Downfall

aus Short-Stories

It came upon them like a thunderstorm without clouds, like lava bursting out of a mountain, like the sea that suddenly flows into the land and covers everything up until there is nothing left. It began with a blue sky, a few birds chirped, as usual, in spring. Then the beet farmer looked over the fence and looked at the coal farmer’s huge, fat coal that was pouring out of the ground. The cabbage farmer came out of the house, wearing an old, worn shirt, under which a piece of his soft white belly looked out. He rubbed his bald head to wake up, for it was morning. The beet farmer didn’t like that. He sat on the wooden bench in front of his stone house, drank a bitter mixture of herbs (which he drank every morning so that he would be at least 205 years old), and turned up his nose. There he is, standing in the middle between his huge cabbages, and yet looks like one himself, thought the beet farmer, spitting contemptuously on the floor. 

In the other houses, too, people began to cast strange glances at each other. A woman suddenly felt the desire to tear down her neighbor’s laundry, which had been painstakingly washed by hand, and throw it into the pig’s run. What she didn’t know was that she was looking out the window at the neighbor’s beloved cat and wanted to throw her into the mountain stream, where he plunges over the rocks into the valley. The cowherd walked down the street with a cow on a rope and saw a girl he had found terribly beautiful until the previous day. He had wanted to marry her. Now he looked at her as she was dribbling around with little feet, and felt a touch of disgust that grew stronger and stronger with every step he took as he approached her. As he walked past her, he stared at her only with a silent gaze. He would have liked to take her on a leash, like the cow, tied somewhere and kicked a little until she cried. The girl also looked at him, and although she had found him quite appealing until yesterday, she now angered his forward leaning body, which gave him a thoughtful look, and she wanted to see him frightened. The glacier monster was to fetch him, she mumbled before her and imagined him running down the mountain with his eyes wide open, while he was chased by the eternal ice with his green eyes. 

The children also felt it. Then the little brother drilled his fingernail insidiously into the big sister’s arm until she screamed out loud. The act filled him with a gruesome satisfaction, for since he had woken up that day, her long blond curls that she combed every day annoyed him, and he began to forge a plan as to how he could light them on fire. The sister looked at the mother and found her sight 

all of a sudden, it’s completely unbearable. She wanted to chase the mother out of the house and lock the door so that she had to sleep in the goat barn, where the animals would climb over it at night. 

It had all started in the night. The basket maker had dreamed of hatred, and when he woke up in the morning, he failed to wash himself with the water he always fetched from the well in the evening. Until that day, he had never taken a step out of his chamber without splashing water in his face and emptying it to the floor behind the house. So all his dreams had seeped into the ground except for this day. But that morning he had not done so, so the hatred of his dream clung to him like pollen and the wind carried it to every corner of the place. He himself knew as little about the severity of his failure to wash as he could remember his dreams. So he looked helplessly and grimly out into the world and tried to give a leg to the healer who had just come down the mountain with fresh herbs. 

What people did not notice was that her body began to change. Their eyes became narrow and their forehead wrinkled, as if they had to think about something terribly complicated without interruption. They stared around the area and could no longer hear the birds, because they only thought about who to throw into a pit or whose hair to light. 

At first they thought that the moon might have hit the wrong place in the sky that night, or that some strange mood had fallen on the meadows with the morning dew. But after a few days they forgot what life had been like before the hatred had scattered throughout the village and only thought about how they could realize their ill-omened desires. So they half-heartedly ploughed their fields, pondered without motivation in their gardens, and shovelled manure without pleasure from the stables, always looking at the other people nearby. Shortly thereafter they stopped cooking, eating only the leaves from the trees and tubers they had torn out of the ground. They stopped washing and began to carve skewers with shining eyes. This unbearable glow in their chest, which deformed their faces and made them breathe quickly and flat, had to stop. The embers had to blaze and burn until the fire was out and you could walk barefoot over the soft ashes. There should be crying, suffering and wailing, until finally all those who were so infinitely pathetic were destroyed, packed away, buried, extinguished. 

Exactly six days after the basket weaver’s dream had escaped, the beet farmer hit the cabbage farmer on the back of his head with a shovel. The cabbage farmer had stooped down to 

to pick something up from the ground, and at that moment the beet farmer had been overwhelmed by his feeling. He had to go away, that cabbage farmer, that gigantic fat weakling, disappear, scream first and then be dead. To the sorrow of the beet farmer, the cabbage farmer did not scream, he simply fell dead, face down on the road. But with the first murder a gate had opened, and death flowed from the mountain down to the village. Soon they ran out of their houses and dark corners, with skewers and forks and sticks, to hear each other scream and suffer. But no one ran away, no one hid, no one suffered, because hatred had made them blind and insane, and they only sought to destroy each other while they themselves were being destroyed. The woman drowned her neighbor with the clean laundry, and the blonde-haired sister ran with burning hair through the village to chase her friend into the forest to be eaten by the wolves. The unfortunate woman burned to death before reaching her friend’s house. The friend was meanwhile pushed down from the roof by the tinker. So the monster came over her like a thunderstorm, it grabbed and shook the people, made them all mad predators equal, and destroyed them until all were gone, crushed, smothered, crushed and extinguished. The cowherd was the last one left. He dragged himself a few more steps along the road with his injuries, to see if he might not have seen someone alive he could stab with his pitchfork, but there was nobody left. And so he was content to insult a few corpses and bled to death on the open road. 

A traveller found the village a few days later. He said that even the leaves had fallen from the trees and that all the flowers within a radius of ten kilometres had withered. No living creature had appeared, not even the call of a bird in the distance. The only living thing was the bowl of water that the basket maker hadn’t touched since that morning and was still standing on the ledge in his chamber.