Brother of Sleep: A Novel (4 page)

By human norms, the child should have been deafened on the spot. So it is extraordinary that his hearing was left unscathed, but there are no later signs to indicate otherwise. God, it seemed, was not yet finished with him. God was not finished with him by a long way.

After the terrible experience with his hearing, the distortions of the child's body retreated. His eyeballs shrank to their original size, his spine straightened, the cramps in his limbs relaxed. Likewise, his jaws, which had protruded so terribly, shrank back again. But the glowing yellow of his irises did not return to their melancholic rain-green color. At the back of his head, whole tufts of hair had fallen out, and he had lost all his teeth. But this disfigurement did not last long, for soon he had a new set of precocious adult teeth.

As well as the ghostly yellow of the irises, there were other changes, no less ghostly. The child's glass voice had mutated. It had swollen, increased in range and volume, developed into a full bass voice. This remarkable voice attracted such attention in the village that the child's parents, for pure shame, decided to lock Elias in the children's room and keep him there like an epileptic. One other metamorphosis was apparent: a
thin fluff had grown at the child's temples, on his upper lip, his chin, his armpits, and his member. The body of Elias Alder had entered puberty.

We cannot explain how the child made his way home. Haintz's wife, who had come to Seff Alder's house for a little chat on that December afternoon, was the first to see him. The kitchen was steaming with the semolina that Seff's wife was preparing for dinner. She was standing by the oven, stirring the gruel with her ladle. Yes, the curse of God was upon the boy, that was becoming clearer to her from one day to the next. Haintz's wife nodded her massive head and wiped the condensation from the window with her gouty hand. She had, Seff's wife continued, a vague sense of something when the child was born, but decided it was merely a notion.

Suddenly Haintz's wife uttered a hoarse cry. “My God, my good Lord! The naked boy, the naked boy is lying outside in the snow!”

The pan clattered to the floor, the door burst open, a wooden clog lay in the doorway. Seff's wife stumbled down through the snow and took the child in her horrified arms, pressing him so tightly to her body that he could barely breathe. She brought him back into the kitchen and laid him on the shiny wooden table to dress him. When the two women saw Elias lying there they blushed with shame, noticing that his little penis was erect. Frightened, Seff's wife went to fetch a blanket from the tub and swiftly turned the child over, away from the glazed eyes of Haintz's wife, and was about to
swaddle him but pushed his sex so violently from his belly that Elias, crazed with pain, cried out.

“My God, my good Lord! What a voice! Like a baying stag,” said Haintz's wife, crossing herself before running away, mad with fear.

It is true that she did not leave the farm before promising, by all that was sacred, that she would not utter so much as a word about the incident. Which is why all eyes were on the Alders that Sunday. It is not impossible that certain women felt a kind of pride, having only given their husbands a Mongoloid child rather than a devil with cow-piss yellow eyes.

But another woman, Nulf's wife, who was then in the fifth month of her pregnancy, put her prayer book on her belly and prayed. If it was a child sound in mind and body, she swore by Our Lady that she would place a bouquet at her altar every month for as long as she, Virginia Alder, would live.

Seff's wife later bitterly reproached herself, in front
of her husband, for not having noticed the inde­­cency
of the boy's appearance when he was still in the snow. No one would have known anything about it; as to his hair and teeth, they would quickly have grown again. But now it was hopeless. Elias became the enigma of Eschberg, the cause of much whispering.

For the first few nights Seff and his wife slept not in the parental chamber but on the threshing floor, up in the hayloft. They kept Fritz between them. During this period, Seff's wife lay awake until the early hours, her thoughts revolving ever more closely around the
child, who she assumed had been poisoned. When she suggested to Seff that a worm-eaten plank might fall on the boy, or that he might accidentally drown in the Emmer, or that a runaway cow might gore him to death, Seff drove his fist so hard into her blasted mouth that he dislocated her chin. From then onward not a word was spoken about the child; when she was able to speak again she had lost the will to live. But she did not abandon hope of an improvement in things, as the following chapter will relate.

THE TIME IN THE ROOM

AFTER
God had granted Elias his sense of hearing, in such a miraculous yet cruel way, the boy fell silent. But silence did not fall around him. So the Alders, anxious about publicity, concealed him, and, with slaps in the face, with blows and birchings, imprisoned him in his room, which he was unable to leave unless asked to do so.

Seff Alder's farm, hitherto so peaceful, grew animated. All the relations one could think of–almost everyone in Eschberg–suddenly found it was time to go and see their dear ones in the hamlet of Hof. They came for the most contrived reasons, pretended interest in the well-being of the cattle, insistently praised the cleanliness of the cowshed and the fact that the cattle did not have to lie in their dung, sniffed appreciatively at the unusually dry hay, drank greedily from the cider
that was served them, loudly praised Seff's wife's un­commonly clean kitchen, and finally all of them asked after the dear and oh, so pitiable child. In this way they hoped to catch a glimpse of the cretin, but Seff and his wife answered in a monotone. “The kid's poorly, scarlet fever.”

Later visitors were struck to notice that the spicy cider was no longer served, and the boy's scarlet fever was lasting a lot longer than it usually did. And when even Nulf Alder, the family's mortal enemy, crossed the threshold of the house, poor Seff's patience was exhausted. He grabbed his brother by the shoulders and threw him into a hole in the snow. No one caught a glimpse of the boy.

This prompted a handful of Eschberg children–spurred on by the old people's suppositions–to creep up to the accursed farm one day after Sunday school. They had already identified the window of the boy's room. They made their way to it and mocked Elias about his eyes, cow-piss yellow. “Come to the window and do your voice!”

Elias had already heard them braying when they left the presbytery to dance their way up to him. He pulled his pallet to his face and tried to wait in silence until the horror had passed. However much he pressed his hands to his ears, it was no use. When the name-calling did not stop and one of them loudly said he was a “yellow devil,” he could bear it no longer. He sprang to the window and poured such a bellowing cry on the heads below that the tormentors ran away in an instant, howling with fear. For
days afterward the children blubbed about having seen Piss-yellow with their own eyes.

But one child stayed calmly beneath the window. His name was Peter Elias, and he was the son of Nulf Alder. We have met him already, for he was christened at the same time as our Elias. Peter stood and refused to move from the spot. Not because he was in shock, far from it. Peter stayed from a sudden fascination with one so utterly different. And he heard him begin to cry loudly. Elias wept so heartrendingly into the spring evening that the young grass in the meadows began to dip sadly and the nearby forest rang with a sound like sobbing. But Peter was not moved. He stood openmouthed, his eyes coldly piercing that other boy above his head. From that day onward, Peter tried to win Elias's friendship. At first he stood beneath the room every evening. Then he came less often, but with a stubborn constancy. He did not need to whistle or announce his presence with owl hoots. Elias expected him.

We may claim that Peter was the only person in Elias Alder's life who recognized his genius. He sensed that greatness had been bestowed on Elias. And be­cause he could not rid himself of that sense, he tried to keep Elias down. And Elias obeyed his friend almost blindly. He obeyed him with naive gratitude that one human being, and one alone, had not abandoned him in the bitterest moments of his life. Elias loved Peter.

In the meantime Seff's wife neglected all those things that might have encouraged the favorable devel­opment of her precocious son. She did not speak to
him. She put his soup outside the door of his room, as one might leave milk out for a cat. At first she avoided any contact with him, for fear of catching yellow fever from his eyes. Tenderness, or words of that kind, was unknown to her and to most of the Eschberg women. And she paid less and less attention to his hygiene, so that he ended up covered in filth and lice. Usually she washed her children on Saturdays, and it had been her dream as a young girl to present the little ones to the congregation on Sundays with the shiniest little noses and cleanest little collars in the village. Now she energetically denied ever having dreamed of doing any such thing. Seff's wife let herself go. She grew brutalized, and it would of course be untrue to say that her kitchen was kept spotlessly clean.

She regained hope on one occasion, hauled herself out of her apathetic lassitude, and sang once more the songs of her girlhood. Her hope lasted only a few days. It was Haintz's wife, the wife of the blind beadle, who stirred her. She advised her to try various unguents on the boy. The idea had come to her, she wheezed, as she stared absently into the green May morning. Green, green everywhere, she had thought. Surely some of that green could be given back to Elias, and she knew how to do it.

They first tried dandelion leaves, moistening them with spittle and clapping them onto the child's closed eyelids. Elias was not allowed to move his little back from the spot. In the evening they removed the withered leaves in the hope of finding a wonderful dandelion
green in the boy's irises. But the candle enviously illuminated a yellow that made its own yellow pale in comparison.

The next day they went to work early. For half the morning they picked through the meadows, collecting aprons full of herbs and anything else distinguished by a respectable green. In their beelike zeal, the women even collected the young sprouts of the Norway spruce, which were usually boiled down into a syrup. It was Haintz's wife who first suggested trying the sprouts. The result of this was that–after the sprouts had been cooked in simmering water and the concoction dripped on the child's lids–Elias was severely scalded. Hardly had the poor lad recovered than Haintz's wife devised a new method for putting green into his irises.

This idea had come to her as she was absently mowing the evening grass for the cattle. As it was an internal sickness, it could–my God, my good Lord, it was so obvious!–only be treated from within. So she took a soup plate and grated some birch and hornbeam bark into it, mixing the bark with the leaves of the butterfly orchid, yellow bird's nest, spurge laurel, and martagon lily, and drizzled into it two spoonfuls of the first milk of a cow that had freshly calved. The result this time was a night-long stomach cramp, and when the women set about trying yet another cure, the boy chased them from the room with a loud, furious roar. Haintz's wife failed in her attempts to make the melancholy rain-green of his eyes shine again, and from then on she seldom dropped in on her friend. She had, she
said by way of apology, so much work these days, and one calving after another at the farm.

For two winters Elias stayed locked in the room. Every so often Peter would come and stand silently under the window, stare up, and go away again. Nulf, his father, Seff's brother and mortal enemy, could not dissuade him from these visits, not even by beating him until the blood flowed. Peter came, stood silently, and went away. The boys barely spoke three words to each other. But Peter's stubborn loyalty won Elias's trust.

The day of Quasimodo came. Elias should have taken communion the year before, but his mother had persuaded the curate to grant a delay. The boy, she said, had unexpectedly developed a painful illness of the limbs, and he was also troubled by loss of weight and terrible headaches. The communion had to be put off for a year. The curate, Friedolin Beuerlein, could not believe this, and resolutely went to Seff Alder's farm. Curate Beuerlein was a benevolent, dry man with a very long nose. When, after quiet persuasion, the couple were still not prepared to send Elias to communion, the curate said some, for him, harsh words and began to chastise them most vehemently for their bovine obsti­nacy. Only when the curate dragged in the worst imag­inable torments of hell did Seff agree. Not so his wife. It was all the same to her, she maintained, if she roasted away on a spit in hell. The boy was not going to communion.

Without going into the communion service in detail (the gawping and rubbernecking, the sudden
silence of the congregation when the child began to sing in a bass voice), we shall still maintain that no communicant ever allowed the Christ child into his heart with greater piety and with greater volume than did our Elias Alder. At the subsequent dinner in the Huntsman's Inn, however, the boy was no longer to be seen, and henceforward Seff's wife insisted that he could go to mass, but only if he entered the church after the second Kyrie and left it again before the curate's benediction. Also, he was to sit in the rearmost pew on the epistle side, where the tobacco-chewing ancients had their Sunday snooze.

Let us turn our attention once more to the mother of our hero, who, we have said, lost the will to live because of her child's abnormality. We can support this assertion with reference to an episode that occurred on the Feast of the Holy Trinity in the same year.

On the Feast of the Holy Trinity there was a fair, which usually culminated in violent altercations, an exchange of insults, and thoroughly bloody scuffles. On no other day in the year did the whole crowd of peasants meet in a single place, the field in front of the little church. And on no other day did people drink so heartily as they did at that fair, when kirsch was distributed for free.

The feast began with an open-air service. The altar was surrounded by a charming carpet of flowers, made of daisies and dandelions. The words
ave maria
had been embroidered into the carpet, but during the night a cow wandered into the meadow, and the letter
r
was now covered by a fat, juicy cowpat. This dismayed the curate, who was a priest of Marian inclinations and had even, as a young man, belonged to the congrega­tion of the Heart of Mary. The curate tried to put the letter right again. The choristers could smell this and, when he offered the holy water, they turned their noses up with a marked lack of humility. All in all, it was a very moving mass, and at the solemn blessing with the monstrance the peasants intoned the Te Deum with such joyful ease that they might already have been singing their marching and drinking songs.

After the mass the real feast began. The village choirmaster had taught the children an interminable ode to the imperial house, the verses of which were written by a man whom we shall often have cause to meet later on. His name was Charcoalburner Michel, because he worked the charcoal pit in the hamlet of Altig. Each of the children had to recite two verses from the vast poem and illustrate their words with actions, even Elias. When Elias's time came, some people pulled drunken faces, which made the scandal all the worse. The boy walked before his audience, a daisy chain in his hair, and began his recitation. When he started to speak in a warm and richly dramatic bass voice, the crowd of peasants burst into such terrible laughter that it could be heard in Götzberg. Elias did not utter another syllable and stared wide-eyed into the shrill horde, which stared back into the shrill yellow of his irises. Seff's wife was suddenly unable to breathe and collapsed in front of everyone. Elias stood rooted to the
spot, until the schoolmaster finally dragged him from the wooden stage. The chaotic yelling–some, who wished to be particularly distinguished, shouted
Tack­apo! Tackapo!
–only
calmed down when the celebrated fire-eater Signor Foco mounted the stage. During Sig­nor Foco's fiery cascades they jokingly recalled Brim­stone Sunday in 1800 and pointed with a laugh at the triple-thickness twelve-hinged bronze doors, and blind Haintz Lamparter lamented the good old days. Since Curate Benzer had passed away, nothing ever happened in Eschberg. He gave a sigh and felt around patiently for his jug of beer.

Subsequently Agathe Alder, Seff's wife, went terribly downhill. She stopped washing, cooked nothing but semolina gruel for weeks, stuffed herself with stale gruel, and grew fat and white as lard, and she was only twenty-six years old. She no longer slept with her husband, and when she was as fat as “a pregnant sow”– in the words of her only friend–Seff stopped loving her. She also devoted herself to mysterious cults, wandered through Eschberg at night praying and singing, put burning candles on toads, rolled naked in the autumn leaves, let dung beetles crawl over her belly, stuffed her pudenda with mud, and finally carved flesh from her left cheek. She then carried it solemnly to the little church on a cushion and displayed the relic on the altar of St. Eusebius, who was supposed to have carried a piece of his own flesh from Bresnerberg up to Vik­torsberg (and with a considerable degree of virtuosity: it was his head, severed by desecrators of the Sabbath).
Seff's wife spent hour after hour kneeling before the altar, asking over and over the eternal question: Why did God have to impose such a child upon her? If only he had given her an idiot–by which she meant a Mongoloid–no one in the village would have paid any attention to it. (Sadly, years later–she had recovered from her torments long since and found a new delight in life–this fatal wish was fulfilled in her third child.) Heartless as it may sound, his mother's passing mad­ness marked the beginning of Elias's life. He was freed–or, rather, he freed himself. In the Alder household, by this time, it came to the same thing.