Steppenwolf (13 page)

Thus, in the early hours, in a remote outlying district of town that I hardly knew, I found myself entering a pub where, behind the windows, I could hear loud dance music. As I went in, I read on the old sign above the entrance: ‘The Black Eagle’. Drinking hours were unrestricted that night, and inside the place was packed with people, full of smoke, the smell of wine and the loud cries of the drinkers. In the large room at the back people were dancing; the music was in full swing there. I stayed in the room at the front where the customers were without exception ordinary folk, some of them poorly clad, whereas in the ballroom at the rear I also glimpsed the odd fashionably dressed figure. Carried along by the throng of people, I found myself pushed across the room and ended up squashed against a table near the bar. There, on the bench by the wall, sat an attractive, wan-looking girl in a thin, low-cut little ball-dress, a faded flower in her hair. When she saw me coming the girl gave me a friendly, attentive look, then smiled as she moved a bit to one side to make room for me.

‘May I?’ I asked, sitting down beside her.

‘Certainly, dear,’ she said. ‘And who are you, then?’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I can’t possibly go home, I can’t, I can’t. I want to stay here, next to you, if you’ll let me. No, I can’t go home.’

She nodded as if understanding me and, as she nodded, I contemplated the lock of hair that ran down from her forehead past her ear, noticing that the faded flower she wore there was a camellia. Over in the back room the music was blaring out, while at the bar the waitresses were hastily calling out their orders.

‘Just you stay here,’ she said in a soothing voice. ‘Why is it you can’t go home, then?’

‘I can’t. There is something waiting for me at home. I just can’t. It’s too terrible.’

‘Then let it wait, and stay here. Come on, give your glasses a clean first; you can’t see a thing like that. There, give me your hanky. Now what shall we have to drink? Burgundy?’

She cleaned my glasses for me. Only now could I see her clearly: her pale, firm face with the lips painted blood-red, her bright grey eyes, her smooth, cool forehead, the short, tight lock of hair in front of her ear. In a kind, though slightly mocking, manner she took me under her wing, ordering the wine. Then, as we clinked glasses, she looked down at my shoes.

‘My God, where have you been, then? You look as though you’ve walked it here from Paris! You don’t go to a dance looking like that!’

I answered yes and no, laughed a little, and let her talk. I was amazed to find that I liked her a lot since until now I had avoided young girls like her, if anything viewing them with suspicion. The way she behaved towards me was exactly what I needed at this point to make me feel good, and in fact it has been like that whenever we have been together since. She treated me with precisely the degree of protectiveness I required, but poked fun at me too, just as judiciously. Ordering a sandwich, she commanded me to eat it. Pouring me a glass of wine, she told me to take a drink from it, but not too quickly. Then she praised me for being so obedient.

‘There’s a good boy,’ she said, encouraging me. ‘That wasn’t so difficult, was it? I bet it’s a long time since you last had to obey orders from somebody, isn’t it?’

‘You win. How did you know that?’

‘Easy. Obeying orders is like eating and drinking; anyone who has gone without either for a long spell will think there’s nothing quite like it. It’s true, isn’t it: you like obeying me?’

‘Very much. You know everything.’

‘That’s not difficult in your case, my friend. I might even be able to tell you just what it is you are so afraid of, waiting for you there at home. But you yourself know what it is, so we don’t need to talk about it, do we? What nonsense! People either hang themselves, in which case – well, they go ahead and hang themselves, no doubt for a good reason. Or they remain alive, in which case all they have to worry about is living. It’s as simple as that.’

‘Oh, if only it were that simple!’ I cried. ‘I swear to God I’ve done enough worrying about living, and it’s got me nowhere. Hanging oneself may be difficult, I don’t know, but living is much, much more difficult. God only knows how difficult it is.’

‘On the contrary, it’s child’s play, as you will see. We’ve already made a start: you’ve cleaned your glasses and had something to eat and drink. Now we’ll go and give your trousers and shoes a bit of a brushing; they could certainly do with it. And then you’re going to shimmy with me.’

‘You see, I was right after all!’ I exclaimed eagerly. ‘Nothing grieves me more than being unable to carry out one of your orders, but this one is beyond me. I can’t shimmy; I can’t waltz or do the polka either, or any of those things, whatever you call them. In all my life I’ve never learned how to dance. Not everything is as simple as you say it is. Don’t you see that now?’

A smile appeared on the blood-red lips of the beautiful girl as she shook her firm head of boyish hair. Looking at her, it seemed to me at first that she resembled Rosa Kreisler, the first girl I had fallen in love with as a young boy, and yet she had been swarthy and dark-haired. No, I couldn’t tell who this stranger of a girl reminded me of; all I knew was that it was someone from my very early youth, my boyhood days.

‘Don’t be so hasty,’ she cried. ‘Gently does it! So you can’t dance? Not at all? Not even a one-step? And yet you claim to have gone to heaven knows how much trouble to make something of your life! You were telling a fib when you said that, my lad, and
at your age people shouldn’t still be telling fibs. Come on, how can you say you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to make something of your life when you don’t even want to dance?’

‘But what if I just can’t? I’ve never learned how to.’

She laughed.

‘But you have learned to read and write, haven’t you, and you’ve learned arithmetic; probably Latin and French too, all sorts of stuff like that? I bet you spent ten or twelve years at school, then quite possibly went to university into the bargain. For all I know, you may even have a doctorate and can speak Chinese or Spanish. You see? But you’ve never managed to spare a bit of time and money for a few dance lessons! There, I told you so!’

‘It was my parents,’ I said, trying to justify myself. ‘They got me to learn Latin and Greek and all that stuff. But they never made me learn to dance; it wasn’t the fashionable thing to do in our family. My parents themselves never went dancing.’

She gave me a really icy look, full of disdain. Again I saw something in her face that reminded me of the earliest days of my youth.

‘I see, so it’s your parents who must take the blame! Did you also ask their permission to come to the Black Eagle tonight? Did you? They are long since dead, you say? Well then! If from sheer obedience to them you refused to learn to dance in your youth, that’s all right with me, though I don’t believe you were such a model son back then. But what about afterwards, what did you get up to in all the years afterwards?’

‘Oh,’ I confessed, ‘I’m not sure myself now. I went to university, made music, read books, wrote books, travelled –’

‘You have strange ideas of what it means to live! So you’ve always done difficult and complicated things, never once learning how to do the simple ones? No time for them? No desire? Well, fair enough, I’m not your mother, thank God. But then to pretend
that you’ve given life a serious try and found it worthless, that simply won’t do!’

‘Don’t take me to task,’ I pleaded. ‘I don’t need you to tell me I’m mad.’

‘Go on with you! Don’t try to fool me. You’re not the least bit mad, Herr Professor; indeed, you’re nowhere near mad enough for my liking! You strike me as clever in a stupid kind of way, as true professors are. Come on, have another sandwich. Afterwards you can tell me more about yourself.’

She got me another sandwich, put some salt on it and a little mustard, cut a bit off for herself and ordered me to eat. I ate. I would have done anything she ordered me to, anything apart from dancing. It did me a power of good to obey someone, to sit next to someone who was questioning me, giving me orders and taking me to task. If only the professor and his wife had done that to me a few hours ago, I would have been spared a great deal. But no, it was a good thing they hadn’t, because then I would have missed a great deal too!

‘By the way, what’s your name?’ she suddenly asked.

‘Harry.’

‘Harry? That’s a little boy’s name! And a little boy is what you are, Harry, in spite of the odd grey patch in your hair. You’re a little boy, and you should have somebody to keep a bit of an eye on you. I won’t mention dancing again, but what about the state of your hair? Haven’t you got a wife, or a sweetheart?’

‘I’ve no wife now; we’re divorced. I do have a sweetheart, but she doesn’t live here. I very rarely see her; we don’t get on very well with one another.’

She whistled softly through her teeth.

‘It strikes me you must be a really difficult man if no woman can stick it out with you. But tell me now, what went wrong tonight specially? What made you wander the streets in a daze like that? Did you have a row? Had you gambled away all your money?’

I had some difficulty explaining why.

‘You see,’ I began, ‘it was actually something or nothing. I’d been invited to dinner at the home of a professor – though I’m not one myself – and I ought really not to have gone. I’m not used to that kind of thing any more, sitting and chatting with people. I’ve forgotten how. What’s more, even as I entered the place I sensed that things would turn out badly. When hanging up my hat, the thought already occurred to me that I might need to take it back again in no time at all. And you see, at this professor’s, there happened to be a picture on the table, a stupid picture that annoyed me –’

‘What sort of picture?’ she asked, interrupting me. ‘Why were you annoyed?’

‘Well, it was supposed to represent Goethe, you know, the great writer Goethe. But it wasn’t Goethe as he looked in real life – actually we have no idea how he looked exactly, he’s been dead a hundred years. No, some modern artist or other had produced a smart, well-groomed version of Goethe as he imagined him, and his picture annoyed me. I’m not sure whether you can understand why, but I found it horribly repugnant.’

‘Don’t worry, I can very well understand why. Go on.’

‘I was already at loggerheads with the professor. He’s a great patriot, as nearly all professors are, and during the war he did his bit to help deceive the nation’s people – all in good faith, of course. But I’m an opponent of war. Well, no matter, let me go on. Of course, I needn’t have looked at the picture at all –’

‘You can say that again.’

‘But in the first place, I felt really sorry for Goethe. You see, I’m very, very fond of him. And then one way or another I thought – I um … the thing is I thought, or rather felt, something along the lines of: Here I am, sitting in the home of people I regard as like-minded, who I assume will have a similar liking for Goethe and pretty much the same image of him as me, and I
now find they’ve got this tasteless, adulterated, saccharine picture on display. And, oblivious to the fact that the spirit of the picture is exactly the opposite of Goethe’s, they find it splendid. They think it is wonderful – fair enough, they are of course entitled to their opinion – but as for me, any faith I have in these people, any friendship with them, any feeling of kinship or solidarity is immediately over and done with. Besides, we weren’t such great friends anyway. So at that point I became really angry and sad, realizing that I was entirely on my own and that no one understood me. Do you see what I mean?’

‘Of course, Harry, it’s not difficult. And then what? Did you fling the picture at them, hit them on the head with it?’

‘No, I cursed and swore, then I rushed off, intending to go home, but –’

‘But there would have been no mummy waiting there to comfort her stupid baby boy, would there, or to give him a good telling-off. Oh dear, Harry, you almost make me feel sorry for you. You’re a real big baby if there ever was one!’

I certainly was. I could see that now, or so it seemed to me. She gave me a glass of wine to drink. She was really mothering me, but from time to time I noticed momentarily how beautiful and young she was.

‘So,’ she began again, ‘so famous old Goethe died a hundred years ago and our Harry, who is very fond of him, conjures up this wonderful picture of him in his head, imagining how he may have looked, as Harry is of course perfectly entitled to, that’s right, isn’t it? But the artist, who is also mad about Goethe and creates his own image of him, isn’t entitled to; nor is the professor or anyone else at all, because that doesn’t suit Harry. That’s something he can’t put up with. It makes him curse and swear, then he rushes off! If he had enough sense, he would simply laugh at the artist and the professor. If he were mad, he would chuck their picture of Goethe straight back in their faces. But
since he’s just a little boy he runs off home, meaning to hang himself … I can well understand your story, Harry. It’s a funny story. It makes me laugh. Hey, hold on, don’t drink so quickly. You should take your time with burgundy, otherwise you’ll get too hot. But then you need to be told everything, don’t you, my little lad?’

She had a look of strict admonition on her face, just like that of a sixty-year-old governess.

‘Indeed I do,’ I said contentedly. ‘Go on, tell me, just tell me anything.’

‘What am I supposed to tell you?’

‘Anything you like.’

‘All right, I’ll tell you something. For an hour now you’ve been listening to me using the familiar form “du”, yet you are still addressing me formally as “Sie”. Just like your blessed Latin and Greek, always making things as complicated as you possibly can. If a girl says “du” to you, and you don’t exactly find her loathsome, you say “du” back to her. There, you’ve learned something new. And secondly: for half an hour now I’ve known that you’re called Harry. Because I asked you your name, that’s why. But you’ve no desire to know what I’m called.’

‘Oh yes I have, I want very much to know your name.’

‘Too late, little man! If we ever meet again, you can ask me once more. I’m not going to tell you today, so there you are. And now I fancy a dance.’