Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) (12 page)

From then on the father was despondent and in tears. The whole village mourned the passing of the young farmer, Elisabeth was inconsolable, the children wept and wailed. Six months later the old father died; Elisabeth’s parents followed soon thereafter, and she was obliged to manage the household alone. All the chores took her mind off her misery, raising the children and running the estate left her no time for worry and grief. After two years she decided to marry again; she exchanged vows with a spirited young man who had loved her since childhood. But soon things changed for the worse. Cattle died, hired hands and maids were derelict in their duty, barns filled with fruit burned to the ground, people who owed considerable debts disappeared with the money. Soon the landowner felt compelled to sell several fields and meadows; but a bad harvest and heavy overheads made matters even worse. There was little doubt but that the wondrously acquired money seemed to fly out of the window; in the meantime the family grew, and in
their despair Elisabeth and her new husband became careless and negligent; he tried to distract himself with strong wine that made him sulky and irritable, and so Elisabeth often bemoaned her fate with bitter tears. And as their fortunes declined their friends in the village withdrew, such that within a few years she felt herself abandoned and only scraped by from week to week with the greatest effort.

All they had left were a few sheep and a cow that Elisabeth and the children often watched over themselves. So one day, as she sat in the pasture tending to her work, with Leanore at her side and a newborn baby nursing at her breast, she spotted in the distance a strange figure advancing towards her. It was a barefoot man in a torn coat, his face burnt dark brown from the sun and all but hidden by a long dishevelled beard; he wore no hat on his head, but had a wreath of green leaves woven in his hair that only added to the wildness and strangeness of his appearance. Bearing a heavy load in a tightly bound sack on his back, he walked leaning on the bough of a young fir tree.

Stepping closer, he set down his heavy load and gasped for air. He bid good day to the woman, who shrank back at his appearance; the girl clung to her mother. Once he had caught his breath he said: ‘I’ve come from an arduous trek through the bleakest mountains on earth, but it paid off, as I brought back the most precious treasures you could imagine or ever wish for. Look here and be amazed!’ Hereupon he opened the sack and emptied its contents; it was full of pebbles, as well as big hunks of quartz and other stones. ‘It’s just that these jewels haven’t yet been polished and filed down,’ he added, ‘that’s why they don’t dazzle the eye; the sparkling fire is still buried in their hearts, but all you’ve got to do is beat it out of them, scare them into letting down their guard, then you’ll see what stuff they’re made of.’ At these words, he picked up a hunk of rock and struck it hard against another, so that the sparks flew. ‘Did you see that sparkle?’ he cried out. ‘They’re all fire and flicker inside lightening the darkness with their laughter, but they won’t yet do it willingly.’ He painstakingly swept everything back into his sack and tied its cord tightly. ‘I know you, woman,’ he said wistfully, ‘you’re Elisabeth.’

The woman took fright. ‘How do you know my name?’ she asked with portentous trembling.

‘Dear God!’ said the poor unfortunate, ‘I’m Christian, who once came to you as a hunter, don’t you recognize me?’

Overcome by fear and profound pity, she did not know what to say. He fell into her arms and kissed her.

Elisabeth cried out: ‘God in heaven, my husband’s coming!’

‘Be still,’ he said, ‘I’m as good as dead to you; there in the forest my beauty, the mighty wench in the golden veil, is waiting for me. That’s my beloved child, Leanore. Come here, my dear little one, and give me a kiss, just one, so that I may once again feel your lips on mine, then I’ll be on my way.’

Leanore cried and clung to her mother, who, shaking with tears, half nudged her towards the wanderer, half held her back, and finally took her in her arms and pressed her to her breast. Then he quietly walked away, and at the edge of the forest they saw him talking to the terrible Wench of the Woods.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked the husband upon finding mother and daughter both white in the face and trembling with tears. Neither could bring herself to reply.

But the poor unfortunate wanderer was never seen again.

1810

Heinrich von Kleist

At the end of the sixteenth century, as the iconoclastic storm of destruction raged in the Netherlands, three brothers, young students in Wittenberg, met up in the city of Aachen with a fourth brother, himself engaged as a preacher in Antwerp. They sought to lay claim to an inheritance left them by an old uncle whom none of them knew, and since no one was there to meet them at the place where they were supposed to apply, they retired to an inn in town. After several days, which they spent sounding out the preacher on the curious incidents that had occurred in the Netherlands, it so happened that Corpus Christi Day was soon to be celebrated by the nuns in the Cloister of St Cecilia, which, at the time, was located just outside the gates of the city; so that, fired up by the revelry, their youth and the example of the Netherlanders, the four brothers decided to treat the city of Aachen to its own spectacle of destruction. That evening, the preacher, who had already led several such initiatives, gathered together a group of young merchants’ sons and students committed to the new religious teachings, all of whom spent the night at the inn carousing over wine and food, heaping curses on the papacy; and as soon as day broke over the ramparts of the city, they equipped themselves with pickaxes and other tools of destruction to carry out their business. They triumphantly agreed upon
a signal, at the sounding of which they would start smashing the stained-glass windows decorated with biblical tales; and, certain of the large following they would find among the people, they resolved at the hour when the bells sounded in the cathedral not to leave a stone of the sanctuary intact. The abbess, who had, come daybreak, been warned by a friend of the impending danger to the cloister, sent word several times in vain to the imperial bailiff in charge of keeping the peace in the city, requesting a guard detail to protect the cloister; the officer – who was himself hostile to the papacy and, as such, at the very least a clandestine sympathizer with the new religious teachings – denied her request under the pretext that she was imagining things and that there was not the slightest risk of danger to the cloister. Meanwhile, the hour struck at which the service was to begin, and amidst fear and prayer, and with a dark foreboding of things to come, the nuns prepared themselves for mass. Their only protectors were a seventy-year-old cloister caretaker and a few armed porters who stood watch at the gates of the church. In such cloisters, as is common knowledge, the nuns, who are well trained in all sorts of instruments, play their own music; often – perhaps precisely on account of the feminine feel of this mysterious art form – with a precision, a mastery and a sensitivity not to be found in male orchestras. And, to the sisters’ twofold distress, their
Kapellmeisterin
, Sister Antonia, who usually conducted the orchestra, had fallen ill with a nervous fever several days before; such that, in addition to the danger posed by the four blasphemous brothers who had already been spotted, cloaked and ready, beside the columns outside the church, the cloister was all abuzz, worrying how the performance of a sacred musical work would come off in a seemly manner. The abbess, who on the previous evening had ordered that a stirring, age-old Italian mass composed by an anonymous master be presented – a work which the cloister orchestra had already performed on several occasions and to the finest effect, on account of its exceptional holiness and loveliness – was now more adamant than ever in her command, and once again sent word to Sister Antonia to find out how she was; but the nun who transmitted the message returned with the news that Sister Antonia
lay unconscious in her bed and that it was altogether out of the question to think that she might direct the aforementioned work. Meanwhile, in the cathedral, where more than a hundred evil-doers of all classes and ages armed with hatchets and crowbars had assembled, the most unthinkable incidents had occurred; some of the porters stationed at the gates of the sanctuary had been rudely shoved around and the lone nuns who every now and then passed through the aisles engaged in some pious matter were treated to the sauciest and most shameless remarks; as a consequence of which the old caretaker hastened to the sacristy and, falling to his knees, begged the abbess to cancel the service and put herself under the protection of the commandant in the city. But the abbess was unwavering in her resolve that the prescribed service be celebrated in honour of God Almighty; she reminded him of his sworn duty to stand guard over the mass and the sacred festivities conducted in the cathedral; and since the bell had just tolled, she commanded the nuns, who stood trembling around her, to pick an oratorio, no matter which and of what quality, and to begin the service with it immediately.

The nuns promptly hastened to the organ balcony; the score of a musical work that they had often performed was distributed; violins, oboes and cellos were tested and tuned, just as Sister Antonia suddenly appeared on the steps, fresh and healthy, albeit a bit pale in the face. She clasped under her arm the score of the age-old Italian mass upon whose performance the abbess had so adamantly insisted. In answer to the nuns’ stunned question: ‘Where did you come from? And how did you so suddenly recover?’ Sister Antonia replied: ‘No matter, my friends, no matter!’, distributed the score she had in hand and sat herself down at the organ, glowing with anticipation of the thrill of directing this superb piece of music. It came as a wondrous, heavenly consolation easing the hearts of the pious women, who promptly positioned themselves with their instruments on the balustrade. The acute tension that they felt served to vault their souls, swinging them, as it were, into the heavenly heights of harmony. The oratorio was played with the greatest and loveliest musical skill; during the entire performance not a
breath stirred in the aisles and on the pews – especially during the
Salve regina
, and even more so during the
Gloria in excelsis
, it was as if all those present in the church were dead; for in spite of their evil intent, not even the dust was scattered on the marble floor beneath the feet of the four accursed brothers and their rabble, and the cloister still stood intact at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, whereupon, pursuant to an article in the Westphalian Peace Treaty, it was, nevertheless, declared secularized.

Six years later, when this incident had long since been forgotten, the mother of the four youths arrived from The Hague and, after sadly reporting their disappearance to the magistrate of Aachen, initiated an official court inquiry as to the road they might have taken. The last word received from them in the Netherlands, where, in fact, they came from, as their mother told, was a letter written prior to the aforementioned incident, on the eve of Corpus Christi, by the preacher to a friend of his, a schoolteacher in Antwerp, in which he elaborated with much merriment (or rather, a free-spirited humour) in four tightly written pages, on a planned action to storm the Cloister of St Cecilia – concerning which the mother did not, however, wish to elaborate. After several failed attempts to ferret out the persons sought by the distressed woman, the authorities suddenly remembered four young people, their nationality and place of origin unknown, who, for a few years now – a period of time more or less in accordance with the dates she indicated – found themselves in the municipal madhouse recently endowed with imperial funds. Since, however, the four youths in question suffered from a delirium derived from a religious notion, and their comportment, according to the sad testimony taken by the court, remained altogether gloomy and melancholy – this description accorded so little with the mother’s, alas, all too familiar sense of her sons’ temperaments, that she paid this news but little notice, especially since it seemed almost certain that the young people in question were Catholic. Nevertheless, oddly struck by a number of distinguishing attributes used to describe them, she went one day to the madhouse, accompanied by a court officer, and asked the director to be so good as to permit her an exploratory visit with the four hapless, troubled youths in his
charge. But who can describe the horror of that poor woman, who immediately, upon passing through the door of their cell, recognized her sons? They sat in long black robes around a table on which a crucifix stood, and seemed to be engaged in silent worship of it, with their hands folded before them on the wooden plank. Robbed of her strength, the woman collapsed into a chair. In answer to her question: ‘Whatever are they doing in this place?’ the director replied: ‘They are simply consumed by their glorification of the Saviour, whom they believe themselves better qualified than most to recognize as the true son of the one true God.’ The director added that these youths have for the last six years led this ghostly existence; that they slept but little and hardly ate; that no syllable passed from their lips; that only at the midnight hour did they rise from their seated position; and that they then, in unison, in a voice that made the windows shake, intoned the
Gloria in excelsis
. The director concluded with the assurance that these youths were in perfect physical health; that one could not deny that they showed a certain high-spiritedness, however solemn and ceremonial it be; that, when declared mad, they merely gave a sympathetic shrug of the shoulders, and that they had already declared on several occasions: ‘If the citizens of the good city of Aachen only knew what we know, they would all set aside their petty affairs and likewise incline their heads before the crucifix and sing out the
Gloria
.’

The woman, who could not bear the dreadful sight of these sad souls and promptly had herself led back to her room on shaking knees, proceeded the very next morning to the home of Mr Gotthelf Veit, the reputed draper, to try to establish the cause of this dreadful condition; for this man was mentioned in the preacher’s letter, and it was revealed that he had enthusiastically taken part in the plan to wreak havoc in the Cloister of St Cecilia on Corpus Christi Day. The draper Veit, who had since got married and fathered many children and taken over his father’s considerable business, received the woman most graciously; and when he learnt what business it was that brought her to him he promptly locked the door and, bidding her have a seat, gave the following account: