The Knife Thrower

by Steven Millhauser

  I understand of course that my progress is far from complete. About this matter I have no illusions. When I enter a room I am fully aware of the stray looks of amusement or pity, to say nothing of those subtler and more harmful looks that may be described as the polite suppression of amusement or pity. Even now, as a full-grown man of twenty, I cannot hold my arms in a natural way, but can feel them hanging awkwardly at my sides, the fingers slightly outspread. My manner of walking is uncertain. This is especially so when I feel myself the center of attention: then I advance in a kind of delicate lurch, or as if I were falling forward and then quickly moving my feet in order to remain upright. Nor am I absolute master of my face, which now and then will break into a scowl, or reveal a look of childlike astonishment. Even my words don’t always emerge with the fluency I long for, but come forth in rushed clusters, or with unnatural slowness. Sometimes I stumble into a pit or well of sadness, a deep pit, a long fall; the sheer walls soar; and as I fall, never reaching the bottom, for there is no bottom, I stare up and see, far above, in the little circle of light that is always receding, faces peering down at me, faces unimaginably high up—and they are your faces, ladies and gentlemen of Nuremberg. For though I have been formed in your image, yet at the same time I am so far beneath you that the effort of looking up at you makes me giddy. That much is clear.

  Nevertheless, despite these flaws in my progress, I think I may say that I have come a remarkably long way. Certainly it is remarkable that I am able to stand upright before you today, after a lifetime of being shackled to the ground. But I needn’t rehearse for you my well-known history. Let two examples suffice. I remember an incident that took place shortly after my arrival here, during the time when I was kept in the Vestner Tower of the castle. One day my prison-keeper, who always treated me gently, carried in to me an object I had never seen before. It was a kind of stick, which I could scarcely see, because in my ignorance of the world I could not yet distinguish objects clearly; but there was something bright and shining at the top, which pleased me and attracted my deepest interest. My keeper set it down on a table. With a feeling of excitement and delight I reached out my hand. The stick bit me. I gave a startled cry and snatched my hand away. I could see a look of alarm on my keeper’s face, an alarm that disturbed me even more than the dangerous stick. What had I done wrong? Why had the stick hurt me? Ah, the stick, the stick, ladies and gentlemen—you know the stick, do you? But as for me, I knew nothing except terror and pain.

  I pass on to the second incident. I was visited in the tower one day by a gentleman stranger, not long before I was moved to Professor Daumer’s home. Herr von Feuerbach had a kind but searching look, and after a number of questions he led me to the place in the wall of the tower where, from a safe distance, I liked to look up at the brightness. He seemed aware of the tenderness of my eyes and was careful to position me at one side of the dangerous place. With words and gestures he indicated that I should look down at what lay before me. I obeyed. Immediately I was overcome by anxiety and a terrible sense of oppression, and turning away I cried “Ugly! Ugly!”—a word I had recently been taught. My sensation was that a window-shutter had been placed directly before me, and that on this shutter were ugly splotches of wall-paint—green and yellow and white and blue and red. At that time, you see, I had no knowledge of the changes wrought in objects by distance, indeed I had no sense of distant things; but rather, what I saw appeared as if directly before my gaze, a window-shutter splashed with ugly wall-paint, closing me in.

  The stick and the shutter, ladies and gentlemen! Do you begin to understand? I was a youth of sixteen or seventeen, with a beard beginning to grow on my cheeks, and yet I had no knowledge of a candle, no faintest notion of a landscape seen from a window. I had a handful of words that had been taught to me in the tower and that I used in my own way, often to the confusion or hilarity of visitors. Shall we speak of the hilarity of visitors? No, I think not. And of course I had my little toy horses, which I liked to decorate with ribbons and pieces of colored paper. Bright, shiny objects pleased me. I spoke to my horses, I spoke to my bread. I was a child—no, I was less than a child, I was scarcely more than a toad. One day I was taken for a walk in the streets, in the company of two policemen. Suddenly a black thing came toward me, a shaking black thing. Terror seized me, I tried to run away. Only later, much later, could I be made to understand that I had seen a black hen.

  For even then, you see, in the castle tower, high above the roofs of the town, I was barely human. And yet, when you consider the black emptiness that was my earlier life, my earlier death, the tower was civilization itself. But can you consider it, that other life? Can you? Is it possible for you, ladies and gentlemen of Nuremberg, by the deepest, the sincerest, the most sustained effort of imagination, to understand what it means to have the sensations of a worm? To inhabit a dark place for seventeen years; seeing no light; never a face; not a voice; without even being able to feel the loss of such things—is it possible? I lived in the dark. Something prevented me from standing. I could sit up and slide a little. And perhaps, in this single instance, I may claim an advantage over you, a dubious and inglorious superiority, for I think I may say that I alone among you have experienced such an existence. Seventeen years! No, it is too difficult. Even I can scarcely imagine it. The man who looked after me never showed himself. He left the bread and water when I fell asleep. I woke always in the same dark. The ground was covered with straw. Of course the idea of cruelty didn’t occur to me then. I had my water and my bread and my two little horses. They were white and made of wood. I sat with my legs straight out. I was content, or if not content, then not discontent. What did I know of such things? It was only later, when I emerged from my dungeon, that I learned the meaning of discontent. And that is something I think you should take into account, ladies and gentlemen of Nuremberg, when you contemplate my remarkable progress. For it was only in leaving myself behind that I saw what I had been, although it is equally true that by the time I was able to see myself at all, I had already advanced so far that when I glanced back I was scarcely visible.

  Please understand that if I mention such things, it isn’t in order to evoke your sympathy, least of all your pity, but only to remind you how confusing my new life was bound to be. For many days I couldn’t endure the light. It scalded my eyes like boiling water flung in my face. Light, ladies and gentlemen! Symbol of knowledge! By this alone you can see how thoroughly my other life had indisposed me for progress.

  And yet I did progress. I did. First the dungeon: then the tower. Even the tower—especially the tower—was progress of a startling kind. Was it in recognition of my unsolved nature that I was still forbidden to live on the level ground? In any case, once removed from the tower, where I was visited daily by crowds of the curious, once settled in the peace and order of Professor Daumer’s family, I surged ahead. Within three months I had learned to speak, to write, to understand the difference between things that are alive, like cats, and things that only appear to be alive, like paper blown by the wind. The ball didn’t roll along by itself whenever it wanted to: this too I learned, with difficulty. Who had cut the leaves into their shapes? Why did the horse on the wall not run away? Professor Daumer was very patient. I felt bursts of power and curiosity, followed always by a fall into melancholy, as I became more deeply aware of the big hole in my life. Then I would surge ahead again. One night—I remember it clearly—I saw the stars for the first time. Then did I feel an uplifting, a rapture, such as I had never known; though the plunge into despair that soon followed was deeper than that height.

  My progress, as I say, was rapid, though I soon became aware that my life in the dark had sharpened my nervous system in peculiar ways. The keenness of my sight astonished Professor Daumer. I saw perfectly in the dark. In a darkened room where guests were unable to see each other at five paces, I was able to read easily from a printed book. At twilight, at a distance of one hundred paces, I was able to distinguish the single berries
in a cluster of elderberries; at sixty paces I could distinguish an elderberry from a black currant. My sense of smell was so sharp that for many months I suffered fits of nausea when I walked in the countryside. Flowers sickened me with their harsh perfumes. Revolting odors of drying tobacco rose from distant fields. I was able to distinguish apple, pear, and plum trees from each other by the violent smell of their leaves. Indeed all odors were offensive to me except that of bread, fennel, anise, and caraway—smells I had known in my dungeon. Even my sense of touch was disturbingly keen. The touch of a hand affected me like a blow.

  How well I remember my first sight of the full moon. It was from a window in Professor Daumer’s house, in summer. The room was warm, summer-night warm, but my body felt suddenly cold. I began to shiver. I felt a pressure on my chest. I kept looking at the moon, the big white moon, the big big bigger and bigger moon, which seemed too big for the sky, too big for the entire world. My eyes burned, I was shivering, shivering. When I looked away, everything was white.

  Yes, my nerves were sharp in those days—so sharp that I could feel the presence of hidden metals in a room, by a tugging sensation in my body. Professor Daumer performed experiments, which he carefully wrote down. Visitors came, and observed my unusual capacities, and spread word of them. Gradually, in the course of a year, as I grew accustomed to the strange new world into which I had burst, like a barbarian into Rome—for I have read your books, ladies and gentlemen—the unpleasant acuteness of my sensations weakened, until at present they are nearly normal, except for my ability to distinguish objects in the dark.

  I will say nothing here of the bloody attempt on my life by the man in black, which took place one morning when Professor Daumer had gone for a walk, and which first brought me to the attention of Europe.

  Now I stand before you, a civilized man, a rational man, in certain respects a remarkable man: a Wundermensch, as I have been called. No doubt it is wonderful to have passed through twenty years of mental life in the space of a few short years. It is precisely this leap that has enabled me to become one of you, or nearly so, for as I have said, there are little flaws in the copy, little imperfections that give me away, especially to myself. Even the leap of which I speak, the tremendous leap toward you and away from me, a leap that leaves the bruise of my heels in my own sides—even this leap is no more than a sign of my difference.

  And this brings me to the real subject of my address, namely, the inner life, the intimate feelings, of Kaspar Hauser. What is it like to be Kaspar? For people look at me and wonder. You too, ladies and gentlemen, you who have come to look and hear—you too have wondered: what is it like? For I think it fair to say that I am interesting to you. I am a riddle, an enigma that cannot be solved. Can it be that you are in need of riddles? For after all, you know yourselves through and through, you who are not enigmas; perhaps you are tired of yourselves; perhaps you’ve come to the end of yourselves; you have filled yourselves with yourselves to the very edges of your being; so that now it is time for—let us say, for Kaspar Hauser. But then, aren’t you in danger of a contradiction? For if I am interesting to you precisely to the extent that I’m not one of you, then your desire to civilize me, to turn me into a good citizen of Nuremberg, can lead to nothing but loss of interest. Is it possible then that what you secretly desire is to be through with Kaspar Hauser, that irritating enigma, that grotesque mistake, whose childlike stares and melancholy smiles are alike intolerable? But I mention this only in passing. For I was about to tell you what it is like to be Kaspar Hauser. I have brooded over this question ever since I’ve had words to brood with, and I believe I am ready to tell you now.

  To be Kaspar Hauser is to long, at every moment of your dubious existence, with every fiber of your questionable being, not to be Kaspar Hauser. It’s to long to leave yourself completely behind, to vanish from your own sight. Does this surprise you? It is of course what you have taught me to desire. And I am a diligent student. With your help I have furnished myself inside and out. My thoughts are yours. These words are yours. Even my black and bitter tears are yours, for I shed them at the thought of the life I never had, which is to say, your life, ladies and gentlemen of Nuremberg. My deepest wish is not to be an exception. My deepest wish is not to be a curiosity, an object of wonder. It is to be unremarkable. To become you—to sink into you—to merge with you until you cannot tell me from yourselves; to be uninteresting; to be nothing at all; to experience the ecstasy of mediocrity—is it so much to ask? You who have helped me to advance so far, won’t you lead me to the promised land, the tranquil land of the ordinary, the banal, the boring? Not to be Kaspar Hauser, not to be the enigma of Europe, not to be the wild boy in the tower, the man without a childhood, the young man without a youth, the monster born in the middle of his life, but to be you, to be you, to be nothing but you! This is my vision of paradise. And although the very existence of such a vision reveals nothing so much as my distance, which widens into an abyss even as I try to fling myself across, still I am not without hope.

  For just as my nervous sensibilities have lessened, in the course of my short sojourn in the realm of light, so have other changes been wrought. The world has come to seem less and less mysterious to me. No longer do I feel a childish wonder when I look up at the night sky full of stars. My extraordinary zeal for learning, noted by Professor Daumer and many visitors, has gradually given way to a steady, reasonable diligence. My memory, which at first astonished the world, is now neither more nor less than it ought to be. When I discover that I am ignorant of something, I learn what is necessary and no more. Many have remarked upon my practical nature, my good common sense. I am told that my gaze remains childish, my smile melancholy and rueful; before the mirror I practice other expressions. My speech, though still imperfect, has become less rough, without harsh edges; above all I love common words, familiar phrases, into which I disappear as into a warm shadow. Sometimes I feel that I am slowly erasing myself, in order for someone else to appear, the one I long for, who will not resemble me. Then I think of my assassin, whose breath, on my neck, I feel in the night. Is it possible that he, the dark whisperer, will fulfill my deepest desire? For when the knife, which already is plunging toward me, sinks deep into my chest, then at last I will no longer know what it is to be Kaspar, but will leave him behind forever.

  Thank you for listening to me today, and if in the course of my remarks I have said anything to offend you, please forgive poor Kaspar Hauser, who would not harm the meanest insect that crawls in dung—far less you, ladies and gentlemen of Nuremberg.

  BENEATH THE CELLARS OF OUR TOWN

  1

  Beneath the cellars of our town, far down, there lies a maze of twisting and intersecting passageways, stretching away in every direction and connected to the upper surface by stairways of rough stone. The origin of the passageways remains unclear. Although there is some evidence that they were known to the Indians who preceded the first white settlers, our historians are unable to decide whether the passageways are the result of natural process or whether they represent an ancient form of subterranean architecture. Our earliest records, which go back to 1646, the year of our incorporation, make mention of a “tunnel” or “cave” that is said to be located “under the ground.” The words have led some to argue that our passageways were originally a single long passage, to which later ones were added by deliberate design. Such evidence as we can gather neither refutes nor supports this hypothesis.

  2

  The passageways vary considerably in width, though even the broadest give an impression of narrowness because of the extreme height of the walls. The darkness is dimly relieved by old-fashioned oil lamps in the shape of glass globes, which hang from brackets projecting from the walls at irregular intervals some fifteen feet above the ground. Sometimes a path turns sharply downward, and may in time pass beneath the structure of passageways into a lower level that is simply a twisting continuation of the one above. This level in turn may lead downward to still lower
passageways. The paths are of hard earth. Small stones or fragments of fallen rock lie about. Here and there a black puddle gleams at the base of a wall.

  3

  We descend through openings that lie scattered throughout the township, not only in the north woods but also in parking lots behind the stores on Main Street, in the slopes of the railroad embankment, in the picnic grounds overlooking the creek, in the Revolutionary War graveyard, in weed-grown vacant lots and backyard gardens, at the edges of schoolyards, at the back of the long shed in the lumberyard, behind the green dumpster at the back of the car wash, beside yellow fire hydrants and dark blue mail-boxes on maple-lined streets rippling with sun and shade. No one knows how many openings actually exist, for new ones are continually being discovered, while old ones collapse or are condemned as unsafe or are covered over by forest growth or the clumsiness of backhoes and bulldozers. A few openings have been given a kind of architectural permanence: in back of the town hall the opening has been surrounded by a circular platform of polished granite, on which a circle of white wooden columns stands in support of a domed roof, and here and there, on street corners or in parking lots, you see simple structures composed of two square posts under a peaked roof covered with black or red asbestos shingles. Most of the openings, however, remain impermanent and inconspicuous. The stone stairways are steep and sometimes circular; at the bottom there is always a short path that leads through an arched opening into a winding passageway.