Beneath the Wheel (15 page)

Perhaps it would have helped him if the pastor had shown some interest in him. But what should the pastor have done? What he was in a position to give—knowledge, or at least the incentive to search for it—he had not withheld from the boy, and that was all he had to give. He was not one of those pastors whose competence in Latin is in doubt and whose sermons are drawn from well-known sources, but to whom you gladly turn in troubled times because of their kind eyes and the friendly words they have for all who suffer. Nor was Papa Giebenrath a friend or consoler, even if he made an effort to conceal his anger and disappointment from Hans.

Thus the boy felt abandoned, unloved; he sat around in the small garden sunning himself, or lay in the woods and gave himself up to his dreams or tormenting thoughts. He was unable to find solace in reading because his eyes and head would begin to hurt as soon as he opened a book, and the ghost of his days at the academy and all his fears would return to haunt him, filling him with dreadful dreams during which he felt as if he were choking and being riveted by burning eyes.

In these desperate and forlorn straits, another ghost approached the sickly boy in the guise of a treacherous comforter that gradually became familiar and indispensable: the thought of death. It was easy enough to obtain a gun or to attach a noose to a tree somewhere in the forest. The thought of death accompanied him on his daily walks. He inspected various quiet, lonely places until he finally chose one where it would be good to die. He designated this as the place where he would definitely end his life. He visited it time and again, and sitting there derived peculiar pleasure from imagining how they would soon find his corpse there. He not only chose a branch for the rope but had tested it—no further obstacles stood in his way. Little by little he composed a brief farewell letter to his father and a much longer one to Hermann Heilner. They were to be found on his corpse.

These preparations with their sense of purposefulness exerted a beneficial influence on his state of mind. Sitting under the fateful branch, he enjoyed many hours during which the pressure lifted from him and a feeling of almost joyous well-being overcame him.

He did not really know why he hadn't hanged himself long ago. His mind was made up, he had passed the death sentence on himself, and this made him feel so well that in the meantime he did not scorn—in these his last days—the enjoyment of sunshine and his solitary dreams in the way you do before setting out on a long trip. He could leave any day he chose, everything was settled. And he took particular and bitter satisfaction in lingering voluntarily for a while in his old surroundings, looking into the faces of people who had no idea of his dangerous resolve. Whenever he encountered the doctor, he could not help thinking: “Well, my friend, I'd almost like to be around to see the face you'll make.”

Fate allowed him to enjoy his gloomy intentions. She watched him every day sipping a few drops of joy and zest from the cup of death. There might be precious little in store for this crippled young being, but nonetheless it must complete its appointed course and not leave this earth before having drunk a little deeper of life's bitter-sweet waters.

Inescapable, oppressive images haunted him less and less frequently. He gave way to a weary feeling of capitulation, a painless and listless mood in which he saw hours and days pass, gazed blandly into the blue sky. At times he seemed to be sleepwalking; at others he seemed to be returning to childhood. Once he sat beneath the spruce in their little garden, enveloped in a lazy twilit mood, and hummed, without being aware of it, the same old verses over and over to himself, verses he remembered from his grammar-school days:

“Oh, I am so weary

Oh, I am so weak

Have no money in my wallet

And nothing in my satchel.”

He hummed it in the old accustomed manner and thought nothing of repeating the same verse twenty times over. But his father happened to be listening near the window, and was shocked. This pleasant and mindless singsong was beyond his sober sensibility; he interpreted it, with a deep sigh, as a sign of hopeless mental decline. From that day on he watched his son even more anxiously. And his son, of course, noticed and suffered from this. Yet Hans still could not find the right moment to take the rope to the forest and put that strong branch to good use.

Meanwhile the hottest time of year had set in, and now twelve months had passed since the examination and the summer holidays which followed. Every so often Hans thought back to those events, but without feeling any particularly strong emotion; he had become quite insensitive. He would have liked to go fishing again but dared not ask his father for permission. Yet whenever he came near the water and stood any length of time in a place where no one could see him, his eyes eagerly followed the movement of the dark, noiseless fish as they swam about; it was agony to realize that he could not go fishing.

Every day toward evening he walked a stretch down-river to go swimming. Because he always had to pass by Inspector Gessler's little house he discovered by chance the return of Emma Gessler, on whom he had such a crush three years ago. He cast a curious eye at her a few times, but he no longer much cared for her. She had been a finely built delicate girl at that time; now she had grown heavy, her movements were angular, her modern hairdo looked far too adult and disfigured her completely. Nor did long dresses suit her, and her attempt to look ladylike was decidedly unfortunate. Hans found her ridiculous but at the same time he felt sorry for her when he remembered how peculiarly sweet and dark and warm he had felt whenever he had seen her. Indeed, everything had been completely different, so much more beautiful, so much livelier! It had been such a long time since he had known anything but Latin, history, Greek, examinations, academy and headaches. In those days his books contained fairy tales, cops and robbers. The mill he had constructed in the garden had been running and in the evening he had listened to Liese tell her wild stories in the gateway of Naschold's house. At that time he had regarded his old neighbor Grossjohann, nicknamed Garibaldi, as a murderer and robber and had dreamed of him. Throughout the year he had always looked forward to something or other every month: hay-making, clover-mowing, the first day you could go fishing, catch crayfish, pick hops, shake plums off the trees, burn weeds in potato fields, and the first day of threshing. In between there had been Sundays and holidays. There had been so many things that mysteriously attracted him: houses, little alleys, haylofts, wells, fences; people and animals of every kind had been familiar and dear to him or fascinating. When he had gone hops-picking he listened to the older girls and memorized some of the verses they sang, most of them light and funny but a few oddly sorrowful.

All of that had come to an end without his even noticing it. First the evenings with Liese had been no more, then fishing for minnows on Sunday mornings, then the reading of fairy tales and so on, one thing after the other, including hops-picking and the mill in the garden. Where had it all gone?

And what happened was that the precocious boy experienced an unreal second childhood during this period of illness. His sensibility, robbed of its real childhood, now fled with sudden yearning back to those already dimming years and wandered spellbound through a forest of memories whose vividness was perhaps of an almost pathological nature. He relived these memories with no less intensity and passion than he had experienced them in reality before. His betrayed and violated childhood erupted like a long pent-up spring.

When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.

This is what was happening to Hans Giebenrath, so let us accompany him into his childhood land of dreams.

The Giebenrath house stood near the old stone bridge on a corner between two entirely different streets. The first of these streets, to which the house actually belonged, was the longest, widest, most dignified in town. It was called Tannery Street. The second street led up a steep hill, was short, narrow and miserable; it was named Falcon after an age-old inn that had long since been shut down, whose sign had displayed a falcon.

In house after house on Tannery Street there lived good, solid, well-established families, people who owned their own houses, had their own pews in church, whose gardens rose in terraces steeply uphill and whose fences, all overgrown with yellow broom, bordered on the railroad right-of-way that had been laid out in the 1870's. For splendor and respectability, nothing could compare with Tannery Street except the town square, where church, courthouse, county administration, town hall and vicarage were situated with unalloyed dignity and lent this little town a certain nobility, the illusion of being a city. Tannery Street, though lacking such official attributes, consisted of old and new middle-class dwellings with impressive doors, old-fashioned half-timbered houses with brightly decorated gables. The entire street exuded a friendly atmosphere of well-lighted comfort, due in large part to the fact that it consisted of a single row of houses. The other side of the street was open, save for a wall, propped up by wooden pilings, behind which the river flowed.

If Tannery Street was long, wide and spaciously dignified, Falcon was the opposite. Here stood warped gloomy houses with splotched and crumbling plaster, gables that lurched forward, broken and often patched windows and doors, crooked chimneys, leaky rain pipes. The houses deprived each other of room and light and the little alley was narrow, oddly twisted and cast in a perpetual gloom which rainstorms or dusk changed into damp darkness. Masses of wash always hung on lines and poles outside the windows. As small and miserable as the street was, hordes of people made their homes here, not even counting the sub-tenants and those who flopped there for the night. Every nook and cranny of these ill-shaped, aging houses was occupied. The street was densely populated and poverty, vice and sickness were rank. If a typhus epidemic broke out, it would start here; if manslaughter were to occur, it would be here, and if something was stolen in town people looked first in the Falcon. Peddlers had their lodgings there, among whom were Hotte-hotte, the queer vendor of silver polish and Adam Hittel, the scissors grinder, a man accused of every imaginable crime and vice.

*   *   *

During his first years in school Hans had been a frequent visitor in the Falcon. In the company of a dubious gang of flaxen-haired, ragged boys he had listened to the notorious Lotte Frohmüller's tales of murder. She was divorced from a small innkeeper and had spent five years in prison. She had been a well-known beauty in her day, had had any number of lovers among the factory workers, and caused any number of scandals and knife fights. Now she lived alone and spent her evenings, after the factory closed, making coffee and telling stories. Her door was always open and besides the wives and young workers a horde of neighborhood children listened from the doorstep with a mixture of delight and terror. The water in the kettle boiled on the black stone hearth, a tallow candle burned nearby. It added its adventurous flickering to the blue flame from the little coal fire; together they illuminated the overcrowded dark room and cast hugely enlarged shadows of the listeners on walls and ceilings, filling the room with ghostly activity.

Hans made his first acquaintance with the brothers Finkenbein at the age of eight and remained friends with them for almost a year, despite his father's strict prohibition. Dolf and Emil Finkenbein were the sharpest street boys in town. Famous for stealing cherries and apples and minor transgressions against the forestry laws, they were also expert in all kinds of tricks and pranks. On the side they conducted a flourishing trade in bird eggs, lead pellets, young ravens, starlings and rabbits, and transgressed a town ordinance by leaving baited lines in the river overnight. They felt at home in every garden in town, for no fence was too sharply pointed, no wall so thickly crowned with broken glass that they could not easily scale it.

Hans had become an even closer friend of Hermann Rechtenheil, who also lived in the Falcon. He was an orphan, a sickly, precocious and unusual child. Because one of his legs was shorter than the other, he could only hobble with the help of a stick and took no part in the street games. He was of slight build and had a pale, ailing face with a mouth prematurely bitter and a chin that was excessively pointed. He was an exceptionally dexterous and enthusiastic angler, a passion he communicated to Hans. Hans did not have a fishing license at that time but they went anyway, secretly, to out-of-the-way spots. If hunting is a pleasure, then poaching, as everyone knows, is a supreme delight. The hobbled Rechtenheil taught Hans to pick the right rods, pleat horsehair, dye his lines, tie running knots and sharpen fishhooks. He taught him to watch for telltale weather signs, to observe the water and muddy it with white clay, select the right bait for fastening to his hook; he also taught him to distinguish the various kinds of fish, to listen for the fish and to keep the line at the proper depth. By wordless example he communicated to Hans the delicate sense of when to pull in or let out the line. He vociferated against store-bought rods, floats and transparent lines and all other artificial paraphernalia, and he convinced Hans that there was no real fishing with tackle whose parts you had not put together yourself.

Hans and the Finkenbein brothers had gone their separate ways after an angry quarrel. Hans' friendship with the quiet, lame Rechtenheil ended on a different note. One day in February his friend crawled into a miserable little bed, after laying his crutch across his clothes on the chair, and passed away quickly and quietly; the Falcon forgot him immediately and only Hans cherished his memory for long.