Anarchistbanjo's World

By Karl Hans Strobl and translated by Joe E Bandel

“I know,” Reichenbach replied gruffly, “nothing but trifles and side matters.” To him, all that had been achieved and accomplished were mere trifles and side matters; the great and decisive things always lay a bit further ahead in the dark, brittle, resistant unknown. Failures didn’t paralyze him; they spurred him forward. That thick Swabian skull knew no surrender.

The carriage jolted over the dark, rutted path, then the hooves clattered over small wooden bridges under which the Punkwa roared, the mysterious river of this landscape.

After a while of silence, Reichenbach said: “Sometimes it feels like there’s an evil spirit haunting my life. You know, don’t you, that as a young man I spent two months locked up in the Hohenasperg fortress?”

“Where Schubart was once imprisoned?”

“Yes. And do you know why? Because I wanted to emigrate to Tahiti with a few friends. Back then, Napoleon had made our own homeland unbearable for Germans, and the king was pressing all young men into military service. That’s why we weren’t allowed to emigrate and got locked up—because we didn’t want to fight Napoleon’s wars. And who betrayed our plan? I truly believe it must have been that same evil spirit. Because sometimes I think I’d be better off if I were with the Tahitians in the Pacific Ocean now. It’s always like this: I manage this or that, but when it comes to the real thing, it just doesn’t work out—there the devil puts his tail on it.”

The old count didn’t reply; he likely thought he should let his friend talk out his frustration. They had now reached the spot where the Dry Valley and the Od Valley meet. The waning moon had risen above the forest’s edge, sleepy and mute lay the Skala Mill, its white limestone cliffs glowing in the pale light. The stars had faded before the moon, except for the brightest ones; the Punkwa trickled silver over the stones.

The Salm hunting lodge was a simple wooden structure with a veranda on the upper floor under a jutting roof. They stopped, and the servant carried the bottle basket up the stairs behind them.

There they sat in the moonlight, and the old count Hugo let a greenish wine flow from a narrow bottle neck into bulbous goblets. “Forster Hofstück!” he said. “Your wine, Reichenbach! Cheers!”

A brief, bright clink of glass on glass, then the Punkwa’s rush grew louder again.

“I always think of Karoline von Linsingen when I’m in this lodge,” said the old count into the weave of the night, “the later Frau Doktor Meineke. She loved sitting here too. A remarkable woman.”

“Hm!” Reichenbach cleared his throat and tilted his goblet to catch the moonlight, making the wine sparkle.

“You know, your wife reminds me of Frau Meineke. She’s just as gentle and quiet, and been a bit dreamy. A remarkable woman. She was already dead when you arrived here. But you knew Meineke, and you were quite close with their daughter, Frau Teubner. I don’t know the whole story very well, but Frau Teubner gave you the letters of the deceased, so you know more about it.”

“God, an unhappy love affair,” Reichenbach growled.

It was a soft, gentle, soul-soothing summer night, perfectly suited for reflecting on an unhappy love story. And besides, it was time for Reichenbach to move on from the furnace that nearly blew them all sky-high. “Yes, she was,” the old count continued, “as far as I know, she was morganatically married to the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV of England.”

The Forster Hofstück had slowly begun to lift Reichenbach’s sullen and irritated mood. “They were properly married,” he said. “They were wed in Vermont, by a Scottish priest, all in secret. The queen tolerated the affair at first, as long as it was just an affair, but when it got serious, she raged against it and refused to recognize the marriage.”

“The quintessential mother-in-law,” the old count interjected.

“Karoline loved the prince dearly, but she was too proud and too noble to throw the entire royal family into chaos. She insisted the marriage could stand, but she gave in and agreed to the separation.”

The old count pulled the second bottle from the basket, poured, and asked in between: “And Meineke?”

“Yes, he was a doctor in Hannover back then and was called to Karoline when she was lying in a fever from grief and distress. They say she was out of her mind for a week, and everyone thought she was done for and ready to be buried. Only Meineke recognized that she was still alive and saved her from being put in the grave. And later, out of gratitude, she gave him her hand. But Meineke probably dressed it up romantically after the fact.”

“Why? Why dressed up?” asked the old count. An unhappy woman and a strange story, but that’s just how it was—there were ordinary stories and strange ones, and perhaps the charm of life lay in its peculiarities and mysteries. Why didn’t Reichenbach believe Doktor Meineke’s story? Surely there was some secret principle in people, something magnetic, a fluid or the like, that entered the body and left it again, and perhaps that was what made up life. The Indian fakirs with their tricks, right? They lie down, hold their breath, and stay as if dead for months, then get up, and everything’s as it was before. And the spiritualists with their table-turning and ghostly apparitions? It’s not entirely laughable. Maybe it’s true that they draw life force from their mediums, that magnetism, that certain principle, and then work with it.

“Oh, come now,” said Reichenbach mockingly from above, “don’t rack your brain with such nonsense!”

But the old count couldn’t be stopped when he got to talking about these things. And what about animal magnetism? That couldn’t be denied, could it? There was the case of von Linsingen. And he could tell a story from his own family, dreadful enough, that had happened to one of his own relatives. She had died and was properly laid to rest in the Salm family crypt in Bloup. The next day, the sacristan heard a clattering and rumbling under the church floor at night. The noise came from the crypt, and the sacristan told himself it could only be the countess making a racket—that is, though she had died and been laid in the coffin, her spirit was somehow, understandably, restless. So he locked the church and went home. The next day, the spirit was making a commotion in broad daylight, which, frankly, isn’t proper for a respectable ghost. The priest was called; he heard the uproar too. A Countess Salm finding no rest in her grave? Could a deceased countess Salm even haunt? One only haunts if they’ve left something unresolved in life, and a Countess Salm, even after death, has a duty to the family to keep her conduct above reproach. Besides, a church is a consecrated place, guaranteeing peace in the crypt. And what would people think of a church disturbed by a ghost? So, not a word of it; the priest made the sacristan swear to silence. The noise did indeed grow weaker and weaker, and after a week, it stopped entirely. But years later, when the crypt was opened again to remove a coffin, they found a human skeleton on the stone steps, and the countess’s coffin was open and empty.

Reichenbach shrugged. There could be no doubt about the truth of the account, but what was it supposed to prove?

“The life force,” said the old count eagerly, “that’s the great mystery. Where is the life force when the body lies in a death-like state? Or even when it’s asleep? It wanders around, maybe enters another person. That’s what they call possession. Or a demon. You yourself spoke of an evil spirit haunting your life.”

Reichenbach grew irritated, seeing his own words turned against him: “Oh, come on, sometimes you just spout that kind of nonsense!”

“No, there are still plenty of gaps in our science. They call Africa the dark continent. But I tell you, the human being is a far darker continent than Africa.”

The old count broke off; a glowing sign had suddenly appeared in the night sky. It had burst forth from the cluster of stars, right where a thin cloud was veiling them—a fiery ball, as big as the moon and brighter. It trailed a blazing tail, igniting the cloud with its light so that it flared like a fiery host, growing quickly larger than the moon, twice as large, six times, ten times… Had the heavens opened? Was its fire breaking forth to devour the earth? And now the blaze burst into a sheaf of colored light points; streaks flashed, darted earthward over the hunting lodge. Sparks sprayed as if from an iron block struck between hammer and anvil; three thunderclaps crashed down, followed by a rumbling that rolled away, chased by a whistling and whooshing, as if a monstrous whip were being swung between heaven and earth. Then came a cracking and snapping of branches in the forest and a splash in the water, like a stone hurled.

“Now, what was that?” cried the old count. “Did Saint Peter’s wood-carbonization furnace explode up there or what?”

The lantern, which had been all but extinguished in the onslaught of the heavenly fire, flickered back to life with its faint, earthly glow.

Reichenbach had leapt up, gripping the veranda railing and staring into the night. But nothing stirred anymore; the apparition had vanished, and the Punkwa rushed as before. Reichenbach returned, agitated, enraptured, inspired: “Did you see it too? Where did it come from?”

“From up there,” said the old count hesitantly, pointing with his finger to a spot among the stars, “at least, I think so.”

“Definitely from up there! Do you know what that was? It was a meteor! And we Salm folks saw it fall straight from the sky. Right from the heavens. But the know-it-alls don’t want to believe that stones can fall from the sky. Not until a few years ago near Paris, when stones nearly bashed their heads in. Tomorrow, I’ll go collect those stones—one must be in the Punkwa; you heard it too, didn’t you?”

“Well, Reichenbach,” said the old count, “there you see, there are still plenty of question marks between heaven and earth. But I’m glad that a heavenly boulder didn’t crash into our bottle basket.” And he pulled out the third bottle of Forster Hofstück.

*

As the two friends descended the stairs in the twilight of dawn, they found the old servant distraught and trembling, kneeling on the ground floor. His withered lips mumbled prayers.

“Now, what’s the matter, Johann?” asked the old count, placing a hand on the man’s shoulder.

The old man struggled to his feet, standing shakily before his master with eyes full of mortal fear. “A calamity, gracious lord, a great calamity,” he stammered. “The heavens have given a sign.”

“The heavens haven’t given any sign,” Reichenbach snapped irritably, “except that your foolishness is crying out to the skies!”

“No, Johann,” the old count smiled soothingly, “the only calamity here is that those were our last bottles of Forster Hofstück, and we’ll need to order a new cask. You’ll remind the estate manager about it, Johann, understood?”

The carriage first took the old count to the castle, then Johann took the reins and drove Reichenbach home. He arrived in the bright morning; the bedding was already airing out in the open bedroom windows, and from the arbor at the back of the garden, the voices of the children could be heard, sitting with their tutor for morning lessons. At the garden gate stood the forester Wenzel Ruf. As Reichenbach climbed down from the carriage, the man doffed his hat, his face a tangled mix of urgency, shyness, embarrassment, and pride.

“Do you want something from me, Ruf?” asked Reichenbach.

The man twisted his hat, looked at the ground, swallowed, then glanced up again, sheepish but trusting.

“Has something happened?” Reichenbach encouraged the hesitant man.

“Yes, Herr Director—my wife gave birth to a girl last night.”

“Well, then… Johann, you were right after all.” Reichenbach turned, but Johann was already driving off, enveloped in a cloud of white limestone dust down the road. “So the heavens really did give a sign. Only, we don’t know if it’s a misfortune or a blessing. Your wife certainly picked a memorable night. So, how many is that now, Ruf? You’ve got quite a brood already, if I’m not mistaken.”

“It’s the seventh, Herr Director.”

“Thunder and lightning, Ruf, you’re outdoing even your name!” The forester let out a delighted, gurgling laugh.

“And what do you want from me? Besides my hearty congratulations, of course—”

“Well, Herr Director, since it’s the seventh, my wife thought it would be a special honor and mark of respect, and because Frau Director is so kind and has always had a heart for us and my children…”

“If I understand you correctly, Ruf, you want my wife to be the godmother.”

A blissful nod confirmed that Reichenbach had understood correctly.

“Well, alright, I’ll tell my wife, and I’m sure she’ll do it.”

A radiant glow of gratitude spread across the man’s face. He mumbled something muddled about never forgetting and eternal devotion. Then it was clear that, now certain of the outcome, he was eager to rush home with the good news.

“Go on, then,” Reichenbach allowed, “and tell your wife.”

As Wenzel Ruf was already some distance away, Reichenbach called after him: “And send me a few men right afterward—maybe ten—to help search for the shattered stones.”