Tidings. Ernst Wiechert

a Jew from Poland. You know, we call him Kuba, because that’s what we used to say at home. He lives in a camp a good way from here. One morning he came up here, and he maintained that he was an honest man. He only wished, he said, to swap: from the right to the left hand, and from the left to the right. Perhaps he cheats us a bit, but that does not matter – at least he comes alone.

      “Besides, we have a friend among the American officers down there: First Lieutenant Kelley, John Hilary Kelley. I like his name Hilary, Hilarius goes well with our funny names. And he goes well with us too. He is always smiling, but his smile is a little sad. War does not mean the same to him as it does to most of them. He speaks German very well.”

      “And what does he want when he comes up here?”

      “Oh, nothing particular, you know. He only likes to sit here for a while and forget his own people. He does not like them very much. He says they no longer have any ears – none of them – but only antennae made of wire. He might very well be a cousin of ours, from another part of the family. He does not think in terms of guilt and punishment as the others do. He does not feel a victor, but like somebody who had to join in the game. And he who joins in the game will get his share of profit and loss.”

      “But what is going to happen now?” Amadeus asked.

      “Nobody knows, brother,” replied Aegidius. “Sometimes in history there are short intervals in which nothing happens. At any rate nothing that our eyes can see. So much happened that those happenings have to settle down first before anything new can begin. And then I shall try to find some work – a field, a flock, a plow. It is hard for me to live without a plow – do you understand that, brother?”

      Yes, Amadeus understood. Aegidius had been the only one who had “done something” – all his life long. Erasmus and he himself had done nothing, and perhaps they would go on doing nothing; or at least what people call nothing.

      “I cannot stay with you very much longer,” Amadeus said after a while, shading his eyes with his hand against the rising sun.

      “That is nonsense, brother,” replied Aegidius kindly. “For really none of us can live without the other two. That was already the case at school, and I am sure it has not changed. You must now try to understand your fate a little. It was hard enough that father went away.”

      “I can only live alone,” said Amadeus in a low voice.

      Aegidius glanced at him quickly, and then he gazed over the marshes again. “The times of Orestes are gone,” he answered, and there was no doubt in his voice. “And you are not a matricide, brother. We shall play together again, Amadeus, do you hear? We shall play Mozart, and there are no ghosts with Mozart.”

      “I shall never play anymore,” said Amadeus, scarcely audible, gazing at his right hand which lay on the dark wood of the table.

      “Why do you say that, brother?” asked Erasmus, frightened, leaning forward. “If I said that, I who have deserted the colors . . . but you who have only suffered?”

      “I have not only suffered,” said Amadeus gloomily, slowly clenching his fist. “I have killed, too, with this hand. And what is more, or more wicked, as you would say: I would kill again at any time, if one of the faces which smiled while they tortured appeared here. There something within me changed; something that I had was taken away from me – and something that I did not have was added. Nothing has been taken away from you, nor has anything been added. You have remained the same. But if somebody were to paint us now as a triptych – some great artist, who sees the ultimate, all that is really hidden – then people would be shocked at the third among us. He would be different from the other two, and people would say that the evil one was standing behind him.”

      The two leaned forward and took his hand which lay clenched on the table. They took it in such a way that it lay hidden in their hands. And for the first time they noticed that he did not wear his signet ring anymore.

      “Brother,” said Aegidius in his soft voice, “if this artist, this great artist, had painted all the Liljecronas in our faces – back to bygone days, and all they thought and believed and did – don’t you think that the onlooker would make the sign of the cross on seeing them? Do you fancy that you are the only one who has killed?”

      “It is no consolation not having been the only one. The fact is that it was not in our nature. It is something foreign to us, and I have opened the door to it. I have allowed someone with dirty shoes to step over our threshold, and I cannot wipe it clean.”

      “Tell us all about it, brother,” begged Aegidius, “now, this very first morning. You have not quite understood yet, brother, that you are with us again, that we three are together again. And that is as if we were one.”

      “We are not one,” persisted Amadeus. He turned his eyes away and looked past the two faces over the moors. Little white clouds rose above the eastern horizon and began to sail up into the blue of the morning sky. The cry of the migrating cranes was heard from a distance.

      Again Amadeus felt that all this might have been the same a thousand years ago. As if nothing had happened, at least not here; that it was wrong for him to sit here. As if he ought to go away quite quickly, so that all this might remain the same for another thousand years. So that at least there would be one small place in this world where nothing had happened and where nothing would happen.

      “He was a Frenchman,” he began in a low voice, “small and thin and ill. A professor of the history of art at the Sorbonne. According to the lists he had long been dead – heart failure. But we had always saved him. We had falsified the list. That was possible in the last months. Then ‘the hangman’ discovered him. Of all the murderers he was the most merciless. He held a high rank in the camp. He had also invented the business with the meathook. Did you know about that?”

      They both shook their heads.

      “Those who had been condemned were hung by the chin on such a hook. It was a dreadful death, perhaps the most dreadful of all. We were forced to lead the Frenchman there. He was quiet and brave, but when we entered the large slaughterhouse, he looked at me once – with eyes that had drunk in beauty for a lifetime, eyes that were filled with the pictures of madonnas and cathedrals – they were so filled with that beauty that these pictures almost covered his death agony. But at the bottom of his eyes, deep below these pictures, I saw it – only I.

      “All was already disorganized, because the sound of the enemy’s guns was coming nearer and nearer, and some of us secretly carried weapons. I did. When we had led the Frenchman under the beam with the hook, I asked the hangman to turn around. He turned as fast as if a serpent had bit his heel. And he looked into the muzzle of my revolver.

      “His face became rigid, for he did not understand. To him it was as if the whole world were breaking into pieces. But it was still a wicked, nay, an infamous face – even in its terrible rigidity. More so than in the relaxation of his daily life.

      “He looked around and he saw nothing but the end. There was no pity on any of the faces – only the end.

      “He fell down on his knees and begged for his life, and we had not known that human words could come from these lips. We listened as we would have listened if a spider in its web had begun to speak. Or a scorpion. Or a basilisk. We were horrified to hear him speak with a human voice. We felt as if in all these years there had not been a deeper defamation of the image of man than this voice of his. We had thought that there would be the voice of a devil in him or the voice of a wolf, as in the pictures of Hieronymus Bosch.

      “The professor begged for the hangman’s life, but we shook our heads. The others wanted to lift him on to the hook, but before they could seize him, I shot.

      “I could have shot him through the heart, but I shot into his face. Perhaps I thought that with a heart-shot he might get up again, because there was a vacuum in his body where we have a heart. Nothing but an empty space. His life was only in his face, which we had seen smiling. Many, many times. And I shot into this smile.

      “He sank down head foremost, but I felt that he did