II
It had not been very hard for Pagel to get the old forester out of his sickbed again—not half so difficult as the doctor had thought. A man who had passed his whole life in the fresh air felt his head swim when he was always shut up in a stuffy room. “I’m afraid the walls will collapse on me,” he complained to Pagel. “It’s all so small—and she won’t have a window open.”
Perhaps it was not the confinement or the lack of air, or the bees who had to be prepared for the winter, or the hunting dog who wanted to be fed every day, that brought the forester so quickly out of his bed—perhaps it was “she,” his wife, who more than anything sickened him of his room. They had spent a whole lifetime side by side—till they couldn’t bear the sight of each other. Day after day they passed by one another without exchanging a word. He would go into the kitchen, make his coffee and butter his bread, and then, when he had left, she came and made her coffee and buttered her bread. They had long passed beyond disgust, hate and aversion; now they did not exist for one another at all. For a very long time. Before he opened his mouth she knew what he would say, and he knew everything about his wife; how peas agreed with her, and that when the wind was in the south she couldn’t hear with the left ear, and that lampreys tasted much better with than without a bay leaf.
“Move into another room,” proposed Pagel. “There are enough empty rooms in the house.”
“But my bed has always stood in this room! I can’t move it about at my time of life. I would never get to sleep.”
“Then go for a little walk,” replied Pagel. “Fresh air and a little exercise can only do you good, the doctor says.”
“Yes? Does he really think so?” asked the forester anxiously. “Then I’ll do it.” He was very willing to do whatever was ordered by the doctor who had procured so many good things for him: rest from work, sick benefit, splendid medicine that brought a man tranquil sleep. And he had promised even better things: the end of inflation, a pension, a peaceful evening to his life. So the forester went for a walk. But that again was a difficult matter. At no price would he go into the forest, which came right up to his house. He had seen enough forest in his life, much too much. Actually he couldn’t see the wood for the trees. He saw only so-and-so many cubic feet of timber, railway sleepers, wood for fellies, shafts for the wheelwright, stakes … And if he took a walk in the forest it would look, not as if he were ill, but as if he were on duty again. It would have been the same as for a sick clerk to go to his office for recreation.
In the other direction, however—toward the village—he also did not go. All his life the people had kept repeating that he was merely a lazybones who did nothing but walk about. He didn’t intend now to go for real walks under their very eyes; that would look as if they had been right in the end.
There remained then only one way for him, that which led past the potato clamps fairly directly to Neulohe Farm and the staff-house. Kniebusch therefore went only this way, with great regularity, several times a day; and with the greatest regularity he arrived several times a day in the staff-house.
With the forester it had come to pass that he, a very old man, had at last found a real friend—and Pagel did not want to disappoint this simple faith. Yet he sighed whenever he saw the old man approaching, to sit down and not take his eyes off him for half an hour at a time. He did not exactly intrude; he never spoke if Pagel was busy—at the most he let himself be carried away into a rare exclamation of rapture when Pagel was typing, such as: “Oh, how fast he does that! Like machine-gun fire! Splendid!” No, he did not intrude, but it was a little disturbing to have those seal-like eyes fixed upon one in a glance of unbounded devotion, enthusiastic friendship. Perhaps it was disturbing precisely because Pagel did not in any way return this emotion. He had no particular love for the aged, timorous forester. And what had he done to earn such friendship, after all? Practically nothing: a talk on the telephone with the doctor, a little charity, two or three short sickbed visits.…
When things got too bad Pagel would interrupt his work. “Come along, Herr Kniebusch; I must see if there are any more mouse holes in my potato clamps: I’ll accompany you the little distance.”
The forester always got up at once and came away willingly. It never entered his head that his friend wanted to get rid of him. When this had happened three or four times, however, it occurred to the old man that at least he could take one job off this friend’s hands, and now on his morning walk to the office he would go from one clamp to the other. “Stacks six, seven, eleven each have a hole,” he would report. “At the north end, middle, south end.” He was very exact.
“Yes, you sigh, Herr Pagel,” said Amanda exasperated, “but you could easily tell him that the constant sitting around and staring is no good to you in the office. That Kniebusch is certainly no soft touch, and if he lays into someone, that someone definitely knows it. And if you don’t like to tell him, then I will.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort, Amanda.” And Pagel spoke with such emphasis that Amanda did nothing of the sort.
When the forester had left his house that morning there was a very fine rain falling and no breath of wind. It was one of those mournful autumn days which lie on the hearts of young people like a nightmare, but the weather pleased the old forester, certain that his young friend could be found in the office, under shelter. Throwing a rain cape round his shoulders, he set forth.
Slowly and comfortably he shuffled toward the farm. His hands, clasped over his belly, were dry and warm under the cape. If he weighed up things closely, he had never been better off in his life, or felt better. He hadn’t even to fear the Geheimrat’s return. At Pagel’s instigation the doctor had written to the old gentleman, who had sent an amiable note to Kniebusch—he should see if he couldn’t get about a little again, so as to initiate his successor in the hiding places of the game, the ins and outs of the forest, and the artfulness of the population. But he shouldn’t bother himself any more about his work.
A fat lot the old gentleman knew! The forester wasn’t bothering himself or worrying a bit—least of all about the forest. But was he not perhaps a trifle sorry when he found holes in the potato clamps? That vexed and troubled his best and only friend, Pagel, as he knew; but it delighted him, because when there were holes he had something to report and was of use.
So he walked quite contentedly up one side of the clamps and down the other. Unfortunately, however, as he might almost have imagined, the people hadn’t, in this beastly weather, the heart even to steal; clothing was so scarce that men didn’t like to expose to rain the single gray uniform they had brought back with them from the war.
It looked then as if there would be nothing to report today, and that was annoying—till old Kniebusch came to the very last clamp, on the other side of which, next to the forest, he found the wished-for hole; and a splendid one, too. Six or eight hundredweights of potatoes had been taken out of it at least.
Satisfied, he might now have made his report. Instead, he looked thoughtfully at a small path trodden out from the hole into the pine plantation. The soft ground betrayed clearly that the potatoes had not been taken straight on a handcart to the road and thus to the village—the still quite fresh marks showed that they had been taken into the plantation and were probably still there.
The inquisitiveness of old men, as tormenting as an eczema, plagued him, and the hunter’s instinct urged him on—one doesn’t track game a whole lifetime to pass heedlessly over a trail in one’s old age. The thought of being able to report something very special to his friend Pagel also encouraged him. Not for a moment did he think that this investigation could prove dangerous. Potato thieves were harmless people; their theft was merely of food and was punished with a paper fine, so that they had little to dread if caught. If anything caused the forester to hesitate, it was his firm decision not to bother about other things. However, he wanted to do Pagel a favor, so gently, on tiptoe, he took up the trail. Over the years people had provided themselves with so many poles and faggots from the plantation that the place had become thinned out, and the forester arrived very quickly at the spot where a small mound of potatoes lay. They were Red Professor Wohltmanns. Wanted, no doubt, to fatten his pigs with them!
Kniebusch, feeling that he was not alone, raised his eyes and saw a man squatting under the pines. His trousers were down and he looked calmly at the forester.
“Hi! What are you doing here?” shouted the surprised Kniebusch.
“I’m shitting,” replied the man with a friendly grin.
“I can see that,” said the forester, amused. Oh, what a lot he would have to tell Pagel! “Was it you who pinched the potatoes?”
“Of course,” declared the man, taking his time.
“But who are you? I don’t know you at all!” The forester thought he knew every soul for twenty kilometers
