that the evil one was standing behind him.”
The two leaned forward and took his hand which lay clenched on the table. They took it in such a way that it lay hidden in their hands. And for the first time they noticed that he did not wear his signet ring anymore.
“Brother,” said Aegidius in his soft voice, “if this artist, this great artist, had painted all the Liljecronas in our faces – back to bygone days, and all they thought and believed and did – don’t you think that the onlooker would make the sign of the cross on seeing them? Do you fancy that you are the only one who has killed?”
“It is no consolation not having been the only one. The fact is that it was not in our nature. It is something foreign to us, and I have opened the door to it. I have allowed someone with dirty shoes to step over our threshold, and I cannot wipe it clean.”
“Tell us all about it, brother,” begged Aegidius, “now, this very first morning. You have not quite understood yet, brother, that you are with us again, that we three are together again. And that is as if we were one.”
“We are not one,” persisted Amadeus. He turned his eyes away and looked past the two faces over the moors. Little white clouds rose above the eastern horizon and began to sail up into the blue of the morning sky. The cry of the migrating cranes was heard from a distance.
Again Amadeus felt that all this might have been the same a thousand years ago. As if nothing had happened, at least not here; that it was wrong for him to sit here. As if he ought to go away quite quickly, so that all this might remain the same for another thousand years. So that at least there would be one small place in this world where nothing had happened and where nothing would happen.
“He was a Frenchman,” he began in a low voice, “small and thin and ill. A professor of the history of art at the Sorbonne. According to the lists he had long been dead – heart failure. But we had always saved him. We had falsified the list. That was possible in the last months. Then ‘the hangman’ discovered him. Of all the murderers he was the most merciless. He held a high rank in the camp. He had also invented the business with the meathook. Did you know about that?”
They both shook their heads.
“Those who had been condemned were hung by the chin on such a hook. It was a dreadful death, perhaps the most dreadful of all. We were forced to lead the Frenchman there. He was quiet and brave, but when we entered the large slaughterhouse, he looked at me once – with eyes that had drunk in beauty for a lifetime, eyes that were filled with the pictures of madonnas and cathedrals – they were so filled with that beauty that these pictures almost covered his death agony. But at the bottom of his eyes, deep below these pictures, I saw it – only I.
“All was already disorganized, because the sound of the enemy’s guns was coming nearer and nearer, and some of us secretly carried weapons. I did. When we had led the Frenchman under the beam with the hook, I asked the hangman to turn around. He turned as fast as if a serpent had bit his heel. And he looked into the muzzle of my revolver.
“His face became rigid, for he did not understand. To him it was as if the whole world were breaking into pieces. But it was still a wicked, nay, an infamous face – even in its terrible rigidity. More so than in the relaxation of his daily life.
“He looked around and he saw nothing but the end. There was no pity on any of the faces – only the end.
“He fell down on his knees and begged for his life, and we had not known that human words could come from these lips. We listened as we would have listened if a spider in its web had begun to speak. Or a scorpion. Or a basilisk. We were horrified to hear him speak with a human voice. We felt as if in all these years there had not been a deeper defamation of the image of man than this voice of his. We had thought that there would be the voice of a devil in him or the voice of a wolf, as in the pictures of Hieronymus Bosch.
“The professor begged for the hangman’s life, but we shook our heads. The others wanted to lift him on to the hook, but before they could seize him, I shot.
“I could have shot him through the heart, but I shot into his face. Perhaps I thought that with a heart-shot he might get up again, because there was a vacuum in his body where we have a heart. Nothing but an empty space. His life was only in his face, which we had seen smiling. Many, many times. And I shot into this smile.
“He sank down head foremost, but I felt that he did not stop smiling. Do you understand? He did not stop smiling. It was as if his smile were immortal. The immortal evil, and a thousand shots would not have extinguished it. It was as if I had shot into Sirius or into the Milky Way.
“I saw the others drag him away. I was certain, as I had never been before, that this man would rise again. And in his resurrection he would still have the same smile.
“The Frenchman took my hand. The left, not the right. And he said something very remarkable. He said, ‘Ceux qui restent ce sont les pauvres.’ Those who remain are the poor. It was so very remarkable, because it was the truth. One of those truths that a man can only pronounce when he has discarded all earthly things: fear, hope, hatred and perhaps love also. Ce sont les pauvres . . .
“And that’s why I must live alone.”
The brothers were still holding his hand. He did not look into their faces, because he knew there would be horror in them. He only looked at them when Aegidius put his hand in a special way over his own, and he saw that Aegidius smiled.
“Don’t you remember?” asked Aegidius in a low voice.
“What?”
“Don’t you remember when we had a cut in our hand, when we were children? And the blood was not to be stanched, and we ran to Grita? Don’t you remember what she used to say?”
“Was it . . . ?”
“Yes, that’s what it was. One of her half-Christian, half-heathen verses. She took our hand in her hands – so – and then she said: ‘Cover hand, cover death – wake up again by God’s breath.’ She herself did not know where the saying came from. Probably from her great-grandmother. A spell to speak over running blood. And it always stopped running. Always.”
“But this does not stop,” said Amadeus after a while.
“It has already stopped, brother,” said Erasmus. “It stopped the moment you told us about it. And don’t you realize that you saved a life, brother?”
“I did not save it,” replied Amadeus gloomily. “The Frenchman died of spotted typhus a few weeks later. After we had been liberated. Are you so sure that one is allowed to save one life with another?”
“I seem to remember,” said Erasmus in a low voice, “that he who died on the cross saved many lives with his life.”
“You must not blaspheme, brother,” replied Amadeus, drawing his hand out of his brothers’ hands. “Not even from love of me. Or do you think that my hand was allowed to do what God’s hand did?”
“Perhaps that’s what it means,” said Erasmus still more gently, “that we are created in his image.”
Then Jakob came. It was his day. He walked a little crooked and a little bent around the corner of the sheepfold with his half-sly, half-sad smile. “Djing dobry to the noble counts,” he said, raising his dark cap. “Djing dobry, Kuba,” replied Aegidius. “Haven’t I told you often enough
