Under a Changing Moon, page 26
At suppertime, the long table looked empty without the other boys. “Good evening, everyone,” said Adolf and found that today his napkin ring was at the place next to his father. It was a rare honor, reserved for birthdays or when you brought home a particularly good school report.
Mama nodded to him. “It’s good to have you home again, Adolf dear.”
And once Papa leaned over toward him and asked softly, “Everything all right?”
“Yes, Papa,” he said, and then as he glanced quickly around the table, he asked, “Where’s Aunt Rikchen?”
“She took over from Paula and is sitting with Babett,” said Mama. “It’s lucky the little ones are out of the house. We have to be quiet. Babett has had a heart attack.”
A heart attack! Adolf knew that was something serious. A schoolfriend’s father had died from a heart attack last year. He hoped Babett would not die. She had been looking forward to her ninetieth birthday for a long time, and the boys had thought out all sorts of surprises for her, beginning in the morning with a serenade of songs and music on their recorders. Everyone in the house had planned something to make the day happy for her. Adolf himself had written a poem to celebrate the momentous occasion. Paula, to whom he had read it, had pronounced it a beauty, very moving and here and there a little funny, too, for that was an essential part of a birthday poem. He didn’t of course consider for a moment reciting it himself: he would have died of embarrassment. Georg and Ferdinand were the actors in the family, and Adolf had offered it to Georg first as the elder, since he thought it an honor to read his poem. But Georg had not accepted; he said he had enough to learn by heart for school. Just like old Georg! Ferdinand, on the other hand, was all for it. There wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house when he recited the seven verses; whatever else you might say about him, Ferdinand certainly had feeling, and moreover he was always willing to do anyone a favor if it didn’t actually run counter to his own plans.
“Yesterday evening, when I said good night to her, Babett was quite cheerful,” said the Amtmann. “She said she didn’t want to go into the almshouse after all; she had lived all her life with the family, and she wanted to die with us when the time came. The curate described the old people’s home in glowing terms to her, but all those old women, that wasn’t her cup of tea at all, she said. If we were moving to Wiesbaden, then she would move with us.”
“To Wiesbaden?” asked Adolf.
“Yes. Of course, you weren’t there when we talked about it with Paula and the boys yesterday evening. August and Georg told Mama and me that they would like to enter the cadet corps next Easter, if we have nothing against it. They discussed it all with Lieutenant von Quitzow once again when they met at the Crown in Assmannshausen, and he’s going to put in a good word for them with his uncle, who’s going to be the commandant at Oranienstein. Well, we won’t stand in their way—and we told them and the little ones that next year, as soon as the roads are clear of snow, we’ll be moving to Wiesbaden.”
“But what about Silver? Where shall we keep him in Wiesbaden?”
“I shan’t need a horse in town. There won’t be any more official trips around the countryside for me,” said Papa. “If I have to make a journey on business for Frau von Savigny, she will provide a carriage and horses for me, and besides I can always make use of the mail coach or the railway.”
Oh, Silver! Silver! Adolf could think of nothing else.
“I’ll relieve Aunt Rikchen now with Babett,” he heard Mama saying. “If you want, you can go to the Rosary this evening, Paula. Take Adolf with you if he’s not too tired.”
“I’ve something more to see to in the office; then I’ll join you, Margarete,” said Papa. “We can sit with Babett together and wait for the doctor to come—he’s promised to look in once again before nightfall. Adolf, we are all proud of you today. Now don’t look like a dying duck in a thunderstorm just because we’re going to Wiesbaden. It’s a beautiful and interesting town. Just think of all there is, theaters and opera and lectures. The Taunus Mountains will be on our doorstep, and we’ll be able to go for splendid hikes and rambles. And Franziska will be so near us that you can easily visit her on a Sunday. Mama and I are looking forward to seeing more of her and her family. And besides that, we intend to see Mozart’s Don Juan and The Magic Flute at least once every winter.”
If I have to give up Silver, too, thought Adolf, I don’t care about all that! But then, as though his own grief had made him perceptive, he suddenly had a flash of insight. Perhaps the truth was that Papa had to comfort himself and Mama with The Magic Flute and all the other things they could enjoy in the town. Wasn’t he just as fond of his career as Adolf was of Aqua and Silver? Weren’t he and Mama just as sad at heart when they thought of having to part with their sons and with all their friends in Limburg? And what would Mama do without her big garden?
“Yes, Papa,” he answered. “I guess it’s quite possible to live in Wiesbaden, too, if we must.”
Later as he walked up to the cathedral with Paula, she put her arm through his. “Was it very bad?” she asked.
“Oh, all right,” said Adolf. “Just think, Aquarius went through water when he heard the man’s voice. . . . Then I really knew that the time had come.”
“Yes. But now it’s a good thing that Aquarius is with his old master after all, isn’t it? He’d never have managed to become a town dog—he’s been used to the freedom of the country all his life.”
“I know, I know,” said Adolf.
“You’ll like it in Wiesbaden once you get used to it. And won’t it be nice to see a lot of the Ippel girls, whom we all liked so much when they were here in the summer.”
Adolf’s face cheered up a little at this. “We’re engaged to be married,” he said. “Don’t tell anybody.”
“Engaged?”
“Yes. Toni and I.”
“Congratulations,” said Paula. “I couldn’t wish for a nicer sister-in-law.”
“I gave her a little garnet heart for her birthday. Isidor bought it for me at the Frankfurt Fair, then he delivered it to her for me, and I’m sure he’ll bring me a letter from her when he comes before Christmas. He got me something for your birthday, too, Paula, but I won’t tell you what it is.”
“I can hardly wait to see,” she said, and he nodded happily.
In the cathedral, the Lady altar was radiant with candles, and the statue of the Mother of God stood above a cloud of autumn flowers: asters, dahlias, and sunflowers, and bouquets of bright fall foliage with red and blue berries, silver thistles, and delicate wild grasses.
“October has always been one of my favorite months,” Paula whispered to Adolf as they went up the side aisle together. “It’s such a lovely thought that the Queen of the Rosary is honored everywhere. So you mustn’t be so sad if we leave here. In Wiesbaden we can go to October Rosary devotions and on Holy Saturday to the Easter Vigil and at Christmas to Midnight Mass, just as we can here in Limburg or anywhere in the world.”
The voice of the priest leading the recitation of the Rosary resounded in the vaulted roof, and the response of the small congregation was like the murmur of an underground river. After the Rosary, the organist played one of the beautiful hymns to Mary, the Ave Maristella. Adolf heard his sister’s voice next to him as clear as a blackbird’s song, and he joined in the singing even though his throat was still raw with grief and soreness. Then the mysterious invocations of the Litany to the Blessed Virgin rolled out, which always conjured up strange pictures in his mind’s eye: “Tower of David! Tower of ivory! House of gold! Morning Star! Comforter of the afflicted!” “Pray for us!” answered the congregation and “Pray for us!” Adolf begged, too. His grief was still overwhelmingly big and dark. Aquarius! he thought; Silver! August! Nothing, nothing would ever be the same again, nothing as it used to be. Aqua had left him for an older loyalty. He was a clever dog; he must have known that he would never again have such a good life as he had with Adolf. No nice soft bed that he shared with his master on cold winter nights, but instead hard service and short rations and constant bother with the silly lambs that were always getting lost. But he had chosen what he had to choose. And he, Adolf, had done what he had to do without anyone’s forcing him to it.
Strange, he thought, that with so much sorrow, one still remained the same person as before; it didn’t make one rot inside; one didn’t get disfigured by sorrow as by a wound. It almost seemed as though something had been added to his own essence and not taken away, as though he had found something and not just lost on his agonizing journey. Not the Holy Grail, like Parsifal, to be sure . . . then what? Himself perhaps? The self that would later grow into a man? He couldn’t have expressed it in words. It was only a dim foreshadowing of what he might perhaps be able to understand much later—just as he could only guess at what his sister meant when she said that always and everywhere, even in the strangest places, there was an unchangeable constancy ever ready to comfort you if only you were willing to let yourself be comforted.
“But you, Paula,” he said on their way home. “You will stay with us, won’t you? You’re not going to the convent to be a nun?”
She shook her head. “Don’t worry, Adolf. I’m going to stay with you. If Papa’ll let me go to the Ursuline college in Wiesbaden and become a teacher, I’ll always be able to live with Mama and Papa and look after them later on when they’re quite old.”
That night Adolf slept for the first time alone in the boys’ room, without any of the others and without Aqua. He woke once or twice and felt involuntarily for the dog or listened for his brothers’ breathing. There was a lot of stirring in the house of which he was aware even in his sleep. Suddenly Paula was standing by his bed, and at once he was wide awake, even before she shook him, although he usually slept heavily. “Wake up, Adolf. Babett’s worse. The doctor has been, and Holwein’s gone off to fetch Father Knodt. We must all be with her.”
He dressed quickly and went downstairs with his sister. Babett, he thought. Babett who had been with them as long as he could think! It wasn’t possible that Babett would die?
The entire household had gathered in Babett’s room. She had already received Holy Communion; now she lay there, her face a waxlike yellow against the white pillows, but her bright bird’s eyes still watched everything that was going on. She even acknowledged Paula’s and Adolf’s presence with a quick glance. Then she turned her attention to the hands of the young priest as he anointed her with the oil of Extreme Unction, the last sacrament. She watched him with an alert attentiveness, for now it was important that everything was done properly to prepare her for her last hard journey.
On the little table beside her bed, covered with a white cloth, two candles were burning. The Amtmann himself put the crucifix into the hands of his old friend, and as she took it, she kept hold of his hand also.
When the curate said the prayers for the dying, they all knelt and made the responses.
The breathing of the dying woman was now so heavy that it filled the room. The sunken chest rose and fell, as though every little breath of air demanded a painful effort from her tired heart. Adolf could not take his eyes off this struggle: he watched with burning curiosity. He had never seen anyone die; death was as yet not the reality for him that is at the end of every life. He was frightened. He felt his own skin going cold, his young healthy limbs getting stiff, his breathing becoming heavy. Sweat was breaking out on his forehead, and when he suddenly felt Paula’s hand clasping his fingers, it seemed to him that this hand was the only thing that still linked him to life.
Babett’s face strained with the effort of a last urgent contemplation. Her whole life she had been a faithful steward of all the things entrusted to her. Now she trusted that her credit of intercessions would be rewarded. Prayers had to be repaid by prayers; that was only fair. She sought the eyes of the Amtmann, who had been the very personification of justice for her on this earth, and as though he had followed her train of thought, he nodded his assurance. Between his hands he was now holding hers, and that also was in order and as she had always wanted it to be at the end. Her gaze wandered once more over his face, then to the pictures of the dead on the walls, and finally to the young priest, who had done everything there was to be done. Then her features relaxed and smoothed out. The tough old heart stopped fighting; it yielded and consented. A last quivering sigh came from her tortured breast, and the bluish eyelids closed of their own accord.
The curate said the final prayers, made the sign of the cross over the dead woman, shook hands with everyone in the room, and went out.
Uncle Emmo escorted the quietly weeping aunts to their room. The Amtmann put his arm around his wife, who looked near to collapse with tiredness. “Go to bed now, dearest,” he said. “And you, too, children, off to bed. I will stay.”
Kettchen and little Anna were wailing loudly, for loud lament was proper at a death. So in primitive times women had wailed over their dead. Kettchen opened the window to allow the soul free passage and veiled the little mirror with a cloth. The Amtmann did not interfere. Age-old customs must be fulfilled; the simple folks’ sense of propriety insisted on it. As soon as he was alone, he would close the window again.
Two o’clock was chiming from the church tower as Paula and Adolf made their way upstairs again. Paula held her brother’s hand as she had often done when he was a small boy and would not admit to being frightened in the dark.
“I’ll sleep in your room tonight, in August’s bed,” she said. “Then you won’t feel lonesome.”
Winter
ON ALL SOULS’ Day Paula’s half sister, Franziska, came over from Schwalbach and drove out alone with her father to Montabaur to visit her mother’s grave as they did every year.
November, the last month of the Church year, belongs to the dead. In the twilight of the short winter days, candles burned in little blue glasses on the graves after the lovingly tended flowers of summer had faded and been cleared away. On All Souls’ Day, even on the oldest graves, where the writing could no longer be deciphered under the heavy coat of ivy, there would be twigs of evergreen and a candle burning, lit by someone for the dead whom no living person mourned any longer, a symbol of the love that forgets no one.
This year Franziska had taken leave of her family for a whole week, since after the visit to Montabaur, she wanted to have a Mass said for Babett on the fourth, which was her birthday, and put a wreath on her grave.
For Paula’s eighteenth birthday on the seventh, a small party had been planned but now that Babett had died, six weeks of mourning had to be observed for the household’s oldest member. Paula was quite content to cancel the party, for with all the preparations that would have been necessary, she would have had far too little time left to spend with her sister. Naturally her parents and the aunts wanted to enjoy the visitor, too, and the boys demanded their rights when they came home from school in the afternoon.
Paula left it to her sister to keep the aunts company at tea every day while she was there; they had brought her up from the very first when she was a tiny baby and loved her like a daughter, although according to their age, she could have been their granddaughter. This meant that Paula had more time for taking tea with Uncle Emmo and with Konrad Overberg, who was there almost every day now. It had been decided that shortly after the New Year Uncle Emmo would move to Bad Ems and take up his position as librarian of the Overberg collection. From time to time, he drove over to make the necessary arrangements. It had been agreed that there, as in the courthouse, two rooms would be at his disposal for his own books, and his clients could visit him as they had done in Limburg. When his trips to Ems fell on a Saturday, Adolf was invited, too, and in good weather would enjoy a ride with Konrad Overberg or would sit in the stable with Suleika as long as he wanted, gazing his fill on the newborn foal.
Franziska had been installed in the upstairs guest room. The chimney of the kitchen stove ran up behind one wall of the room, so that it was always comfortably warm, however violently the autumn storms blew across the valley. The two sisters sat there every evening far into the night and talked about all sorts of things that were not suitable for discussion in the wider circle of the family.
“So you thought of the convent, did you, little sister,” said Franziska when Paula had told her of the difficulties of her first months at home. “It was a bit different in my case, but it comes to the same thing. I still thank the Lord even now that my dear Karl appeared on the scene before I had a chance to marry someone just in order to escape Mama’s severe discipline. She’s a magnificent woman, even if not an easy task mistress. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how much reason I have to be grateful to her for teaching me the essentials of housekeeping, even if it did cost me many tears.”
“So you, too, shed tears occasionally under Mama’s stern rule?”
“Of course! Do you suppose she would have been more lenient with me than with her own daughter? But just you wait and see, one day you, too, will remember her with gratitude when you have to cope with your own house and children.”
“That will never happen, dear Franziska, since I don’t intend to get married.”
“Really? Well, now that you’ve put the idea of the convent out of your head, which seems fortunate both for you and the convent, nothing stands in the way of a sensible marriage.”
“A sensible marriage! Aunt Rikchen has told me several times already that they’re often the happiest. They may be for someone who has never experienced love. If you have, it’s enough for a lifetime, Franziska, even if you pay dearly for it. For me, it was hopeless right from the beginning. Just think how shocked Mama and Papa would have been if a Protestant and a Prussian officer to boot had asked for my hand.”
Franziska didn’t seem to be as astonished at this sudden confession as Paula would have expected. From Aunt Rikchen’s letters during the summer, she had learned of a certain anxiety in the family. “This Prussian lieutenant,” her aunt had written, “is making me worried. Fair as the young Alcibiades, Emmo calls him (whoever that might be). Anyway, he’s attractive—on that point even two old women like Stina and myself are agreed. We thank God that he disappeared before anything serious could develop. A Protestant! We’ve never yet had a mixed marriage in our family.”
