2. JOURNEY TO A NEW HOME
When Rudy was eight years old, his uncle in the Rhone valley, on the other side of the mountains, wanted to take the boy to live with him. He could be more easily educated there and would have more opportunities. Grandfather realized this too, and let him go.
Rudy was leaving. There were others besides Grandfather to whom he had to say good bye. First there was Ajola, the old dog.
“Your father was a postman, and I was a post dog,” said Ajola. “We traveled both up and down, and I know the dogs and people on the other side of the mountains. It’s never been my habit to talk much, but now that we won’t be able to talk to each other much longer, I will say a little more than usual. I will tell you a story that I’ve always thought a lot about. I don’t understand it, and you won’t be able to either, but that doesn’t matter because I have gotten this much out of it: things are not distributed quite the way they should be, either for dogs or for people in this world. Not everyone is created to sit on laps or drink milk. It’s not something I’ve been used to, but I have seen a puppy ride on the postal coach sitting in a passenger seat. The woman who was his mistress, or perhaps he was the master, had brought a milk bottle with her that he drank from. He was given cake, but he couldn’t be bothered to eat it. He just sniffed at it, and so she ate it herself. I was running in the mud beside the coach, as hungry as a dog. I chewed on my own thoughts. It wasn’t right, but then again there is much that isn’t. I hope you’ll end up on a lap and in the coach, but it’s not something you can do by yourself. I haven’t been able to, either by yipping or yawning.”
That was Ajola’s speech, and Rudy put his arms around the dog’s neck and kissed it right on its wet snout. Then he picked up the cat, but it squirmed.
“You have become too strong for me, and I don’t want to use my claws! Climb over the mountains. I have taught you to climb, you know! Never think that you will fall, and you’ll manage!” And then the cat ran away because it didn’t want Rudy to see the sorrow in its eyes.
The hens were running around on the floor. The one had lost its tail. A tourist who wanted to be a hunter had shot the tail off because he thought the hen was a bird of prey.
“Rudy’s going over the mountains,” said one hen.
“He’s always in a hurry,” said the other, “and I don’t like saying good-bye!” And both of them pattered off.
He also said good by to the goats, and they cried, “Nayhhh, nayhhh.” They wanted to go along, and it was so sad.
There were two good guides in the district who were just then going over the mountains. They were going down the other side through the Gemmi pass. Rudy went with them, on foot. It was a rigorous hike for such a little fellow, but he had great strength and tireless courage.
The swallows flew with them for a distance. “We and you, and you and we!” they sang. The route went over the rapid Lutschine that gushes forth in many small streams from Grindelwald glacier’s black cleft. Loose tree limbs and boulders act as bridges here. Now they were high in the scrub alder and started up the mountain, close to where the glacier separates from the side of the mountain, and then they went out on the glacier, over blocks of ice and around them. Sometimes Rudy had to crawl, sometimes walk. His eyes shone with pure pleasure, and he stepped firmly with his iron clad mountain boots as if he wanted to mark where he had walked. The black earth deposits on the glacier spawned by the mountain water flow gave it the appearance of being calcified, but the blue-green, glassy ice still shone through. They had to walk around small pools that were damned up by the ice pack, and once they came close to a big boulder that was rocking on the edge of an ice fissure. The rock lost its equilibrium and fell rolling. The echo came resounding from the glacier’s deep hollow caverns.
Upward, ever upward they walked. The glacier itself stretched up in height like a river of wildly towering ice masses, squeezed between sheer cliffs. For a moment Rudy thought about what they had told him—that he had lain deep down in one of these cold-breathing crevices with his mother, but soon such thoughts were gone. It was to him like one of the many similar stories he had heard. Now and then when the men thought it was a little too hard for the boy to climb, they reached out and gave him a hand, but he wasn’t tired, and he stood as surefooted as a goat-antelope on the ice. Then they came out on the bare rock again, sometimes walking between barren rocks, sometimes between dwarf spruces, then out on grass-covered slopes. Always changing, always new. Around them rose the snow-covered mountains, those that he, like every child here, knew: The Jungfrau, Munken, and Eiger.
Rudy had never been so high before, never before been on the outstretched ocean of snow, lying there with immovable waves of snow that the wind blew a few flakes from, like it blows foam from the ocean. The glaciers hold each other by the hand, if you can say that about glaciers, and each is a glass palace for the Ice Maiden whose power and will is to capture and bury. The sun was shining warmly, and the snow was blinding and looked like it had been sown with sparkling whitish-blue diamonds. Innumerable insects, especially butterflies and bees, lay dead in masses on the snow. They had flown too high, or the wind had carried them until they died in the cold. Around Wetterhorn a threatening sky hung like a finely carded wad of black wool. It sank down bulging with its hidden Fohn, a violent force when it broke loose. The impressions of the entire journey became forever fixed in Rudy’s memory: staying overnight on the mountain, the path from there, and the deep mountain ravines where the water had sawed through the boulders for so long it made him dizzy to think of it.
An abandoned stone hut on the other side of the sea of snow gave them shelter for the night. They found charcoal and tree branches there, and a fire was soon lit. They prepared for the night as best they could. The men sat around the fire, smoked tobacco and drank the hot, spiced drink they had made themselves. Rudy received his share, and then the men talked about the mysterious creatures of the Alps and the strange giant snakes in the deep lakes, about the folk of the night, the legions of ghosts who carried the sleeper through the air to the wonderful swimming city of Venice. They talked about the wild herdsman who drove his black sheep across the pastures. Even if they hadn’t seen them, they had nevertheless heard the sound of their bells, and heard the uncanny bleating of the herd. Rudy listened curiously, but without fear because he was never afraid. As he listened he thought he could sense the ghostly, hollow bellow. It became more and more audible. The men heard it too and stopped talking. They told Rudy not to go to sleep.
It was the Föhn blowing. The violent stormy wind that flings itself from the mountains down into the valley and cracks trees in its fury as if they were reeds. It moves log houses from one side of the river bank to the other as easily as one moves a chess piece.
After an hour had passed they told Rudy that now the storm was over and he could sleep. He slept as if on command, so tired was he from the trek.
They broke camp early in the morning. That day the sun shone for Rudy on new mountains, new glaciers and fields of snow. They had arrived in the canton of Valais and were on the other side of the mountain ridge you could see from Grindelwald, but still far from Rudy’s new home. Other mountain ravines, other grassy pastures, forests and mountainous paths unfolded before them. They saw other houses and other people, but what people they were! Indeed, they were deformed, grim, fat with yellow-white faces. Their throats were heavy, ugly clumps of flesh hanging out like bags. They were cretins.6 They dragged themselves sickly forward and looked with dumb eyes at the strangers. The women looked the worst. Were these the people of his new home?
3. RUDY’S UNCLE
At his uncle’s house, when Rudy got there, the people, thank God, looked like the people Rudy was used to. There was only one cretin there, a poor foolish lad. One of those poor creatures who in their poverty and loneliness live by turns in families in canton Valais. They stay a few months in each house, and poor Saperli happened to be there when Rudy came.
Rudy’s uncle was still
a strong hunter, and in addition he was a barrel-maker. His wife was a lively little person with an almost birdlike face, eyes like an eagle, and a long and quite downy neck.
Everything was new to Rudy—the clothing, the customs, even the language, but his childish ear would soon learn to understand that. It was clear that they were better off here than at Grandfather’s home. The rooms they lived in were bigger. The walls were covered with antelope antlers and highly polished guns. Over the door hung a picture of the Virgin Mary with fresh rhododendrons and a lamp burning in front of it.
Rudy’s uncle, as mentioned, was one of the district’s best goat-antelope hunters and was also the best and most experienced guide. Rudy would now become the darling of the house, although there was already one there. This was an old, blind, and deaf hunting dog who was no longer of any use, but who had been so. They remembered the animal’s ability in earlier years, and he was now a member of the family who would live out his life in comfort. Rudy pet the dog, but it wouldn’t have much to do with strangers, and of course Rudy was still a stranger. But not for long. He soon took root in the house and in their hearts.
“It’s not so bad here in Valais canton,” said Rudy’s uncle. “We have goat-antelopes, and they won’t soon die out like the mountain goats did. It’s much better than in the old days no matter how much people talk about their glory. It’s better now. There’s a hole in the bag now, and fresh air has blown into our enclosed valley. Something better always comes forward when the old antiquated things fall away,” he said. When Rudy’s uncle became very talkative, he talked about his childhood years and about the years when his father was in his prime, when Valais was, as he put it, a closed bag with way too many sick people, the pitiful cretins. “But then the French soldiers came, and they were real doctors. They soon killed the illness, and the people too. The Frenchmen could fight all right, strike a blow in more ways than one, and the women could strike too!” and Rudy’s uncle nodded to his French-born wife and laughed. “The French were able to strike the rocks so they’d give way. They built the Simplon7 road out of the cliffs, built that road so that I could now tell a three-year-old child to go down to Italy. Just stay on the road, and the child will find Italy if he stays on the road.” And then Rudy’s uncle sang a French ballad and gave a cheer for Napoleon Bonaparte.
That was the first time Rudy had heard about France and about Lyon, the big city on the Rhone where his uncle had once been.
It wouldn’t take many years for Rudy to become a good antelope hunter because he had an aptitude for it, said his uncle, and he taught him to hold a gun, take aim, and shoot. In the hunting season he took Rudy along up in the mountains and let him drink the warm antelope blood, which was supposed to keep dizziness from the hunter. He taught him to know what time avalanches would happen on the various mountain sides, whether at dinner time or in the evening, depending on how the sun beams worked the slopes. He taught him to observe the antelope and learn from them how to leap so that you could land on your feet and stand firmly, and if there wasn’t footing in the mountain clefts, how you had to support yourself with your elbows, clinging fast with the muscles of your thighs and legs. You could even keep yourself in place with your neck if it was necessary. The goat-antelopes were smart and even posted a lookout, but the hunter had to be smarter, and get downwind from them. He could fool them by hanging his cloak and hat on his walking stick, and the antelope would mistake the cloak for the man. His uncle played this trick one day when he was hunting with Rudy.
The mountain path was narrow. It really wasn’t a path at all, just a thin ledge, right by the dizzying abyss. The snow was lying half melted there; the stone crumbled when you walked on it. That’s why Rudy’s uncle laid down on his stomach, long as he was, and crept forward. Every stone that broke off fell, careened, and broke, skipped and rolled again, bounced from cliff to cliff before coming to rest in the black depths. Rudy stood on the outermost firm cliff crag a hundred steps behind his uncle. He saw an enormous vulture approaching in the air, swaying over his uncle. With one flap of its wings, the bird could throw the creeping worm into the abyss to turn it into carrion. His uncle had eyes only for the antelope that was visible with its kid on the other side of the cleft. Rudy kept his eye on the bird, understood what it wanted to do, and so he had his hand on the gun ready to shoot. Then the antelope leaped up, and Rudy’s uncle fired. The animal was killed by the shot, but the kid ran as if it had practiced fleeing its whole life. The huge bird flew quickly away, frightened by the shot. Rudy’s uncle didn’t realize the danger until Rudy told him about it.
As they were on their way home in the best of spirits, Rudy’s uncle whistling a tune from his childhood, they suddenly heard an odd sound from not far away. They looked to both sides, and then upward, and there on the heights, on the sloping mountain ledge, the snow cover was lifting. It was waving as when the wind sweeps under a spread-out sheet of linen. The tops of the waves snapped as if they were plates of marble cracking and breaking up and then released in a foaming, plunging stream, booming like the muffled roar of thunder. It was a rushing avalanche, not right on top of Rudy and his uncle, but close—too close.
“Hold on tight, Rudy!” his uncle cried. “Tightly, with all your might!”
And Rudy threw his arms around a nearby tree trunk, while his uncle clambered over him up into the tree’s branches and held on tightly. Although the avalanche was rolling past many yards from them, all around them the air turbulence and gusts of wind cracked and broke trees and bushes as if they were but dry reeds and scattered them widely. Rudy lay pressed to the ground. The tree trunk he was holding was now a stump, and the crown of the tree was lying a long way off. Rudy’s uncle lay there, amongst the broken branches. His head was crushed, and his hand was still warm, but his face was unrecognizable. Rudy stood there pale and trembling. This was the first fright of his life, the first time he had known horror.
He brought the tidings of death home in the late evening, a home that was now a house of grief. His uncle’s wife reacted without words, without tears. Only when the corpse was brought home, did grief erupt. The poor cretin crawled into his bed. No one saw him the whole day, but towards evening he came to Rudy.
“Write a letter for me! Saperli can’t write. Saperli will take the letter to the post office.”
“A letter from you?” asked Rudy, “and to whom?”
“To the Lord Christ!”
“Who do you mean by that?”
And the half-wit, as they called the cretin, looked at Rudy with pleading eyes, folded his hands, and said so solemnly and piously: “Jesus Christ! Saperli wants to send him a letter and ask that Saperli may lie dead and not the master.”
Rudy squeezed his hand. “That letter wouldn’t reach him. That letter wouldn’t bring him back to us.”
It was hard for Rudy to explain how impossible this was.
“Now you’re our sole support,” said his foster mother, and that’s what Rudy became.
4. BABETTE
Who’s the best shot in Valais canton? Well, the goat-antelopes knew that. “Watch out for Rudy!” they would say. “Who’s the best looking shot?” “Well, that’s Rudy,” said the girls, but they didn’t say, “Watch out for Rudy!” Even their serious mothers didn’t say that because he nodded just as cordially to them as to the young girls. He was so bright and happy. His cheeks were brown, his teeth fresh and white, and his eyes shone coal-black. He was a handsome fellow and only twenty years old. The icy water didn’t bother him when he swam, and he could turn in the water like a fish. He could climb like no other and cling tight to the cliff walls like a snail. He had good muscles and sinews, and this was evident too in his jumps and leaps which he had first learned from the cat and later from the goat-antelopes. You couldn’t entrust your life to a better guide, and Rudy could have amassed a fortune from that. He wasn’t interested at all in barrel-making, which his uncle had also taught him. All his delight and longing was for shooting antelope, and that
also brought in money. Rudy was a good match, as they said, as long as he didn’t set his sights too high. At dances he was a dancer that the girls dreamed about, and one and another of them thought about him when they were awake too.
“He kissed me while we were dancing,” Annette, the school teacher’s daughter, told her dearest friend. But she shouldn’t have said that, even to her best friend. It’s not easy to keep quiet about such things. It’s like sand that runs out of a bag with a hole in it. Soon everyone knew that Rudy, no matter how proper and good he was, kissed girls while dancing. And yet he had not kissed the one that he most wanted to.
“Watch him!” said an old hunter. “He kissed Annette. He’s started with A and will most likely kiss through the whole alphabet.”
A kiss while dancing was yet all that could be gossiped about Rudy, but he had kissed Annette, and she was not at all the flower of his heart.
Down by Bex, between the big walnut trees and right next to a little rushing mountain stream, there lived a rich miller. His house was a big one with three stories. It had small towers, covered with wooden shingles and fitted with pieces of tin that shone in the sun and moonlight. The tallest tower had a weather vane in the shape of an apple with a shiny arrow through it. It was supposed to represent Wilhelm Tell’s arrow. The mill looked prosperous and neat, and could be both drawn and described, but the miller’s daughter could neither be drawn nor described. At least that’s what Rudy would say, and yet he had her picture in his heart. Her two shining eyes were burning there like a fire. It had flared up at once, like fire does, and the strangest thing about it was that the miller’s daughter, the lovely Babette, had no idea about this. She and Rudy had never spoken so much as two words to each other.