Gossip from the Forest Read Online Free

always been weak in the lungs. Only desperate nations called on such boys.
    Herr Erzberger’s dreams now were a sort of seepage from that death. Therefore he avoided sleep. He stayed up till two in the morning, drinking schnapps with Count Maiberling in the saloon. The Count had been tiresome earlier in the evening. There had been berserk switches of mood. But since the staff officers who traveled with them had gone to bed, Maiberling became a better companion. He had always had the jitters about officers: a strange phobia to show up in an aristocrat.
    At two, feeling better than he had for days, Matthias decided that he and Maiberling must sleep, must not be blunted. Their special train rolled slowly through rail-junctions jammed with troop trains. They found their couchettes in the next carriage.
    Erzberger: I’m going to dream, damn it!
    Maiberling: Everyone dreams. Tonight, even the drunks!
    Erzberger: I dream every night.
    So he went in foredoomed to do it in his own plush and enameled compartment.
    The second he fell asleep, there he was, at a summerhouse in a forest—the Black Forest inevitably. The space in front of the house was covered with small wild strawberries and butterflies. Sunlight lit up all the stone façade of the house. At the door he felt very pleasantly ready for the first forest stroll of his vacation and was waiting for his wife to get her hat. Down the stairs she came but dropped the hat, the mannish straw item in her trim hand, on the bare boards of the hall. She said she’d decided to stay and cook pastries. Instead, she said, producing a treacherous umbrella, instead take this.
    He had never felt threat from her before. His anger and terror were greater than anything he’d experienced in politics. For one thing, she knew after all their marriage that umbrellas couldn’t be tolerated. He refused. She said yes, now that he had a dead son he must take the umbrella and go, go for his damned walk.
    It was all at once out of his power. He took the thing, feeling nausea. He was now like a man under orders.
    Erzberger: Kiss me good-by.
    She didn’t do that but had in her hand, from nowhere, a fresh strawberry. She rubbed it along his lips. They were rather long, rather full lips, so that it took her some time to cover them—like a child coloring in. Then, more savagely, she crushed the strawberry to a pulp against his forehead.
    Wife: Now do you believe I love you?
    Erzberger: Yes.
    Wife: Time for your walk.
    He went without looking back lest she should think less of him than she did of his son. For they both knew the boy had forced his way from delirium to delirium, clear-headed about death and grappling the earth to him, since to him, drifting as he was amongst breathless constellations, it had become so small.
    With such a son, you didn’t look back although you were coerced to walk into the forest with a terrible umbrella.
    It was a clammy and fungoid forest. It wasn’t summer here. Some renting agent, too smart for his own good, must have put one over Paula by letting a summer cottage in a winter or, at best, autumn forest.
    Why do I come here for holidays? he wondered. I detest stepping back into the forest, it’s like going back into a womb, not your mother’s but Kali’s. He went on, finding the paths more and more repulsive. The elms seeped as slum walls seep with waters of uncertain origin. His journey to the place he knew, where the path turned a full corner, took some time. But when he got there two men with black masks were waiting with repeating revolvers in their hands. He didn’t like seeing them so he raised the umbrella and put it before his face. They began shooting the umbrella full of holes. He felt it struggle, was one with its panic and pains. When they’d finished he dropped it. Its wounds were blood-bespattered.
    Erzberger: Why did you do it? Now I can never go back to her.
    From each bullet hole in the sickening