Brother of Sleep: A Novel (5 page)

But what did Seff do, whose affection his family so badly needed? For it happened that Elias threw himself at his father's breast, weeping bitterly, unable to say a word, simply in the hope that his father might hold him, might silently console him.

Seff said nothing.

And his brother, Fritz? We shall make no bones about saying that he is of no interest to us. Fritz was, as long as he lived, so insignificant as to be ignored entirely. He was one of those people who, in any era, have nothing to say; in fact, not a single word uttered by Fritz has been handed down to us. And had it been, it would have been completely uninteresting.

The picture of our hero's early youth is a dark one. Yet it had moments of radiant joy, which it would be dishonest to conceal from the reader. We shall look at one final episode, for which we must go back to the spring of 1808, to the five-year-old Elias.

It was a rain-drenched April morning. At around midday Elias was standing at the window of his room and could see a strange woman wheezing up the vil­lage street. By the straps over her shoulder and her red leather case he immediately recognized her as a midwife. Elias opened the window and tried to see where the woman was going. She had vanished from his range of vision, so he leaned dangerously far out of the window and saw that she was turning into Nulf Alder's house. About half an hour later, he was lying on his pallet when a piercing pain shot into his head, and a stich into his heart, and his breath was suddenly stilled.

My God, my God, what is it? The question whirled through his little brain. What is it? His heart was racing. “What is it, what is it?” he cried from the depths of his throat, laughing and crying at the same time; he leaped up with horror, shook the bolted door of his room, and beat his fists against the faded brown wall. And Elias banged his head against the windowpane and cried down to the forest, with the Emmer flowing behind. “Don't stop! Don't stop!” he cried.

Virginia Alder, Nulf's wife, had given her husband a girl. She was perfectly sound in mind and body. The child was baptized Elsbeth. Henceforward there was always a sumptuous bouquet on the side altar of the Virgin. No one could ever remember seeing it fade.

And Elias sobbed with joy. He was jubilant, jubilant in mind and body. For he could hear a wonderful
beating, and that beating sound made him think he could see paradise.

“Don't stop, you!” groaned the child, down toward the forest's edge, behind which he had first heard that sound.

It was Elsbeth's heartbeat. It was the sound of love.

THE VOICE, THE ANIMALS, AND THE ORGAN

AT
ten years of age, the boy was a man. His hair
was thinner, his coming baldness showed at his re­ceding
temples. As he wanted to look like all the boys of his age, he singed his stubble with a burning candle, in the belief that this would stop his beard from growing. The power of his experience in the riverbed of the Emmer had thrown his growth into disarray. He had the appearance and voice of a man but the size of a ten-year-old child. He wanted to be a child, he wanted to be able to talk like a child. As regards the peculiarity of his outward appearance, he had heard things that were beyond his comprehension. That Elias remained unspoilt by all the village filth of presumptions, lies, and calumnies can only be put down to the nature of his own heart. He had a good heart. It had the power of hope.

But the unusual, if seen every day, becomes normal, and people soon grew used to the man-child. In the schoolroom, among hydrocephalics, Mongoloids, and other products of inbreeding, a frail person with glowing yellow eyes was not particularly conspicuous. At that time the village schoolmaster Oskar Alder noticed how miserable and gaunt Seff's sons had become. Their little faces were emaciated, their chins were too pointed, and black and blue circles had formed under their eyes, for Seff's wife had been serving up nothing but her loveless, watery gruel for ages. So Oskar Alder put the boys in lodging elsewhere. When Seff's wife returned to her senses, her sons also prospered.

And it happened that some women suddenly be­gan to look at Elias with lustful eyes; they no longer squinted at his yellow irises but at his overdeveloped member. Elias did not understand the meaning of their ringing words, the hammering heartbeats between their breasts. He tried henceforward to avoid meeting these women. One woman in particular set her cap for the little man. Her name was Burga Lamparter, and she lived alone, her betrothed having been killed by the French in an ambush. Burga loved people and life, so she had been made the village prostitute. She had a bad reputation because she did not attend mass on Sunday. Burga would have liked to go, had she not had to kneel in the front pew, the fallen women's pew. This pew acted as a pillory, separated from the other women's pews, a simple bench without a backrest. Here knelt all the girls and women who had given birth to a child out
of wedlock. But Burga was an abortionist, as everyone in the village knew.

At this time, Elias decided not to say another word in public. The terrible event of the Feast of the Holy Trinity pursued him into his deepest dreams. He began to hate himself and his bass voice. When he had to
speak, in school, at catechism class, he spoke tone­lessly;
he wheezed and whispered as if suffering from constant hoarseness. This way of talking was such an effort that it gave him headaches, which only made him all the more taciturn.

In his distress he went down to the Emmer one day, where he knew no ear could hear him. As the water had once polished his favorite rock, he now polished his voice. First, for hours, he cried out everything that needed to be cried out. He cried out until he was on the verge of exhaustion, because he thought this would remove the bass from his voice, leaving only a bright boy's soprano. Elias was mistaken, for all that remained was hoarseness. Then he began to cry. He dangled his legs lifelessly in the water and gazed absently up toward the waterfall, gazed into the crashing white fountain, the endlessly falling waters of the mountain stream.

One June evening, two days before his eleventh birthday, he was sitting disconsolately on his stone
again, staring at the waterfall, when suddenly every­thing
fell into place. He discovered that water always flows from top to bottom, that a stone falls down, not up, that raindrops fall too, that even hay blossoms eventually fall to earth. He had discovered the law of
gravity. So he tried to place his voice within this order of things, to let it glide from the heights to the depths, from the depths to his head. After a number of hours he was able to speak in a falsetto voice.

Then something happened. He was taking his falsetto to its topmost register when a young fox slipped out of the undergrowth, looked him impudently in the eye, raised its snout, gave a jump, and came to rest by his feet. Elias gave a start, the little fox did the same, and the red-brown tail disappeared into the hedge. Then it came back but stayed some distance away, as though offended. The damp, dark clefts by the water-fall came to fluttering life. Bats had awoken early and shot this way and that, losing their bearings. When one bat suddenly landed on Elias's head, crashed onto the stone, and stuck there as a bloody gray stain, he grew frightened. At the same time the dogs of Eschberg started barking, and their polyphonic chorus was endless. Soon, two fire salamanders crawled onto the stone, imagining that the sun had risen.

Elias had–we can find no other explanation– found the auditory frequencies of the animals; he had sung in the ultrasound of the bats, whistled in the frequencies of the foxes and dogs. Without knowing, he had spoken to the animals.

During this period, the schoolmaster Oskar Alder observed a change in the man-child. He could not keep still at his desk, he kept impatiently rubbing the seat of his trousers up and down, and on one occasion even broke his slate in two. When the teacher asked him a
question because no one else knew the answer, the boy seemed completely absent. This astonished the teacher, for Elias had never been at a loss for an answer. Indeed, Oskar had often marveled at the child's memory, and so had the long-nosed curate, Beuerlein. The child was so well versed in the catechism and knew the names and stories in both testaments so thoroughly that the curate had to focus all his attention to follow the flow of ideas. After catechism the curate was often seen studying the Bible or reading one passage or another. How Curate Beuerlein would have liked to put Elias in the young people's congregation in Feldberg, but his father would not have it. You didn't need schooling to milk cows and scatter dung, said Seff. And, sadly, he was right.

The boy was unrecognizable. When he got more and more cheeky in class, Oskar Alder found himself obliged to reach for the hazel rod and give him ten blows on the fingers. All that Elias had meant to do was try out the effect of the new falsetto voice he had learned. No, Oskar Alder was by no means a strict teacher. The rod seldom whistled. True, he had once knocked a Lamparter child about so cruelly that it
suffered lasting damage. The child had, without mal­ice,
called him a bull's pizzle; immediately, Oskar Alder had kicked the child to the ground and beaten it into a silent, bloody heap. Afterward the other pupils had picked the child's scalp from the tiles and proudly kept the trophy in a clay bottle. Whenever the teacher looked at the Lamparter child thereafter, asking for an answer, the child began to stutter, and its stutter
remained with it throughout its life. Nevertheless, Os­kar Alder was not a strict teacher, that is true. But Elias was not intimidated, and he showed the stubborn character of the Eschbergers, who, when they're in deep water, swim farther and farther out.

Elias went down to the water-polished stone every day and tirelessly polished the sound of his voice. He cried out what he had to cry out, sang in overtone scales, and developed sounds that were strange, even uncanny. He also discovered an extraordinary talent for imitating the voices of others, as the following episode will reveal.

On Corpus Christi in 1815 a religious hysteria took hold of the village, principally in the home of blind Haintz Lamparter. It so happened that the blind man was putting out stakes for a new fence around his pasture near the forest's edge, along the boundary between Seff's property and his own. Now we must wonder how a blind man is at all in a position to erect a fence without outside help.

The idea came to her one rainy Sunday, Haintz's wife told Haintz, when she was absently looking out at her little farm and over to Seff Alder's vast pastures. Surely fences could walk, it occurred to her.

The next day Haintz was seen blindly fencing his way into his neighbor's property. Haintz's wife stayed nearby, but hidden. Voicing infinite precautions, she directed the blind man into the Alders pasture. Seff discovered the subterfuge and said nothing. He pa­tiently took down the wildly curving fence and, equally
patiently, Haintz put it back the following morning. Thus Haintz's wife planned to fleece her neighbor of his property.

The dispute continued for a considerable time. One mild evening the blind man was busy stealing land from his neighbor again. Suddenly he heard a voice, weird and new. His mallet dropped from his hands, and his fat-lipped mouth hung open. He dropped to his knees, a tear ran from between from his crusted lids, and he trembled. Had the angels spoken to him? To him, a mere beggar before the Lord?

“Why sinnest thou against thy neighbor? I, the prophet Elijah, command you to repent!”

When Haintz heard these words, echoing with divine thunder, he leaped to his feet and whooped, dug his fingers into the earth, and smeared his face with soil. “My soul is black, O prophet! Let me live at least! My wife led me astray!” sobbed Haintz, so pitifully that our rascal himself took fright and sloped away.

After the curate had shown her to the door with calming words, Haintz's wife resolved to write a little letter to the gentlemen in Rome, informing them of the
event. For she did not for a moment doubt the testi­mony
of her tear-drenched husband, to whom the prophet Elijah had appeared with his horses and his fiery chariot. She made the blind man show her the spot where the miracle had happened, and when Haintz tapped his way deeper and deeper into his neighbor's farm she led him with infinitely cautious hands to the most likely point of the revelation, which
was in the middle of her potato field. Then she began erecting the fence herself, and the double echo of the mallet was heard until long past midnight.

The curate eventually yielded to stubborn requests and came by to give his blessing to the little field. This caused an uproar in the village, for some people could not see why this particular revelation was held to be valid while the miracles, the visions, the events, the apparitions in their own fields, in their own forests, in their own rooms, were dismissed as mere fantasies. But Haintz's wife had greater things in mind. From Eschberg's wood-carver, known as Mostly, she commissioned fourteen Stations of the Cross and fourteen matching offertory boxes, which she planned to erect along the path to Elijah's Field. In this way the faithful pilgrim would be able not only to walk along Christ's via dolorosa from one station to the next but also to sample the bitter poverty of the visionary. Haintz's wife was not stupid, and she knew as well as anyone that seeing is believing. So she built a little plank cabin in the field as a shelter from the wind and rain, where the blind seer would stand, hands folded, gazing heavenward with an expression of astonishment.

It was not to be. The gentlemen in Rome did not reply to her little letter. Mostly billed her for the Sta­tions of the Cross and the offertory boxes, and so it happened that the beadle and his wife had to get rid of a cow and an ox. From that day, Haintz's wife was not seen for some time, even at High Mass. She put it about that there was so much work to do at her farm–
by the prophet Elijah–what with one cow calving after another.

When, by dint of tireless practice, Elias had found a voice whose tonality touched everyone to the heart, Curate Beuerlein decided to appoint him reader of the Sunday epistle. But our hero was not able to fulfill this task for long, since his wonderfully warm speech so disturbed the women of Eschberg that they forgot all about their prayers. The moment the man-child began to read, the gospel side grew agitated. There was much slithering and sliding in the pews. Sunday frocks rustled and corsets creaked, hair was rearranged, prayer books were fingered nervously, shoes slid crashing from the knee rests, and when, on the Sunday before Advent, the Day of the Dead, an ancient Lamparter woman fell dying from her pew just as the gospel reading began, even Curate Beuerlein began to sense that Elias's voice, far from reinforcing devotion, was doing it active harm. Some lads even hatched a malicious plot to smash in the mouth of the sweet-tongued talker who turned their women's heads. Thankfully, he was able to escape them, because the Alder gossip thwarted the plans of the jealous lads. But we must put ourselves in the place of those men, whose wives were forever singing the praises of Elias's angelic voice. That is what we must do.

At the age of fourteen Elias left school, and we must note with a shock that he had already lived more than half his life.