The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  ‘Wait a moment, not so fast! I need to digest that first,’ cried von Klumm, pressing his hand against his forehead, which was once more throbbing painfully. ‘Everything here is quite new to you? … Well, I must say … assuming all these things you have been telling me are correct … I must say you show commendable good manners and self-assurance. Many people have sat there, where you are sitting now, and been so embarrassed they didn’t know what to do with themselves. Perhaps I should tell you that I am – I can say this without being presumptuous – a man of some influence, and strangely enough people say of me – I have really no idea how I have acquired this reputation – that there is something imposing about my personality, so that even the boldest or most impudent citizens find it difficult to preserve their sangfroid when face to face with me.’

  At this the ghost, who up to that point had been following the conversation just as intently as the minister, gave the first sign of boredom, a rather clear sign in fact, as it fixed its eyes on the window and began to look at the landscape outside with visible enjoyment, craning its neck and even half rising from its chair.

  The minister was too polite to notice it.

  ‘What beautiful mountains,’ said the ghost, and its breast heaved with a sigh of longing.

  ‘So you recognise our earthly mountains as well,’ said the minister in a tone of coolly polite commendation. ‘I must compliment you on your capacity for rapid orientation. Are there things like mountains in your world too?’

  ‘No. At home everything manifests itself, or rather, everything manifested itself, in electric waves, spinning funnels of air and whirlpools.’

  ‘And yet …’

  ‘In our kind of matter there is also natural beauty, sublime expressions of eternal forces, of growth and decay. It is probably because during my whole life, whenever I managed to get out and enjoy nature, which was rarely enough with my awful job – indeed, it was probably precisely the fact that it was so unusual that gave me a thirst for the glories of nature and a true delight in them – but whenever I did commune with nature, it automatically aroused in me the feeling that the joy I felt brought me into contact with eternal, general truths, with the bedrock of reality; and that is probably what enables me to respond so quickly to any kind of natural beauty, even in this new world, and to sense immediately whenever I am in the presence of anything significant in that respect here as well.”

  ‘Most strange. To tell the truth, I couldn’t match you in that. If I came from a place where the Alps consisted of nothing but whirling air-pools … that’s what you said, wasn’t it? … of nothing but soap bubbles, with no rocks, no snow, no plants, no colours … of course, without colours … well, I must say, if I were confronted with real mountains I would be totally baffled, totally …’ The baron fell into a brown study from which he eventually came to with a start. ‘In a word, I would be baffled.’

  ‘I think you are mocking me,’ moaned the ghost. ‘Am I not sufficiently baffled or confused? It is only with nature that I feel I know where I am.’

  ‘Not at all, there are other areas where you seem surprisingly sure of yourself. Even, it seems to me, the most important ones. You have a precise idea – let me be honest: an unnaturally precise idea – of where you come from and where you are going.’

  ‘But sir, I don’t know, I don’t know at all.’

  Then baron refused to be distracted, ‘You are even aware of the fact that you are at a transitional stage. You have some idea of the trials that await you, of a court of judgment that you must face and of the good works you can cite in evidence before the court. Added to that, you have, remarkably, no difficulty at all with our language or our concepts in this rather complex field. You talk like a book, you talk of eternal justice as if you were related, you talk of God, and death, and hell, and the devil knows what else …’ The baron had worked himself up into a rage and was pacing up and down the room.

  ‘Yes … well … fortunately I took something of an interest in that kind of thing during my lifetime,’ said the spectre, very timidly, ‘even if it was nowhere like enough. Not that I really understood them, but I felt a certain yearning that kept drawing me back to them; and there, too, I had the feeling that I was dealing with the foundation of reality that was valid for all places and all times … Unfortunately it meant that I neglected other things, and I’m paying dearly for that now …’

  ‘Come on then,’ said the baron impatiently, as the ghost paused. ‘That is just what I would like to hear about. What is it that you are paying for now? What was your sin?’

  ‘I was … I was …’ he stuttered with the shame of it. ‘How shall I put it, I was very clumsy about minor details. That is, I thought they were minor details, but now I see that they have their own significance and even, if you take proper care over them, contain a grain of reality which one should respect. Now is the time I need them. That is the special rule that governs us in this first hour after our death. Action and reaction are completely reversed. All the things which during our mortal lives we regarded with respect, awe and wonder are now familiar to us. But the things we treated casually, that we debased to matters of soulless routine, appear alien and incomprehensible to us here. That is why I am having such problems with …’ again he broke off, ‘with my clothes. To be honest, I neglected them badly. Matters of polite behaviour I never understood at all. I looked down on them with a certain arrogance and, because of my interest in higher things, I even believed my arrogance was justified. Now I’m being punished for it. I’m sure even etiquette – civilised behaviour between creatures, moderation, keeping your distance – contains something of universal value, is part of God’s design. It could be that keeping your distance is exaggerated, that it contains a grain of truth amid a large amount of deception. But it was my duty to find that grain of truth. However crude the deception that concealed it, it was not a sufficient excuse for letting myself be put off by the wrapping. My punishment is that now I am totally at a loss as to how to behave. Just imagine how embarrassing it is for me that that I still can’t work out what form you take. I can’t see you at all. I think that your voice comes from that beautiful, radiant body,’ he pointed to the desk-lamp behind the baron, who at these words, perhaps for the first time in his life, felt small and insignificant, though the only effect it had was to intensify his rage, ‘and I take the light for the centre of the personality I am conversing with. But unfortunately, beyond that I can find no shape distinguishable from the surroundings. And I can’t work out what to do with my own body, however hard I try to adapt to my new world. One moment I seem to wrinkle up, the next I feel as if I’m spreading in all directions. I feel uncomfortable in every pore. Believe me I have no spatial orientation at all, everything is reeling through my head in a most dizzying manner. I can’t find the right level for my movements. I see everything lop-sided.’

  ‘Yes, I realise that now,’ said von Klumm with a mocking laugh.

  ‘Only now do I realise how right a friend of mine was who kept telling me about his homesickness. He had only come from another city, not from another world, but he kept on complaining how alien he felt, as if it were a punishment even. An aspect of his life which at home had been concealed beneath a blanket of agreeable habits in the close-knit, almost bodily warmth of the family circle was stripped bare there: a certain inner emptiness and meaninglessness.’

  ‘That is just what the military attaché was saying today,’ murmured the baron, and his suspicion intensified.

  ‘If,’ the apparition continued unperturbed, ‘you spend your life under the delusion of constant activity, if you are always industrious and ambitious, concentrate on the so-called “serious” things, which mostly concern just the bare, and banal, essentials, and waste your leisure on “unserious” things, which are just as unreal as the “serious” ones … in brief, if all you can see is dreary routine and necessity, never the liberating, absolute truth …’

  ‘That’s going too far,’ the baron shouted
, striding over to the spectre with clenched fists. ‘Now you’re talking about me!’

  ‘No, about my friend,’ screamed the apparition, pulling its upper body back as far as it could.

  ‘Hah! So he could not see absolute truth anywhere? Listen, I take my hat off to him; he is a grand fellow, your friend, he’s just my man. That’s the way I am too. The bare facts of life I recognise; some things are more expedient, more reasonable than others, relatively speaking! But all this drivel you talk about the foundations of reality that are valid for all places and all times … Damn it all, I see the whole purpose of my life – a modest purpose, but perhaps not without some significance – in combating such foolish ideas. Good grief, is there anyone so short-sighted that they cannot see that? There are no rights that are valid for all, no justice, because everyone is in the right, every single one of us. That is why there must be war without end, conflict between man and man, and warfare between the nations …’

  Scarcely had the minister spoken these words than a transformation came over the ghost. If, up to this point, it had been one of the plaintive sort, almost entirely lacking in spirit, it now flew into a frenzy of rage equal to the baron’s. ‘What?! What?! That’s rubbish,’ it shouted, putting aside all its meekness at once. ‘There is no such word as “must”, things that are reasonable are not so merely “relatively speaking”. With views like that you’re just blinding yourself to the true nature of reality.’

  ‘Me, blind! Me, whom everyone recognises as the most down-to-earth, most realistic of modern statesmen!? And who says so? A utopian daydreamer like you! Do you know that I consider people of your kind the worst, indeed the only enemies of mankind?’ The baron was so overcome with indignation that he had grabbed the apparition by the arm and was dragging it backwards and forwards. But the apparition had lost its temper as well. In its fury it hit out in all directions, but so clumsily that it missed the baron. ‘Such an enemy of mankind, in fact,’ screamed the latter, jumping out of the way, ‘that I have no hesitation in shooting you and your silly ideas down on the spot.’ He rushed to the desk, opened a box and began to reload the revolver, his hands trembling. At the same time he kept on shouting and arguing, his voice getting hoarser and hoarser with excitement and rage, ‘You and your stupid talk of eternal justice! Don’t you realise you are blaspheming against mankind’s most dearly held belief. If there were one right, one justice valid for all, then what about the intrinsic wrongness, pointlessness of all earthly existence which depends on the very fact that all those who are lashing out at each other, all of them, are in the right at the same time. What about Christianity, the religion of suffering, what about the essentially tragic nature of earthly life?’

  ‘You miserable wretch!’ The ghost, for its part, now screamed with all its might, and in its voice there was a rumble of something like underground thunder, even the windows seemed to echo it darkly, and the wind outside blew with even greater force, bringing from the mountains a strange, soft, whistling, rustling sound, as if somewhere in the distance the age-old rock was cracking and preparing to trickle down in streams of fine sand. ‘You miserable wretch!’ In its fury, the whole of visible nature seemed to be joining in the scream. ‘Is it any business of yours to meddle in God’s affairs, to take the tragic nature of His creation under your gracious patronage, when enough, probably more than enough, is done to make it tragic if, in His infinite goodness, He allows harmful pests such as you to go on living, instead of exterminating them!’ At these words the ghost bent right back, as if it was preparing to run at the mannikin, knock him down with the mere force of its body and crush him. By this violent movement, however, it unexpectedly freed itself completely from the floor, in which it had still been stuck as far as its knees. It shot up, as if through a trap door, and amazingly did not stop when the soles of its feet reached floor level but, as if with the force of its own violence, continued to rise in the air, not, however, straight up, but at an angle, as if it were floating up an invisible staircase. In the course of this it passed close by the baron like an icy draught; that is, it missed him. ‘Woe is me!’ it cried now, with a searing, plaintive sound, as it suddenly stopped in midair, almost fixed to the spot apart from a gentle pendulum motion. ‘My sins! My sins!’

  The baron had tumbled trembling to his knees, the gun flying in a wide arc from his hand and clattering to the floor. It was not so much what the ghost said that demolished his painstakingly erected composure, as the awful sight of its body hanging in the air, as if from an imaginary gallows, far surpassing in its eeriness all the strange things he had seen on this memorable evening. And now the trembling words from above him, that sounded as if they came straight from a tormented heart, plucked at a nerve in his soul which had not resonated for years, perhaps not since his earliest childhood. ‘My sins! My sins!’ he started to whimper as well, and rolled his eyes, for the tears would not come; over the long years he had forgotten how to cry.

  For a while their piteous moans filled the whole room, arousing an eerie echo in the gentle creaking of the furniture. The moon had set, and outside the circle of lamplight there was complete darkness. Only now did the soft glimmer of bluish-white light around the apparition become visible, like the crackle of a comb as it is drawn through the hair. It really gave the impression that every tiny fibre in the ghost’s clothes was standing painfully on end and shivering in the alien, refractory medium of the earth’s atmosphere, which made itself felt at the slightest movement in an unpleasant soreness.

  ‘What is the matter with you? Lord above, what’s the matter?’ cried the minister, whose fury had completely dissipated, and who now felt only pity, pity for the poor, lost, spectral apparition, and even greater pity for himself, for he was beginning to suspect that his fate in that inevitable first hour after death would turn out to be similar to that of the ghost, only much, much more horrible.

  ‘Can’t you see?’ came the pitiful wail from above. ‘I have no sense of space, that is what is the matter. I can see that there are rooms and stories, a certain regularity in the arrangement of above and below, of right and left. But I can’t integrate this peculiar arrangement into my senses, I can’t feel it from within … And now I’ve realised for what particular event in my life this punishment has been visited upon me.’

  ‘Oh, how terrible,’ lamented the minister. ‘What crime did you commit? Perhaps I can help you. If it lies within my power, you can rest assured that I will leave no stone unturned …’ The usual diplomatic clichés came tumbling over his pale lips, only completely tonelessly.

  The ghost did not respond to his offer at all, it seemed sunk in recollection and to be talking to itself. ‘Once a real gentleman, some kind of minister I think, came to visit me in my attic. He probably came with the best of intentions, full of goodwill. He wanted to learn from me, he said, wanted to examine with his own senses my original way of life, my home-grown philosophy. Those were his very words. Then I became puffed up with proletarian pride and threw him downstairs single-handed, crying out in exultation, “Let that be a lesson to you that for me there is no difference between high and low, superiors and inferiors.”’

  ‘No difference between high and low? And that’s why you’re hanging in mid-air, you poor man? Well, it wasn’t a very nice thing to do though, was it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I shouted after him. My voice rang with conviction, I believed I had done something fine. Unfortunately I’m very quick-tempered, as you have just had an opportunity to see. It seemed the right thing to do, the obvious thing even, to grab him by the collar and throw him down the stairs. For a long time afterwards I was really pleased with myself for having had such a brilliant idea, it seemed to come from my innermost soul, I could not imagine it could have happened any other way. Now, however, I feel that it is precisely that apparently obvious and self-enclosed nature of things, their lack of love, their blatant palpability and certainty which is the worst danger, the worst temptation for mortals. It’s just the way things
are, we think, or rather don’t think. We salve our consciences with the idea that although misery and hypocrisy and mass murder and wastage exist, that’s it and we can do nothing about it. We think we can’t change or improve anything, quite forgetting that we could make a start with ourselves …’

  The baron interrupted him, his teeth chattering in an outburst of abject fear, ‘But my dear fellow, just think what will happen to me, if you have to suffer so much just because of one single, insignificant transgression, merely a piece of robust behaviour? I’ll be well up in matters of etiquette and keeping one’s distance, it’s true, but what about all the other and, so it appears, more important things, which I just treated as routine and which will consequently all rise up against me? I was in the habit of saying that we had even become accustomed to death. I’m going to find everything, simply everything in this upside-down world, in the afterlife, I mean, startlingly new and inexplicable, aren’t I?’

  ‘Ah, now I can feel it,’ exclaimed the ghost joyfully at that moment, completely ignoring the horror-struck minister. ‘Now, now the chastisement is slackening. I can feel that I am being forgiven. I can feel a sense of unparalleled harmony flowing through my every limb …’ The ancient apparition was silent, its eyes glistening with tears of joy as, with a gentle smile on its lips, it slowly floated down to the floor. It was now not much more than the normal shape and size of a human, and the prickly sparkle had disappeared from round its body. Now its feet were on the floor. Immediately they were freed from their puppet-like restraint, and it walked easily towards the baron, whom it now seemed to have no difficulty in distinguishing from his surroundings. It noticed that the later was kneeling on the floor. ‘Get up,’ it said in a friendly voice, and gave the groaning minister a helping arm. ‘No one is entirely lost … But I am being drawn powerfully to some other place. What other trials await me? Or are they already at an end and I have been purified, ready for the highest level? I do not know. All I feel is that my time in this terrestrial world is over and that I am about to plunge into another sphere, perhaps – oh, the mere idea is bliss! – into a purer one than this and my own are. Fare thee well!’