Beneath the Wheel (17 page)

When Hans Giebenrath first reached this area, he was subdued and afraid; he had not come gladly. But right away, at the first cider press he passed, he was given a beakerful, and from Naschold's Liese of all people. He took a sip, and while he swallowed the sweet strong cider, its taste brought back any number of smiling memories of bygone autumns and filled him with the timid yearning to join the frolicking again for a change and to have a good time. Acquaintances talked to him, glasses were proffered, and when he reached Flaig's press, the general festivity and drinking had taken hold of him and begun to transform him. He tossed the shoemaker a snappy greeting and cracked a few of the customary cider jokes. The master hid his astonishment and bade him a cheerful welcome.

Half an hour had passed when a girl in a blue skirt approached, gave Flaig and the apprentice a bright laugh and began helping them.

“Well, yes,” said the shoemaker, “that's my niece from Heilbronn. Of course she's used to a different kind of harvest what with all the vineyards where she lives.”

She was about eighteen or nineteen years old, agile and gay, not tall but well built and with a good figure. Her warm dark eyes shone cheerful and intelligent in her round face with its pretty, kissable mouth. Although she certainly looked like a healthy and lively Heilbronn girl, she did not in the least give the impression of being a relative of the devout shoemaker. She was very much of this world and her eyes did not look like the kind that are glued to the Bible at night.

Hans suddenly began to look unhappy again and wished fervently that Emma would soon leave. But she stayed on and laughed and sang and chatted away and knew a quick comeback to every joke. Hans felt ashamed and became completely quiet. Having to deal with young girls whom he had to call “Miss” he found awful anyway. This one was so lively and talkative, she paid no attention to him or his shyness, so he withdrew his feelers awkwardly and a little offended and crawled back into himself like a snail brushed by a cartwheel. He kept quiet and tried to look like someone who is bored; but he did not succeed and instead wore a face as though there had been a death in the family.

No one had time to notice any of this, Emma least of all. As Hans found out, she had been visiting the Flaigs for the last two weeks but she already knew the whole town. She ran from rich to poor, tasted the new cider, kidded everyone, laughed a little, came back, pretended to help, picked up the children, gave away apples and created an abundance of laughter and joy around her. She called out to every child that passed: “Want an apple?” Then she would select a fine red one, place her hands behind her back and let them guess: “Left or right?” But the boys never guessed what hand the apple was in, and only when they started to shout did she give them an apple but always a smaller, greener one. She also seemed well informed about Hans and asked him whether he was the one who always had the headaches, but even before he could answer she was talking to someone else.

Hans was of a mind to quit and go home when Flaig placed the lever in his hand.

“So, now you can work a while. Emma'll help you. I've got to go back to the shop.”

The master left, leaving the apprentice to help his wife cart off the cider kegs, and Hans and Emma to tend the press. Hans clenched his teeth and worked like a fiend.

When he began to wonder why the lever was so difficult to push, he looked up and the girl burst into bright laughter. She had been leaning against it as a joke and when Hans furiously tried to pull it up she did it again.

He didn't say a word. But while he pushed the lever with the girl's body leaning against it on the other side, he suddenly felt quite inhibited; gradually he stopped trying to turn the lever. A sweet fear overcame him. When the young slip of a thing laughed cheekily directly into his face she suddenly seemed transformed, more of a friend yet less familiar, and now he too laughed a little laugh of awkward intimacy.

And then the lever came to a complete stop.

And Emma said: “Let's not kill ourselves,” and handed him the half-full glass from which she had just drunk.

This mouthful of cider seemed much sweeter and more powerful than the last, and when he had emptied the glass, he looked longingly at it and wondered why his heart beat so swiftly and he breathed with such difficulty.

Then they worked again for a while. He didn't really know what he was doing when he placed himself in such a way that the girl's skirt had to brush him and his hand touched hers, and whenever this happened his heart would seemingly come to a stop with anxious bliss and a pleasantly sweet weakness came over him.

He did not know what he was saying but he answered all her questions, laughed when she laughed, wagged his finger at her a few times when she fooled around and twice more emptied a glass from her hand. At the same time a whole swarm of memories rushed through his mind: servant girls he had seen standing with their boy-friends in doorways, a few sentences from novels, the kiss Heilner had given him, and a mass of words, stories and dark hints dropped during schoolboy conversations about the “girls” and “what it's like if you have a sweetheart.”

Everything was transformed. The isolated voices, curses and laughter merged into an indistinguishable curtain of noise; the river and the old bridge looked remote as if painted on canvas.

Emma also looked different. He no longer saw her entire face—just her dark happy eyes and her red mouth, sharp white teeth; a slipper with a black stocking above it, then a handful of curls dangling loosely in the back of her neck, a round tanned neck gliding into a blue bodice, the firm shoulders and the heaving breasts underneath, a pink translucent ear.

And after another while she let her beaker drop into the vat, and when she bent down for it, she pressed her knee against his wrist at the side of the vat. And he too bent down but more slowly and almost brushed his face against her hair. The hair gave off a weak scent and beneath it in the shadow of loose curls there glowed a warm, tanned, beautiful neck that disappeared into the blue bodice through whose tightly stretched lacing he caught a glimpse of the back of her waist.

When he straightened up again and her knee touched his hand and her hair grazed his cheek, he saw that she was flushed from bending down, and a tremor passed through all his limbs. He turned pale and for a moment felt such a profound weariness that he had to steady himself by holding on to the press. His heart quivered, his arms became weak and his shoulders ached.

From that moment on he hardly said another word and avoided her gaze. However, as soon as she looked away, he stared at her with a mixture of unfamiliar desire and bad conscience. In this hour something broke inside him and a new, alien but enticing land with distant blue shores opened up before his soul. He did not know or could only guess what the apprehension and sweet agony signified, and did not know which was stronger, pain or desire.

But the desire signified the victory of his adolescent vigor and sensuality and the first intimation of the mighty forces of life, and the pain signified that the morning peace had been broken, that his soul had left that childhood land which can never be found again. His small fragile ship had barely escaped a near disaster; now it entered a region of new storms and uncharted depths through which even the best-led adolescent cannot find a trustworthy guide. He must find his own way and be his own savior.

It was a good thing that the apprentice came back and relieved him at the press. Hans stayed on for a while, hoping for one more touch or a friendly word from Emma, who was again chattering away with people at other cider presses. But because Hans felt embarrassed in front of the apprentice, he slipped off without saying good-bye.

It was remarkable how everything had changed, how beautiful and exciting it had become. The starlings which had fattened up on the apple-pulp shot noisily through a sky that had never looked as high and beautiful, as blue and yearning. Never had the river looked like such a pure, blue-green mirror, nor had it held such a blindingly white roaring weir. All this seemed a decorative newly painted picture behind clear new glass. Everything seemed to await the beginning of a great feast. He himself felt a strong, sweet seething of brilliant expectations, but felt also that it was all a dream which would never come true. As they intensified, these two-edged feelings became a dark compulsion, a feeling as though something powerful wanted to tear free within him and come into the open—perhaps a sob, perhaps a song, a scream or a loud laugh. Only at home did he calm down a little. Everything there, naturally, was as usual.

“Where are you coming from?” asked Herr Giebenrath.

“From Flaig's cider mill.”

“How many barrels?”

“Two, I think.”

Hans asked to be allowed to invite Flaig's children when his father pressed his cider.

“Makes sense,” grumbled his father. “I'll start next week, you can bring them then.”

It was an hour before he would have supper. Hans went out into the garden. Except for the two spruce trees little was left that was green. He ripped off a hazel-bush rod and whipped it through the air and stirred about with it in the dried leaves. The sun had set behind the mountain whose black outline cut through the greenish-blue, moisture-free, late afternoon sky with its finely delineated spruce tops. A gray, elongated cloud, burnished by the sun, drifted slowly and contentedly like a returning ship through the thin golden air up the valley.

As Hans strolled through the garden, he felt moved in a strange and unfamiliar way by the ripe, richly colored beauty of the evening. Often he would stop, close his eyes and try to picture Emma to himself, how she had stood across from him at the press, how she had let him drink from her beaker, how she had bent across the vat and come up blushing. He saw her hair, her figure in the tight blue dress, her throat and the neck in the shadow of her dark curls, and all this filled him with desire and trembling. Only her face he could not imagine, however hard he tried.

Once the sun had set he did not feel the coolness. He perceived the growing dusk like a veil rich with secret promises which he could not name. For, though he realized that he had fallen in love with the girl from Heilbronn, he had only an obscure comprehension of the masculinity awakening in his blood as an unaccustomed, wearisome irritation.

During supper he felt it was odd to sit in his changed condition amid his accustomed surroundings. His father, the old housekeeper, the table, its utensils and the entire room seemed suddenly to have grown old and he peered at everything with a feeling of astonishment, estrangement and tenderness as though he had just now returned from a long trip.

When they had finished supper and Hans wanted to get up, his father in his curt manner said: “Would you like to become a mechanic, Hans, or a clerk?”

“What do you mean?” Hans replied in astonishment.

“You could start your apprenticeship with Mechanic Schuler or week after next go to city hall. Give it some thought! We'll talk about it tomorrow.”

Hans got up and went outside. The sudden question had confused and blinded him. Unexpectedly, active daily life, with which he had nothing to do for months, confronted him with a half-enticing, a half-threatening face, making promises and demands. He had no genuine enthusiasm for becoming a mechanic or a clerk. The grueling physical labor of the former frightened him a little. Then he remembered his schoolfriend August, who had become a mechanic and whom he could ask.

While he considered the matter, his ideas on the subject became less and less clear and it no longer seemed so urgent. Something else preoccupied him. Restless, he paced back and forth in the hallway. Suddenly he grabbed his hat, left the house and walked slowly out into the street. It had occurred to him he would have to see Emma once more today.

It was getting dark already. Screams and hoarse singing drifted over from a nearby inn. Some windows were lighted and here and there one after the other lit up and shed a weak reddish glow in the dark air. A long line of young girls flounced arm in arm down the alley with loud laughter and talk running like a warm wave of youth and joy through the drowsy streets. Hans looked after them for a long time, his blood rushing to his head. One could hear a violin behind a curtained window. A woman was washing lettuce at the well. Two fellows and their sweethearts were strolling on the bridge; one of them, holding his girl loosely by the hand, was swinging her arm back and forth and smoking a cigar. The second couple walked slowly, holding each other tight; the fellow held her firmly around the waist and she pressed shoulder and head firmly against his chest. Hans had seen this a hundred times without giving it any thought. Now it held a secret significance, a vague yet sweet and provocative meaning; his glance rested on this group and his imagination strained toward an imminent comprehension. Fearful but shaken to the roots of his being, he felt the nearness of a great mystery, not knowing whether it would be delicious or dreadful but having a foretaste of both.

He stopped before Flaig's house but he had not the courage to enter. What was he to do and say once inside? He remembered how he used to come here as an eleven-year-old boy, when Flaig had told him stories from the Bible and steadfastly replied to the onslaught of his questions about hell, the devil and ghosts. These were awkward memories and they made him feel guilty. He did not know what he wanted to do, he did not even know what he desired, yet it seemed to him as though he stood before something secret and forbidden. It did not seem right to him to stand in front of the shoemaker's house in the dark without entering. And if Flaig should happen to see him or should step outside he would probably not even bawl him out, he'd just laugh, and that he dreaded most of all.

Hans sneaked behind the house to look into the lighted living room from the garden fence. He did not see the master anywhere. His wife was either sewing or knitting. The oldest boy was still up and sat at the table and read. Emma walked back and forth, obviously clearing the table, and he caught sight of her only intermittently. It was so quiet you could hear every step distinctly from the remotest part of the street, and the rushing of the river on the other side of the garden. The darkness and the chill of night came fast.