The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse (24 page)

Finally something happened. The two young men entered. They greeted the lady with exquisite manners and were introduced to
me.
Monkeys
, I thought, and became angry at myself because one of them had a reddish-brown jacket tailored in a nice and stylish fit, and it put me to shame and made me feel jealous. It’s terrible to feel such envy toward irreproachable people, toward free and easy, smiling people! “Control yourself!” I exclaimed softly to myself. The two young men shook my extended hand with indifference—why had I even offered it?—and with sneers on their faces.

It was then that I sensed something was wrong about me, and I felt an irritating chill begin to rise up my legs. As I looked down, I turned pale when I saw that I was standing only in my stocking feet without shoes. Once again those dreary, deplorable, paltry obstacles and restraints! Nobody else ever had experiences like appearing naked or half naked in a salon before people of irreproachable and correct manners! Pathetically, I tried at least to cover my left foot with my right. In the process I glanced through the window and saw the steep, wild, blue banks of the lake, threatening in false and gloomy tones and seeking to become demonic. Distressed and in need of help, I looked at the strangers, full of hatred toward these people and full of greater hatred toward myself—I was a nothing, and nothing ever turned out right for me. And why did I feel responsible for that dumb lake? Indeed, if I felt that way, then I was responsible, too. Imploringly I looked at the man dressed in the reddish-brown jacket. His cheeks glowed and revealed how healthy and well groomed he was, and I knew full well that I was placing myself at his mercy to no avail and that he could not be moved.

Just at that moment he noticed my feet in the coarse dark-green socks—oh, at least I could still feel grateful that there were no holes in them—and made a nasty smile. He nudged his friend and pointed to my feet. Then the other one also grinned, full of derision.

“Just look at the lake!” I cried, and pointed toward the window.

The man dressed in the reddish-brown jacket shrugged. It did not occur to him in the least to turn toward the window, and he said something to the other man that I only half understood, but it was aimed at me and had to do with fellows in socks whom one should not really tolerate in such a salon. When I heard the word
salon
, it smacked of beautiful and somewhat false elegance and worldliness, as it had during my childhood.

Close to tears, I bent over to see if there was anything I could do to improve my feet and saw that they had slipped out of large house shoes. At least, a very large, soft, dark-red slipper lay behind me on the floor. I picked it up, not knowing what I should do with it, and I held it in my hand and was still on the verge of tears. Then it slipped out of my hand, but I caught it as it was falling—it had become even larger in the meantime—and now I lifted it by the toe.

As all this happened, I suddenly felt emotionally relieved and realized the profound value of the slipper, which was flapping a little in my hand, weighed down by the heavy heel. It was glorious to have such a red limp shoe, so soft and heavy! As an experiment, I swung it several times through the air. This was delightful, and joy flowed through my entire body to the roots of my hair. A club or a rubber tube was nothing in comparison to my large shoe. I called it
calziglione
in Italian.

When I gave the man in the reddish-brown jacket the first playful blow on the head with the
calziglione
, the irreproachable young man tumbled onto the couch, and the rest of the people, the room, and the terrible lake lost all their power over me. I was big and strong. I was free, and with the second blow to the head of the man in the reddish-brown jacket, the fight had all but ended, and I could let
loose and not worry about self-defense. Instead there was pure rejoicing on my part, and I felt myself the lord of my own whims. But I did not hate my defeated foe in the least. He was interesting to me. He was precious and dear. I was now his master and creator. With each good blow of my strange shoelike club, I shaped his unripe and apelike head, forged it, built it, composed it. With each blow that formed it, his head became more pleasant, more handsome, and finer. He became my creature and work, something that satisfied me and that I loved. With one last tender forging blow, I drove his sharp head down so that it was sufficiently flat on top. He was finished. He thanked me. He stroked my hand.

“That’s all right.” I waved with my hand.

He crossed his hands over his heart and said shyly, “My name is Paul.”

Wonderfully strong and happy feelings swelled within my breast and gave me some space. The room—forget calling it a salon!—retreated with shame and crawled away until it became nothing. I stood by the dark-blue lake. Steel clouds pressed on the somber mountains. In the fjords the turbid water boiled with foam. Sultry spring storms strayed compulsively and anxiously in circles. I looked above and stretched my hand out to signal that the storm could begin. A bolt of lightning exploded clear and cold out of the hard blue sky. A warm typhoon howled straight down to the ground. In the sky, gray forms blew apart and branched out into veins of marble. Enormous round waves rose terrifyingly out of the whipped-up lake. The storm ripped the tips of the foam and the clapping bits of water from the backs of the waves and threw them into my face. The black petrified mountains tore open their eyes full of horror. Their cowering and silence sounded like a plea.

In the middle of the glorious storm, hunting on gigantic horses, I could hear a timid voice nearby. Oh, I had not forgotten her, my pale lady with long black hair. I bowed over her. She spoke to me childishly—“The lake is coming.” It was impossible to stay there. I kept looking at the gentle sinner. Her face was nothing but a silent pallor in the wide dusk of her hair. Then the breaking waves were already beating my knees and my breast, and the sinner floated helplessly and silently on the rising swells. I laughed a little and placed my arm under her knees and lifted her up to me. This, too, was beautiful and liberating. The woman was unusually light and small, full of fresh warmth, and her eyes were affectionate, trusting, and horrified, and I saw that she was not a sinner at all and not a distant enigmatic lady. No sins, no mystery. She was simply a child.

I carried her out of the waves and over rocks and through the royally dismal park made dark by rain to a place that the storm could not reach. Nothing but soft beauty spoke from the bowed crowns of old trees, nothing but poems and symphonies, a world of noble presentiments and charming cultivated pleasures, lovely painted trees by Corot and noble rustic woodwind music by Schubert that mildly enticed me with a fleeting upsurge of nostalgia to the beloved temple. However, it was in vain. The world has many voices, and the soul has its hours and moments for everything.

God knows how the sinner, the pale lady, the child, took her leave and vanished. There was an outside stairway made out of stone. There was a house gate. There were servants present, everything dim and murky, as if behind an opaque glass, and other things, much less substantial, much dimmer, figures blown there by the wind. A note of reproach and reprimand directed against me made me angry at that
storm of shadows. Nothing remained of it except the figure of Paul, my friend and son Paul, and in his features an infinitely well-known face revealed itself and concealed itself and still could not be named, the face of a schoolmate, the face of a legendary nursemaid from ancient times, nurtured from the good, nourishing memories of the fabulous early years.

Good ardent darkness, warm cradle of the soul, and lost homeland—all this opened up. All this opened into the time of existence unformed and the first indecisive undulation on top of the ground of all things, beneath which the primordial time of the ancestors sleeps with dreams of the primeval forest. Just feel your way, soul, just wander about, burrow blindly into the full bath of innocent twilight drives! I know you, scared soul, nothing is necessary to you. Nothing is so much food, drink, and sleep for you as the return to your beginnings. The wave roars around you, and you are wave; the forest rustles, and you are forest. There is no more outside and inside. You fly, a bird in the air; you swim, a fish in the sea; you absorb light, and you are light; you taste darkness and are darkness. We wander, soul, we swim and fly, and smile and tie the torn threads again with ghostly fingers and blissfully drown out the destroyed pinions. We no longer seek God. We are God. We are the world. We kill and die along with others. We create and are resurrected with our dreams. Our most beautiful dream is the blue sky; our most beautiful dream is the sea; our most beautiful dream is the bright starry night, and is the fish, and is the clear happy noise and the clear happy light—everything is our dream. Each one is our most beautiful dream. We have just died and become earth. We have just invented laughter. We have just arranged a constellation.

Voices resound, and each one is the voice of our mother. Trees
rustle, and each one rustles above our cradle. Roads divide in the form of a star, and each road is the way home.

He who called himself Paul, my creature and friend, was there again and had become as old as I. He resembled a friend of my youth. But I did not know which one, and therefore, I was somewhat uneasy with him and kept a polite distance. He drew power from this. The world no longer obeyed me, it obeyed him. Consequently, all previous things had disappeared and had collapsed in meek improbability, shamed by him who now ruled.

We were at a square. The place was called Paris, and in front of me was an iron beam standing straight up high. It was a ladder and had narrow iron rungs on both sides. You could hold on to them with your hands and climb on them with your hands. Since Paul wanted to climb, I began, and he was next to me on a similar ladder. When we had climbed as high as a house or a very high tree, I began to feel frightened. I looked over at Paul, who did not feel afraid, but he perceived that I was scared and smiled.

For one split second, while he smiled and I stared, I came close to recognizing him and recalling his name. A gap in the past was ripped open and kept splitting until it receded to my early school years when I was twelve years old, the most wonderful time of life, everything full of fragrance, everything ingenious, everything with an edible aroma of fresh bread and with an intoxicating shimmer of adventure and gilded heroism—Jesus was twelve years old when he shamed the scholars in the temple. By twelve, we have all shamed our scholars and teachers, have shown that we are smarter than they. Memories and images stormed in convulsions upon me: forgotten school notebooks, detention during the noon hour, a bird killed with a slingshot, a jacket pocket filled with sticky stolen plums, boys
splashing wildly in a swimming hole, torn Sunday pants and a very bad conscience, fervent evening prayer about earthly cares, wonderful heroic feelings of splendor while reading poetry by Schiller.

It took only a second, a flash of lightning, an avid rushing sequence of images without a focus. The very next moment, Paul’s face looked at me again, tormentingly somewhat familiar. I was no longer certain of my age. Perhaps we were boys. Farther and farther below the narrow rungs of our ladders were the masses of streets called Paris. When we were higher than any tower, our iron poles came to an end, and each ladder was crowned with a horizontal board, a tiny platform. It seemed impossible to climb upon them, but Paul did it with ease, and I had to do it, too.

Once on top I laid myself down flat on the board and looked down over the edge as though I were on a small high cloud. My gaze fell like a stone and did not hit a target. Then my friend pointed somewhere with his hand, and my eyes became glued to a marvelous sight that hovered in midair. All of a sudden I saw a strange-looking group of people in the air suspended over a wide street at the same level of the highest roofs but still very far beneath us. They seemed to be tightrope dancers, and indeed, one of the figures walked back and forth on a rope or a pole. Then I discovered that there were many, and most of them were young girls. They seemed to me to be gypsies or nomadic folk. They walked, lay, sat, moved at the height of the roofs on an airy scaffold made out of the thinnest planks and poles similar to an arbor. They lived there and were at home in this region. Beneath them one could sense the street. A fine whirling cloud extended from the ground until it almost reached their feet.

Paul made a remark about this.

“Yes,” I answered. “It is touching—all those girls.”

Of course, I was much higher than they were, and I clung fearfully to my post while they floated lightly and fearlessly, and I saw I was too high. I was at the wrong place. They were at the right height, not on the ground and yet not as hellishly high and remote as I was; not among the people and yet not so entirely isolated. Besides, there were many of them. I saw clearly they represented a bliss that I had not yet attained.

But I knew that I would have to climb down sooner or later from my gigantic ladder, and the thought of it was so oppressing that I felt nauseous and could not bear being up there one second longer. Full of desperation and shaking from dizziness, I felt beneath me for the rungs of the ladder with my feet—I couldn’t see them from the plank—and I hung for some horrifying minutes at that terrible height suffering from convulsions. No one helped me. Paul was gone.

In profound dread I made some dangerous stabs with my feet and hands, and I felt myself enveloped by something like a fog. I felt that it was not the high ladder or the dizziness that I had to experience and endure. In fact, I lost perspective and could not determine the shape of things. Everything was foggy and uncertain. At one time, I was still hanging on the rungs of the ladder feeling dizzy, and then the next thing I knew, I was crawling, small and fearful, through dreadfully narrow underground shafts and corridors. Then I was hopelessly wading through swamp and dirt and felt the filthy slime rise up to my mouth. Darkness and obstacles were everywhere. Terrible tasks with serious yet concealed meaning. Fear and sweat, paralysis and cold. Hard dying, hard being born.