He had two brothers who let him live with them and who kept an eye on him. During the daytime they went to work; then the blind man was all alone in the house. For eight hours a day or more. For eight long hours the man who for thirty years had had his sight without being aware of it, sat on his bed in the dark or walked around the room. Early on men with whom he had formerly played cards for low stakes came to see him. They talked about politics, women, the future. The man they were looking at had none of these three things, and no work either. The men told him what they knew and never came again. Some people die sooner than others.
The blind man walked up and down his room for at least eight hours a day if he was lucky. After three days he stopped bumping into things. Just to keep himself amused he thought of everything that had ever happened to him. He even recalled with pleasure the blows he had been given by his parents as a child to make him grow up into a good person. All this went on for a certain time. But then the eight hours became too long for him. The person in question was thirty years of age and a few months. With luck a man can live for three score years and ten. So he could hope for another forty years. His brothers let him know that he was growing visibly fatter. That came from his easy life. If things went on like this he might eventually get too fat to squeeze through a door. Then, when the time came, they would have to cut up his corpse if they didn’t want to damage the door. For far too long he entertained himself with thoughts of this kind. In the evening he told his brothers he had been to the music-hall. They laughed.
They were very good-natured and loved him as men love one another, because he was a decent person. Keeping him wasn’t easy for them but they never gave the matter any thought. At first they took him along to the theatre every now and again; he enjoyed that. But when he discovered the ramshackle nature of words, it only made him sad. It was God’s will that he had no understanding of music.
After a while his brothers remembered that it was many weeks since he had last been out. They took him along once: he felt faint. When a child took him out for a walk it ran off to play and he was seized by a great fear and was not brought home till late at night. Then the brothers who had been worried about him laughed and said: ‘You must have been with a woman,’ and ‘We can’t get rid of you, you see’. They meant it as a joke, being glad to have him back again.
That night he could not get to sleep for a long time. Those two sentences settled down like squatters and made themselves at home in his brain which had become as inhospitable to the brighter side of life as a house without windows is to cheerful lodgers. He had not seen their faces; their remarks were nasty. When he had thought about this for a long time without coming to any conclusion, he put such thoughts aside like chewed-up grapeskins which lie on the dirty floor and make your feet slip.
One of the brothers once said to him at mealtime: ‘Don’t push your food with your hand. Use two spoons instead.’ Deeply shocked, he put down his fork and in the air he saw children eating. They straightaway calmed him down but after a while that brother started having his food brought to him in the factory. This was because of the long journey. The blind man, who went walking by himself for at least eight hours a day, had not yet composed his thoughts about it when the other brother idly asked if he was having a lot of difficulty washing himself. From that day on the blind man had an aversion to water, like a dog with rabies. For now it appeared to him that he had been patient long enough and that there was no reason why his brothers should live in pleasure if he was perishing in misery and loneliness.
He grew a beard and could no longer recognise himself. His clothes were cleaned by his brothers but from then on the stains from the food which he spilt on his shirt grew worse and worse. Around the same time he acquired the inexplicable habit of wanting to lie on the ground like an animal.
He grew so dirty that his brothers could not take him anywhere. Now he had to spend all Sunday alone, going for walks. On such Sundays various mishaps occurred. Once he fell with the washbasin and spilt it on his brother’s bed, which took a long time to dry. Another time he put on his brother’s trousers and soiled them. When the brothers realised that he was doing this deliberately they felt very sorry for him at first, then they asked him not to do such things; their misfortune was great enough. He listened quietly, his head bowed, and guarded the sentence in his heart.
They also tried to get him to work. They had absolutely no success. He was so purposely clumsy that he ruined the material. They came to see that he was growing more ill-natured every day, but could not do anything about it.
So the blind man walked in darkness and pondered how he could increase his sufferings in order to endure them better. For it seemed to him that a great torment was easier to bear than a small one.
He who had always been so clean that his mother in her lifetime had held him up as an example to his brothers, now began to foul himself by urinating into his clothes.
This made his brothers deliberate how to get him into an institution. He listened to their deliberations from an adjoining room. And when he thought of the institution, all his past suffering seemed bright and beautiful, so much did he hate the prospect. There are more people like me there, he thought, ones who have come to terms with their misery, ones who endure it better; in that place we shall be tempted to forgive God; I’m not going there.
When the brothers had left he sat for a long time in deep contemplation, and five minutes before he expected them back he turned on the gas tap. He turned it off again when they were delayed. However, when he heard them on the stairs he turned it on once more and lay down on his bed. They found him there and were seized with a great fear. They took pains with him for one whole evening and tried to revive his interest in life. Obstinately he resisted their efforts. That was one of the best days of his life.
But then the procedure to admit him to an Institution for the Blind was speeded up.
On the evening before the appointed day the blind man was in their home alone and set fire to it. His brothers returned unexpectedly early and put out the blaze. While doing so one of them could not contain his anger and began to yell at the blind man. He enumerated all the misfortunes they had endured on his account, omitting no cause of ignominy or occasion for anxiety but on the contrary exaggerating every single point. The blind man listened patiently and his face showed his distress. Then the other brother, who still took pity on him, tried to comfort him as much as possible. He sat up with him for half the night and held him in his arms. But the blind brother did not say a word.
The next day the brothers had to go to work, and did so with a heavy heart. And when they came home that evening to take him to the Institution, the blind man had disappeared.
When evening came, on hearing the town clocks strike, the blind man had descended the steps. Towards what? Towards death. He had groped his way laboriously through the streets, had fallen, been laughed at, pushed and berated. Then he reached the edge of the town.
It was a very cold winter’s day. The blind man was actually glad to be freezing cold. He had been driven out of his house. Everyone had turned against him. He didn’t care. He made use of the cold sky for his own destruction. God was not forgiven.
He could not accept it. An injustice had been done to him. He had gone blind, blind through no fault of his own, and had then been driven out in the ice and the snowy wind. This was the work of his own brothers, who were privileged to see.
The blind man crossed a meadow till he came to a stream. He stepped in. He thought: Now I shall die. Now I shall be forced into the river. Job was not blind. Never has anyone borne greater suffering.
Then he swam down the stream.
A Helping Hand
In a harsh land there once lived an evil man by the name of Lorge; he had a heavy hand and where he struck the grass did not grow again. He choked the life out of the peasants and slept with their wives by force; he devoured the property of orphans; he swigged brandy from a cask as a bull swigs water and when he wa
s drunk he spoke with the trees at night. Nobody could touch a hair of his head, even though he was a sore trial, for he was very strong.
In a fight one day this man was struck across the eyes and as a result grew blind. He stood in the centre of a meadow in the midday light, and now his sun set rapidly and the wind grew very loud around him. His servants chased his enemies away but Lorge sat on a tree-stump the whole day and reflected.
When the news reached the villages there was great rejoicing everywhere. People believed that God had intervened; for they did not yet know that Lorge’s adversary was even worse than Lorge.
This man extended his protection to the defeated Lorge and let it be known that he would be as hard as Lorge himself on anyone who tried to hurt him and this would shorten their life. When Lorge heard that he laughed again for the first time.
He stayed in his farm and nobody did anything to harm him. The servants lived riotously off his property, and left the blind man sitting in his room. However, they set his cask of brandy in front of him.
Lorge did not touch the brandy cask and when the servants saw that he had grown pious and that this alone was bringing him low, they took it away again. Lorge said nothing. He was waiting for something.
Lorge waited for three weeks and nothing came. Then he began to understand that nothing would ever come to him again. In the wall there was a hole; through it there came a weak cold sun or a weak warm sun. In the table in front of him there were a number of streaks and hollows which never changed. Sometimes the servants sang outside. If you walked around, you fell down easily. It was hard to sleep. These were Lorge’s experiences now and for evermore. Perhaps the Amen would be added sometime later.
Once he went out of his room and leaned against a linden tree which he loved very much, particularly its crown. When he pressed his cheek against the trunk, he felt the tree trembling and he could imagine its top again swaying in the wind. The tree could not see either, and lived for centuries. It had a different way of living. Lorge went to it many times although people often laughed at him because he had a new lover.
But after three weeks he had the horses harnessed and was driven by his neighbour. This neighbour was a friend of his. He had been away at the time when Lorge had lost his eyesight. When he now saw the pale fat clod in the rack-waggon, he became very confused and afraid of fate. He stepped up to the waggon and greeted Lorge and Lorge stood up, reeling, and his thin fair hair blew about his great head and he opened his eyes wide and said: ‘You must help me, brother. I cannot see any more.’
Then the other invited him into his house and promised to help him and they shook hands on it. They sat together at night and the neighbour drank. And Lorge didn’t drink a drop for whenever he drank he was seized with an irresistible desire to go out and do evil. The neighbour was greatly shaken by the fact that Lorge could not do evil any more.
In the morning he gave Lorge into the care of his best servant and went out with the rest of his servants to avenge Lorge. And by the evening he was already a corpse and no longer in need of help.
Lorge never learnt of this. For when he heard that his friend wanted to avenge him, he was bitterly disappointed and said to the servant, ‘Trusty servant, I have business to do. You must help me.’ The servant agreed.
Then they retraced their steps to Lorge’s farm, this time on foot and they walked all day. But a short hour’s walk from Lorge’s farmhouse he turned off the road and he had himself brought to the farm of his greatest enemy among the peasants. He knew that this man must be at a Midsummer festival that night. So he groped his way into the house with the servant helping him, and the two of them tried to rape the farmer’s wife. However, they did not succeed. Instead, the wife ran away in her nightdress to her husband and the husband returned before morning. There sat blind Lorge in his room waiting for him. And as the farmer entered wanting to kill him he said: ‘As long as I could see what your wife looked like, I didn’t want to have her. But now she doesn’t want me any more.’
So the farmer noticed just how much trouble Lorge was taking to provoke him, and simply got two servants to eject him from the house. And Lorge groped his way home. All was not going well on his farm; even in his blindness he noticed that, but it did not matter. In any case it was better than if everything had taken its normal course. No one bothered about Lorge, they often forgot to serve him his meals and sometimes they bolted the room so that he had to relieve himself beside the bed. In addition it rained through the roof and the wind whistled through the cracks. The fields were untilled, the animals were slaughtered or died in their filthy stalls. The servants quarrelled and spent the whole of February drinking, and the people from the neighbourhood went out of their way to avoid the house. From a distance they looked into this hell where the blind man sat and was sure to perish, and they were glad.
But in March just as the great storms began Lorge set out one day, walking off alone in the early morning. He walked along swampy roads, corroded by the black rain and lashed by the stormy winds, and he had to grope his way along the roads with his feet, but often strayed into swampy meadows. In places where he was unknown people sometimes took him in for the night, and those were his last good days.
Finally he walked day and night and in April came to his brother’s farm. One evening when his brother came home from hunting there he was, standing among the servants. But his brother recognized him straightaway and reined in his horse. And Lorge, while the servants jostled him, spoke into the air: ‘I’ve lost my sight. You must help me.’ Then his brother dismounted, and saw that he was very dirty and had grown thin and blind as well, and he fell upon his neck and wept over him.
But that evening they sat together drinking and Lorge drank too; for now he no longer turned vicious. He told his brother everything that had happened to him, and when he came to the point where the farmer gave him two servants for his farm, his brother got up and closed the windows. Afterwards they went out into the farmyard arm in arm.
And Lorge began telling, and he told of how they had all forborne to hurt him and had avoided him and been unwilling to help him. Then his brother brought him to a place on the wall where there was a drop of around twenty feet into the castle moat and he said to him: ‘Watch out; if you make one false step here you’ll drive the bones through your body.’ Then Lorge let go his arm.
But his brother saw how Lorge’s legs were searching carefully for the path along the wall and Lorge made no false step. He said nothing more, but his face was grim and there was sweat on his forehead and he stepped carefully.
When they were both sitting again in the room and felt each other’s breath – for both of them were big and strong, and the room was too small – and began to drink again, the brother complained about the world and called it a treacherous vale of tears. Then Lorge got up and bent forward and tried to locate his brother, and they stood opposite each other as in their youth and Lorge had been the younger one, but now he said: ‘I tell you it’s more beautiful than anything else, don’t contradict me.’
Then his brother sat down and said nothing more, but he drank a lot. After a while Lorge, too, sat down again.
As it was growing light they went out of the chamber, and the brother put a sword in Lorge’s hand. They had not exchanged another word since Lorge’s remark about the world. As Lorge examined the thing and noticed that it was a sword, he hesitated and drew a deep breath and looked out of his blind eyes into the air and did not blink.
Then they both walked off beside each other, and his brother supported Lorge because he was blind.
They came to a place in the wood where there was a linden tree and they stood there with bare shoulders, powerful both of them, with swords in their hands. But Lorge himself struck the first blow.
Then his brother struck and now they fought fiercely for a long time and Lorge defended himself well and fought mightily and pressed his brother hard till he was standing by the linden tree and could not step to left or to right. Then his b
rother, who was in danger of his life, gripped his sword with both hands and closed his eyes and struck the blow.
Java Meier
Come to think about it, Samuel Kascher was one of the oddest men I ever set eyes on. He was a fishmonger, but convinced you it didn’t mean much since his father had married into the business. For many years it never occurred to him – and even before then it would have been too late to think of it – that he could have chosen his own profession. What’s more, bankruptcy hovered continuously over his small white bungalow. And yet as far as one could see he only had one single passion, and it was this which brought us together. For he subscribed – a luxury way beyond his circumstances – to almost all the important German newspapers and read them carefully. The outlay was high and he justified it simply: he needed paper to wrap his fish in. He also had interesting attacks of conscience every now and again, during which he proved to anyone, rather ingeniously, that the sole purpose of all these forms of entertainment was to benefit his fish business (which his father had married into). It was purely for the sake of the fish business that he occupied himself with certain forensic exercises; for just as he considered a good newspaper to be a good advertisement for the fish wrapped inside it, he also believed he could attract connoisseurs of fish with interesting conversations. At least he believed this during his bouts of guilty conscience. One of his strangest cases was the episode of Java Meier.
One evening I was sitting with him in the brown wooden extension behind the shop, whose white curtained window opened to the yard, among old newspapers and the stink of blubber and fish. Kascher was drawing initials in his ledger and on the blotter as he recounted slowly, as was his wont, an event of the previous night in Well Lane (where his shop was) which he had heard from one of the cooks in the neighbourhood; for although he himself probably heard the shot, he had not thought it worth getting up for.