From the kitchen came the sound of Klaus’ loud preaching voice, he was reading to Agnes from the Bible.
On the fourth day after the night of the storm came the news that a boat had washed ashore at the fishing village beyond the lighthouse. Frau Steege put on her Sunday dress and drove there with the coastguard. Late in the afternoon she came back and reported that it was their boat, much battered, and that she had immediately sold it to a fisherman there. She wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes with her index finger, but she was calm and matter-of-fact. Since she was already wearing her good dress, she wanted to go up to the schoolmaster’s now and have him ring the bell for her husband, and because tomorrow was Sunday, the schoolmaster could read the service for the dead,45 since the pastor had gone away to the city for a week. Agnes said that she would accompany her.
Sunday morning was sunny and the sandy path that led to the church was crowded with worshippers. When Doralice and Agnes entered the little church they found all of the pews tightly packed. From the sympathetic glances that greeted them they realised that they were expected and that places had been saved for them in the front pew next to Frau Steege and her three children. The whitewashed room was full of sunshine and the altarpiece, Christ leading Peter over the water, with its bilious green waves, its red and yellow garments, stood out starkly in the brilliant whiteness. A hymn was sung by loud, hoarse female voices, then the schoolmaster read out a sermon, his pale, puffy face was twisted into an expression of grief, his voice was lilting and monotonous. The women in all of the pews began to sigh, Frau Steege and her children wept loudly, Agnes also wept. Doralice, however, was unable to cry, and, because she felt that the women were looking at her with surprise and disapproval, she lowered her veil over her face. She did not have the sense that these singing and sighing women, or the words that the ugly man up there in the pulpit was reading, could possibly have anything to do with her or her grief. The service came to an end, the fishermen’s wives lingered in groups in the sunny churchyard and talked. Frau Steege was surrounded by a large crowd – they promised to help her with the potato harvest, and Frau Stibbe told her she should come over to her house for fish cleaning, she would receive some fish in return. The universal sympathy seemed to make Frau Steege feel better, and she had an almost satisfied expression on her face as she disappeared into the low doorway of her cottage with her children. From this day forward her misfortune was an established fact of her life that she had come to terms with. From now on she would no longer wander about the beach.
Doralice now walked along the shore by herself, she walked there for hours every day, this gave her life a purpose. She wanted to be of use to Hans, wanted to be with him, wanted to remain true to him. By the sea she was also able to feel her grief more deeply, could mourn her love, could be unhappy, because if she could not do that, what would she have, what would become of her? Then everything around her and inside her would be empty. But there was something else that accompanied her in her wanderings. Whenever she walked along the shore and the waves, white with their delicate foam, ran up the sand to her, it seemed as if the sea were trying to persuade her to do something, something that she resisted, that she argued against, at times arguing so violently that, talking loudly to herself, she shouted “No! No!” into the roar of the waves. And yet there was something terribly exciting and appealing for her about this quarrel with the sea. There were times, though, when all of this slipped away from her, when she sank into an unthinking contemplation of the fine lines that the water had written on the sand, and of the lemon-yellow, light-blue and light-pink shells that were scattered across the shore like little flowers. Or with her eyes she followed the waves as they hurriedly pursued each other without ever catching up.
The late September days brought summer-like warmth, Doralice ventured further afield, far beyond the lighthouse, she walked until her feet were heavy with exhaustion. Further still to where the tall forest came down close to the edge of the dunes, pines with huge red trunks and tangled crowns, here and there a birch or an aspen among them, their foliage, already an autumnal yellow, standing there like golden furnishings in a columned hall. The moss-covered ground was bright with autumn mushrooms and cranberries, the sunshine and the shadows of the tree branches carried on their silent game. “This looks like a good place to rest for a bit,” thought Doralice. She walked up into the forest and stretched out on a mossy mound.
We can be suffering from terrible grief, we can be very unhappy, and yet none of that can withstand the joy of stretching out our legs comfortably after a long and tiring walk. She looked up into the tops of the pines, high above them a hawk patrolled the sky, shiny and metallic amidst all of the blue. An aspen standing near her whispered ceaselessly. How lovely it was here, better than anything one could wish for. Doralice shut her eyes, the last thing that she saw with her half-closed lids was a group of deer descending from the high ground. The animals raised their thin legs carefully over the tall ferns. They advanced to the edge of the dunes, stood there motionless and peered out at the sea.
Doralice slept so sweetly that when she awoke she continued to lie there without moving in the hope that she might be able to hold on to a little more of this unthinking happiness. But ultimately her waking up became irreversible, she sat up and reflected on her mental state. How happy she had felt, how happy she still felt. How was that possible? What had become of her terrible grief, her unhappiness? Where were they? Had she lost them? No, no, anything but that. Fearfully she jumped to her feet and hurried down to the sea to reclaim her grief there.
The nights were once again moonlit. Knospelius and Doralice sat in their usual place on the dunes, at their feet slept the pointer Karo. The sea was profoundly calm, the moonshine flickered softly on the water, only among the breakers were the small silver waves murmuring contentedly to themselves. In front of Stibbe’s cottage the women were once again cleaning fish and singing their old plaintive song:
“Little sun wants to sleep in the sea,
Dark waters are his covers,
Hake, you green officer,
Run quickly to wake him up.
Raderi, raderi, raderidira.
Little sun wants to sleep in the sea,
Where my boy must also sleep.
Flounder, little brown maiden,
Bring both of them my greeting.
Raderi, raderi, raderidira.”
“Karo is sleeping a lot these days,” said the Privy Counsellor, “he is out of sorts, the sea does not interest him, and that’s why he wants to dream, he hunts in his dreams, his dreams are forest green or harvest yellow.”
“Yes,” replied Doralice, “I hadn’t realised until now how important dreams could become.”
The Privy Counsellor puffed on his cigar thoughtfully for a while: “I know, I know,” he began again, “I’ve also lived through times when reality had nothing to offer me and dreams then became all important. At such times one has to accommodate one’s dreams; one has to search out places that are conducive to dreaming or that at least do not disturb it. Such places do exist, down in Italy or in the Greek Islands. I had thought, when you leave this place…”
“Where am I supposed to go?” Doralice interrupted him passionately. “You know very well that the only place where my life has any meaning is right here.”
“Of course, of course,” murmured Knospelius, “I am only saying, whenever you do depart. Eventually winter will arrive, the countryside here will not be the same any more; then a quiet southern bay would be advisable – blue skies, sunshine, the air as soft as a powder puff and one’s life such a matter of course that one does not have to think about whether one should live it or not. One does not think at all, or if one does think, one muses on the past, because we may well despise our present, but each of us has something worth preserving in our past. And so I think, then, that whenever you can bear to leave this place, we should go to just such a quiet bay.”
“We?” asked Doralice.
“Thank you,” said Doralice softly, “but right now I can’t leave this place.”
“Of course not, of course not,” said Knospelius cheerfully, “we have time, we have learned to bide our time here, we will wait, we will wait quietly until the sea releases us.”
And so it came to pass that when the October wind drove the yellow birch leaves from the forested heights out to sea and the paler gold of the October sun lay on the waves, this strange pair still walked along the shore day after day, the beautiful, pale woman with her mourning veil blowing in the breeze and the small, twisted gentleman in the long grey overcoat, followed by his bored dog yawning sullenly at the sea. All three of them were waiting for the sea to release them.
Notes
44 …disappeared into thin air like the Jew at Michaelmas: The source of Agnes’ expression is uncertain, but this is likely an example of the sort of casual anti-Semitism that was still common among rural Germans at the time. The meaning is clear enough: The feast of St. Michael (September 29) was one of the four days during the year when rent and other dues and fees were traditionally due, and so dishonest or greedy individuals who did not want to pay their bills might want to make themselves scarce.
45 …the village schoolmaster could read the service for the dead: In Protestant Germany at this time the schoolmaster was often a young clergyman-in-training (or an older man still waiting for an appointment to a parish), so it would not have been unusual for him to fill in when the pastor was away.
Copyright
Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited
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Publishing History
First published in Germany in 1911
First published by Dedalus in 2019
Waves translation, introduction & notes copyright © Gary Miller 2019
The right of Gary Miller to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, Elcograf S.p.A
Typeset by Marie Lane
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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