Regina Ullman: The Country Road

It was night now. Night. It no longer gave freely of itself to anyone, nor did it willfully withdraw. Only we ourselves played the part of the righteous there; to our own misfortune, perhaps. I was tired, I didn’t even know how tired. And yet I could not leave this place. As heavy as I felt, I was spellbound, and I had to follow the course of this strange being. A little owl was already hooting. A bird cowered with a fearful cry, as if the predator had already grabbed it by its throat, but perhaps that was only in a dream.

Dream, song, and sound wove themselves together; they followed each other like the fireflies. It was not a proper state of affairs. This singing and flying and dancing was a job for birds, flowers, and butterflies, for fireflies perhaps, but not for people. Least of all for people like this, life was through with them before it even began. . Oh, this creature of the outskirts. Something in me cried out. Perhaps it was my weariness.

The fog was moving in the fields like a herd of distant sheep. The wind drove it onward. One hour gave way to another.

But my neighbor was not at all tired that night. She talked on and on. She recounted the years to me. That is a task of its own that not everyone can do. . How she collected money in the dish, and passed it out again. How each profit was divided into smaller profits. And how each day’s profit became so small that it hardly sufficed for more than half a day. “Often,” she said in such a terrible way, “the day was only half dressed.” Of course by that time singing and dancing were no longer singing and dancing. And the family back home had honest trades, only she was still traveling around in smaller cities and market towns, almost on the street. .

So you could hardly be surprised at the way that she had slowly cut my great marigold into smaller bits. She told me bluntly: she had decided to marry. It had occurred to her all of a sudden. I felt I could see that evening in the little garden, when she made her decision. As if she had brought the garden here to me. A hunchback sat at the table beneath the chestnut trees. He was the one who fancied her. Oh yes, he fancied her. He had eyes. Not eyes for today and tomorrow, many people have those. He had eyes for the duration of things. “Look,” he said to himself, “the dance will soon be over. The song will soon be over. But life lasts longer than a dance or a song. Maybe she can see that. And if she can see that, she will see me, too.”

With that, he stood and left. But whenever there was another performance, he appeared again beneath the trees. And once he even wore a flower in his buttonhole. — (A wind began to blow, as if it were already combing our hair for the morning.)

But she had other things on her mind by then. And anyway, she couldn’t have seen everything that was going on. But again and again, in one way or another, new events cast doubt on her plans for the future. For even if she and her small troupe did not belong to the respectable society of the smaller cities, the people of those cities still came to see them. To see her most of all. She had a special act. She wore a blue velvet dress and tossed out golden stars. They always liked that the best. They clapped so much then. Once they even brought her flowers. That had never happened to her before. There was one man in particular, she described him in detail. A big man with red hair. He had really grown attached to her. He took care of the troupe. The wine always came from him. And he was always sitting in the front. A real man. A proper man, you could see that. She wove him into her thoughts, thoughts she had entertained for some time. He wasn’t one of those unsound types who wants to be paid in advance. He had thoughts of his own. He wanted to marry, too. Her, to be precise. In her mind a proper wedding had already been arranged. The hunchback had been cast out. That is to say, he sat in the shadows. The paper lanterns swung their restless, colorful heads in the storm. And between them the stars, which this aging girl gathered and gathered. It was truly amazing.

The morning of the dance, she was prepared to make it serious, she told me. She was done with this life, this halfway disreputable business. And she didn’t want to marry a hunchback. She wanted to marry someone who was healthy and had strong limbs and a profitable, respectable trade. This was the man she wanted to marry. There was no question anymore. The hunchback was forgotten. Let him play the fiddle at her wedding! He was just a humble music teacher in search of his daily bread, something the other man already had: he was a butcher. That was easy to see, and not just any butcher, but a most able one. His shop was always filled right up to the steps with gossiping girls. And even if no daughter of a respectable house would have taken him (for a butcher is a slaughterer, and a slaughterer’s work is at the outer limit of the honest trades), still he could be a proper husband for her, she who had already played with the stars, and could no longer pass for a respectable child.

And she wanted to have a place within that world. She felt that more and more. Within it, not outside it, where she had cast me in her prophecies.

For my part, I stood there freezing. The night had laid it all down, its fog, its shadows. It was a moonlit day. The moon had become the sun of this night. My hand was silver, resting uncertainly on the window post. I felt my eyes themselves becoming moons. Sleep came.

But as if she wanted to kill me, this woman who stood with her back to all that splendor, she kept talking on and on.

She told me of the night she called her bridal eve. She told me of the dancing. There were even fiddles playing. A very fine fiddle was playing, a homemade, sensible fiddle.

Now the tables had turned: they became the audience for once, and the others were only musicians. Even if there was one among them who was better than the rest.

Oh, and now this desperation should come to an end. She couldn’t take this humble life anymore, this scraping by. This desperation should come to an end. How they could dance.

That was a real bridal eve, that night.

My neighbor looked deeply, searchingly into my eyes. Had I guessed it? Suddenly she wanted to spare herself the words. I didn’t know why. I had fallen asleep standing up, like an animal. I had been absent. Only for a moment, of course. Moments of sleep at night are like the distance from star to star. On unsteady legs (for her words had taken the floor out from under me, down to the last little speck), on unsteady legs I saw her standing before me, the woman with her hairstyle, her little jacket, her shoes, just as I had imprinted her on my mind. I felt that I was swaying back and forth, but she was immovable.

Yet it amazed me that she was still there. Hadn’t thousands of years gone by?

The clement night held mignonettes and gillyflowers before my face. . I breathed. Deeply.

Meanwhile the people danced on in some garden. I saw them making their noise and turning in circles, my neighbor hardly needed to say more. For her eye was still on that one word that she didn’t want to say. She was positively waiting until the dance and drunkenness had reached an unnatural pitch. Until the word sprang from her lips of its own accord, from those lips that now seemed so sober. .

In the end, it was a woman from her own troupe who said it first, this word. And she could see at once that it was true, she could tell from the way that the dance stood still, that her own partner suddenly went limp. “Hangman,” someone from her troupe had said.

And then, as if no one had understood yet, the guest continued:

“Yes, hangman. Before you were a butcher, you were a hangman. That’s why no respectable girl will have you. That’s why you have to marry someone from our troupe. Yes, you were a hangman, hangman, hangman.”