Steppenwolf (14 page)

Since she moved as if to get up, I suddenly felt my spirits sink. I feared she would go and leave me on my own, and I would be back where I started. Just as a toothache that has fleetingly vanished can resurface, burning like fire, my anxiety and dread were back again in a trice. Lord only knows how I had managed to forget what was lying in store for me. Had anything really changed?

‘Stop,’ I cried. ‘I beg you, young lady, not to … uh, sorry … 
I mean, don’t leave me, dear. Of course you can dance, dance as much as you like, but don’t stay away too long. Come back again, dear. Come back again.’

With a laugh, she stood up. I had imagined her to be bigger, but now that she was standing I could see that she was slim but not tall. Again she reminded me of someone, but who? I couldn’t put my finger on it.

‘You’ll come back?’

‘I’ll come back, but I may be gone a while, half an hour or even an hour. I’ll tell you what to do. Close your eyes and get a bit of sleep. That’s just what you need.’

I made room for her to go. Her little dress brushed against my knees; then, as she walked away, I saw her glance at herself in a tiny round pocket mirror, raise her eyebrows and dab her chin with a miniature powder puff before disappearing into the ballroom. Looking around me, I saw strange faces, men smoking, spilled beer on the marble-topped table. All around I could hear shouting and shrieking, and from the next room the noise of dance music. She had told me to get some sleep. What an innocent child! Little did she know how shy a creature sleep was in my experience, even less likely to keep me company than a weasel. And she wanted me to sleep in this funfair of a place, sitting at a table with the clatter of beer mugs on all sides! I sipped at my wine, took a cigar out of my pocket and looked around for matches, but feeling no really strong desire to smoke, I put the cigar down in front of me on the table. ‘Close your eyes,’ she had said. Heaven knows where the girl had got that voice of hers from, that slightly deep, kind voice, like a mother’s. It was good to obey that voice, as I had already discovered. Obediently closing my eyes, I leaned my head against the wall and, with hundreds of raucous sounds ringing in my ears, smiled at the thought of trying to sleep in this of all places. I decided to make my way to the ballroom door and steal a glance inside – after all, I couldn’t
miss seeing my beautiful girl dance. But only now realizing, as I moved my legs under the table, just how immensely tired I felt after wandering the streets for hours, I remained seated. And before I knew it I was already asleep, following mother’s orders to the letter. I slept my fill, unable to get enough of it, and was thankful. And I dreamt, dreamt more clearly and beautifully than I had dreamt for ages. What I dreamt was this: –

I was sitting waiting in an old-fashioned anteroom. All I knew at first was that I had an appointment to see some dignitary or other. Then I suddenly realized that it was none other than Herr von Goethe who was to receive me. Unfortunately I was not there in a private capacity, but as the correspondent of a magazine. I found this very disturbing, unable as I was to understand what had landed me in such a situation. I was also worried by a scorpion that only a moment ago I had seen trying to climb up my leg. Although I had warded off the little black creepy-crawly by shaking myself, I didn’t know where it was now, and I didn’t dare make a grab for it.

I was not sure either whether I’d been granted an audience with Matthison
³
rather than Goethe, but in my dream I must also have confused Matthison with Bürger,
⁴
since I ascribed the Molly poems to him. I would, by the way, have been delighted to meet Molly, whom I imagined to be a wonderful woman: soft, musical, nocturnal. If only I hadn’t been sent there by the editor of that damned magazine! I was getting more and more annoyed at this, and bit by bit my annoyance shifted to Goethe too. Suddenly I found all manner of things to question and criticize
him for. A fine audience this might turn out to be! But as for the scorpion, it was perhaps not so bad, even if it were a possible threat lurking somewhere quite close to me. You could, it seemed to me, put a more friendly interpretation on it. Perhaps, I thought, it had something or other to do with Molly. It might be some sort of harbinger of her, or the creature on her crest: a beautiful, dangerous heraldic creature representing femininity and sin. Might not this creature’s name perhaps be Vulpius?
⁵
However, at this point, a servant threw open the door and, rising from my seat, I went in.

Standing there stiffly was the small, ageing Goethe and – sure enough – the venerable Classic was sporting the sizeable star of some Order on his chest. It seemed he was still in a position of power, still granting audiences, still exercising control over the world from his Weimar museum. For scarcely had he cast eyes on me when, jerkily nodding his head like an old crow, he solemnly declared: ‘Well, I suppose you youngsters find precious little to agree with in our person and all that we are striving to accomplish?’

‘Quite right,’ I said, chilled to the core by the ministerial look in his eye. ‘We youngsters are indeed unable to agree with you, ageing Sir. You are much too solemn for our liking; too vain and pompous; not honest enough, Your Excellency. Not honest enough, that is probably the nub of the matter.’

The little old man thrust his stern face slightly towards me. Suddenly his harsh, tight-lipped official mien gave way to a little smile and he came charmingly alive. All at once my heart beat faster as I remembered the poem ‘Dusk descended from above’,
⁶
realizing that the words of this poem had come from this man
and these lips. At that moment, in fact, I was totally disarmed and unnerved, within an ace of kneeling down in front of him. But I held myself erect as his smiling lips uttered the words: ‘Aha, so you’re accusing me of being dishonest, are you? A fine thing to say, I don’t think! Would you mind going into more detail?’

I was pleased to do so, only too pleased.

‘Just how problematic and desperate a thing human life is, you, Herr von Goethe, like all great minds, clearly recognized and felt: how the splendour of the moment fades miserably; how it is only possible to experience the heights of emotion at the expense of an everyday life lived in a prison house; how this prison-house routine is the mortal enemy of our equally ardent and equally sacred passion for the lost innocence of nature; all the terrible sense of being left hanging in a void, uncertain about everything and condemned to experience things fleetingly, never to the full but always in an experimental, dilettantish fashion; in short, human existence in all its hopelessness, absurdity and heartfelt despair. You recognized all this, from time to time you even confessed to believing that it was so. Yet you spent your whole life preaching the opposite, expressing faith and optimism, and deluding yourself and others into believing that our intellectual and spiritual endeavours are meaningful and of lasting value. You dismissed those who believed in penetrating to the depths, suppressed those voices speaking the desperate truth, your own voice as well as those of Kleist and Beethoven.
⁷
For decades you acted as if accumulating knowledge and collections of things, writing and hoarding letters, as if the whole life you led in Weimar
in your old age really was a way of preserving momentary experiences for all eternity and lending spiritual meaning to things natural. Yet you only succeeded in mummifying the moment and turning nature into a stylized masquerade. That is what we mean when accusing you of dishonesty.’

Deep in thought, the old privy counsellor looked me in the eyes, a smile still playing on his lips.

Then, to my amazement, he said: ‘In that case you must, I suppose, find Mozart’s
Magic Flute
utterly abhorrent.’

And, even before I had time to protest, he went on: ‘The
Magic Flute
pictures life as an exquisite song; it extols our feelings, which are after all transient, as something eternal and divine. Far from agreeing with Messrs von Kleist or Beethoven, it preaches optimism and faith.’

‘I know, I know!’ I cried in a rage. ‘Lord only knows what made you hit on the
Magic Flute
of all things. It is dearer to me than anything on earth! But Mozart didn’t live to be eighty-two. And in his personal life he never aspired to lasting significance or to the well-ordered existence of a stuck-up dignitary like you. He wasn’t so full of his own importance. He sang his divine melodies, was poor, died an early death, impoverished and unappreciated …’

I had run out of breath. Ideally I would have needed to say a thousand things in ten words. Sweat was starting to appear on my brow.

However, Goethe replied amiably: ‘It may well be unforgivable of me to have lived to the age of eighty-two, but I derived less pleasure from doing so than you may think. You are correct in saying that I was always filled with a great desire for lasting significance, and I did constantly fear and battle against death. It is my belief that the struggle against death, the stubborn, unconditional desire for life is what has driven all outstanding human beings to act and live their lives as they did. On the other hand, my young
friend, the fact that one must nevertheless ultimately die is something that I proved at the age of eighty-two just as conclusively as if I had died as a schoolboy. And by way of self-justification, if it helps, I’d like to add that there was a great deal in my make-up that was childlike, a lot of curiosity and playfulness, much delight taken in wasting time. There, and the fact is it took me a fair amount of time to realize that one day the playing had to stop.’

As he said this he smiled slyly, looking positively like a rogue. His figure had grown larger, his stiff posture and his forced expression of dignity had disappeared. And now the air around us was full of nothing but melodies, all of them settings of Goethe poems. Among others I clearly detected Mozart’s ‘The Violet’ and Schubert’s ‘To the Moon’. And Goethe’s face was now young and rosy. He was laughing, now looking so like Mozart, now so like Schubert that he could have been their brother. And the star on his breast was made up entirely of wild flowers, a cowslip bursting forth joyfully and juicily from its centre.

Since the old man’s attempts to evade my questions and accusations in such a jocular manner were not quite to my liking, I gave him a disapproving look. At this point he bent forward, placing his mouth, now completely transformed into the mouth of a child, close to my ear, and whispered softly into it: ‘You are taking old Goethe far too seriously, my lad. Old people who have already died shouldn’t be taken seriously, it’s unfair on them. We Immortals don’t like taking things seriously, we like to have fun. Seriousness, my lad, is a function of time. It arises – this much I’ll divulge to you – when the value of time is overestimated. I too once overestimated the value of time; that’s why I wanted to live to be a hundred. But, you see, there is no time in eternity. Eternity is an instant, just long enough for a prank.’

From now on, in fact, it was quite impossible to talk seriously to the man. He was taking great pleasure in prancing lithely up
and down, making the cowslip in the centre of his star shoot out one moment like a rocket, the next shrink to nothing and disappear. Watching him execute such brilliant steps and figures, I couldn’t help thinking that here at any rate was a man who had not neglected to take dancing lessons. He could dance wonderfully well. Then, suddenly thinking of the scorpion again, or rather of Molly, I called out to Goethe: ‘I say, is Molly not here?’

Goethe laughed out loud. Walking to his desk, he opened a drawer, took out a valuable case made of leather or velvet and, opening it, held it up to my eyes. There, small, immaculate and sparkling on a bed of dark-coloured velvet, lay a tiny woman’s leg, an enchanting leg, slightly bent at the knee, the stretched foot pointing downwards and culminating in the daintiest of toes.

Utterly enamoured, I held out my hand, intending to take hold of the little leg, but just as I was about to seize it with two fingers, the toy limb seemed to make a tiny jerking movement and at once I suspected that it might be the scorpion. Goethe appeared to understand my reaction, seemed indeed deliberately to have placed me in a deep quandary, making me wince, as desire fought inside me against fear. Dangling the charming little scorpion really close to my face, he saw me both yearn for and shrink back from it, and this seemed to give him the greatest of pleasure. While taunting me with this charming, dangerous object he had aged again. He was really ancient now, a thousand years old, his hair white as snow, his withered old man’s face silently laughing. Without making a sound, he was chortling away to himself with the dark, inscrutable kind of humour typical of the very old.

When I woke I had forgotten the dream. Only later did I recall it. I suppose I had slept for about an hour at the pub table. I would never have thought that possible, what with the noise of the
music and the hustle and bustle all around. The dear girl was standing in front of me, one hand on my shoulder.

‘Give me two or three marks,’ she said. ‘I’ve had a bite to eat over there.’

I gave her my purse. She went off with it, returning again soon.

‘There, now I can sit with you a little while longer. Then I’ll have to go. I’ve arranged to meet someone.’

I was startled. ‘Who?’ I quickly asked.

‘A gentleman, Harry my boy. He’s invited me to the Odeon Bar.’

‘I see. I was thinking you wouldn’t leave me on my own.’

‘In that case you ought to have invited me yourself. Someone else has beaten you to it. Never mind, this way you’re saving a fair amount of money. Do you know the Odeon? Nothing but champagne on offer after midnight, leather armchairs, a Negro band, the finest of the fine.’

All this had been far from my thoughts.

‘Oh, why don’t you let me take you out somewhere!’ I begged. ‘I thought it went without saying. After all, we’ve become friends, haven’t we? Let me take you out, anywhere you like, please.’

‘That’s very sweet of you, but don’t you see, a promise is a promise. I’ve agreed to go and I’m going. Don’t you go to any more trouble. Come on, have a bit more to drink, there’s still some wine left in the bottle. Drink it up, then go home like a good boy and get some sleep. Promise me you will.’