The Hunchback
The living room was alone again. There was only an old maid passing through to shut the windows. You could think of it as any time of year you pleased, from March to September. The light was a rainy rose color. The streets must have been damp. The roofs were, in any case. The sky settled there like the pigeons that strutted across those roofs, holding their breasts puffed out before them. They almost seemed to be there in that room.
But mostly there were only bird cages, not an unusual sight in the home of a hunchback, they were mounted on the walls beside the windows, at just the right height to be seen by someone crouched over his work. But the two occupants, each in his own cage, were covered with a small green cloth. They sang, in turn or in unison. They were bullfinches, and they had forgotten their songs, as they did each year during molting season. And the covering might have been meant to distract them from all thoughts of spring, and to reacquaint them with those well-practiced melodies. Their tongues had been loosened, and one of them sang as if it were a bubbling spring, and had only just thought to sing those songs men often wrote to accompany its flowing notes. So it poured forth, as if the song had recollected itself again. Then all was silent for a while, and you could only speculate that the singer was enjoying a little bunch of lettuce, and his neighbor had dipped his feathered head into a water bath; for joy is to be shared on earth. And the room trembled and wobbled a bit, so alone, delicate as a young girl. .
There wasn’t a mirror in the room — oh, yes, on the door, in a darkish spot; and in it you could glimpse a Christ child under a glass dome. Then the singing began again, like the voice of a young girl in church. God, what a room that was. How the sun ripened there, too. The sofa had spread out its flower garden. There was an order there, too, it felt like early spring. And some people are like that all the time. They always have ears for that first season of their soul. But it would be unjust indeed to deny them their sentiments. It is the pure melody of their hearts, it is their unclouded truth. In the face of that, all preaching falls away, in the end they know more than we do. Above all, they have a real home. What was there, was breathing like the hundred-year-old ivy of a garden. It might be sentimental, but it was sacred, too. Is it even possible to draw such a distinction without being truly heartless? Can we even possibly enter the mind of a thoroughly uneducated person? The way that he has constructed the world for himself out of inherited customs and laws discovered on his own. . But despite the apparent risk of growing caught in this cocoon, there was a sobriety there, too. There was order there, as I have said. And cleanliness, too, its natural consequence. There was an old writing desk, you could see that it was used for calculations. And there was another corner that looked like a workshop. Violins were hanging there, made for angels, never touched by a finger, these instruments may have been more than precious; there were unfinished violins hanging there, violin necks with fingerboards and violins without backs. You could gaze into the mystery of the violin. Down from the wall came a sound like the song in a dream. You not only saw it, you felt it: this was the workshop of a violin maker.
Then a clock that had been ticking unnoticed, soft as velvet, began to strike its melody, three times. And as if the bird had found its song again in those strokes, or as if there were no bird at all in the room, but only an ancient clock that played a song to mark the hour, the room was singing again, a patient, maidenly folk song.
And now the scents were stirring, too. It mostly smelled like wood. The violins smelled like the wood of refined trees. Was there a birch among them, that tree that yields healing water when tapped with a pipe? I didn’t know, I almost doubted it, I know nothing about violin making. But I liked the thought that this birch was such a melodic tree. .
So here, too, in this craftsman’s pious, almost childlike world, large things were squeezed small enough to grasp, while small things were made inconceivably large, for these trees had been made into violins, and violins into trees.
A single photograph hung above the small workbench, a picture of a child. The little hunchback standing next to his mother. His mother sat there with the look of someone who does something out of pride, but almost dies of shame in the process. And the son, the child? Oh, we don’t need to describe him. He had a mother, and so he was in good hands. He rested his own hand on her shoulder, with one foot forward (he was wearing long pants). It must have been a memento of his first communion, this little picture. And on the other side of the room, above the baby Jesus in the glass dome, another, crucified Christ hung on the wall. His rib cage protruded, and his arms stood out from the cross, revealing his shoulder blades so clearly that he, too, appeared to have been a hunchback, this God incarnate. Who could have put that crucifix there so casually? And in just that spot? For it was reflected in the iridescent shimmer of the glass dome, so sharply that it seemed to shatter the dome into a thousand shards, and to destroy the tender, comely little waxen Jesus child. It was truly a cause for concern. You could even start to wonder if the nail was fixed firmly in the wall.
And even if the son was an orphan now, all this was his home, the steadfast home of this one man. The maid, who had left me alone the whole time while I waited (the violin maker would be back in half an hour), came in and talked to me. It was a surly sort of chitchat, but it told me all that mattered: it told me what might be in one of the drawers, in writing or in a picture, though I never would have looked without permission.
She asked if I was going to the circus, too. This circus, which seemed to have stretched the tent of its excitement over the whole town. Ever since, you could hear the lions roaring, and elephants walked down the street in broad daylight, almost alone.
I was convinced that these animals wouldn’t hurt the slightest creature, much less us people. But the surly maid couldn’t believe that. . If you were that big, with feet and teeth like that. She looked at me disparagingly. . Somehow I had transgressed against this servant’s point of view by belittling the mental faculties of that animal — for that’s what she thought I had done. “I’m not going to the circus,” she added at once, by way of explanation. God knows what else lay buried in that conversation. “I’m not, but my master Jakob is.” But now, all at once, she fell silent. For now everything was there on the surface, so that even her awkward silence spoke.
An entire life spent with one person is everything. She had held this hunchbacked, invalid boy in her hand on the very first day; and then he had simply grown, had learned to speak and to walk, to write and to read, had learned his craft, and in the end he had become her master. Especially now that his mother had died. Since then he spoke to her directly, giving orders (before he had always expressed them as childlike wishes): he wanted it this way or that way, at this time or that. She was the servant, but she had secretly also become a sort of mother to him. She unconsciously took on the tone and the manner of thinking of his late, real mother. And her manner of dress as well, up to a point. The photograph showed that clearly enough. And she did all this not to become the mistress of the house, but rather to remain a servant. The longer I waited there beside her, the better I liked her. I sensed the clean atmosphere of her kitchen and her chambers. God could come to her at any time. She wouldn’t even have to dust off her wooden suitcase for him. In any event, cleanliness and subservience were a part of her religion. And these two traits had also saved her from the humiliations of old age. They would keep her in good hands in this life, until the day she died. I had noticed that, and she felt that I had noticed. And since I had discovered this before she did, in just a quarter of an hour, I had become more acceptable to her, and she looked at me a bit more mildly. I stared straight ahead. I was trying to find a reason to leave. All at once I didn’t want to wait for the violin maker anymore; instead I wanted to secure a seat for myself at the circus, like Mr. Jakob.