Immensee and Other Stories

by Theodor Storm

  She went all the way downstairs, with some difficulty, lit a candle, and placed it in the shop window; then, after she had inspected the height of the tide, she again went up to her room. “Be easy, Chrissy, the water won’t come into the house today, but Uncle Heinrich wasn’t here either.”

  Perhaps a quarter hour had passed; it seemed to have grown quieter outside, and people sat waiting in their houses. Then suddenly Brigitta put the child down from her lap. “What was that? Did you hear that, Chrissy?” And again she ran to the stairs. “Is anyone down there?” she called down into the hall.

  A man’s voice answered through the open door.

  “What do you want? Is it you, neighbour?” asked the old woman. “How did you get to our house?”

  “I have a boat, Brigitta, but come down a moment.”

  As quickly as she could, with the child again clinging to her skirt, she went down the stairs. “What is it, neighbour? God protect us from misfortune!”

  “Yes, Brigitta, yes, God protect us! But beyond Kramer Street on the fens there’s a man in distress.”

  “Merciful God, a man! Do you want the big rope from our loft?”

  The man shook his head. “It’s too far, and the man is sitting on the tall barn post that is just barely above the water. Listen! You can hear him crying out. No, no, it was only the wind. But over there from the baker’s attic they can see him.”

  “Stay here,” said the old woman. “I’ll call Carsten; maybe he’ll know what to do.”

  They exchanged a few more words; then Brigitta ran to the back hall. But it was dark, Carsten was not there. When she and the child had groped their way to the corner of the annex, they found the door locked.

  “Carsten, Carsten!” she called, beating against it with both hands. Finally steps came down the stairs, the key was turned, and Carsten stepped towards her, pale as death, holding the burnt-down candle in his hand.

  “For Heaven’s sake, brother, how you look! Why do you lock yourself in? What were you doing up there in the death chamber?”

  He looked at her calmly, yet almost vacantly, wide-eyed. “What do you want, sister?” he asked. “Has the water started to fall?”

  “No, brother, but there’s been an accident.” And she reported with rapid words what the neighbour had told her.

  The stony form of the old man suddenly came to life. “A human being? A man, Brigitta?” he cried, seizing the arm of his old sister.

  “Of course, of course; a man, brother!”

  The child, who had not let go of Brigitta’s skirt, now stuck out her little head. “Yes, Uncle Carsten,” she said with an air of importance, “and the man is always calling for his father. From the baker’s attic they can hear him yelling.”

  Carsten dropped the candle on the stone floor and rushed away. He was already down at the bulwarks and would have gone right into the water if the neighbour had not appeared in the nick of time and helped him into his boat.

  A few moments later he was standing over on Kramer Street in the dark attic of the baker’s house; through the open dormer window his gaze strayed out into the terror of the night.

  “Where, where?” he asked, trembling.

  “Just look straight ahead. The post on Peter Hansen’s fen,” an­swered the stout baker, who stood next to him, his thumbs in the armholes of his vest. “Only it’s too dark now; you must wait until the moon appears again. But I’m going down; I am too soft-hearted; I can’t bear to hear that yelling!”

  “Yelling? I hear nothing!”

  “You don’t? Well, it can’t help the one over there anyhow.”

  A blinding flash of moonlight broke through the racing clouds and lit up the ghastly pale face of the old man, who was holding his flying hair with both hands, while his wide-opened eyes anxiously roamed over the foaming water waste. Suddenly he gave a start.

  “Carsten, what the devil, Carsten!” cried the baker, who in spite of his soft heart was still there; for at the same moment Carsten had fallen without a word into the arms of the portly man.

  “Oh, that’s it,” he added, as he too took a look through the window. “The post – upon my soul – is empty! But what the deuce did that have to do with the old man?”

  It was to be sure never determined who the man had been whose cry of distress had been drowned that night by the water, but it is certain that Heinrich did not return home either that night or later, nor was he ever seen again.

  For the rest, Mr Jaspers’s cheerful confidence was more than con­firmed; not only the house in South Street but also the one on the alley soon went through his hands. Only Aunt Brigitta’s coffin was still standing in the cool hall, from where it was carried out to its eternal rest. Carsten had to move out; while the auctioneer’s gavel was ringing inside, he left his house leaning on Anna’s arm, never to enter it again. Up on South Street, far beyond Heinrich’s former business, where the last little houses are thatched with straw, there was now their joint home. Carsten no longer held any office, nor did he carry on any other business; for in that night he had had a stroke, and his mind had suffered; yet he was still quite capable of caring for little Heinrich, who had spent half the day on his grandfather’s lap. The old man suffered no want, although Anna had also given up the last remnant of her assets for the sake of her husband’s memory, but her hands and her courage never flagged. She had faded completely, having retained only her beautiful blonde hair; however, a spiritual beauty now shone from her countenance, which she had not possessed before, and whoever saw her in those days, the tall woman between the child and the man who had become a child, could not but remember the words of the Bible: though the body die, yet the soul will live.

  It was a daily recurring joy to the old man, however, to seek and find the features of the mother in the little face of his grandson. “Your son, Anna; entirely your son!” he used to call out after long observation. “He has a happy face.”

  Then Anna would nod and say smiling, “Yes, grandfather, but the boy has your eyes!”

  And so it goes on within the generations; hope grows with each human being, but no one thinks that with each morsel of food he also gives his child a piece of his own life, which soon can no longer be freed from his.

  Blessed is he whose life is secure in the hand of his child, but also he for whom there remains, from all he once possessed, only a merciful hand to shake up the pillows for the last time under his poor head.

  Notes

  p.26, Schnaderhüpferl: Short nonsensical folk songs (German dialect).

  p.60, Nesi: Storm names the child Nesi, familiar for Agnes; the woman’s name is Ines in German. (trans­lator’s note)

  p.62, Carsten Carstens: Note that Storm distinguishes between “Carstens” as the public and “Carsten” as the family man. (trans­lator’s note)

  p.72, Lessing’s Nathan: Nathan the Wise is a 1779 play by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), the German writer and critic.

  p.72, Hippel’s Careers in an Ascending Line: A reference to the German writer Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741–96) and his mostly autobiographical work Lebensläufe nach aufsteigender Linie (1778–81).