Narcissus and Goldmund

by Hermann Hesse

  Part of this sacrifice was recoverable. A few of his love adventures, his fights with rivals constituted a small revenge against the slavelike sedentary order of his present life. All his emprisoned wildness, all the caged-in strength of his nature steamed out of this escape valve; he became a known and feared rowdy. A sudden attack in a dark side street, on his way to see a girl or on the way home from a dance; a couple of blows from a stick, throwing himself around with lightning swiftness to pass from defense to attack, to press the panting enemy to him, to land a fist under the enemy's chin, or drag him by the hair, or throttle him mightily--all these things tasted good to Goldmund and cured his dark moods for a while. And the women liked it, too.

  All this gave him plenty to do, and it all made sense as long as he was working on his St. John. It took a long time. The last delicate shapings of face and hands were done in solemn, patient concentration. He finished the statue in a small wooden shed behind the assistants' workshop. Then the hour of morning came when the work was finished. Goldmund fetched a broom, swept the shed meticulously clean, gently brushed the last sawdust from his Saint's hair, and stood in front of his statue for a long time, an hour or longer, filled with the solemn feeling of a rare and great experience which he might perhaps know one more time in the course of his life or which might remain unique. A man on the day of his wedding or on the day he is knighted, a woman after the birth of her first child might feel such emotions in the heart: a deep reverence, a great earnestness, and at the same time a secret fear of the moment when this high, unique experience would be over, classified, swallowed by the routine of the days.

  He saw his friend Narcissus, the guide of his adolescent years, clad in the robe and role of the beautiful, favorite disciple, stand listening with lifted face and an expression of stillness, devotion, and reverence that was like the budding of a smile. Suffering and death were not unknown to this beautiful, pious, spiritualized face, to this slender figure that seemed to be floating, to these graceful, piously raised long hands, although they were filled with youth and inner music; but despair was unknown to them, and disorder, and rebellion. The soul of those noble traits might be gay or sad, but its pitch was pure, it suffered no discordant note.

  Goldmund stood and contemplated his work. His contemplation began as a meditation in front of the monument to his youth and friendship, but it ended in a tempest of sorrow and heavy thoughts. There his work was, the beautiful disciple would remain, his delicate flowering would never end. But he, the maker, would have to part with his work; tomorrow it would no longer be his, would no longer be waiting for his hands, would grow and unfold under them no longer, was no longer a refuge to him, a consolation, a purpose in his life. He remained behind, empty. And therefore it seemed to him that it would be best to say farewell today not only to his St. John but also to the master, to the city, to art. There was nothing here for him to do any more; no images filled his soul that he might have carved. The longed-for image of images, the figure of the mother of men, was not yet accessible to him, would not be accessible for a long time. Should he go back to polishing little angel figures now and carving ornaments?

  He tore himself away and walked over to the master's workshop. Softly he entered and stood at the door, until Niklaus noticed him and called out to him.

  "What is it, Goldmund?"

  "My statue is finished. Perhaps you'll come and take a look at it before you go up to eat."

  "Gladly. I'll come right now."

  Together they walked over, leaving the door open for more light. Niklaus had not seen the figure for a while; he had left Goldmund undisturbed at his work. Now he examined it with silent attention. His closed face grew beautiful and light; Goldmund saw his stern eyes grow happy.

  "It is good," the master said. "It is very good. It is your assistant's piece, Goldmund. Now you have finished learning. I'll show your figure to the men at the guild and demand that they make you a master for it; you deserve it."

  Goldmund did not value the guild very highly, but he knew how much appreciation the master's words meant, and he was glad.

  While Niklaus walked slowly around the figure of St. John, he said with a sigh: "This figure is full of piety and light. It is grave, but filled with joy and peace. One might think that the man who made this had nothing but light and joy in his heart."

  Goldmund smiled.

  "You know that I did not portray myself in this figure, but my dearest friend. It is he who brought light and peace to the picture, not I. It was not really I who made the statue; he gave it into my soul."

  "That may be so," said Niklaus. "It is a secret how such a work comes into being. I am not particularly humble, but I must say: I have made many works that fall far behind yours, not in craft and care, but in truth. No, you probably know yourself that such a work cannot be repeated. It is a secret."

  "Yes," Goldmund said. "When the figure was finished and I looked at it, I thought: you can't make that again. And therefore I think, Master, that I'll soon go back to wandering."

  Astonished and annoyed, Niklaus looked at him. His eyes had grown stern again.

  "We'll speak about that. For you, work should really begin now. This is not the moment to run away. But take this day off, and at noon you'll be my guest."

  At noon Goldmund appeared washed and combed, in his Sunday clothes. This time he knew how much it meant and what a rare honor it was to be invited to the master's table. As he climbed the stairs to the foyer that was crowded with statues, his heart was far from being filled with the reverence and anxious joy of the other time, that first time when he had stepped into these beautiful quiet rooms with pounding heart.

  Lisbeth, too, was dressed up and wore a chain of stones around her neck, and besides carp and wine there was another surprise for dinner: the master gave Goldmund a leather purse containing two gold pieces, his salary for the finished statue.

  This time he did not sit in silence while father and daughter talked. Both spoke to him, they drank toasts. Goldmund's eyes were busy. He used this opportunity to study carefully the beautiful girl with the distinguished, slightly contemptuous face, and his eyes did not conceal how much she pleased him. She treated him courteously, but he felt disappointed that she did not blush or grow animated. Again he wished fervently to make this beautiful immobile face speak, to force it to surrender its secret.

  After the meal he thanked them, lingering a while before the statues in the foyer. During the afternoon he strolled through the city, an aimless idler. He had been greatly honored by the master, beyond all expectation. Why did it not make him happy? Why did all this honor have such an unfestive taste?

  Heeding a whim, he rented a horse and rode out to the cloister where he had first seen work by the master and heard his name. That had been a few years ago; it seemed unthinkably longer. He visited the madonna in the cloister church and again the statue delighted and conquered him. It was more beautiful than his St. John. It was similar in depth and mystery, and superior in craft, in free, gravityless floating. Now he saw details in the work that only an artist sees, soft delicate movements in the gown, audacities in the formation of the long hands and fingers, sensitive utilization of the grain of the wood. All these beauties were nothing compared to the whole, to the simplicity and depth of the vision, but they were there nevertheless, beauties of which only the blessed were capable, those who knew their craft completely. In order to be able to create a work like this, one had not only to carry images in one's soul; one also had to have inexpressibly trained, practiced eyes and hands. Perhaps it was after all worthwhile to place one's entire life at the service of art, at the expense of freedom and broad experience, if only in order to be able once to make something this beautiful, something that had not only been experienced and envisioned and received in love, but also executed to the last detail with absolute mastery? It was an important question.

  Late at night Goldmund returned to the city on a tired horse. A tavern still stood open. There he took bread a
nd wine. Then he climbed up to his room at the fish market, not at peace with himself, full of questions, full of doubts.

  12

  THE next day Goldmund could not bring himself to go to work. As on many other joyless days, he roamed about the city. He saw housewives and servants go to market. He loitered around the fountain at the fish market and watched the fish venders and their burly wives praise their wares, watched them pull the cool silvery fish out of the barrels and offer them for sale, saw the fish open their mouths in pain, their gold eyes rigid with fear as they quietly gave in to death, or resisted it with furious desperation. He was gripped by pity for these animals and by a sad annoyance with human beings. Why were people so numb and crude, so unthinkably stupid and insensitive. How could those fishermen and fishwives, those haggling shoppers not see these mouths, the deathly frightened eyes and wildly flailing tails, the gruesome, useless, desperate battle, this unbearable transformation from mysterious, miraculously beautiful animals--the quiet last shiver that ran across the dying skin before they lay dead and spent--into flattened, miserable slabs of meat for the tables of those jovial paunches? These people saw nothing, knew nothing, and noticed nothing; nothing touched them. A poor, graceful animal could expire under their very eyes, or a master could express all the hope, nobility, and suffering, all the dark tense anguish of human life, in the statue of a saint with shudder-inducing tangibility--they saw nothing, nothing moved them! They were gay; they were busy, important, in a hurry; they shouted, laughed, bumped into each other, made noise, told jokes, screamed over two pennies, felt fine, were orderly citizens, highly satisfied with themselves and the world. Pigs, that's what they were, filthier and viler than pigs! Of course he had only too often been one of them, had felt happy among them, had pursued their girls, had gaily eaten baked fish from his plate without being horrified. But sooner or later, as though by magic, joy and calm would suddenly desert him; all fat plump illusions, all his self-satisfaction and self-importance, and idle peace of mind fell away. Something plunged him into solitude and brooding, made him contemplate suffering and death, the vanity of all undertaking, as he stared into the abyss. At other times a sudden joy blossomed from the hopeless depth of uselessness and horror, a violent infatuation, the desire to sing a beautiful song, to draw. He had only to smell a flower or play with a cat, and his childlike agreement with life came back to him. This time, too, it would come back. Tomorrow or the day after, the world would be good again, it would be wonderful. At least it was so until the sadness returned, the brooding, the remorse for dying fish and wilting flowers, the horror of insensitive, piglike, staring-but-not-seeing human existence. It was at such moments that Viktor always came to his mind. With torturing curiosity and deep anguish, he would think of the lanky wayfarer whom he had stabbed between the ribs and left lying on pine boughs covered with blood. And he wondered what had become of Viktor. Had the animals eaten him completely, had anything remained of him? The bones probably, and perhaps a few handfuls of hair. And what would become of the bones? How long was it, decades or just years, until bones lost their shape and crumbled into the earth?

  As he watched the goings-on in the marketplace, feeling pity for the fish and disgust for the people, anguished by the melancholy in his heart and a bitter hatred against the world and himself, he once more thought of Viktor. Perhaps someone had found and buried him? And in that case, had all the flesh fallen from the bones, had it all rotted off, had the worms devoured everything? Was there still hair on the skull, and brows above the hollows of the eyes? And what had remained of Viktor's life, which had been so full of adventures and stories, the fantastic playfulness of his odd jests? Was there nothing else left alive of this human existence, which had, after all, not been ordinary, other than the few stray memories his murderer had of him? Was there still a Viktor in the dreams of women who had once loved him? Or had every vestige of him disappeared and dissolved? Thus it happened to everyone and everything: a brief flowering that soon wilted and was soon covered by snow. All the things that had flowered in him when he arrived in this city a few years ago, burning with desire for art, with deep anxious respect for Master Niklaus--what was still alive of them? Nothing, nothing more than was left of poor lanky Viktor's boastful silhouette. If somebody had told him a few years ago that the day would come when Niklaus would recognize him as an equal and demand his master's licence from the guild, he would have believed all the happiness in the world was in his hands. And now this achievement was nothing but a faded flower, a dried-up, joyless thing.

  In the middle of these thoughts Goldmund suddenly had a vision. It lasted only an instant, a lightning flash: he saw the face of the universal mother, leaning over the abyss of life, with a lost smile that was both beautiful and gruesome. She was looking at birth and death, at flowers, at rustling autumn leaves, at art, at decay.

  Everything had the same meaning to the universal mother. Her chilling smile hung above everything like a moon, sad and pensive. The dying carp on the cobblestones of the fish market was as dear to her as Goldmund; she was as fond of the scattered bones of the Viktor who had once tried to steal his gold as she was of his master's proud cool young daughter Lisbeth.

  The lightning flash was gone; the mysterious mother face had vanished. But the pale glow continued to tremble deep in Goldmund's soul, the beat of life, of pain, of longing agitated his heart. No, no, he did not want the satiated happiness of the others, of fish venders, of burghers, of busy people. Let them go to hell. Oh, her twitching pale face, her fully ripe late-summer mouth, her heavy lips on which the immense fatal smile trembled like wind and moonlight!

  Goldmund went to the master's house. It was toward noon, and he waited until he heard Niklaus leave his work and go to wash his hands. Then he went in.

  "May I say a few words to you, Master, while you're washing your hands and putting on your jacket? I'm starving for a mouthful of truth. I want to say something to you that I might perhaps be able to say right now and never again. I must speak to a human being and perhaps you are the only one who can understand. I'm not speaking to the man with the famous workshop who is honored by so many assignments from great cities and cloisters, who has two assistants and a rich, beautiful house. I'm speaking to the master who made the madonna in the cloister outside the city, the most beautiful statue I know. I have loved and venerated this man; to become like him seemed to me the highest goal on earth. Now I have made a statue, my statue of St. John. It's not made as perfectly as your madonna; but that can't be helped. I have no plans for other statues, no idea that demands execution. Or rather, there is one, the remote image of a saint that I'll have to make some day, but not just yet. In order to be able to make it, I must see and experience much, much more. Perhaps I'll be able to make it in three or four years, or in ten years, or later, or never. But until then, Master, I don't want to work as an artisan, lacquering statues and carving pulpits and leading an artisan's life in the workshop. I don't want to earn money and become like other artisans. I don't want that. I want to live and roam, to feel summer and winter, experience the world, taste its beauty and its horrors. I want to suffer hunger and thirst, and to rid and purge myself of all I have lived and learned here with you. One day I would like to make something as beautiful and deeply moving as your madonna--but I don't want to become like you and lead your kind of life."

  The master had washed and dried his hands. He turned and looked at Goldmund. His face was stern, but not angry.

  "You have spoken," he said, "and I have listened. Don't worry now. I'm not expecting you to come to work, although there is much to be done. I don't consider you an assistant; you need freedom. I'd like to discuss a few things with you, dear Goldmund; not now, in a couple of days. In the meantime, you may spend your hours as you please. You see, I am much older than you and have learned a few things. I think differently than you do, but I understand you and what goes on in your mind. In a few days I'll send for you. We'll talk about your future; I have all kinds of plans. U
ntil then, be patient! I know only too well how one feels when one has finished a piece of work that was important to one; I know this emptiness. It passes, believe me."

  Goldmund left, dissatisfied. The master meant well, but how could he be of help? Goldmund knew a spot along the river where the water was not deep; its bed was covered with shards and all kinds of rubbish that fishermen had thrown there. He sat down on the embankment wall and looked into the water. He loved water very much; all water attracted him. From this spot, one could look through the streaming, crystal-threaded water and see the dark vague bottom, see a vague golden glitter here and there, an enticing sparkle, bits of a broken plate perhaps or a worn-out sickle, or a smooth flat stone or a polished tile, or it might be a mud fish, a fat turbot or redeye turning around down there, a ray of light catching for an instant the bright fins of its scales and belly--one could never make out what precisely was there, but there were always enchantingly beautiful, enticing, brief vague glints of drowned golden treasure in the wet black ground. All true mysteries, it seemed to him, were just like this mysterious water; all true images of the soul were like this: they had no precise contour or shape: they only could be guessed at, a beautiful distant possibility that was veiled in many meanings. Just as something inexpressibly golden or silvery blinked for a quivering instant in the twilight of the green river depths, an illusion that contained, nevertheless, the most blissful promise, so the fleeting profile of a person, seen half from the back, could sometimes promise something infinitely beautiful, something unbearably sad. In the same way a lantern hung under a cart at night, painting giant spinning shadows of wheel spokes on walls, could for a moment create a shadow play that seemed as full of incidents and stories as the work of Homer. And one's nightly dreams were woven of the same unreal, magic stuff, a nothing that contained all the images in the world, an ocean in whose crystal the forms of all human beings, animals, angels, and demons lived as ever ready possibilities.