Steppenwolf Page 17

  I nodded, nodded, nodded.

  'You had an image of life in your head, a faith, a challenge. You were prepared to do great things, to suffer, to make sacrifices - and then bit by bit you noticed that the world wasn't demanding great deeds, sacrifices and the like from you at all; that life wasn't an epic poem with heroic roles and that kind of thing, but more like the parlour of a conventional household where the inhabitants are perfectly content to eat, drink coffee, knit stockings, play cards and listen to music on the radio. And anyone wanting the other heroic and noble life, and having it in them, anyone venerating great writers or venerating the saints, is a fool and a Don Quixote. Good. And my experience, my friend, was exactly the same! I was a gifted girl, destined to live according to high ideals, to make high demands on myself and to carry out worthy tasks. I had the ability to take on great responsibilities, to be the wife of a king, the lover of a revolutionary, the sister of a genius, the mother of a martyr. But all that life allowed me to become was a courtesan of reasonably good taste, and even that was made difficult enough for me! That is how I fared. For quite a while I was disconsolate, for a long time I sought to blame myself. Surely, I thought, when all's said and done, life must always be right. If life treated my beautiful dreams with derision, my dreams must simply have been stupid and wrong, I thought. But that was of no help at all. And since I had good eyes and ears, and a rather inquisitive nature, I took a really close look at so-called life, at people I knew and my neighbours, fifty or more individuals and their fates. And what did I see, Harry? That my dreams had been right, a thousand times right, just as yours were, whereas life, reality, was wrong. That a woman of my kind should have no alternative but to grow old sitting at a typewriter, working pointlessly and for a pittance in the service of someone well paid, or to marry someone like that for the sake of his money, or else to become a kind of whore - all that seemed just as wrong as someone lonely, shy and in despair like you being forced to reach for his razor. The misery I went through was perhaps more financial and moral, yours more intellectual and spiritual, but our journeys were the same. Do you think I'm incapable of understanding your fear of the foxtrot, your distaste for bars and dance floors, your resistance to jazz music and all that sort of stuff? I understand it all only too well, just as I do your disgust with politics, your sadness at the way the parties and the press ramble on and kick up a fuss about things, your despair over wars, the one there has just been and those still to come, and about modern habits of thinking, reading, building, making music, celebrating things and providing education! You are right, Steppenwolf, a thousand times right, and yet you must perish. You are far too demanding, too hungry for today's straightforward, cosy world, satisfied as it is with so little. You have one dimension too many for its liking, so it will spit you out. It is impossible for anyone wishing to live and enjoy life in today's world to be like you or me. It is no home, this fine world, for people like us who, instead of nonsensical noise, demand music; instead of pleasure, joy; instead of money, soul; instead of industrial production, genuine labour; instead of frivolity, genuine passion ...'

  She looked down at the ground, deep in thought.

  'Hermione!' I exclaimed lovingly. 'How well you see things, dear sister! And yet you taught me the foxtrot! What do you mean, however, by saying that people like us, people with one dimension too many, are unable to live in this world? What is it that prevents them? Is it only true of the present day, or was it always the case?'

  'I don't know. To be fair to the world I'd like to think that it is merely true of the present day, just a sickness, a temporary misfortune. The political leaders are resolutely and successfully working to bring about the next war while the rest of us are dancing the foxtrot, earning money and eating fancy chocolates. In an age like this the world is bound to look well and truly lousy. Let's hope other ages were better and will be better again, richer, broader, deeper. But all that's of little use to us. And perhaps it has always been like this ...'

  'Always like today? Always a world fit for politicians, conmen, waiters and playboys, a world where there is no air fit for human beings to breathe?'

  'Who knows? I don't, nobody does. It makes no difference anyway. But now I'm wondering what it must have been like for your great favourite Mozart, whom you've told me about from time to time, even reading to me from his letters. How was it for him? Who was ruling the world in his day, creaming off the best, setting the tone, and considered important? Was it Mozart or the profit-seekers, Mozart or shallow, run-of-the-mill types? And how did he die? How did they bury him? And I think it has perhaps always been like that and always will be. And the subject they call "World History" in schools and the things you have to learn off by heart in them in order to be educated - all those heroes, geniuses, great deeds and sentiments - is just a confidence trick devised by the schoolteachers for the purposes of education and to give the children something to keep them occupied during the prescribed years of schooling. It has always been the case and always will be that time and the world, wealth and power belong to those who are petty and shallow, whereas the rest, the real human beings, have nothing. Nothing other than death.'

  'Otherwise absolutely nothing?'

  'No, they have eternity.'

  'You mean they achieve fame, their names going down to posterity?'

  'No, little wolf, not fame. Is fame of any value? Surely you don't think all really authentic and complete human beings have achieved fame and are known to posterity?'

  'No, of course not.'

  'So we are not talking about fame. Fame wouldn't exist if it weren't for education. It's only of concern to schoolteachers. Oh no, we are not talking about fame, but what I call eternity. Believers call it the kingdom of God. The way I see it, all of us more demanding people, those of us who long for something better and have that one dimension too many, would be incapable of living if, apart from this world's atmosphere, there weren't another air to breathe; if, apart from time, eternity didn't also exist, the kingdom of authentic life. Mozart's music is a part of it, as are the poems of your great writers. So too are the saints who performed miracles, died as martyrs and set a great example to people. But the image of every authentic act, the strength of every authentic emotion, are just as much a part of eternity, even if nobody knows about them, witnesses them, writes them down and preserves them for posterity. There is no such thing as posterity in eternity, only contemporaneity.'

  'You are right,' I said.

  'True believers,' she continued, deep in thought, 'of course knew more than anyone about this. That's why they established the saints and what they call the communion of saints. The saints, they are the authentic human beings, the Saviour's younger brethren. Our lives are one long journey towards them; our every good deed, every bold thought, every act of love is a stage along that road. In times gone by painters portrayed the communion of saints in the setting of a golden heaven where all was radiant, beautiful and full of peace, which is precisely what I earlier called "eternity". It is the realm beyond time and appearances. That is where we belong, it is the home we are striving with all our heart to reach, Steppenwolf, and that's why we long for death. It is where you will rediscover your Goethe, your Novalis and Mozart, and I my saints, St Christopher, St Philip Neri and all the rest. There are lots of saints who were bad sinners to begin with. Sin too can be a pathway to sanctity, sin and vice. Don't laugh, but I often think even my friend Pablo might be a secret saint. Sadly, Harry, we have to grope our way through so much filth and rubbish in order to reach home! And we have no one to show us the way. Homesickness is our only guide.'

  As she uttered these final words her voice had become quite quiet again, and now all was peacefully silent in my room. The gilt lettering on the spines of the many books that made up my library was gleaming in the rays of the setting sun. Taking Hermione's head in my hands, I kissed her forehead, then rested her cheek against mine, as a brother might his sister's. We remained like this for a moment.
I would have much preferred to stay close to her in this way and not to venture out again that day, but Maria had promised to spend the night with me, the last one before the Grand Ball.

  On the way to meet her, however, I wasn't thinking of Maria but only about what Hermione had said. All those thoughts, it seemed to me, were not hers but perhaps my own which she, perceptive as she was, had read and digested and was now returning to me, having shaped them in such a way that they struck me as fresh. I was particularly thankful to her for having put into words during that hour together the idea of eternity. It was vital to me since I could not live without it, or die either. That day, at the hands of my friend and dancing teacher, my faith in a sacred afterlife, a timeless realm, a world of everlasting value and divine substance, had been restored. I could not help thinking of my Goethe dream, of the image of the wise old man laughing his non-human laughter and amusing his immortal self at my expense. Only now did I understand that laughter of Goethe, the laughter of the Immortals. It had no object, this laughter. It was pure light, pure brightness; it was what remains when an authentic human being has lived through humankind's sufferings, vices, errors, passions and misunderstandings and managed to break through into the realm of eternity, into outer space. And 'eternity' was none other than the redemption of time, so to speak, its restoration to a state of innocence, its retransformation into space.

  I looked for Maria in the place where we used to eat on our evenings together, but she had not yet arrived. Waiting in that quiet pub in the suburbs, sitting at the table that was already laid, my thoughts were still of the conversation with Hermione. All the ideas that had arisen in it seemed so deeply familiar, so well known to me for such a long time, it was as if they had been drawn from the well of my own most private imagery and mythology! The Immortals, remote icons now, living in timeless space, immersed in crystalline eternity like ether, and the cool clarity, starlike in its radiance, of this extraterrestrial world - how come all of this seemed so familiar to me? On reflection, what occurred to me were passages from Mozart's Cassations and Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and it seemed to me that this music was permeated with the same cool, bright, starry radiance and the same vibrant, ethereal clarity. Yes, that was it. This music was rather like time frozen to become space, and it was suffused with a never-ending, superhuman serenity, a laughter that was eternal and divine. Oh yes, and this was where the aged Goethe of my dream fitted in perfectly! All at once I could hear this fathomless laughter all around me, could hear the Immortals laughing. I sat there spellbound. Spellbound, I felt for the pencil in my waistcoat pocket and, looking around for some paper, saw the wine list in front of me on the table. Turning it over, I started to write on the reverse, lines of poetry that I rediscovered in my pocket only the next day. They read like this:

  The Immortals

  Time and again we spot the rising fumes,

  Products of high-pressure life on earth;

  All its drunken excess, its misery and dearth,

  Bloodstained smoke from countless hearty meals

  For those condemned to die; fits of carnal lust;

  Hands that murder, make money and pray;

  Teeming masses, whipped up by fear and greed,

  All emitting a rank, stuffy, warm and acrid dust,

  The breath of bliss and rampant lechery;

  Devouring their own flesh and spitting it out,

  Devising future wars and pleasing forms of art,

  Painting the brothel red even as it burns,

  Gorging, stuffing, whoring their infantile way

  Through the gaudy, tawdry fairground array

  That's born afresh for each of them in turn,

  But one day will for each to dust return.

  Unlike you we've found ourselves a home

  Up in the starry ether, bright and cold.

  Oblivious to the passing hours and days,

  We're neither male nor female, young nor old.

  To us your murderous and lecherous ways,

  Your fears, your ecstasies and sins

  Are merely a show like the circling suns,

  And every day is as long as the last.

  While you fret and fidget we quietly slumber,

  Inhaling the icy cold of outer space,

  Or quietly gaze at stars without number

  And the heavenly dragon, our friend.

  Our life is eternal, cool and unchanging;

  Cool and star-bright, our laughter knows no end.

  Then Maria arrived and, after a cheerful meal together, I went with her to our small rented room. That evening, Maria was more beautiful, warmer and more intimate than ever before, and I savoured the caresses and love-play she lavished on me, thinking them the ultimate in passionate abandon.

  'Maria,' I said, 'only a goddess is as extravagant with her favours as you are tonight. Don't go wearing us both out, after all it's the masked ball tomorrow. What kind of partner are you going with? I fear he may be a fairy-tale prince and you'll be seduced by him, my little flower, never more to return to me. Tonight you are making love to me almost as devoted lovers do for the last time when they are about to part.' Pressing her lips right inside my ear, she whispered:

  'Don't say a word, Harry. Any time may be the last time. When Hermione takes you, you'll never return to me. Perhaps she will take you tomorrow.'

  I never experienced the characteristic feeling of those days, their strangely bitter-sweet alternating mood, more powerfully than in the night before the ball. Happiness was what I experienced as a result of Maria's beauty and her winning ways; the opportunity to relish, feel and breathe countless sensual delights that I, as someone getting on in years, had never known until now; a chance to splash around like a child, rocked by gentle waves of pleasure. And yet this was only on the surface. Inside me, everything was laden with meaning, tension and destiny. While amorously and tenderly engaged in the touching sweet nothings of lovemaking, seemingly afloat in a warm bath of pure happiness, in my heart I could feel my destiny propelling me forwards at a headlong pace, whisking me along at a gallop like a frightened steed towards the abyss into which I would plunge, filled with fear and longing, in total surrender to death. In much the same way that only a little while ago I had still been shyly and timidly resisting the agreeable frivolity of exclusively sensual lovemaking and feeling afraid of Maria's radiant beauty, all the benefits of which she was willing to lavish upon me, so now I was feeling afraid of death. However, I knew that this fear I was experiencing would soon turn to willing and liberating surrender.

  While we were silently absorbed in the energetic play of our lovemaking, more intimately at one with each other than ever, my soul was already taking leave of Maria and everything that she had meant to me. Before the final curtain, she had taught me childlike trust once more in the surface play of things, how to find joy in the most transient of experiences, how to be both child and animal in the innocence of sexual intercourse, a condition I had known only on rare and exceptional occasions in my earlier life. The reason was that sexuality and the life of the senses almost always had a slightly bitter taste of guilt about them for me, alongside the sweet but worrying taste of forbidden fruit, something anyone with an intellectual bent needs to guard against. Hermione and Maria had now shown me this garden in all its innocence and I had been grateful to be their guest in it, but it was too beautiful, too warm, and the time was fast approaching for me to move on. To go on pursuing the crown of life, to continue to atone for the infinite guilt of life, was what I was destined for. An easy life, an easy love, an easy death were out of the question for me.

  From things the girls had hinted at, I gathered that quite special delights and sensual excesses were being planned for the next day's ball, or immediately after it. Perhaps this was the finish, perhaps Maria was right in sensing that we were lying together for the last time tonight. Tomorrow, perhaps, my fate was to take a new turn. Full of ardent yearning, full of suffocating dread, I clung desperatel
y to Maria, fitfully and hungrily exploring once again every path and all the undergrowth in her garden, once again sinking my teeth into the sweet fruit of the tree of paradise.

  The next day I made up for the sleep I had lost that night. In the morning I went to the public baths, before going home totally exhausted. There, having shut out the daylight from my bedroom, I discovered in my pocket, as I was undressing, my poem. Forgetting it again, I immediately lay down and slept right through the day. Maria, Hermione and the masked ball were forgotten too. Waking up in the evening, it was only when having a shave that I realized the ball was already due to start in an hour and I needed to look among my things for a dress shirt. I finished dressing in good spirits and went out for a meal before things began.

  This was to be the first masked ball I had participated in, for although I had now and again attended such festivities in earlier years, sometimes even finding them fun, I had not joined in the dancing but merely been an onlooker. And it had always struck me as strange that other people should talk about them and look forward to them so enthusiastically. Today's ball was now a special event for me too and I was looking forward to it, if somewhat nervously, with eager anticipation. I decided, since I had no partner to take with me, to leave it late before going, which is what Hermione had also recommended.

  In recent times I had seldom been to the Steel Helmet, my former refuge where disillusioned men sat whiling away their evenings, supping their wine and playing at being bachelors. It no longer suited the style of life I was now leading. That evening, however, I was drawn to it willy-nilly. My current mood, a mixture of nervousness and gaiety resulting from the sense that my fate was about to be decided and the time had come to say my farewells, meant that all the stations of my life, all the places steeped in memory, were once again bathed in that painfully beautiful light that attaches to things past. And this was the case with the small, smoke-filled pub where, not long ago, I had still been a regular; where, not long ago, that crude narcotic, a bottle of country wine, was all I needed to get through one more night in my lonely bed and make life bearable for one more day. Since then I had been sampling other substances, stronger stimulants, and savouring poisons that were sweeter. It was with a smile on my face that I now entered the old place to a welcome greeting from the landlady and nods all round from the taciturn regulars. The roast chicken I had been recommended arrived and my rustic tumbler was filled to the brim with crystal-clear young wine from Alsace. The scrubbed white wooden tables and the old yellow panelling had a familiar, friendly look about them. And as I ate and drank I had the increasingly strong sensation of time running out, of formally taking my leave of things and scenes with which my previous life had been inextricably entwined. Never having managed to tear myself away from them fully, I now felt the time was almost ripe for me to make the break, and the feeling was at once sweet and painfully intense. So-called 'modern' individuals call this sentimentality. They are no longer fond of inanimate things, even those most sacred to them, their cars, which they hope to exchange for a better model as soon as possible. These modern individuals are well drilled, efficient, healthy, cool and muscular. They will give a splendid account of themselves in the next war. I had no desire to emulate them. Neither modern nor old-fashioned, I had dropped out of time and was drifting along close to death, and willing to die. I had nothing against sentimental feelings; I was pleased and thankful that this burned-out heart of mine could still experience feelings of any kind. So I luxuriated in my memories of the old pub, my fondness for its clumsy old chairs, its smell of smoke and wine, the warm glow of familiarity and something akin to homeliness that all these things brought to me. It is beautiful to take leave of things. It puts you in a gentle frame of mind. I felt a fondness for the hard chair I was sitting on and for my rustic tumbler, a fondness for the cool, fruity taste of the wine from Alsace, a fondness for each and everyone known to me in that room, for the faces of the drinkers perched dreamily on the bar stools, those disillusioned figures I had long thought of as my brothers. What I was experiencing here were the sentimental feelings of a typical bourgeois, given just a touch of added spice by an old-fashioned, romantic attachment to the atmosphere of pubs that stemmed from my boyhood, when such establishments with their wines and cigars were still forbidden things, strange and glorious. Yet no Steppenwolf reared up and bared his teeth, threatening to tear my sentimental feelings to shreds. I went on sitting there peacefully, basking in the glow of the past, in the now feeble rays of a sun that had already set.