MARS
523
beating and torn at their tips like the wings of a wild goose on its
migratory flight. This breathing was the last thing he later remem–
bered before he flung open the door and with net and steel ball
broke into Johanna's dream like a murderer. . . .
Mter she left the kitchen, she had thrown herself on her bed
in her clothes and fallen asleep. She was dreaming that as a young
girl, just out of school, she was going on an errand through the
fresh Morgenbach valley on the forest-lined footpath that led down
to Bingen. Walking between mighty spruce trees and then following
the old Roman roads whose stony surfaces, overgrown with juniper
and broom and burning in the midday sun, arch over the mountain
rises,
she suddenly seemed to hear footsteps, marching in time, up
and down, and accompanied by a refrain which she could not make
out. Fright, mixed with curiosity, made her walk faster. With beating
heart she anticipated the next turn in the road, breathing with relief
when at last from a dizzying height she saw the Rhine flowing be–
tween dark trees. Mter a span of time-who can measure it in a
dream?-the steps again approached, and at last a man came in
sight: a woodcutter, roundheaded, with stockings to his knees and a
short ax whose blade gleamed with every movement as if he had a
small flame sitting on his shoulder. She saw his bare knees, the glitter–
ing steel-and then a great helmet over cruel, inflamed eyes. She
screamed several
times,
though she was aware that the screams were
inaudible, and then saw her husband standing in the open door
larger than life-size.
Everything went round, then the figure collapsed and shrank
to its normal proportions and then to those of a fat dwarf with a
bloated head waddling into the room.
-Swine, hissed Johanna, and tore from him the bottle which
he had held fast. He stumbled and almost fell, and reaching out
blindly he seized his wife's hair, which instantly unrolled on her
shoulders ,and emitted that odor which had penetrated to its roots:
hides and lilac mixed with the hair's own strong bitter smell. This
might have been Johanna at an earlier age: wild, scornful, virginal.
But the man who now fell on her and locked
his
teeth in her coarse
hair-taking her braids into his mouth as
if
he were chewing hen–
bane, and then with confused senses lapsing into a stupor-was no
longer the man she knew, Franz Hohler, proprietor of the Hooded
Man.
