Brother of Sleep: A Novel by Robert Schneider Page B

received their baptismal promise. Two lads then trotted staccato fashion to Götzberg and told the priest there that they could no longer stand the reverend curate in Eschberg. The priest in Götzberg was thunderstruck when told of the disturbed state of his dear brother. He listened to the lads’ descriptions with red cheeks and a quiet “What the devil!” and promised help, promised to come to Eschberg in person, promised to bring the matter before the vicar-general. When he blessed the lads for the first time–he too was advanced in years– they understood, and tramped grumpily back to Esch­berg with an even louder staccato.
    Those who had not left for the Rhine Valley remained stubbornly in Eschberg. By Epiphany they began to rebuild their farms. The landlord of the Hunts­ man’s Inn gave their families lodging. During the win­ ter months more than seventy people lived and slept head to toe in the little taproom.
    And Seff’s wife, the poor, pitiable woman, had to suffer her third birth there–in front of everyone. They ignored her request to screen off her bed with a sheet. Men stared at her open vagina; children secretly clenched their fists and then clenched them even more tightly, as if to help the child to push. Some women gazed open-mouthed at the scar on the woman’s face. Then a rumor ran through the taproom. An idiot had come into the world–a Mongoloid, they meant. Poor Agathe Alder, poor Agathe.
    While everyone was lodged in the taproom, the inside of Elias’s head was like a deep and dangerous abyss. All his thoughts fell into a bottomless pit and echoed without reply. He had a high fever, he suffered from sudden bursts of perspiration, and when he woke in the morning involuntary tears flowed from his sleep-encrusted eyes. Then he would crouch in one place without moving. He did not even sniff up the drip at the end of his nose. They often had to grab him by the shoulders and shake him violently until some vague sound finally issued from his mouth. He no longer seemed to be able to hear or to speak. No one knew that he was in shock.
    When, on the night of the crime, the murderers had come into the inn, his body had begun to tremble violently as though he were being thrown back and forth by invisible hands. However much he desperately sought to control himself–he would never have be­ trayed his father–it did no good. Involuntary guttural sounds escaped him, and he stuffed half his fist in his mouth, sank his teeth in his flesh so it would fi­ nally pass. It did no good. Everyone was staring at Elias. Finally he made himself faint by pressing his arms against his rib cage so he could not breathe. The scene looked very strange, and people assumed that what they were seeing was an epileptic attack and told Seff, who had just come in, to take his boy out of the room. Seff did so and carried him out. The boy’s limp body awoke in his arms. But when Seff saw the boy’s eyes, two ghostly holes, he sensed that Elias knew everything. Seff weakened, and Elias slid from his arms. Then he saw black water spraying from the corners of the boy’s mouth. He could not look and stumbled back into the inn.
    There he did something that no one would have thought possible. He, who barely uttered two words in the course of a day, suddenly spoke as hastily and as much as if he were the most talkative man in Esch­berg. He spoke in ragged sentences, ended them with hacking hand gestures, stammered and bellowed, and didn’t pause for breath. While he was talking like this, the other men who had come in with him gathered closer and closer around him, and they too began to boom and thunder into the astonished, silent faces of the others.
    They had looked everywhere for the blasted cur, for they knew from witnesses that it had been Mostly who had set fire to the village. For more than six hours they had scoured the gorge, but it seemed that the earth