Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) (11 page)

So they journeyed, and Christian was happy again. He told his father of his recent good fortune, of his child and his new home; his own words made him giddy, and, in speaking, he first fathomed that nothing was lacking in his perfect contentment. And so, swapping sad and joyous stories, they came at last to the village. Everyone was happy that the journey had ended so soon, most of all Elisabeth. The old father moved in with them and pooled his modest savings with the household reserves; they were the picture of happiness and harmony. Their fields were fertile, their livestock multiplied and it wasn’t long before Christian’s house became one of the most stately in town; and soon he was the father of several children.

Five happy years went by, when a stranger who happened to be passing through the village stopped and asked to be put up at Christian’s house, as it was the loveliest to look at. He was a friendly, talkative man who played with the children and gave them presents and soon won everyone over. He liked it there so much that he wanted to spend a couple of days, but the days turned into weeks and then months. No one was surprised at his extended stay, for people grew so accustomed to his presence that they counted him a member of the family. But Christian often sat wondering; for it seemed to him as if he already knew the traveller from somewhere in the past, and yet he could recall no occasion on which he might have met him. After three months the stranger finally packed up his things and said: ‘Dear friends, a wondrous destiny and extraordinary prospect draw me to yon mountains, the lure of which I can’t withstand; I leave you now and I don’t know if I will be back again. I am carrying a sum of money with me that is safer in your hands than it is in mine, and so I ask you to keep it for me; if I’m not back in a year’s time, you can keep it and take it as a token of my gratitude for your proven friendship.’

So the stranger set off, and Christian agreed to hold the money. He took pains to keep it under lock and key, and every now and then, driven by an exaggerated sense of scrupulousness, he counted it again to make sure nothing was missing, and made a big to-do about it. ‘This much money could make us very happy,’ he once said to his father, ‘if the stranger were not to return, there’s enough here to take care of us and our children for life.’

‘Forget about that gold,’ the old man replied, ‘it won’t make us happy, we have never lacked for anything, thank God, put the thought of it out of your mind.’

Often Christian woke up at night to rouse the hired hands to get to work and to supervise everything himself. Concerned that his son would spoil his youth and his health from over-diligence, the father awakened one night to warn him to curtail his activities, when, to his great surprise, he found him seated under a little lamp at a table once again assiduously counting the gold pieces.

‘My son,’ the old man said with a heavy heart, ‘have you sunk to that level, did this damned metal find its way under our roof just to cause our misfortune? Pull yourself together, my dear boy, lest the evil one drain your blood and your life.’

‘Yes,’ said Christian, ‘I don’t understand myself any more, the thought of it won’t let me be, by day or by night; see how it gapes at me again, its red glimmer pierces deep in my heart! Listen how it jingles, this golden blood! It calls to me in my sleep, I hear it when music is playing, when the wind blows, when people chatter on the street; when the sun shines, all I see are these yellow eyes winking at me, whispering sweet, tender endearments in my ear: so I’m driven to rouse myself every night just to slake its thirst for love, and then I feel it thrill in inner exultation at the touch of my fingers, it grows ever redder and more radiant with pleasure; you can see for yourself the glow of ecstasy!’

Trembling and in tears, the old man took his son in his arms, prayed and said: ‘Christian, my boy, you must turn back to the word of God, you must go more regularly to church and be more diligent and devout in your worship, or else you’ll dry up inside and waste away in sad misery.’

The money was locked away again, Christian promised to mend his ways and to find his footing, and the old man felt reassured. More than a year had passed, and there had been no word from the stranger; the old man finally gave in to his son’s entreaties and the money left behind was invested in lands and in other ways. In the village people got talking of the young farmer’s wealth, and Christian seemed inordinately gratified and content, so much so that the father thanked his lucky stars to see him so hale and hearty: all his fears were allayed. So much the more was his surprise when one evening Elisabeth took him aside and told him in tears how she no longer understood her husband; he talked so strangely, especially at night, had dark dreams, often sleepwalked around the room without knowing it, and filled her ears with the oddest things that often made her shudder. But what dismayed her most was his gaiety during the day, as his laughter was wild and impudent, and the look in his eyes was mad – he was just not himself. The father
was stunned, and the troubled wife continued: ‘He keeps talking about the stranger, and claims they’d already met, that this strange man was, in fact, a gorgeous woman. And he doesn’t want to go out to the fields or work in the garden any more, as he says he hears a terrible groaning underground, like the kind you hear when you pluck out a root. He shrinks back in terror and seems to tremble before all plants and herbs as if they were ghosts.’

‘Good God!’ cried the father, ‘has the awful craving already taken such deep root that it has come to this? Then his haunted heart isn’t human any more, it’s the stuff of cold metal. Anyone who has lost his love of flowers has forsaken all love and fear of God.’

The following day the father went for a walk with his son and repeated to him some of the things Elisabeth had told him; he warned him to embrace piety and that he had better turn his spirit to godly reflections.

To which Christian replied: ‘Gladly, father. I often feel such a sense of well-being, and everything seems to succeed; it’s the strangest thing, for a long while, for years on end, I’m inclined to lose sight completely of my true self, and to slip with ease, so it seems, into someone else’s life; but then all of a sudden it is as if my own ascendant star, the real me, rises in my heart like a new moon and defeats the strange force. I could be completely contented, but once on one wondrous night an arcane sign passed through my hands and was imprinted deep in my heart; often that magical figure is asleep, unnoticeable – I mean it’s absent from my spirit – but then, all of a sudden, it wells up again like a poison and invades my every move. And once it has got hold of me all my thoughts and feelings are ruled by it, everything else is transformed, or rather engulfed, by its force. Just as a lunatic shrinks back in terror at the sight of water and the poison intensifies in his veins, so I am affected by all sharp-angled shapes, by every line, by every glimmer; everything in me wants to be free of that immanent presence and to hasten its delivery like a baby, and my spirit and body are riddled with fear. Just as the heart received it from a feeling in response to external stimuli, that sentient muscle writhes and wrestles to
retransform it into an externally directed feeling just to be rid of it and at peace.’

‘It was an unlucky star,’ said the old man, ‘that pulled you away from us; you were born for a quiet life, your spirit was inclined to peacefulness and plants, but your impatience led you astray into the society of stones. The cliffs, the crooked crags with their sharp-edged shapes shattered your spirit and instilled in you the devastating hunger for metal. You should always have averted and so preserved yourself from the sight of the mountains, and that’s how I thought to raise you, but it was not to be. Your humility, your peace of mind, your childlike innocence were overwhelmed by stubbornness, wild ways and arrogance.’

‘No,’ said the son, ‘I remember very clearly that it was a plant that first introduced me to the misfortunes of the whole world, it’s since then that I have become aware of the moans and groans evident in all of nature every way you turn your head, if only you give heed to it; the plants, herbs, flowers and trees are all squirming with pain, consumed by a great wound; the corpses of splendid stone worlds that prevailed before them, they treat our eyes to a spectacle of the most revolting state of decay. Now I understand that this is what that root was trying to tell me with its guttural groans, it forgot itself in its pain and revealed everything to me. That’s why I find all green things so irritating, so much at odds with my life; they try to erase the image of that beloved figure from my heart and to win over my soul every spring with their twisted cadaverous pose. It’s unheard of and cunning how they pulled the wool over your eyes, old man, why they’ve taken possession of your soul. Just ask the stones, you’ll be surprised to hear what they have to say.’

The father looked at him a long time and had nothing more to say. They walked back home in silence and, just like his daughter-in-law, the old man was now deeply disturbed by his son’s jovial manner, since it seemed altogether out of character – as if another being, turning his body into a machine, played him awkwardly and badly.

It was time again for the harvest festival. The entire community
went to church, and Elisabeth and the children likewise put on their Sunday best to attend the service; her husband also got ready to accompany her, but inexplicably turned around before they reached the door of the church and left the village lost in thought. He sat himself down on a nearby hill and gazed again at the smoking chimneys, listened to the sound of singing and the organ tones emanating from the church, and watched dressed-up children dancing and playing on the village green. ‘I’ve lost my life in a dream!’ he said to himself. ‘Years have gone by since I descended from this hill, and went to join the children who played here then and now sit seriously in church. I too went into that building, but Elisabeth is no longer the bright-eyed young girl she was, her youth has faded, I no longer seek out her gaze with the same longing I felt before. I wilfully forsook a lofty eternal bliss for a temporal, fleeting fling with happiness.’

Wistful, he walked into the nearby woods and pressed on into the darkest shade. A terrible silence surrounded him, no breeze stirred in the leaves. At that very moment he saw a man in the distance approach; recognizing him as the stranger, he took fright; his first thought was that he would ask for his money back. As the figure came closer, he realized how wrong he had been, for the approaching profile disintegrated as he gazed upon it; a hideously ugly old woman came up to him, hobbling on a crutch, dressed in filthy rags, with a torn kerchief holding a few grey hairs in place. In a grating voice she addressed Christian and asked after his name and station in life; he replied in detail, whereupon he said: ‘But who are you?’

‘They call me the Wench of the Woods, and every child has heard tell of me. Have we never met?’ With these last words she turned around, and Christian thought he recognized the golden veil flitting among the treetops, the proud gait, the mighty build of her limbs. He wanted to run after her but he could find her no more.

At that very moment something glittering drew his gaze down to the green grass. He picked it up and saw that it was the magic tablet inlaid with colourful precious stones and with the image of the marvellous figure which he had lost many
years ago. With a sudden burst, the figure and the bright lights sparked all his senses. He took tight hold of it to convince himself that he once again had it in his hands and hurried back to the village. He met his father. ‘See,’ he called to him, ‘the thing I so often told you about that I thought existed only in my dreams is now definitely and truly mine.’

The old man studied the tablet a long time and said: ‘My son, my heart shudders when I look at the outline of these stones and, pondering, sense the meaning of this strange syntax; see how coldly it sparkles, what gruesome looks these stones give, bloodthirsty like the red eye of the tiger. Throw away this inscription that makes you grow cold and gruesome yourself, and turns your heart to stone’:

   See, the gentle blossoms bursting,

   How from their own heart they rear,

   And like children roused, the first thing

   They will greet you with good cheer.

   Peek-a-boo, their life’s a pleasure,

   Turn their faces to the sun,

   For her warm kiss is a treasure,

   And more precious there is none.

   For her gentle lips they pine,

   Love and longing takes its toll;

   Smiling once, now lie supine,

   Withered, willingly grown old.

   Nothing’s sweeter than to yield

   To the lure of the loved one,

   And in dying to reveal

   That in fading we become.

   Pressed and drained, it’s not yet spent:

   The flower’s love still fills the air,

   Thrilling others with its scent,

   Though it isn’t even there.

   
Love’s a minstrel to man’s spirit,

   Makes the heartstrings softly quaver,

   And the soul says: Yes, I hear it,

   All in life that there’s to savour:

   Aching, longing to be near it.

‘There must still be marvellous, immeasurable treasures left to be dug out of the depths of the earth,’ the son replied. ‘Just to locate them, lift them out and make them mine! Just to press the earth to me like a beloved bride so that, her heart throbbing with love, she would gladly give up her most precious possession! The Wench of the Woods called out to me, I’m going to search for her. There’s an abandoned old mine shaft nearby dug centuries ago by a miner; maybe I’ll find her there!’

He rushed away. The old man tried in vain to hold him back, but his son soon disappeared from view. Several hours later, with considerable effort, the father reached the old mine; he saw the footprints pressed in the sand at the entrance and turned around in tears, convinced that his son made a mad dash in and drowned in the depth of the water that had seeped in over time.