My Life and My Efforts

by Karl May

The father died as a consequence of a series of hemorrhages. Taking care of him was so exhausting that the daughter came close to death herself, but she survived it. After the time of mourning had passed, May, the faithful lover, came and took her on. Now finally, finally she was truly happy! It was a marriage, according to God's will. Two children were born, my father and a sister before him; she later suffered a serious fall and was crippled as a consequence of it. So you see, that we always had our share of afflictions, or rather tests of faith. And you can also see that I do not conceal anything. It must not be my intension, to embellish the ugly parts. But shortly after the birth of the second child, that sorrowful event occurred at Christmas time, I already told about. The good young man plunged at night with the bread into the deep, snowy ravine and froze to death. Grandmother and both of her children had nothing to eat during the Christmas holidays, and only found out after a long time of agony that she had lost her beloved husband, and under such dreadful circumstances. Hereafter came years of mourning and then the hard times of the Napoleonic wars and of famine. Everything was devastated. No work could be found anywhere. Inflation grew; hunger raged. A poor, young journeyman came to beg. Grandmother could not give him anything. She did not even have a single piece of bread for herself and her children. He saw that she was silently weeping. This aroused his compassion. He left and returned after more than one hour. He poured out before her, whatever he had got, pieces of bread, a dozen potatoes, a rutabaga, a small, very ancient cheese, a small bag of flour, an equally small bag of barley, a thin slice of sausage, and a tiny piece of mutton-suet. Then, he swiftly went away to avoid her gratitude. She never saw him again; but there is one who knows him for sure and will not forget him. This one sent even more and better help. The wife of a head forester had died. He lived outside of the town and was known to be as prosperous as he was kind-hearted. His wife had left him with a very large number of children. He wished to employ grandmother as a housekeeper. In this time of need, she would have liked to accept just too well, but declared that she could not possibly part with her own children, even if she found a place to house them. It did not take the good man long to decide. He declared to her, he would not care whether six or eight children ate at his house; they would all be fed. She should just come, not without them, but with them. This saved her from the direst need!

The stay in the quiet, lonely house of the forester was doing the mother and her children a world of good. They grew healthier and stronger from the better nutrition. The head forester saw grandmother doing her best to show her gratitude and to gain his satisfaction. She worked almost more than her strength would allow, but felt good about it. He quietly observed this and rewarded her by granting her children, in every respect, the same things his own children received. Surely, he was an aristocrat and basically proud. He ate alone with his mother-in-law. Grandmother was just a servant, yet she did not eat in the servant's, but the children's room. But when, after some time, he had gained an insight into the peculiar world of her soul, he cared for her spiritual wellbeing as well. He eased the heavy burden of her work, allowed her to read to him and his mother-in-law from her books in the evenings, and permitted her then to look at his own books as well. How much did she enjoy this! And he had such good, such useful books!

The children had, in reasonable limits, a free life. They chased each other through the forest and got strong limbs and red cheeks. Little May was the youngest and smallest of them all, but he joined the others with all of his energy. And he payed attention; he learnt and remembered. He wanted to know everything. He asked about every object he did not know yet. Soon, he knew the names of all plants, all caterpillars and worms, all bugs and butterflies, which existed in his realm. He sought to familiarise himself with their character, their properties and habits. This zest for knowledge, gained him the head forester's special affections, who did not even regard it beneath him, to allow the boy to accompany him. I have to mention this, so that later events become understandable. The following relapse from this sunny, hopeful time of his boyhood into the previous poverty and wretchedness could not possibly have had a positive effect on the boy.

It was at this time that, during lunch, grandmother suddenly fell from her chair and dropped dead to the floor. The whole house became very excited. The physician was called. He diagnosed a heart attack and stated that grandmother was dead and had to be buried within three days. But she was alive. Yet, she could not move a single limb, not even her lips or the not entirely closed eyelids. She saw and heard everything, the weeping, the lamentations for her. She understood every word that was spoken. She saw and heard the carpenter, who came to take her measurements for the coffin. When it was done, she was placed into it and put into a cold chamber. On the day of the burial, she was laid out in the corridor. The pall bearers came, the minister and the cantor with the students' choir. The family started to bid its farewell to her who appeared to be dead. Just imagine their agony! For three days and three nights, she had made every effort, to show by any kind of movement that she was still alive -- -- in vain! Now, the last moment had come, when she could still be saved. Once the coffin had been closed, there was no hope left. Later, she told that in her terrible mortal fear, she had made efforts, quite beyond what is humanly possible, to at least wiggle one finger, when one after another came by to hold her hand for the last time. So also did the head forester's youngest girl, who had always felt particularly close to grandmother. Suddenly, the child startled and screamed: "She has grabbed my hand; she wants to hold on to me!" And really, everyone saw the seemingly deceased, alternatingly opening and closing her hand in a slow motion. The funeral was, of course, called off immediately. Other physicians were brought in; grandmother was saved. But from then on, the way she led her life was even graver and more uplifted than before. Just rarely, she talked about what she had thought and felt in those unforgettable three days on the threshold between life and death. It must have been horrible. But this also just served to strengthen her faith in God and to deepen her confidence in Him. Just as her death had been unreal, from now on she also regarded the so-called actual death as equally unreal, and for many years she sought the right ideas to explain and to prove this. It is thanks to her and her false death that I in general only believe in life, but not in death.

Before she was mentally quite over this experience, grandmother and her two children were hurled back into their previous way of life, on account of the head forester being assigned to another district and getting remarried. She returned to Ernstthal, and again had to earn her living penny by penny. A good man, Vogel by name and also a weaver by trade, proposed to her. Everyone kept urging her, she had to give her children a new father; she owed them that much. She did it, and had no cause to regret it, but unfortunately, she became once more a widow after just a short time. He died and left her everything he owned: poverty and the reputation of a good, hard working man. Hereafter, her life became quiet and even quieter. She got her girl a place with a seamstress, and her boy was sent to a weaver, who kept him working at the reel from dawn to dusk. After all, it was now taken for granted that the boy had to become nothing but a weaver, though he had definitely lost all interest in it during his stay at the forester's house. He had already gained an entirely different image of himself, and it is surely understandable that later, after having been forced into this unloved craft, he got the idea to free himself from it again by means of the pigeon-trade. Nevertheless, he did his duty, both as a boy and as an adolescent. He worked hard and became a capable weaver, whose merchandise turned out so clean and accurate that every businessman liked to have him work for him. But, in this leisure-time, he strolled through forests and meadows, to collect plants and to keep all the knowledge he had gained at the head forester's fast in his memory. Therefore he took great pleasure from the fact that among the previously mentioned inheritance of our mother there were also some old, most interesting books, the contents of which turned out to be of great benefit to him in these leisure-time activities. Here, I am particularly thinking of a large, thick folio, which had about a thousand pages and bore the following title:

Herbal Book

Of the most learned and worldwide famous Dr. Petri Andreae Matthioli. Now again with many beautiful new illustrations, useful medicine also, and other good pieces, for the third time with particular effort enlarged and printed,

by
Joachimum Camerarium,
Doctor of medicine at the praiseworthy city of Nürnberg.

With three, well ordered, useful registers of herbs' Latin and German names, and then the medicine, with the usage of the same included. Also ample information, on distilling and kilns.

With special privilege of His Roman Imperial Majesty,
not to be copied in any format.
Printed in Frankfurt am Main,
M. D. C.

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It was the most natural thing in the world for father to immediately take this book and to study it eagerly. It contained even more than the title promised. For instance, the names of the plants were often also given in French, English, Russian, Bohemian, Italian, and even in Arabic, which later helped me in particular to a quite extraordinary degree. Father also turned from one page of this delightful book to another, from one plant to another. He added much, much more to the knowledge, he already had; not just about the flaura itself, but also about its nutritious and technical properties and its healing effects. The ancestors had tested these effects and had added very many marginal notes to the volume, telling about the results of these tests. Later, this book became a source of the purest and most natural pleasure for me, and I may well say that father excellently supported me in this.

Another one of these books was a collection of biblical woodcuts, probably from the earliest time of the xylographic art. I own it, just like the Herbal Book, up to this day. It contains very many, quite excellent pictures; some are unfortunately missing. The first one is Moses and the last one the beast from the eleventh chapter of the Revelation of John. The title page has been lost. Therefore, I do not know who the author is or in what year this volume was printed. Grandmother used this book as an aid when telling us the biblical stories. We immensely enjoyed every one of these tales, and this brings me to most outstanding quality, grandmother possessed for us children, this was her incomparable gift for story-telling.

Actually, what grandmother did was not that much story-telling as it was creating, drawing, painting, shaping. Even the toughest subject-matter gained shape and colour, being told by her lips. And when twenty persons listened to her, every single one of these twenty had the impression that she told what she told quite exclusively for him alone. And it stuck, it lasted. Whether she related a passage from the Bible or from the vast realm of her fairy-tales, it always culminated to some profound insight in the relationship between heaven and earth, the victory of good over evil, and the warning that everything on earth was just a parable, because the source of truth was not to be found in this low form of life, but only in a higher existence. I am convinced that she did not do this consciously and with the full intension; she was not sufficiently educated for this, but it was a inborn gift, a genius, and such a beneficial spirit will, as is well known, do its work most surely, when it is neither discovered nor observed. Grandmother was a poor, uneducated woman, but nevertheless a poet with a god-given talent, and therefore a stroy-teller, who created characters from the wealth of her stories, which not just existed in those stories, but truly came alive.

Thinking back at my earliest memory, I do not come across the fable of Sitara first, but rather the fable "of the lost and forgotten human soul". I felt such endless pity for this soul. I have wept for it with my blind, unseeing eyes of a child. To me, this tale contained nothing but truth. But only years later, after I had experienced how life could treat a person and after I had extensively delved into the the heart of mankind, I realized that the knowledge of the human soul had indeed been lost and forgotten and that all of our psychology had not not yet been able to return this knowledge to us. In my childhood, I have spent hours sitting quietly and motionlessly, staring into the darkness of my sick eyes, to contemplate where this lost and forgotten soul might have ended up. I really, really wanted to find it. Then, grandmother took me on her lap, kissed me on the forehead and said: "Be quiet, my boy! Don't be sad for it! I have found it. It is here!" "Where?", I asked. "Here with me", she answered. "You are this soul, you!" "But I am not lost", I objected. "Of course, you are lost. You have been cast down into the poorest, dirtiest Ardistan. But you will be found; because even when everybody and all have forgotten about you, God has not forgotten about you." -- I did not comprehend this, then; I only understood it later, much, much later. Actually, in this time of my early childhood, every living being was just a soul to me, nothing but a soul. I saw nothing. To me, there were neither appearances nor shapes, nor colours, neither locations nor movement from one location to another. I was very well able to feel, hear, and smell the persons and objects, but this was not enough to picture them truly and vividly. I could only imagine them. I did not know how a person, a dog, a table would look like; I could only picture it in my soul, and this picture reflected its soul. Whenever somebody spoke, I did not hear his body, but his soul. Not his external, but his internal appearance approached me. To me, there were only souls, nothing but souls. And so it has continued to be, even after I had learnt to see, from my boyhood on, up to this day. This is the difference between myself and others. This is the key to my books. This is the explanation for everything which has been praised or condemned in me. Only he who had been blind and became seeing again, and only he who possessed such a deeply rooted and powerful world within himself that it, even after he became seeing, dominated the world outside for his entire life, only he will be able to put himself in my place and understand everything what I was planning, what I did, and what I wrote, and only he will have the ability to criticise me, nobody else!