He got the money for it from old Danner. I still remember how surprised I was the old lady told me that, because she hardly ever said anything at all.
There she sat, and she started talking. At first I didn’t even realize she was talking to me. She spoke so softly I thought, oh, she’s praying, and she couldn’t look you in the eye when she spoke to you.
Except with her grandchildren. She was a really loving grandma to those kids. I guess they were her only joy. Marianne and little Josef.
She can’t have had a good life with that husband of hers, that’s for sure.
He was a bit younger than her, and I’m sure he just married her for the farm. It belonged to the old woman, you see, and Danner married into it. I think she was sometimes afraid of him, because otherwise a person can’t keep her mouth shut all her life, can she? She must have been afraid of her husband, bad-tempered as he was. There was many a day when he didn’t have a kind word for his wife. He snapped at her, and she always took it lying down. I never heard her raise her voice to him once, not once. Not even the time when he threw the food all over the floor just because he said her “eternal praying” was getting on his nerves. He swept the dish off the table with his arm, and the food splashed all over the room. Old Frau Danner stood there and then cleaned it all up without saying anything. Just stood there like a beaten dog. And Barbara watched as she mopped it up. Me, I wouldn’t have put up with that.
And now I guess you want to hear the story about Hauer, too, am I right? Yes, I thought I knew what you were after straight away.
Well, Hauer, he’s their nearest neighbor. You can see his farm from the attic window. Yes, from the Danner farm they can look right across to Hauer’s property. It lies on the other side of the meadows. A fine place it is.
Ten minutes on foot, I should say, if you walk fast. I never timed it.
Like I said, from the attic window you can see it, but only from there, that’s the only place.
Hauer was chasing after Barbara. Very keen on her, he was. The little boy’s supposed to be his. At least, he claimed to be the father.
Well, what I mean is he had himself entered as Josef’s father at the registry office, in the register of births.
Barbara Spangler’s husband left right after their wedding, you see. Marianne wasn’t born yet. That’s what Hauer told me. Said he disappeared overnight. Here one day, gone the next.
Anyway, that’s what Hauer said, but no one at the farm ever mentioned it.
Hauer’s wife died three years back. She’d been ill for quite a long time. He told me so himself, and I heard it from people in the village, too.
She had cancer, it seems, and she lingered on for a long time.
Just as soon as his wife was dead, Hauer started his affair with Barbara Spangler. She was in love with him to start with, mad for him, she positively pressed herself on him soon after his wife died, he said.
Whether that’s true I don’t know. I don’t get the impression that Hauer would be much of a ladies’ man.
I’m only telling you what he told me himself. Hauer can get quite talkative when he’s had a beer too many.
Barbara must have fallen pregnant right after they got together. Then, once the little boy was born—little Josef, that was—she suddenly didn’t want anything to do with him anymore. He just had to register that he was the father, and after that she gave him the brush-off, or leastways that’s what he told me. He wanted to report Barbara and her father, so as their relationship would be brought out into the light of day. Because it’s a mortal sin, he said, it’s against nature, and so on and so forth.
But then Hauer had had one too many when he told me the story. At the church dedication festival, it was. He told me all the ins and outs of it.
I wasn’t really listening to the whole palaver, and I didn’t understand most of it either, he was so drunk.
I just happen to have seen for myself how once old Danner wouldn’t let Hauer see Barbara, you could say he hid her from him. He said she wasn’t at home. Although she was sitting in the little room next to the kitchen all the time.
If you want more details you’ll have to talk to Hauer himself. I’m not saying any more about it, you just get involved in tittle-tattle that way.
Well, if there’s no more questions you want to ask, I’ll go back to my work now, Like I said, no one gets paid for idling around.
Evening has come. Everyone else in the house is already in bed.
His son, Hansl, his sister-in-law, Anna. She came here six years ago now, their Anna did. When the first signs of his wife’s sickness were showing, and she wasn’t able to keep the place going anymore. Slowly, bit by bit, Anna took over the running of the household. She looked after Hansl as if he were her own son.
She nursed his wife when she was lying so sick up in the bedroom. His sister-in-law Anna unselfishly nursed her sister, his wife. Washed her in the morning, fed her. Cared for her all day long. Stood by her when it was clear what the end would be. When the sight of his wife’s suffering had become unbearable for him, she moved into their bedroom with his wife instead of him. To be with her at night as well, ease her suffering, give her comfort.
By then he already found it impossible to be close to his wife. Her infirmity scared him away, he couldn’t help her, couldn’t be any support to her. As should have been his duty. “For better and for worse, in sickness and in health.”
He caught himself wishing her suffering would come to an end at long last. He was tired of the sight of her and her martyrdom. He could no longer bear the smell of sickness and death, a sweetish smell surrounding her like a cloak. He couldn’t bear to look at her, so thin and emaciated.
He was out of the house as often as possible. Even on the day of her death he had been out all day. Had stayed out, walking around the place, even when his work was done. He’d wandered through the woods, spent a long time sitting on a rock. He would do anything rather than go back to his house. He didn’t want to feel aware of the narrow confines of life and mortality.
When Anna told him the news, he was relieved. He didn’t mourn, he was glad. A millstone had been lifted from his neck. He could begin to live again. He felt free. Free as a bird.
No one would have understood.
Before the first month of mourning was over, when his relationship with Barbara began, he showed no shame or sense of guilt. After all, he was free. For the first and perhaps the only time in his life he felt free.
At first her interest in him surprised him. He doubted whether her feelings for him were genuine. But the readiness with which she gave herself to him laid the doubts in his mind to rest. Indeed, it made him long for her and her body even more.
Her body, free of the breath of death and infirmity. A body still enfolded in the smell of life, a body full of lust for life. Greedily, without inhibition, he gave way to that urge, to that passion.
Let the rest of the world consider his conduct improper and immoral—in Barbara he had found what had been denied him all his life before, not only in the last years of his marriage.
That marriage had always been more a marriage of convenience than the union of two kindred spirits. An arranged marriage, something usual among farming people. “Love comes with the years. What matters is to keep the farm going.”
After a brief moment of fear when the desire he felt near Barbara frightened him, he indulged his sensuality without inhibitions.
When Barbara finally confessed her pregnancy to him he was happy. Only slowly did doubt grow in him.