Melchior thought he heard footsteps. "Wendla?" He questions, looking around him. Melchior is strolling around the graveyard and thinks Look at this, you spend your life running from the Church, and where do you wind up? Melchior chuckles to himself. He spots Moritz' grave and kneels. "Moritz, my old friend." Melchior sighs, "Well, they won't get to me. Or Wendla. I won't–– I won't let them. We'll build that world, together, for our child."
Melchior hears the twelve chimes of the church bells. Midnight. He stands up and looks around and listens for Wendla's steps. She's usually easy to hear since she's deaf. When he doesn't hear anything, he wanders to a new, fresh grave. Melchior kneals, not hearing about any devastating losses from his mother in her letters. "Here rests in God, Wendla Berg––" Melchior starts reading.
"No!" He bends closer to read the stone. Surely they messed up. "Born the third of… Died? Of anemia?" Melchior doubles over with grief, crying "Oh my God. Wendla too? No. No. No!" Without hesitating, he pulls out his knife. There is nothing more for him to live. Those he loves have gone, so what's the use in living? He looks at the blade and all he sees is Moritz' face. His eyes are pleading and his face is somber, like he's trying to tell Melchior something. Melchior turns it around, and sees Wendla's face in it. At first, he thinks it is her reflection, but when he turns around, he sees that it's only his imagination. He can't kill himself with those faces etched in stone. His friends are dead, there's nothing to do.
Melchior sits there for what seems like hours figuring out what he wants to do with his life, but decides to take the most painful route: go back to school. He tredges his way back through the forests onto the road back to hell.
It was not an easy battle to get back into school. The headmaster was furious, and made him scrub the floors for weeks. It didn't help that none of the boys wanted anything to do with him. He found little babies in his pillowcase and in his drawers. They don't know what has happened to Wendla, and Melchior doesn't know if he ever will tell them. There was one boy, Erne (pronounced Aahr-na), a year older than him, who was always on the stairs reading Schiller's Maria Stuart, a book Melchior was always interested in reading. He never could understand why Erne would sit on the steps reading, if Melchior had to ask every time for him to move while he scrubbed. It was humiliating, and one day he had enough.
"Why do you sit here? You know I am going to have to ask you to move. Why waste your time?" Melchior asks as he works his way scrubbing up the stairs. "You just keep reading the same book over and over. What's the point?"
Erne closes his book and looks earnestly at Melchior. "It's my favorite, I never seem to fully grasp the reason all of the events unfold. I think sometime you should read it."
"Is that so?" Melchior asks, putting down his brush. "I have always wanted to read it, but I am not sure I have time for it with all this scrubbing."
"What if I read it to you?" Erne asks. "I know you've had something terrible happen. I've heard your screams. I see your eyes." Erne sees the look of horror in Melchior's face. "I-I don't mean to impose anything. I get them too, the nightmares."
"You do?" Melchior asks, pulling up his knees to his chin. He hasn't had a conversation with anyone in weeks. He doesn't want to push Erne further, but he is quite interested. Maybe they have the same scars.
"My sister, Clara, died when I was eleven." Erne takes a shaky breath. "They said, she died from anemia, but I knew better. I have seen what happened to girls like her before. They fall in love and then-" His voice breaks, Melchior scoots closer.
"She's gone. Dead. Just like that." Erne says as he puts his head in his hands. "It was over five years ago, and I still can't understand. She was so young, too smart and too beautiful for this world I guess. That's why I read Maria Stuart, it helps me try to understand inhumane deaths." Erne lifts his head, "So, who's gone and has left a scar your mind?"
Melchior freezes. That is a sign he used with Wendla whenever they were together. She leaves a bruise on his mind, he leaves on on her heart. He hasn't talked to anyone about her death, so why should he open up now? But the look on Erne's face mirrors is own, and his sister reminds him of Wendla. "I had a friend, well, more than a friend, who died from anemia. She was young too, and too innocent."
Before Melchior could speak another word, the headmaster yelled from the bottom of the stairs. "Those stairs are not going to clean themselves! Get back to work Gabor!"
"Meet me in the library this evening, 11:00. The librarian knows about me, and lets me in during the nights I can't sleep. She will surely do the same for you. She had a daughter who was like Clara as well. As far as I know, it's just us three with these stories. It's why she works here, to help young boys learn what caused their deaths."
Melchior questions if Erne knows what really happened with Wendla, that HE was the one to cause the pain, not some other person, him and only him. Melchior nods silently towards him as he makes his way back to the scrub brush and pale.
When it is almost time for him to meet up with Erne late at night, Melchior thinks about not going. Why was Erne so interested in him? Why tell him about his sister? Does he hope that Melchior would admit to Wendla's death? Many questions swirled his mind and he knows there is only one way to get them answered, and that's by going to the library.
Melchior makes his way to the library when Frau Palmer opened the door and let him in. "I've heard about you child. Erne is in the fiction section if you want to talk. If not, I'll be here too if you want to talk to me." Melchior thanks her and walks to the fiction section where he finds Erne hunched over a book. When he comes closer, Erne looks up. "I didn't think you would come. I am glad to see you here."
"Does it ever get better? The pain, the nightmares. I can't seem to break through them." Melchior asks, sitting down next to Erne. He closes the book that he's reading, and Melchior catches the title: Faust. Melchior's favorite.
Erne puts his head in his chin and looks at Melchior. "I don't know exactly what you've gone through, but over time, the pain will fade. It will come back every now and then, but remember, they're always in your hearts. I know for Clara, her birthdays are what get me every year, along with Christmas. She used to always come into my bed and we'd read our favorite stories out loud the night before Christmas. Melchior," Erne hesitates, "The best thing that helped me was to talk about it. I know you may not want to with me, but it's what brought me back to lucidness after so many months of drowning in sorrow."
Melchior looks at him with tears in his eyes. He backs up against the bookshelf, so they face each other. "I-I don't know how to start."
"Start with the good. How did you become friends with this person?"
"Wendla, her name was Wendla. And Moritz, he plays an important role in this story as well." Melchior starts, with a big sigh now or never he thinks. "Wendla, Moritz, our friend Ilse and I would all play pirates together on our way home from school, back when the boys and girls were still able to be in school together. Moritz and I would run out in the meadow and hide in the corn, waiting for Ilse and Wendla to find us. We were the voyagers, they were our maidens. Then, as we grew up, we got separated. The girls went to a different school, while Moritz and I went to another. We only met up during church activities, but never like those early days, just the four of us." Melchior wraps his arms around his knees. "There was a long time when we didn't see each other together. Ilse was abused at her home, and one day ran away to an artists' colony. No one saw her much, she became an outcast, and I think became somewhat of a prostitute. She makes her way, but I think she sees that there is more good than bad in her life and still trudges along."
"Is Ilse the one?" Erne asks, not wanting to impose too much.
"No," Melchior starts sadly. "We'll get there."
"Moritz and I went to quite a small school, so he and I were always in class together. Have I mentioned he and Wendla are deaf? They taught both Ilse and I sign language growing up. They are not siblings, but were friends younger than the four of us knew each other, since their moms figured out ways together to communicate with their children. Most of the sign their parents know are from Moritz and Wendla, which did not help Moritz and Wendla learn as quickly as the rest of the kids, which is when Ilse and I stepped in. We all helped each other with school work, and a long lasting friendship budded. When Moritz and I were in school, he started to fail his exams. I would try to help him, it is hard to conjugate Greek and Latin when you are deaf and the teacher expects you to speak. It was hard for him to find a place in school. I tried my best to help, but eventually other stuff got in the way."
"Should have been sent here, I am sure the headmaster would have been his worst nightmare." Erne says with a smile.
"Yes, he would have hated it here. Back home, he got distracted with dreams."
"Those kind of dreams?" Erne asks with a smirk. "Don't we all."
Melchior blushes and looks down. "Yes. He came up to me one day and described them, telling he was going insane. If that were the case, than half of the population would be in reformatories." Melchior says with a chuckle. "My parents are quite liberal with my education, they let me read Faust at a young age. I was able to explain to him that everyone in our class was in the same boat as him, and that he was not an outcast."
"Wait, you read Faust when you were younger?" Erne questions, holding up his copy he was reading earlier. "I am sure that was quite an eye opener."
Melchior smiles, "It was. It definitely helped me with Moritz, who was uncomfortable with the talk of sex wanted me to write it all down for him, with pictures. The day after I gave it to him, he couldn't stop talking about it, but it made his dreams worse: more graphic. I tried my best to help him through it, but eventually he started to slip through the cracks. It was around this time I saw Wendla for the first time in a while outside of church." A tear slips from Melchior's eye.
"Oh," Erne says softly. "Wendla, she's your bruise." He shifts closer.
Melchior smiles meekly, "She was much different than I remembered from our childhood, but the same. Innocent. But, she messed with my mind. I couldn't get her out of my head, like one of Moritz' dreams. One day, she asked me to beat her, so she could feel the pain of what it was like for her friend Martha to be beaten by her father. That's when everything changed."
