The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  We were turned away by the locked gate. A strange relief on the tympanum puzzled us. We went up close to look at it: with his bare hands a Saint George was strangling a snake, which had wrapped itself round his armoured legs and was trying to pull itself up him. His charger, a unicorn, stood by, its halter round the tree from the Garden of Eden. This symbol of chastity was his only companion; unlike every other portrayal, this one lacked the lady he set free. His triumph was overlaid with sorrow; his features radiated the aching purity of those who have suffered long torture.

  I was overcome with a leaden sadness, which clearly oppressed the others as well. The actress abruptly bent over her husband’s hand and kissed it; she was sitting beside him now, her shoulders sagged forlornly against him, seeming to bear the sorrow of the whole world. His hands did not leave the wheel; only his smile was clouded, a calm severity made his features almost like those of the knight above the cathedral door. ‘Let’s go!’ was the vehement desire within me, for my heart was already rushing to my head as well; it needed the rhythm of the machine imposed on it, that would put everything to rights. And it happened; my silent wish was fulfilled.

  In front of us cowered a row of almshouses; their monastic structure resembled the church and they were probably from the same period. And there was someone standing there, the old woman again. She must have made incredible speed, or did all the old people in this strange town look the same? Had they come to be akin over the long years, just as earth, when trodden down, is indistinguishable, earth, which they would soon become themselves? ‘Force her to speak,’ I commanded myself. But for that I would need some banal question that belonged to the coarse material world – the whereabouts of an inn, for example – which would break the spell cast by the old woman, who seemed to come straight from the brush of a Rembrandt. I received my answer even before I had spoken; ‘The Traveller’s Rest,’ it came like a voice from the crypt, and the old woman waved her hands around at the same time. Was she making the sign of the cross over us, or was she indicating the direction? My friend seemed to assume the latter; he drove on.

  From the cathedral square six echoing blows thudded to the ground; it was the Angelus, the hour when the mind opens to receive divine thoughts, but also the soft hour of seduction, of betrayal. There was a strange brightness revealing everything; in spite of the fading sun, we and all the things around us appeared with precise and painful clarity; we could almost see into each other’s minds. I wanted to point this out to the woman, but her eyes were embracing her husband. ‘That is the way people look at little children when they haven’t any of their own!’ I thought.

  The car floated through an arched gateway – yes, ‘floated’ was the word, we moved so smoothly we could hardly feel the ground. In a niche an ecstatic saint was stretched upon the rack; his stone arms, broken off, were excruciating to see. Above him was a sundial with a strange motto curving round the circle of the hours, Quaelibet vulnerat, ultima necat: ‘Each one wounds, the last one kills.’ But that was, I assumed, the end of all the strangeness, for beyond the gate was a welcoming inn, a broad, grey, ancient farmhouse; on the threshold stood the innkeeper, a tall man with a quiet face that seemed not unfamiliar to me.

  There was nothing that might be called special about it when we went in. The room, its ceiling festooned with withered wreaths, was obviously used for local dances and country celebrations, and here we came across signs of life. That is, there were many people sitting there in the half-light; they were drinking or smoking, only no one was talking. They looked as if they had long since said everything there was to say, and were afraid of irritating each other with the mere sound of their voices.

  Without a word, the innkeeper moved softly behind the bar. ‘Like a dead man,’ I thought to myself, for his features revealed a weary sagacity, such as befits only God’s ripe harvest, the dead who have truly rounded off their lives. I did not attempt to pass this thought on to my friends. Since we had entered the town I had the feeling, which was becoming stronger all the time, that we suddenly knew so much about each other that speech was unnecessary between us.

  A twitching melody came from another room. It was a Javanese dance tune; it consisted of a despairing repetition of the same sequence of notes which sounded as if it was derived from one of their dirges; the playing was clumsy, with the same mistakes being repeated.

  ‘We must go through your role,’ the director reminded the actress, as we sat down at a table where another man was sitting, his face turned towards the shadows. I was surprised. She had no engagements for the near future, and yet my friend was behaving as if there were nothing more urgent. Besides, they were the very first words he had addressed to her since we had driven through the town gate.

  The gentle innkeeper brings some wine. He doesn’t talk to us, just looks at us as if he wanted to express something, but he definitely says very little, only ‘Some wine’ – or ‘Amen;’ yes, ‘Amen,’ that was probably it. And the man at the table turns to face me, and it is my brother. ‘Julian,’ I murmur, without surprise. He nods.

  Behind me the director starts muttering something to the actress; it is presumably her role. I feel I know the work it is from, but can’t remember the name of the writer. One single sentence keeps being repeated, ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven …’

  And then I suddenly realise my brother Julian fell in the War, on the Stry; he is buried somewhere in Russia. And yet he is sitting here. And now a lithe woman, a puma in clothes, is waving to me from the door; it’s Evelyne, Evelyne who died last year, who laughed as she toyed with all kinds of male beasts until she tumbled into love and drowned; and there is Heinrich, the theatre manager, with his sardonic grin; it was at the same time that I heard he had chosen death; and there are lots of others here from the other side, I gradually recognise them. And the Javanaise trickles on. And a couple stand up and dance to it, slowly. And the innkeeper’s soft, sad glance embraces them all. And the red wine has a bittersweet taste. And the actress behind me keeps repeating after her husband, ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven …’

  No, I must be dreaming, so I try to close my eyes in my dream – that makes you wake up. It’s an old remedy that our nursemaid taught us to drive away a nightmare. But the vision I have behind my closed lids, surely that must be the dream? There is a crashed car and blood running over the ground, a lot of blood, and bodies screaming with gaping flesh. And as I look on, my neck and arms are racked by terrible pain. I must open my eyes! I want to wake up, damn it! ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven …’ I can hear it beside me, so they must all still be here, they are all round me, why won’t they help me, then? Poor advice, nanny! I am crying, I can’t hear myself, but I know that I am crying. All I can see is a lot of stupid faces staring at me in horror; what can they want? I’m asleep, of course, dreaming…

  Then at last a human countenance appears above me; my old nursemaid is looking down at me. ‘Nanny,’ I feel myself say, ‘take me home.’ And she is stroking me, and now it’s the old woman from the town, of course, that’s who it is, and now I can open my eyes, carefully, and everything reappears out of a mist, the inn and the people around me, but now there is colour in their cheeks, as if the blood had come back in their veins; they are alive like me. And the Javanaise plays on, and a couple are dancing … And the actress is repeating, louder and louder, ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven …’ And my brother is smiling, and I want to embrace him, but someone is holding my hands down. Or have I no hands any more?

  What does it matter? I am awake again. Back in life once more, in the life of this little town, which isn’t so odd as it at first seemed to us. In fact, everything seems perfectly straight-forward here, it is what must have come before that now seems like a pointless diversion. And my brother must be of the same opinion, he’s nodding to me warmly, and the actress is smiling a smile of relief at her husband, who for the first time is giving her a clear-eyed look, full of love, and the words she is saying speak to me of home, and my old nanny is
bending over me again, and all around me she is like a safe, dark cave which will protect me as I fall asleep … like a dead man…

  No … like a child…

  The Playground: A Fantasy

  Franz Werfel

  Heart longing alone hears aright.

  (Wagner: Siegfried – The Woodbird.)

  During the night before his thirtieth birthday Lucas had had a dream which he could not remember in the morning. What a strange awakening it had been! His body had lost all feeling. He felt just as your foot feels when you sleep with it in an awkward position; you can grab it and hit it, but it has become alien, it does not belong to you any more than a table or a book that you might hold. Only your own hand touching it can feel itself. That was what Lucas felt about his body when he woke up. It was as if his soul were hovering over the bed with a strange corpse in it, cool and without memory.

  Slowly, he coalesced with himself again, but ever since that moment of awakening there had been a slight dislocation within him and in the way he saw the world.

  Whenever he went to the window and looked out onto the central square of the little town, he would suddenly put his hands to his eyes as if his vision had to be corrected, for it was set at too great a distance and did not register the two ungainly carriages outside the ‘Red Crab’, nor the women with their baskets of fruit, the onion-shaped dome on the Town Hall or the young waiter dusting down the tables in the garden outside the beer hall.

  Whenever he arrived home from the ministry in the evening and sat down on the broad chair by his table, he had to jump up again straight away, for his heartbeat would suddenly start to race so that he felt dizzy and near to collapsing. Then he would lie down on the old, waxcloth-covered sofa, whose white, enamelled pins shone with a patriarchal glow through the half-light of the paraffin lamp.

  But there was no rest there, either.

  He sprang back onto his feet, stretching his head forward into the darkness like a hunter. Massive silence was all around him. The high, muted violins of the sphere, which fills all space, shimmered. And in his ear the jets of ancient fountains began to sound as they splashed down into eroded stone basins in hidden courtyards. He listened with bated breath. But the word did not emerge from the rippling of the mysterious water.

  He would go to bed exhausted.

  A great and alien sorrow stopped him from falling asleep.

  He felt as if he had been in an unknown world for an hour, where he had buried the being dearest to him, a woman, a friend, a child. Then he had woken up with the pain, but no memory of what the pain was about.

  During the day he would sit in his office, staring at the clock above his desk. There was a scratching of pens. Malicious, dusty steps shuffled across the floor. Sometimes a silly remark was heard. A cackle of laughter came from one corner in reply.

  But all he could hear was the seconds dripping into the bowl of time. On the hour it was full and would overflow, the superfluous drops ringing out. He could not hold himself back either, and had to repress a sob in his throat.

  Once the office supervisor came up behind him.

  ‘Mr. Lucas, how often must I say this? There is something wrong with the files again. Case Number 2080 is not closed. I keep on telling you! You can believe me with my experience!! People who are born with a silver spoon in their mouths and can pull strings are usually slipshod dreamers! If daddy was one of the bigwigs, well then, of course …’

  ‘I am a dreamer, only I forget the dream.’

  Lucas said it quite clearly and was surprised to hear his voice.

  The clerks, spiteful as schoolboys, creased up with laughter. The most spiteful of all kept a solemn face and was always the last to double up.

  ‘You can’t concentrate, can’t concentrate,’ said the supervisor as he turned once more in the doorway, wiping his spectacles with a studied air.

  One morning when Lucas woke up after a nasty, uneasy sleep, he heard himself say aloud, ‘Forgetting is a sin. Forgetting is the worst sin there is.’

  He propped himself up on his elbows, but he could not control his mouth, which was talking without him willing it.

  ‘I must get up and search, search.’ He dressed slowly. There was a cloud round his neck, like a warm, misty lace ruff.

  He took his rucksack out of the cupboard and stuffed some bread and spare clothing into it.

  Then he took his walking stick and left.

  ‘Where on earth am I going?’ he asked himself, as if he was in a daze, when he stepped out into the empty square, blazing red in the sunrise.

  ‘To search for the dream,’ answered the voice.

  Lucas stepped out and had soon left the little town behind him. Some strange power drove his legs on so that his heart, exhausted from all the sleepless nights, could hardly keep pace. The many conical hills of the uplands faced him, strange and unfamiliar. The fog had long since dissipated. Only around the summit of Thundertop was one cloud gathered, as if it were the last breath of the extinct volcano.

  A nuthatch with blue wings flitted past. High in the air hovered a bird of prey.

  Lucas walked beneath a thin roof of birdsong. None was like another. The trees, both deciduous and coniferous, which surged in waves over the tops and tors, still had the somewhat ragged look of a belated April. But the fields and meadows were already full of dandelions.

  Lucas left the road, left the footpath and turned off into a narrow green valley between two wooded hills. The grassy pasture was yielding to the foot, and that lightened his heart as he made his way. His desperate restlessness eased a little, and suddenly he threw himself to the ground and bit passionately into the earth. It was a lover’s kiss. ‘O star that I kiss, you smell of woman.’

  He felt as if with this kiss he had come closer to the mystery he had been commanded to seek.

  Without consciousness of a goal he continued on his way.

  It must have been about midday when he left his airy valley for a narrower, rockier one. He had to clamber along the side of the mountain, for there was a stream roaring in the bottom. However, he soon found a cart-track. This path had many little wooden bridges with pointed roofs which it flung across the gorges. In the roof-space over each bridge hung a Madonna with an oil-lamp.

  Suddenly Lucas stopped.

  He should proceed no farther, he felt.

  Something within him was quivering, like the tiny deflection of the needle of a compass.

  He closed his eyes and scrambled up the steep slope. At the top a calm, dense wood stretched out. The trunks stood rigid. Only the tops waved to and fro to a lumbering melody that came booming out of an immense distance, hovered massively for a moment and then boomed back into the immense distance.

  Thus far Lucas had had no thought for food and drink. Nor had he needed it. Something was driving him ever onwards.

  There was a memory that would not leave him. As a child he had gone with his father through a forest, his bearded father in front, he behind. Often his father would bend down for some herb or mushroom, often he would part the bushes when he suspected they might conceal a good find. They did not speak a word to each other. Suddenly his father was no longer there; he had disappeared amongst some saplings and left the boy alone. But he, mad with anxiety, ran on down the path, looking for his father. He did not dare to shout. Some bashfulness, some qualm always stopped him from addressing his father as ‘father’. He was consumed with a double fear, for himself and for the man who had disappeared and who had perhaps collapsed somewhere off the path and was lying amongst the bracken.

  Later his father had appeared from a thicket and the child showed no sign of what he had felt.

  Lucas could not get this memory of his childhood fear out of his mind.

  He kept hurrying onwards. A wordless message called, ‘Keep going, keep going.’

  Already the evening was draping its yellow and red flags across the branches.

  The mountain leant down. He ran down to the bottom. Now he was out of the tre
es.

  He hurried through grass that grew higher and higher until it reached his hips. Like a new-created being, he sensed a different air and a swaying wind. Suddenly he was standing on the bank of a wide river. The current drew long, vigorous lines and wrinkles in the stream. The water bore off the dying evening like the still smoking beams and debris of a conflagration.

  The river banks were narrow. A strip of sand and grass on either side; but to the right and left the measureless forest rose up again.

  Not a soul was to be seen.

  Without wetting their wings, waterfowl shot in unerring arcs over the curvature of the water; above a marshy place near the water’s edge a host of dragonflies trembled in glaring and delicate colours.

  Dancing round in the eddies, peeled tree-trunks floated down on the current, and sometimes things of more mysterious form which disappeared in the twilight gloom. From the other bank now arose the great evening noise of the frogs and toads. Banks of mist gathered there too, billowing up and dispersing like dust clouds on a road. Wandering back and forth, they were like belated passengers on a rainy evening waiting for the bell of the approaching steamer somewhere along the Rhine, the Don or the bank of a great lake.

  Lucas walked along the bank in the direction of the setting sun, where the last light was still floating on the surface of the water.

  The twilight was almost gone now. From behind his back came the hum of darknesses edging forward like magic bees.

  And now it was night.

  Still he felt no hunger, nor a need to rest. He was all soul following a scent, a track, like a ghost at the moment of apparition. His joints strewed his steps lightly on the ground before him, as if there were no resistance to overcome. He bounded along, carefree and secure, like a child led by the hand.