Leavetaking (12 page)

the quietness and tiredness, the reserve and the suffering in this voice. Perhaps I had expected a signal for rebellion. The voice was too remote for me in its mature wisdom. It spoke of patient work, of slow, thorough studying, of the necessity of some means of livelihood, and of the dangers of isolation. Only much later did I understand Haller’s words. At the time I was too impatient. The words were too mild, too conciliatory for me. The words stood on the side of the orderly and the considered. I longed for the other extreme, the extreme of blind self-abandonment to the extremes of the unruly and the instinctive. I longed for it, but did not understand it, I groped in the dark and everything slipped through my fingers. It was decided I should go to Prague and take up an apprenticeship in a textile factory. A room was rented for me not far from the factory. The minute I set foot in this room I knew I would never stay. Experimentally I filled the walls with my pictures and drawings, spread out my papers about me, and then lay down weakly on the sofa, while behind the pane of frosted glass in the door the sounds and shadows of a strange family came and went unsteadily. Next morning I went to the factory to present myself to the Director. The building rose like a fortress in the midst of broad, dry fields. Inside in the workshops the looms hummed in long rows, and the working girls were cocooned in the close, whirring threads. In a small room I made my mission known by shouting above the roar of the machines and men in white coats handed me on to each other until I landed up in front of the Director, from
whose words, as far as I could tell, hindered as I was by the foreign language and the ceaseless roar, I thought I gathered that he had to turn me down on grounds of competition, since my father ran a similar factory. Already he had turned away and the assistants in the white coats, having wheeled me around, shoved me off and away out through the screaming rows of machines. Triumphantly I walked past the cocooned weaver girls who turned their pale faces after me, ran across the fields and into my new freedom. What now happened had been long since prepared, it was the moment in which after years of pressure the bars around me fell away. I packed my belongings together and stood with my suitcase all on my own, out on the sidewalk. Haller had given me the address of a man from whom I might expect advice and help. Max B. lived in a boardinghouse near the freight yard, his room was veiled in dense tobacco fumes and Max lay in bed in a woolen coat with a green scarf around his neck, half buried under newspapers. His slabby, bony face lit up when I mentioned Harry Haller’s name. The account of my suddenly and unexpectedly won freedom roused him out of his lethargy to which four years of emigration had reduced him. From the very first moment there was an understanding and trust between us, I who was twenty years his junior, embodied the hopes and possibilities that he had long since given up. I had a future ahead of me and immediately Max championed this future, on the same afternoon we looked up all his contacts who might be useful to me. The editor of a newspaper, a dark, owlish man to whom
I showed my drawings, gave me a commission to do illustrations for him, the head of a school of graphic arts recommended me to a professor of the art academy who, after he had studied my work, assured me that I would be able to enter his class. Thus on the afternoon of the same day on which I had set off as I thought to take up employment in a textile factory, I found myself in the light-flooded studio of the academy and my new comrades in their paint-smeared smocks gave me friendly smiles. This upheaval in my life had been accomplished with effortless ease but after only a few hours the old darkness and heaviness welled up in me again and extinguished all the brightness. I had no right to this freedom, I did not believe that it could have been handed to me on a platter, I must have got it by stealth, have sneaked into a preserve where I did not belong. Although the professor attempted in a letter to persuade my parents of my needing to paint, I was filled with feelings of guilt, and foreboding. In the evening in Max’s room on the sofa, which had been made up as a bed for me, a swamp fever buzzed in me, my throat, my chest, my head were inflamed by the bacilli of the old, unresolved pestilence, and then Max suddenly came to me, naked, his tall, lean, hairy body glaringly lit up by the lamp on the ceiling and his penis erect. He approached me and in his approach I understood his great need for closeness and tenderness and his helpless attempt to break through the long, killing loneliness. There was nothing repulsive about him, I was only sorry that I could not fulfill his wish. When I refused him there
remained no tenseness between us, our understanding for one another had at this moment been only increased. For a long time we lay and talked to each other until I sank into half sleep, and it was then that I heard my name being called, a long drawn-out, icy cry, that cut through the noise of the freight yards, where wheels were rolling on frozen rails, brakes squealing, where the crashings of car couplings being engaged were being propagated from car to car, it penetrated me, a cry in my mother’s voice. And my parents became resigned when they got the letter from the Authority, they gave up on me, but nevertheless, with his sense of the practical, my father tried to make it an orderly leave-taking, and I was sent money, given a trial year, by the end of which I was to show I was equal to a painter’s calling. Now I was on my own, all to myself, no one to keep an eye on me, no one to fence me in, I could make of my day what I pleased, and so undertake the impossible, to be done with my old self and create an existence of my own. There I stood in the city of Prague and had to prove myself, and I looked for a room in this city, a room that would take me in, in which I could find myself, I walked about in the strange city and the streets were hung with black flags and muted drums were beaten and a coffin was borne to the grave on a mount through the ranks of the silent crowds. There I stand before alien doors, speak brokenly in a foreign tongue, ask for a room, am led by strangers down corridors where the air is stale and stuffy. I intrude upon these strangers, force my way into their apartments, I have never seen these people before,
and they know nothing about me and I expect them to give me a room. These fat women, these lean women, these poorly dressed widows, these dolled-up
demimondaines
, they open the doors of the rooms and switch the light on and the light is always feeble so that one does not notice how worn-out the room is, and I stand before a dimness of furniture, gloomy shapes which try to look like chairs, tables, wardrobes, beds, enveloped in a smokiness of nightmare wallpaper, and always, somewhere, the big nail sticks out of the wall, the nail on which to hang oneself. Until I finally find a room with its own entrance, a studio, dilapidated, dusty, with sooted windows, the ruins of a bedstead, with boxes and planks from which a table and a seat could be constructed. This room appeals to me, it is sick, it is spotted and burst open with sores, it shows me my wretchedness, it shows me the lowness of my estate. So I settled down in the foreign city, I found a lair into which other strangers had crept before me, and which would serve someone else as a flop. In this brief interval I made it livable for myself in my stony den in the middle of a great pile of stone, and surrounded myself with scrawls, hieroglyphs intended to give notice that I lived here, surrounded myself with magic signs, spells, with which I wanted to frighten away the evil spirits of loneliness. I lived for a whole year in this city. The city, with its ranks of streets, its architectures piled one atop the other, its gateways, bridges, and golden statues of my life, and in this framework the long walks and conversations with Max took place, along the banks of the river or on the slopes of the
vineyards, in the parks, and in the outer framework lay the great Academy building among trees in which the birds chirped, in this external frame the hours of work passed away in the communal studio, with my fellow students in front of the model or the still life, scraping the brush on the canvas, in the smell of oil paints and turpentine. The inner levels of my existence, however, were enclosed by the room, this dwelling-place in which I could hide. Relieved of my parents and my teachers, I took over the tyranny over myself. Nobody could have been harder and more ruthless than I was to myself. At daybreak I forced myself out of bed and began my work. The lessons at the academy were merely a formal justification for my stay in this city, my actual achievements were like blood oozing out after torture. I punched myself in the ribs, I spat on my hands and slapped my face with them, I punished my tiredness and inattention by depriving myself of food and with all this drudgery it did finally come about that pictures rose up in me and slowly, tentatively were projected onto the panels before me. Memories of the surroundings of my earliest childhood re-echoed in these pictures, interspersed with the impressions and reflections of later years, I tried to recognize myself in these pictures, I tried to heal myself with these pictures, and they were full of the leaden heaviness of my isolation and the explosive glow of my pent-up despair. The evocation of these visions brought me no release, the visions came to me as to a drowning man, and the bodily experiments I carried on beside my intellectual exertions led me to the brink of madness. In
the past years I had several times tried and failed to have sexual intercourse with a woman. A few days before my departure for England I tested myself with a prostitute. I was still dressed in mourning after Margit’s funeral. I thought now I must prove myself, now I must begin my new life as a man. The woman took off her skirt and placed herself with legs astraddle over a pail and pissed into the pail. I did not even try to undress. I gave her the money and departed. In London I came across a woman who invited me into her apartment. First of all she sent me to have a bath, for I was dirty and had wandered around town for some days in an attempt to break away. She came to me in black, transparent silk. She tried hard to get me going but she had two little Pekinese dogs lying on the bed who distracted me with their squeaking and sniffing and their licking tongues. She did not want any money from me, she wanted me as her lover, perhaps wanted to pay my way, too, but it did not appeal to me. I ascribed this failure to my outward lack of freedom, nevertheless sensed it had deeper roots. Even now, when there was no one to stop me from bringing a woman up to my room, and no one to disturb us, a prohibition, a curse, paralyzed me. Outside in the world beyond there had been kisses and close embraces, I had been gripped by physical desires, but now in the containment of my own room, when the naked, bodily acts were imminent, I felt only coldness and futility. I explored the warm, strange skin, the limbs and joints, the soft parts of the flesh. With the flat of my hand and my eyes I had carnal knowledge of the curves of shoulders,
breasts, hips, belly, thighs, and my conscious mind pieced these perceptions together into a concept of woman, but my function as a man was not awakened thereby, I found myself faced with an insoluble task. The woman’s movements indicating sexual excitement scared me, I knew that her sexual parts, now heaving up and down, were waiting for me, but I lacked the key to set the mechanism of this union in motion. I tried to find something in the woman’s face that could help me to overcome the chasm of strangeness. Her eyes were shut, her half-open mouth breathed heavily. Behind the closed eyes lay the world of another human being, who wanted my most intimate closeness. When her eyes opened and I caught her longing look, I could feel for a second’s duration the possibility of entering her, but straight-away the meaning of our being together was lost again in intangibles. My fingers stroked her pubic hair and the lips of her vagina, which opened up between her yielding outspread thighs, I saw the rosy and brownish inside of the wet lips, I imagined the depths that wanted to take me in, yet I felt no enticement, felt only the impossibility of it all. Suddenly I could see Margit’s body in front of me, as she had once offered herself to me, and I saw the bones of this body far from me in a hole in the earth and I sprang up and only wanted to be alone and the stranger who had followed me into my lair threw on her clothes and fled in terror. She, who was dead, I could love, I could give myself to her, I need no longer have any fear of her, she asked nothing from me. To her who was dead, I could escape and no one could
find out if my love was genuine. Whenever I failed in my attempts with the living, the living woman in my presence, I consoled myself with the dead, the childlike woman of the past. From a living woman I could not hide, in her presence I had to come out of my confinedness, reach out far into an outer world. And that meant being swallowed up, surrendering myself. As a child I had once seen my mother’s genitals, she was standing bent over in her nightdress and between her heavy thighs gaped the dark, hair-fringed hole. As then, when I had stared in vertiginous alarm into my mother’s great crack, so now my gaze was riveted on the genitals of a living woman of the present, my fingers opened the wet, soft lips, under whose swellings and recesses was concealed the secret of all existence, and if I could penetrate into this sucking depth I would penetrate to the very core of life. In my impotence I looked for women who wanted to be hurt and who put up with the endless preliminaries that always had no result. These women had no names, their faces were blurred, they were merely an
idée fixe
for me, I drew them into my madness, I felt them out and searched them out, and sometimes for a few moments they were like my dead sister, and their faces were surrounded by wire frames and the head was fastened to the neck with screws and tubes and I worked feverishly in this technical confusion to restore the control mechanism that could bring her back to life again and sometimes the mouth moved and sometimes the eyelids twitched and I whispered, Wake up, wake up, and around me in the half-dark room the surfaces of
pictures and the boxes and plants and frames stood out and the easel rose up like a gallows, and white papers shone out of the shadows, and then I pulled the naked body from the bed onto the floor and we wallowed in the soot and crawled around between the planks and pots and embraced each other in contorted positions. I could not talk to anyone about it, not even to Max. Once I went to a doctor who in a newspaper ad promised to cure impotence. He sold me a powder that I was to take mixed with soda water. There was no other remedy. There was only hang on or kick the bucket. If I do not kick the bucket, perhaps sometime I will find a woman whose look and gestures, whose voice and caresses, will suddenly break through the layer of ice. And one day I will find out what this opening underneath her body is like, this entrance to life, and I will thrust myself into the silky warmth, I will let myself be sucked round by life’s wet, soft mouth, I will burrow into it, and unload a part of my life into the greedy, viviparous deep. My mouth, too, will trace out the opened, mussel-colored lips, my tongue will lap up the sweet taste to the tenderly haired vagina, incredible that I should have recoiled from it before. And then perhaps one day I will discover that there is no loneliness, that this whole culture of loneliness was only a misunderstanding, only a convention, a lack of fantasy, an impoverishment of feeling, for how can there be loneliness if one can come so close to someone else, so deeply pervade each other. And this possibility must have existed then too, otherwise if it had not been there I should have thrown myself out of the