The night after Lutz brought me here, carrying me in his arms like a calf, the winter storms began. Snow has been falling for five days. When the outer door opens I can see how deep the snow lies. Lutz keeps the path clear, shovelling the snow morning and evening into heaps on either side. This is the way to the privy, the small wooden shed where there is a box seat with a deep hole beneath. When at last I grew strong enough to walk, Lutz led me out here, through still-falling snow. Sitting on the smooth wooden seat, straining for a result, shivering in the cold, I racked my brains to discover how I had emptied my bowels during my days in the bunk by the stove. I concluded I hadn’t. I carried within me the waste matter of six days; though it’s true to say that for most of that time I’d eaten nothing.
My illness is not really an illness so much as a collapse. The fall down the mountainside hurt me, but did no lasting damage. I was badly chilled by lying in the stream. Had Lutz not found me I would now be dead. But I believe the root cause of my fever is moral shock. In the days since I entered this miserable country I have seen too much suffering and hatred, too much cruelty and death. I’ve not been prepared for this. I have no picture of the world into which it all fits. I feel as if I’ve lost all bearings, or as if my life up to this point has been a dream, and now with merciless brutality I am thrust into the waking world. Why this should be so I can’t conceive. Is this punishment? If so, what are my crimes? Silently, within myself, I cry the aggrieved cry of the eternal child: It’s not fair, why are they picking on me, I didn’t do anything.
It’s true. It’s not fair. They are picking on me. But it begins to strike me that it’s the same for everyone. They pick on everyone. I am not alone.
You see why I read Vicino with such eagerness. His voice is wry and undeceived, but he has hope. He loves the company of other people.
Lutz’s father, the old man, is singing. He sits on a bench with his back to the stove and a wool hat pulled down low over his withered face and croons to himself. He sings sweet songs with simple repetitive tunes that go round and round for ever. The old lady, his wife, shuffles about the house moving implements and dishes back to what she considers to be their proper place. There are no shelves in this long-roofed barn: everything hangs from hooks attached to the rafters, or slides into pockets made of netted string. The old lady is permanently annoyed that Hanna doesn’t know the right hook for the stew pan, or the right pocket for the heavy white plates. She never tells Hanna she’s made a mistake. She just shuffles about, breathing heavily, and puts things back where they should be. Hanna too never remarks on this, or even seems to notice. But I am watching from my bunk, and I see how whenever the old lady is at her rearranging, Hanna becomes especially preoccupied with the needs of her baby.
This baby is a boy named Manfred, who they call Man. They all adore Man, and compete in worshipping him. He is a delightful good-natured baby, about six months old, and always smiling. When Hanna is raking out the hot embers from the stove she puts Man in the bunk with me, and we sit and smile at each other. He finds me enormously interesting. After gazing at me for a while he reaches out one hand, and I lean my face close and he feels my face with his fingers. He pokes his fingers into my mouth and nostrils and eyes, and bats at my nose and chin. This is exactly how he treats the huge shaggy dogs that come loping back with Lutz every evening. The dogs react as I react, with patient submission. The prod of Man’s little hands feels like an honour.
These people have taken me into their home without questions. Of course I have no means of answering them, even if they were to question me, but their every action has shown that they have no doubts about what they are doing. I’m a fellow creature in need, and they have the means to help me. They’re not especially virtuous people. Hanna’s steady good humour conceals a stubborn insistence on getting her own way, and Lutz almost certainly has a secret supply of alcohol somewhere outside the house. His mother, the old lady, devotes her life to silent but determined demonstrations of her daughter-in-law’s fecklessness; while the old man has clearly decided that his working days are over, and now in his final years has opted to do nothing whatsoever. I doubt if he’s much over sixty. So contented peasants they are not, with the possible exception of Man. However I believe they enjoy frequent moments in which they have, for a little while, all that they require. Vicino calls this “the Great Enough.”
In the midst of aches in the joints, anxiety over the payment of bills, concern for the safety of those you love, envy of the rich, fear of robbers, dog-weariness at the end of a long day, and the unacceptable slipping away of youth, there does occasionally appear, like a ray of light piercing the clouds, a moment of joy. Perhaps you have entered the house and sat down before removing your boots. A friend has pressed a drink into your hands, and is telling you the latest news. You see from his face that he’s glad you’ve come in; and you are glad too. Glad to be sitting down, glad of the warming glow of the drink, glad of your friend’s furrowed brow and eager speech. For this moment, nothing more is required. It is in its way unimprovable. This is what I mean by the Great Enough.
Lutz comes back accompanied by a boy of twelve or so. The boy has a tale to tell, to which the others listen in silence, occasionally glancing at me. Then the boy comes over to where I lie and solemnly offers me his hand.
“Hello sir,” he says. “I am name Bruno.”
He speaks carefully. He has planned this sentence in advance. Still, at last I can talk.
“I’m happy to meet you.”
I echo his courteous formality.
“I am son of brother of Lutz,” he tells me.
Then in awkward stumbling English, he explains why he has come. It seems two policemen called on his father’s farm, some way down the valley, to warn the family that there were dangerous men in the area. These men carry bombs, with which they blow up innocent people.
“Why?” I ask.
“They are terrorist,” says Bruno.
“Why should terrorists want to blow up innocent people?”
“Because they are terrorist,” he replies. It’s as if I’ve asked why foxes take chickens. That’s what foxes do. Then I remember Petra fixing me with her beautiful eyes and telling me, “It will be a great sacrifice, but it will bring liberation.” Bruno is right. The movement sacrifices innocent people because that is their mode of operation.
“I think the police come here too.”
He looks at me steadily as he says this and I understand that he believes I am a terrorist. Despite this, he has come to warn me. I think this is because the code of hospitality is stronger than the fear of terrorism that the authorities are seeking to cultivate. I have slept under his family’s roof, I have broken bread with them. I have asked for and been given refuge. For all these reasons, these puzzled people are in some way obligated to me. Perhaps there’s nothing here to do with country custom after all, perhaps it’s simply that I have become real to them. No real person is a terrorist.
And yet Egon was real to Petra, and she killed him. As Vicino writes: Other people’s lives are more mysterious than the moon and the stars.
“I’m not a terrorist, Bruno.”
Those grave eyes. Children grow up young here.
“That is good.”
Nevertheless I have no wish to be discovered by the visiting policemen. This is entirely understood by the family. Hanna brushes dry soil from a section of the floor, and lifts a hatch. A ladder leads down into a lightless cellar, where the winter’s supply of tubers is stored.
“They come,” explains Bruno, “you go here.”
Now it seems he plans to go, even though darkness has fallen. He holds out his hand for me to shake once more.
“Please,” I say. “Tell your uncle he has saved my life. I owe him my life.”
Bruno passes this on. Lutz shrugs and looks down and mumbles a few words.
“He says anyone would do this.”
“Tell him, I don’t wish to place his family in danger. As soon as I’m st
rong, I’ll go on my way.”
On my way. What way is that? From an unknown resting place to an unknown testing place.
As a gauge of my returning strength, I go out with Lutz for the day. We leave the house at first light, with the dogs at our heels. I have not been further than the privy for a week, and the effect of the sunrise is startling. It’s a bitter cold, still, clear day, the Morning Star still hovering over the horizon. Snow covers the valley and the tree-clad hills that rise steeply on either side. The sun is about to appear above the eastern range of mountains, and already it is reaching out from behind gold-rimmed clouds three fan-shaped beams of amber light. These beams shine upon the underside of a second, higher layer of cloud, turning the pale grey to a warm silver. Then as the burning orb of the sun itself climbs into view, the dazzling light spills down the valley, and all the snow turns gold before our tramping feet. Lutz has lent me a long warm coat and a fur hat with ear flaps that I suspect belong to his father. I am glad of them: I’m shivering with the cold. The sunrise brings no addition of warmth, but the celestial glory of it takes my breath away. Lutz says nothing as usual, but I glance at him and see that he too is appreciating it. Then, as quickly as it began, it’s over. The sun has risen into the cloud belt, and the valley is mortal again.
We are going to fetch wood for the ever-hungry stove. The wood-pile by the house is well stacked, all down one outside wall beneath the eaves, but as it is used it must be replaced. We carry axes, to cut the timber into lengths that will fit into the iron mouth of the stove. I follow Lutz and his dogs down a path he has tramped before. His boot marks are before us, frozen in the snow. No one else has been this way. The path leads over the stream, up the hillside, to a small clearing in the trees. The clearing is Lutz’s own creation: each stump the remains of a tree felled by his axe. Across the clearing lies a tall birch felled by Lutz on some previous occasion. Our task is to cut it up.
He takes the base end, where the trunk is widest, and suggests to me, by pointing and making chopping gestures, that I cut off the feathery branches higher up. He then stands alongside the tree trunk and swings his axe with light circular strokes as if he’s skipping rope, and a section of timber half a metre wide falls away. When I tackle a slender branch, aiming to shear it off where it joins the trunk, my blow misses entirely and I bury my axe-blade in the ground. For the first time in my life I find myself wondering how you aim an axe. You can’t look down it. You can’t track the line from the blade to the target, because when you start to strike the blade is high above your head. I watch Lutz. He doesn’t seem to look at anything, and yet blow after blow lands in exactly the same place, until the wood splits.
I can’t stand still, it’s too cold. So I decide to copy Lutz, and swing my axe as if it knows itself where to go, and to act as if wherever it lands is fine with me. So I chop away, and make crisscross marks in the hard ground, and chip the sides of the trunk, and slice off the odd twig, and at least I get warm. I also get blisters. Lutz works steadily on, slicing rings of tree trunk and stacking them behind him, paying no attention to my ridiculous miming of chopping wood.
Now my hands hurt quite a lot, and I decide I might as well stop. Lutz does not stop. He’s getting close to my part of the trunk, where the side branches begin. He moves towards me, and with small sideways snips of his axe he lops off some branches. Then he goes back to his stack of trunk-rings, and lays one by itself on the ground, and crack! crack! chops it into four triangular segments. This I now recognise as the final product, as stacked in the house wood-pile. He rolls another ring into place, and signs to me to try chopping it. I think of showing him my blisters and then decide not to.
My second blow splits the ring in two. I’m astonished, and proud. Lutz hasn’t noticed. After that I swing away with a will. It takes me seven more blows to achieve the pure clean power that caused the timber to part, but now I have tasted success. On I work, becoming ever more capable, my arms and wrists and hands gradually learning the precise path they must travel through the air to deliver the irresistible blow. I catch sight of Lutz glancing in my direction. He says nothing, but no words are necessary. The split logs are my witnesses.
When at last we stop, my hands are actually bleeding, and I haven’t been aware of it. Lutz sees, and frowns, and washes my burst blisters with snow. He produces a metal flask which contains schnapps, and we both drink from it. Then he pulls out two tangled bundles of string which turn out to be nets, and we gather up the split logs.
I carry my load the way he shows me, leaning forward on the balls of the feet, with the weight resting on the small of my back. The two main cords run over my shoulders and I hold them at waist level in both hands. We plod home down the track, over the stream and across the snow-covered fields. I am surprised to see from the length of my shadow before me that the sun is sinking in the sky. We have been chopping wood for nearly all the short winter day.
It strikes me that this is what Lutz does every day. There is no ploughing or planting possible in such weather. This must mean that the household burns as much wood in twenty-four hours as we can chop each day. He’s like the fish that swim about all day finding food to give them the energy to swim about all day. This no longer seems ridiculous to me. I have joined the fish.
Back at the house, Hanna has hot food waiting in the stew pot. I have never been so hungry in my life. The smell of the stew alone makes me feel faint with anticipated joy. The actual eating of it, even with the distraction of the pain in my hands, is mouthful upon mouthful of bliss. When at last I stop, unable to eat any more, the overwhelming sensation of bodily satisfaction fills me from top to toe, and I sit and beam in glowing silence.
Lutz tells Hanna about my blisters. She comes and looks at my hands, and clicks her tongue, and fetches a jar of ointment. The ointment is cool and soothing. I watch her grave plain features as she applies the ointment, and suddenly I’m flooded with gratitude. What excellent people they are! How good she is, to fill my belly and ease my pain. How well Lutz swings his axe. How pleasantly the old man sings, and the baby gurgles. How obliging of the stove to keep me warm and the roof to keep me dry. How welcoming my bunk, how irresistible the nest prepared for me beneath the rugs. How sweet the warm motherly arms of sleep.
The police come. Their arrival is heralded by the roar of a four-wheel drive from far down the valley. Lutz is out, but Hanna remains calm. She lifts the hatch in the floor and I go down into the dark to crouch among the potatoes. Seeing nothing, I hear the boots of the policemen, and their voices and their laughter. I work out that Hanna is giving them a glass of schnapps and they are playing with the baby. I’ve no doubt little Manfred smiles on them as bonnily as he smiles on me.
Then they go, and I hear the roar of their vehicle departing. The hatch opens, and I climb out. Hanna makes no attempt to tell me what has happened, nor do I need to be told. The policemen have come looking for strangers. Hanna has told them nothing, and they have gone on their way. An everyday story of courage and kindness with no possible hope of reward.
When Lutz returns, he has Bruno with him. They know of the police visit. I say at once, through Bruno, that I will leave in the morning. They nod and accept this. Bruno will stay the night. In the morning he will guide me to the road that leads to their nearest town. They take it for granted that as a non-countryman I will want to go to the town.
That evening Hanna tells the story of the policemen, and there’s huge amusement. Bruno, smiling, explains.
“The police say, these strangers, they cut the throat, they kill the baby, they steal the cow.”
I too laugh. But as I laugh I think how it might have been, if the police warnings had come before Lutz found me. Would these fears have sounded so preposterous then, if I had appeared as the predicted stranger? I can as easily imagine Lutz taking his axe and dashing out my brains, to stop me cutting his wife’s throat and killing his baby, as doing what he in fact did, which was to lift me gently out of the stream and carry me to a bed
by the stove.
I can give these people nothing in return for all they have given me. I offer them my foreign money, aware that if they try to spend it they will attract suspicion. They know this better than I. They shake their heads, and I put my notes away. Perhaps after all payment is not required. They have given me the purest gift known to mankind, which is to care for a stranger in need. My part is to receive the gift, and when my turn comes, to pass it on.
NINE
The narrow road down which I am walking is striped white and brown where passing cars have left their tracks in the snow, and flecked with broken reddish stones. On either side of the road grow tall thin-trunked branchless trees that put out leaves only at the top, in uncertain bundles like the heads of mops. These trees, both straight and not straight, retreat before my eyes into the distance, a parade of homely standards that make of the road a ceremonial approach. Beyond them, the view is divided by their bent trunks into a line of vertical windows. I can make out the snowy roofs and soft red walls of a small town. There’s a church with a square tower, capped with a cupola that’s too smooth-sided to hold the snow and glints silver-grey in the morning light. The land on either side of the road is laid out in orchards, all now under snow. A man is walking towards me, with a shotgun over one shoulder and a dog at his heels.
I come to a stop. This is the town to which Bruno has directed me. I stand looking down the avenue of trees towards the church with its odd-shaped tower. The man with the gun approaches. I nod a greeting. He passes by with barely a glance, his dog behind him. Bruno told me there has been a bomb explosion in some other town, not far away, and people are afraid. The hunter shows no curiosity in me. This may be because I am wearing the long outer coat and the fur hat with ear flaps given me by Lutz. I look like all the rest of them, bundled up against the cold.
The Society of Others Page 9
