The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse (25 page)

How much night surrounds us! How many dreadful, awful paths of torment we take! Go deep into the shaft of our run-down soul, eternal poor hero, eternal Odysseus! But we go on, we go on. We
bow and wade. We swim and wade. We swim and suffocate in the slime. We crawl along the smooth treacherous walls. We weep and despair. We moan fearfully and sob loudly in pain. But we move on and bite our way through.

Once again images arose from the turbid vapors of hell. Again a small stretch of the dark path was illuminated and formed by a modest light of memories, and my soul pushed its way out of the primeval world into the familiar sphere of time.

Where was this? Familiar things confronted me. I recognized the air that I breathed. A large room in half darkness, an oil lamp on the table, my own lamp, a large round table somewhat like a piano. My sister was there and my brother-in-law. Perhaps they were visiting me, or perhaps I was at their place. They were quiet and worried, full of concern about me. And I stood in the large dismal room, walked back and forth, stood still, and walked again in a cloud of sadness, in a flood of bitter, suffocating sadness. And now I began searching for something, nothing important, a book or scissors or something like that, and I could not find it. I took the lamp in my hand. It was heavy, and I was terribly tired. I soon put it down and then picked it up again. I wanted to search, search, although I knew that it was in vain. I would find nothing. I would only confuse everything even more. The lamp would fall out of my hands. It was so heavy, so painfully heavy, and so I would continue to grope and search and wander through the room for the rest of my miserable life.

My brother-in-law looked at me anxiously and somewhat reproachfully. They realized that I was going mad. I thought quickly and picked up the lamp again. My sister came over to me, quietly, with pleading eyes, so full of fear and love that I thought my heart would break. I could say nothing. I could only stretch out my hand
and wave her away, to ward her off, and I thought:
Just leave me alone! Just leave me alone! You certainly can’t know how I feel, how much everything hurts, how terribly much it hurts.
And again:
Just leave me alone! Just leave me alone!

The reddish light of the lamp flowed dimly through the large room. Outside the trees sighed in the wind. For a moment I believed I felt and saw the night outside deep within me. Wind and wetness, autumn, bitter smell of foliage, scattered leaves of the elm tree. Autumn! Autumn! And once more, for a moment, I was not myself but saw myself like a picture: I was a pale, lean musician with flickering eyes, and my name was Hugo Wolf, and on this evening I was on the verge of going insane.

Meanwhile I had to continue searching, hopelessly searching and lifting the heavy lamp on the round table onto the chair, onto the heap of books. And I had to protect myself with imploring gestures when my sister looked at me again sadly and considerately, sought to console me, to be near me, and to help me. The sadness in me grew and filled me to the point of bursting, and the images all around me were impressive and eloquent in their clarity, much clearer than reality is otherwise. A few autumn flowers in a glass of water, a dark red-brown dahlia among them, glowed in such painful, beautiful loneliness, each thing, even the shining brass base of the lamp, was enchantingly beautiful and infused with a fateful loneliness, as in the pictures by the great painters.

I sensed my fate clearly. Yet another shadow in this sadness, another look from my sister, another look from the flowers, from the beautiful spiritual flowers—then it would overflow, and I would sink into madness.
Leave me alone! You certainly don’t know!
On the polished side of the piano a ray of sunlight was reflected in the black wood, so beautiful, so mysterious, so filled with melancholy!

Now my sister stood up again and went over to the piano. I wanted to beg, ward her off with all my might, but I couldn’t. No power whatsoever emanated from my loneliness that was sufficient to reach her. Oh, I knew what had to happen now I knew the melody that now had to express itself and had to say everything and destroy everything. Enormous tension compressed my heart, and while the first hot tears sprang from my eyes, I threw my head and hands across the table and listened and felt with all my senses and with new senses as well, the text and melody at the same time, Wolf’s melody and the verses.

What do you know, dark tops of trees
About the beautiful olden days?
Home lies beyond mountain peaks
,
How far it lies, how far away!

With this song, the world glided apart before me and within me, sank away in tears and tones. Impossible to say how it all poured out, how it flowed, how good and painful it was! Oh tears, oh sweet collapse, blissful melting away! All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.

Forgetting all causes and reasons, I wept my way down from the heights of unbearable tension into the mild twilight of everyday feelings, without thoughts, without witnesses. In between images fluttered: a coffin in which a person was lying, someone very dear and
important to me, but I did not know who it was.
Perhaps it’s you yourself
, I thought. Then another image came to me from a far pale distance. Hadn’t I at one time, many years ago or in an earlier life, glimpsed a wonderful sight? A group of girls living in the air, nebulous and weightless, beautiful and blissful, swaying as light as air and as melodious as string music.

Years flew between, pushing me gently and firmly away from the picture. Oh, perhaps the meaning of my entire life had only been to see these noble floating girls, to approach them, to become like them! But now they vanished in the distance, unreachable, uncomprehended, unredeemed, tired, and surrounded by the fluttering of despairing nostalgia.

Years fell to the ground like snowflakes, and the world changed. Distressed, I wandered toward a small house. I was feeling very miserable, and a dreadful sensation in my mouth seized hold of me. Anxiously I touched a loose tooth with my tongue. Immediately it moved sideways and fell out. Then the next one fell out as well! A very young doctor was there. I complained to him, I held the tooth up to him imploringly with my fingers! He laughed cheerfully, waved me off with a deadly professional gesture, and shook his young head—it’s nothing, quite harmless, happens every day.
Dear God
, I thought. But he continued and pointed to my left knee: That’s the problem. That’s something else and not a joking matter. I grabbed my knee terribly fast—there it was. There was a hole into which I could thrust my finger, and instead of skin and flesh, there was nothing to touch but an insensitive, soft loose mass, light and stringy like a wilted plant. Oh, my God, this was decay, this was death and putrefaction! “There’s nothing more you can do?” I asked, trying to be friendly.

“Nothing more,” the young doctor said, and he was gone.

Exhausted, I walked toward the little house, but I was not as desperate as I should have been. Indeed, I was almost indifferent. I had to go into the little house where my mother was expecting me—hadn’t I already heard her voice? Seen her face? Steps led up to the house, crazy steps, high and smooth without railings, each one a mountain, a peak, a glacier. It was certainly too late—she had perhaps left already, perhaps she was already dead? Hadn’t I just heard her call again? Silently I coped with the steep mountain of steps, falling and crushed, wild and sobbing, I climbed and pushed onward, supporting myself on my breaking arms and knees, and was on top, was at the gate, and the steps were again small and pretty and lined by box trees. Each one of my steps was sticky and heavy as though I were going through slime and glue, barely moving forward. The gate stood open, and inside my mother was walking about in a gray dress, a little basket on her arm, silent and steeped in thought. Oh, her dark, slightly gray hair in a little net! And her gait, the small figure! And the dress, the gray dress! Had I completely lost her image all these many, many years, not really thought about her at all? There she was. There she stood and walked. She could be seen only from behind, exactly as she was, completely clear and beautiful, pure love, pure thoughts of love!

Feeling lame, I furiously waded through the sticky air. Weeds wrapped themselves around me more and more like thin strong ropes. Hostile obstacles everywhere. There was no moving forward! “Mother,” I called—but I had no voice.… There was no sound. There was glass between her and me.

My mother walked on slowly, without looking back, quietly absorbed in beautiful caring thoughts. She brushed an invisible
thread from the dress with her hand that I knew so well. She bent over her little basket of sewing material. Oh, the little basket! She had hidden Easter eggs in it one time. I screamed in despair, unable to make a sound. I ran and could not leave the spot! Tenderness and rage tugged at me.

And she kept walking slowly through the garden house. She stood at the open back door and stepped outside. She sunk her head a little to one side, softly and attentively, deep in her thoughts. She lifted and set down the little basket, I noticed a note that I had found in her sewing basket one time when I was a boy. She had lightly written her plans for the day on it, what she wanted to remember: “Hermann’s pants frayed—put away laundry—borrow book by Dickens—Hermann did not say his prayers yesterday.” Streams of memory, cargoes of love!

Bound and chained, I stood at the gate, and beyond it the woman in the gray dress walked slowly away, into the garden, and was gone.

A
t the dawn of civilization, quite some time before human creatures began wandering over the face of the earth, there were forest dwellers. They lived close together fearfully in the dark tropical forests, constantly fighting with their relatives, the apes, and the only divine law that governed their actions was—the forest. The forest was their home, refuge, cradle, nest, and grave, and they could not imagine life outside it. They avoided coming too close to its edges, and whoever, through unusual circumstances while hunting or fleeing something, made his way to the edges would tremble with dread later when reporting about the white emptiness outside, where the terrifying nothingness glistened in the deadly fire of the sun.

There was an old forest dweller who decades before had been pursued by wild animals and had fled across the farthest edge of the
forest. He had immediately become blind and was now considered a kind of priest and saint with the name Mata Dalam, or “he who has an interior eye.” He had composed the holy forest song chanted during the great storms, and the forest dwellers always listened to what he had to say. His fame and mystery rested on the fact that he had seen the sun with his eyes and lived to tell about it.

The forest dwellers were small, brown, and very hairy. They walked with a stoop, and they had furtive, wild eyes. They could move both like human beings and like apes and felt just as safe in the branches of the forest as they did on the ground. They had not yet learned about houses and huts. Nevertheless, they knew how to fabricate many kinds of weapons and tools, as well as jewelry. They made bows, arrows, lances, and clubs out of wood and necklaces out of the fiber of trees that were strung with dried beets or nuts. They wore precious objects around their necks or in their hair: a wild boar’s tooth, a tiger’s claw, a parrot’s feathers, shells from mussels. A large river flowed through the endless forest, but the forest dwellers did not dare tread on its banks except in the dark of night, and many had never seen it. Sometimes the more courageous ones crept out of the thickets at night, fearful and on the lookout. Then, in the faint glimmer of dusk, they would watch the elephants bathing and look through the treetops above them and observe the glittering stars with dread as they appeared to hang in the manifold interlaced branches of the mangrove trees. They never saw the sun, and it was considered extremely dangerous to see its reflection in the summer.

A young man by the name of Kubu belonged to the tribe of forest dwellers headed by the blind Mata Dalam, and he was the leader and spokesman for the dissatisfied young people. In fact, ever since Mata Dalam had grown older and become more tyrannical, the
malcontents had made their voices heard in the tribe. Until then, it had been the blind man’s uncontested right to be provided with food by the other members of the tribe. In addition, they came to him for advice and sang his forest song. Gradually, however, he had introduced all sorts of new and burdensome customs that were revealed to him, so he said, in a dream by the divine spirit of the forest. But several skeptical young men asserted that the old man was a swindler and was concerned only with advancing his own interests.

The most recent custom Mata Dalam had introduced was a new moon celebration in which he sat in the middle of a circle and beat a drum made of leather. Meanwhile the other forest dwellers had to dance in the circle and sing the song “Gulo Elah” until they were exhausted and collapsed on their knees. Then all the men had to pierce their left ears with a thorn, and the young women were led to the priest, who pierced each of their ears with a thorn.