The Scar (14 page)

And then he once again dissolved; he lost his memory and his ability to reason. Branches were lashing at his face: it seems he was running after all, except that his legs refused to obey him, like in a bad dream, and continually threatened to collapse under him. At that moment, he was tormented by a desire far greater than the pain and fear, the desire to cease to exist, to not be, to have never been born. Who was he now, Glorious Heaven? Who was he after all this? What crime was more dreadful than that which the monstrosity of fear, having taken up residence in his soul against his will and lacerating him from the inside, had already committed?

And once again the darkness came, and everything ended.

*   *   *

The ancient hermit who lived in the mud hut by the stream would occasionally find people in the forest.

Once, on a brisk winter’s morning, he found a young girl, about fourteen, in a thicket. White and hard as a statue, she was propped up against a tree trunk, and in her hands she held an empty basket. The hermit had never found out who she was or what brought her to ruin.

Another time he found a young lady in the forest. She was bloody, covered in bruises and suffering from delirium. He carried her to his little mud hut, but the next day he was forced to bury her as well.

The third time, the hermit’s discovery turned out to be a man.

He was a handsome and strong young man who was far taller and heavier than the hermit himself and thus quite difficult to drag through the forest. Trying to catch his breath, the elder was washing him with water from the river when the foundling groaned and opened his eyes.

The hermit rejoiced: At the very least, he would not have to bury this one! He flung his arms up and bellowed. Deprived of the gift of speech since birth, only thus could he give expression to his feelings.

*   *   *

River weeds trailed across the surface of the little stream. Their dark green tips, stretching out as if in supplication, were trying to sail away along the current, but their roots, bogged down in the obscure, earthy depths, restrained them. Dragonflies hung motionless over the stream, enormous, mindless dragonflies, opalescent as a lady’s finery.

For days on end, Egert Soll sat by the water, watching the trailing weeds and the dragonflies. Now and then he enlivened this spectacle by leaning over the dark mirror of the water and peering at the lean, vagabond scar reflected there. Sparse, sandy brown stubble could not hide the mark.

The hermit did not seem at all dangerous, but Egert still required an entire week to train himself not to shrink back at his approach. The kindhearted elder constructed a bed for his guest out of dried grass and shared his food with him, which consisted of fish, mushrooms, and cakes. Where these latter were baked was a mystery to Egert, but they appeared with enviable constancy. Very little was required of Egert in exchange: the hermit indicated that he should gather brushwood from the opposite shore of the stream or split the firewood that was piled up by the side of the hut. However, it became clear almost immediately that these tasks were beyond Egert.

A flimsy little bridge crossed the stream: three thin boles, lashed together with ropes. The stream only came up to Egert’s waist at this crossing, and the bridge lay only inches above the water, but all the same Egert was afraid to entrust the quivering beams with the weight of his body.

The hermit watched from afar as the strong young man unsuccessfully tried to overcome the obstacles that arose before him. A step, at most two, along the bridge and a disgraceful flight backwards were all he could manage at first. Tying his boots around his neck, Egert tried to ford across the brook, but once again had to retreat because the icy water gave him a cramp in his leg. No one will ever know what the hermit thought about all this, for he was mute and accustomed to keeping his thoughts to himself.

Egert made it across the river the following day. Clutching at the beams with a viselike grip, he crawled across on all fours; only when he reached solid ground did the former guard—soaked, shivering, his heart pounding furiously—decide to open his eyes.

The old man watched all this from his hut, but Egert no longer had the strength to be ashamed. He was a mute witness: the same as the pines, as the sky, as the stream.

Egert had similar problems with splitting the firewood. The stump with its ax planted securely in it instantaneously reminded him of an executioner’s block, of beheading, of death: the wide blade of the ax carried within itself pain, lacerated muscles and tendons, hewed bones, and torrents of blood. Vividly, as if in a vision, Egert saw how the ax would slip from the stump and embed itself into his leg, his knee, how it would chop him into pieces, mutilate him, kill him …

Egert could not take such an awful weapon in his hands. The patient old man did not insist.

Thus, day after day passed by. Sitting by the stream, looking at the water and the dragonflies, Egert frequently remembered everything that had transformed Lieutenant Soll from a splendidly valiant man into an abject, cowardly tramp.

He would have been happier not to remember. He envied the hermit fiercely: it seemed as though he could think about nothing at all for hours on end while an expression of ethereal unconcern and heavenly peace lay on his pitted, sparsely bearded face. Such happiness was inaccessible to Egert, and shame, red-hot as if from the coals of a fire, at times compelled him to beat his head on the ground.

The hermit would withdraw a ways every time he observed in Egert’s eyes the onset of these convulsions of grief, these assaults of shame and despair. He would walk away, and with an attentive yet unintelligible expression on his pocked face, he would watch Egert from afar.

Not only memories tormented Egert: never in all his days had he slept on straw, eaten dried mushrooms, or gone without a change of linen. Egert grew thin and lean, his eyes began to cave in, and his beautiful blond hair became stuck in matted clumps; giving in one day, he cut off his long tresses with the hermit’s knife. His stomach ached and growled from the unfamiliar food. His lips cracked, and his face sagged. He laundered his shirt in the cold stream and at the same time washed himself, an activity that caused the hermit to marvel: Why did the young man bother with these time-consuming and unpleasant formalities?

The first two weeks were the most difficult. With the onset of darkness, when the forest became a den of murmurs and shadows, Egert hid in the mud hut with his head bundled up in the hermit’s burlap sacks like a little boy. Once or twice, a long, plangent howl arose from brush. Stopping up his ears with his palms, Egert shivered until dawn.

However, there were quiet, clear evenings, which Egert ventured to while away together with the silent hermit by a pale campfire, lit near the entrance to the hut. On one of these evenings he raised his head, and there amidst the scatterings of stars, he suddenly saw a familiar constellation.

He was happy until he realized that this constellation repeated the smattering of beauty marks on the neck of a certain woman, a woman whom Egert had known for only a very short time, but whom he could never forget. He grew morbid again because all the memories tied to her name tormented him as much as his affliction.

Then it started to become easier. One day, Egert set off to get some brush, and right as he got to the little bridge, he realized that he had forgotten his rope. He returned to the hut, and surprisingly enough, the complicated and torturous process of fording the stream passed by this time far more easily than usual; in any event, it seemed easier to Egert. Another time, he intentionally returned away from the bridge, and as if he had received an additional charge of bravery, he waded to the other shore almost entirely without the use of his hands, though he was doubled over by the end.

His life became easier from that moment on, though it was still endlessly complicated. An array of fine, precisely defined, and seemingly senseless actions protected him from any imminent danger: to cross over the unsteady little bridge on his way back to the mud hut, he had to touch his palm to a shriveled old tree on the far shore and silently count to twelve. Every evening, he threw three pieces of kindling, one after the other, into the stream to protect himself from nightmares. In this way he gradually overcame himself; he even decided to take up the ax, and with some success he chopped a few logs in front of the surprised and gladdened hermit.

One day, when Egert was, as usual, sitting by the water and asking himself for the hundredth time about the source of the misfortune that had befallen him, the hermit, who until then had never plagued the young man with his company, walked up and put his hand on Egert’s shoulder.

Egert flinched; the hermit felt how his muscles tightened under his threadbare shirt. Egert saw what appeared to be compassion in the old man’s eyes.

He frowned. “What?”

The hermit warily sat down next to him, and he traced a line with his grimy finger down his own cheek from his temple to his chin.

Egert jerked backwards. He involuntarily raised his hand and touched the slanted scar on his cheek.

The elder began to nod, satisfied that he had been understood. Continuing to nod his head, he chafed his skin with his fingernail until a red stripe, similar to Egert’s scar, bled through the sparse gray whiskers on his spotted face.

“Well, what of it?” Egert demanded desolately.

The hermit glanced at Egert and then at the sky. He frowned, shook his fist in front of his own nose, fell back, shut his eyes and again scratched his fingernail down his cheek.

“M-m-m…”

Egert was silent; he did not understand. The hermit smiled sorrowfully, shrugged his shoulders, and returned to his hut.

*   *   *

Every once in a while, the hermit would leave for an entire day and return with a basket full of food, which would have seemed simple and coarse to Lieutenant Soll, yet was delicious from the point of view of the tramp Egert. Egert supposed that the old man visited some place where people lived, and that these people were well disposed toward the ancient hermit.

One beautiful day, Egert summoned up the courage to ask the elder to take him along.

They walked for a long time. The hermit, by some unknown signs, ferreted out a scarcely perceptible path, while Egert firmly pressed the pinkie finger of his left hand into the thumb of his right: it seemed to him that this ploy would spare him the fear of lagging behind and getting lost.

Autumn reigned in the forest, not the earliest autumn, but also not the latest; it had not yet had the chance to grow old and wicked as it progressed toward winter. Egert carefully stepped through the yellow shreds of fallen leaves, which seemed to crunch with a weary sigh each time his foot disturbed them. The trees, besieged by a dreary calm, heavily lowered their half-naked, weakened limbs to the ground, and every fold in their coarse bark reminded Egert of his old scar. Pressing the pinkie of his left hand to the thumb of his right, he followed his mute guide, but was not at all happy when the forest finally ended and an isolated hamlet came into sight.

From somewhere beyond the fence resounded the howls and barks of a pack of dogs, which caused Egert to freeze in place. The hermit turned back and mooed encouragingly at him. From the nearest gate in the fence, two teenage boys were dashing toward them, skipping and hopping as they ran; at the sight of them, Egert involuntarily seized the hermit by his shoulder.

Ten paces away, the boys stopped short, gulping air, their eyes and mouths wide open. Finally, the one who was a bit older gleefully cried out, “Look! Elder Chestnut has picked up a stray!”

The little hamlet was small and solitary. It consisted of twenty-odd farmyards, a little turret with a sundial, and the house of the local wisewoman, which was on the outskirts. Life flowed by there lazily and with regularity. The arrival of Egert did not especially surprise anyone except the children: Chestnut had picked up some young man with a scar, and that was all well and good. At the suggestion that he stay on to work and spend the winter at the hamlet, Egert only sullenly shook his head. To winter where it was warm? What for? To grope for human society? Perhaps he would still return home, to Kavarren, where his father and mother, and his room with its fireplace and tapestries were?

Glorious Heaven, after everything that he had done! He no longer had a home. He no longer had a father or a mother; it was past the time to mourn Lieutenant Soll, whose place in the world was now occupied by a nameless young man with a scar.

*   *   *

Winter turned into one long delirium.

Though accustomed to the cold since childhood, Egert still took ill with the arrival of the first frost. More than once over the course of the long winter, the hermit grieved that it was so difficult to hollow out a grave in the frozen earth.

Egert thrashed about on the straw, gasping and coughing. The old man seemed more of a fatalist than a doctor: he swathed Egert in bast matting and gave him herbal infusions to drink, but after assuring himself that his patient had quieted down and fallen asleep, he went into the forest with a spade, justly reasoning that if he chipped away at the ground little by little, the hole might attain the appropriate depth by the time it was needed.

Egert was unaware of this. Opening his eyes, he saw above him first that solicitous, pocked face, then the gloomy beams of the ceiling, then the honeycombed patterns that had been carved into the mud walls. One day he came to consciousness and saw Toria over him.

“Why are you here?” he wanted to ask. His tongue would not obey him, but he asked the question without parting his lips, mute like the hermit.

She did not answer. She was sitting, her back arched and her head lowered toward her shoulders like a mournful stone bird on someone’s grave.

“Why are you here?” asked Egert again.

She shifted slightly. “And why are you?”

Fierce, burning flames seared his eyes as if a torch had been set to them.