Tidings. Ernst Wiechert

and looked into her eyes, which did not avoid his glance. “You struck me once,” he said, lost in thought. “Now take care that you do not strike your mother! Grita used to say that a hand raised against one’s mother would grow out of the grave.”

      Her face remained motionless, and there was no flicker of her eyelids, so he did not know whether she had understood.

      The light of the moon fell over them as they went away, and it seemed as if they were returning to the dark depths of the moors, from which they had emerged for a transient hour. They did not seem to be going back to any human dwelling.

       3

      TIME PASSES, PEOPLE SAY. And some say that it rolls on or flies. But for Amadeus it does not pass, it only exists and he exists in it. Sometimes it seems to him as if they were both standing still, sometimes as if they were falling through space into the depths where there is neither space nor time. He and time are not two separate things, they are included in each other, and neither of them is without the other. Things were different behind the barbed wire. Time was there as the hangman or the bloodhounds were there. Not only the time which was shown by the clock on the watchtower: the time for work or sleep, the living time. But behind it, as it were, was that universal, deadly time – something that was not theirs to dispose of, something that was measured out to them. For everything belonged to the people in uniform: work, food, sleep, death. And also time. He who had spent six years there counted as little to them as he who had come the previous day. The victims were shadows without time or name. Only the others had names and time.

      But now it is quite different. When the cuckoo calls in the morning, it does not seem to call only today. For it was so yesterday and will be so tomorrow, as it will be in a thousand years. And it is the same with the stars and the evening mist, or with the warm rain that from time to time passes over the moorland like a soft, gray wall. Amadeus accepts it all like a stone lying in the moss. He need not move nor is he capable of motion. He only keeps quiet when all this passes over him: the call of the bird, the mist, the rain, and the stars. He is a creature among other creatures. It is all the same whether he is gay or sad, nor are his thoughts of any importance.

      Sometimes he does not know whether he is gay or sad. He only knows that he exists, and what is more important still, that the others do not exist. When he wakes up in the reddish dawn, and the morning light falls into his narrow room, he sits up in his bed with a sudden, wild, breathless movement and listens with strained attention. Like an animal at bay. His heart pounds so that the whole room is filled by it, his hand closes on the revolver, and slowly, quite slowly, the ominous dream-pictures which have weighed down his sleep are shattered: the picture of a dark, closed van, the door of which opens noiselessly to take him in, while he knows that behind the dark walls will be horror, the last, frightful horror that only man can prepare for men.

      Or the picture of the young, friendly woman is there, she who stroked his hair in the night when he had sought refuge with her. She bends over him – so closely that he can see the arteries in her throat pulsing, and she smiles down on him as on an awakening child. But the smile changes slowly, terribly, and below her neckerchief something moves, something that he cannot see nor recognize – it may be an animal with a hundred legs and ice-cold eyes – such as the fathomless waters of the deepest ocean may conceal.

      Many phantoms drink at his heart in the night, and what they drink is always blood. And whether they assume a thousand forms, inexhaustible as only dreams can be, behind all those thousand forms stands man. Man, who stood over him for four years, smiling and motionless, to drain his heart, and only from time to time the hand with the cup is raised to the icy lips. And the cup is filled with Amadeus’ blood, his fear, his horror, his life, and his time.

      Then he falls back on his bed trembling and breathing heavily, and softly, imperceptibly, time, which he had lost while sleeping, returns and envelops him.

      The cuckoo calls and the mice rustle about in the reed thatching. He is so wide awake that he could fancy that he hears the dew falling on the grass or the morning clouds sailing above the reddish moorland. Pliantly, willingly, he is drawn once more into the orbit of all created things. The light blesses him, the call of the bird, and the holiness of the early morning.

      Amadeus sits on the doorstep and slowly breaks his bread. He might be the first human being in the landscape, the first and the last. Time does not exist for him. There is no time as long as “the others” are not here. He need not go down to be questioned by authorities in offices or behind counters. Aegidius sees to all that for him. And when they make difficulties there is Kelley, First Lieutenant Kelley, who arranges everything with his capable hands.

      Amadeus can waste his day or fill it or leave it empty, just as he likes. The day does not dictate to him, it only gently makes him part of itself.

      Generally he goes out early in the morning and comes home in the afternoon or evening. He has formed friendships on the moors, quiet friendships which need no words: with the red kite that has its nest in a high tree above the rocks, with the lizards on the peat mounds, with the quaking ground between the brown water pools on which the cranes have their breeding places, and with the sundew in the peat ditches, with the wild arum and the lady’s slipper and with the tall, yellowish orchid which stand like candles in the grass. He often picks a bunch that fills the room with a strange, intoxicating scent.

      He does not read much, nor does he think much; he only exists. From the great library of their father’s house the brothers have saved nothing but “the whole of the Prophet Jeremiah.” Sometimes he opens the book in the evening by the fire, his eyes travel over the large, old-fashioned letters, and he listens to the sound of the great, imploring words which are like the primal complaint of humankind, of those beings created to suffer, born of woman and chosen for all eternity.

      “The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire, the founder melteth in vain.”

      Or: “Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: thou must empty the cup of thy sister, as deep and wide as it is.”

      Or the word by which their father had suffered himself to be deceived before he went into the unknown.

      He reads the words not as wisdom, nor even as revelation. He lets them sink into his ear as he does the voices over the peat bogs, voices which are “above the deep” and sound in the evening under the first stars: the oldest voices of the earth which is trembling with the foreboding of woe, and it matters not whether the tune of this suffering sounds in the mouth of a human being or in that of an animal.

      Sometimes Amadeus opens the scores of the old music, which his brothers had saved when they saved the instruments, and he follows the lines strung with black signs and hears the sounds as they were when he was his former self. This great riddle of life: that a black sign can stand for a sound and the sound in its conjunction with other sounds can convey the mood of the heart – its sadness or its sparkling joy. A cadence can mean a girl’s lament or the dance of a young fellow though he is sad. The great riddle that the vibration of a string is also the vibration of the heart, and yet the quivering of the string is nothing but a physical law, which can be expressed in a formula, while the vibration of the heart can only be expressed by a smile of the lips or a tear on the eyelash.

      But even there, even with the tunes, Amadeus is alone. Everything is for him as it was on the first day. He remembers the past, but only as in a dream. The marshes are new to him, the grass, the sky, the fire, everything. He must conquer the world anew, just as children conquer it. And he does so with infinite caution. Once he fell into a pit, and he walks as if expecting the next pitfall to await him just by his door. As a child he had known sorrow and melancholy, as all children do. But he had not known horror, and now, knowing horror, he is a marked man. His greatest pleasure is to put his hands on moss and to open and close his fingers in the sun. This is the gesture of freedom for him, of rescue, yes, of salvation.

      Since Amadeus is out all day long, the brothers come in the evening. They sit on the doorstep or on the warm trunk of the alder. They had not known about the forester’s denunciation, but now his wife has told them of it. She wept and they consoled her. They do not speak of it to Amadeus, but in the twilight