Brother of Sleep: A Novel (8 page)

Desolation of desolations, for everyone who had watched the disaster. The crashing, crackling, and raging of miles of fire was not enough. The laments of
people everywhere were not enough. No, they had to watch their helpless beasts suffocating, burning and falling to their deaths. Because all the deer had made for the ridges, they had no way out. A whole herd, their instincts failing them, hurled themselves into the gorge. The smaller animals whimpered and whistled as they ran in circles, their skins on fire. Birds crashed into the flames with burning feathers, for the heat rose to the sky and the wind-whipped tongues of flame climbed higher than a mile.

Then, in the January snow, when Elias called to the animals of the forest in inaudible sounds, noises,
and trills, none of them appeared from the gray hori­zon
scattered with tree trunks: not Resi the doe or Wunibald the badger. Not Lips the little red fox, not Sebald the polecat, not the one-legged bullfinch.

Only one little house on the northern flank of the village was spared. Alas, we must add, for it was the little farm of the wood-carver Roman Lamparter– Mostly.

But the buildings on the southern side of Eschberg still stood as before. Neither church nor farm, not the tiniest shingle, had been touched. This intensified the fury of the people in the north of the village, and upon
seeing the injustice some of them collapsed uncon­scious,
in infernal screaming fits.

On Christmas Day eight families bundled together the little they had and, weeping, left their beloved Eschberg. They followed the Emmer down to the Rhine Valley, where in the course of time they either
perished in poverty or else spent the rest of their days working other people's land. These included Haintz and Haintz's wife, as well as the family of the Alder gossip. We shall lose sight of these people, and the stories connected to them.

But the Alder gossip seemed able to go only after putting an insane calumny about the village, the cruel consequences of which were seen on St. Stephen's Day. She claimed, if we are to believe her testimony, to have seen–from a safe distance–Mostly, walking up and down behind closed shutters until dawn. He had been speaking to his shadow, his hair wild and his mouth foaming; he had rolled on the ground like an epileptic; then he had written something on a piece of paper, where the word
burn
was clearly visible. In the blackest darkness of his cellar he had indulged in sacri­legious practices, reciting the Hail Mary backward, after the manner of the Moslems, and had even finished by urinating on the crucifix: this was what the Alder gossip claimed to have seen, in the dark of night, and from a safe distance, if we are to believe her.

Not even the most dangerous idiots of Eschberg lent credence to this testimony, and yet it was taken as read that the carver Roman Lamparter had started the fire. For too long the peasants of Eschberg had had to endure this short-legged man, with his bushy eyebrows and the thousand laughter wrinkles around his mouth, insolently mocking their faith, their life, and their work, day in and day out. For on workdays he would walk around in Sunday clothes, and if he saw someone
raking a slope in the July heat, he would go up to him, take his eyeglasses off, blow pollen from the lenses, draw a circle in the air with his carved walking stick, and speak, as the greatest authority on the subject, of the trials of the mountain peasant's life. He explained that it was not worth it, that their laborious toils were mostly not enough to fill their bellies, and that it therefore made more sense to twiddle one's thumbs and sit in the shade contemplating the aesthetic blue of the skies, like the birds in the trees. These were the sentiments inflicted on them by someone who could not afford so much as a hundredweight of hay. And the sweating men would have spat on the ground in rage, had their dusty mouths not been dry.

But what most infuriated the peasants was the appearance of his house. He, who never attended a church service, not even Midnight Mass, had hit on the idea of building a home based on the exterior of the Eschberg tabernacle. Mostly had spent more than four years sculpting his little house, and when it was finished it resembled the Holy of Holies down to the last details, the last pinnacles and crockets. If we try to enter the heart of an Eschberg peasant, we will easily understand why Mostly was held in suspicion and even hated. For who would not have wished to live in the tabernacle? And that it was he of all people–a maker of debts, an Antichrist–who shared this habitation with Jesus was an injustice crying out for reparation. Mostly was unworthy to have the Lord beneath his roof. He of all people!

Last of all, he added one further crime to this one. His own milk cow–a haggard beast with a gray muzzle
and bloodshot eyes–he christened St. Elizabeth, be­
cause the cow had borne him a calf at a great age. It would take too long to relate all the infuriating episodes from Mostly's life, unless we were to write a little book dedicated entirely to him.

On the morning of St. Stephen's Day they kicked down his door with their boots, thundered up to his room, beat him out of his deepest dreams, and would have rammed the wooden stake into his face had not one of them shouted “Stop!” and cried that the blasted cur should burn alive. Two of the people who had come tore his nightshirt off, beat him from his bed, and tore off one of his ears, while the third, like the devil, demolished all the decorations in his room, all the carvings and furniture. The eyes of the third fell upon a tin can, and on the can was written the words
lamp oil
. Then they threw him naked down the stairs, but he was lucky enough not to hurt himself and got away. They hurled themselves after him: they were faster, for they had the strength of murderers. He zigzagged and escaped them again, he stumbled and found his feet and burrowed into the branches of the undergrowth, climbing to the top of the gorge called St. Peter's Rock. But there was an abyss, and there was only a single route to take: running into the smoke, through the charred and often still glowing branches of the burned forest. He had only the strength that comes from the fear of death, and it is crazed and directionless. For a while he managed to disappear into the cloud. He had burned his feet, but he felt neither cold nor hot and penetrated ever deeper into the smoke. Then he heard their voices close in front of him, turned back, ran in all directions, bumped suddenly into a tree trunk and gave a piercing cry; a sooty fist shot from the cloud, and he was captured.

Where had he left his blasted Sunday best today? came the mocking laugh. He didn't know whether he should hold his hand to his bloody jaw or cover his privates. And where had he put his eyeglasses today? Let him talk to them now, like a great authority, about the life of the mountain peasant and so on, and clutch his stiff collar, and swan about the place like a woman, as he mostly liked to do. They humiliated him and tormented him for more than two hours. Then they
bound him with hempen rope to a tree stump, col­
lected half-charred wood, piled it around his body, poured petrol over him, bellowed with satisfaction, and set him on fire. The murderers knew that the fire had not been his doing, so they bellowed all the louder until their bellows overcame their consciences.

It happened that at the same time Elias was ex­ploring the area around St. Peter's Rock in search of his vanished friend, for he knew Peter's hiding place. But he could not find him in the fault, only Elsbeth's cat in its death rattle and a tinderbox. When he was on his way home a loud cry practically burst his eardrums. At first the cry sounded like a terrible laughter, but then Elias knew that somewhere in the cloud of smoke a man was being killed. And Elias heard the voices of the murderers, and the man who was driving the others on was Seff Alder. Seff Alder, his father. His father, whom he loved and who loved him.

There he stood, the man-child. His fingers twisted, his lips turned blue. But from his lips there came, tenderly and endlessly, “Father, Father, Father?”

WINTER 1815

THE
dead were buried the day after New Year's Day, nine days after the catastrophe, because Eduard Lam­parter's body had not been found. However thoroughly they searched through the rubble of his farm, not so much as a little charred bone could they find. All that came to light was the porcelain bowl of a tobacco pipe, which made Eduard's wife cry out with sorrow. Five coffins stood in the choir of the little church, and beneath them four little wooden boxes that had been cobbled together for the children who had died. But beside the fifth coffin stood a chair, and on it, on a damask cushion, sat Eduard Lamparter's pipe bowl.

The pain of the mourners was aggravated by the fact that Curate Beuerlein ended the requiem with the
tuba mirum
, squinted with confusion into the congregation, and then suddenly remembered, with a great deal of self-assurance, that it was time for the christening. So the curate walked down to the coffins and received their baptismal promise. Two lads then trotted staccato fashion to Götzberg and told the priest there that they could no longer stand the reverend curate in Eschberg. The priest in Götzberg was thunderstruck when told of the disturbed state of his dear brother. He listened to the lads' descriptions with red cheeks and a quiet “What the devil!” and promised help, promised to come to Eschberg in person, promised to bring the matter before the vicar-general. When he blessed the lads for the first time–he too was advanced in years– they understood, and tramped grumpily back to Esch­berg with an even louder staccato.

Those who had not left for the Rhine Valley remained stubbornly in Eschberg. By Epiphany they began to rebuild their farms. The landlord of the Hunts­
man's Inn gave their families lodging. During the win­
ter months more than seventy people lived and slept head to toe in the little taproom.

And Seff's wife, the poor, pitiable woman, had to suffer her third birth there–in front of everyone. They ignored her request to screen off her bed with a sheet. Men stared at her open vagina; children secretly clenched their fists and then clenched them even more tightly, as if to help the child to push. Some women gazed open-mouthed at the scar on the woman's face. Then a rumor ran through the taproom. An idiot had come into the world–a Mongoloid, they meant. Poor Agathe Alder, poor Agathe.

While everyone was lodged in the taproom, the inside of Elias's head was like a deep and dangerous abyss. All his thoughts fell into a bottomless pit and echoed without reply. He had a high fever, he suffered from sudden bursts of perspiration, and when he woke in the morning involuntary tears flowed from his sleep-encrusted eyes. Then he would crouch in one place without moving. He did not even sniff up the drip at the end of his nose. They often had to grab him by the shoulders and shake him violently until some vague sound finally issued from his mouth. He no longer seemed to be able to hear or to speak. No one knew that he was in shock.

When, on the night of the crime, the murderers had come into the inn, his body had begun to tremble violently as though he were being thrown back and forth by invisible hands. However much he desperately
sought to control himself–he would never have be­
trayed his father–it did no good. Involuntary guttural sounds escaped him, and he stuffed half his fist in
his mouth, sank his teeth in his flesh so it would fi­
nally pass. It did no good. Everyone was staring at Elias. Finally he made himself faint by pressing his arms against his rib cage so he could not breathe. The scene looked very strange, and people assumed that what they were seeing was an epileptic attack and told Seff, who had just come in, to take his boy out of the room. Seff did so and carried him out. The boy's limp body awoke in his arms. But when Seff saw the boy's eyes, two ghostly holes, he sensed that Elias knew
everything. Seff weakened, and Elias slid from his arms. Then he saw black water spraying from the corners of the boy's mouth. He could not look and stumbled back into the inn.

There he did something that no one would have thought possible. He, who barely uttered two words in the course of a day, suddenly spoke as hastily and as much as if he were the most talkative man in Esch­berg. He spoke in ragged sentences, ended them with hacking hand gestures, stammered and bellowed, and didn't pause for breath. While he was talking like this, the other men who had come in with him gathered closer and closer around him, and they too began to boom and thunder into the astonished, silent faces of the others.

They had looked everywhere for the blasted cur, for they knew from witnesses that it had been Mostly who had set fire to the village. For more than six hours they had scoured the gorge, but it seemed that the earth had swallowed him up. Nulf Alder, in the midst of this, thundered that the Antichrist had now vanished forever. So everyone who could walk had the right to plunder the carver's house. As mayor of Eschberg, he granted them permission. And the murderers hypocritically threatened that Mostly, if he dared to show his face
anywhere near their beloved village, would imme­
diately get a freshly sharpened ax in his head.

Elias stumbled along the wainscoting until he got outside. He wanted to dive into the darkness and die. Then a little hand touched his shoulder, and a hushed, broken voice said, “You won't betray me, will you? You won't do that. Because then something else will happen.”

Elias turned around. They both stood calmly. Then, we don't know why, they ran their hands through each other's hair and smelled each other's breath. Peter pointed to his crippled arm, as if to apologize for it. Elias wiped his mouth, moved his lips, and tried to speak. They said nothing. And again Elias's lips trembled; he had to speak, he had to say at least one word, one word. They said nothing. But Peter felt certain that his friend would never betray him.

After Nulf Alder had delivered Mostly's little house over to plunder, a great crowd set off, and within half an hour they had stripped the farm down to a skeleton, like caterpillars with a leaf. All the wood carvings, the beautiful decorations, the many knives and chisels, the wing collars, the eyeglasses, the ceiling work, the shutters, the bedstead, the beams in the floor–everything was stolen. Matthew Alder and Char­coalburner Michel charged their way into the stable at the same time, untied St. Elizabeth, and argued who the cow now belonged to. Matthew was stronger; he pushed Michel into the gutter and dragged the ancient cow outside. Then Michel grew angry, chased after
Matthew, and furiously planted his boot in St. Eliz­
abeth's rump. The cow lost her balance, slipped, tumbled down the slope like a heavy sack of flour, broke her neck, and died. Charcoalburner Michel laughed broadly, wiped the dung from his face as though it were honey, and triumphantly yelled in Matthew's face; “Goddamned whoring shit! She belongs to me anyway!”

In the weeks that followed the Great Fire, snow fell thigh-high. Then came the cold, then hunger. But the peasants of Eschberg stood together. Those whom the fire had spared shared their milk with those who had been impoverished overnight, baked bread, gave out clothing, spoke encouraging words, and even gave free wood from their own stretches of forest to rebuild their farms. In the January snow those victims who had been encouraged in this way went around uncovering the walls of their farms. Children and wives piled the snow up into great piles, and if anyone suddenly found a piece of furniture that had remained intact, they would show it, shining-eyed, to everyone else. On the south side of the village new tracks were cut into the forest, and those who owned the land did not skimp but let the fattest fir trees fall, harnessed their horses, oxen, and bullocks, and pulled the wood along deep grooves cut in the snow to the northern edge of the district. As winter days are short, they drove their animals on with
furious shouts, and the animals steamed in the glitter­
ing January air.

A mysterious generosity seemed to have entered their hearts. Those who had been plunged into misery could not understand why the others were helping them so selflessly. They convinced themselves it was out of gratitude to God for sparing their houses on the southern side. Never had a Lamparter voluntarily gone to the help of an Alder, let alone an Alder to the help of
an Alder. Formerly, if someone had stood sweating, baling his curling hay beneath ugly storm clouds, his neighbor would stand behind the window and hope the clouds would break and great sheets of rain would rot his bales. Only when the rain thundered down would he finally run to lend a hand.

By summer of the same year these suspicions were shown to have had had some justification. It turned out that the generous helpers had kept secret lists, carefully recording every plank of wood, every pound of trout, every loaf of bread, every egg, and every mouthful of cherry wine. Even the pinches of tobacco that had been offered so often and so instantly to the poor had been added up. The day of reckoning came and the creditors demanded every last penny, even if it took years to pay it back.

In the unhappy Christmastime of 1815 we see Elias wandering aimlessly through the village. He stamps nervously through snowy pastures. His only clothing, his Sunday suit, is torn and ragged. Anyone meeting him grows heavy of heart. He stands there like a young cherry tree whose buds have frozen before they could blossom. Anyone who sees his eyes falls silent, and some think the child's mind has died. When he wakes up in the inn in the morning, tears run down his cheeks. Then he sits motionlessly counting the slats in the dark, faded wainscoting. He makes up ideas, from one slat to the next. Sometimes it is his idiot brother, when he hears him breathing at his mother's breast. Some­times it is Seff, whom he is beginning to hate. When the pastures grow again he secretly swears he will not bring in the grass for his father, he will not groom the cows, he will not push the newborn calf's muzzle into the milk pail, he will not collect the fallen leaves in the autumn. But the nights, the nights when everyone in the inn
breathes, clears their throat, murmurs, coughs, whis­
tles, and snores, the nights belong to Elsbeth, his beloved, whose life he saved. Then he lies awake and listens to her thin breath passing through her lips. In his thoughts he smells the leaf-yellow hair, he plays with her ears, and he screws his eyes up and tries to count the beats of her heart. His thoughts grow calm. Some­times a twitch in the girl's body brings perfect peace. Elsbeth's dreams are filled with nighttime firestorms and pictures in which she looks for her marmalade cat and cannot find it. Then Elias would like to stand up and steal over the sleeping bodies to Nulf's wife, at whose feet the girl lies. He would like to put Elsbeth's sweat-cold hand in his warm armpit, he would like to fan her brow, but his courage fails him. So in his thoughts he hums the girl a lullaby. And he is the one who falls asleep.