German Moonlight

Excerpt

Let me state my case calmly and without any undue fuss. I am, even by German standards, an uncommonly prudent person and I know how to keep my five senses under control. Apart from that, I am a lawyer and father to three sons. Neither during lilac time nor when there are hibiscus, sunflowers and asters on the ground am I in the habit of laying myself open to sentimental and romantic mood-swings. I do not keep a diary, but my legal appointments books are stored in strict chronological order, year by year, on my library shelves. First of all I have to tell you that, in the year 1867, acting on medical advice, because of the sea air and the salt water, I found myself on the island of Sylt and that, while I was there, I made the acquaintance of someone—a quite extraordinary acquaintance.

It goes without saying that I cannot stop myself by means of an account in writing of my own experiences and feelings from correcting or corroborating things often felt and even more frequently depicted and described in letters or printed matter. The impression made by the lapping of waves, sand dunes and dune grass, the flight of seagulls and, above all, the west wind on everyone who has had to wash off the dust and sweat of German officialdom is a pleasant and invigorating one. These things did not fail to have the same effect on me either given that the efforts that preceded the said invigoration were no less strenuous.

I lived on the periphery of two villages, Tinnum and Westerland, and therefore had a walk of at least half an hour to cover in order to reach the beach and the health-giving briny. A not much shorter walk led from there to the good fellow who took us every day at noon for a consideration back again. As a German civil servant used to moderation I set no great store by domestic bliss or even luxury. As I had taken with me seven of my twenty-one pipes, I could have set up home for myself in a megalithic tomb and not have felt uncomfortable.

Good. I lived with a baker who heated his oven with jetsam wood, that is to say wood bought at beach auctions that came from the spars and timberwork of ships that had foundered on the sand. I helped him from time to time to split this wood and felt pleasantly stimulated here by the task—at home I devote myself to this chore more for health reasons.

At home I saw and split my firewood in my leisure time, whereas here I did things for fun or carefully perused some papers on the House of Brunswick inheritance that I had brought with me in my suitcase. During what would have been my business hours I went for walks along the beach.

When you stay in a place like this to take the waters everything takes that much longer. At home I walk every day and in every weather round the purpose-built walls of the town where I carry out my duties as a public servant. On Sylt I had lunch, lay down on a dune for an hour for an afternoon nap and then ran along the beach towards the north of the island, sometimes getting as far as the Red Cliff, but usually only as far as the bathing huts of Wenningstedt.

As the sea like a washerwoman of both sexes cannot keep things to him or herself, but throws everything back, these runs were never without a certain charm. Even though I am by nature a prosaic person, I can nevertheless feel sadness when I turn a dead seal lying on its back over onto its belly and have thoughts about my own mortality as I do so.

Good—or rather on this occasion: even better! I had been on this long, stretched out from south to north and vice versa, island for three weeks approximately when I had the encounter already mentioned at the start of my narrative.

It was getting on towards evening. The sun had gone down and today I was coming back from the Red Cliff, and no less tired for all that since low tide had made the way to the beach accessible for all those patients on Sylt suffering from abdominal problems to the best of its ability....