Regina Ullman: The Country Road

It is a tempo that sweeps us blissfully along, usually in love. In love with a person, or with money, or with work. Of course it can be hate, too, malice. That doesn’t matter. It can also be stupidity and thoughtlessness, that too is a sort of rapture. Regardless, it is something that has taken hold of us, something we have taken hold of, visibly and invisibly.

And so it is no surprise that one of the men sitting there in the darkening room suddenly found himself lost in thought. At first, he started puzzling it out.

“That couldn’t be,” he said to himself. For marriage was a lifelong endeavor. You loved someone you thought was properly suited for your entire life. Someone who would still blow out the lamp when she was old and deaf and everyone else had gone to sleep in the dark. You loved with the seriousness proper to certain questions in life: whether to buy another piece of land, whether the house really needed a new roof, or if it could be patched for another year. The same seriousness applied to deciding what was needed inside the house. But the fear there is greater, since people are subject to change. And before you know it, you’re a different person, too. You’re not in the same place as before.

This last thought troubled the farmhand the most. It troubled him because his love was so different than he had reckoned.

This love had been there for a long time. But he had never realized it. It was the old horsekeeper who had first brought her into his house. Right into the house where he lived: you could hardly hope for anything better. But it soon became clear that this was a love of a different kind.

For the child that the old man had simply set down in his house was feeble-minded. The basket was leaning against the wall; to him, the little boy, it seemed like a house in its own right. And the two-year-old creature sat on a stool, her little head leaned on a chair that someone had placed there: free of sadness, of pain, of joy and devotion. She was so lovely, sitting there in her soulless splendor, that at first no one asked anything else of her.

But that was just the danger. That allowed her to find room in human hearts, where she would not have found any otherwise. And the boy made sure that nourishment was not lacking there. Because first of all she was wordless like everyone else in the house, and then the little creature was also truly beautiful. And that was something new.

At first that seemed to be enough. After the horsekeeper had fed her some porridge, he set her back in her basket. She crouched there again with no sign of impatience while the old man repacked his pipe; she was neither person nor thing.

Back then the bullfinch was still alive, too, that nimble and joyful bird (it’s said that such a bird can die of joy), and the boy would really have liked to know if the little girl hadn’t heard it. But already the old man was standing at the door and banging and wheezing, with that beautiful nothing, with his stick resting jauntily on his shoulder. And they were alone again, and life wasn’t made for thinking too much about that sort of thing.

That was years ago. It had happened several times since. At first the child had grown very slowly. Four years were like two. But then, when he saw her again much later, observing her now with a curiosity he concealed (though in fact he’d run after her as she went home from the horse pastures with the old man), she seemed to have grown into a wonderful flower of paradise: like a life-sized gentian. (It’s a mysterious thing about the human body: the sleep of the soul sometimes does it such good. Once I saw a young man, a twenty-four-year-old, who suffered from the falling sickness; he was endowed with a holy purity worthy of the body of Christ. But when he slept he looked like the god of love. And his four and twenty years appeared no more than eighteen, untouched and innocent as they had been.) It was the child, a young woman now, who brought this wondrous boy to mind. I could imagine her becoming his Psyche. She was barely seventeen, perhaps even younger. Her body was white as snow from always sleeping in the shade. And her head, with a pile of hair pinned together on top, was motionless, almost aloof.

To be sure, it was soon clear that she didn’t actually look at anyone, she didn’t even look at the animals as they passed by with their billowing manes. And she could not have missed them, if she’d had a soul at all. But the animals knew her and loved her. First one, then another enjoyed the company of this senseless, idle nothingness. When the child drank from the artesian well, animals liked to come too, to quench their thirst alongside her. And often the girl lay between two horses as they joyfully rolled in the flowers. Other times one of them would come from behind and press its head against her back, as if it to push her up the mountain, and yet another time one of them thoughtfully touched its mouth to the girl’s head as she sat with her hair undone, staring blankly forward.

And so it was no surprise that someone should not only find her lovely, but actually love her. For even if something warned against it, as if it were a deadly sin to love a soulless creature, even if instinct bore out these whispers of conscience: still the same girl was there as before. She was the child of a wealthy farmer, which only added to the reverence with which she was regarded. For her that meant that she was not pressed into service, not forced to acquire a consciousness she didn’t have: that consciousness that so terribly transforms young beasts of burden, and makes them into something quite unlike animals — into something truly low. Quite the contrary. Indeed, in a less apparent sense she was more than just a person. Her undisturbed, beautiful way of life lent to her movements a degree of perfection that we may never have seen before in this natural form. In the city, her affliction might have been accounted a mental illness. But here in the country she was feeble-minded, simply feeble-minded. And whatever she did, in its momentary infinity it became a landscape, always newly created. The farmhand, in any case, was thinking of her. And that was all he needed to do, for days on end. That was enough for him.

That autumn he would not have gone to any of the church festivals, even with the most beautiful living girl around, simply out of sorrow for this one dead girl. For even if she was still living, breathing, he told himself that she was dead, was damned. And yet she was not damned in the truest sense. It was simply that her soul had remained in a vegetative state. Though she drank from the well, she did not feed herself. As the flowers are fed by heaven, so she too required feeding, by a human hand. Otherwise she would have grazed from her plate, just as she drank from the trough. But as it was, she sat at the feet of the old horsekeeper. And the old man, with a sort of reverence, would dip the spoon into the copper pan as it sat on the stove — country habits still held sway around the horse pasture — and place it in the child’s mouth. Sometimes he stroked the girl’s hair, or held her two limp hands in his hairy, scarred, old-man’s hand.

At such times he was especially aware of how much she needed his protection. More than the horses, which often fought to the death in the moonlit field. It kept him up at night, so to speak. And so, too, he had to make do with two of the farmer’s younger children in place of the farmhands he might otherwise have had, and he accomplished his great task alone, with their meager assistance.

He had already felled many trees with his own hands, and dragged them to the drinking trough to channel water, and at times he nearly disappeared beneath a load of hay as he carried it uphill, wheezing, as if he himself were a mountain of grass. Although he was small by nature, he acquired a certain stature from the duties he had taken on. The little man would have hanged himself at once if the girl had suffered any harm. I don’t mean to say that her death was out of the question. All men must die, the horsekeeper told himself, and this creature could only rest comfortably in God’s hands. But an inner fear seized him at times when he thought that he might die before the child. And so he climbed higher and higher into his old age, and perhaps he was already as old as the woman in the tavern below, in the lonely valley, perhaps she too only postponed death because she knew no one who could do her job.