sat up as quickly as when he had one of his bad dreams and stared at the figure that knelt before the hearth and blew into the feeble glow. The feet of the figure were wrapped in rags such as the woodcutters in his homeland wore, and of the head Amadeus could only see the white hair that fell long and smooth over the coat collar. The coat was blue and reached to the knees.
“Christoph,” he said in a low voice, and he felt the hands on which he leaned tremble.
“Just a minute, Herr Baron,” replied the soft voice. “Let me blow the fire up. You must try to get some small pine twigs, so that you will not have so much bother in the morning, Herr Baron.”
When the fire burned and filled the room with its crackling, Christoph rose, supporting himself with one hand on the hearth. Then he carefully wiped his hands with a gray cloth, came to the bed, and sat down gently on the side of it.
“So you are here, Herr Baron,” he said, gazing with his bright eyes full of affection into the face of the baron, “and we did not know whether you were still alive. Only down at the castle they told us.”
He spoke as if he had piled up the wood in the hearth the previous night as well as on a hundred previous nights. But he took pains to control the quivering of his chin, which trembled a little as with children who are nearly crying. “Four years, Herr Baron,” he said, counting it off on his fingers. “In four years a tree can bear fruit.”
“I have not borne much fruit, Christoph,” replied Amadeus. “But how many of you have come through it all?”
Christoph counted once more on his fingers. “Worgulla,” he said, “and he was the man who looked after the farm horses. Donelaitis and Skowroneck, and they were day laborers, and their wives and five of their children got through. Two others were frozen on the road, and one was shot by bandits when they tried to rob the van. They were German or Polish robbers. And one baby starved because the mother had no milk and the peasants would only give milk in exchange for a horse. But we needed the horse, and when we had made up our minds to exchange it, it was too late; those were German peasants.”
“And the others, Christoph?”
Christoph folded his hands on his knees. “The others died, Herr Baron – there – on the night when our Heavenly Father drove us out.”
“It was not God who drove you out, Christoph,” said Amadeus gently.
“The sin, Herr Baron,” replied Christoph. “And those who sin are driven out by our Heavenly Father. Not on account of the sins of our fathers, but the sins of our sons and daughters, the sins of all of us, Herr Baron.”
“Did they suffer, Christoph?”
“Some did, Herr Baron, but not many. Most were broken by the iron tanks, but some of them were only half killed. The frost got them after a few hours. We could not bury them.”
“And you, Christoph?”
“I was lying in the ditch, Herr Baron. I could not run in my big wolfskin coat. Those who ran across the field were shot. Then we put the horses into the vans again. There were just four left. We waited until the morning, and when nobody came anymore, we drove on. We have been driving for a long time. Sometimes they held us up, and sometimes they sent us the wrong way. I have been driving all my life, Herr Baron, with two or four or with six horses. But never as I had to drive now, never. I don’t want to hold reins anymore, Herr Baron.”
His face looked tired and drawn in the morning light, and a thin film passed over his eyes as over eyes that are going blind.
Then he drew himself up again, as if he were sitting on the coachman’s box and had to drive the countess. “The water is boiling,” he said. “Have you got coffee, Herr Baron? We have only barley, but anyhow it is homegrown.”
Amadeus dressed quickly and went out. The country was sparkling in the morning sun, and he saw them at once in the golden light: a battered remnant. They huddled at a little distance from the sheepfold, where some big stones lay among the heather. But they neither sat nor lay there – they crouched on the stones and around them, and only a few children stood at their mothers’ knees and looked toward Amadeus with their old eyes. They crouched there quietly without moving, as if night had drawn all life out of them. As if they had been here for many days and nights, without hope and without a plan, waiting for what should be decided about them. Their clothes were old, their shoes torn, and most children stood barefoot in sand and dew.
But Amadeus thought that the most terrible thing about them was their eyes. They looked as if they did not contain nor reflect anything. There was not even curiosity in them; there was nothing in them. They had seen so much that they neither wanted to say nor to see anything more. It would not have been so terrible had they been blind.
They got up as Amadeus came to them, and he saw that their lips even tried to smile. The women kissed his hands, and when he put his hands behind his back, they kissed the hem of his coat. The men stood there with their arms hanging down and looked at him. They did not look at him as they used to do, when he had visited them in their cottages or spoken to them at the edge of the field. Formerly he had been, as it were, of their own kind, a being of the same world, standing high above them, as if standing on a mountain. But now he had been removed beyond their reach to a gloomy realm beneath the earth, and they had not known that he would return once more with a human face.
Then the women began to weep, and that was more terrible for Amadeus than anything else. He stood in their midst and tried to pat their hands or their shoulders, as he had done when a child, but he did not succeed. He was bewildered at their wretched appearance as they stood there, and that they had been crouching silently around him while he had been asleep, perhaps throughout the whole night; that for them he was still the master, gifted with magic hands that could lift them out of their accursed fate. He was no longer a master and he had no magic. He was only full of fear. They did not know that he had been humiliated and beaten, that he hid and veiled his face from the earth and from time. That he could not bear so many eyes about him, so many outstretched hands, so many hearts that pressed hard upon him. Everything that once had been and had united them was lost in the depths.
Not even suffering linked them together, nor homelessness, nor death. They stood before him like shadows, like the departed who had risen once more from the rigidity of death from that nocturnal road under the willow trees over which the clanking caterpillar chains had rolled.
He tried to smile and did not understand why the women’s eyes were filled with so much fear, even with some horror as they hung on this smile – as if a smile did not become him anymore. He did not realize that this smile distorted his face, because only the face smiled, not the heart.
He led them into the little room around the fire and spread all his provisions before them. Then he saw for the first time that Christoph still wore the long, blue coachman’s coat with the silver buttons stamped with the coat of arms and the seven-leafed crown. And below that the rags that he had wound around his feet, and above it the smooth, white hair that fell over the collar of his coat. Now he understood why the people at the roadsides, at all the roadsides, had stared at him as at an apparition. That’s what he was – an apparition from another century, much further back than the year of his birth.
He charged Christoph to care for them all, and he also put a packet of cigarettes on the table. He would now go to fetch his brother Erasmus who had been waiting for them every minute of the day and the night. His brother would know what should be done for them.
He went off quickly as if he were afraid that the children or the women might hold him back by his sleeve,
