The Dedalus Book of German Decadence (15 page)

[…]

Sebastian approached the garden gate: it was locked, bolted and barred. He grabbed two of the iron railings and tried to bend them apart, then drew back his smarting hands, thick streaks of rust ran across his palms, from fingers to wrist. He took the long way round, along the wall, away from the main path into the bushes, along the stream and across slippery banks to the bridge, and at last he came to the lawn behind the villa […] With one bound he jumped the railing and landed on the ground. No skulking, into the house with you! It was only in the foyer that he grew quieter. Perhaps she too had watched and waited, for nights, and had only just started to dream. She owed you everything: hope, the present, sleep  …  but not your dreams. These are holy  …  quietly! quietly!

He was able to get into the boudoir without difficulty. It was pitch black but every step was familiar to him. Before the bedroom curtain – she was sleeping, he could hear her quiet breathing – his fingertips touched the large armchair that always stood there. He quietly sat, sitting upright despite his exhaustion after the exertions, his hands clutching the carved wood of the armrests. He sat, waiting for day to break.

A little after dawn Désirée appeared on the threshold. They stood looking at each other.

‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

She repeated his words:

‘You’ve, been waiting for me?’ And then she cried aloud when she saw what his fingers, convulsively, were gripping  …  She tore the gun from his hands and held it stiffly, awkwardly, away from her, then raised it to her eyes which, wide open, seemed almost to be breathing.

‘Yes, I’ve been waiting for you, me, me. I can’t live any more, I don’t belong to myself, I’m completely lost, without hope, a slave. I know everything  …  Your husband, Wilmoth  …  I know it all. Remember your words in the carriage  …  I bring you my last gift  …  take it, I’ll throw it away, I don’t want it  …  here  …’ He tore his coat open with both hands, his waistcoat, his shirt, and bared his chest, breathing wildly, as though his heart would burst  …  He seized Désirée’s hand and forced the barrel up against his ribs, to his beating heart, and tried to pull the trigger, to fire, to carry out this strange command, this onslaught against his own life  …

It was only when her finger tips felt the warmth of his body that she tore her gaze from the weapon and fixed her eyes on his gaunt, naked, snow-white breast where the two circular discs were glowing  …  The pistol fell to the floor, knocked to the ground, and she kicked it away with her foot, her foot  …

[…]

For some time now Désirée Wilmoth had been brooding on the problem of how to replace the somewhat stilted choreography which one frequently saw in theatres in the Venusberg scene of
Tannhäuser
with wild, lascivious dances, dances more appropriate to the passionate beauty of the music yet which did not offend the sacred allurement of pagan sensuality. She often summoned Meinewelt to her to learn from him, listen to his advice and pick his brains, for the editor had once spent months with Eugénie Fougère in his youth (an unhappy time, and one which he rarely spoke about) touring the cities and towns of the continent and remembered a lot from this time. He now became wildly enthusiastic, put all his time and energy at Désirée’s disposal and raved about her genius, her intuition, her dancing which would revolutionize the discredited choreography of the present and for ever sweep away the sort of ballet which theatres churned out. He immediately composed a series of articles which, illustrated by Saarmünster (this was Désirée’s idea), would appear in ‘The Holy Grove’ and reach out into the world, disseminating her ideas and accomplishments.

Meinewelt detected behind all this a profound change which had taken place in the woman’s soul over the last four weeks, and swore to be vigilant. She suddenly demonstrated a remarkable interest in the world outside her villa, sought any expedient to fill her days and demanded all sorts of things that she had hitherto either denied or simply not noticed. She sought the admiration of the crowd, a general approbation, or confirmation; she sought to make good some spiritual defect by external stimuli, and even repeated the idea that after rehearsing certain eurhythmic movements within her four walls she would hire a gigantic hall in the city in which, to the strains of an invisible orchestra, she would dance a solo on a stage covered with fabrics, exotic flowers and shrubbery  …  She would dance before artists, and before the common people, she would travel and perform in Paris, Rome, London and America  …  Intoxicated with these notions she demonstrated increasingly a yearning for vast, free movements on colossal stages, movements which would consume her dancing, her emotions  …  and spoke about all this with the earnest conviction of an absolute necessity, forgetting to mention the motive why she had given up dancing in happier times: it was now a case of whirling some great and permanent restlessness from her soul by vast and passionate agitation. […]

One morning Sebastian surprised her in her Grey Room, walking amongst a heap of the most remarkable fabrics, tissues, material, veils of all sorts which were cast about the room, some colours shouting and discordant, others shading into the finest, most subtle nuances  …  They were thrown all over the throne, hung down to the ground from the piano and lay scattered over carpets, chairs and chests in piles of varying sizes, depriving the room of its earnest monotony. She was walking, slim, agitated, dressed in white, amongst all these colours: she bent down to pick up this piece of cloth or that, and draped it round herself, her waist or her shoulders; she let it fall from her breasts, then she would seize with both hands into the heap of fabric, choosing, rejecting, considering, weighing up the most heterogeneous nuances and then, suddenly, draping herself in five different ones […]

‘I shall dance a poem!’ she said, speaking more to herself, and in an overwrought manner. ‘A poem which says “My soul longs to burst forth in incandescence!” Look, the first verse!’

She quickly seized three heavy, costly pieces of fabric – violet, purple and black, rich, dark colours – which made her look like mournful, imperious Cassandra, gazing back into the past, and forward into an inexorable future. Then she dropped the three colours, and behind her upright figure, dressed in white, was writhing a long, silky, lemon-coloured veil, high above her head. ‘This is the second: the resolution. And now – ‘She ran to the mirror in its Venetian frame, gathered up a heap of disparate material and dragged it into the middle of the room, knocking aside anything that stood in her way. In a few seconds she had attached golden brocade, orange velvet, pale pink gauze and various Liberty veils of a sunflower yellow colour to her body; she stretched upwards, paused a moment, and then began to dance.

Sebastian had never seen anything like it, neither in life nor in his most secret dreams: it was also the first time that she had ever danced in front of him. It could, in fact, hardly be called a dance for her whole body seemed to dissolve into movement as the colours flowed one into the other. The gleam of her eyes, the wave of her hair, an expression on her lips – these were the only human entities. But even these had had to surrender their corporeal essence to the mysterious bond which, separate and independent, pulsed between dancer and spectator and whose name was: burning soul. It seemed to Sebastian that he could seize these contours in both hands, and grip them tight – contours which consumed themselves in endless rhythmical modulations, which dissolved, flickered, sank, and were again reborn – without so much as touching the dancer with his fingertips:
now
he understood what dancing meant to her. But she stopped, abruptly.

And the spirit, the phantom, reverted to its frame of flesh. Her arms fell to her hips, her eyelids drooped, her chin sank to her breast; her whole body was crushed with exhaustion. She gently shook her head, and her hands opened and closed in a spasmodic agony. Sebastian quietly rose from his seat and stood before her; sadly, gently, he ran his fingertips down the flaming glory of her garments. She let go of the yellow veils that she had tied to her wrists and they fell to the floor – a golden, trampled sun.

She had created four more dances: the cameo-dance, the ruby-dance, the diamond-dance and the dance of the pearls. There was a fifth – and she called it the dance of death. This one gave her much tribulation. She did not like talking about it as it preoccupied her exclusively. She admitted to Sebasstian that it was meant to express the legend of Orpheus and Euridice and also something else – the dream of the sleep of death, in which she fervently believed, as do all who had believed so passionately in life  …  and also ‘continuance, and visitation’.

She did not explain what these words meant – continuance  …  visitation  …

But on the night of the nineteenth of May, which was the anniversary of Wilmoth’s death, she invited Meinewelt as well, and Sulzwasser and Saarmünster, to her house and danced before them the dances of the four jewels as well as the dance of the ‘burning soul’ which now had a fourth stanza: the dance of ash  …

[…]

Little town on the Belgian coast. Sebastian Sasse has been living here for days  …  months  …  years? The sun rises behind the dunes, stands high above them at midday, then sinks, golden-red, into the sea at evening. But such calculations are inappropriate for those who dwell along the coast. What is meant by ‘day’ or ‘time’ is determined by other insiders: nothing happens on the coast except the play of sun and wind, of moon and sea. It is only the millions upon millions of grains of sand that know this; the marram grass grows grey and tired and sinks to rest in the sand, for autumn moves to rest  …  Further inland the puddles have a thin crust which splinters like glass when one’s foot slips from the furrow. Autumn on the coast.

[…]

Evening after evening, as the moon was rising behind the slim belfry and climbing the heavens, Sebastian would put down his pen and gaze out of his attic window in the ‘Swan of Brabant’ at the tower in which the cluster of little bells was hanging like ripe grapes. Behind these tiny objects, heavy with the sweetest melodies, the sky gradually became clearer, pale-blue or amethyst, and the delicate gossamers of the radiant moonbeams wove their tender web between the walls, a hazy delicacy like elfin wings, or elfin hair, then suddenly light and shadow parted and there was a sound, then another, and then a jingling, resounding carillon. Then the hundreds of heavy bells followed, all over the town, in a sturdy, solemn procession, like worthy city dignitaries in black, the gleaming ruff around their necks, the ebony mace, decorated in silver, carried before them – a long procession of old, venerable notabilities, whose hearts were weighing weighty matters, civic and corporate and who were now moving towards the cathedral, deep in prayer already. But the jingling carillon was running before them like a frisky white puppy who was showing them the way, barking and running across the ancient squares and bridges.

It was in vain that Sebastian brooded on whether or not he could share the great, silent piety that pressed upon the town like a lowering cloud, never leaving it, and which brought that peace which reigned with equal severity over men, stones and the swans which floated on the brackish water in the canals. On Sundays he had often joined the groups of men and women who, silent and hooded, darted from their small neat houses and scurried almost fearfully into the many churches. What were they confessing? What were they supplicating? Behind those tiny doors with their brightly polished knockers, behind those thick green curtains, framed in black, which hung between the two windows to prevent the curious from looking in one only saw pale, dead faces gazing solemnly downwards, and if a passer-by did look into one of the numerous peepholes which looked down the street he would only see a section of a face which would have grey, tired eyes, a face which expressed dread rather than curiosity or, indeed, anticipation.

At every hour thousands are kneeling in these enormous churches, churches whose towers stand like inverted wooden dice-shakers (and the die is already cast, perhaps, for this country); they kneel and murmur their endless litanies between folded hands whilst the bells alone dare to resound. He knelt with the thousands of others and waited, feeling only the cold of the stone flags beneath him but never the warming breath which drifted across the congregation from censers and sermons. And the woe which he had sensed when gazing at the sea flared again, and forced him yet more deeply to the ground. And in one of the churches – a church where his brow had touched the floor – there he saw it: an old, dark altar piece by a pupil of Memling which represented the virgin sitting on the grass outside the town between the gates, the Beguinenhof and the small lake called the Minnewater. She was sitting on a stone, and her long slim hands were not holding her Son, but a bunch of anemones, which she was pressing to her breast  …

Extracts from Arthur Holitscher:
Der vergiftete

Brunnen,
Munich, 1900.

There is nothing left to disturb the silence of desolation. The clouds sail above the dark masses of ancient trees and are reflected in the greenish-blue waters of the tarn which seems to be bottomless. And the surface rests, day in, day out, sunk in a mournful submissiveness.

In the middle of the silent tarn stands the castle, rearing its pointed, crumbling roofs and towers towards the clouds. Rank weeds grope across the blackened, shattered walls, and the sunlight breaks on the round, dull windows. Doves fly around the dark, gloomy courtyards, seeking a hiding place in the cracked masonry.

They seem to fear something for they constantly fly, startled and agitated, past the windows. The fountain splashes in the courtyard below, gently, delicately. And the thirsty doves intermittently drink from the bronze basin.

Now and then a breath of febrile decay wafts through the dusty corridors of the castle; the bats fly up, terrified. Nothing else disturbs the deep silence.