Beneath the Wheel Page 11

  The district doctor was quite put out that his patient should indulge in such tricks. He ventured a cautious opinion, ordering an immediate sick-leave and calling in a nerve specialist. "That fellow will end up having St. Vitus's dance," he whispered to the headmaster, who nodded and found it expedient to change his facial expression from the previous ungracious angry look to a paternal and sympathetic one--something which came easily to him and fit him well.

  He and the doctor each wrote a letter to Father Giebenrath, put them in the boy's pocket, and sent him home. Then the headmaster's anger changed to profound concern: what was the Stuttgart school board, so recently upset by the Heilner case, to think of this new misfortune? To everyone's astonishment he even dispensed with a lecture suitable to the occasion, and during Hans' last hours in school treated him with an almost ominous affability. It was self-evident to him that Hans would not return after his sick-leave; this student, who had fallen so far behind, could not possibly make up the weeks and months he had missed even if he recovered completely. Although he bade Hans a hearty good-bye with an encouraging, "I hope we'll see you back here soon," whenever he entered Hellas and caught sight of the three empty desks he felt a certain measure of embarrassment. He had trouble suppressing the thought that part of the blame for the disappearance of the two talented boys might yet be attached to him. But as he was a courageous and upright man, he eventually succeeded in dispelling these useless and gloomy doubts.

  The monastery with its churches, gateway, gables and towers sank away behind the departing academician with his small suitcase; and in the place of woods and ranges of hills the fertile orchards of Baden's borderland appeared, then came Pforzheim and after that the first of the blue-black spruce-covered hills of the Black Forest, intersected by many valleys and streams. It seemed bluer and cooler, holding more than the usual promise of shady bliss. Hans contemplated the changing and increasingly familiar landscape with pleasure, until he drew near his home town; then he remembered his father, and a deep anxiety about his reception thoroughly ruined what little relief the trip home had afforded him. The trip to Stuttgart and the first trip to Maulbronn and all their expectation, excitement and anxiety came back to mind. What use had it all been? Like the headmaster, he realized that he would never return. This was the end of his academy days and of his studies, and all ambitious hopes. Yet the thought did not really sadden him now; only the fear of his disappointed father, whose hopes he had betrayed, weighed heavily on his heart. He longed for only one thing at present--to rest, to sleep, to cry, to dream as much as he wanted, to be left in peace. And he was afraid he would not be able to do this at home with his father. At the end of the trip, he had such a violent headache that he stopped looking out the window even though the train was passing through his favorite region, whose heights and forest he had roamed with such passion at one time. He almost failed to get off at the familiar railroad stop.

  He stood there now, umbrella and suitcase in hand, while his father inspected him. The headmaster's last report had changed his disappointment and indignation into boundless fear. He had pictured Hans as hollow-cheeked and completely enfeebled; he found him looking thin and weak, but still walking on his own two legs. He felt a little easier now; but the worst thing was his secret dread of the nervous condition the headmaster and doctor had mentioned. No one in his family had ever suffered from nervous disorders. They always spoke of persons so afflicted with uncomprehending mockery or scornful pity, in the way they talked about lunatics. Now his own Hans was coming home with something like that.

  The first day home the boy was glad to have been spared recriminations. Then he began to notice the shy and anxious care his father took of him with such obvious effort on his part. Occasionally he also became aware of his father casting peculiarly probing looks in his direction, regarding him with an unholy curiosity and speaking to him in a muted hypocritical tone of voice, observing him only when he thought Hans would not notice. The upshot of this was that Hans became even more timid; a vague fear of his own condition began to torment him.

  When the weather was fine, he would lie for hours in the forest--and he felt soothed by this. A pale shadow of his former boyhood bliss touched his injured soul: pleasure in flowers and in insects, in observing birds or tracking animals. But this was short-lived. Most of the time he stretched out listless in the moss, suffered from headaches and vainly tried to think of something until daydreams returned to transport him into another realm.

  Once he had a dream. He saw his friend Heilner, laid out on a stretcher. When he tried to approach, the headmaster and the teachers kept pushing him back, and whenever he advanced, they gave him short, painful jabs. The professors and tutors from the academy were not his only tormentors--the principal of the school and the Stuttgart examiners were also among them, all with embittered countenances. Suddenly the scene changed and the drowned Hindu lay on the stretcher, his comical father in his high top hat standing bowlegged by his side.

  There was another dream. He was running in the forest looking for Heilner. He kept spotting him at a great distance among the trees but whenever he was about to shout his name he saw him disappear. Finally Heilner stopped, let him approach and then said: "Hey, you know, I have a sweetheart." Then he broke out into a terribly loud laugh and disappeared in the undergrowth.

  In the same dream he saw a slim and handsome man alight from a boat, with tranquil, godlike eyes and peaceful hands, and he ran up to him. The scene dissolved and he tried to remember what it meant until the sentence in Mark came back to him:

  "Straightaway they knew him, they ran up to him." Now he had to remember what form

  was and what the present tense, infinitive, perfect and future of the verb were. He had to conjugate it in the singular, dual and plural, and he began to panic whenever he got stuck. When he came to himself again, he felt as if his head were sore inside. When his face involuntarily took on his old guilty and resigned smile, he instantly heard the headmaster say: "Wipe that grin from your face."

  All in all, Hans' condition showed little improvement despite the few days during which he felt better. On the contrary, everything was still going downhill with him. The family doctor, who had treated his mother and pronounced her dead and who attended his father when he came down with gout, pulled a long face and put off making a diagnosis from one day to the next.

  During these weeks Hans realized for the first time that he had had no friends during his last two years in grammar school. Some of his former companions had left town altogether, and others, he noticed, had become apprentices. With none of them did he have anything in common, there was nothing he wanted from any of them, and none of them bothered with him. His old principal twice addressed a few friendly words to him. The Latin teacher and the pastor would give him a friendly nod when they met him on the street, but Hans was no longer any concern of theirs. He was no longer a vessel which could be stuffed with all sorts of things, no longer fertile ground for a variety of seeds; he was no longer worth their time and effort.

  Perhaps it would have helped him if the pastor had shown some interest in him. But what should the pastor have done? What he was in a position to give--knowledge, or at least the incentive to search for it--he had not withheld from the boy, and that was all he had to give. He was not one of those pastors whose competence in Latin is in doubt and whose sermons are drawn from well-known sources, but to whom you gladly turn in troubled times because of their kind eyes and the friendly words they have for all who suffer. Nor was Papa Giebenrath a friend or consoler, even if he made an effort to conceal his anger and disappointment from Hans.

  Thus the boy felt abandoned, unloved; he sat around in the small garden sunning himself, or lay in the woods and gave himself up to his dreams or tormenting thoughts. He was unable to find solace in reading because his eyes and head would begin to hurt as soon as he opened a book, and the ghost of his days at the academy and all his fears would return to haunt him, filling him with dreadful dreams
during which he felt as if he were choking and being riveted by burning eyes.

  In these desperate and forlorn straits, another ghost approached the sickly boy in the guise of a treacherous comforter that gradually became familiar and indispensable: the thought of death. It was easy enough to obtain a gun or to attach a noose to a tree somewhere in the forest. The thought of death accompanied him on his daily walks. He inspected various quiet, lonely places until he finally chose one where it would be good to die. He designated this as the place where he would definitely end his life. He visited it time and again, and sitting there derived peculiar pleasure from imagining how they would soon find his corpse there. He not only chose a branch for the rope but had tested it--no further obstacles stood in his way. Little by little he composed a brief farewell letter to his father and a much longer one to Hermann Heilner. They were to be found on his corpse.

  These preparations with their sense of purposefulness exerted a beneficial influence on his state of mind. Sitting under the fateful branch, he enjoyed many hours during which the pressure lifted from him and a feeling of almost joyous well-being overcame him.

  He did not really know why he hadn't hanged himself long ago. His mind was made up, he had passed the death sentence on himself, and this made him feel so well that in the meantime he did not scorn--in these his last days--the enjoyment of sunshine and his solitary dreams in the way you do before setting out on a long trip. He could leave any day he chose, everything was settled. And he took particular and bitter satisfaction in lingering voluntarily for a while in his old surroundings, looking into the faces of people who had no idea of his dangerous resolve. Whenever he encountered the doctor, he could not help thinking: "Well, my friend, I'd almost like to be around to see the face you'll make."

  Fate allowed him to enjoy his gloomy intentions. She watched him every day sipping a few drops of joy and zest from the cup of death. There might be precious little in store for this crippled young being, but nonetheless it must complete its appointed course and not leave this earth before having drunk a little deeper of life's bitter-sweet waters.

  Inescapable, oppressive images haunted him less and less frequently. He gave way to a weary feeling of capitulation, a painless and listless mood in which he saw hours and days pass, gazed blandly into the blue sky. At times he seemed to be sleepwalking; at others he seemed to be returning to childhood. Once he sat beneath the spruce in their little garden, enveloped in a lazy twilit mood, and hummed, without being aware of it, the same old verses over and over to himself, verses he remembered from his grammar-school days:

  "Oh, I am so weary

  Oh, I am so weak

  Have no money in my wallet

  And nothing in my satchel."

  He hummed it in the old accustomed manner and thought nothing of repeating the same verse twenty times over. But his father happened to be listening near the window, and was shocked. This pleasant and mindless singsong was beyond his sober sensibility; he interpreted it, with a deep sigh, as a sign of hopeless mental decline. From that day on he watched his son even more anxiously. And his son, of course, noticed and suffered from this. Yet Hans still could not find the right moment to take the rope to the forest and put that strong branch to good use.

  Meanwhile the hottest time of year had set in, and now twelve months had passed since the examination and the summer holidays which followed. Every so often Hans thought back to those events, but without feeling any particularly strong emotion; he had become quite insensitive. He would have liked to go fishing again but dared not ask his father for permission. Yet whenever he came near the water and stood any length of time in a place where no one could see him, his eyes eagerly followed the movement of the dark, noiseless fish as they swam about; it was agony to realize that he could not go fishing.

  Every day toward evening he walked a stretch down-river to go swimming. Because he always had to pass by Inspector Gessler's little house he discovered by chance the return of Emma Gessler, on whom he had such a crush three years ago. He cast a curious eye at her a few times, but he no longer much cared for her. She had been a finely built delicate girl at that time; now she had grown heavy, her movements were angular, her modern hairdo looked far too adult and disfigured her completely. Nor did long dresses suit her, and her attempt to look ladylike was decidedly unfortunate. Hans found her ridiculous but at the same time he felt sorry for her when he remembered how peculiarly sweet and dark and warm he had felt whenever he had seen her. Indeed, everything had been completely different, so much more beautiful, so much livelier! It had been such a long time since he had known anything but Latin, history, Greek, examinations, academy and headaches. In those days his books contained fairy tales, cops and robbers. The mill he had constructed in the garden had been running and in the evening he had listened to Liese tell her wild stories in the gateway of Naschold's house. At that time he had regarded his old neighbor Grossjohann, nicknamed Garibaldi, as a murderer and robber and had dreamed of him. Throughout the year he had always looked forward to something or other every month: hay-making, clover-mowing, the first day you could go fishing, catch crayfish, pick hops, shake plums off the trees, burn weeds in potato fields, and the first day of threshing. In between there had been Sundays and holidays. There had been so many things that mysteriously attracted him: houses, little alleys, haylofts, wells, fences; people and animals of every kind had been familiar and dear to him or fascinating. When he had gone hops-picking he listened to the older girls and memorized some of the verses they sang, most of them light and funny but a few oddly sorrowful.

  All of that had come to an end without his even noticing it. First the evenings with Liese had been no more, then fishing for minnows on Sunday mornings, then the reading of fairy tales and so on, one thing after the other, including hops-picking and the mill in the garden. Where had it all gone?

  And what happened was that the precocious boy experienced an unreal second childhood during this period of illness. His sensibility, robbed of its real childhood, now fled with sudden yearning back to those already dimming years and wandered spellbound through a forest of memories whose vividness was perhaps of an almost pathological nature. He relived these memories with no less intensity and passion than he had experienced them in reality before. His betrayed and violated childhood erupted like a long pent-up spring.

  When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.

  This is what was happening to Hans Giebenrath, so let us accompany him into his childhood land of dreams.

  The Giebenrath house stood near the old stone bridge on a corner between two entirely different streets. The first of these streets, to which the house actually belonged, was the longest, widest, most dignified in town. It was called Tannery Street. The second street led up a steep hill, was short, narrow and miserable; it was named Falcon after an age-old inn that had long since been shut down, whose sign had displayed a falcon.

  In house after house on Tannery Street there lived good, solid, well-established families, people who owned their own houses, had their own pews in church, whose gardens rose in terraces steeply uphill and whose fences, all overgrown with yellow broom, bordered on the railroad right-of-way that had been laid out in the 1870's. For splendor and respectability, nothing could compare with Tannery Street except the town square, where church, courthouse, county administration, town hall and vicarage were situated with unalloyed dignity and lent this little town a certain nobility, the illusion of being a city. Tannery Street, though lacking such official attributes, consisted of old and new middle-class dwellings with impressive doors, old-fashioned half-timbered houses with brightly decorated gables. The entire street exuded a friendly atmosphere of well-li
ghted comfort, due in large part to the fact that it consisted of a single row of houses. The other side of the street was open, save for a wall, propped up by wooden pilings, behind which the river flowed.

  If Tannery Street was long, wide and spaciously dignified, Falcon was the opposite. Here stood warped gloomy houses with splotched and crumbling plaster, gables that lurched forward, broken and often patched windows and doors, crooked chimneys, leaky rain pipes. The houses deprived each other of room and light and the little alley was narrow, oddly twisted and cast in a perpetual gloom which rainstorms or dusk changed into damp darkness. Masses of wash always hung on lines and poles outside the windows. As small and miserable as the street was, hordes of people made their homes here, not even counting the sub-tenants and those who flopped there for the night. Every nook and cranny of these ill-shaped, aging houses was occupied. The street was densely populated and poverty, vice and sickness were rank. If a typhus epidemic broke out, it would start here; if manslaughter were to occur, it would be here, and if something was stolen in town people looked first in the Falcon. Peddlers had their lodgings there, among whom were Hotte-hotte, the queer vendor of silver polish and Adam Hittel, the scissors grinder, a man accused of every imaginable crime and vice.

  *

  During his first years in school Hans had been a frequent visitor in the Falcon. In the company of a dubious gang of flaxen-haired, ragged boys he had listened to the notorious Lotte Frohmuller's tales of murder. She was divorced from a small innkeeper and had spent five years in prison. She had been a well-known beauty in her day, had had any number of lovers among the factory workers, and caused any number of scandals and knife fights. Now she lived alone and spent her evenings, after the factory closed, making coffee and telling stories. Her door was always open and besides the wives and young workers a horde of neighborhood children listened from the doorstep with a mixture of delight and terror. The water in the kettle boiled on the black stone hearth, a tallow candle burned nearby. It added its adventurous flickering to the blue flame from the little coal fire; together they illuminated the overcrowded dark room and cast hugely enlarged shadows of the listeners on walls and ceilings, filling the room with ghostly activity.