Death in Venice and Other Stories (6 page)

Silence prevailed at Einfried. The expedition was not expected to be back before nightfall. The “serious cases” lay in their rooms, suffering. Mr. Klöterjahn's wife and her mentor went on a short walk, after which both returned to their quarters. Mr. Spinell stayed in his room as well, occupying himself in his own way. At around four o'clock the ladies were each brought a half-liter of milk, while Mr. Spinell took his usual weak tea. A short time later, Mr. Klöterjahn's wife tapped on the wall separating her room from Mrs. Spatz's and said:

“Should we go down to the sitting room, Mrs. Spatz? I just don't know what to do with myself any more up here.”

“Just a second, dear!” answered the magistrate's wife. “I'll just put on my boots, if you don't mind. I've been lying on my bed, you see.”

As was only to be expected, the sitting room was empty. The ladies sat down by the fireplace. Mrs. Spatz stitched flowers on a piece of evenweave, and Mr. Klöterjahn's wife, too, completed a couple of stitches, whereupon she let her needlework drop into her lap and sat staring out over the armrest of her chair, daydreaming. Finally she made a remark hardly worth her opening her mouth for, and to her dismay, Mrs. Spatz asked “What?” and she had to repeat the entire sentence. Mrs. Spatz asked again, “What?” At that moment, however, steps could be heard in the outside foyer. The door opened, and Mr. Spinell came into the room.

“Am I disturbing?” he asked softly, still on the threshold, looking exclusively at Mr. Klöterjahn's wife and bowing at the waist in a kind of gentle, hovering way . . . The young woman answered:

“Oh, why, not at all! In the first place this room is a designated open port, Mr. Spinell, and secondly, there's nothing to disturb. I have the distinct impression I'm boring Mrs. Spatz . . .”

He had nothing to say to this, so he smiled instead, baring his decayed teeth, and under the eyes of the ladies walked over to the glass door, his steps extremely self-conscious. There he stopped and stared outside with
his back rather impolitely toward them. Then he turned halfway around, continuing to stare out into the garden, and said:

“The sun has disappeared. The sky has clouded over little by little. It's already beginning to get dark.”

“Yes, there are shadows everywhere,” answered Mr. Klöterjahn's wife. “It seems our sleigh riders will get their snow after all. Yesterday at this time it was still broad daylight, but today it's already getting dark.”

“Oh,” he said, “after the extreme brightness of these past weeks, the darkness is good for the eyes. I'm almost grateful to this sun, which lights up the beautiful and vulgar with the same obtrusive clarity, for finally hiding its face a bit.”

“You're not fond of the sun, Mr. Spinell?”

“Well, I'm not a painter . . . People turn inward in the absence of sun. — There's a thick pale gray line of clouds. Perhaps that means a thaw tomorrow. In any case, I wouldn't recommend straining your eyes on your needlepoint all the way over there, madam.”

“Oh, don't worry. I'm in no danger of that. But what is there to do?”

He had sat down on the rotating stool in front of the piano, one arm resting on the instrument's lid.

“Music . . .” he said. “If only we had some music now! Sometimes the English children sing little Negro songs, but that's about it.”

“Yesterday afternoon Miss von Osterloh thrashed her way through ‘The Monastery Bells,'” Mr. Klöterjahn's wife remarked.

“But you play, madam,” he said in a pleading tone, standing up . . . “You used to play duets every day with your father.”

“Yes, Mr. Spinell, but that was then. In the days of the fountain, you know . . .”

“Do it now!” he requested. “Play a few bars just this once! If you only knew how I long . . .”

“Both our family doctor and Dr. Leander have expressly forbidden it, Mr. Spinell.”

“They're not here, either of them! We're free . . . You're free, madam. A few meager chords . . .”

“No, Mr. Spinell, you won't get anywhere with that. Who knows what kind of miracles you expect from me! I've forgotten everything, believe me. There's hardly a thing I still know by heart.”

“Oh, then just play this ‘hardly a thing'! And besides, there's some sheet music here somewhere. Here it is, on top of the piano. No, this is nothing. But here's some Chopin . . .”

“Chopin?”

“Yes, the nocturnes. The only thing left is for me to light the candles . . .”

“Don't get the idea I'm going to play, Mr. Spinell! I'm not allowed to. What if it damages my health?” —

He fell silent. He stood with his immense feet, his long black jacket and his gray-haired, weak-jawed, beardless face in the light of the two candles on the piano, letting his hands dangle at his sides.

“I won't ask you again,” he said at last, softly. “If you're afraid of damaging your health, madam, then let the beauty that might have sounded under your fingers remain dead and mute. You weren't always so reasonable, at least not conversely when it came to renouncing beauty. You didn't worry about your health and showed much more daring and determination about following your will, when you forsook your childhood fountain and laid aside the little golden crown. . . . Hear me out,” he said after a short pause, lowering his voice even further. “If you sit down here and play as you did before, when your father stood beside you drawing those notes from his violin which always made you cry, then maybe it will appear once more, secretly sparkling on your head, the little, golden crown . . .”

“Really?” she asked with a smile . . . By chance, her voice failed her when she said this word, so that the first half came out hoarse and the second was utterly toneless. She cleared her throat and then said:

“Are those truly Chopin's nocturnes you have there?”

“They truly are. They're open and everything is ready.”

“Well, then, by God, I will play one of them,” she said. “But only one, you hear? You'll have heard enough of me then forever, anyway.”

With that, she got up, laid her needlepoint down at her side and walked over to the piano. She took a seat on the stool, which had a couple of bound volumes of music on top, adjusted the candelabras and flipped through the sheet music. Mr. Spinell had pulled up a chair and sat there next to her like a music teacher.

She played the Nocturne in E-flat Major, op. 9, no. 2. If it was true that she had forgotten some of what she once knew, her performing skills back then must have been truly first-class. It was only a mediocre piano, but after the first few chords she knew how to handle it with control and taste. She displayed a tensely attuned sensitivity to timbre and a joyful command of rhythm that bordered on the fantastic. Her touch was both sure and delicate. Under her hands, the melody yielded every last bit of sweetness, and her embellishments nestled around its main lines with restrained grace.

She wore the same dress as on the day of her arrival: the dark, heavy bodice with the thick-cut velvet arabesques that made her head and hands look so unearthly and delicate. Her facial expression remained unchanged while she played, but her lips seemed to become more clearly defined, and the shadows in the corners of her eyes seemed to deepen. After she had finished, she put her hands in her lap and continued to gaze at the music. Mr. Spinell sat silent and still.

She played another nocturne, then a second and a third. Then she stood up, but only in order to look for more music on the top of the piano.

Mr. Spinell had the idea of investigating the volumes in black cardboard on the piano stool. Suddenly he made an incomprehensible sound, and his immense white hands fumbled excitedly with one of those discarded books.

“Impossible! . . . It can't be,” he said . . . “Do my eyes
deceive me? No! . . . Do you know what this is? . . . What was lying here? . . .What I'm holding here?”

“What is it?” she asked.

Without a word he showed her the title page. Quite pale, he lowered the book and stared at her with trembling lips.

“Really? How did that get there? Let me see it,” she said simply. She propped it up on the stand, sat down and after a moment's silence began with the first page.

He was sitting at her side, leaning forward, his hands folded between his knees, his head down. She played the beginning at an extravagantly, torturously slow tempo with unsettlingly long pauses between the individual phrases. The
Sehnsuchtsmotiv
, a lonely and wayward voice in the night, softly made its fearful question heard. Silence and waiting. And look: the answer. That same timid and lonely sound, only a bit brighter and more tender. Renewed silence. Then, in that wonderful hushed sforzando, came the
Liebesmotiv
that is so like passion stirring and arising in sacred revolt. It ascended, climbed ecstatically upward toward sweet entanglement, then sank back, disengaging itself, as the cellos emerged with their deep song of heavy, anguished rapture to carry the melody . . .

With not inconsiderable success, the pianist strove to suggest on this poor instrument the effects of an orchestra. The violin runs of the great crescendo sounded with shining precision. Playing with keen reverence, she lingered piously over every theme and emphasized each individual passage with humble insistence, like a priest raising the Holy Communion over his head. What was happening? Two forces, two enraptured beings reached out in suffering and bliss toward one other and embraced in the ecstatic, frenzied pursuit of the eternal and the absolute . . . The prelude blazed, then died down. She concluded at the parting of the curtains and continued to gaze silently at the music.

Meanwhile, in Mrs. Spatz, boredom had reached that point where it distorts the human countenance, causing the eyes to bulge and giving the face a hideous,
corpselike look. This sort of music upset the nerves in her stomach, filling the dyspeptic magistrate's wife with such anxiety that she feared an attack of cramps.

“I'm afraid I must go to my room,” she said weakly. “Farewell, I'll be back . . .”

With that she left. The light had grown much dimmer. Outside you could see the snow falling thick and silent on the terrace. The two candles gave off a close, flickering light.

“The second act,” he whispered, and she turned the pages and began the second act.

The horns died away in the distance. Or was it the rustling leaves? The gentle murmuring of the fountain? Already night's silence had swathed hedge and house, and pleading admonitions could no longer check the sway of passion. The sacred mystery was consummated. The torch was extinguished, the
Todesmotiv
descended with an unearthly, suddenly muted timbre, and restless with impatience, longing waved her white veil at the beloved, who was approaching, arms outspread, through the darkness.

O torrential and unquenchable exultation at union in the eternal realm beyond things! Liberated from agonizing delusion, delivered from the bonds of space and time, thou and I, thine and mine melted together in sublime bliss. Though the day's thievish illusions might still divide them, those nocturnal seers could no longer be blinded by its pompous lies, for the love philter had initiated their vision. For him who had lovingly gazed into death's night and its secret, there remained in the madness of day but one desire, the longing for that sacred night, unending and true, that unifying . . .

O fall upon them, night of love, grant them the oblivion they crave, wrap them wholly in your bliss and free them from the world of deception and division. Behold the last torch extinguished! Reason and supposition founder in the sacred twilight that spreads out, world redeeming, over the agonies of madness. Then, when the illusions fade, when mine eye bursts with delight, and that from which the day's lies have excluded me, that
which it has falsely and to my eternal agony pitted against longing—then I, o miracle of fulfillment! then
I myself
am the world. And there followed, during Brangäne's dark song of warning, that ascending violin phrase that surpasses all reason.

“I don't understand it all, Mr. Spinell; a lot of it I can only sense. This part ‘then—I myself am the world,' what does that mean?”

He explained it to her, softly and in a few words.

“Yes, so it is. — How is it that you, who understand it so well, can be unable to play it?”

Strangely enough, he was at an absolute loss in the face of this harmless question. He blushed, wrung his hands and sank into his chair.

“The two rarely coincide,” he said finally, looking pained. “No, I cannot play. — But you please continue.”

And they continued with the drunken songs of the mystery ritual. Has love ever died? Tristan's love? The love of thine and mine Isolde? O, the strokes of death cannot touch love eternal! What is there to perish in death except that which plagues us, that which deceptively divides beings that are one? Love joined them with a sweet
and
. If death tore them asunder, could it be other than that, in destroying the individual life of the one, death would be given to the other as well? And a duet, full of mystery, united them in the ineffable hope of the
Liebestod
, of eternal undivided immersion in night's miracle realm. Sweet night! Eternal night of love! All-encompassing land of bliss! Once one has had an inkling glimpse of you, how could he reawaken without horror into the barren day? O fair death, banish their fears! Free these lovers forever from the desperation of waking! O, unbound storm of rhythms! O upward-struggling chromatic ecstasy of metaphysical realization! How to seize it, how to leave it, this great bliss, far from the divisive agonies of the light? Gentle longing, fearless and real; dying embers, exalted and painless; twilight beyond sublime, immeasurable! Thou Isolde, Tristan I, no longer Tristan, no longer Isolde—

Suddenly, something startled them. The pianist broke
off the music and put her hand to her eyes to peer through the darkness, and Mr. Spinell swung around quickly in his chair. The door behind them leading to the hall had opened, and a shadowy figure entered, leaning on the arm of a second. It was one of Einfried's guests, who had likewise been unprepared to accompany the others on the sleigh ride and who was now passing the hour on one of her sad unthinking walks through the clinic, that sick woman who had lost her wits after bringing nineteen children into the world—Mrs. Höhlenrauch, the pastor's wife—on the arm of her nurse. Without looking up she proceeded with groping, erratic steps through the rear of the room, then disappeared through the opposite door—silent and blank, straying and unconscious. — There was silence everywhere.