Goldmund Takes Lene Away from the Plague-Stricken Town

Goldmund Takes Lene Away from the Plague-Stricken Town is a turning point in Goldmund’s journey through a land devastated by the Black Death: faced with a deserted town and its frightened inhabitants, he invites Lene to leave with him and tries to make a temporary home beyond the plague’s reach. The episode joins practical flight to a fragile intimacy, while the surrounding death gives their improvised domestic life its urgent, transitory character.

A Town Under the Plague

The decision grows out of what Goldmund and Robert have already encountered on the road. A group of armed peasants had driven them away from a village, and the following morning they found an isolated farm silent and abandoned. Inside the house, Goldmund discovered the dead members of a family. Robert understood the villagers’ hostility as an attempt to keep outsiders away from infection and feared that Goldmund had exposed himself among the bodies. Goldmund kept Robert from fleeing alone, insisting that they face the shared danger together.

As they wandered on, the scale of the crisis became impossible to mistake. Villages barred their gates or lay open and empty; farms stood deserted, livestock went unattended, and the dead remained unburied. The travelers found food and drink in abandoned places, but that abundance did not make their passage carefree. Robert was consumed by fear, repeatedly checking himself for signs of illness and trying to protect himself with smoke from their campfire. Goldmund, by contrast, moved through the afflicted country with a mixture of fascination and sorrow, attentive to the deaths around him rather than governed by Robert’s panic.

The contrast sharpens at a fortified town whose open gates have no guards. Robert refuses to enter. A priest emerges carrying a cross, followed by carts loaded with corpses, and Goldmund watches the bodies taken to a vast pit outside the city. When he enters alone, the familiar sounds of civic life are absent: streets that memory fills with work and conversation now hold only silence. The scene establishes what Lene will be leaving—not simply a place where disease threatens, but a community whose ordinary life has been emptied out.

Goldmund Invites Lene to Leave

Inside the town Goldmund sees a baker pass a roll through a window on a long shovel, then close his window when Goldmund walks away without paying. In another street, he notices a young woman at an upper-floor window combing her hair. He calls to her and asks whether she is ill. When she signals that she is not, he urges her to leave the city with him for the woods, where they can live more safely and enjoy whatever time remains to them.

Goldmund does not ask for her decision immediately and disappear. He walks on through the deserted streets, then returns; Lene is still at the window and waves when she sees him. She runs after him before the gates with a small bundle and a red kerchief tied around her head. Asked her name, she answers that she is Lene and says she will go with him because the city is terrible and everyone is dying. Her choice is both a response to the danger and a decisive break from the life she has been living there.

Robert, waiting near the gates, objects when Goldmund returns with Lene. He protests that bringing someone out of the plague-stricken town puts them all at risk and threatens to end their companionship. Goldmund lets him finish, then declares that Lene will stay with him and tells Robert that he too will come. His proposed arrangement gives each a place: Goldmund as head of the household, Lene as its mistress, and Robert as their friend. He promises Robert that no one will require him to touch Lene, addressing the particular fear behind his reluctance rather than asking him to set it aside.

Making a Temporary Household

The next day the three find an empty log cabin in a small birch forest, perhaps built by woodcutters. Its door is broken open, and Robert judges the place and its surroundings suitable. They have also taken a stray goat, which offers milk but does not solve their shortage of food. Goldmund assigns Robert the task of making a partition in the cabin: one room for Goldmund and Lene, another for Robert and the goat. He plans to search for provisions the following day.

Their work makes the proposed refuge tangible. Goldmund and Lene gather straw, fern, and moss for bedding; Robert cuts small birch posts with his knife. He cannot finish the partition in one day and sleeps outside that night. The wall is eventually completed by all three, with juniper woven into its openings. Lene gathers berries and tends the goat, Goldmund explores the surrounding region for food, and Robert takes satisfaction in a shelter that keeps them apart from both possible infection and conflict with other people. The quiet also has a cost: the region seems uninhabited, and food is scarce.

For a brief period the cabin supports a household shaped by shared labor and unequal fears. Robert’s caution remains part of its organization, while Goldmund assumes responsibility for decisions and provisions. Lene’s presence gives the shelter a personal and affectionate dimension for Goldmund, but the cabin is never more than a precarious refuge within the wider catastrophe. Its walls can divide a room; they cannot make the plague-stricken world safe.

Significance and Aftermath

The episode sets Goldmund’s response to death against Robert’s. Robert tries to avoid contact and imagine escape from illness; Goldmund recognizes that neither can guarantee survival, yet still acts to protect and accompany another person. His invitation is not a cure for the plague or a way to restore the town. It is an immediate, limited choice: Lene need not face the danger there alone, and Robert need not be abandoned to face it alone either.

The refuge also gives the narrative a compressed image of life under epidemic conditions. A bundle, a goat, improvised beds, and a partition become the materials of domestic order, assembled in the same landscape where farms and towns have been emptied. The household’s warmth is therefore shadowed from its beginning by uncertainty. Goldmund’s decision to take Lene away briefly interrupts his wandering, but it cannot suspend the forces that have made the journey so perilous. The episode’s significance lies in that tension: care and companionship are possible, but they remain exposed to a crisis larger than any shelter the travelers can build.