Tidings. Ernst Wiechert
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as the dead will walk – the dead who no longer wear any shoes. He had not pulled them off, but others would have seen to that. Shoes had become valuable.
He sighed and began climbing again. His shoulders ached with the straps of the haversack which they had filled with food for him. But he knew that he was carrying more than bread and provisions. Everybody had to carry an immense burden once his hair turned gray. Time, memory, the child he once had been. The living and the dead. They had learned how heavy the dead were to carry. Nothing had been added to their substance, and yet they were as heavy as if they were made of stone.
“Settle yourself down up there, I’ll carry you all right, I’m not afraid,” he said gently. He had often talked to himself in these last years, because he had not spoken to anybody else. He did not want to become dumb.
He stopped and bowed his shoulders, as if he wished to make it easier for the other. But he did not feel anything. Nor had he felt anything when he had been carrying stones. He had dismissed his heart. And you can only feel the dead on your heart, not on your shoulders.
He climbed now without stopping until he stood before the archway of stone which opened into the yard. The great building with the steep roof glittered in front of him up into the starlit vault, and noise, singing and the music of loudspeakers came from all the windows. But he paid no heed to it. He looked up at the coat of arms above the gate and tried to distinguish in the light of the moon the blue field with the golden lilies carved into the stone. It was no longer there. Probably they had thrown stones at it or shot at it with pistols. Only the gray crumbling stone was left. He sighed, but it was right that it should be so. Evidently this was what they called the “new time.” People always called it a new time when they washed the blood off their hands.
Only then did he notice the two figures near the archway who stood in the shadow of the lilac bushes: the man with a white, not very clean tunic and the girl who tried to hide a heavy bag behind her back.
“Well, old friend, what do you want here?” asked the man, taking a cigarette from his pocket and lighting it. “The lost time, young friend,” was the reply.
The man in the white tunic gazed at him attentively with a suspicious expression. He was still young and his insignificant features showed only the shifty self-assurance of those who stand under the protection of the victors – no matter where they had stood previously.
“You can go on looking for that,” he said mockingly after a while. “But beggars are not allowed here.”
“Where there is stealing there is not any begging,” replied the man in the coat. “Don’t bother about your bag,” he said to the girl, “I shall not take anything away from you.”
The girl cast a contemptuous look at the striped coat which was still hanging round the man’s shoulders. “That’s all done away with, that about taking away,” she said.
“Only the roles have changed,” replied the man. “But I would like to know who lives here now?” he added, nodding toward the lighted windows.
“And why do you want to know that?” asked the young man.
“Because it belongs to me, so to say, my young friend.”
The young friend took the cigarette out of his mouth and stared at him in surprise. “Two others have already been here pretending that,” he said at last.
“Yes, and I am the third,” replied the man with the coat. “But it is grand that the other two were here. One does not know nowadays who is still alive.”
“I am sorry, Herr Baron,” said the young man not very politely, “but now the Amis live here.”
“Who are the Amis?”
“The Americans; and a whole staff is quartered here. I help in the kitchen.”
“That’s a good job,” replied the man in a friendly tone, glancing for a moment at the girl’s bag. “I don’t want anything. I have enough. And you probably have gone hungry for a long time.”
“God knows, we have,” said the girl rudely.
“I just wanted to see it,” the man went on, looking up again at the broken coat of arms. “I have often been here.”
“And then?”
“Then I did not come here anymore. I was prevented, my young friend. But the two others you spoke of, do you know where they are now?”
The young man took the cigarette out of the corner of his mouth and pointed with it over the archway toward the wooded hills on which the moon was shining. “In the shepherd’s hut, Herr Baron,” he said, and one could not tell whether he was glad or sorry about it. “Do you know the hut, Herr Baron?”
“I know it well,” replied the man, “it is a beautiful place up there. I liked to go there in times gone by. Thank you for the information.” And he turned to go.
The kitchen hand looked uncertainly at the tall, bent figure which even under the striped coat had the air of owning all this: the coat of arms over the archway, the illuminated castle and the distant sheepfold. He took a cigarette from his pocket, made a movement to offer it to the baron, but on second thoughts he took out the open packet with the other hand and offered it to him. “Help yourself, Herr Baron,” he said.
“Thank you, my friend,” said the baron pleasantly. “They gave me plenty.”
The young servant pushed the packet back into his pocket and shrugged his narrow shoulders with a commiserating gesture. “Perhaps it is just as well,” he said with an overly familiar smile, “if nowadays barons have to live for a bit in a shepherd’s hut.”
The baron did not return the smile, but he raised his hand in a friendly farewell greeting. “Better, probably,” he answered quietly, “than if sheep had to live in castles. As time went on, it would not suit them.”
At this the young pair looked a little embarrassed, but Baron Amadeus resumed his climb, passing by the courtyard of the castle up the narrow path which led to the heath, the marshes and the peat bogs to where the sheepfold stood. He remembered it all very well, he could have found the path even in the dark. He had not been pleased with these two young people, but he had only gone a few steps when they were forgotten. They were no different from those he had met on his way. No victory and no defeat ever pierced to the roots. Nothing but death reached the roots; and then only if it were admitted to man’s vital soul, not simply to the vital point of the body.
But it was splendid that the shepherd’s hut was still there – and splendid that his brothers were there – not exactly that they were in the sheepfold – but that they were alive, that they had not been killed in front of a red bespattered wall or under the gallows.
Baron Amadeus had loved but little in his life: music, a few books, his home country and his two brothers. Everything else had sunk as a stone sinks in the sea; but his brothers, even if they had been killed, would only have sunk into the depths of his heart. People had often laughed at them in childhood, and ridicule binds together more closely than pity. Simple people had laughed at them because they were so much alike. Their hair was brown and soft like the fur of a mole, their noses were a little too long and set a little askew in their narrow faces. Others had been amused at the queer seriousness with which they met fun as well as malice, an expression so unusual in immature faces, the composure of which resembled that on the faces of young martyrs or youthful saints.
A wit on a neighboring estate had nicknamed them the “triptych,” and that is how they appeared to the unthinking, as if one had only to open the two wings of an altarpiece – and there they would be, standing side by side, three youthful figures from some place beyond the well-known earth, and one of them might well be holding a medieval lute in his long, thin hands, the second a violin, and the third some instrument with which the songs of the Old Testament might have been accompanied. So they seemed to look at the spectator from that sphere with their strange, pure faces without a smile, but with the joyfulness that belongs to those who have touched the hem of God’s garment.