Tidings. Ernst Wiechert
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as an animal when the branches part before it. But at that moment the heavy door of the hut was pushed aside, and Erasmus stood before a dimly illuminated background. He stood there like an apparition which had emerged from mystery into reality, and without making a movement he gazed at the figure in the moonlight.
Then Amadeus raised his hand – in the way they had hailed each other from a distance when they were children – and Erasmus recognized the gesture.
“Brother,” he whispered, stretching out his arms.
And then Amadeus stood on the threshold.
It was the small room which the shepherd had used as a living room. With a wooden partition they had divided it off from the large, dark barn and had hung it with mats of rushes. The same clay hearth in whose glowing embers the shepherd used to roast mushrooms stood in the corner and a small peat fire was still burning under the ashes.
But the room was no longer empty and bare as it had been formerly. It was full of old furniture, from centuries gone by, and Amadeus recognized that it had come from the castle. His eyes dwelt on everything, and on the two faces turned to him in silence, and at last they rested on the three music stands on one of which a candle was burning, its calm light shining on the three instruments. Sheets of music stood open on the stands.
“You have . . .” said Amadeus in a low voice.
“Yes, brother,” replied Aegidius, “this is what we have saved. This is nearly all.”
Then he got up from his seat at the hearth and came slowly toward Amadeus. He did not touch him. He only stroked along the folds of the coat which hung over Amadeus’ shoulders. It was the striped coat of which the children had been afraid and from which the eyes of the adults had looked away. Time and again he raised his hand and stroked down the rough, dirty material. It was as if he was stroking something that was alive and needed protection – a sick animal, perhaps, or a child that had been hit.
And under this movement Amadeus slowly closed his eyes. He had fixed them on his brother’s face which was quite close to him, and he had gazed into his brother’s eyes, which had followed the movement of his hand. He was not looking at his gray hair, nor at the deep lines around his thin-lipped mouth. He only gazed into his eyes, and perhaps he felt without realizing it that he had not seen such eyes for many years. Eyes which in some incomprehensible way had been allowed to retain in this world “the patience and faith of the saints.”
Then when Amadeus raised his hand, they took the coat and the haversack gently from his shoulders and led him to the old easy chair by the fire. Erasmus put some wood on the glowing embers, and then they sat with their hands clasped between their knees and gazed into the flames. Their faces between light and shadow were again as the faces on the triptych – faces of young martyrs or saints, strange, cleansed faces without a smile, but one could read in them that they had been in “a fiery furnace.”
They did not speak, and only after a long time, when they were smoking the cigarettes which Amadeus had taken out of his pocket, Erasmus bent down toward the fire and put a dark, twisted root in the dying flames and in a low voice recited the verses of their childhood: “By the Memel’s farther shore stand three maples fresh and green . . .”
He stopped short, because he felt his brothers’ eyes on him, and when he raised his head he saw that in their shy glances was a hardly perceptible reproach.
Then he thrust the dark, twisted root better into the glowing embers and clasped his hands again between his knees, and thus the three remained until a thin white ash began to form over the dying glow.
2
AMADEUS WOULD NOT lie down on one of the beds which the brothers had arranged for themselves, and as he refused with a violence they failed to understand and persisted in sleeping on the floor in front of the fire, they put some cushions on the clay floor and covered them with two blankets.
When they began to undress, Amadeus took a pair of brown pajamas which the American soldiers had given him out of his haversack, opened the heavy door and left the room. His two brothers exchanged a quick, furtive glance, but they did not say anything. The light of the candle was so feeble that neither of them could read the sorrow in the other’s face . . . nor was it necessary.
When Amadeus came back, he carried the coat, which was rather like a uniform, on his arm and the heavy shoes in his hand. He looked absent-minded, and his face was shut and withdrawn, as he folded the garment carefully on a chair and put his shoes under it. He went back again and placed them side by side, so that their toes were in line with the edge of the chair. But he did it as if in a dream, and he did not hear the faint sigh with which Erasmus closed his eyes.
When Amadeus lay in front of the hearth, his head propped on his hand and his face turned to the expiring glow, Erasmus put out the candle.
“Good night,” said Amadeus in a low voice.
It was now dark and quiet, only a feeble glimmer showed in the gloom from the last sods of peat; a mouse stirred gently in the reed roof. Erasmus and Aegidius had closed their eyes and breathed deep, feigning sleep. But they were not asleep, and from time to time they opened their eyes and looked furtively at the hearth. The attitude of the resting man there did not change, only now and again he stretched out his left hand to light a cigarette at the last embers. But they only saw the dark hand with a reddish shining outline, and the hand appeared strange to them and all by itself, as if it did not belong to a living body. The body did not move, not throughout the whole night.
The narrow beam of light which the setting moon cast through the small window grew longer and fainter. It traveled slowly over the clay floor, until it reached the foot end of the shakedown before the hearth. There it faded away, and the two brothers still looked at the spot, even when nothing was to be seen but the blackness of the nocturnal room. It was as quiet as if a dead man were lying there.
Erasmus was the first who could not bear it any longer. “You are not asleep, dear brother?” he asked.
“No,” replied Amadeus gently. In the darkness of the room their two voices also sounded unreal, as if there were no living hearts behind them, but as if they rose from the depths of the earth which lay silently around the house. Such voices, submerged voices as it were, are heard sometimes at night over a swamp, and the belated wanderer stops to listen, shivering in the fog that clings to his forehead.
“I will try to tell you everything now, brother,” Erasmus went on, “the little that must be told. It is better to tell it in the night than in bright daylight.”
He did not sit up, nor did he support his head with his hand. He remained lying, his arms outstretched on the blanket, and he spoke up to where his open eyes were gazing – up into the high roof of reeds above which stood the stars which could not be seen.
“When you went away,” he said, “they were at the height of their triumph. It was the era of the flourish of trumpets. They tried time and again to get me back into the army, but I refused. As a major general I could refuse, even at that time, and besides I was certainly not in good health. The doctors called it coronary disease. I made the most of it; and Aegidius had his six thousand acres, and that was more important to them than one more infantryman’s rifle.
“We went from pillar to post for your sake, brother, but it was no use. They held what they had as if in a net of steel. Aegidius volunteered . . .”
“You are to tell only the most important things,” Aegidius interrupted quickly. “Night will soon be over.”
“Just as you like, brother, though there is nothing more important than to bare one’s breast and say, ‘Ad sum! Here I am!’ as Isaac did under the knife. Nothing greater and nothing more important. Well, they only laughed. You can exchange clothes for cigarettes, they said, but not a life for a life.”
“Brother,” Aegidius begged once more.
“It is all right,” Erasmus went on.
Amadeus stretched out his hand with another