Brother of Sleep: A Novel (9 page)

ELSBETH AND THE SPRING

SOON
nature decided to invade the mountain pastures with its most sumptuous colors. The burns and scorches healed, and the ash, nature's favorite tree, grew again, strong and plentiful. Soon the new farms proudly pointed their roofs toward the Rhine Valley, and the dazzling white of their sprucewood fronts could be seen glinting from Appenzell. Those people who had been impoverished by the catastrophe were less given to anger, and from the first thaw the unhappy widow of Eduard Lamparter started paying eager visits to Kun­rich Alder. By the end of the year they were married, and by the end of the year Eduard's grave was in a
shameful state of neglect. Soon the weeping and griev­
ing was forgotten. The spring emboldened people's spirits; at the fair they laughed over their past misfortunes, and on stormy nights they told their families of the wretched ways in which they had seen a bullock or a little child consumed, howling with the child's voice or outdoing themselves in agonized mooing. However much they indulged themselves in the pleasures of oblivion, the mere trace of the catastrophe burrowed inexorably into their souls and led them for years into the black abysses of countless nightmares.

The peasants of Eschberg had understood what God had been trying to show them with the Great Fire. So they grew even more stubborn and ceased to conceal their hostility to God and the Holy Church. Nulf Alder in particular, refused a blessing on his gleaming new farm. Where once the household altar had stood he built an alcove, and from now on Nulf Alder himself slept in the Lord's corner.

And Johannes Elias Alder had grown into a man. At fifteen his limbs suddenly sprouted, at nineteen he had the figure of a man of forty. He had grown tall, had two well-worked but mature hands, and when the sun burned his face at haymaking time he was covered all over with freckles. The painful task of carrying bales of hay had damaged his spine, and the skin on his body was rough and calloused.

Elias broke the oath he had sworn against his father. At the first harvest, he helped with the mowing, raked the shaggy pastures, milked the cow, and pushed the muzzles of the newborn calves into the milk pail, and in the autumn he collected the leaves on the slopes and refused to let anyone help him. But he avoided the once-beloved Seff, Mostly's murderer. Elias had basically broken with his family. His brother Fritz had never meant anything to him, his mother's misery had never really touched his heart, and he would not have given so much as a sniff if she had lain cold in her bed one day. The only one he loved was his little idiot brother, Philipp. He spent time with him whenever he could, brought him to his room, taught him to walk, showed him a language of sounds and notes that only the two of them understood. And when Elias discovered a fine gift for music in the boy, their love grew all the greater and they were brothers to the depth of their souls.

But Elias Alder's face retained all the nervous traits of his early youth. Not a trace of reconciliation had come to his mouth, although he had beautiful, even lips; it was surrounded by wrinkles, and his wide-
nostriled, calm nose accentuated the uneasy expres­
sion of his face. Although his head was well-proportioned–a rare and striking thing in the village–the bright color of his irises immediately marred the harmony of his face. Compared to the grotesque physiognomies of Eschberg's human specimens, however, we must describe Elias as a handsome man, and an Esch­berg gossip observed quite accurately that the young gentleman was the very image of Curate Benzer.

From his seventeenth year he wore his thin pale hair down to his shoulders. He also developed a predilec­tion for black frock coats and would ideally have worn only black, but this gave him a sanctimonious appearance. He developed a pretentious, short-stepped way of walking, which he practiced and polished for over a year. This curious walk was his only outward revolt against the doltish peasant world of which he had never wished to be a part. And, whether he suspected it or not, his walk faithfully reflected the world of his musical thought. For
his nocturnal musical inventions on the organ were slen­
der, light compositions, in which one brief, hasty idea caught, replaced, or inverted the next. It is in the nature of every genius to produce something with such a high degree of perfection that it has never been seen or heard before. And Elias never heard polyphonous music, for the preludes of Oskar Alder consisted only of fat-fingered, helpless chords.

Elias's nervous appearance and his good constitution might show that he would one day revolt against the world, or at least that he harbored a tenacious rebellion in his heart. Apart from the peculiarity of his walk and the horror of his death, however, the musician never really did revolt. He accepted his life, he devoted himself to the seasons and the year's necessities, he toiled and developed the usual bent back, and got calluses on his hands, without expecting satisfaction, cheerful fatigue, or hope of a decent future. He slaved away on his father's farm lest he attract further attention. He never recovered from the shock of his childhood.

What would our advice to Elias have been? If a person were told from the start that he was possessed of genius but would never be able to bring it to perfection because the laws of a wasteful plan decreed otherwise, nothing about that life would change, even had it been lived far away, in the favorable surroundings of a music-loving world.

God is the strongest, for He loves all injustice under the sun.

In the years that followed the catastrophe, the profile of his musical vocation was transformed. Since the night when he rescued the girl from the flames, he loved Elsbeth with a power and a passion that bordered on the inhuman. He thought it was good to opt for love, to devote to it the spirit and strength of an entire human life. With the very last atom of his limited will he decided in favor of Elsbeth, and thus against his musical career. But because his genius was a gift from God, he sided against God.

Now our reader, to whom we are linked by a sense of strange familiarity, should not think that Elias stopped playing music. The opposite is the case. He began to take his talent to an extreme, because he was playing for Elsbeth. Twice a week he had himself locked in the little church and learned to play the organ all by himself. Tenacious study left him with very agile, even dizzying fingerwork. And when his hands finally grew to their full size, each of them could cover–and this is no word of a lie–a full tenth, running prestissimo up and down the manual. He tended to play the pedal only with the tips of his feet, and the precision of this technique enabled him to achieve perfect
legati
. When the incessant coming and going between the console and the bellows began seriously to spoil his pleasure, he took Peter into his confidence and asked him to be the organ blower. Peter gladly accepted, for by that point he was
already in love with Elias Alder. When he first wit­
nessed his friend's fabulous talent for improvisation, he became really frightened and forgot for a moment to pump the bellows. Just as once in his childhood, when he had stood under Elias's window, he had felt the cold fascination of the strange boy, now once more he was astonished by this strange human being. His pulse thundered in his clenched fists when Elias smiled over to him and asked him to give his opinion of what he had heard. Peter was unable to speak. He wanted to cry out and hurl himself with longing at his friend's body. He must, his thoughts raced feverishly, make Elias the love of his life, he must have Elias near him, now and for all time. How could he live without him?

We must relate how our musician, exerting all his forces in a single night, dismantled the entire instrument. The constant changes in the weather, dryness and moisture, soot and grease, had left the organ in such a sorry state that some of the keys sagged, the feeders leaked, and the pipes emitted fearsome howls, as though the trumpets of Jericho were blowing. He did not want to hear this any longer, so he removed floors and walls, beams and boards, took out the keys, the stickers, the backfalls, and the trackers, took one pipe after another out of the wind chest, and, with a little brush, set about removing the accumulated dust of a century from each part of the organ. The loft looked like a workshop occupied by a blacksmith, a tanner, and a wood-carver all at the same time. He listed each intervention, each step, on detailed plans, and not the tiniest piece of leather escaped his attention. After all the parts had been cleaned and restored, he began, with infinite skill and an impeccable ear, to tune the registers. He took two cornet stops that he had made himself, conical and concave; he tinkered with the pipes and straightened the tongues with careful blows of the hammer, while Peter patiently held down the keys until the tremble in the notes in question grew ever weaker and finally disappeared. By Morning Mass an entirely rebuilt organ stood resplendent in the little church. The two friends stayed in the organ loft until the Angelus, because it was some time before Elias had carefully sealed the seams of the bellows and the joints of the hinges. He dipped the fine brush into flour, applied it to each joint, and where the flour blew away even slightly he stopped, took a piece of sheepskin, and glued it to the damaged spot with hot bone glue.

In the quiet enchantment of midday the friends then meandered back to their farms. Elias, dusty and dirty, remembered the oath he had sworn by the Lord when he had spent his first night at the organ: He would not rest until it had regained its soul. Now he could rest, and when Philipp howled and hollered with joy, Elias whistled to the idiot to be quiet, and the idiot was quiet.

Terrible was the awakening of Oskar Alder. In the prelude he was seized by fear, at the Kyrie his glasses steamed up, at the Gloria his sweat-drenched fingers slipped from the manual, and by the second Gloria–Curate Beuerlein having forgotten what he had just done–he lost his breath and slipped from his bench in a faint. Two insolently grinning faces immediately lifted the giant back on his stool; a zealous Alder fished around for handkerchiefs, spat on them, and swabbed the blue bump on the organist's brow. From that point onward Elias was not allowed to pump the bellows, and from that point onward no excuses were found for Oskar's playing, because the new organ loudly and clearly declaimed the slightest false note. Nulf Alder, who had ceased to come to mass since the catastrophe, delivered a devastating verdict in the Huntsman's Inn: Oskar was a musical fraud. He had always, he said, known this,
Sicket erat et principus in nunk and semper!
No one comforted the poor man, and so humiliated was he that he sought consolation in schnapps, his only restorative.

When Elias played, he played for Elsbeth, he invented music that captured the fragrance of her leaf-yellow hair, the tremble of her little mouth, the squeaky tones of her girlish laughter, the crackling of the folds of her blue damask apron. He pilfered one secret after another from the child, down to the most fleeting but recurring limp in her right leg, a momentary curve of the nostrils, an insignificant rush of gooseflesh, the first shadows of red on her brow. He listened to all the child's words and the tune of her voice, and with his imitative talents he soon learned to speak in her dark manner. We must stress that this man began to love a seven-year-old child–at first, admittedly, without any erotic desire, although the yearnings of the flesh tormented him even then. For that reason he sought distraction in work; he slaved away until he was tired, in the belief that his lust would vanish in fatigue. But when the girl experienced her first purification, and when her iris-blue bodice began to swell, Elias felt the desperate courage to stroke her hair as if in passing. He did so, and he did not wash his hand until he could no longer smell the scent of the stable that her tresses had left on it.

Elsbeth was a calm, balanced child of good character, which should come as some surprise if we consider her father, a vulgar brute, a despicable individual full of resentment toward his family and toward the world at large. But Elsbeth took after her mother, and she was a woman who patiently put up with her husband's out
bursts of temper when he came home drunk on Sun­
day, who did not complain when she was beaten and violated, who stood by her husband no matter what humiliation she had to endure, who silently forgave the sins for which he himself would never have asked forgiveness. She was weak, and when the children sought refuge with her, she pushed them away for fear of her raging husband. There was a great deal of her mother in Elsbeth. Just as Nulf's wife imagined a world where life was more lovable, Elsbeth dreamed a dream of her own, in which a boy would come one day from faraway places and ride with her through the morning mist of the Rhine Valley, kiss her hands, lift the veil she wore over her head, and revive her frozen mouth with kisses. In short: the girl saw things with loving eyes. And although the boy was there–from quite different faraway places–she could not see him.