So except for the goodness which inheres in the pungent odor of apples baked because they are beginning to go off, Hannale had no one but Lars. For the last three years she had had nothing to look forward to but 156 anxiously awaited Saturdays or Sundays. Suppose he didn’t come?
It was worse than an orphanage; it was a home for unwanted children. So she would bend obediently over those minute but senseless studies and think she heard sea gulls. From talking too much about him at first, she had learned not to talk about her brother.
“The father, apparently, ran a fishing smack.”
*
There came a morning when Lars woke up and knew he could not stand it any more. It is like a man getting up suddenly: a bell has rung inside. Something quickens and goes faster than we do. If it gets us to our feet, the choice has been made for us.
In Lars’ case it was nothing more than pulling on those yellow boots. They were Mysendonck’s seven-league boots. They stood in a corner, rumpled and floppy. They were something he did not want to be. We strengthen ourselves by lifting weights, but the new muscles change us. And violence is as impersonal as the village idiot, and village idiots are alike; they are what jabbers out of the uniform, which frees us of ourselves so soon as we put it on. But so be it; they were massive and weighty; they would get him away. The noise they made hurried you past reason.
Splashing cold water on his face, he went to fetch Hannale. While he kept moving, he was something else, which had nothing to do with him, but now it was what was needed.
The béguinage was sheltered from the street by a high wall of fitted stone, whose base formed a sort of bench on either side of the gateway. Less and less encouraged to enter, he had taken to meeting her here. It was a gray wall, lichenous and mossy in the chinks of its courses.
Hannale sat by the wall, neatly turned out; the apple-baking lady saw to that. You might say she was wearing, though she did not know it, the interest on her capital. Since that could not be touched, it would have to be abandoned. Nobody is going to turn over interest-bearing money before he has to. He was not old enough to doubt the probity of established men, but he was old enough to know it was futile to ask them a favor unless you had the power of granting one. So leaving her money could not be helped.
Hannale’s feet dangled above the ground, and she was kicking her heels. He picked her up, hugged her, and set her down. Such was their custom. Absent-mindedly, he had brought two wicker creels for berries, it being that season. He took her hand and they walked away.
From the edge of the hillside wood, one could see the town, the river, the towers, also the now pale green treetops within the courtyard of the béguinage. It was May passing on toward summer. Below them, surrounded by minute puffs of dust, three people and a donkey with two panniers entered the gate. A tall, bony man in a long black robe came out and crossed a neighbor’s field.
It was a day suspended; the sun was not quite warm enough on the hand. Clouds stood moored in the sky, gently rocking. Above them wispier clouds moved smoothly west. There were little blue flowers in grass already turning dryly pale. Lars sat down on the bank, and felt decision ebb. He knew it must not. Stretched out before him, Mysendonck’s endless clumsy yellow boots seemed about to gulp him down. They clung to his thighs with the soft suck of fishes. Their heavy soles and heels seemed to want to make him rise. They weighted him to pull him erect, no matter how he felt about it. Hannale was watching him. She had been watching him all afternoon. He shaded his eyes.
“I’m going away. I have to go away.”
She was doing nothing, yet something inside her stopped.
“But I can’t leave you. Will you come?”
Something inside her, after a thump, began to move again. For answer, she got up and ran among the trees. Without using his hands, Lars levered himself up and, frowning at the town, went stumbling after her. He found her pressed up against the bole of a beech.
“I hate it there,” she said. “I hate it.” And she began to cry, not loudly, it was just a spilling over. “There’s never been anybody but you and Sister Clothilde, and she just bakes apples.” Then she really sobbed. She wanted a baked apple. She could smell it. He held her until it was over, which was soon.
“Do we go now? Oh Lars, let’s go now.”
He nodded yes. It was his plan to find their Uncle Stöss; he had no other. It at least gave them a goal.
She ran back toward the edge of the wood, three feet six inches of explorer. She had wanted to take a last look at that stream whose bank was Wollin. But it was hidden by bushes. She did not say that this was what she had wanted to do. She came back and took his hand. The tops of Mysendonck’s boots, which he had pulled up, came to her shoulder, and they creaked.
“I’m ready now,” she said. Taking that small warm confiding hand, he smiled down at her, and then peered uncertainly at the sun. Until they were far enough away, it would be better to avoid the roads.
Together they went into the dark wood, disturbing a branch that shimmered back into place after them. Five minutes after they had passed, it was as though they had never been. Underfoot, under Mysendonck’s feet, grew small fragrant clumps of shy violas, their scent obliterated by that of pine. But darkness came very soon.
30
These woods turned out to be full of living ghosts. Those whose world had died had taken to them. What protected Lars and Hannale was the astonishment of finding them there. The abrupt presence of a tall, gangly, fresh-faced boy, leading by the hand an immaculate moon child with eyes the pale shade of spiritual agate, startled everyone; and most women, and all men, however rude, would like to be kind, if only they could be sure there was no harm in it, that they would not be struck down by way of return. A child in whom can be perceived no future evil is so rare as to be sacred. Innocence is the oldest of our gods. Feeding Hannale was the next best thing to a folk communion, it gave the same satisfaction, and the boy treated her as though she were the representative of something holy.
But then, they were fortunate in their forest. Thieves go to one, those who refuse to be robbed to another. And peasants, unlike most people, have had centuries to learn that food is not something raised only to be bought and sold, food is all that stands between ourselves and death. So extortionate profits on very little of it had made it possible for them, once their patience had been exhausted by requisition direct and the other forms of robbery, to hide their remaining sausages in the woods. Thus there was plenty to eat, creeks to follow, springs to drink from, mushrooms, not much meat, some upland pastures for hay, milk, sometimes wine, goats, sheep, cheese, and cows. The farther you went in, the more there was.
They came one morning to what in that region was an upland meadow. By this time they had crossed the Spreewald and were somewhere near a place called Dahme. Six hundred feet in that countryside is an alp. They had not seen Dahme—kindly folk had warned them away from the roads and towns—but they had heard its bells. Their story was out by now. They were known as the Children of the Pastor. Impossible to explain that they were not; simpler to agree that they were. People this far inland did not know what the ocean was, let alone what it looked like.
They were out of the country of sand and getting into the country of limestone. At the far end of a boggy meadow, on the other side of a dribbling stream, folded outcroppings in the rock had formed caves. Which was to say good-bye, for the Marks have still something of the sea about them as far down as Berlin, because of the sand dunes.
Here they heard a lowing, and saw wattle fences at the mouths of the caves. It was where the peasants had hidden what was left of their cattle. At dusk there were fires hidden among the trees. If the man was sour, the woman took pity on them; if the women, whose life was devoted to counting small mounds of hoarded things, would not give up so much as a round of Thuringer, it was the men who felt ashamed. With the boys who tended the cows, it was Mysendonck’s boots that helped, for little boys have a hopeless admiration for bigger boys, and stand in
awe of clatter and panache. They have not yet learned to soak the world an universal gray. So Lars and Hannale did well. It was a walk in a haunted wood, scary but agreeable. At night they slept under the stars: it is not that they seem closer when looked up at from the ground, but that one falls endlessly among them, lost from lines and moorings and lightheaded. They are farther away than ever, but for a moment one leaves the earth. Here and there a comet or a meteor, darting out of sight like a minnow, hinted at an alien life lurking furtive and enormous in the black pools of the air.
Hannale, in the manner of the day, was dressed not like a child but like a small adult.
“Ay, you’ll have to watch out for her,” said a farmer fled from Jüterbog, for they were now on the heights, such as they were, of the Fläming, not far from Wiesenburg. And with horned hands he carved them meticulously a brown slab of goat cheese, that smells more than any other kind of rancid milk. “She isn’t pretty, but she has a way with her.”
Lars did not like this kind of talk.
“Soldiers do anything,” said the peasant. “Even your own sons turn different. Marry her off young, before they get at her. That’s my advice. If you don’t believe me, look at him over there.”
Lars looked, but saw nothing but the whites of avid eyes, by firelight.
“True, he’s the next best thing to an idiot. But so is the world,” said the old farmer. “I should know; I spawned him.” It seemed to be bothering him. “My daughter was raped. After that she didn’t fetch much. They don’t afterwards. Had to give a cow to get her wed. Didn’t get him nothing. Next lot through, they took the cow.” And finding it was better-than-average cheese, he wiped his hands on his pants and offered Lars another slice. “You watch out. One thing to having your last son simple: tell him to do something, he does it all day. Good to mind cows.” And he went on masticating his cheese, half wise man, half dromedary.
“What did he tell you?” asked Hannale, who had been with the women.
“Nothing much,” said Lars. It was his worst fear. “Don’t you go wandering off.”
That night he didn’t get to sleep until the idiot boy was sleeping. And in the morning he got them out of there early.
The blubbering oaf stepped out from a tree before them.
“Get away.”
Instead the boy followed with a foolish, lopsided, lecherous grin. Lars knocked him down. He hadn’t meant to. It just came out of his arm, and kicking him seemed natural.
The simple are clumsy. Knock them over, and it takes them a turtle time to get up again. But Lars hadn’t cared for the crablike way the idiot’s hands had crept over his face while he was being kicked. He had seemed to expect and enjoy it.
“I liked him. He gave me water,” said Hannale after a while.
“You didn’t like him,” shouted Lars, and startled, said nothing for the next hour.
Two days later they began to descend through long slow woods toward the Elbe, and the devastated pasture lands around Magdeburg. The blackened walls of the town, half cast over, held behind them no silhouette but the spire of the Dom.
31
Lars had no idea (how should he form it?—besides, such people are unconscious of such things) that there was something about him people hesitated to harm, and did their best to avoid. It was innocence. It is the most inexorable and therefore the most hated form of authority. It is easy to cheat but hard to deal with, and most men have not the heart to destroy it. It is so rare.
“But you can’t,” said the Pastor, to whom this matter had been referred, and he looked helpless. “Have you any idea how far it is to Blicksburg? It is on the other side of the war, and the roads are clogged. There is plague. We are not even safe here.”
It was true. The town outside the converted chapter house was a field of ash and cinders, blackened and stretching to the scorched walls, what was left of them. They were being mended, but the work went slow. A bush tugged in the wind where formerly had been a house. Here and there, in those areas which had been gardens, bulbs had come up early, encouraged by the warm ash, and their brown desiccated husks left over from blooming rustled above a low scab of tenacious orange-flowered weeds.
Through cracks in the boarded-up windows, they could hear the carpenters running up temporary hovels. It seemed tentative.
“Did you know my uncle?”
“Slightly,” said the Pastor shortly. “We did not know he had relatives.”
“What is he like?”
“Like? I did not know him well. But you can’t possibly—You are not alike. He was dark, very dark.” And the Pastor stared at this disturbing lout, this apparition in elkskin shorts, those huge boots, a worn white shirt, clean but darned and rumpled, a shock of tow hair. The thing to do was to get him out of here. Remembering Stöss, he felt a moment of compunction.
“Have you any money?”
“Some.” Lars did not lie well.
“There was once something called Peter’s Pence,” said the Pastor. “But Protestants are poorer.” And handed him ten schillings, two pfennig.
Lars looked at the dingy bits in his palm.
“Take it.”
“But why are you doing this?”
The Pastor had no idea why he was doing it. He was good with the sick. He was good with the dying. He was good whenever you asked him to be. But for once he had been moved by an individual face, and he did not like to be moved by people in the singular. He found it disturbing.
He got Lars out of there, wished him good luck, found he meant it, and left to himself, glowered at the wall.
I do not like to be kind. It makes me shy. It is too much like being haunted by a face in the crowd. Forever. Mutton broth for the poor is so much easier. I am a foolish man. I have been touched by beauty. Did we but know which crowd was to contain that face, we could evade joy, we would then be invulnerable in our goodness. As it is, we are always unprepared. And what’s more I will never see him again.
Good, said the Pastor, and did not mean it.
*
Lars had left Hannale in the Dom. Its windows were empty except for a few molten clinkers from the fire. It had not been possible to replace the glass yet.
The building was so empty, so shadowy, so big, he could not call out, it took him a while to find her. On the cold flags Mysendonck’s boots rang like metal.
Und dass mein eignes Ich, durch nichts gehemmt, Herüberglitt aus einem Kleinen Kind mir wie ein Hund umheimlich stumm und fremd. Why not? They have such mute and grateful tongues.
“Uncle Stöss isn’t here,” he explained. “We’re going to a tavern. Are you hungry?”
Why is there no statue of St. Joseph with the infant Christ, ever? He is a relegated father. And yet big brothers with their little sisters can be as pathetic and confidential as the Virgin and child.
“You’ve got your dress all hiked sideways,” he said, and straightened it. It was a womanish building. They left.
The tavern fed them well and it was good to be in a building again, for was he not ten schillings two pfennig rich? He contented himself with scowling and poking food into Hannale. She looked so small and modish, opposite him, they might have been grown-ups. Two men at a far table were talking about him and nudging each other.
“Recruiters,” said the woman who served them.
“Oh.”
“It’s not so bad, but you never get paid,” she said. “Sometimes they steal people. Because of the bounty.” She mopped the table. “Everybody’s in the army. There’s no disgrace in it. There isn’t anything else to do any more.”
“We need a room. A room to ourselves.”
Business for the house was another matter. After a nod, the two men shrugged and went out.
“Well, aren’t you the solemn little miss,” said the woman to Hannale.
Hannale gave Lars that patient scornful look children get when the furniture is too big for them. To play grown-up is only fun with other children. Being let in among them isn’t the same thing.
They got a room for two schillings (which left seven schillings, four pfennig), and what was more, the sheets were practically clean, and there were no bedbug holes in the eiderdown. He told her about Uncle Stöss and Blicksburg. She thought that would be an adventure. Though she got tired sometimes, and was apt to shy at shadows, she had yet to learn fear.
From beyond the open window came the odor of May flowers. Like the crown of thorns, they are spiny but have blossoms. It was sheets again, for the first time in three years. He curled around her in his sleep, like a small boy who has smuggled a black puppy into the bed.
“Lars?”
Grunt.
“Will there be leopards?”
But he was asleep. He was a stranger, but she had known him all her life. He was a warm rock. Sure of the world again, but timid, she followed him down into unconsciousness.
Next morning they faced south, toward the unknown, deeper and deeper inland. He did not want her to guess how uncertain he felt, and kept squinting at the sun as though it were some sort of glaring map.
Behind them the trumpets sounded, for though there was no town, the turmmusik had been restored by the dead order of Great Gustavus. He was two years gone, but he was still obeyed; he had believed that old customs should be kept up. There is no sound more lost than a winding horn.
32
“This is a thing that no one ever grasps fully, and it is too dreadful to lament about: that everything glides and flows by us. And that my own self, without anything to hinder it, glided over to me out of a small child as mute and strange to me as a dog.”
Below him the immense griefs stood at the end of overgrown boxwood alleys, like statues. They could be seen, but because of the overgrowth not reached. This place had been magisterially planned. It is easy to think this way, and yet it means nothing. Like life, it is merely phenomenal. Our twenty-first year, our fiftieth, our sixtieth, our seventy-fifth, stands before us like a stick in the tide, showing us the wet mark of the neap, in whose recession we are caught for life. And over the great coastal ports of the North there hangs a cloud. There is less traffic here than formerly.
People of the Book Page 21