Brother of Sleep: A Novel (16 page)

Nobody could direct him toward the land of the Californian, so he hiked in adventurous detours via Rätikon and through the Bergamasque Alps and was finally taken in, half starved, by a tanner in Lecco. He spent eight weeks in Lecco before running away, after which he was sought throughout the whole of Lom­bardy. In fact he had–in self-defense–killed the tanner who had saved his life, because he had served him up rotten bits of offal. Michel fled into Piedmont and down to the Ligurian coast, where he became a sailor on a Levantine coffee ship. He had never been wise with money, and it took him an hour to get through it all with ladies of pleasure. On one of his journeys, the ship ran into difficulties off the coast of Toulon, but God did not allow Michel to drown, washing him up instead at the feet of a Toulon master butcher, in whose abattoir he spent ten more months without in the slightest abandoning his plan to find the country of the Califor­nian. In Toulon he was responsible for a number of acts of indecency, the swarthy complexions of the women there leading him at first to imagine that he had found the dark-brown Californians. Michel had to flee again and decided, after he had failed to find the Californians and had entered his forty-third year, to return to his homeland and end his days as a simple and mature peasant. The return journey was even more difficult, in that he contracted a nervous fever in the Alps of the Valais. Anyone who set eyes on this man, ugly from birth but now pitifully emaciated, was touched to the heart.

It would take us too long to list all the stages of his life. We need mention only the fact that Charcoal-burner
Michel actually did find his way home. Curi­
ously, however, he did not settle in Eschberg but entered service as a stableboy in Hohenberg. His adventurous heart settled down over the years, and he even married late in life. To the fifteen children that his wife gave him he could not help talking, over and over again, about those mysterious black folk, the so-called Californians, whose chief he had been for four years.

We shall not be seeing Charcoalburner Michel again. He reached the Methuselan age of one hundred and eight, and the year of his death was the cradle of our own century. His children and his children's children honored their father, for even today in the region of Hohenberg there are three excellent poets of religious inclination. The fate of Charcoalburner Michel may tell us something of the considerable power of the written word during that period.

The disturbance of the heart, the taste of a new era, a longing for foreign parts–all these things passed Elias Alder by without a trace; in fact, he did not even register them. He was not one of those who were disturbed in Götzberg. He did not read the well-thumbed illustrated books that secretly circulated in the village. His vocabulary remained the same, while he spoke less and less.

When, in the evening, he crept out of his room for his supper, he silently took his place at the heavy oak table, sipped without appetite at his burnt soup, and uttered not a single word. We might wish that a painter had captured the unchanging tableau of the Alders' supper. A milk-white evening light is flowing through the little south-facing kitchen window. Seff's wife, in her blue apron, is spooning soup into her husband's distorted face with her gouty hands. Philipp, the idiot, is rolling his eyes, and Fritz is crossing himself. Is it conceivable that in this scene of wretchedness there sits the greatest musical genius that the Vorarlberg ever produced? Is it conceivable that a genius lives here, someone who can use his musical intelligence to say things that could advance the musical history of the nineteenth century by a mighty stride? It is not. It seems more like a great sad fairy tale.

The last few weeks in this man's life are run through with savage phantasmagorias of doubt and despair. We may rightly claim that when he had decided to die he had already gone mad. Only thus can we understand the incredible manner of his death. In the belief that he might reverse time he succumbed to a terrible longing for the past. One day he publicly declared that he was seventeen and looked older because he had entered puberty early. By the calendar he was twenty-two, but the deeper truth was that he was over forty. With terrible despair he cultivated the lie that Elsbeth was still unmarried, that she was still a virgin and would remain so until the time was ripe for him to ask for her hand. The harder he tried to resurrect the intensity of the past, the less successful he was. He knew he no longer loved Elsbeth. He knew God had taken from him his capacity for love. The idea was so unbearable he finally drove it from his brain amid masochistic torments. In truth, and Elias Alder would not understand this, it had freed him from his love for Elsbeth Alder. God wanted to let him live, for it pained Him to see how much this man suffered from love.

But has it never happened to the reader that, just when he thought his fate was moving disastrously above his head like masses of lowering black clouds, he has still found one patch where a thin ray of sunlight shone hopefully through? That was how it was with Elias Alder.

On the second Sunday in August a stranger en­
tered the village of Eschberg. He was an inconspicuous
man dressed like a city dweller, with a handlebar mus­
tache and a dark blue top hat. As well as a large rucksack, he carried with him a roll of papers bound with twine. This man was a musician. He was the cathedral organist in Feldberg. His name was Bruno Goller. This Goller did not come to Eschberg by chance. He was one of those early pioneers who sought to write their country's history from the point of view of their specialist area. Now Goller had been commissioned by the Institute of the Most Noble and Classical Arts in Feldberg, to which the Musical Institute was attached, to examine all the organs in the region and to describe them in minute detail in a large register.

What Goller discovered in Eschberg on that second Sunday in August was a simple five-stop organ and the most magnificent organist his schoolmasterly ears had ever heard.

“In the n-n-name of St. Cecilia, who are you?” stammered Goller, when he saw Elias creeping down the stairs from the organ loft. Goller swallowed and turned his top hat in his hands. “M-my name is Goller. Friederich Fürchtegott B-b-bruno G-g-goller,” he stuttered and held out his hat, rather than his trembling hand. Without a word of greeting, Elias looked at him tiredly, his eyes empty.

“C-c-cathedral organist in Feldberg, c-c-cantor as well,” Goller added fearfully. When he had pulled himself together he asked once again who Elias was, but he received no answer.

Then Peter, who had been watching the scene, joined them and greeted the stranger. “Good sir,” he said quickly, and in a flattering tone, “this is our Elias Alder, organist and headmaster of our school, and I am his cousin and friend and lowly organ blower.”

Because Elias did not reply, Goller talked to Peter. Never had he heard organ playing of such genius. Wild and primitive and yet of such sublime greatness. Never had he heard such complex counterpoint. It was simply impossible. He had managed to play the four chorales of the mass as a four-voiced quodlibet without changing a single note. That was utterly impossible; they must
show him the manuscript of this wonderful compos­
ition immediately. He wished to examine it once more. Then the communion fugue, which he had played
quasi unam fugam
, had had a volcanic power unparalleled in organ literature. In the postlude on the chorale “Christ our Lord came to Jordan” he had actually heard the water of Jordan flowing, and the chromatic condensation at the words “and suffer bitter death” had chilled him to the marrow, so much so he had had to hold on to his hat. If the gentlemen would now be to good as to show him the scores of all the pieces he had heard–

“Good sir,” Elias suddenly began, “I am unpracticed in the art of writing music.” There was a short silence, Peter smiled, a little ashamed, and Goller twisted his hat in his hand again.

“You can't–?” The words stuck in Goller's throat.

“That is,” Peter interjected hastily, “he taught himself to play the organ. Our late teacher could read music, and write it as well.”

Goller sat down in the spinsters' pew. “No manuscript?” he asked quietly and incredulously.

“See for yourself!” said Peter, puffing himself up. “Apart from Oskar's books you will find nothing!”

Then Goller slowly began to understand. “No manuscript,” his fish mouth snapped. “No manuscript.” Elias was about to go, but Goller held him back. “I beg you! Improvise at the organ again, I beg you!” he implored,
so the three of them climbed up to the organ loft.

When Goller had heard the utterly impossible again, he quietly told Peter that the organist must, in
the name of St. Cecilia, come without fail to the Musi­
cal Institute in Feldberg. For the timing was good; in
just two weeks the annual organ festival would be held there, in which the pupils were tested in extemporized organ playing. Peter did not understand every word, but he did promise to turn up with Elias at the appoin­ted time. Peter had a sense that this would be the greatest triumph in his friend's life.

Bruno Goller left Eschberg the same morning, without having minutely described the little organ for his big register, which is why it does not appear in his later book,
Little Treasure of the Organs of the Vorarlberg
. His encounter with the music of Elias Alder totally unnerved him, and for a number of days he was incapable of thinking calmly. When he was able to do so again, he bitterly regretted the invitation. It was not impossible, grumbled his narrow musician's heart, that Elias could end up being a dangerous rival to him. And what if, by St. Cecilia, this man were to be given the vacant position of second cathedral organist? Goller quickly left his study, for he needed to breathe the fresh night air of his little rose garden. On no account must that accursed man appear!

On the last Sunday in August the friends set off for Feldberg. It was a cripplingly hot summer morning, and even in the morning the air trembled over the horizon. It had taken a great effort on Peter's part to persuade his friend to undertake the journey, for in the meantime Elias had grown so apathetic that he did not even wash his body anymore. That Sunday he would have prefer­red to stay in bed, ruminating behind closed shutters on the mystery of his impossible love, as he had done for some time. But by using a piece of irresponsible cunning, Peter had managed to rouse the hypochondriac from his bed. He mentioned a rumor that Lukas Alder had fallen ill with a fever of the brain. Who knows, perhaps Elsbeth would be free again soon? Elias knew as Peter said this, that it was not true, but the idea of Elsbeth being free gave him the strength to travel to Feldberg.

When Elias made his farewells–he looked silently into the eyes of his paralyzed father, his mother was still asleep, Fritz was at the first milking–Philipp resisted with all his strength. Elias tried to calm him down in the language of sounds he had taught him. But Philipp's fury only grew all the more vocal. Philipp bucked like a calf being led on a rope from the warmth of the stable on its way to the slaughterhouse. Could it be the idiot sensed that Elias would not be coming back to the farm?

In the late afternoon, when the sun had stopped its noise, the friends set off barefoot for the little town of Feldberg. Peter still knew the way; he had gone there with Nulf to sign the legal papers for his inheritance. So he was able to show his friend all the lovely things to be seen.

Coming from the north on the outskirts of town, the country road ran past a stone house that had been there since time immemorial. Beside the house stood a little church, which had been dilapidated for years. That was the Feldberg infirmary, Peter explained know­ledgeably. If they were lucky they would find a few sick people who were held there because of their dangerous ailments. The two men walked into the stone-paved courtyard, and Elias was indeed able to discern a few figures, faces disfigured with cracks and boils, miserable eyes, and limbs, some of them bandaged, some not, consumed by the ravages of age. Peter could not have enough of this spectacle and went to the heavily barred windows and stared eagerly at the wretched creatures.

The former town wall had already been knocked down, but huge piles of stone remained. The most important emblem of Feldberg had always been the eight-story dungeon, built on an oval plan. Legend has it that at the time of the Montforts, Feldberg had suffered an unimaginable plague of cats. Indeed, the extent of the plague is compared to the plague of locusts in the Old Testament. The people of Feldberg were at a loss, the cats literally devoured the jute from their bodies, and in the alleyways it was impossible to put one foot in front of the other without setting off a terrible hissing and meowing. The wily town administrator, Jörg Bertschler, suggested the building of a tower of Babylonian proportions, from whose battlements the cats could be hurled, confined in baskets. Bertschler's advice was followed, and soon they were rid of the plague, which is why the tower is called the Cats' Tower until the present day.

In Elias's time the people of Feldberg held twelve French soldiers prisoner in the Cats' Tower. There would have been nothing strange about that, had the city fathers not forgotten the twelve poor devils in the
tower after the withdrawal of the troops. Every year, to this day, Feldberg pays a symbolic penny to the town of Arras, the home of eight of those unfortunates who starved to death.

There are many curious things we might mention about this little town, but we can now see the friends entering Goller's little rose garden. So we shall take our invisible places in the scene once again and describe what happened.