Young Mystery of A Young Man

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-6678-8392-2
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 303 Seiten

As far as Caspar could remember, he had always been in a dark room, never anywhere else, always in the same room. Never seen man, never heard his step, never heard his voice, never chirped a bird, never cried an animal, never seen the ray of the sun, never seen the gleam of the moon. Heard nothing but himself, and yet knowing nothing of himself, not becoming aware of his loneliness.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Young, Jeffrey

Leseproben

PART I
The strange youth
In the first days of summer 1828, strange rumors were circulating in this city about a person who was being held in the Vestner Tower at the castle and who amazed both the authorities and the private individuals who were watching him. It was a youth of about seventeen. Nobody knew where he came from. He himself was unable to provide any information on this, for he could speak no more than a two-year-old child; He could only pronounce a few words clearly, and these he repeated again and again with a slurring tongue, now lamenting, now joyfully, as if there was no meaning behind them and they were only misunderstood signs of his fear or his lust. His gait also resembled that of a child who has just learned the first steps: he did not touch the ground with his heel first, but stepped heavily and carefully with his whole foot. They are curious people. Every day hundreds hiked up the castle hill and climbed the ninety-two steps of the dark old tower to see the stranger. It was forbidden to go into the half-darkened chamber where the prisoner was staying, and so their dense crowds saw from the threshold the strange human being, which crouched in the farthest corner of the room and usually played with a little white wooden horse, which it happened to be watching seen by the keeper's children and that, touched by the awkward stammering of his desire, had given. His eyes seemed unable to take in the light; he was evidently afraid of the movement of his own body, and when he raised his hands to feel it was as if the air offered a mysterious resistance. What a poor thing, people said; many thought that a new species had been discovered, some sort of caveman, and not the least of the oddities reported was that the boy loathed any food other than water and bread. Gradually, the particular circumstances under which the stranger had appeared became common knowledge. On Whit Monday around the fifth hour in the afternoon he suddenly stood on the Unschlittplatz, not far from the new gate, looked around in bewilderment for a while and then practically tumbled into the arms of the shoemaker Weikmann, who happened to be walking along the way. His trembling fingers produced a letter with the address of Rittmeister Wessenig, and now that a few other people had arrived, they dragged it with considerable difficulty to the Rittmeister's house. There he fell, exhausted, onto the steps, blood oozing through his torn boots. The Rittmeister didn't come home until dusk, and his wife told him that a starved and half dead boy was sleeping on the litter in the stable; at the same time she handed him the letter, which the Rittmeister, after breaking the seal, read through a few times with the greatest astonishment; it was a document as humorous in some points as in others of cruel clarity. The Rittmeister went into the stable and had the stranger awakened, which was accomplished with great effort. The boy didn't answer the officer's measured military questions, or answered them only with meaningless noises, and Herr von Wessenig decided without further ado to have the man who was walking him taken to the police station. This undertaking was also associated with difficulties, for the stranger could hardly walk; Traces of blood marked his way, he had to be dragged through the streets like a stubborn calf, and the townsfolk returning from holiday excursions enjoyed themselves. "What's up?" asked those who watched the unfamiliar tumult only from afar. "Oh, you're running a drunk farmer," was the report. In the guardroom the clerk tried in vain to interrogate the prisoner; he babbled the same half-silly words over and over again, and swearing and threatening were useless. When one of the soldiers turned on a light, something strange happened. The boy made hopping movements with his upper body like a dancing bear and reached into the candle flame with his hands; but when he felt the burn, he began to cry so much that everyone went through marrow and bones. Finally the clerk had the idea of holding out a piece of paper and a pencil in front of him, and the strange man grabbed it and slowly drew the name in childishly large letters Caspar Hauser. Then he staggered into a corner, literally collapsed, and fell into a deep sleep. Because Caspar Hauser – as the stranger was called from now on – was dressed like a farmer when he arrived in the city, namely with a tailcoat with the tails cut off, a red tie and large high-heeled boots, it was initially believed to be the son of a farmer from the area who was in some way neglected or stunted in development. The first to strongly disagree with this opinion was the jailer on the tower. "No peasant looks like that," he said, pointing to his prisoner's flowing light brown hair, which had something inexpressibly pristine about it, and shone like the fur of animals accustomed to living in darkness. "And those fine white hands and that velvety skin and those thin temples and the distinct blue veins on either side of the neck, truly, he looks more like a damsel than a peasant." "Not badly noticed," said the municipal court doctor, who, in addition to these characteristics, emphasized in his report the special formation of the knees and the calloused soles of the prisoner's feet. "So much is clear," it said at the end, "that we are dealing here with a person who knows nothing of his peers, does not eat, does not drink, does not feel, does not speak like others, who knows nothing of yesterday, nothing knows about tomorrow, doesn't understand the time, doesn't feel himself.« The high police authority let in through not divert such judgment from the superior course of the investigation; there was a suspicion that the city court doctor had been influenced by his friend, the grammar school professor Daumer, and had been seduced into such exuberance. Prison warden Hill was hired to secretly spy on the stranger. He often peeked through the hidden hole in the door when the boy thought he was alone; but there was always the same sad seriousness in her features, now slack and oppressed, now distorted and torn as if by the sight of an invisible fearful figure. It was also in vain to creep to his couch at night when he slept, to kneel down, listen to his breath, and wait to see if he uttered treacherous words from within; For people who plot evil tend to speak while they are asleep, and they sleep more by day than by night, where they linger on their thoughts and projects, but slumber overtakes them as soon as the sun goes down, and wakes when the sun goes down the first rays of morning squeezed through the closed shutters. It could arouse suspicion that he winced every time the door of his prison was opened; but it probably did not indicate the anxiety of a guilty mind, but rather an over-excitability of the senses, to which every sound from outside came painfully close. "Our gentlemen at City Hall will have a great deal of paper to smudge if they're going to get on the way," said good Hill one morning--it was the third day of the Caspar Hauser's detention – to Professor Daumer, who wanted to visit the stranger; "I'm sure I know all the tricks of the rascals, but if the fellow is a simulant, I'll let myself down." Hill unlocked the door and Professor Daumer entered the chamber. As usual, the prisoner was startled, but once the newcomer was in the room, Caspar Hauser no longer seemed to notice him and, enchanted in dull ignorance, looked down silently in front of him. It was then, when Hill had opened the shutter, that the boy, perhaps as never before in his life, lifted his riveted gaze, turned it away from the silent, even fear that might be harboring within his breast, and looked it out through the window into the sunny open air, where tiled roof after tiled roof painted itself steeply and glowing red on a background of bluish twilight meadows and forests. He stretched out his hand; His lips curled in surprise and joyless amazement, hesitantly he put his arm into the glittering painting, as if to touch the colorful mess outside with his fingers, and when he was satisfied that it was nothing, something distant, deceptive, intangible , then his face darkened and he turned away indignantly and disappointed. That same afternoon Mayor Binder came to Daumer's apartment and, in the course of a conversation about the boulder, said that the gentlemen from the city council were more hostile and incredulous than benevolent towards him. "Incredulous?" replied Daumer, amazed. "In what way incredulous?" "Well, the fellow is supposed to be playing tricks on us," replied the mayor. Daumer shook his head. "What man of sense or skill will, out of sheer hypocrisy, condescend to live on bread and water, and reject with disgust anything that pleases the palate?" he asked. "For what benefit?" "Never mind," answered Binder undecidedly; 'It seems a complicated story. Since no one can say or guess what the game is about, caution is all the more necessary when careless credulity provokes the just mockery of the discerning.” "That almost sounds as if only doubters and naysayers could be called judgmental," remarked Daumer, frowning. "Unfortunately we've had enough of the...