The Glass Bead Game (60 page)

At these words the little girl beside Knecht sprang to her feet as if she had been bitten by a snake, screamed, and ran headlong away. She had been sitting for a long time fighting back the terror caused by the story, until she could no longer endure it. One old woman laughed. Other listeners were almost as frightened as the little girl, but they controlled themselves and remained seated. But Knecht, startled out of his trance of fear, also sprang up and ran after the girl. The old woman went on with her story.

The Rainmaker had his hut close by the village pond, and Knecht looked for the runaway in this direction. He searched and tried to lure her out of hiding with coaxing, reassuring hums, and singsongs and clucks, using the voice that women use to call chickens, sweet, long drawn-out notes, intent on enchantment. “Ada,” he called and sang. “Ada, little Ada, come here, Ada, here I am, Knecht.” He sang again and again, and before he had heard a sound from her or caught a glimpse of her he suddenly felt her small soft hand force its way into his. She had been standing by the path, pressed against the wall of a hut, and been waiting for him since hearing his first call. With a sigh of relief she moved close to him; he seemed to her as tall and strong as a man.

“Were you frightened?” he asked. “You shouldn't be, no one will hurt you, everyone likes Ada. Come, we'll go home.” She was still trembling and sobbing a little, but was already calmer, and went gratefully and trustfully along with him.

Dim red light filtered through the doorway of the hut. Inside, the Rainmaker sat stooped by the hearth. Yellow and red light gleamed through his flowing hair. The hearth-fire was lit and he was boiling something in two small pots. Before entering with Ada, Knecht watched curiously from outside for a few moments. He could see at once that whatever was being boiled was not food; that was done in different pots, and besides it was already much too late to prepare a meal. But the Rainmaker had already heard him. “Who is standing at the door?” he called out. “Step forward, come in! Is it you, Ada?” He placed lids on his pots, raked glowing embers up against them, and turned around.

Knecht was still peering at the mysterious little pots; he felt curiosity, awe, and a sense of oppression all at once, as he always did whenever he entered this hut. He came here as often as he could, made up all sorts of pretexts for coming, but once he was here he always felt this half-thrilling, half-warning sensation of slight uneasiness, of eager curiosity and pleasure warring with fear. The old man knew that Knecht had long been trailing after him, turning up as he did at odd moments and unlikely places. The boy was pursuing him like a hunter following a spoor, and mutely offering his services and his company.

Turu, the Rainmaker, looked at him with his bright hawk's eyes. “What are you doing here?” he asked coolly. “This is no time of day for visits to strange huts, my boy.”

“I've brought Ada home, Master Turu. She was listening to the Mother tell stories about witches and all of a sudden she was so frightened she screamed, so I walked her home.”

The Rainmaker turned to his daughter. “You're too timid, Ada. Sensible little girls need not fear witches. You're a sensible little girl, aren't you?”

“Yes, but the witches know all sorts of wicked tricks, and if you don't have a boar's tooth…”

“I see, you'd like to have a boar's tooth. All right. But I know something even better, a special root I'll give you. We'll look for it in the autumn. It protects sensible girls from all kinds of magic and even makes them prettier.”

Ada smiled happily; she was already reassured, now that the smell of the hut and the familiar firelight surrounded her. Shyly, Knecht asked: “Couldn't I help look for the root? If you would only describe the plant to me…”

Turu's eyes narrowed. “A good many little boys would like to know that,” he said, but his voice did not sound angry, only slightly mocking. “There's time for that. Perhaps in the autumn.”

Knecht slipped away and went to the youth house where he slept. He had no parents; he was an orphan; for that reason, too, he was entranced by Ada and her hut.

Turu the Rainmaker was not fond of words. He did not like to hear himself or others talking. Many tribesmen thought him peculiar, and some sullen. But he was neither. He knew what was going on around him, or at any rate knew more than anyone would have expected in a man seemingly so solitary, absent-minded and full of learning. Among other things he knew quite well that this somewhat bothersome but handsome and evidently clever boy was running after him and observing him. He had noticed this as soon as it began, for it had been going on a year or longer now. He knew, too, exactly what it meant. It meant a great deal for the boy's future, and also meant a great deal for him, the Rainmaker. It meant that this boy had fallen in love with rainmaking and was longing to learn the art. Every so often there would be such boys in the village, and they would begin to hang about him, much as this boy was doing. Some could easily be discouraged and frightened away, others not; and he had taken on two of them as his disciples and apprentices. Both had married into other villages far away and were the rainmakers or simples gatherers there. Since then, Turu had been alone, and if he ever again took another apprentice, it would be to train him as his own successor. That was how it had always been; that was how it ought to be, and it could be no other way. A gifted boy always had to turn up and attach himself to the man whom he saw as the master of his craft. Knecht was talented; he had what was needed, and he also had several signs to commend him: above all the look in his eyes, at once piercing and dreamy; the reserve and quiet in his manner; and in the expression of his face and the carriage of his head something questing, scenting, and alert, an attentiveness to noises and smells. There was something of the hawk and something of the hunter about him. Surely this boy could become a weathermaker, perhaps a magician also. He could be taught. But there was no hurry; the boy was still too young, and there was no reason to show him that he had been recognized. Apprenticeship must not be made too easy for him; he must go the whole way himself. If he could be intimidated, deterred, shaken off, discouraged, he would be no great loss. Let him wait and serve; let him creep around and pay court.

Knecht sauntered through the gathering night, under a cloudy sky with two or three stars. He made his way into the village, content and happily excited. This village knew nothing of the luxuries, beauties, and refinements which we today take for granted and which even the poorest among us regard as indispensable. The village had no culture and no arts. Its only buildings were the crooked mud huts. It knew nothing of iron and steel tools. Even wheat and wine were unknown. Inventions such as candles or lamps would have seemed dazzling wonders to these people. But Knecht's life and the world of his imagination were no poorer on that account. The world surrounded him like a picture book full of inexhaustible mysteries. Every day he conquered another little piece of it, from the animal and plant life to the starry sky; and between mute, mysterious nature and the breathing soul in his solitary, nervous boyish frame there dwelt all the kinship and all the tension, anxiety, curiosity, and craving for understanding of which the human soul is capable. Although there was no written knowledge in his world, no history, no books, no alphabets, and although everything that lay more than three or four hours' walk beyond his village was totally unknown and unreachable, he nevertheless lived fully and completely in his village, in the things that were his. The village, home, the community of the tribe under the guidance of the mothers gave him everything that nation and state can give to man: a soil filled with thousands of roots among whose intricate network he himself was a fiber, sharing in the life of all.

Contentedly, he sauntered along. The night wind whispered in the trees. Branches creaked. There were smells of moist earth, of reeds and mud, of the smoke of wood still partly green, an oily and sweetish smell that meant home more than any other; and finally, as he approached the youth hut, there was its smell, the smell of boys, of young men's bodies. Noiselessly, he ducked under the reed mat, into the warm, breathing darkness. He settled into the straw and thought about the story of the witches, the boar's tooth, Ada, the Rainmaker and his little pots in the fire, until he fell asleep.

Turu only grudgingly yielded to the boy's importunity; he did not make it easy for him. But the youth was always on his trail. Something drew him to the old man, though he himself often did not know what it was. Sometimes, when the Rainmaker was off somewhere in a remote spot in the woods, swamp, or heath, setting a trap, sniffing the spoor of an animal, digging a root, or collecting seeds, he would suddenly feel the boy's eyes upon him. Invisible, making no sound, Knecht had been following him for hours, watching his every move. Sometimes the Rainmaker would pretend not to notice; sometimes he growled and ungraciously ordered the boy to make himself scarce. But sometimes he would beckon him and let him stay for the day, would assign him tasks, show him one thing and another, give him advice, set tests for him, tell him the names of plants, order him to draw water or kindle fires. For each of these procedures he knew special tricks, knacks, secrets, and formulas which must, he impressed this on the boy, be kept strictly secret. And finally, when Knecht was somewhat older, he took him from the youth house into his own hut, thus acknowledging the boy as his apprentice. By that act Knecht was distinguished before all the people. He was no longer one boy among others, he was the Rainmaker's apprentice, and that meant that if he bore up and amounted to something, he would be the next Rainmaker.

From the moment the old man took Knecht into his hut, the barriers between them dropped—not the barrier of veneration and obedience, but of distrust and constraint. Turu had submitted; he had allowed Knecht to conquer him by tenacious courtship. Now he wanted nothing more than to make a good Rainmaker and successor of the boy. In this course of instruction there were no concepts, doctrines, methods, script, figures, and only very few words. The Master trained Knecht's senses far more than his intellect. A great heritage of tradition and experience, the sum total of man's knowledge of nature at that era, had to be administered, employed, and even more, passed on. A vast and dense system of experiences, observations, instincts, and habits of investigation was slowly and hazily laid bare to the boy. Scarcely any of it was put into concepts; virtually all of it had to be grasped, learned, tested with the senses. The basis and heart of this science was knowledge of the moon, of its phases and effects as it waxed and waned, peopled by the souls of the dead whom it sent forth into new births in order to make room for the newly dead.

Like that evening when he had escorted the frightened Ada to her father's hearth, another time was deeply etched on Knecht's memory. This was a time when the Master woke him two hours after midnight and went out with him in deep darkness to show him the last rising of a vanishing crescent moon. The Master in motionless silence, the boy somewhat tremulous, shivering from lack of sleep, they waited a long time on a ledge of rock in the midst of the forested hills, watching the spot indicated by the Master, until the thin, gently curving line of the moon appeared in the very position and shape he had described beforehand. Fearful and fascinated, Knecht stared at the slowly rising heavenly body. Gently it floated between dark banks of clouds in an island of clear sky.

“Soon it will change its shape and wax again; then will come the time to sow the buckwheat,” the Rainmaker said, counting out the days on his fingers. Then he lapsed into silence again. Knecht crouched as if he were alone on the rock gleaming with dew. He trembled with cold. From the depths of the forest came the long-drawn call of an owl. The old man pondered for a long while. Then he rose, placed his hand on Knecht's hair, and said softly, as if awakening from a dream: “When I die, my spirit will fly into the moon. By then you will be a man and need a wife. My daughter Ada will be your wife. When she has a son by you, my spirit will return and dwell in your son, and you will call him Turu, as I am called Turu.”

The apprentice heard all this in astonishment. He did not dare say a word. The thin silvery sickle rose and was already half devoured by the clouds. A strange tremor passed through the young man, an intimation of many links and associations, repetitions and crosscurrents among things and events. He felt strangely poised both as spectator and participant against this alien night sky where the thin, sharp crescent, precisely predicted by the Master, had appeared above endless woods and hills. How wonderful the Master seemed, and veiled in a thousand secrets—he who could think of his own death, whose spirit would live in the moon and return from the moon back into a person who would be Knecht's son and bear the former Master's name. The future, the fate before him, seemed strangely torn asunder, in places transparent as the cloudy sky; and the fact that anyone could know it, define it, and speak of it seemed to throw open a view into incalculable spaces, full of wonders and yet also full of orderliness. For a moment it seemed to him that the mind could grasp everything, know everything, hear the secrets of everything—the soft, sure course of the planets above, the life of man and animals, their bonds and hostilities, meetings and struggles, everything great and small along with the death locked within each living being. He saw or felt all this as a whole in a first shudder of premonition, and himself fitted into it, included within it as a part of the orderliness, governed by laws accessible to the mind. This first inkling of the great mysteries, their dignity and death as well as their knowability, came to the young man in the coolness of the forest as night moved toward morning and he crouched on the rock above the multitude of whispering treetops. It came to him, touched him like a ghostly hand. He could not speak of it, not then and never in his whole life, but he could not help thinking of it many times. In all his further learning and experiencing, the intensity of this hour was present in his mind. “Think of it,” it reminded him, “think that all this exists, that there are rays and currents between the moon and you and Turu and Ada, that there is death and the land of the souls and a returning therefrom and that in your heart there is an answer to all the things and sights of the world, that everything concerns you, that you ought to know as much about everything as it is possible for man to know.”