St. Nickolas in Trouble (Part I)

A Story by Felix Timmermans, translated from German by Jessica Rath

This is one of my favorite Christmas stories. We read it aloud when my daughter was little, and I still love to read it.  There must be a previous  English translation, but I couldn’t find any. I hope I’m not violating any copyright rules, but I believe it is in the public domain.

Felix Timmermans was a Flemish writer who was born and died in Lier, a city in Belgium. He wrote plays, novels, and poems and was a painter as well. Because it is rather long, I will post it in two parts.

A few more snowflakes fell from the passing cloud, and then – all of a sudden – the radiant full moon was visible above the white tower. 

The snow-covered town became a silvery town.

It was an evening of silence as soft as down feathers, of peacefulness as pure as lilies. And if the glittering stars would have descended to walk through the streets,  dressed like saints in golden robes, nobody would have been surprised. 

It was an evening made for wonder and miracles. But nobody saw the blessed beauty of the little old town under its cover of moonlit snow. 

The people were asleep. 

Only the poet Renoldus Keersmaker who saw beauty in everything and therefore wore long hair, was sitting by candle light  and tobacco smoke, composing a poem about the gods of the Olympus and the glory of the Greek heaven, which he had admired so deeply on woodcuts.

The night watchman Dries Andivel, who kept watch on top of the tower, hurried outside every quarter of the hour, quickly blew three notes in the four directions, and then crept back into the warm, wood-paneled room with the glowing fire in the iron stove, and kept reading his little book of songs: “The Flemish Bard, One Hundred Songs for 5 Cents”. When he found one of which he knew the tune, he would scratch it on his old fiddle and sing the song through his white beard until it would resound high above in the pitchblack scaffolding of the tower.  And then a cool glass of beer would lubricate his throat, as a reward.

Trinchen Mutser of the “Candied Nostril” sat in her kitchen and sadly looked through the little arched window into her shop. Her heart had dropped into a briar patch. Trinchen Mutser’s heart was totally broken and pierced through; not because all her sweet treats had been sold out by tonight, on the eve of St. Nickolas – oh no! – but because the giant chocolate ship was still standing there. It was three feet high and as long as from here to there! How beautifully it stood there, behind the bottle-green window panes of her little shop, gaily decorated with silver foil, pink candied roses, with small step ladders spun from white sugar, and with smoke coming from its chimneys. The smoke was white cotton. 

The whole thing cost as much as all the other little delicacies together: the gingerbread roosters with little feathers on their bottoms, the candy canes, the taffy, the jelly beans and the chocolate cookies. And if this piece, this ship made out of chocolate which spelled in pink letters that its name was “Congo”, if it would not sell, then all her profit would go down the drain and she would lose money on top of it. Why did she ever have to buy it? What had she been thinking! Such a precious piece for her modest little shop! Of course, everybody came to look at it, mothers and children, and she had sold as never before. But nobody asked for the price of it, and so it stood there and kept smoking its white cotton, silent like a fish. 

When the doctor’s wife, Mrs. Vaes, came to buy Varenberg’s Cough Lozenges, Trinchen had said: “Here, Mrs. Vaes, look, what a beautiful ship! If I were you, I wouldn’t give your children anything else for St. Nickolas. They will feel so happy, like being in heaven!”

“No”, Mrs. Vaes declined. “St. Nickolas is a poor man. The children are too spoiled already, and anyway, the doctor’s business is doing very poorly. Can you believe it, Trinchen, this winter hardly anybody is getting sick! If this doesn’t become better, I don’t know what we’ll do!” And she bought two gingerbread roosters on a stick, and stayed out of sight for several days. 

And tonight was St. Nickolas Eve. All the little things were sold, only the “Congo” was still there, solitary and forsaken, and smoked its white cotton. A loss of 20 Francs! The horizon was as black as the “Congo” itself. Maybe it could be sold piece by piece, or with a raffle? Oh no, that would hardly bring in five Francs, and she couldn’t possibly put the thing on her dresser, next to the other knick-knacks. Her heart had dropped into a briar patch. She lit a candle for St, Anthony, and one for St. Nickolas, and she prayed a rosary so that heaven would have pity and bestow grace on the ship. She waited and waited. Silence moved up and down. At ten o’clock she closed the shutters, but sorrow made her stay awake in her bed.

There was a fourth human being in the little snow-covered town who didn’t sleep. This was a small child, Cecily; her head was covered in blond, silky curls and she was so poor that she never had soap to wash herself with; and she was wearing a shirt which had only one sleeve and was frayed at the edges, so it looked like icicles hanging down from a roof. 

While her parents were asleep upstairs, little Cecily sat in front of the fireplace and waited for St. Nickolas to drop Trinchen Mutser’s chocolate ship down the chimney. She knew that he would bring it to her. She had dreamt it every night, and now she was sitting there, waiting full of confidence and patience, and since she feared that the ship might break when it fell, she had put her pillow over her arm so that the ship would land softly.

And while those four awake people in the little town: the poet, the night watchman, Trinchen Mutser, and Cecily, each occupied with their own joy, sorrow, or longing, didn’t see anything of the night which looked like a palace, the moon opened like a round oven with a silvery, round door, and out of the hole in the moon such a radiant clarity poured forth that even a golden pen could not describe it adequately. For one moment the true light from real heaven fell on the earth. This happened so that St. Nickolas on his white, heavily loaded donkey and Rupert, his helper, could get through. But how did they manage to get down to earth? Very simple. The little donkey stepped on one ray of moonlight, stiffened his legs, and slid down as if the ray was a slanted ice rink. And clever Rupert grabbed the tail of the little donkey and was pulled along, sitting comfortably on his heels. That’s how they arrived in the little town, in the middle of the snow-covered market place. 

On each side of the donkey hung a basket filled with fragrant delicacies which Rupert had baked in the heavenly bakery under St. Nickolas’s supervision.  When it became apparent that they didn’t have enough and the sugar was getting low, Rupert had put on plain clothes so that he wouldn’t be recognized when he went to buy sweets at little shops, including Trinchen Mutser’s. He used the money that he was allowed to collect once a year from the collection-boxes for St. Nickolas in every church. He had already climbed a ray of moonlight up to heaven, loaded with all these tasty treats. Now everything had to be distributed among the friends of St. Nickolas.

St. Nickolas rode through the streets; he stopped at every house with a child, and, depending on the child’s behavior, handed out differing amounts of sweets to Rupert. With cat-like agility Rupert climbed up on rain pipes, along drains, and over shingles to the chimney where he carefully let the confections fall down through the cold, drafty shaft straight onto a plate or wooden shoe, without scratching or bumping the fragile delights even a bit.

Rupert knew his job and St. Nickolas loved him like the apple of his eye.

So they worked through the whole town, throwing down (where they had to) here and there a hard cane for the real good-for-nothings.

“That’s it, we’re done until next year”, said Rupert as he saw the empty baskets. He lit his little pipe and sighed with relief, because now their work was done.

“What?” asked St. NIckolas anxiously. “It’s all gone? And little Cecily? What about good little Cecily? Shhh!” 

St. Nickolas saw at once that they stood right in front of Cecily’s house, and he lifted his finger warningly. But the child had heard the warm, humming voice that sounded like many bumblebees, opened her eyes wide under her shock of golden curls, rushed to the window, opened the curtains, and saw St. Nickolas, the real St. Nickolas. The child stood with her mouth open, amazed. And while she couldn’t see enough of the golden bishop’s mantle which sparkled with multi-colored jewels like a flower garden; of the miter on which shone a cross made of diamonds, cutting the night with its light as with knives; of the magnificent ornaments decorating the crozier where a silver pelican picked ruby-blood for her young; while she looked at the fine lace which fell like a veil over the crimson cloak; while she was delighted by the good white donkey; and while she had to laugh about the antics of Rupert who rolled his eyeballs as if they laid loose in his head like pigeon’s eggs; while all this was going on, she heard the two men speak thus:

“Isn’t there anything left in the baskets, dear Rupert?”

“No, holy master, not any more than in my purse, either.”

“Look again, look really well, Rupert!”

“Yes, Master, and if I would squeeze the baskets, not so much as a pin would fall out!”

St. Nickolas stroked his curly beard with a sorrowful air and blinked with his eyes as golden as honey. “Well”, said his helper, “there is nothing you can do now. Write to little Cecily that next year she’ll get twice and three times as much.” 

“Never! Rupert! I who is allowed to live in heaven because I brought three children back to life and returned them to their mother – I should let her miss out, little Cecily, the best behaved child in the whole wide world, so she’ll have a bad opinion of me? Never, Rupert, never!” 

(End of Part I