Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) (5 page)

‘Yes! It is Coppelius,’ father confirmed with a weak and broken voice. Tears streamed from mother’s eyes.

‘But father, father!’ she cried, ‘must it be so?’

‘This one last time,’ he replied, ‘it’s the last time he comes here, I promise you. Just go, go with the children! Go! Go to bed! Goodnight!’

I felt as if I’d been pressed into cold, heavy stone – my breath stood still! Mother grabbed hold of my arm when I remained standing there: ‘Come, Nathaniel, come along, please!’ I let her lead me, I went into my room. ‘Be quiet, be quiet, just go to bed! – sleep – sleep,’ mother cried after me; but, torn as I was by my inner fear and turmoil, I could not close an eye. The picture of that hated, repulsive Coppelius stood there sniggering at me with his sparkling eyes; in vain did I try to erase the image from my mind.

It might already have been midnight when a terrible boom went off, as if a cannon had been fired. The whole house rumbled, it rattled and roared past my door, the front door was slammed shut with a mighty clatter. ‘That’s Coppelius!’ I cried out in terror and leapt from my bed.

Then came a piercing shriek and a wretched wail, and I rushed to my father’s room. The door stood open, a suffocating steam hit me in the face, the chambermaid cried out: ‘Oh, the master! The master!’

In front of the steaming hearth my father lay dead on the floor with his terribly contorted face burnt black. My sisters howled and whined around him, my mother lay unconscious at his side. ‘Coppelius, you cursed Satan, you killed my father!’ I cried out, whereupon I lost consciousness. Two days later, when they laid my father in his coffin, his expression was once again mild and gentle as it had been in life. It was at least comforting to think that his pact with that devilish Coppelius could not have condemned him to eternal damnation.

The explosion had awakened the neighbours; the incident seemed suspicious to them and they informed the authorities, who issued a warrant for Coppelius’ arrest. But he had disappeared without a trace.

If I tell you, dearest friend, that that barometer salesman was none other than the accursed Coppelius, you will not, I trust, think ill of me for taking his inimical reappearance as a sign of bad things to come. He was dressed differently, but Coppelius’ physique and facial features are too deeply engraved in my memory for me to mistake him for another. Moreover, Coppelius did not even change his name. He now pretends to be a Piedmontese mechanic and calls himself Giuseppe Coppola.

I have resolved to confront him and to avenge my father’s death, come what will.

Don’t tell mother a thing about that terrible creature. Give a hug to my dear sweet Clara, I’ll write to her when I’ve calmed down a bit. Be well, etc. etc.

It is true that you haven’t written to me in quite a while, but I still believe that you think of me and hold me dear. I was surely very much on your mind, for though you intended to send your last letter to my brother Lothar, you unwittingly addressed it to me, not him. I tore open the envelope with joy and only realized the error upon reading the words: ‘Oh, my dearest Lothar’ – I know I ought not to have gone on reading after that, but rather to have handed the letter to my brother. But seeing as you sometimes reproached me in a childish, teasing way that I had such a calm, ladylike, sensible disposition that, before fleeing a house about to collapse I would be inclined quickly to smooth out a wrinkle in the curtain, I dare hardly admit that the first lines of your letter upset me profoundly. I could hardly breathe, my eyes went blank. Oh, my dearly beloved Nathaniel! What terrible thing could have burst into your life! Being separated from you, the possibility of never seeing you again, that thought pierced my breast like the sharp blade of a dagger. I read and read! Your description of that disgusting Coppelius is really horrible.

Only now did I fathom that your dear old father died such a terrible, violent death. My brother Lothar, to whom I passed the letter, tried in vain to calm me down. The image of that despicable barometer pedlar Giuseppe Coppola pursued me wherever I went, and I am almost ashamed to admit that he even managed to trouble my ordinarily unruffled and restful sleep with all sorts of nightmarish phantasms. But soon thereafter, in fact by the very next day, my mood calmed down. Don’t be mad at me, my dearest one, if Lothar tells you, despite your strange premonition that Coppelius would harm you, that I am once again my old cheerful, carefree self.

Let me confess here and now my firm conviction that all the awful and frightening things you speak of only happened in your
imagination, and that the real outside world played little part in it. That old Coppelius may well have been repulsive enough, but the fact that he hated children made you and your siblings develop a real aversion to him.

Your childish imagination naturally associated your nanny’s nursery account of the terrible Sandman with old Coppelius, who for you, even though you didn’t believe in the Sandman, remained a fantastic monster of the kind children fear so intensely. The weird goings-on with your father at night were surely nothing other than alchemical experiments the two conducted together in secret, with which your mother may not have been pleased, since a lot of money was no doubt uselessly squandered in the process – on top of which, as is always the case with such laboratory assistants, your father became so consumed by the elusive craving for higher wisdom that he forgot about the family. Your father probably brought about his own death by a careless mistake, and Coppelius is not to blame. Can you believe that yesterday I asked the pharmacist next door if such a sudden deadly explosion ever occurred during chemical experiments? He said: ‘Yes, indeed,’ and described for me in his typical long-winded and minute manner how such a thing could happen, in the process citing all kinds of curious-sounding substances I cannot now recall. Now you’ll get angry with your Clara. You’ll say: ‘Not a ray of the mysterious that embraces us with its invisible arms could break into that cold nature of yours; it only fastens on the colourful surface of things and takes a childish delight in the glittering golden fruit whose flesh contains a deadly poison hidden within.’

Oh my dearly beloved Nathaniel! Don’t you think that even a cheerful – unaffected – carefree nature like mine could harbour an inkling of a dark force that insidiously strives to corrupt the sanctum of our inner self? But forgive me if, innocent girl that I am, I dare imply what I really think of that inner battle. I can’t find the right words to say it and you’re probably laughing at me, not because I mean to say something foolish, but because I am having such a hard time saying it.

If there is a dark force that can insidiously slip a perfidious filament into our innermost self, wherewith it then grabs hold of
us and drags us along on a dangerously destructive path that we would not otherwise have taken – if there is such a force then it must reconfigure itself in our image, indeed it must become us; for only in
this
way will we be inclined to believe in it and give it the space it needs to realize its shadowy end. If we have enough good sense, fortified by healthy living, to recognize strange inimical influences as such, and steadfastly to hold to the path our nature and calling prescribe, then that sinister force will fail in the futile attempt to fashion itself in our image. It is also certain, Lothar adds, that that dark physical force to which we surrender ourselves of our own free will often makes us internalize strange figures that life flings into our path, so that we merely rouse the spirit which our vivid delusion makes us believe emanates from that figure. It is the phantom of our own self whose deep affinity and profound influence on our state of mind either damns us to hell or uplifts us into heaven. You see, my best beloved Nathaniel, that we, my brother Lothar and I, discussed at length the subject of dark forces and compulsions, which, seeing as I have taken great pains to formulate the essential, now seems to me to be very deep indeed. I don’t quite grasp Lothar’s last point, though I have a sense of what he means and firmly believe it to be true. I beg you, erase the image of that ugly barrister Coppelius and the barometer pedlar Giuseppe Coppola from your mind. Be assured that these strange figures have no power over you; only your belief in their malevolent power can, in fact, make them malevolent to you. If the deep upset of your soul did not cry out in every line of your letter, if your state of mind did not shake me as profoundly as it does, in truth I could make light of your Mr Sandman, Esq. and that barometer pedlar Coppelius. Be cheerful – cheerful! I have decided to come to you and act as your guardian angel, and should that repulsive Coppelius dare reappear and trouble you again in your dreams, I will exorcize him with loud laughter. I am not in the least bit afraid of him and his loathsome fists; he will not spoil a tender titbit with his barrister’s touch or steal my eyes as the Sandman.

Forever, my dearly beloved Nathaniel, etc. etc. etc.

I am very sorry that, granted, on account of my own absent-minded mistake, Clara recently tore open and read the letter I wrote to you. She wrote me a very profound philosophical response in which she took great pains to prove that Coppelius and Coppola only existed in my imagination and were phantoms of my own troubled self, phantoms that would be instantaneously reduced to dust if only I recognized them as such. It is indeed hard to believe that the spirit that emanates from such a brightly smiling, sweet child’s eyes could display such brilliant insight. She cites you. So you talked about me. You instruct her in logical disputation so that she may learn to sort and filter out the chaff from the grain. Better leave it alone!

By the way, it’s certain that the barometer pedlar Giuseppe Coppola is not the old lawyer Coppelius. I’ve just begun attending the lectures of the recently arrived Professor of Physics who, like the illustrious naturalist, is also named Spalanzani, and is of Italian descent. He has known Coppola for a good many years and, moreover, you can tell from the pedlar accent that he really is Piedmontese. Coppelius was a German, but no true blue one, I think. I’m still not altogether calmed down. Even if you and Clara take me for a dark dreamer, I cannot erase the terrible impression of Coppelius’ accursed face. I’m glad, as Spalanzani claims, that Coppelius has flown the coop. This Professor is a wondrous sort, a round, little man with high cheekbones, a finely chiselled nose, pouting lips and small piercing eyes. But you can get a clearer picture of him if you look at Chodowiecki’s
*
portrait of Cagliostro
^†
in any Berlin pocket calendar. That’s just what Spalanzani looks like.

I recently discovered while climbing the steps to the lecture hall that the glass door ordinarily covered with a curtain left a visible crack open at the side. A tall, very slender and
well-proportioned, splendidly dressed lady sat in a room at a little table on which she rested both her arms, with her hands folded before her. She was seated just opposite the door, so I got a good look at her angelically lovely face. She did not seem to notice me and, in fact, her eyes had something glassy about them – I’d almost be inclined to say they could not see; it seemed to me as if she slept with open eyes. I felt the strangest rush of feeling and, therefore, slipped quietly off to the auditorium next door.

Later I learnt that the lovely figure I spotted was Spalanzani’s daughter Olympia, whom for some strange reason he keeps locked up so that no one can come near her. I’ve begun to think there is something peculiar about her, that perhaps she’s simple-minded. But why do I write to you about all this? I could have told it to you more clearly and in greater detail in person. I might as well admit that I’ll be visiting you in two weeks’ time. I simply had to see my sweet angel-faced Clara again. By then the ill humour brought on (I must admit) by that annoyingly understanding letter of hers that sought to sound my depths will have blown over. Which is why I’m not writing to her today.

A thousand greetings, etc. etc. etc.

It would be impossible to imagine anything more incredible and strange than what happened to my poor friend, the young student Nathaniel, and which, dear reader, I have undertaken to tell you. Have you, gentle reader, ever experienced anything that so completely permeated your heart, your mind and your thoughts that it supplanted all other notions? Something that simmered and seethed in you, that made your blood boil and flow like lava through your veins and made your cheeks turn a fiery red. A thing that turned your gaze so eerie, as if it sought to grasp the presence of figures imperceptible to all other eyes in an empty room, as your words melted into dark moans. And your intimates asked you: ‘What is it, friend? What on earth is the matter with you?’ And then you wanted to describe your state of mind in all the glowing colours and shadows and lights, and strained to find the words, and didn’t know where to begin. But it seemed to you as if with your very first word you felt
compelled to evoke all the wondrous, beautiful, horrible, laughable, frightening things that happened, so that your account would strike your listeners like an electric shock. But every word that came to mind, anything that language could conjure up, seemed colourless, frigid and dead. You searched and searched, and stuttered and stammered, and the sensible questions of friends struck like icy gusts of wind that soon dissipated in the emotional cauldron within. But had you, like a bold painter, begun with a few audacious brush strokes to set down the rough outline of your state, you would have been able to apply with great ease ever brighter dabs of colour, and so to dazzle your friends with the living swirl of multifarious figures, and they would see themselves, as you see yourself, in the middle of the picture that issued from your imagination.

No one, I must admit, gentle reader, ever actually asked after the story of young Nathaniel; but as you well know, I am one of those rum writers to whom, if burdened with impressions of the kind I’ve just described, it seems as if anyone who happens to cross their path, indeed the whole world, were dying to know: ‘What’s bothering you? Pray tell us if you please!’ So I felt a pressing need to speak to you of Nathaniel’s fateful path. The very wondrousness and strangeness of it consumed my consciousness, but for that very reason – and because I needed to make you, dear reader, likewise inclined and, therefore, able to bear the things I am about to tell, which is no small feat – I tormented myself as to how to begin my account in a significant, original, gripping fashion.