The Last Bell

by Johannes Urzidil

  The embittered Bierschimmler, whose wife was constantly badgering him and who considered himself and his family to have been the victims of insult and injury, soon resorted to retaliatory measures. He suddenly demanded from Birkner, a right-banker who had absolutely nothing to do with the conflict, repayment of a two-year-old loan that the man had taken out to purchase a cow and to date only paid off in part. Since Birkner was unable to pay upfront, Bierschimmler demanded the cow as collateral and, when this was refused, proceeded forthwith, while Birkner was out chopping wood, to have the animal driven to his own pasture, even going so far as to have it milked.

  Birkner called this highway robbery, and he probably wasn’t entirely wrong, and so a few days later a group of right-bankers appeared on Bierschimmlers’ pastureland and drove the cow right back to the opposite bank, to Birkner’s pasture.

  Far from accepting this state of affairs, Bierschimmler threatened to sue and even took the trouble one Sunday after Mass to visit the lawyer in Salnau and present his case. This cost him a full five crowns, for which sum the relevant laws were explained to him, namely, that, while he undoubtedly had a claim to the remaining amount of one hundred and twenty-seven crowns, he could not as yet assert a right to the cow itself, which could only be seized as collateral once the courts had determined that the amount of the debt could in fact not be recovered.

  Birkner agreed to raise the amount requested, but demanded for his part that Bierschimmler reimburse the equivalent value of the fifteen liters of milk he had unlawfully extracted during the wrongful confiscation of said cow. Bierschimmler, however, refused to do so, pointing out that, first of all, he hadn’t milked fifteen liters and that, second, the cow had gorged itself on Bierschimmler’s rich pastureland during the days in question, which is why the milk produced belonged to him and no one else, an interpretation whose soundness one would justifiably be inclined to doubt.

  Then one day the volcano really erupted when Alois was discovered on the grazing patch of Birkner, lying under the cow at issue and feasting himself straight from the udder. Now, no one will deny that milk warm from the cow is tasty if not wholesome, but Birkner’s wife, a strapping woman who caught Alois red-handed, grabbed a nearby stick and tried to chase the boy away, who broke out into roaring laughter. In doing so she scared the cow. The animal, out of its wits, ran into a granite block and subsequently broke its leg. The cow thus had to be slaughtered.

  At that, Birkner filed suit against Bierschimmler, demanding three hundred crowns in damages for the loss of the cow in addition to compensation for the fifteen liters of unlawfully milked milk, not to mention the milk that Alois had made his own. Bierschimmler objected that it’s really no concern of his if the Birkner woman chases her cow into a rock, and that he was not about to forgo collecting the hundred and twenty-seven crowns in debt owed to him. The lawyer in Salnau explained that, while Bierschimmler was indeed responsible for the actions of his mentally incompetent son, that is to say for guzzling warm milk straight from the cow, he was not accountable for the reckless conduct of the Birkner woman and its regrettable consequences.

  The Birkner woman, for her part, in an effort to bolster her and her husband’s case, took refuge in the allegation that Alois had acted threateningly towards her, what’s more had even acted as if he’d wanted to lay hands on her in a rather unseemly manner. Thereupon the Bierschimmler woman yelled across the stream that the Birkner woman was an old frump and that no one in their right mind would ever think of touching her, probably not even her husband, who’s been married to her for twenty years and still has no children. The Birkner woman shrieked back: “Better to have no children than to bring a fool into this world!”—whereupon the Bierschimmler woman began chucking stones across the stream at the Birkner woman, none of which hit their target. The right-bankers, in their fury, declared that no woman or girl on their side of the stream was safe, their lives and honor now being at stake. The very next night, a number of the Bierschimmlers’ windows were smashed.

  The following Sunday, the Salnau priest gave a sermon on the question, “Are we not all children of God?” But the pastor’s exhortations were interpreted in completely different ways on the right and the left bank, respectively. Each side viewed itself as children of God and the opposite side as children of the Devil intent on no less than conquering and subjugating the whole valley, which for them was tantamount to the whole world.

  Forester Jelen, who’d kept out of the dispute until then, suggested to Bierschimmler that they go back to the roots of the issue and find out who actually stole the infernal cheesecake. But Bierschimmler and his followers explained that it had long since ceased to be about the blasted cheesecake; it was about more important, fundamental things at this point. That was grist for the right-bankers’ mill, who now insisted there had never been a cheesecake in the first place, that it was nothing but an invention of the left-bankers, who, notoriously despotic and malicious, were spoiling for a fight and eager to take it out on the peace-loving right bank. And, anyway, forester Jelen, who wasn’t even from these parts, should really mind his own business. These were bold words; but in the final analysis the right and the left bank were agreed on one thing at least. It was a questionable attitude, to be sure, because forester Jelen ultimately assigned the logging jobs so essential to Hirschwalden’s livelihood. Nevertheless, this occasion revealed the basic animosity of everyone against the estate owners, whose forest with its deadwood, mushrooms, grass, berries and wildlife everyone exploited in his own way anyhow, viewing these as public property unlawfully withheld from them. Moreover, the villagers were well aware that the forester knew better than to deprive them of their logging work, and in purely technical terms was hardly in a position to do so anyway, being all but completely dependent on them in this remote border region.

  The Salnau lawyer proposed a settlement between Bierschimmler and Birkner with regard to the slaughtered cow, which with a little bit of common sense should certainly have been within the realm of possibility, but ended up getting nowhere. Because Bierschimmler’s broken windows were now added to the equation. What’s more, the womenfolk were unable to forget the chain of insult and injury inflicted on each other, and kept on hounding each other however they could. Besides, the controversy that had been unleashed satisfied a deep emotional need on the part of everyone involved.

  The latter now included not only the adults, but the children as well. They heckled and jeered each other in every imaginable way, often ending in an exchange of blows, the girls no less pugnacious than the boys. That precious gift of nature—children playing together wholly apart from the world of adults—was poisoned, because even within these rival camps they were no longer free and uninhibited. Some were suspected of defecting, others turned into boasters and braggarts. The loud and ill-natured began to call the shots; the meek and better-natured had to cower and hide. Only the harebrained Alois could break up the occasional fight and calm down flaring tempers; all he had to do was approach them and the presence of this strong, unpredictable boy was enough to disperse the combatants and at least postpone their conflict.

  That was how things stood while I lay in the sun one afternoon, in the meadow in front of the forester’s lodge. It was especially quiet, as always at this time of day. But this quiet now had a disturbing character, because you never knew if the noisy quarreling of women and children would suddenly erupt again. I lay and tried to read; or, rather, I daydreamed in an open book, in Stifter’s My Great-Grandfather’s Notebook, which was set in these parts. “Read the poet in his land,” someone had instructed me once, a correct though not always practicable piece of advice, if you don’t want to limit yourself to writers from those few countries you happen to have access to in the course of a relatively brief life. All the same it seemed like a special privilege to engage with the poet of the forest in this valley of all places, even though his gentle law no longer held sway at this point in time.

  I constantly strayed from the page, as th
e case of the left bank vs. the right bank preoccupied me incessantly, and I wondered how hard it would be to bring it to any kind of conclusion and make the combatants understand that you can never actually win a war. For nothing makes the just man more sad than complete triumph, since he knows how convoluted justice and injustice are at bottom, and that even the most righteous person only has half a case before God. That’s why no war, it seemed to me, had ever really come to an end; at some level it always continued even after it was over. Because a war is quickly divorced from its immediate causes, acquires a life and momentum of its own. It might be possible to refute this philosophically, depending on whether you view peace or war as the primary state; in the history of human activity, peace has always been a desirable aim but, alas, has never played a leading role. At present no one in the valley of Hirschwalden seemed to be in a peaceful mood, except the forester Jelen, myself and presumably the fool Alois.

  Each of us lived in our own separate world at the outer edge of the crater, in which black and red flames scuffled and tussled, and in which there seemed to be no love, or at least none that met the eye. Mother Nature, so the poet taught, ennobles human beings. She hints at what is essential, and all of her endeavors aim to eternalize the ephemeral. Her ultimate and hallowed aim always being life itself, so those with experience assured us, Mother Nature always tends to mutual assistance rather than enmity, otherwise she would be extinct. The pious, believing in a divine plan, have reached the same conclusion in their own way.

  How, among the people of this Arcadian valley, who lived in, with, and by virtue of nature, could such a total drive to annihilation emerge for such a trivial reason, sparing only the three outsiders? There must have been an error in my calculations. The greats negated the perpetuation of hatred, and from the fiery-molten vapors of the Montagues and Capulets they had the Phoenix soar in infinite love, the glory of purity and the apotheosis of sacrifice. Maybe the proper thing to do would be to look for a couple like Deucalion and Pyrrha, who ultimately threw rocks over their shoulders in order to create new human beings, paving the way for reconciliation. But it wasn’t that easy.

  The conflict persisted. No woman spread out her laundry behind the house to bleach it in the sun or baked bread in the brick oven behind the barn without shouting something hurtful or accusatory at a neighbor across the stream. It was inexplicable how so much guilt could have come together in such a small place. No cottager or logger ever missed an opportunity to blame the other side for something or other and make their lives difficult in every possible way. A downright creative ingenuity seemed to be at work here.

  The forester had to put up with it, indeed he even had to see to it that the left- and right-bankers, who used to work together in the same part of the forest, now be separated and kept as far away from each other as possible. Felling trees is a dangerous business. How easy it would be for an accident to happen, not always or exclusively the fault of chance or fate; and how easy it would be even in the case of an accidental disaster to see evil intentions and foist the blame on a colleague from the other bank whose only witness was God! But it’s almost a matter of principle that God’s testimony is only valid for the good. The rest get to know it belatedly.

  Something happened at the start of autumn that always happens at that time of year: Someone poached a deer. No one knew who it was, but the forester knew that someone in Salnau had eaten roast venison on Sunday. And, anyhow, a forester always knows the time of day. Jelen heightened his vigilance. But he was too experienced not to know that things like this are bound to happen in a forest and, provided it didn’t happen again, ultimately would have been inclined to let the matter drop if he hadn’t one day found a note under his door with the name of the alleged culprit.

  Now he had to investigate the matter.

  “I can’t allow anyone to accuse me of aiding and abetting a poacher,” he said. “I have a responsibility towards the forest owners. And of course I have a responsibility towards the wildlife, which has a right to huntsmanlike conduct.”

  It was not just a question of property or unlawfulness. The game population was contingent on ancient, established laws. This order allowed a certain number of animals to be claimed each year, no less but also no more. The right of human beings to presume an order of nature at all might have perhaps seemed contestable; but tradition elevates this right to ritual. That’s the way it was, after all, with all orders devised by human beings. Not even the forest owner himself would dare to violate these laws regarding the game population, the former, in the eyes of the forester, being nothing but a temporary overlord in a sinecure granted by a higher power to whom he, the forester, was ultimately accountable. This order, to his mind, was modeled after nature itself, or at least corresponded to the intentions of nature, which counterbalanced or contained an overabundance by means of famine or disease. The lessons learned from the days of yore determined the scope and permissible limits of this order. And the dignity of this experience was more sacred than the arbitrariness masquerading as freedom, however much it derived its claim from a certain hardship. What would become of the forest if anyone was allowed to raid and plunder it at will? The estate owners were no exception, and certainly could not have overridden the forester and asserted such rights by dint of ownership.

  All the same, it had never happened before in such cases that someone in the valley had denounced someone else. In their infringements against the princely forest they had always been united; no one had betrayed the other. This too was an almost hallowed tradition. The incident only showed the extent to which this solidarity had been undermined. Forester Jelen spoke about the denunciatory note with sadness.

  “And how do I know,” he said, “if the man who wrote it—and I think I know who wrote it—isn’t the actual offender himself?”

  He paced the room, distressed.

  “If I let it slide, I’ll indict myself and expose myself to calumny. And if I approach the man, all hell will break loose.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I said.

  It was evening. We went to the left bank. The man’s name was Schlehdorner. He was certainly poor enough.

  “Don’t you want to make amends?” asked the forester.

  “And what should I make amends for?” asked Schlehdorner. But it was plain from the look in his eyes that the question was hollow, a way to buy time. Anyway, the forester could probably smell if something was amiss in someone’s house.

  “You can come up with any excuse you like,” he answered, and we left. “What was the man supposed to say?” the forester later said. “But maybe I could have helped him out of it somehow.”

  The village breathed heavily that night. A final autumn storm had broken. Rumbling cannon fire was accompanied by the clatter of distant lightning. The din came from below as well as from above. The storm poured down and reared up towards the heavens all at once.

  In the morning a right-banker was found slain at the edge of the forest near his home.

  “The note was from him,” said the forester.

  “First objects, then animals, and now people too,” he added. He was a man of many thoughts.

  What else could be destroyed?

  At some point or another, human beings first entered this valley. First one, then the other. They were there for each other. They took wives and had children. The forest and their work sustained them, sustained their bodies and their souls. When God existed, the forest was His most beautiful and profound wonder. It was said and written that God existed. One felt it too, often enough.

  Then one day, the people became divided. Why that was so, no one could say. But from now on the stream could no longer merely flow, glitter over quartz and granite, make leaves and branches grow, babble through the willows and alders. It had to acquire a meaning: here left, there right! The measure of suffering doled out to each by nature was not enough. Sickness, death in childbed were not enough. The tree felled by the logger, the idiotic son whose language was sobbing and
laughing was not enough. It was not enough to be tired to the point of collapse just trying to sustain a meager existence. There were joys and pleasures, there were love, trust and support, but they couldn’t withstand the allure of “us” and “them.”

  Now the courts entered the valley, the officials and men in uniform. They questioned, interrogated, put under arrest. People were turned into witnesses. He said or did this, they said or did that. Everyone was innocent and everyone was guilty, depending on how you looked at it. Long-concealed abysses suddenly opened up. It was no longer just about a murder. Women cried alone in their homes; between crying they cocked their ears towards the stream; and if they heard a sound from the other side, they stole to the bank like predators and hurled the projectiles of their fury indiscriminately at another woman, who had probably been crying before as well. Alois’s gales of laughter resounded in ghastly staccato in between—or his wailing, like nocturnal cats or the hoot of the eagle owl. The sound of songbirds had long since vanished. “The swallows haven’t been here for years,” said the forester.

  *

  I left the valley on an autumn morning. Sun wove its gold in the misty slopes of the left bank. On the right bank the spruces rose up from their earnest shadow valleys. Cool and melodic, the stream escorted me. The forester waved from his door. No one else could be seen. From an elevation I took one last look at the village, which seemed to be dreaming away in the loving embrace of the mountains, in perfect harmony. Then I moved on. I’m still on the move.

  Years later I received a letter.

  “I’m alone here, as always,” wrote the forester. “But I do have some news. The people are obsessed with politics now. It was never like that before. Are you for it or against it? That’s all you ever hear now. They’re still fighting like they were before, but in a different way now. The only sensible person is Alois. I’ve grown quite old and am entering retirement, probably soon the everlasting kind.”