Brother of Sleep: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

MIRACLE OF HIS HEARING
    ALL afternoon the fog swept up from the Rhine Valley into the hamlet of Hof, where Seff Alder’s property lay. The fog froze in the woods, drew icy threads from the branches, and covered the south-facing bark of the pine trees. That afternoon the moon and sun faced each other, the moon a broken host, the sun a mother’s cheek. The child stood on a stool at the window of his room, which Seff’s wife now bolted twice, jamming a wooden plank between the handle and the doorpost. Elias stood staring up toward the forest rim, with the Emmer flowing behind it. His heart was filled with melancholy. He had to go down there.
    In the night, the child was waked by the sound of the falling snowflakes. Wild with joy, he jumped to the window, opened it, and stayed there listening until dawn. (By this time his brother Fritz no longer shared a room with him. His parents had taken Fritz into their room to protect him from the accursed child.) When Seff’s wife discovered Elias in the morning, his brow was covered with sweat, and he then spent ten days in bed with a fever, but he also was filled with an inexplica­ble gaiety, spending half the day singing all the hymns from the church year.
    At this time the child did not understand very much. He did not understand why he had to be silent when a stranger entered the house, when his brother was always allowed to be there. He did not understand why his mother would not stay with him, waiting for the wonderful sound of the snowflakes to return. And he did not understand why he was not allowed to touch her earlobes when he wanted to go to sleep. When she tried to forbid him to sing, the child began to howl so heartrendingly that she finally gave in and allowed him at least to sing during the night.
    At this point we must reveal the child’s secret, because the strange behavior of Seff’s wife will other­ wise remain inexplicable. Elias had a voice of glass, according to his uncle Oskar Alder, Eschberg’s organist and schoolmaster. The phenomenon of this curious voice cannot be explained in medical terms, being congenital. When the child began to speak, a single high whistle issued from his mouth. The voice did not have a speaking melody as such; it did not modulate but emerged as a single constant whistling tone. This was what had made Seff shiver at the baptism, for he thought the defect was ineradicable. He did not say a single word about it, as, indeed, he seldom ever said anything.
    That afternoon, when sun and moon had faced each other, five-year-old Elias stole from his room. Something was calling. He had to go.
    No one paid any attention to Elias. In Eschberg, nobody paid attention to their children at all. When, in a terrible storm, an Alder child had drowned in the turbulent brown water of the Emmer, its mother had excused herself by saying that the children had always found their own way in the past and the Lord God himself had set an appointed hour for the poor little mite. Some days after the storm, Seff had begun to take driftwood out of the Emmer. Peasants had enjoyed this right for centuries. What one could remove became one’s property. But the removal of driftwood was a constant source of argument and bloodshed, for it was entirely possible that someone might cut down a fine fir tree from a neighbor’s wood and obstinately claim it as driftwood.
    On the occasion of this deforestation of the Em­mer, Elias had been allowed to accompany his father. And there the child discovered the place, the water-polished stone, that was to exert such a strange and curious attraction for him. Seff had noticed the way the child, when paddling in sand and mud, would suddenly stop, nervously casting his hand from one side to the other as though trying to listen to something. Then the child climbed out and clambered impetuously through the undergrowth, as if summoned by an unknown power. As he put everything within reach to his mouth