The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig (24 page)

She kisses him once more, very lightly, an almost sisterly kiss on the lips, and then she goes out without a word. That is the only time they talk about it. A few more days, and then the convalescent is taken down to the garden, where the first faded leaves are already chasing across the path and early evening breathes an autumnal melancholy. Another few days, and he is walking alone with some difficulty, for the last time that year, under the colourful autumn canopy of leaves. The trees speak louder and more angrily now than on those three mild summer nights. The boy, in melancholy mood himself, goes to the place where they were once together. He feels as if an invisible, dark wall were standing here behind which, blurred in twilight already, his childhood lies; and now there is another land before him, strange and dangerous.

He said goodbye to the whole party that evening, looked hard once more at Margot’s face, as if he had to drink enough of it in to last for the rest of his life, placed his hand restlessly in Elisabeth’s, which clasped it with warm ardour, almost looked past Kitty, their friends and his sister—his heart was so full of the realization that he loved one of the sisters and the other loved him. He was very pale, with a bitter expression on his face that made him seem more than a boy; for the first time, he looked like a man.

And yet, when the horses were brought up and he saw Margot turn indifferently away to go back up the steps, and when Elisabeth’s eyes suddenly shone with moisture, and she held the balustrade, the full extent of his new experience overwhelmed him so entirely that he gave himself up to tears of his own like a child.

The castle retreated farther into the distance, and through the dust raised by the carriage the dark garden looked smaller and smaller. Then came the countryside, and finally all that he had experienced was hidden from his eyes—but his memory was all the more vivid. Two hours of driving took him to the nearest railway station, and next morning he was in London.

A few more years and he was no longer a boy. But that first experience had left too strong an impression ever to fade. Margot
and Elisabeth had both married, but he did not want to see them again, for the memory of those hours sometimes came back to him so forcefully that his entire later life seemed to him merely a dream and an illusion by comparison with its reality. He became one of those men who cannot find a way of relating to women, because in one second of his life the sensation of both loving and being loved had united in him entirely; and now no longing urged him to look for what had fallen into his trembling, anxiously yielding boyish hands so early. He travelled in many countries, one of those correct, silent Englishmen whom many consider unemotional because they are so reserved, and their eyes look coolly away from the faces and smiles of women. For who thinks that they may bear in them, inextricably mingled with their blood, images on which their gaze is always fixed, with an eternal flame burning around them as it does before icons of the Madonna? And now I remember how I heard this story. A card had been left inside the book that I was reading this afternoon, a postcard sent to me by a friend in Canada. He is a young Englishman whom I met once on a journey. We often talked in the long evenings, and in what he said the memory of two women sometimes suddenly and mysteriously flared up, as if they were distant statues, and always in connection with a moment of his youth. It is a long time, a very long time since I spoke to him, and I had probably forgotten those conversations. But today, on receiving that postcard, the memory was revived, mingling dreamily in my mind with experiences of my own; and I felt as if I had read his story in the book that slipped out of my hands, or as if I had found it in a dream.

But how dark it is now in this room, and how far away you are from me in the deep twilight! I can see only a faint pale light where I think your face is, and I do not know if you are smiling or sad. Are you smiling because I make up strange stories for people whom I knew fleetingly, dream of whole destinies for them, and then calmly let them slip back into their lives and their own world? Or are you sad for that boy who rejected love and found himself all at once
cast out of the garden of his sweet dream for ever? There, I didn’t mean my story to be dark and melancholy—I only wanted to tell you about a boy suddenly surprised by love, his own and someone else’s. But stories told in the evening all tread the gentle path of melancholy. Twilight falls with its veils, the sorrow that rests in the evening is a starless vault above them, darkness seeps into their blood, and all the bright, colourful words in them have as full and heavy a sound as if they came from our inmost hearts.

I
N THE AUTUMN OF
1899, the incredible, improbable news that that ugly creature Ruzena Sedlak, known to everyone far and wide as ‘the Death’s Head’, had had a baby aroused much mirth in the small Southern Bohemian town of Dobitzan. Her alarmingly and indeed distressingly ugly appearance had often enough caused amusement that none the less was more pitying than spiteful, but even the most inventive joker would never have ventured to speculate that such a battered, unattractive pot would ever find its lid. Now, however, a young huntsman had vouched for what was surely a miracle, if a miracle in the worst of taste. He had actually seen the baby in the remote part of the forest where Ruzena Sedlak lived, had seen it suckling happily from her breast, and the maidservants who heard this amazing news made haste to carry it back with their buckets to all the shops, inns and houses of Dobitzan. All that grey October evening, no one talked of anything but the unexpected infant and its presumed father. Forthright souls drinking at the regulars’ table dug one another meaningfully in the ribs, spluttering with laughter as they accused each other of that unappetizing claim to fame, and the pharmacist, who had a certain amount of medical knowledge, described the probable course of the amorous scene in such realistic detail that everyone had to put back another schnapps or so in order to recover. For the first time in her twenty-eight years, the unfortunate Ruzena had provided her fellow citizens with piquant and abundant material for jokes.

Of course Nature herself, long ago, had been the first to play a cruel and ineradicable joke on the poor monstrosity, the daughter of a syphilitic brewer’s man, by squashing her nose while she was still in the womb, and the derisive nickname that clung so terribly came into the world with her. For as soon as the midwife, who had
seen plenty of strange and ugly creatures born in forty years, set eyes on the newborn baby she hastily made the sign of the cross and cried, losing all control of herself, “A death’s head!” For where the arch of the nose normally rises clear and distinct in a human face, protecting the eyes and shading the lips, dividing light and shadow on the human countenance, there yawned in this child only a deep-set, empty Nothing: just two breathing holes, black as bullet wounds and shockingly empty in the pink surface of flesh. The sight, which no one could stand for long, reminded people forcibly of a skull, where a similarly monstrous and disturbing void lies between the bony forehead and the white teeth. Then, recovering from her first shock, the midwife examined the baby and found that otherwise the little girl was well proportioned, healthy and shapely. The unfortunate child needed nothing to be the same as other babies but an inch of bone and gristle and a small amount of flesh. But Nature has made us so accustomed to the regularity of her laws that the slightest deviation from their familiar harmony seems repellent and alarming. Every mistake made by the creator arouses our bitter dislike of the failed creation—an injustice for which there is no remedy. Fatally, we feel revulsion not for the negligent designer but for the innocent thing it has designed. Every maimed and malformed being is doomed to suffer horribly not only from its own torment, but from the ill-concealed discomfort of those who are normally formed. And so a squinting eye, a twisted lip, a split palate, all of them just single mistakes of Nature, become the lasting torment of a human being, the inescapable misery of a soul—indeed, such diabolical misery that the sufferer finds it hard to believe in any sense of justice on the circling star we call the Earth.

Even as a child Ruzena Sedlak learned, to her shame, that she was known with good reason as the Death’s Head, at the same time as she learned to talk, and every second she was reminded yet again that because of that missing inch of bone she was mercilessly banished from the cheerful company of other human beings. Pregnant women quickly turned away if they met her in the street;
farmer’s wives from the local countryside, bringing their eggs to sell at market, crossed themselves on seeing her, for these simple souls could not help thinking that the Devil himself had squashed the child’s nose. And even those who were more kindly disposed and talked to her kept their eyes obviously lowered as they talked; she could not remember ever having seen the pupil of an eye clearly and at close quarters, except in the eyes of animals, who sense only kindness and not ugliness in human beings. It was lucky that her mind was dull and lethargic, so that she suffered only vaguely from this injustice of God’s when she was with other people. She did not have the strength to hate them, or any wish to love them; she took little notice of the whole town, which remained strange to her, so she was very pleased when kind Father Nossal put in a good word for her and found her a post as housekeeper at a hunting lodge out in the forest. It was eight hours’ walk from town, and very remote from any human company. In the middle of his extensive woods, which reached from Dobitzan to the Schwarzenberg Forests, Count R had had a log cabin built in the foreign style for his guests, and apart from those few weeks in autumn when they came visiting, it was always empty. Ruzena Sedlak was installed as caretaker, with a ground-floor room to live in. Her only duties were to look after the hunting lodge, and feed the deer and the small game in hard winters. Otherwise her time was her own to use as she pleased, which she did by rearing goats, rabbits, chickens, and other small livestock, cultivating a vegetable garden, and trading a little in eggs, chickens, and kids. She lived entirely in the woods for eight years, and the animals, which she loved dearly, made her forget human beings. In their own turn human beings forgot her. Only the miraculous fact that some specimen of masculinity, either blind or dead drunk (no one could explain the aberration in any other way), had made the Death’s Head pregnant, brought this forgotten creature of God back to the amused attention of the people of Dobitzan after many years.

One man in town, to be sure, did not laugh at the news but growled angrily, and that was the Mayor. For if Nature is unkind
to one of her offspring now and then, and God forgets one of his creatures, an official would be no kind of official if he allowed himself to forget any human being, and there must be no omissions from a well-kept register. A child five months old and not yet registered, with no name in the records, grumbled the Mayor (who was a baker by profession) in great indignation. The priest was upset too: a child of five months and not yet baptised! These were heathen ways. After long discussion between the two of them, as representing the earthly and divine powers, the town clerk Wondrak was sent off to the forest to remind Ruzena Sedlak of her duty as a citizen. At first she told him roughly that the child was hers, no business of anyone else, and no concern of God or the Devil either. But when Wondrak, a sturdy figure and sticking to his point, replied that she was wrong there, the Devil would indeed take an interest in an unbaptised child, he’d carry its mother off to Hell if she failed to have the baby christened, the poor simple creature felt terrified of good Father Nossal, and she obediently brought the child to town next Sunday, wrapped in blue cotton. The baptism was celebrated early in the morning, to keep curious mockers away, the sponsors being a half-blind beggar woman and the good clerk Wondrak, who gave his own first name of Karel to the crying boy. The civil formalities proved a little more awkward, for when the Mayor asked as in duty bound for the father’s name, a small, unseemly smile escaped both him and the kindly Wondrak. Ruzena did not reply, but bit her lip. So the unknown man’s son was registered in her name, and thereafter was known as Karel Sedlak.

It was a fact that Ruzena, the Death’s Head, could not have said who Karel’s father was. One misty October evening the previous year, she had come back from town very late with her pannier on her back. Three fellows met her deep in the forest, out to steal timber, perhaps, or poachers or gypsies, at any rate not local men. The thick leaves cast far too much shade for her to tell their faces apart, and they could not make out who they had in front of them either (a sight which might have spared her their unwanted attentions). They
saw only from her full, bell-shaped skirts that they were looking at a woman, and they attacked her. Ruzena quickly turned to run away, but one of them leaped at her from behind, moving faster than she did, and knocked her to the ground so hard that her back crashed down on her smashed pannier. Now she wanted to scream, but the three men quickly pulled her skirt up over her head, tore her shift in two, knotted the rags of it together and used them to tie her hands as she hit out wildly, punching and scratching. That was when it happened. There were three of them, she couldn’t tell one from the other with her skirts up over her face, and none of them said a word. She heard only laughter, deep, rumbling and spiteful, and then satisfied grunts. She smelled tobacco, felt bearded faces, hard hands inflicting pain, weight falling on her, and more pain. When the last man had finished with her she tried to get up and free herself, but one of them hit her on the head with a cudgel so hard that she fell down. They weren’t standing for any nonsense.

They must have been a long way off by the time Ruzena Sedlak ventured to get up again, bleeding, angry, abused and beaten. Her knees were trembling with exhaustion and rage. Not that she felt ashamed: her own hated body meant far too little to her, and she had known too much humiliation to feel that this vicious attack was anything out of the ordinary, but her shift was torn, her green skirt and her apron, and in addition the rogues had broken her pannier, which had cost her good money. She thought of going back to town to complain of the vagabonds, but the people there would only mock her; no one would help her. So she angrily dragged herself home, and once among her animals, good, gentle creatures who nuzzled her hands affectionately with their soft noses, she forgot all about the vile attack on her.

Only months later did she realize, in alarm, that she was going to be a mother. She immediately decided to get rid of the unwanted child. She didn’t want to bring another monstrosity like herself into the world! No other innocent child should suffer as she had suffered herself. Better to kill it at once, get rid of it, bury it. For the next
few weeks she avoided going to town so that no one would notice her condition, and as her pregnancy went on she dug a deep pit beside the compost heap ahead of time. She would bury the child there as soon as it was born, she thought; who would ever know? No one came into these woods.

One May night her pains began, so suddenly and savagely that she lay writhing on the floor, groaning as hot claws tore at her inside, and had no time to find a light. She bit her lips until they bled. Alone, helpless and in agony, she bore her child on the bare floor like an animal. She had just enough strength left afterwards to drag herself to her bed, where she collapsed, exhausted, in a wet and bleeding heap, and slept until it was day. Waking up when it grew light, she remembered what had happened, and the thought of what she must do now immediately came back into her mind. She hoped she wouldn’t have to kill the brat, she hoped it was dead already. She listened. And then, very faintly, she heard a thin sound, a squeaking sound on the floor. She dragged herself over to it; the child was still alive. She felt it with a shaking hand: first the forehead, then the tiny ears, the chin, the nose, and she trembled worse than ever. It was a wild yet at the same time pleasant feeling, for an extraordinary thing had happened—the baby was well-formed. She, the monstrosity, had brought a real, pure, healthy child into the world. The curse had run its course. In amazement, she stared at the pink little thing. The child looked fair, she even thought beautiful, he was a little boy, not a death’s head but made like other human beings, and a tiny smile was just forming on his tadpole of a mouth. She no longer had the strength to do what she had meant to do; she picked up the faintly breathing little creature and put it to her breast.

Many things altered for the better now. Life no longer went pointlessly by; it came running to her with tiny gasps and little cries, now it touched her with two small, clumsy baby hands. She had never had anything but her own malformed body; now she had something of her own. She had made a creature that would
outlast and survive her, a child who needed and made use of her. For those first five months Ruzena Sedlak was perfectly happy. The baby grew for her alone, no one else knew about him, which was all to the good. And he had no father; that was good too. No one on earth knew about him, and once again that was excellent. He belonged entirely to her, and her alone.

That was why she snapped so angrily at poor Wondrak when he came from the offices in town with the message to say she had to take the baby to be baptised and registered. Her dull, rural sense of greed instinctively if vaguely felt that if people knew about her baby, he would be taken away from her. Now he was hers, all hers, but if those people in the offices, if the State and the Mayor wrote his name in one of their stupid books, a part of the baby as a human being would belong to them. They would have got a grip on his ankle, so to speak, they could summon him and order him about. And indeed, this was the one and only time that she took her Karel as a baby to town to see other people. To her own surprise, he grew to be a sturdy, brown, pretty boy with a pert, curious nose and quick straight legs, a lad with an ear for music who could whistle like a thrush, imitate the cry of the jay and the cuckoo, who climbed trees like a cat and ran races with the white dog Horcek. Knowing no one else, he was not afraid of her deformed face, and she laughed and was carefree and happy when she talked to him and his round, chestnut-brown eyes were turned on her. He was soon helping her to milk the goats, gather berries and split wood with his firm little hands. It was at this time that she, who had seldom been to church, began to pray again. She was never entirely free of the fear that he might be taken away from her as suddenly as he had arrived.