Brother of Sleep: A Novel Page 3

  On the occasion of this deforestation of the Em­mer, Elias had been allowed to accompany his father. And there the child discovered the place, the water-polished stone, that was to exert such a strange and curious attraction for him. Seff had noticed the way the child, when paddling in sand and mud, would suddenly stop, nervously casting his hand from one side to the other as though trying to listen to something. Then the child climbed out and clambered impetuously through the undergrowth, as if summoned by an unknown power. As he put everything within reach to his mouth and ears–mud, gravel, insects, salamanders, grass, and rotting leaves–Seff had called him by name, to show he was not alone in the wilderness. This so terrified the child that he began to cry, and it was a long time before he would be consoled. And he refused to move an inch from a particular rocky protuberance, so that Seff had been obliged to pull him from it by force and take him under his arm. On the basis of this observation we may see that the miracle did not strike Elias like a bolt from the heavens but announced itself gradually, in an almost human way.

  This afternoon the stone was calling. Elias had to go to the river. He stole down the hill and out through the pasture and reached the steaming stable. From there he took the path that could not be seen from any of the house’s windows. Still, he ran the first part of the way, until he knew he could no longer see the farm. He whistled with joy, tumbled, and scampered through the hamlet down to the bed of the Emmer. But Seff, scattering dung in the next hamlet, saw him. He saw the little airy dot of humanity against the great whiteness of the field. He saw it disappearing in the zigzag behind the forest’s rim. Seff shoved the pitchfork into the frozen ground, cupped his hands to his mouth, and was about to cry out to his son when he stopped. He did not wish to disturb the child in his happy solitude. Seff looked glassy-eyed at the forest shadow behind which the lad had disappeared. Then he picked up the fork and drove it powerfully, furiously, into the steaming dungheap. “Blast it if there isn’t something wrong with the boy!” And that forkful of dung flew farther than all the rest.

  There he went, that strange child, stamping through the fog-frozen landscape. Walked for half an hour or more, climbed skillfully around the first water­fall, then the second. On his walk he had to stop frequently, because he could not hear enough of the whirring sound of the ice flakes that fell rustling from the branches all around him. Filled with exultation, Elias pushed the tips of his heavy, tight leather shoes into the frozen snow. And the rough crust whirled into a thousand sparks, whispered and groaned in sounds so diverse that Elias had never heard their like. Even the wonderful sound of the snowflakes the other night was as nothing in comparison with this magnificent concert.

  On walked Elias, ever onward. He pulled up his trousers, lifted his nose, and tugged a felt hat lower over his face. On difficult nights he drew this hat from his pallet and smelled it until he was comforted. He smelled the cold sweat, the hair, the smell of the cattle–it was the hat his father wore in the stable.

  The closer Elias came to the water-polished stone, the more uneven his heartbeat grew. It was as though the sound of his steps, his breath, the whispering of the frozen snow, the groaning of the trees, the rushing of the water under the ice of the Emmer–as if everything surrounding him was swelling up, ringing out with ever greater force and brilliance. When Elias had finally climbed up to the stone, he heard a thunder emanating from his heart. He must have had an inkling of what was to come, for he suddenly began to sing. Then the miracle happened. That afternoon, five-year-old Elias heard the sound of the universe.

  Because his head was freezing again, he grabbed his hat, to pull it farther down on his face. This produced such a violent explosion in his ears that the shock sent him sliding from the stone and he fell back into the snow. His last glimpse of reality was a tuft of blond, bloody hair. While he was falling, his sense of hearing multiplied.

  The little body began to change. His eyeballs sprang abruptly from their sockets, sticking out from between their lids until they protruded beneath the eyebrows. And the fluff of his brows stuck to his tear-drenched corneas. His pupils dissolved, engulfing the whites of his eyes. Their natural color, the melancholy green of rain, disappeared, to be replaced by a glowing and repellent yellow. The nape of the child’s neck grew rigid, and the back of his head bored painfully into the hard snow. Then his spinal column arched, his navel grew horn hard, and blood seeped from the navel’s long-scarred flesh. But the child’s face bore a terrible aspect, as though all the cries of pain of mankind and all the world’s creatures lay buried within it. His jaws stood out, his lips reduced to two thin, bloodless slashes. One by one the child’s teeth caved in, for the gums had atrophied; we have no way of explaining why Elias did not suffocate. Then, monstrously, his little member stiffened, and his precocious sperm mingled with urine and the blood from the navel to run down his groin in a warm trickle. Throughout all this, the child released all his body’s excretions, from sweat to excrement, in uncommonly large quantities.

  What the child then heard was the black thunder emanating from his heart. One clap of thunder today, one tomorrow. Which is to say he lost all sense of time. So we cannot determine how long Elias really lay in the snow. By human measurements, a few minutes per­haps; by divine reckoning a period of years, as one remarkable circumstance will show.

  Sounds, noises, timbres, and tones arose, the like of which he had never heard before. Elias not only heard the sounds, he also saw them. He saw the air incessantly contracting and expanding. He saw into the valleys of sounds and into their gigantic mountain ranges. He saw the hum of his own blood, the crackle of the tufts of hair in his little fists. And his breath cut his nostrils in such shrill whistles that a raging summer Föhn would have sounded like a murmur in comparison. The juices of his stomach churned and clattered heavily around. An indescribable diversity cooed in his intestines. Gases expanded, hissed, or blew apart, the substance of his bones vibrated, and even the water in his eyes trembled with the dark beating of his heart.

  And again his range of hearing multiplied, exploded, covering the patch of ground on which he lay like a vast ear. Listened down into landscapes hundreds of miles deep, listened out into regions hundreds of miles across. Against the sonorous backdrop of his own body noises, ever more powerful acoustic scenarios passed with increasing speed: storms of sound, tem­pests of sound, seas and deserts of sound.

  All at once, out of this huge mass of noises, Elias discerned his father’s heartbeat. But his father’s heart beat so arhythmically, so out of harmony with his own, that Elias, had he been in command of all his senses, would have despaired. But God, in his endless cruelty, did not stop his display.

  In unimaginable streams, the storms of sounds and noises fell upon Elias’s ears: a mad tohubohu of hundreds of beating hearts, a splintering of bones, a singing and humming of the blood of countless veins, a dry brittle scratching when lips closed, a crashing and crunching between teeth, an incredible noise of swallowing, gurgling, snorting, and belching, a churning of gall-like stomach juices, a quiet splash of urine, a swish of human hair and the yet wilder swish of animal hair, a dull scrape of fabric on skin, a thin singing of evaporating sweat, a whetting of muscles, a screaming of blood when the members of animals and men grew erect. Not to mention the crazed chaos of voices and sounds of men and creatures on and under the earth.

  And deeper went his ear, into all the screams, jabbers, squawks, into all the talking and whispering, singing and groaning, screeching and yowling, yam­mering and sobbing, sighing and coughing, slurping and slapping, right into the sudden silence where the vocal cords were really still violently vibrating with the sounds of words just uttered. Even the droning of thoughts was revealed to the child. The range of his hearing grew ever more powerful, and he saw ever more picturesque sounds.

  Then came the indescribable concert of sounds and noises of all the animals and all of nature and the endless mass of soloists. The mooing and bleating, the snorting and whinnying, the rattle of ha
lter chains, the licking and tongue-whetting on salt blocks, the clapping of tails, the grunting and rolling, the farting and blowing, the squeaking and peeping, the meowing and barking, the quacking and crowing, the twittering and wing-beating, the gnawing and pecking, the digging and scratching.…

  And he saw yet deeper and farther. He saw the beasts of the sea, the song of the dolphins, the gigantic lament of dying whales, the chords of huge shoals of fish, the clicking of plankton, the spiral of ripples when fish expelled their roe; saw the resonance of the waves, the collapse of subterranean mountains, the luminous metallic stridency of streams of lava, the song of the seasons, the foam on the sea, the hissing of the thousands of tons of water sucked up by the sun, the crashing and bursting explosion of gigantic cloud choirs, the noise of light.… What are words?

  We must mention one last noise, a sound so fili­gree in form that it should by rights have been sub­merged in all the noise of the universe. But the sound remained and did not go under. It was emanating from Eschberg. It was the soft heartbeat of an unborn child, a fetus, a human female. What Elias had previously heard and seen, he forgot, but the sound of the unborn heart he did not. For it was the heartbeat of the person destined for him forever. It was the heart of his beloved. It is hard to believe that Elias survived this assault, that it did not drive him mad.

  By human norms, the child should have been deafened on the spot. So it is extraordinary that his hearing was left unscathed, but there are no later signs to indicate otherwise. God, it seemed, was not yet finished with him. God was not finished with him by a long way.

  After the terrible experience with his hearing, the distortions of the child’s body retreated. His eyeballs shrank to their original size, his spine straightened, the cramps in his limbs relaxed. Likewise, his jaws, which had protruded so terribly, shrank back again. But the glowing yellow of his irises did not return to their melancholic rain-green color. At the back of his head, whole tufts of hair had fallen out, and he had lost all his teeth. But this disfigurement did not last long, for soon he had a new set of precocious adult teeth.

  As well as the ghostly yellow of the irises, there were other changes, no less ghostly. The child’s glass voice had mutated. It had swollen, increased in range and volume, developed into a full bass voice. This remarkable voice attracted such attention in the village that the child’s parents, for pure shame, decided to lock Elias in the children’s room and keep him there like an epileptic. One other metamorphosis was apparent: a thin fluff had grown at the child’s temples, on his upper lip, his chin, his armpits, and his member. The body of Elias Alder had entered puberty.

  We cannot explain how the child made his way home. Haintz’s wife, who had come to Seff Alder’s house for a little chat on that December afternoon, was the first to see him. The kitchen was steaming with the semolina that Seff’s wife was preparing for dinner. She was standing by the oven, stirring the gruel with her ladle. Yes, the curse of God was upon the boy, that was becoming clearer to her from one day to the next. Haintz’s wife nodded her massive head and wiped the condensation from the window with her gouty hand. She had, Seff’s wife continued, a vague sense of something when the child was born, but decided it was merely a notion.

  Suddenly Haintz’s wife uttered a hoarse cry. “My God, my good Lord! The naked boy, the naked boy is lying outside in the snow!”

  The pan clattered to the floor, the door burst open, a wooden clog lay in the doorway. Seff’s wife stumbled down through the snow and took the child in her horrified arms, pressing him so tightly to her body that he could barely breathe. She brought him back into the kitchen and laid him on the shiny wooden table to dress him. When the two women saw Elias lying there they blushed with shame, noticing that his little penis was erect. Frightened, Seff’s wife went to fetch a blanket from the tub and swiftly turned the child over, away from the glazed eyes of Haintz’s wife, and was about to swaddle him but pushed his sex so violently from his belly that Elias, crazed with pain, cried out.

  “My God, my good Lord! What a voice! Like a baying stag,” said Haintz’s wife, crossing herself before running away, mad with fear.

  It is true that she did not leave the farm before promising, by all that was sacred, that she would not utter so much as a word about the incident. Which is why all eyes were on the Alders that Sunday. It is not impossible that certain women felt a kind of pride, having only given their husbands a Mongoloid child rather than a devil with cow-piss yellow eyes.

  But another woman, Nulf’s wife, who was then in the fifth month of her pregnancy, put her prayer book on her belly and prayed. If it was a child sound in mind and body, she swore by Our Lady that she would place a bouquet at her altar every month for as long as she, Virginia Alder, would live.

  Seff’s wife later bitterly reproached herself, in front of her husband, for not having noticed the inde­­cency of the boy’s appearance when he was still in the snow. No one would have known anything about it; as to his hair and teeth, they would quickly have grown again. But now it was hopeless. Elias became the enigma of Eschberg, the cause of much whispering.

  For the first few nights Seff and his wife slept not in the parental chamber but on the threshing floor, up in the hayloft. They kept Fritz between them. During this period, Seff’s wife lay awake until the early hours, her thoughts revolving ever more closely around the child, who she assumed had been poisoned. When she suggested to Seff that a worm-eaten plank might fall on the boy, or that he might accidentally drown in the Emmer, or that a runaway cow might gore him to death, Seff drove his fist so hard into her blasted mouth that he dislocated her chin. From then onward not a word was spoken about the child; when she was able to speak again she had lost the will to live. But she did not abandon hope of an improvement in things, as the following chapter will relate.

  THE TIME IN THE ROOM

  AFTER God had granted Elias his sense of hearing, in such a miraculous yet cruel way, the boy fell silent. But silence did not fall around him. So the Alders, anxious about publicity, concealed him, and, with slaps in the face, with blows and birchings, imprisoned him in his room, which he was unable to leave unless asked to do so.

  Seff Alder’s farm, hitherto so peaceful, grew animated. All the relations one could think of–almost everyone in Eschberg–suddenly found it was time to go and see their dear ones in the hamlet of Hof. They came for the most contrived reasons, pretended interest in the well-being of the cattle, insistently praised the cleanliness of the cowshed and the fact that the cattle did not have to lie in their dung, sniffed appreciatively at the unusually dry hay, drank greedily from the cider that was served them, loudly praised Seff’s wife’s un­commonly clean kitchen, and finally all of them asked after the dear and oh, so pitiable child. In this way they hoped to catch a glimpse of the cretin, but Seff and his wife answered in a monotone. “The kid’s poorly, scarlet fever.”

  Later visitors were struck to notice that the spicy cider was no longer served, and the boy’s scarlet fever was lasting a lot longer than it usually did. And when even Nulf Alder, the family’s mortal enemy, crossed the threshold of the house, poor Seff’s patience was exhausted. He grabbed his brother by the shoulders and threw him into a hole in the snow. No one caught a glimpse of the boy.

  This prompted a handful of Eschberg children–spurred on by the old people’s suppositions–to creep up to the accursed farm one day after Sunday school. They had already identified the window of the boy’s room. They made their way to it and mocked Elias about his eyes, cow-piss yellow. “Come to the window and do your voice!”

  Elias had already heard them braying when they left the presbytery to dance their way up to him. He pulled his pallet to his face and tried to wait in silence until the horror had passed. However much he pressed his hands to his ears, it was no use. When the name-calling did not stop and one of them loudly said he was a “yellow devil,” he could bear it no longer. He sprang to the window and poured such a bellowing cry on the heads below that the t
ormentors ran away in an instant, howling with fear. For days afterward the children blubbed about having seen Piss-yellow with their own eyes.

  But one child stayed calmly beneath the window. His name was Peter Elias, and he was the son of Nulf Alder. We have met him already, for he was christened at the same time as our Elias. Peter stood and refused to move from the spot. Not because he was in shock, far from it. Peter stayed from a sudden fascination with one so utterly different. And he heard him begin to cry loudly. Elias wept so heartrendingly into the spring evening that the young grass in the meadows began to dip sadly and the nearby forest rang with a sound like sobbing. But Peter was not moved. He stood openmouthed, his eyes coldly piercing that other boy above his head. From that day onward, Peter tried to win Elias’s friendship. At first he stood beneath the room every evening. Then he came less often, but with a stubborn constancy. He did not need to whistle or announce his presence with owl hoots. Elias expected him.

  We may claim that Peter was the only person in Elias Alder’s life who recognized his genius. He sensed that greatness had been bestowed on Elias. And be­cause he could not rid himself of that sense, he tried to keep Elias down. And Elias obeyed his friend almost blindly. He obeyed him with naive gratitude that one human being, and one alone, had not abandoned him in the bitterest moments of his life. Elias loved Peter.

  In the meantime Seff’s wife neglected all those things that might have encouraged the favorable devel­opment of her precocious son. She did not speak to him. She put his soup outside the door of his room, as one might leave milk out for a cat. At first she avoided any contact with him, for fear of catching yellow fever from his eyes. Tenderness, or words of that kind, was unknown to her and to most of the Eschberg women. And she paid less and less attention to his hygiene, so that he ended up covered in filth and lice. Usually she washed her children on Saturdays, and it had been her dream as a young girl to present the little ones to the congregation on Sundays with the shiniest little noses and cleanest little collars in the village. Now she energetically denied ever having dreamed of doing any such thing. Seff’s wife let herself go. She grew brutalized, and it would of course be untrue to say that her kitchen was kept spotlessly clean.