But not even such news as that would have been necessary; if we had only come of our own accord and offered ourselves, picked up our old connections without another word about the letter, it would have been enough. Everyone would happily have stopped mentioning the subject, for as well as fear it was mainly the embarrassment of the whole business that had separ-ated them from us, they merely wanted not to have to hear about it, talk about it, think about it, feel it affecting them in any way at all. If Frieda mentioned it she didn’t do so for pleasure, but in defence of herself and everyone around her, to alert the community to the fact that something had occurred from which they should keep their distance most carefully. We as a family weren’t at the centre of the affair, only the incident itself, and we were concerned only because we had become involved in the incident. So if we had simply come out in public, leaving the past behind, had shown by our behaviour that we had got over it, had appeared, so to speak, not to mind about it, and people in general had thus been convinced that the affair, whatever its real nature, wouldn’t be mentioned again, then again everything would have been all right, we would have found helpful people everywhere again, even if we had forgotten the incident only incompletely they would have understood, they’d have helped us to forget it entirely. But instead we stayed at home. I don’t know what we were waiting for, maybe for Amalia’s decision, for at the time of the disaster, on that same morning, she had taken the reins as head of the family and held them firmly, making no particular arrange-ments, giving no orders, making no requests, she did it almost entirely through her silence alone. The rest of us, of course, had much to discuss; we were whispering from morning to evening, and sometimes my father called me to him in sudden alarm, and I spent half the night at his bedside.
Or sometimes we sat together, I and Barnabas, who understood very little of the whole business and kept passionately demanding explanations, always the same explanations; he realized that the carefree years ahead of other boys of his age were no longer for him, so we sat together, K., very much as you and I are sitting now, and forgot that night was falling and morning coming again. My mother was the feeblest of us all, probably because she suffered not just our common affliction but everyone’s separate trouble too, and we were horrified to see in her changes such as, we guessed, were in store for our whole family. Her favourite place was the corner of a sofa—we don’t have it any more, it is in Brunswick’s big living-room—but she sat there and—well, we didn’t know exactly what she was doing—she dozed or held long conversations with herself, as the movement of her lips seemed to indicate. It was only natural for us to keep discussing the business of the letter, look-ing at it this way and that in all its known details and unknown pos-sibilities, and to compete constantly in thinking up ways to bring it all to a happy conclusion. Yes, it was natural and inevitable, but not a good idea; it plunged us ever more deeply into what we wanted to escape. And what use were our ideas, however excellent? None of them could have been put into practice without Amalia, they were all just preliminaries, rendered pointless by the fact that they did not get through to Amalia at all, and even if they had, would have met with nothing but silence. Well, fortunately I understand Amalia better now than I did then. She bore more than any of us, it is incredible how much she has borne, and she still lives here with us today. Our mother perhaps bore the affliction of all of us, she bore it because she suffered its full onslaught, and then she couldn’t bear it for long; it can’t be said that she still bears it today, and even then her mind was confused.
But Amalia not only bore our affliction, she also had the lucidity of mind to see it for what it was; while we saw only the con-sequences she saw the reason; we hoped for some small means of improvement, whatever it might be; she knew that all was decided, we had to whisper, she had only to keep silent. She faced the truth and lived, and bore her life then as she does now. How much better off the rest of us are, for all our misery, than Amalia. We had to leave our house, of course, and Brunswick moved in; we were given this hovel and brought our belongings here on a handcart, making several journeys. Barnabas and I pulled it, our father and Amalia pushed at the back. Our mother, whom we had brought here first, was there to welcome us, sitting on a crate and moaning quietly all the time. But I remember that we ourselves, during those laborious journeys—which were also very humiliating, for we often met har-vest carts with harvesters who fell silent and turned their faces away as we passed—I remember that we, Barnabas and I, could not help talking about our anxieties and plans even on those journeys, that we sometimes stopped in mid-conversation and were reminded of our duty only when our father hailed us. But none of our conversations changed anything in our life, except that now we gradually began to feel the effects of want. Remittances from our relations stopped com-ing, our financial means were almost used up, and at that of all times the disdain for us as you have seen it began to be felt. People noticed that we didn’t have the strength to work our way out of the letter incident, and thought poorly of us for that; they didn’t underesti-mate our sad fate, but all the same they didn’t know just what it was like. If we had overcome it they would have respected us for doing so, but as we didn’t, they finally made a permanent ostracism out of what had been only temporary before. They knew that in all likeli-hood they themselves would not have stood the test any better than we did, but that just made it more necessary to cut off all contact with us. Now they no longer spoke of us as human beings, our family name was never mentioned, if they had to say something about us we were merely called “the family of Barnabas”, who was the most innocent of us all. Even this hovel fell into disrepute, and if you are honest with yourself you will admit that you too thought you saw how justified the general disdain was when you set foot here. Later, when people sometimes came to see us again, they looked down their noses at unimportant things, for instance that the little oil-lamp there hung above the table. Where else would it hang if not over the table? But to them it seemed intolerable. However, if we hung the lamp anywhere else, they disliked that just as much. Everything we were, everything we had, met with the same disdain.’
19
Petitioning
‘And what were we doing meanwhile? The worst thing we could have done, something for which we might more rightly have been despised than for our real offence—we betrayed Amalia, we broke with her rule of silence, we couldn’t go on living like that without any hope at all, and we began petitioning or pestering the castle, each in our own way, with demands for forgiveness. Of course we knew that we were in no position to make good the damage, and we also knew that the one link we had with the castle offering any hope at all, the link with Sortini, the official who liked our father, was beyond our reach because of what had happened, but all the same we set to work. Our father began paying pointless visits to the village mayor, to the secretaries, the attorneys, the clerks, who usually refused to see him, and if by chance or cunning he made his way in after all—how we rejoiced and gleefully rubbed our hands at such news—then he was sent packing very quickly and never received again. It was only too easy to answer him, everything was always so easy for the castle. What did he want, they asked? What had happened to him? What did he want forgiveness for? When had anyone in the castle raised so much as a finger against him, and if someone had, who was it? He was certainly impoverished, he had lost his customers, and so on, but those were the accidents of everyday life, the vicissitudes of his trade and the market, was the castle to take care of everything? It did in fact take care of everything, but it couldn’t simply interfere in devel-opments just like that, merely to serve the interests of a single man. Was it supposed to send its officials running after our father’s custom-ers and bringing
