Brother of Sleep: A Novel Page 8

  From his seventeenth year he wore his thin pale hair down to his shoulders. He also developed a predilec­tion for black frock coats and would ideally have worn only black, but this gave him a sanctimonious appearance. He developed a pretentious, short-stepped way of walking, which he practiced and polished for over a year. This curious walk was his only outward revolt against the doltish peasant world of which he had never wished to be a part. And, whether he suspected it or not, his walk faithfully reflected the world of his musical thought. For his nocturnal musical inventions on the organ were slen­der, light compositions, in which one brief, hasty idea caught, replaced, or inverted the next. It is in the nature of every genius to produce something with such a high degree of perfection that it has never been seen or heard before. And Elias never heard polyphonous music, for the preludes of Oskar Alder consisted only of fat-fingered, helpless chords.

  Elias’s nervous appearance and his good constitution might show that he would one day revolt against the world, or at least that he harbored a tenacious rebellion in his heart. Apart from the peculiarity of his walk and the horror of his death, however, the musician never really did revolt. He accepted his life, he devoted himself to the seasons and the year’s necessities, he toiled and developed the usual bent back, and got calluses on his hands, without expecting satisfaction, cheerful fatigue, or hope of a decent future. He slaved away on his father’s farm lest he attract further attention. He never recovered from the shock of his childhood.

  What would our advice to Elias have been? If a person were told from the start that he was possessed of genius but would never be able to bring it to perfection because the laws of a wasteful plan decreed otherwise, nothing about that life would change, even had it been lived far away, in the favorable surroundings of a music-loving world.

  God is the strongest, for He loves all injustice under the sun.

  In the years that followed the catastrophe, the profile of his musical vocation was transformed. Since the night when he rescued the girl from the flames, he loved Elsbeth with a power and a passion that bordered on the inhuman. He thought it was good to opt for love, to devote to it the spirit and strength of an entire human life. With the very last atom of his limited will he decided in favor of Elsbeth, and thus against his musical career. But because his genius was a gift from God, he sided against God.

  Now our reader, to whom we are linked by a sense of strange familiarity, should not think that Elias stopped playing music. The opposite is the case. He began to take his talent to an extreme, because he was playing for Elsbeth. Twice a week he had himself locked in the little church and learned to play the organ all by himself. Tenacious study left him with very agile, even dizzying fingerwork. And when his hands finally grew to their full size, each of them could cover–and this is no word of a lie–a full tenth, running prestissimo up and down the manual. He tended to play the pedal only with the tips of his feet, and the precision of this technique enabled him to achieve perfect legati. When the incessant coming and going between the console and the bellows began seriously to spoil his pleasure, he took Peter into his confidence and asked him to be the organ blower. Peter gladly accepted, for by that point he was already in love with Elias Alder. When he first wit­nessed his friend’s fabulous talent for improvisation, he became really frightened and forgot for a moment to pump the bellows. Just as once in his childhood, when he had stood under Elias’s window, he had felt the cold fascination of the strange boy, now once more he was astonished by this strange human being. His pulse thundered in his clenched fists when Elias smiled over to him and asked him to give his opinion of what he had heard. Peter was unable to speak. He wanted to cry out and hurl himself with longing at his friend’s body. He must, his thoughts raced feverishly, make Elias the love of his life, he must have Elias near him, now and for all time. How could he live without him?

  We must relate how our musician, exerting all his forces in a single night, dismantled the entire instrument. The constant changes in the weather, dryness and moisture, soot and grease, had left the organ in such a sorry state that some of the keys sagged, the feeders leaked, and the pipes emitted fearsome howls, as though the trumpets of Jericho were blowing. He did not want to hear this any longer, so he removed floors and walls, beams and boards, took out the keys, the stickers, the backfalls, and the trackers, took one pipe after another out of the wind chest, and, with a little brush, set about removing the accumulated dust of a century from each part of the organ. The loft looked like a workshop occupied by a blacksmith, a tanner, and a wood-carver all at the same time. He listed each intervention, each step, on detailed plans, and not the tiniest piece of leather escaped his attention. After all the parts had been cleaned and restored, he began, with infinite skill and an impeccable ear, to tune the registers. He took two cornet stops that he had made himself, conical and concave; he tinkered with the pipes and straightened the tongues with careful blows of the hammer, while Peter patiently held down the keys until the tremble in the notes in question grew ever weaker and finally disappeared. By Morning Mass an entirely rebuilt organ stood resplendent in the little church. The two friends stayed in the organ loft until the Angelus, because it was some time before Elias had carefully sealed the seams of the bellows and the joints of the hinges. He dipped the fine brush into flour, applied it to each joint, and where the flour blew away even slightly he stopped, took a piece of sheepskin, and glued it to the damaged spot with hot bone glue.

  In the quiet enchantment of midday the friends then meandered back to their farms. Elias, dusty and dirty, remembered the oath he had sworn by the Lord when he had spent his first night at the organ: He would not rest until it had regained its soul. Now he could rest, and when Philipp howled and hollered with joy, Elias whistled to the idiot to be quiet, and the idiot was quiet.

  Terrible was the awakening of Oskar Alder. In the prelude he was seized by fear, at the Kyrie his glasses steamed up, at the Gloria his sweat-drenched fingers slipped from the manual, and by the second Gloria–Curate Beuerlein having forgotten what he had just done–he lost his breath and slipped from his bench in a faint. Two insolently grinning faces immediately lifted the giant back on his stool; a zealous Alder fished around for handkerchiefs, spat on them, and swabbed the blue bump on the organist’s brow. From that point onward Elias was not allowed to pump the bellows, and from that point onward no excuses were found for Oskar’s playing, because the new organ loudly and clearly declaimed the slightest false note. Nulf Alder, who had ceased to come to mass since the catastrophe, delivered a devastating verdict in the Huntsman’s Inn: Oskar was a musical fraud. He had always, he said, known this, Sicket erat et principus in nunk and semper! No one comforted the poor man, and so humiliated was he that he sought consolation in schnapps, his only restorative.

  When Elias played, he played for Elsbeth, he invented music that captured the fragrance of her leaf-yellow hair, the tremble of her little mouth, the squeaky tones of her girlish laughter, the crackling of the folds of her blue damask apron. He pilfered one secret after another from the child, down to the most fleeting but recurring limp in her right leg, a momentary curve of the nostrils, an insignificant rush of gooseflesh, the first shadows of red on her brow. He listened to all the child’s words and the tune of her voice, and with his imitative talents he soon learned to speak in her dark manner. We must stress that this man began to love a seven-year-old child–at first, admittedly, without any erotic desire, although the yearnings of the flesh tormented him even then. For that reason he sought distraction in work; he slaved away until he was tired, in the belief that his lust would vanish in fatigue. But when the girl experienced her first purification, and when her iris-blue bodice began to swell, Elias felt the desperate courage to stroke her hair as if in passing. He did so, and he did not wash his hand until he could no longer smell the scent of the stable that her tresses had left on it.

  Elsbeth was a calm, balanced child of good character, which should come as some surprise if
we consider her father, a vulgar brute, a despicable individual full of resentment toward his family and toward the world at large. But Elsbeth took after her mother, and she was a woman who patiently put up with her husband’s outbursts of temper when he came home drunk on Sun­day, who did not complain when she was beaten and violated, who stood by her husband no matter what humiliation she had to endure, who silently forgave the sins for which he himself would never have asked forgiveness. She was weak, and when the children sought refuge with her, she pushed them away for fear of her raging husband. There was a great deal of her mother in Elsbeth. Just as Nulf’s wife imagined a world where life was more lovable, Elsbeth dreamed a dream of her own, in which a boy would come one day from faraway places and ride with her through the morning mist of the Rhine Valley, kiss her hands, lift the veil she wore over her head, and revive her frozen mouth with kisses. In short: the girl saw things with loving eyes. And although the boy was there–from quite different faraway places–she could not see him.

  This happened in the spring of 1820. Elsbeth was thirteen years old, a beautiful, elegant young woman with a strikingly dark complexion and hence, even in March, a suntanned face. She was small, and she remained so her whole life long. That and her pretty face, lent special charm by a little snub nose, meant that some of the boys did not take her seriously; she was seen as a delightful woman, with whom one might indeed be happy to dally but whom no one would ever have thought of as having spirit and intelligence. But even as a little girl Elsbeth did have a certain intel­ligence; she knew, as a sleepwalker knows, who would be dangerous, useful, or helpful company. From the start she was clever enough to avoid her father, and her brother as well. And yet something vulgar persisted in her speech. She had never heard eloquence until the day Elias Alder entered her life, and he had entered her life when he saved it.

  In the spring of 1820, Elias walked over almost every day and asked for Peter, his friend. In fact, he yearned for Elsbeth. The girl liked the tall man in his black frock coat. She felt respect for his age and en­joyed his mannered way of walking and his speech. For when he spoke, even that was music.

  In the months of that particular spring a curious event occurred in Eschberg. As so often happened, a trivial incident provoked such hysteria among the inhabitants that they could turn overnight into saints or murderers. The incident was the sermon of a traveling preacher. There were many traveling preachers in the countryside at that time, and their calling and their character were always dubious in the extreme. None­theless, they saw themselves as the new and true Church of Christ, were therefore bitterly hostile to the old and true Church of Christ, and were forbidden either to enter or to preach in the house of God.

  The traveling preacher Corvinius Feldau von Feld­berg–certainly a pseudonym–was a man of disheveled appearance, about thirty years of age, with a sleepy-looking face and unkempt red hair. He was dressed in nothing but a sheepskin–and two women claimed to have seen his member dangling beneath it. This Corvinius came to the village on Palm Sunday and delivered a sermon in front of the little church, the consequences of which were catastrophic for the peasants of Eschberg, as we shall shortly see.

  “Rejoice in the beloved of thy youth,” began the redhead with a yawn, “for she is like a roe or a young hart. Let her love assuage you always, and savor all the ways of her love.” And the preacher began to interpret the language of Solomon so graphically that everyone was soon breathless. He was, he said, as he awakened a little from his somnolence, an apostle of love. Nothing was more important in this contemptible world than love. No other law was valid. Everyone, young and old, should devote themselves to the intoxication of love. The end was nigh; a mighty host of Moors stood waiting just beyond the Arlberg. Anyone with a woman should take her and never let go of her. Children should Copulate, and the old likewise. Marriage, swore the apostle of love, was dissolved forever. The world was freed from its bonds. If a woman desired two men, she should take three. If a man coveted another’s wife, his ox, or his cow, so be it.

  Speaking in these terms, the carrottop’s voice rose to an orgiastic screech, and his body contorted in the most obscene fashion as he sought to depict, with a flood of indecent words, the copulation of men and animals. Silence fell, and heavy outpourings of breath came from dilated nostrils. The women’s breasts heaved, and there were stirrings in many a pair of trousers. The people had never experienced anything like this before, being stir­red to lust by a mere sermon!

  Reaching the peak of his proclamations, he expressed himself in such tattered words that many of the women burst out laughing and screeching. For, he croaked, he alone could enter paradise who had devoted himself to love for life. Dark veins stood out on his brow, and the people feared he might collapse with exhaustion. “Not for a moment may you rest!” he cried from his inflamed throat. “Anyone who lets a single hour go past without love will have to spend that time in purgatory. You may sleep no more, for when sleeping you do not love. Look at me! For ten days and nights I have not slept!” And with the words “He who sleeps does not love!” traveling preacher Corvinius Feldau von Feldberg finally collapsed in a faint.

  The charlatan’s sermon had an undesirable effect on certain minds. The baptismal register for 1820 shows twelve christenings for the month of December, and the death register speaks of “three women deceased w/out the blessing of the Church.”

  It is curious that the mere appearance of this rough character, preaching fornication, should have captured the heart and mind of our musician. Although he was alert to the vulgar intentions that others had also perceived, Elias still understood the unbelievable anar­chism of the words with which the redhead had collapsed. In fact, that night and the night that followed, Elias Alder did not rest but devoted all his thought and yearning to young Elsbeth. He went into the mountains, and beneath the full Easter moon he thanked God for his life, now knowing it had found its ultimate purpose. Stretched out on the black grass of the still meager mountain pastures, he spread his arms and legs, wept, and sang, ‘He who loves does not sleep! He who loves does not sleep!’ He clutched the grass with his fingers as if to hold on tight to this big, round, beautiful world. No, he would not let go of it, for on this big, round, beautiful world lived Elsbeth.

  He would have liked to spend another night in the mountain, had Philipp not been having such desperate dreams. The idiot was inconsolable and howled endlessly, like a dog.

  At about midday on Holy Thursday they set off for their first walk together. Together, that is: Elsbeth, Elias, and his little idiot brother; and, hiding: Peter, who had been following them since the first day. With his eyes to start with. He saw them taking the path to the Emmer, and when they disappeared he could not bear it. Perhaps Elias heard the curious rustling in the undergrowth. Perhaps he once saw Peter’s shadow in the clearing or heard his breathing close by. But Elias knew Peter was following them from a short distance. And he said nothing.

  He had washed, stolen a starched shirt from his father, dabbed on two drops of his mother’s eau de rose, which had faded long ago, brushed his shoes, and carved a double E on his walking stick in baroque letters. It was thus that he received her; he would have liked to have given her his arm, so she could put her own little arm into it, when the path grew steep and bumpy.

  Seff, who was busy fencing off a spring pasture in the neighboring hamlet, saw the three figures of different sizes. When he saw the black frock coat a glint of melancholy came to his eyes. His mallet dropped to the ground and he moved his lips, pursing them briefly as though about to call to his son. He would have liked to have called, Son! Will you never forget it? Then he buried his fingers in his thin earth-brown beard, and again he heard the cries of the burning Roman Lampar­ter, and again he had terrible pains in his head. Since the murder Seff had worn a full beard, as if to hide his face behind it.

  Elsbeth’s eyes flashed with curiosity. “Is it a long way to this stone?” she asked merrily, undoing her blue damask apron.

&nb
sp; “Sometimes I think it’s far, and then again so near!” said Elias. He held his head high and tried to affect the mannered gait of a dancer.

  This was a joy to Philipp, who was walking behind them and tried to imitate his brother, which made Elsbeth laugh with all her heart.

  “Little Philipp!” she joked. “You’ll be a good dancer. When the violins and the tambourines come for the fair, we’ll dance, won’t we?” Elsbeth took the child, held him to her breast, and began to sing, “This is the month of maying.”

  At that moment Elias wished he were Philipp, to be carried and rocked like that by this young woman. “Wait a second!” he cried suddenly. “A tune’s coming to me!”

  Elsbeth fell silent and looked at him.

  “Pay attention now! You go on singing the tune and I’ll sing above and below it. But be strict with yourself and don’t make me lose the notes!”

  Elsbeth did not understand what he meant and did not want to sing because he had been listening to her. But so insistent were his pleas that she finally agreed and sang “Now is the month of maying” again.

  Then something incredible and uncanny came to the girl’s ears. While she was singing, Elias suddenly began to sing with her voice. The girl was so frightened that Philipp nearly slipped from her arms. Elias picked them both up with his strong arms and tried, blushing, to smile into her eyes. “Many people are afraid when they hear the sound of their own voice,” he said darkly. “You must know that I’m familiar with all the voices in our village. And I’ve discovered,” he whispered, “that you can tell a person’s character just from the sound of their voice.”