‘That may be so,’ said Olga, ‘but then it’s even worse. It means that the official has such important business that the files are too valuable or too extensive to be taken with him, and then such officials travel at a gallop. At least, they could have no time left for my father. And what’s more, there are several ways to the castle. Sometimes one is in fashion, and most of the officials drive that way, sometimes another, and then that one gets crowded by traffic. No one has ever yet discovered the rules governing that change. At times they will all be driving along one road at eight in the morning, then half-an-hour later they will all be on another road, ten minutes later they’ll be using yet a third, then half-an-hour later they may go back to the first road and that road will be in use all day, but every moment there is the possibility of a change. It’s a fact that all the ways from the castle meet close to the village, but there all the carriages are racing along, while their speed is a little more moderate close to the castle. And just as the order in which the roads are used by the carriages is irregular, and no one can work it out, so is the number of carriages. There are often days when there’s not a carriage to be seen, and then there will be crowds of them again. And just imagine our father fa-cing all this. In his best suit, soon his only suit, he leaves the house every morning, accompanied by our blessings and good wishes. He takes with him a small fire-brigade badge, which he was really wrong to keep, and puts it on outside the village because he is afraid to wear it in the village itself, even though it is so small that you can hardly spot it two paces away, but our father really thinks it will mark him out to the officials as they drive by. Not far from the entrance to the castle there is a market garden belonging to a man called Bertuch* who supplies the castle with vegetables, and our father chose a place there on the narrow stone base of the garden fence. Bertuch allowed it, because he used to be friends with our father, and was one of his most faithful customers too; one of his feet is slightly crippled, and he thought only Father could make him a boot to fit it. So Father sat there day after day; it was a gloomy, rainy autumn, but he didn’t mind the weather; he had his hand on the doorknob at the appointed time every morning and waved us goodbye, and in the evening he came home wet through, stooping more every day, and flung himself down in a corner.
At first he told us about the little things that had happened, for instance how out of pity and for old times’ sake Bertuch had thrown a blanket over the fence for him, or how he thought he had recognized this or that official in a carriage driving past, or again how a driver recognized him now and then, and flicked him lightly with the lash of his whip in jest. Later he stopped telling us these things, obviously no longer hoping to achieve anything at all, but he thought it his duty, his dreary vocation, to go up and spend the day there. It was at this time that his rheumatic pains began, winter was coming, snow fell, winter begins early here, well, so he sat there sometimes on stones wet with rain, sometimes in the snow. At night he groaned with pain, in the morning he sometimes wasn’t sure whether he ought to go out, but he overcame his feelings and went anyway. Our mother clung to him and didn’t want to let him go, and he, probably afraid that his limbs would no longer obey him, allowed her to go with him, and so she became a martyr to the pain too. We were often there with them, we took them food, or just went to see them or try to persuade them to come home—how often we found them there, huddled together on their narrow perch with a thin blan-ket over them, hardly covering them, and nothing around but the grey of snow and mist far and wide, with not a human being or a car-riage to be seen all day long! Oh, what a sight, K., what a sight! Until one morning our father couldn’t get his stiff legs out of bed any more. He was in despair, in a fevered fantasy he thought he saw a carriage stopping at Bertuch’s market garden at that very moment, an official getting out, looking along the fence for our father, and then, shaking his head with an angry expression, getting back into the carriage again. At that our father uttered such cries that it was as if he wanted to attract the official’s attention all the way off up there, explaining how he couldn’t help his absence. And it was a long absence, for he never went there again. He had to stay in bed for weeks. Amalia took over his care and nursing, his treatment, everything, and she has done the same until this day with only a few breaks. She knows about healing herbs to soothe his pain, she hardly needs any sleep, she is never alarmed, fears nothing, is never impatient, she did all the work for our parents. And while we, unable to do anything to help, hovered around ineffectually, she remained cool and calm in every way. But when the worst was over, and Father could make his way out of bed again, cautiously and supported on both sides, Amalia immediately withdrew and left him to us.’
20
Olga’s Plans
‘Now we had to find some occupation for our father that he could still manage, something that would at least keep him believing that it helped to lift the blame from our family. Finding anything like that was not easy, basically everything I thought of was about as useful as sitting outside Bertuch’s market garden, but I did hit upon some-thing that gave even me a little hope. Whenever there had been talk in the offices or among the clerks or elsewhere about our guilt, only the insult to Sortini’s messenger had ever been mentioned, and no one dared go any further into it. Well, I said to myself, if public opinion, even if only on the surface, seems to know only about the insult to the messenger, everything could be put right, again even if only on the surface, if we could make things up with the messenger himself. No complaint has been made, they explain, so no office is looking into the case, and therefore the messenger is free to be rec-onciled with us for his own part, and that’s what it’s all about. None of this could have any crucial significance, it was just for show and could lead to nothing more, but it would please our father, and per-haps the many seekers after information who had pestered him so much could be driven into a corner, which would be very satisfying to him. First, of course, the messenger must be found. When I told our father about my plan he was very angry at first—for he had always been extremely self-willed—partly because he thought, and this notion had developed during his illness, that we had prevented his ultimate success all along, first by stopping our financial support and then by keeping him in bed, and partly because he was no longer entirely able to take in new ideas. I hadn’t finished telling him every-thing before he had rejected my plan; as he saw it, he ought to go on waiting outside Bertuch’s market garden and, since he was certainly in no state to go up there daily by himself, we must take him in the handcart.
But I persisted, and gradually he came to terms with the idea. What upset him was just that in this he must rely entirely on me, for only I had seen the messenger, and Father didn’t know him. To be sure, any one of the castle servants is much like any other, and even I couldn’t be absolutely certain that I would know this one again. So we began going to the Castle Inn and looking around among the servants there. The man had been a servant of Sortini, and Sortini didn’t come into the village any more, but the gentlemen often chopped and changed servants, we might well find him in the group serving another gentleman, and if we couldn’t find Sortini’s messenger himself, then we might get news of him from the others. But to do that we would have to go to the Castle Inn every evening, and we were not welcome anywhere, certainly not in a place like that. And we couldn’t figure as paying customers. However, it turned out that we could be useful there after all; you probably know how the servants pestered Frieda. Most of them are quiet enough in them-selves, but spoilt and made slow-witted by having only light work to do. “May you be as well off as
