Lanceheim Read Free Page A

knew.
    When Father showed up down in the glade, Mother quickly got up and hurried down to the kitchen to prepare dinner. I kept to the lower floor, in the living room or at the kitchen table, where I sat reading my books. In passing, Mother mumbled the same thing every day.
    â€œToday I know that Papa is going to like the food.”
    But not one single time did I hear Father comment on Mother’s cooking.
    I loved Mother’s fragile smile and her beautiful voice, and there was nothing I wanted more than to protect and take care of her. She might look at me with a questioning expression, as if she wondered for a moment who I was, before her gaze was veiled again and she withdrew back into her own, inner life. She taught me not to exaggerate the significance of the gestures, words, and expressions that a female shows the world; it is what goes on in her soul that is decisive.
    And what did I really think of my father?
    I realize that in the above description observant readers may detect a certain antipathy between the lines. The reply to the question just posed is that there were occasions when Father’s impulsiveness and aggression coincided in the perfect, cross-ruled system of coordinates that was his spiritual life, and then he was a stuffed animal that you were compelled to fear. Nonetheless I loved him and admired him as if he were the wisest, most remarkable stuffed animal in all of Mollisan Town. For to get an appreciative glance from Father, I was prepared to climb up in the beech tree at Heimat without a ladder or run naked through the thistle field east of Pal’s Ravine. Naturally Father would have punished me severely if I had done either of these foolish pranks. He was an animal who set scientific reason and religious veneration above all; he viewed everything else with skepticism.
    Â 
    That the trees fell to my father Karl Beaver’s lot was completely natural to all who knew him. His character was easy to compare to a tree’s: tough and ancient, but strong and confident of victory. The few times when I was growing up that Father showed a sensitive, verging on raw, side were when he was forced to fell any of his stately friends, for he knew them all as individuals. If he had shown me or Mother the same consideration, he would have—according to Father’s way of seeing things—betrayed himself and revealed a weakness that a model father ought not to show an impressionable son.
    He would leave us early in the morning, along with the other beavers, and did not come home until dinnertime. He participated in all the ceremonies and activities that were part of our isolated miniature society in Das Vorschutz, and he defended us all. I am certain that he would have sacrificed his life to save me or Mother if it had been needed. But at the same time—if a paradox may be permitted—he would have saved us for his own sake.
    Does this make him a better or a worse stuffed animal?
    I would prefer to leave that unsaid.
    My father, the daring Karl Beaver, if he had had the opportunity to consider and judge my life, would have brooded a great deal. Now it will soon be five years since the red pickup fetched him, and in many respects he remains a mystery to me, just as I would grow up to be a mystery to him.
    Oh well, genuine love allows mysteries to remain unsolved. This I have learned from Maximilian, and this I have learned from love itself.
    Â 
    The first six years of my life I spent in Das Vorschutz. I never left our securely staked-out part of the massive forest; there was no reason to. Hans Beaver and his Olga Woodpeckerand Anders Beaver and Bluebird Niklasson had each had a cub of their own delivered the same year I myself arrived with the green pickup. Together with my same-age companions Weasel Tukovsky and Buzzard Jones, I kept myself occupied from early in the morning until late in the evening.
    This self-imposed isolation, encouraged and upheld by the grown-ups in Das