Tidings. Ernst Wiechert

saw the others drag him away. I was certain, as I had never been before, that this man would rise again. And in his resurrection he would still have the same smile.

      “The Frenchman took my hand. The left, not the right. And he said something very remarkable. He said, ‘Ceux qui restent ce sont les pauvres.’ Those who remain are the poor. It was so very remarkable, because it was the truth. One of those truths that a man can only pronounce when he has discarded all earthly things: fear, hope, hatred and perhaps love also. Ce sont les pauvres . . .

      “And that’s why I must live alone.”

      The brothers were still holding his hand. He did not look into their faces, because he knew there would be horror in them. He only looked at them when Aegidius put his hand in a special way over his own, and he saw that Aegidius smiled.

      “Don’t you remember?” asked Aegidius in a low voice.

      “What?”

      “Don’t you remember when we had a cut in our hand, when we were children? And the blood was not to be stanched, and we ran to Grita? Don’t you remember what she used to say?”

      “Was it . . . ?”

      “Yes, that’s what it was. One of her half-Christian, half-heathen verses. She took our hand in her hands – so – and then she said: ‘Cover hand, cover death – wake up again by God’s breath.’ She herself did not know where the saying came from. Probably from her great-grandmother. A spell to speak over running blood. And it always stopped running. Always.”

      “But this does not stop,” said Amadeus after a while.

      “It has already stopped, brother,” said Erasmus. “It stopped the moment you told us about it. And don’t you realize that you saved a life, brother?”

      “I did not save it,” replied Amadeus gloomily. “The Frenchman died of spotted typhus a few weeks later. After we had been liberated. Are you so sure that one is allowed to save one life with another?”

      “I seem to remember,” said Erasmus in a low voice, “that he who died on the cross saved many lives with his life.”

      “You must not blaspheme, brother,” replied Amadeus, drawing his hand out of his brothers’ hands. “Not even from love of me. Or do you think that my hand was allowed to do what God’s hand did?”

      “Perhaps that’s what it means,” said Erasmus still more gently, “that we are created in his image.”

      Then Jakob came. It was his day. He walked a little crooked and a little bent around the corner of the sheepfold with his half-sly, half-sad smile. “Djing dobry to the noble counts,” he said, raising his dark cap. “Djing dobry, Kuba,” replied Aegidius. “Haven’t I told you often enough that we are not counts?”

      Kuba smiled indulgently and wiped his forehead with a lace-edged handkerchief. “What is a count and what is a baron?” he asked gaily. “Whether the count has seven leaves to his coronet or nine – what is the difference? When a stag has six branches on his antlers and they say that it is a stag of eight branches – that is a mistake. But when I address you as a count, that’s not a mistake. For even without a coronet you are a count.”

      “Ah, Kuba,” replied Aegidius, pouring out a mug of coffee for him, “you want a ring or a bracelet, that’s why you do not mind about the leaves on the coronet.”

      “If I want a ring,” said Jakob, “I wish for gold, and when I want politeness in conversation I say count.”

      “We can’t give you anything today, Kuba,” replied Aegidius. “Call again in a week.”

      “The gentlemen have a visitor,” said Jakob, glancing at Amadeus. “You will have to do business again, for the gentleman, your brother, must also eat and drink and have an American cigarette. The gentleman your brother has his hair cut short?”

      “Our brother was in a camp for four years,” said Erasmus.

      “The Holy One, blessed be he,” said Jakob in a hushed voice and raised his cap. “Now I must say prince, and not only count.”

      “Leave it alone, Kuba,” said Aegidius.

      Jakob drank his coffee in silence and got up. “Next time I shall bring a bottle of Scotch whisky,” he said, lost in thought. “I shall not bring it for gold, I shall bring it for nothing.”

      He took off his cap and glanced at Amadeus. “If an old man is allowed to speak,” he said in a low voice, “this old man would like to say this: he would kindly beg the gentleman to let the Lord our God live in his face and not . . .”

      “And not what?” asked Amadeus.

      “And not the dead, sir,” replied Jakob.

      “Thank you, Kuba,” said Aegidius.

      Jakob bowed, put on his cap, and went away.

      Later, when Erasmus carried the crockery into the living room, he found a box of American cigarettes on the window ledge. He gave it to Amadeus, saying, “That’s a lot for Kuba, really a lot.”

      “I shall go out for a while now,” said Amadeus when they had washed and dried the crockery. “I want to have a good look at everything. It may be evening before I come back, but I shall come back.”

      “We know that, dear brother,” said Erasmus.

      Amadeus took only some bread and a field-flask of coffee with him. He walked toward the west so that he had the sun on his back, and he thought of walking all around the peat bog. These were high moors, just as in his homeland, with stunted pines and birches between the flat expanses of reed and water, and it took a couple of hours to walk around it. At the edges the woods thinned out, everywhere the basalt rocks lay in the moss, and lizards were basking on the warm stones. The sky was high and blue, small white clouds sailed over it, and flights of birds were traveling northward. There was complete calm – not even his shoes made a sound on the soft earth. Only when he passed over dry peat did his footsteps ring a little hollow.

      But he did not think of death now. It was as if his brothers’ hands had covered death, as Grita had covered the blood. He felt that things were easier since he had spoken. In four years he had scarcely said a word. Nothing was changed, but he felt as if he had climbed out of a cellar.

      He no longer knew what it was like to walk without goal or purpose. To have nobody behind who carried a whip or a revolver with the safety catch released. He had forgotten that there was an earth which one was not forced to dig or cart away. Earth which lay there quietly resplendent with the sun, which gave space for his feet willingly and without guile.

      And now he could walk across the earth in all directions of the compass, and he could stand still and stroke the smooth stems of the reeds with his hands. He could breathe deeply without feeling a load on his shoulders. He could sit on the dry turf and wait until the lizard came out of the grass again.

      In the distance the cranes still called, as they had called in his homeland. He shaded his eyes with his hand, but he could not see the birds. He could only see the sky, the space, the unlimited, silent, marvelous space. Grita would have said that on such a morning one could see God’s feet resting quietly and sacredly on a blue footstool.

      He got up again and walked on, his hands folded behind his back. This too was something lovely, because for four years he had not known that one could hold one’s hands in this way unless they were fettered. Time after time he separated them and laid them together again. It was marvelous to feel how they moved.

      Then for a while he thought of his home. Much was lost: the books, the music, the lovely little bricks with which one built up one’s day; and the feeling with which the roots of the heart reached down into the cool, damp depths of the familiar soil over which he had run as a child.

      That was lost now. Fate had lifted him, at that time, as the wind lifts a seed pod, and some time it would drop him. If there was still