Pictor's Metamorphoses (6 page)

They all fell silent, listening now to the sounds of the golden evening sky and the colorful landscape. Lulu began to hum very softly; gradually the melody went from a half-whisper to full-voiced singing.

The young men listened in silent rapture. The soft, sweet tones of her noble voice seemed to come from the very depths of the blessed evening, like dreams from the bosom of the slumbering earth.

From the clear expanse of sky,

Peace and harmony gently fall;

As do joy and suffering, all

Like sweet songs, sweetly die.

With this stanza the evening song was done. Then Ludwig Ugel, who lay on the grass at the feet of the others, began to sing:

O fountain in the forest, O Silverspring most clear,

Down to the white chapel, through secret channels, steer!

There on the mossy steps the Virgin Mary is.

Call to her softly, murmur, tell her of my distress.

Hush, speak gently, tell her, tell her of my need:

My mouth is red with sin, and oh with singing red.

Carry to her this lily, a pure white offering

So that she may forgive me my red life and my sins.

Perhaps her gracious smile will shine upon your face,

And from the pure white flower a sweet scent will arise:

Drinking in love and sunlight be all the singer's sins,

And only by her gracious kiss may Song's red mouth be cleansed.

And then Hermann Lauscher sang one of his songs:

The summer nods its weary head,

Sees its pale image in the lake.

Weary, dust-covered, still I tread

The broad, shady road I must take.

Weary, dust-covered, onward I tread;

Behind me my youth stands still.

Its shapely limbs, its lovely head

Will not bend to my will.

Meantime, the sun had set, suffusing the sky with red hues. The overcautious junior barrister was about to remind everyone it was time to be getting home, when once again the lovely Lulu began to sing:

Many a towering city,

Many a stern fortress

Stand in the realm of my father,

The King called Sorrowless.

And should a knight of valor

Pledge troth and deliver me,

To half my father's kingdom

Heir he would rightly be.

Now they all got up and slowly started back down the glowing mountain. On the other side of the summit of high Mount Teck, a late strip of sunlight gleamed and failed.

“Where did you learn that song?” Karl Hamelt asked the lovely Lulu.

“I really can't remember,” she said. “I think it's a folksong.” And she quickened her pace, suddenly seized by a fear of getting home too late and incurring the wrath of the innkeeper's wife.

“We won't let that happen,” Erich Tänzer cried out. “In any event, I've been meaning to give Frau Müller a piece of my mind, to tell her exactly…”

“No, not that!” the lovely Lulu interrupted him. “Things will only get worse for me if you do! I'm just a poor orphan who must bear whatever burdens others place on me.”

“Oh, Fräulein Lulu,” said the barrister, “I wish you were a princess and that I could save you.”

“No,” cried the aesthete Lauscher, “you really are a princess. It's we who are not ‘knight' enough to save you. But what's preventing us? I'll do it today. I'll take that damned Frau Müller by the throat…”

“Hush! Hush!” Lulu cried beseechingly. “Leave me to suffer my fate alone! I'm only sorry I'm not free to enjoy the rest of this lovely evening.”

Little more was said as they quickly neared the town. There Lulu returned to the Crown alone; the others watched her disappear down a dark street.

My father is the King,

The King called Sorrowless …

Karl Hamelt quietly hummed to himself as he made his way home to the village of Wendlingen.

6

L
ATER THAT SAME EVENING
, Erich Tänzer bided his time in the Crown, waiting until Lauscher took his night light and went up to his room and he alone remained in the tavern. Alone, that is, with Lulu, who was still sitting at his table. All of a sudden, Erich shoved his beer glass aside, grabbed the fair maiden's hand, looked into her eyes, cleared his throat, and addressed his subject: “Fräulein Lulu, I must speak to you. The future public prosecutor in me prompts me to do so. And I must lodge a complaint. You are so beautiful, more beautiful than is permissible by law, that you make yourself and others unhappy. Don't try to speak in your own defense. Where is my good appetite? And my splendid thirst? Where the compendium of Corpus Juris Civilis I so laboriously crammed into my head with the help of Meisel's crib? And the Pandects? And the penal code? And civil procedures? Yes, where are they? In my head, only one paragraph remains, and its rubric reads ‘Lulu.' And the footnote: ‘O you lovely lady, O most lovely of them all!'”

Erich's eyes bulged even more than usual, his left hand furiously kneaded his fashionable new silk hat to tatters, his right hand clamped down on Lulu's cool hand. She, meanwhile, was on the lookout for an opportunity to escape. Herr Müller was snoring away in the buffet; she could not call out for help.

Then, fortuitously, someone opened the door a crack; a hand and part of a white flannel shirtsleeve pushed through the narrow opening. Something white fell from the hand and fluttered to the ground; then the door closed as quickly as it had opened. Lulu managed to free herself; she bounded toward the door and retrieved the fallen piece of stationery, on which there was writing. Erich sat in vexed silence. But Lulu burst out laughing and read aloud what was on the paper:

Lady, must you laugh at me?

See, this burning poet's head

You once trusted—so you said—

Now lies shamefaced at your feet.

And this heart which had come to know

Joy most high and Suffering most low

Trembles shyly in your dainty hand.

I, the wanderer, plucked red roses, and

I, the singer, sang red songs for you,

Now they languish, wilt, and bid adieu,

Lie, poor wretches, at your feet—

Must you laugh at me?

“Lauscher!” the provoked Erich cried out. “That contemptible scoundrel! You can't possibly believe that thoughtless windbag takes his writing seriously. Those damned verses. Verses!—he writes them to a new heartthrob every three weeks!”

Lulu made no reply to Erich's outburst; she walked over to the open window and stood there listening. From outside came jangling guitar sounds, accompanied by a bass voice singing:

Under an impatient star

I stand and play my guitar …

Oh, do not stay and linger,

But come and love your singer!

A gust of wind set the window banging shut. At this, the innkeeper awakened in the buffet and came peevishly through the door to the main room. Erich threw his money down on the table beside his untouched beer and left the tavern without saying goodbye. Taking a leaping bound down the stairs, he went crashing into the back of the guitarist, who turned out to be none other than junior barrister Ripplein. He and Erich went off toward the chestnut-tree-lined embankment, angry and quarreling.

The lovely Lulu extinguished the gaslights in the parlor and vestibule, and went upstairs to her own room. When she passed by Lauscher's door, she could hear agitated footsteps and frequent deep, long sighs. Shaking her head, she came to her own room and lay down on her bed. Since she could not fall asleep, she mulled over the evening's events. But she no longer laughed about them; on the contrary, they made her very sad. It all now seemed like a badly played farce. Pure of heart, she wondered how all these people could be so narrow-minded and foolish, thinking only of themselves, esteeming and loving her only for her pretty face. These young men seemed like so many poor, misguided moths, reeling around a tiny flame, while she had important matters to discuss. How sad and ridiculous, all their talk about Beauty and Youth and Roses; they surrounded themselves with colorful stage sets, made entirely out of words, while the whole bitter truth of life strangely passed them by. On her simple, girlish soul the truth was plainly and deeply inscribed: the art of living inheres in learning both sorrow and laughter.

The poet Lauscher lay on his bed only half-asleep. It was a sultry night. Rash, fragmentary, feverish thoughts boiled up in his forehead and vaporized into dreams that swiftly paled; still, the extreme sultriness of the August night and the stubborn, tormenting buzzing of a few crane flies did not escape his consciousness. The crane flies tormented him most. Now they seemed to sing:

Perfection,

Today you've peered in my direction …

and now the Song of the Dream-harp. Suddenly he remembered that by now the lovely Lulu had held his poem in her hands and knew of his love. That Oscar Ripplein had serenaded her and that in all likelihood Erich, too, had confessed his love this evening was no secret to him. The poet's thoughts were filled with his beloved's enigmatic temperament, her strange unconscious tie to the philosopher Turnabout, to the Saga of Ask and to Hamelt's dream, her strangely soulful beauty and her gray, commonplace lot in life. That the whole narrow clique of the cénacle was drawn to her as to the lodestone, and that he himself—instead of taking his leave and traveling—with each passing hour found himself more and more inextricably enmeshed in the web of this romance, all this made him feel as if he and the others were merely figments of some humorist's imagination, or characters in some grotesque fable. His aching head throbbed with the notion that he and Lulu and the whole tangle of events were all textual fragments from one of the old philosopher's manuscripts, powerless and with no wills of their own; hypothetically, tentatively recombined elements in an ongoing experiment in aesthetics. And yet everything in him violently opposed such an unhappy
cogito ergo sum;
he pulled himself together, got up, and walked over to the open window. Thinking it over clearly, he recognized the hopeless absurdity of his lyrical declaration of love. He felt and understood that, at bottom, the lovely Lulu did not love him but found him laughable. Sadly he lay down on the ledge of the window; stars shone out between wisps of clouds, a breeze blew across the dark crowns of the chestnut trees. The poet decided that the next day would be his last in Kirchheim. The spirit of renunciation, both sad and uplifting, penetrated his tired, uneasy mind, which had been so befuddled with the dream of the previous day.

7

W
HEN
L
AUSCHER WENT DOWN
to the tavern early the next morning, Lulu was already busy with her chores. The two of them sat down to drink a cup of steaming hot coffee. Lulu seemed remarkably changed. An almost queenly radiance illuminated her pure, sweet face, and a singular kindness and intelligence looked out of her lovely eyes, which had grown even deeper.

“Lulu, you have become even more beautiful overnight,” Lauscher said admiringly. “I didn't think such a thing possible.”

Smiling, she nodded. “Yes, I've had a dream, a dream…”

Across the table, the poet questioned her with a look of astonishment.

“No,” she said, “I cannot tell it to you.”

At this moment the morning sun came in the window and shone through Lulu's dark hair, proud and golden as a halo. Attentive with sad joy, the poet's gaze hung on the exquisite image. Lulu nodded at him, smiled again, and said: “I have yet to thank you, my dear Herr Lauscher, for the poem you sent me yesterday. It was a very pretty poem, though I must confess I could not entirely understand it.”

“It was such an oppressively warm night,” Lauscher said, looking straight into the beauty's eyes. “May I see the poem again?”

She gave it to him. After reading it over, he folded it up and hid it away in his pocket. The lovely Lulu looked on in silence, thoughtfully nodding her head. Now they could hear the innkeeper's footsteps on the stairs. Lulu got up with a start and went back to work.

The stout little innkeeper came in and greeted Lauscher.

“Good morning to you, Herr Müller!” Hermann Lauscher replied. “This will be the last day I enjoy your hospitality; I'll be leaving tomorrow morning.”

“But, Herr Lauscher, I thought…”

“No matter. I'd like you to put a couple of bottles of champagne on ice, and reserve the back room for tonight's farewell celebration.”

“Whatever Herr Lauscher wishes.”

Lauscher left the inn and set off to see Ludwig Ugel. He wanted to spend his last day in Kirchheim in the company of his best friend.

The sound of morning music already streamed from Ugel's lodgings on Steingaustrasse. His hair still uncombed, Ugel stood in his shirtsleeves at his coffee table. It was a pleasure to hear him play his fine violin. The little room was filled with sunlight.

“Is it true that you're leaving tomorrow?” Ugel asked the poet.

The latter was not a little surprised. “How do you know that?”

“Turnabout told me.”

“Turnabout? The devil could learn a thing or two from him!”

“Yes, he's quite a droll companion. He spent half the night here, going on and on, quite colorfully, about some Princess, some story about a lily garden and the like. And he gave me to understand that I must rescue the Princess; he was disappointed in you, you're not the true Harp Silversong. Crazy, no? I didn't understand a word he said.”