Tidings. Ernst Wiechert
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well be mistaken. He waited until he saw the glowing dot appear again before the hearth.
“We had a lot of trouble with mother,” he continued. “She resented it as a disgrace, just as when father went away. Not as something wrong, brother, do you understand, but as a disgrace. Something that could only happen to a Liljecrona, because they were peasants and had no feeling for greatness. For the peasant, she said, there was only the sanctity of the pitchfork, not the sanctity of the sword. She too had fallen into ‘their’ way of speaking.
“But for us she was of some use. Because of her they overlooked many things.
“By the way, when the flourish of the trumpets ceased, she went to her relatives in the Münsterland, to a castle with a moat. There her ‘equals in rank’ live as in the time of Charles the Great.
“We stayed until the tanks came. They did not allow us to leave before. We drove the cattle together and loaded the sleighs. Christoph sat on the front one – as solemnly as if he were driving to church . . .”
“Christoph . . .” whispered Amadeus.
“Yes, he was much over seventy then, perhaps he was already eighty. But his chin was clean-shaven, and he wore the great wolfskin coat which his grandfather had worn before him. There were twenty-five degrees of frost, and the east wind swept the snow over the land.
“We drove for a whole day, and then the tanks overran us. It was as dark as in a tomb, but with searchlights playing they drove over the sleighs, over the cattle, over women and children. They went forward and backward several times. It sounded as if the wheels were rolling on wet brushwood. They fired from all the guns, because some sleighs were lying in the ditches and some tried to escape into the open fields.
“We lost each other. We ran toward a wood which showed up now and again in the rays of the searchlights. We fell down – and then we ran again. In the wood we lost each other completely. We went astray and did not find the road again, not even at dawn.
“But I found Aegidius. He had been shot through the left shoulder and was freezing to death. He only told me in the evening that he had been wounded; by that time it was almost too late.
“Then we made our way slowly until we came here. It took us nearly three months. I thought that here we would find some of those who had been with us. They all knew that they were to meet here. But there was nobody.”
“The dead rise slowly today,” said Amadeus after a while. “And probably the living too.”
Erasmus was silent, then he went on in a low, changed voice: “I was no hero, dear brother,” he said. “I ought not to have run away, unless I was the last. It all depends on where one is when one runs. But probably my mind was disturbed by the noise when the caterpillar wheels rolled over the sleighs – they screamed so, brother, they screamed so terribly – even the horses screamed . . .”
“We have unlearned there, brother, the obligation to throw ourselves voluntarily under a wheel,” said Amadeus after a while. “The wheel will catch up with us, if Laima wishes it. Even if we were sitting on a steeple.”
“But they are calling,” said Erasmus in a whisper now. “I hear them calling. Every night. ‘Herr Baron,’ they call, and sometimes they say another word. ‘Yes’, I say, ‘I am coming!’ But I do not come. It is too late; I have forsaken them. Father would not have forsaken them.”
“We do not know anything about father,” said Aegidius. “We only know that he was good. To be good and to sacrifice oneself are not the same things.”
A soft, early light fell through the window, and they heard the first cuckoo call over the peat bog. It sounded like the tone of a distant bell, as if the sacrament were being carried through the early morning. All three listened, and for the first time Amadeus sank back on his cushions, folding his arms under his head.
“How different everything is for my brothers,” he thought. “How completely different . . . Those they saw were ten or twenty, struck by war as a tree is struck by lightning. But the others, millions probably, whom they slaughtered as cattle are killed in a slaughterhouse . . . And one cannot tell them, because they might think that one measures the dead by their number. Nor can one tell them all the other things . . . Aegidius did not say either that he offered himself as a sacrifice for my sake . . . ‘Ad sum! Here I am!’ That is grand . . . but I cannot lie here and talk about it every night. There was something we found among father’s papers: ‘He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.’ Erasmus was hit in the root so that he ran away into the field. He may be destroyed by it. He still thinks like a nobleman, and he who thinks so nowadays will perish. He is the last aristocrat of the family; neither Aegidius nor myself are. He is the defenseless one. All aristocrats are defenseless today. The tank is the symbol of our time, not the sword. The tank and the whip.”
The cuckoo was still calling and Amadeus got up. He took a tin of coffee from his haversack and put it on the hearth. Then he picked up his clothes and shoes and went out.
The morning dazzled him, and he stopped for a while leaning his back against the wall of the hut. Marvelous that the earth could be so new every morning, as if it had risen from the grave after the night.
The peat bog steamed in the morning sun. The rocks in the background sparkled like liquid gold. In the stunted pine trees the spiders’ webs were glistening. Nothing moved but the first buzzard, which circled above the peat mounds. No evil had ever been here – not yesterday, not a thousand years ago. Here had always been the harshness of nature and its creatures, but it was too lonely here for the wickedness of mankind.
Only the shepherd had been here, and he had been too old for the vengeance of man. He had not been worth their while. Since they had arrested him, Amadeus, and had led him away from here, all this had remained untouched. Like a bath which the angels had prepared for all those who had risen from the dead. Also for the defeated and terrified, nay, for them most of all.
But was there a healing power in nature? Was there salvation at all in this world? Yes, if Christoph had been saved, everything would be easier. He had had “the faith.” One need not have the same faith, but it was beautiful to look at somebody who had it, somebody who needed no staff, no philosophy, but who could see the little light in the heather, for whom there were no limits between the underworld and the heavenly world, who was included in the vast circle and who could say everywhere and at each moment, “Here I am, oh Lord!” Who could also say it when the caterpillar wheels rolled over his eyes and broke his body. He need not ask, “Why did I run away?” He only said, “Here I am, oh Lord!”
Amadeus sighed and went slowly through the low wood to the small pond at the edge of the moor. The dew wet his bare feet, and the coolness of the earth penetrated to his heart. He looked around for a long time before he undressed and got into the water. The bottom was soft and sandy and only at some distance from the shore became dark and swampy.
The cuckoo was still calling, but Amadeus did not count the years which it promised him. Life was not counted by years anymore.
“One must help him,” he thought, “before it consumes him and destroys the roots. Somebody must tell him that I have seen thousands die without moving a hand. One must stop asking, ‘Where is thy brother Abel?’, because the number of brethren has become millions. Yes, probably one must stop asking at all, instead existing quietly and without any question. The asking of questions has ruined the world since the serpent first asked.”
He dressed slowly and went back. The fire was burning on the hearth, and they drank their coffee in front of the door. Erasmus had carried out the small table and three chairs. A heron flew over the moorland and their eyes followed it for a long time. It was as quiet as at the beginning of the world after the seven days of creation.
“How do you manage to live here?” asked Amadeus at last.
“Oh, don’t worry, there is always something,” replied Erasmus. “They fell trees in the woods, and not everything has been stolen from the castle. The Americans came too quickly. And the things that have not been stolen, we sell one after another,