Tidings
Ernst Wiechert
Translated from the German by
Marie Heynemann and Margery B. Ledward
In jüngeren Tagen war ich des Morgens froh, des Abends weint ich; jetzt, da ich älter bin, beginn ich zweifend meinen Tag, doch heilig und heiter ist mir sein Ende.
HOELDERLIN
When I was younger I was happy in the morning, and I slept in the evening; now as I have grown older I begin my day in doubt, but holy and serene is its end for me.
Published by Plough Publishing House
Walden, New York
Robertsbridge, England
Elsmore, Australia
Copyright © 2014 by Plough Publishing House
All rights reserved.
Original German ©1980 by LangenMüller at F.A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, München. All rights reserved.
Original title: Missa sine nomine by Ernst Wiechert, 1950
Cover image: Repin, Ilya (1844–1930) Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (detail) © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image Source: Art Resource, NY
PRINT ISBN: 978-0-87486-635-3
PDF ISBN 978-0-87486-638-4
EPUB ISBN 978-0-87486-636-0
MOBI ISBN 978-0-87486-637-7
1
SO THAT WAS HOW a man walked when death had touched him between the shoulders.
He walked as lightly as if he had wings, but below the ground something moved with him, and that which moved beneath his feet was not light and had no wings, but was dark and heavy like the juice of poppy seeds.
But what did he who walked into the night know of the juice of poppy seeds? He could stand at the side of the road leaning his back against one of the apple trees, as above him under the full May moon the early dew fell on the clustering pink flower buds. He could shut his eyes, and the picture of the red blossoms of poppies at the edge of a yellow wheat field might appear before his closed eyes and the picture of a child who stood there shyly touching the blossoms, as if they were enchanted.
It was all far away and unreal as in a dream – the poppies, the field, and the child’s hand.
There were no children’s hands anymore – nowhere and never again, and the red of the poppies changed into another red which flowed together out of stains fused into a crimson liquid which ran on till it skirted the edge of the field, of all the fields of this earth; yes, right on to the rim of this dark star which rushed noiselessly along through the May night on into other constellations. And it seemed as if the constellations fell back before the star with the bloody rim into the outlines of the Milky Way to give it free space and to open for it the icy infinity which awaited it behind the constellation of Hercules.
The man under the apple tree opened his eyes and made a wry mouth. Over him hung stars, the full moon, and the Milky Way. Nothing had gone out of its course, and nothing would ever go out of its course. A voice began to sing behind the fields, but it was only the voice of a drunkard, as most of the voices had been which he had heard this evening. It was not the voice which he had expected to hear, that lonely, shadowed, distant and once uttered tone which would be pronouncing the words of judgment over the trembling earth: “He who sheds the blood of man, his blood shall be shed also.”
A word – a field – a child – sunk into oblivion. And never more and nowhere would they rise again.
The man sighed and stepped back into the bright road, out of the shadow of the apple tree. He shivered in his brown suit which looked like a uniform of some kind, and he hung the coat over his bent shoulders. The coat was striped blue and white, a gay coat, but children avoided it, and grown people turned their heads away as if they had not seen it.
An hour later the man sat on the parapet of a village fountain and watched the moonlit jet of water which flowed into the basin. His feet ached in the new shoes which the victors had given him. He took some dry bread out of the pocket of his coat and held it under the flowing water before he slowly ate it. Then he smoked one of the strong, foreign cigarettes that they had stuffed into his pockets and gazed at the dark gables behind which the moon was shining. There were still lights in many of the little windows.
“There they sit and wait for the future,” he thought. “All these years they have waited for the future. First for one of glory, now for that of the Prodigal Son. People are always waiting for the future, condemned by this terrible conception of time. The animal does not know a tomorrow – nor does God. Eternity has no tomorrow. But they are waiting. Just as I am waiting. Perhaps I am more patient than they are, perhaps I am only more wicked than they, colder and more deadened. I was dead, and so the children turn from me. Animals and children scent death.”
He pressed out the cigarette on the rim of the fountain and got up. There was not far to go now. He could see the castle on the mountain behind the gables. It was lit up from top to bottom, and it occurred to him that Belshazzar’s castle might have looked something like it. “Midnight already drew near . . .” So many verses which he had learned as a child came to mind. There was now no hand which wrote on a white wall. Only the airplanes wrote letters of fire.
From here on he knew every turn of the road. He had often been here. He had loved the barren, melancholy landscape, and it was from here that they had fetched him. What people call time had passed, but for him there was no time anymore. He had been taken out of the fiery furnace, and now he had grown rigid. But he was not cleansed. Perhaps he had been taken out of the red heat too soon, perhaps too late. Only love cleanses, not violence. And he did not love anymore.
He walked up to the bright windows, because they belonged to him. He had inherited them, that’s what he had been told. But he did not know whether a heritage was still valid, since all heritage had been wasted – that of generations and that of many centuries. He only went there to find a roof perhaps, a piece of bread, a fountain with water. If he did not find it there, he would walk on or sit down on a doorstep until the night frost fell over him.
He stopped for a while to give his heart a rest and turned around. The village lay below him in the valley and the steep roofs were shining in the light of the moon. The road ran like a white ribbon into the dark hills. A dog barked in the distance, and it sounded like a voice crying in the wilderness. In just such villages as these were born the men who have exalted the name of the nation, he thought. In quiet, darkness, and namelessness. And also those others were born in such villages: the hangmen and the murderers, and nobody knows whether they have not in their blood a drop of that which flowed in the veins of those who wrote the great melodies or the wisdom of their centuries. Wheat and thistles grow in the same field.
A shooting star drew a silver trail from the zenith to the dark northern horizon. Yet he did not think of wishing for anything. But he raised his tired eyes to the sparkling canopy of heaven. He felt the magnitude, the purity and the inexpressible strangeness of space – space had neither regarded nor taken part in what had happened: in what had happened for years, by day and by night. Cries had not reached it, nor curses, nor prayers. Constellations had risen and had set. Everything that had happened had noiselessly rushed with the turning axis into that sparkling space on and on toward the distant constellation of Hercules.
Was it beautiful, what he saw? Did happiness flow down upon his brow from that eternity? He had forgotten beauty and happiness and probably also eternity, which was not eternity at all but only an immeasurable time.
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