Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist (17 page)

sole wish is to get it into his hands, I promise you he will get it!” Kohlhaas, who had ample proof of her courage as well as her wisdom, asked her how she envisioned doing it; whereupon, looking down, a bit ashamed, she replied that in former times, while serving in Schwerin, the Majordomo of the Prince's castle had courted her; that he was now married, with several children; that she was quite sure that she would, nevertheless, not have been completely forgotten; in short that, for this and other reasons, the enumeration of which would take too long, he should leave it to her to take advantage of her contacts. Kohlhaas kissed her with great joy, said that he accepted her suggestion, instructed her that all she had to do was to gain access to his lordship's wife's chambers to encounter the Elector in his castle, gave her the appeal, had the chestnut browns harnessed to a carriage and sent her on her way, well fitted for the trip, along with Sternbald, his trusted servant.

But of all the fruitless efforts he made to support his cause, this trip proved the most unfortunate. For but a few days later, Sternbald pulled back up into the yard, driving the carriage in which Lisbeth lay stretched out with a bad bruise on her breast. Kohlhaas, who rushed to the carriage, white in the face, was unable to elicit any coherent account of the cause of this misfortune. The Majordomo, as Sternbald related, was not at home when they got there; they were consequently obliged to spend the night in an inn not far from the castle; Lisbeth left the inn the following morning and instructed the servant to stay behind with the horses; and not before nightfall did she return in this sorry state. It seems she tried to boldly press her way forward to speak to the Elector in person, and through no fault of his, was driven back by an overzealous guard, who landed
her a blow to the breast with the shaft of his lance. This at least is what bystanders said, who brought her back to the inn that evening, unconscious; for she herself was hardly able to speak, still gagging as she was on the blood that poured from her mouth. The appeal was later taken from her by a knight. Sternbald said that he had immediately wanted to leap on a horse and inform him of this terrible mishap; but Lisbeth insisted, despite the caution urged by a physician who'd tended to her wound, that she be taken back post haste to her husband in Kohlhaasenbrück without any advance warning. Her condition aggravated by the journey, Kohlhaas carried her to bed, where, painfully gasping for air, she lived a few days longer. Vain attempts were made to bring her back to consciousness to try and shed some light on what happened; she lay there in a daze, staring before her with a blank and broken expression, and did not say a word. Only moments before her death did she regain consciousness. By her bedside, reading to her in a loud, albeit sensitively solemn, voice from a chapter in the Bible, stood a priest of the Lutheran persuasion (to which faith, gaining ground at the time, she had converted, following her husband's example); and all at once she looked up at the priest with a dark expression, grabbed the Bible out of his hands, as if to say there was nothing more in it for her, leafed and leafed through its pages, and seemed to be searching for something; and turning to Kohlhaas, who sat by her side, she pointed with her forefinger to a verse: “Forgive your enemies . . . do good to them that hate you.” She squeezed his hand with a deeply soulful look in her eyes, and died. Kohlhaas thought: “Let God never forgive me if I forgive the Junker!” and kissed her, the tears welling up, pressed her eyes shut, and left the room. He took the hundred gold guldens
that the magistrate had already advanced for the stables in Dresden and ordered a funeral fit more, so it seemed, for a princess than for the wife of a horse trader; in an oaken casket with metal rims, fitted with silken pillows, with gold and silver tassels, in a grave dug eight yards deep, lined with fieldstones and limestone. He himself stood by the graveside, supervising the work, with his youngest child in his arms. On the burial day, the body lay white as snow in an open casket in a hall whose walls were covered with black cloth. The priest had just concluded a stirring sermon beside her bier when he received the Elector's resolution in answer to the appeal presented by the deceased, which said, in sum: that he should go fetch his horses from Tronkenburg Castle, and at the risk of imprisonment, cease and desist from any future petitions in this matter. Kohlhaas put the letter in his pocket and had the casket brought to the hearse. As soon as the grave had been covered back up, the cross had been planted in it and the guests who'd been present at the funeral had departed, he threw himself one last time before her now empty bed, and promptly turned to the business of revenge. He sat himself down and drafted a final ultimatum, in which he demanded that within three days of receipt thereof, Junker Squire Wenzel von Tronka himself, by the power invested in him, lead the nags he took from him and worked half to death in his fields back to Kohlhaasenbrück and personally feed them their fill in his stables. He sent his demand via mounted messenger, and instructed the man to return to Kohlhaasenbrück immediately upon delivery. As the three days elapsed without delivery of the horses, he called for Herse; told him the final ultimatum he'd made to the young lord, that he personally bring back and feed his horses; asked Herse two things: first, if he would ride with him
to Tronkenburg Castle to fetch the lord; and second, if the latter proved lax in the fulfillment of his demands in the stables of Kohlhaasenbrück, would Herse be prepared to use the whip? And as soon as Herse had grasped his meaning, and shouted for joy: “Yes Sir, I'm ready to ride today!” and hurling his cap in the air, swore he'd have a whip with ten knots braided to teach him how to care for a horse, Kohlhaas proceeded to sell his house, packed his children into a carriage and sent them across the border; and at nightfall, called his other men together, seven in number, every one of them sure as gold; fitted them with arms and a steed, and rode off to Tronkenburg Castle.

At daybreak of the third night, he and his little band of men fell upon the toll collector and the gatekeeper, who stood chatting at the gate, and trampled them under, galloping into the castle yard. And having set fire to the barracks and guardroom, while Herse hurried up the winding stairway to the castellan's tower, where he found the manager and the overseer half-dressed, playing dice, and promptly cut them down, Kohlhaas rushed into the castle to seek out Junker Wenzel. So the angel of justice descended from heaven: the Junker, who had just then been reading aloud the horse trader's ultimatum to a group of young friends visiting at the time, his friends responding with laughter, when he heard its author calling out in the yard, turned pale in the face, and cried out to his guests: ‘Brothers, save yourselves!' and promptly disappeared. Bursting into the hall, Kohlhaas grabbed by the collar a Junker Hans von Tronka who came toward him and hurled him so hard against the wall he cracked his skull, and while the horse trader's men overpowered and scattered the remaining knights who'd reached for their arms, Kohlhaas asked
where Wenzel von Tronka was. Furious at the silence of the stunned guests, Kohlhaas kicked open the doors to two passageways that led to wings of the castle, and after scouring every corner of the far-flung premises and finding no one, cursing, he stormed back down to the castle yard to patrol any possible escape route. Meanwhile, the castle itself having caught fire from the barracks, thick columns of smoke rising now from every structure on the castle grounds, as Sternbald and three diligent companions dragged out everything that wasn't nailed down and hauled it along as booty, along with the horses, a jubilant Herse hurled the corpses of the manager and the overseer, as well as their wives and children, out the open window. On his way down the castle steps, Kohlhaas encountered the Junker's palsied old housekeeper, who flung herself at his feet. Pausing, he asked her where Junker Wenzel von Tronka was. With a weak and trembling voice, she replied that she thought he'd taken refuge in the chapel; whereupon Kohlhaas called two of his men, and lacking keys, had them break their way in with gunpowder and crowbars, overturned altars and benches, but to his anger and dismay, did not find the Junker. It so happened that at the same time Kohlhaas came back out of the chapel, a young stable boy in the Junker's service ambled over to a stone stable threatened by the flames to save the Junker's warhorses. Kohlhaas, who, that very moment, spotted his nags in a little straw-roofed shed, asked the boy why he didn't save the nags. And when, thrusting the key into the lock of the stable door, the boy replied that the shed was already on fire, Kohlhaas tore the key out of the lock and tossed it over the wall, and, raining blows on the boy with the flat side of his sword, drove him into the burning shed, amidst the terrible laughter of his men, and forced him to save
the nags. But when the boy emerged, pale with terror, leading the horses by the reins, and the stall collapsed behind him moments later, Kohlhaas was gone; and when the boy went to join the other stable hands in the castle yard and asked the horse trader, who kept his back turned to him: ‘What shall I do with these broken-down beasts?' – with a fearful grimace, the latter drew back his boot and let loose a kick that would have killed him if he hadn't dodged it, and without a word, mounted his chestnut brown steed, and from the castle gate watched in silence as his men went about their business.

By daybreak, the entire castle, walls and all, had burnt to the ground, and no one but Kohlhaas and his seven men still stood within. He climbed down from the saddle and once again, in broad daylight, searched through every nook and cranny of the ruins now laid bare to the naked eye; and since, as painful as it was, he needed to confirm for himself that his action had failed, with a heaving breast he sent Herse and a few of his men to find out the direction in which the Junker had fled. He had his eye, in particular, on a well-endowed convent school named Erlabrunn located on the banks of the Mulde, whose abbess, Antonia von Tronka, was well-known in the region as a pious, charitable and holy woman; for it seemed all too likely to the unhappy horse trader that, stripped as he was of worldly possessions, the Junker would have taken refuge here, since the abbess was his aunt and the woman who had raised him. After learning of this eventuality, Kohlhaas climbed what was left of the overseer's tower, a single room of which remained intact, and drafted the so-called “Kohlhaas Mandate,” in which he called upon the country to give no quarter to said Junker Wenzel von Tronka, with whom he was engaged in a just conflict, putting its people, the Junker's relatives
and friends included, under obligation, at the risk of bodily harm and death and unavoidable destruction of all their holdings and worldly possessions, to surrender this man unto him. He had word of this declaration dispersed throughout the land by passing travelers and strangers; indeed, he gave his man, Waldmann, a copy of the mandate with the aforementioned demand to deliver it in person to Antonia in Erlabrunn. Hereupon he spoke with several erstwhile servants of Tronkenburg Castle, who had been unhappy with the Junker, and who, enticed by the prospect of booty, wished to join his band; armed them as foot soldiers with crossbows and daggers, and instructed them to march behind his mounted troops; and after liquidating all the spoils his men had amassed and dispersing the money among them, he took a few hours' rest from his woeful business under the castle gate.

Herse returned at noon and confirmed what Kohlhaas' heart, forever riddled with dark forebodings, had already told him: namely, that the Junker had indeed taken refuge in the convent at Erlabrunn, where he was welcomed by his aunt, the old abbess Antonia von Tronka. It appears that he escaped through a hidden door in the rear wall of the castle that opened onto a narrow stone stairway and led to a little covered dock, where several skiffs were attached, one of which he managed to commandeer down a moat that ran into the Elbe. At least Herse established for certain that he had pulled in around midnight in a skiff without rudder or oars to a village on the Elbe, to the surprise of the villagers who had assembled outside on account of the fire at Tronkenburg Castle; and that he had driven on in a donkey cart to Erlabrunn. Kohlhaas took a deep sigh at this news; he asked if the horses had been fed; and being told that they
had, rallied his men, and three hours later stood before Erlabrunn. At the rumble of a distant thunderstorm that flashed on the horizon, with torches he'd ignited on the spot, he and his band entered the cloister yard, and Waldmann, his servant, who came striding toward him, reported that the mandate had been delivered, just when he spotted the abbess and the convent caretaker engaged in a troubled exchange stepping out under the gate. And while the caretaker, a little, old, white-haired man, cast angry glances at Kohlhaas, he had himself armored up, and boldly called to the servants who surrounded him to ring the bell – the abbess, pale as a sheet, with a silver effigy of the crucified savior in hand, flung herself, along with all the young girls in her charge, before Kohlhaas' horse. While Herse and Sternbald easily overpowered the caretaker, who had no sword in hand, and led him as a prisoner in between the horses, Kohlhaas asked her: “Where is the Junker Wenzel von Tronka?” “In Wittenberg, Kohlhaas, my good man!” she replied, loosening a ring of keys from her belt, and with a trembling voice, added: “Fear God and do no wrong!” Then thrust back into the hell of his unsatisfied thirst for vengeance, he was about to cry: Set fire!, when a powerful bolt of lightning struck the ground at his feet. Turning his rattled horse back to her, he asked: “Did you receive my mandate?” And in a hushed, hardly audible voice, the woman replied: “Just now!” “When?” “Two hours, as God is my witness, after my nephew, the Junker, had already gone.” And when Waldmann, to whom Kohlhaas turned with a angry look, confirmed this fact in a nervous stutter, and told him that the waters of the Mulde, swollen by the rain, had prevented him from reporting back before now, Kohlhaas regained his composure; a sudden violent downpour that
struck the flagstones of the yard and put out the torches, stilled the pain in his unhappy breast; tipping his hat to the lady, he turned his horse around, dug in with his heels, and with the words: “Follow me, brothers. The Junker is in Wittenberg!” rode out of the cloister.