Читать книгу Tidings - Ernst Wiechert - Страница 7

WAS IT CHANCE OR fate that Baron Erasmus had been sitting for more than a hundred days by the rock gazing in vain down upon the valley road – or had his melancholy eyes prepared the highway for the van with the four horses? One can ask for a highway, even when it is difficult to understand the language of the people who live there, and no magic is needed to find it in the end.

For, one morning in August, Amadeus awoke at the sound of the fire crackling on the hearth. He left the heavy door of his room open at night now, because the small window did not let in enough air, and he entrusted his light sleep only to the great solitude of the moorland.

He sat up as quickly as when he had one of his bad dreams and stared at the figure that knelt before the hearth and blew into the feeble glow. The feet of the figure were wrapped in rags such as the woodcutters in his homeland wore, and of the head Amadeus could only see the white hair that fell long and smooth over the coat collar. The coat was blue and reached to the knees.

“Christoph,” he said in a low voice, and he felt the hands on which he leaned tremble.

“Just a minute, Herr Baron,” replied the soft voice. “Let me blow the fire up. You must try to get some small pine twigs, so that you will not have so much bother in the morning, Herr Baron.”

When the fire burned and filled the room with its crackling, Christoph rose, supporting himself with one hand on the hearth. Then he carefully wiped his hands with a gray cloth, came to the bed, and sat down gently on the side of it.

“So you are here, Herr Baron,” he said, gazing with his bright eyes full of affection into the face of the baron, “and we did not know whether you were still alive. Only down at the castle they told us.”

He spoke as if he had piled up the wood in the hearth the previous night as well as on a hundred previous nights. But he took pains to control the quivering of his chin, which trembled a little as with children who are nearly crying. “Four years, Herr Baron,” he said, counting it off on his fingers. “In four years a tree can bear fruit.”

“I have not borne much fruit, Christoph,” replied Amadeus. “But how many of you have come through it all?”

Christoph counted once more on his fingers. “Worgulla,” he said, “and he was the man who looked after the farm horses. Donelaitis and Skowroneck, and they were day laborers, and their wives and five of their children got through. Two others were frozen on the road, and one was shot by bandits when they tried to rob the van. They were German or Polish robbers. And one baby starved because the mother had no milk and the peasants would only give milk in exchange for a horse. But we needed the horse, and when we had made up our minds to exchange it, it was too late; those were German peasants.”

“And the others, Christoph?”

Christoph folded his hands on his knees. “The others died, Herr Baron – there – on the night when our Heavenly Father drove us out.”

“It was not God who drove you out, Christoph,” said Amadeus gently.

“The sin, Herr Baron,” replied Christoph. “And those who sin are driven out by our Heavenly Father. Not on account of the sins of our fathers, but the sins of our sons and daughters, the sins of all of us, Herr Baron.”

“Did they suffer, Christoph?”

“Some did, Herr Baron, but not many. Most were broken by the iron tanks, but some of them were only half killed. The frost got them after a few hours. We could not bury them.”

“And you, Christoph?”

“I was lying in the ditch, Herr Baron. I could not run in my big wolfskin coat. Those who ran across the field were shot. Then we put the horses into the vans again. There were just four left. We waited until the morning, and when nobody came anymore, we drove on. We have been driving for a long time. Sometimes they held us up, and sometimes they sent us the wrong way. I have been driving all my life, Herr Baron, with two or four or with six horses. But never as I had to drive now, never. I don’t want to hold reins anymore, Herr Baron.”

His face looked tired and drawn in the morning light, and a thin film passed over his eyes as over eyes that are going blind.

Then he drew himself up again, as if he were sitting on the coachman’s box and had to drive the countess. “The water is boiling,” he said. “Have you got coffee, Herr Baron? We have only barley, but anyhow it is homegrown.”

Amadeus dressed quickly and went out. The country was sparkling in the morning sun, and he saw them at once in the golden light: a battered remnant. They huddled at a little distance from the sheepfold, where some big stones lay among the heather. But they neither sat nor lay there – they crouched on the stones and around them, and only a few children stood at their mothers’ knees and looked toward Amadeus with their old eyes. They crouched there quietly without moving, as if night had drawn all life out of them. As if they had been here for many days and nights, without hope and without a plan, waiting for what should be decided about them. Their clothes were old, their shoes torn, and most children stood barefoot in sand and dew.

But Amadeus thought that the most terrible thing about them was their eyes. They looked as if they did not contain nor reflect anything. There was not even curiosity in them; there was nothing in them. They had seen so much that they neither wanted to say nor to see anything more. It would not have been so terrible had they been blind.

They got up as Amadeus came to them, and he saw that their lips even tried to smile. The women kissed his hands, and when he put his hands behind his back, they kissed the hem of his coat. The men stood there with their arms hanging down and looked at him. They did not look at him as they used to do, when he had visited them in their cottages or spoken to them at the edge of the field. Formerly he had been, as it were, of their own kind, a being of the same world, standing high above them, as if standing on a mountain. But now he had been removed beyond their reach to a gloomy realm beneath the earth, and they had not known that he would return once more with a human face.

Then the women began to weep, and that was more terrible for Amadeus than anything else. He stood in their midst and tried to pat their hands or their shoulders, as he had done when a child, but he did not succeed. He was bewildered at their wretched appearance as they stood there, and that they had been crouching silently around him while he had been asleep, perhaps throughout the whole night; that for them he was still the master, gifted with magic hands that could lift them out of their accursed fate. He was no longer a master and he had no magic. He was only full of fear. They did not know that he had been humiliated and beaten, that he hid and veiled his face from the earth and from time. That he could not bear so many eyes about him, so many outstretched hands, so many hearts that pressed hard upon him. Everything that once had been and had united them was lost in the depths.

Not even suffering linked them together, nor homelessness, nor death. They stood before him like shadows, like the departed who had risen once more from the rigidity of death from that nocturnal road under the willow trees over which the clanking caterpillar chains had rolled.

He tried to smile and did not understand why the women’s eyes were filled with so much fear, even with some horror as they hung on this smile – as if a smile did not become him anymore. He did not realize that this smile distorted his face, because only the face smiled, not the heart.

He led them into the little room around the fire and spread all his provisions before them. Then he saw for the first time that Christoph still wore the long, blue coachman’s coat with the silver buttons stamped with the coat of arms and the seven-leafed crown. And below that the rags that he had wound around his feet, and above it the smooth, white hair that fell over the collar of his coat. Now he understood why the people at the roadsides, at all the roadsides, had stared at him as at an apparition. That’s what he was – an apparition from another century, much further back than the year of his birth.

He charged Christoph to care for them all, and he also put a packet of cigarettes on the table. He would now go to fetch his brother Erasmus who had been waiting for them every minute of the day and the night. His brother would know what should be done for them.

He went off quickly as if he were afraid that the children or the women might hold him back by his sleeve, and not before he had arrived in the shelter of the wood did he stand still and look around, as if he thought they might be following him. His heart beat painfully and heavily, and he felt as if behind each tree somebody was standing and looking at him, somebody who did not want to do him any harm, who only stretched out his hand gently and without saying a word, because he trusted him. The wonderful confidence of the past, the confidence of the poor in the hand and the heart of the master.

“I have lost so very much,” he thought, deeply troubled, “so terribly much.”

“You must come now,” he said gently to Erasmus. “A few of them have come back.”

Amadeus had to help his brother to put on his coat and his shoes. Erasmus was like a child that had been lifted out of a wolf’s pit. But later he was able to speak to the forester’s wife, to ask whether she would give them the barn for the time being. Then he would look after everything himself.

The woman was even willing to give them the house, all that he might ask for. She understood what this meant for Erasmus.

Then they returned, and now Erasmus talked almost without a pause. “Aegidius will know what to do,” he said. “He will take them to the estate. People who can work are needed everywhere.”

Amadeus stopped before they came to the last bushes. “I am going on the moors for a bit,” he said. “It is rather much for me . . .”

Only now did Erasmus look at him. “Forgive me, brother,” he said gently. “I have only thought of myself; I am afraid it has always been like that with me.”

“You need not say that,” replied Amadeus. “They did not come to me, none of them. They did not even know whether I was still alive. I am only a kind of ghost to them, and they will have to get accustomed to me.”

“They will come to you, too, brother,” said Erasmus in a sweet voice. “Somebody will be the first to come. We do not yet know who it will be.”

When Amadeus came back about noon, the space in front of the sheepfold was empty. Something colored was lying among the stones, and he picked it up. It was a child’s doll, or the remains of one. It was made of some coarse material, even the face. It had yellow eyes and one was torn. A tiny, yellow rag hung down from it. It looked as if a stone had hit it and as if it was running out.

Amadeus held the doll long in his hand, pondering what its name might be. Children always saved the most important items, he thought, in a fire or in any other emergency, while grown people always snatch up the most unimportant things.

He took the doll and put it in the farthest corner of the hearth, where the clay did not get warm. Its half-torn, yellow eyes, which the child was sure to have called golden, followed him now when he walked about in the room or picked anything up. So little could make up a home.

They had to carry on their backs everything with which the van was loaded, and it took them two days to do it. They also led up the lean horses. The gay, clear voice of Baron Erasmus was to be heard until late in the evening.

Then all became as quiet as it had been before. Christoph came in the morning and in the evening to the sheepfold to light a fire and to be at hand. Sometimes he was allowed to sit by the fire and Amadeus listened to him. Amadeus was not afraid of him. He seemed not to belong to this life anymore. He asked and required nothing. He was as one who got leave now and again from the underworld to sit with men and hold a chip of pinewood in his hand which he split with a big, old-fashioned knife. Even the knife looked as if it had been lost in the sand in pagan times.

Christoph did not speak of the days when they had been happy together. In his tales he went much further back, to the times of his father and grandfather, when something like serfdom still existed and when at the age of six he had started to polish the head harness of the carriage horses. His round Slav face became more and more absorbed in himself, and his bright blue eyes beamed with a light that did not come from the things of this earth but from the visions which were behind these things. His mouth had become a little twisted in his old age, and his lips drooped to the right where for a lifetime he had held his short pipe.

“Yes, the old families, Herr Baron,” he said, taking the pipe from his mouth to press the glowing tobacco down with his forefinger. “Where the pictures hung on the walls and the children grew up with the dead. So much happens in these old families, Herr Baron – and in those times, you know, everything was different from today. Life was not as nowadays when everything can happen in one way just as well as in another; no, what happened then had to happen just as it did. Our Heavenly Father still looked at it, you know. He stood above the roof at night and looked on, and then everything happened as he willed. Do you understand, Herr Baron?”

Amadeus understood very well.

“The masters were not always quiet, Herr Baron,” Christoph went on, lost in thought. “Some were wild and some were also hard. It is long ago, but my grandfather still remembered it. All of them, however wild, could be stirred.

“One of them gambled, you know. He gambled for ten years. And when the father of my grandfather stood with his sleigh and six horses in front of the house where the master was gambling, he did not know whether in that night the horses and he himself would be the stakes. At that time the masters even gambled away their men. At midnight, when inside the house the gamblers shouted and made a great noise, my great-grandfather peeled off one after another the rugs in which he had wrapped himself and went upstairs, whip in hand, as the baroness had ordered him to do. Then he stood behind the master in the golden hall, pulled him by the sleeve, and said, ‘Pray excuse me, sir, but the mistress is waiting.’

“The master did not look up from his cards and his gold. ‘Let her wait, Christoph,’ he said. ‘Back to the horses with you!’

“Then my great-grandfather went back to the horses.

“But after an hour he stood again in the hall, pulled his master by the sleeve, and said, ‘Pray excuse me, sir, the fields and the cattle are waiting.’

“The master did not look up. ‘Let them wait, Christoph,’ he said. ‘Back to the horses with you!’

“Then my great-grandfather went back to the horses.

“But after an hour he stood again in the hall, pulled his master by the gold-embroidered sleeve and said: ‘Pray excuse me, sir, but our Heavenly Father is waiting.’

“Then the master laid the cards down, stuffed his gold into his pocket, and got up. ‘Hold me by the belt, Christoph,’ he said, for at that time the masters wore belts round their coats, ‘and hold me fast so that I do not turn back.’

“Then they went out. My great-grandfather held his whip in his left hand, and with his right he led his master by the belt downstairs to the sleigh. That’s what they were like at that time, Herr Baron, do you understand?”

Amadeus understood that too.

Christoph took a glowing cinder out of the hearth with his fingers and put it on the tobacco in his pipe.

“And once,” Christoph went on, “it was in the early dawn, they saw a beggar standing on crutches at the roadside. He stretched out his hand. ‘Drive on, Christoph,’ called the master.

“But my great-grandfather stopped the six horses and waited.

“ ‘Drive on, Christoph,’ shouted the master and stood up in the sleigh.

“But my great-grandfather undid his leather belt, unbuttoned his wolfskin coat and took a coin out of his pocket and gave it to the beggar; ‘For Christ’s sake, brother,’ he said. Then he buttoned his coat again, buckled his belt, took up the reins and the whip and drove on. When they had been driving for a while the master said, ‘What did you say to him, Christoph?’

“ ‘I said to him “For Christ’s sake, brother,” Herr Baron.’

“ ‘Drive back, Christoph,’ commanded the master.

“And they turned around and found the beggar by the roadside, and the master poured all the gold he had won in the night into the beggar’s cap. It was so much that some of it fell over the rim into the snow.

“Yes, the old families,” concluded Christoph, and gazed into the fire, which was burning down on the hearth with a sighing note.

Christoph never said anything to show that he was worried about Baron Amadeus, and that his anxiety determined the choice of his stories. But when he got up and put the chips of pinewood on the hearth he sometimes said, “So it went with the masters formerly, Herr Baron. They could be aroused – and sometimes our Heavenly Father chose a simple hand . . .”

Amadeus liked to listen to him.

It was as if Christoph’s hands turned the globe and this continent sank down, so that others, strange ones, might rise above the horizon. And with this continent that sank down, the last years sank down too, yes, perhaps all his own life, and it seemed as if nothing were left but the long line of the generations, all that was common to them and encompassed them. As if the baron Amadeus were only an unnumbered page in the great book which gently opened by itself, and that the triptych was something nameless, just as the father who had suffered himself to be deceived. Nothing was left but the character of the family, and God leaned down over the old roof, now long fallen in, and looked at it. This family, the members of which could in bygone times be “aroused.”

Then Baron Amadeus remained sitting at the other side of the fire, his elbows propped on his knees while the last gleam from low flames fell on his idle hands, which he tried to warm at the golden embers. Only once before Christoph said goodbye he stopped by the baron, lost in thought, as if he were about to pluck his sleeve or to grasp his belt, and with his deep, kind old voice he said, “You poor, frozen master.”

But Amadeus did not answer.

Nor did he ask much; he only sat there waiting. Old people like to talk. Christoph had had neither wife nor child, but only the horses and his masters. The horses were lost, but the masters still existed, as well as the whip which he had saved. There was no other token of office for a coachman of the nobility. The whip was for him like the scepter in the hand of a king.

Even without his horses he was still indispensable to these “young masters” whose hair was gray or already white, but who sometimes were as children at his knees, just as in times gone by, when he had sat on the oat bin and had given them the fruits of his life’s experience: a serving life, poor and within narrow limits, but through serving his life had become so rich that there was not its equal in the manor house.

Now the two “young masters” lived up here, and they were as poor as he was. But Christoph saw very well that poverty did not oppress them. For the real aristocrat, poverty was neither a burden nor a disgrace. But he saw very well, too, that they were sometimes afraid. He did not know how great or how small this fear was, nor what they were afraid of – his eyes were too simple for that. But he realized that they were afraid like children. No wisdom was needed to console children. They only needed a pair of old hands which put the glowing cinder on the tobacco in the pipe, quietly and without trembling, even if the outside world came to an end.

He felt, too, that they were not afraid of the things that humble people feared. They were too noble, too high-born, and he knew well what that meant. They were afraid because their door was no longer locked, the door to the room where they could be apart. Because the door was forced, and because everybody could step over the threshold: the military police or a cattle dealer or a farm hand who asked for higher wages; afraid because they were still living in an aristocratic world and now suddenly nobody was obliged to wipe his shoes before stepping over their threshold. Not that they had ever asked anybody to wipe his shoes before entering their door, but they expected that this should be done in honor of the world in which they lived; a stately room perhaps, furnished with books and pictures. Or in face, their narrow, reserved features which were only in part their own, the other part belonging to the noble family whose name they bore and whose honor they had always upheld.

So Christoph was not surprised when Baron Amadeus asked him one evening by the fire whether he was afraid.

Christoph took the pipe from his mouth and bent down a little to the fire.

“When I was a small child, Herr Baron,” he said, “so small” – and he held his hand with the pipe a little above the floor – “I was afraid as children are afraid. At that time we were still told of the Man in Black, the Corn Woman, and the Moor Witch. At that time the wood owl hooting in the oak tree predicted somebody’s death. At that time little lights were to be seen on the peat bogs, and Queen Mab made plaits of elflocks in the manes of the horses. Perhaps it is still so today, and I believe it is so. But my eyes see it in a different way, Herr Baron, do you understand? My eyes are full of faith now, and he who is full of faith is not afraid. Our Heavenly Father can send the Man in Black to you, for he can send everything, but the Man in Black does not exist for his own sake, do you understand? Our Heavenly Father holds him on a thin thread and pulls him back, when it is enough.”

“And our Heavenly Father?” asked Amadeus. “Would you not be afraid of him, if he were standing at the threshold?”

“Why should I be afraid, Herr Baron? If he should say: ‘Are you there, Christoph?’ I would put my pipe down on the hearth and answer: ‘Come in, O Lord, here I am. But stoop a little, because the door is so low.’ Do you think that it can give him pleasure to frighten me, Herr Baron? An old man with white hair? Who never stole any oats from the oat bin and has never lost his whip?”

“But if it were not our Heavenly Father who stood on the threshold, Christoph, but a human being? A friendly-looking man, but one whose clothes were transparent and you could see the knife around which his hand had closed in his pocket? Or you could read on his lips the words which he would speak before the court, lying words and words of betrayal? Or if you knew or believed that any man whom you know, everyone indeed, could stand before your threshold like that?”

Then Christoph raised his left hand which trembled a little and put his finger tips cautiously and gently on the folded hands of Baron Amadeus. And with a kind, quite beautiful smile he said, “Can you believe, Herr Baron, that Christoph could stand like that before your threshold?”

“No, not you, Christoph, not you. But . . .”

“And even if it is only your old coachman who would not stand there, sir,” said Christoph, “is it not always true that our Heavenly Father would have room to stand there? You see, sir,” he went on gently after a while, “we, too, have had fathers, grandfathers, and forefathers. Many of them in far-off days were fettered and were whipped and some were whipped to death. But we do not carry it as a burden anymore, sir. Our Heavenly Father has taken the load from us. He has even taken to himself those who used the whip. I believe that he was more grieved about them than about those who shrieked in pain. Do you think, sir, that his hand is so small that there is no room for you in it – even though you are a baron?”

He sat quietly thinking for a time, then he took a cinder from the hearth and put it on his pipe.

“If God crucifies,” he said gently, “he must take into his hand the one who is crucified. He does not stretch out his hand in vain, sir. He does not trifle, not he.”

The fire died down, but the last crimson glow was still reflected on their faces.

“I am going to tell you something now, sir,” said Christoph after a while. “When everything had come to an end at that time, we drove westward. We could not bury the dead, because the earth was frozen a meter deep. Snow had already covered them, when we had harnessed the four horses. We drove only by night; by day we camped in the woods and lit a small fire.

“We drove around the villages, because there was death in the villages. Once under the full moon we came to a village which was burned and deserted. It lay low, where there were only woods and lakes and marshes. One could think that it was the world’s end.

“But it was not altogether deserted, for a dog was howling around the chimneys which were left standing. It was terrible to hear it, Herr Baron. The sky was crimson all around, and there was no living being on the earth, not a vestige of life. Only the dog was howling. The echo resounded from the wood and you might fancy that another, a second dog was howling there. And these two were all that God had left alive.

“We had no more oats for the horses and I left the others on the outskirts behind a wall and went into the village. I and my shadow – a big shadow, for I was wearing the wolfskin coat. I thought the shadow was too big for myself and for the burned village. I was afraid of my shadow.

“I found nothing; all was burned down to the foundations – except the church. It stood a little off the road on a hillock and was not burned. Perhaps they had not had time to climb up the hillock.

“I went up there. I had not found the dog, it always crept away when I came near. It may have been afraid of my big shadow.

“The church was built of wood, and I stopped in front of the door which lay in deep shadow.

“Then I got a shock, sir, yes. I was frightened to death. For somebody was sitting on the threshold. So wrapped up that I could not recognize whether it was a man or a woman. But it was a woman. At least it had been one. Now she was nothing but a ghost. She held something in her hand that looked like a child’s toy, a rattle or some such thing. She raised this hand toward me. I believe lepers must stretch out their hands like that.

“But she was not a leper. She was only distraught. Something had crushed her, and she had been left lying in the snow. I only saw something white where her face was. I did not know whether she was alive, and yet she had raised the hand with the toy.

“I asked her many questions, but at first she did not answer. Then she told me everything. She may have been afraid of my coat, until I told her who we were.

“She told me everything. ‘I am the only one left,’ she said, ‘I alone, I and the dog. We had done nothing to them. They killed men and women. The women screamed before they were killed. I heard them, because I did not scream. The girls had poisoned themselves beforehand. The doctor had given them poison. We had a great doctor in our village. He defended himself and they shot him dead.’

“ ‘And the children?’ I asked.

“ ‘They drowned the children in the cesspool. They had to break the ice first, and then they drowned them.’

“Oh, sir, the words came from her white face as from the face of a dead woman; and all the time the dog was howling.

“ ‘Come along with us,’ I said. ‘You cannot stay here. There will be room for you on the sleigh.’

“I saw that she shook her head. ‘I cannot come,’ she said, ‘for I am with child. By those who have slain. Many children. I don’t know how many. It shall grow up under the cross, it cannot grow up otherwise, or it will be cursed.’

“ ‘What cross?’ I asked.

“She lifted her hand out of the black shawl and pointed to the church door. It was in the shadow. ‘Are your eyes blind?’ she asked.

“I raised my eyes, sir, and I saw. A man was nailed on the church door and his head was bent. I may have cried out, for she shook her head. ‘You must not cry,’ she said. ‘He did not cry either. He is our vicar. I cannot take him down, for he is frozen fast.’

“The dog was howling and I trembled, sir. I trembled in my wolfskin coat.

“ ‘Now go,’ she said. ‘It shall grow up under this cross. A village must have children, or God wipes it out.’

“ ‘Come along with me,’ I pleaded, ‘for Christ’s sake, come.’ But she drew the black shawl around her again. Nothing was to be seen of her face after that. The dog was howling.

“Then I went off, sir, I and my shadow.” He was silent, and his bright eyes stared into the dying fire.

“Thus it is written in the Bible,” he went on gently after a while: “In the same night two will lie on a bed; one is taken, the other is left. Two will grind grain together; one is taken, the other is left. Two will be in the field; one is taken, the other is left. Thus it is written, sir.

“I asked her for the name of the village, but I have forgotten it. It may have been the village Nameless or Nowhere.

“Then we came into a district which Worgulla knew well. There were three burned villages one after another, but the signboards with the names on were not burned. The name of the first was Adamsverdruss, and I gazed at this name for a long time. The second was called Beschluss, and the women were afraid of it. But the third was called Amen, and it was there that we lost the wolves’ track. Then we could drive by day, if the airplanes did not come.

“And now ask me once more whether I am afraid, sir,” said Christoph. He got up and dusted the ashes of his pipe from his long coat. “Was the woman afraid who remained sitting there below the crucified man? And are we to be less than a cottager’s wife in the village Nameless?”

But Amadeus did not answer this question either. He looked at the child’s doll with its yellow, half-torn eyes that was propped in the corner of the hearth, and he did not hear that Christoph went out and gently closed the door behind himself.

The next morning one of the children stood at the door of the hut, a girl about six years old, timid and silent, her right forefinger in her mouth, and stared at the doll on the hearth.

“Is that yours?” asked Amadeus.

The girl nodded.

“What’s her name?” asked Amadeus.

“Skota,” answered the child. And Skota meant Goldie. Amadeus took “Goldie” from the hearth and gave it to the little girl. The girl wrapped it in her shawl and pressed it to her. Then she left without saying goodbye. Always from now on when Amadeus entered his room, he looked first at the comer of the hearth. But it was always empty. Goldie was gone.

Aegidius came the third day after the arrival of the cottagers. He had not been able to leave the wheat harvest. He sat on a bundle of straw in the barn of the forester’s house and distributed the food and the clothes he had brought with him. He suggested that he should take them all the next evening to the estate of which he was now the bailiff. They needed workers as they needed their daily bread, and he would be a kind master to them. They would be responsible to him alone, only to him.

His face tanned by the harvest sun was beaming, and he looked from one to the other as they stood in front of him with their faces marked by fear and privation.

But then something strange happened – they did not want to come. Donelaitis spoke for them while he held his cap quietly and modestly in his hands.

They did not want to come because they wished to remain apart. They did not like other people, but they were fond of each other. They had never quarreled on the way. Donelaitis had looked around immediately after their arrival. There were a few wooden houses by the peat bog, well and solidly built, with clay hearths. During the war there had been much activity there with foreign workers who had lived in these houses. Peat was like gold at this time, and they could live there. In winter they could fell timber. So much timber had to be felled. He had spoken about it to the forester’s wife. They would not suffer want. And they would be together.

Aegidius looked at him thoughtfully. “But you will be in the wilderness, Donelaitis,” he said at last.

“Is not the whole world a wilderness today, Herr Baron?” asked Donelaitis. “And here it is a little like it was in the old days. It smells as it smelled at home, Herr Baron.

“But if you could help us a little, Herr Baron, with bedding and kitchen utensils, for instance, and with some wood so that we might have a bed and a table?”

Aegidius was not satisfied, but he had to give in. He went to Kelley, to the commissioner for refugees, and to the Landrat, and after two weeks the cottagers moved in. Christoph remained with Baron Erasmus in the forester’s house.