Brother of Sleep: A Novel (3 page)

Only the closest family members attended the baptism. Johannes Elias's Alders sat on the epistle side, and Peter Elias's Alders on the gospel side. The curate delivered a sermon comparing the power of water with the power of fire. The sermon was a long one, and it seemed almost as if the curate was in some way nervous of the baptism itself. When he finally dabbed holy water on the boys' lobster-red brows, his hand began to tremble so violently that he had to interrupt his flow lest he hurt the little creatures. Involuntarily, the cur­ate's eye fell on Seff's wife's face, and they both blushed in the most embarrassing manner. Fortunately, the or­gan sounded the baptismal chorale and, fortunately, Johannes Elias suddenly began to cry. He was jubilant, for he was hearing the sound of an organ for the first time in his life. He was jubilant because he had discovered music.

Seff, however, his father, sat sunk in a pew, his eyes plunged deep into his lap. When the boy began to cry, a frost descended upon Seff once more, a strange frost that ran down his back, around over his belly, and into his testicles.
Blast it if there isn't something wrong with the boy! That voice!
thought Seff, and pressed his ears closed so that the veins stood out in his hands.

But Peter Elias, Nulf Alder's child, did not cry. We think we are able to see in this a prefigured trait of his later character, for Peter Elias never cried and complained. Only once, and that is an occasion to which we shall return in detail.

Three days later Curate Benzer met a terrible end. He had climbed up into the Eschberg woods to the plateau known as St. Peter's Rock. He had gone there, it was supposed, to pick spring juniper. A little wicker basket was found nearby. But he must have fallen mis­erably over the cliff, for his body was found utterly unrecognizable in the scree, his thighs thrust into his torso to the knee. The bare white bone of his left thigh lay a yard away.

The rumor of suicide died hard. The baptismal registration of Seff's boy reveals a trembling, almost illegible script, while the other shows the curate's usual extravagant hand–which is not to say anything more than we mean to say.

*
The first Sunday in Lent, when coal stoves are lit in Germanic countries.

THE MIRACLE OF HIS HEARING

ALL
afternoon the fog swept up from the Rhine Valley into the hamlet of Hof, where Seff Alder's property lay. The fog froze in the woods, drew icy threads from the branches, and covered the south-facing bark of the pine trees. That afternoon the moon and sun faced each other, the moon a broken host, the sun a mother's cheek. The child stood on a stool at the window of his room, which Seff's wife now bolted twice, jamming a wooden plank between the handle and the doorpost. Elias stood staring up toward the forest rim, with the Emmer flowing behind it. His heart was filled with melancholy. He had to go down there.

In the night, the child was waked by the sound of the falling snowflakes. Wild with joy, he jumped to the window, opened it, and stayed there listening until dawn. (By this time his brother Fritz no longer shared a
room with him. His parents had taken Fritz into their room to protect him from the accursed child.) When Seff's wife discovered Elias in the morning, his brow was covered with sweat, and he then spent ten days in bed with a fever, but he also was filled with an inexplica­ble gaiety, spending half the day singing all the hymns from the church year.

At this time the child did not understand very much. He did not understand why he had to be silent when a stranger entered the house, when his brother was always allowed to be there. He did not understand why his mother would not stay with him, waiting for the wonderful sound of the snowflakes to return. And he did not understand why he was not allowed to touch her earlobes when he wanted to go to sleep. When she tried to forbid him to sing, the child began to howl so heartrendingly that she finally gave in and allowed him at least to sing during the night.

At this point we must reveal the child's secret,
because the strange behavior of Seff's wife will other­
wise remain inexplicable. Elias had a voice of glass, according to his uncle Oskar Alder, Eschberg's organist and schoolmaster. The phenomenon of this curious voice cannot be explained in medical terms, being congenital. When the child began to speak, a single high whistle issued from his mouth. The voice did not have a speaking melody as such; it did not modulate but emerged as a single constant whistling tone. This was what had made Seff shiver at the baptism, for he thought the defect was ineradicable. He did not say a single word about it, as, indeed, he seldom ever said anything.

That afternoon, when sun and moon had faced each other, five-year-old Elias stole from his room. Something was calling. He had to go.

No one paid any attention to Elias. In Eschberg, nobody paid attention to their children at all. When, in a terrible storm, an Alder child had drowned in the turbulent brown water of the Emmer, its mother had excused herself by saying that the children had always found their own way in the past and the Lord God himself had set an appointed hour for the poor little mite. Some days after the storm, Seff had begun to take driftwood out of the Emmer. Peasants had enjoyed this right for centuries. What one could remove became one's property. But the removal of driftwood was a constant source of argument and bloodshed, for it was entirely possible that someone might cut down a fine fir tree from a neighbor's wood and obstinately claim it as driftwood.

On the occasion of this deforestation of the Em­mer, Elias had been allowed to accompany his father. And there the child discovered the place, the water-polished stone, that was to exert such a strange and curious attraction for him. Seff had noticed the way the child, when paddling in sand and mud, would suddenly stop, nervously casting his hand from one side to the other as though trying to listen to something. Then the child climbed out and clambered impetuously through the undergrowth, as if summoned by an unknown power. As he put everything within reach to his mouth and ears–mud, gravel, insects, salamanders, grass, and rotting leaves–Seff had called him by name, to show he was not alone in the wilderness. This so terrified the child that he began to cry, and it was a long time before he would be consoled. And he refused to move an inch from a particular rocky protuberance, so that Seff had been obliged to pull him from it by force and take him under his arm. On the basis of this observation we may see that the miracle did not strike Elias like a bolt from the heavens but announced itself gradually, in an almost human way.

This afternoon the stone was calling. Elias had to go to the river. He stole down the hill and out through the pasture and reached the steaming stable. From there he took the path that could not be seen from any of the house's windows. Still, he ran the first part of the way, until he knew he could no longer see the farm. He whistled with joy, tumbled, and scampered through the hamlet down to the bed of the Emmer. But Seff, scattering dung in the next hamlet, saw him. He saw the little airy dot of humanity against the great whiteness of the field. He saw it disappearing in the zigzag behind the forest's rim. Seff shoved the pitchfork into the frozen ground, cupped his hands to his mouth, and was about to cry out to his son when he stopped. He did not wish to disturb the child in his happy solitude. Seff looked glassy-eyed at the forest shadow behind which the lad had disappeared. Then he picked up the fork and drove it powerfully, furiously, into the steaming
dungheap. “Blast it if there isn't something wrong with the boy!” And that forkful of dung flew farther than all the rest.

There he went, that strange child, stamping through the fog-frozen landscape. Walked for half an hour or more, climbed skillfully around the first water­fall, then the second. On his walk he had to stop frequently, because he could not hear enough of the whirring sound of the ice flakes that fell rustling from the branches all around him. Filled with exultation, Elias pushed the tips of his heavy, tight leather shoes into the frozen snow. And the rough crust whirled into a thousand sparks, whispered and groaned in sounds so diverse that Elias had never heard their like. Even the wonderful sound of the snowflakes the other night was as nothing in comparison with this magnificent concert.

On walked Elias, ever onward. He pulled up his trousers, lifted his nose, and tugged a felt hat lower over his face. On difficult nights he drew this hat from his pallet and smelled it until he was comforted. He smelled the cold sweat, the hair, the smell of the cattle–it was the hat his father wore in the stable.

The closer Elias came to the water-polished stone, the more uneven his heartbeat grew. It was as though the sound of his steps, his breath, the whispering of the frozen snow, the groaning of the trees, the rushing of the water under the ice of the Emmer–as if everything surrounding him was swelling up, ringing out with ever greater force and brilliance. When Elias had finally
climbed up to the stone, he heard a thunder emanating from his heart. He must have had an inkling of what was to come, for he suddenly began to sing. Then the miracle happened. That afternoon, five-year-old Elias heard the sound of the universe.

Because his head was freezing again, he grabbed his hat, to pull it farther down on his face. This produced such a violent explosion in his ears that the shock sent him sliding from the stone and he fell back into the snow. His last glimpse of reality was a tuft of blond, bloody hair. While he was falling, his sense of hearing multiplied.

The little body began to change. His eyeballs sprang abruptly from their sockets, sticking out from between their lids until they protruded beneath the eyebrows. And the fluff of his brows stuck to his tear-drenched corneas. His pupils dissolved, engulfing the whites of his eyes. Their natural color, the melancholy green of rain, disappeared, to be replaced by a glowing and repellent yellow. The nape of the child's neck grew rigid, and the back of his head bored painfully into the hard snow. Then his spinal column arched, his navel grew horn hard, and blood seeped from the navel's long-scarred flesh. But the child's face bore a terrible aspect, as though all the cries of pain of mankind and all the world's creatures lay buried within it. His jaws stood out, his lips reduced to two thin, bloodless slashes. One by one the child's teeth caved in, for the gums had atrophied; we have no way of explaining why Elias did not suffocate. Then, monstrously, his little member
stiffened, and his precocious sperm mingled with urine and the blood from the navel to run down his groin in a warm trickle. Throughout all this, the child released all his body's excretions, from sweat to excrement, in uncommonly large quantities.

What the child then heard was the black thunder emanating from his heart. One clap of thunder today, one tomorrow. Which is to say he lost all sense of time. So we cannot determine how long Elias really lay in the
snow. By human measurements, a few minutes per­haps;
by divine reckoning a period of years, as one remarkable circumstance will show.

Sounds, noises, timbres, and tones arose, the like of which he had never heard before. Elias not only heard the sounds, he also saw them. He saw the air incessantly contracting and expanding. He saw into the valleys of sounds and into their gigantic mountain ranges. He saw the hum of his own blood, the crackle of the tufts of hair in his little fists. And his breath cut his nostrils in such shrill whistles that a raging summer
Föhn
would have sounded like a murmur in comparison. The juices of his stomach churned and clattered heavily around. An indescribable diversity cooed in his intestines. Gases expanded, hissed, or blew apart, the substance of his bones vibrated, and even the water in his eyes trembled with the dark beating of his heart.

And again his range of hearing multiplied, exploded, covering the patch of ground on which he lay like a vast ear. Listened down into landscapes hundreds of miles deep, listened out into regions hundreds of
miles across. Against the sonorous backdrop of his own body noises, ever more powerful acoustic scenarios
passed with increasing speed: storms of sound, tem­pests
of sound, seas and deserts of sound.

All at once, out of this huge mass of noises, Elias discerned his father's heartbeat. But his father's heart beat so arhythmically, so out of harmony with his own, that Elias, had he been in command of all his senses, would have despaired. But God, in his endless cruelty, did not stop his display.

In unimaginable streams, the storms of sounds and noises fell upon Elias's ears: a mad tohubohu of hundreds of beating hearts, a splintering of bones, a singing and humming of the blood of countless veins, a dry brittle scratching when lips closed, a crashing and crunching between teeth, an incredible noise of swallowing, gurgling, snorting, and belching, a churning of gall-like stomach juices, a quiet splash of urine, a swish of human hair and the yet wilder swish of animal hair, a dull scrape of fabric on skin, a thin singing of evaporating sweat, a whetting of muscles, a screaming of blood when the members of animals and men grew erect. Not to mention the crazed chaos of voices and sounds of men and creatures on and under the earth.

And deeper went his ear, into all the screams, jabbers, squawks, into all the talking and whispering, singing and groaning, screeching and yowling, yam­mering and sobbing, sighing and coughing, slurping and slapping, right into the sudden silence where the vocal cords were really still violently vibrating with the
sounds of words just uttered. Even the droning of thoughts was revealed to the child. The range of his hearing grew ever more powerful, and he saw ever more picturesque sounds.

Then came the indescribable concert of sounds and noises of all the animals and all of nature and the endless mass of soloists. The mooing and bleating, the snorting and whinnying, the rattle of halter chains, the licking and tongue-whetting on salt blocks, the clapping of tails, the grunting and rolling, the farting and blowing, the squeaking and peeping, the meowing and barking, the quacking and crowing, the twittering and wing-beating, the gnawing and pecking, the digging and scratching.…

And he saw yet deeper and farther. He saw the beasts of the sea, the song of the dolphins, the gigantic lament of dying whales, the chords of huge shoals of fish, the clicking of plankton, the spiral of ripples when fish expelled their roe; saw the resonance of the waves, the collapse of subterranean mountains, the luminous metallic stridency of streams of lava, the song of the seasons, the foam on the sea, the hissing of the thousands of tons of water sucked up by the sun, the crashing and bursting explosion of gigantic cloud choirs, the noise of light.… What are words?

We must mention one last noise, a sound so fili­gree in form that it should by rights have been sub­merged in all the noise of the universe. But the sound remained and did not go under. It was emanating from Eschberg. It was the soft heartbeat of an unborn child, a
fetus, a human female. What Elias had previously heard and seen, he forgot, but the sound of the unborn heart he did not. For it was the heartbeat of the person destined for him forever. It was the heart of his beloved. It is hard to believe that Elias survived this assault, that it did not drive him mad.