in front of a red bespattered wall or under the gallows.
Baron Amadeus had loved but little in his life: music, a few books, his home country and his two brothers. Everything else had sunk as a stone sinks in the sea; but his brothers, even if they had been killed, would only have sunk into the depths of his heart. People had often laughed at them in childhood, and ridicule binds together more closely than pity. Simple people had laughed at them because they were so much alike. Their hair was brown and soft like the fur of a mole, their noses were a little too long and set a little askew in their narrow faces. Others had been amused at the queer seriousness with which they met fun as well as malice, an expression so unusual in immature faces, the composure of which resembled that on the faces of young martyrs or youthful saints.
A wit on a neighboring estate had nicknamed them the “triptych,” and that is how they appeared to the unthinking, as if one had only to open the two wings of an altarpiece – and there they would be, standing side by side, three youthful figures from some place beyond the well-known earth, and one of them might well be holding a medieval lute in his long, thin hands, the second a violin, and the third some instrument with which the songs of the Old Testament might have been accompanied. So they seemed to look at the spectator from that sphere with their strange, pure faces without a smile, but with the joyfulness that belongs to those who have touched the hem of God’s garment.
In their father’s private rooms, which lay in a distant part of the house, each of them, while still quite young, had found for himself some musical instrument, and under the imperfect instruction of a rather unorthodox tutor they had begun to attune these three instruments to one another and to play them with unshakable seriousness. After a few years their mother had commanded them to play before guests for the first time at a birthday party.
They sat down in silence under the candles of the old chandelier and with their solemn faces and stately instruments they had begun to play one of the old masters, perhaps Tartini.
They played until a whisper was heard or a slight smile was seen on the faces of some of the guests, then Amadeus got up with his cello in the middle of the delicate andante, bowed seriously, and left the hall, followed immediately by his two brothers. He had not spoken to his brothers about this occurrence, and from his unmoved face there was nothing to be gathered about the causes that had prompted this action. Before the embittered anger of his mother he had only remarked in a polite and gentle voice that just this andante was the musical interpretation of the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians and that this chapter must be well-known to the countess, his mother.
From that time on they had never again played in public.
On the height which the baron had reached by now a soft wind blew which smelled of the peat bogs, and Amadeus sat down for a while on one of the blocks of basalt which lay by the path. The wood was now sparser and more stunted and in the distance the moonlight lay on the bare rock, which shone like silver.
The thoughts of the baron wandered for a little from the thirteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Corinthians to his mother who was called Countess or My Lady by the farmers, and who in respect for her birth wished to be addressed in this way. The Liljecronas who originally came from Sweden had always been a “doubtful” family for her, a family of peasants probably from the dark ages of the Vikings, and she did not consider it impossible that a few hundred years ago they had still eaten horseflesh and had sacrificed human beings to their one-eyed god.
Amadeus did not remember that his mother had ever kissed him, and he could not even imagine how her thin lips would have been able to do so. Only Grita, the old Lithuanian nurse, had kissed him. On holy days she wore seven petticoats one on top of the other, and under these seven petticoats she would hide easily and willingly anything that she wished to protect against Laima, the goddess of destiny – whether it was a young chicken which was to be killed or one of the child-saints of the triptych who wished to hide from the countess. On the battlefields of the children’s lives Grita had been the asylum of which they had read in the history of the Middle Ages, the threshold of the sanctuary beyond which the sword did not reach, the peace of God which must not be violated.
Amadeus smoked and remembered the tunes of the Dainos, those Lithuanian folk songs which Grita used to hum in the evenings, when the scent of baked apples came from the oven and the thread of her spinning wheel glided through her old, twisted hands. Eastern melodies, old and melancholy. Amadeus had set them for the three stringed instruments, and Grita had listened to their playing, her white head bent, and then she had raised her face with the peculiar eyes to the playing youths and had smiled as only idols can smile, and had sung in a low voice:
By the Memel’s farther shore
Stand three maples fresh and green
Underneath these green trees, underneath their branches
On a day three cuckoos sat.
No, those were not cuckoos three
‘Twas not birds were cooing so.
Fellows three were fighting here
Fighting o’er a maiden fair
Under these three maple trees.
Said the first one: “She is mine,”
Said the second: “As God wills.”
But the third, the youngest lad,
Was so sore, oh, sore at heart.
Fain would move into the town,
Seek a fiddler for you there.
Dance, my laddie, full of sorrow,
Dance, I want you to be gay . . .
They had riveted their attention on the song, “the three young fellows,” and had shivered with that early foreboding of defenseless creatures under the trampling feet of humankind. And later, much later, Amadeus had gone to the old nurse when she was sitting on the threshold with folded hands in the twilight and had asked: “Grita, what does that mean: ‘Dance, my laddie, full of sorrow, dance, I want you to be gay’?”
She had wrapped her large dark shawl around him, for she had felt the trembling of his young, narrow shoulders and she had answered gently: “Leave it now, young master, until you have learned that tears are salt and a kiss is sweet. And that this is better than if it were the other way round.”
He remembered that they had played this tune by many cottagers’ coffins: “Dance, my laddie, full of sorrow . . .” Their mother had always looked at them through her gold-rimmed lorgnette, as if they were three adopted children who talked to each other in a foreign language – the language of the American Indians or of the Polynesians. But the cottagers’ wives had wept, and after one of these funerals as they stood silently at the lofty window of their music room, their father had come in quietly, had stood behind them and said in his gentle voice which seemed as if it came from a distance: “He who builds a bridge for the poor is more than he who builds an empire for kings . . .”
They had pondered about it for a long time, each for himself, for they never discussed such things with each other – and besides, it was such a rare thing for their father to speak to them.
The moon had now sunk to the horizon, and the baron took another cigarette.
Yes, what had the secret about their father been, that none of them had really known anything about him; that nobody had known him, and yet that in some strange way he had been familiar
