141. Childhood Story

It was a quarter past five in the afternoon. Christof had a long day at school behind him. The last of the six school hours had been filled with the elementary teaching of the circle. Now he was on his way home, which took an hour if he walked. Christof had already walked for a quarter of an hour. It was a gloomy autumn evening. A monotonous gray covered the entire sky. The narrow footpath was covered with fallen leaves, many of which had been trodden into the soft, clayey soil. Along the path were trees, mostly cherry trees. Defoliated, they towered into the air, which was about to fill with wetting fog. To the right of the footpath was the slippery country road and further on, on both sides, wide fields in the unadorned earth color of autumn. Christof saw this environment with the same matter-of-factness with which boys see it who grow up with nature. He could let everything take effect on him and yet also fill his mind with the impressions of the day's experiences at school. He was tired from his seven hours of school, and also from carrying the heavy school bag and a drawing board. Behind him, a car came along the country road. The occupant of the car, an acquaintance of Chrflistof]'s parents, invited the boy to sit with him on the car. The man asked all sorts of questions related to the boy's school situation. The boy gave his answers rather mechanically, without inner participation. After a while, both fell silent and just sat next to each other on the wagon seat. The fog was getting thicker; the darkness was increasing.

The wagon was of the simplest kind. A moderately high open wagon body. A seat for two people; the owner drove the horse himself. Christof could barely see 20 feet in any direction. Yet the area was well known to him. On the right, the mountains that he had often explored during summer days; on the left, a wide plain, partly covered with meadows. The journey took only a very short while, and the boy's soul became strangely illuminated. The fog became transparent. It was as if Chrflistof could see everything in the area. He lived with everything. The ground was like a dull hum throughout the area, and the boy could interpret the different tones of this. He summarized the tones in all sorts of paradoxical words. Some words seemed to repeat themselves often, some only came once. Gradually, the whole thing became as if the ground were holding a conversation with the surrounding air. The words became all sorts of animated figures that rose up. Others came from above to meet them. In the encounter between these lower and upper figures, structures emerged to which Christof could only find an emotional connection. He sensed something in them that his soul seemed to long for. He knew that all this was his reverie.

He was not a dreamer at all. He had hardly made any acquaintance with books other than those he used for school. And in his schoolbooks, he was most interested in what many consider the most sobering. He had taken a particular interest in the new system of weights and measures that had just been introduced in his homeland. How to convert ells and feet into meters, pounds and hundredweight into kilograms, occupied him to the fullest extent. Small blue books, filled with conversion tables, were his reading material during school holidays. He did not know what a municipal theater was; of dramatic performances, he had only seen those that usually followed tightrope walking performances in the open air in villages. He only knew a few fairy tales from the school books, and they did not make a deep impression on him. His relatives were sober people, living in the difficult worries of the day, who would not have particularly liked to see the boy occupy himself with anything spiritual that could not even serve the purpose of life.