Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) (46 page)

‘Too late,’ declared the ministers.

A later chronicler substantiated this opinion.

*

When the hanged man was cut down from the gallows his eyes had not yet closed. The hangman hastened to press them shut. Bystanders had already noticed and sank their suffering gaze.

But at that very moment the gallows took itself for a tree, and since no one had their eyes open, it is impossible to say for certain that it was not so.

*

He laid virtues and vices, guilt and innocence, qualities and faults on the scale, as he wanted to be sure before passing judgment on himself. Yet weighed down as they were, the scales of justice came out level.

But since he absolutely wanted to know for certain, come what may, he shut his eyes and walked countless times in a circle around the scales, first in one direction, then the other, until
he no longer knew which scale held what. Whereupon he passed judgment, randomly selecting one of the scales.

When he opened his eyes again, one scale had indeed dipped lower, but it was impossible to say which: the one loaded with guilt or the one with innocence.

It made him mad to derive no benefit from the evidence, and so he condemned himself, though he could not help thinking that he might be mistaken.

*

Make no mistake: this last lamp doesn’t shed more light – the surrounding darkness was just sucked into itself.

*

‘Everything passes’: this too, and does it not simultaneously give us pause?

*

She turned her back to the mirror, for she could not abide its vanity.

*

He taught the laws of gravity, offered proof after proof, but his teachings fell on deaf ears. Then he raised himself aloft and taught the laws in this suspended state – whereupon the people paid heed, though no one was surprised not to see him sink back down again.

1971

Ingeborg Bachmann

Once upon a time there was a Princess of Chagre or Chageran, from a people that later called itself the Kagran. St George, the very same saint who slew the dragon in the swamp, so that after the monster’s death the city of Klagenfurt could be founded, was also active here in old Marchfelddorf, on the far side of the Danube, where a church still stands near the flood lands marking his sainted memory.

The princess was very young and very beautiful and she had a black horse on which she rode ahead of everyone else. Her retainers counselled and implored her to hold back, for the land where they lived on the banks of the Danube, where later the Rhaetians, the Marcomanni, the Norics, the Moesians, the Dacians, the Illyrians and the Pammonians settled, was always in danger, and borders had not yet been invented. There was also a Cis- and a Transleithania, for peoples were still on the move. One day the Hungarian Hussars rode up from the
puszta
into the far-reaching, undiscovered corners of what would later become Hungary. They brought with them their wild Asian horses, as swift as the princess’s steed, and everyone trembled with fear.

The princess lost sovereign power, she was taken prisoner as she did not put up a fight; but she refused to be pawned off as a bride to the hoary-haired King of the Huns or the aged King of the Avars. She was held as a hostage and guarded by many
red and black riders. Because the princess was a true princess she preferred death to being bedded down by some decrepit old monarch, and she had to pluck up her courage, for that very night she was to be taken to the castle of the King of the Huns or that of the King of the Avars. She thought of escaping and hoped that her guards would fall asleep before the break of dawn, but her hope faded. They had taken her steed, and she had no idea how she might slip out of the enemy compound and find her way back to the blue hills of her homeland. Sleepless, she lay in her tent.

In the middle of the night she thought she heard a voice singing, not speaking; it murmured and gently lulled, but then, so it seemed to her, it no longer sang for others, but for her ears only in a language that enthralled her and of which she did not understand a single word. Nevertheless, she fathomed that the voice was directed to her alone and called out to her. The princess did not need to understand the words. Enchanted, she got up and pulled aside the cloth that covered the opening of her tent. She saw before her the endlessly dark sky of Asia and, looking up, caught a shooting star. The voice that broke through to her told her she could wish for something, and she wished it with all her heart. Suddenly she saw a stranger standing there before her in a long black coat, not one of the red and blue riders; he hid his face in the shroud of night, but even though she could not see his countenance she knew that he had cried out for her and sung hope into her heart in a voice never heard before, and that he had come to free her. He held her horse by the reins, and she quietly parted her lips and asked: Who are you? What is your name, my rescuer? How am I to thank you? Whereupon he laid two fingers to his lips, which she understood to mean that she should be still; he motioned for her to follow him and flung his black coat around her so that no one could see her. They were blacker than black in the night, and he led her and the horse which quietly lifted and lowered its hooves without whinnying, led them through the encampment and out a fair distance into the steppe. The princess still had his wondrous song in her ear, and she was charmed by this voice and wished to hear it again. She wanted to ask
him to ride upstream with her, but he made no reply and handed her the reins. She was still in the greatest danger and he gave her a sign to ride off. Then she lost her heart to him, even though she had not yet seen his face, since he kept it hidden; but she obeyed because she had to obey him. She swung herself onto the horse, looked down at him in silence and wanted to bid him a word of farewell in his language. She whispered it with her eyes. But he turned away and disappeared into the night.

The horse started trotting towards the river, the damp air guiding its direction. The princess cried for the first time in her life, and later peoples wandering in the region found several river pearls, which they brought to their first king and which are, to this day, amongst the oldest precious stones set in St Stephen’s crown.

Once she reached open country she rode upstream for many days and nights until she came to a region in which the river spread into countless backwaters running in all directions. Soon it turned into one big marsh overgrown with stunted willow bushes. The water was still at its normal level, the bushes bent and swayed, rustling in the ever-changing path of the wind of the plain, in which the willows could never stand upright but remained stunted. They swayed gently like marsh grass and the princess lost her way. It was as if everything had been set in motion, waves of willow branches, waves of grass – the plain was alive and no other person trod its soggy ground. The rush of the Danube, relieved to have broken free of the constraint of its immovable banks, split into countless streams that lost themselves in the labyrinth of the canals, whose veins cut broad swaths through the washed-up islands past which the water shot with a mighty crash. Listening amidst the foaming currents, the tide and tangle and the stream, the princess understood that the water was fast eroding the sandy beachhead on which she stood, eroding great hunks of the embankment, taking clumps of willow along with it. The water consumed entire islands and washed others up again elsewhere, and that is how things would proceed on the plain until the time of the high water, when willow and islands would be washed away and
disappear without a trace. A smoky fleck hung in the sky overhead, but there was not a trace of the blue heights of her native land. She did not know where she was, she did not recognize the Theban Heights, the foothills of the Carpathians, all still nameless, and she did not see the March flow into the Danube; nor did she know that one day a watery border would be drawn here, dividing two as yet nameless countries. For there were no countries and no borders to divide them back then.

On a bank of pebbles swept up by the tide she descended from her horse, the poor beast being unable to go on; observing the flood-waters getting swampier and swampier, she was gripped by a pang of fear, for she knew that this was a sign of the rising current and she saw no way out of this hostile landscape, a world of willow, wind and water; slowly she led her horse along, crushed by this realm of solitude, an impassable and bewitched realm she’d wandered into. She started looking for a spot to spend the night, as the sun was setting and the monstrous life force of this river grew ever more insistent in its raging rush and roar, its clapping, its swelling laughter washing up against the stones swept aside, its faint whisper in a quiet bend, its rapids hissing, its never-ending grinding against the rocky riverbed, and all the other sounds on the surface. Flocks of grey cranes swooped in as evening fell and the cormorants started scouring the banks for food; storks fished in the current and swamp birds of every description circled round, piercing the air with their fervent, far-echoing craw.

The princess had heard tell as a child of this grim region on the Danube, of its bewitched islands where one died of hunger but where one also had visions and experienced the greatest rapture in the delirium of one’s own demise. The princess felt as if the island moved along with her, and yet it was not the thundering current that made her tremble – rather, she was gripped by a commingling of alarm and amazement and a sense of unrest, never before experienced, that came from the willows. Something deeply threatening emanated from them and weighed heavy on the princess’s heart. She had come to the end of human habitation. The princess bent down to her horse, which collapsed in exhaustion and also gave off a plaintive
sound, for he too felt that there was no way out and he begged her forgiveness with a dying look for no longer being able to carry her through and over the water. The princess stretched herself out in the hollow beside the horse, feeling a dark foreboding as never before; the willows whispered more and more, they murmured, they laughed, they cried out shrilly, howled and moaned. No troop of enemy soldiers was hot on her heels now, but she was surrounded by an army of alien beings, myriad leaves fluttered over the bushy tails of the willows; she lay in the bend of the river that led to the land of the dead and she had her eyes wide open as the mighty columns of shadow beings swept over her; one moment she buried her head in her arms to blot out the howl of the fearsome wind and the next moment she leapt up again, roused by a terrible tapping, scraping sound. She could not press forward or turn back – her only choice was to be smothered by the willows or drowned by the water – but in the blackest night a light flickered before her; and since she knew that it could not be a human light, but had to be a ghostly light, she approached it with a deathly fear, albeit enchanted, entranced.

It was no light; it was a flower, redder than red, not grown in the earth but burst into bloom in the free flow of night. She reached her hand out to touch the flower, but what she touched, along with strange petals, was the palm of another hand. The wind and the laughter of the willows went silent, and in the eerie white light of the rising moon that shone over the slackening current of the Danube she recognized the stranger in the black coat standing before her. He held her hand in his and pressed two fingers of his other hand over his mouth so that she would not ask him again who he was, but he smiled down at her with his dark, warm eyes. He was darker than the night that surrounded her before, and, cradled in his arms, she sank into the sand at his feet, and he laid the flower on her breast as one does with the dead, and drew his coat over her and him.

The sun had already risen high in the sky when the stranger awakened the princess from her deathlike slumber. He had made the real immortals, the elements, be silent. The princess
and the stranger started talking, as if they’d known each other for ever, and when one spoke the other smiled. They talked of darkness and light. The high water fell to a gentle flow, and before the sun went down the princess heard her horse rise and snort and trot through the brush. Startled in her heart of hearts, she said: I must move on, I have to ride upriver, come with me, never leave me again! But the stranger shook his head, and the princess asked: must you return to your people?

The stranger smiled: my people are older than all the peoples in the world and are scattered by the winds of time.

Then come with me! cried the princess, pained and impatient.

But the stranger replied: patience, be patient, you know now, you know.

In the night the princess had grown a second face, and so she said, tears streaming from her eyes: I know we’ll see each other again.

Where, smiled the stranger, and when? Endless is the ride ahead.

The princess peered down at the wilted flower, its lustre extinguished, left lying on the ground, and whispered, with eyes shut tight, on the edge of dreams: let me see!

Slowly she started to tell: it will be further upriver, the peoples will resume their migration, it will be in another century, let me guess, it will be more than twenty centuries from now, you will say as people do: beloved …

What is a century? asked the stranger.

The princess picked up a handful of sand and let it run swiftly through her fingers; she said, that’s about twenty centuries, then the time will come when you return and kiss me.

Then it will be soon, said the stranger, go on!

It will be in a city and in this city it will be on a street, the princess continued, we’ll be playing cards, I will close my eyes, in the mirror it will be Sunday.

What are city and street? asked the baffled stranger.

Stunned, the princess replied: we’ll soon find out, I only know the words, but we’ll see what they are when you drive thorns through my heart, we’ll be standing before a window,
let me finish, it will be a window filled with flowers, a flower for every century, more than twenty flowers, that’s how we’ll know that we’re in the right place, and all the flowers will look like this one!