Authors: Penelope Fitzgerald
I
N
the Hardenbergs’ house there was an angel, August Wilhelm Bernhard, fair as wheat. After plain motherly Charlotte, the eldest, pale, wide-eyed Fritz, stumpy little Erasmus, easy-going Karl, open-hearted Sidonie, painstaking Anton, came the blonde Bernhard. To his mother, the day when he had to be put into breeches was terrible. She who hardly ever, if at all, asked anything for herself, implored Fritz. ‘Go to him, go to your Father, beg him, pray him, to let my Bernhard continue a little longer in his frocks.’ ‘Mother, what can I say, I think Bernhard is six years old.’
He was now more than old enough, Sidonie thought, to understand politeness to a visitor. ‘I do not know how long he will stay, Bernhard. He has brought quite a large valise.’
‘His valise is full of books,’ said the Bernhard, ‘and he has also brought a bottle of schnaps. I dare say he thought there would not be such a thing in our house.’
‘Bernhard, you have been in his room.’
‘Yes, I went there.’
‘You have opened his valise.’
‘Yes, just to see his things.’
‘Did you leave it open, or did you shut it again?’
The Bernhard hesitated. He could not remember.
‘Well, it doesn’t signify,’ said Sidonie. ‘You must, of course, confess to Herr Dietmahler what you have done, and ask his pardon.’
‘When?’
‘It should be before nightfall. In any case, there is no time like the present.’
‘I’ve nothing to tell him!’ cried the Bernhard. ‘I haven’t spoiled his things.’
‘You know that Father punishes you very little,’ said Sidonie coaxingly. ‘Not as we were punished. Perhaps he will tell you to wear your jacket the wrong way out for a few days, only to remind you. We shall have some music before supper and after that I will go with you up to the visitor and you can take his hand and speak to him quietly.’
‘I’m sick of this house!’ shouted the Bernhard, snatching himself away.
Fritz was in the kitchen garden patrolling the vegetable beds, inhaling the fragrance of the broad bean flowers, reciting at the top of his voice.
‘Fritz,’ Sidonie called to him. ‘I have lost the Bernhard.’
‘Oh, that can’t be.’
‘I was reproving him in the morning room, and he escaped from me and jumped over the window-sill and into the yard.’
‘Have you sent one of the servants?’
‘Oh, Fritz, best not, they will tell Mother.’
Fritz looked at her, shut his book and said he would go out and find his brother. ‘I will drag him back by the hair if necessary, but you and Asmus will have to entertain my friend.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He is in his room, resting. Father has worn him out. By the way, his room has been turned upside down and his valise is open.’
‘Is he angry?’
‘Not at all. He thinks perhaps that it’s one of our customs at Weissenfels.’
Fritz put on his frieze-coat and went without hesitation down to the river. Everyone in Weissenfels knew that young Bernhard would never drown, because he was a water-rat. He couldn’t swim, but then neither could his father. During his seven years’ service with the Hanoverian army the Freiherr had seen action repeatedly and crossed many rivers, but had never been put to the necessity of swimming. Bernhard, however, had always lived close to water and seemed not to be able to live without it. Down by the ferry he was forever hanging about, hoping to slip on board without paying his three pfennig
for the crossing. The parents did not know this. There was a kind of humane conspiracy in the town to keep many matters from the Freiherr, in order to spare his piety on the one hand, and on the other, not to provoke his ferocious temper.
The sun was down, only the upper sky glowed. The mist was walking up the water. The little boy was not at the ferry. A few pigs and a flock of geese, forbidden to go by way of Weissenfels’ handsome bridge, were waiting for the last crossing.
F
OR
the first time Fritz felt afraid. His imagination ran ahead of him, back to the Kloster Gasse, meeting the housekeeper at the front door - but, young master, what is that load you are carrying into the house? It is dripping everywhere, the floors, I am responsible for them.
His mother had always believed that the Bernhard was destined to become a page, if not at the court of the Elector of Saxony, then perhaps with the Count of Mansfeld or the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbuttel. One of Fritz’s duties, before long, would be to drag his little brother round these various courts in the hope of placing him satisfactorily.
The rafts lay below the bridge, close into the bank, alongside piles of gently heaving, chained pinewood logs, waiting for the next stage in their journey. A watchman was trying a bunch of keys in the door of a hut. ‘Herr Watchman, have you seen a boy running?’
A boy was supposed to come with his dinner, said the watchman, but he was a rascal and had not come. ‘Look, the towpath is empty.’
The empty barges laid up for repair were moored at their station on the opposite bank. Fritz pelted over the bridge. Everyone saw him, coat flying. Had the Freiherr no servants to send? The barges wallowed on their mooring ropes, grating against each other, strake against strake. From the quayside Fritz jumped down about four feet or so onto the nearest deck. There was a scurrying, as though of an animal larger than a dog.
‘Bernhard!’
‘I will never come back,’ Bernhard called.
The child ran across the deck, and then, afraid to risk the drop onto the next boat, climbed over the gunwale and then stayed there hanging on with both hands, scrabbling with his boots for a foothold. Fritz caught hold of him by the wrists and at the same moment the whole line of barges made one of their unaccountable shifts, heaving grossly towards each other, so that the Bernhard, still hanging, was trapped and squeezed. A pitiful cough and a burst of tears and blood were forced out of him like air out of a balloon.
‘How am I going to get you out of here?’ demanded Fritz. ‘What a pest you are, what a pest.’
‘Let me go, let me die!’ wheezed the Bernhard.
‘We’ll have to work our way along forward, then I can pull you up.’ But the instinct to preserve life seemed for the moment to have deserted the child, Fritz must do it all, dragging and shuffling him along, wildly protesting,
between the two gunwales. If they had been on the other bank there would have been passers-by to lend a hand, but then, Fritz thought, they’d think murder was being done. The boats grew narrower, he saw the glimmering water idling beneath them and hauled the child up like a wet sack. His face was not pale, but a brilliant crimson.
‘Make an effort, do you want to drown?’
‘What would it matter if I did?’ squeaked the Bernhard. ‘You said once that death was not significant, but only a change in condition.’
‘Drat you, you’ve no business to understand that,’ Fritz shouted in his ear.
‘My
Mutze
!’
The child was much attached to his red cap, which was missing. So, too were one of his front teeth and his breeches. He had on only long cotton drawers tied with tape. Like most rescuers, Fritz felt suddenly furious with the loved and saved. ‘Your
Mutze
has gone, it must be on its way to the Elbe by now.’ Then, ashamed of his anger, he picked the little boy up and put him on his shoulders to carry him home. The Bernhard, aloft, revived a little. ‘Can I wave at the people?’
Fritz had to make his way to the end of the line of barges, where perpendicular iron steps had been built into one bank and he could climb up without putting down the Bernhard.
How heavy a child is when it gives up responsibility.
He couldn’t go straight back to the Kloster Gasse like this. But Sidonie and Asmus between them would be equal to explaining things away during the before-dinner music. Meanwhile, in Weissenfels, he had many places to get dry. After crossing the bridge again he walked only a short way along the Saale and then took two turns to the left and one to the right, where the lights were now shining in Severin’s bookshop.
There were no customers in the shop. The pale Severin, in his long overall, was examining one of the tattered lists, which booksellers prefer to all other reading, by the light of a candle fitted with a reflector.
‘Dear Hardenberg! I did not expect you. Put the little brother, I pray you, on a sheet of newspaper. Here is yesterday’s
Leipziger Zeitung
.’ He was surprised at nothing.
‘The little brother is in disgrace,’ said Fritz, depositing the Bernhard. ‘He ran down onto the barges. How he came to get quite so wet I don’t know.’
‘
Kinderleicht, kinderleicht
,’ said Severin indulgently, but his indulgence was for Fritz. He could not warm to children, since all of them were scribblers in books. He went to the very back of the shop, opened a wooden chest, and took out a large knitted shawl, a peasant thing.
‘Take off your shirt, I will wrap you in this,’ he said. ‘Your brother need not return it to me. Why did you cause all this trouble? Did you hope to sail away and leave your father and mother behind you?’
‘Of course not,’ said the Bernhard scornfully. ‘All the boats on that mooring are under repair. They could not sail, they have no canvas. I did not want to sail, I wanted to drown.’
‘That I don’t believe,’ replied Severin, ‘and I should have preferred you not to say it.’
‘He loves water,’ said Fritz, impelled to defend his own.
‘Evidently.’
‘And, indeed, so do I,’ Fritz cried. ‘Water is the most wonderful element of all. Even to touch it is a pleasure.’
Perhaps Severin did not find it a pleasure to have quite so much water on the floor of his bookshop. He was a man of forty-five, ‘old’ Severin to Fritz, a person of great good sense, unperturbed by life’s contingencies. He had been poor and unsuccessful, had kept himself going by working very hard, at low wages, for the proprietor of the bookshop, and then, when the proprietor had died, had married his widow and come into the whole property. Of course the whole of Weissenfels knew this and approved of it. It was their idea of wisdom exactly.
Poetry, however, meant a great deal to Severin - almost as much as his lists. He would have liked to see his young friend Hardenberg continue as a poet without the necessity of working as a salt mine inspector.
For the rest of his journey home the Bernhard continued to complain about the loss of his red
Mutze
. It
was the only thing he had possessed which indicated his revolutionary sympathies.
‘I don’t know how you got hold of it,’ Fritz told him. ‘And if Father had ever caught sight of it he would in any case have told the servants to throw it on the rubbish heap. Let all this be a lesson to you to keep yourself from poking about among the visitors’ possessions.’
‘In a republic there would be no possessions,’ said the Bernhard.
F
REIHERR
von Hardenberg was born in 1738, and while he was still a boy came into the properties of Oberwiederstadt on the River Wipper in the county of Mansfeld, and the manor and farm of Schloben-bei-Jena. During the Seven Years’ War he served, as a loyal subject, in the Hanoverian Legion. After the Peace of Paris he gave up his commission. And he married, but in 1769 there was an epidemic of smallpox in the towns along the Wipper, and his young wife died. The Freiherr nursed the infected and the dying, and those whose families could not afford a grave were buried in the grounds of Oberwiederstadt which, having once been a convent, still had some consecrated earth. He had undergone a profound religious conversion - but I have not! said Erasmus, as soon as he was old enough to ask about the rows of green mounds so close to the house. ‘I have not - does he ever think of that?’
On each grave was a plain headstone, carved with the words:
He, or she, was born on—, and on—returned home
. This
was the inscription preferred by the Moravians. The Freiherr now worshipped with the Moravian Brethren, for whom every soul is either dead, awakened, or converted. A human soul is converted as soon as it realises that it is in danger, and what that danger is, and hears itself cry aloud,
He is my Lord
.
A little over a year after his wife’s death the Freiherr married his young cousin Bernadine von Boltzig. ‘Bernadine, what an absurd name! Have you no other?’ Yes, her second name was Auguste. ‘Well, I shall call you Auguste henceforward.’ In his gentler moments, she was Gustel. Auguste, though timorous, proved fertile. After twelve months the first daughter, Charlotte, was born, and a year later, Fritz. ‘When the time comes for their education,’ the Freiherr said, ‘both shall be sent to the Brethren at Neudietendorf.’
Neudietendorf, between Erfurt and Gotha, was a colony of the Herrnhut. The Herrnhut was the centre where fifty years earlier the Moravians, refugees from persecution, had been allowed to settle down in peace. To the Moravians, a child is born into an ordered world into which he must fit. Education is concerned with the status of the child in the kingdom of God.
Neudietendorf, like the Herrnhut, was a place of tranquillity. Wind instruments, instead of bells, summoned the children to their classes. It was also a place of total obedience, for the meek are the inheritors. They must
always go about in threes, so that the third might tell the Prediger what the other two had found to talk about. On the other hand, no teacher might give a punishment while he was still angry, since an unjust punishment is never forgotten.
The children swept the floors, tended the animals and made the hay, but they were never allowed to strive against each other, or take part in competitive games. They received thirty hours a week of education and religious instruction. All must be in bed by sunset, and remain silent until they got up at five the next morning. After any communal task had been completed - say, whitewashing the henhouses - the long trestle tables were brought out for a ‘love-feast’, when all sat down together, hymns were sung and a small glass of homemade liqueur was handed to everyone, even the youngest. The boarding fees were eight thaler for a girl, ten thaler for a boy (who ate more, and needed a Latin and a Hebrew grammar).
Charlotte von Hardenberg, the eldest, who took after her mother, did very well at the House of Maidens. She married early, and had gone to live in Lausitz. Fritz had been born a dreamy, seemingly backward little boy. After a serious illness when he was nine years old, he became intelligent and in the same year was despatched to Neudietendorf. ‘But in what has he fallen short?’ demanded the Freiherr, when only a few months later he was
requested by the Prediger, on behalf of the Elders, to take his son away. The Prediger, who was very unwilling to condemn any child absolutely, explained that Fritz perpetually asked questions, but was unwilling to receive answers. Let us take - said the Prediger - the ‘children’s catechism’. In the course of this the instructor asks, ‘What are you?’
A
I am a human being
.
Q Do you feel it when I take hold of you?
A
I feel it well
.
Q What is this, is it not flesh?
A
Yes, that is flesh
.
Q All this flesh which you have is called the body.
What is it called?
A
The body
.
Q How do you know when people have died?
A
They cannot speak, they cannot move anymore
.
Q Do you know why not?
A
I do not know why not
.
‘Could he not answer these questions?’ cried the Freiherr.
‘It may be that he could, but the answers he gave in fact were not correct. A child of not quite ten years old, he insists that the body is not flesh, but the same stuff as the soul.’
‘But this is only one instance -‘
‘I could give many others.’
‘He has not yet learned -‘
‘He is dreaming away his opportunities. He will never become an acceptable member of Neudietendorf.’
The Freiherr asked whether not even one sign of moral grace had been detected in his son. The Prediger avoided a reply.
The mother, poor Auguste, who soon became sickly (although she outlived all but one of her eleven children) and seemed always to be looking for someone to whom to apologise, begged to be allowed to teach Fritz herself. But what could she have taught him? A little music perhaps. A tutor was hired from Leipzig.