Steppenwolf (22 page)

Tenderly Hermione gazed into my eyes, her own eyes suddenly darkening in the way they could: splendid, fearsome eyes! Slowly, searching for her words one by one and piecing them together, she said – so quietly that I had to strain to hear her:

‘Today I want to tell you something, something I have known for a long time. You too already know what it is, but it may be that you have not yet said it to yourself in so many terms. I’m now going to tell you what I know about me and you and our destiny. You, Harry, were an artist and thinker, someone full of joy and faith, always on the trail of great and eternal ideas, never content with minor attractions. However, the more life brought you to your senses and turned your attention to yourself, the more acute your situation became and the more profound your
suffering, anxiety and desperation until you were up to your neck in them. Then all the beautiful and sacred things you knew, loved and revered, all your earlier faith in human beings and the high achievements they were destined for were of no avail, worthless, shattered to pieces. Your faith had no air left in which to get its breath. And suffocating is a hard way to die. Is that right, Harry? Is that what fate decreed for you?’

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.