Tidings. Ernst Wiechert

you on the sleigh.’

      “I saw that she shook her head. ‘I cannot come,’ she said, ‘for I am with child. By those who have slain. Many children. I don’t know how many. It shall grow up under the cross, it cannot grow up otherwise, or it will be cursed.’

      “ ‘What cross?’ I asked.

      “She lifted her hand out of the black shawl and pointed to the church door. It was in the shadow. ‘Are your eyes blind?’ she asked.

      “I raised my eyes, sir, and I saw. A man was nailed on the church door and his head was bent. I may have cried out, for she shook her head. ‘You must not cry,’ she said. ‘He did not cry either. He is our vicar. I cannot take him down, for he is frozen fast.’

      “The dog was howling and I trembled, sir. I trembled in my wolfskin coat.

      “ ‘Now go,’ she said. ‘It shall grow up under this cross. A village must have children, or God wipes it out.’

      “ ‘Come along with me,’ I pleaded, ‘for Christ’s sake, come.’ But she drew the black shawl around her again. Nothing was to be seen of her face after that. The dog was howling.

      “Then I went off, sir, I and my shadow.” He was silent, and his bright eyes stared into the dying fire.

      “Thus it is written in the Bible,” he went on gently after a while: “In the same night two will lie on a bed; one is taken, the other is left. Two will grind grain together; one is taken, the other is left. Two will be in the field; one is taken, the other is left. Thus it is written, sir.

      “I asked her for the name of the village, but I have forgotten it. It may have been the village Nameless or Nowhere.

      “Then we came into a district which Worgulla knew well. There were three burned villages one after another, but the signboards with the names on were not burned. The name of the first was Adamsverdruss, and I gazed at this name for a long time. The second was called Beschluss, and the women were afraid of it. But the third was called Amen, and it was there that we lost the wolves’ track. Then we could drive by day, if the airplanes did not come.

      “And now ask me once more whether I am afraid, sir,” said Christoph. He got up and dusted the ashes of his pipe from his long coat. “Was the woman afraid who remained sitting there below the crucified man? And are we to be less than a cottager’s wife in the village Nameless?”

      But Amadeus did not answer this question either. He looked at the child’s doll with its yellow, half-torn eyes that was propped in the corner of the hearth, and he did not hear that Christoph went out and gently closed the door behind himself.

      The next morning one of the children stood at the door of the hut, a girl about six years old, timid and silent, her right forefinger in her mouth, and stared at the doll on the hearth.

      “Is that yours?” asked Amadeus.

      The girl nodded.

      “What’s her name?” asked Amadeus.

      “Skota,” answered the child. And Skota meant Goldie. Amadeus took “Goldie” from the hearth and gave it to the little girl. The girl wrapped it in her shawl and pressed it to her. Then she left without saying goodbye. Always from now on when Amadeus entered his room, he looked first at the comer of the hearth. But it was always empty. Goldie was gone.

      Aegidius came the third day after the arrival of the cottagers. He had not been able to leave the wheat harvest. He sat on a bundle of straw in the barn of the forester’s house and distributed the food and the clothes he had brought with him. He suggested that he should take them all the next evening to the estate of which he was now the bailiff. They needed workers as they needed their daily bread, and he would be a kind master to them. They would be responsible to him alone, only to him.

      His face tanned by the harvest sun was beaming, and he looked from one to the other as they stood in front of him with their faces marked by fear and privation.

      But then something strange happened – they did not want to come. Donelaitis spoke for them while he held his cap quietly and modestly in his hands.

      They did not want to come because they wished to remain apart. They did not like other people, but they were fond of each other. They had never quarreled on the way. Donelaitis had looked around immediately after their arrival. There were a few wooden houses by the peat bog, well and solidly built, with clay hearths. During the war there had been much activity there with foreign workers who had lived in these houses. Peat was like gold at this time, and they could live there. In winter they could fell timber. So much timber had to be felled. He had spoken about it to the forester’s wife. They would not suffer want. And they would be together.

      Aegidius looked at him thoughtfully. “But you will be in the wilderness, Donelaitis,” he said at last.

      “Is not the whole world a wilderness today, Herr Baron?” asked Donelaitis. “And here it is a little like it was in the old days. It smells as it smelled at home, Herr Baron.

      “But if you could help us a little, Herr Baron, with bedding and kitchen utensils, for instance, and with some wood so that we might have a bed and a table?”

      Aegidius was not satisfied, but he had to give in. He went to Kelley, to the commissioner for refugees, and to the Landrat, and after two weeks the cottagers moved in. Christoph remained with Baron Erasmus in the forester’s house.