Brother of Sleep: A Novel Page 5

  Elias went down to the water-polished stone every day and tirelessly polished the sound of his voice. He cried out what he had to cry out, sang in overtone scales, and developed sounds that were strange, even uncanny. He also discovered an extraordinary talent for imitating the voices of others, as the following episode will reveal.

  On Corpus Christi in 1815 a religious hysteria took hold of the village, principally in the home of blind Haintz Lamparter. It so happened that the blind man was putting out stakes for a new fence around his pasture near the forest’s edge, along the boundary between Seff’s property and his own. Now we must wonder how a blind man is at all in a position to erect a fence without outside help.

  The idea came to her one rainy Sunday, Haintz’s wife told Haintz, when she was absently looking out at her little farm and over to Seff Alder’s vast pastures. Surely fences could walk, it occurred to her.

  The next day Haintz was seen blindly fencing his way into his neighbor’s property. Haintz’s wife stayed nearby, but hidden. Voicing infinite precautions, she directed the blind man into the Alders pasture. Seff discovered the subterfuge and said nothing. He pa­tiently took down the wildly curving fence and, equally patiently, Haintz put it back the following morning. Thus Haintz’s wife planned to fleece her neighbor of his property.

  The dispute continued for a considerable time. One mild evening the blind man was busy stealing land from his neighbor again. Suddenly he heard a voice, weird and new. His mallet dropped from his hands, and his fat-lipped mouth hung open. He dropped to his knees, a tear ran from between from his crusted lids, and he trembled. Had the angels spoken to him? To him, a mere beggar before the Lord?

  “Why sinnest thou against thy neighbor? I, the prophet Elijah, command you to repent!”

  When Haintz heard these words, echoing with divine thunder, he leaped to his feet and whooped, dug his fingers into the earth, and smeared his face with soil. “My soul is black, O prophet! Let me live at least! My wife led me astray!” sobbed Haintz, so pitifully that our rascal himself took fright and sloped away.

  After the curate had shown her to the door with calming words, Haintz’s wife resolved to write a little letter to the gentlemen in Rome, informing them of the event. For she did not for a moment doubt the testi­mony of her tear-drenched husband, to whom the prophet Elijah had appeared with his horses and his fiery chariot. She made the blind man show her the spot where the miracle had happened, and when Haintz tapped his way deeper and deeper into his neighbor’s farm she led him with infinitely cautious hands to the most likely point of the revelation, which was in the middle of her potato field. Then she began erecting the fence herself, and the double echo of the mallet was heard until long past midnight.

  The curate eventually yielded to stubborn requests and came by to give his blessing to the little field. This caused an uproar in the village, for some people could not see why this particular revelation was held to be valid while the miracles, the visions, the events, the apparitions in their own fields, in their own forests, in their own rooms, were dismissed as mere fantasies. But Haintz’s wife had greater things in mind. From Eschberg’s wood-carver, known as Mostly, she commissioned fourteen Stations of the Cross and fourteen matching offertory boxes, which she planned to erect along the path to Elijah’s Field. In this way the faithful pilgrim would be able not only to walk along Christ’s via dolorosa from one station to the next but also to sample the bitter poverty of the visionary. Haintz’s wife was not stupid, and she knew as well as anyone that seeing is believing. So she built a little plank cabin in the field as a shelter from the wind and rain, where the blind seer would stand, hands folded, gazing heavenward with an expression of astonishment.

  It was not to be. The gentlemen in Rome did not reply to her little letter. Mostly billed her for the Sta­tions of the Cross and the offertory boxes, and so it happened that the beadle and his wife had to get rid of a cow and an ox. From that day, Haintz’s wife was not seen for some time, even at High Mass. She put it about that there was so much work to do at her farm– by the prophet Elijah–what with one cow calving after another.

  When, by dint of tireless practice, Elias had found a voice whose tonality touched everyone to the heart, Curate Beuerlein decided to appoint him reader of the Sunday epistle. But our hero was not able to fulfill this task for long, since his wonderfully warm speech so disturbed the women of Eschberg that they forgot all about their prayers. The moment the man-child began to read, the gospel side grew agitated. There was much slithering and sliding in the pews. Sunday frocks rustled and corsets creaked, hair was rearranged, prayer books were fingered nervously, shoes slid crashing from the knee rests, and when, on the Sunday before Advent, the Day of the Dead, an ancient Lamparter woman fell dying from her pew just as the gospel reading began, even Curate Beuerlein began to sense that Elias’s voice, far from reinforcing devotion, was doing it active harm. Some lads even hatched a malicious plot to smash in the mouth of the sweet-tongued talker who turned their women’s heads. Thankfully, he was able to escape them, because the Alder gossip thwarted the plans of the jealous lads. But we must put ourselves in the place of those men, whose wives were forever singing the praises of Elias’s angelic voice. That is what we must do.

  At the age of fourteen Elias left school, and we must note with a shock that he had already lived more than half his life.

  In vain will the reader wait with us for an external event to call the young man away from his narrow- minded village. A wandering scholar, a trained mu­sician might stray to Eschberg, meet Elias, hear him speaking and singing, and loudly exclaim, “See this man! He will make a name for himself.” How we should like to relate that our hero bade farewell to his father’s house, which was never really his father’s house! That he had his last conversation with the animals of the Emmer: Resi the doe, Wunibald the badger, Lips the little red fox, Sebald the polecat, and the one-legged bullfinch. That he journeyed to Feldberg, where his wonderful bass voice put the Musical Institute in a state of agitation. That he learned to write music and in organ playing soon surpassed not only the pupils but the masters themselves. How we should like to describe for the reader his first string quartet–al­lowing that he had written one–a hastily assembled choral fugue, a fragmentary sonata movement based on a magnificent idea! And, our hears aflame, we would run through the Alder-Werke-Verzeichnis, one opus num­ber after another taking us to new peaks of enthu­iasm.

  Eschberg never saw a trained musician. And when one did arrive, he was jealously personified.

  But let us return to the man-child whose voice, when he read the Sunday epistle, delighted some and infuriated others. One Sunday a terrible accident occurred in the little church, one which cannot be linked to Elias’s voice. Disrespectful though it may sound, it was this accident that opened the portal of music, the door of the organ loft, to Elias Alder.

  The organ blower, Warmund Lamparter, who was not only work-shy but also given to drinking until he could not even see the darkness, had turned up that Sunday morning with a fine purple face. Oskar Alder wanted to send him home on the spot but was afraid the rogue would not be able to climb down the steep wooden steps without hurting himself. Furthermore, the Lamparter stubbornly insisted on his God-given Sab­bath-day duty to blow the bellows. In order to bring the curate’s endless sermon to an end, he began to deliver the benediction from the balustrade. When a cheekily grinning face grabbed the drunk man’s sleeve, but he managed to twist away and began singing the Ite missa est in a braying voice, the accident happened: Warmund Lamparter fell from the balustrade and crashed to the stone floor, where his body lay shattered. He was not granted the blessing of an instant death, for only after nine terrible days and nights of shrieking did merciful God give his soul eternal peace. But in the flagstone where his heavy body had been dashed, Curate Beuer lein had the following inscription carved as a warning:

  DEMONS HURLED HIM HERE

  WINE WAS HIS BIER

  R.I.P.

&nb
sp; The little verse was the work of Charcoalburner Michel, a brother of the deceased. Warmund’s terrible death must have made a powerful impression in Mich­el’s life, for from that day onward he put his hands in his lap. He gently told his astonished wife that he had had a vision in his charcoal pit. A thrush had spoken to him, bidding him to cease the work of a common man and answer the vocation of a religious poet. After Michel’s wife had pulled herself together, she punched the vi­sionary in his transfigured face. But he was not to be dissuaded and became a religious poet. Thankfully, from time to time certain well-meaning neighbors gave him a dried bit of bread, a rancid piece of butter, or some stale milk, for his work as a poet would certainly have left the charcoalburner starving.

  On the day of Advent in 1815, Elias became organ blower of the five-stop organ in Eschberg. Organ blowing was only an excuse, of course, to be able to see and experience the mysterious instrument from close up. No one knew the organ as well as Elias did. As a child, when he had been condemned to sit in the backmost pew, he had already studied the five stops. He had discerned that certain pipes rang out from beechwood, while the rest were from the material that was nailed to his toe caps. He had noticed that when Sundays were hot and close the registers sounded fuller, or at least deeper, than they did on winter days, for example, when they sounded thin and brittle. That made him suspect that the organ must possess something like a soul, that the frost hurt it, as men’s fingers are bitten by frost. On nights in his room, when even the hairs in his nose were frozen, he would have liked to take the big tarpaulins that his father used on the hay and cover the organ case and the unprotected pipes. The fact that the organ was chronically out of tune was a particular source of anguish to him, although he could not have put it in those terms. Nonetheless, he went to his uncle and told him that the organ was ill, hoarse in some way, that the pipes were fighting among each other, that they could not find harmony together. One was too high and another too low. He could tell him which ones were especially unwell. There was the third one from the end in the right-hand case. In the summer, he knew, it had cracked. Oskar Alder laughed and shook his head. What was the boy talking about? He himself had recently taken the organ apart and tuned it. Who was a snotty-nosed boy to give him lessons?

  But he was still vaguely unsettled. So after the evening milking he climbed up to the organ, opened the right-hand case, and found a tear as long as a spear in the front of the third-last bourdon pipe. Then he went to the bellows, pulled it up, dashed to the manual, and fingered his way through all the possibilities of the mixture stops. He could hear no dissonance. But in fact that was due to his own obstinacy, for his ears could hear the dissonance perfectly well.

  His uncle soon regretted his decision to make Elias his organ blower, although he had no complaints about his bellows work. The wind in the bellows was always even, something that could not have been said in Warmund Lamparter’s day. How often, just as a piece was in full sentimental flight, had the little organ not collapsed, howling and whistling with its last reeds, simply because the Lamparter had gone to sleep at the bellows! How often had that tosspot deprived him of the most wonderful conclusions of his postludes, sim­ply by wandering off, saying that he had been playing long enough and to do so any longer would transgress the sacred duty of Sunday rest! At this point, in retro­spect, we must concede that Warmund Lamparter’s intuition was quite correct, for Oskar Alder’s postludes often lasted more than an hour, with the aim, not without a certain arrogance, or returning to the fundamental tonality.

  But Elias served him with infinite patience, put his sheet music on the music stand in the correct order, and kept the wind going during the postludes until the teacher, losing patience, finally concluded with an incomplete cadence. But the teacher was not happy. He could feel the boy watching him earnestly, squinting to follow his gnarled fingers on the manual. Once he even saw him painfully wrinkling his brow, just because he had introduced notes into E major that did not belong in E major. Oskar sensed that not a single mistake escaped this little devil, even if it was only a finger or a foot that slipped for a fraction of a second. But he felt genuine distress when, one Sunday, he was forced to realize that the lad was capable of singing all the voices of a chorale, from the soprano to the bass. And as if that wasn’t enough, the organ blower was correcting his playing! In a full voice he complemented the bumpy bass line, restored a fluffed line in the alto, embellished the melody with bold transitions and coloraturas, cried a desperate B flat when the schoolmaster, yet again, had played a botched B natural, experimented with magnif­icent tenor sustains, and even sometimes introduced entirely new voices into a piece that was already beyond Oskar’s comprehension. The organist’s glasses steamed up, and he grew frightened. The cheekily grinning faces that had disturbed devotion since the days of Curate Benzer suddenly listened, with sweet expressions, to the organ blower’s angelic singing. That was too much! The schoolmaster no longer took any pleasure in his organ playing and lost all his self-esteem. He was just a little minstrel for the Lord, a man of quite minor talents, and he would have liked to take his organ playing further, but sadly he had a big family to feed and had to run the school as well. That was what he said at the Huntsman’s Inn over a beer. And he continued to abase himself, until exalted by words of praise. What was he saying? Nulf Alder said forcefully. He was the decentest organ player on God’s earth, Sicket erat et principus in nunk and semper. In fact, Oskar Alder did think of himself as a minstrel blessed by grace divine, and when he heard Nulf blustering like that the pink of ambition returned to his cheeks.

  On the second Sunday of Advent, Elias asked his uncle to teach him how to play the organ. Oskar put him off until later but secretly resolved never to teach the boy a single note. He alone was the organ player of Eschberg. That was how it was, and it would stay that way.

  It did not stay that way. We think of Easter Day in 1820, and our heart leaps with joy. On that day Elias will play a more wonderful prelude than anyone in the world of Eschberg has ever heard. We have difficulty in calming our hearts enough to continue with our chronicle of this life. Great difficulty.

  The teacher thought it a good idea to lock the organ loft from now on. He kept hiding the key in different places. And because, in a terrible nightmare, he had seen a little man sitting in his place at the organ, he put the key in yet more unthinkable places. Who would have expected to find a key in the hollow head of the statue of St. Eusebius or immersed in the font, in the seam of the flag of the Sacred Heart, between the pages of a prayer book? Or in the communion cup, which gave the kindly but increasingly forgetful curate grave concerns about the mystery of transubstantia­tion? But nothing escaped Elias. Wherever the key fell or splashed or slipped or wriggled, he found it.

  In the night, four days before Christmas, Elias Alder crept to the organ loft. He found the key in the reliquary behind the high altar, in the middle of St. Wolfgang’s bones. Pearls of sweat were glittering on Elias’s brow, and his heart was thundering in his throat when the beadle walked in to lock the church. Haintz felt patiently around for the keyhole, made a perfunctory genuflection, uttered a slovenly “Lord have mercy,” and Elias was free, locked in the little church, alone with himself and the organ. There it was in front of him, the mysterious little object. Elias opened the manual, lit a candle, fixed it in place, and crossed himself. Then tears suddenly sprang to his eyes. He himself did not know where they came from or why. We shall not pretend that we know, either, and shall leave our musi­cian alone, waiting until he has calmed down and prepares to play the first notes of his life.

  Outside the Föhn is raging, howling in the tree­tops, dancing like a child over the pastures, breaking little twigs, a rotten branch, blowing the dry leaves around and whipping them into house doorways. Not­ing in this Advent would make one think of Christmas. The children are deprived of snow, the pastures have dried up, the Emmer is a mere trickle. And strangely, here and there the willows already bear catkins.

  And,
at the window, Peter’s shadow. He hears the whispering noise, sees the tops of the pines swaying. He looks at the big swelling on his little arm and bites back the terrible pain. Then he looks at the great halo around the moon. Peter devises a plan. His father has broken his little arm for stealing liquorice and sweets. Peter goes to the lantern and holds his open hands over the chimney. He isn’t cold at all. He devises a plan. He will kill his father. His father must perish. And Peter looks at the big swelling again, bites shreds from his lips, and imagines how his father will die.

  Elias raised the bellows, scurried to the manual, looked for the eight-foot principal, added a gedeckt, and ran his index finger carefully from one key to the next until he had found his favorite note, the deep F. The balls of his fingers nestled in the hollows in the ivory, for the manual was old and worn. In places the wood gleamed through the keys. He held his F until it had vanished in a thin sigh. Then he raised the bellows again and began to put melodies together from notes. Elias had begun to compose.

  His enthusiasm mounted, and his burning head did not cool down the whole night long. Soon his fingers had found their way to F major, which his ear had long anticipated. Elias sought the melody of a Christmas carol, hummed the phrases, looked for the appropriate keys, tried them, and never tired of lifting the bellows again. When he was able to play the melody he decided to improve it. He smoothed out the parts that seemed too bumpy. Those passages that struck him as poor he filled with richness, and when the candle had burned to a stump he had made up a melody that was as mysterious as the candlelight in the curate’s golden chalice. Soon the keys obeyed him, as if of their own accord.