The Man Who Was Born Again

by Paul Busson

  Many swimming figures appeared and followed after Eva. An old Jew in a caftan, a man who raised his white and scurvy skull out of the trap door, a hunchbacked little woman, with snub nose and chattering mouth, a black cat sitting on her hump, and a lame little white dog after her. Another hideous, blear-eyed woman glided up to my bed, and angrily hissed at my sleeping body. With crooked fingers she snatched the little pot, and rubbed her wrinkled skin with the ointment. I turned to the window with a feeling of boundless felicity, and out and over the bending and wind-beaten poplars, rejoicing to have recovered my power of flying.

  I could rise and descend at will, with slight movement of hands and feet; I could shoot up, light as a feather, or turn about or glide slowly. I felt no fear within me; I was like a feather carried on the wind. Even when I remained motionless, I beheld treetops passing below me. I made no more directing movements, I surrendered myself entirely to the calm sensation of being free of the earth. Far and near I saw other forms moving in the milky air, all in the same direction as myself.

  As soon as I tried to fix my eyes on one of their faces, however, it would fade into a twirling vapour and escaped me. But even this neither frightened nor astonished me. Every thing seemed to me very familiar, and quite the right thing, a thing I was accustomed to. I was exhilarated by the freedom of my own limbs and the lightness of my body, which, entirely devoid of will, was carried gently among the clouds, moon and stars and distant earth.

  The forms assembled more thickly around me. I sank down.

  I was dazzled by a livid blaze. Lights danced beneath, bluish and yellow lights. I saw faces with glinting eyes under blazing crowns of fire. Fire was everywhere.

  All around me there was a whirling and jumping, a hopping and dancing of countless forms. Some were squatting in clusters round bonfires, humming and clapping their hands in time with the weird tune. Many couples were lying prone in rapture. A brown boy with pointed ears, handsome and pert, with rounded hips like a woman, was careering about on a black, bearded shaggy male goat between those who writhed on the grass in convulsive embraces. Grey wolves with red glaring eyes glided among the beautiful naked women, and dark froth ran from their panting jaws.

  A cripple, who was without legs and yet who propelled himself with the help of a pair of apish arms, moved about in a tumbril through the confusion, and stared everywhere with eyes squinting like a crab’s. A figure whose skin was stretched like parchment over his flesh less limbs, blew a dead bone like a trumpet, and glow-worms crawled about his eye-sockets. A row of women with grey hair and hanging breasts danced in a circle round this ghastly musician.

  “So you also are here! Hurrah!” I heard a shout of greeting, and when I looked round I saw Montanus pushing past me. His belly, glowing like red-hot iron, hung out of his split pants.

  I saw legs, peeled skin hanging off in shreds, and laughing mouths, out of which worms and maggots crawled. One with broken limbs led another whose neck bore the blue-grey mark of the rope, manhood erect, as they stumbled toward a naked, dancing, black-haired woman.

  Depraved children with distorted eyes writhed in the arms of hermaphrodites; women screamed and drew sniggering lanky boys to their perspiring bosoms; grey milk flowed out of bestial udders into the toothless jaws of old men...

  Little flames danced about and darted up from the ground. The deathly face of Bavarian Haymon. pale and sad and shattered, nose quenched, rose out of a bush and his mouth whispered; “Take my advice, Mahomet; look to your escape. Mahomet.”

  A monstrous chorus of screams rose up. and cries and wild singing. Everybody motioned with their hands and kicked convulsively at a high black stone. In the wavering, uncertain moonlight, a figure was squatting there, angular and silent, with chin resting against its knees.

  I stared hard at it. To my horror I recognised Fangerle.

  There he was, motionless, as if he had become part of the stone. His

  evil face, puckered up under the broad peasant’s hat, glimmered like rotten wood; his long coat shone as if a blue flame were concealed under it. His piercing goat’s eyes were fixed straight on me, full of unutterable evil. And then he emitted the horrible cry that I had heard

  Heiner utter before the executioner’s wheel.

  “I-i-iicchr

  Thousands of arms, fingers, claws and nails were pointed at me. I made an effort to rise into the free air, but they caught at my feet and pulled, me downward...

  “Seize him! Hold him!” yelled the Satan on the stone.

  Desperately I kicked and struck out with my hands. But now the arms of women flung themselves heavy and soft round my neck, hot lips pressed sucking to my face, claws lore my hair, heavy bodies hung on to me. smothering my breath. I could rise no more. The yellow brute eyes of Fangerle burned me and his sharp teeth gnashed at me.

  I was in deadly fear. Paralysis held my limbs, my heart hammered as though it was ready to burst, my breath ceased, suffocation held my throat...

  “Lord, my God!” I cried in mortal anguish.

  Fangerle’s hand seized me violently and flung me up in the air. Away I went. Scornful laughter followed me. The fires went out in the dead of night, the shadows whisked away, the air whistled, wept, screamed, howled -

  I was lying in a wet meadow. I felt cold through and through, and yet at the same time all my body was burning. A fit of shivering sent me leaping upward; straight before me was the black mass of Krottenriede. A blood-red moon was setting behind the wind-beaten poplars.

  Then someone came, picked me up, laid me in a cradle and sang a lullaby over me.

  The next moment I was awake again. I was in the bed with the angels' heads. By the first light of morning I saw candles and the lighted squares of the windows. I tried to move, but my limbs were too heavy.

  “You have a fever,” said a dull voice.

  At my side the Magister was sitting in a dirty dressing gown. He was stirring something in a glass.

  “It was by chance that I saw you. my Lord Baron, making strange leaps in the meadow,” he said. “Johann and I ran down, and managed to carry you indoors. That is all I know. Had I not sat up all night at those accursed accounts, who knows but we might have picked you up frozen to death in the cold dew ”

  He held the glass to my lips and I drank...

  “Do I look exhausted?” I asked.

  “I should say so,” he replied. “I knew it would come to something of the kind - living in this room, and that at the end of April, about Walpurgis time. The Master of the Hounds is up already, asking angrily what the noise has been about, and he keeps on asking. I must give him a discreet answer, or the devil will be let loose again. Now you’d better go to sleep, and another time keep your hand away from things that are not to be toyed with.”

  And he pointed to the blue pot, that lay broken on the floor.

  His face was as sullen and colourless as the dull day. I closed my eyes, and from the depths of my soul called with all my power for Evli, who would not appear to me.

  Chapter Thirty Six

  I became seriously ill, and lay weak and faint in the canopy bed. The angels’ heads made faces at me when my temperature rose.

  The Magister Hemmetschnur took upon himself the task of nursing me.

  Once the Master of the Hounds came to see me, walking with one of his feet still bandaged. He sat for a while by my side and told me about more of the escapades he and my father had had, namely put-ting a frog into the chamberpot of a lady of high rank.

  Evenings between eleven and twelve o’clock, I heard his loud singing. I recognised the tune of a hunting song: “A fox I will capture, red as my darling’s hair.” I was so weak that this song made me cry: it reminded me of Zephyrine in the rose bushes saying to me: “It is a little vixen I have under my heart” - and I remembered how sadly it all ended, now so long ago that I had begun to believe the pain in me had wept itself to death.

  The thought of Aglaia also drew tears from me. Again I saw her with her wreath glisteni
ng by the glimmer of the candles.

  Of what use had been my unhappy, wretched life, to whom had it been of any avail?

  It was all wild passion, foul sin, and weird devilry, and now its path was slanting towards the end. How deeply I despised myself when I looked back on my squandered years! Husbandmen had ploughed their unyielding fields in the sweat of their brow; artisans plied their honest hands for their daily bread without rest; physicians sat attentive and tireless at the bedside of the sick; scholars searched and meditated by the light of a dying lamp; musicians delighted the weary hearts of men with sweet song. But as for me...

  There I was, like a rotting tree that had borne neither leaves nor blossom, nor given any fruit of life. Hans Dampf, the legendary embodiment of futility, had not dissipated his life more uselessly than I had wasted mine. But I had been repaid for it: suffering had been heaped on me in full measure, and what I felt now was more than pain. A dreadful feeling of nothingness overwhelmed me, a devastating sense of futility.

  But suddenly - “All has served to thy purification,” said a soft and gentle voice in a language quite unknown to me, which nevertheless I understood as if it were my own. In the twilight beside my bed stood Evli. A thin, bluish light was about him.

  It was indeed Evli. Under the black turban, between the eyebrows, I saw the red. straight mark; his eyes shone like black flames; the noble dark face had not a wrinkle. Yellow amber beads lay round his neck and on the red-brown cloth of his mantle.

  “Who are you?” I could not help asking. My voice was toneless, as the voice one hears in a dream.

  “I am here.” he breathed back.

  On the gentle lips appeared an understanding smile that soothed me like a soft caress.

  “At last you have come,” I whispered.

  “I have come.”

  “Is this indeed your true form?” I asked.

  “It is the form thou gavest me.”

  “I gave you?”

  “Thou gavest me this self.”

  Suddenly I saw myself as a child, bowed in a praying meditation before the glass case that contained the little figure which had since so often appeared to me. I was afraid he would slip away this time again, but Evli smiled gently as if he had guessed my fear, and said;

  “Thou art near to me.”

  Then I saw behind his shoulders a distorted, evil face with yellow piercing cyca; and I cried out:

  “Another is near me as well!”

  “He is everywhere.” replied Evli calmly. “He always walks by thy side, and by mine.”

  “Fangerle," I groaned.

  ‘‘To name him is to call him,” the voice continued. “Give him no name and he is no more.”

  And indeed the horrible, grinning face behind him vanished in the darkness, and was no more. A golden light appeared in the eyes which looked at me so kindly, like the reflection of a boundless splendour.

  “Thou hast walked so deep in grief and pain that he has no more power over thee. Thou art near the goal, brother.”

  “Help me,” I groaned. “I am so weak------”

  “Thou art weary of the long journey, but thou must still plod on. Thou alone canst help thyself, for I am thee.” he said.

  “I cannot understand you” - I raised my aching head with difficulty. “What is the goal?”

  “Eternal life,” he said, and in that moment the dark room seemed to me so dazzlingly bright that I had to shut my eyes. When I opened them again, fearful of seeing a void where Evli had been, I saw to my indescribable solace that he was still with me.

  “I am Iza Bekchi, Iza the Watcher,” I heard him say.

  “You watch over me?”

  “Always, only over thee.”

  With a heavy heart I asked him, “And whither does my way take me, Iza Bekchi?”

  “Towards re-birth,” he answered, and over his unspeakably beautiful face there again passed rays of light.

  “And death?”

  “That which is immortal returns to God.” The voice sounded triumphantly.

  “The immortal part of every man?” I asked, stretching out my hands to him.

  “Of every man.”

  “So everyone shall be born again. O Evli!” Sweet hope descended on me.

  “Re-birth may be of two kinds,” he said, and his voice was deep as the sound of bells. “Unconscious and conscious.”

  I was seized with fear at these words.

  “And I?” I exclaimed. “Help me. Brother!”

  “Thou alone canst help thyself.”

  I felt a racking strain, a burning desire to understand. I wanted to rise, to ask, to beg! But I could not. I looked at him imploringly, praying in silent anxiety that he might remain. He spoke in a low voice, and from his eyes a bright light flowed into my soul.

  “Hearken unto me. There was once a mighty sovereign and a wise one, who caused a criminal to be sentenced to death, despite that a voice spoke in him. telling him that no man can take another’s life before its term. When the condemned one knelt down on the scaffold, to receive the stroke of death, he looked up at his sovereign with a look in which there was so much burning hatred that the retainers of the wise ruler were stricken with fear. The Ruler said:

  “ ‘If thou abandonest evil I will grant thee thy life.’

  “But the criminal laughed out, and cried: ‘Thou darest not kill me, because thou fearest the Vengeance that will be wreaked on thee by my departed spirit!’

  “The Ruler looked on him and said: ‘No more will thy head severed from thy body be able to assail me or pronounce the word Vengeance, than I do fear thee.’

  “Then the sentenced man laughed again and called: ‘Executioner, do thy duty!’ The sword fell, and to the horror of everybody the severed head rolled up to the sovereign’s feet, and the lips distinctly uttered the word ‘Vengeance!’ while the eyes displayed, with horrible fixedness, a will-power strained to the utmost.

  “In great terror the retainers looked on. But the wise man said: ‘Fear nought! It is true I have done wrong in causing this man to be killed, but I have warded off the danger of his rage. For, behold, he had to concentrate all his will-power at the moment of death to do that of which I had spoken to him. Thus, for his later evil designs, he has no more power. His will has been squandered on a useless undertaking. and when it returns he will be without consciousness of what has happened to him. If he had only thought of returning and saved his consciousness for the life after death, he would have become an Evli, one who returns. But no evil one can be an Evli.”

  I was silent with amazement. It seemed to me as if I were standing at an open door, which I had up to the present passed by unheedingly, without knowing that behind it was the solution of all my questionings.

  “Understand me. Brother,” said Evli, “I show thee the way.”

  “The wish at the moment of death!... ” I repeated to myself. “To take with me my consciousness for the life after death - to save remembrance...״

  “Thou hast understood. Fare thee well.”

  Slowly he glided into the dusk, his figure became indistinct, but his face was still shining.

  "Kemam, remain with me,” I wanted to call to him, but no sound came from my lips.

  Then, slowly and distinctly, he uttered words I could not understand:

  “Hamd olsun - tekrar gördüğümüze.”

  I was awake, but I saw him no more.

  “Iza Bekchi.” I cried. “Remain with me.” But only my own wailing voice echoed in the wide room.

  Why had I understood all he had said except those last words? I remembered them as one remembers a sound that has ceased, a tune which gradually escapes from memory. Hastily I repeated to myself the foreign words over and over until they impressed themselves on my mind like the formula of a prayer spoken a thousand times.

  Why was my heart so sad?

  How many questions I would have liked to ask him! I would have asked about Aglaia, about Zephyrine, about the horror of the hellish night!...

>   Had he not said that we were one?

  “I am thee.”

  He was in me, therefore, and the answer could come only from myself: out of the depths of my own consciousness, in which all riddles might be disentangled into plain writing.

  My heart beat evenly, free of all fear, free from expectation, and as sure and happy as a child in its mother’s arms.

  “Death, where is thy sting?”

  Like a distant consoling sound came those words of the Sacred Book. There was no death for him who wished to live in all Eternity, live till he had reached complete purification and the glorious ascent, the conscious existence in God.

  Tears of joy poured down my cheeks.

  I had been wandering in the dark, but now that I approached the end of the journey a feeble ray of the unextinguishable light shone on me through the eternities. However distant it might be, however great the terror and distress which lay on both sides of the path, yet it led to the goal. Iza the Watcher had shown me the truth. What could befall me, and who could do any harm to the immortal part of me?

  The door opened. Magister Hemmetschnur came up to my bed, holding in his hand a silver cup with a cooling drink of mint and sugar water.

  “You must have met a foreign monk on the stairs,” I said to him quietly. “A man in a brown mantle with a black turban and beads about his neck.”

  “Hullo, the fever is rising again,” he growled sullenly to himself. “No, no,” I assured him. “The stranger has just been with me, he stood there in front of my bed. He could not have passed unnoticed.”

  I again described Evli to him. and urged him to bring him back in haste.