He also sat on his father’s knee in the evenings when his father had come home from work in the forest. Then his father’s leather breeches were shiny and worn and smelled of pitch and perspiration. These were Father’s own pants and did not belong to the Crown, and it mattered not even if he peed on them. Father had a prickly beard, hard hands, and a hard knee. Father called Valter his “big helper.”
He sat on the knee of Grandmother Mathilda, who moved close to the fireplace and put both her feet on the hearth. She was cold. She had a big nose and watery eyes. Other people’s eyes were watery when they cried, but Grandmother’s eyes were watery all the time, even though she said she was not crying. In her nostrils hung black specks with a strong smell; she used snuff. Grandmother’s skirt was coarse and gray and hard, her knee was sharp and rough. She called Valter her “poor little one.”
He sat on the knee of his godfather, soldier Banda. He was a shoemaker and smelled of leather and cobbler’s wax. The godfather rocked him frightfully, pressed him against his big, soft stomach, and tickled him in the armpits until he was forced to laugh even though it hurt so much that he would have liked to cry instead. Soldier Banda called him “my little godson.”
He sat on the knee of his sister, Dagmar, but her knee was small and uncomfortable and he did not like to sit there. It sloped so much that he skidded down to the floor. Dagmar grabbed him under the arms and pulled him up again brusquely, but again he slid down. She blamed him—he was unable to sit quietly. She called him “the brat.”
He sat on his mother’s knee in front of the fire. On a soft, checkered apron with a fragrance of sweet milk. Mother’s knee was soft, her hands were soft, everything about her was soft and sweet and smelled of fresh milk and breast. Mother would sing a ditty while rocking him. When a spark from the fire flew in his face, she would blow on the smarting skin. Mother called Valter her “sweet friend.” Her knee was the best of all.
The beginning of Valter Sträng’s existence was in a hundred-year-old soldier-cottage, deep in a forest glade. A few acres of the village woodlands had once upon a time been set aside for the man chosen to serve in the Army. The timbered walls were covered with a beautiful green moss, in the yard lay great rocks, wonderful to climb, and between the rocks grew flowers. Valter no longer reached for the wallpaper flowers; now he picked them in the yard—dandelions, buttercups, bluebells. In the yard grew also a crabapple tree with a wide-spreading crown, a pear tree whose fruit became sweet preserved pears in the fall, and a few gooseberry bushes. From the cottage a road led through the forest out into the World.
In this out-of-the-way place Valter’s soul emerged and awakened to its own consciousness. He began to call objects by name and repeat words. One of the first words his tongue pronounced was a short one of three letters: God. It was the first word of a prayer which his mother had taught him to repeat:
God Who loves the children all,
Look to me who am so small.
Wherever in the world my way I wend,
My earthly field lies in God’s hand.
His tongue pronounced the words clearly, but their meaning was dim to him. He listened to those around him, questioned, pondered. God was the one who lived up there, high above the roof and above the crown of the crabapple tree. He was the one who had made everything and was in charge of everything. “Me who am so small”—that was he himself, Valter. He was the smallest one in the cottage and hereabouts. The world—that was everything, both outside and inside: the apple tree, the pear tree, the big stone at the stoop, the cellarhouse, the well, the barn. But what did “field” mean? God and the world and himself he understood. But what could the field be?
“I shall sow the rye in the field,” his father said.
“I’ll pick the potatoes in the field,” his mother said.
“I saw someone walking across the field,” Dagmar said.
Thus it was made clear to Valter that the field was the narrow strip of tilled earth at the edge of the woodland.
He grew, his horizon widened, and when summer came and he was allowed to go barefoot he wandered a bit out into the world. But a short distance away, at the edge of the property that his soldier-father occupied, there was a heavy gate across the road which he could not open. Here the world came to an end for anyone as little as he. The grown-ups could open the gate and walk still farther into the world and then turn about. But he could only stand there and peer between the slats. He craned his neck, he turned his head, he wanted so to look into the world. The road continued into the forest and disappeared at a bend. And on the other side of the gate, behind another fence, lay the field.
Wherever in the world my way I wend,
My earthly field lies in God’s hand.
Out there lay his field, in God’s hand. Great green plants grew there, and Mother hoed under the plants and found potatoes, which she boiled, a full pot of them, so that all of them could eat their sufficiency. “It’s from the field we get the food,” Father would say as the peelings grew into a tall pile at his plate. But the field was supposed to lie in God’s hand. Where was God’s hand? Standing at the gate, he looked about. God’s hand could grab the field and lift it into heaven, but he did not see the hand. How could this be? Wherever he turned, his field was supposed to be in God’s hand.
He asked his mother: “Our field—is it mine?”
“Yours? No—it belongs to the village, of course.”
“Where’s my field?”
“You have no field, my little friend.”
“I mean the one in God’s hand.”
“Nonsense, little child. Those things you don’t understand.”
The field in the evening prayer was not a piece of ground. He must learn to understand what he read.
“But where is my field? The one in God’s hand?”
“It means your fate. Your success in life.”
“What is success?”
“It means good luck. You’ll have good luck in everything you do.”
Valter thought deeply and sucked the knuckle of his right index finger. This he always did when he thought deeply about something. The knuckle was rather bruised.
Good luck. That was his, then.
“Where is my luck?”
“Your luck, little one? Don’t bite your knuckle.”
His mother was sitting in the yard cleaning lingonberries that she had poured in a heap on one of her largest aprons, spread on the ground. She was weary of his many questions.
“What did you say, my little one?”
“Where is my luck that I shall have?”
“Your luck? It comes and goes. As it does for everyone.”
“Can I see it when it comes?”
“No! Luck is not a person.”
“Can’t I see anything when it comes?”
“No, of course not. It isn’t visible.”
“How does one know when it comes, then?”
“One feels it.”
“How does one know when luck leaves?”
“One soon gets to know.” His mother sighed deeply as she picked leaves and twigs and rubbish from her hand that was heaped full of lingonberries: Bad luck and misfortune existed also. One got to know these, too. “Now you know. But you don’t understand as yet.”