It was wonderful, better than anything, to play what came into your mind, really play it, taking ideas of the beauties of this earth and her memories, half-dreams, and casting them into the evening silence like coloured balls in a game, finding the sweetest of notes on the keys with delicate fingers, yet suddenly shivering at the sound of an entirely new, incredibly wonderful harmony that was gone next moment, blown away by the wind as if it had never been, while the Biblical figures of which her father had told her walked over the lowered music stand on the piano: the Prodigal Son hesitantly knocking at the wooden door, welcomed in by loving chords; or Ruth walking blissfully over the rough stubble of the fields in the autumn sun; the Mother of God always stretching out her arms into the void with invisible tears in her eyes; Lot’s wife turned to a pillar of salt and standing on a sand dune in the desert, dwindling to an ever smaller figure in the rain. Later, after those three weeks of starvation, she could not understand how she had once come to unite music with the Biblical memories of her childhood.

He father’s own figure too became more and more translucent, like Lot’s wife, and so did the memory of the blond boy in the black-draped church. At seventeen Franziska felt that her first youth was already far behind her, a domain that she had left for ever, long since gone beyond retrieval.

Yet even now there were days when life as still wonderful. For everything she experienced, every moment flying past on shimmering wings, was hers alone, every step she took drew her on into unutterable distances, the outskirts of the dark forest were far away, so were the trembling lights coming on in the spring dusk in the little town in the valley, everything fell into her rough, work-worn hands. When she played a Bach fugue, a Haydn scherzo, a Beethoven sonata she felt as if she were hearing it for the first time, as if the music belonged to her alone. And as she walked under the sky with its distant stars, beneath trees where the night hung, she sensed the sweetly ineluctable moment, accepting it in the depths of her soul because she knew it would never come again.

There are people who are so strongly attached to themselves that they would rather not commit themselves to any other human being, instead giving themselves to nature and the infinity of the inanimate. They sink into it, intoxicated by silence, the mists, the fragrance of the forest.

And when a railway train thundered out of the dark woods beside the path, as if stamping on giant feet and shining in the thousands of golden sparks that streamed from the conical funnel of the engine, like a swarm of bees rising from a sunbaked hive in the garden, when the flame suddenly shot up from that funnel and rose high above the windswept tree-tops in dense, red smoke, then Franziska’s strong, virginal heart rejoiced to meet an invincible power, for she felt she was truly alive.

When the heavy train had rolled away into the distance she suddenly felt tired. Her room at home called her, the room where her mother had died and which would now be hers. And in it stood her mother’s bed, where she would sleep tonight and for all the nights to come.

Henriette was not home yet, but food had been left in the oven. Minna thought of everything. And what was she thinking of now?

Franziska didn’t want anything to eat; she felt as if she could nourish herself on sleep alone, inhaling it like an intoxicating aroma. When she knew she was falling asleep she longed for a dream, and immediately felt her tired eyes fixing on a vision. First she saw her mother standing in front of her, a black stocking around her neck, smiling gravely. Then she wasn’t standing at all but dragging herself over the ground, and she dragged her daughter down too, seizing her vigorously when Franzi wearily tried to resist. And as she went along she kept digging her way into the earth. The end of the stocking now trailing after her on the ground was really made of iron and gouged out a deep channel, her mother was holding a cutlery set with black bone handles and a thin silver spoon, which she wanted to bury in the earth. “You won’t be needing these any more,” said her voice. “Minna’s gone, and you others don’t deserve them.” Suddenly she pointed behind her with a terrible expression of ill-will, and there was her father too, pale and wearing an eyeshade, trying to stow away the gleaming black ocarina he always used to play in his breast pocket. Although it had been lying quietly on a green velvet cushion in a glass case, the instrument suddenly broke three months after his death,. Then many more figures came, including living people who had simply left the town. A little boy whom she had known when they were children held an empty cotton reel in his hand. Twilight surrounded all these figures, and their footsteps sounded like murmuring voices.

Suddenly a blazing flame rose ahead of them. All faces were turned up, everyone was delighted, amazement and jubilation showed in all eyes. There was a desert all around them, a few palm trees trailed their lower fronds on the sand, which was damp with the night air, a deep and beautifully flowing melody like the sound of a stream came from behind a sand dune, and now Franziska saw herself sitting alone in the dimly lit room, sober again and believing herself back in reality. But the music went on. She heard herself improvising on the piano, felt more and more new notes receiving her with outstretched arms, more and more new harmonies. The old piano was walking along too on its three legs, although with difficulty, trying to reach the blazing pillar of flame like all the rest of them, while her mother stood closest to it, almost in the middle of the bright, singing blaze, her pale face thrown back with a blissful expression, and all the fine folds and wrinkles of her features gleamed like golden threads. Then Franzi suddenly felt everything slowly sinking, disappearing far, far away, and she woke up. Henriette was standing in the doorway, shining a lamp into the room.

V

NIGHTS OF SUCH DREAMS passed by like clouds above Franziska’s life, but were not reflected in it, for when did the sun and the stars ever cast their reflection on a rough country road? A voice in her mind said, “Forward!”, never mind where to. From one stage of her art to the next, from one laboriously saved pfennig to another.