The Rebirth of Melchior Dronte by Paul Busson and translated by Joe E Bandel

Over and over again they went about to create new life.
They hid themselves from the others and became one. All
beings, which were invisible to the people, but always surround
them, retreated before the divine, which emanated from the
procreators, however barren and poor they might otherwise be,
as flawed and weak, but in this action they unleashed the
elemental power of eternity, they were more powerful and
greater than all other creatures. I was fervently attached to such
pairs of people everywhere. In the black nomad tents of the
steppes, in dim snow huts, in thin beds, on haystacks, behind
stacks of boards, in the bushes of the forest, on the straw
mattresses of dull houses, in garrets and state rooms. In
countless places, at secret hours of the day and night. The law
was above me. I felt attracted and repelled, without grief,
disappointment or impatience.
Once it happened, quicker than the lightning flared up.
At the union of two cells, the power of new life enclosed
me. I was caught in tiny union, caught up in hot, red, radiant,
working and pulsating being. I felt warmth, darkness, moisture,
currents of nourishment, the rustling of creative forces. Blissful
growth was in me.
Juices flowed through me; the thunder of unfolding and
the soft crackling of becoming were around me. Consciousness
became dim. Sleep enveloped it, happy, refreshing sleep. Torn
and incoherent experiences passed through my dreams as
unrecognizable silhouettes, disjointed and inaudible, ancient,
lost, sinking memories.
I grew in slumber, stretched my limbs out comfortably,
smacking with pleasure, stretched, moved softly in sleep.
Delicate and precious organs, protected in bony armor, were
formed in me, warm blood raced through me in rapid,
throbbing beats, friendly tightness pressed me tenderly, moved
me swaying, showing me the way to the light.
Crystal, cold, clear air rushed into my lungs.
Colorful, confused rays penetrated my eyes, confused
sounds pressed into my ears. Everything happened to me that
accompanies young life when it enters this world.
I was there. I was the one who had come back, the Ewli.
My name was Sennon Vorauf.
I had a father, a mother and other people who loved me. I
learned to speak and walk, a child like other children.
Everything was new to me, a great revelation.
Until the ability to look back into my past life.
This began with dreams of anxiety in childhood, which
caused my good parents a lot of worry. But even when I was
awake, I was not safe from sudden sinking. The memories of
Melchior Dronte, the son of a nobleman in days long past,
came back to me fiercely, and frightened me very much. Only
slowly did I gain from myself the repetitive, chasing, and
frightening memories and gradually put them together so that I
could grasp them as fragments of a former whole, which I
called the life of Melchior Dronte, my former life.
Shaken by the horror of my parents (they often both sat
by my bedside and listened, stunned by my wild fantasies, as
they thought), I withdrew already in boyhood and showed
myself to others as a strangely precocious, quiet and thoughtful
child, who preferred to sit alone staring with open eyes.
My new life was suitable for such thoughtfulness. My
parents, good-hearted and simple people, had, following a
custom of the country, named me “Sennon” after one of the two
saints of my birthday and loved me more than anything. After
ten years of childless marriage, I was the eagerly awaited “gift
from heaven” sent to them. In the first years of my life, I had,
as already mentioned often caused them great fear and worry.
Thus I had once fell into severe convulsions when, by accident,
I was present when a few boys threw stones at a black dog, so
that it ran away howling. To an aunt, who loved me tenderly, I
did not want to go to her until the squawking parrot, which she
had in her apartment was removed.
Sometimes one, such as the reader of this book,
understandably took these behaviors for stubbornness and
punished me mildly. The patience and the lack of any
consciousness of guilt, with which I accepted the gentle
punishments, however, soon made it completely impossible for
the good-hearted to act against me in such a way.
Especially my mother, who despite her low status was an
unusually sensitive Frau, who with her trained intuition,
recognized better than my father, that all the violent emotional
expressions of her child must indicate quite unusual mental
processes which ruled out any crude influence. I clearly
remember a Sunday afternoon, when I was with her in a garden
filled with the deep glow of the autumn sun. She had cut
flowers to put in a vase. The arrangement of the copper, blue,
white and fire-yellow Georgiana flowers she had made
suddenly seized me in a very peculiar way, and without being
able to explain where these words came from, I said
completely lost in a dream and quietly to myself:
“Aglaja also arranged them like this”.
Then my mother looked at me with a very strange, shy
look, stroked her hand over my hair and said to me:
“You must have once loved her very much -.”
We then spoke nothing for a long time, until it became
completely dark. Then mother heaved a sigh of relief, hugged
me fiercely and we went into the house to wait for my father,
who was working in a large optical company.
I had little contact with other children, and generally kept
away from them, not because I was arrogant or afraid of people,
but because I had no taste for their games. I still liked best to
be with the son of a well-traveled doctor who lived in our
neighborhood, with Kaspar Hedrich, who was the same age as
me, and who, like me, was a quiet and lonely boy. I went on
many hikes in the surroundings of the small town that was my
home, and to him, as the only one, I sometimes told my dreams,
but only when I was in my twelfth or thirteenth year, did the
realization dawn on me of the nature of these ever-renewing
and complementary dream images and what they were. From
then on I kept them to myself and did not listen to Kaspar’s
vehement pleas to tell him more. In any case, he was the only
one who listened with great attention and without any sign of
disbelief until then to the tangled stories that often violently
forced themselves out of me, perhaps only in the unconscious
longing to find an explanation for them. When this finally came
like a revelation, I guarded my secret in the realization that it
could hardly ever be understood correctly by others.
Then something happened with Kaspar Hedrich and me,
which at that time filled me with great uneasiness. Today,
however, I must think of the event with a smile and am filled
with consolation, of an event that was my first, dearest, greatest
and most valuable confirmation of the special pardon that I
have been granted.
Kaspar and I had a special joy of walking on cold winter
days on the frozen dead branch of the river to a place where we
could ice skate that was a half an hour’s walk away. We kept
this place of our solitary pleasures from our parents, knowing
that they would not have allowed us because of the danger of
both the remoteness of the water and the uncertainty of the ice
conditions. They thought nothing other than that we, like the
other boys, were on one of the two busy and completely safe,
artificially created skating rinks of the town. The deception
succeeded all the more, because neither of our fathers, who
were busy during the day nor my mother, who was absorbed in
the economic worries of the day (Kaspar’s mother had been
dead for a long time), had ever found time to teach us skating
skills.
On the day I want to tell you about, Kaspar came to us
with the skates on his arm to pick me up. There was a warm
wind that had sprung up, and water dripped softly from the roof.
All the more reason, thought my playmate, to hurry in order to
take advantage of the last opportunity of the departing winter.
However, I had caught a cold the day before and was
feverish. My worried mother, who came into the room during
the visit, explained that in view of my condition Kaspar would
have to do without my company this time. I was always
obedient to my mother and complied. Kaspar was disappointed
to have to do without his comrade, but then he said goodbye
and went on his usual way to the lonely river place alone.
After about an hour, my mother took a pillow and
lovingly made me sit on the bench by the warm stove and lean
against the cushion. She herself did some work and advised me
to take a little nap, and I soon heard her knitting softly rattling
half in a dream. All of a sudden it was as if I could clearly hear
the voice of my friend, who repeatedly and in the highest fear
called my first name!
I wanted to rise, but I was paralyzed. I made a
tremendous effort. Then it happened.
Suddenly I found myself outside my body. I clearly saw
myself, sitting on the stove bench with stiff, wide-open eyes,
with my unsuspecting mother at the table, lost in her counting
meshes at the table. In the very next moment I found myself, as
if carried away by a whizzing gust of wind, at the edge of that
river arm. With the greatest sharpness I saw the leafless pollard
willows, the uniform gray of the ice, the snow eaten away by
the warm wind, the skate tracks on the slippery ice and in the
middle of the cracked ice an open spot of the water, from
which, screaming in fear, Kaspar’s head protruded, and his
wildly beating hands that searched in vain for a hold on the
breaking ice sheets.
Without any reflection I stepped across the ice to the very
edge of the collapse, reached out my hand to the man in the
greatest need and pulled him without the slightest effort onto
the solid ice. He saw me, chattering with his teeth from the
frost, and yet laughing with joy, and opened his mouth to say
something —.
Then something pulled me away from him with terrible
force and I was seized by an unparalleled feeling of fear, and I
became painfully aware of my own distressed body —

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The Rebirth of Melchior Dronte by Paul Busson and translated by Joe E Bandel

I went near one of the windows, unfolded the paper and
read:
“My heart weeps for the best and noblest of men; yet I
bow before a heroism that respects death less than the betrayal
of itself. My now impotent gratitude will forever honor your
memory. May there be a reunion that gives you new goals.”
It was the well-known handwriting of the magister.
In the dim morning light we could see through the
windows, which were high up but clean and bright, that a fine
rain was falling outside. Drops hung sparkling on the iron bars
of the lattice.
This dungeon, admittedly the last one in which we were
housed, was in every respect friendlier than the gloomy coal
mine where we had awaited our sentencing. A bow-legged
jailer with a good-natured face and a natural gift for joking
words, brought us washing water in wooden cans and lent us
clean, coarse cloths to dry our faces and hands. For those
prisoners who still had money on them, he provided chocolate
for breakfast and pieces of cake. The others were given a soup
of burnt rye flour and a large slice of bread.
Since everything seemed trivial to me that was still
connected with the needs of the body, I was content with a few
spoonfuls of soup. Also in these last hours of my life, I
sometimes felt as if I were completely outside the events and
saw from afar, like an observer, me and my fellow sufferers.
Nevertheless, this observing being, which was my ego, was
connected by a guiding thread with my body, and felt the
morning chill, hunger and that dull, constricting feeling in the
stomach area, which precedes bad events. This strange out-of-
myself sensation was so strong that my own hands seemed like
something foreign, for I looked at them closely and with a
strange feeling as if I were seeing something familiar again
after a long time. In all these ambivalent feelings was mixed
with a kind of regret over the ingratitude, with which the soul
calmly left forever, the house in which it had been for so long
and through whose senses it had taken in the image of its
changing surroundings. I could not, try as I might, find
anything great or decisive in the imminent departure from the
accustomed form of earthly life. It was as if the body, although
its sensations continued, no longer participated in those of the
soul.
Even the scenes that took place around me could not
move me violently, as much as I was aware of their sadness.
Something constantly stirred in me, as if I had to speak to the
poor people and tell them that all this was only of secondary
importance and that it did not really have to mean much. But it
was also completely clear to me that they would not have
understood me at all, and so I kept silent and out of the way.
Many things happened around me. Women wept bitterly
and their hot tears, with which they said goodbye to life,
dripped into the soup bowls from which they ate. The Marquis
de Carmignac sat in a corner and had his beard shaved and his
hair arranged. A withered, weary smiling old man read to a
small crowd of listeners from the “Consolations of Philosophy”
by Boethius. A handsome young man in a riding suit leaned
against a pillar with rapt eyes and hummed a little song over
and over again, which was obviously dear to him as a memory.
He stopped only when an Abbe, who was whispering prayers
with several older and younger ladies, approached him and
politely asked him not to disturb the religious gathering of the
dying. Several sat dully, despairingly and completely absorbed
in themselves on the straw mattresses of the beds that were set
up here.
After some time, a young, pale-looking barber’s assistant
entered with the jailer, waved to his comrade, who was taking
the marquis’ tip with many bows and with a trembling voice
asked the people present to sit down in turn on a bench placed
in the middle of the room, to have their hair cut. This request
caused loud sobs and a fit of fainting, but the toilet, as the
procedure was called for short, proceeded swiftly. The long
tresses of the ladies, which were carefully cut off and placed in
a small basket, he very politely requested them to be
considered useful for his business, and presented each woman
who gave her consent, a small vial of smelling salts as a return
gift.
The frosty, rattling and moving of the scissor also
touched my neck, and their blades cut through my hair. Coldly
I felt the lack.
All around, the praying grew louder and more fervent. At
eight o’clock a booming drum rattled and the door opened. In
front of a crowd of soldiers, a commissar with a sash appeared
and read off name after name from a list. All those named rose
immediately and lined up to the left of the door.
“Citizen Melchior Dronte!”
I bowed briefly to those who obviously remained behind,
and stood next to a tall, strong man who, with a contemptuous
expression, derisively pushed his chin forward. By his braids
and lapels and the uniform, I recognized him as a major of the
Broglie regiment.
“Skunks – riffraff from the gutter!” he growled and spat
out so violently that a small, hungry-looking soldier jumped to
the side, startled.
A somewhat lopsided, gray-clad man with a mocking
face, who was one of those called up, laughed softly to himself.
“This carnival play will soon be over. And it wasn’t even
very funny.”
We were now; about twenty in number, led out of the
cellar, went up the stairs and came to a courtyard that was
completely surrounded by soldiers. It was still trickling thinly
from the cloudy sky. Some ladder wagons were standing there,
and we were ordered to sit on the boards nailed across. A boy
of about fifteen years old climbed up behind us and tied our
hands behind our backs with strong vine cords, supervised by a
mounted sergeant. I saw that the young lad whispered
something in the ear of each person whom he bound. And when
it came to my turn, I heard from behind, half-breathed, while
the warm breath hit my shivering neck, the words:
“Forgive me!”
I felt how restless and hot the hands were that bound my
arms.
Amidst much shouting, running to and fro, and up and
down trotting of the cavalry escort the wagons were finally
loaded with their human cargo. Next to the coachman, a soldier
swung himself onto the bench and the big door of the courtyard
opened with a loud creak. Incalculable masses of people filled
the street outside and formed two rows, between which our
carts now slowly began to roll.
Quietly, I looked around me. In front of me, stiffly erect
and looking over the people, sat the Marquis de Carmignac,
next to him the major of the Broglie regiment, who, with his
furiously lowered red head reminded of an irritated bull.
Crouched on the bench next to me was an obviously deranged
man, about sixty years old, with white beard stubble, a
wrinkled face and rolling eyes, who was intoning incessant
incantations to himself.
“O Astaroth, O Typhon, O ye seven fiery dragons, you, O
keeper of the seals, hasten to help me! Let flames fall upon
them, let the earth open up and take them to the lowest hell, but
carry me to the garden of the white Ariel Arizoth Araman
Arihel Adonai.”
The words became unintelligible, and at last he burst into
a triumphant giggle and became calm, obviously firmly
convinced of the sure effect of his spirit invocation.
I turned my head with difficulty to the back bench and
caught sight of an aging girl with brick-red spots on her
cheekbones, who was dressed in a black robe, with her eyes
turned to Heaven, praying without ceasing. Beside this nun,
who with glowing eyes, was preparing for martyrdom,
trembled like a jelly, a white-flour covered baker, whose
swollen, puffy eyes gazed out of a hot face in which mortal fear
gaped. His huge belly, which almost burst the buttons of the
trousers, wobbled back and forth with every step of the horses.
I saw excessively clearly, and not the slightest detail
escaped me. I noticed a hanging silver button on the jacket of
the marquis. On the neck of the major an inflamed pustule. On
the vest of the man sitting next to me the remains of an egg
dish, and the medals on the nun’s rosary sometimes clinked
against a board of the cart.
My poor body, which was now to change, was doing
everything in its power to keep the calm serenity of the spirit
that was preparing to leave busy with unimportant worries on
its way into eternity. A natural need, for the satisfaction of
which there was no time left to satisfy, arose with annoying
agony. An old cold pain which had not tormented me for a long
time, had shot into my right hip during the night and caused me
great agony with the shocks of the cart. And to all this was
added the fear of death that the body felt. It manifested itself in
strong stomach pains and finally brought it to the point that
cold drops ran down my face. It was cold sweat, death sweat…
But I stood above or beside these sensations which, in
spite of their strength, could no longer really penetrate to the
consciousness. A sharp and irrevocable divorce between body
and soul had occurred, and the soul realized with joy that no
earthly feeling would accompany it on its way.
From the crowd a song burst forth in full chords, into
which thousands of voices fell. The truly entrancing melody,
the words of which I could not understand, except for
“Fatherland”, “tyranny” and the like, had a strong and moving
effect on me. It was a genuine and noble-born, fiery child of
the time, and it was as if this rapturous singing carried
something hot in it.
Everywhere people were looking out of the windows of
the suburban houses, joining in the song with bright,
enthusiastic voices and waving their scarves. The horses in
front of our wagon, a chestnut and a summer black, neighed
and began to prance and nod their heads in time with the
mighty tune, which was glowing and storming up to the sky.
Even the driver, a scowling man, and the young soldier next to
him sang the hymn, for such it was, with a loud voice.

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