Brother of Sleep: A Novel by Robert Schneider

of them collapsed uncon­scious, in infernal screaming fits.
    On Christmas Day eight families bundled together the little they had and, weeping, left their beloved Eschberg. They followed the Emmer down to the Rhine Valley, where in the course of time they either perished in poverty or else spent the rest of their days working other people’s land. These included Haintz and Haintz’s wife, as well as the family of the Alder gossip. We shall lose sight of these people, and the stories connected to them.
    But the Alder gossip seemed able to go only after putting an insane calumny about the village, the cruel consequences of which were seen on St. Stephen’s Day. She claimed, if we are to believe her testimony, to have seen–from a safe distance–Mostly, walking up and down behind closed shutters until dawn. He had been speaking to his shadow, his hair wild and his mouth foaming; he had rolled on the ground like an epileptic; then he had written something on a piece of paper, where the word burn was clearly visible. In the blackest darkness of his cellar he had indulged in sacri­legious practices, reciting the Hail Mary backward, after the manner of the Moslems, and had even finished by urinating on the crucifix: this was what the Alder gossip claimed to have seen, in the dark of night, and from a safe distance, if we are to believe her.
    Not even the most dangerous idiots of Eschberg lent credence to this testimony, and yet it was taken as read that the carver Roman Lamparter had started the fire. For too long the peasants of Eschberg had had to endure this short-legged man, with his bushy eyebrows and the thousand laughter wrinkles around his mouth, insolently mocking their faith, their life, and their work, day in and day out. For on workdays he would walk around in Sunday clothes, and if he saw someone raking a slope in the July heat, he would go up to him, take his eyeglasses off, blow pollen from the lenses, draw a circle in the air with his carved walking stick, and speak, as the greatest authority on the subject, of the trials of the mountain peasant’s life. He explained that it was not worth it, that their laborious toils were mostly not enough to fill their bellies, and that it therefore made more sense to twiddle one’s thumbs and sit in the shade contemplating the aesthetic blue of the skies, like the birds in the trees. These were the sentiments inflicted on them by someone who could not afford so much as a hundredweight of hay. And the sweating men would have spat on the ground in rage, had their dusty mouths not been dry.
    But what most infuriated the peasants was the appearance of his house. He, who never attended a church service, not even Midnight Mass, had hit on the idea of building a home based on the exterior of the Eschberg tabernacle. Mostly had spent more than four years sculpting his little house, and when it was finished it resembled the Holy of Holies down to the last details, the last pinnacles and crockets. If we try to enter the heart of an Eschberg peasant, we will easily understand why Mostly was held in suspicion and even hated. For who would not have wished to live in the tabernacle? And that it was he of all people–a maker of debts, an Antichrist–who shared this habitation with Jesus was an injustice crying out for reparation. Mostly was unworthy to have the Lord beneath his roof. He of all people!
    Last of all, he added one further crime to this one. His own milk cow–a haggard beast with a gray muzzle and bloodshot eyes–he christened St. Elizabeth, be­ cause the cow had borne him a calf at a great age. It would take too long to relate all the infuriating episodes from Mostly’s life, unless we were to write a little book dedicated entirely to him.
    On the morning of St. Stephen’s Day they kicked down his door with their boots, thundered up to his room, beat him out of his deepest dreams, and would have rammed the wooden stake