STORY TWO

SCHNITZEL-LAND, WHERE THE OOMPAH PLAYS

OR:

FROLICKING WITH THE MILK MAIDS

It wasn't Brigadoon, but it could very well have been. An isolated pastoral village named Oberhaid / Horni Dvoriste nestled amid rolling hills, where, for the exception of recently introduced electricity, to a few select village homes, everything seemed to have been pretty much as it was - a long time ago. Perhaps to be more explicit, there was no running water, there was no indoor plumbing, there were no garages, there were no cars, there were no paved streets, no traffic lights, no street lights, no neon signs. Perhaps there was one radio in the village, but no one had yet heard of TV or telephones. To be frank, I can't rightly tell you just how many people there were, was it three hundred or three hundred and twenty, and how many homes there were, whether it was one hundred and ten or one hundred and twenty, but I can tell you for sure that there were more cows, oxen, horses, sheep, chicken, pigs, rabbits, dogs and cats than there were people, and I can also tell you for sure that there was a bakery, a butcher shop a couple of general stores, a blacksmith, a school, a post office, an inn, one general practitioner, a church, a lady seamstress and some two hours walk from the village, a local train station. There were also a number of very pretty milk maids, and a village band who played Dorfmusik among other things.

Naturally there were also loads of little boys and girls and that's where I fit in, more or less. Life for us kids was just a lot of fun, but especially for me it was one adventure after another. I frequently was taken advantage of by some of the older boys, whom I looked up to, but who were full of pranks. After all, this was all preschool stuff. Take the time for example, when we walked through the country side, which incidentally we did quite often, and the boys took me up a wooden railroad overpass, where they said I could really see the locomotive engine quite well. I stood there, in the middle of the trestle as they indicated I should, looking over the side waiting for the train to pass. It was a long wait, but just about the time we had given up, we heard the whistle of the train and its chugging along. I was really excited. The boys shouted, "Look now, look now" and I felt a lot of trembling and shaking and noise and then the engine passed right below me, its chimney spewing out thick black sooty smoke as it sped by. Luckily I instinctively closed my eyes, but it must have taken a lot of soap and water to clean me up when I finally made it back home that evening.

But such things were current happenstance when it came to me. The time that curiosity got the better of me when the boys told me I would see something special if I looked at the bottom end of a cylindrical wagon, which of course I did, and upon which they promptly opened the spigot. As it was it just happened to be a manure wagon (the friendly farmers used night fertilizer) and they had to bury my clothes and try to disinfect me for three days before I could come close to anyone. But not all incidents were that harmless. When a group of kids hopped on a standing empty hay wagon, teamed with two horses, I naturally couldn't be left out. I was the smallest of the lot, and normally that wouldn't have made any difference. This time, however, someone or something scared the horses while we kids were on the wagon and the farmer had gone inside his house, so that the horses reared and started running at full speed with no one to control them. When the dirt road started to go sharply downhill, all the kids jumped from the runaway wagon, but I was too small to jump the railings. At the bottom of the steep hill, there was a concrete cistern, where folks could go for water, and you guessed it, the road took a slight turn, the horses were too fast, the wagon overturned, I went shooting out like an arrow and my forehead hit the corner of the cement cistern not only knocking me out, but putting a good sized hole in as well. Of course they carried me home, where thanks to the skill of our elderly, but wise town doctor, who incidentally knew me very well through many visits, took good care of me and probably saved my life, once again.

Yes, I said once again, because there was one other rather critical occasion. That one resulted from a walk through the forest. You see about three hours walk from the village was a large forest preserve. If you walked some two hours more you would come to the beautiful part of the thick forest, where the blue Moldau flowed through it. We often went into the forest to look for delicious large white mushrooms which if you looked very carefully on the shady side of the big trees, where the moss was in abundance, were there for the taking. Well one nice afternoon we did just that, spent the afternoon picking wild raspberries, and blueberries as well as mushrooms in the forest. On the way home I scratched my right hand because a horsefly had bitten it. That happens. This time, however, my right arm started to swell up like a balloon in the middle of the night and it was painful as well. The kindly doctor was woken and rushed home to look at me. He had no trouble diagnosing my symptom; a big red stripe up the arm meant a case of bad blood poisoning and an immediate cutting open of the hand or it would be too late to save me. Well the scar in the form of a cross still is very evident on my right hand, even after many, many years - and it had a beneficial side benefit in-as much as I could always tell the right side from the left side, after looking at my right hand.

Everyday though wasn't really a calamity for me. There were many real fun days. The boys took me along and we'd meander through the countryside, knowing where to stop for the sweetest carrots in the fields, who grew the best apples, cherries and other fruit, which poppy fields had the ripest poppies that we just opened and ate the seeds (by the way poppies were used for poppy seed to make poppy strudels, and not for today's twisted use) and where the sweetest green peas were. Naturally we also made a small fireplace, lined it with stones and baked potatoes while smoking wheat stalks and talking boys' talk. No one wore shoes unless they were in school or in church and my feet didn't even notice running over a field of freshly cut hay or wheat, or for that matter, walking through the forest. We did appreciate it though when we were far from the village and were invited to hop on top of a wagon load of hay that was ready to go back to the farmer's barn. Sometimes we weren't so lucky. One afternoon on our way back, a sudden fierce storm overtook us. There was no shelter around, and we knew to stay away from any trees. The others started to run towards the direction of the village, but I was the smallest and unable to keep up with the older boys. As I ran through the meadow, I got stopped in my tracks and was probably frozen as a statue for a second or two, as a blinding lightning flash struck just ahead of me. I don't know how close ahead, but it must not have been very far. Guess someone was looking out for me that day.

Sometime, I made my own fun and adventure. One day an older boy, whom I liked to follow, made a plan with me. It sounded great! We were going to spend the day playing and not go home that evening, but spend the night in a barn talking about robbers and ghosts and other things of intense interest to growing boys. That's just what we did. Of course I didn't realize the whole town would be out looking for us all night, and never find us, but when I came home the next day, believe me when I tell you that I couldn't sit on my rear for three days till the tenderness wore off from the spanking I received. A somewhat similar fate was in store for me the time a carnival came through town. My parents gave me a small amount of spending money for tickets to a merry-go-round, but that was soon expended. It was such a rare treat for me that I kept on riding all afternoon and funny, the attendant never chased me off. Naturally, he was a pretty smart cookie and just presented the bill that evening to my Dad, who was gentlemen enough to pay him and father enough to pay me back as well.

The house next to ours was that of the blacksmith. He was a crude but gentle man with a good sense of humor and lots of work. I often went over to his shop and watched him hammer hot iron on his anvil, or place formed metal in the furnace and then pull it out and cool it in water with all hissing and steam that generates. Not only was he a smith, but he was also a farmer and he had numerous cows and calves which his teenage daughter took to the meadow to graze most days. She was beautiful and of course I did everything I could to be around her. I think she understood and would on occasions, invite me to come along for the day and keep her company. She would also pack an extra amount of food for a real royal picnic. Sometimes a neighboring farm maiden would bring along her cows and calves and that made for extra company. The young ladies would tell me all kinds of stories and talk of their future hopes and dreams, much of which I'm sure went right over my head. Some of it stuck however, and especially the parts dealing with the bees and the flowers which were described in great detail to me and which seemed naturally to make a lasting impression on me.

Dear reader now you are surely deep in slumberland, for how could you possibly avoid it! But just in case, just for the sake of taking no risk, should there be one of you who is so resilient that even this didn't absolutely do the trick for you, then I have no other recourse but to kindly ask you to continue on and turn to STORY NUMBER 3, which should assuredly lull you quickly into slumberland.

©1990 Herbert Holzbauer

published @1996 edition S.p.N.LAUB

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