Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page B

that mother only denied the existence of the Sandman so that we wouldn’t be afraid, didn’t I hear him with my own two ears coming up the steps? With a burning desire to know more about this Sandman and his connection to us children, I finally asked the old woman who took care of my youngest sister: ‘What kind of man is that, the Sandman?’
    ‘Oh, Thanelchen,’ she replied, ‘don’t you know yet? He’s a bad man who comes to visit children when they won’t go to sleep and flings a handful of sand in their eyes, so they scratch themselves bloody, then he flings them in his bag and carries them off to the half-moon to feed his children; they sit up there in their nest and have crooked beaks like owls with which they pick out the eyes of naughty human brats.’
    So in my mind I painted a grim picture of that awful Sandman; as soon as I heard that lumbering step on the stairs I trembled with fear and horror. My mother could get nothing out of me but that one word stuttered amidst tears: ‘Sandman! Sandman!’ Then I bounded up to my bedroom and all night long I was tormented by the terrible presence of the Sandman.
    By the time I was old enough to know that all that business about the Sandman and his children’s nest on the half-moon the nanny had told me couldn’t possibly be true, the Sandman had become entrenched in my mind as a hair-raising spook, and I was gripped by dread and terror when I heard him not only come clambering up the steps but tearing open the door to my father’s study and barging in. Sometimes he stayed away a long time, but then he came more often, night after night. This went on for years, but I was never able to get used to that ghastly spook, nor did the grisly image of the Sandman ever fade from my mind.
    I got ever more worked up about his dealings with my father; while some unbridgeable reserve kept me from asking him about it, the desire grew stronger from year to year to find out the secret for myself – to see the fabled Sandman with my own two eyes. The Sandman lured me down the path of wonder, the craving for adventure, that longing that had already taken seed in my childishmind. I liked nothing better than to hear or read fear-tingling tales of goblins, witches, sprites and suchlike; but the Sandman remained at the head of my list of the grisly figures I scribbled with chalk and charcoal on table tops, cupboards and walls.
    When I turned ten, my mother moved me from the nursery into a little room off the corridor not far from my father’s study. We still had to make ourselves scarce at the strike of nine, when that unseen presence was heard in the house. From my little room I distinctly heard him enter my father’s chamber and soon thereafter it seemed to me as if the entire house filled with a strange-smelling vapour. My ever-mounting curiosity stirred my pluck to try and find a way to make the Sandman’s acquaintance. Many times I slipped out into the corridor as soon as mother had passed, but I was too late, since by the time I reached the spot from which I might catch a glimpse of him, the Sandman had invariably already entered. Finally, driven by an overpowering urge, I decided to hide in my father’s room and await the Sandman’s appearance.
    One evening, by my father’s silence and my mother’s sadness I surmised that the Sandman was coming; and so, pretending to be very tired, I excused myself before nine o’clock and hid in a nook beside my father’s door. The front door creaked, the slow, heavy thud of steps advanced through the vestibule towards the stairs. Mother hastened by me with my brothers and sisters. Quietly then I opened my father’s door. He was seated in silence, as usual, with his back to the door; he did not notice me slip in behind the curtain drawn over a closet where he hung his clothes.
    Closer, ever closer came the thud of the steps; there was a curious cough and a scraping and a grumbling outside. My heart beat double-time in terror and