Peter Camenzind (18 page)

I realized that this malady was incurable and tried to do a little work at least. I drew up a master plan and drafted several preliminary studies, but soon I saw that this was not the right time. Meanwhile, ominous reports of the Föhn were coming in from all quarters and the village itself was badly stricken. Dams along the raging brooks broke; houses, barns, and stables were heavily damaged; and several families in outlying districts, deprived of any shelter, sought refuge with us. Everywhere there was lamentation and distress and nowhere was there any money. It was my good fortune that the mayor asked me to his office to see if I would be willing to join the relief committee. He felt confident that I would be able to represent the village successfully before the cantonal government and arouse the rest of the country with newspaper articles asking for help and money. The request came just at the right moment, for it suited me to be able to forget my own unproductive suffering by engaging in more serious and worthwhile affairs. So I threw myself into the cause with all my heart. By means of a few letters, I quickly found several people in Basel willing to collect money for us. The cantonal government, as we knew, had no funds and only sent a few people to help us. Then I turned to the newspapers, with reports and demands: letters, contributions, and inquiries poured in. In addition to attending to this massive correspondence, I had to contend with the hard-nosed farmers who served on the community council.

These few weeks of disciplined, strenuous work were very good for me. By the time the operation was running fairly smoothly and my services were less necessary, the meadows were turning green all around us, and the lake again reflected sun and snow-free slopes.

My father was a little improved and my love sickness had disappeared like the soiled remains of an avalanche. This was the time of year when my father used to repair his boat, while Mother watched from the garden, and I too watched, my eyes trained on his agile hands, on the smoke curling from his pipe, and on the yellow butterflies. Now there was no boat in need of a paint job, Mother had died long ago, and my father huddled moodily in our derelict house.

Uncle Konrad also reminded me of the old days. Sometimes, without Father seeing us, I would take him to the inn for a glass of wine and listen to him reminisce with good-humored laughter, and not without pride, about his many ventures. He no longer engaged in adventures, and old age had left its mark on him in other ways too, though his face and laugh still had a certain boyishness that always pleased me. Often, when I became fed up with my father, he was my sole consolation and amusement. When I took him to the inn for a glass of wine, he trotted by my side and tried his best to keep his thin, crooked legs in step with mine.

“Hoist your sails, Uncle Konrad,” I would say encouragingly, and at the word “sail” we invariably began to discuss our old boat, now gone, mourning it like a lost friend. As I had been fond of the old wreck and missed it, we dredged up all the stories about it in great detail.

The lake was as blue as ever, the sun no less festive and warm. Older by so many years, I often contemplated the yellow butterflies with a feeling that had changed very little. Couldn't I lie down in the meadows again and abandon myself to dreams? That this was no longer possible became obvious to me whenever I washed: I saw my face with its prominent nose and sour mouth smiling back at me out of the rusty washbasin. Camenzind Senior made even more certain that I would make no mistake about the way times had changed. If I wanted to be transported into the present, all I needed to do was open the tightly-wedged table drawer in my room, where my future work lay slumbering, a package of outdated sketches and six or seven drafts on quarto sheets. But I opened this drawer only rarely.

Besides caring for the old man, I had my hands full with our decrepit house. There were gaping holes in the floorboards, oven and stove were defective, smoke filled the rooms with acrid stench, the doors would not shut properly, and the ladder to the loft, once the scene of my father's chastisements, was a danger to life and limb. Before I could undertake any repairs, I had to have the ax ground, the saw sharpened, borrow a hammer, and find some nails. The next problem was to fashion usable pieces of wood from the remains of our rotting stock. Uncle Konrad lent a hand with repairing the tools and the old grindstone, yet he was too old and bent to be of much use. So I tore my tissue-soft writer's hands on the splintery wood, worked the wobbly grindstone treadle, clambered over the leaky roof, nailed, hammered, cut the tiles, and whittled away. During all this I lost a considerable portion of my excess weight. At times, especially while wearily patching the roof, I would suddenly come to a halt, the hammer in midair, and sit down to take a pull on my half-extinguished cigar and gaze into the deep blue sky. I savored my idleness, glad that my father could no longer goad me or find fault. If neighbors happened to pass by, women, old men, or schoolchildren, I would amplify my inactivity by engaging them in neighborly chats. Gradually I earned the reputation of being someone you could talk to sensibly.

“It's warm, Lizbeth, isn't it?”

“Right you are, Peter. What's that you're doing?”

“Patching the old roof.”

“Can't do it any harm. It's been needing it for so long now.”

“Right you are, Lizbeth.”

“What's the old man up to these days? He must be seventy if he's a day.”

“Eighty, Lizbeth, eighty it is. What do you think it'll be like when we're as old as that? It's no fun.”

“Right you are, Peter. But I've got to get on now. My man wants his lunch. Take care now.”

“Bye now, Lizbeth.”

And as she walked on with her lunch basket, I blew smoke clouds in the air, followed her with my eyes, and wondered how it was that everyone else accomplished so much while I had been hammering away at the same plank for two full days. But finally the roof was patched. For once, my father took an interest, and as I couldn't hoist him up to the roof, I had to produce a detailed account of every board I had replaced. It didn't really matter that I exaggerated a little.

“That's fine,” my father conceded. “That's fine, but I never would have believed you'd get it done this year.”

*   *   *

When I reflect on all my journeys and efforts to live, I am both pleased and annoyed to have proved the old adage that “fish belong in the water, farmers on the land.” No amount of art will transform a Camenzind from Nimikon into a city dweller. It is a situation to which I am becoming accustomed, and I am glad that my clumsy pursuit of luck has led me back, against my will, to the old nook between lake and mountains where I started, and where the virtues and vices, especially the latter, are the normal, traditional ones. In the world outside I had forgotten what it was like at home and had come very near to regarding myself as some rare and remarkable bird. Now I saw once again that it was merely the spirit of Nimikon spooking about inside me, unable to adjust to the customs of the rest of the world. Here in my village, no one thinks of me as out-of-the-ordinary. When I look at my father, or at Uncle Konrad, I feel myself to be a very normal son and nephew. My few flings in the realm of intellect, and the so-called world of culture, can be compared to my uncle's famous sailing episode—except that they cost me more in money, effort, and precious years. My appearance too, now that Cousin Kuoni trims my beard and I walk around again in lederhosen and rolled-up sleeves, has become completely native. When I am old and gray, I will take my father's place and play his small role in village life and no one will notice. People know only that I was away for many years. I take great care not to tell them what a miserable life I led then, and how often I got stuck—otherwise they'd have a nickname for me in no time at all. Whenever I tell any of them about Germany, Italy, or Paris, I boast a little. Sometimes I begin to doubt my own veracity even in the well-remembered parts of my stories.

What, then, is the upshot of so many blind voyages and wasted years? The woman I loved and still love is rearing her two beautiful children in Basel. The other woman, who loved me, has found consolation and carries on her fruit, vegetable, and seed trade. My father, for whose sake I returned to this God-forsaken haven, has neither deteriorated completely nor recovered, but sits opposite me on his bed of sloth, gazing at me. He envies me the possession of the cellar key.

But of course that isn't everything. Apart from my mother and my drowned friend Richard, I have blond Aggie and my little hunchback Boppi as angels in heaven. I have seen the houses repaired in the village and the dikes mended. If I wanted to, I could join the community council—but there are enough Camenzinds there as it is.

Recently an entirely new possibility has turned up in my life. Innkeeper Nydegger, in whose inn my father and I drank so many liters of Veltliner, Valais, and Vaud, is going downhill rapidly and no longer enjoys his trade. He complained to me about his troubles just the other day. The worst of it is, if no one from the village buys the inn, the outside brewery will, and that would be the end of it and we would be without a comfortable table. Some outside tenant would be installed who'd prefer serving beer to wine, naturally, and under whose mismanagement the good Nydegger wine-cellar would be adulterated and spoiled. I haven't stopped worrying since I found this out. I still have a little money left in my account in Basel and I wouldn't be the worst successor old Nydegger could find. The only hitch is that I would not like to become an innkeeper while my father is still alive. For not only would I be unable to keep the old man from drinking, but he would be triumphant: with all my studying and Latin, I'd have ended up as the Nimikon innkeeper. That would not do at all, and so I am marking time until my old man passes on—not impatiently, mind you, only for the sake of the cause.

After many quiet, drowsy years, Uncle Konrad is again thirsting for adventure, and I don't like it at all. He goes about with a finger in his mouth, his forehead wrinkled in thought, strides around his room with quick little steps and, when the weather is good, peers across the lake. “I'm beginning to think he wants to build boats again,” remarked his wife, Cenzine. Indeed, Konrad looks livelier and more daring than he has for years, with such a sly, superior look, as if he knew exactly what he was doing this time. But I don't believe there's anything to it. Most likely, it is just his tired soul longing for wings to take it homeward soon. Time to put on sails, old uncle! But once that time arrives, the people of Nimikon will be treated to an unheard-of spectacle. For I have decided that when Uncle Konrad's life has ended, I myself shall say a few words at his graveside, something unknown in these parts. I will commemorate him as a blessed and beloved son of God, and follow this edifying part with a good handful of acid remarks for the beloved mourners, remarks they will neither forget nor want to forgive for some time to come. I hope my father will be around to witness the occasion.

And in my drawer lie the beginnings of my great work. “My Life's Work” I might call it—but that sounds too pretentious. I'd rather not call it that, because, I must confess, its continuation and conclusion seem highly doubtful. Perhaps a time will come when I'll start all over again and see it through to the end. In that case, the yearning of my youth will be proved right, and I will turn out to be a poet after all.

This would mean as much, or perhaps more, to me than being a village councilor—or the builder of the stone dams. Yet it could never mean as much to me as the years of my youth that are gone but not lost, or as much as the memory of all those beloved people, from slender Rösi Girtanner to poor Boppi.

 

Books by Hermann Hesse

Peter Camenzind

Beneath the Wheel

Gertrude

Rosshalde

Knulp

Demian

Strange News from Another Star

Klingsor's Last Summer

Wandering

Siddhartha

Steppenwolf

Narcissus and Goldmund

The Journey to the East

The Glass Bead Game

If the War Goes On …

Poems

Autobiographical Writings

Stories of Five Decades

My Belief

Reflections

Crisis

Tales of Student Life

Hours in the Garden

Pictor's Metamorphoses

Soul of the Age: Selected Letters of Hermann Hesse

PETER CAMENZIND
. Copyright © 1953 by Hermann Hesse, Montagnola. Translation copyright © 1969 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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ISBN 0-312-42263-6

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First Picador Edition: December 2003

eISBN 9781466835139

First eBook edition: January 2013