The death of Lene from plague, followed by Goldmund’s burning of their hut and departure, is a turning point in his passage through a devastated countryside. Faced with the illness in the shelter they share, he chooses to remain with her rather than protect himself by leaving. After her death, he burns the hut and walks on alone, carrying the experience into a broader encounter with mass death, social collapse, and the meaning of mortality.

The Plague Reaches the Shelter

The episode grows out of a journey through a region already marked by the Black Death. Goldmund and Robert come upon an isolated farm where the entire household is dead. The deserted buildings, an unattended cow, and the bodies inside reveal the danger that had prompted villagers to keep strangers away. Robert understands that they may have encountered plague and fears that Goldmund has been exposed. Goldmund refuses to let him flee alone: he insists that the two remain together, either to survive or to die in one another’s company. As they travel onward, they see abandoned farms, unburied bodies, and livestock left without care. The countryside offers food and shelter, but its abundance is shadowed by death.

Goldmund and Robert eventually establish a temporary shelter with Lene. When she falls ill, Goldmund examines her and finds plague boils. He keeps his discovery from her, while Robert becomes alarmed and proposes sleeping outside with the goat to avoid infection. Goldmund responds furiously, drawing the goat to his own side of the juniper partition and ordering Robert away. The quarrel makes their different responses to danger explicit: Robert is governed by fear of contagion, whereas Goldmund will not abandon the sick person in his care.

Goldmund Stays with Lene

Goldmund tells Lene that he will stay and that she will recover. She does not share that hope. She urges him not to come too close, but also says she would rather die than wake to find that he has left her alone. Her words give the vigil its central conflict: care may expose Goldmund to the same illness, yet leaving would repeat the abandonment she fears.

As Lene weakens, Goldmund continues to tend her. He gives her water and remains beside her, going outside only briefly for air. The practical demands of their shelter continue around them: he lets the goat out to feed and drink, and, when Lene can no longer swallow milk, he drinks it himself because there is no other food. He watches her closely as her strength fails. Her face changes rapidly, and she speaks only occasionally, addressing him as Goldmund or as her lover. He wets her swollen lips with drops of water. She dies the following night, with only a brief movement before her breathing stops.

The moment recalls for Goldmund the fish he had pitied in the market, whose lives also ended in a final quiver. That association connects Lene’s death to his wider attention to vulnerable, vanishing life. His grief does not make him leave at once. He kneels beside her, then sits outside, remembers the goat, and releases it. When he returns to the hut, he looks once more at Lene’s dead face.

Burning the Hut and Leaving

Goldmund cannot accept leaving Lene’s body in the shelter. He gathers dry wood and brush, throws it into the hut, and sets it alight. He takes nothing from the dwelling except the flint. The juniper wall catches quickly; he watches outside as the roof burns and beams fall, while the frightened goat cries out. Although he knows that killing and eating the goat would give him strength for the road, he cannot bring himself to do it. He drives the animal out onto the heath and walks away as smoke follows him into the forest.

The departure is not presented as relief or a clean return to freedom. Goldmund has long been drawn to wandering, but he leaves this shelter profoundly disconsolate. Lene’s death has made the journey more than a succession of encounters: he has stayed through another person’s dying, and the act of leaving comes only after he has faced the obligations of care and burial through fire.

From Private Loss to a Stricken Land

Beyond the shelter, the scale of death expands. Goldmund encounters empty houses, starving dogs, unburied corpses, abandoned children, and death pits at city gates. The plague has damaged not only bodies but the bonds that ordinarily organize life: parents leave sick children, husbands leave sick wives, and frightened people avoid one another. Others answer the terror with drinking, dancing, and frantic pursuit of pleasure. Goldmund witnesses both reactions, at times fleeing the feverish gatherings and at times joining them.

The crisis also turns fear into accusation. People claim that enemies deliberately spread disease, blaming the poor, the French, doctors, and especially Jews. Goldmund watches one town’s ghetto burn as a mob prevents those trying to escape from getting away. The episode of Lene thus precedes a wider landscape in which illness and death become occasions for abandonment, violence, and scapegoating. Goldmund’s own passage through that landscape is marked less by fear of infection than by an intense, watchful attention to what death reveals about people and their world.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Lene’s death brings the Black Death’s public catastrophe into an intimate scene of care. Earlier, Goldmund had insisted that Robert should not face possible death alone; with Lene, that principle becomes a sustained choice. He remains despite the danger, tends her as her condition worsens, and refuses to leave her body unattended. Burning the hut closes the period of shared shelter while making his departure an act shaped by grief rather than mere onward movement.

The episode also prepares Goldmund’s changing understanding of mortality. As he travels, he sees death figured in a painted Dance of Death, but the image seems incomplete to him: it presents death as stern and unavoidable, while his own experience gives it a more intimate, maternal quality. The narrative links the personal loss of Lene to this developing vision and to the devastated communities Goldmund witnesses. In the later conversation with Narcissus, Goldmund recounts the story of Rebekka and the burning of Jews in detail, and his account prompts a direct exchange about the world’s cruelty and the limits of what a person can prevent. The episode of Lene’s death belongs to the same larger reckoning: it shows what Goldmund can do in the face of suffering—stay, care, and witness—without suggesting that such actions can stop the plague or repair the world.