Tidings. Ernst Wiechert

must not worry so much, Herr Baron,” he said, drawing at his short pipe on whose porcelain bowl there was a brightly colored picture of the old emperor. “Not about his lordship, your father, either. All is well with your father, the old lord, for he has gone to the nether world, do you understand? Some go to join those in the heavenly world, but then we do not hear them anymore. But the others – a man can hear them – if he doesn’t go out to look for them.”

      “Do you hear him, Christoph?”

      The coachman took the pipe out of his mouth and nodded. “Sometimes, Herr Baron,” he said very quietly.

      “Where the three big juniper bushes stand on the moor, before one passes the peat bog – that’s where I hear him. The horses get restive there, because a little light stands among the heather. And then I hear him say: ‘Well, how are you and everybody, Christoph?’ and I answer, ‘Things are all right, Herr Baron.’ Then we drive past and the light disappears. You see, he has gone down again, Herr Baron.”

      “You can still do that,” Amadeus said after a while. “Your feet still reach into the underworld.”

      Christoph shook his head doubtfully, pressing the tobacco more tightly into his pipe. “I don’t know, Herr Baron, whether it’s the feet,” he said. “I think it’s because we still have faith. Never let anyone drive you four-in-hand, Herr Baron, as the countess does. Whoever drives four-in-hand has lost his faith. Christ went on foot.”

      Yes, much had flowed into him in his childhood – mysterious and incongruous tales. It had probably helped him to come through the years, the tens of years, the First World War and the revolution, the collapse of a nation and the decay of the Western world. Those mysterious powers of the underworld had protected him, that which was incomprehensible to reason, yes, that at which reason smiled. The spinning wheel and the oat bin had been more to him than the folio volumes. Long before books had been written people had spun – even in the earliest fairytales, and while they were spinning they had sung: “Dance, my laddie, full of sorrow, dance, I want you to be gay . . .” And that’s perhaps what he did, even when it seemed to others that he did nothing.

      And now at last he got up. The light of the moon still shone over the world and from a distance the wind brought now and again the fragment of a tune from a loudspeaker. It sounded as if a delirious patient were talking in his sleep.

      “That’s what they have kept,” thought Amadeus while he climbed up among the stones. “Victors and vanquished, dancing. But not full of sorrow. Not even the defeated are full of sorrow – to say nothing of their gaiety.”

      The air had become cooler and the juniper bushes stood like dark pilgrims among the heather, each with its long shadow. The moonlight made everything unreal. A softly sparkling world, but it was unreal and unsubstantial. The dead had as much room in it as the living, and the baron had seen so many dead people.

      Then behind a wood of low pine trees, there was the shepherd’s hut. Dark and massive, with its steep low gable, and the moonlight shone like silver on the thatched reed roof. Amadeus had no home now and would never have one again, but there might be a roof to cover him in this ruined world, and this, thatched and gray, looked as if it might have space under it for innocent animals and for guilty human beings. It was an old roof, and the shepherd had spent a life under it, and he had learned silence and wisdom. Amadeus had often sat with him on the threshold, from which could be seen a vast expanse of sky and a view over the Vogelsberg on one hand and over the Thueringer Wald on the other. The earth here was poor and barren, but the landscape was grand and lonely, and here the shepherd had had his visions, and his face had been shaped by this country, as these rocks had been shaped by the subterranean fires millions of years ago.

      It was from this threshold that they had fetched him. The last he had seen was the tall, lean figure of the shepherd holding up his crook under the drifting clouds. And the last he had heard had been his fearless, solemn voice calling as from a mouth of brass: “He who makes prisoners shall himself be taken to prison. He who takes the sword, shall perish by the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.”

      Two of them had only turned and jeered, but the third had looked round and made a threatening gesture with his fist.

      Throughout four long years Amadeus had searched for it: the patience and the faith of the saints. He had not found it.

      Ah, and now he would see them again, his two brothers, and he was afraid. So afraid that his heart throbbed and his hands trembled, when he saw the feeble gleam of light behind the reed curtain of the small window.

      He was afraid for many reasons, his heart was afraid, and reason could not give a name to it. What he first realized was that he was afraid to touch a human being. Not only was he afraid of their words and opinions, their looks and gestures. But there was an actual physical fear of touching them. When a man has slept for a long time on a plank bed with two others, he no longer thinks of the human body as something sacred. When one’s habitation has been a dark, airless room filled with the bodies, the breathing, the groaning, and the delirium of human beings, he recoils before men, unless he has “the patience and the faith of the saints.” But he did not have them.

      As he did not possess them, he wanted nothing but to hide himself like an animal in a thicket. He had been branded and he had not yet got so far that he could transform the mark.

      He was afraid because these men were his brothers and he felt that he loved them. He had believed that love was dead in his heart, and now he realized that this was not true. The shy, unspoken love of their childhood, youth, and manhood flamed up in his heart, as soon as he saw the gleam of light. He remembered how they had gone together through the vast loneliness of life, and how different they had been from others in everything: in their faces, their names, the music they played, even in the way they opened and closed a book.

      But the other two had remained undamaged, or they would not be here. They had not been free from peril, but they had remained in the cleanliness of their old existence. Their bodies had not been seized, they had not been whipped, and they had not been forced to suffer the feet of tyrants trampling upon them. They could look at their bodies without feeling disgust. They were still clean. They could look in a mirror; there was nothing but the face of their father and behind this the faces of all those who had been like him: quiet, sad, noble, and good.

      And there was something that he must know before he stepped over the threshold; and still more it was what they must know before their hands, wearing the signet ring of the family, were offered to him: not that he was no longer good, but that he was bad. It was not important that he was no longer clean, nor undamaged, nor proud, but that he was bad. That with all the power of his blood he hated the murderers and perhaps many of the murdered. He would not mind pointing his revolver at any of those faces with the rigid, sightless masks, at many of those faces arrayed one beside another as before a firing squad. He had already done this with his own hand. And he did not repent it. He held his hand before his eyes and looked at it. The weals and scars showed up even in the light of the moon. It was no longer the hand which had handled the bow in obedience to the tunes which the great dead musicians had devised and written down. It had become a different hand. No lonely hand anymore, only belonging to itself, to a sealed, silent world, but one that had stretched itself out or had been stretched out to the world of violence and evil, and there it had changed. It would not be seen, but his heart knew it. And from his hand the transformation had spread into the innermost recesses of his heart. He had not been incorruptible or this would not have happened. It had not sufficed to live in purity and quiet and “to do nothing.” He had closed his eyes against the evil of the world, and the evil had found him defenseless. And if not defenseless, vulnerable and infirm. He had not had “faith,” as Grita and Christoph had. His roots had reached into the depths of the earth but not further. And so the blow of the ax had struck into his marrow.

      He glanced around – stealthily and hastily – as he had done for four years. There was still time to go. The brothers would never know. He was dead for them, and their last tiny spark of hope would be put out if he did not come back within a few months. They would mourn for him, as millions were mourned in this devastated world. He would remain for them a pure picture broken to pieces