The Rebirth of Melchior Dronte by Paul Busson and translated by Joe E Bandel
I went back again. Dark yellow light fell out from the
chamber; a coffin stood on black-covered trestles, on which
was a cross of silver, and a high funeral crown, with flitters,
colored glass and mirrors. The wax ran and dripped, the
candles flickered. The flowers smelled of earth. Muhme knelt
by the coffin.
“O my Aglajele! My Aglajele!” she cried. That her little
face is never to be known! – Is it raining already?” she asked,
turning her puffy eyes toward me.
“I don’t know.”
And then I cried out and cried so wildly that Muhme put
her arms around my shoulders and spoke to me.
“You must not, boy, you must not – the people are
coming!”
One could hear feet trampling. People were coming,
murmuring. The finch in the hallway jumped from rung to rung
in its cage and kept shouting:
“Look – look – look – the travel gear!”
I stood up.
The priest came. He had the sniffles and often pulled out
his handkerchief. He had baptized Aglaja and blessed her.
Carriages drove up: the Sassens came, the Zochte, the
Merentheim, the cuirassiers from the city, Doctor Zeidlow, the
old Countess Trettin, the Hohentrapps.
A bell rang in the village, tolled; bing – bong – bing –
bong. Schoolchildren.
Muhme waved to the teacher. I heard how she said,
sobbing:
“He makes me sing the same song as he did with my
blessed little Hans, even though she was already blessed. But
she is in white innocence, as it were like a newborn child – God,
oh God!”
Ursula Sassen and Gisbrechte Hohentrapp embraced her
and led her. Then the servants picked up the coffin and carried
it out into the rain.
It was not far to the cemetery. Crows were sitting in the
weeping willows. Crooked old crosses leaned on both sides of
the gravel-strewn path. The iron gate of the hereditary burial
ground stood open with rust-red insides. Above it was a marble
skull with two crossed bones. In its open yawning mouth birds
had built a nest. It stood empty and abandoned. On top of the
head grew moss like woolly hair. I saw everything.
They put the coffin on the ground, and the school sang
again. As Muhme had wanted it, a song that is usually only
sung for very young children. My cousin Hans was two years
old when he died.
When little heirs to heaven
Die in their innocence,
So you don’t forfeit them.
They are only there
Lifted up by the Father,
So that they may not be lost.
Then the priest blew his nose and spoke. The old man
cried. The eighty-year-old Countess Trettin raised her lace
shawl upwards.
“Dust to dust -,” said the priest.
They carried the coffin down. The footsteps sounded
hollow, there was a terrible echo. Voices came from the depths.
Something fell with a thud down there in the darkness.
The rain rushed harder and harder. The carriages drove in
puddles of water. The men tied red handkerchiefs over their
hats, and the women put their skirts over their heads when they
were outside.
My father looked sternly on all sides. The sexton brought
him the key to the crypt.
“There – now have a drink!” said my father, and the
sexton, wet and chattering with his teeth, bowed low. He made
a face and ran his hand to his shoulder. He suffered from acute
Rheumatism.
“Aglaja is freezing -” said a disconsolate voice inside me.
“Aglaja-“
The big house was empty when I got home, the corridors
silent. There was a whispering in the corners, and the clocks
ticked. The stairs creaked in the night, and the wind cried in the
chimney. It was a very strange house. So big and so empty.
On the dark corridor of the second floor was a Dutch
clock with a polished face, on which the moon, sun and stars
moved. Above it, the ornate hands went their way. The
pendulum swung back and forth with a muffled, wham – wham.
After every quarter of an hour, the striking work let its three-
note sound be heard as if from far away:
Gling-glang-glong. At the end of each hour chimes
announced their number. Then a door above the dial opened,
and a small brown rooster slid out of it, moving its wooden
wings with a groaning sound. His voice was lost. Always an
invisible force took him back and closed the door again. At
noon, however, an angel with a blue, gold-edged robe appeared
instead of the cock and in three stiff jerks lifted a green palm
branch.
At twelve o’clock at night, however, a dead little girl
would appear in place of the angel. So we were told when
Aglaja was still alive.
I was standing in this corridor one night. It smelled of
apples and the strange wood of the wide linen cupboards on the
wall. Deer heads carved from wood hung there. They held
white turnips in their mouths and wore antlers that father and
grandfather had captured. Certainly a hundred such deer heads
were distributed throughout the entire house. One of the deer
had been kept tame, held in a fenced area and then released.
Later it had killed a fodder servant and the maids said that the
blood of the servant still stuck to the antlers. The paint had
peeled off the eyeballs of the wooden head, and so he looked
down on me with a ghastly white and blind glare.
Old Margaret, shuffling through the corridors with her
cane and enjoying the bread of mercy, had told me that at the
midnight hour of the day the dead walked in the house where
they had liked to be during their lifetime. I held in my hand a
candelabrum with one of the wax candles that had burned at
Aglaja’s coffin a year ago, and waited for her to come.
The cupboards cracked, there was a throbbing in the wall,
and then it was like a sigh. The wind went over the roof, so that
the shingles rattled. When the hour strike was about to begin,
the door above the clock face opened, and sure enough out
came out a little dead man with hourglass and scythe, turned
his skeleton once to the right and once to the left and raised the
tiny scythe to strike.
“Wham – wham -,” went the pendulum in the pauses of
the hoarse chime of the bell.
“Aglaja” I called softly and peered down the corridor.
Then silently the door of the closet opened, I was
standing nearby, and in the uncertain light of the candle I
thought I saw an ancient woman with a wrinkled brown face
and a large white hood. I staggered to the wall, but when I
forced myself with all my courage to look once more I could
not see anything but the closed door.
Then there was a cough and shuffling footsteps.
Something gray and stooped. The candlestick rattled in my
hand. But it was only old Margaret who was worried about me
and came to see if I was really up there. I held on to her sleeve
like a child and told her what I had encountered. She giggled
and nodded.
“It was the old woman- The great-grandmother of Aglaja
Starke, the daughter of the mayor, who had twisted the family
tree – on the Krämer side. You have seen rightly, my Melchior,
quite rightly. It’s just that she came instead of the young one.
She grabbed me by the jacket. I tore myself loose and stumbled
down the stairs.
In the afternoon Heiner Fessl was executed. He had
overheard the magistrate harass his wife, and since he noticed
that his wife had given in to the powerful man, he had run from
the workshop into the room and had shoved a red-hot iron that
was lying in the fire, through the body of the magistrate, so that
the strong man had to perish and die miserably. He had cruelly
beaten him and likewise the woman. She was dying, people
said. – Powerful helpers, who would have taken care of him-
were not there, and so they broke the staff for him.
At dawn, the man of fear had gone out into the field and
had announced it to the ravens, that the flesh of the sinner
would be available before sunset. So the executioner’s pigeons
were sitting on all the roofs and waiting.
Father told me to put on the silk, lavender-grey coat and
go with him.
“You’re a wimp and a whiner, but you’re no Dronte,” he
said. “I’m going to take you to the spa, boy!”
I felt sick with fear when I heard from a distance the
muffled beat of the drum and the roar of the crowd. All the
alleys were full. They had all travelled to see Fessl on the
executioner’s cart, and now he was to return. To my comfort,
we had to stop quite a distance from the scaffolding, because
the crowd did not move and did not take into consideration the
rank of my father.
“There you see how bold the scoundrels are when there
are many of them together,” said my father loudly and angrily.
He was appeased, however, when the baker, who had his store
there, hurriedly brought us two chairs, so that we could rest for
the time being.
“What you see will be very wholesome for you,” my
father said after a while. “Justice does not work with rose water
and sugar cookies. If it did, we noble folk could pound gravel
on the roads and give our belongings to the rabble.”
In the trees that stood in front of us and lined the square,
many people were sitting. Just in front of us squatted an
abominable fellow, dressed in the manner of Hessian cattle
dealers, in the crown of a linden tree. The sight of him was so
repulsive to me, that I had to look again and again.
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