Brother of Sleep: A Novel Page 12

  His gaze lingered on the mother-of-pearl inlaid door of the tabernacle. “Why do You humiliate me? Have You not made me in Your image? Then You are humiliating Yourself, You Anti-God!”

  He cast his eyes to the ground. “I have nothing more to lose, and what I have lost I never possessed. And yet You have breathed something into my soul that seemed very paradise to me. You have poisoned me. Why, You great, powerful, and all-knowing God, why can it please You to refuse me the joy of my life? Are You not a God of love? Why do You not let me live? Why must my heart flame for Elsbeth? Did You think I had decided on Elsbeth of my own free will? It was You who led me to her. I obeyed You, for I thought it was Your will. You powerful God! What? Can You delight in my going astray?”

  The gleam of evil fury returned to his eyes. He got up from the floor, went closer to the tabernacle, and began shouting again. He could not feel the pain in his throat.

  “I didn’t come to curse You! I came to finish with You! You are not a loving God! Love alone was not enough for You! You had to create hatred, You had to create evil! Or did You, perhaps, not create the angel Lucifer? You planted the seed of evil in him! The angel had to fall because it was Your eternal plan!”

  “So,” he said, with bottomless contempt, “hear what I have to say to You,” and he bent close to the door of the shrine. “If You in Your magnificence have given us men free will,” he whispered, “then I, Johannes Elias Alder, wish to taste that freedom. Know that I will not accept my misfortune. Know that I shall not cease to love Elsbeth. Know that I am resisting Your fate. Know that You cannot visit any greater suffering on me than You have visited already. From now on, Your power will cease to work in me. And if I, Johannes Elias Alder, should perish, it is my will, and not Yours!”

  Having spoken these words, he suddenly thought of taking his own life. Not a single desire had been fulfilled in his wretched existence, he raged. He had had no childhood; his parents had been afraid of him and had rejected him for that reason. When he had precociously entered manhood, they had not allowed him to learn to write music in Feldberg. He had had to enjoy his love of music in secret, to sit at the organ at night like a church thief, in constant fear that someone might discover him. How often had he begged his Uncle Oskar to teach him music. That wish, too, had remained unfulfilled. He would willingly have put up with all this, had God not so cruelly deceived him in love.

  While Elias was talking, something strange happened. We cannot say whether only his vividly hallu­cinating mind saw this strange thing or whether it existed in reality. But he suddenly felt that someone was near him in the nave of the church. He felt a vague strength, a kind of living warmth, even heat, which spread evenly on his neck and shoulders and finally radiated all the way down his back. At the same mo­ment a gentle but ghostly sound arose. A soft carpet of countless sounds filled the nave, and Elias felt as though these sounds were blowing from a single mouth. The mouth fell silent and the sounds faded, and the mouth started again, and the air was set in endlessly gentle movement once more.

  Someone was playing the organ. Elias Alder turned around. When he saw what was happening in the nave of the church, his heart stood still.

  Certainly, the phenomenon of the mysterious so­norities might, in retrospect, have had a reasonably plausible explanation. The last time he had played the organ, Elias had in fact forgotten to put the stops back. In addition, the north-facing gallery window was open, and so a strong gust of wind could have forced its way into the wind chest and set the columns of air in the pipes in motion. But we cannot explain what Elias saw.

  “Who are you?” he breathed with chalk-white lips, and stared helplessly into the middle benches on the gospel side. “Who are you?” he breathed again, and his lips trembled with fear. The soft moans of the pipes rose up again and ebbed, and the elongated shadows of the Stations of the Cross vacillated in the moving light of the candles. “Where have you come from?” asked Elias in a hoarse voice, in which there was a note of mortal terror.

  A pale yellow light passed over the child’s bound head and fell upon its narrow naked shoulders, for its coarse-woven jacket was torn and tattered.

  “Whoever you are, I’m not afraid of you!” said Elias, his eyes glaring. His heartbeat gradually returned to its true rhythm. When he had pulled himself to­gether again, he went over to the Easter candle, took it from the chandelier, climbed over the balustrade, and cautiously approached the pew where the ragged child with the bound head was cowering. He saw that the child was holding something in its hands and playing with it. When it briefly lowered its head, Elias thought he could see marks on his temples as big as fists. The closer he came, the greater was the warmth that seemed to emanate from the child. It was a mysterious warmth that came from within, that made him inexplicably happy and brought a wonderful peace to his soul. Elias did not dare move a step farther. He raised the candle a little, and now he could see the apparition in its entirety.

  He saw a child whose face he had never seen in Eschberg. It was sitting in the pew playing with a missal. It was flicking through the pages, feeling the rough paper with curious little fingers, letting the pages fly, bringing the book to its mouth, biting the leather cover with its little teeth, and then letting the pages fly once again. Elias watched this in silence and felt an inexplicable peace within himself. He looked at the child’s head. It was wrapped in a tight linen bandage, and on its left temple was a large black stain that looked like dried blood. Elias looked at the child’s defenseless body, covered with brown rags. He saw the body trembling with cold and knew it was consumed by its injury. Then he discovered a mysterious feature: The child had no navel.

  “Are you God?” he asked, having found his voice. The child raised its head to Elias and looked at him. The light that came from the child’s big dark eyes enveloped Elias in a hypnotic serenity. And Johannes Elias Alder recognized the child. “Lord, give me eternal rest,” Elias stammered, dumbfounded, “and may the eternal light shine upon me.”

  He felt an inexpressible longing for the beauty radiating from the child’s mysterious eyes, and he wanted at least to be able to touch its little bare feet. But when he stretched out his hand, the child’s body tore open. Its mouth opened in torment, tried to speak, and could not. And Elias had to watch the black stain on the child’s temple begin to glitter, and a wet halo spread around the stain. The wound had begun to bleed. The child was still in torment. It tried to speak but could not. And when it had finally closed its mouth, blood burst from between its lips. Elias stretched his hand out to the child again, slowly and with an unusually tender gesture. Again the child’s body tore apart, and again its mouth tried to speak.

  Then Johannes Elias Alder realized he could not touch the child. He suddenly lost all the strength of his body and collapsed, faint with longing.

  He lay there between the pews until Charcoal-burner Michel shook him awake in the morning. When Elias opened his eyes, a shrill cry escaped from Michel. His irises had lost their color. A dark green had replaced the bright yellow, a green like the pastures when it rains from black overcast skies. In fact, the color had re­turned to Elias Alder’s eyes, but Michel could not have known this.

  That night–Seff’s wife, overjoyed, would later tell her son–his half-paralyzed father had suddenly woken. He had stood up, and suddenly he had been able to speak again. The whole thing had lasted half an hour. And she swore by God and all the saints that it had not been a dream vision.

  FARAWAY PLACES

  THE return of the natural color of his eyes was only the visible sign of what had happened to Elias in the course of that mystical night. But the wounded child had also given another sign, and a more important one: Elias had ceased to love. His heart was suddenly freed of that terrible longing. Elsbeth meant nothing to him.

  If a door opened unexpectedly, he no longer gave a nervous start. If he saw a woman coming to the farm from the distance, his pulse no longer raced. If he heard women’s laughter by the village well at nigh
t, he no longer tried to find Elsbeth’s laughter in it. He was delivered.

  But deliverance is the recognition of the mean­inglessness of all life. We learn that from the biographies of the great men of this world. Jesus, when he was delivered, no longer felt any inclination to work in this world. He went away and did not return. The saints of good and evil, the tyrants of humanity, when they completed their work, sought or found death before their time. We are not putting our hero in the ranks of these saints. But the same fate befell him: He wanted to die.

  Paradoxically, he wanted to die at a time when his star seemed outwardly to be in the ascendant. In the summer months of the year 1825–the year of his death–a happy stroke of luck suddenly seemed to reverse his destiny. In that eventful summer the cantor Bruno Goller, cathedral organist in Feldberg, discovered our musician’s genius. It is the story of how this happened, and how matters developed, that the com­ing sections of our little book shall deal with.

  Put yourself in the soul of Elias, sitting at the organ playing the music at Elsbeth’s Wedding Mass! For he had obeyed her heartfelt wish that he should be the one who played the music at her wedding. At this time people married in traditional black (and in the Vor­arlberg they still do), on the principle that not even the wedding day should be a joyful one, because joy brought sin into the world. And black did seem the appropriate color for weddings in those days. Seldom did people marry for love. Nevertheless, Elsbeth was a happy bride. The pretty girl with the snub nose knelt stiffly in the bridal pew, and only now and again did she permit herself a quick sideways glance at Lukas. She saw a contented face, indeed one that contentedness had left looking flabby and simpleminded. This confirmed Elsbeth’s feeling that God in His wisdom had led her to this dear man. And it is true, she thought again, Lukas is good with the cattle. I have never once seen him beating or shouting at them.

  Elias invented some measured, very skillful, but entirely indifferent music–the music of an organist who often plays at weddings and does not take part in the events themselves. He recalled the time when he had built magnificent cathedrals of sound on the meter of Elsbeth’s heartbeat. Out of a distant sympa­thy for the girl, he thought of returning to this princi­ple in the postlude. He went inside himself and listened but made no particular effort to find that measure, so he abandoned the idea and based a terri­bly witty postlude on the theme of a lullaby. In this he embedded the halfhearted wish that Elsbeth’s baby might be healthy in mind and body. Afterward, when everyone was shaking the couple’s hand in the churchyard, Elias joined them, pushed his way into the wait­ing group, and stretched a warm, healthy, and strong hand out to Elsbeth. He even joked, and whispered, so quietly that no one but the couple could hear, “When it comes to the baptism, you must have me as a godfather.”

  “That’s a promise,” said Lukas, but Elsbeth immediately objected that he could not do both: play the organ and be the godfather.

  “Why not?” Elias laughed. “I’ll play, and then I’ll leap from the organ, help with the baptism, dash back to the organ, help with the baptism again, and so on.”

  Everyone burst out laughing at the idea of that picture, Elias the heartiest of them all. Elsbeth darted a look into his eyes, whose new light she had still not grown used to.

  At that moment a shadow of melancholy passed across her face. It might have been just an illusion, for we cannot really understand why these two people could never find each other. Therefore we beg the reader to join us in believing that a shadow of melancholy passed across Elsbeth’s face.

  Is that still Elias? Peter wondered nervously. How can he look so delighted and jokingly reach his hand out to her? Peter no longer understood his friend. When, at the banquet, he imitated Eschberg voices to everyone’s delight, Peter grew almost angry and sat in silence, his face red and motionless, and dug his nails into the tablecloth.

  “You liar!” he exclaimed when they were return­ing to their farms at dawn. Elias looked at him in bafflement. “All of a sudden she means nothing to you! You never loved her!” he said, with evil passion.

  “It’s good the way it is,” said Elias, yawning.

  “Nothing is good, nothing!” Peter cried furiously.

  “Why so enraged, my friend?” Elias said soothingly. “I realized that Elsbeth belonged to another. That is the way of the world. We blind people must try to find traces of the divine path. In this world we are not given more than that.”

  “You’ve never really tried,” Peter said dejectedly. “You’ve never been manly enough to declare your desire to her.”

  “Have you ever tried?” asked Elias tiredly. “Have you ever declared your desire to me?”

  Peter fell silent and left his friend without saying goodbye.

  Over the weeks that followed, Elias was forced to acknowledge that nothing provoked pleasure or passion in him anymore. The school he had previously been so fond of bored him now, and the shouts of the children irritated him. He was tired when he woke in the morning and stayed tired for half the day. That had never been his way before. He had got up wide awake, looked at the day through the window in his room, and felt joy. The gleaming yellow, wonderfully scented sum­mer morning no longer awakened any interest in him, and the morning had ceased to be an image of new hope. Everything seemed empty, as if he had seen and exhausted everything. His heart had aged. It had lost its juices, like a withered old apple on his mother’s stove.

  So, with his last remaining courage, he decided to conjure up the old times again. He went to the places of his former passion, sought his former strength in the sounds of the pastures, but felt nothing but boredom and staleness. You never loved her. Peter’s accusation rang unforgettably in his ears.

  “Did I really never love her?” he said to himself, chewing on a stem of sorrel. “What? What if I started loving again? What if I was really resisting God’s plan? Even the most hopeless passion is easier to bear than no passion at all.”

  While he was having this conversation with himself, a white butterfly settled on his forearm. And soon another came dancing down from the whirring blue air. Then they fluttered around each other and flew capriciously away. Elias remembered the first night he spent secretly at the organ. Remembered the first composition of his life, when he wrote a second melody to the melody of a Christmas carol–after the image of two yellow butterflies that he had once watched as a child, with dreaming eyes. He felt as though he wanted to cry. He wanted to cry and could not. He got up from the grass, went to the path, and swore to try love one last time. He wanted to bring back the images, the smells, the hopes and longings with their former strength. This–he sensed, or even knew–put the seal on his death. The terrible law by which all love leads to death was to find fulfillment in this man in an atrociously perverse way.

  We shall leave him for a moment now, rather than describe the massive error in which, lying to himself, he has taken refuge. But we do understand his despair. Has his whole life not been a grotesque caricature of divine transgression?

  The summer, as we have mentioned, was exceedingly eventful, in a number of different ways. At the beginning of July, the people of Eschberg devised a project to work together to widen the village street so that “at least two carts might pass with room to spare,” as the resolution read. The age of medieval slumber was coming to an end, in Eschberg as elsewhere, and in the Vorarlberg towns some reckless speculators had already begun to erect curious constructions, which they then filled with droning metal monsters. The embroidery business was gaining a foothold. It would transform the wretched farming country into a prosperous center of wretched avarice.

  The plan to widen the village street came from the pen of Nulf Alder. His ludicrous dispossession by his own son had also deprived him of his office as bur­gomaster, but the word of the wild Alder still carried weight in certain circles. Since Elsbeth’s wedding, he and his wife lived at Lukas Alder’s farm. Peter had made this one of the conditions of the marriage. And, to make the deal more palatable to Luka
s, he gave him three milk cows rather than the two he had promised.

  At this time there was an extremely curious atmos­phere in Eschberg. It was as though an inexplicable sense of unease had entered the villagers’ minds. This manifested itself in a kind of nervous hyperactivity. Many peasants had already gathered in their second harvest, as if it were a matter of running against the seasons. But because they had mown the grass far too early, their haystacks were not even a third full. Some young men began to hike to Götzberg every day for no visible reason, because they had come to find the confinement of the village irksome. There they made contact with characters who were for the most part suspicious, and the more often they went to Götzberg the more their simple brains were filled with confusion. Their vocabulary grew richer, more colorful and corrupt, and Matthew Lamparter blustered on about automatic cattle and automatic milk churns he had seen installed at one of the farms in Götzberg. The times were now modern, that is true. In August, under violent protests–particularly from the old folk–petroleum was introduced, an oil with which Mostly had wonderfully illuminated his little room and which had finally been poured over him and set alight.

  The boys brought dubious writings back to the village, bought from plausible crooks in Götzberg. Illustrated writings were particularly sought after, and they devoured them as pigs devour apple peel, staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the nudes tastelessly displayed. In this context we must tell of the fate of Charcoalburner Michel, which took a dangerously sharp turn during these weeks.

  Michel too was hungry for culture. He was one of those who walked to Götzberg every day and stomped home again late in the evening with his head in a fever. A certain Markus Huffer, a traveling salesman who traded in blasphemous writings and had for that reason been locked up several times in the village jail, had managed to sell him a copy of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Charcoalburner Michel had immediately subscribed to the full set of volumes, since which time he had been in a terrible state. In the book he came upon the description of a race of people whose character and way of life filled him with such longing for faraway places that he decided to find them and spend the rest of his life there.