The Narrator Meets the Bell-Ringer and Becomes His Shoulder-Riding Companion

The narrator’s meeting with the Bell ringer becomes a reversal of fear: after fleeing from the man’s approach, the child accepts his return of a lost ink eraser and soon rides on his shoulders as they race through Hesterberg. Their connection develops without much speech, through repeated encounters, the sound and movement of the bells, and a physical intimacy that unsettles the narrator’s earlier assumptions about danger and difference.

The Bell ringer at Hesterberg

The Bell ringer is an adult patient who has spent his entire life within Hesterberg, having arrived there shortly after birth. Though he is already in his late twenties, the hospital has not transferred him to Stadtfeld. His days follow a precise pattern: he walks the grounds along the same routes, while his dark hair, full beard, Bundeswehr parka and trousers, and heavy boots make him a striking presence. His teeth grind audibly, a sound that the child finds especially disturbing.

The bells define how others experience his passage through the grounds. Patients, staff, visitors, and even the food cart move aside as he walks, swinging the bells with muscular arms. Once a month, accompanied by three attendants, he is allowed to leave the hospital and climb the bell tower at Schleswig Cathedral; in the loud peal above, he is happy. The persistent ringing is so disruptive that nearby residents complain. These details establish both the force of his daily presence and the narrow, permitted route beyond the hospital walls.

The child narrator grows up amid Hesterberg’s crowded institutional world, where patients are often spoken of through crude labels and encountered as figures in a familiar daily landscape. The Bell ringer is different: among the patients free to move about, he is the one the narrator truly fears. That fear is shaped by his appearance, grinding teeth, and overwhelming sound, rather than by any described attack. The distinction matters when the two finally become companions: the relationship does not begin with an explanation of the man, but with the child’s experience of him changing.

The first encounter and flight

One afternoon, walking home from school alone, the narrator hears bells directly behind him. Ordinarily, when accompanied by his father, the child takes his father’s hand and lets the Bell ringer pass; alone, the child usually turns and runs as soon as the ringing is heard. This time the man appears suddenly, and the narrator leaves the path, removes the schoolbag, and presses against an avenue tree, hoping not to be seen.

The child remembers a brother’s warning that patients should not be shown fear, because visible fear might provoke them. Trying to follow this advice, the narrator edges around the trunk and out of the Bell ringer’s line of sight as he passes. The man stops abruptly, one bell raised and the other beside his head. The narrator retreats against the tree, convinced that the Bell ringer has turned and will come toward him. When the child bends to retrieve the schoolbag, its strap slips through the fingers and several pens fall into the grass. Then comes the unmistakable sound of grinding teeth, now close by.

The narrator bolts toward three doctors visible at the end of the avenue, but even while running feels shame at the possibility of having overreacted and being met with incomprehension. Reaching the next corner, behind one of the hospital’s bungalows, the child stops and struggles to breathe, gasping as though breathing itself has become unfamiliar. The episode makes fear bodily and immediate: the child cannot yet know whether the Bell ringer’s stop was a threat, but the sound, the dropped pens, and the flight have already made the encounter feel perilous.

The returned ink eraser

The change begins later at the minigolf course. The narrator has hit a ball hard against the boundary and is searching for it in the grass when the grinding sound returns. Without lifting the head at first, the child senses the Bell ringer nearby. He stands by the loop and takes an ink eraser from his parka pocket: the one the narrator has missed since fleeing from him.

The child wants to run, yet walks toward him, minigolf club gripped tightly. The Bell ringer holds the eraser while the narrator pulls at it. For a moment the child feels the force of his hand and understands that the object could not be taken against his will. His jaws grind, as though he might be trying to speak, but the scene supplies no words. He opens his hand; the narrator backs away.

Then the Bell ringer bends toward the bells lying in the grass. He starts with the larger one, swinging it along his body and above his head, then brings in the smaller bell with its higher sound. The motion spreads through his shoulders, back, and head until his whole body seems to join the swinging rhythm. He gallops away across the field, ringing loudly. The recovered eraser has brought them into proximity, but the encounter remains strange and wordless: the narrator watches the man’s ritual rather than fleeing from it.

From fear to shoulder rides

The next day, the narrator hears the bells soon after passing through Hesterberg’s gate. The first impulse is still to escape, but this time the child stays. As the Bell ringer approaches, the sound seems rich and exhilarating, vibrating in the ears. He sets the bells down on the asphalt and steps closer. The narrator notices the smell of his parka, hair, and beard, uncertain whether it is foul or intense. His grinding teeth, once a source of alarm, now seem almost friendly and inviting.

Without ceremony, the Bell ringer takes the narrator by the wrist and lifts the child onto his shoulders. He runs, ringing ecstatically. The narrator grips his black hair with both hands and presses the thighs against him to stay secure among the swinging golden bells. The ride is exhilarating but requires the child to attend to the man’s strength and to the movement around them; trust here is physical, enacted by climbing on and holding fast.

They wait on the long straight road for the food cart, then let it gain a small lead before the Bell ringer runs after and overtakes it. Its stainless-steel sides reflect the narrator on the man’s shoulders, a blond-haired rider atop a shaggy giant. The drivers wave. The Bell ringer grunts happily, and the pair leave the road, push through the undergrowth, and make another circuit of the hospital park.

From then on, the narrator is allowed to ride him almost daily. The child calls him a human throne, but the closeness is registered in more intimate traces too: the smell of the Bell ringer remains on the narrator’s fingers even after washing before bed, and the skin of the hands feels unusually soft after the rides. Their companionship is repeated, not a one-time rescue or spectacle.

A relationship beyond appearance

The Bell ringer’s gentleness also appears in his care with chocolate. He loves sweets and becomes visibly restless when the narrator brings him a bar. He opens the wrapper with his pointed fingernails, carefully breaks the chocolate into pieces, and arranges them in a row on whatever surface is nearby before eating them one by one. The child can ask whether they are going, but the Bell ringer remains absorbed in this deliberate ritual. The scene gives the relationship an everyday rhythm beyond the dramatic rides: the narrator brings a treat, and the man attends to it with complete concentration.

The father describes the Bell ringer as one of the kindest patients in the hospital, the opposite of what his appearance suggests. That judgment stands against the child’s original terror without erasing the terror itself. The bond grows through encounters that are at once unsettling and affectionate: grinding teeth and offered belongings, overwhelming bells and a steady shoulder, a feared figure who becomes a regular companion. In the wider landscape of Hesterberg, where many patients remain solitary despite the crowded grounds, these repeated rides create an unusual shared world—one made not through explanation, but through sound, movement, return, and trust.