— 8–
It was snowing in the small village that morning. The children arriving at school had wet snowy shoes, trousers, skirts and heads and caps. They brought the scent of snow into the schoolroom with them, along with all sorts of debris from the muddy, sodden roads. Because of the snowfall, this horde of little ones was distracted, pleasurably agitated and not terribly inclined to attentiveness, which made the teacher a bit impatient. She was just about to start the religion lesson when she became aware of a dark, slender, mobile, ambulatory spot before the window, a spot that couldn’t have been made by any peasant, for it was too delicate and agile. It went flying right past the row of windows, and all at once the children saw their teacher race from the room, the lesson forgotten. Hedwig now went out the door of the schoolhouse to throw herself into the arms of her brother, who was standing right before her. She wept and kissed Simon and led him into one of the two rooms she had at her disposal. “You come unannounced, but it’s good you’ve come,” she said, “take off your things and put them here. I have to go teach some more, but I’ll send the children home an hour early today. It won’t make any difference. They’re so completely inattentive today that I have ample cause to be annoyed and send them off earlier than usual.” —She arranged her hair, which had gotten rather out of joint during their impetuous greeting, said goodbye to her brother and went back to work.
Simon began to make himself at home in the country. His suitcases were delivered by mail, whereupon he unpacked all his things. He no longer had many possessions: a few old books he hadn’t wanted to sell or give away, linens, a black suit and a bundle of small items like twine, scraps of silk, neckties, shoelaces, candle stumps, buttons and bits of thread. The teacher at the next school over agreed to loan out an old iron bedframe and a straw mattress to go along with it: This was sufficient for sleeping in the country. The bedstead was transported from the neighboring village on a wide sled in the middle of the night. Hedwig and Simon sat down upon this strange vehicle; the son of the teacher who was Hedwig’s friend, a strapping lad who’d just finished his military service, guided the sled downhill into the hollow in which the schoolhouse was located. There was much laughter. The bed was set up in the second room and furnished with the necessary bedding and thus made ready for a sleeper who had no exaggerated demands to make of a bed, which of course Simon did not. At first Hedwig thought for a while: “Well, he’s coming to me now because he doesn’t have anywhere else to live in all the wide world. That’s what I’m good for. If he’d had somewhere else to sleep and eat, he wouldn’t have remembered his sister.” But she quickly dismissed this thought, which had arisen in a moment of defiant pride and had been pursued only because of the manner of its arrival, not because it was agreeable. Simon in his turn felt a little ashamed to be making claims on his sister’s kindness in such a way, but this feeling didn’t last long either; for habit soon swallowed it up, he quite simply grew used to all of this! He really didn’t have any money left, but right away, just a day or two after his arrival, he sent around a letter to all the notary publics in the region asking them to send him work, as he was a skilled copyist with a lovely hand. And why did one need money in the country! Not much was needed. Gradually all the fragile walls separating the two schoolhouse inhabitants fell away, and they lived as if they’d always lived together, joyfully sharing both deprivations and amusements.