Sasa Stanisic - Before the Feast

Anyway.

The thunder’s coming closer. Goosebumps. Hardly a light on anywhere. In the parsonage, where Hirtentäschel is busy not smoking pot. The roads are empty except for the lady who paints. Going down to the lake. Ma once said she’s definitely all right, but something about her is definitely all wrong too.

Johann sets off to collect the bell-ringer. Since the beginning of human history every single one of his ancestors has survived, every single person on his mum and dad’s side has successfully passed on life, and now it’s autumn and when Johann next rings the bells he will firmly believe that they, his ancestors, can hear his bell-ringing.

WE HAVE THREE CHURCH BELLS. THE TWO SMALLER ones are twins: Bonifatius and Bruno. Johann calls them “the Bees.” They’re still young, two slender, playful lads, ringing with a bright sound, in C sharp and E sharp. They were cast in 1926 as replacements for two bronze bells that had been called up to go to war ten years earlier.

LET HEATHENS ALL WITH FURIOUS IRE

ATTACK ME HERE WITH SWORD AND FLAME

says the inscription on the metal casing of Bonifatius,

I’LL RING THEM DOWN INTO HELLFIRE

AS I CAN WELL DO IN GOD’S NAME

says the wording on Bruno’s casing.

Our main bell doesn’t have a Christian name. The bell-ringer just calls her “the Old Lady.” A massive, almost black chunk of metal, with a mighty clapper, year of casting unknown.

The twins sound good with each other. The Old Lady gets on best with silence. You can tell that from looking at her, the way she broods in the eternal twilight of the belfry, the lazy way she begins to swing, the dry, lingering resonance of her note. We guess that she could sound louder, deeper, somehow more , but she doesn’t have the right audience for that. Or a good reason. Or the strength.

She has no ornamentation, she doesn’t tell us the name of the man who cast her or the donor who gave her to us, as bells sometimes used to do. Only an inconspicuous inscription inside her rim tells us:

BE PATIENT IN TIME OF TROUBLE

The bell-ringer and Johann don’t often persuade all three to ring together with a sound like cymbals. The bell-ringer rings the Old Lady, his apprentice rings Bonifatius. If the Old Lady happens to forget herself, all Fürstenfelde down below pricks up its ears. People can hear: there’s something up.

Frau Schwermuth tells two stories about the Old Lady. In the first, the black bell is ringing in the middle of the night. This is sometime in the sixteenth century, and as the bell won’t stop, more and more people assemble in the church. But there’s no bell-ringer there, no one is pulling the bell ropes. The people are feeling afraid of this bell with a mind of its own, when a storm suddenly sweeps over the village, destroying houses, burying men, women and children under trees, injuring dozens. Those who made their way to the church, however, are unhurt.

The second story runs like this: in 1749 the black bell rings again in the middle of the night, and as it won’t stop, more and more people assemble in the church, once again there’s no one pulling the bell ropes, etc. Then the rural district shepherd tells those present the first story — about the black bell calling the people to take refuge from the storm in the house of God. All of a sudden screams are heard outside; the village is burning! Several people hurry out to rescue those who didn’t leave home, most of them stay in the nave of the church, thinking themselves safe from the sea of flames. The fire burns everything down. Many, many people die, including those who stayed in the church. The black bell is left enthroned on the rubble, looking even darker than before.

We like the idea of a shepherd appointed by the rural district council.

We trust the old stories, and we believe in the value of copper.

WE’RE NOT WORRIED. ELECTRIC FLASHLIGHT, RAIN cape, gumboots and her umbrella: Frau Kranz is well equipped. In her little leather case, cracked, on its beam ends, a thousand and one expeditions old, are her watercolor paints, brushes, the old china saucer for mixing paints and some loo paper. For provisions: a cigar, a thermos flask of rum with some fennel tea in it, a sandwich. She carries her easel over her shoulders — Lada has built a little light into it specially for tonight. She has all you could need when you set out to paint on a night when it looks like rain.

“Does rum in fennel tea taste nice?” That’s the journalist. He’s been visiting Frau Kranz this week to write a column about her ninetieth birthday, for the weekend supplement, under the heading “We People of the Uckermark — the Nordkurier Introduces Us,” and he’s been firing off all sorts of other exciting questions, one H-bomb after another: homeland, hobbies, Hitler, hopes, Hartz IV social welfare benefits, in no specific order. “Yes, I’m afraid I really must have a photo, that’s non-negotiable; right, not in front of a tree, no, it wouldn’t be so good taken from behind; yes, I’d love some juice.”

Frau Kranz is hanging out laundry in the garden. The journalist sniffs at a sheet.

“Let’s begin at the beginning. Your homeland and how you left it.”

“Good God.”

“I’d be interested to know how you felt, young as you were then, going here and there all over Europe in the confusion of wartime.”

Frau Kranz smokes a cigar, drinks rum tea with some fennel in it, has a little fit of coughing and takes the journalist round her house. Canvases all over the place. Fürstenfelde everywhere. Small pictures, large pictures, serious, gray, brown, empty, post-war, festive, collective, rebuilding, new buildings, in the past, back at a certain time, a few years ago, today, at every season of the year. Since 1945 Frau Kranz has been painting exclusively Fürstenfelde and its surroundings.

“ Paysage intime ,” the journalist remembers. He spent a year studying the history of art in Greifswald, before he abandoned the course for being “too theoretical.” He sips his elderberry juice and makes a face. “Wow. Is it homemade?”

“It’s elderberry juice.”

“So you are originally a Danube Swabian.”

“I know.”

“Or to be precise, a Yugoslavian German.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Can we talk a little about that?”

“About the accident of birth?”

“We could talk about the Banat area. I’ve seen photos of it. Flat, rural, like the Uckermark. Did the similarity of the landscape help you to get used to living here?”

“No.” Frau Kranz makes very sweet elderberry juice.

“Right, and thinking back now do you sometimes feel homesick?”

Without a word, Frau Kranz leads the journalist into her bedroom, where a huge painting of nothing but rapeseed in flower shines all over one of the walls. The journalist, forgetting his question and also forgetting himself, delivers his verdict: “Like yellow rubber gloves for cleaning the loo, only prettier, of course.”

At last something on which he and Frau Kranz can agree. She pours him more elderberry juice; he puts his hand over his glass just too late.

We’re worried now. Frau Kranz walks down to the lake with a firm tread. We’re not happy about the evening dress she is wearing under her cape tonight. It doesn’t suit the night, it doesn’t suit her work, although it suits Frau Kranz herself very well indeed.

Last time she wore that dress was in 1977 in Schwerin, when she was given a certificate for artistic services to the Schwerin area in the category of painting, sub-category “The land and its people.” Frau Kranz went up on the platform, but she didn’t make a speech, she sang a song in bad Croatian. It was called “ Polijma i traktorima ” (In praise of fields and tractors), and one thing soon became clear: Frau Kranz does not sing well, but she does sing at the top of her voice, and what with that and the loudspeakers being turned up, and what with her ignoring the planned program of events, and a few men made more and more aggressive by the crude Croatian language and wanting to escort Frau Kranz off the stage after seven or eight verses when it looked as if the song was going on for ever, but some other men didn’t like their attitude and tried to protect Frau Kranz — well, what with all of that, there was a scuffle as background to the music that sounded like the roar of a rutting stag, and thinking it all over you can hardly imagine what a crazily wonderful evening that was for Frau Kranz in Schwerin in 1977. The certificate is hanging in her kitchen, rather yellow now from all the steam.