Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

UNSTORYLIKE STORIES

The Giant Agoag

When the hero of this little story — and truly, he was one! — rolled up his sleeves, two arms as thin as the sound of a toy clock came into view. And the women praised his intelligence in a friendly manner, while they went out with others for whom they didn’t always have such kind words. Just one comely beauty once, to everyone’s surprise, deigned to grant him a greater intimacy; she loved to make big eyes at him and shrug her shoulders. And following the vacillation in the selection of endearments that usually comes at the start of every love affair, she called him “my little squirrel!”

Henceforth he read only the sports section of the newspaper, in the sports section dwelt most avidly on the boxing news, and of the boxing news preferred to read about the heavyweights.

His life was not happy, but he never stopped searching for a means to build up his strength. And since he didn’t have enough money to join a muscle-building club, and since sports has in any case, according to modern view, long since ceased to be the lowly talent of the body, and has become instead a moral triumph, a victory of the spirit, he pursued the search for strength on his own. There was no free afternoon which he did not use to go walking on his toes. Whenever he found himself alone and unobserved in a room, he reached with his right hand behind his shoulder to grab the things that lay on his left, and vice versa. Getting dressed and undressed became a challenge to the spirit which he carried out in the most strenuous way possible. And since every muscle in the human body has a counter muscle, such that one stretches while the other flexes, or flexes while the other stretches, he succeeded in infusing every movement with the most unspeakable difficulties. One might well maintain that on good days he consisted of two people, complete strangers who were forever fighting each other. And when, after such an optimally utilized day, he got ready to go to sleep, he once again strained all at once, all the muscles he could reach; and then he lay there, in his own muscles, like an alien piece of meat in the claws of a bird of prey, until tiredness came over him, his grip loosened and he let himself slip vertically into sleep. By this lifestyle it was inevitable that one day he would become invincibly strong. But before this could happen, he got into a fight on the street and was beaten up by a sizable crowd.

Following this disgraceful melee, in which his soul suffered injury, he was never the same as before, and it was questionable for quite some time thereafter if he would be able to endure a life stripped of all hope. Then he was saved by a giant omnibus. He chanced to witness a massive omnibus run over a rather athletically built young man, and this accident, as tragic as it turned out for the victim, resulted in a new point of departure in his life. The athlete was, so to speak, peeled-off existence like a wood shaving or the skin of an apple; whereas the omnibus, hardly stirred by the contact, rolled to the side, stopped and gaped back out of its many eyes. It was a sad sight, but our man quickly saw his chance and climbed aboard the victor.

So it was and so from that hour it would remain: For fifteen cents he could, whenever he wished, crawl into the body of a giant from whose path every muscleman had to jump aside. The giant’s name was Agoag. That probably stood for Athletes-Get-on-Omnibus-Associated Group; and in any case, those who still want to experience fairy tales nowadays can’t be too overly cautious. So our hero climbed on top of the bus and was so big that he lost any feeling for the dwarves that swarmed on the street below. He could no longer even imagine what they had to talk about with each other. He loved to see them leap aside in terror. And when they crossed the line of traffic, he barked at them like a watchdog snapping at sparrows. Cognizant of his destructive power, he looked down disdainfully on the roofs of the stylish private cars whose elegance had always in the past intimidated him, and he felt like a man with a knife eyeing the poor dumb chickens in a coop. This didn’t require that much imagination, just the application of a little logic. For if it is true what they say, that clothes make the man, then why not an omnibus too? You put its immense strength on about you, like someone else might put on a suit of armor or hang a rifle over his shoulder; and if knightly valor can be associated with armor, then why not just as well with an omnibus? And even for the mighty conquerors of history: Was it their weak body softened by the comforts of power that instilled terror in the enemy, or the apparatus of power with which they were able to surround themselves which made them invincible? And what is it, our man thought (enthroned in his new way of thinking), about the noble coterie who surround the kings of boxing, running and swimming like courtiers, from manager to trainer to the man who carries away the bucket of bloody water or lays the bathrobe on the champ’s shoulders; do these contemporary descendents of the old Lord High Steward and Cup-Bearer derive their dignity from their own power, or from the reflected rays of an alien power that surrounds them? (As one can see, he drew great insight from the accident.)

From now on, he no longer used every free moment for sports, but rather for bus riding. He dreamed of acquiring a far-reaching long-distance bus pass. And if he did in fact fulfill his dream and hasn’t since died, been crushed or run over, didn’t fall from a precipice, or land in a madhouse, then he is still riding around with it today. Once, though, he went too far and took a girlfriend along for the ride, expecting that she would be able to appreciate intellectual masculine beauty. There with them in the massive belly of the bus was a minuscule parasite with a mustache who smiled a few times suggestively at his girlfriend, and she, almost imperceptibly, smiled back; and when this mustached mite got up to leave, he even accidentally brushed past her and seemed to whisper something in her ear while publicly offering chivalrous apologies. Our hero boiled with rage; he would have liked to jump on his rival, but as small as the latter would have appeared beside the giant Agoag, just so big and brawny did he appear inside. Thus our hero remained seated and later showered his girlfriend with reproaches. But even though he had initiated her in his way of thinking, she did not reply — I don’t care a hoot about musclemen, it’s big husky omnibuses I love! — but rather simply lied to him.

Ever since this spiritual betrayal, to be blamed on the inferior intellectual daring of women, our hero took fewer bus rides, and when he did ride a bus, it was without any female companion. He divined a glimmering of that fateful truth about man summed up by the adage: The strong are strongest alone!

A Man Without Character

You really have to seek out character with a lantern nowadays; and you would probably look ridiculous to boot, walking around in broad daylight with a burning lamp. I want to tell the story of a man who always had difficulties with his character, who, to put it plainly, never even had a character; yet I am concerned that I may simply not have recognized his significance early enough, or that he may be something like a pioneer or forerunner of a new trend.

We were neighbors as kids. Whenever he carried off one of those little feats of mischief that are so splendid you’d rather not tell about them, his mother groaned, for the beating that she gave him tired her out. “Son,” she wailed, “you haven’t a speck of character; what in the world will become of you!?” In serious cases, however, his father was called in, and then the beatings had a certain ceremonious aspect and a solemn dignity, something like a school assembly. Before the festivities, my friend had with his own hands to go get the Lord High Counselor a cane switch whose primary use was to beat out the wash and was kept by the cook; and when it was all over with, the son had to kiss his father’s hand and, thanking him for the reprimand, had to beg forgiveness for the trouble he had caused his dear parents. My friend did it the other way around. He pleaded and howled for forgiveness before it began, and continued pleading from one blow to the next; but when it was all over with, he refused to utter another word, was all red in the face, swallowed tears and saliva, and tried by means of assiduous rubbing to wipe away the traces of his pain. “I don’t know,” — his father liked to say — “what will become of that boy; the rascal has absolutely no character!”

So in our childhood, character was what you got a beating for, even though you didn’t have it. There seems to have been a certain injustice in this. Character, my friend’s parents maintained (on one exceptional occasion they demanded it of him and actually sought to make him understand), was the conceptual opposite of bad report cards, skipping school, tin pans tied to the dogs’ tails, idle chatter and clowning around during class, obstinate excuses, faulty memory, and innocent birds struck by the sling of a nasty little marksman. But the natural opposite of all this was, after all, the terror of punishment, the fear of discovery and the pangs of guilt that tormented the soul with the remorse that you felt when things went wrong. That was all; there was no room and no function left over for character, and it was completely superfluous. Still, they demanded it of us.

Perhaps the enlightening words of counsel occasionally spoken to my friend during his punishment were supposed to give him a basis on which to build character, advice like “Don’t you have any pride, son?!” Or: “How can anyone be such a low-down liar?!” But I must say that I still find it difficult to this very day to fathom how anyone is supposed to be proud while getting a beating, or how he’s supposed to demonstrate his pride while bent down over the parental knee. Anger I can imagine; but that’s just what we weren’t supposed to have! And the same holds true for lies: How in the world are you supposed to lie, if not in a low-down way? Awkwardly perhaps? When I think about it today, it still seems to me as though what they really demanded back then was for us boys to be ingenious liars. But thus we were charged with conflicting orders: first, don’t lie; and second, if you have to lie, don’t lie like a liar. Maybe grown-up criminals have mastered this, since in the courtroom it is always held as a particularly dastardly villainy if they committed their crime cold-bloodedly, with malice and forethought; but it was definitely too much to ask of us boys. I am afraid that the only reason I don’t have such a marked absence of character as my friend is that I was not brought up with such painstaking care.

The most plausible of the parental dicta concerning our character was the one that joined its regrettable absence to the warning that we would have need of it as grown men: “And a boy like that wants to become a man!?” is approximately the way it went. The fact notwithstanding that this business about wanting was not altogether clear, the rest at least gave us to believe that character was something that we would be needing later on; so why all these hurried preparations now? This would have accorded altogether with our own way of looking at it.

Even though my friend possessed no character at the time, he did not suffer from the lack of it. That only came later, and began between our sixteenth and seventeenth year. It was then that we started frequenting the theater and reading novels. My friend’s brain, more prone to the dazzling seduction of art than my own, was naively annexed by the villain of the state theater, by the gentle father, the heroic lover, the comic characters, and even the devilish and bewitching femme fatale. Now he only spoke with false inflections, but suddenly possessed all the character of the German stage. If he promised something, you never knew whether you had his word as hero or villain; sometimes he started out perfidious and ended up honest, or the other way around; he would greet us friends with a grumble of displeasure only to switch suddenly to the bon vivant and offer us chocolate bonbons and a chair, or else hug us with fatherly affection and meanwhile steal the cigarettes out of our pocket.

And yet all this was harmless and honest compared to the effects of reading novels. Novels contain descriptions of the most amazing modes of behavior for countless situations. The main drawback, however, is that the situations you actually get yourself into never accord altogether with those for which the novels have prescribed what to do and what to say. World literature is a huge depot in which millions of souls are dressed up with magnanimity, indignation, pride, love, disdain, jealousy, nobility, and meanness. If a worshipped woman steps on our feelings, we know that we are to reply with a reproachfully soulful look; if a scoundrel mistreats an orphan, we know that we are to knock him out with a single punch. But what are we to do if the worshipped woman slams her door shut in our face so that our soulful look never reaches her? Or if a table laden with costly crystal separates us from the scoundrel mistreating the orphan? Shall we break the door down just to cast our sensitive look through splinters; and should we carefully remove the costly crystal before resorting to the indignant blow? In such truly crucial situations, literature always leaves you in the lurch; maybe things will only get better in a few hundred years, when more facets of life are described.

Meanwhile, however, the well-read character always finds himself in a particularly unpleasant fix every time he gets into a so-called real-life situation. He is seething with a good dozen prescribed lines, half-raised eyebrows or clenched fists, backs turned and heaving breasts, all of which don’t really fit the provocation, and yet are not altogether out of place. The corners of the mouth are simultaneously drawn upwards and downwards, the forehead both darkly furrowed and brightly illuminated, and the eyes want at the same time to lunge forward reproachfully and draw back ashamedly into their sockets: this is very unpleasant, for one hurts oneself in the process from all angles. The result all too often is that familiar palpitation and heaving which spreads across the lips, eyes, hands, and throat, sometimes consuming the entire body to such an extent that it twists like a screw that has lost its nut.

It was then that my friend discovered how much more convenient it would be to possess a single character, his own, and started searching for it.

But he stumbled into new exploits. I met him again years later when he had entered the legal profession. He wore glasses, was clean-shaven and spoke in a quiet tone of voice. “You’re looking me over?” he remarked. I could not deny it, something impelled me to seek an answer in his appearance. “Do I look like a lawyer?” he asked. I did not wish to disagree. He explained: “Lawyers have a very particular way of glancing over the rim of their glasses, which is different from the way, say, doctors do it. It might also be maintained that all their words and gestures are more pointed or sharp-edged than the rotund and knotty words and gestures of the theologian. The latter differ from the former as a piece of light journalism from a sermon. In brief, just as fish do not fly from tree to tree, so lawyers are submerged in a medium they never leave.”

“Professional character!” I said. My friend was pleased. “It wasn’t so easy,” he added. “When I started out, I wore a Christlike beard; but my boss forbade it, as it did not accord with the character of a lawyer. Thereafter I comported myself like a painter, and when that was denied me, like a sailor on shore leave.” “For God’s sake, what for?” I asked. “Because I naturally wanted to resist adopting a professional character,” he replied. “The unfortunate thing is that you can’t avoid it. There are of course lawyers that look like poets, and likewise poets that look like grocers, and grocers with the heads of thinkers. But they all have something of a glass eye or a false beard about them, or a wound that hasn’t quite healed. I don’t know why, but it’s like that, isn’t it?” He smiled as he was wont to and added resignedly: “As you know, I don’t even possess a personal character. . ”

I reminded him of his many theatrical characters. “That was only youth?” he proceeded with a sigh. “When you become a man you take on, in addition, a sexual, a national, a state, a class, and a geographical character to boot; you have a writing character, a character of the lines in your hand, of the shape of your skull, and if possible, a character that derives from the constellation of the stars at the moment of your birth. All that is too much for me. I never know which of my characters to follow.” Once again, his quiet smile appeared: “Happily I have a fiancée who claims I do not possess the slightest trace of a character, because I have not yet kept my promise to marry her. I’ll marry her for that very reason, since I can’t do without her healthy judgment.” “Who is your fiancée?”

“From the point of view of which character? But you know,” he interrupted himself, “she still always knows what she wants! She used to be a charmingly helpless little girl — I have known her for a long time already — but she learned a lot from me. When I lie, she finds it awful; when I don’t leave on time for the office in the morning, she claims I’ll never be able to support a family; when I can’t resolve to keep a promise I previously made, she knows that only a scoundrel could do such a thing.”

My friend smiled again. He was an amiable fellow in those days, and everyone looked affectionately down on him. No one ever thought for a moment that he would amount to anything. His external appearance alone already gave him away, for as soon as he started talking, every part of his body twisted into a different position; his eyes shifted to the side; shoulder, arm, and hand turned in opposite directions; and at least one leg swayed in the hollow underside of his knee like a postage scale. As I said, he was an amiable fellow back then, modest, shy, respectful; and sometimes he was also the opposite of all that, but one remained well-disposed toward him, out of curiosity alone.

When I met him again, he had a car, that woman as a wife who was now his shadow, and a respected, influential position. How he started this, I don’t know; but I suspect that the secret of it all was that he grew fat. His daunted, lissome face was gone. To be more precise, it was still there, but it lay buried under a thick upholstery of flesh. His eyes, which in the old days, when he had done some mischief, could be as touching as those of a sad little monkey, had in fact not lost their internal lustre; but they had a hard time shifting sideways beneath the bulk of his heavily upholstered cheeks, and so stared forwards with a haughty, pained expression. Internally, his movements continued to twist in every which way, but on the outside, at his elbows, knees and joints, padded pillows of fat held them back, and what came out gave an impression of brusqueness and decisiveness. So he had also become the man to suit the image. His flickering soul had taken on solid walls and convictions. Sometimes a spark of his old self still sallied forth; yet it no longer emanated any brightness in the man, but was rather a shot that he gave off to impress or to achieve a specific goal. The fact is that he had forfeited much of what he was before. Above all, the things he said, it was six of one or half a dozen of the other, even if they were a half-dozen sound, reliable goods. He recalled the past as one does a youthful indiscretion.

Once I succeeded in directing his attention back to our old topic of conversation, character. “I am convinced that the development of character has something to do with the way we wage war,” he expounded in short-breathed, insistent syllables, “and that nowadays, for that very reason, it can only be found among savages. For those who fight with knives and spears require character to come out on top. But what kind of character, however resolute, can stand up to tanks, flame throwers and poison gas!? What we therefore need today is discipline, not character!”

I had not contradicted him. But the strange thing was — and that’s why I permit myself to record this memory — all the while he spoke and I watched him, I retained the impression that the old person was still inside him. He stood inside himself, confined within the larger fleshy revision of the old self. His gaze was stuck inside the gaze of that other, his speech inside his speech. It was almost uncanny. I have since run into him again on several other occasions, and each time had the same impression. It was clear to me, if I may say so, that he would have liked to be himself again; but something held him back.

A Story Over Three Centuries

1729

When the Marquis d’Epatant was thrown to the beasts of prey — a story which unfortunately is not mentioned in a single one of the chronicles of the 18th century — he suddenly found himself in a tight scrape, the like of which he had never encountered. He had bid life adieu, and smiling with a look that seemed to emanate from two cleanly cut diamonds, but no longer saw anything, he stepped into nothingness. Yet this nothingness did not cause him to dissolve in eternity, but rather congealed around him in a very actual fashion; in short, not nothingness, but nothing followed, and as soon as he once again used his eyes to see, he noticed a big beast of prey watching him irresolutely. This would not, we must assume, have further ruffled the Marquis — he was afraid, but knew how to comport himself — had he not at that same instant realized that it was a female beast standing before him.

Strindbergian views were not yet current at the time; people lived and died with their 18th-century views, and Epatant’s most natural response would have been to doff his hat and gallantly bow. But then he noticed that the wrists of the lady looking at him were almost as wide as his thigh, and the teeth that became visible in that voluptuous and eagerly opened mouth gave him an inkling of the massacre that awaited him. This creature that stood before him was terrifying, beautiful, strong, but absolutely feminine in her expression and bearing. The ardently playful intent evident in every limb of the wildcat’s body reminded him in all respects of the ravishing, silent eloquence of love. Not only did he have to suffer dread, but he likewise had to contend with the shameful struggles that his dread waged with his masculine need, under any circumstances, to impress a female, to subdue and vanquish the woman in him. Instead of subduing her, however, he felt himself perplexed and defeated by his opponent. The female beast intimidated the beast in him, and the consummately feminine aspect that every one of her movements exuded added the stun of impotence to the failure of any resistance. He, the Marquis d’Epatant, had been reduced to the condition and role of a woman, and this in the last minute of his life! He saw no way to evade this awful affront, lost control of himself, and fortunately, no longer knew what happened to him.

2197 before Our Time

It should not be presumed that the date is correct, but if the State of the Amazons did indeed exist, then ladies to be reckoned with must have lived there. For if they had merely constituted a somewhat violently inclined women’s rights organization, they would have earned the historical reputation of Abderites or Sancho Panzas, and would have remained down to the present day a comic example of unwomanly behavior. Instead, however, they live on in heroic memory, from which we may conclude that in their day they had quite a considerable reputation for burning, murdering, and looting. More than one Indo-Germanic man must have been afraid of them for them to have achieved such a name for themselves. More than one hero must have run away from them. In short, they must have done no small damage to the pride of prehistoric man, until finally, to excuse so much cowardice, he made legendary figures out of them, following the same law by which a vacationer who runs from a cow will always claim it was at least an ox.

But what if this nation of virgins never existed? And this is more than likely, for the simple reason that it would be difficult to imagine divisions and regiments of storks flying new recruits in to the man-killing virgins. What, then, were the ancient heroes afraid of? Was the whole thing nothing but a curious, violently inclined dream? We cannot help but recall that classical man also venerated goddesses by whom, in the frenzy of worship, they were torn to pieces, and the Thebans knowingly visited the Sphinx like the fly visits the spider. We must shamefully wonder just a little at what kind of spider and insect dreams were harbored by these ancestors of our classical training! Exemplary athletes who didn’t think much of women, they dreamed of women whom they could fear. Is it possible in the end that Mr. Sacher-Masoch should have had such a long lineage? This is hardly likely. For we may wish to imagine that the past was dark, so that today things seem all the brighter; but it is hard to believe that there should be something so deranged at the very base of our humanistic education. Were they jokers, those ancient Greeks? Or were they given to vast exaggeration, in the manner of all Levantines? Or did a primal harmlessness underlie their primal perversity, that only much later took root in our sick souls?

Dark are the early days of civilization.

1927

What have two centuries of “Modern Time” made of this story?

In open combat, a man defeats the Amazon horde and the Amazon falls in love with her conqueror. So now things are back to normal! Her obstinacy subdued, she lets her shield and spear fall, and the men, flattered in their vanity, snigger all around. This is all that’s left of the old legend. Of the wild young woman marauder burning to dig the tip of her arrow into man’s ribs, the age of the enlightened middle class has preserved only the moral example, namely, how unnatural drives revert back into natural urges; and perhaps also at best the paltry remains in theaters, in movies, and in the heads of sixteen-year-old bon vivants, where the demonic female, the femme fatale, and the vamp remind us from afar of their man-killing ancestresses.

But times keep changing. We will not here speak about female office managers around whom the male subordinate creeps like lowly ivy around the mighty oak; there are instances that cut closer to the core of masculine pride. Such an instance took place some time ago when the famous researcher Quantus Negatus participated in a conference at which the opposition was led by women. It was not exactly a political conference, but nonetheless, one of those at which new ideas clash with old. Quantus, a man proud of his achievements, sat comfortably ensconced in the pillows of the old. He had absolutely no intention of arguing over attitudes and greeted the presence of the ladies above all as a diverting change. While they expounded above, he eyed their feet in their flat-heeled shoes below. But suddenly he was struck by a detail: He heard them say that the men of the majority were asses. They said it in a ravishing fashion, and not exactly using this word, but all the same without that degree of respect. And when one of them sat down, another stood up, relaxed and ready to repeat the accusation in a slightly different way. Little perpendicular folds of anger and effort formed on their foreheads; their gesticulations were pedantic, as when one is forced to make clear to children what lazy-heads they are; and their sentences were painstakingly articulated, the way a skilled chef carves pheasant.

The famous researcher Negatus smiled; he was no ass, he stood above the situation and could open-mindedly permit himself to be taken in by its charm; when it came to the voting, his own views would of course be approved. By chance, however, he happened to cast an untimely glance at the other gentlemen of the majority. And all at once it seemed to him as if the lot of them sat there stiff-backed, like so many little women, who, faced with a man’s attempt to teach them the overpowering magic of logic, can find no other weapon in their defense than to reply to each new conclusion, But I don’t want to! Then he realized for the first time that he was no different from the rest. With a wandering eye, he examined legs and fingertips, the line of lips and shapely bodily curves, and yet all the while he had to hear how his power of volition had fallen asleep, and his intelligence was that of a fat bourgeois who doesn’t like to exercise it much. And then something happened that in fact rarely happens, Quantus felt himself half-convinced. When he thought of his reputation as a scholar, he seemed to himself like a proper housewife who fiddles around with bottles and pots at home, while these ladies leaped on a sparkling steed through the wide-open world. There were of course a number of particular things about which few people know as much as he did; but what good was this knowledge in the face of such general questions, whose uncertainty required, he was about to say, the certainty of a whole man?! Already he sensed that the arguments his reason came up with to counter the sly contentions of these young women were actually shaky, and his thoughts followed with an almost girlish enthusiasm the wild leaps of their intellect.

What kept him composed was the fact that in the opposition camp, men likewise got up to blubber incoherencies. As a result of this, the conference sometimes became downright lively, and no one let the other finish speaking. Quantus Negatus observed what the female speakers did: In this chaotic din of masculine clamor, they smiled in silence and it seemed to him that they gave a plaintive sign. Then each time a corpulently hefty young man with a wide face and a thick head of hair got up and gave off a veritable booming phenomenon of voice, he in turn was interrupted by loud exclamations that made little sense, but in one burst swept twenty contentious voices over the crowd, so that in the silence that followed you could once again hear the interrupted female speakers. “That’s a man!” Negatus thought, flattered at first. But when he reflected more upon it, in the mood he was in at that moment, he realized that a powerful voice was after all just another sensual phenomenon, like a long pigtail or an opulent bosom had been in his youth. These thoughts, so foreign to his usual way of thinking, tired him out. He was more than a little bit tempted to leave his party in the lurch and sneak out of the gathering. Dark memories from his high school days stirred in him: the Amazons? “What a topsy-turvy world!” he thought. But then he also thought: “How curious it is, for once to imagine a topsy-turvy world. It provides a certain change of pace.” This train of thought made him feel confident again; there was a certain boldness in it, a candid manly curiosity. “How dark is the future of civilization!” he thought. “I am a man, but that will finally mean something very feminine, if we don’t soon return to an age of true men!” But when the issue was brought to a vote he sided after all with the reaction.

The opposition was defeated; the conference came to an end. Quantus stirred awake, and with a courtly bad conscience, his eyes searched for those of his tenacious female opponents. But they were just then in the process of powdering their faces and had pulled out their little silver mirrors. With the same unerring detachment with which before they uttered such deadly words, they now applied their powder. Quantus was astonished. And his last, albeit still highly disconcerted, thought upon leaving was this: “Why do comely male heads trouble themselves over such useless thoughts?!”

Children’s Story

Mr. Hiff, Mr. Haff, and Mr. Huff went out hunting together. And because it was autumn, nothing grew in the fields; nothing but earth that had been so loosened by the plough that their boots got brown all the way up to the leg. There was an awful lot of earth all around, nothing but still brown waves as far as the eye could see; sometimes one of those waves wore a cross on its crest, or a saint or a deserted pathway; it was very lonesome.

As they stepped back down into a hollow, the gentlemen spotted a hare, and because it was the first animal they had seen all day, all three raised their rifles quickly to their cheeks and fired. Mr. Hiff aimed over his right boot toe, Mr. Huff over his left, and Mr. Haff aimed right between his two boots, for the hare sat about the same distance from each of them and looked up in their direction. Now the three shots raised a terrible thunder, the three bits of buckshot rattled through the air like three clouds of hail, and the ground exploded in dust; but once nature had recovered from this shock, the hare lay there in the heap of pepper and moved no more. Only nobody knew now to whom he belonged, for all three had shot him at the same time. Mr. Hiff called out already from afar, “If the hare’s hit on the right, he’s mine” because he shot from the left; Mr. Huff maintained the same, but from the opposite side; but Mr. Haff argued that the hare could still have pivoted at the last moment, which could however only be established if he had been shot in the breast or the back: but then, and in any case, however, they realized that it was impossible to decide where the hare had been hit, and started arguing anew about whose hare he was.

Then the hare politely raised himself upright and said: “Gentlemen, if you can’t decide the matter among yourselves, then I’ll take the liberty of still being alive! For I fell, as I now realize, from the mere shock of it.”

Then Mr. Hiff and Mr. Haff were, as we say, all in a huff, which in the case of Mr. Huff naturally goes without saying. But the hare proceeded unperturbed. He regarded them with big, hysterical eyes — probably, after all, because death has grazed his hide — and began to tell the hunters their fortunes. “Gentlemen, I can prophecy your end,” he said, “if only you let me live! You, Mr. Hiff, will in as soon as seven years and three months be mowed down by death in the form of a bull’s horns; and Mr. Haff will grow very old, but I see an awfully grisly end for you — something — well, it isn’t so easy to talk about.” He paused and regarded Haff with a look of concern, then snapped out of it and rattled quickly: “But Mr. Huff will choke on a peach pit, that’s simple.”

Then the hunters turned pale, and the wind howled over this lonely place. But as the gun barrels still rattled in the wind against their legs, their fingers loaded up their guns again, and they said: “How can you know what hasn’t happened yet, you liar!”

“The bull that is supposed to spear me in seven years,” said Mr. Hiff, “isn’t even born yet; how can he spear me if he may never be born!?”

And Mr. Huff consoled himself in this way, saying: “All I have to do is not eat any more peaches, and already you’re a swindler!”

But Mr. Haff just said: “Well, well!”

The hare replied: “You gentlemen can make of this what you will; it won’t do you any good.”

Then the hunters made ready to trample the hare to death with their boots, and yelled: “No hare is going to make us superstitious!!” But in that instant an ugly old hag came walking by, carrying a load of kindling, and the hunters had to spit three times quickly so as to ward off the evil eye.

Then the hag, who had noticed what they’d done, grew angry and cried back: “Yas tink I couldn’ toin der heads in de old days!” No one could say for sure where her accent was from; but it sounded an awful lot like the dialect of Hell.

The hare took advantage of this opportunity to escape.

The hunters thundered after him with their rifles, but the hare was no more to be seen, and the old hag had also disappeared, though they thought they heard a wild cackle above the sound of the three shots.

Then Mr. Haff wiped the sweat off his brow and shivered.

Mr. Hiff said: “Let’s go home.”

And Mr. Huff was already bounding up the hill.

When they got to the stone cross up on the top of the hill though, they felt safe in its proximity and took a rest.

“We made fools of ourselves,” said Mr. Huff, “— it was an absolutely ordinary hare.”

“But he spoke to us —” said Mr. Haff.

“That can only have been the wind, or the blood climbing to our ears,” Mr. Hiff and Mr. Huff explained.

Then God whispered down from the stone cross: “Thou shalt not kill. .!”

The three were once again struck with terror and stepped back a good twenty steps from the stone cross; things are bad when you can’t even feel safe here! And before they could say another word, they found themselves bounding home with giant steps. It was only after the familiar smoke of their rooftops curled round the bushes, and the village dogs barked and children’s voices shot through the air like the chirp of sparrows that their legs stopped shaking. They stood still on them, feeling warm and safe. “Everybody’s got to die of something,” sighed Mr. Haff, who according to the hare’s prophecy had the longest to live; he knew damn well why he’d said what he said, though all of a sudden he grew troubled by the suspicion that his pals might also know why, and he was ashamed to ask them.

But Mr. Hiff replied in kind: “If I weren’t allowed to kill, well then I wouldn’t be allowed to be killed either, would I? Ergo, I say, there’s a fundamental contradiction here!” Each might apply this as he saw fit, a sensible answer it was not, and Mr. Hiff chuckled philosophically, so as to hide the fact that he was dying to know if the others had understood him all the same, or if something wasn’t right in his head.

Mr. Huff, the third one, pensively trampled an earthworm underfoot and replied: “We don’t only kill animals, we also protect them and preserve order in the field.”

Then everyone knew that the others knew too; and while everyone secretly remembered it, the experience already began to fade like a dream after waking, for what three men heard and saw cannot be a secret and thereafter not a miracle either, but must at best be a delusion. And all three suddenly sighed: Thank God! Mr. Hiff sighted it over his left boot toe, Mr. Huff over his right, for both squinted back at God in the field, whom they secretly thanked for not having actually appeared in person; but since the two others looked aside, Mr. Haff could turn himself all the way around to the cross, twitch his ears, and say: “We drank brandy on an empty stomach today, a hunter shouldn’t ever do that.”

“That’s it!” all three agreed, sang a merry hunter’s song about green woods and fields, and tossed stones at a cat that had surreptitiously slipped into the field to hunt hare eggs; for now the hunters were no longer afraid of the hare. But this last part of the story may not be quite as authentic as the rest, for there are people who claim that hares lay eggs on Easter.