But of course the dog didn’t do that, for he didn’t know that there’s a gulf between belief, hope and dreaming on the one side, and reality on the other, or that I lacked the luck or power to bridge that gulf, whether I was living in the country or in the town. That may be the same gulf that the old man meant when I sat before him like a poor sinner and failed to take life seriously enough. He was probably right about that, and today even the dog could have confirmed that, if anybody had asked him. But since there was nobody to ask, he looked at me almost tearfully and whimpered, for what else should he do? When he drove his hunted prey towards me, I either didn’t notice it, or if I did, I didn’t shoot at it, and if I did shoot, I didn’t hit it. Thus the dog learnt to know the gulf between belief and reality, for I was looking more at the hare’s tracks than the hare itself, more the length of the hare’s leaps than the leaping of the hare. It had a long stride too, I thought as I measured the tracks with my eyes, knowing exactly who it represented. And how could I shoot that same hare who reminded me of that other one who didn’t have long legs or ears, but is tall, who doesn’t fear the barking of a dog, but might also bark, if there were no gulf between belief and reality in the world.
Nobody at home could understand how I failed to bag a single animal after firing so many shots. Only my sister seemed to realise something, for she looked at me with an alert gaze and asked, when we were alone, “Have you forgotten how to shoot, or are you thinking hard about someone?”
“I was thinking about myself and my situation,” I replied.
“You were thinking about yourself and you let the hare run away,” she smiled brightly. “But I thought you were thinking of someone else when you let it go.”
“Why did you think that?” I asked with interest.
“But you’re a bit strange anyway. You used to be like that once, and then you changed, but now you’re back to who you were before. Then you went hunting for a young bird and you let that go too, but not quite like today. That’s why I thought that if you can’t catch them, your mind’s on other things.”
“Of course,” I agreed, “my thoughts are in town.”
“So she’s in town,” said my sister, while a blush rose to my own face.
“Who’s she?” I asked, as if I didn’t understand.
“She’s the one you didn’t kill the hare for!” laughed my sister, as brightly as before. “She’s beautiful, terribly proud, wouldn’t even talk to my sort! Can’t you tell me then?”
“Only on one condition,” I replied, approaching her, ”you mustn’t breathe a word to anyone.”
“All right, just tell me,” she replied happily.
“I don’t have a hope of a position in town, that’s why I couldn’t catch the hare,” I said, and I must have done it very hopelessly, because my sister burst into tears. But my own eyes were getting wet too, because in saying it I wasn’t thinking of my job, but of her, the only “her” who hadn’t gone from my mind for a moment.
“And I was stupid enough to think you’re again with some…,” she was going to say when she had throttled her tears.
“We think too much, dear sister,” I interjected, as if afraid of what she was going to say. “We think, and the hares and life run past us.”
“Hares and life run past us,” she repeated tearfully, as if some wisdom lay in those words. “Yes, you’ve reached full manhood and you still haven’t caught anything. Mother once said, when we were talking together, that our Oskar could take a really rich wife if nothing else helps.”
So my mother in the country was just as wise as town mothers are, at least our landlady, who thought that the easiest solution for the problems of life is for poor boys to take rich wives and poor girls to take rich husbands. Women generally seemed to think that life takes a turn for the better if you take a wife or a husband. But instead of that, my father asked me before I left the country, “Are you thinking of graduating from university or have you given it up?”
“For the time being I’m only thinking of supporting myself,” I replied.
“Well, but are you hoping to get ahead in your career with your half-finished education?”
“I’ll manage, if there’s a position,” I said.
“You say that as if you had no hope of it,” my father pointed out. “Yesterday I read in the paper about the heavy redundancies and I thought, Look, they’ll shut the door in your face.”
“I don’t think they will,” I explained with an indifferent air, “because a higher education is an advantage.”
“But you haven’t finished anything,” he protested. “That’s why I sometimes think that you should just try to get it finished. If you can’t get by otherwise, I might try to help you, though things are tight with me too. I was talking about it with Enn, and she doesn’t seem to have anything against it either. She said, ‘Well, he’d have to get a roof over his head,’ and added, ‘if there’s someone to take him.’ So you see, it’s up to you. Just don’t start thinking that I can give you everything, no, I could only help you out. You’ll have to be a man, bear that in mind, you’re old enough for that. For when does a person get any sense, if not at your age? I even wanted to say to you that if you’d try to give up your old life, that cap and all that other German stuff, then maybe you’d get rid of your old friends and start doing a better job. What the Germans had has been messed up; their estates and everything have been taken over, and now they’re ruined. It’s not right. Of course, you’ll know best about that, but I thought I’d better say it anyway – maybe it’s your own way of life and habits that are to blame, that you somehow can’t get a roof over your head, as Enn says.”
Father said all of this quietly and calmly, as if just in passing, and as if he’d planned it well in advance, so I started to wonder whether these were his own ideas or someone else’s, and I said cautiously, “You haven’t talked about this before.”
“Look, son, I haven’t had to think about it before, but if you’ve come away from the university, then… Enn mentioned once that men tend to play the German, riding on the shoulders of power, sort of. But we only have mums and dads, brothers and sisters, and they’re poor. That’s what she once said, and I’ve started thinking too, that if you really…”
Those were the lessons I was fed at home to turn me into a man, as they said, if a “man” meant a person who had a decent income and a reasonable life. In a nutshell, I was assured at every step that I didn’t have that in their opinion, although they didn’t know yet that I had nothing at all.
But the more I was lectured and the more they worried about my past and future, the more I was being driven back to the town, although I didn’t really know what to do there. Nevertheless I did know one thing: I wanted to be closer to her, to the one I compared to a snowfield, to a running hare, to its tracks and its ears, with everything I saw and heard. I no longer hoped for anything, but a piece of my past was buried in her – a large piece, I felt – and for the first time in my life I seemed to realise why people, estates, whole nations, cling so much to their pasts.