I
Of the infancy of Hans-Konrad Hund
I
Well, what is there to say? None have asked of me before to recount everything I have done in my whole life. Fortunately, I have been given, by the grace of my amanuensis, a few days' time to reminisce, and with that time I have dredged up and sorted, as best I was able, a good variety of recollections, though I must admit that many of these old memories are rather dusty and covered with cobwebs, having reposed in the dark basement of my mind for so many years, and so I ask that I be forgiven if these come forth in a jumbled or disordered state.
Accepting that, I’m sure the reader will notice too that I am not a natural orator, nor a man of letters, so let it be understood that I am only a soldier, and that I prefer to speak simply and straightforwardly, and that a reader in search of salacious tales or epic dramas will find here only an austere and rather matter-of-fact account.
I ask the reader furthermore to accept that my object with this record is not to glorify my own image, or the memory any might have of me, but rather to put to rest the rumors and mistruths that pertain to me and the remarkable persons I have involved myself with, and with whom I have fought side-by-side, and some even bitterly against, in the unprecedented times that we have lived through. Though perhaps I should not say it thusly, as many of these persons have not lived through them, but rather died in them, and suffered horrible agonies in pursuit of just and righteous causes, and it sickens me to know that falsehoods continue to be told about them.
Finally, I say it with faith that if there is anything contemptible to me it is falseness, and, as I can readily confirm, in these most dissolute times falsehood spreads faster than truth, so I promise with my whole heart, and I swear it on the lives of my friends, on the graves of my mothers and fathers, and on the name of God, that the words I say here, the words that will be put to pen in this record and may be read for eternity hereafter, will represent the truth as I have seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears.
With that said, I should like to proceed with my account, but before I plunge into details I will say a word about the course of my young life.
My youth was cleaved by two events: the fire, which marked the end of my infancy, and the calamity at Wiesenfeld, which marked the end of my childhood. These two events decided the course of my life, and imprinted their brands on me in ways that I am only now, as an old man, beginning to fully apprehend. They are sad memories, very sad memories, which don’t please me to revisit. I will, however, revisit them, for it pleases me even less to deny the request of a cherished friend, and indeed, it was my friend Franz Meier who asked me to remember these principal moments of my life so that they may be put to record for the benefit of posterity, for in his eyes they pertain to the history of the Waltz.
I will start with the earliest memories of my infancy. My recollections from before the fire are scarce, but I will recount them as best as I am able.
The very earliest memories I can recall are of being held in my mother’s arms, and of people talking around me, of blurry faces, and of looking at a besom which was there in the corner of the house. It must have been given to my mother as a gift by a friend from the village, perhaps to celebrate the birth of a child, probably my own birth, and I might have been less than a year of age at this time. This memory arrives to me as a vague and pleasant feeling.
Speaking of the village, it was in a village somewhere in the Grünes Tal1 that I was born, but I will elaborate more on this later.
I remember with the utmost clarity the vista of green and blue which I had the great pleasure of seeing every morning and every day, looking out over the beautiful valley that we lived in, with the sunlight pouring onto me and illuminating everything so gorgeously.
When I walked out my door I saw this image: green rolling turf, rolling down and down through the deep cleft in the mountains, partitioned into little plots and strips, the fertile soils in yellow and green, the little white houses dotted between them and clustered in the far village, in the midst of which stood the tall white chapel. The valley was like a great trench that had been carved in the grey-blue mountains by the pickaxe of some ancient titan, and the rocky walls of this trench were shorn, like they had been cut violently, and the rich soils and minerals had settled between them, in some primordial process of creation where they now produced good food and crops for us to eat, thanks to God. Far down at the base of this trench, beyond the village, the blue sapphire of the river meandered lazily, flowing through the deepest cut in the valley. Looking up again, one could see far away the white peaks of mountains, gleaming in the sun, standing proud and immovable, bold and regal against the azure sky above us, through which ran the chariot of Sol, while a few lonesome but great white clouds, rising up like handsome fortresses in the sky, drifted silently along. How could one forget such a paradise, the image of that? It still lives clear in my mind like a Volterra2.
Though, excepting a few particular events, all of those days are as one in my mind, as I was too young to distinguish them sharply, and, it must be said, the life of the peasant is monotonous and most of those days were in truth probably indistinguishable to anyone. I should say, too, that I have not returned to that country since the time I was taken from it, and I have accrued so many new memories in the travel and tumult of my life that the memories of that early time only come to me in brief flashes, as a handful of stark images, or simply as warm or cold feelings that by the strength of their impression alone have clung on in my consciousness. The image of the green and lush vales of the Grünes Tal, of blue rivers cleaving through the high and rocky hills, however, is one of those stark images that has survived in me.
The sense of home, too, remains strong in my memory, both the warm feeling of belonging, but also of the house itself, as of course the lives of infants, being too young to work in the field, pivot around the home. Like most peasant abodes, ours was small and modest, with walls of daub and wattle and a crowning roof of thatched gray-white straw. It was dark inside, usually, and at night we slept there with the pigs. I remember their grunting, behind the thin partition that divided our bed from their little pen, and I remember the sounds of their shuffling and groaning at night, which kept me awake. In the mornings, they squealed with joy to be let out, and the rest of us followed, eager to be free of the cramped and dark interior and to feel the sun on our faces again.
We cooked eggs often for breakfast, and it was my job to procure these eggs from the chickens, and I conducted this duty with great aplomb, I recall, if the munificent praise of my parents was to be believed. My mother, or sometimes my father, cooked the eggs on the skillet over a little fire, and we ate them with bread, sitting outside on our little bench.
There is a particular memory, which I believe may be the first in which I was really acting with conscious purpose, which was a daring episode I conducted with the support of a close friend of mine, who was a boy from the village with memorable white-blonde hair, whose name I believe was Stefan. We must have only seen two or three winters at that time. Our object was to steal a taste of a treat my grandmother had brought us, a sweet cake with honey which was being saved for after supper, and in pursuit of this we climbed up on a wooden trunk to reach the high shelf upon which this treat was stored. With stealth and finesse we succeeded in our aim and pilfered this cake from the shelf. Careful not to eat it entirely, lest our mischief be discovered, we satisfied ourselves by swiping it with our fingers and licking the honey from them.
Sadly, we were discovered in the act.
We were scolded, but only mildly, for in that time everything was good, and none of us wanted for anything, and everyone’s souls were full and happy. Whose wouldn’t be, living there, in the Grünes Tal?
Many of the peasants there were rich, too, and wore furs and good clothes, and used steel tools. I saw them walking in the village, with their big mountain dogs, amicable beasts who slobbered at the lips and wore spiked collars to protect them from wolves, and who trotted weightily alongside their owners like mottled little bears. The people there in the valley, the prosperous farmers with their tall hats and feathers and furs, looked so dignified, both men and women. “Hello!” they would call as they strode past me, giving me the congenial smiles that adults give to young children, taking big steps and supporting themselves with walking sticks and elegant shepherds’ axes as they hiked up the sloping paths. This place seemed, in my memory at least, almost untouched by the oppression and immiseration that would become so familiar to my eyes in later years, so prevalent elsewhere in the Empire. While we weren’t particularly rich in money, my parents loved me, and there was trust and fellowship between neighbors, and we were content with our lot, and we did not want for anything, or go hungry except in the last days of winter, when even the richest ate little more than porridge and wanted dearly for fresh fruit and other things.
And, the church bells. The chapel down in the village had a real bell, though it was not terribly large, but it always rang with a loud and decisive peal in the mornings and evenings.
Another memory has just bubbled up in me. In church, I recall a particular moment. I was standing there to the side of the dark interior of the chapel, looking at a painting of someone, maybe St. Ragnhild, or perhaps even the Prophet (though I can not be sure). I was standing there one afternoon while my parents spoke to the parish priest and some other village folk on a somnolent morning after mass, and suddenly I was able to hear a voice in my head, to speak to myself, to hear my own voice inside me. This memory is also very clear to me.
There are a few more brief flashes I can recall.
An incident with a steer that left a scar on my forehead, though in truth, I remember little about the incident itself, only that my parents later told me that was how I received my scar.
I have few memories of my father from those days, and only remember that he was a warm and large presence who made me feel safe. One moment comes to mind. I was helping my father carry sticks and pieces of wood from the chopping stump to the pile next to our house. I remember my father showing me his axe, and marvelling at it, and taking care not to touch the edge, as he warned me that it was very sharp, as that was the way he liked to keep it, and admonished me for running my finger down the edge of the blade.
The clearest of all my memories of infancy is of my mother, and one particular memory stands out among them.
I remember she was sitting inside, sewing, and I believe it must have been the Sabbath, for there was a sense of quietude and an air of relief, the kind of relief one feels when one knows the whole world is in repose, when nothing is urgent or stressing, and one need not feel guilty for indulging in leisure. I was too young to know about work, of course, but the feeling was still detectable to me, and I enjoyed the Sabbath because I enjoyed seeing my parents rest, and my mother and father were happiest on those days.
I was singing a song to my mother, a song which I had learned from a pilgrim, or perhaps a monk, who had sung them to me one day, though I don’t recall exactly where or when. I remember only meeting his eyes, and seeing his gaunt and weather-worn but happy face, his scruffy curly hair, his threadbare brown robes and burgundy travelling cape. Most of the words of this song I do not recall, but among the lyrics was a rhetorical question, repeated several times, and after finishing my performance of this song to my mother, it was this question that stuck in my mind. I did not know the answer, so I posed the question to my mother.
“When Adam delved and Eve spun, who then was the gentleman?” I asked.
I would encounter these words again, many years later, and I would learn that it was a common refrain in Volkland, and indeed its provenance went back to the followers of John Urchin of Gwynland. But at that time they were the simple lyrics of a pleasing melody, of a happy and friendly pilgrim who smiled at me as he sang.
She immediately took notice, and then said something like “Has Father Gerhard been singing his rhymes to you again, dear?” I said no, it was a pilgrim, and she accepted this, and she did not scold me for repeating the provocative refrain, though neither did she answer, and I could sense it was perhaps not something to pursue, though I repeated the song again, singing it inside the house with her, and after the second time she told me to quieten down, and diverted the conversation with a riddle.
“Who was the man who was born but never had a mother?” she asked me.
I didn’t know.
“Adam,” she said. I accepted this fact unquestioningly, though the notion that a man could be born without a mother stupefied me. I remember taking a few moments to consider the possibility—at that time it was not clear to me that all men had mothers, but I quickly understood, if only by the implication of the riddle, that it must be a rare thing indeed to be born without one.
Satisfied, I stirred from my contemplation and continued to wander the house from corner to corner, antagonizing the chickens and our one goose, pondering songs and riddles and Adam and Eve, and probably spouting nonsense, and my mother sat on the edge of the bed sewing, and she continued to challenge me with riddles, most of which I could not answer, nor can I presently recall them. I must have given her a few of my own in return, because I distinctly remember her laughing a great laugh, and it must have been that my childish riddles were quite creative indeed to inspire such a reaction. I remember distinctly how on that beautiful morning the gorgeous sun poured in through the windows and open door, casting a warm light on her face, leaving the dark shadows to take refuge in the corners of the house, and I remember looking at her and smiling, and enjoying the sight of her rosy cheeks and her elegant face, illuminated by the warm light of morning, and I was so happy and content in that moment.
I believe she was, too.
This remains to me a clear and bright memory, perhaps the clearest of those I have from before the fire, and, though I have enjoyed great highs in my eventful life, it is perhaps the warmest of all of them, for it is the only real recollection I have of my mother.
There are a few more I could recount here, but they are trivial, and mostly take the form of fleeting images and feelings, and I have gone on long enough about these remembrances.