Tidings. Ernst Wiechert
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need not hear the breathing of any human being. The peat fire on the small hearth was glowing as it did last night, and as it always would from now on. It was his fire; he need not share it anymore.
He leaned his head against the warm post and clasped his hands around his knees. The evening star was now high above the horizon, and the constellations of early spring gradually appeared over the moorland. An owl hooted in the darkness and a dog barked in the distance.
He was alone; the time had now come when he would learn how to be alone. Horror had taught him how lonely he was. All those who had protected him so far had fallen to dust; gone was all comfort, all security. Man had shown what he was capable of doing when he abandoned himself to the depths of his depravity. Man had become a murderer without passion, without even being at all worried about it. A careless, smiling murderer – and the victims stood on the other side. And in between there was nothing. They might talk and write for years now about guilt and atonement, about freedom and the rights of man. But he who got power again would always do the same, even more carelessly and perhaps more thoroughly. But he who had no power was alone. Gone was the period of childhood, when one stretched out a hand to grasp another hand, that of a mother or that of the law or that of God. You could still stretch it out, but you stretch it out only into empty space. All the victims of these years had stretched out their hands to the last second while they screamed or prayed under the gallows, under the ax, under torture. Nobody had grasped those outstretched hands. Even in death they remained outstretched, open, twisted, alone.
He, Amadeus, would now remain here for a while before this hearth which warmed him, under this starlit sky which shone down upon him as it shone down on the grass and the stones. He had two brothers, and formerly they had been as one, as they had been one when they set their bows to their instruments. But at present they were no longer one. Now each of them was alone, as their father had been alone. So much alone that he had suffered himself to be “deceived.” At that time the Lord had “deceived” him, but who should deceive nowadays?
Fate had given him another breathing space, and he accepted it and breathed deeply.
A dog barked in the distance, but it was not one of “their” bloodhounds. He raised his hands and dropped them again. They were no longer fettered. The owl hooted, but it was not a human being that screamed in agony. That’s what he possessed and owned now. He had got it as a present without deserving it. It might very well not have been presented to him; he could just as well have been trodden to pieces like the others. The foot of the hangman had passed him by at a hair’s breadth. There was no law about it, no consolation, no promise.
There was no future in this evening, except the promise of other evenings to come. He knew neither how much time was granted to him nor what was being prepared for him. He had escaped and he did not know where the next trap was laid for him. He was as lonely as a wolf that slinks through the thicket. And like a wolf he strained his ears to hear whether man was about, the creature with power, the creature with the smile. And he did not know which was the more terrible.
The woman in whose house he sought refuge for a night had smiled. In the second year he had escaped when he was on a work detail outside the camp. It had taken him six months to make his preparations, and he had succeeded, because he had come to a river and had found a boat. The water left no tracks.
But he wore the striped garment and he was nearly starving. At twighlight on the fourth evening, he crept through a wood to a small farm, The farmer’s wife was alone with an old maidservant and a prisoner of war. She was young and after the first shock she smiled as a mother smiles over a child gone astray. She gave him food and a small room and stroked his hair before she left him.
In the night she called the police. They bound him while he was asleep and took him back. The woman stood at the door and watched. She did not smile when he stopped in front of her and gazed at her. She only raised her hands, as if she thought he was going to strike her.
But he would not have struck her even if his hands had been free. He only wanted to gaze at her for all the future. Not that he wanted to recognize her, only to find out what two human eyes looked like. “Thank you for meat and drink,” he said. “I wonder if you know how I shall have to pay for it.” Nothing but that. But she had put her hands over her eyes and had turned away.
They had beaten him half dead after that, and he had been transferred to a penal company for a year. For a year he had stood at the gate of hell. Pious people believed that hell was in a world beyond.
He did not attempt to escape again. He could have done so once or twice but he was afraid. Not of the flight nor of the possibility of being caught, but of the eyes of the farmer’s young wife and of the lips that had smiled.
And this fear had remained. The last and most terrible fear of all: the fear of man.
He got up and put dry wood on the glowing embers. He was shivering, and he laid his revolver near his seat by the fire.
Then he sat quietly smoking, until he heard the voices. At first he only heard one, suppressed and imploring. The other was scarcely audible, it was so soft.
The door was still wide open, and he recognized them at once as they stood at the doorstep: the forester’s wife with a careworn face and the hostile eyes of the child. She was no longer a child, she was a young girl with dark, loose hair. It would have been nice to look at her, if one could forget the eyes of the farmer’s wife.
He made an inviting gesture, and the woman came to the fire. The young girl stood in the doorway and looked angrily at her mother.
Amadeus did not glance at the woman or at the girl. He had clasped his hands around his knees again and gazed into the fire.
“Herr Baron,” said the woman, and tears choked her voice from the first words.
Amadeus nodded to show her that he heard what she said.
“I wanted to tell you, Herr Baron, how glad I am,” said the sobbing voice.
“I have been told that already,” replied Amadeus.
“He is in a camp now,” the voice went on, “and I was there once. They stand behind the wire netting. The guards are Poles, and they shoot at the women when they go too near the fence.”
“Where I was,” said Amadeus, “nobody came to the wire netting.”
“I do not complain, Herr Baron,” sobbed the woman. “But you must know that he did not do it with a light heart. I implored him at the time not to do it. God is my witness. And he said: ‘My heart is heavy, but I have got to do it. I have sworn an oath, and I must do it.’ And then he did it.”
“Many have done it,” said Amadeus. “There seemed to be no harm in it.”
“But when he is taken to court,” said the woman, folding her hands over her breast, “will you give evidence, Herr Baron?”
For the first time Amadeus turned his face away from the fire and looked at the woman. “I too shall say that I have sworn an oath, Frau Buschan,” he replied. “Exactly as he has.”
“And you will ruin him,” she whispered, staring over the fire into the darkness.
Amadeus glanced at the girl on the threshold, and then he looked again at the woman’s face. “I will neither help nor ruin,” he said slowly. “I shall only look at the scales hanging in the balance. Just as he looked on, just as you and your daughter looked on.”
“But you are a Christian, Herr Baron,” she cried despairingly.
“I am not a Christian, but a wolf,” said Amadeus in a low voice. “I have been down in the pit, and no one should speak to me.”
The woman drew the shawl around her shoulders and turned to leave. But she came back once more and bending over him she whispered, “Is it not enough that I have a daughter?”
He gazed at her for a long time. “Perhaps it is enough,” he replied in the same tone.
Then he got up and went with her to the door. The girl was still leaning against