The Last Bell

by Johannes Urzidil

  Otti was an odd child. I first noticed this when she was sitting on a granite boulder in the meadow along the edge of the forest. On the hand of her outstretched arm sat a woodland bird, a bullfinch, so it seemed to me, shimmering-pink and bluish. It chirped a little then flew away, only to come back after a while and sit down on her hand again. I was more than a little astonished that a girl could tame a wild bird, but I didn’t dare get any closer for fear of disrupting this little game. Another time I saw her bend over a piece of quartz and pick it up; the stone seemed to shine in a curious way, dark purple, as if it were an amethyst, but maybe it was just a stray beam of light that had somehow managed to get inside. Yet another time—and this time it was very conspicuous—I saw the child standing before a mullein. Holding her hand above it at a considerable remove, she gently waved the hand in the air until the plant began to follow her movements, swaying back and forth, even though there wasn’t the slightest breeze. And then I saw her crouching at the stream with her hand in the water. This time I got very close. The child looked up and put the index finger of her other hand over her mouth, as a sign that I should be quiet. She had opened the hand in the water, and I saw a trout approach and stop inside her hand, which closed as if caressing it, without the silver miracle fleeing; indeed, it seemed eager to snuggle up to her hand, which Otti then opened, gently releasing the fish.

  “How do you do that?” I asked.

  “I just do,” she said, explaining nothing.

  “You could catch some fish for dinner.”

  “No,” she said, shocked. “Only father with his fishing pole.”

  “How do you get the fish and birds to come to you like that?”

  “The hares, too,” she said, and ran away.

  Sometimes she accompanied me on my walks. There was one route that went along the flank of the mountain, halfway up, that offered sweeping views through the forest aisles, clear into the Vltava Valley. Another, the Seitz path, penetrated higher and deeper into the woods, where red deer occasionally darted past, black grouse could be heard, or where motionless silence prevailed in hidden places, a silence which—if you strained your ear—turned out to be made of a million voices. Or we went to the “Cholmer,” a dark-green pool of water in the middle of the woods. There she would sit down at the edge of the water, where the lilies were, and lean forward. I wanted to hold her back to keep her from falling in.

  “Don’t,” she said. “I’m talking.”

  And it was wondrous how the moist, wide-open blossoms came closer and closer to her. Yet she never would have plucked one. Sometimes she would stop in front of a spruce, point to the ground, and say, “There!” There was nothing visible except brown needles and moss. But she bent down and dug away the humus a little until an entire family of young, white-brownish mushrooms appeared, which she carefully placed into her colorful scarf. At other times she would suddenly stop in front of a fern, study the leaves for a while then say, “Rain!” And although the sky had been clear and bright, it would soon get dark and rain would fall. She never ran away from the rain, but received the drops like a thousand caresses. We went up to the Stingelfelsen, a cliff from where you could look out over into the Austrian forests and, to the left, at the castle ruins of the Vítkovci. Sometimes she would look hard at the Danube plain, raise her hand and say, “Now!” and in the distance you saw the Alpine glacier suddenly flash blue-white.

  Some days I sat on the bench I’d built and, feeling light-hearted, would hum a tune to myself or whistle quietly. She might listen for a while then say, “Hurting?” I’d stop whistling and didn’t know if I was sad now because of what she’d said or if she’d noticed, despite my whistling, that I’d been sad all along.

  She never spilled a drop of anything, nothing she ever carried broke, everything she did was almost inaudible, and objects seemed to eagerly obey her. She just needed to sing to them now and then, not songs or melodies I’d heard before, no sentences that made any kind of sense, but something like this:

  Broom . . Bench . . Ground-deep …

  Bench-ground . . High-ground …

  Or in a completely unintelligible language:

  Ameta . . Pumeta … Pumerover …

  Ashes . . Alfish . . Anteclover …

  Sometimes it rhymed and almost sounded like an incantation if she sang while going about her chores, sweeping out the room, scrubbing the pots or firing up the stove. If I happened to misplace something, a pencil or a book, and was rummaging around my attic or the downstairs room trying find it, Otti gave me a quick glance then proceeded with unerring accuracy to where the sought-for object was hiding, took it from among the other things and handed it to me. And when I’d carelessly closed a book without putting a bookmark between its pages, she would take it and open it with a single movement to precisely where I had stopped reading, pointing to the paragraph.

  “Does she go to school?” I asked the teacher Macho.

  “No, she’s sick.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “We had her here when she was six. But she never adapted to the other children. We tried it over and over, each year. But her behavior is bizarre and she always gives the wrong answers.”

  “What kind of answers?”

  “If you ask her, for example, ‘Who created the world?’ she’ll say, ‘I created the world.’ Of course all the children start laughing, and the whole lesson is disrupted. When she’s supposed to pray the ‘Our Father’ she says, ‘Our Mother,’ and it’s impossible to make her change it. I tried to teach her reading and writing. I didn’t succeed. If I tell her, ‘Write the word: sun!’ she points with her finger out the window but refuses to write it down. When she’s supposed to read, she takes the primer, glances at it, but says something completely different from what the book says, sometimes completely senseless words, and all the children start to laugh again. Or, right in the middle of class, she starts telling a kind of made-up fairy tale. Once, all of a sudden, she jumped up from her desk and yelled, ‘Fire!’—‘Where?’ I asked her.—‘In Hüttenhof,’ she said. Hüttenhof is at least a half-hour’s walk from the schoolhouse. Strangely enough, there really was a fire there. But how can you teach a child like this in the same classroom with the others? All the children shun her, no one wants to sit next to her or play with her.”

  I asked the pastor, “Does Otti go to church?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “Toni brings her a few times a year. He’s an oddball himself, if not to say downright unchristian. With a girl like that, though, it isn’t easy.”

  “How does she behave?”

  “She doesn’t sing with us, she doesn’t pray with the others. When she’s supposed to kneel or stand during Mass, you always have to nudge her first, and then she doesn’t necessarily do it. There’s always the danger that she’ll butt in right in the middle of the liturgy or homily, and shout: ‘The wind is coming.’ or ‘A deer is running.’ She turned my Scripture lessons upside down. For a while I tried individual instruction, but you can’t get anywhere with her. A doctor from Krummau examined her and asked her a lot of questions. In the end he declared her abnormal. What a shame!”

  I brought up Stifter Otti at the tavern.

  “She’s nuts, that girl,” said Hochholdinger.

  “But not particularly dangerous,” said cobbler Poferl. “Been that way since her mother died,” Hochholdinger added by way of explanation. “Talks gibberish ever since. A girl like that, without a mother, is no end of trouble.”

  “She’s something special if you ask me,” said the American Feiferling, who added after giving it some thought: “I read something once about a magnetic girl who attracted lightning.”

  Otti’s father, Toni, took his daughter’s eccentricities for granted. “Is it gonna rain?” he’d ask her. “Go find some mushrooms,” he’d tell her, or: “Get some cress.” It never occurred to him that she’d come back empty-handed. Or if she suddenly paused and listened while drying the dishes, he’d say, “Here comes ano
ther one.” And what do you know, Skinny the dog began barking a few minutes later and, down by the flume, someone walked past.

  Otti seemed both older and younger than other twelve-year-olds. She was certainly a beautiful child, not thanks to any specific features but to their harmonious whole. Her entire body took part in every one of her movements; with every glance, her perfect being resonated. When she spoke it was not just her mouth but everything about her that did so, and often her eyes said enough.

  When her father came home, tired from felling trees or doing some odd job, she knelt down next to his chair, took both of his hands in hers and looked at him. A few moments later he’d be refreshed. He was so used to these things that he’d come to expect it. She had done this with me several times as well, with the same effect.

  That’s the way Otti was, and I, too, grew accustomed to her special manner and peculiar talents. Some things are inexplicable; we have no choice but to accept them. The incident with Ludwig, for instance, the little village boy who’d gone missing and was nowhere to be found one evening. He must have gotten lost in the woods. The forest never seemed too threatening at first. But the forest was endless. There were boulders that a child could fall from and hurt himself. There was Cholmer pond, and just a two-hour walk away the lake—and the lake was deep. There were primeval tree trunks that suddenly fell. And there was much, much more that you normally didn’t think about but which suddenly seemed menacing to an agitated mind.

  It was late at night. Ludwig’s parents had already asked around everywhere. Groups of villagers combed the forest, brandished lanterns, called and shouted. They came to us, too. Neither Toni nor I knew what to tell them. Only Otti, whom no one had asked, and who stood there with her eyes closed, said something. She said: “Bühhübel.” The Bühhübel was a hidden ledge on one of the slopes of the Hochficht. It was at least an hour’s walk to get there.

  It was strange how we all headed to the Bühhübel without any further debate. Otti led the way. A bright-red dawn was breaking by the time we arrived. The boy, Ludwig, was lying there unconscious and inert, one foot jammed between a rock and a tree trunk, which must have fallen while he was playing there. The foot was probably badly injured. The tree trunk could barely be lifted, and no one dared to roll it over. Otti took one look and said, “Dig!” Someone had a shovel. Otti pointed to a certain spot under the rock and said, “There!” Just a few stabs with the shovel and the stone was loosened so well that the child could finally be freed.

  “She does have something special, that girl,” admitted Hochholdinger.

  “Magnetic, that’s what she is,” explained the American Feiferling.

  The summer gradually began its retreat from the forest, and September and October were already on my mind. Early autumn was beautiful in this area, the beeches were ablaze in the pine groves, rowan berry clusters reddened, and late flowers were advancing; the air was silent once the morning fog had dispersed in crystalline purity above the varied formations of nature, and the mountain water in the stone trough outside the house had become so cold that you had to set down your cup once or twice while drinking.

  “What you writing?” Otti asked me once when I was sitting at the table under the spruces. She’d hardly ever asked any questions before, and her speech had always been terse, except when she was singing one of her quirky songs.

  “I’m making something up,” I said.

  “Like trees do?”

  “Like dreams.”

  “What are dreams?”

  “Don’t you ever dream?”

  She looked at me, clueless.

  “When you sleep and then wake up, don’t you ever remember what happened in your sleep?”

  “Never,” she said. “Do they dream?” she then asked, pointing to the heather.

  “Maybe. Nobody knows.”

  From that point on she asked questions every day, and she always began with some word or other.

  “Moon,” she said, and seemed proud that she knew the name. It was morning and the moon was still visible, shimmering white above the woods.

  “What about the moon?”

  “Always different.” She said it like a question.

  I tried to explain this phenomenon to her. She listened attentively and earnestly, but walked away without a word.

  I’d observed that for some time now early in the morning, when her day began, she would stand at the doorpost and, using a piece of charcoal, make a mark above her head. There were already a lot of marks there, one right on top of the other. She combed herself before the windowpane in the kitchen, which is where she slept. She took great pains with her two pigtails, and even wove a piece of green ribbon into them that she’d once found on the ground somewhere.

  One of the Sundays was the parish fair. Herr Kari had fixed up the bowling alley. In the tavern garden, the veterans’ association had set up a wheel of fortune. There were prizes to be won: a “Sandauer” snuffbox, for instance, or coffee mugs, painted plaster dogs, sweets and things made of gingerbread. Three strikes in a row while bowling could win you a ham in tin foil. There was also a Watschenmann, a punching doll made of cast iron with a head that barely moved. When you hit him in the face, a hand on the dial would leap up, indicating your strength. In the morning the deacon of Oberplan had celebrated an outdoor Mass. The veterans’ associations from the area had marched in with their flags, from Untermoldau, Neuofen, Salnau, Okfolderhaid, Oberplan and, finally, belatedly, from Kirchschlag. (“Typical Kirchschlag,” said Hochholdinger.) They were all decked out for a parade. The cobbler Poferl was wearing his fire brigade commander’s uniform. Herr Feiferling had a nondescript, presumably American badge in his buttonhole. “You should see how we Americans do a parade,” he said.

  “How’s that?” asked Poferl.

  “The drum majorettes out in front dance in the middle of the street.”

  “Why didn’t you bring us one?”

  Many people came from across the border in Austria, too, from Aigen and Ulrichsberg, including a Schrammel quartet, which struck up dance tunes at three in the afternoon. Songs were sung in between, and Hochholdinger put on quite a performance.

  Bismarck and ol’ Gorchakov,

  One day they took a walk.

  And Bismarck says to Gorchakov:

  You and me should have a talk …

  That was an old number, in which the Russian prince Gorchakov didn’t fare so well.

  “Try your luck, Otti,” I said at the wheel of fortune. She didn’t seem to understand me entirely, but number twelve won her a gingerbread hussar, which she henceforth carried tucked under her arm.

  The Schrammel quartet played waltzes, gallops and polkas, and the couples moved more ceremoniously than gaily, even to the faster rhythms. The dancers held each other tightly, but their faces were almost solemnly grave, the girls’ heads gently tilted to one side, their eyes half closed. Their skirts undulated like waves, glistening white and foamy.

  Towards evening I accompanied Otti back home. We’d lost her father in all the hullaballoo. Behind the village, in the patch of forest we had to cross, the late sun was still shining. There was a spot where the flume took a slight bend, where a path led up to the slopes of the Hochficht. The child stopped there, and I watched her for a while as she listened intently.

  “There,” she finally said, and began to climb the path. We walked through trees for a while, then we came to a clearing. It was almost dark. She stopped and pointed to the opposite edge of the meadow.

  Two people lay there in each other’s arms. It was hard to tell if it was an embrace or maybe a murder. I pulled the child away, back down to the street. It was dark now. I heard her sobbing.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “It was nothing,” I added, glossing over it. “They were being good.”

  But she kept on sobbing. It was the first time I’d heard her crying.

  “Did you lose your pumpernickel hussar? I’ll buy you another.”

  Toni got home a little later
than we did. The child ladled soup into a bowl. But it fell from her hand and broke into pieces.

  Sleep came to me late that night. My thoughts of the child held it back. Like clear granite water bursting forth from its secret source, following the pure laws of gravitational motion and earthly order, running its flawless course to the border where human-conditioned misery intrudes! Her mother had apparently taught her some things after all. But the most important things are taught naturally. Something else had then taken the place of her mother, had taken her to its bosom and offered her deep revelations bestowed on no one else; included her in a community closed to others; brought her into harmony with totality and being, so the flower would bow to her and quartz would shine in her hand. It should have been no problem for her to find gold in these mountains. She disrupted class and the Sunday sermon. They’d tried to teach her what was right and where God dwelled, because they knew precisely where. She didn’t know; but she existed. Being refused to exchange itself for knowledge, just as agate isn’t prone to leave its druse and reveal its stripes, but is forced to do so through cutting and polishing. The agate probably thinks: I no longer exist. But people say: How beautiful it is now! How anxiously she charts her growth on the doorpost! How utterly alone she is!

  I walked through the forest more than ever now. I walked through the high-lying valley over to the woods by the lake, the ones described in stories, and followed the narrow path around the lake, encircled as if by a crown of thorns by tangled rootstocks and fallen tree trunks scoured white. I climbed up to the obelisk in memory of the man who’d stood there once and heard the heart of the high forest beating, as well as the heart of the world, his own heart and the heart of God. I heard the giant stampers stamping and heard the echo of timber being felled.