The elderberry tree stirred, and then spoke. “You lay down in my shadow, infused with my fragrance, but you failed to fathom my secret. The fragrance is my language when inflamed by love.”

  The evening wind swished by and whispered, “I tickled your temples, but you didn’t take the hint, the breeze is my language when inflamed by love.”

  The last rays of the setting sun burst through the cloud burning with words, as if to say, “I showered you with liquid gold, but you didn’t grasp my meaning; the glow is my language when inflamed by love.”

  Ever deeper and deeper entranced by the look of those lovely eyes, his longing swelled, his desire sizzled, everything stirred and swayed as if awaking to a new and happy life. Flower petals and blossoms burst with fragrance; the scent was like the splendid song of a thousand flutes, and what they sang was echoed in the golden puff of evening clouds floating by to distant lands. But when the last rays of the setting sun faded behind the mountains, and dusk flung its cape over the surroundings, a deep raspy voice intoned from the distance:

  “Hey, hey, what kind of whispered fuss is that?— Hey, hey, who seeks to glimpse my last rays behind the mountains! Enough basking, enough singing!— Hey, hey, o’er bush and grass, grass and stream I roam!— Hey, hey, down-down-adown I go— Down-down-a-down I go!”

  Then the sun went silent like the stilled murmur of distant thunder, but the crystal bells shattered in a discordant clang. All went silent and Anselmus watched as the three shimmering and sparkling snakes went slipping along through the grass toward the water’s edge. Slithering away, they hurled themselves into the Elbe and disappeared behind the waves; little green flames flared up, zigzagging their way toward the city, suddenly evaporating in a puff of mist.

  Second Vigil

  How the Student Anselmus was taken for a drunk and a madman. Crossing the Elbe River. The Bravour-Arie of Kapellmeister Graun, Conradis Magen Liqueur, and the bronzed apple lady.

  A proper bourgeois lady, who caught sight of Anselmus’s strange doings on her way home from a stroll with her family, stopped dead in her tracks with her arms crossed before her and remarked: “The gentleman is not in his right mind!”

  Anselmus had embraced the trunk of the elderberry tree and kept beseeching the branches and leaves: “Oh, just twinkle and glimmer one last time you sweet little golden snakes, just let me hear your bell-like voices ring again! Just wink at me one more time with your enchanting blue eyes, one more time, I beg you, or else I’ll dissolve in pain and passionate longing!” And all the while he sighed and groaned pitifully from the bottom of his heart and, with impatient longing, kept shaking the elderberry tree, which just stood there stiff and unresponsive, fluttering its leaves, as if making light of the student’s sufferings.

  “The gentleman is not in his right mind!” the lady repeated, and Anselmus felt as if abruptly shaken out of a deep dream or doused with ice cold water. Only then did he see clearly where he was, and fathom that some strange spook must have muddled his mind and forced him to break out in a stream of words muttered at the top of his lungs. Profoundly embarrassed, he stared back at the lady and finally grabbed his hat that had fallen to the ground, preparing to make a quick escape.

  In the meantime, the paterfamilias had come up close; having set down the little one he’d been carrying, he’d leaned with amazement on his walking stick and seen and heard the student’s strange carryings on. Now he picked up the pipe and tobacco pouch Anselmus had let fall, held it forth, and remarked: “The gentleman had best not blubber and carry on like that in the dark, and let him not trouble decent folk if all that ails him is that he’s had a drop too much to drink! Better be a good boy, go home and sleep it off.”

  Deeply mortified, the student let out a tearful “Ach!”

  “Tut tut,” the proper gent continued, “let him pay it no more mind, such things happen to the best of us, and surely on dear Ascension Day a man can be allowed to go on a bit of a bender. Such things even happen to a man of the cloth – the young gentleman is, after all, a candidate for clerical office – but if he will permit, I’ll stuff my pipe from his stash of tobacco, mine having gone empty over the course of our constitutional.” As the gentleman spoke this last sentence, Anselmus was preparing to pocket his pipe and tobacco pouch, but the patriarch proceeded to slowly and carefully clean his own pipe and had already reached out to slowly stuff it from the student’s stash.

  Several girls from good families stopped to commiserate in a whisper with the woman and giggled among themselves while casting a contemptuous look at Anselmus. To him, it felt as if he were standing on a bed of pointed thorns and glowing hot needles. As soon as he retrieved his pipe and tobacco pouch, he immediately dashed off.

  All of the wondrous things he’d seen were erased from memory, and all he recalled was that he had babbled a whole lot of nonsense at the top of his lungs under the elderberry bush, a fact he found all the more painful to recall having long harbored a visceral aversion to those who talked to themselves. Satan speaks through them, said his rector, and he had always held this to be true. To have been taken for a drunken theology student on Ascension Day – the very thought of it made him recoil.

  He was just about to turn on Poplar Alley, abutting Kosel Garden, when a voice behind him called out: “Herr Anselmus! Herr Anselmus, where are you dashing off to in such haste, for a thousand heavens’ sake?” The student stopped dead in his tracks, as if riveted to the ground, convinced as he was that a new misfortune was about to befall him. The voice rang out again. “Herr Anselmus, do come back, we’re waiting at the water’s edge!” Only then did the student realize that it was his friend Deputy Rector Paulmann calling out to him. He turned and went back to the Elbe, where he found the deputy rector with his two daughters, together with the Registrar Heerbrand, about to climb into a gondola. Deputy Rector Paulmann invited the student to join them on a ride across the Elbe, and subsequently to spend the evening at his lodgings in the suburb of Pirna. Anselmus was glad to accept, believing he would thereby escape the streak of bad luck that had befallen him today.

  Once they had set out across the river, it so happened that a fireworks display was set off on the far bank in Anton’s Gardens. Crackling and hissing, the rockets soared through the air and exploded, emitting a thousand sparkling streaks of fire. Anselmus sat beside the oarsman, deep in thought, when, upon seeing the reflection in the water of the flying sparks and flames, it seemed to him as if the golden snakes swam along with the current. All of the strange things he had seen under the elderberry tree leapt back into mind, and he was once again gripped by the same inexpressible longing, the burning desire that had made his breast quake with spasms of painful rapture.

  “Oh, can it be you again, you little golden snakes? Sing to me, sing! Let those entrancingly lovely dark blue eyes glimmer again in your sweet song. Oh, my darlings, is it you swimming under the rippling stream!” Anselmus cried out, all the while making tempestuous gestures, as if he meant to fling himself from the gondola into the river.

  “What the devil?” the oarsman cried back, grabbing him by the coattails. The girls who were seated beside him shrieked in terror and fled to the far side of the craft; Registrar Heerbrand whispered something into Deputy Rector Paulmann’s ear, of which Anselmus only heard the words: “Fits like that— not yet noticed?”

  Immediately afterward Deputy Rector Paulmann got up and sat himself down beside the student, took his hand, eyed him with a seriously grave and officious expression, and said: “What’s got into you, Herr Anselmus?”

  Anselmus almost lost it, overwhelmed as he was by a strange split in his mind that he could not reconcile. He clearly recognized that what he took to be the glimmer of the little golden snakes was, in fact, the reflection of the fireworks in Anton’s Garden. But a feeling he’d never had before – he could not say for sure whether it was rapture or pain – convulsed in his chest, and as the boatman dipped the oar so strenuously into the surface that the river seemed to respond with furiously rushing, rippling purls of water, the young man heard in the din a furtive whisper: “Anselmus! Anselmus! Can’t you see us forever drawing near? My little sister has her eye on you again. Believe! Believe! Believe in us!” And it seemed to him as if he saw in the reflection three green glowing stripes.

  But when he gazed wistfully into the deep, searching to see if those precious eyes were peering back at him, he saw that the shimmer came from the reflection of the nearest lighted windows. He sat there in silence, battling with himself. The deputy rector spoke louder still: “What’s with you, Herr Anselmus?”

  The student replied timidly, “Oh, my dear deputy rector, if only you knew what absolutely wondrous things I just dreamt with my eyes wide open under the elderberry tree near the left garden wall, you would not hold it against me that I should seem so out of sorts.”

  “Heavens, Herr Anselmus,” the deputy rector replied, “I always took you for such a solid young man, but to dream— to dream with your eyes wide open— and then to suddenly want to leap into the water— forgive me, but only lunatics and madmen do such things!”

  Anselmus was completely nonplussed at his friend’s harsh words. Paulmann’s youngest daughter, Veronica, a very good-looking young girl in the flush of her sixteen years, then spoke up. “Dear father, Herr Anselmus must have experienced something inexplicable, and maybe he only thinks he was awake, unaware that he had, in fact, fallen asleep under the elderberry tree and dreamed all sorts of crazy stuff that’s still running through his mind.”

  “And dearest Mademoiselle, honored Deputy Rector,” Registrar Heerbrand added, “ought a person not also be permitted to sink into a quasi-dreaming state while still awake? The very same thing happened to me one afternoon over coffee. While lost in thought, at the precise moment of bodily and intellectual digestion, the location of a lost file suddenly leapt to mind, as if sparked by inspiration – and just yesterday a lovely, large bit of Latin text danced before my wide-open eyes.”

  “Oh, most honored Registrar,” replied Deputy Rector Paulmann, “you always had a certain poetic leaning, which makes a person fall easily into fantastic and far-fetched notions.”

  But it did Anselmus’s heart good, profoundly depressed as he was, to be taken for drunk or just a little batty, and despite the fact that it had grown quite dark out, for the first time he was struck by Veronica’s stunning dark blue eyes without thinking of the wondrous eyes in the water. Suddenly all that odd business under the elderberry tree slipped from his mind, and he felt so lighthearted and happy; indeed, in the sway of his high spirits, he went so far as to reach out a gallant hand to help his charming defender Veronica out of the gondola, and when she proceeded to wrap her arm in his he managed so skillfully to steer her home that he only slipped once, and it being the sole muddy spot along the way, only ever so slightly soiled Veronica’s white dress.

  Taking note of the felicitous change in Anselmus’s comportment, Deputy Rector Paulmann once again took a liking to him, and asked his forgiveness for the harsh words he’d let slip before. “Yes,” he admitted, “there are indeed numerous instances in which certain phantasms that people experience and that terrify and torment them no end derive from bodily malady, for which leeches applied appropriately to the posterior can help, according to an illustrious recently deceased man of science.”

  Though Anselmus could not say for certain if he had been drunk, daft, or physically ill, leeches seemed in any case altogether superfluous at the present time, since the aforementioned phantasms had completely disappeared and he felt ever merrier the more he managed with little pleasantries to entertain the lovely Veronica. As usual, the frugal supper was followed by music making; Anselmus sat down to play the piano, while Veronica let her pure and lovely voice ring out.

  “Precious Mademoiselle,” observed Registrar Heerbrand, “your voice is clear as a crystal bell!”

  “Not so!” the words slipped out of Anselmus’s lips, he knew not how, and everyone eyed him with stupefied wonder. “Crystal bells ring wondrously clear in elderberry trees— ever so wondrously clear!” the student kept muttering, half to himself.

  Veronica lay her hand on his shoulder and said, “What stuff and nonsense are you chattering about, my dear Herr Anselmus!”

  At this, the student promptly returned to his senses and started playing again.

  Deputy Rector Paulmann gave him a dark look, but Registrar Heerbrand lay a sheet of music on the stand and sang a bravura aria by Kapellmeister Graun to everyone’s delight. Anselmus accompanied a few more pieces, and played an able duet with Veronica of one of Deputy Rector Paulmann’s own compositions which put everyone in the merriest of moods.

  It had grown rather late, and Registrar Heerbrand reached for his hat and walking stick, when Deputy Rector Paulmann took him aside and whispered in his ear, “Honored Registrar, I wonder if you could be so kind as to, um, see that our good Herr Anselmus, how shall I put it, um, in the aforementioned matter—”

  “Of course, of course you can count on me,” Registrar Heebrand replied, and after everyone had regrouped in a circle, he continued aloud to wit:

  “There is, here in town, a most remarkable old gentleman. They say that he dabbles in all sorts of arcane studies, but since such matters are outside the scope of recognized scientific inquiry I would rather think of him as a kind of antiquarian and an experimental chemist on the side. I am, of course, referring to our noted Archivarius Lindhorst. He lives alone, as you know, in an old house far outside the city, and when he’s not busy doing something else, you can find him in his library or in his chemical laboratory, the latter completely off-limits to anyone else. In addition to countless other most extraordinary books, he possesses some manuscripts in Arabic, Coptic, and a few in an indecipherable script written in some unknown tongue. He would like to have the latter copied in a faithful facsimile, and to this end is seeking someone with a steady hand able to flawlessly and precisely transcribe all these obscure signs and symbols— and to do so, moreover, in Chinese ink on fine vellum. The copyist would work under his supervision in a designated room of the house set aside for that purpose and, in addition to board and a silver dollar for the day’s work, he promises a handsome present once the transcription job is done. The daily hours are from twelve to six. From three to four, you rest and eat. Since he already tried out the copying skill of a few young people and was disappointed, he finally turned to me to find him an able scribe; naturally I thought of you, my dear Herr Anselmus, since I know that you not only have a clear and neat handwriting, but that you also have a graceful and adroit hand for drawing. Should you, in these difficult times, and pending your possible steady employment, like to earn that daily silver dollar and the promised recompense once the job is done, bestir yourself to arrive tomorrow at twelve noon on the dot at the home of the archivarius, whose address you must know. But do take pains to avoid any ink flecks; if they fall on the transcription, no matter how minuscule, you’ll have to start again from the beginning. And if they fall on the original, the archivarius is liable to fling you out the window, as he is a temperamental man.”

  Anselmus was overjoyed at Registrar Heerbrand’s mention of this prospect of employment, for not only did he write with a clean and steady hand and like to draw, but it was also his true passion to transcribe with painstaking calligraphic care; so he thanked his patron in the most polite terms and promised not to miss his noontime rendezvous the next day. All night long he pictured nothing but shining silver dollars and heard their lovely clink. Who could possibly hold it against the poor fellow, just recently cheated of his dreamed-of Ascension Day on account of a freakish misadventure, a young man forced to count every penny and to forgo the pleasures that his young heart craved?

  Early the next morning he gathered together his pencils, his crow quills, and his Chinese ink, convinced that the archivarius could muster no better materials than these. Among other things, he scrutinized and arranged his calligraphic masterpieces and his drawings to present to the archivarius as proof of his proficiency in the required criteria. Fortunately, everything went smoothly; he seemed to be guided by a lucky star shining over him. His neckerchief held at the first binding, no seam in his outfit burst, no stitch in his silk socks came undone, his hat didn’t tumble back into the dust once he’d brushed it. In short, all went well! At precisely 11:30, the student stood in his trout-gray coat and his pitch-black garments, with a roll of manuscripts and ink drawings in his pocket, in Conradi’s Apothecary on Schloßgasse, downing one— two— shot glasses of the finest stomach-calming liquor, for here, he said to himself, striking his other empty pocket, silver dollars will soon clink.

  Despite the considerable distance to Archivarius Lindhorst’s lonesome old house, Anselmus was standing at his door before twelve. He stood there eyeing the lovely big door knocker, but when he reached to grip it as the last loud bell rang out from the church tower and filled the air with its mighty quavering clang, the metal face twisted into a repulsive grotesque grin in the glimmering blue light of noon. Dear God! It was the face of the apple hag from the Black Gate. The sharp teeth clattered in the drooping mouth, and in the clatter a shrill voice cried: “You lunatic— lunatic— lunatic! Wait, wait! Why did you try to run! Lunatic!”