Steppenwolf

by Hermann Hesse, David Horrocks, Hermann Hesse, David Horrocks

  In this way, starting with Rosa and the violets, I was able to relive my whole love life under happier auspices. Rosa was lost sight of and Irmgard appeared. The sun grew hotter, the stars giddier, but neither Rosa nor Irmgard became mine. I had to climb the ladder rung by rung, had to experience and learn a great deal, had to lose Irmgard, and after her Anna. Every girl I had loved once upon a time in my youth I was now permitted to love again, but this time I was able to inspire love in them, to give something to each one of them and to receive something in return. Wishes, dreams and possibilities that had once existed solely in my imagination were now made lived realities. Oh, Ida and Lore and all you other beautiful flowers that I once loved for a whole summer, for a month or just for a day!

  Realizing that I was now that handsome, passionate little youth that I had earlier seen running so eagerly towards love’s doorway, I understood that I was presently living to the full this part of my being and life, only a tenth – no, a thousandth of which had previously achieved fulfilment. It was now being allowed to flourish, unhampered by all the other figures that constituted my self, neither disturbed by the thinker, plagued by Steppenwolf, nor restricted in scope by the writer, the dreamer, the moralist in me. On the contrary, I was now the lover and nothing but the lover. Love was the sole air I breathed, in happiness and in sorrow. I had already learned to dance with Irmgard, to kiss with Ida, before, one autumn evening under the wind-blown leaves of an elm, Emma, the most beautiful of them all, became the first to let me kiss her brownish breasts and invite me to drink from the cup of desire.

  I experienced a great deal in Pablo’s little theatre, a thousand things more than can be put into words. All the girls I had ever loved were now mine. Each gave me what was hers alone to give and I gave to each of them what only she knew how to take from me. I got to sample much love, much happiness, much lust, and a great deal of confusion and sorrow too. In the space of this one dreamlike hour, all the love I had missed out on during my life returned magically to fill my garden with a variety of blooms: flowers that were chaste and delicate, garish flowers blazing with colour, dark flowers that swiftly faded. I ran the gamut of flickering desire, intense reverie, feverish melancholy, the anguish of death and the joyful radiance of rebirth. I found women who could only be won in haste, taken by storm; others it was a joy to woo at length and with utmost solicitude. Light was cast on every dim corner of my life in which I had once, if only for a minute, heard the voice of sex calling me, a look from a woman had aroused me, or I had been attracted by the glimpse of a girl’s shimmering white skin. And now every previously missed opportunity was made up for, every woman becoming mine, each in her own way. There was the woman with the remarkably deep brown eyes under her flaxen hair that I had once stood next to for a quarter of an hour by the window in the corridor of an express train and who had later appeared to me several times in dreams. She didn’t utter a word, but she taught me some things about lovemaking I never imagined existed, frightening, deadly arts. And then there was that sleek, calm Chinese woman from the dockside in Marseille with her glassy smile, smooth jet-black hair and swimming eyes. She too knew some outrageous things. Each of them had her secrets, each the perfume of her homeland. All of them kissed and laughed differently; all were bashful – and shameless too – in their own distinctive ways. The women came and went with the current. Either it bore them to me or I was washed towards them, then away again. To float like this on a wave of sexuality was like a childhood game, full of charm, full of danger, full of surprise. And I was amazed to discover how rich my ostensibly barren and loveless Steppenwolf existence had been in episodes of infatuation, sexual opportunities and temptations. I had let almost all of them slip by or had run away from them. Stumbling upon them, I had forgotten them as fast as I could, but here they were all stored up in their hundreds, every single one of them. Now I could see them, surrender to them, open myself to them and descend into the rosy half-light of their underworld. Even the orgy Pablo had once tempted me to indulge in recurred, along with other, earlier proposals I hadn’t even understood at the time, to join in fantastic threesomes and foursomes. Now I was welcomed into such revels with a smile. Lots of things took place, lots of games were played, all of them unmentionable.

  From this unending current of temptations, vices and entanglements I resurfaced calmly and silently. I was now well equipped, full of knowledge, wise, deeply experienced, ripe for Hermione. For it was she, Hermione, who emerged as the final figure in my mythical cast of a thousand. In the endless series of names, hers was the last to appear, and its appearance coincided with my return to consciousness. It also marked the end of my erotic fairy tale, because I had no desire to encounter her here in the half-light of a magic mirror. Only the whole Harry would suffice for her, and I was now oh so determined to reconfigure all my chess pieces solely with her and her fulfilment in mind.

  The current had washed me up on dry land. I was again standing in the silent corridor behind the theatre’s boxes. What now? I felt for the little chessmen in my pocket, but the urge to rearrange them had already lost its force. All around me I was confronted by this inexhaustible world of doors, inscriptions and magic mirrors. Mechanically my eyes lit on the next notice and I shuddered to see that it read:

  HOW TO KILL THE ONE YOU LOVE

  I had a rapid flash of memory, lasting no more than a second. It was of Hermione at a restaurant table. Looking frighteningly serious, the food and wine forgotten, she was absorbed in profound conversation, telling me that she would make me fall in love with her only so that she could die by my hand. I felt a heavy wave of fear and gloom surge across my heart. Everything was suddenly confronting me again. Suddenly, deep down inside me, I could again sense fate pressing in on me. In my despair I felt for the figures in my pocket, meaning to take them out and work a little magic by rearranging them on my chessboard. But the figures had gone. Instead, what I took from my pocket was a knife. Frightened to death, I ran along the corridor, past all the doors, and suddenly found myself in front of the gigantic mirror. Looking into it, I saw a huge, handsome wolf, as tall as me. It was standing there motionless, its nervous, restless eyes flashing. Then, one eye glinting, it winked at me and laughed a little, its lips parting for an instant to reveal a red tongue.

  Where was Pablo? Where was Hermione? What had become of that clever chap with all his fine talk of reconstructing one’s personality?

  I took another look in the mirror. I must have been mad. There was no wolf there rolling its tongue in its mouth behind the tall looking glass. What I saw in the mirror was me, Harry, my face ashen now, showing no trace of all those games I’d been playing. I looked terribly pale, exhausted by all the vices I’d indulged in, but at least I was a human being, someone you could talk to.

  ‘Harry,’ I said, ‘what are you doing there?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said the figure in the mirror. ‘I’m just waiting. I’m waiting for death.’

  ‘Where is death, then?’ I asked.

  ‘It is coming,’ the other one said. And from the empty chambers in the interior of the theatre I heard some beautiful, terrible music ring out, the passage from Don Giovanni that accompanies the appearance of the Stone Guest. Arriving from the beyond, the world of the Immortals, the icy sounds of it echoed spine-chillingly throughout the haunted building.

  ‘Mozart!’ I thought, conjuring up the most noble and best-loved images of my inner life.

  Behind me I now heard the sound of laughter, bright and ice-cold laughter, a product of the gods’ sense of humour, originating from another world unheard of by human beings, a world beyond experienced suffering. I turned round, chilled to the bone yet delighted by this laughter, and there was Mozart walking towards me. Laughing, he passed by me and, strolling nonchalantly towards one of the theatre’s boxes, opened the door and went in. Eagerly I followed him, the God of my youth, the object of my love and veneration throughout my life. The music continued to ring o
ut. Mozart was standing at the front rail of the box, but nothing could be seen of the theatre. In the immeasurable space beyond him all was darkness.

  ‘You see,’ Mozart said, ‘the effect music can achieve even without a saxophone. Mind you, I certainly wouldn’t want to be standing too close to that splendid instrument either.’

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked.

  ‘We are in the last act of Don Giovanni. Leporello is already down on his knees. An excellent scene, and the music’s not bad either, come to think of it. It may still possess all sorts of qualities that are very human, but there’s no denying that you can already hear traces of the world beyond in it, in the laughter – don’t you agree?’

  ‘It’s the last great piece of music to have been written,’ I said solemnly, like a schoolmaster. ‘True, Schubert was still to follow, then Hugo Wolf came along, and I mustn’t leave out poor magnificent Chopin either. Now you’re frowning, Maestro. Oh, yes, there is also Beethoven, he too is marvellous. Yet, however beautiful all of that is, there is something piecemeal about it, a sense of things fragmenting. No human being has again produced a composition that is so perfectly integrated a whole as Don Giovanni.’

  ‘Take it easy,’ Mozart said, with a laugh that was terribly scornful. ‘I suppose you’re a musician yourself. Well, I’ve given up the job, gone into retirement. If from time to time I take a look at what’s still going on in the profession, it’s just for fun.’

  He raised his hands as if conducting an orchestra and somewhere or other I saw a moon or some equally pale heavenly body rising. I was gazing out over the edge of the box into immeasurable depths of space. Mists and clouds were swirling in it; mountain ranges and coastlines came dimly into view; and beneath us stretched a desert-like plain as wide as the earth. On this plain we could see a venerable-looking old gentleman with a long beard who was walking mournful-faced at the head of an enormously long procession of tens of thousands of men dressed in black. He looked dejected and desperate, and Mozart said:

  ‘Look, that’s Brahms. He is doing his utmost to achieve salvation, but he’s still got a long way to go.’

  He told me that the black-clad thousands were the people who had sung or played all the notes in Brahms’s scores that had been judged superfluous by the gods.

  ‘All too densely orchestrated, you see, waste of material,’ said Mozart with a nod.

  And immediately after this we saw Richard Wagner marching at the head of an army just as large. He had the look of a martyr as he trudged along wearily, and we could sense what a heavy burden on him the thousands in his wake were.

  ‘In my youth,’ I remarked sadly, ‘these two composers were regarded as the greatest opposites imaginable.’

  Mozart laughed.

  ‘Yes, that’s always the case, but viewed from a certain distance, opposites like that tend to look more and more like one another. It wasn’t, incidentally, a personal fault of either Wagner or Brahms to go in for such dense orchestration, it was a fault of the age they lived in.’

  ‘What? And they now have to pay so dearly for it?’ I exclaimed indignantly.

  ‘Naturally. The law must take its course. Only when they have discharged the debt of their age will it become clear whether enough still remains that is personal to them to make a reassessment of their value worthwhile.’

  ‘But surely neither of them is responsible for it?’

  ‘Of course not, any more than you are responsible for the fact that Adam ate the apple, but you still have to pay for it.’

  ‘But that’s terrible.’

  ‘Certainly. Life is always terrible. We are not responsible for things, yet we have to answer for them. Just by virtue of being born we are guilty. You must have enjoyed a strange kind of religious education if you didn’t know that.’

  By now I was feeling well and truly miserable. I had a vision of myself trudging dog-tired through that desert plain in the beyond, bearing the burden of the countless superfluous books I had written, all the essays and journalistic pieces too, and following in my train the host of those obliged to work on them as typesetters or to swallow the whole lot as readers. My God! And then there was Adam and the apple, and all the rest of that original sin business into the bargain! So all of that had to be atoned for, endless purgatory endured, before it would even be possible to consider whether there was still something of personal, individual value left behind, or whether all my activities and their consequences had been mere foam on the waves, a performance signifying nothing in the overall current of events.

  When he saw my long face Mozart started to laugh. He laughed so much he turned somersaults in the air and played trills with his feet. And in doing so he shouted at me: ‘Hey, my lad, you look so sad, are things that bad? Worried about your readers, the greedy bleeders? Printers’ devils, rabble-rousers, sabre-rattlers? Laugh? My sides I’ve split, you stupid twit, I’ve nearly shit myself! You’re so naive, prone to believe and constantly grieve, I’ll sing a psalm on your behalf, but just for a laugh. What waffle and piffle, what melodramatic monkeying around! Come, wiggle and waggle your tail, don’t shilly-shally or dilly-dally on the way! To hell with you and your scribble and scrawl, you deserve to be lynched for all that you pinched from Goethe and Nietzsche et al.’

  This was simply too much to take. There was no time to dwell on my former melancholy now. I was so angry that I seized Mozart by his pigtail, which grew longer and longer like the tail of a comet as he hurtled off into space with me whirling along behind. God, it was cold out there! What a glacial, rarefied atmosphere these Immortals were able to survive in! Yet it put you in a cheerful mood, this ice-cold air; as I was just able to appreciate for a brief moment before falling unconscious. It was a bitterly sharp, icy cheerfulness that I felt penetrating my being like cold steel, and it made me want to laugh in just as bright, uninhibited and unearthly a manner as Mozart had done. But then, before I had chance to, I stopped breathing and lost consciousness.

  When I came to again I was battered and bewildered. The white light of the corridor was reflected in its shiny floor. I was not in the realm of the Immortals, not yet. No, I was still in this world, the world of mystery and suffering, of Steppenwolf figures and agonizingly complex entanglements. It was not a good place to be, not a place I could abide for any length of time. I had to put an end to this existence.

  Harry was facing me in the large mirror on the wall. He did not look well. He looked much the same as on that night after his visit to the professor’s and the dance in the Black Eagle. But that was in the distant past, years, centuries ago. Harry was older now, he had learned to dance, visited the Magic Theatre, heard Mozart laugh. He was no longer frightened of dances, women or knives. Even a moderately talented person matures if he has raced his way through a few centuries. I took a long look at Harry in the mirror. I could still recognize him all right. He still looked a tiny bit like the fifteen-year-old Harry who had encountered Rosa one Sunday in March up in the rocks and, fresh from his confirmation, had raised his hat to her. Yet since then he had grown a good few hundred years older, had studied music and philosophy to the point were he was fed up with both, had drunk his fill of Alsace wine in the Steel Helmet, had taken part in debates on the God Krishna with reputable scholars, had loved Erika and Maria, made friends with Hermione, shot down passing cars and slept with that sleek Chinese woman in Marseille. In meetings with Goethe and Mozart he had also managed to tear various holes in the mesh of time and pseudo-reality in which he remained trapped. And even though he had lost his precious chessmen, he still had a trusty knife in his pocket. Onwards, Harry, old man, weary old chap!

  Ugh! How bitter life tasted! I spat at the Harry in the mirror, I kicked out at him, shattering him to pieces. Slowly I walked along the echoing corridor, examining the doors of the Magic Theatre that had promised so many wonderful things, but now there wasn’t an inscription to be seen on any of them. I paced by all hundred of them slowly, a
s if inspecting troops. Hadn’t I been to a masked ball earlier today? Since then a hundred years had gone by. Soon there won’t be any more years. Something still needed to be done. Hermione was still waiting. Ours would be a strange wedding. These were troubled waters I was drifting in, pulled along by a murky current, a slave, a Steppenwolf. Ugh!

  I stopped by the last of the doors, drawn to it by the murky current. O Rosa, O my distant youth, O Goethe and Mozart!

  Opening the door, I was witness to a scene that was simple and beautiful. I discovered two naked people lying side by side on rugs on the floor: beautiful Hermione and handsome Pablo. They were fast asleep, utterly exhausted by lovemaking, one’s appetite for which, though seemingly insatiable, is nonetheless rapidly satiated. Beautiful, beautiful people, splendid images, wonderful bodies. Under Hermione’s left breast there was a fresh, round, richly dark mark, a love bite from Pablo’s beautiful gleaming teeth. It was there that I plunged my knife in, as far as the blade would go. Blood flowed over Hermione’s tender white skin. If the whole situation had been slightly different, if things had turned out a little differently, I would have kissed the blood away. As it was, I didn’t. I just watched the blood flowing and saw the look of agony and utter astonishment in her eyes as they briefly opened. Why is she astonished? I thought. Then it occurred to me that I ought to close her eyes, but they closed again of their own accord. The deed was done. She just turned on her side a little. As she did so I saw a fine, delicate shadow playing between her armpit and her breast. It reminded me strongly of something or other, but annoyingly I could not remember what. Then she lay still.

  I looked at her for a long time. Eventually, as if waking from sleep, I started with fright and made to leave. At that moment I saw Pablo open his eyes and stretch his arms and legs. Then he bent down over Hermione’s dead body and smiled. He will never learn to take anything seriously, I thought. Whatever happens just makes the chap smile. Carefully turning up one corner of the rug, Pablo covered Hermione with it as far as her breast so that the wound was no longer visible. Then he silently left the theatre box. Where was he going? Were they all leaving me here alone? I stayed there, alone with the half-shrouded body of the dead woman that I loved and envied. Her boyish curl was hanging down over her pale forehead, her slightly open mouth stood out bright red from the extreme pallor of her face, her delicately perfumed hair allowed just a glimpse of her small, finely sculpted ear.