A House and Its Neighbors A Cautionary Tale

A HOUSE AND ITS NEIGHBORS A CAUTIONARY TALE / Gerold Späth translated by Rita and Robert Kimber ON THE NORTHERN EDGE of the woods, just short of the municipal forest of S, a town whose citizens were, for the most part and by tradition, complacent and well-to-do, stood a nearly square little house on underpinnings of heavy oak beams. This house was built of spruce boards originally soaked in ox blood. Its south side, with a door and two tiny windows, faced the woods and was shaded by towering firs. There were two more windows on the north side, and one each in the smaller side walls. The whole thing was topped off by a nearly flat tile roof whose eaves extended not much more than a foot beyond the low walls all around. This little house had been built by a certain Egloff, who had done menial work in the big chemical plant in the town of R for over fifty years. Egloff was a short, scrawny man and not too bright, people said. He was unmarried, and in those long years before his retirement he had always lived near the factory, at first with two ladies who had rented rooms. He had changed his address twice, both times because of death. His first landlady, an arid old spinster, simply did not get up one summer morning when Egloff was still in his early thirties. Heart attack, probably just after midnight. The second, Frau Ida HauserOchsner , the slightly overweight widow of an office worker, had made Egloff homeless in the week before Whitsun just two days before his fifty-third birthday. At a street construction site, she had fallen on some slippery boards and come under the double rear wheels of a dump truck. From then into his sixty-fifth year, he had lived with his foreman, Ambeck, who had a small place in a low-cost housing development. The Ambecks had plenty of room because their daughter had gotten married and their son had moved out. The unskilled laborer Egloff probably got the urge to build a house of his own while he was living with Emil and Rosmarie Ambeck. In any case, some six or seven years before his retirement, he bought a small piece of land far back from the nearest road. Ambeck did Egloff's bargaining for him with the landowner, a farmer and trucker named Sternenberg, and also went to the bank and to the Registry of Deeds. From then on, Egloff spent almost every evening darting about among the bushes and soon began driving stakes into the The Missouri Review · 242 ground and running strings and wires from one to the other, knee-high and head-high, usually at right angles. For two or three years nothing but wires and strings from stake to stake. Egloff kept resetting his stakes and «stringing his strings to make larger and smaller rectangles. Late one fall he finally began to clear his building site. Constantly mumbling to himself, he sawed and hacked at bushes and shurbs. He dug and pulled roots out of the ground until he had a rectangle of clean, black earth in front of the firs. He made a pile of branches to one side and let another winter pass. He made plans. He bought paper and pencils and a ruler and started drawing. Then he bought colored pencils, too. He sharpened them and shaded with them until he had everything down on paper: his house by the woods, his house on oaken underpinnings, his little wooden house with four front steps, a door, windows, a roof, and a chimney. Emil Ambeck, who was already retired at that time, looked at the handsome drawing, patted Egloff on the back, opened a bottle, and poured himself and Egloff a glass of good red wine. And during the next year and a half, after work and on Saturdays, he helped Egloff build the house, once the chemical factory had smoothed the way for the necessary building permit. Egloff's ox-blood colored little house on the northern edge of the municipal forest of S—Friday evenings he would go out to it, open...