Tidings. Ernst Wiechert
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not come home. He had disappeared as a sail behind the horizon or as a cloud in the evening sky, and no trace of him was ever found. He had left nothing but a strip of paper on his desk and on it he had written in his graceful, old-fashioned handwriting: “Lord, thou hast deceived me and I was deceived.” Long afterward Amadeus had found this saying in the twentieth chapter of the Prophet Jeremiah.
There had been a great stir in the district, and the countess felt this stir as an unparalleled disgrace. One did not leave the world anonymously, not even if one’s name was only Liljecrona. Tramps or saints might do so. “I do not believe that he is dead,” she said to her most intimate friend. “He was too awkward for that. I believe that he has gone to Africa, where they still sacrifice human beings – as his ancestors did. There was too much peasant and heathen blood in him.”
They searched for him for many months, but he was not found.
The brothers did not speak about this either. But they did not play their trios any longer in one of their own rooms, but in their father’s large, forsaken library. “The whole of the Prophet Jeremiah” lay open on the big oak table, and now and again one or the other of them stood before it and his eyes went over the strange words: “And I was deceived.”
At that time Grita was still alive, and she was the only one to whom Amadeus turned with a question: “Do you believe that he is dead?” he whispered.
She smiled and stroked his smooth hair: “How should he be dead, as he was so sad?” she replied.
And when he looked at her inquiringly, she took the full spindle from her spinning wheel and turned it in her twisted fingers. “He has spun to the end of the thread,” she said, “and now he has taken a new spindle. God has given him a new thread.”
This was a great consolation for Amadeus, and he thought it wrong to keep it to himself, and in the evening he told his brothers.
“I have always thought,” said Erasmus, the eldest, after a while, “that he sits by the shore of one of the holy rivers in India and smiles. Nobody could smile as he could. Just as if he were at one with God. He had gone through all this on earth, and he had seen that one must start all over again.”
With a slight shock Amadeus had noticed how his brother made the same sweeping movement with his hand that their father had made that time when he spoke of “the fat of the land.”
“More and more stars,” thought Amadeus looking up into the sky. “As if a thousand new ones had been added in all those years when I did not see a star. It will soon be midnight, and I must get up now.”
But he sat on, his hands laid together as if they were still fettered.
They had not had an easy time at school. Even their Christian names had been a source of amusement and probably also of ridicule. Erasmus, Aegidius, Amadeus. Evidently they had their origin in their father’s old folio volumes and in his veneration of a time when God still bent over the shoulder of the writer. “He still looked at it,” he used to say. “He did not look away, as He does today.”
But they had got over these years. When they entered the classroom one after the other, tall, slim, with a faraway look in their eyes, it always seemed to the others that emissaries of another nation had arrived, and as if they carried gold and precious stones in their pockets. They answered but they never asked, and the most self-confident teachers lost a little of the brilliance of their diction when these three pairs of eyes looked fixedly at them. “Liljecrona, you always seem to be pretending you have a king’s crown under your coat,” said one of them to Erasmus with suppressed irritation. “Do take it out so that we can see whether it is made of gold or brass.”
“We have no crowns under our coats,” replied Erasmus gently and politely. “And if we had, this would probably not be the right place to show them around.”
At the time when the old baron reached his end, the school had tried not to show any curiosity. But at the beginning of winter when there had been a fire in the poor quarters of the little town, and the school authorities thought of helping those who had suffered through it by arranging a benefit concert, the headmaster had called the three brothers to his office and had asked them in a kindly way whether on such an occasion and for such a good purpose they would be willing to play – for everybody knew that they played music together.
Yes, they would do so, Erasmus, the eldest, had replied without having consulted his brothers.
They had chosen a slow and very stately movement by Mozart. None of the audience would ever forget how they sat on the platform with the light of the candles on their music stands falling on their thin, serious faces. They had not looked at their music but straight past each other into a distance which was perhaps filled with quiet faces and forebodings. Those who listened would not forget how the musicians drew their bows across the strings, how they picked up from each other the simple, golden melodies, which fell apart and then wove together again, while they listened to the inner tones of their instruments without any alteration of their general bearing. They only seemed to give out what a distant voice whispered to them, while they were living with and in each other with the same simplicity as in their daily life, and with the same remoteness that separated them from people at other times. It was as if a spell emanating from them fell over the audience, over the unimaginative, nay, over the most ordinary hearts. All felt not only that the melody of the great, dead musician enclosed them in its web, but that they were overwhelmed by the purity and simplicity of these three youths, whose lives were perhaps as strange and peculiar as the life and the end of their father, but no curiosity and no mockery were allowed to touch it, because they sat there as in an altar picture; and it must have been a pious hand which had painted them.
When they had finished and let their bows fall and walked slowly out of the hall, no one stirred, but the headmaster, who was sitting in the last row, got up and bowed to them, when they went past him, and after a pause he turned to the music master who sat at his side and said: “They did not play for the people who have been burned out; they played for their father.”
That was the first time they had played in public since their childhood.
“More and more stars,” thought Amadeus clasping his hands round his knees. “And I fancied that all light had been extinguished in these years.”
Yes, and then Erasmus entered a cavalry regiment as a second lieutenant, and Aegidius had taken over the large estate, and he, Amadeus, in his turn had studied, and sitting at the large oak table, with “the whole of the Prophet Jeremiah” open in front of him, had written down verses and melodies and had slowly gone his father’s way of “doing nothing,” as the methodical people said.
Yet there was so much to be done, so immeasurably much. For years and decades; and just now under the silent stars it seemed to him as if centuries had passed. For if nothing else could be done, there was one thing that had to be done: to try to find the hidden meaning of a song that fishergirls sang on the sand dunes of Kurland:
Dance, my laddie, full of sorrow,
Dance, I want you to be gay.
Grita had known it even when she was spinning her shroud. But he did not know it, and neither the folio volumes nor the microscope could impart that to him. He who relies only on the intellect must walk with crutches, even though they be set with precious stones, and at the first breath of fate will break like matchsticks.
Of the old people there was now only Christoph, the coachman, left, and often Amadeus sat with him at dusk on the oat bin. On the large estates in the eastern provinces the coachman had always been of special importance, because the horses, too, had been of particular importance. The faithful coachmen were the imperturbable kings among all the retainers on the estate. They drove the babies to church to be christened, the young couples to be married, and the dead in their coffins to be buried, and in the twilight of their stables the young sons learned the wisdom of a long life of service.
Christoph had light blue eyes and a small beard under his clean-shaven chin. The beard, at that time, was already white. He was the only one who addressed Amadeus with the familiar “Du.” He said Herr Baron –