A flimsy little bridge crossed the stream: three thin boles, lashed together with ropes. The stream only came up to Egert’s waist at this crossing, and the bridge lay only inches above the water, but all the same Egert was afraid to entrust the quivering beams with the weight of his body.
The hermit watched from afar as the strong young man unsuccessfully tried to overcome the obstacles that arose before him. A step, at most two, along the bridge and a disgraceful flight backwards were all he could manage at first. Tying his boots around his neck, Egert tried to ford across the brook, but once again had to retreat because the icy water gave him a cramp in his leg. No one will ever know what the hermit thought about all this, for he was mute and accustomed to keeping his thoughts to himself.
Egert made it across the river the following day. Clutching at the beams with a viselike grip, he crawled across on all fours; only when he reached solid ground did the former guard—soaked, shivering, his heart pounding furiously—decide to open his eyes.
The old man watched all this from his hut, but Egert no longer had the strength to be ashamed. He was a mute witness: the same as the pines, as the sky, as the stream.
Egert had similar problems with splitting the firewood. The stump with its ax planted securely in it instantaneously reminded him of an executioner’s block, of beheading, of death: the wide blade of the ax carried within itself pain, lacerated muscles and tendons, hewed bones, and torrents of blood. Vividly, as if in a vision, Egert saw how the ax would slip from the stump and embed itself into his leg, his knee, how it would chop him into pieces, mutilate him, kill him …
Egert could not take such an awful weapon in his hands. The patient old man did not insist.
Thus, day after day passed by. Sitting by the stream, looking at the water and the dragonflies, Egert frequently remembered everything that had transformed Lieutenant Soll from a splendidly valiant man into an abject, cowardly tramp.
He would have been happier not to remember. He envied the hermit fiercely: it seemed as though he could think about nothing at all for hours on end while an expression of ethereal unconcern and heavenly peace lay on his pitted, sparsely bearded face. Such happiness was inaccessible to Egert, and shame, red-hot as if from the coals of a fire, at times compelled him to beat his head on the ground.
The hermit would withdraw a ways every time he observed in Egert’s eyes the onset of these convulsions of grief, these assaults of shame and despair. He would walk away, and with an attentive yet unintelligible expression on his pocked face, he would watch Egert from afar.
Not only memories tormented Egert: never in all his days had he slept on straw, eaten dried mushrooms, or gone without a change of linen. Egert grew thin and lean, his eyes began to cave in, and his beautiful blond hair became stuck in matted clumps; giving in one day, he cut off his long tresses with the hermit’s knife. His stomach ached and growled from the unfamiliar food. His lips cracked, and his face sagged. He laundered his shirt in the cold stream and at the same time washed himself, an activity that caused the hermit to marveclass="underline" Why did the young man bother with these time-consuming and unpleasant formalities?
The first two weeks were the most difficult. With the onset of darkness, when the forest became a den of murmurs and shadows, Egert hid in the mud hut with his head bundled up in the hermit’s burlap sacks like a little boy. Once or twice, a long, plangent howl arose from brush. Stopping up his ears with his palms, Egert shivered until dawn.
However, there were quiet, clear evenings, which Egert ventured to while away together with the silent hermit by a pale campfire, lit near the entrance to the hut. On one of these evenings he raised his head, and there amidst the scatterings of stars, he suddenly saw a familiar constellation.
He was happy until he realized that this constellation repeated the smattering of beauty marks on the neck of a certain woman, a woman whom Egert had known for only a very short time, but whom he could never forget. He grew morbid again because all the memories tied to her name tormented him as much as his affliction.
Then it started to become easier. One day, Egert set off to get some brush, and right as he got to the little bridge, he realized that he had forgotten his rope. He returned to the hut, and surprisingly enough, the complicated and torturous process of fording the stream passed by this time far more easily than usual; in any event, it seemed easier to Egert. Another time, he intentionally returned away from the bridge, and as if he had received an additional charge of bravery, he waded to the other shore almost entirely without the use of his hands, though he was doubled over by the end.
His life became easier from that moment on, though it was still endlessly complicated. An array of fine, precisely defined, and seemingly senseless actions protected him from any imminent danger: to cross over the unsteady little bridge on his way back to the mud hut, he had to touch his palm to a shriveled old tree on the far shore and silently count to twelve. Every evening, he threw three pieces of kindling, one after the other, into the stream to protect himself from nightmares. In this way he gradually overcame himself; he even decided to take up the ax, and with some success he chopped a few logs in front of the surprised and gladdened hermit.
One day, when Egert was, as usual, sitting by the water and asking himself for the hundredth time about the source of the misfortune that had befallen him, the hermit, who until then had never plagued the young man with his company, walked up and put his hand on Egert’s shoulder.
Egert flinched; the hermit felt how his muscles tightened under his threadbare shirt. Egert saw what appeared to be compassion in the old man’s eyes.
He frowned. “What?”
The hermit warily sat down next to him, and he traced a line with his grimy finger down his own cheek from his temple to his chin.
Egert jerked backwards. He involuntarily raised his hand and touched the slanted scar on his cheek.
The elder began to nod, satisfied that he had been understood. Continuing to nod his head, he chafed his skin with his fingernail until a red stripe, similar to Egert’s scar, bled through the sparse gray whiskers on his spotted face.
“Well, what of it?” Egert demanded desolately.
The hermit glanced at Egert and then at the sky. He frowned, shook his fist in front of his own nose, fell back, shut his eyes and again scratched his fingernail down his cheek.
“M-m-m…”
Egert was silent; he did not understand. The hermit smiled sorrowfully, shrugged his shoulders, and returned to his hut.
Every once in a while, the hermit would leave for an entire day and return with a basket full of food, which would have seemed simple and coarse to Lieutenant Soll, yet was delicious from the point of view of the tramp Egert. Egert supposed that the old man visited some place where people lived, and that these people were well disposed toward the ancient hermit.
One beautiful day, Egert summoned up the courage to ask the elder to take him along.
They walked for a long time. The hermit, by some unknown signs, ferreted out a scarcely perceptible path, while Egert firmly pressed the pinkie finger of his left hand into the thumb of his right: it seemed to him that this ploy would spare him the fear of lagging behind and getting lost.
Autumn reigned in the forest, not the earliest autumn, but also not the latest; it had not yet had the chance to grow old and wicked as it progressed toward winter. Egert carefully stepped through the yellow shreds of fallen leaves, which seemed to crunch with a weary sigh each time his foot disturbed them. The trees, besieged by a dreary calm, heavily lowered their half-naked, weakened limbs to the ground, and every fold in their coarse bark reminded Egert of his old scar. Pressing the pinkie of his left hand to the thumb of his right, he followed his mute guide, but was not at all happy when the forest finally ended and an isolated hamlet came into sight.