Tidings. Ernst Wiechert
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face, and if they were not the dead one might say that they are installed for a lifetime.
Amadeus, too, watches his brothers. When they get up, Aegidius looks as if all this still belonged to him, and as if he would stride over the moors as before he strode over the fields. But Erasmus looks like a tree a little bent over, at the edge of a desert or on the crest of a dune from where one sees nothing but sand. He is the only one in whose face still lingers a trace of childhood: of the helplessness, the uncertainty, and confusion of those early years.
When they have gone away, Amadeus thinks most about him. He is the only human being whom he would like to help, the only one for whose sake he can forget himself for a while.
When Jakob comes, he arrives in the early morning. He just looks in on him on his way to the forester’s house. He does not come to exchange anything from “the right hand into the left.” He knows that the baron will not barter, yes, that he is so poor that he has nothing to barter – neither material things nor things of the spirit. And it is on account of this poverty that Jakob comes, especially for the poverty of the baron’s spirit.
Jakob himself has overcome everything so completely that bargaining, exchanging, and adventure give him pleasure again. Even the early morning delights him, and when he stands at the edge of the moor and the lapwings call in the distance, he can even think of his lost home, of the little village with the thatched roofs where his parents were killed more than thirty years ago in a pogrom.
His people have come through so much in two thousand years that it has passed into the blood of the later generations. At one time the sickle-wheeled chariots drove over them, then there were the crucifixions and death in the flames. They wandered and sang. Then the caterpillar chains of the tanks went over them, they suffered torture and died in the fiery furnace. They wander again and sing again. They sing and trade and sometimes they dream of the Promised Land. Once upon a time they sat by the waters of Babylon when the Assyrians ruled over them, and now they sit in the camps of the victors waiting for their fate to be decided. They have learned great fearlessness and great patience. None on this earth has greater patience than they.
Some of them are tired and some are wicked, and some are as full of hatred as their torturers were. But not many, and Jakob does not belong to those. Nature has created him without hatred, and he has remained so pious that there is no room for hatred in his heart. He has become even more pious than he was in his homeland.
“The Holy One, blessed be he, wanders again,” he says to Amadeus and clasps his hands around his thin knees. “He is wandering and looks for a place where he can rest. He looks into the faces of men and goes past. The face of the Herr Baron is not yet a place where he can rest. The face of the Herr Baron is still occupied by the dead and by himself. You must put aside all that belongs to yourself, so that the Holy One, blessed be he, can find a place to rest.”
“And you yourself, Jakob?” asked Amadeus after a while.
“I have put everything aside, Herr Baron,” answers Jakob, gazing over the moors with his melancholy eyes. “I have put aside father and mother, and I have put aside a young wife and two children whom they burned in the fiery furnace. I have made room in my face, and when the Holy One, blessed be he, wants to visit me, he can visit me or not visit me – just as he likes.”
“And how did you do that, Jakob?”
“I have done nothing, Herr Baron. I thought of my young wife and the two children in the fiery furnace, and I thought that they sang. And how should I lament or cry when they sang? My distress was insignificant, Herr Baron, and the distress of Herr Baron is also insignificant. As long as others are in distress in this world, our own distress is not much.”
“I have seen them,” said Amadeus after a while, as if speaking to himself. “Their distress was not small, Jakob.”
“What is small and what is great, Herr Baron? It is not good for a man to look at himself with a magnifying glass, Herr Baron. We ought to look at ourselves with a soldier’s field glasses holding them the wrong way around, so that we may see ourselves as small as if we were far away behind the marshes. Then we will see ourselves as the Holy One, blessed be he, sees us: so small, so small, Herr Baron.” He picked up a dry blade of grass from the floor, cut it to pieces with his fingernails, put the smallest bit on the palm of his hand and blew it into the air like a speck of dust.
“Herr Baron ought not to think so much about himself,” said Jakob, getting up. “Herr Baron must not think that he has got to carry the dead on his shoulders. There is the Holy One, blessed be he, who carries the dead, and he has not asked either Herr Baron or me to help him.”
Jakob picks up his cap and bows. “Herr Baron will forgive me,” he says politely, “if I speak to him as if we were equals.”
Amadeus’ eyes follow him for a long time while he walks around the sheepfold into the wood toward the forester’s house, a little crooked, a little bent, the sack over his shoulder, as his people walked a thousand years ago from village to village, from country to country, despised, spat on, and hated, and yet they had not forgotten to “make room” in their faces for their God, who had been to them a stern and jealous God through all the generations.
But when the thin, bent figure has disappeared behind the pine trees sparkling with dew, the face of the baron closes up again. It has no room yet. He does not yet live for others – neither for God nor for men.
“Time passes,” people say, but Baron Erasmus does not know whether that is right. When he sits in the warm moss at noon, leaning his back against a rock and gazing through the smoke of his cigarette over the shimmering moors, he looks like somebody who really lives beneath the rocks and who has only come up for a little time to observe a strange world. He has the saddest eyes of the three brothers, though he rode for many years at the head of the Uhlans: first at the head of a squadron, then at the head of a regiment, and at last at the head of a brigade. He loved his men and his horses with the temperate but reliable and unswerving love of a nobleman.
He was not born to be a cavalryman. From childhood his heart had been full of dreams in which he was a great benefactor, like the old, rather weary magicians in fairytales who put their wealth into needy hands. Erasmus had always been a little uncertain, somewhat oppressed by fear, when he was away from his brothers. He was like a precious stone broken out of a ring. In order to be whole he needed someone to walk at his right and at his left. Not just anybody or someone grand or powerful – just his brothers. With them at his side there was nothing striking in him any longer, nothing special. Then he was nothing but one panel in a triptych, and if he did not want to be looked at or spoken to, the wings with the pictures of the brothers closed above him and he was hidden away.
He had only expected to grow old in a quiet, beautiful way. He would become intimate with the families in the old manor houses of the district, as a guest who appeared now and again, to read aloud to the women and to tell fairytales to the children. A rather peculiar but beloved guest, a last relic of times gone by, when respect and even worship were due to women. He would not have done anything outstanding in life. He would not have won a battle, nor written a book. He would have discovered neither the poles of the earth nor a new star. But if somebody had been in need under the old roofs of his homeland, he would have been remembered, his delicate hands which drew the bow without pretension over his violin, his kind eyes which, in spite of their melancholy, spread radiance over all that was dark. If it were a matter of honor or discord or pain or some insoluble problem, he would have been called on as a calm, great judge of the troubles of the heart. Such were Erasmus’ thoughts when he retired from the army, and now he sits in the warm moss, his back against a boulder, listening to the black woodpecker beyond the moors. He had been called upon – though in a different way from what he had imagined – and he had not heeded. He had not been called upon as a calm judge, but for help when anguish was at its deepest – as one who could save and heal – and he had not heeded. He had run over a snow-covered field in unworthy haste, he had run to a dark, sheltering wood and behind him the screams had died down – those of the men and those of the horses, the terrible screams of those who were forsaken and lost. “Herr Baron,” they had called – “Herr Baron” – and then it was only “Herr,”