“Oh, I’m fine, I’m doing very well,” answered Lolo.
It was almost as cosy, thought Lolo, as if they were both lying on a green satin couch and chatting with each other. Yes, that was it, she wanted to talk to her now. She no longer felt as self-conscious as out there on the sandbank. Should she ask if it was very cramped living at the Wardein farm? No, that was too impersonal, so she said: “Madame, I see you every night from my window taking a walk in the moonlight.”
“So,” replied Doralice, who shifted to her side so she could look at Lolo, her face covered with shimmering drops, “that must be your window up in the gable, the one in which I see light every night?”
“Yes,” Lolo cried enthusiastically. It pleased her that Doralice had been looking up at her window. Having now arrived back at the shore, they walked up onto the beach.
“It is delightful,” said Doralice, “to swim as a pair,” and she offered Lolo her hand. Lolo took the small damp hand, held it for a moment, and then carried it to her lips. “I… I thank you, Madame,” she said softly.
“Please, don’t,” resisted Doralice, who bent forward and kissed Lolo on the mouth.
Down from the dune, though, now surged a column of people advancing hurriedly towards Lolo. At the head was Frau von Buttlär, who was continuously crying “Lolo” and waving her handkerchief, followed by Fräulein Bork with the bath towel, then Wedig with his hands in his pockets and an ironic smile on his lips and lastly the Generalin, overheated and out of breath. Lolo walked a little hesitantly towards the group. “Here you are at last,” cried Frau von Buttlär, “you will be the death of me yet with your escapades.” Lolo allowed herself to be wrapped silently in the towel, but one could immediately see from her obstinate expression that she had no intention of producing an apology. As the group now moved back towards the changing hut, Frau von Buttlär walked behind her daughter, scolding her without pausing: “Something like this could only happen to you, to run straight into the arms of that person, and then she kissed you. Who does she think she is, the brazen hussy? And you allowed that to happen. Will there be anyone at all whom you do not allow to kiss you?”
In response Lolo turned her head slightly and said resolutely and stubbornly: “She kissed me because I had kissed her hand.”
“You kissed her hand,” cried Frau von Buttlär, “has anyone ever heard of such a thing? And why? I ask you. This person, she is practically half naked – no sleeves, and what a décolletage! But you have no pride, you are engaged, you are supposed to become an honest woman; we honest women are supposed to form a common front against such ladies, and yet you kiss their hands. Your fiancé will be delighted. Oh God, I feel quite ill, I am so ashamed.”
At this point the Generalin intervened, pushing her grand-daughter into the changing hut and saying: “That is enough for now, Bella, the child is exhausted, what’s done is done. We will cure her of the kiss of Countess Jasky with a little valerian.”15
When they reached the house Frau von Buttlär sent Lolo immediately to bed, she also lay down herself, and Ernestine ran up and down the stairs with the valerian.
Lolo, still pale, lay upstairs in her room on top of her bed and looked pensively at the ceiling with restless eyes. Nini sat next to her, she said nothing, but merely watched Lolo expectantly. Finally Lolo began to speak, slowly and dreamily: “Yes, she was magnificent, but I knew that, and that I would have no choice but to love her, I knew that too, but I did not know that there was something about her that could move one to tears. I got the same feeling in my throat that I get when I come across a deeply moving passage in a novel – that is of course because everyone speaks so ill of her, because everyone is against her. But I am on her side…”
“I am as well,” said Nini.
“You?” asked Lolo surprised, “you don’t know her at all.”
“That doesn’t matter,” replied Nini, “I was already on her side that first evening, when I saw her walking in the moonlight. But what will you do now?”
“I know what I am going to do,” said Lolo earnestly. She got up, then sat down at her desk and began to write a letter. Nini waited patiently and then asked: “Have you written to her?”
“Oh, no,” answered Lolo grandly. “I ordered a large number of red roses from the city, which I will toss to her through her window in the evenings.”
“And I,” resolved Nini, “will practise for as long as it takes, until I too am able to swim to the second sandbank, even if I drown as a result.”
Notes
13 …Fénelon’s Télémaque: François Fénelon (1651-1715) was a French archbishop, theologian, writer, and, from 1689 to 1697, the tutor of the grandson of King Louis XIV. He is best remembered today as the author of Les aventures de Télémaque (The Adventures of Telemachus), which was written as an instructional guide for the young prince, and was first published in 1699. The book tells the story of the travels and education of Telemachus, the son of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. The book was wildly popular in the eighteenth century, and its liberal attitudes helped shape the thought of the Enlightenment. But Wedig’s boredom is understandable: very few fifteen-year-old boys on holiday are going to be enthusiastic about having to read a two-hundred-year-old didactic text written in a foreign language.
14 …“faites les liasons, mon enfant”: (French) “Connect the words, my child.” (The baroness is giving her son advice on the correct pronunciation of French, telling him to run the words together.)
15 “…with a little valerian.”: A flowering plant, the dried root of which has been used medicinally as a sedative since ancient times.
Chapter Five
Day after day of cloudless skies and unrelenting sunshine followed. A hot, dazzling light lay over everything, swimming and trembling on the water, flashing on the sand, touching off sparks among the pebbles and the stiff stalks of beach grass and sedge.
“There’s no escaping from this glare,” noted Hans. Yet the evenings and nights also brought neither cooling nor darkness. A light west wind merely stirred up the mugginess without alleviating it. Every evening the mass of hazy purplish clouds on the horizon blazed with lightning and then the nearly full moon appeared and everything glittered and sparkled again.
“I would just like to tell this eternal brightness,” remarked Hans Grill yet again, “leave me in peace!”
But they could find no peace at home either, it was too cramped and too hot indoors, and the darkness settled over the sleepers like a thick black blanket. Even the fishermen, who otherwise were in the habit of disappearing into their cottages after nightfall, sat in front of their houses and stared out at the sea. And so the Wardeins sat on a long bench outside their front door, arranged side by side in a row like sea birds on a cliff. The eighty-year-old grandmother, tall and raw-boned like a man, cooled her strangely gnarled hands by resting them on her kneecaps. Wardein smoked his pipe; his pale wife held her youngest to her breast and the other children sat there in nightclothes swinging their little bare feet restlessly. No one spoke a word, and everyone, even the children, peered earnestly and patiently straight ahead into the darkness. When the lightning in the distance suddenly illuminated the horizon, Wardein pointed at it wordlessly with his pipe. Down on the beach strolled silent pairs of lovers, walking side by side with their arms hanging loosely, languidly dragging their feet across the sand. They had nothing to say to each other, since from time immemorial the sea had had the right to speak here, and it would have been pointless to interrupt.
Doralice and Hans now spent most of the daylight hours in a hollow in the dunes. Hans set up his artist’s sunshade there, spreading a cloth on the sand for Doralice to lie upon, while he himself sat before his easel and painted the sea. “This is the only solution,” maintained Hans. “We must behave like those fowls that make holes in the ground to keep cool.”
Doralice closed her eyes and murmured, almost too lazy to move her lips: “If you lie completely still and don’t move, and then, do you also feel
it? Inside of us it is always trembling and flickering, just like the sunshine on the water. It makes you tired.”
“Good, good, just lie there quietly,” said Hans paternally and soothingly. They remained silent for a while, until Hans tossed aside his brush and stretched out on the sand.
“It wants and does not want to become something,” he said with exasperation. Doralice opened her eyes and, looking at the picture on the easel, replied: “Why are you annoyed, it is quite good – it’s transparent, it’s green.”
Hans responded vehemently: “Transparent and green. A piece of glass is also transparent, a piece of cloth can be green. No, that is still not the sea. The sea can only be drawn, do you see, only the lines have movement and life. I can paint your blue dress, nothing is easier than that, but to paint it so that everyone can see that you are there under the blue – that is art. With the sea there is also something there, just under the transparency and the greenness, which lives and moves, and that is precisely the sea.”
“Ah, I see,” said Doralice, her eyes closed once more, “then paint that.”
“Paint that, paint that,” repeated Hans. “That’s just it, I would like to know, where the devil has my talent gone? I certainly used to have some.”
“Is it my fault?” asked Doralice quietly and sleepily.
Hans did not answer immediately. He lay there and looked up at the sky and pondered. Yes, what had changed? And he began to speak slowly, as if to himself. “Fault? No one is at fault here, but the thing is, you take up such a big part of me now that there is no longer any room left for talent. Of course, that is it. You have entered into my life like a miracle, and you continue to be at every moment an inconceivable miracle. How could there be room for anything else in my life? Constantly experiencing a miracle is exhausting.”
“And do you believe,” interrupted Doralice a little testily, “that it isn’t also exhausting to be a miracle – always – the whole day long?
Hans laughed good-naturedly: “You needn’t worry, I’m already getting used to the miracle.”
“Oh, really, you are getting used to it,” replied Doralice lightly.
“Certainly,” continued Hans, “everything that we take for granted was at one time a miracle. I will come to take you for granted too. Just wait until we have settled down.”
Doralice raised her arms high above her head and stretched: “Oh yes, you and your settling down, go ahead and tell me about how we will settle down. A little house, isn’t that right? That’s how it has to begin?”
“Certainly a little house,” began Hans petulantly, “a little house somewhere, let’s say a suburb of Munich, a little house that is your personal creation, the expression of your being, and there you will reign. My studio will naturally be in the city, but I will come home at midday and you will be waiting for me…”
“I already know all of that,” interrupted Doralice, “I would only like to know what I have been doing the whole morning by myself.”
“You will naturally have your own sphere of activity,” explained Hans. “You will have your household affairs, on which you will impose your character.”
Doralice shrugged her shoulders: “Oh God, I can’t sit there alone the entire morning imposing my character on the household.”
Hans turned red and made a face, like someone who trembles in every limb because he cannot untangle a knot. “Alone, why alone? There will be people there, we will gather a circle around us, our own social set. We have no ties to society, but that’s just it, we will be the creators of our own society.”
Doralice raised herself slightly and looked at Hans and her eyes had grown wide and taken on an anxious expression: “People,” she said softly, “you know very well that I’m afraid of people.”
The compassion aroused in him by those eyes was so painful that he was able to rescue himself only by speaking in anger. He practically screamed: “You shouldn’t be afraid, you can’t be afraid, not when I am there, that is insulting to me, and we can’t always live in isolation. I don’t want for us to be outcasts. You can’t continue to be out of the ordinary for me, no, you must be my everyday life, my daily bread, only then will I entirely possess you. And we must live like other people and with other people. The world is full of good, wonderful people, you will find women friends, generous, free-thinking, noble-minded women.”
Doralice had leaned back again and closed her eyes: “I know these women,” she observed. “They wear velveteen reform dresses16 and talk about objective and subjective. Two former pupils of Miss Plummers once came to visit her, they were just like that, and Miss Plummers described them as ‘very clever indeed!’”17
Hans’ fingers were full of grass, which he had, in his anger, pulled up from all around him: “This is always the way it is,” he said, “you don’t want to understand me. Having forsaken your own social set, you believe that there are no other people worthy of you. That is arrogance, or are you ashamed to appear in public on my account? Tell me, are you ashamed of me?”
Doralice smiled with closed eyes. “No, you are a fine man,” she replied, “you are good for me, it’s only your Frau Grill, with all her character, whom I do not care for, whose acquaintance I would prefer not to make.”
“But you must make her acquaintance,” cried Hans, “if you want me, then you must also want Frau Grill, I will stand up for her, I will not allow you to shove her aside haughtily. But this is the way it always goes, we talk and talk as if one of us were standing on the first sandbank and the other on the second. And neither of us understands what the other is saying, and we constantly shout to each other: ‘What? What?’”
Hans had jumped to his feet, he stood before Doralice and looked at her. How calmly she lay there in her yellow summer dress,18 the blonde hair shimmering all around her hot face – she looked like a very young girl sleeping peacefully. Only the twitching of her mouth, with its narrow too-red lips, suggested the agitation that was awake inside of her. “Does she not know how much I suffer?” thought Hans. He pulled his straw hat further down his forehead and ran from the dune down to the sea. To go into the water, to swim, at such moments that was the only thing that he could do.
Hans Grill had never expected that life would pamper him, he had battled stout-heartedly against poverty and other horrors; but he had always had faith in life, and even if he had found it hard at times, he had never found it incomprehensible. Everything unclear in the world had become immediately clear when confronted by Hans’ twenty-year-old ego, and all riddles had been solved when he posed the question: are you for or against Hans Grill? But now he no longer understood the world. Something had come into his life that made him unrecognisable to himself, as though another man were living his life for him. Girls, and whatever goes by the name of love, these were things that he had already encountered earlier in his life, and they had bewildered him at times, causing him to make a fool of himself, but they had been comprehensible and it had all worked out pretty smoothly in the end as part of his general life experience. One just had to leap into action determinedly and a little recklessly. “Hold tight, then nothing will get tangled up,” Hans’ grandmother, who knitted stockings for a living, had liked to say, when little Hans sat before her and held the strands of cotton as they unwound. But this woman here, why did he desire her so achingly, even now, when he already possessed her? Why did he never enjoy the calm, happy feeling of possession, why did he always fear that, when he held her close, he was going to lose her? His whole being was overflowing with this woman and yet she was still remote from him. He didn’t understand, and now he had no choice but, like a growling beast of prey, to guard his prize so that no one might wrest her away from him. Hans had undressed and was now slowly making his way through the surf into the sea. “I will force the question,” he thought grimly. “I will convert her to the world view of Hans Grill.”
“Good day, sir,” said a voice near him. Under a breaking wave, as if under a dome of green glass, stood Knospelius in a
yellow bathing suit. Now the wave crashed down upon him, hiding him beneath a white curtain of foam, but immediately thereafter he emerged again, shook himself, nodded and said: “Von Knospelius. I already have the honour of being acquainted with your wife.” Hans bowed stiffly.
“Hot days,” continued the Privy Counsellor, “one cannot get enough of bathing. Otherwise a lovely place to stay. One might only wish for a little more social intercourse. It is about to get livelier here though. Baron Buttlär will be here before long with his future son-in-law.”
“Ah, my wife and I are not feeling all that sociable right now,” replied Hans as he looked down curiously at the big, pale boy’s face. “I know, I know, honeymoon, les jeunes mariés.19 Waiting upon a charming wife, that is the duty of all duties. Every normal man has it or seeks it. Compared to it, everything else is only a side interest. But an old bachelor like me, who only has side interests, must cling to sociability. We should set up a miniature version of Norderney20 here. I will take the liberty of paying a call on you in the near future.”
“I believe,” said Hans, “most of the people here are seeking solitude.” While he spoke the Privy Counsellor disappeared beneath a wave, like a field mouse into a furrow. When he emerged again, he held up his index finger, like a lecturer making a point, and said: “Those are always the liveliest social gatherings, the ones made up entirely of people who are seeking solitude. Now I need to get out of the water, my Klaus is already waiting for me.”
He bowed formally and walked up onto the beach, where a very tall, serious man with a towel was waiting for him.
Hans shrugged his shoulders. “What on earth does he want?” he thought. “There is no escape now from this complete and utter nonsense.” He went further out and began to swim, swimming far out to sea. This felt better. There was nothing incomprehensible here, he moved his arms and legs powerfully, cutting through the water and remaining always on the surface and not concerning himself with the dark depths that lay beneath him.
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