LITMIR.BIZ

       4

       Bernhard’s Red Cap

      FOR the first time Fritz felt afraid. His imagination ran ahead of him, back to the Kloster Gasse, meeting the housekeeper at the front door – but, young master, what is that load you are carrying into the house? It is dripping everywhere, the floors, I am responsible for them.

      His mother had always believed that the Bernhard was destined to become a page, if not at the court of the Elector of Saxony, then perhaps with the Count of Mansfeld or the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. One of Fritz’s duties, before long, would be to drag his little brother round these various courts in the hope of placing him satisfactorily.

      The rafts lay below the bridge, close into the bank, alongside piles of gently heaving, chained pinewood logs, waiting for the next stage in their journey. A watchman was trying a bunch of keys in the door of a hut. ‘Herr Watchman, have you seen a boy running?’

      A boy was supposed to come with his dinner, said the watchman, but he was a rascal and had not come. ‘Look, the towpath is empty.’

       The empty barges laid up for repair were moored at their station on the opposite bank. Fritz pelted over the bridge. Everyone saw him, coat flying. Had the Freiherr no servants to send? The barges wallowed on their mooring ropes, grating against each other, strake against strake. From the quayside Fritz jumped down about four feet or so onto the nearest deck. There was a scurrying, as though of an animal larger than a dog.

      ‘Bernhard!’

      ‘I will never come back,’ Bernhard called.

      The child ran across the deck, and then, afraid to risk the drop onto the next boat, climbed over the gunwale and then stayed there hanging on with both hands, scrabbling with his boots for a foothold. Fritz caught hold of him by the wrists and at the same moment the whole line of barges made one of their unaccountable shifts, heaving grossly towards each other, so that the Bernhard, still hanging, was trapped and squeezed. A pitiful cough and a burst of tears and blood were forced out of him like air out of a balloon.

      ‘How am I going to get you out of here?’ demanded Fritz. ‘What a pest you are, what a pest.’

      ‘Let me go, let me die!’ wheezed the Bernhard.

      ‘We’ll have to work our way along forward, then I can pull you up.’ But the instinct to preserve life seemed for the moment to have deserted the child, Fritz must do it all, dragging and shuffling him along, wildly protesting, between the two gunwales. If they had been on the other bank there would have been passers-by to lend a hand, but then, Fritz thought, they’d think murder was being done. The boats grew narrower, he saw the glimmering water idling beneath them and hauled the child up like a wet sack. His face was not pale, but a brilliant crimson.

      ‘Make an effort, do you want to drown?’

      ‘What would it matter if I did?’ squeaked the Bernhard. ‘You said once that death was not significant, but only a change in condition.’

      ‘Drat you, you’ve no business to understand that,’ Fritz shouted in his ear.

      ‘My Mütze!’

      The child was much attached to his red cap, which was missing. So, too were one of his front teeth and his breeches. He had on only long cotton drawers tied with tape. Like most rescuers, Fritz felt suddenly furious with the loved and saved. ‘Your Mütze has gone, it must be on its way to the Elbe by now.’ Then, ashamed of his anger, he picked the little boy up and put him on his shoulders to carry him home. The Bernhard, aloft, revived a little. ‘Can I wave at the people?’

      Fritz had to make his way to the end of the line of barges, where perpendicular iron steps had been built into one bank and he could climb up without putting down the Bernhard.

      How heavy a child is when it gives up responsibility.

       He couldn’t go straight back to the Kloster Gasse like this. But Sidonie and Asmus between them would be equal to explaining things away during the before-dinner music. Meanwhile, in Weissenfels, he had many places to get dry. After crossing the bridge again he walked only a short way along the Saale and then took two turns to the left and one to the right, where the lights were now shining in Severin’s bookshop.

      There were no customers in the shop. The pale Severin, in his long overall, was examining one of the tattered lists, which booksellers prefer to all other reading, by the light of a candle fitted with a reflector.

      ‘Dear Hardenberg! I did not expect you. Put the little brother, I pray you, on a sheet of newspaper. Here is yesterday’s Leipziger Zeitung.’ He was surprised at nothing.

      ‘The little brother is in disgrace,’ said Fritz, depositing the Bernhard. ‘He ran down onto the barges. How he came to get quite so wet I don’t know.’

      ‘Kinderleicht, kinderleicht,’ said Severin indulgently, but his indulgence was for Fritz. He could not warm to children, since all of them were scribblers in books. He went to the very back of the shop, opened a wooden chest, and took out a large knitted shawl, a peasant thing.

      ‘Take off your shirt, I will wrap you in this,’ he said. ‘Your brother need not return it to me. Why did you cause all this trouble? Did you hope to sail away and leave your father and mother behind you?’

      ‘Of course not,’ said the Bernhard scornfully. ‘All the boats on that mooring are under repair. They could not sail, they have no canvas. I did not want to sail, I wanted to drown.’

      ‘That I don’t believe,’ replied Severin, ‘and I should have preferred you not to say it.’

      ‘He loves water,’ said Fritz, impelled to defend his own.

      ‘Evidently.’

      ‘And, indeed, so do I,’ Fritz cried. ‘Water is the most wonderful element of all. Even to touch it is a pleasure.’

      Perhaps Severin did not find it a pleasure to have quite so much water on the floor of his bookshop. He was a man of forty-five, ‘old’ Severin to Fritz, a person of great good sense, unperturbed by life’s contingencies. He had been poor and unsuccessful, had kept himself going by working very hard, at low wages, for the proprietor of the bookshop, and then, when the proprietor had died, had married his widow and come into the whole property. Of course the whole of Weissenfels knew this and approved of it. It was their idea of wisdom exactly.

      Poetry, however, meant a great deal to Severin – almost as much as his lists. He would have liked to see his young friend Hardenberg continue as a poet without the necessity of working as a salt mine inspector.

      For the rest of his journey home the Bernhard continued to complain about the loss of his red Mütze. It was the only thing he had possessed which indicated his revolutionary sympathies.

      ‘I don’t know how you got hold of it,’ Fritz told him. ‘And if Father had ever caught sight of it he would in any case have told the servants to throw it on the rubbish heap. Let all this be a lesson to you to keep yourself from poking about among the visitors’ possessions.’

      ‘In a republic there would be no possessions,’ said the Bernhard.