A FATHER TO HIS CHILDREN
THE reverend curate Elias Benzer was a man of great oratorical skills, a passionate lover of life, and–as much because of this as out of obedience to his natural disposition–an enthusiastic admirer of all things feminine. It was this passion, as we shall see, that led to his downfall.
The Reverend Benzer came from Hohenberg in the Rhine Valley: Hohenberg, which had always been a bastion of superstition and things demonic. So his sermons were full of the last witch-burning in the Vorarlberg, which he had seen, as a child, with his own eyes. This strange experience had become the pillar of his theology. He devoted countless sermons to painting pictures of the stake for the eyes of his Eschberg peasants, with such fire that their mouths grew dry and the blood began to redden in their brows and in their eyes. Some even felt as though they had been hit by the first sparks or delivered whole into the flames. Whenever the reverend curate, in his Sunday morning gospel readings, had the slightest opportunity to throw a bridge back to that great event of his childhood, he seized the opportunity to cross it. Thanks to a flamboyant imagination, he was able against all odds to pass from the Burning Bush to the Hohenberg Burning.
Such homilies nearly led to a murderous incident in Eschberg. Prompted by the curate’s incendiary sermon–yet in good faith–three Lamparters, on “Spark Sunday”* in 1785, decided to cast into the fire not the customary straw witch but Zilli Lamparter, known as “Zilli of the Souls.”
This Zilli of the Souls, an ancient widow biding the modest time that remained to her in the complete solitude of the highest farm in the village, had the unique reputation of being able to hold discussions with the Eschberg dead. She explained this clairvoyant gift by saying that of all the inhabitants she was the one who lived closest to the good Lord, and she could therefore clearly hear the laments of the people in the beyond–on clear nights at least, for clouds impeded her hearing. That much was obvious to everyone. When Zilli of the Souls then claimed that a number of Moors from the Orient had appeared to her, men and women with coal-black skin, coal-black faces, coal-black limbs, and coal-black teeth, no one had any doubts about this woman’s extraordinary gifts.
The old woman thus hit upon the idea of constructing a system, a kind of spiritual bookkeeping, which would indirectly provide her with a regular pension. She knew that the deceased, before they went to paradise, had first to burn in purgatory, so she resolved to draw up a catalog of things the living were to do to rescue their departed relations. In Eschberg, however, everyone was related to everyone else. To keep confusion to a minimum, people called each other by their Christian names and women were known by the names of their husbands.
One day, then, Zilli of the Souls descended laboriously to the farm of a Lamparter and revealed to him that his father had appeared to her amid groans and lamentations. His father could find no peace, because he still owed her seven bundles of soft chopped firewood. Furthermore, in the course of countless meetings with the Eschberg dead, Zilli finally came to the conclusion that everyone, whether Lamparter or Alder, owed her something. Then she would say, with unvarying menace, “Eight eggs, ten Our Fathers. Three pounds of wax and fifty Hail Marys. A hundredweight of bedding straw and seven masses. Ten ells of linen and eight psalms.”
No amount of cursing and complaining to the curate did any good. Never had there been so many offerings of wax and masses. Never had the little church in Eschberg heard such ardent prayer. As we can see, Zilli knew how to unite the necessary and the salutary, and it was this that made her the first person in Eschberg–and even, we may confidently say, in the Vorarlberg–to draw a pension.
Gradually, people came to hate her. By a stroke of bad luck, at this time a blight, one that was highly unusual and only ever seen in Eschberg, afflicted the potato crop in the village’s mountain fields. In a single night, the potatoes were said to have hollowed out and shriveled to the size of a walnut. Be that as it may.
Amid laughter and shouts, mingling with the woman’s muttered rosaries, Zilli was carried in a dung cart to the hamlet of Altig, where the stake had been erected. Zilli howled in mortal terror and swore she would give everything back to everyone, but one Alder, in a voice of thunder, his eyes aflame with lust, recalled the curate’s sermons and gave new encouragement to all those who were on the point of abandoning the deed. When the old woman was dragged from the cart, she still seemed to be screaming, but not a sound fell from her swollen, scarred mouth. Salt clung to her crumpled cheeks, and from the corners of her mouth red spittle flowed, which she thirstily licked away with her long tongue. The fire split the night. Some people pulled their hats down and hid their faces for fear of recognition as they struck the old woman’s ragged body with fists and toecaps. Even the children pinched and spat, refusing to desist. When an unknown man struck her scarf from her head, a dark murmur ran through the crowd of peasants drenched in the atmosphere of death. For the first time everyone saw that Zilli was completely bald, and even the least credulous among them thought he had before his eyes a living, flesh-and-blood witch. The unknown man thrust his clenched fist into her stomach and her empty breasts and ripped her clothes away, so that everything might proceed as the reverend curate had described in his sermons. But suddenly the unknown man uttered such a fearful yell that people were afraid he had lost his reason. “The blight! The blight!” he bellowed, stumbling through the crusted snow into the night. And like the sparks from the logs as they fell to earth, at that moment the crowd fled in all directions. The supposed blight had saved the last few weeks of the woman’s life.
When this event reached the ears of our curate via an Alder gossip, he vowed that same day never to deliver another incendiary sermon. And saying that, by the Trinity, not everything a vicar might say from the pulpit should be taken at face value, he dismissed the gossip, whose faith in the infallible truth of the priest’s words was shattered for good.
But this spirited resolution proved short-lived, because the curate was soon forced to acknowledge that the religious zeal of the people of Eschberg was on the wane. Saturday rosaries, he complained, were only attended by women, the reprehensible habit of tobacco chewing during the holy mystery of the mass had come back into fashion, some of the menfolk sitting in the organ loft were disturbing prayers with their insolent grins, and furthermore, in the past two weeks, only eight kreuzers had gone into the collection box. But the most shameful thing of all–and his eyes flashed demonically into the frightened little eyes of some Alder virgins–was that dances were lately being held in the houses of the village and strong liquor was served there. Since in the period immediately after this no changes were noticed in the behavior he had castigated, and on three Sundays in succession, apart from a few tortoiseshell buttons, nothing rattled in the poor box, the curate broke his vow. He devised a sermon that would once and for all eradicate the baseness of the people of Eschberg.
The spirit of this fatal sermon descended upon the curate on the Feast of Pentecost in 1800, in the stable of his presbytery, where he went whenever he had something grave on his mind. He liked to think in the tepid air of the stable, among cows, goats, pigs, and chickens. He had sat down on a wooden barrel next to the pigsty, his brow in his hands, knowing only that he wished to transfer the image of the Gospels–the tongues of flame of the miracle of the Pentecost–to a fire of a quite different order. He sat musing for a long time on his little barrel but could not find a bridge that seemed worth crossing. When his bottom went to sleep he stood up grumpily, took a few steps, and put his foot in a fresh steaming cowpat. He slipped, staggered backward, and banged his head–by the Trinity!–against the rim of the barrel. The barrel. That was it! Gunpowder. Marauding Napoleonic soldiers had lost the barrel in the forest. He had taken it into his keeping lest it cause any harm. He felt around cautiously for the thumb-sized bump and grumbled at the way the Holy Ghost had chosen to come upon him. But the Fire Sermon took form at that moment. With nightfall the curate was seen descending into the h
amlet that was home to Haintz Lamparter, the beadle of Eschberg. They saw the candles burn to a stump. That was how long the curate stayed.
On the day of Pentecost, matters took their tragic course. Some parishioners, it must be said, were startled by the peculiar location of the fuse, but no one paid the circumstance the attention it deserved. One of them, who had his hair singed, spoke afterward of a curious barrel. He had elbowed his neighbor and said, “Look! He’s drinking in the house of the Lord!” Another related how the reverend curate’s voice had been strangely agitated in the Kyrie, and a child in the choir agreed that at the very moment the curate climbed into the pulpit, the beadle had left the church, taking with him an hourglass he had just upended.
The purifying Pentecostal fire would now become the all-consuming flames of hell, came the tremulous voice of the curate in the pulpit. So powerful was Beelzebub that in his arrogance he would not stop at the door of the church. It was within his power to tear down the church portals, once he had seized the souls of the faithful. And, alas, this he had done in Eschberg, which is why everything would shortly disappear in smoke and brimstone. Thus spoke the booming voice from the pulpit. As an alert Alder later declared to the vicar- general in Feldberg, the reverend curate repeated the idea of burning, crashing, smoke, and brimstone an unusually large number of times and in an unusually loud voice.
Three peasants in the back rows had their eardrums burst by the explosion, and the insolently grinning menfolk in the organ loft fell suddenly silent. Those who were leaning against the church door were particularly unlucky. One had his legs broken by the exploding portal, another his hip, and the blood of a third sprayed from his ears against the whitewashed wall, reaching up to the Stations of the Cross. Another unlucky man was the beadle, who had only wanted to attend properly to his duties and had closely followed the burning fuse, although the curate had expressly forbidden him to do this. Haintz Lamparter lost his sight and would have burned to death had the explosion not hurled him into the dewy morning grass. The faithful, frightened half to death, ran shrieking from the church, and we must add that they did not wait for the curate’s blessing.
The citizens of Eschberg brought the matter before the civil and ecclesiastical court in Feldberg, but the vicar-general claimed it was a matter for the church alone, and the errant brother would be judged by an ecclesiastical tribunal, which is what happened. The curate’s stipend of three hundred and fifty guilders was reduced by half. He, and all pastors who succeeded him, were reduced to the rank of cooperator expositus, which meant henceforward that any spiritual decision would require the assent of the vicar of Götzberg. The curate did defend himself with impressive oratorical gifts–by the Trinity, not every word a priest said from the pulpit could be taken at face value–but it did him no good. The curate left Eschberg three weeks after that day, which went down in memory as Brimstone Sunday. Two lines on the door of his presbytery announced that he had moved to Hohenberg to take a long overdue summer holiday. For eight months, the people of Eschberg lacked spiritual guidance of any kind. Then, all of a sudden, the curate returned unexpectedly, sternly resolving henceforward to be a wise shepherd to his flock. Sadly, resolution was as far as it went.
This all happened three years before the birth of Johannes Elias. The reader who has followed us this far may wonder why we have devoted so much time to this hotheaded curate, rather than turning our attention to that strange child. Let the reader wonder a little longer.
Two weeks after the birth of the child, in the little church in Eschberg–now admired for its bronze double doors, triple thickness, with twelve hinges and iron nails–a double baptism took place. The two boys who were being baptized were in the Alder line, which had been riven for decades. One, our child, was christened Johannes Elias, and the other, born five days later, Peter Elias. Peter Elias had come into the world with the help of a midwife from Altberg known as the “Weigher.”
We might observe that the name Elias returns with some persistence. This is why. Since the Damascus road experience of Pentecost, Elias Bender saw himself not merely as a good shepherd but as a father to his children in Eschberg. He must have confused the purely spiritual meaning of the word with the carnal sense, for in Eschberg there would soon be a number of brown-haired children cast very much in the mold, it was said, of the reverend curate. And the curate had an almost vainly exaggerated weakness for the idea of immortality. He seemed to know that even the most inflamed words are soon extinguished, but a name is far more enduring. Thus he established the unusual practice of giving Elias as a second name to all male newborns.
Only the closest family members attended the baptism. Johannes Elias’s Alders sat on the epistle side, and Peter Elias’s Alders on the gospel side. The curate delivered a sermon comparing the power of water with the power of fire. The sermon was a long one, and it seemed almost as if the curate was in some way nervous of the baptism itself. When he finally dabbed holy water on the boys’ lobster-red brows, his hand began to tremble so violently that he had to interrupt his flow lest he hurt the little creatures. Involuntarily, the curate’s eye fell on Seff’s wife’s face, and they both blushed in the most embarrassing manner. Fortunately, the organ sounded the baptismal chorale and, fortunately, Johannes Elias suddenly began to cry. He was jubilant, for he was hearing the sound of an organ for the first time in his life. He was jubilant because he had discovered music.
Seff, however, his father, sat sunk in a pew, his eyes plunged deep into his lap. When the boy began to cry, a frost descended upon Seff once more, a strange frost that ran down his back, around over his belly, and into his testicles. Blast it if there isn’t something wrong with the boy! That voice! thought Seff, and pressed his ears closed so that the veins stood out in his hands.
But Peter Elias, Nulf Alder’s child, did not cry. We think we are able to see in this a prefigured trait of his later character, for Peter Elias never cried and complained. Only once, and that is an occasion to which we shall return in detail.
Three days later Curate Benzer met a terrible end. He had climbed up into the Eschberg woods to the plateau known as St. Peter’s Rock. He had gone there, it was supposed, to pick spring juniper. A little wicker basket was found nearby. But he must have fallen miserably over the cliff, for his body was found utterly unrecognizable in the scree, his thighs thrust into his torso to the knee. The bare white bone of his left thigh lay a yard away.
The rumor of suicide died hard. The baptismal registration of Seff’s boy reveals a trembling, almost illegible script, while the other shows the curate’s usual extravagant hand–which is not to say anything more than we mean to say.
*The first Sunday in Lent, when coal stoves are lit in Germanic countries.
THE MIRACLE OF HIS HEARING
ALL afternoon the fog swept up from the Rhine Valley into the hamlet of Hof, where Seff Alder’s property lay. The fog froze in the woods, drew icy threads from the branches, and covered the south-facing bark of the pine trees. That afternoon the moon and sun faced each other, the moon a broken host, the sun a mother’s cheek. The child stood on a stool at the window of his room, which Seff’s wife now bolted twice, jamming a wooden plank between the handle and the doorpost. Elias stood staring up toward the forest rim, with the Emmer flowing behind it. His heart was filled with melancholy. He had to go down there.
In the night, the child was waked by the sound of the falling snowflakes. Wild with joy, he jumped to the window, opened it, and stayed there listening until dawn. (By this time his brother Fritz no longer shared a room with him. His parents had taken Fritz into their room to protect him from the accursed child.) When Seff’s wife discovered Elias in the morning, his brow was covered with sweat, and he then spent ten days in bed with a fever, but he also was filled with an inexplicable gaiety, spending half the day singing all the hymns from the church year.
At this time the child did not understand very much. He did not understand why he had to be silent when a strange
r entered the house, when his brother was always allowed to be there. He did not understand why his mother would not stay with him, waiting for the wonderful sound of the snowflakes to return. And he did not understand why he was not allowed to touch her earlobes when he wanted to go to sleep. When she tried to forbid him to sing, the child began to howl so heartrendingly that she finally gave in and allowed him at least to sing during the night.
At this point we must reveal the child’s secret, because the strange behavior of Seff’s wife will otherwise remain inexplicable. Elias had a voice of glass, according to his uncle Oskar Alder, Eschberg’s organist and schoolmaster. The phenomenon of this curious voice cannot be explained in medical terms, being congenital. When the child began to speak, a single high whistle issued from his mouth. The voice did not have a speaking melody as such; it did not modulate but emerged as a single constant whistling tone. This was what had made Seff shiver at the baptism, for he thought the defect was ineradicable. He did not say a single word about it, as, indeed, he seldom ever said anything.
That afternoon, when sun and moon had faced each other, five-year-old Elias stole from his room. Something was calling. He had to go.
No one paid any attention to Elias. In Eschberg, nobody paid attention to their children at all. When, in a terrible storm, an Alder child had drowned in the turbulent brown water of the Emmer, its mother had excused herself by saying that the children had always found their own way in the past and the Lord God himself had set an appointed hour for the poor little mite. Some days after the storm, Seff had begun to take driftwood out of the Emmer. Peasants had enjoyed this right for centuries. What one could remove became one’s property. But the removal of driftwood was a constant source of argument and bloodshed, for it was entirely possible that someone might cut down a fine fir tree from a neighbor’s wood and obstinately claim it as driftwood.
Brother of Sleep: A Novel Page 2