ranger’s house tomorrow, if he learned that his forester was not doing what he had written.…
Fear … The man’s entire life had become fear. So much could a man torment himself, then, about a meager life which had known little pleasure. And now that it was in decline, and had become quite flat and unblessed, the fear grew worse. From every side it assailed him; it was not the will to existence which kept him among the living, no, it was the fear of existence. Wolfgang Pagel soon gave up speaking to the old man comfortingly and consolingly. He clearly didn’t want consolation. He sat as if in the middle of his worries, which came at him like waves from all sides, lifting him up, ready to drown him! “Yes, Herr Pagel, I read every day in the newspapers about suicides, and that there are so many old people who do it, seventy and eighty years old. But I can’t, I just can’t do it; I have a sick wife and I keep on thinking: What would become of her if I went first? There’s not a soul who worries about her; they’d simply let her die like an animal. That’s why I’m so afraid.”
“Oh, stop talking, Kniebusch,” said Pagel, wearied. “Get into bed now and the doctor will come this evening; once you’ve had a sleep everything will look different. And while you’re undressing give me the Geheimrat’s letter to read.”
Kniebusch, the old forester, a little bad-tempered and complaining, clumsily removed his clothing. Pagel stood under the lamp and looked over the letter the Geheimrat Horst-Heinz von Teschow had written to his forester. In a big chair at the window sat the forester’s wife, whom the people in the village said grew stranger and stranger. She was staring into the night. On her knees was a book with a golden cross on the cover, no doubt a hymnal.
“Who puts your wife to bed?” asked Pagel, interrupting his reading.
“Oh, she won’t be going to bed today,” replied the forester. “She often sits like that all night and sings. But when she wants to go to bed she can manage quite well by herself.” The young man threw a quick searching look at the forester’s wife who continued to look out into the night while he read further. The forester crept into his nightshirt and then into his bed. On the pillow his face, tanned by sun and wind, and his yellow-white beard, seemed strangely colored.
Just as young Pagel had reached the part of the letter that the forester had just given him which once and for all banned everyone from access to the Geheimrat’s woods, starting with all those from Neulohe, including his son- in-law’s family, as well as all staff from the Neulohe estate, including the little upstart Pagel—just as Pagel had got this far in the incendiary, provocative and completely antagonistic letter, the old woman began to sing.
She’d stuck one finger into her songbook but didn’t look down at it. She continued to look out into the night, and with a shrill, broken voice sang lightly to herself from an old hymn, “Commit yourself and your cares to our true saviour who guides heaven. Through sky and clouds and tempests, he will guide your footsteps.”
Pagel looked towards the forester, but the old man didn’t move. His head was motionless on the pillow. “I’m going now, Herr Kniebusch,” said Pagel. “Here is the letter. Thanks very much and, as I said, I shall keep silent.”
“Shut the door from outside,” replied the old man. “The key’s in the lock. I have another, if the doctor comes. I shall hear him coming, I shan’t sleep.”
“The singing disturbs you, I suppose?”
“The singing? What singing? Oh, my wife’s? No, that doesn’t disturb me, I don’t even hear it. I’m thinking the whole time.… When you leave, please turn out the light; we don’t need a light.”
“What do you think about then, Herr Kniebusch?” asked Pagel looking down on the forester, lying with his eyes shut, motionless.
“Oh, I’ve been thinking it out like this. I think, Supposing I hadn’t done such and such a thing in my life or hadn’t met such and such a person—what would have happened then? But it’s a difficult matter.”
“Yes, it is certainly difficult.”
“For example, I think, If that rascal Baumer hadn’t ridden me down, how would things have been then? It could so easily have been like that, eh, Herr Pagel? I need only have been going a little faster. If it hadn’t been so dark in the ravine I should have been out of it already; he would have seen from a distance and avoided me.”
“And how would things have been different then, Herr Kniebusch?”
“Everything! Every single thing! Because if Baumer hadn’t run over me then I shouldn’t have had a court case about him in Frankfurt. And if I hadn’t been in Frankfurt, then I shouldn’t have met Meier again. And if I hadn’t met Meier again, then he wouldn’t have betrayed the arms dump.”
Pagel grasped the forester’s dry bony hands, speckled with age. “I should try to find something else to think about, Herr Kniebusch,” he suggested. “Imagine what it will be like when you are pensioned. And you’ve got your pension from the employees’ insurance office. Then perhaps things really will be different with money. The Geheimrat writes about that in his letter, too. You must have read it.… I should think about how I’d arrange my life; some hobby or other.”
“Bees,” said the forester in a low voice.
“There you are then. Bees are supposed to be wonderful things. Whole books are supposed to have been written about them. Supposing you have a shot at something like that?”
“Yes, I could.” The forester opened his eyes wide for the first time. “But you still don’t understand why I do the other, Herr Pagel. Because if it only happened through Baumer running me over, and I can think of a hundred such things in my life, then I’m not to blame for the other, either. And I haven’t got to suffer any remorse, isn’t that so?”
Pagel looked thoughtfully at the old man, who was once again lying with his eyes closed. At the window, her face turned toward the night, the old woman went on singing psalm after psalm in her grating voice, as if she were alone.
“Well, get a bit of rest before the doctor comes,” said Pagel suddenly. “I’ll ring him up now.”
“But why don’t you answer me, Herr Pagel?” complained the old man, half sitting up in bed and staring at him. “Isn’t it like I said, then? If Baumer hadn’t run me down, everything would have been different!”
“You suffer remorse and wish to acquit yourself, isn’t that it, Herr Kniebusch? But acquittal is no good unless one feels innocent. I should prefer to have a go at the bees. Good night.” And with that Pagel turned out the light, locked the front door, and stood outside. It was already dark, but perhaps he would still find the men at the potato clamps.
VI
The clamps were some five minutes’ distance from the farmyard, at a place bordered on two sides by forest. The situation was convenient for carting, because three field paths met there, and the wood protected the clamps from the icy east and north winds; but its remoteness permitted thieves to approach it unseen, while the neighborhood of the forest made their flight an easy one.
Pagel had had constant trouble with these clamps. Every morning there was a hole dug here or there in the soil that covered the potatoes against the frost. Already over five hundred tons were stored here—the theft of four or five hundredweights was of little importance compared with the work required to fill the hole again, or with the danger a clamp ran of being frozen because of it. A hundred times had Pagel blamed himself for thoughtlessly agreeing to the suggestion that the clamps be laid down in this place. An experienced man would have foreseen all the difficulties which had arisen this year from the shortage of food. He was convinced that all Altlohe would have helped with the potato crop had the clamps been situated under constant supervision right by the farmyard. But as things were, it was much simpler to take at night, without risk, that which one otherwise could have won only through many days of hard and freezing labor. And the people could not even be blamed for it. They lacked the barest necessities, they suffered hunger. If they took a trifle of the abundance, whom could that harm?
In growing darkness Pagel roamed between the long, almost man-high mounds. The laborers had already gone, of course, and the thieves not yet come; once again he had made a fruitless journey.
But not quite fruitless: his foot knocked against a forgotten shovel, which would not be improved by being left out in the damp night. He picked it up, to take it along to the tool room. But a minute later he stumbled on two spades stuck in the ground. He took them along, too. Immediately he came across two pitchforks and more shovels—it was impossible, he couldn’t lug them all to the farm alone.
Suddenly, quite discouraged, he sat down on a bale of straw. It is often the case that someone bravely endures a host of troubles for a long time, only to be cast down by a trifle. Pagel had with unchanged amiability borne greater troubles these last weeks, but the thought that he was running about from dawn to well into the night while slovenliness and indolence increased—the thought that fifteen shovels, spades and forks would become rusty that night—utterly disheartened him.
