Authors: Penelope Fitzgerald
‘I shall not forget it,’ said Fritz, thinking of an early morning in May, towards the end of his year in Jena. His Aunt Johanna had died of pneumonia in the bitter spring winds which Professor Schiller had just survived, and Fritz had lodgings in Schustergasse 4 (second staircase up), which he shared with a distant cousin - but where was this cousin when Fritz woke up, having been dragged out of bed half naked?
‘He and some others are in the students’ prison,’ said the visitor, not a friend, hardly an acquaintance. ‘You all went out together yesterday evening -‘
‘Very good, but in that case why am I not in the Black Hole along with them?’
‘You have a better sense of direction than they have, and you were not arrested. But now you must come with me, you’re needed.’
Fritz opened his eyes wide. ‘You are Diethelm. You are a medical student.’
‘No, my name is Dietmahler. Get up, put on your shirt and jacket.’
‘I have seen you in Professor Fichte’s lectures,’ said Fritz, grasping the water-jug. ‘And you wrote a song: it begins “In Distant Lands the Maiden …”’
‘I am fond of music. Come, we have not much time.’
Jena being in a bare hollow, at the foot of a cliff, you can only get out of it by walking steadily uphill. It was still only four o’clock in the morning, but as they tramped up in the direction of Galgenberg they could feel the whole stagnant little town beginning to steam in its early summer heat. The sky was not quite light, but seemed to be thinning and lifting into a cloudless pallor. Fritz had begun to understand. There must have been a quarrel last night, or at least a dispute, about which he remembered nothing. If a duel was to be fought, which in itself was a prison offence, you needed a doctor, or since no respectable doctor could be asked to attend, then a medical student.
‘Am I the referee?’ Fritz asked.
‘Yes.’
The referee in a Jena duel had to decide the impossible. The students’ sword, the
Schlager
, was triangular, but rounded towards the point, so that only a deep three-cornered wound was allowed to score.
‘Who has challenged who?’ he asked.
‘Joseph Beck. He sent me a note to say he must fight,
who or why he did not say. Only the time and place.’
‘I don’t know him.’
‘Your rooms were the nearest.’
‘I am glad he has so true a friend.’
They were now above the mist level, where the dew was beginning to dry, and turned through a gate into a field which had been cleared of young turnips. Two students were hard at it, with flapping shirt-tails, attacking each other without grace or skill on the hardened, broken, yellowish ground.
‘They started without us,’ said Dietmahler. ‘Run!’
As they crossed the field one of the duellists cut and ran for it to a gate in the other direction. His opponent left standing, dropped his
Schlager
, then fell himself, with his right hand masked in blood, perhaps cut off.
‘No, only two fingers,’ said Dietmahler, urgently bending down to the earth, where weeds and coarse grass were already beginning to sprout. He picked up the fingers, red and wet as if skinned, one of them the top joint only, one with a gold ring.
‘Put them in your mouth,’ said Dietmahler. ‘If they are kept warm I can perhaps sew them back on our return.’
Fritz was not likely to forget the sensation of the one and a half fingers and the heavy ring, smooth and hard while they were yielding, in his mouth.
‘All Nature is one,’ he told himself.
At the same time (his own common sense told him to do this, without instructions from Dietmahler) he gripped the blubbering and spouting Joseph Beck under the right elbow, to hold up his forearm and keep the veins at the back of the hand empty. Meanwhile the whole sky, from one hilltop horizon to the other, was filled with light, and the larks began to go up. In the next meadow hares had stolen out to feed.
‘As long as his thumb is saved, his hand may still be of use to him,’ Dietmahler remarked. Fritz, with no way of swallowing his own saliva, mixed with earth and blood, thought, ‘This is all of interest to him as a doctor. But, as a philosopher, it doesn’t help me.’
They returned to Jena in a woodcutter’s cart which was providentially going downhill. Even the woodcutter, who normally paid no attention to anything that did not concern him directly, was impressed by the cries and groans of poor Beck. ‘The gentleman is perhaps a singer?’
‘Drive straight to the Anatomy Theatre,’ Dietmahler told him. ‘If it is open, I may be able to find needles and gut.’
It was too early to buy either schnaps or opium, though Dietmahler, who was also a disciple of Brownismus, was impatient to pour quantities of both down his patient.
I
N
the Michaelmas of 1791 Fritz began the second stage of his university education, at Leipzig. He was nineteen, and Leipzig, with fifty thousand inhabitants, was the largest town he had ever lived in. He found it impossible to manage on the allowance that could be spared for him.
‘I must speak to Father,’ he told Erasmus.
‘He will be displeased.’
‘How many people are pleased when they are asked for money?’
‘What have you done with it, Fritz?’
‘Well, I have spent what I had on the necessities of life. There is the soul, and there is the flesh. But the old one too, when he was a student, must have had these necessities.’
‘That would be before he was awakened,’ said Erasmus gloomily. ‘You cannot expect sympathy from him now. Nineteen years should have taught you that much.’
On his next return to Weissenfels, Fritz said: ‘Father, I am young, and, speaking with due respect, I cannot
live like an old man. I have kept myself under extreme restraint in Leipzig, I have ordered one pair of shoes only since I have been there. I have grown my hair long to avoid expense at the barber. In the evening I eat only bread …’
‘In what respects do you find that you cannot live like an old man?’ asked the Freiherr.
Fritz shifted his ground.
‘Father, there is not a student in Leipzig who does not owe money. I cannot manage on what you allow me at the moment. There are six of us still at home, I know, but we still have estates at Oberwiederstadt, and at Schloben.’
‘Did you think I had forgotten them?’ asked the Freiherr.
He passed his hand over his face.
‘Go to Oberwiederstadt, and see Steinbrecher. I will give you a letter to him.’
Steinbrecher was the revenue steward.
‘But isn’t he at Schloben?’
‘He deals now with all our properties. This month he is at Oberwiederstadt.’
Fritz took a place in the diligence, which left the Stag in Weissenfels at four in the morning, and went by way of Halle and Eisleben. The German diligence was the slowest in Europe, since all the luggage, which was loaded onto a kind of creaking extension of the floor extending over the back axle, had to be unloaded and re-loaded
every time a passenger got in or out. While the conductor supervised this work the driver fed himself and his horses, on loaves of coarse brown bread.
At the Black Boy at Eisleben a farm servant was sitting on the bench outside, waiting for him.
‘
Gruss dich
, Joseph,’ said Fritz, remembering him from seven years back. ‘Let us go into the grocer’s and take a glass of schnaps.’ In Saxony the inns were not allowed to sell spirits.
‘I should be sorry to see your father’s son diverting himself in such a way,’ Joseph replied.
‘But, Joseph, I was hoping to divert
you
.’ This, it was clear, was not possible. The inn provided horses, and in silence they rode to Oberwiederstadt.
The revenue steward was waiting for them, although by now it was dark. Fritz presented his father’s letter, and waited for him to read it through twice. Then, feeling the awkwardness of silence, he said, ‘Herr Revenue Steward, I think my Father has commissioned you to give me some money.’
Steinbrecher took off his spectacles.
‘Young Freiherr, there is no money.’
‘He sent me a long way to be told that.’
‘I imagine that he wanted you to remember it.’
F
RITZ
walked the thirty-two miles back to Weissenfels. When he reached the Kloster Gasse his father had returned from the offices of the Salt Mines Administration, but he was not alone.
‘His Highmindedness, the Uncle Wilhelm, is here,’ Sidonie told him. ‘The Big Cross himself. They are discussing your affairs. How did you get on with Steinbrecher? I’ll tell you what I think, it’s this: if some people were not older than others, and young people were as rich as old ones -‘
‘But, Sidonie, I really believe now that we are much poorer even than we thought.’
‘You don’t ask me what I believe,’ said Sidonie. ‘I am here in the house, I have more opportunity to think about it than you do.’
‘It depends on all of us now, but on myself in particular -‘ Fritz began, but the Bernhard, who had made his appearance, interrupted: ‘I am the chief sufferer. When the Big Cross is here, my mother brings me forward,
believing that I am his favourite. In fact he dislikes children, and myself in particular.’
‘He will expect better wine and more company than we usually have,’ said Sidonie. ‘He mentioned that, you know, the last time he honoured us with a visit.’
‘Last time I was called upon to recite,’ the Bernhard continued, ‘my uncle shouted: “For what reason has he been taught such idiocies?”’
‘My mother is not in the salon,’ said Sidonie. ‘What shall I tell her to do?’
‘Nothing,’ said Karl, who was lying at ease on the only sofa. His position was unassailable. In a week he was off to begin his military training as a cadet with a regiment of carabiniers in the service of the Elector of Saxony. He was therefore approved of by his Uncle Wilhelm, even though he had never been invited to Lucklum. Fritz appeared not to be listening. Some urgency, some private resolution seemed to possess him. Sidonie had not noticed it when he first walked in, she had perhaps been too pleased to see him, but now it was unmistakable, as though he had brought an embarrassing stranger in with him, who was waiting for the moment of introduction.
In the reception room the Big Cross did not take a chair, but walked rapidly up and down, displaying each time he turned back into the room the dazzling emblem on his dark blue cloak. The Freiherr, tired after a day of disputes at the Inspectorate, sat in his roomy elbow-chair,
thinking that if his brother did not take off his outer garment, there was some hope that he would soon go. ‘But where is your wife, where is Auguste?’ enquired Wilhelm.
‘I don’t imagine she will appear this afternoon.’
‘Why is that? She need not fear me, I am not a spook.’
‘She needs rest, she is delicate.’
‘If a woman keeps working, she will find she is never tired.’
‘You have never married, Wilhelm. But here, at least, is Friedrich.’ Fritz, pale as clay, came into the salon, and after greeting his father and his uncle not quite attentively enough began at full pitch.
‘I want to tell you that I have decided what I am to do with my life. It came to me on the journey back from Oberwiederstadt.’
‘How fortunate that I am here,’ said the Big Cross, ‘just when my advice is most needed.’
‘During my studies at Jena and now at Leipzig you, Uncle, have taken it amiss because I preferred philosophy and history to law, and you Father, have been offended when I said that even law would be preferable to theology. But now I want both of you to put these anxieties away from you - to blow them away, as if they were dust from the earth. I see now that my duty is to be a soldier. Everything points to it. In that way I shall cost you nothing. And I know now that I need discipline. I have
romantic tendencies. In a barracks these will be corrected by the practical, unromantic duties of my daily life - the shit house, the fever ward, the route march, foot inspection. Later, when I see action, I shall have nothing to fear, because life, after all, is a goal, not a means. I have it in mind to apply to the Cuirassiers of the Elector’s Guard.’
‘
Scheisskerl
, shut your muzzle!’ bellowed the Big Cross.
‘That is not the way to address my son, or any decent man’s son,’ said the Freiherr. ‘But it’s true that he’s talking like an idiot.’
‘But Karl -‘ Fritz broke in.
‘- is a smart young fellow, anxious to start life on his own account,’ the Uncle cried. ‘Whereas you! - The Cuirassiers! - I have heard you say at my own table, when you were the age that Karl is now, that life would be better if it were a dream, and that perhaps it will become one. Where is your practical ability? You’ve never even seen a man wounded!’
Fritz left the room. ‘Whatever you have been talking about, you have put things much too strongly,’ said Sidonie, coming past with two of the servants carrying coffee and bread and butter, which the Uncle, in disgust, waved away from a distance.
‘At least they are agreed,’ said Fritz. ‘They are at one in thinking me incapable, and possibly a coward.’
Sidonie pressed his elbow in sympathy. But through the open doors of the salon the Uncle and the Father could be seen to turn towards each other in furious confrontation.
‘Leave your son’s concerns to me. You know absolutely nothing of these matters.’
‘You forget that I served seven years in the Hanoverian Legion,’ cried the Freiherr.
‘But without acquiring the slightest military competence.’
Karl and Sidonie took the dejected Fritz into the garden, and down to the orchard. ‘We’re going to have pears and plums innumerable this year,’ said Sidonie. ‘Wherever did you get such a stupid idea? Why should you think you would ever make a soldier?’
‘Where is your sense?’ added Karl.
‘I don’t know. Tell me, Karl, what makes a man a soldier?’
‘I, myself, wanted to enter the service of my Prince. I also wanted to get away from home,’ said Karl.
‘Won’t you miss us, Karl?’ asked Sidonie.
‘I cannot afford to think about that sort of thing. I am of more use to you all, in any case, out in the world. And you, Sido, will soon be married, and forget about your brothers.’
‘Never!’ cried Sidonie.