Tales from the Underworld

  And then I forgot everything else, everything but her dark brown eyes and her dark eyebrows and her lovely silky hair, and I loved her so much because she was so pretty, and I was so angry with her because she had agreed that the Kruselin meadow had to be, just like Father was always saying. I pulled her closer and closer to me, when with a jerk she freed herself.

  ‘You’re getting married in two weeks,’ she said. ‘You think I’m the kind of girl you can see before or after, whenever it suits you?’

  ‘Just this once—’ I started to implore, but she stopped listening. And when I went on, and started bothering her and pawing her, and the hotel bell kept going out on the landing, then she got angry. I could see a change come over her eyes, how they glittered, and her lips were pressed together tight, and she struck me. ‘You’re a drunk,’ she said. ‘It’s the drink that wants me, not you.’

  ‘I won’t drink any more, Martha!’ I said, but then I caught another blow in the face. It’s a long time since anyone’s hit me, not since I was at school, and with a fist, flush in the face. I almost hit her back because I saw the red mist, but she slipped away and ran out of the room.

  She didn’t come back, and I sat in front of the window for a long time, feeling that everything was busted and could never be fixed, neither in me and with my face and everything, and if we’d turned our backs on the Kruselin meadow now, that wouldn’t have made anything better either. Not with Martha.

  Finally I rang for the waiter and ordered a bottle of cognac, and then I asked him if I could have my room cleaned. He sent Martha up, and she had to clean the room under my watching eyes, while I sat by the window, drinking the cognac and watching. She didn’t look up once, and when she was done I said, ‘Thank you,’ and put down a mark. But she left it there.

  I felt like staying on for a couple of days and watching her silently, but that night I suddenly had a change of plan, and I went home, and got married a fortnight later. My marriage didn’t turn out so bad, because Ella’s frightened of me. I don’t drink any more either.

  But sometimes the old yen comes over me, and then I go looking for Martha, and though she keeps moving on, I always manage to find her in the end. I stand somewhere near her, and look at her. We’ve never said a word to each other, but I know she’s not angry with me any more. Sometimes when she’s not wanted in the kitchen, she goes out into the town where she’s working. Then she sits down on a bench, and I sit down on another bench, and sometimes we look at each other. There’ll never be a girl I’ll care for as much as her. Then after an hour or two, she’ll get up to go home. She enters a stone house, and she turns round and waves to me through the window. But she’s careful only to do it when the door’s closed between us. She understands how difficult things are for me.

  Then, when she’s gone, I get on the train home. That’s right, home.

  The Kruselin meadow is a right good meadow, and without it we couldn’t have kept the farm going. But I don’t really understand, and now that I’ve written it all down, I still don’t understand. I always thought I must have left something out, so it didn’t make sense, but I haven’t left anything out. It’s more than a person can understand. The miller is supposed to have called me a lily-livered coward, and I expect he’s right, but I still don’t see what else I could have done. We have four children, and I kept on hoping one would turn out like Martha. But they’re all like Ella, and so I prefer to be on my own. Father’s pretty broken-down these days.

  The writing hasn’t done me any good, so I suppose I’ll have to get the train again tomorrow and try and see her. I’ve decided that when I get to be fifty, I’ll talk to her once more. I draw a bit of comfort from that, but even so it’s a long way off, what with my being thirty-two now. Good night!

  The Missing Greenfinches

  (1935)

  In the Rogges’ garden stood a line of twelve bushes, alternating gooseberries and currants. Their stout trunks were three feet high, and they were topped by pretty, well-pruned, dark-green crowns, so dense that there was no harvested bush that didn’t still have the odd overlooked berry or sweet cluster for little Tommy in its interior.

  It was Liebrecht the farmhand who discovered that the currant bush closest to the house had a further secret. The whole village, and of course everyone on the farm, knew why the Rogges didn’t keep a cat. So Liebrecht thought nothing of barging into the farmer’s study and bringing him out into the garden.

  ‘What do we have here?’ asked Rogge, carefully parting the twigs – while Tommy tugged at his father’s trouser legs, begging: ‘Papa! Papa! Me too!’

  ‘I see,’ said his father, and his voice sounded very grave and contented. ‘A nesting pair of greenfinches! You must admit they would never have settled here, Liebrecht, if we had kept a cat … It’s birds or cats, that’s the way of the world, and I for my part would rather have birds in my garden. All right, Tommy, you can have a look now.’

  He picked the little boy up in one arm, and with the other parted the twigs for him. There perched in his nest sat the little bird with the pretty yellow-green back and the ash-grey neck. He had his wings out beside him like little fans, edged in lemon yellow, and he pressed his little head down against the side of the nest, because it must have felt shocking to him in his sun-dappled green fastness to see two big round white moon faces, a big moon and a little one …

  ‘Papa!’ exclaimed Tommy, and the little bird pressed itself still harder into its nest, and a pale grey membrane seemed to flicker rapidly across the shining black eyes …

  ‘And you have to be very quiet,’ the father said, ‘otherwise he’ll fly away and never come back. Now, I’d say you’ve seen enough.’

  And he set the boy back down on the ground.

  ‘But why would he fly away, Papa? We won’t hurt him!’

  ‘Greenfinches are always nervous, Tommy, because they’re so small and frail. If you throw your hat up in the air, it’ll think it’s a hawk, and hide.’

  ‘Will you throw your hat up in the air, Papa?’

  ‘Honestly, Tom, do you want to scare him off? He’s keeping the eggs warm. And they’ll hatch into little baby greenfinches, and they’ll eat the charlock seeds in our oats, so our little grey horse will get nice pure oats to eat.’

  ‘Papa, will you let me see the eggs, I want to see them.’

  ‘Not now, Tom,’ said his father. ‘We mustn’t scare the little bird. But I’ll tell you something: sometimes the mama finch has to fly away to find something to eat for herself. Then you should stand here on the path and keep this bush in view. When she comes flying out, I want you to call me, and I’ll pick you up, and we can both look at the eggs.’

  ‘You won’t even need to pick me up, Papa, I’ll get my stool and see all by myself!’

  The father was afraid for the little nursery in his currant bush. ‘Now, Tom,’ he said gravely. ‘You must not do that under any circumstances, don’t look in there by yourself. I want you to call Mama first, or Herr Liebrecht or Herr Schulz. I don’t want you to look in there alone, otherwise you’ll scare away them away, and we won’t get any little ones …’

  ‘Yes, and then the grey will get bad oats … I understand, Papa.’

  ‘So, is that a promise, Tom?’

  ‘You can leave me now, Papa. I’ll stand here and keep watch.’

  His father disappeared behind the bushes, but he didn’t go far. His young son was standing on the sandy path in the bright sunshine, looking across at the little bush. I wonder how this will turn out, the father asked himself anxiously. How long will he keep it up?

  His son stood there perfectly immobile, like a wall, with sun and shadow in his face. The father waited. He fancied a cigar, but thought he wasn’t far enough away. He knew his son had sharp hearing that would pick up the scrape of a match, and a keen nose for cigar smoke.

  Thomas made a mark with his foot on the path, and then he stood still again. His father thought his patience was unnatural, and began to get bored. The su
n shone on the garden, a light breeze got up and stirred the leaves, then stopped, and there was silence again. It was so quiet that you could hear the clang of a hoe striking a stone in the potato field behind the house.

  In the pleasant warmth, he must have dropped off, because the next time he looked, there was no Tom on the garden path any more. Instead the boy was under the currant bush – tapping the trunk with his finger.

  Thomas! He wanted to call out, but felt ashamed of his snooping. No, he didn’t call out, he took a step or two back. I’ve asked him to do something he can’t possibly do, he thought, upset with himself.

  The boy went on tapping. The grown-up, torn between solicitude for the birds and pedagogy, went round the corner, lit a cigar and, clearing his throat, approached his son.

  ‘Papa,’ he was greeted, not at all awkward, unlike his spying father. ‘I keep knocking, and each time the little bird answers me “Cheep, cheep”. Does that mean I can come in?’

  ‘Well, let’s take a look, shall we,’ said Herr Rogge, now reconciled to his fate. ‘But I want that to be all for today, all right, Thomas?’

  ‘Pick me up,’ said the boy, when – whoosh! – the greenfinch shot out of the shrubbery with an angry cheeping.

  ‘You see, we did bother it too much,’ said the father in concern, and then both looked at the nest. Six little eggs, pale blue with little pink dots, lay there.

  ‘Oh, Papa!’ said Tommy, enraptured.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said his father, just as thrilled. ‘How lovely they look, don’t they? Once they’ve hatched into little baby finches …’

  There was a ‘Cheep! Cheep!’

  ‘See, there she is!’ exclaimed Herr Rogge. And there on the weeping willow, plaintively, insistently cheeping, sat the little greenfinch, looking at the pair of them with her darting black eyes. ‘We should take that as a sign to go and stop bothering her. Come on, Tom.’

  No sooner had they taken their first steps away, than something shot past them, slid in between the closely clustered twigs, and was gone!

  ‘Sweet little Mama finch!’ enthused the boy, a little disingenuously, as his father thought. ‘When are the babies going to be born? Will it be today? How can you tell which is the Mama and which is the Papa? Where is the Papa anyway?’

  The father led the boy by the hand into his study, and looked at books and pictures with him, first of finches, and then of all sorts of other birds, and then at trains, cars and aeroplanes, until the greenfinch phase was over, and the boy could be allowed to go out into the garden again unsupervised – wanting to build a motorway in his sandbox, with a multi-storey garage.

  Yes, he had pulled it off. The little pair of bird parents could do their business in the next days and weeks without fear of disruption from cats or children. Father and son did indeed go to visit the nest in the currant bush from time to time, and look and whisper. But the initial and worst danger was past. The mother and father birds became familiar with the two visitors – the two full moons – and no more did they press their heads down anxiously against the parapet of the nest when they loomed. Instead they waited – at the most with an irritated cheep – for the two lightless heavenly bodies to vanish, or even, on an urgent feeding mission, flew straight past them, to the greedily gaping, begging cluster of beaks.

  Yes, the shells were broken and had been tossed over the edge. Pitiful, hideous, scrawny, yellow-skinned shapes with black speckles had crawled out of them. Thomas couldn’t believe that they would ever turn into anything as trim and lovely as their greenfinch parents. They were hungry, their indefatigable parents brought them little seeds to eat, and they grew.

  Space in the nest got tight. When father or mother arrived with feed in their beaks, then the little ones would barge each other aside with their little stumps of wings on the parapet of the nest, so that the humans worried lest they knock each other into the terrifying abyss.

  ‘Soon they’ll be fledged and fly away, Tommy,’ said Herr Rogge happily. Sure, it was a small, even a slightly ridiculous joy, but what life can be altogether bad that offers such joys in the course of an after-breakfast walk?

  ‘When will they fly away, Papa? Today?’ Thomas asked impatiently.

  ‘We don’t know. Today or tomorrow or the day after – we just have to bide our time.’

  Together they walked back to the house, Herr Rogge returned to his work, and Thomas thinking he might go into the village to see if he couldn’t find someone to play cars with.

  Three hours later, at noon, Herr Rogge made his usual rounds of the farm, garden and fields. In the stables he ran into Herr Schulz, and the two of them exchanged a few words about the pigs, whose appetite seemed to have returned at last.

  ‘There’s nothing to beat fishmeal, eh!’

  ‘But six weeks before slaughtering, they have to be taken off it.’

  ‘Else the bacon will be yellow …’

  ‘And taste oily.’

  ‘That’s right,’ affirmed Herr Rogge, and went out onto the sunny garden path. It was a glorious day, the sky was a deep blue, the leaves a deep green, the flowers all sorts of other deep colours. Over the fields to the right of him and ahead of him, the larks were singing and mafficking away, a pair of coots were chasing and splashing each other on the lake, the midday smoke climbed peacefully from all the village chimneys over on the opposite side.

  Peaceful …

  A pitiful ‘Cheep, cheep!’ came from the direction of the weeping willow.

  Under the currant bush stood the little three-legged stool that Thomas liked to use in his games … Herr Rogge parted the twigs carefully …

  Peaceful …

  The little clumps of foliage looked strangely empty to him … bare twigs … no sign of a nest … all gone … nothing …

  ‘Cheep, cheep!’ went the mother finch.

  Herr Rogge’s heart was beating hard. It’s not possible, he thought. Thomas wouldn’t do anything like that …

  He looked down at the ground. No trace, no dropped feather, no helpless chick, no sign of the homely nest …

  Grief and rage in his heart, Herr Rogge started to run. So meaningless … he thought. Perhaps as early as tomorrow they might have been fledged … Twenty-four hours – and fate has other ideas! Fate?!

  Herr Rogge ran. Yes, there was a tragedy, a stain, a disgrace. He was running, but it wasn’t from running that his face was red, and his hands damp with sweat …

  Thomas wasn’t in his sandbox. He wasn’t on the lake. He wasn’t in the stable. But he was sitting on his swing, swinging with another boy – wasn’t that Walter Rehberg from the village?

  ‘Look, Papa, see what we—’

  He broke off, alarmed by the expression on his father’s face, and his own contorted itself – with fear.

  His father stopped the swing, lifted his son onto the ground, knelt down in front of him – he ignored Walter Rehberg: ‘Thomas, what happened to the finches?’

  With trembling hands he gripped his son, and looked at him in fear and dread. ‘Thomas?!’

  The boy’s face twisted, he started crying, he was bawling …

  ‘Thomas!’ the father beseeched him. ‘Stop wailing. I won’t hurt you. Just tell me: where are our little birds? The greenfinches?’

  The answer came out in fits and bursts, between sobs and cries, barely comprehensible. ‘I didn’t throw them in the water.’

  The father let go his son, suddenly his agitation was passed. He could see clearly, as in a dream, where you watch the full spectrum of your personal terrors in a condition of helplessness – clearly see the awful hand reaching for the nest where the sixfold helplessness was slowly growing into life … Painfully loudly he heard the terrified ‘Cheep, cheep!’ of the bereft parents … He saw the quick jog trot to the lake with the little pier jutting out into it …

  He was there as well, in his mind’s eye, running along with them …

  And then the nest was shaken out, and one after the other they tumbled out, p
erhaps cheeping still, but for sure the parents filled the air with their lamentations … There were plenty of people in the house and the farm, but no one there to prevent the tragedy …

  But surely tragedy was something else, six worthless birds … Herr Rogge knew from books: bird’s-nesting was a popular pursuit. He was just being sentimental, and that was the truth.

  Little Thomas was yelling for all he was worth, because he had got going, and it was a useful measure in case his father planned to chastise him … But in his heart the thing his parents had tried to prevent had now come about: the rapine of helplessness, the brute, destructive lesson of the power of the stronger …

  ‘It wasn’t me!’ wailed the five-year-old.

  Herr Rogge looked up. The other lad, the big twelve- or fourteen-year-old (just then he seemed to Herr Rogge to be vastly old, completely irresponsible and utterly corrupt), stood there, grinning.

  ‘Did you throw them in the water?’ asked Herr Rogge.

  ‘Yeah!’ said Walter Rehberg.

  ‘But why in the world? What possessed you?’ demanded Herr Rogge in a reversion to his initial agitation.

  ‘Just because,’ said the boy obtusely. ‘Stupid bloody birds.’

  Herr Rogge took a deep breath. He took his beloved son by the hand and shouted ‘Murderer!’ in the other boy’s face. He took a few steps away with Thomas, then turned round: ‘Don’t you ever show your face on my land! And I forbid you to play with my son. I’m going to tell your father, and tell your teacher! You deserve a whipping! Now, get out of my sight!’

  Herr Rogge fell into an exhausted silence. Grinning sheepishly, understanding nothing, young Rehberg sloped off round the corner of the stables.

  Hand in hand, father and son returned to the garden. The sobs that shook the little chest had settled, as had the rage in the bigger chest. The father was left with a sensation of melancholy and grief, of which he tried to convey something to his son by taking him to the orphaned spot in the currant bush. Make him understand, by showing him the void in his own life, the end of the joyful mission of setting out to peek into the bush first thing each morning, to watch the comings and goings of the finches …