Read Online Brother of Sleep: A Novel by Robert Schneider - Free Book Online

patience, finally concluded with an incomplete cadence. But the teacher was not happy. He could feel the boy watching him earnestly, squinting to follow his gnarled fingers on the manual. Once he even saw him painfully wrinkling his brow, just because he had introduced notes into E major that did not belong in E major. Oskar sensed that not a single mistake escaped this little devil, even if it was only a finger or a foot that slipped for a fraction of a second. But he felt genuine distress when, one Sunday, he was forced to realize that the lad was capable of singing all the voices of a chorale, from the soprano to the bass. And as if that wasn’t enough, the organ blower was correcting his playing! In a full voice he complemented the bumpy bass line, restored a fluffed line in the alto, embellished the melody with bold transitions and coloraturas, cried a desperate B flat when the schoolmaster, yet again, had played a botched B natural, experimented with magnif­icent tenor sustains, and even sometimes introduced entirely new voices into a piece that was already beyond Oskar’s comprehension. The organist’s glasses steamed up, and he grew frightened. The cheekily grinning faces that had disturbed devotion since the days of Curate Benzer suddenly listened, with sweet expressions, to the organ blower’s angelic singing. That was too much! The schoolmaster no longer took any pleasure in his organ playing and lost all his self-esteem. He was just a little minstrel for the Lord, a man of quite minor talents, and he would have liked to take his organ playing further, but sadly he had a big family to feed and had to run the school as well. That was what he said at the Huntsman’s Inn over a beer. And he continued to abase himself, until exalted by words of praise. What was he saying? Nulf Alder said forcefully. He was the decentest organ player on God’s earth, Sicket erat et principus in nunk and semper . In fact, Oskar Alder did think of himself as a minstrel blessed by grace divine, and when he heard Nulf blustering like that the pink of ambition returned to his cheeks.
    On the second Sunday of Advent, Elias asked his uncle to teach him how to play the organ. Oskar put him off until later but secretly resolved never to teach the boy a single note. He alone was the organ player of Eschberg. That was how it was, and it would stay that way.
    It did not stay that way. We think of Easter Day in 1820, and our heart leaps with joy. On that day Elias will play a more wonderful prelude than anyone in the world of Eschberg has ever heard. We have difficulty in calming our hearts enough to continue with our chronicle of this life. Great difficulty.
    The teacher thought it a good idea to lock the organ loft from now on. He kept hiding the key in different places. And because, in a terrible nightmare, he had seen a little man sitting in his place at the organ, he put the key in yet more unthinkable places. Who would have expected to find a key in the hollow head of the statue of St. Eusebius or immersed in the font, in the seam of the flag of the Sacred Heart, between the pages of a prayer book? Or in the communion cup, which gave the kindly but increasingly forgetful curate grave concerns about the mystery of transubstantia­tion? But nothing escaped Elias. Wherever the key fell or splashed or slipped or wriggled, he found it.
    In the night, four days before Christmas, Elias Alder crept to the organ loft. He found the key in the reliquary behind the high altar, in the middle of St. Wolfgang’s bones. Pearls of sweat were glittering on Elias’s brow, and his heart was thundering in his throat when the beadle walked in to lock the church. Haintz felt patiently around for the keyhole, made a perfunctory genuflection, uttered a slovenly “Lord have mercy,” and Elias was free, locked in the little church, alone with himself and the organ. There it was in front of him, the mysterious little object.