Klingsor's Last Summer Read online

  But now, when he tried to recall these past fifteen minutes, he gratefully felt the experience to have been a joyful one. It was progress, a step toward release, a confirmation.

  The doubts he had been feeling about his whole customary world had tormented him and terribly wearied him. He had experienced the miracle that life becomes more meaningful precisely when we lose our grasp of all meanings. But again and again had come the painful doubt whether these experiences were really significant, whether they were no more than minor ripples on the surface of his fatigued and sick mind, basically whims, petty nervous stirrings. Now, last night and today, he had seen that his experience was real. It had radiated out of him and changed him, had drawn another person to him. His solitude was shattered; he was in love again; there was someone whom he could serve, someone to whom he wanted to give pleasure. He could smile again, laugh again.

  The wave passed through him like pain and like voluptuous delight. He trembled with sheer emotion. Life roared in him like surf. Everything was incomprehensible. He opened his eyes wide and saw: trees on a street, slivers of silver in the lake, a running dog, bicyclists—and everything was strange, like a fairy tale, and almost too beautiful. Everything looked as if it had come brand-new out of God’s toy box. Everything existed for him alone, for Friedrich Klein, and he himself existed solely to feel this stream of wonder and pain and joy pouring through himself. There was beauty everywhere, in every rubbish heap by the wayside; there was deep suffering everywhere; God was everything. Yes, all this was God, and in the unimaginably distant past, as a boy, he had once felt Him that way, and had sought Him with his heart whenever he thought “God” and “Almighty.” Let not my heart break with overflowing.

  Once more, from all the forgotten shafts of his life, released memories rushed forth. They came without number: conversations, the period of his engagement, clothes he had worn as a child, vacation mornings during his student days. The memories arranged themselves in circles around certain fixed points: the image of his wife, his mother, Wagner the murderer, Teresina. Passages from classical writers occurred to him, and Latin proverbs that had once moved him in his schooldays, and foolish, sentimental lines from folk songs. The shadow of his father stood behind him. Once again he lived through the time of his mother-in-law’s death. Everything that had ever passed into him through eyes or ears, through people or books, all the delight and the anguish that had been buried within him, seemed to be present again, all at the same time, all stirred together and whirling chaotically but meaningfully. It was all there, all significant; nothing had been lost.

  The pressure became a torture that could not be distinguished from extreme voluptuous pleasure. His heart beat rapidly. Tears filled his eyes. He realized that he was on the verge of madness and yet knew that he would not go mad, while at the same time he was peering into this new psychic landscape of madness with the same astonishment and rapture as into the past, as into the lake or the sky. There too everything was enchanted, mellifluous and full of meaning. He understood why madness, in the minds of great-hearted peoples, was considered sacred. He understood everything; everything spoke to him, everything was revealed to him. There were no words for this state. It was wrong and hopeless to cogitate about it and try to apprehend it in words. The thing was to be receptive, to hold yourself in readiness; then all things, the whole world, could enter into you in an infinite parade as if you were a kind of Noah’s Ark. And then you possessed the world, understood it, were one with it.

  Sadness swept him. If only all men knew this, could experience this! How carelessly people lived, carelessly sinned; how blindly and immoderately people suffered. Had he not been annoyed with Teresina only yesterday? Had he not, only yesterday, hated his wife, hurled accusations against her and tried to blame her for all the suffering in his life? How sad, how stupid, how hopeless. Why, everything was so simple, so good, so meaningful, as soon as you saw things from inside, as soon as you saw the essence dwelling behind everything, saw him, God.

  Here a road forked off to new gardens of the imagination, new forests of imagery. If he turned his present feeling toward the future, a hundred realms of happiness rose up like fireworks and spread open for him and for everyone. There was no need to lament, to accuse, to judge his apathetic, ruined life. Rather, it could be transformed into its opposite, could be seen as full of meaning, full of joy, full of kindliness, full of love. The grace he had just experienced must be radiated out and affect others. Phrases from the Bible came into his mind, and everything he knew about the blessed and the saints. This was how it had always begun, for all of them. They had been led the same harsh and gloomy way as himself, had been cowardly and full of fears until the hour of conversion and illumination. “In the world ye have fear,” Jesus had said to his disciples. But one who had overcome fear no longer lived in the world, but in God, in eternity.

  They had all taught this, all the sages of the entire world, Buddha and Schopenhauer, Jesus, the Greeks. There was only one wisdom, only one faith, only one philosophy: the knowledge that God is within us. How that was twisted and mistaught in schools, churches, books, and scholarly disciplines!

  Klein’s mind flew through the realms of his inner world, his knowledge, his education. Here too, as in his outward life, treasure upon treasure was stored, wellspring upon wellspring; but each was by itself, isolated, dead and worthless. Now, however, struck by the ray of illumination, order, meaning, and shape suddenly appeared in the chaos, creation began, life and relevance leaped from pole to pole. The statements of abstruse contemplation became obvious, obscurities appeared bright, and the multiplication table was transformed into a mystical experience. This world, too, acquired animation and glowed with love. The works of art that he had loved in his younger years reverberated in his mind with fresh enchantment. He saw now that the same key opened the mysterious sphere of art. Art was nothing but regarding the world in a state of grace: illumination. Art was revealing God behind all things.

  Afire with this new blessing, he strode through the world. Every twig on every tree shared in an ecstasy, pointed upward more nobly, hung downward more delicately, was symbol and revelation. Violet shadows of clouds played over the surface of the lake, quivering with frail sweetness. Every stone lay significantly beside its shadow. Never had the world been so beautiful, so deeply and sacredly lovable, or at least never since the mysterious, legendary years of early childhood. “Unless you become as little children…” occurred to him, and he felt: I have become a child again, I have entered into the Kingdom of Heaven.

  When he began to be conscious of fatigue and hunger, he found himself far from the city. Now he remembered where he had come from, what had happened, and that he had run away from Teresina without a word of parting. In the next village, he looked for a restaurant. A small rural tavern with a wooden table in a tiny garden, beneath a cherry laurel, attracted him. He asked for a meal, but they had nothing but wine and bread. How about soup, he asked, or eggs, or ham. No, they did not have such things here. People here were not ordering anything of the sort in these dear times. He had talked first with the woman who ran the tavern, then with a grandmother who was sitting on the stone threshold at the door of the house, mending linen. Now he sat down in the garden, under the deep shade of the tree, with bread and tart red wine. In the adjoining garden, invisible behind a grape arbor and washing on the line, he heard two girls singing. Suddenly a word of the song stabbed his heart, without his grasping what it was. It was repeated in the next verse; it was the name Teresina. The song, a partly comic one, dealt with a girl named Teresina. He made out:

  La sua mamma alla finestra

  Con una voce serpentina:

  Vieni a casa, o Teresina,

  Lasc’ andare quel traditor!

  Teresina! How he loved her. How glorious it was to love.

  He laid his head on the table and dozed, fell asleep and awakened again, several times. It was evening. The woman who ran the tavern came and planted herself in fron
t of the table, perplexed by this patron. He placed money on the table, asked for another glass of wine, and queried her about the song. She became friendly, brought the wine, and stood by. He had her repeat the words of the whole Teresina song, and was particularly delighted with the stanza:

  Io non sono traditore

  E ne meno lusinghero,

  Io son’ figlio d’un ricco signore,

  Son’ venuto per fare l’amor.

  The woman said he could have soup now if he wanted some, she would be cooking it for her husband anyhow; she was expecting him home soon.

  He ate vegetable soup and bread. The husband came home; the late sun faded on the gray stone roofs of the village. He asked for a room and was offered a small chamber with thick, bare stone walls. He took it. Never before had he slept in such a chamber; it seemed to him like the den in some story of robbers. Now he strolled through the village, found a small grocery store still open, bought chocolate and distributed it among the children who were swarming along the single street. They ran after him; parents greeted him; everyone wished him a good night, and he returned the greeting, nodded to all the old and young people who sat on the thresholds and front steps of the houses.

  With pleasure he thought of his chamber in the tavern, that primitive, cavelike den where the ancient mortar was flaking from the gray walls on which nothing useless was hung, no pictures, no mirror, no wallpaper or curtain. He walked through the twilight village as if it were an adventure; everything glowed, everything was filled with secret promise.

  Returning to the osteria, where the tiny public room was dark and deserted, he saw a light coming from a crack, followed it, and entered the kitchen. The room seemed like a cavern in a fairy tale. The sparse light flowed over a red tile floor and before it reached the walls and ceiling ebbed away in dense, warm dusk, and from the enormous, intensely black suspended chimney hood an inexhaustible spring of darkness seemed to flow out.

  The innkeeper’s wife was sitting with the grandmother. The two sat stooped, small, and weak on low, humble stools, their hands resting on their knees. The wife was weeping; both of them ignored Klein as he entered. He sat down on the edge of the table beside remnants of vegetables. A knife gleamed dully; in the glow of light, polished copper pans shone red on the walls. The woman wept; the gray-haired old woman murmured encouragement in the dialect. Gradually Klein understood that there was dissension in the house and that the husband had left again after a quarrel. Klein asked whether the man had struck her, but received no answer. After a while he began to offer consolations. He said the husband would certainly return shortly. The woman said sharply: “Not today and maybe not tomorrow either.” He gave up. The woman sat up straighter. Her weeping stopped. They sat in silence. The simplicity of it all, the lack of discussion, seemed to him wonderful. There had been a quarrel, she had been hurt, had wept. Now it was over; now she sat still and waited. Life would go on. As with children. As with animals. If only you did not talk, did not make simple things complicated, did not turn your soul inside out.

  Klein requested the grandmother to make coffee for all three of them. The women revived; the grandmother promptly put twigs into the fireplace. There was a crackle of breaking wood, of paper, of flame catching. In the sudden flare of the firelight he saw the wife’s face, illuminated from beneath, somewhat woebegone but calmer. She looked into the fire, smiling occasionally. Suddenly she stood up, went slowly over to the faucet, and washed her hands.

  Then all three of them sat at the kitchen table drinking the hot black coffee and an aged juniper liqueur. The women became livelier, told stories and asked questions, laughed at Klein’s painful and incorrect Italian. It seemed to him he had been here for a long, long time. Strange, how much room there was for so many things these days. Whole eras and periods of life fitted into an afternoon; every hour seemed overladen with the cargo of life. For brief seconds a fear flashed within him like sheet lightning that fatigue and consumption of his vitality might assail him with hundredfold intensity and burn him away like the sun licking a drop of water from a rock. In those fleeting but recurrent moments of alien lightning he saw himself living, felt and saw inside his brain, and observed there the quickened oscillations of an inexpressibly complicated, delicate, and precious apparatus vibrating with multiple tasks, like a highly sensitive watchworks shielded behind glass because a grain of dust suffices to disturb it.

  He learned that the innkeeper put his money into uncertain ventures, stayed away from home a great deal, and had affairs with women. The couple had no children. While Klein made efforts to find the Italian words for simple questions, the delicate watchworks clicked restlessly away behind glass, in a subtle fever, instantly including every lived moment in its calculations and considerations.

  Before the night wore on too long, he stood up to go to bed. He shook hands with both women, and the young wife looked probingly at him while the grandmother fought not to yawn. Then he groped his way up the dark staircase, finding the steps astonishingly high, to his room. There he found water in a pitcher, washed his face, for a moment felt the lack of soap, slippers, and nightshirt. He spent another quarter hour at the window, leaning on the granite sill, then undressed completely and lay down in the hard bed. The coarse sheets delighted him and brought a flood of pleasant rustic images. Was this not the only right thing, to live in a room consisting of four stone walls, without the ridiculous paraphernalia of wallpapers, ornaments, furniture, without all those exaggerated and basically barbarian incidentals? A roof overhead against the rain, a simple blanket over you against the cold, bread and wine or milk against hunger, the sun to wake you in the morning, the darkness to lull you to sleep at evening—did a man need more?

  But as soon as he had put out the light, the house and the room and the village vanished. He was standing by the lake with Teresina again and talking with her. He had difficulty remembering today’s conversation and was doubtful about what he had actually said to her, even wondered whether the whole meeting had not been a dream, an illusion of his. The darkness felt good—God only knew where he would wake in the morning.

  A noise at the door waked him. Softly, the latch was moved; a thread of light entered and hesitated in the crack. Startled and yet at the moment understanding, he looked toward it, not yet fully in the present. Then the door opened; barefoot, a candle in her hand, the innkeeper’s wife stood there, silent. She looked searchingly over at him, and he smiled and held out his arms, without thought. Then she was beside him and her dark hair lay beside his face on the rough pillow.

  They did not say a word. Inflamed by her kiss, he drew her to him. The sudden nearness and human warmth against his chest, the strong, unfamiliar arm around his neck, moved him strangely—how alien, how unknown, how painfully new this warmth and closeness was for him—how alone he had been, how terribly alone, how long alone! Abysses and infernos had gaped between himself and all the rest of the world, and now a stranger had come to him, in wordless trust and in need of comfort, a poor, neglected woman just as he had for years been a neglected and intimidated man, and she clung to his neck and gave and took and greedily sucked a drop of delight out of the barrenness of life, drunkenly but shyly sought his mouth, let her sadly delicate fingers play in his, rubbed her cheek against his. He raised himself above her pallid face and kissed her on both closed eyes and thought: she thinks she is taking and does not know that she is giving; in her loneliness she has fled to me and does not suspect my loneliness. Only now did he see, for he had been sitting blindly beside her all evening long, that she had long slender hands and fingers, graceful shoulders, and a face full of anxiety over her fate and full of blind hunger for children, and found that she possessed a shy knowledge of little, delicious ways and practices of lovemaking.

  He also realized, with sorrow, that he himself had remained a boy and a beginner in love, had become resigned in the course of a long, lukewarm marriage, was timid and yet without innocence, lustful yet full of guilt. Even while he clung wi
th thirsty kisses to the woman’s mouth and breast, even while he felt her hand tenderly and almost maternally on his hair, he was already anticipating disappointment and was conscious of a pressure around his heart. He felt the horror of anxiety returning, and with it there flowed through him like icy water the fear and the foreboding that deep within himself he was incapable of love, that love was a kind of evil spell that could bring him only torment. Even before the brief storm of lust had subsided, timidity and suspicion cast an evil eye upon his mind. Already he was disgruntled that he had been taken instead of taking and conquering. The anticipation of disgust came before disgust itself.

  Silently, the woman slipped away, taking her candle. Klein lay in the darkness, and in the midst of satiation the moment arrived, that evil moment he had feared hours before during those premonitory flashes of sheet lightning. The excessively ornate music of his new life now found only tired and mistuned strings within him; his feelings of pleasure suddenly had to be paid for with lassitude and dread. With pounding heart, he felt all his enemies lurking in ambush; sleeplessness, depression, and the glimmerings of nightmares. The rough sheets burned against his skin; moonlight glared through the window. Impossible to stay here, helpless before the coming torments. Ah, here it was again, the guilt and the dread were coming again, the sadness and despair. All that he had overcome, the whole of the past, was returning. There was no salvation.

  Hastily, he dressed, without light, found his dusty shoes at the door, stole down the stairs and out of the house, and walked swiftly, desperately, on weary, sagging legs, through the village and the night, despising himself, lashing himself, hating himself.