And yet and yet I have not exchanged ten words with the sick Maria. She says nothing. But I have sat for hours by her and glanced into her sick and suffering face and thought over and over that she must die.
In the garden, I lay on the grass inhaling the perfume of a thousand flowers; my eyes exalted in the radiant colours of the blossoms flooded by sunlight from above, and I obeyed the stillness of the wind, temporarily diverted by a birdcall. I became aware of the fecund, sultry earth’s inner mystery, the secret tumult of life’s perpetuity. At that moment I felt life’s greatness and beauty. At that moment too, I felt I belonged to this life. But then my glance fell on the bay window of the house. There I saw the sick Maria motionless and still, eyes closed. And all my images were again wrenched from me by the suffering of this one being who dwelt there becoming a painful, avowedly timid yearning, leaving me disconcerted, bewildered. And withdrawn and placid was how I left the garden, as if I had no right to remain in such sanctuary.
Clambering over the fence I brought with me one of the big, pungent and dazzling roses like those in my memory. I then had a tentative urge to penetrate the window, for within I saw the fragile, shaky shadow of Maria’s form detached from the floor. And my shadow made contact with hers as if in an embrace. There I stepped up to the window as if bound to a passing compulsion and lay the rose, broken off at the base, on Maria’s lap. Then I made away as if fearing entrapment.
How often had this child returned seemingly plausible incidents to my mind! I don’t know. To me it was as if I had laid a thousand roses in the ailing Maria’s lap, as if our shadows had embraced a thousand times. Maria made no mention of the episode, but from the glimmer of her large, bright eyes I sensed that she was happy.
These hours were perhaps the two of us sitting together, silently sharing a pact of large, quiet, deep happiness so beautiful that any greater beauty was beyond my reckoning. My old uncle allowed us this quiet. But one day, when sitting with him in the garden, in the midst of all the bright flowers, with the dreamy yellow butterflies floating above us, he said to me with a pensive voice, Your spirit tends toward suffering, my lad’. And with that he lay his hand on my head and seemed to want to say something else. But he remained silent. It may be that he did not know either what he then divined in me and what power had since arrived within me.
One day, when I again stepped up to the window which the sitting Maria habitually occupied, I saw in her face the stiffened pallor of death. Sunbeams strayed over her tender, delicate form; with her hair, untied, fluttering in the wind she seemed to me not to have been struck down by illness; it was as if she died without visible cause. An enigma. I put the last rose in her hand. She took it with her to her grave.
Shortly after Maria’s death I went to the city. But the recollection of those placid sunfilled days stayed alive within me, perhaps more alive than in the chaotic present. I was never again to lay eyes on the small town of Talesgrund indeed I shied from the prospect of seeking it out again, I do think I could. When at times also overcome by a forceful longing for those eternally young things of the past, I know then that I will give myself over to finding them, only to find that there are no traces; I would find nothing of what still stays alive in my memory alive as the day and the thought of that fills me with pointless anguish.
