“I tell you you’re exaggerating,” he heard the Rittmeister say angrily. “The child is simply nervous. She must get into the fresh air. Come, Vi, let’s go for a little walk.”
Räder nodded. He slipped through the bathroom and the Rittmeister’s bedroom to the stairs, down which he vanished into his own bare room. He unlocked the cupboard. With a second key he opened a suitcase from which he took out a well-thumbed book—What a Young Man Must Know Before and About Marriage. This he wrapped in a piece of newspaper. One evening he would place it under Violet’s pillow. Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but the day after. He was convinced Vi would read it, despite her outburst.
VI
Sophie Kowalewski, ex-maid to the Countess Mutzbauer, had said to her parents this Sunday morning: “I’m going over to Birnbaum to see Emmi. Don’t keep dinner waiting for me; perhaps I won’t be back until evening.” Her kind-hearted old father had nodded his head. “Ride along the main road, Sophie, not the forest path. There are such a lot of fellows knocking around the district now.” And her tremendously fat mother, interested only in food and digestion, had said: “Emmi has made a wonderful match. They already have a cow and two goats. They kill three pigs for their own use. They don’t have to go around with hungry bellies; there’s always something to eat. They’ve also got chickens and geese. If you would only have such luck!”
Sophie did not stay to hear it all. She duly let her friend, who was lending her the bicycle, admire her blue costume, swung on to the saddle and pedaled slowly through the village with bell ringing, so that all should see her. She turned into the quiet mossy forest path along which the cycle ran as silently as on velvet, a firm and very narrow path, close to the rutted cart track. Heather and broom kept brushing the pedals, casting drops of morning dew on to the toes of her shoes. The beautiful pillars of old pine trees wandered past her, tinged reddish by the morning sun—and sometimes the path went so narrowly between two trunks that she had to grip the handle bars firmly in order not to knock against them. The bilberries were thick and their berries already turning blue. The forest grass was still green, and the junipers stood dark and silent in the bright undergrowth; there was an incessant fluttering and twittering of little forest birds.
Here Sophie had passed her childhood; every sound was familiar to her. As a child she had heard the distant vague soughing of the forest, which came close, but could never come closer. The sun shone on her hair as it had shone on the child’s. As she glided by, there opened and closed almost immediately glades which seemed to lead into the heart of the forest.
No one is all bad, and Sophie isn’t either. Sophie was filled with a gaiety which had nothing in common with the boisterous merriment of a night spent drinking in a bar. It was as if her body had received new blood; joyful, serene thoughts streamed through her with every fresh breath she took; instead of a dreary dance hit she hummed the song of “May has come.” … The clouds—they wander—in the canopy of heaven.… Oh, wonderful!
Suddenly Sophie laughed. She remembered how her mother once took her to pick berries in the forest. At that time she was eight or nine years old. The laborious picking soon bored her. Playing, humming to herself, she wandered away from her busy mother; ten times she heard herself being called, without paying any heed; the eleventh call no longer reached her. Singing softly, laughing with happiness, she wandered deeper and deeper into the forest, aimlessly on and on, from the sheer joy of movement, into the little valleys where the trees descended from flat hills like silent pilgrims. For a long time she listened to the gurgling of a hurrying brook. For a still longer time she watched a butterfly which flew from blossom to blossom in the heat of a forest clearing—and was not tempted to try and catch it.
At last she reached a beech wood. The trees towered high and silver-gray. The green above was so bright. They stood far from each other; everywhere sunbeams penetrated into the golden warm shadows; her bare feet sank deep into the soft brownish-green moss. Singing softly, almost without knowing what she was doing, Sophie stripped off her clothes. There lay her little dress; over a tree stump the bright patch of her little knickers; now her chemise fell upon the moss—and gaily whooping, the child danced naked through sun and shade, laughing.
It was the joy of living on this earth, of wandering in the light—the joy of life! The little heart in the thin body throbbed. Dancing into ever new greenness, into ever different worlds, into ever deeper mystery. With sounds such as the birds sing, interrupted to watch a beetle lost in a wheel track … and begun again, all without thinking, like breathing.…
It was the joy of life, the happiness of being—that for which grown-up people eternally yearn, whether they know it or not. Happiness—for which they are always seeking, and which they will never find again. Joy which vanishes with childhood—only to be glimpsed afterwards in the weak reflection of a lover’s embrace, in the joy over some work.
The bicycle sang softly along the path, the chain grated. Passing over a root, the rear mudguard clattered and the saddle springs sighed. Sophie, wishing to sing, could not succeed, and remembered only how to the child the sun had suddenly become cold, and the familiar forest strange. She had burst into tears—she was lost. Everything was hostile: prickly brambles, pointed stones on the path, a swarm of horseflies blowing over from a herd of cattle. At last a woodsman, old Hofert, had found her …
“Aren’t you ashamed, Sophie, to run around naked like that?” he had scolded her. “You’re a human being, you know, not a little pig.” And he had taken her back to her mother. Oh, her mother’s anger. The long search for her clothes, which could not be found, the scolding, the blows. The return to the village, with her mother’s kerchief round her hips. The mocking of the other children, the wise observations of the old people: “Look out, Kowalewski. That girl will bring you trouble some day.”
Sophie pedaled faster, ringing the bell loudly in the forest silence. She shook her head, although no swarm of horseflies now buzzed round her—she wanted to shake her thoughts away. No person can say how he has become what he is, but sometimes a piece of the way is revealed to us. Then we become angry with ourselves, find it disagreeable, shake the tormenting thoughts from our head. We’re all right as we are; it’s no fault of ours if we haven’t turned out differently. We needn’t think about that.
Faster and faster sped the bicycle; glade after glade, path after path, glided by. Sophie was not cycling to Birnbaum to see Emmi. She was cycling to the prison to visit Hans Liebschner, a lawfully condemned swindler with previous convictions. Life is no holiday; it’s an extremely deceitful business, and whoever doesn’t cheat others gets cheated himself. Sophie had no time to waste on dreams. She had to work out how she could get a visitor’s permit as Hans’s sister—without identification papers!
Her eyes had a dry, hard gleam. True, she had certified on a sheet of note-paper from the Christian Hostel that she was the cook, Sophie Liebschner, working there. But she was quite aware that this badly written and perhaps not even properly spelled document would be worthless to an official eye. From what her father had told her, Meier, the little bailiff who had run away, would have been just the right man to have given her some sort of certificate with the farm stamp on it. But there again she had been unlucky; she hadn’t been able to get hold of the fellow. And the other two, who had traveled in the train with her, they wouldn’t do a girl a favor like that, as you could see at a glance. They’d been much too polite, just like those gentlemen in a bar who are so politely cold merely to save themselves buying a lady a whisky!