Brother of Sleep: A Novel Page 16

  “Where have you been?” asked Peter loudly. Elias did not seem to hear the question. Peter asked even more loudly, and Elias’s face pulled a painful grimace. After laborious interrogations he finally discovered that his friend had wandered up to the highest mountain, the Kugelberg, got lost, and had only now found his way back.

  At this stage, Elias could still have spoken clearly, but the intoxicating effect of the amanites, along with the stimulant of the deadly nightshade leaves, made speech a torment. Elias’s lips were swollen and stiff. It took several attempts for him to express what he had to say. He could not go on, he managed to say by dint of obstinacy. He wanted Peter to stand him upright, he said, and tie him to the trunk of that young ash tree. How could he ever appear before the eyes of Elsbeth and tell her he loved her for life if he did not stay awake? Peter grasped the emaciated body in his arms and tied it to the tree trunk. Elias was thirsty; he needed a great deal of water. Peter gave him some mouthfuls with tender care, but within a few minutes Elias brought up all that he had drunk.

  In the afternoon, when it grew sultry even in the cool of the forest, the effect of the intoxicating herbs wore off, and it looked as though Elias’s strength was returning. At least he managed to speak more clearly again. Indeed, he even laughed once and said that sleep robbed man of the finest time of his life. He had a sense that time was of greater duration than we generally thought. What had previously seemed like a moment was now as long as a morning. And he asked Peter gravely how long he thought a moment of eternity would last. Peter did not answer but hung the water-drenched frock coat over his head and chest to cool him down. Elias thought, he said from behind the coat, that a moment of eternity would amount to between seven and nine mornings of our earthly time. Maybe more. Maybe less. At any rate, it was certainly three. From now on Peter stayed with the bound man. He did go to the farm in the evening to milk the cows but then hurried back to the stone.

  Peter must pinch him, Elias blathered, in his cheeks, in his legs, or slap him if necessary. He had to have deadly nightshade, he needed water, leaves in his arse. He must untie him; he could stand no longer. Peter patiently did as Elias demanded, took a few steps with him, pushed half a belladonna berry between his teeth, and bound the feeble body again. He was or­dered to wrap a hempen rope around his brow, throw the end over the branch, tighten it, and finally attach it to his own toes. That way they would be prepared for the night. If his head fell forward, Peter would immediately notice, wake up, and force him awake, beat him awake, for when one slept one did not love.

  So the sixth night fell on the forest, and Elias stayed awake and did not sleep. But only with immense effort, for Peter had to keep untying him from the tree, walking a few steps with him, and immersing him in the cold water. Hardly had Peter gone to sleep than the madman cried out that he could stand no more and was afraid of going to sleep himself.

  In the morning of the seventh day of keeping watch, Peter left for a quarter of an hour to do what needed to be done at the farm. On his return, he saw that Elias had gone to sleep. He also saw that he was no longer capable of holding back his excrement. Urine was dripping from Elias’s shin, and on his martyred skin Peter discovered yellow stains as big as nuts. Peter felt such a pang of anguish that he slapped the sleeping man awake and yelled in his face that he could no longer bear to see this. If Elias did not bring his torture to an end he would go and get his sister, bring her down here, and expose her to this terrible sight. He would tell her why Elias was inflicting this kind of pain on himself. In the twilight of his mind, Elias groaned and stammered in words that were barely comprehensible that Peter had to keep his oath. He had kept his own in the past.

  Those were his last attempts to speak, for he was no longer capable of moving a single limb, let alone his jaws or his tongue. With impotent rage Peter whipped him awake again and again, supported the dying body, dipped him in the water, and forced little pieces of belladonna into his mouth. Because he could no longer keep his eyelids open, and his eyes were already dimmed and septic, Peter took some pollen wax, molded it, and placed it between his eyelashes so his lids could no longer fall closed.

  At around the fifth hour of the afternoon something happened that Peter found quite inexplicable. A sudden disturbance hit the area. The undergrowth crackled and rustled all around them. Never had Peter seen a deer come so close to a man, so close he could have touched it. The young chamois, shyest of all mountain animals, drank from the water of the Emmer without the slightest fear. It did not even make as if to flee when Peter stood up on the rock. Lower down, beside the grotto, three roe deer were grazing. A bat danced out of the darkness of the grotto, and it was not long before salamanders were crawling on the water-polished stone. At the same time, and only now did Peter hear this, the dogs of Eschberg began to bark. He could not imagine, let alone hear, the dying man talking anymore. But his voice was ringing out in the frequency of the animals. He was singing in the ultrasound of bats, whistling inaudibly in the vibrations of foxes and dogs. The last message of his wretched life was heard only by the animals of the forest.

  In the seventh night it happened that his hearing was multiplied for a few moments. Elias not only perceived all the sounds of his body, he heard or saw within himself. He saw the sounds above and below the sounds, the tones above and below the tones, and heard the most insignificant vibrations of the irregular beats of his heart. He was not to hear anything more than that, for God was done with him.

  The following morning his pulse was so fast that if he had wished to sleep he could no longer have done so. Peter, overtired from several sleepless nights, his ear pressed to Elias’s chest, clearly heard the rise and fall of his heartbeat. When he returned from his morning milking, Elias’s body lay motionless in the hempen ropes. Peter untied him, and the body collapsed. Peter listened for his heartbeat. It was there, but thin and barely audible.

  Around the time of the morning Angelus, on the ninth of September, 1825, Johannes Elias Alder, illegitimate son of Curate Elias Benzer and Agathe Alder, known as Seff’s wife, passed away. He died of respira­tory paralysis, which had set in as a result of the excessive absorption of belladonna.

  We raise our eyes from these papers and glance up from our low desk–as small as a doll’s house–down toward the slope, now covered with grayish snow. We hear the happy cries of children and the bright laughter of a young mother, and we see the living little bundles coming up with their sleds, we feel the joy of these children, wading effortlessly through the deep, fresh snow. Then we turn back to our writing table, still fragrant with late summer sultriness.

  No, we are not grieving for this man. We are grieving for his genius and the impossibility of his love. What glorious people–the idea comes to us again– must the world have lost simply because it was not granted them to live their life in a balance of happiness and unhappiness.

  We are closing the pages of our little book about Johannes Elias Alder. What follows is of little importance. It brings to an end the chronicle of a world that has lost its significance.

  THE OBLITERATION

  PETER sat by the corpse, and with the hand of his crippled arm he closed Elias Alder’s mouth and eyes. In the distance the Angelus rang out, and when it had chimed its last, Peter could no longer control himself, and he broke down in bitter tears. Then he began to caress the corpse, as he had always done in his daydreams. Soon the blue of death covered Elias’s lips, and his breast grew cool. Then Peter stood up and decided to bury the corpse near the deer pool. For he remembered the words that Elias had once spoken to Elsbeth, saying that all the people of Eschberg had to come down here immediately after their death, because above this place was the gate to the other world. So Peter took the corpse, hid it securely in the undergrowth, crept to the farm, and returned around midday with a pick and shovel. He had a great deal of trouble chasing away the foxes and martens, for they had already picked up the scent of the cadaver. Peter put the dead man over his shoulder, made his way with dif
fi­culty to where the deer pool lay, laid him in the moss in the clearing, and began to dig. He dug the hole more than eight feet deep, for he knew the foxes would scratch for the corpse. Then he did something he had never done in his life: He went and picked flowers from the late summer pastures. Upon his return he had to drive away the foxes again with blows from his stick. Then he wreathed the white shorn head of the dead man, mumbled, weeping, a prayer for the dead, picked up the corpse from the moss, and slid it into the hole in the earth. Following old customs, he took a handful of earth and scattered it on the head of the huddled corpse.

  “Naked I came from my mother,” whispered Peter, “naked shall I go. What the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.” And at the words “Praised be the name of the Lord,” he burst into tears again. They were tears not of grief but of rage.

  He sat by the open grave for a long time. Then he closed the hole in the earth, so that later he would not be able to find the spot himself. But he was able to find the spot after all, for fourteen paces to the west stood a Norway spruce, and in the bark of that Norway spruce Peter carved an elegant E. For as long as he lived, Peter returned to recarve that E with the greatest care.

  After he had buried his only friend, his secret beloved, Peter went back to the farm and slept for a night and a day without once waking. Then, when he was taking the cows to be milked, he saw that their udders had begun to run, for they were full to bursting. He saw their eyes staring mad with pain and suddenly felt pity for the defenseless creatures. Peter was no longer the person he had been.

  And his endlessly lonely life–he had, after all, driven his parents from the farm–took a new and unexpected turn. It came about that his disturbed underhand character changed so much that not only human beings gradually came to trust him but–and this counts for more–so did animals. As if he had had a Damascus road experience, Peter stopped his torture, and the Lamparter gossip claimed to have seen that the cattle in his stable were no longer forced to lie in their own dung but lay on freshly strewn leaves. Over the years Peter attracted a great deal of respect in the village; indeed, a few months before the Second Fire he was made chairman of the parish council. There was only one thing that people did not understand: Why did Peter never marry?

  There is no point in wondering why Peter’s character underwent such profound changes. It would have been all too easy to think that, since he had seen his late friend’s suffering, he now understood that suffering deliberately inflicted cannot help our understanding of this incomprehensible life on earth. The failure that had been Johannes Elias Alder’s life purified him. We believe this with childlike gravity, for evil battles with good until good destroys it.

  At the age of thirty-eight–sixteen years after the death of Elias Alder–Peter died of St. Anthony’s fire, a mysterious disease to which several people in Eschberg succumbed at the time. He had caught it from some rye afflicted with a fungal parasite, which meant that the limbs suddenly turned black and, eventually, gradually, died.

  Peter saw the devastations of the Second Fire with his own eyes. For reasons that were unexplained it had broken out on a May morning when the Föhn was blowing. The Second Fire destroyed almost the entire village, and the little church burned down to its foundations. But this time it only claimed a single human life, and the cattle were spared because they had been driven to Götzberg in time.

  No one would have had to die if a terrible misunderstanding had not happened. Seff’s wife thought Seff had already been taken out of the house. In fact Fritz had brought the Mongoloid to safety but not his father, so the paralyzed Seff burned to death. A Lamparter who was running past claims to have heard a cry that sounded like terrible laughter. He thought it was the laughter of a desperate neighbor watching his farm burn down for a second time. He too had laughed, he had been crying so hard.

  We shall spare the reader, who has become a good friend to us–otherwise he could not have made it to this page in our little book–the details of the obliteration of the village of Eschberg. But by the time of the Second Fire the people seemed to have understood that God had never wanted them there. They moved away from Eschberg. But not everyone went. Two Lamparter families and one family of Alders, thirteen people in total, with incredible obstinacy, refused to leave the village. Then, when the Third Fire raged on 5 Septem­ber 1892, twelve people were burned in their beds and forty-eight head of cattle in the stables. Only one person was left alive. His name was Cosmas Alder. Cosmas was a small man, an old man, with a bulbous drinker’s nose.

  MOTHER, WHAT DOES LOVE MEAN?

  IT was some nine years after his death, on one of those rainy May Sundays when children grow tiresome from being bored in their room. So Lukas’s wife decided to walk down to the stream with her six little ones. She wanted to show them the spectacle of the crashing brown Emmer and was even curious to see what course the stream had taken after the storm.

  Although she was a woman who could still be called young, the almost annual births had consumed her beauty. Her teeth were bad, and her hands were rough and calloused from her work in farm and pasture. She had had to abandon her damask embroidery, but she did not mind. She had found her place.

  With her dark voice that he had loved so much, she urged her children to follow her hand in hand, in single file. They walked like this along the curving path that followed the bank, twisting and turning. Cosmas, her firstborn, brought up the rear and proudly uttered commands of “Attention!” and “Halt!” to his band of soldiers.

  When Lukas’s wife came to the place where she had often sat with him in her youth, she suddenly stopped and called in astonishment, “The stone is gone!”

  “The stone?” asked four-year-old Anna self-im­portantly.

  “It’s gone!” cried Lukas’s wife. “The storm has pulled it away!” The rain had stopped, and the children threw their hoods back. Then Lukas’s wife told them to crowd closely around her and she would tell them a fairy story. The children gladly did as she bade them and made curious little faces.

  “Over there, for years and years,” said Lukas’s wife, pointing, “there lay a big stone. It looked like the sole of the foot of our Lord God.”

  In Eschberg there lived a young man, she contin­ued, who had been destined to bear a heavy cross. From birth his eyes had had a yellow glow. He suffered terribly from this mark. She herself had known this man well; indeed, he had saved her life when the village burned down. The man had been very taciturn by nature. No one had ever seen deep inside him. One fine Sunday, that mysterious man had climbed up to the organ in the little church and had played so beautifully that people had to reach for their handkerchiefs. They had had to blow their noses, so magnificent had his playing been. And the man had never learned to play the organ. Some years later he had suddenly vanished without a trace. He had never come back, although they had looked for him everywhere. But she thought he was still alive. Maybe he had only left Eschberg because he hadn’t been able to find his love there.

  “And over there,” said Lukas’s wife, bringing her fairy tale to an end, “where the big water-polished stone used to be, that was his favorite place.”

  The children looked at her with round brown eyes. Then Cosmas, the eldest, went to his mother and, affecting an adult voice, he asked, “Mother dear, what does love mean?”

  “What does love mean?” Lukas’s wife laughed, kissed his gleaming bulbous nose, and pulled his hood over his head. For the rain had started falling again.

  Robert Schneider

 

 

 
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