Under a Changing Moon, page 21
He also knows about unhappy love, Paula suddenly saw with her new perception, for was not this little country his great love? He had been born and raised in it and had lived here all his life except for his student years in Bonn and Göttingen.
Soon the beech trees would be turning into an even deeper orange, she thought, feeling the first hint of autumn in the late summer day, a foreboding of parting. Adieu, orange and blue . . .
They made their first stop in one of the clean, pretty little villages where Father had business with the mayor. He was an elderly farmer, a redhead, with deep, shrewd eyes behind heavy lids. He invited them to the midday meal in an old half-timbered house with texts from the Scriptures on the crossbeams. His wife brought in a huge bowl of rice; over which brown butter had been poured and which had been sprinkled liberally with sugar and cinnamon. The mayor and his wife, their two sons, an old manservant, and a young maid sat with them around the table of lime wood, silent and serious. The mayor muttered a prayer; then they each seized a tin spoon and started eating from the dish in the middle of the table. Not a word was spoken, for eating was important business. If you didn’t pay proper attention, you had only yourself to blame if you didn’t get enough. The Amtmann’s children liked nothing better than to have a meal in a farmhouse when they were off on trips with their father. There was almost always rice on such occasions, the accepted dish for special visitors, and the boys loved it. Occasionally in the courthouse, there was rice pudding as a main dish on fast days, but it could not be compared with what the farm folk made. It was not swimming in a pool of butter, and served in individual portions on plates, it tasted different from rice taken out of a big communal dish. Not a grain was left over now, but there was a little more in the big pot in the kitchen, which the farmer’s wife scraped out for Aquarius, who lapped it up as though he, too, had never tasted anything so good before.
After the Amtmann had finished his business, they drove on, and in the afternoon they arrived at Montabaur. They pulled up in the marketplace in front of yet another timbered house, this time a patrician one. It was the family home of the mayor of Montabaur, Peter Modest Waterloo, who was married to the Amtmann’s sister Helene and whose son was Adolf’s godfather. Whenever Jacob Eisenberth came to Montabaur, he stayed with the Waterloos, and he often took one or two of his sons along, for this was a place where they could meet the family en masse.
“What a lovely surprise!” Aunt Helene said when she took Paula into her arms—Paula, whom she had not seen for almost three years. “What do you say, Modest? A grown young lady!” It was really a surprise, for there had been no way to send a message ahead, but the Waterloos’ guest rooms were always ready. While young Waterloo took his godson Adolf into his bachelor apartment in the same house, the Amtmann and Paula were led to their rooms by Uncle Modest and Aunt Helene. Again Paula felt the warmth of her aunt’s welcome when she walked up the stairs, her arm around her young niece, almost enveloping Paula in the folds of her wide skirt, which made her stately figure even statelier. One of the guest rooms was under the gable. It was light and airy, the high bed covered with snowy linen, and this looked so inviting to Paula that she would have liked to climb right into it. She was still tired from her almost sleepless night.
“Now, freshen up, child, and have a little rest,” said her aunt. “I’ll send the maid around to summon the whole clan for supper. They’ll hardly be able to wait another hour to see you!”
Sure enough, when Paula came down an hour later, the living room was already brimming over with a welcoming crowd, and she found herself surrounded by aunts in black and gray silk, uncles in tail coats, and handsome young cousins, male and female; one of the young families had even brought two small children to greet the visitors from Limburg.
It was difficult to sort out the generations. Paula’s father had four sisters and five brothers, some much older, some younger than himself, so that some of their children were really in the age group of aunts and uncles, like Adolf’s godfather, Adolf Waterloo. Then there were a few of the even older generation; it was a little confusing, and Paula exchanged an amused glance with her brother who was handed around by young Waterloo. They were embraced and patted. Paula kissed a variety of cheeks—smooth young ones, wrinkled and stubby old ones. She had to answer questions about the folks at home, she smiled about family jokes she dimly remembered from childhood, straightened out pillows or shoved footstools under the feet of the elder ladies, and allowed her white dress to be admired and fingered, the same one she had worn for the Carnival ball last winter and for all parties since. By the standards of the remote little hill town of Montabaur, it was in the most modern style, and Paula heard much praise for her skillful mother who had turned her out so prettily.
Over supper, the dignified Uncle Modest, with his handsome white sideburns, made a gracious little speech in honor of the guests, and the Amtmann replied with a toast. Supper was cold because of the short notice but as excellent as one would expect it to be from such a perfect housewife as Aunt Helene. And the wine—well, Montabaur was still near enough to the Rhine and Mosel to have well-equipped wine cellars. The cutlasses rang as they touched. The atmosphere grew even gayer, and once again, as at her homecoming the previous December, Paula felt overwhelmed by the exuberance and high spirits of her family. There was only one short interval of quiet while one of the cousins gave a horn solo and an aunt played the Moonlight Sonata on the pianoforte.
A nursemaid in traditional country dress brought in the two children to say good night: a three-year-old girl and a tiny baby. “May I hold him?” asked Paula, and the young mother, only a few years older than herself, put the warm little bundle of life into her arms. She held it, sniffed the clean, healthy baby smell, felt the flower-petal smoothness of the soft skin, and thought: I want a baby! Oh, how I would like to have such a little treasure of my own! Even that fulfillment was now out of the question forever, alas!
Then there were more questions to be answered, about things at home, about Mama and the aunts and Uncle Emmo and Babett, her brothers and the Prussian occupation, of which they had heard but had seen nothing up here in the Westerwald.
Paula began to feel sleepier and sleepier; she had to make an effort to keep her eyes open. Gradually, the whole room full of friendly relatives began to swim before them.
At last Aunt Helene noticed. “The poor child!” she exclaimed. “In another moment, she’ll fall over with exhaustion. Traveling all day and then the strong mountain air to which she is not accustomed!” And after another round of kisses and embraces, Paula was handed her bedroom candle in the hall and climbed slowly up to her room. The window was wide open, and she could see out across the quiet marketplace, which seemed—in its way—like a continuation of the family gathering. Over there, under the lantern, which was not lit tonight because of the bright moon, stood the Red Ox, the house her great-grandfather had built and in which widowed Uncle Adam now lived. On the corner beside the town hall was the house of Uncle Heinrich, the youngest brother. Because of that, this branch of the family was called the Eisenberths of the Corner. In the neighboring streets, she knew, were the homes of some of the relatives by marriage, the Waldorfs and the Wingens, the Knodts and the Corceliuses.
A fountain murmured drowsily. From an invisible church tower, eleven strokes fell into the peace of the late-summer night. Down below she heard the leave-taking of the guests.
Paula piled the eiderdowns and one of the heavy woolen blankets on the little curved sofa, slipped in between the cool sheets, and slept undisturbed into the bright morning, when the tempting aroma of coffee and fresh rolls wafted up through the house.
That day the Amtmann went for a drive with his brother-in-law to attend to some business matters. The previous evening he had avoided talking about his future plans, but now, alone with Modest, he spoke more freely. “We haven’t decided yet,” he said. “The Prussians have made me a fair enough offer of a government position in Koblenz. There is a good deal to be said in favor of it, and against it, too. True, it would mean greater financial security, and the boys must get an education. But I am no longer young enough to get used to this separation of legal and administrative duties. I’m not cut out for a desk official. I need contact with the people I am supposed to lead. I want to talk to them, to explain to them why I expect this or that of them, not to send them written ordinances that they’ll hardly read anyway. You know that the peasants up here need a lot of personal persuasion not to grow so many potatoes to make schnapps but to think of years when the potato crops are bad and what they’ll feed their livestock with during such a calamity. It’s not too long ago that you had a potato famine up here. What a job it was to knock some sense into these blockheads! Margarete and I think our two older boys have some plans of their own. I don’t want to talk about it all yet. If things work out, we may be able to get along on my pension. And what about you, Modest? I don’t think the Prussians will be in a hurry to change things up here.”
“No,” the mayor said. “I guess they’ll let us go at the old pace at least as long as I am in office. It’s not easy to imagine you as a Prussian official, Jacob.”
“They’ll give me until next spring to decide,” the Amtmann said.
Paula and Adolf had been sent up to the graveyard with a basket of flowers from the garden to pay their respects to the family graves. The first stone they found in the cool, shady cemetery around the old church was that of Johann Emmerich Eisenberth and his wife Christine. He had been called to his rest in 1712. The date of his birth and his wife’s maiden name had been worn away by the years. “They must have seen the Thirty Years’ War!” Adolf said. “Think of it!” There they lay, or what was left of them, surrounded by children and grandchildren and their offspring, a family gathering as impressive as that of the evening before.
The children found the same names on the tombstones as those on the front doors of the town houses. “So many of them!” Paula said to her brother. “Such an awful lot of them!” There was also the grave of their father’s first wife. A bunch of asters was lying on the gray stone; Papa must have been up here early in the morning. Young as they were, they felt the hint of death and transiency, the swift, relentless passage of time. Quickly they put their flowers on the well-cared-for graves under their stern crosses, said a prayer, and hurried out from the shade into the warm sunshine, where Aquarius was waiting for them impatiently.
Adolf went back to fetch his godfather, who had promised to take him fishing. He felt like an important grownup guest in Adolf Waterloo’s bachelor apartment, with its collection of long pipes, the colored caps of his student brotherhood, and the two crossed swords on the wall—altogether a wonderful masculine atmosphere. Paula walked on alone up the wooded slope behind the church to a spot from which she could see far over the austere beauty of the Westerwald landscape to the bare basalt summits in the east. She sat there for a long time among gorse and blooming heather, content to be alone.
After dinner, Aunt Helene took her out into the garden, where a hammock was slung between two gnarled apple trees. “Have a good rest now,” she said. “Young girls need a lot of sleep. It’ll be another late evening.” A lot of sleep, indeed! Paula smiled. Aunt Helene should hear Mama! It was easy to see that this aunt had never raised a girl. But it was nice to be treated with so much tender consideration for once!
That evening the family met in the house On the Corner at the invitation of Uncle Heinrich and Aunt Gertrud. He was the head of the tannery and leather business his father had founded, was quite a wealthy man, and was considered a trifle fast by the ladies of the family and a spendthrift. Well, he seemed to be able to afford his extravagances. His elder brother, the Amtmann, he called jokingly “our poor relation,” since he drove out unpretentiously with only one horse. Heinrich always drove in double harness. “And believe me, he would drive a four-in-hand if he weren’t scared of our wagging tongues!” old Aunt Maria Anna informed Paula. “Can you imagine—he has brought up his children with butter and jam on their bread every day of the week?” No, of course Paula could hardly conceive of such unheard-of extravagance. But later, when Uncle Heinrich made a speech in extempore verse in honor of the ladies, mentioning in particular his young niece, who had blossomed into such a charming young lady, she understood why he was considered the gay spark of the family.
One more night in the room under the gables, lit by the full moon, with the lullaby of the fountain from the marketplace, and then it was time to say good-by. It was Adolf who found the parting hardest after the short spell of bachelor life with his admired godfather. For the first time in his life, he had been invited to smoke a pipe with real tobacco, which didn’t make him feel sick at all like the pipes filled with chestnut leaves that he and his friends smoked in secret on the island to prove their manliness. They had come back from their fishing trip with a big pike and three beautiful trout. The pike had gone to the main kitchen; the trout were prepared by young Waterloo’s housekeeper and served with new potatoes sprinkled with parsley, fresh butter, and a green salad from the garden. As a farewell present and partly as a birthday present, since his thirteenth birthday had been just a couple of days ago on August 25, Adolf received five guilders from his godfather, a staggering sum. He thought he would venture to ask Papa to allow him to keep the money instead of saving it for him. He needed it for all kinds of things—first of all for a present for Toni, secondly for a new collar for Aqua, thirdly for a nice birthday present for Paula in November, and after all that, there had to be enough left over for Christmas presents. Now that he looked after the horse all by himself, his allowance had been raised to a guilder a month. When you came to think of it, he had become a kind of Croesus.
The road along which they drove dipped down into a valley at first, then climbed up to one of the higher ridges from which they had once more a splendid view of the highland country near and far, rolling away under a carpet of purple heather, gorse brush, shaggy woods, and meager pastures. There were no signs of life, no villages, no people, except for a solitary shepherd with his flock on a distant slope. His blue linen smock caught the sunlight as he stood near his long shepherd’s cart, which served him as bed and shelter from early spring until fall and which he pushed along from one pasture to the next. It looked like a coffin on wheels.
“It must be a peaceful life,” Adolf said. “No one ever disturbs you when you’re thinking your own thoughts, and you are always out of doors with your dog and your sheep.”
They had stopped to eat the provisions Aunt Helene had packed for them. They filled their traveling mugs at one of the springs so abundant in these parts. Aqua drank his fill also, and so did Silver, whom Adolf had unharnessed to let him graze on the rough mountain grass.
“Come, let’s be on our way, children,” Papa said after they had sat for a long while, each occupied with his own thoughts. “I still have an hour or two’s business to do in Hadamar.”
The narrow road with its deep, grass-grown ruts ran downhill, frequently twisting and turning. Foxgloves grew at the roadside. Around the tree trunks stood little families of toadstools. The briar bushes were dotted with red hips, and the sloes full of black berries. As they came farther down, they saw a village here and there or a lonely farmstead. Once again they caught sight of a shepherd on a steep meadow, waving to them. When they saw he was hurrying down the slope, they stopped. The man had recognized the Amtmann’s carriage, and he stood and talked for a little while, hungry for company, eagerly asking for news from “down below.” As he stroked Silver’s head, Aquarius came up and sniffed the man’s shoes.
“If I didn’t know that old Kasper’s dog, Bello had drowned in the flood in March ’65, I could have sworn that was him,” he said, knitting on a long woolen stocking. All the shepherds in the Westerwald knitted during the long, lonely summer months.
“Is that so?” said the Amtmann without looking at Adolf. “Where does the man live?”
“High up in the Elbbach Valley. He was a good dog, that Bello was. Let me see your hand, lad. It’s covered with warts.”
Adolf held out his hand, and the man ran his fingers over it. “I’ll take care of them, lad. God bless you all.”
“God bless you, shepherd,” said the Amtmann, and Paula nodded a farewell to the man, who walked back to his dog and his flock. Adolf called Aqua to jump up beside him on the box. The dog had spent almost the whole journey running behind or in front or beside the carriage, sometimes bounding off to scrabble about among the trees or dig up molehills or sniff an alluring scent. Only now was Adolf aware that whenever they had seen a flock of sheep in the distance, Aqua had stood quite still for a few minutes, his head lifted, with quivering nostrils, and had whined softly. The boy remembered what the shepherd had said, and a cold fear crept into his heart.
They drove down to the village of Hadamar in silence. Paula thought of getting back. Would she see him today? Tomorrow she must tell him that everything between him and her had to be over.
An hour later, when the Amtmann had attended to his business with the Hadamar mayor, they made their way home along the Elbbach stream. “You silly little stream!” said Adolf crossly to the harmless brook that hurried down between meadows and wooded slopes. But it was not always harmless. It came from the Westerwald mountains, where there was for months every winter deep snow. There is a story told of these mountains in which a rider loses his way at nightfall one winter evening and, as he cannot find village or hamlet or house, ties his horse to a post, wraps himself in his cloak, and sleeps till dawn in the soft snow. The thaw came that night, and when he woke, he saw his poor horse hanging from the top of a church steeple.
When they arrived home, Ferdinand and Karl were in the yard, waiting impatiently to blurt out their great piece of news. “The lieutenant’s gone! Our lieutenant and Orje and the horses! Transferred to Wiesbaden. He left a letter for you and Mama on your desk, Papa. It told all about it and thanked you for your hospitality.”
