Strange News From Another Star Read online

  In the metropolis where Anselm was now a teacher and had a high academic reputation, he went about behaving exactly like other people of the world. He wore a fine hat and coat, he was serious or genial as the occasion demanded, he observed the world with alert but rather weary eyes, and he was a gentleman and a scholar just as he had wanted to be. But now things took a new turn for him, very much as they had at the end of his childhood. He suddenly felt as if many years had slipped past and left him standing strangely alone and unsatisfied with a way of life for which he had always longed. It was no real happiness to be a professor, it was not really gratifying to be respectfully greeted by citizens and students, it was all stale and commonplace. Happiness once more lay far in the future and the road there looked hot and dusty and tiresome.

  At this time Anselm often visited the house of a friend whose sister he found attractive. He was no longer inclined to run after pretty faces; in this too he had changed, and he felt that happiness for him must come in some special fashion and was not to be expected behind every window. His friend's sister pleased him greatly and often he thought he truly loved her. But she was a strange girl; her every gesture, every word, bore her own stamp and colouring, and it was not always easy to keep pace with her in exactly the same rhythm. Evenings when Anselm walked up and down in his lonely home, reflectively listening to his own footsteps echoing through the empty rooms, he struggled a great deal within himself about this woman. She was older than he would have wished his wife to be. She was odd, and it would be difficult to live with her and pursue his academic ambitions, with which she had no sympathy at all. Also she was not very robust or healthy and in particular could not easily endure company and parties. By preference she lived in lonely quiet amid flowers, music, and books, letting the world go its way or come to her if it must. Sometimes her sensitivity was so acute that when something alien wounded her she would burst into tears. Then again she would glow with some silent and secret happiness, and anyone who saw her would think how difficult it would be to give anything to this strange beautiful woman or to mean anything to her. Sometimes Anselm believed she loved him, sometimes it seemed to him that she loved no one but was simply gentle and friendly with everyone and wanted nothing but to be left in peace. But he demanded something quite different from life, and if he were to marry, then there must be life and excitement and hospitality in his home.

  'Iris,' he said to her, 'dear Iris, if only the world were differently arranged! If nothing at all existed but your beautiful gentle world of flowers, thoughts, and music, then I too would wish for nothing at all but to spend my whole life with you, to hear your stories and to share in your thoughts. Your very name does me good. Iris is a wonderful name, and I have no idea what it reminds me of.'

  'But you do know,' she said, 'that the blue and yellow sword lilies are called that.'

  'Yes,' he replied with an uneasy feeling. 'I know it very well and that in itself is beautiful. But always when I pronounce your name it seems to remind me of something else, I don't know what, as though it were connected with some very deep, distant, important memories, and yet I don't know what they might be and cannot seem to find out'

  Iris smiled at him as he stood there at a loss, rubbing his forehead with his hand.

  'I always feel the same way,' she said to Anselm in her light, birdlike voice, 'whenever I smell a flower. My heart feels as though a memory of something completely beautiful and precious were bound up with the fragrance, something that was mine a long time ago and that I have lost. It is that way too with music and sometimes with poems - suddenly there is a flash for an instant as though all at once I saw a lost homeland lying below in the valley, but instantly it is gone again and forgotten. Dear Anselm, I believe we are on earth for this purpose, for this contemplation and seeking and listening for lost, far-off strains, and behind them lies our true home.'

  'How beautifully you put it,' he said admiringly, and he felt an almost painful stirring in his breast, as though a compass hidden there were persistently pointing towards his distant goal. But that goal was quite different from the one he had deliberately set for his life, which disturbed him, for was it, after all, worthy of him to squander his life in dreams with only pretty fairy tales for pretext?

  And one day Herr Anselm came back from one of his lonely journeys and found his barren scholar's quarters so chilly and oppressive that he rushed off to his friend's house, determined to ask beautiful Iris for her hand.

  'Iris,' he said to her, 'I don't want to go on living this way. You have always been my good friend. I must tell you everything. I need a wife, otherwise my life seems empty and meaningless. And whom should I want for a wife but you, my darling flower? Are you willing, Iris? You shall have flowers, as many as we can find, you shall have the most beautiful garden. Are you willing to come to me?'

  Iris looked him in the eye calmly and with deliberation; she did not smile, she did not blush, and she answered him in a firm voice.

  'Anselm, I am not surprised at your question. You are dear to me, although I had never thought of being your wife. But look, my friend, I demand a great deal from the man I marry. I make greater demands than most women. You offer me flowers and you mean well by it. But I can live even without flowers, and without music too; I could very well do without many other things as well, if it were necessary. But one thing I cannot and will not do without: I can never live so much as a single day in such a way that the music in my heart is not dominant. If I am to live with a man, it must be one whose inner music harmonizes beautifully and exactly with mine, and his single desire must be that his own music be pure and that it blend well with mine. Can you do that, my friend? Very likely you will not become more famous this way or garner further honours, your house will be quiet, and the furrows which I have seen in your brow for many a year must all be smoothed out. Oh, Anselm, it will not work. Look, you are so constituted that you always have to study new furrows into your forehead, constantly create new worries, and what I perceive and am, you no doubt love and find pleasant, but for you as for most people it is after all simply a pretty toy. Oh, listen to me carefully: everything that now seems a toy to you is life itself to me and would have to be so to you too, and everything you strive for and worry about is for me a toy, in my eyes is not worth living for - I shall not change, Anselm, for I live according to an inner law, but will you be able to change? And you would have to change completely if I were to be your wife.'

  Anselm could not speak, startled by the strength of her will, which he had always thought weak and frivolous. He remained silent and thoughtlessly crushed a flower he had picked up from the table in his nervous hand.

  When Iris gently took the flower from him, her action struck him to the heart, like a sharp rebuke - and then suddenly she smiled cheerfully and charmingly, as though she had unexpectedly found a way out of the darkness.

  'I have an idea,' she said in a gentle voice, and blushed as she spoke. 'You will find it strange, it will seem to you a whim. But it is no whim. Will you listen to it? And will you agree that it will decide about you and me?'

  Without understanding her, Anselm stared at Iris with worry in his pale features. Her smile compelled him to have confidence and say yes.

  'I want to give you a task,' Iris said, becoming immediately very serious again.

  'Do so, it is your right,' Anselm replied.

  'This is serious with me,' she said, 'and it is my last word. Will you accept it as it comes straight from my soul and not quibble or bargain about it, even if you don't understand it right away?'

  Anselm promised. Then she said, getting up and giving him her hand: 'Often you have said to me that whenever you speak my name you are reminded of a forgotten something that was once important and holy in your eyes. That is a sign, Anselm, and it is what has drawn you to me all these years. I too believe you have lost and forgotten something important and holy in your soul, something that must be reawakened before you can find happiness and attain what is intended
for you. - Farewell, Anselm! I give you my hand and I beg you: go and make sure you find again in your memory what it is you are reminded of by my name. On the day when you have rediscovered that, I will go with you as your wife wherever you wish and have no desires but yours.'

  In confusion and dismay, Anselm tried to interrupt her and dismiss this demand as a whim, but with one bright look she reminded him of his promise and he fell silent. With lowered eyes he took her hand, raised it to his lips, and left.

  In the course of his life he had taken upon himself many tasks and had carried them out, but none had been so strange, important, and at the same time dismaying as this one. Day after day he hurried around concentrating on it until he was weary, and the time always came when in despair and anger he denounced the whole undertaking as a crazy feminine notion and rejected it completely. But then something deep within him disagreed, a very faint secret pain, a soft, scarcely audible warning. This low voice, which was in his own heart, acknowledged that Iris was right and it made the same demand that she did.

  However, the task was much too difficult for this man of learning. He was supposed to remember something he had long ago forgotten, he was to find once more a single golden thread in the fabric of the sunken years, he was to grasp with his hands and deliver to his beloved something that was no more than a vanished bird song, an impulse of joy or sorrow on hearing a piece of music, something finer, more fleeting and bodiless than a thought, more insubstantial than a dream, as formless as morning mist.

  Sometimes when he had abandoned the search and given up in bad temper, unexpectedly something like a breath from a distant garden touched him, he whispered the name Iris to himself ten times and more, softly and lightly, like one testing a note on a tight string. 'Iris,' he whispered, 'Iris,' and with a faint pain he felt something stir within him, the way in an old abandoned house a door swings open without reason or a cupboard creaks. He went over his memories, which he had believed to be stored away in good order, and made amazing and startling discoveries. His treasury of memories was a great deal smaller than he would have surmised. Whole years were missing, and when he thought back they stood there as empty as blank pages. He found that he had great difficulty in summoning up a clear image of his mother. He had completely forgotten the name of a girl whom as a youth he had hotly courted for a whole year. He happened to remember a dog he had once purchased on the spur of the moment and had kept with him for a time; it took him a whole day to recall the dog's name.

  Painfully, with increasing sorrow and fear, the poor fellow saw how wasted and empty was the life that lay behind him, no longer belonging to him, alien and with no relationship to himself, like something once learned by heart of which one could now only with difficulty retrieve meaningless fragments. He began to write; he wanted to set down, going backward year by year, his most important experiences so as to have them clearly in mind again. But what had been his most important experiences? When he had been appointed professor? When he had received his doctorate, been an undergraduate, been a secondary-school student? Or when once in the forgotten past this girl or that had for a time pleased him? He looked up terrified: Was this life? Was this all? He struck himself on the forehead and laughed bitterly.

  Meanwhile, time ran on, never had it fled so inexorably! A year was gone and it seemed to him that he was in exactly the same position as when he had left Iris. Yet in this time he had greatly changed, as everyone except himself recognized. He had become almost a stranger to his acquaintances, he was considered absentminded, peevish, and odd, he gained a reputation of being an unpredictable eccentric - too bad about him, but he had been a bachelor too long. There were times when he forgot his academic duties and his students waited for him in vain. Deep in thought, he would sometimes prowl through the streets, brushing the housefronts and the dust from the windowsills with his threadbare coat as he passed. Many thought that he had begun to drink. But at other times he would stop in the midst of a classroom lecture, attempting to recall something; his face would break into an appealing, childlike smile in a manner entirely new to him, and then he would go on talking with a warmth of feeling that touched many of his listeners to the heart.

  In the course of his hopeless search for some continuity among the faint traces of bygone years, he had acquired a new faculty of which he was not aware. It happened more and more frequently that behind what he had hitherto called memories there lay other memories, much as on an old wall painted with ancient pictures still older ones have been overpainted and lie hidden and unsuspected. He would try to recall something, perhaps the name of a city where he had once spent some days on his travels, or the birthday of a friend, or anything at all, and while he was burrowing and searching through a little piece of the past as though through rubble, suddenly something entirely different would occur to him. A breath would unexpectedly reach him like an April morning breeze or a September mist. He smelled a fragrance, tasted a flavour, felt delicate dark sensations here and there, on his skin, in his eyes, in his heart, and slowly it came to him that there must once have been a day, blue and warm or cool and grey, or whatever kind of day, and the essence of it must have been caught within him and clung there as a buried memory. He could not place in the real past that spring or winter day he distinctly smelled and felt, he could attach no name or date to it; perhaps it had been during his college days, perhaps, even, he had been in the cradle, but the fragrance was there and he knew that something lived in him which he did not recognize and could not identify or define. Sometimes it seemed to him as though these memories might well reach back beyond life into a former existence, although he would smile at the thought.

  Anselm discovered a good deal in his helpless wanderings through the abysses of memory. He found much that touched and gripped him, and much that startled him and filled him with terror, but the one thing he did not find was what the name Iris meant to him. In the torment of his fruitless search he went once to explore his old home, saw the woods and the streets, the footpaths and fences, stood in the old garden of his childhood and felt the waves break over his heart, the past encompassing him like a dream. Saddened and silent, he returned and with the announcement that he was ill he had everyone who wanted to see him turned away.

  One, however, insisted on entering, the friend he had not seen since his courtship of Iris had ended. This friend found Anselm sitting unkempt in his cheerless study.

  'Get up,' he said to him, 'and come with me. Iris wants to see you.'

  Anselm sprang to his feet.

  'Iris! What has happened to her? - Oh, I know, I know!'

  'Yes,' said his friend, 'come with me. She is going to die. She has been ill for a long time.'

  They went to Iris, who was lying on a sofa, slender and light as a child. She smiled luminously with overlarge eyes and gave Anselm her light white childlike hand, which lay like a flower in his. Her face was as though transfigured.

  'Anselm,' she said, 'are you angry with me? I set you a hard task and I see that you have remained faithful. Go on searching, go on as you have been doing until you find what you are looking for. You thought you were searching on my account but you were doing it for yourself. Do you realize that?'

  'I suspected it,' Anselm said, 'and now I know it. It is a vast journey, Iris, and I would long since have turned back, but now I can find no way to do that. I don't know what is to become of me.'

  She gazed deep into his sorrowful eyes and smiled encouragingly; he bent over her thin hand and wept in silence, and her hand became wet with his tears.

  'What is to become of you?' she said in a voice that was only like a glow of memory. 'What is to become of you is something you must not ask. You have sought many things in your life. You have sought honour and happiness and knowledge and you have sought me, your little Iris. All these were only pretty pictures and they deserted you, as I must now desert you. It has been the same with me. What I sought always turned out to be dear and lovely pictures and they always failed and faded. Now I
have no more pictures, I seek nothing more, I am returning home and have only one small step to take and then I shall be in my native land. You too will join me there, Anselm, and then you will have no more furrows in your brow.'

  She was so pale that Anselm cried out in despair: 'Oh, wait, Iris, do not go yet. Leave me some sign that you are not disappearing completely.'

  She nodded and reached over to a vase beside her and gave him a fresh, full-blown blue sword lily.

  'Here, take my flower, the iris, and do not forget me. Search for me, search for the iris, then you will come to me.'

  Weeping, Anselm held the flower in his hands and weeping took his leave. When a message from his friend summoned him, he returned and helped adorn Iris's coffin with flowers and lower it into the earth.

  Then his life fell to pieces around him; it seemed impossible for him to go on spinning his thread. He gave everything up, left his position and the city, and disappeared from the world. Here and there he turned up briefly. He was seen in his native town leaning over the fence of the old flower garden, but when people inquired after him and wanted to assist him he was nowhere to be found.

  The sword lily remained dear to him. Whenever he came upon one, he would bend over it and sink his gaze into the calyx for a long time and out of the bluish depths a fragrance and a presentiment of all that had been and was to be seemed to be rising towards him, until sadly he went his way because fulfilment did not come. It was as though he were listening at a half-open door and behind it the most enchanting secret was being breathed, and just when he felt that at that very moment everything would be made plain to him and would be fulfilled, the door swung shut and the chill wind of the world blew over his loneliness.

  In his dreams his mother spoke to him; her face and form he had not seen so close and clear for many long years. And Iris spoke to him, and when he awoke, an echo lingered in his ears to which he would devote a whole day of thought. He had no permanent abode. He hurried through the country like a stranger, slept in houses or in the woods, ate bread or berries, drank wine or the dew from the leaves of bushes, but was oblivious to it all. Some took him for a fool, some for a magician, some feared him, some laughed at him, many loved him. He acquired skills he had never had before, like being with children and taking part in their strange games, or holding conversations with a broken twig or a little stone. Winters and summers raced by him, he kept looking into the chalices of flowers and into brooks and lakes.