The Good Meadow

(1946)

The village had never had enough grazing for its cattle – which wasn’t helped when farmer Karwe sold his big meadow by the lake, and then not to a local, but to the owner of the Waldhof estate.

‘What’s he going to feed his six cows then?’ they were asking in the village.

‘He’s supposed to have got clear eight thousand from the Waldhof, and none of us could have matched that,’ they said.

‘But it still ain’t right,’ they moaned. ‘The lake meadow belongs to the village and not the estate, that’s got enough land as it is.’

‘Kurt and his old man are supposed to have practically come to blows over it,’ they gossiped. ‘The old man’s gone mad, he said to Erwin Seiler in the pub, apparently.’

‘Kurt needs to watch his lip,’ they reckoned. ‘If old Karwe loses his temper, young Kurt is on a hiding to nothing, in spite of his five-and-twenty years.’

Kurt was sitting under a cow, and milking into a bucket. One cow along, his sister Rosemarie was doing the same. Old Karwe was standing in the passage, pretending to be busy with something, but under his bushy grey brows he was glowering at his son. ‘What’s the matter with your milking today, Kurt?’ he finally came out with. ‘Then again, if you get plastered, then it’s the poor beasts that have to pay.’

The son, with red boozy splotches in his face, made no reply.

‘Why can’t you act like a Christian, you flaming heathen, you!’ scolded the old man. ‘Can’t you tell you’re hurting Bianca?’

Again the son made no reply; but the cow Bianca turned her head in the direction of udder and milker, and mooed softly.

‘Leave off!’ yelled the old man suddenly. ‘Get out of my byre!’ he yelled still more loudly. ‘You’re a tormentor of animals.’

‘And out of your farm and all, eh, Pa?’ asked the son. ‘Because I don’t approve of you selling the lake meadow?’ But he’d taken care to get up and step out into the passage.

‘Keep it down, the pair of you,’ said Rosemarie. ‘Mum will hear you in bed, and worry.’

‘You can start by shutting up, yourself!’ Karwe growled at her. ‘Without your womanly ways …’ He stopped with a look at his son. ‘I want to show you something in the orchard, Kurt,’ he went on quite calmly. ‘You finish the milking, Rose!’

‘Then supper’ll be late,’ lamented the daughter. ‘I can’t do everything at once.’

‘Who said anything about that?’ replied her father, leading his son out of the cowshed.

In the orchard the old man stopped at the fence; his son stood a few feet away, leaning against the trunk of an apple tree. For a while they stood there in silence, the old man looking at his son, and the son looking at the fruit trees, the apples and pears bearing as much as he could remember. Even the Golden Noble apples, which were coming off a heavy yield last year, were full again; they hadn’t taken a year off, as they usually did. ‘But what use is it all?’ thought the son, and probably he’d thought it out loud.

‘No, Kurt,’ confirmed the old man. ‘It’s no use being obstinate in the face of me and the world. It won’t get the meadow back.’

‘It’s a shame,’ Kurt insisted angrily. ‘How could you make us a subject for gossip like that, Father?’

‘The alternative would have been a worse shame, Kurt,’ replied the old man.

The son spun round, stared at his father with round eyes. There was silence for a time. The father saw the son getting to grips with it, but declined to help him out.

Finally he asked quietly: ‘Beese from Bergfeld?’

The father nodded slowly. ‘That’s right. He wants ten thousand as capital for his haberdashery, else he’ll leave Rose on her own.’

‘Let him!’ exclaimed the son angrily. ‘She’ll find someone other than that wretched townie.’

‘They’ll marry in a fortnight, at least the child will be born in wedlock.’ He saw the son turn pale under his tan. Farmer Karwe waited another moment, then he repeated: ‘That’s just the way it is!’ and left his son alone in the orchard.

He took a few steps into it, stopped, looked round to check he was alone. Then he dropped heavily onto the grass, propped his head against a tree and thought: I feel like I’ve been sawn off at the knees.

He wanted to try and think of one thing at a time, he wanted to order his heart and mind, but everything was pell-mell: Beese the merchant from Bergfeld with the cunning yellow features and the dark, oil-gleaming hair as curly as a ram’s. Then his sister, who had got involved with a character like that who didn’t belong, an enigma, no attachments, an incomer. Someone who could have spent time in prison – and by the time you found out about it, it would be too late. And now he remembered how he had cleared the ditches in the lake meadow with his father, before and after winter. It had been hard, cold, wet work, but it hadn’t felt hard to them, not for a moment; both of them, father and son, had relished the work. The meadow was a living thing for both of them: you had to look after it well, and then it would pay you back with a great yield. Last year, when no one in the village had any hay because of the drought, the lake meadow had yielded up three harvests! And now it was gone, it seemed they had cleared the ditches for others, it was no longer part of the Karwe farm.

The young man almost groaned with the pain of it. Again he looked around quickly, to see if someone wasn’t listening, then he jumped up and ran off. He didn’t run onto the village street, where they could all see him in his disgrace, he ran along the lakeside, clambering over the garden fences, and didn’t stop running until he was in the lake meadow. He climbed over the rough board fence, he leaped across the wide ditch, he went as far as the corner where the reed roof was, that gave the cattle protection from sun and rain. There he sat down on the side of the trough and looked across the meadow, the Karwe meadow, his meadow …

Yes, there it was, it hadn’t changed yet, it was still the same. And yet everything was different, it wasn’t the Karwe meadow any more, it was a meadow on some rich person’s country estate, one among many, not a shining individual jewel. You couldn’t tell that it had changed. That was something else that Kurt couldn’t understand: his father and his grandfather and his father before him and a generation before that, and himself as well, each of them a Karwe, they had put their work into the meadow. That was what had made it a good meadow, rewarding labour and love. It had become of a piece with the Karwes, barely separable from the hand that worked it or the heart that was attached to it. But now eighty blue banknotes had changed hands, and it was no longer anything to do with the Karwes – it was like selling a piece of your own heart, for God’s sake! You couldn’t do that!

No, Kurt couldn’t understand it, this was a mystery he couldn’t fathom, however he racked his brain. And with a sudden effort he pushed all these useless, tormenting thoughts away, and his whole fury settled on his sister: if only Rosemarie hadn’t done what she had done, then Father wouldn’t have sold the meadow, and everything would have remained as it should!

He sat there silent and tormented in the lean-to, and he didn’t have the strength to get up, it really was as though his limbs had been severed. He would have happily gone to the pub, and maybe forgotten his tormenting thoughts in the chatter of the others, but he couldn’t do that. Also, he needed to talk to Anneliese; they hadn’t seen each other since the terrible news of the sale of the meadow. He hadn’t kept their assignation: it was really important for him to talk to her now, and hear what she and her people thought about the sale, because he wasn’t the same suitor as he had been before. But he couldn’t go to Anneliese either, it was all he could do to sit here in his pain and rage and think about the lost meadow.

Then he noticed someone else on the meadow, it was the fat, red-faced inspector of the Waldhof estate. He was on horseback, and seemed to be enjoying riding back and forth over the meadow, galloping over the ditches. His horse’s hooves threw up great clods of turf. So that was how they were going to treat his meadow!

After a while the inspector drew up alongside young Karwe, he patted the neck of his horse, and said: ‘A bit of Bessemer slag and some potash will do wonders for this meadow!’

‘The meadow’s good enough without!’ replied young Karwe. ‘It’s not acid.’

‘Good enough for you farmers, maybe!’ the inspector retorted. ‘I’ll get more out of it than you ever dreamed.’

‘In good years, we had four mowings,’ boasted Kurt. ‘And you should have seen the grass, lovely thick swathes of it …’

‘I know,’ the inspector suddenly conceded. ‘To begin with, the boss didn’t want to pay as much as eight thousand. But I told him it was worth it, and it would have been worth ten.’

‘Then how much would you be prepared to sell it for?’ asked Kurt softly, and suddenly he could feel his heart beating. ‘Twelve?’

‘Sell it?’ said the inspector mockingly. ‘Sell the meadow?’ He looked at the young man. ‘You’re probably not happy about your father selling it? You’d like to buy it back later on, isn’t that right? Well, forget about that, son, this meadow won’t be sold any time, it’s part of the estate now!’

‘But what if you were able to get twelve for it, or even fifteen?’ Kurt Karwe persisted. ‘Not that I could make you an actual offer or anything – Lord, it would take me a lifetime to get that much together! But at least so that I had a chance of getting the meadow back one day?’ All of a sudden he had got rather talkative, strange for a quiet fellow.

The inspector could tell, and he felt almost sorry for the young man. ‘Ach, Karwe,’ he said finally, ‘if you were to offer twenty, it wouldn’t matter. What a big estate has, it keeps. It’s gone. Your father for whatever reason let it go, and now it’s gone for keeps, you understand?’ The young man stared at him. He looked for a way out. ‘You’ll just have to sow serradilla everywhere,’ he said. ‘That way you’ll have some feed. It used to be that a lot more serradilla was grown here in the village, you sell the seeds and keep the hay – you’ll do fine.’

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ said Kurt Karwe mechanically, thinking about how his father had let the meadow go, for keeps. If it had been him, he wouldn’t have bought Rosemarie a husband. Let her have her baby on her own, there would a big to-do about that at first, and then everyone would just get used to it and carry on. Whereas the meadow would always be missing from the farm, and that’s all there was to it, always, as long as he lived. Father thought about these things the way the old people thought about them, and he was in charge. He, the son, just had to put up and shut up.

On the eve of the wedding, when Father counted out the money onto the table for his brother-in-law to be, he felt like walking out. Next door the drunken guests were carrying on. His brother-in-law Beese stood beside the table, his hands in his jacket pockets watching as Father laid the money out on the table. As though he saw sums like that every day of his life. Rosemarie stood next to Beese, her arm round his shoulder, her lips moving, as though she was counting along …

‘Eight thousand five hundred!’ old Karwe said finally, and put down the last bill. ‘You’ll have to wait a little for the balance, Erwin. It’s a lot of money to raise from such a small farm, you understand.’ His voice had a rare sound of begging.

Erwin Beese stood there impassive, hands in his pockets, and made no move to take the money off the table. He said: ‘The sum we discussed was ten thousand, not eight and a half. You need to be serious in a transaction, especially a transaction like this. Eight and a half and patience isn’t serious. All of me is getting married, I’m not waiting for a little bit to follow in the fullness of time. No, I’m afraid I need the remaining fifteen hundred, Father, everything as we agreed.’

‘Livestock prices are hopeless right now, Erwin,’ said the old man, imploringly. ‘I’d have to lose another two cows. See,’ he went on, and gestured to the money on the table, ‘it’s still an awful lot of money. I don’t think there’s ever been this much money on the table, and it’s an old table, it’s from my great-grandfather. You’ll get the rest as soon as the butcher pays a bit better.’

‘Whatever you arrange with the butcher is your affair, Father,’ said Beese coldly. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. But when we discussed it, you said ten thousand, you said it, and so it must be. I need the money, I have put in hand a refurbishment of my shop, and ordered a lot of new stock – I must be serious with my suppliers, and so you have to be serious with me!’

‘Give me four weeks!’ begged farmer Karwe. ‘Prices must surely have turned by then. Your suppliers won’t all want to be paid at once. If I sold now, I’d be running the farm down. I’ve already run it down quite a bit for my boy, Erwin …’

Hearing his father begging like that, Kurt felt moved to speak, but Beese got in ahead of him. ‘I have seen enough,’ he said in his arrogant drone, ‘and I can see you’re not serious. You promised me ten thousand on my wedding day, Karwe, that was the deal that was struck between us. Isn’t that right, Rosemarie?’ It was the first time he had turned to his intended; thus far she had been an extra at the deal. ‘Tell your father that was the arrangement, and that you want him to keep his word like a serious businessman.’

The girl didn’t look at him, but neither did she look at her father or her brother. Nor did she take her arm off her husband’s shoulder when she said, with a look at the money on the table: ‘Yes, we agreed it should be ten thousand, and I want Father to keep his word to you!’

‘You see!’ crowed Erwin Beese. ‘From the lips of your own daughter. And,’ he went on, and took the girl’s other hand between his, caressingly, ‘and you know the state of your father’s business. You can tell me yourself how to raise the fifteen hundred marks.’

The girl twisted under the eyes of the three men. ‘You know very well, Rosemarie, that I’d have to slaughter the four best cows and probably the fat sow as well – we’d have nothing left! He’s from the town, he doesn’t know what it’s like when all the animals are gone from a farm …’

‘I’ll buy the fat sow off you myself for whatever the butcher offers,’ Beese put in hurriedly. ‘Then we’ll have something good to slaughter. Will it make good eating, your fat sow, Rosemarie?’

‘Very good, Erwin. She weighs five hundredweight, and there’s bacon on her as wide as my hand …’

‘You see!’ laughed Beese. ‘We’re reaching an accommodation, Father, the deal will work out for us both …’

‘Beese,’ put in the son suddenly, ‘I’m thinking you need all this money to buy your stock, and here you are talking about getting a pig on the side, to slaughter.’

For a moment the smooth townie was confused, but soon he caught himself. ‘But I’ll be saving money that I’d otherwise be paying the butcher, and earning a bit!’

‘And,’ Kurt Karwe went on, ‘I don’t like your way of talking about your marriage to my sister. Is it Rosemarie you’re marrying, or ten thousand marks? You keep going on about business, nothing but business – but marrying my sister isn’t a business. You should count yourself lucky you’re getting such a good wife!’

Beese twisted his mouth into a mocking scowl. ‘I could have had as many good wives as I have fingers on my hand. If I’m standing here now, it’s because she comes with ten thousand marks!’

Now it was the old man and his son who exchanged a look and understood each other, without a word. ‘All right, you’ll get the remaining fifteen hundred tomorrow morning, before the minister weds you, Erwin!’ said old Karwe.

‘That’s what I call serious,’ said Beese unctuously. ‘And don’t forget, I’m taking the fat sow in payment as well.’

‘I don’t recall anything being said about that in our agreement,’ replied the old man. ‘It was just the ten thousand.’

And so it was. So it began, and as it began so it went on, which is to say, not well. Rosemarie was one of those girls who, once married, almost completely lose touch with the parental home. She was content in her marriage, from time to time there was a little falling-out, because Beese was successful in more than business. But gradually she got used to that, just as she got used to the town, the children, the shop, the slowly growing respect she enjoyed on account of her husband’s progress.

She sometimes saw her father and brother in town; to begin with she would ask eagerly how things were at home, but over time she stopped asking, because the replies didn’t sound good, rather they sounded like an accusation in her ears.

In fact, the little farm never quite got over the haemorrhage that the wedding had brought about. The meadow was gone, the animals one by one came under the hammer, and while the old man and his son slaved away, there was no real progress. They were no longer proper farmers, they were cottars. And of course the marriage to Anneliese was off, her parents wouldn’t allow their daughter to marry into such a poor farm. She married another farmer’s son, and Kurt Karwe stayed at home with his father. The son couldn’t help wondering if his father didn’t regret selling the good meadow. He felt sorry for the old man, working himself to the bone, and to so little purpose. But the old man never mentioned the lake meadow, and Kurt, who still sometimes went there of an evening, never once saw his father there.

With that the years passed, people got on with their lives, and in the village they got used to thinking of the Karwes as cottars rather than productive farmers. Only young Karwe occasionally protested at this; the old man had stopped long since.

The old man was happy that his son, who wasn’t a young man any more, finally did find a bride, an old spinster who brought an eight-year-old bastard into the marriage with her, but also a cow; he didn’t say a word about any shame or disgrace. On the contrary, he bloomed; there were more children, and children are hope, children are the only real riches in this life.

A couple of years later, old Karwe went on, or rather he went out as a light goes out that has burned down to its last bit of wick. The evening of his death, Kurt Karwe went down to the meadow by the lake again. That was the only secret he had, not just from his wife, but from everyone, and the one person who might have guessed at it or understood it, well, he was gone now. Because for young Karwe it remained his meadow, the lake meadow, the good meadow – he had never given up on it, never accepted its loss.

As he sat there, he was no longer at odds with his father. His father had acted as he had to; he himself acted as it was in him to act, holding onto the good meadow against all reason and against all likelihood; it remained for him the Karwe meadow. For many years now he had watched employees from the large estate digging ditches there, spreading artificial fertilizer and mowing – and they had their hands full with the mowing. Oh, it had remained a good meadow, but for that very reason it had also remained his meadow, even if not many people even knew that the lake meadow on the estate had once been the Karwe meadow.

There is an old German saying: there are always grounds for hope, it just has to be the right hope. Germany went through some terrible years: warfare and other horrors that were worse than warfare. What had once been anguish was as light as a feather compared to the burdens that had to be borne now. Everything that had once existed broke down, but in this general breakdown something good and new came into being. The large landholders’ estates were being broken up, and there was a commission sitting, and its members would often talk themselves into a lather.

But when they asked Karwe: ‘What do you have to say? What do you want?’ he simply answered: ‘I just want to get my meadow back, the good meadow by the lake.’

That gave some of them pause, they didn’t know what meadow he was calling his meadow, and usually a big quarrel started: he was asking for too much, they all needed pastureland.

But he remained stubborn, he wanted his meadow back, it had always belonged to the Karwes. And in the end he got his way. The evening came when he was sitting on the side of the trough under the rush roof, looking out at his meadow. No fat, red-faced inspector had the right any more to ride around on it, issuing silly advice about planting serradilla. The good meadow had been returned to the Karwes, and there was no more talk of cotting.

Almost twenty-five years had elapsed. Kurt Karwe hadn’t been able to do much, only wait and hope and remain true to his ideal. And then, as though life had crossed out what it had done on that one awful evening, Rosemarie was back under his roof. The business had been destroyed in the war, the man disappeared, the children scattered; now the ageing woman was back home, helping a little, complaining a lot, everything was just the way it had been before.

No, not quite. The farm was still down by two cows. ‘But I’ll get them, see if I don’t!’ said young Karwe, whom people had long ago taken to calling old Karwe. ‘You just see if I don’t!’ He felt very old, but full of wisdom and common sense, as though life was just beginning for him, as though he wasn’t a mortal man. ‘The meadow is back, and Rosemarie is back – surely I’ll get the two cows as well!’

He went into the cowshed, to watch the women at milking. They didn’t see him push a bit of hay into the rack in front of his favourites – hay from the good meadow.