Up higher ran the border, along the highest ridge, separating secrets from each other, one breath here, another there, a different way of looking, laughing, crying. You walked passed a stone and things became different; why, no one could explain. Here lay the one world, there the other, the line between them invisible and abrupt, like the way a fraction of a second can suddenly divide and transform. I sometimes met Otti on paths like these. “You here too?” she called and kept walking. She must have had her business in the woods, sometimes near, sometimes far; she walked off the beaten path and knew about trails that no one else did, except perhaps for the deer and foxes.
She’d starting becoming sad, though. You could see it at home, in her movements. She hardly ever sang songs anymore. Sometimes I’d see her around the stream, her open hand in the water. The water was icy now, and I said: “Be careful!” But she didn’t look up and seemed not to hear me. I saw her hands imploring the autumnal plants, but the plants wouldn’t move. She fulfilled her obligations at home, of course, but her movements no longer had the grace and beauty of being in tune with nature.
One evening she came home late.
“Where’ve you been so long” asked her father.
“Fisher-woman,” she said. “Had a question.”
I looked at her and saw that she wasn’t a child anymore.
In what way does a person die? When his heart stops beating; that’s probably the most familiar way. Or by becoming like everyone else. Many people die like that and no one is aware of it, many times they themselves don’t notice, their whole so-called lives long; only very late does it sometimes dawn on them for a split second, but they brush it off like a speck of dust from their clothing. When you have the choice you don’t even know it, and by the time you know it you no longer have the choice. This is how it normally works.
Stifter Otti was supposed to enter a convent over in Austria. The priest had to twist her father’s arm to convince him that the nuns would take good care of her; that she could still go to school and learn something useful; that she was now grown up and they had to make sure she stayed on the straight and narrow; that he’d managed to get a scholarship for her and would pay the travel expenses himself, after all it wasn’t that far; that she should thank God for her good fortune, because with a little help from above she might someday belong to the Holy Orders herself or, if God has other things in mind, might lead a different sort of life, one that will still make her happy and which no one, least of all her father, is entitled to stand in the way of. What could Toni have possibly answered, given these many reasons?
He said, “If that’s the way it has to be.” But Otti lowered her head and said, “No!”
The fisher-woman came a few days later. She’d been a friend of Otti’s mother, even though she hardly entered the house, at least not since I was living there. “Mary ’n’ Joseph,” she said, “just look at this place,” even though it looked like it always did, and to my mind rather passable. “This place needs a hardworking woman,” she said, and I saw how Otti closed her eyes. Then the fisher-woman launched into a lengthy speech about how the priest just wants the best; she spoke about sin and ingratitude, and what a capital place St Matilda’s convent was, she’d been there on a pilgrimage, twelve girls to a room, no reason to be scared, the girls often have a whale of a time.
Toni said, “I’ve nothing against it.” But Otti said, “No!” Tears welled up in her eyes and she ran from the room.
The teacher Macho came too and tried to reason with her. “Look,” he said, “you have to make things a little bit easier on your father. No one’s going to bite your head off. Everyone’s very friendly at the convent. Morning, noon and evening you’ll get your meals, they cook the same for everyone. The nuns are good teachers. You have to learn something, you must realize that. You’re a big girl now. You’ll soon keep house better than Frau Kari does. And if your mother were still alive, she’d surely be happy for you.”
But Otti cried and said, “No, no, no!”
No one came for a week after that. Then one day, Otti came to me. I was sitting in the attic at my desk, writing and occasionally looking through the skylight, between the spruces and into the countryside. She’d probably been standing behind me a while without my even noticing, because you couldn’t hear when she entered. But this time she laid her hand on my arm, which she’d never done before, and I looked up.
I waited, not daring to say a word in the presence of this delicate creature. I felt her respond to my silent waiting, and when she was ready she said, very quietly: “Should I?”
She stood there and I marveled how much she’d actually grown. Her gaze hovered moistly past me. She shivered as if there were a draft in the room.
“Should I?”
She stood erect and slightly swaying, like a mullein or an iris.
I said, “Look, that’s life. I don’t know much about it. But it doesn’t always do what we want. I know that much. I think it’s worth a try. Fish follow the course of the stream, or they try to swim against the current; but they have to stay within its banks. You know that.”
“Never come,” she said, sadly.
“Maybe one day they will,” I said, but I was just saying. “Maybe different than you think,” I added.
“How, different?” she asked.
“You have to see for yourself,” I said, “there’s no way of telling.”
I saw her crying. I saw her head slowly wilt on her chest. She left quietly, the same way she’d come. I heard the door fall shut downstairs and saw her walk through the spruces towards the forest.
She didn’t come back that evening. Her father and I ate alone. She didn’t come back that night. We set out to search and make some inquiries. We searched and asked for days. Then one day the lake gave an answer, lifting her between pale roots up onto its shore.
WHERE THE VALLEY ENDS
IF YOU WALKED northwest from Plöckenstein Lake, downhill through the high forest, after about three-quarters of an hour you reached a small woodcutters’ settlement, there where the valley basin ends. The settlement was made up of barely two dozen houses on both sides of the stream. The stream, not wider than a stone’s throw and not deeper than a walking stick, formed the dividing line between the two rows of houses on either bank. At the spot where both rows ended at the bottom of the valley, a footbridge joined the two branches of the road that led first from the lake to the settlement, then from there to the village of Neuofen, an hour’s walk in the opposite direction on the other side of the stream.
Although you could virtually see and hear everything that happened on the opposite bank, even understand almost every word that wasn’t whispered; and although you might think that people who lived in the same acoustic area would be closely linked by a host of other things as well, still it made a huge difference which side you lived on—that is to say, if according to the local terminology you belonged to the right-bankers or to the left-bankers. The village as a whole was called Hirschwalden.
Certainly atmospheric factors played a role in this profound division. The right-bankers, underneath tall spruce trees at the top of the slope leading up from the lake, were more in the shade and only got some sun in the late afternoon, whereas the left-bankers, even though they lived at the foot of a hill, could count on getting sunlight almost all day long. They also claimed to be the older original inhabitants, and had slightly more fertile soil, though the difference was rather negligible, as both groups were basically poor cottagers and loggers with a few goats and cows and this or that patch of potatoes or oats. The forest was ultimately the real and indispensable means of survival for all of them, though none of it belonged to the left-bankers or to the right-bankers; it all belonged to the princely estate, which had installed a forester and set up a forester’s lodge right where the two parts of the settlement converged.
The forester’s lodge, in other words, represented the neutral and as it were abstract center of the village, all the more so considering th
at the forester did not hail from Hirschwalden. Though a German from the Egerland, his name was Jelen, at which point it should be noted that the name is actually Czech and means “deer,” or Hirsch in German, a name which certainly befitted a forester and was particularly well suited to Hirschwalden. The surnames in bilingual Bohemia were always very mixed. A few minutes’ walk from the forester’s lodge, that is to say a good distance from Hirschwalden, was a mountain tunnel built more than a hundred years before and which the much older, princely timber float passed through; and not far away, in Jokuswalde, was the Bärnstein, a rocky summit where sometime in the middle of the last century the last bear of the Bohemian Forest was shot. This five-minute-long tunnel and the Bärnstein were well-known sights and landmarks of the area.
Being neighbors—and this is true not only for the residents of Hirschwalden, but for everywhere in the world—can make people helpful, but it can also make them brittle and touchy. The slightest indiscretion or weakness or absentmindedness can disrupt the balance that life in a neighborly community depends on. It’s a permanent risk. Now and then you do each other mutual favors, like lending out a shovel or a bucket. But watch out if someone gives the shovel back with a nick in it or the bucket with a tiny leak, which surely would have happened anyway if their owners had been using them, these objects being long in use. The man who asked to borrow it becomes the target of bitter, even malicious accusations that are not confined to the shovel or the bucket. He is careless, doesn’t know how to handle other people’s property, thinks he can get away with anything, is exploitative, selfish, greedy, and capable of the most heinous deeds. And the neighbor woman who breaks a borrowed jug, even though the jug had a crack beforehand and although she even replaced it—good gracious—the names she isn’t called! She’s disorderly, slovenly, degenerate, and always has been; and the jar was no ordinary jar like all the rest, but an especially precious one inherited from a grandmother or bought at a bargain price at an unforgettable parish fair, and no jug in the universe could compare with it.
Such trifles give rise to much loneliness within a close-knit community. Then there are the families: the hearths of love, but also the germ cells of self-seeking group behavior and mutual acts of presumptuousness. On top of this, everyone whom fate has favored just a little fancies that he’s capable of doing and understanding more than the others. That which a stroke of undeserved luck has happened to toss his way he expects the others to acknowledge as something he’s earned by dint of his superior skills; his better potatoes are due not so much to the quality of his farmland or the favorable location or simply to God’s assistance, but to his incredible talent in tilling and cultivating the soil. Added to this is the need to belittle others in order to feel stronger yourself, to savor the pleasure of negation, or indulge the urge for violence.
Over it all, curiously enough, hovers a superstructure of piety which isn’t even feigned. For while it is true that the elements, sickness and death spare no one, the mightiest life force is always rapid forgetfulness, that most assiduous reviver of error and evil.
Although the left-bankers took pride in their better haystacks and this or that slate roof they’d installed in place of the straw or wooden shingles, there had nonetheless been a painful counterforce at work for some time now which seriously damaged their reputation: the village idiot Alois. To make matters worse, he belonged to the most well-to-do family on the left bank, the Bierschimmlers, whose name referred to the fact that apart from being cottagers they also dealt in beer, not a taproom, which didn’t exist at all in Hirschwalden, but the retail sale of bottled beer. Needless to say, the right-bankers did not get their beer from Herr Bierschimmler, but one of them, Grünschmied by name, had his own beer-selling business.
Now, Alois was by no means a stupid-looking or repulsive creature, but a young and well-developed lad—as if nature had allowed itself a cautionary refutation of the old Roman saying about a sound mind in a sound body. He had never managed to speak in words, let alone in sentences, but had had two ways of expressing himself ever since he was a child: either shrieking with laughter or whining and crying. But the most absurd thing about it was that these utterances always came when the opposite was expected. He mourned on all occasions that were generally considered happy or pleasant, and shook with laughter when calamity struck, if someone was sick or died. In this case he had to be locked in the barn or somewhere else, but even then his shrill, unbroken laughter could be heard from far away in the valley.
Whenever something sad happened on the left bank, the right bank inevitably found out about it thanks to Alois’s unmistakable peals of laughter; and if a child was being christened, he let out a mournful wail. If a sudden thunderstorm broke and rain poured onto the freshly gathered hay, Alois giggled grimly, whereas a well-meaning sun was the cause of bitter moaning. Although he was strong enough to pull out a leiter-wagon stuck in the mud, he was useless for any kind of work, for whenever he laid a hand on something, no matter how good his intentions, the effects were always disastrous. If you let him chop wood, the head of the ax would fly off the handle; if he was supposed to hold the door open, he’d tear it off its hinges; he’d lift a sack of potatoes with one hand as if it were a feather, but would tear it open in the process; and he wouldn’t carry a crate of beer, he’d hurl it out of the cellar, breaking half the bottles. In short, wherever he set foot the grass no longer grew. Although he seemed well disposed towards children, he could nonetheless be a danger around them, for he always intervened in their little quarrels, and always took the side of the weak or disadvantaged, thus evincing a certain sense of justice, but he knew no limits in punishing the bad guy and had to be restrained lest he’d beat the malefactor to death if the latter didn’t save himself by making a hasty escape.
I learned all of this and, as will soon be seen, other things as well, having occupied a room at forester Jelen’s for a while, a room with a view of the entire village, both its left bank and its right. I had known Herr Jelen from my earliest childhood. He had once been the gamekeeper in the village where my father was born, my grandfather, the schoolmaster, had taught him how to read and write, and to me he was an important person, a friend who commanded my respect, back when I was a child and would spend the summer in that forest village together with my father.
I’d arrived in Hirschwalden by foot with a rucksack. Coming from the lake that summery afternoon, I reached the right bank whose houses seemed deserted to me. Blazing silence reigned all around, an almost uncanny stillness. Only at the little bridge beneath the forester’s lodge did I see a fellow squatting who brayed with laughter as soon as he saw me. I looked around me in search of a reason for this extraordinary hilarity. “What’s so funny?” I asked, slightly offended, but he kept on guffawing and gave no explanation.
Forester Jelen, whom I told about this abstruse laughter while drinking my welcome coffee, merely commented: “Ah, Bierschimmler Alois, he’s a fine boy, just one card shy, that’s all.”
During my visit, the latent antagonism between the left-bankers and the right-bankers would surface unmistakably. It happened like this.
The Bierschimmlers’ house was broken into one day while the family was out in the meadow. The losses were not that severe, but a freshly baked cheesecake did go missing; it had been on the table, cooling down, and was intended for the priest in Salnau on his name day. Bierschimmler’s wife raised a hue and a cry which, thanks to the laughter of her son Alois, turned into a fit of wild rage, which everyone on the right bank heard. The latter felt a certain satisfaction at the damage done to the Bierschimmler woman. They said the Bierschimmlers had had far too little stolen from them. The left-bankers had every reason to suspect Alois himself of having done it, as his gluttony was renowned. Yet Alois had an alibi, having spent the entire day in the meadows where hay was being cut, not actually working but loafing around where the others could see him. So the culprit must have been someone else.
In the course of the evening, Bierschimm
ler’s wife asked the Grünschmied woman across the stream if she’d maybe seen someone prowling around the house, because, after all, she’d been home all day and didn’t have any hay to make. Grünschmied’s wife took it amiss and replied that no one, save for the cats, would even touch the Bierschimmler woman’s cake.
“What?” screamed the Bierschimmler woman, “My curd cheese was mixed with egg yolks and raisins, and even had grated lemon peel!”
The mention of egg yolks and especially the raisins was bad enough, but the lemon peel was more than Grünschmied’s wife could bear and made her absolutely livid. “Lemon peel!” she screamed. “Your idiot son might buy that one.”
This was not what you might call tactful, and a torrent of invectives followed on the part of the insulted Bierschimmler woman. It was a lucky thing in this case that the stream flowed between them, else the two women would have attacked each other physically. But as if this shouting match weren’t enough, the plaintive howl of Alois added fuel to the fire, whereupon the Grünschmied woman couldn’t help but get even meaner, exclaiming: “If you get any more bent out of shape you’ll end up dropping dead with a stroke and your boy will be in stitches.” This still would have qualified as a catfight. But Grünschmied’s wife, as might be expected, claimed that Bierschimmler’s wife had accused her and the entire right bank of thievery. In just a matter of days, the assertions and counterassertions had become so entrenched and deep-rooted that the left bank took it for granted that the right-bankers were nothing but a pack of thieves; the latter, for their part, accused the left bank of having started the whole affair in the first place, with unknown but surely very evil intentions, to the detriment of the right bank.
The Last Bell Page 13