Selected Stories (3 page)

[1913]

Kleist in Thun

K
LEIST
found board and lodging in a villa near Thun, on an island in the river Aare. It
can be said today, after more than a hundred years, with no certainty of course, but
I think he must have walked across a tiny bridge, ten meters in length, and have pulled
a bell rope. Thereupon somebody must have come sliding lizardlike down the stairs
inside, to see who was there. “Have you a room to let?” Briefly then Kleist made himself
comfortable in the three rooms which, at an astonishingly low price, were assigned
to him. “A charming local Bernese girl keeps house for me.” A beautiful poem, a child,
a heroic deed; these three things occupy his mind. Moreover, he is somewhat unwell.
“Lord knows what is wrong. What is the matter with me? It is so beautiful here.”

He writes, of course. From time to time he takes the coach to Berne, meets literary
friends, and reads to them whatever he has written. Naturally they praise him to the
skies, yet find his whole person rather peculiar. He writes
The Broken Jug.
But why all the fuss? Spring has come. Around Thun the fields are thick with flowers,
fragrance everywhere, hum of bees, work, sounds fall, one idles about; in the heat
of the sun you could go mad. It is as if radiant red stupefying waves rise up in his
head whenever he sits at his table and tries to write. He curses his craft. He had
intended to become a farmer when he came to Switzerland. Nice idea, that. Easy to
think up, in Potsdam. Poets anyway think up such things easily enough. Often he sits
at the window.

Possibly about ten o’clock in the morning. He is so much alone. He wishes there was
a voice beside him; what sort of voice? A hand; well, and? A body? But what for? Out
there lies the lake, veiled and lost in white fragrance, framed by the bewitching
unnatural mountains. How it all dazzles and disturbs. The whole countryside down to
the water is sheer garden, it seems to seethe and sag in the bluish air with bridges
full of flowers and terraces full of fragrance. Birds sing so faintly under all the
sun, all the light. They are blissful, and full of sleep. His elbow on the windowsill,
Kleist props his head on his hand, stares and stares and wants to forget himself.
The image of his distant northern home enters his mind, his mother’s face he can see
clearly, old voices, damn it all—he has leapt up and run out into the garden. There
he gets into a skiff and rows out over the clear morning lake. The kiss of the sun
is indivisible, unabating. Not a breath. Hardly a stir. The mountains are the artifice
of a clever scene painter, or look like it; it is as if the whole region were an album,
the mountains drawn on a blank page by an adroit dilettante for the lady who owns
the album, as a souvenir, with a line of verse. The album has pale green covers. Which
is appropriate. The foothills at the lake’s edge are so half-and-half green, so high,
so fragrant. La la la! He has undressed and plunges into the water. How inexpressibly
lovely this is to him. He swims and hears the laughter of women on the shore. The
boat shifts sluggishly on the greenish, bluish water. The world around is like one
vast embrace. What rapture this is, but what an agony it can also be.

Sometimes, especially on fine evenings, he feels that this place is the end of the
world. The Alps seem to him to be the unattainable gates to a paradise high up on
the ridges. He walks on his little island, pacing slow, up and down. The girl hangs
out washing among the bushes, in which a light gleams, melodious, yellow, morbidly
beautiful. The faces of the snow-crested mountains are so wan; dominant in all things
is a final, intangible beauty. Swans swimming to and fro among the rushes seem caught
in the spell of beauty and of the light of dusk. The air is sickly. Kleist wants a
brutal war, to fight in battle; to himself he seems a miserable and superfluous sort
of person.

He goes for a walk. Why, he asks himself with a smile, why must it be he who has nothing
to do, nothing to strike at, nothing to throw down? He feels the sap and the strength
in his body softly complaining. His entire soul thrills for bodily exertion. Between
high ancient walls he climbs, down over whose gray stone screes the dark green ivy
passionately curls, up to the castle hill. In all the windows up here the evening
light is aglow. Up on the edge of the rock face stands a delightful pavilion, he sits
here, and lets his soul fly, out and down into the shining holy silent prospect. He
would be surprised if he were to feel well now. Read a newspaper? How would that be?
Conduct an idiotic political or generally useful debate with some respected official
half-wit or other? Yes? He is not unhappy. Secretly he considers happy alone the man
who is inconsolable: naturally and powerfully inconsolable. With him the position
is one small faint shade worse. He is too sensitive to be happy, too haunted by all
his irresolute, cautious, mistrusted feelings. He would like to scream aloud, to weep.
God in heaven, what is wrong with me, and he rushes down the darkening hill. Night
soothes him. Back in his room he sits down, determined to work till frenzy comes,
at his writing table. The light of the lamp eliminates his image of his whereabouts,
and clears his brain, and he writes now.

On rainy days it is terribly cold and void. The place shivers at him. The green shrubs
whine and whimper and shed rain tears for some sun. Over the heads of the mountains
drift monstrous dirty clouds like great impudent murderous hands over foreheads. The
countryside seems to want to creep away and hide from this evil weather, to shrivel
up. The lake is leaden and bleak, the language of the waves unkind. The storm wind,
wailing like a weird admonition, can find no issue, crashes from one scarp to the
next. It is dark here, and small, small. Everything is pressed right up against one’s
nose. One would like to seize a sledgehammer and beat a way out of it all. Get away
there, get away!

The sun shines again, and it is Sunday. Bells are ringing. The people are leaving
the hilltop church. The girls and women in tight black laced bodices with silver spangles,
the men dressed simply and soberly. They carry prayer books in their hands, and their
faces are peaceful, beautiful, as if all anxiety were vanished, all the furrows of
worry and contention smoothed away, all trouble forgotten. And the bells. How they
peal out, leap out with peals and waves of sound. How it glitters and glows with blue
and bell tones over the whole Sunday sunbathed little town. The people scatter. Kleist
stands, fanned by strange feelings, on the church steps and his eyes follow the movements
of the people going down them. Many a farmer’s child he sees, descending the steps
like a born princess, majesty and liberty bred in the bone. He sees big-muscled, handsome
young men from the country, and what country, not flat land, not young plainsmen,
but lads who have erupted out of deep valleys curiously caverned in the mountains,
narrow often, like the arm of a tall, somewhat monstrous man. They are the lads from
the mountains where cornland and pasture fall steep into the crevasses, where odorous
hot grass grows in tiny flat patches on the brinks of horrible ravines, where the
houses are stuck like specks on the meadows when you stand far below on the broad
country road and look right up, to see if there can still be houses for people up
there.

Sundays Kleist likes, and market days also, when everything ripples and swarms with
blue smocks and the costumes of the peasant women, on the road, and on the narrow
main street. There, on this narrow street, by the pavement, the wares are stacked
in stone vaults and on flimsy stalls. Grocers announce their cheap treasures with
beguiling country cries. And usually on such a market day there shines the most brilliant,
the hottest, the silliest sun. Kleist likes to be pushed hither and thither by the
bright bland throng of folk. Everywhere there is the smell of cheese. Into the better
shops go the serious and sometimes beautiful countrywomen, cautiously, to do their
shopping. Many of the men have pipes in their mouths. Pigs, calves, and cows are hauled
past. There is one man standing there and laughing and forcing his rosy piglet to
walk by beating it with a stick. It refuses, so he takes it under his arm and carries
it onward. The smells of human bodies filter through their clothes, out of the inns
there pour the sounds of carousal, dancing, and eating. All this uproar, all the freedom
of the sounds! Sometimes coaches cannot pass. The horses are completely hemmed in
by trading and gossiping men. And the sun shines dazzling so exactly upon the objects,
faces, cloths, baskets, and goods. Everything is moving and the dazzle of sunlight
must of course move nicely along with everything else. Kleist would like to pray.
He finds no majestic music so beautiful, no soul so subtle as the music and soul of
all this human activity. He would like to sit down on one of the steps which lead
into the narrow street. He walks on, past women with skirts lifted high, past girls
who carry baskets on their heads, calm, almost noble, like the Italian women carrying
jugs he has seen in paintings, past shouting men and drunken men, past policemen,
past schoolboys moving with their schoolboy purposes, past shadowy alcoves which smell
cool, past ropes, sticks, foodstuffs, imitation jewelry, jaws, noses, hats, horses,
veils, blankets, woolen stockings, sausages, balls of butter, and slabs of cheese,
out of the tumult to a bridge over the Aare, where he stops, and leans over the rail
to look down into the deep blue water flowing wonderfully away. Above him the castle
turrets glitter and glow like brownish liquid fire. This might almost be Italy.

At times on ordinary weekdays the whole small town seems to him bewitched by sun and
stillness. He stands motionless before the strange old town hall, with the sharp-edged
numerals of its date cut in the gleaming white wall. It is all so irretrievable, like
the form of a folk song the people have forgotten. Hardly alive, no, not alive at
all. He mounts the enclosed wooden stair to the castle where the old earls lived,
the wood gives off the odor of age and of vanished human destinies. Up here he sits
on a broad, curved, green bench to enjoy the view, but closes his eyes. It all looks
so terrible, as if asleep, buried under dust, with the life gone out of it. The nearest
thing lies as in a faraway veil-like dreaming distance. Everything is sheathed in
a hot cloud. Summer, but what sort of a summer? I am not alive, he cries out, and
does not know where to turn with his eyes, hands, legs, and breath. A dream. Nothing
there. I do not want dreams. In the end he tells himself he lives too much alone.
He shudders, compelled to admit how unfeeling is his relation to the world about him.

Then come the summer evenings. Kleist sits on the high churchyard wall. Everything
is damp, yet also sultry. He opens his shirt, to breathe freely. Below him lies the
lake, as if it had been hurled down by the great hand of a god, incandescent with
shades of yellow and red, its whole incandescence seems to glow up out of the water’s
depths. It is like a lake of fire. The Alps have come to life and dip with fabulous
gestures their foreheads into the water. His swans down there circle his quiet island,
and the crests of trees in dark, chanting, fragrant joy float over—over what? Nothing,
nothing. Kleist drinks it all in. To him the whole dark sparkling lake is the cluster
of diamonds upon a vast, slumbering, unknown woman’s body. The lime trees and the
pine trees and the flowers give off their perfumes. There is a soft, scarcely perceptible
sound down there; he can hear it, but he can also see it. That is something new. He
wants the intangible, the incomprehensible. Down on the lake a boat is rocking; Kleist
does not see it, but he sees the lanterns which guide it, swaying to and fro. There
he sits, his face jutting forward, as if he must be ready for the death leap into
the image of that lovely depth. He wants to perish into the image. He wants eyes alone,
only to be one single eye. No, something totally different. The air should be a bridge,
and the whole image of the landscape a chair back to relax against, sensuous, happy,
tired. Night comes, but he does not want to go down, he throws himself on a grave
that is hidden under bushes, bats whiz around him, the pointed trees whisper as soft
airs pass over them. The grass smells so delicious, blanketing the skeletons of buried
men. He is so grievously happy, too happy, whence his suffocation, his aridity, his
grief. So alone. Why cannot the dead emerge and talk a half hour with the lonely man?
On a summer night one ought really to have a woman to love. The thought of white lustrous
breasts and lips hurls Kleist down the hill to the lakeside and into the water, fully
dressed, laughing, weeping.

Weeks pass, Kleist has destroyed one work, two, three works. He wants the highest
mastery, good, good. What’s that? Not sure? Tear it up. Something new, wilder, more
beautiful. He begins
The Battle of Sempach,
in the center of it the figure of Leopold of Austria, whose strange fate attracts
him. Meanwhile, he remembers his
Robert Guiscard.
He wants him to be splendid. The good fortune to be a sensibly balanced man with
simple feelings he sees burst into fragments, crash and rattle like boulders collapsing
down the landslip of his life. He helps him nevertheless, now he is resolute. He wants
to abandon himself to the entire catastrophe of being a poet: the best thing is for
me to be destroyed as quickly as possible.

What he writes makes him grimace: his creations miscarry. Toward autumn he is taken
ill. He is amazed at the gentleness which now comes over him. His sister travels to
Thun to bring him home. There are deep furrows in his cheeks. His face has the expression
and coloring of a man whose soul has been eaten away. His eyes are more lifeless than
the eyebrows over them. His hair hangs clotted in thick pointed hanks over his temples,
which are contorted by all the thoughts which he imagines have dragged him into filthy
pits and into hells. The verses that resound in his brain seem to him like the croakings
of ravens; he would like to eradicate his memory. He would like to shed his life;
but first he wants to shatter the shells of life. His fury rages at the pitch of his
agony, his scorn at the pitch of his misery. My dear, what is the matter, his sister
embraces him. Nothing, nothing. That was the ultimate wrong, that he should have to
say what was wrong with him. On the floor of his room lie his manuscripts, like children
horribly forsaken by father and mother. He lays his hand in his sister’s, and is content
to look at her, long, and in silence. Already it is the vacant gaze of a skull, and
the girl shudders.