Brother of Sleep: A Novel (2 page)

THE UNBORN

THE
task of capturing the lives and customs of the Lamparters and Alders in a book, successfully unraveling, and with a nimble pen, the hundred threads that form the tangle of intertwining of the two lineages, defending the physical defects left by inbreeding–the oversized head, the bulbous bottom lip in the sunken chin–as healthy signs of primitive authenticity, is one that a local historian, attached to the intimate knowledge of his ancestors, might undertake. But all in all it would be a waste of time to describe the history of the peasants of Eschberg, the wretched monotony of their years, their sordid quarrels, their singularly fanatic faith, their unparalleled inflexibility in the face of nov­elties from without, had not the Alder clan, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, produced a child with musical gifts which were unheard of in the true
sense of the word and which, it seems, will not be found again in the region of the Vorarlberg. The child's name was Johannes Elias.

The story of his life is nothing but a sad list of the shortcomings and omissions of all those people who might have had a sense of his great talent, but who allowed it to perish, from indifference, plain stupidity, or, like Cantor Goller, the organist in Feldberg cathedral (whose bones should be exhumed and scattered to the four winds, lest his body take shape again on the Day of Judgment), from pure envy. It is an indictment of God that, in a wasteful whim, he should have seen fit to bestow such a valuable gift as music on the child of an Eschberg peasant, of all people, when He should have seen that the boy would never be able to bring his aptitude to fruition in a region so musically deprived. It pleased God, furthermore, to equip Johannes Elias with such a passion for love that it prematurely consumed his life.

God created a musician who could not put so much as a note on paper, for he had never learned to write music, however much he might have longed to do
so. But it was human beings, in their heavenly sim­
plicity, who brought what we can only call a satanic plan to completion. When we first heard the astounding story of Johannes Elias Alder, we fell silent and thought, How many magnificent people–philosophers, thinkers, poets, sculptors, and musicians–must the world have lost, just because they were never allowed to learn their genuine skill. And we mused further that Socrates
might not have been the supreme thinker, Jesus the greatest expression of love, Leonardo the most splendid sculptor, or Mozart the most sublime musician, that other names might have determined the course of the world. Then we grieved for those unknown people, born and yet, as long as they lived, unborn. Johannes Elias Alder was one of them.

THE BIRTH

FOR
the third time that early summer afternoon in 1803, Seff Alder opened the door to the room where his wife lay, begging and screaming for the birth of her second child. It was as though it refused to come out, as though it were revolting against this world and would not set foot there of its own free will. Try as the poor woman might to give birth to it, finally pressing her hands against her belly and shrieking in pain all the while, the child would not come.

Seff breathed deeply. The air was filled with the smell of his wife's sweat and blood. He turned to the window and wrenched it open with such violence that half the room trembled. The vibration passed down the wall from the windowsill, over the tiles to the bedstead, and up into the feverish head of the woman in childbed. Seff was no talker. Opening the window seemed the only comfort he could give his wife. The air reflected the sun, so sultry was that June day, and its draught brought no relief. Seff looked out the window, down to the last bend in the village street, from where that godforsaken midwife would surely soon be appearing. Two hours and more had passed since he had sent the boy to Götzberg. Then, incredulously, he really did see her coming around the corner, struggling up the street with her red leather case, the straps over her shoulder. His son, he saw, was running behind. Seff pushed the window shut, went to his wife, looked into the water jug on the little chest, filled the untouched glass to the brim, closed the door, and thought up a prayer for his wife. He could have told her of Miss Ellenson's arrival. Seff was no talker. He waited downstairs in the wide-open doorway, and when the midwife entered, sweating and wheezing, he showed her her cider, her twenty kreuzers in payment, and the stairs up to the parents' room. Then, with the boy, he crossed to the adjoining hamlet, to turn the hay one last time.

Up in the bedroom his wife shrieked in pain.

Miss Ellenson set to work, joylessly and without the speed that would have been so welcome earlier. When she stumbled up the narrow stairs for the third time, she had already decided to put her plan, the one she had been tossing back and forth in her prattling head on her way up the hill, irrevocably into action.

This birth would be the last one. She was still young, despite her twenty-one years. Her forehead wrinkled with impatience. Also, she had fine hands, one man at least had said. Much too fine for midwifery. And she wrinkled her brow with yet greater displeasure. On the wash table she arranged her instruments in the sequence she had learned at midwife school in Innsbruck: the clyster and, next to it, as ever, the holy water, the speculum, the forceps, the catheter, and
finally the umbilical scissors. Then she began to ar­
range the straps by length and function.

Seff's wife shrieked in pain.

Yes, Miss Ellenson reflected, she would now accept the offer of Franz Hirsch from Hötting and go into service with the baker. That would guarantee her free bread and a higher daily wage, at least thirty kreuzers. Then she would also be rid forever of those sordid arguments with the district clerk, the endless bickering over the Christmas overtime that Herr Richter of the Civil and Criminal Court in Feldberg had personally won for her. The intention of the district clerk, with his contrary manner, was certainly just to wear her down. In future the self-employed midwives could do it. But she would like to see whether the district clerk would really find them that much cheaper. No, she had had enough of all that business. And the district clerk couldn't fool her. Just because she'd turned him down for a dance once, years before, that was why he was being so difficult with her now. It wasn't her fault he had a pot belly and goaty feet.

Seff's wife shrieked in pain.

And it was not true that no man would ever ask for her hand, because Franz Hirsch, from Hötting, had done just that not even two weeks ago. By letter, yes indeed, by letter. And Franz Hirsch from Hötting was in every respect a more cultured man than that bloated fathead, that pompous little district clerk. At the end of the day, Franz Hirsch from Hötting was a fine-looking man, his hunchback apart. She paid attention to charac­ter, that was all she paid attention to. And Innsbruck was really quite a big place. What could a district clerk tell her about the world, when he'd never set foot any farther afield than Dornberg, three hours away? But maybe she wouldn't take Franz Hirsch from Hötting after all. His hunchback was quite a serious drawback when you thought about it, and she was a pretty person with fine hands. Hands far too beautiful for midwifery. That's what Corporal Zenker had sworn on his honor as a soldier of the Double Monarchy. A brief smile nestled in the corners of her mouth but fled again when she thought about the cripple from Hötting, whom she had promised nothing but whose hopes she had aroused by clearly dropping hints.

Seff's wife shrieked in pain.

He would have been the man for her, had it not been for that embarrassing hunchback. And, of course, she had discovered that he often suffered from lung disease. The things she thought about. In the end, she paid attention to character, that was all she paid attention to. He was a bit sick in the head, too. Something that could never be said of Corporal Zenker. But Zen­ker certainly didn't have two acres of land, while Franz Hirsch of Hötting was comfortably off. Maybe she could go into service in one of the noble bourgeois households, so that she wouldn't be exposed to all the illnesses found in ordinary people's houses. In any case,
she intended, if she had not made a decision by eve­
ning, to take part in the Heart of Mary Fellowship pilgrimage to the Udelberg and pray ardently to the Holy Virgin to help her make up her mind. In any case, she would move to Innsbruck. But before she left she would tell the pompous fathead, she would tell him straight to his face, so that his mustache would fall in horror.

Seff's wife lay there, quietly weeping.

The best thing to do was to follow her mother's recommendation and not judge people by appearances but by their character. She was already doing so. And yet it was true that Corporal Zenker took too much pleasure in annoying and teasing people. Even the Kaiser himself had been the butt of his remarks, while Franz Hirsch of Hötting couldn't even bring himself to smile and …

When she lifted the blood-splashed linen the child was lying, its umbilical cord torn, on Seff's wife's knee. Horrified, the midwife picked up the child, took it to the wash stand and, hands trembling, cut off its umbilical cord. She stared at the child, listened to it anxiously, and finally shook and struck it.

It didn't cry.

She held the infant in her dripping hands, smacked it again, listened, and held her breath to hear whether the little heart was finally beating. In desperation she intoned the Te Deum, singing it in an imploring voice and then, with terror, in a loud one. All of a sudden she felt the little bundle of flesh give a tremble. Then another. She stopped singing, held her ear to it again, and now she knew that the bundle was alive. The Te Deum had saved the child's life.

Afterward, Miss Ellenson could not remember the baby's sex. But still she announced to the village clerk that a son had been born to Joseph and Agathe Elder, and she was absolutely right.

At this point we shall leave Miss Ellenson and her chatter. We shall not be seeing her again. But we should also like to add that the birth of Johannes Elias was
her last act as a midwife, that she moved to Inns­­
bruck, where she married … Corporal Zenker, per­
haps? Well, no, in fact, Franz Hirsch of Hötting. She had opted in favor of character, then. The alliance was not blessed with children, and Franz Hirsch of Hötting died of consumption in 1809. His widow married a second and even a third time. And in the end–hard as it is to believe–she married the goat-footed fathead, the district clerk of Götzberg. We lose track of her around 1850. A year before this we find her name in a file involving a fake inheritance. We cannot say how she passed her final days. But she was present at the birth of a musician of genius.

Who would not be proud to mention such an event in her modest biography? Allowing that, if we could have shouted in her face that a twofold miracle had happened right before her eyes, the birth of a man and the birth of a genius, she would not have understood a word. And the others, Seff's wife in childbed, Seff and his boy, would not have understood either. But that is not the worst. When this man's talents had been apparent for a long time, no one understood even then.

A FATHER TO HIS CHILDREN

THE
reverend curate Elias Benzer was a man of great oratorical skills, a passionate lover of life, and–as much because of this as out of obedience to his natural disposition–an enthusiastic admirer of all things feminine. It was this passion, as we shall see, that led to his downfall.

The Reverend Benzer came from Hohenberg in the Rhine Valley: Hohenberg, which had always been a bastion of superstition and things demonic. So his sermons were full of the last witch-burning in the Vorarlberg, which he had seen, as a child, with his own eyes. This strange experience had become the pillar of his theology. He devoted countless sermons to painting pictures of the stake for the eyes of his Eschberg peasants, with such fire that their mouths grew dry and the blood began to redden in their brows and in their eyes. Some even felt as though they
had been hit by the first sparks or delivered whole in
to the flames. Whenever the reverend curate, in his Sunday morning gospel readings, had the slightest opportunity to throw a bridge back to that great event of his childhood, he seized the opportunity to cross it. Thanks to a flamboyant imagination, he was able against all odds to pass from the Burning Bush to the Hohenberg Burning.

Such homilies nearly led to a murderous incident in Eschberg. Prompted by the curate's incendiary sermon–yet in good faith–three Lamparters, on “Spark Sunday”
*
in 1785, decided to cast into the fire not the customary straw witch but Zilli Lamparter, known as “Zilli of the Souls.”

This Zilli of the Souls, an ancient widow biding the modest time that remained to her in the complete solitude of the highest farm in the village, had the unique reputation of being able to hold discussions with the Eschberg dead. She explained this clairvoyant gift by saying that of all the inhabitants she was the one who lived closest to the good Lord, and she could therefore clearly hear the laments of the people in the beyond–on clear nights at least, for clouds impeded her hearing. That much was obvious to everyone. When Zilli of the Souls then claimed that a number of Moors from the Orient had appeared to her, men and women with coal-black skin, coal-black faces, coal-black limbs, and coal-black teeth, no one had any doubts about this woman's extraordinary gifts.

The old woman thus hit upon the idea of constructing a system, a kind of spiritual bookkeeping, which would indirectly provide her with a regular pension. She knew that the deceased, before they went to paradise, had first to burn in purgatory, so she resolved to draw up a catalog of things the living were to do to rescue their departed relations. In Eschberg, however, everyone was related to everyone else. To keep confusion to a minimum, people called each other by their Christian names and women were known by the names of their husbands.

One day, then, Zilli of the Souls descended la­boriously to the farm of a Lamparter and revealed to him that his father had appeared to her amid groans and lamentations. His father could find no peace, because
he still owed her seven bundles of soft chopped fire­
wood. Furthermore, in the course of countless meet­
ings with the Eschberg dead, Zilli finally came to the conclusion that everyone, whether Lamparter or Alder, owed her something. Then she would say, with unvary­ing menace, “Eight eggs, ten Our Fathers. Three pounds of wax and fifty Hail Marys. A hundredweight of bedding straw and seven masses. Ten ells of linen and eight psalms.”

No amount of cursing and complaining to the curate did any good. Never had there been so many offerings of wax and masses. Never had the little church in Eschberg heard such ardent prayer. As we can see,
Zilli knew how to unite the necessary and the salutary, and it was this that made her the first person in Eschberg–and even, we may confidently say, in the Vorarlberg–to draw a pension.

Gradually, people came to hate her. By a stroke of bad luck, at this time a blight, one that was highly unusual and only ever seen in Eschberg, afflicted the potato crop in the village's mountain fields. In a single night, the potatoes were said to have hollowed out and shriveled to the size of a walnut. Be that as it may.

Amid laughter and shouts, mingling with the wo­man's muttered rosaries, Zilli was carried in a dung cart to the hamlet of Altig, where the stake had been erected. Zilli howled in mortal terror and swore she would give everything back to everyone, but one Alder, in a voice of thunder, his eyes aflame with lust, recalled the curate's sermons and gave new encouragement to all those who were on the point of abandoning the deed. When the old woman was dragged from the cart, she still seemed to be screaming, but not a sound fell from her swollen, scarred mouth. Salt clung to her crumpled cheeks, and from the corners of her mouth red spittle flowed, which she thirstily licked away with her long tongue. The fire split the night. Some people pulled their hats down and hid their faces for fear of recognition as they struck the old woman's ragged body with fists and toecaps. Even the children pinched and spat, refusing to desist. When an unknown man struck her scarf from her head, a dark murmur ran through the crowd of peasants drenched in the atmosphere of
death. For the first time everyone saw that Zilli was completely bald, and even the least credulous among them thought he had before his eyes a living, flesh-and-blood witch. The unknown man thrust his clenched fist into her stomach and her empty breasts and ripped her clothes away, so that everything might proceed as the reverend curate had described in his sermons. But suddenly the unknown man uttered such a fearful yell that people were afraid he had lost his reason. “The blight! The blight!” he bellowed, stumbling through the crusted snow into the night. And like the sparks from the logs as they fell to earth, at that moment the crowd fled in all directions. The supposed blight had saved the last few weeks of the woman's life.

When this event reached the ears of our curate via an Alder gossip, he vowed that same day never to deliver another incendiary sermon. And saying that, by the Trinity, not everything a vicar might say from the pulpit should be taken at face value, he dismissed the gossip, whose faith in the infallible truth of the priest's words was shattered for good.

But this spirited resolution proved short-lived, because the curate was soon forced to acknowledge that the religious zeal of the people of Eschberg was on the wane. Saturday rosaries, he complained, were only attended by women, the reprehensible habit of tobacco chewing during the holy mystery of the mass had come back into fashion, some of the menfolk sitting in the organ loft were disturbing prayers with their insolent grins, and furthermore, in the past two weeks, only
eight kreuzers had gone into the collection box. But the most shameful thing of all–and his eyes flashed demon­ically into the frightened little eyes of some Alder virgins–was that dances were lately being held in the houses of the village and strong liquor was served there. Since in the period immediately after this no changes were noticed in the behavior he had castigated, and on three Sundays in succession, apart from a few tor­toiseshell buttons, nothing rattled in the poor box, the curate broke his vow. He devised a sermon that would once and for all eradicate the baseness of the people of Eschberg.

The spirit of this fatal sermon descended upon the curate on the Feast of Pentecost in 1800, in the stable of his presbytery, where he went whenever he had something grave on his mind. He liked to think in the tepid air of the stable, among cows, goats, pigs, and chickens. He had sat down on a wooden barrel next to the pigsty, his brow in his hands, knowing only that he wished to transfer the image of the Gospels–the tongues of flame of the miracle of the Pentecost–to a fire of a quite different order. He sat musing for a long time on his little barrel but could not find a bridge that seemed worth crossing. When his bottom went to sleep he stood up grumpily, took a few steps, and put his foot in a fresh steaming cowpat. He slipped, staggered backward, and banged his head–by the Trinity!–against the rim of the barrel. The barrel. That was it! Gunpowder. Marauding Napoleonic soldiers had lost the barrel in the forest. He had taken it into his keeping lest it cause any harm. He felt around cautiously for the thumb-sized bump and grumbled at the way the Holy Ghost had chosen to come upon him. But the Fire Sermon took form at that moment. With nightfall the curate was seen descending into the hamlet that was home to Haintz Lamparter, the beadle of Eschberg. They saw the candles burn to a stump. That was how long the curate stayed.

On the day of Pentecost, matters took their tragic course. Some parishioners, it must be said, were star­tled by the peculiar location of the fuse, but no one paid the circumstance the attention it deserved. One of them, who had his hair singed, spoke afterward of a curious barrel. He had elbowed his neighbor and said, “Look! He's drinking in the house of the Lord!” An­other related how the reverend curate's voice had been strangely agitated in the Kyrie, and a child in the choir agreed that at the very moment the curate climbed into the pulpit, the beadle had left the church, taking with him an hourglass he had just upended.

The purifying Pentecostal fire would now become the all-consuming flames of hell, came the tremulous voice of the curate in the pulpit. So powerful was Beelzebub that in his arrogance he would not stop at the door of the church. It was within his power to tear down the church portals, once he had seized the souls of the faithful. And, alas, this he had done in Eschberg, which is why everything would shortly disappear in smoke and brimstone. Thus spoke the booming voice from the pulpit. As an alert Alder later declared to the vicar-
general in Feldberg, the reverend curate repeated the idea of burning, crashing, smoke, and brimstone an unusually large number of times and in an unusually loud voice.

Three peasants in the back rows had their ear­
drums burst by the explosion, and the insolently grinning menfolk in the organ loft fell suddenly silent. Those who were leaning against the church door were particularly unlucky. One had his legs broken by the exploding portal, another his hip, and the blood of a third sprayed from his ears against the whitewashed wall, reaching up to the Stations of the Cross. Another unlucky man was the beadle, who had only wanted to attend properly to his duties and had closely followed the burning fuse, although the curate had expressly forbidden him to do this. Haintz Lamparter lost his sight and would have burned to death had the explosion not hurled him into the dewy morning grass. The faithful, frightened half to death, ran shrieking from the church, and we must add that they did not wait for the curate's blessing.

The citizens of Eschberg brought the matter before the civil and ecclesiastical court in Feldberg, but the vicar-general claimed it was a matter for the church alone, and the errant brother would be judged by an ecclesiastical tribunal, which is what happened. The curate's stipend of three hundred and fifty guilders was reduced by half. He, and all pastors who succeeded him, were reduced to the rank of
cooperator expositus
, which meant henceforward that any spiritual decision
would require the assent of the vicar of Götzberg. The curate did defend himself with impressive oratorical gifts–by the Trinity, not every word a priest said from the pulpit could be taken at face value–but it did him no good. The curate left Eschberg three weeks after that day, which went down in memory as Brimstone Sunday. Two lines on the door of his presbytery announced that he had moved to Hohenberg to take a long overdue summer holiday. For eight months, the people of Eschberg lacked spiritual guidance of any kind. Then, all of a sudden, the curate returned unexpectedly, sternly resolving henceforward to be a wise shepherd to his flock. Sadly, resolution was as far as it went.

This all happened three years before the birth of Johannes Elias. The reader who has followed us this far may wonder why we have devoted so much time to this hotheaded curate, rather than turning our attention to that strange child. Let the reader wonder a little longer.

Two weeks after the birth of the child, in the little church in Eschberg–now admired for its bronze double doors, triple thickness, with twelve hinges and iron nails–a double baptism took place. The two boys who were being baptized were in the Alder line, which had been riven for decades. One, our child, was christened Johannes Elias, and the other, born five days later, Peter Elias. Peter Elias had come into the world with the help of a midwife from Altberg known as the “Weigher.”

We might observe that the name Elias returns with some persistence. This is why. Since the Damascus road experience of Pentecost, Elias Bender saw himself not merely as a good shepherd but as a father to his children in Eschberg. He must have confused the purely spiritual meaning of the word with the carnal sense, for in Eschberg there would soon be a number of brown-haired children cast very much in the mold, it was said, of the reverend curate. And the curate had an almost vainly exaggerated weakness for the idea of immortality. He seemed to know that even the most inflamed words are soon extinguished, but a name is far
more enduring. Thus he established the unusual prac­tic
e of giving Elias as a second name to all male newborns.