Brother of Sleep: A Novel Read online

  She regained hope on one occasion, hauled herself out of her apathetic lassitude, and sang once more the songs of her girlhood. Her hope lasted only a few days. It was Haintz’s wife, the wife of the blind beadle, who stirred her. She advised her to try various unguents on the boy. The idea had come to her, she wheezed, as she stared absently into the green May morning. Green, green everywhere, she had thought. Surely some of that green could be given back to Elias, and she knew how to do it.

  They first tried dandelion leaves, moistening them with spittle and clapping them onto the child’s closed eyelids. Elias was not allowed to move his little back from the spot. In the evening they removed the withered leaves in the hope of finding a wonderful dandelion green in the boy’s irises. But the candle enviously illuminated a yellow that made its own yellow pale in comparison.

  The next day they went to work early. For half the morning they picked through the meadows, collecting aprons full of herbs and anything else distinguished by a respectable green. In their beelike zeal, the women even collected the young sprouts of the Norway spruce, which were usually boiled down into a syrup. It was Haintz’s wife who first suggested trying the sprouts. The result of this was that–after the sprouts had been cooked in simmering water and the concoction dripped on the child’s lids–Elias was severely scalded. Hardly had the poor lad recovered than Haintz’s wife devised a new method for putting green into his irises.

  This idea had come to her as she was absently mowing the evening grass for the cattle. As it was an internal sickness, it could–my God, my good Lord, it was so obvious!–only be treated from within. So she took a soup plate and grated some birch and hornbeam bark into it, mixing the bark with the leaves of the butterfly orchid, yellow bird’s nest, spurge laurel, and martagon lily, and drizzled into it two spoonfuls of the first milk of a cow that had freshly calved. The result this time was a night-long stomach cramp, and when the women set about trying yet another cure, the boy chased them from the room with a loud, furious roar. Haintz’s wife failed in her attempts to make the melancholy rain-green of his eyes shine again, and from then on she seldom dropped in on her friend. She had, she said by way of apology, so much work these days, and one calving after another at the farm.

  For two winters Elias stayed locked in the room. Every so often Peter would come and stand silently under the window, stare up, and go away again. Nulf, his father, Seff’s brother and mortal enemy, could not dissuade him from these visits, not even by beating him until the blood flowed. Peter came, stood silently, and went away. The boys barely spoke three words to each other. But Peter’s stubborn loyalty won Elias’s trust.

  The day of Quasimodo came. Elias should have taken communion the year before, but his mother had persuaded the curate to grant a delay. The boy, she said, had unexpectedly developed a painful illness of the limbs, and he was also troubled by loss of weight and terrible headaches. The communion had to be put off for a year. The curate, Friedolin Beuerlein, could not believe this, and resolutely went to Seff Alder’s farm. Curate Beuerlein was a benevolent, dry man with a very long nose. When, after quiet persuasion, the couple were still not prepared to send Elias to communion, the curate said some, for him, harsh words and began to chastise them most vehemently for their bovine obsti­nacy. Only when the curate dragged in the worst imag­inable torments of hell did Seff agree. Not so his wife. It was all the same to her, she maintained, if she roasted away on a spit in hell. The boy was not going to communion.

  Without going into the communion service in detail (the gawping and rubbernecking, the sudden silence of the congregation when the child began to sing in a bass voice), we shall still maintain that no communicant ever allowed the Christ child into his heart with greater piety and with greater volume than did our Elias Alder. At the subsequent dinner in the Huntsman’s Inn, however, the boy was no longer to be seen, and henceforward Seff’s wife insisted that he could go to mass, but only if he entered the church after the second Kyrie and left it again before the curate’s benediction. Also, he was to sit in the rearmost pew on the epistle side, where the tobacco-chewing ancients had their Sunday snooze.

  Let us turn our attention once more to the mother of our hero, who, we have said, lost the will to live because of her child’s abnormality. We can support this assertion with reference to an episode that occurred on the Feast of the Holy Trinity in the same year.

  On the Feast of the Holy Trinity there was a fair, which usually culminated in violent altercations, an exchange of insults, and thoroughly bloody scuffles. On no other day in the year did the whole crowd of peasants meet in a single place, the field in front of the little church. And on no other day did people drink so heartily as they did at that fair, when kirsch was distributed for free.

  The feast began with an open-air service. The altar was surrounded by a charming carpet of flowers, made of daisies and dandelions. The words ave maria had been embroidered into the carpet, but during the night a cow wandered into the meadow, and the letter r was now covered by a fat, juicy cowpat. This dismayed the curate, who was a priest of Marian inclinations and had even, as a young man, belonged to the congrega­tion of the Heart of Mary. The curate tried to put the letter right again. The choristers could smell this and, when he offered the holy water, they turned their noses up with a marked lack of humility. All in all, it was a very moving mass, and at the solemn blessing with the monstrance the peasants intoned the Te Deum with such joyful ease that they might already have been singing their marching and drinking songs.

  After the mass the real feast began. The village choirmaster had taught the children an interminable ode to the imperial house, the verses of which were written by a man whom we shall often have cause to meet later on. His name was Charcoalburner Michel, because he worked the charcoal pit in the hamlet of Altig. Each of the children had to recite two verses from the vast poem and illustrate their words with actions, even Elias. When Elias’s time came, some people pulled drunken faces, which made the scandal all the worse. The boy walked before his audience, a daisy chain in his hair, and began his recitation. When he started to speak in a warm and richly dramatic bass voice, the crowd of peasants burst into such terrible laughter that it could be heard in Götzberg. Elias did not utter another syllable and stared wide-eyed into the shrill horde, which stared back into the shrill yellow of his irises. Seff’s wife was suddenly unable to breathe and collapsed in front of everyone. Elias stood rooted to the spot, until the schoolmaster finally dragged him from the wooden stage. The chaotic yelling–some, who wished to be particularly distinguished, shouted Tack­apo! Tackapo!–only calmed down when the celebrated fire-eater Signor Foco mounted the stage. During Sig­nor Foco’s fiery cascades they jokingly recalled Brim­stone Sunday in 1800 and pointed with a laugh at the triple-thickness twelve-hinged bronze doors, and blind Haintz Lamparter lamented the good old days. Since Curate Benzer had passed away, nothing ever happened in Eschberg. He gave a sigh and felt around patiently for his jug of beer.

  Subsequently Agathe Alder, Seff’s wife, went terribly downhill. She stopped washing, cooked nothing but semolina gruel for weeks, stuffed herself with stale gruel, and grew fat and white as lard, and she was only twenty-six years old. She no longer slept with her husband, and when she was as fat as “a pregnant sow”– in the words of her only friend–Seff stopped loving her. She also devoted herself to mysterious cults, wandered through Eschberg at night praying and singing, put burning candles on toads, rolled naked in the autumn leaves, let dung beetles crawl over her belly, stuffed her pudenda with mud, and finally carved flesh from her left cheek. She then carried it solemnly to the little church on a cushion and displayed the relic on the altar of St. Eusebius, who was supposed to have carried a piece of his own flesh from Bresnerberg up to Vik­torsberg (and with a considerable degree of virtuosity: it was his head, severed by desecrators of the Sabbath). Seff’s wife spent hour after hour kneeling before the altar, asking over and over the eternal question: Why did God have to impose su
ch a child upon her? If only he had given her an idiot–by which she meant a Mongoloid–no one in the village would have paid any attention to it. (Sadly, years later–she had recovered from her torments long since and found a new delight in life–this fatal wish was fulfilled in her third child.) Heartless as it may sound, his mother’s passing mad­ness marked the beginning of Elias’s life. He was freed–or, rather, he freed himself. In the Alder household, by this time, it came to the same thing.

  But what did Seff do, whose affection his family so badly needed? For it happened that Elias threw himself at his father’s breast, weeping bitterly, unable to say a word, simply in the hope that his father might hold him, might silently console him.

  Seff said nothing.

  And his brother, Fritz? We shall make no bones about saying that he is of no interest to us. Fritz was, as long as he lived, so insignificant as to be ignored entirely. He was one of those people who, in any era, have nothing to say; in fact, not a single word uttered by Fritz has been handed down to us. And had it been, it would have been completely uninteresting.

  The picture of our hero’s early youth is a dark one. Yet it had moments of radiant joy, which it would be dishonest to conceal from the reader. We shall look at one final episode, for which we must go back to the spring of 1808, to the five-year-old Elias.

  It was a rain-drenched April morning. At around midday Elias was standing at the window of his room and could see a strange woman wheezing up the vil­lage street. By the straps over her shoulder and her red leather case he immediately recognized her as a midwife. Elias opened the window and tried to see where the woman was going. She had vanished from his range of vision, so he leaned dangerously far out of the window and saw that she was turning into Nulf Alder’s house. About half an hour later, he was lying on his pallet when a piercing pain shot into his head, and a stich into his heart, and his breath was suddenly stilled.

  My God, my God, what is it? The question whirled through his little brain. What is it? His heart was racing. “What is it, what is it?” he cried from the depths of his throat, laughing and crying at the same time; he leaped up with horror, shook the bolted door of his room, and beat his fists against the faded brown wall. And Elias banged his head against the windowpane and cried down to the forest, with the Emmer flowing behind. “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” he cried.

  Virginia Alder, Nulf’s wife, had given her husband a girl. She was perfectly sound in mind and body. The child was baptized Elsbeth. Henceforward there was always a sumptuous bouquet on the side altar of the Virgin. No one could ever remember seeing it fade.

  And Elias sobbed with joy. He was jubilant, jubilant in mind and body. For he could hear a wonderful beating, and that beating sound made him think he could see paradise.

  “Don’t stop, you!” groaned the child, down toward the forest’s edge, behind which he had first heard that sound.

  It was Elsbeth’s heartbeat. It was the sound of love.

  THE VOICE, THE ANIMALS, AND THE ORGAN

  AT ten years of age, the boy was a man. His hair was thinner, his coming baldness showed at his re­ceding temples. As he wanted to look like all the boys of his age, he singed his stubble with a burning candle, in the belief that this would stop his beard from growing. The power of his experience in the riverbed of the Emmer had thrown his growth into disarray. He had the appearance and voice of a man but the size of a ten-year-old child. He wanted to be a child, he wanted to be able to talk like a child. As regards the peculiarity of his outward appearance, he had heard things that were beyond his comprehension. That Elias remained unspoilt by all the village filth of presumptions, lies, and calumnies can only be put down to the nature of his own heart. He had a good heart. It had the power of hope.

  But the unusual, if seen every day, becomes normal, and people soon grew used to the man-child. In the schoolroom, among hydrocephalics, Mongoloids, and other products of inbreeding, a frail person with glowing yellow eyes was not particularly conspicuous. At that time the village schoolmaster Oskar Alder noticed how miserable and gaunt Seff’s sons had become. Their little faces were emaciated, their chins were too pointed, and black and blue circles had formed under their eyes, for Seff’s wife had been serving up nothing but her loveless, watery gruel for ages. So Oskar Alder put the boys in lodging elsewhere. When Seff’s wife returned to her senses, her sons also prospered.

  And it happened that some women suddenly be­gan to look at Elias with lustful eyes; they no longer squinted at his yellow irises but at his overdeveloped member. Elias did not understand the meaning of their ringing words, the hammering heartbeats between their breasts. He tried henceforward to avoid meeting these women. One woman in particular set her cap for the little man. Her name was Burga Lamparter, and she lived alone, her betrothed having been killed by the French in an ambush. Burga loved people and life, so she had been made the village prostitute. She had a bad reputation because she did not attend mass on Sunday. Burga would have liked to go, had she not had to kneel in the front pew, the fallen women’s pew. This pew acted as a pillory, separated from the other women’s pews, a simple bench without a backrest. Here knelt all the girls and women who had given birth to a child out of wedlock. But Burga was an abortionist, as everyone in the village knew.

  At this time, Elias decided not to say another word in public. The terrible event of the Feast of the Holy Trinity pursued him into his deepest dreams. He began to hate himself and his bass voice. When he had to speak, in school, at catechism class, he spoke tone­lessly; he wheezed and whispered as if suffering from constant hoarseness. This way of talking was such an effort that it gave him headaches, which only made him all the more taciturn.

  In his distress he went down to the Emmer one day, where he knew no ear could hear him. As the water had once polished his favorite rock, he now polished his voice. First, for hours, he cried out everything that needed to be cried out. He cried out until he was on the verge of exhaustion, because he thought this would remove the bass from his voice, leaving only a bright boy’s soprano. Elias was mistaken, for all that remained was hoarseness. Then he began to cry. He dangled his legs lifelessly in the water and gazed absently up toward the waterfall, gazed into the crashing white fountain, the endlessly falling waters of the mountain stream.

  One June evening, two days before his eleventh birthday, he was sitting disconsolately on his stone again, staring at the waterfall, when suddenly every­thing fell into place. He discovered that water always flows from top to bottom, that a stone falls down, not up, that raindrops fall too, that even hay blossoms eventually fall to earth. He had discovered the law of gravity. So he tried to place his voice within this order of things, to let it glide from the heights to the depths, from the depths to his head. After a number of hours he was able to speak in a falsetto voice.

  Then something happened. He was taking his falsetto to its topmost register when a young fox slipped out of the undergrowth, looked him impudently in the eye, raised its snout, gave a jump, and came to rest by his feet. Elias gave a start, the little fox did the same, and the red-brown tail disappeared into the hedge. Then it came back but stayed some distance away, as though offended. The damp, dark clefts by the water-fall came to fluttering life. Bats had awoken early and shot this way and that, losing their bearings. When one bat suddenly landed on Elias’s head, crashed onto the stone, and stuck there as a bloody gray stain, he grew frightened. At the same time the dogs of Eschberg started barking, and their polyphonic chorus was endless. Soon, two fire salamanders crawled onto the stone, imagining that the sun had risen.

  Elias had–we can find no other explanation– found the auditory frequencies of the animals; he had sung in the ultrasound of the bats, whistled in the frequencies of the foxes and dogs. Without knowing, he had spoken to the animals.

  During this period, the schoolmaster Oskar Alder observed a change in the man-child. He could not keep still at his desk, he kept impatiently rubbing the seat of his trousers up and down, and on
one occasion even broke his slate in two. When the teacher asked him a question because no one else knew the answer, the boy seemed completely absent. This astonished the teacher, for Elias had never been at a loss for an answer. Indeed, Oskar had often marveled at the child’s memory, and so had the long-nosed curate, Beuerlein. The child was so well versed in the catechism and knew the names and stories in both testaments so thoroughly that the curate had to focus all his attention to follow the flow of ideas. After catechism the curate was often seen studying the Bible or reading one passage or another. How Curate Beuerlein would have liked to put Elias in the young people’s congregation in Feldberg, but his father would not have it. You didn’t need schooling to milk cows and scatter dung, said Seff. And, sadly, he was right.

  The boy was unrecognizable. When he got more and more cheeky in class, Oskar Alder found himself obliged to reach for the hazel rod and give him ten blows on the fingers. All that Elias had meant to do was try out the effect of the new falsetto voice he had learned. No, Oskar Alder was by no means a strict teacher. The rod seldom whistled. True, he had once knocked a Lamparter child about so cruelly that it suffered lasting damage. The child had, without mal­ice, called him a bull’s pizzle; immediately, Oskar Alder had kicked the child to the ground and beaten it into a silent, bloody heap. Afterward the other pupils had picked the child’s scalp from the tiles and proudly kept the trophy in a clay bottle. Whenever the teacher looked at the Lamparter child thereafter, asking for an answer, the child began to stutter, and its stutter remained with it throughout its life. Nevertheless, Os­kar Alder was not a strict teacher, that is true. But Elias was not intimidated, and he showed the stubborn character of the Eschbergers, who, when they’re in deep water, swim farther and farther out.