?”

“I have done nothing, Herr Baron. I thought of my young wife and the two children in the fiery furnace, and I thought that they sang. And how should I lament or cry when they sang? My distress was insignificant, Herr Baron, and the distress of Herr Baron is also insignificant. As long as others are in distress in this world, our own distress is not much.”

“I have seen them,” said Amadeus after a while, as if speaking to himself. “Their distress was not small, Jakob.”

“What is small and what is great, Herr Baron? It is not good for a man to look at himself with a magnifying glass, Herr Baron. We ought to look at ourselves with a soldier’s field glasses holding them the wrong way around, so that we may see ourselves as small as if we were far away behind the marshes. Then we will see ourselves as the Holy One, blessed be he, sees us: so small, so small, Herr Baron.” He picked up a dry blade of grass from the floor, cut it to pieces with his fingernails, put the smallest bit on the palm of his hand and blew it into the air like a speck of dust.

“Herr Baron ought not to think so much about himself,” said Jakob, getting up. “Herr Baron must not think that he has got to carry the dead on his shoulders. There is the Holy One, blessed be he, who carries the dead, and he has not asked either Herr Baron or me to help him.”

Jakob picks up his cap and bows. “Herr Baron will forgive me,” he says politely, “if I speak to him as if we were equals.”

Amadeus’ eyes follow him for a long time while he walks around the sheepfold into the wood toward the forester’s house, a little crooked, a little bent, the sack over his shoulder, as his people walked a thousand years ago from village to village, from country to country, despised, spat on, and hated, and yet they had not forgotten to “make room” in their faces for their God, who had been to them a stern and jealous God through all the generations.

But when the thin, bent figure has disappeared behind the pine trees sparkling with dew, the face of the baron closes up again. It has no room yet. He does not yet live for others – neither for God nor for men.

“Time passes,” people say, but Baron Erasmus does not know whether that is right. When he sits in the warm moss at noon, leaning his back against a rock and gazing through the smoke of his cigarette over the shimmering moors, he looks like somebody who really lives beneath the rocks and who has only come up for a little time to observe a strange world. He has the saddest eyes of the three brothers, though he rode for many years at the head of the Uhlans: first at the head of a squadron, then at the head of a regiment, and at last at the head of a brigade. He loved his men and his horses with the temperate but reliable and unswerving love of a nobleman.

He was not born to be a cavalryman. From childhood his heart had been full of dreams in which he was a great benefactor, like the old, rather weary magicians in fairytales who put their wealth into needy hands. Erasmus had always been a little uncertain, somewhat oppressed by fear, when he was away from his brothers. He was like a precious stone broken out of a ring. In order to be whole he needed someone to walk at his right and at his left. Not just anybody or someone grand or powerful – just his brothers. With them at his side there was nothing striking in him any longer, nothing special. Then he was nothing but one panel in a triptych, and if he did not want to be looked at or spoken to, the wings with the pictures of the brothers closed above him and he was hidden away.

He had only expected to grow old in a quiet, beautiful way. He would become intimate with the families in the old manor houses of the district, as a guest who appeared now and again, to read aloud to the women and to tell fairytales to the children. A rather peculiar but beloved guest, a last relic of times gone by, when respect and even worship were due to women. He would not have done anything outstanding in life. He would not have won a battle, nor written a book. He would have discovered neither the poles of the earth nor a new star. But if somebody had been in need under the old roofs of his homeland, he would have been remembered, his delicate hands which drew the bow without pretension over his violin, his kind eyes which, in spite of their melancholy, spread radiance over all that was dark. If it were a matter of honor or discord or pain or some insoluble problem, he would have been called on as a calm, great judge of the troubles of the heart. Such were Erasmus’ thoughts when he retired from the army, and now he sits in the warm moss, his back against a boulder, listening to the black woodpecker beyond the moors. He had been called upon – though in a different way from what he had imagined – and he had not heeded. He had not been called upon as a calm judge, but for help when anguish was at its deepest – as one who could save and heal – and he had not heeded. He had run over a snow-covered field in unworthy haste, he had run to a dark, sheltering wood and behind him the screams had died down – those of the men and those of the horses, the terrible screams of those who were forsaken and lost. “Herr Baron,” they had called – “Herr Baron” – and then it was only “Herr,” as the cottagers used to cry in their deepest need: “Lord – Lord . . .”

But he was already far away under the dark trees from which the snow fell on his brow, a hunted man and a deserter, and later when shame began to burn in him, he could not find the road again, the crimson road where blood had dyed the snow, where snow fell into the staring, open eyes of the children.

Time passes, people say, but for the baron Erasmus time stood still. A frozen time, and it froze on that road under the gnarled willow trees which stood like ghosts at the edge of the road. Time froze with the dead, the dead took it in their twisted hands and did not give it back again. Baron Erasmus had failed in the hour which fate offered him. He failed, and now time has expelled him from its quiet, constantly progressing march, and he sits there leaning against the rock and sees the sun travel, sees how the clouds sail above him and beyond him, and he is left behind, as the frozen victims were left behind, though he ran away, yes, just because he ran away.

His hair is nearly white now, and sometimes in the morning when he glances into the small looking glass, he feels as if he had paid with his hair. But he knows that one has to pay with one’s heart, not with the hair on one’s head.

He chose this place in the wood because from here he can overlook part of the road in the valley. It is the road that leads to the castle, and he who wants to come up to the brothers must walk along it. He sees how the trucks of the victors leave a cloud of white dust behind them, or he sees a cyclist or now and again a single wanderer who carries something on his back. But no van comes loaded with furniture, no children run at the sides of the wheels, and he imagines that those whom death and frost have spared can only arrive in this manner; just as in his homeland they have always moved from one estate to another, when by chance they had to change masters.

He remains there until night draws near. The moorland grows dark, the wood, the road. Wild ducks fly in the glowing evening sky over the peat bog, and the reed warbler begins to call. The first, white, misty cloud appears above the reed patches, the day shrouds itself in darkness, the evening star mounts above the horizon.

Then he gets up, sighing, a tall, thin, bent man, and returns to his room in the forester’s house, where his brother is waiting for him, so that they can go together for a little while to the sheepfold where the other brother lives, the third and youngest, of whom the song of their childhood said: “But the third, the youngest lad, was so sore, oh, sore at heart.”

But when Erasmus remembers these verses, he shakes his head gently. For the third, this youngest one, has faced the consequences. He did not miss the hour. He did not run away across the field. And when they sit on the trunk of the alder tree or on the doorstep of the shepherd’s hut, Erasmus glances out of the corner of his eye at this youngest brother and asks himself why this face is so gloomy and frozen instead of beaming with happiness, with the happiness of him who has exclaimed, “Ad sum! Here I am!”

“Time passes,” people say, and Aegidius is the only one who experiences it mornings and evenings. He cannot see any field from the moorland, but he feels that the meadows are being mown now and that the grain is ripening. He does not hear the real bird call of the day and of the night, nor the call of the lapwings nor the hooting of the owls. Waking and sleeping he only hears the voice of the corn crake, which used to fill the harvest nights in his home country. That inexhaustible, warning call to praise God, the harvest, and the daily work. The call to the tune of which the scythes were sharpened in the crimson dawn while dew still covered the sleeping earth.

He does not mourn for men, but for the earth, for the lost fields on which thistles will now be growing, for the wheat that falls out of the ears, and for the hands which have nothing to do, neither to sow nor to reap. Empty hands which idly hold a pine branch when he stands at the edge of the wood gazing into the veiled distance toward south or southwest to where the land slopes away and where the fields of Franconia or the blessed Wetterau are ripening in the sunshine.

He is the only one of them who now and again leaves the moors for a day or even for a few days. Jakob managed to get him a bicycle for some jewelry, a well-worn vehicle rattling in all its spokes, but for Aegidius it means just as much as a carriage and four, and on it he roams through the plains at the foot of the mountain range wherever they are making hay. There are only a few large estates, mostly the property of some lord of the manor; and there he sits under one of the apple trees which line the road, or on the bank of a ditch near the bushes, his hands clasped around his knees, and watches the machine as it goes through the field wet with dew, or the scythes as rank on rank the scented grass falls over them in level swathes.

The farmhands in these fields are not so happy as they were in his home country, where harvesttime was still half pagan. Most of the young people he sees wear ragged, dirty uniforms without badges, and most of them glance at him suspiciously as he sits hour after hour beside the ditch watching them. The country is full of pillagers, people from all nations who sit workless in the camps and for whom other people’s lives and property mean as little as they meant for their deposed taskmasters.

For Aegidius it does not matter to whom this land belongs, and still less that it does not belong to him. Only work matters to him, and he likes to gaze at a man who drives a mowing machine or handles a scythe, and if he were not so shy he would ask someone to let him use a scythe.

At the edge of one of the large estates where they have been mowing the grass for days on end, he can at last get up and lend a hand. Something has gone wrong with the machine at his feet and the bailiff, a short, quick man who always scolds in a loud voice, showers a hail of curses on the driver, who bends over the sparkling blades. “I wonder if I can help,” says Aegidius politely and walks around the machine. He does not listen to the hostile question as to who he may be, and after a while he asks for a wrench. It is not difficult for him to find what is wrong, and while he screws on a new nut, he tells the bailiff that he must watch to see that this is always screwed up tight, because it has to bear the main weight of the whole machine.

Aegidius does not hear exactly what the bailiff answers; but it strikes him that he speaks politely, and when he draws himself up, wiping the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his coat, a woman is standing near the machine, in a cotton frock and with a large straw hat shading her sunburned face. She looks at him in a friendly way, says, “Thank you,” and nods at him.

The horses begin to pull again, the grass is mown, and Aegidius’ eyes follow the machine as it drives along the edge of the high grass evenly and quietly. “Machines cannot be put in order by scolding,” he says, turning again to the woman.

He only really looks at her now, and is a little taken aback by her majestic appearance as she stands here in the meadow, a formidable figure. He tries to think of a gentler expression, but does not find one. She is as tall as he, but broader and more powerful. Only her large, friendly, blue eyes under her broad hat are kind and moderate her rather overpowering size.

He walks back with her to the road, where her dogcart is waiting for her, and they start a friendly, rather reserved conversation. She is the mistress of these fields and meadows since her husband was killed in Russia, and she has a lot of trouble with the bailiff and the farm hands.

Everything has changed, not only the times, but with the times men and conditions. In answer to her cautious question Aegidius said that he was but a looker-on. “I have got to cycle almost seventy kilometers to be able to look at fields, but I do not regret that. I cannot sit up there on the moors all day long with folded hands.”

“Where is that – up on the moors?” He tells her, and when she asks for his name, he tells her that too. She knew his cousin and the castle, and she looks at him out of the corner of her eye. “Will you come and have a cup of coffee with me?” He thanks her politely; he has to start on his way home now. His brothers are waiting for him, and in a few words he tells her about them. With her eyes on the ground she draws shapes in the dust of the road with the stick she carries. “I am sorry,” she says in a low voice, which is remarkably gentle for her heavy build.

A fleeting smile crosses his face, and then he looks back at the meadows where the distant machine now creeps through the high grass like a big, awkward beetle. “One must only give sympathy, not receive it,” he replies and helps her politely into the small trap which dips down to one side as she gets in.

Then he takes his bicycle out of the grass and starts on his way home. He has not learned her name.

In the evening it is he who has great things to tell in front of the sheepfold. His brothers listen to him, glancing at him furtively, and even Amadeus’ lips smile awkwardly. “They have started the haymaking too late,” says Aegidius, lost in thought while he looks at a green blade of grass which he has brought home. “And the bailiff is not worth anything. It was quite simple, but he could do nothing but swear. One ought not to swear at harvesttime.”

But Aegidius avoids cycling the same road again. He is worried that he mentioned his name, for he does not like to be invited from the ditch side to a cup of coffee. He is fully aware that he has got to learn and to unlearn a few things, but he does not wish to do it just there.

Time passes; the young birds of prey now wail at the edge of the moors, and the cuckoo no longer calls so many times that one could live to be a hundred years old.

Time passes over the moors and the sheepfold and over the three brothers, one of whom wishes to forget the anguished voices, and the other the scent of the meadows which are being mown, and the third the fear of men and of their smiles. Time takes much away: the yellow orchid in the damp wood and the wildflower for which Amadeus stoops and which he holds long in his hand, while his eyes gaze deep into the little white bells. But time does not take away those memories which the brothers wish to forget. It has enclosed and carefully preserved them and directly a thought touches them they open their eyes wide and stare at their victim. They are there and cannot be avoided.

Nothing happens up here until midsummer. The forester has not come back yet, and his wife with the impassive face looks after the brothers as if they were two princes whom the marshes held in their spell. The girl sits for many hours at the edge of the rocks gazing down upon the road like Erasmus. Her face is gloomy, she looks much older than she is, and when she is alone, her face becomes careworn and hopeless. She, too, is waiting, evidently not for her father, but for the secret armies which will arise somewhere, perhaps in the Alps, and march up here to bury under their tanks the so-called victors and their laughter and their noise.

Jakob comes, and Kelley, but they go again, and it seems as if the summit of the mountain were above the world of humans; no trace is left on it by strange feet.

Only at midsummer something happens. A visitor comes to Amadeus in the evening. He hears an unknown step at the door, a slow, hesitant step, and like a wolf from his lair he is on the threshold. It is only a strange woman, big and heavy, with a straw hat hanging on her arm and a stick in her hand. She looks like one of the giants’ daughters whose fathers once played here with the rocks, when fire still broke through the earth. Amadeus stares at her in silence.

It is good that she does not smile. She only scrutinizes him, knitting her brows a little as if she were thinking of engaging him for some work, and then she asks in her gentle, low voice whether Baron von Liljecrona lives here. She would like to talk to him about something, and as there is no post, no telephone yet, she has come herself.

From what Aegidius had told him, he knows who she is, and with rather a forced politeness offers to show her the way to the forester’s house.

She thanks him, but asks to be allowed to rest a little here. The way up has been rather tiring for her. She sits down on the trunk of the alder tree, and as Amadeus cannot prevent it, he remains standing at the door of the shepherd’s hut, leaning his back against the doorpost with his arms folded over his breast. Seven locks seem to close his face, and it does not make it any better that he notices that the woman considers him, without curiosity, only with a quiet, friendly attention.

“I am sorry,” she says at length, as she had said once before. He, too, is struck by her soft voice, but he only shrugs his shoulders and goes on looking over the moorland on which the shadows grow deeper and deeper.

“I have come,” she says after a while, “to ask your brother to help me. The bailiff has made off with a lot of money, and within a week the rye must be mown. I cannot manage that alone anymore.”

“Who should be able to do it, if not you?” thinks Amadeus.

“Do you think that he would be willing to come?” she asks, and her voice sounds almost shy.

Amadeus shrugs his shoulders once more. “I don’t know,” he replies, “but I think he would be willing to go to any harvest, even if it were on the moon.”

“Thank you,” says the woman, smiling. But after that her face becomes serious again, and like Amadeus she gazes over the moors. “If I could help you at any time,” she says after a while, “I would like to do so. The winters are severe up here and not good for the heart. There will always be room in my house for you.”

“Thank you,” replies Amadeus, “but I have room enough here.”

“Perhaps it is not quite right,” says the woman modestly, “to blame everybody. Everybody is a poetical conception, but not a conception of daily life. Nor is it a kind of conception . . .”

“Neither poetry nor life have obliged me to be kind,” replied Amadeus.

“We can only oblige ourselves to be kind,” says the woman gently. “Anyone who looks rather out of the ordinary, as I do, knows something about that.”

The first shadows of night fall over the earth. Above the western part of the moors the sky is burnished in the setting sun. It looks as if there were a conflagration beyond the earth.

“I have no children,” said the woman gently, “and sometimes I feel happy about it.”

When she is about to get up, Erasmus and Aegidius come out of the wood to the sheepfold.

Erasmus is so bewildered that the woman cannot help smiling, and before she says what she wants she gazes for a little while at the three brothers, at one face after another. They are standing side by side against the wall of the sheepfold; the light of the setting sun reflected in their eyes shows up the almost touching likeness of their features and impresses the stamp of deep, almost painful loneliness upon the three figures.

With some anxiety the woman feels that perhaps none of the three might be able to face life alone. That if she were to take one of them into her house, she would have to take all three. But the next minute she begins to doubt the idea, when her eyes return to Amadeus. He has stood the test alone, and more than blindly has given her to understand that he does not wish to grasp her hand. She sighs a little and then she says what she has come for.

Aegidius does not hesitate for a moment. He even thanks her for having thought of him.

“Of whom else should I have thought?” she asks with her friendly smile. He promises to come quite early the next morning, and now he will accompany her down to where her trap is waiting. It is not too safe for a woman to be alone on the road at this time of the day.

She shakes hands with the two others, and Erasmus kisses her hand according to the old custom. She blushes a little, but she looks at Amadeus. “The victors cannot always make the peace,” she says as she takes leave.

He only bows in silence.

They remain sitting at the door of the sheepfold and wait for Aegidius.

“I feel as if he is going to Queen Semiramis,” says Erasmus after a time, and follows with his eyes the smoke from his cigarette.

“He will go into her field,” replies Amadeus, “not into her hanging gardens.”

“A mighty woman,” says Erasmus, lost in thought.

When Aegidius comes back and sits down between them, they can no longer distinguish each other’s faces. The stars sparkle in all their splendor, and the owls hoot above the moor.

“I was so happy,” says Aegidius at last, “but now I feel how hard it is to leave you. It will only last over the harvest.”

“It will last much longer,” replies Amadeus without any reproach.

Aegidius meditates for a while. “I do not know,” he says. “Perhaps one can get used to her superhuman scale.”

“The ancient Greeks would probably have called her ‘the cow-eyed,’ ” says Erasmus smiling. “But it was a goddess they called by that name.”

“I shall come and look after you as often as I can manage,” Aegidius continues. “She has a trap, and I am sure I shall get permission to use it. She likes you very much.”

“You must not think of us, brother,” says Amadeus. “It is a good thing one of us has got something to do, and there was no doubt that you would be the first. Probably you will be the only one.” He said it without bitterness, but Erasmus bends forward and with particular care he presses out his cigarette end. “I am sure we shall manage all right, brother,” he says, “provided that the forester’s daughter does not kill me.”

“I don’t think that she has a special design on your life,” replied Aegidius smiling. “For her you are only an apparition from a ‘decadent age,’ as we all are. But probably you most, because you are kindest to her.”

“Kindness is the gold of the dispossessed,” said Erasmus gaily. However, he felt very lonely when Aegidius had left. He now had both the rooms on the top floor; he had opened the door between them and walked for hours from one room to the other, avoiding the threshold, which creaked at every step. Or he stood for a long time at one of the small windows, his forehead pressed against the pane, gazing over the low forest into the distance, which always remained void for his eyes.

Sometimes at twilight he saw strangers under the bushes at the edge of the wood, young men with open shirt collars, and he saw the forester’s daughter talking with them while she glanced back at the house over her shoulder. But he did not pay any attention to it.

Not until one morning three American soldiers came into the house and he was summoned into the kitchen and questioned as to whether he had noticed any young men coming frequently to the house, did he remember it and look at the girl, who was leaning coldly and proudly against the wall as if she were St. Joan about to be burned at the stake.

“I have not been watching,” he said politely, “and I am out of the house almost all day long.”

The sergeant looked at him thoughtfully, then asked: “Are you a fugitive?”

“Yes, one may call it so,” replied the baron.

“And you were a general?”

“That’s right,” said the baron smiling. “But I took my discharge twelve years ago.”

The sergeant turned over the leaves of his notebook and shrugged his shoulders. “You ought to be a bit careful,” he said to the girl then, and got up. “After all, we are the victors.”

“Child-murderers are no victors,” replied the girl, looking past him as if a rubbish bin were standing there in his stead.

He frowned, but the two others laughed, and the youngest raised his hand and in fun stroked the girl’s cheek. The girl hit him so hard that he took a step back and glanced flabbergasted at his hand.

“Look here,” he said angrily.

Then they went.

“You ought to be careful,” said Erasmus before he turned to leave the kitchen. “Even if I don’t pay attention, I see many a thing. A girl should not try to run her head against the wall. If it is not bad for the wall, it may be bad for the girl.”

She cast a searching glance at him and then went out of the kitchen.

The soldiers report their visit, and though most of the listeners laugh, the officer of the military police takes it more seriously. One morning when Amadeus locks the door of the shepherd’s hut to walk over the moors, he sees the girl and three soldiers step out of the wood in front of the forester’s house. The girl goes between them through the dew-covered grass and they walk slowly past Amadeus.

The soldiers are merry and carefree, and the girl walks between them as if they were cannibals. She sees Amadeus standing there looking in silence at the four as they pass, but she only returns his gaze with icy contempt.

In the evening Kelley tells Amadeus in his smiling way that it had been a remarkable hearing. If they had caught a wildcat it might have been about the same. It seemed to him throughout that the girl was about to jump over the table and strangle the first lieutenant. “What a pity,” he said in conclusion. “So nice to look at and so thoroughly stupid.”

“She has got a month’s prison for contempt of the dignity of the American Army. Personally I cannot imagine what a girl of seventeen has to do with the dignity of an army of millions.”

After four weeks she comes back, and it is said that the warden of the prison, a pious man, had promised a big wax candle for the church of the little town – if after these four weeks he were still in office and alive.

At this time, when Aegidius is already busy with the wheat harvest, a loaded van drawn by four quite exhausted horses drives with many pauses for rest along the narrow winding road which leads up to a mountain that people call the Wasserkuppe. The van is loaded with old, much-broken furniture. Women in dark shawls which almost cover their foreheads sit in the straw of the van. They sit there quiet and bowed, and the eyes of the people of the district follow them for a long time, as if they were the ancient Fates of the legend, wandering now since the roots of the world ash tree had been sawn through.

There are children walking in the dust beside the creaking, rattling wheels, each holding a stick, and the people in the fields have to look hard to see whether these are really children and not dwarfs from the Kyffhauser or the Riesengebirge. They seem so old and subdued.

In the front of the van on a narrow board covered with a sack sits a tall old man with clean-shaven chin and a white beard the cut of which is unknown here, holding the reins of the four horses in his left hand. He sits upright and straight, as if he were carved out of wood, and his light-blue eyes are the only ones that gaze into the distance, instead of into the dust of the road – as the eyes of all the others do.