Spiegelteich

Spiegelteich is a dark woodland pond in a park near the psychiatric hospital, remembered both as a place where the narrator fishes for small sticklebacks and as the setting of an ambiguous glimpse of a bell after the Bell ringer’s disappearance. Its ordinary summer stillness gives that possible trace of the missing man its force: the pond offers a sighting, but no confirmation or explanation.

Setting and Fishing

The pond lies in a park close to the psychiatric hospital and is described as a forest pond with dark water. In summer, the narrator sometimes fishes there for sticklebacks, small fish with prehistoric-looking spines along their backs. Without a fishing rod, he ties a worm to a thread and lowers it into the water. A fish may fasten onto the bait, but catching it requires skill and precise timing: he must catapult it out at just the right moment, then hope to find it on the forest floor. Of ten fish, only one makes it into the jar.

The Glimpse in the Water

In the summer after the Bell ringer disappears, the narrator lies on his stomach with his head directly over the water, watching a stickleback approach the worm. Sunlight breaks into greenish shafts in the pond, and the scene is quiet. Just as the fish attaches itself and the narrator prepares to move, he notices something farther out, where the water is deeper, among the aquatic plants. It flashes at the bottom. Glare from the surface makes it difficult to see clearly; then a cloud covers the sun and the glimmer vanishes. The narrator believes the object is a bell, but the brief flash leaves its identity uncertain.

Narrative Significance

The pond’s role shifts within the remembered scene from a familiar fishing place to the site of a possible material trace of the Bell ringer. The sighting connects the missing man to the water without resolving what happened to him: the narrator never sees the Bell ringer again, and the glint supplies no definitive answer. Spiegelteich thus holds the story’s uncertainty in a concrete image—a bell-like object glimpsed beneath dark water and lost again when the light changes.