Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) (6 page)

‘Once upon a time’ – the nicest start to any tale – seemed too vapid! ‘In the small provincial town of S. there lived …’ sounded a bit better, at least informative enough to pave the way for the climax. Or to begin right off
in medias res
: ‘ “The devil take you!” the young student Nathaniel cried out with a wild-eyed look of anger and dread at the sight of the barometer pedlar Giuseppe Coppola’ – this I had, in fact, already written down when I was suddenly struck by something droll in the wild-eyed look of the young student Nathaniel; but the story is not in the least bit comical. I could find no words to reflect even
the faintest glimmer of the burning heart of the matter. So I decided to dispense with the beginning.

Just take the three letters, gentle reader, that my friend Lothar was kind enough to pass on to me, as the outline of the picture, to which I will take pains to add more and more colour in the telling. Maybe I will manage, like a good portrait painter, to conjure up a character such that you will find a convincing resemblance without knowing the original; indeed that it will seem to you as if you had seen that person many times with your own two eyes. Maybe then, dear reader, you will believe that there is nothing more wondrous and strange than life itself, and that all that the poet can do is convey a dark reflection of it in a lightly buffed mirror.

So as to clarify what the reader needs to know from the start, I must add to the aforementioned letters that shortly after the death of Nathaniel’s father, Clara and Lothar, the children of a distant relative who likewise died and left them orphaned, were taken in by Nathaniel’s mother. Clara and Nathaniel took a great liking to each other, to which no person on earth objected; they were therefore betrothed when Nathaniel left home to pursue his studies in G., which is where we find him in his last letter, attending lectures by the famous Professor of Physics Spalanzani.

Now I could confidently press on with the tale; but at the moment I have such a vivid image of Clara’s face before my eyes that I cannot look away, which is what always happened when she looked my way with her lovely smile. Clara could by no means have been considered beautiful; such was the opinion of all those who claimed to know a thing or two about beauty. And yet the architects of beauty praised the sleekness and symmetry of her stature, the painters found neck, shoulders and bust almost too maidenly, but were all enamoured of her Magdalene hair and raved about her luminous colouring. But one of them, a real fantast, strangely enough compared Clara’s eyes to a Ruisdael lake in which the azure blue fundament of a cloudless sky and the forest and flowering flora of the lush landscape of life were mirrored. But the poets and thinkers were even more ebullient and said: ‘What lake – what mirror! Can one gaze at this
girl without having heavenly songs and notes come streaming from her eyes, music that reaches deep into our innermost selves, awakening and bestirring all our dormant passions?’ If we ourselves try to sing her praises and the song falls flat, a crude croon masquerading as a serenade with haphazard tones carelessly warbled, the fault is ours and Clara’s lips say it all in their delicately elastic smile. That’s the way it was.

Clara had the healthy imagination of a cheerful, unaffected child, a deep womanly gentle disposition, and a downright sparkling, sharp-sighted intelligence. The mystics and conjurers failed to impress her; for without saying much – idle chatter was anathema to her quiet nature – her bright gaze and that hint of irony in her smile said: dear friends, do you really expect me to take your ephemeral shadow figures for real live people with impulses and emotions? For that reason, Clara was scorned by many as cold, emotionless, prosaic; but others with a sober grasp of all the twists and turns of life had a powerful affection for that tender, understanding, childish girl, none more so than Nathaniel, a young man seriously and passionately committed to the study of science and the arts. Clara was attached to her beloved with all her heart and soul; the first storm clouds troubled their life when he went away to study. With what rapture, then, you can well imagine, did she fly into his arms, when, as he let slip in his last letter to Lothar, he actually showed up in his home town at his mother’s doorstep. It was just as Nathaniel expected; for as soon as he saw Clara again he forgot all about the lawyer Coppelius and Clara’s letter, and his upset disappeared.

But Nathaniel was indeed right when he wrote to his friend Lothar that the appearance of that odious barometer pedlar Coppola had had a detrimental effect on his life. Everyone felt within days of his arrival that Nathaniel was a changed man. He fell into dark brooding spells and began to behave so strangely, in ways that one would never have expected of him. Everything, his entire life, had become the stuff of dream and premonition; he kept saying that everyone who gave free rein to his fancies merely served as a plaything in the terrible game of dark forces, that all resistance was in vain, and all one could do was meekly
to submit to the will of fate. He went so far as to maintain that it was foolish to believe that spontaneity could affect the arbitrary outcome of artistic and scientific investigations; for the passion needed to pursue such work does not come from our innermost selves, but rather derives from the external influence of a higher principle independent of our own free will.

Such mystical musings were altogether repugnant to the sensible Clara, yet it seemed futile to attempt to prove him wrong. But it was only when Nathaniel insisted that Coppelius was the incarnation of the evil principle that had taken hold of him, pulling the strings from behind an invisible curtain, that Clara suddenly fathomed that this disgusting demon threatened to disrupt their happy love, grew very serious and said: ‘Yes, Nathaniel, you’re right, Coppelius is an evil inimical principle, a devilish force that infiltrated your life able to do dreadful things, but only if you refuse to banish him from your thoughts and feelings. As long as you believe in him he does indeed exist and affect you, only your belief gives him the power over you.’

Furious that Clara only accepted the existence of demons as a function of his state of mind, Nathaniel wanted to counter with a disquisition on the entire mystical teachings of devils and uncanny forces; but, vexed in turn, Clara cut him short by suddenly bringing up some altogether irrelevant matter, which made Nathaniel all the more angry.

Cold, unreceptive spirits do not open their hearts to such deep secrets, Nathaniel thought, without fully fathoming that he counted Clara among those lesser natures, which is why he did not stop trying to initiate her into those esoteric teachings. Early in the morning when Clara helped prepare breakfast, he stood by her and read to her from all sorts of mystical texts, whereupon Clara protested: ‘But my dear Nathaniel, what if I were to blame
you
for the evil principle that’s keeping my coffee from brewing? For if, as you wish, I were to drop everything and look you in the eyes as you read to me, then my coffee will boil over and burn and you won’t get your breakfast!’

Nathaniel slammed the book shut and ran in a rage to his room. In the past he had had a charming, lively talent for reading aloud the stories that he jotted down, to which Clara listened
with the greatest pleasure; but now his writings were dark, incomprehensible, shapeless, so that even though, not wanting to hurt him, Clara said nothing, he nevertheless sensed how unreceptive she was. Nothing was more deadly for Clara than this boring stuff; in every look and word she revealed her insurmountable intellectual ennui. Nathaniel’s writings were indeed a crashing bore. His chagrin at Clara’s cold prosaic spirit grew; she simply could not shake off her displeasure at Nathaniel’s dark, morbid, boring mysticism, and so the two drifted inwardly further and further apart without noticing it.

The figure of that repulsive Coppelius faded in his imagination, as Nathaniel himself had to admit, so that he had to take great pains to paint a vivid picture of him in his writings, in which he appeared as the bogeyman. Finally one day he felt impelled to express that dark premonition that Coppelius would disrupt his happy love as the subject of a poem. In the poem he represented himself and Clara as bound by true love, but every now and then it was as if a dark fist reached into their life and ripped out any seed of joy that sprouted in the garden of their hearts. Finally, when they were already standing together at the marriage altar, that terrible Coppelius appears and touches Clara’s sweet smiling eyes; they burst open against his breast, searing and burning like bloody sparks, whereupon Coppelius seizes Nathaniel and flings him into a flaming circle of fire that spins at the speed of lightning and hurls him about in a blue blaze. Then comes a roar, as if the angry tempest whipped up the foaming waves of the sea that rear up in battle like white-hooded black giants. But through this wild roar he hears Clara’s voice: ‘Can you not see me? Coppelius deceived you, those were not my eyes that burned in your breast, they were the glowing drops of your own heart’s blood – I still have my eyes, just look at me!’ And Nathaniel thinks: it
is
Clara, and I am hers for ever. Then it is as if the thought reaches into the circle of fire, stops suddenly, and the roar fades into a dull thud in the black abyss. Nathaniel peers into Clara’s eyes; but it is the face of death that smiles back at him with Clara’s eyes.

While engaged in the composition of this poem Nathaniel remained very quiet and collected; he polished and tinkered
with every line, and since he chose to follow the rule of metre, he did not rest until everything fitted together and sounded just right. When he was nevertheless finally done with it and read the poem out loud to himself he was totally appalled and, gripped by a wild sense of horror, cried out: ‘Whose terrible voice is this?’ But soon the whole thing just seemed to him to be a very successful poetic text, and he was convinced that it would excite Clara’s cold heart, although he failed to consider just where her excitement might lead and to what end he wished to frighten her with such gruesome images, foreshadowing a terrible fate that would tear their love apart.

They, Nathaniel and Clara, sat together in his mother’s little garden, Clara as cheerful as could be because Nathaniel had not tormented her with his dreams and dark premonitions for the last three days, which he’d spent tinkering with the poem. Even Nathaniel spoke in a lively and spirited manner of funny things, like before, so that Clara said: ‘Now at last I have you all to myself again, you see how we drove out that repulsive Coppelius?’ That reminded Nathaniel of the poem in his pocket, which he’d intended to read aloud. He promptly pulled out the pages and started reading.

Expecting the same tedious stuff as before, and prepared to endure it, Clara started quietly knitting. But as the storm cloud of his verse grew ever darker and darker around them she let the knitted stocking sink into her lap and looked Nathaniel hard in the eye. Swept along by the fire of his poetry, his cheeks tinted bright red by the cauldron of turbulent emotions, tears welled up in his eyes. Having finally reached the conclusion, he heaved a heavy sigh of exhaustion, gripped Clara’s hand and sobbed, as though dissolving in inconsolable sadness: ‘Oh, Clara! … Clara!’

She pressed him gently to her breast and said quietly, but very slowly and succinctly: ‘Nathaniel – my dearly beloved Nathaniel! Throw that raving – senseless – insane fairy tale into the fire.’

Whereupon, shoving Clara away from him, Nathaniel leapt up in a fury and cried out: ‘You lifeless, accursed automaton!’ He ran off, leaving Clara completely mortified, weeping bitter tears.

‘He never loved me, he doesn’t understand me!’ she wailed at the top of her lungs. Lothar came striding into the arbour. Clara felt compelled to tell him what had happened. Lothar loved his sister with all his heart; every word of her accusation struck him like a spark, so that the ill will he’d long felt for that muddle-headed Nathaniel now flared up into wild anger. He ran to find him, reproached him with harsh words for his inexplicable treatment of his beloved sister, and the irascible Nathaniel replied in kind. A wild and crazy fop faced off with a miserable, mundane man of the people. A duel was inevitable. They decided, according to the local academic custom, to meet behind the garden and draw sharp-bladed rapiers.

Silently and stealthily they slipped by; Clara had heard and seen the heated argument, and spotted the duelling master bringing the rapiers at dusk. She guessed what was about to happen. Lothar and Nathaniel had just reached the duelling ground and flung off their coats in brooding silence, a bloodthirsty fury pouring from their burning eyes, when Clara came bounding through the garden gate. Sobbing she cried out: ‘Oh you barbaric beastly men! Cut me down right this moment before going at it with each other; for how am I supposed to go on living in this world if my beloved murders my brother, or my brother my beloved!’

Lothar let his sword sink and peered at the ground in silence, and all the heart-rending love Nathaniel had felt in the sweet days of youth for his precious Clara once again flared up in him. The deadly weapon fell from his hand and he flung himself at Clara’s feet. ‘Can you ever forgive me, my only, my ever so dearly beloved Clara! Can you forgive me, my dearest brother Lothar!’ Lothar was stirred by the profound pain of his friend; the three young people, now reconciled, embraced in a flood of tears and swore henceforth faithfully to hold by their love.

Nathaniel felt as though a heavy weight that had pressed him to the ground had been lifted from his shoulders – indeed as though in resisting the dark force that had held him in its sway he had saved his entire being from the threat of annihilation. He spent three more blissful days with his loved ones and then rode back to G., where he had to complete another
year of study, after which he planned to return for good to his native town.

Everything having to do with Coppelius was kept from his mother; since the three friends knew all too well that she could not think of him without trembling, for, like Nathaniel, she too blamed him for the death of her husband.