The Dedalus Meyrink Reader

by Gustav Meyrink

  I was overwhelmed with horror. I tried to resist, but in vain; even the memory of the letters was powerless against it. My mind was paralysed and my heart started to contract convulsively.

  Hastily I told myself it was only the icy draught blowing from the corner over there. Lips numb with fear, I repeated it over to myself, faster and faster, my breath whistling, but it was no use: that smudge of white over there, the card, it was swelling into blistered lumps, feeling its way forward to the edge of the ray of moonlight and then creeping back into the darkness. The silence in the room was punctuated by dripping sounds, half imagined, half real … outside me, all around me, and yet somewhere else at the same time … deep within my heart and then out in the room once more; it was the sound a pair of compasses makes when it falls and the point sticks into a piece of wood.

  And again and again, that smudge of white … that smudge of white! ‘It’s a card, a miserable, stupid little playing card!’ I sent the scream echoing round my skull, but in vain … now it was … was taking on human form … the Juggler … and was squatting in the corner and staring at me with vacant eyes out of my own face!

  For hour after hour I sat there without moving, huddled up in my corner, a frozen skeleton in mouldy clothes that belonged to another. And across the room he sat, he … I … myself.

  Mute and motionless, we stared into each other’s eyes, the one a hideous mirror-image of the other. Can he see the moonbeam too, as it sucks its way across the floor as sluggishly as a snail, and crawls up the infinite spaces of the wall like the hand of some invisible clock, growing paler and paler as it rises?

  I fixed him with my gaze, and it was no use his trying to dissolve in the half-light of morning which was coming in through the window to help him. I held him fast.

  Step by step I wrestled with him for my life, for the life that is mine because it no longer belongs to me. He grew smaller and smaller, and as the day broke he crept back into the playing card. I stood up, walked across the room and put the Juggler in my pocket.

  The street below was still completely deserted.

  I rummaged through the things in the corner that were now revealed in the dull morning light: some broken pottery, there a rusty pan, here scraps of mouldy material, the neck of a bottle. Inanimate objects, and yet so remarkably familiar. And the waIls too, how clear the lines and cracks were becoming! Now where had I seen them before?

  I picked up the pack of cards and it began to dawn on me. Had I not painted them myself? As a child? A long, long time ago? It was an ancient set of tarot cards. With Hebrew signs. Number twelve must be the Hanged Man, I seemed to remember, hanging head downwards with his arms behind his back? I flicked through the pack. There! There he was!

  Then another image, half dream, half certainty, appeared before my inner eye: a blackened schoolhouse, crooked, hunch-backed, a sullen witches’ cottage, its left shoulder too high, the other merging into a neighbouring house. There are several of us, adolescent boys … somewhere there is an abandoned cellar …

  Then I looked down at my body and was thrown into confusion once more. I did not recognise the old-fashioned suit at all …

  I started at the clatter of a cart on the cobbles, but when I looked down from the window there was not a soul to be seen, just a mastiff standing pensively by the corner of a house.

  There! At last! Voices! Human voices! Two old women were trotting slowly down the street. I forced my head part-way through the bars and called out to them. Open-mouthed, they stared up, asking each other what it might be. But when they saw me they let out a piercing cry and fled. I realised they had taken me for the Golem.

  I expected a crowd to gather so I would be able to explain my situation to them, but a good hour passed during which, now and then, a pale face would arrive below, peer up warily at me and immediately start back in mortal fear. Should I wait — perhaps for hours, perhaps even until tomorrow — for the police to arrive, those state-licensed crooks, as Zwakh calls them?

  No, I would rather try to investigate the underground passages, to follow them a little way to see where they led. Perhaps now it was day a glimmer of light might come through cracks in the rock?

  I clambered back down the spiral stairs and continued on the way I had been following yesterday, over whole mounds of broken bricks, through subterranean cellars, then up a ruined staircase — to find myself suddenly in the hallway of the black schoolhouse I had seen in my dream ..

  Immediately I was engulfed in a tidal wave of memories: desks bespattered from top to bottom with ink, arithmetic jotters, songs bawled out at full voice, a boy setting a cockchafer loose in the class, readers with sandwiches squashed between the pages and smelling of orange peel. But I wasted no time in reflection and hurried home.

  The first person I met — it was in Salnitergasse — was a misshapen old Jew with white side-locks. Scarcely had he caught sight of me than he covered his face with his hands and started to reel off Hebrew prayers in a loud howl. At the noise, many people must have rushed out of their hovels, for an incredible clamour broke out behind me. I turned round and saw a teeming throng of pale, terrorstruck faces surging down the alley behind me. I stood dumbfounded until I looked down at myself: I was still wearing the strange, medieval clothes from the night before over my suit; the people must think they were seeing the Golem. Quickly I hurried round the corner and hid in an entrance, tearing off the mouldy clothes.

  A second later the crowd was pouring past me, waving sticks in the air and shouting abuse.

  The Green Face

  First published in 1916, Meyrink’s second novel is set in an Amsterdam full of refugees after a great war, though the haunting atmosphere he creates is very similar to the Prague of The Golem. The ‘green face’ of the title is a variant of the myth of the Wandering Jew, which Meyrink uses here in a symbolic function not dissimilar to his use of the Golem in his first novel. It ends with the cataclysmic destruction of Amsterdam, followed by the ‘mystical marriage’ between the hero, Hauberrisser, and his love, Eva, who had been murdered.

  Extract from The Green Face: Conclusion

  Conclusion

  The hours crept by unbearably slowly, the night seemed unending.

  Finally the sun rose; the sky remained inky black, but around the horizon there was a vivid, sulphurous gleam, as if a dark bowl with glowing edges had descended over the earth.

  There was an all-pervading, matt half-light; the poplar outside the window, the distant bushes and the towers of Amsterdam were faintly illuminated, as if by dim floodlights. Beneath them lay the plain like a huge, blind mirror.

  Hauberrisser scanned the city with his binoculars; in the wan light it stood out from the shadowy background as if frozen in fear and expecting the death-blow at any moment.

  A ringing of bells washed over the countryside in tremulous, breathless waves and then came to an abrupt halt; a dull roar filled the air and the poplar was bent groaning to the ground. Gusts of wind swept over the meadows like the crack of a whip, flattening the withered grass and tearing the sparse, low bushes up by the roots.

  A few minutes later the whole landscape vanished in an immense dust-cloud, and when it reappeared it was scarcely recognisable: the ditches had been whipped into white foam, the windmills were transformed into blunt stumps squatting on the brown earth, as their torn-off sails whirled through the air high in the sky. The pauses between blasts became shorter and shorter, until eventually nothing could be heard but the constant roaring of the wind. Its fury redoubled by the second. The wiry poplar was bent at right angles a few feet above the ground; branches gone, it was little more than a smooth stem, fixed motionless in that position by the immense force of the mass of air rushing over it.

  Only the apple tree stood still, as if protected by some unseen hand in a haven of stillness, not one leaf moving.

  A never-ending shower of missiles flew past the window: beams and stones, clods of earth and tangles of brushwood, lumps of brickwork, even complete wall
s.

  Then suddenly the sky turned light grey, and the darkness dissolved into a cold, silvery glitter.

  Hauberrisser assumed the fury of the tornado was subsiding, then noticed to his horror that the bark of the poplar was being stripped off in fibrous scraps, which disappeared instantly. The next moment, before he could really grasp what was happening, the tall factory chimneys towering over the south-west part of the docks were snapped off at the roots and transformed into thin spears of white dust which the hurricane carried off at lightning speed. They were followed by one church tower after another: for a second they would appear as black shapes, whirled up in a vortex, the next they were lines on the horizon, then dots, then — nothing.

  The vegetation torn up by the storm flew past the window at such a speed that soon all that could be seen through it was a pattern of horizontal lines. Even the graveyard must have been ripped open, for now tombstones, coffins, crosses and gravelamps flew past the house, never deviating, never rising, never falling, always horizontal, as if they were weightless.

  Hauberrisser could hear the cross beams in the roof groaning, every moment he expected it to be torn apart; he was about to run downstairs to bolt the front door so that it would not be blown off its hinges but, with his hand on the knob of the bedroom door, he stopped, warned by an inner voice that if he opened it the draught would smash the windowpanes, allowing the storm that was sweeping past the front of the house to rush in and transform it into a maelstrom of rubble. It could only avoid destruction as long as the hill behind protected it from the full blast of the hurricane and the rooms remained shut off from each other, like cells in a honeycomb.

  The air in the room had turned icy cold and thin, as if in a vacuum; a sheet of paper fluttered round the room, then pressed against the keyhole and stuck there, held fast by the suction.

  Hauberrisser went back to look out of the window. The gale was blowing the water out of the ditches so that it splattered through the air like fine rain; the meadows gleamed like smooth grey velvet and where the poplar had stood there was now a stump crowned by a flapping shock of splinters.

  The roar of the wind was so constant, so deafening, that Hauberrisser began to think that all around was shrouded in a deathly hush. It was only when he went to nail back the trembling shutters, so that they would not be blown against the glass, and found he could not hear the hammering, that he realised how great the din outside must be.

  For a long time he did not dare look out again, for fear that he might see that St. Nicholas’ had been blown away, and with it the nearby house on the Zeedijk harbouring Swammerdam and Pfeill; when he did risk a tentative glance, he saw it still towering up undamaged, but it was an island in a sea of rubble: the rest of the frieze of spires, roofs and gables had been almost completely flattened.

  ‘How many cities are there left standing in Europe?’ he wondered with a shudder. ‘The whole of Amsterdam has been ground to dust like a crumbling rock; nothing left of a rotten civilisation but a scatter of rubbish.’ He was gripped with awe as he suddenly comprehended the magnitude of the cataclysm. His experiences the previous day, his exhaustion and the sudden eruption of the storm had kept him in a state of constant numbness, from which he only now awoke to clear consciousness.

  He clutched his forehead. ‘Have I been sleeping?’

  His glance fell on the apple tree: as if by a miracle, the splendour of its blossom was completely untouched. He remembered that yesterday he had buried the roll of papers by its roots; it seemed as if an eternity had passed since then. Had he not written in them that he had the ability to leave his body? Then why had he not done so — yesterday, through the night or this morning, when the storm had broken?

  Why did he not do it now?

  For a brief second, he managed it. He saw his body as a foreign, shadowy creature leaning at the window, but in spite of the devastation, the world outside was no longer the dead, ghostly landscape of his previous experiences: a new earth was spread out before him, quivering with life, spring hovered on the air, full of glory, like a visible manifestation of the future, his breast trembled with the presentiment of nameless raptures; the world around seemed to be a vision that was gradually taking on lasting clarity — and the apple tree in blossom, was that not Chidher, the ‘ever green tree’?

  The next moment Hauberrisser was back in his body gazing out on the howling storm, but he knew now that the picture of destruction concealed within it the promise of the new land that he had just seen with the eyes of his soul.

  His heart beat in wild, joyous anticipation, he felt that he was on the threshold of the last, highest awakening, that the phoenix within him was stretching its wings for its flight into the ether. His sense of the approach of an event far beyond any earthly experience was so strong, that he almost choked with the intensity of emotion; it was almost the same as in the park in Hilversum, when he had kissed Eva, the same gust of icy air from the wings of the Angel of Death, but now it was permeated with the fragrance of flowers, like a presentiment of the approach of life imperishable. He heard the words of Chidher, ‘For Eva’s sake I will give you never-ending love,’ as if it was the blossoming apple tree that was calling to him.

  He thought of the countless dead who lay beneath the ruins of the destroyed city on the horizon, but he could not feel sorrow. ‘They will rise again, if in a different form, until they find the last, the highest form, that of the “awakened man” who will die no more. Nature, too, is ever renewed, like the phoenix.’

  He was suddenly gripped by an emotion so powerful, that he felt he must choke; was that not Eva standing close beside him? He had felt a breath on his cheek, and whose heart was beating so close to his, if not hers?

  He felt new senses ripening within him to reveal the invisible realm that permeates our earthly world. Any second the last veil that kept it from his eyes might fall.

  ‘Give me a sign that you are near, Eva,’ he quietly implored. ‘Let my faith that you will come to me not be disappointed.’

  ‘It would be a poor love that could not overcome time and space,’ he heard her voice whisper, and his scalp tingled at the intensity of his emotion. ‘Here in this room I recovered from the torments of the earth and here I am waiting with you until the hour of your awakening has come.’

  A quiet, peaceful calm settled over him. He looked around; the whole room was filled with the same joyful, patient expectancy, like the half-stifled call of spring; each object seemed about to undergo the miracle of a transformation beyond comprehension.

  His heart beat audibly.

  The room, the walls, the objects around him were, he sensed, only delusory, external forms for his earthly eyes, projecting into the world of bodies like shadows from an invisible realm; any minute the door might open behind which lay the land of the immortals.

  He tried to imagine what it would be like when his spiritual senses were awakened. ‘Will Eva be with me? Will I go to her and see her and talk to her? Will it be just as beings of this earth meet each other? Or will we become formless, colours or sounds that blend together? Will we be surrounded by objects, as we are here, will we be rays of light, soaring through the infinite cosmos, or will the material world be transformed and ourselves transformed along with it?’ He surmised that, although it would be completely new and something he could not at the moment grasp, it would also be a quite natural process, perhaps not unlike the formation of the whirlwinds which he had seen yesterday arise from nothing — from thin air — and take on shapes perceptible to all the senses of the body; yet he still had no clear idea what it involved.

  He was quivering with the presentiment of such indescribable rapture that he knew that the reality of the miraculous experience awaiting him would far surpass anything he could imagine.

  The hours slipped by.

  It seemed to be midday: high in the sky a gleaming disc hung in the haze.

  Was the storm still raging?

  Hauberrisser listened.

  There w
as nothing by which he might tell: the ditches were empty, blown away; there was no water, no hint of any movement in them; no bushes as far as the eye could see; the grass flattened; not a single cloud crossing the sky — nothing but empty space.

  He took the hammer and dropped it, heard it hit the floor with a crash and concluded that it was quiet outside.

  Through his binoculars he could see that the city was still suffering the fury of the cyclone; huge blocks of stone were thrown up into the air, waterspouts appeared from the harbour, collapsed, towered up again and danced out towards the open sea.

  And there! Was it a delusion? Were not the twin towers of St. Nicholas’ swaying?

  One collapsed suddenly; the other whirled up into the air and exploded like a rocket; for a moment the huge bell hovered free between heaven and earth. Then it plunged silently to the ground. Hauberrisser’s heart stopped still. Swammerdam! Pfeill!

  No, no, no, nothing could have happened to them. ‘Chidher, the eternal tree of mankind, will shield them with his branches.’ Had Swammerdam not prophesied he would outlive the church?

  And were there not islands, like the blossoming apple tree there in its patch of green grass, where life was kept safe from destruction and preserved for the coming age?

  Only now did the thunder from the crash of the bell reach the house. The walls vibrated under the impact of the airwaves on one single, terrifying note, a note so piercing that Hauberrisser felt as if the bones in his body had shattered like glass; for a brief moment he felt consciousness fade.

  ‘The walls of Jericho have fallen,’ he heard the quivering voice of Chidher Green say aloud in the room. ‘He has awakened from the dead.’

  A breathless hush…

  Then the cry of a baby…

  Hauberrisser looked around, disorientated.

  Finally he found his bearings.

  He clearly recognised the plain, bare walls of his room, and yet at the same time they were the walls of a temple decorated with a fresco of Egyptian deities. He was standing in the middle, and both were reality: he saw the wooden floorboards and at the same time they were the stone flags of the temple, two worlds that interpenetrated before his very eyes, fused together and yet separate. It was as if he were awake and dreaming in one and the same moment. He touched the whitewashed wall with his hand, could feel its rough surface and yet at the same time knew without mistake that his fingers were stroking a tall, gold statue, which he believed he recognised as the Goddess Isis sitting on a throne.