Under a Changing Moon, page 13
Whenever the aunts wanted to join in these expeditions, Adolf would drive them out in the chaise. Uncle Emmo at seventy-two was still a stout walker and declared he had no intention of being shaken about the country in the carriage “as though he were an old man.”
Sometimes they spent their Sundays visiting some of the parish priests in the district. There were old churches to be seen, beautiful altarpieces to be admired. The priest would tell them the history of his parish, his housekeeper would bring in dark rich country bread with butter and cottage cheese, and a bottle of wine would be fetched from the cellar.
If any member of the family had a birthday, and there was scarcely a month in the year when there was no such celebration, or even two, then they made a special excursion the following Sunday. Sometimes they went by railway down the Rhine, changed at Koblenz on to a steamer, and puffed their way downstream past castles and woods and vineyards. The children would talk for months to come about experiences like these.
Corpus Christi came, and for the first time Adolf was allowed to take part as a ministrant in the big procession through the town. There were flags waving everywhere; statues of saints were carried in the procession. All the houses were decorated with young birch trees; every street was filled with the spicy smell of birch twigs, the heavy clouds of incense, and the delicate scent of fading rose petals on the dusty pavements.
This summer seemed the same to the boys as all the former ones in the courthouse, but as yet unnoticed by them, there were hints of coming changes in the air. The boys spent most of their free time down by the river, as they had done every summer. After May first, they had begun to go swimming, even though the water was still bitterly cold. They had worked together on caulking their boat, and then they would float downstream and row back again against the current. They landed on the leper island and repaired the damage that snow and winter storms had done to their old hut there. Fish were cooked on a fire between big stones, and the birds’ nests in the tall trees had to be inspected to see if the young birds had hatched. They climbed up again to their cave in the cathedral rocks that they had fitted up and where they stored food every summer, collected more or less legally from attic and larder. Their rusty frying pan was still there, a chair with three legs, and the remains of a fire between rocks that served as a fireplace. But what had become of the glorious campaigns and adventures that had started from this cave? Where were the heroes of Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, Caesar’s victorious legionnaries, the questing knights of King Arthur? This year, August, who for as long as they could remember had been the unquestioned leader of all the boys of the neighborhood, only joined in their games on rare occasions. Most of the time he sat in Uncle Emmo’s study and undertook a serious course in German history.
“You’re crazy,” said Georg angrily. “Don’t you have enough swotting to do for school?”
“I want to find out,” said August with a determined stubbornness that they had never noticed in him before. “I want to see if there is any sort of logic in all this jumble of events they call world history.”
“Oh, come on; don’t talk rot!” said Georg. “You can sit and read books when you’re an old dodderer. The girls are always gaping at me now when I go for a stroll in the evening without you.”
“Oh well, I expect you and Trombetta manage to console them,” said August. Georg shrugged, picked a rose or carnation for his buttonhole, and went off for a stroll in the Schied, the main street that ran all the way around the town center. There the young people of the town promenaded every evening at dusk, like a stream, and who could tell where it would lead them?
Adolf still went swimming every day with his brothers, dived and rowed with them, but he was now no longer able to lead the completely amphibious existence of former years. The previous summer he had still hoped that after a while Aqua would forget his terrible experience in the floods and would get used to watching his new master spending hours on or in the water, or perhaps even come in swimming with him. But it seemed that Aqua’s distaste for water was growing greater, not less. Adolf could scarcely bear to see him lying there on the bank, thoroughly miserable, and not howling only because he had been reprimanded so often for doing so. He suffered cruelly in the conflict between his urge to save his master and his horror of the water. As soon as Adolf was back on dry land again, the dog’s agonies turned to wild delight; Adolf would lie down beside him in the warm grass, stroke him, comfort him, and assure him that he had finished with water for the day.
It was just as well then that the boy had taken on fresh duties this year that fitted in better with Aquarius’s preference for terra firma. After Janosch had gone, Adolf had asked his father if he might take over the care of Silver entirely. The Amtmann had asked him if he realized that this was to be all or nothing. “You’ll be solely responsible for the horse then, and that means you’ll have to feed him regularly and look after him, see his box is kept clean, and so on. On days when I’m not driving out, you’ll have to see he gets some exercise—you may ride him yourself or take the aunts out for a drive. You must see that he goes to the smithy when it’s necessary, and now that it’s summer, you’ll have to take him out to the watering place from time to time. Think over whether you’ll have time for all that with your schoolwork and your other activities.”
Adolf could think of nothing more wonderful. “I’ll get up an hour earlier in the mornings; that’s all. It’s light by four now, and the holidays will be here soon.”
“Yes, but vacations don’t last forever, nor does the summer. And in winter when it’s cold and dark, you’re going to find it hard if you have to do stable chores in the mornings as well as ringing the bells and serving Mass. I want you to think it all over; once you’ve taken the job, you’ll have to carry on with it.”
“I’ve thought about all that, Papa,” said Adolf.
“And don’t try to be too daring when you’re riding him. I know you learned early to sit on a horse, but it was different with our old white one. This gelding is young and temperamental, and that’s quite a different thing.”
“But Janosch learned me how to ride properly.”
“Taught you!”
“Taught me,” Adolf repeated. “You told us yourself he was once a circus rider.”
“Well, I don’t expect you to perform any circus tricks. And don’t get the idea that you can learn to ride properly in such a short time as that. If you manage to stay on and don’t spoil the horse in any way, that’s good enough for a start.”
Since then, Adolf had fed and groomed the gelding every morning, and on days when he did not have to go up to the cathedral early, he usually went out for an hour’s ride before school. Aquarius joined in these rides enthusiastically, and Adolf made the discovery that the forest is never so beautiful as it is in the early morning, with the slanting rays of the sun coming down in great shafts of light between the gray trunks of the beech trees and the reddish pines, changing them into pillars of a cathedral with the treetops forming a vaulted roof overhead. It would be wonderful to be a forester and live here all the time, thought Adolf. A hare leaped across the path. The bright red of a fox flashed among the brambles. What a mercy that Aqua was not a hunting dog! A whistle or a call was enough to bring him back to heel, though he enjoyed taking up a scent or barking at an impudent squirrel that hurled insults at him from the safe refuge of a tree.
He must have been trained as a puppy by someone who loved and understood dogs. Did whoever it was remember Aqua? Did he miss him? It would be impossible to forget a dog like Aqua. But why had he not come forward when they had put that notice in the local newspaper? And Aqua himself—did he remember that he had once belonged to someone else? Better not to think about that . . .
The forest was magnificent! Here and there the anemones were so thick that they made a white carpet, spotted with blue liverwort and scilla. Adolf would have been completely happy on these morning rides with his dog and his horse had there not been one thing missing: the tame falcon on his wrist, which had become a wild falcon again. And Janosch, too, had gone away, never to return. It was depressing to think that a man you had become fond of, a bird you had saved from certain death, could simply disappear, like shooting stars in the night sky, which shone out for a moment and then were extinguished and lost to sight forever. “Stay with me, Aqua!” said Adolf, and the dog looked up at him with complete devotion.
When he took the horse out to water it, Aqua had to be left at home. But Adolf’s two younger brothers were always willing to come with him. They climbed up onto the horse behind Adolf, dressed only in their bathing trunks, which they put on every day the moment school was over. Behind the mill, where the river shelved gradually away from the bank, was the watering place. Silver gave a loud whinny, tossed his mane, and then stepped slowly down into the water. As soon as he felt the ground disappearing from under him, he swam out into the river, which flowed gently at this point. Sometimes one of the riders would slip off into the water, but that was all part of the fun. “Be careful you swim right away from the horse if you fall in,” Adolf warned them. “Otherwise you might get a kick.”
“I wish you’d come with us sometime,” he said to Paula one day when he came back and found her in the garden. They sat together on the low wall, warm from the sun. “Not into the water—just on a comfortable little trot along the river. Remember the high wall and the old garden behind it that we used to peep into through the little iron gate? From the horse you can see right over the wall as far as the deserted house at the other end of the garden. Nothing but little turrets and balconies and bay windows and green ivy thick all over it.”
Yes, Paula remembered the high wall farther up the river very well. Years ago she had imagined all sorts of stories about the deserted house and the green wilderness of the garden. The house belonged to a Frau von Savigny, who came to the Amtmann sometimes for legal advice. Since the death of her husband ten years before, she had not been in either house or garden.
“How I’d love to come with you!” said Paula. “But I’ve nothing suitable to wear for riding, and what do you suppose Mama and the aunts would say?”
“Oh, they need never know anything about it,” Adolf said, and after some more urging, Paula had to agree that her wide skirts wouldn’t look improper on a horse. So a few days later, at the crack of dawn, when everyone in the house was still asleep, they rode away together, Paula in front of her brother on the horse. Mist lay over the river, everything sparkled with dew, the veiled sky was like mother-of-pearl, and the world was fresh and new and all theirs. No one else was about.
“It’s heaven!” Paula said, breathing deeply, her dark eyes shining. They looked over the wall, and everything was just as they had imagined it.
“See the frog prince?” Adolf whispered, slipping back into the fairy-tale world of childhood—and there he was, sitting on the moss-covered stone rim of a little pond, green and wet and sad-eyed. “Waiting for the princess and thinking she has forgotten him.”
“But I haven’t.” Paula joined in the game and waved her hand at the green fellow. “Soon, soon, I’ll come, my prince, and kiss you on your cold snout and rescue you!”
“Ugh!” Adolf giggled, but Paula was suddenly serious, touched by the melancholic beauty of the abandoned place.
“Not yet, my prince,” she said softly. “Not yet,” for the overgrown paths beyond the gray wall led nowhere. The box hedges were unkempt. The chestnut trees had put out a thousand candles for a feast to which no guests would come. Behind its green shroud loomed the white house, almost suffocated by ivy, a phantom . . .
“Let’s go back,” Paula said after a while, and Adolf turned Silver’s head. When he put his sister down at the little gate leading into the courthouse garden, he said, “There we are. Nobody’s caught us.”
“I’ll go straight in and pick some peas,” said Paula. “Mama will be surprised to find me working in the garden so early.”
She gathered courage from this morning ride with Adolf, and they repeated it more than once.
Her delight in the garden and in the life of all the growing things there had completely absorbed her. She never grew tired of it and would have been happy to spend the whole day working among the beds. “Don’t forget to put a hat on,” the aunts were always saying. Paula’s face was already turning a deeper color. Under her dark hair, it looked like a carving of old ivory.
Ferdinand and Karl were happy that their big sister was generally to be found in the garden, for it often happened that they needed her help. More than in previous years; they were left to themselves and to friends of their own age this summer. This meant even more cut knees, bleeding noses, and other indications of a rough but glorious life, and Paula had the job of washing them off with cold water or patching them up with sticking plaster, which she always kept handy in her gardening basket so that Mama would at least not notice immediately that they had been on the warpath.
“Make sure you always have at least an idea of what those two young monkeys are up to,” said Mama to Paula. “They’re safest in the water or near it somewhere. You can’t drown water rats.” She had forgotten that it all depended how you got into the water in the first place. This was yet another one of Mama’s funny notions, Paula thought. To keep an eye on Ferdinand and Karl, you would need a lookout tower and a telescope, and even these wouldn’t always have been helpful, as neither Paula nor any other of the grownups knew that there was a piece of rock jutting out from the cliff and not visible from the house. For each of the boys, who knew these cliffs as well as his own pocket, there was an irresistible challenge to use the rock as a diving board. For years, the older boys had used it for this purpose. It took a bit of skill and a bit of daring—that was all.
Two years ago, Ferdinand and two of his classmates had been initiated into what the older boys called the Death-Dive, something you had to do to prove yourself before you were fully recognized. Now it was Karl’s turn. He had been nine on May seventh and could hardly wait to be accepted as one of the gang at last. That he and the two other novices his age did not jump too short and land on the path instead of in the river, breaking every bone in their bodies, was just one of the everyday miracles boys rely on.
“If there were no miracles,” the Amtmann had once said to his wife, “then there wouldn’t be any grown people. They would all have perished as children.”
It was just as well for the boys that this summer the adults had other problems to occupy their minds. Otherwise, the jumping lessons for Karl, the apple of his mother’s eye, might have been discovered.
Another thing that Paula could not see and that had its dangers was the younger boys’ tree climbing on the leper island. One day Karl had ventured high up in the big elm, which he and Ferdinand had climbed in the spring to look at the pretty greenish-blue eggs in a thrush’s nest. Karl merely wanted to have a look and see how the young ones were getting on, but this time the parent birds objected. They fluttered so anxiously around the boy’s head that he had to put up his hand to guard his eyes and let go of the branch he was clutching. He lost his balance and tumbled down. The thick foliage broke his fall, but the sharp point of a broken branch tore a deep cut in his thigh through his thin cotton swimming trunks. Ferdinand had to drag him to the boat straight away and row him over to the courthouse. When they reached the garden, a green and sobbing Karl fell into Paula’s arms. “Run! Run and get the doctor, Ferdinand!” she said, terrified, and carried Karl into the house in her arms.
The doctor, the only physician in town, was a long, lean man with gray sideburns, spectacles, and a small black tube always sticking out of his pocket with which he used to listen to his patients’ hearts and lungs and—in desperate cases—bellies. Every child knew him and saluted his one-horse, half-open carriage with the old chestnut mare and the old fat coachman. The doctor came at any time, day or night, when needed and also appeared without being summoned about once a month. He felt the pulse of the older people, looked at everybody’s tongue, laid down the law, and then, over a glass of sherry, talked to the parents about the general state of health in the household, including the servants’. With the writing of bills, he couldn’t be bothered. He expected his patients to make notes in their calendars whenever they consulted him. At New Year’s, everybody would send him the money due him, often with a little present, the wealthier ones sometimes sending a choice bottle of wine. His fee was a guilder a visit. Poorer families weren’t charged anything. And the doctor made quite a comfortable living that way.
