Tidings. Ernst Wiechert
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scale.”
“The ancient Greeks would probably have called her ‘the cow-eyed,’ ” says Erasmus smiling. “But it was a goddess they called by that name.”
“I shall come and look after you as often as I can manage,” Aegidius continues. “She has a trap, and I am sure I shall get permission to use it. She likes you very much.”
“You must not think of us, brother,” says Amadeus. “It is a good thing one of us has got something to do, and there was no doubt that you would be the first. Probably you will be the only one.” He said it without bitterness, but Erasmus bends forward and with particular care he presses out his cigarette end. “I am sure we shall manage all right, brother,” he says, “provided that the forester’s daughter does not kill me.”
“I don’t think that she has a special design on your life,” replied Aegidius smiling. “For her you are only an apparition from a ‘decadent age,’ as we all are. But probably you most, because you are kindest to her.”
“Kindness is the gold of the dispossessed,” said Erasmus gaily. However, he felt very lonely when Aegidius had left. He now had both the rooms on the top floor; he had opened the door between them and walked for hours from one room to the other, avoiding the threshold, which creaked at every step. Or he stood for a long time at one of the small windows, his forehead pressed against the pane, gazing over the low forest into the distance, which always remained void for his eyes.
Sometimes at twilight he saw strangers under the bushes at the edge of the wood, young men with open shirt collars, and he saw the forester’s daughter talking with them while she glanced back at the house over her shoulder. But he did not pay any attention to it.
Not until one morning three American soldiers came into the house and he was summoned into the kitchen and questioned as to whether he had noticed any young men coming frequently to the house, did he remember it and look at the girl, who was leaning coldly and proudly against the wall as if she were St. Joan about to be burned at the stake.
“I have not been watching,” he said politely, “and I am out of the house almost all day long.”
The sergeant looked at him thoughtfully, then asked: “Are you a fugitive?”
“Yes, one may call it so,” replied the baron.
“And you were a general?”
“That’s right,” said the baron smiling. “But I took my discharge twelve years ago.”
The sergeant turned over the leaves of his notebook and shrugged his shoulders. “You ought to be a bit careful,” he said to the girl then, and got up. “After all, we are the victors.”
“Child-murderers are no victors,” replied the girl, looking past him as if a rubbish bin were standing there in his stead.
He frowned, but the two others laughed, and the youngest raised his hand and in fun stroked the girl’s cheek. The girl hit him so hard that he took a step back and glanced flabbergasted at his hand.
“Look here,” he said angrily.
Then they went.
“You ought to be careful,” said Erasmus before he turned to leave the kitchen. “Even if I don’t pay attention, I see many a thing. A girl should not try to run her head against the wall. If it is not bad for the wall, it may be bad for the girl.”
She cast a searching glance at him and then went out of the kitchen.
The soldiers report their visit, and though most of the listeners laugh, the officer of the military police takes it more seriously. One morning when Amadeus locks the door of the shepherd’s hut to walk over the moors, he sees the girl and three soldiers step out of the wood in front of the forester’s house. The girl goes between them through the dew-covered grass and they walk slowly past Amadeus.
The soldiers are merry and carefree, and the girl walks between them as if they were cannibals. She sees Amadeus standing there looking in silence at the four as they pass, but she only returns his gaze with icy contempt.
In the evening Kelley tells Amadeus in his smiling way that it had been a remarkable hearing. If they had caught a wildcat it might have been about the same. It seemed to him throughout that the girl was about to jump over the table and strangle the first lieutenant. “What a pity,” he said in conclusion. “So nice to look at and so thoroughly stupid.”
“She has got a month’s prison for contempt of the dignity of the American Army. Personally I cannot imagine what a girl of seventeen has to do with the dignity of an army of millions.”
After four weeks she comes back, and it is said that the warden of the prison, a pious man, had promised a big wax candle for the church of the little town – if after these four weeks he were still in office and alive.
At this time, when Aegidius is already busy with the wheat harvest, a loaded van drawn by four quite exhausted horses drives with many pauses for rest along the narrow winding road which leads up to a mountain that people call the Wasserkuppe. The van is loaded with old, much-broken furniture. Women in dark shawls which almost cover their foreheads sit in the straw of the van. They sit there quiet and bowed, and the eyes of the people of the district follow them for a long time, as if they were the ancient Fates of the legend, wandering now since the roots of the world ash tree had been sawn through.
There are children walking in the dust beside the creaking, rattling wheels, each holding a stick, and the people in the fields have to look hard to see whether these are really children and not dwarfs from the Kyffhauser or the Riesengebirge. They seem so old and subdued.
In the front of the van on a narrow board covered with a sack sits a tall old man with clean-shaven chin and a white beard the cut of which is unknown here, holding the reins of the four horses in his left hand. He sits upright and straight, as if he were carved out of wood, and his light-blue eyes are the only ones that gaze into the distance, instead of into the dust of the road – as the eyes of all the others do.
4
WAS IT CHANCE OR fate that Baron Erasmus had been sitting for more than a hundred days by the rock gazing in vain down upon the valley road – or had his melancholy eyes prepared the highway for the van with the four horses? One can ask for a highway, even when it is difficult to understand the language of the people who live there, and no magic is needed to find it in the end.
For, one morning in August, Amadeus awoke at the sound of the fire crackling on the hearth. He left the heavy door of his room open at night now, because the small window did not let in enough air, and he entrusted his light sleep only to the great solitude of the moorland.
He sat up as quickly as when he had one of his bad dreams and stared at the figure that knelt before the hearth and blew into the feeble glow. The feet of the figure were wrapped in rags such as the woodcutters in his homeland wore, and of the head Amadeus could only see the white hair that fell long and smooth over the coat collar. The coat was blue and reached to the knees.
“Christoph,” he said in a low voice, and he felt the hands on which he leaned tremble.
“Just a minute, Herr Baron,” replied the soft voice. “Let me blow the fire up. You must try to get some small pine twigs, so that you will not have so much bother in the morning, Herr Baron.”
When the fire burned and filled the room with its crackling, Christoph rose, supporting himself with one hand on the hearth. Then he carefully wiped his hands with a gray cloth, came to the bed, and sat down gently on the side of it.
“So you are here, Herr Baron,” he said, gazing with his bright eyes full of affection into the face of the baron, “and we did not know whether you were still alive. Only down at the castle they told us.”
He spoke as if he had piled up the wood in the hearth the previous night as well as on a hundred previous nights. But he took pains to control the quivering of his chin, which trembled a little as with children who are nearly