by Hermann Hesse, David Horrocks, Hermann Hesse, David Horrocks
The dear chap! Linking arms with us, Hermione on his right and me on his left, he led us with tender loving care up a flight of stairs into a small, round room. Lit by a bluish light from above, it was almost completely empty save for a small, round table and three armchairs, in which we sat down.
Where were we? Was I sleeping? Was I at home? Was I sitting in a car, going somewhere? No, I was sitting in the blue light of a round room, where the air was thin and reality too, having lost much of its density, was just a thin veneer. Why was Hermione so pale? Why was Pablo doing so much talking? Could it be that I was making him talk? Was it my own voice emerging from him? Was it not my own soul, that frightened, lost bird, I could see mirrored in his dark eyes, just as I had in the grey eyes of Hermione?
Our friend Pablo, looking at us with all that good-natured and slightly formal kindness of his, talked and talked at length, and about many things. This man, whom I had never heard string two sentences together, who showed no interest in debating any topic or statement, whom I would scarcely have considered capable of thinking about anything, was now talking, indeed speaking fluently in that kind, warm voice of his, and without a slip of the tongue.
‘Friends, I have invited you to an entertainment that Harry has long been dreaming of and wishing to attend. It is rather late, and like as not we are all slightly tired, so let us rest a while here first and take a little something to fortify us.’
From a niche in the wall he took down three small glasses and a quaint little bottle, also a tiny, exotic-looking box made of variegated wood. He poured three full glasses from the bottle, then took three long, thin, yellow cigarettes from the box and, producing a lighter from his silk jacket, offered it to us in turn. Now, leaning back in our armchairs, we all slowly smoked the cigarettes, which gave off fumes as dense as incense, and, sip by tiny sip, slowly drank the unfamiliar, bitter-sweet liquid with its curiously alien taste. The drink really did have the effect of putting new life into us and making us feel extremely happy. It was as if we were being filled with gas and becoming weightless. There we sat, taking short puffs on our cigarettes, relaxing, sipping from our glasses, able to feel ourselves becoming lighter and merrier. And as we did so, the muffled sound of Pablo’s warm voice could be heard, saying:
‘It gives me great pleasure, dear Harry, to be allowed to play host to you in a small way tonight. You have often been sick to death of life, haven’t you, longing to see the back of it? You are yearning to leave this world behind, the time and reality we live in, and to exchange them for a different reality more suited to you, a world that is timeless. Well, do so, dear friend, I’m offering you the possibility. You know, of course, where this other world lies hidden, know that the world you are seeking is that of your own soul, and that the different reality you are longing for is only to be found deep in your own self. I can give you nothing that doesn’t already exist in you. I can open the doors to no picture gallery other than that of your mind. All I can give you is the opportunity, the stimulus, the key. I am going to help you make your own world visible, that is all.’
Again feeling in the pocket of his brightly coloured jacket, he took out a round pocket mirror.
‘Take a look. This is how you have perceived yourself until now!’
As he held the little looking glass in front of my eyes I couldn’t help thinking ‘mirror, mirror in the hand’, a variation on the familiar line from my childhood. What I now saw was rather blurred and hazy, a disturbingly agitated image, full of inner turmoil and ferment. It was of me myself, Harry Haller, and inside Harry was Steppenwolf, a timid, handsome, apparently stray wolf, looking around nervously with a glint in its eyes that was now furious, now sad. Incessantly on the move, the image of the wolf was flowing through Harry just as a tributary of a different colour can be seen merging with a major river, churning and clouding its waters. The two were locked in painful combat, eating away at one another, each longing to assert a fully formed identity, but in vain. The fluid, half-formed wolf was gazing at me sadly, ever so sadly, with its handsome, timid eyes.
‘This is how you have perceived yourself,’ Pablo repeated softly, putting the mirror back in his pocket. I was thankful to close my eyes and take another sip of the strange elixir.
‘Now we’ve had a good rest, a fortifying drink and a bit of a chat, I’d like to take you to my peep show, if you are no longer feeling tired, and show you my little theatre. Agreed?’
We stood up and Pablo, smiling, led the way. Opening a door, he pulled a curtain to one side and we found ourselves standing exactly in the middle of the rounded, horseshoe-shaped corridor of a theatre. This corridor curved away on both sides past a large number, an incredibly large number, of narrow doorways to the theatre’s boxes.
‘This is our theatre,’ Pablo explained, ‘an entertaining theatre, in which I trust you will find a whole variety of things to make you laugh.’ As he said this, he himself suddenly laughed out loud, shaking me to the core, even though his laughter lasted no more than a few notes. It was the same clear, alien-sounding laughter I had already heard earlier coming from on high.
‘My little theatre has doors leading to however many boxes you wish, ten or a hundred or a thousand, and behind each door you will find the very things you are seeking waiting there for you. It is a fine cabinet of curiosities, my dear friend, but you would not benefit from it in the least if you were to do the rounds of it as you are now constituted, for you would be inhibited and blinded by what you are accustomed to term your personality. I have no doubt you guessed long ago that the terms you use to characterize what you are longing for – “overcoming time” or “finding release from reality” or whatever – have no other significance than your desire to rid yourself of your so-called personality. It is the prison you are doing time in. And if you were to enter the theatre as you are, you would see everything through Harry’s eyes, perceive everything through Steppenwolf’s old pair of spectacles. You are therefore invited to take off the said spectacles and to kindly divest yourself of your dear personality, leaving it here at the cloakroom, where you may reclaim it any time you wish. The wonderful evening you have spent at the ball, your reading of the Steppenwolf tract and lastly the little stimulant we have just consumed will in all likelihood have prepared you adequately. Once you have divested yourself of your esteemed personality, Harry, you will have the left-hand side of the theatre at your disposal, Hermione the portion to the right, and you can meet up again on the inside as and when you wish. Hermione, I would like you to please go behind the curtain while I take Harry in first.’
Hermione disappeared to the right, past a gigantic mirror that covered the rear wall from the floor right up to the vaulted ceiling.
‘Now then, Harry, come along and cheer up, do. The whole point of the exercise is to cheer you up and teach you how to laugh, and I hope you will make my task an easy one. You do feel well, don’t you? Yes? You are not anxious, by any chance? That’s good then, very good. You are now about to enter our make-believe world, not anxiously at all, but with genuine pleasure, and you will be introduced to it, as is customary, by means of a little make-believe act of suicide.’
Taking out his little pocket mirror again, he held it in front of my face. Once more I could see the blurred, confused image of Harry, fused with the wrestling figure of the wolf. To tell the truth, this familiar image was not at all congenial to me, so putting an end to it was unlikely to worry me at all.
‘My dear friend, all that’s required of you is to obliterate this now redundant mirror image. If you can bring yourself to laugh heartily when you contemplate it, that will be enough. This is a school of humour that you are in, designed to teach you how to laugh. You see, the first requirement of our advanced humour course is to stop taking yourself seriously.’
Taking a steady look in the ‘mirror, mirror in the hand’, I saw the hybrid Harry-Wolf going through his painful convulsions. Momentarily I felt a slight but painful t
winge in my innards too, something akin to memory, homesickness, remorse. Then this slight anxiety gave way to a feeling similar to the one you have when a bad tooth is extracted from your cocaine-numbed jaw and you sigh, not just with relief, but also amazement at the fact that it hasn’t hurt at all. And this feeling was accompanied by a fresh sense of joviality, an urge to laugh that I could not resist. Indeed, I burst out laughing, which was a great release.
The little cloudy image in the looking glass flared up briefly, then vanished, leaving the small round surface of the mirror looking suddenly grey, rough and opaque, as if it had been scorched. With a laugh, Pablo threw the fragment of glass away and it rolled out of sight along the floor of the endless corridor.
‘What a good laugh that was, Harry!’ Pablo exclaimed. ‘Well done! One of these days you’ll be able to laugh like the Immortals. At last you’ve managed to kill off Steppenwolf, which it’s impossible to do with a razor. Just make sure he stays dead. In a short while you will be able to leave stupid reality behind you. You are more likeable today than you’ve ever been, my dear chap. We must drink to our close friendship the next time we get the opportunity. Then we can say ‘du’ to one another and, if it still matters to you, we can talk philosophy and argue with one another, discussing music, Mozart and Gluck, Plato and Goethe to your heart’s content. You will understand now why such things were impossible before. – I hope you have succeeded in ridding yourself of Steppenwolf for the day, because of course your suicide is not final. We are not dealing with reality here, but mere images. By choosing beautiful and cheerful images you can demonstrate that you aren’t in fact still in love with your questionable personality. Should you nonetheless feel the urge to have it restored, you need only look into the mirror I am now about to show you. However, I take it you are familiar with the old wise saying “A mirror in the hand is better than two on the wall”. Ha! Ha!’ (Again that fine, terrible laughter of his rang out.) ‘So there, and now we just need to perform one little amusing ritual. Now that you have cast off the spectacles of your personality, come and take a look in a proper mirror. You’ll find it fun.’
Laughing as he did so, and giving me the odd little friendly pat and stroke, he turned me round to face the gigantic mirror on the wall. In this one I could see myself.
For just the briefest of moments I saw the Harry I knew, except that the look on his face was unusually good-humoured, bright and radiant. However, scarcely had I time to recognize him when he disintegrated, a second figure detaching itself from him, then a third, a tenth and a twentieth until the whole gigantic mirror was full of nothing but Harrys or fragments of Harrys, innumerable Harrys, each of which I only managed to glimpse and recognize for a fleeting instant. Some of these many Harrys were as old as me, some older, some really aged, whereas others were very young, young men, lads, schoolboys, little rascals, children. Fifty-year-old and twenty-year-old Harrys were running and jumping all over the place. There were thirty-year-olds and five-year-olds; serious and funny, dignified and comical Harrys. Some were well dressed, some in rags, some totally naked even, while some were bald and others had long hair. Yet all of them were me, and they were all only glimpsed and recognized in a flash before vanishing again. They were dispersing in all directions, to the left, to the right, into the depths of the mirror or right out of it. One of them, an elegant young chap, leaped into Pablo’s arms with a laugh, pressed him to his breast and ran off with him. And another one that I particularly liked, a charming, handsome lad of sixteen or seventeen, darted off along the corridor, eagerly reading the inscriptions on all the doors. Following him, I saw him stop outside one door, on which I read:
ALL GIRLS ARE YOURS
INSERT I MARK PIECE
With one jump the dear boy shot up head first, threw himself into the slot and vanished behind the door.
Pablo too had vanished, as had the mirror, so it seemed, and with it all the numerous Harry figures. Sensing that I was now left to my own devices and that the theatre was mine to explore, I walked from door to door, full of curiosity. On each one I read an inscription, an enticing message, a promise.
Attracted by the inscription
TALLY-HO! A-HUNTING WE WILL GO
HIGH SEASON FOR MOTOR CARS
I opened the narrow door and went in.
I was whisked away into a world of loud noise and turbulence. Cars, some of them armour-plated, were tearing along the streets, hunting down pedestrians, running them over and reducing them to pulp, squashing them to bits against the walls of the buildings. Immediately I understood that the war between human beings and machines, long prepared, long expected and long feared, had now finally broken out. Everywhere there were dead and mutilated bodies lying around; everywhere too there were the buckled and half-burned-out wrecks of cars that had skidded out of control. Aeroplanes were circling above this utterly chaotic scene, and people with rifles and machine guns were shooting at them too from many windows and rooftops. On all the walls there were garish, splendidly provocative posters. In gigantic letters, flaring up like torches, the nation was being called upon to finally take up arms on behalf of humanity against machines; to finally exterminate the fat, handsomely dressed, perfumed plutocrats who, with the help of machines, were living off the fat of others. Also to put an end to their huge, coughing, evilly snarling and devilishly humming motor cars; to finally set fire to the factories and go some way towards clearing out and depopulating the desecrated earth so that grass might grow again and the dust-filled concrete jungle might give way to things such as woods, meadows, heaths, streams and marshland. From other posters, in contrast, splendidly stylized and beautifully painted in gentler, less childish colours, came stirring warnings, composed with extraordinary subtlety and wit, about the chaos and anarchy that were threatening all prudent property owners. In truly gripping terms these posters pictured the blessings of law and order, hard work, property and culture, and they praised machines as human beings’ latest and greatest invention, with the aid of which they would be transformed into gods. As I read them, deep in thought, I could not help admiring the posters, the red ones as well as the green. Both their fiery eloquence and their compelling logic made an enormous impression on me. They were right, I thought, as I stood there profoundly convinced, now in front of one poster, now in front of another, albeit perceptibly disturbed by the fairly hefty shooting match going on all around me. Well, there was a war being fought, that was the main thing: a vehement, spirited war that was highly congenial because it wasn’t a matter of the Kaiser, the Republic or national frontiers, or of flags and battle colours and such things of a more decorative and theatrical kind – all essentially shabby issues. No, this was a war in which all those who felt stifled, all those for whom life had acquired a nasty taste, were giving full vent to their grievances and trying their hardest to set in train a process leading to the general destruction of the shoddy world of civilization. All their eyes were shining so brightly with a genuine, burning desire to destroy and kill that I felt the same passions burning just as fiercely in me, flourishing unchecked like tall, rank, blood-red flowers. I was more than happy to join in the fighting.
However, the nicest thing of all was the sudden appearance at my side of my former classmate Gustav, whom I had completely lost touch with decades ago. Of all my early-childhood friends he had once been the wildest and strongest, the one with the greatest appetite for life. My heart leaped to see his bright blue eyes winking at me once again, and when he beckoned to me I was at once delighted to follow him.
‘Good Lord, Gustav!’ I exclaimed happily. ‘I never expected to see you again! What have you been doing with yourself all these years, then?’
Annoyed, he burst out laughing, just as he used to as a boy.
‘Stupid fool! Do we really have to begin right away with tittle-tattle and questions like that? If you must know, I became a theology professor. There you have it, but luckily there’s a war on now, my lad, and n
o call for theology. Come on, what are you waiting for?’
Just then a small motor-truck came puffing its way towards us. Shooting down the driver, Gustav leaped up in the cab with all the agility of a monkey and brought the vehicle to a stop. He got me to climb up alongside him and we drove off at one hell of a pace, past upturned vehicles and through a hail of rifle bullets, making our way out of the town and its suburbs.
‘Are you on the side of the factory owners?’ I asked my friend.
‘Don’t ask me, it’s just a matter of taste. We can worry about that once we’re out of town. But no, hang on. If anything, I think we should opt for the other side, even though it basically makes no difference, of course. I’m a theologian, and since my predecessor Luther in his day came to the aid of the rich and the princes against the peasants, I think we ought now to redress the balance a little. This vehicle’s no good. Let’s hope it holds out for another few kilometres!’
As fast as the wind, the heaven-born wind, we rattled along, entering a peaceful green stretch of land many miles wide; then on through a vast plain before slowly climbing into a huge mountain range. Here we came to a halt on a smooth, shimmering road that boldly wound its way upwards between sheer walls of rock and a low protecting wall, high above a bright blue lake.
‘Lovely area,’ I said.
‘Very pretty. We can call it Axle Road, Harry my boy, since various axles are about to come to grief on it. Just you watch.’
There was a large pine tree by the roadside, and high up in it we could see something like a hut made of planks, a raised stand with a lookout. Smiling brightly, Gustav gave me a sly wink with those blue eyes of his and we both hurriedly got out of our truck. Clambering up the trunk of the pine, we hid ourselves, gasping for breath, in the lookout. It was an ideal spot. We found shotguns, pistols and boxes of cartridges there. And we scarcely had time to cool off and settle down in this shooting box before we heard the hoarse, domineering sound of a car’s horn as it approached the nearest bend. It was a huge limousine, its engine humming as it drove at high speed along the smooth mountain road. We already had hold of the shotguns. The excitement was wonderful.