Tidings: A Novel by Ernst Wiechert

Author:Ernst Wiechert [Wiechert, Ernst]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Plough Publishing House
Published: 2014-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

10

THE TRIAL OF THE FORESTER Buschan took place in the first week of Advent, and his wife and Baron Amadeus were summoned as witnesses. Because of the girl’s mental condition it was decided that she should not be called.

Amadeus was much concerned lest the “young mother” might get to know of the proceedings, but he refused to have her prevented by force, should she wish to go to the trial.

He saw her the moment he entered the little hall in the district town. She was sitting between Erasmus and Christoph, wrapped in a dark shawl like her mother, and gazing at the judge’s seat with a calm, faraway smile. Nobody unacquainted with her story would have thought that she was not normal.

Amadeus sat down on one of the benches at the back. The hall was packed and the people looked as if they had come to see a play and were waiting for the curtain to go up. Amadeus thought that two or even five years ago they would have looked just the same. Recent times had not stamped their faces except with the signs of hunger or even of want; the catastrophe had not shifted their hearts out of the routine of daily work.

The public prosecutor sat at his table and turned over his papers. He was a short man, looking depressed and worried, perhaps a foreman in one of the ammunition factories, and Amadeus had been told that he had spent two years in a concentration camp. He would have known it anyway by his face, which was bad and full of fear, like so many faces he had seen at roll call. He was “in power” now, and the expression in his eyes showed how much he despised all those in the hall who had not been behind barbed wire.

When the president, with the assessors, came into the hall and sat down behind the long table, Amadeus looked at him long and earnestly. He was the former editor of an unimportant newspaper with socialistic tendencies. He had been beaten up in the first days of the seizure of power and had been led through the streets with a placard around his neck. Then he had been submerged, nobody knew where he was, until the surf had thrown him up again onto the shore. He had lost his wife and children in the air raids. But his eyes were quiet as they looked at the people in the hall, as if he did not remember the past years.

The assessors sat there with round, apathetic faces, as if it was their appointed role to sit there, and as if they had been sitting in this small hall for years in order to sentence those who had little chance to sit still on chairs but had been continually on the march.

The accused and the witnesses were called, and then the forester was cross-examined.

Buschan in his clean, plain suit stood quietly at the bar, and with his calm eyes he looked at the president and the prosecutor.

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