Cihlar & Egeler - The Saint and her Fool

„I am only talking about women, you know.”

„Stop that,” he replies almost harshly, „and tell me how you were able to disappear. I do hope Miss Braun did not take you along to Karl.”

Now he does seem to have taken offence because he surely does not have a velvet sofa.

„No,” she continues, rather intimidated. „Babett was supposed to play with me but then her mother came to visit her. She lives far away and her mother began to cry and spoke of so many things; a cow and a Jew were part of the story. They spoke so fast and strangely that I really did not understand very much. Miss Braun has forbidden me to learn the dialect. She says it is common and vulgar.”

He mumbles something under his breath – it sounds like ‘arrogant womenfolk’.

„Go on then!”

„Then Babett went to get something for her mother, something out of a book for which you can get money and her mother was very happy and she left so quickly that she forgot her shawl. This was when I could not resist and I wrapped myself in it, just like the laundry workers do when it starts to rain. I had only pulled on one boot when I became frightened and ran down the servant’s stairs. I did not meet anyone. Then I went through the park where a gardener called ‘Who is there!’ after me and then I reached the moat. But the bridge wasn’t down so I walked over the ice.”

„You walked over the icy water of the castle moat?!”

„It was lovely. I could see the water below the ice and it gurgled as if someone was laughing down there and a fish swam by and there was a big hole and I walked around it …”

Now he knows why no one has come looking for her here. The water in the moat is only slightly frozen over and in places there are underground springs where the water never freezes, not even in the coldest winter. He would like to believe that a guardian angel had watched over the child as she went across this path of utmost danger. He can also visualise the river between his forest and the meadow’s edge; and a deceptive surface of ice and all the men out there with their torches and long sticks searching for a little body that is almost frozen stiff. The Duke is due to arrive tonight on the 8 o’clock train. And they will have to receive him with this terrible news. This man who has already lost so much, what more must he be made to suffer on this dreadful Christmas Eve?

He walks along as quickly as he can, but on a foggy night like this it will take another hour for him to reach his ruins and only from there can he send word. This frail child needs shelter as soon as possible. The Duke of Brauneck would surely rather claim his child at the ruins of an Earl than from the house of a peasant. The Pastor of the village is unmarried, and quite odd and uneasy with people and he is surely going over his sermon for Midnight Mass. He would not know how to deal with an unexpected guest invading his privacy.

The fog seems impenetrable and had he not known every step along the way, it would have been impossible to find his way back. He accuses himself bitterly for not having rushed home immediately.

She wants to know so much about him, so much. With the pure instinct of a child she feels that she has found a friend.

„Why do you live in the ruins and why are you so poor? Did you come into the forest for the same reason as I did, to look for the Christkind ?”.

As they walk along, he finds himself answering her questions, telling her his thoughts. Hesitantly, at first, for he is not used to articulating his feelings; then as he goes on, he seems to be speaking to himself as lonely people do when they open their hearts. He speaks of that fateful night when a terrible fire destroyed the castle that his father had leased to an aristocratic huntsman, for his father and this huntsman had both been officers in the same regiment. And of how his father had been full of self-reproach and had never been able to get over having rented out the castle in order to finance his son’s service career in Berlin. They had not had the heart to return to the ruins which had been their family home for generations. When his father died, he felt isolated in those northern regions of his homeland where the sky always seemed to hang so low and dark that even the walnuts there seemed like tropical fruit. This darkness began to settle in his heart and soul.

Then he speaks on of how he began to paint, first painting the grey cloudscapes above the northern plateaus and then, by memory, the castle of his ancestors, his dear father’s loss. And of how, more and more, everything in his life was turning into bitter misery and exile; how he sought consolation in his canvas and his colours in an attempt to suppress his yearning for his southern woodlands. It was the kind of homesickness that spins fine, grey threads around your heart and squeezes your soul in woe, a feeling that only those who have experienced can understand, a longing that cries out for familiar surroundings and an unbearable sense of being crushed by foreign walls, those walls that separate one from beloved memories: the bittersweet scent of sloe in the fields on the first hot day in April, and the castle well that once murmured, accompanied by birdsong and the harmonica played by the stableman on a Sunday. A singing well like this did not exist in his world anymore, only in the memories of his heart.

He remembers how the sunset would illuminate the ancient walls, turning the windows into golden eyes that peered out into the woodland. This picture of sound, colour and smell was so much more present to him than the walls of the barracks with their grey surroundings and stormy clouds, or than the lifeless sun that turned endless, cold days into nothing but bare lines of ruthlessness. His suffering made him numb to life around him, revealing a bitter inner truth that drove him to the point of bringing it all to an end. No, he does not tell the child that he had held the pistol in his hand and that only the swift intervention of a loyal orderly had prevented the fatal act.

Now he speaks of how he resigned from the military and attended the Academy of Arts in Berlin. He really couldn’t say what he had lived off. He had had a small sum of money from the Duke, to whom he had given his father’s hunting grounds, as well as some occasional earnings (had his father known!) from painting wallpaper. And he recalls how he had had to accept the disgrace of falling below his social class, enduring the mockery of his fellow students, long-haired artists who gave him titles such as ‘Mister Earl’ or ‘Lieutenant off Duty’. They had continued to ridicule him until he grabbed one of them, the most impertinent of the lot, and held him out of the window into the rain in his outstretched arms until the man winced and whined. He had lived in cheap and remote quarters, isolated by a tremendous loneliness, the kind that seems all the greater in a vast city amongst millions of inhabitants.

All this time he has forgotten that he has a listener. He assumes the child has fallen asleep for she does not move anymore. But he is mistaken. She is wide awake and has been absorbing every word, collecting it all in her fine heart, where it will be well kept. And when the right moment comes, it will then ascend from the heart, surely to the amazement of the listener. Her beautiful mind has been creating pictures to match the words, worlds apart from reality yet with the inner truth of life as it is.

Art being a stern mistress, only seldom is he content with his work. Then one hot evening, he remembers, the sticky air was filled with the stench of city courtyards. He was listening to the sounds of women bickering noisily, of drunken men chanting, of a child crying pitifully when he suddenly realised that he could not go on this way. It struck him with utter force: Oh, to smell, just once more, the scent of hay carried up on the evening breeze to the mountain-top castle from the valley below! Am I still alive? Is this still the human condition or is it the cage of hell in which we all live chained together?