They believe nothing, these modern people, so I must tell
them of the eternal truths which our church has revealed and will not stop
revealing.
The devil exists, however much we would prefer that he
didn’t, and to deny him or to ignore him allows him to grow that much stronger.
And how do I know? Because I’ve met him.
I was fourteen at the time, and I, with my friend Georg
Erdmann, had won a scholarship to study at the St. Michael’s School in
Lüneburg. So we set off together to walk the 180 miles to our new school.
Yes, I said walk—since how else were we to get there? True,
a passing farmer with his cart would take us to the end of his fields, or
perhaps into the nearest burg, if it was market day, but mostly we walked. At
night, we would sleep in the fields, or perhaps beg permission to sleep in a
barn. And so the days passed pleasantly: we were young, we were excited, we
were seeing the world for the first time, and it excited us.
Mostly, I think we were full of wonder. There are two
children near me, of about the same age as I was then, and they are predictably
playing video games. I glance at their faces, and they have the dulled look of
an opium smoker. Nothing amazes them, not even the wondrous device that both
stimulates and sedates them.
For me, every experience was new. I saw flowers growing by
the road, and they were not plants but jewels. The stars at night shone only on
us, and each one was a piece of God’s love that he had mounted just for us.
Even the fatigue, at the end of a day, had a special divinity to it: we slept
well no matter how rough the bed, if indeed there were a bed.
All was well until the day that Georg, who tended never to
look where he was going, took a fall, and badly twisted his ankle. A farmhouse
was quite near, and I helped him to its door.
I felt it as soon as I entered the house, and had Georg not
needed a place to rest, I would never have stayed a minute in the place. For
the sense of evil was palpable, from the moment we saw the sullen, suspicious
face of the wife to the moment we said farewell to her drunken oaf of a
husband. Because you could feel it—the menace in the air, the hatred, the fear
and the lies. It was a house of pure evil.
“Ye both can stay, but you’ll have to earn your
keep,” said Otto, the husband, and referring to me. I was willing, but what
could I do? I could sing, I could play the violin and the harpsichord—but farm
life I knew nothing of.
And so the next morning I was up at dawn, and began toiling:
there were the slops to feed the pigs, there was the hay to be forked down to
the cows, there was an endless succession of tasks large and small that kept me
busy.
All this was good enough: I was young, I was healthy, I
liked the feeling of work. What didn’t I like? The constant feeling of being
watched.
Was it real? Was I imagining it? I know not, but it was
nonetheless powerful, even if it were unreal. I felt Otto’s eyes on me at all
times, and I would turn, only to find him looking at something else. But what
accounted for that strange feeling that everyone knows so well of being
observed?
Nor was it just when Otto was present that I felt under observation;
even alone in the barn, in the fields, everywhere, I felt eyes watching me. I
would whirl around, always to be confronted with nothing.
Soon, the feeling of being watched was supplemented by the
sound of a low mutter, speaking a language I knew, but too softly to make out
words. Was it just I, or did others hear it too? I asked Georg; he heard
nothing.
I began to sleep badly, despite being tired from the work on
the farm. And it was then that I could hear Otto, in the room next door,
arguing with his wife. At first, it was impossible to understand what he was
saying; later, it became impossible to ignore.
He was drunk at the time, but that was hardly the point. He
accused his wife of having a roving eye, of desiring every man but him, and of
having relations with anyone who would have her. Nor was that all; very soon
the insults were followed by slaps, then punches, and then—most grisly of
all—beatings against the wall.
The next day, the wife would appear with bruises and black
eyes; she would limp with her eyes cast down about the house, doing the tasks
of cleaning and cooking. The last was a particularly vexing point, since we
were both fourteen, and the needle on the appetite meter tended to be stuck at
“ravenous.” And so we were constantly told that we were eating them out of
house and home, that we were a burden, that they didn’t know why they didn’t
turn us out. Were we grateful for their generosity? We tried to be, but really,
we could not.
Oddly, Georg was less offended by all this than was I.
Because, through lack of sleep and the situation in general, I became irritable
and snappish. Unexpected sounds rattled me, the barking of a dog at night gave
me nightmares.
Then, the smell began.
Like everything else in that accursed place, it was there
before I knew it. I did not so much start smelling it than I realized that I
had been smelling it—and for some time. Nor was it a smell—it was more like an
invading agent. No—that’s not quite it, either. It had the feeling of something
that would permeate everywhere. It was the smell of an animal who had died, and
whose unattended corpse was rotting in the hot summer sun.
As I grew more and more distracted, I grew more and more
careless. I began dropping food; this would provoke long tirades and bitter
accusations. And then, I noticed that Otto was now openly looking at mean, with
slitted eyes that seemed to concentrate the hate and spite. Nor did he attempt
to disguise his hate; he muttered profanities under his breath quite openly.
He grew more abusive to his wife, calling her a slut and a
fallen woman and a whore quite openly in front of us, nor did he attempt to
hide the fact that he was beating her.
It came to a head late one night of exceptional fury, when
he was raging at his wife, calling her a filthy bitch and accusing her
betraying him. I could stand it no more, and shouted from my bed for them to be
quiet. Instead, he erupted with rage, and in a matter of seconds, it seemed, he
was standing at the bedroom door, with his wife beside him. He was holding her on
tiptoes by her hair.
“SO TAKE HIM, YOU CUNT, TAKE HIM IF YOU WANT IT SO MUCH!” he
shouted, and then he shoved her toward me. I dodged and she fell. And that is
when he started the most violent beating of all.
There was very little we could do. We were both 14, and one
of us was still injured, though on the mend. And we were gentle youths—we had
come from homes of good and sober people, where drunkenness and vice and low
living were nowhere to be found. And so we stood in horror at the near
murderous assault the wretch was delivering to his wife, when very easily we
could have found an object and hit him over the head with it.
“Get out,” called the woman to us, “get out of the house.”
And that is when I met the devil, for Otto turned, then, and
I saw the red eyes of hate, I saw the sulfurous flames darting round his head,
and lastly…I smelled the horrible, offensive odor of hate and death that had
tailed me all those days. Yes, I saw the devil, and the devil saw me, and there
was no Otto there, and the devil knew that very well, and knew that I knew. He
looked at me, he acknowledged me, and then…
…he spat at me.
We stumbled out of the house; I half carried Georg away from
that house, and down the road that took us away, but that didn’t, since I
learned this from the devil. Once met, a part of you will ever stay in the
devil’s hands.
(St. Michael's day was 29 September; Michael is revered as the guardian of the church, and the archangel who wrestled with the devil and won.)
