The Dedalus Meyrink Reader

by Gustav Meyrink

  In addition to his previous, familiar human consciousness, he had acquired a new consciousness, which had enriched him with the perception of a new world, which touched the old world, enveloped and transformed it, and yet in some miraculous way let it continue the same.

  Each sense awoke doubled within him, like blooms bursting from their buds.

  Scales fell from his eyes. Like someone who for his whole life has only known two dimensions and suddenly finds he is seeing rounded forms, he could for a long time not grasp what had happened.

  Gradually he realised that he had reached his goal, the end of the path that is the hidden purpose of every human being. His goal was to be an inhabitant of two worlds.

  Once more a baby cried.

  Had Eva not said she wanted to be a mother when she came to him again? The thought was a sudden shock to him.

  Did not the Goddess Isis have a naked, living child in her arm?

  He lifted his eyes to her and saw that she was smiling.

  She moved.

  The frescos were becoming sharper, clearer, more colourful, and all around were sacred vessels. Everything was so distinct that Hauberrisser forgot the sight of his room and only had eyes for the temple and the red and gold paintings round the walls.

  Lost in thought, he gazed at the face of the goddess and slowly, slowly a dull memory rose to the surface: Eva! That was Eva and not a statue of the Egyptian goddess, the Mother of the World!

  He pressed his hands against the sides of his head, he could not believe it.

  ‘Eva! Eva!’ he cried out loud.

  Again the bare walls of his bedroom appeared through the temple walls; the goddess was still there on her throne, still smiling, but close in front of him was her earthly likeness, a young woman, the picture of living beauty.

  ‘Eva! Eva!’ with an ecstatic cry of boundless rapture, he clasped her to him and covered her face with kisses: ‘Eva!’

  For a long time they stood entwined at the window, looking out at the dead city.

  He felt a thought speak within him, as if it were the voice of Chidher, ‘You are united to help the generations to come, as I do, to build a new realm from the ruins of the old, so that the time may come when I, too, may smile.’

  The room and the temple were equally distinct.

  As if he had the double head of Janus, Hauberrisser could see both the earthly world and the world beyond at the same time, and clearly distinguish all details, all objects:

  He was a living man

  Both here and beyond.

  Walpurgisnacht

  First published in 1917, Walpurgisnacht is again set in Prague and, like The Green Face, at a time of cataclysmic events, which reflect those taking place on the battlefields of Europe at the time. The novel moves between the ossified Habsburg bureaucrats and aristocrats in the castle district, which towers above the left bank of the Moldau, and the nationalist and revolutionary elements in the city below. Ottokar Vondrejc is the unacknowledged illegitimate son of Countess Zahradka; when the revolution breaks out, urged on by a drum made from the skin of the Hussite leader, Jan Žižka, Ottokar becomes the symbol of the nationalist movement. He is seated on Wallenstein’s stuffed horse and carried through the streets, only to be shot by his mother, Countess Zahradka.

  Extract from Chapter 3 of Walpurgisnacht: The Dalibor Tower

  The Dalibor Tower

  The shadows of the old lime trees were already slanting across the quiet, walled courtyard of the Dalibor Tower, the grey dungeon on the Hradschin. For a good hour now the tiny warden’s cottage where the veteran soldier, Vondrejc, lived with his arthritic wife and his adopted son Ottokar, a nineteen-year old student at the conservatoire, had been enveloped in the cool afternoon shade.

  The old man was sitting on a bench, counting copper and nickel coins and sorting them into piles on the rotting wood beside him. It was the tips that the day’s visitors to the tower had given him. Every time he reached ten, he made a line in the sand with his wooden leg.

  He finished with a discontented grunt and muttered, ‘Two crowns, seventy-eight kreutzer,’ to his adopted son, who was leaning against a tree, desperately trying to brush out the shiny patches on the knees of his black suit; then he shouted it out loud, like a military report, through the open window, so that his bedridden wife could hear it in the living room.

  That accomplished, Vondrejc, wearing his field-grey sergeant’s cap on his completely bald head, sank into a deathlike stupor, like a jumping jack whose string had broken, his half-blind eyes fixed on the fallen blossoms strewn over the ground like so many dead damsel flies.

  He did not even move a muscle when his son picked up his violin-case from the bench, put on his velvet cap and made his way to the barrack-sized gate with its official yellow and black stripes. He did not even respond to his ‘Goodbye’.

  The violin student set off down the hill, towards Thungasse where Countess Zahradka lived in a narrow, dark town house. After a few seconds, however, he stopped, as if an idea had suddenly struck him, had a quick look at his scratched pocket-watch, then hurried back up the hill, cutting the corners of the path up out of the Stag Moat as much as possible, to the New World, where, without knocking, he went into the room of Lizzie the Czech.

  The old woman was so wrapped up in the memories of her youth, that it was a long time before she understood what he wanted.

  ‘The future? What do you mean: the future?’ she mumbled absent-mindedly, only taking in the last word of what he said. ‘The future? There’s no such thing as the future!’ Slowly she looked him up and down, obviously confused by his braided student’s jacket. ‘Why don’t they have gold braid nowadays? He is the Lord Chamberlain, you know,’ she said to the room at large in a low voice. ‘Oh! It’s Pan Vondrejc mladsi, young Mr. Vondrejc wants to know the future. So that’s it.’ Only now did she realise whom she was talking to.

  Without another word, she went over to the sideboard and fished out from under it a plank covered with reddish modelling clay, placed it on the table and handed Ottokar a wooden stylus, saying, ‘Now, Pane Vondrejc, prick it from right to left — but without counting! Just think of what you want to know. Do sixteen rows, one below the other.’

  Ottokar took the stylus, knitted his brows and hesitated for a while, then suddenly went deathly pale with excitement and, his hand trembling, feverishly stabbed the soft clay full of tiny holes.

  He watched her eagerly as she counted them up, wrote them down in columns on a board and then drew geometrical shapes in a quadrilateral divided up into a number of squares, chattering mechanically all the while as she did so.

  ‘These are the mothers, the daughters, the nephews, the witnesses, the Red Man, the White Man and the Judge, the dragon’s tail and the dragon’s head, all just as they should be according to the good old Bohemian Art of the Dots. That’s what we learned from the Saracens, before they were wiped out in the Battle on the White Mountain. Long before Queen Libussa. Yes, yes, the White Mountain is soaked in human blood. Bohemia is the source of all wars. It was this time and it always will be. Our leader Jan Žižka, Žižka the Blind.’

  ‘What’s that about Žižka?’ Ottokar interrupted feverishly, ‘Does it say anything about Žižka?’

  She ignored his question. ‘If the Moldau did not flow so fast it would still be red with blood, even today.’ Then all at once she changed her tone, speaking as if in bitter amusement, ‘Do you know, my son, why there are so many leeches in the Moldau? From the source until it flows into the Elbe, wherever you lift up a stone on the bank, you will always find little leeches underneath. That’s because at one time it was a river of blood. And they are waiting because they know that the day will come when it will feed them again … What is that?’ With a cry of astonishment she dropped the chalk and looked from the figures on the board to the young man and back again. ‘What’s that? You want to become Emperor of the World?’ She looked searchingly into his dark, flickering eyes.

  He gave no answer
, but she noticed that he was clutching the table to stop himself falling. ‘Would it be because of that woman there?’ she said, pointing to one of the geometrical figures. ‘And I always thought you were sweet on that Božena from Baron Elsenwanger’s?’

  Ottokar gave a violent shake of the head.

  ‘Is that so? It’s all over is it, son? Don’t worry, a real Czech girl never bears a grudge, even if she’s pregnant. But you beware of her,’ again she pointed to the shape, ‘she’s a bloodsucker. She’s Czech as well, but she belongs to the old race, the dangerous race.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ said Ottokar in a hoarse voice.

  ‘She is of the blood of the Borivoj, I tell you. And you,’ she gave the young man’s narrow, brown face a long, thoughtful look, ‘you are of the Borivoj line as well. Two such as you are drawn together like iron and magnet. There’s no need to waste my time reading the signs,’ and she wiped her arm over the board before Ottokar could stop her. ‘Just you be careful it’s not you that’s the iron and she the magnet, otherwise you’re lost, son. Among the Borivoj murder and incest were standard practice. Remember good King Wenceslas!’

  Ottokar tried to smile. ‘Saint Wenceslas was no more from the line of Borivoj than I am. My name is Vondrejc, Frau … Frau Lisinka.’

  ‘Don’t keep on calling me Frau Lisinka!’ In her fury the old woman thumped the table with her fist. ‘I’m no Frau, I’m a whore!’

  ‘What I would like to know … er, Lisinka, is what you meant by “becoming Emperor of the World” and what you said about Jan Žižka?’ asked Ottokar timidly.

  A creaking noise from behind made him stop. He turned round to see the door slowly open and in the frame a man appeared with a large pair of dark spectacles on his face, an incredibly long coat, which had something carelessly stuffed between the shoulders to make him look like a hunchback, his nostrils flared wide from cotton wool that had been stuffed up them, and a carroty wig and whiskers which one could tell from a hundred yards were stuck on.

  ‘Prosím. Milostpane. Milady.’ The stranger addressed Lizzie the Czech in a voice that was obviously disguised. ‘Do hexcuse me, Ma’am, for the disturbance, but would I be right in thinkin’ that ’is Majesty’s Physician, Doctor von ’Alberd was ’ere a while ago?’

  The old woman twisted her mouth in a silent grin.

  ‘Do hexcuse the hinterruption, but I did ’ear ’e was ’ere, Ma’am.’

  Still nothing but the corpselike grin. The strange visitor was clearly perplexed.

  ‘You see, I ’ave to hinform ’is Excellency —’

  ‘I don’t know of any Majesty’s Physician,’ Lizzie the Czech suddenly yelled at him. ‘Get out, and make it quick, you pest.’

  Like lightning, the door was shut, and the dripping sponge that the old woman had taken from the slate and hurled at her visitor fell to the floor with a damp thud.

  ‘That was only Stefan Brabetz,’ she said, anticipating Ottokar’s question. ‘He’s an informer, works on his own account. He dresses up differently every time and thinks nobody knows who he is. If there’s anything going on, he soon picks it up. Then he’d like to demand money, but he doesn’t know how to go about it. He comes from down below. From Prague. They’re all like that down there. I think it must be a result of the mysterious air that comes up out of the ground. They all become like him in time, some sooner, some later — unless they die first. Whenever they meet someone, they give a sly grin, so the other will believe they know something about them. Have you never noticed, son’ — she became oddly uneasy and began to walk restlessly up and down the room — ‘that everything is crazy in Prague? Crazy from all the secrecy? You’re mad yourself, son, you just don’t know it. Of course, up here on the Hradschin it’s a different kind of madness. Quite different from down there. More a kind of … of fossilised madness. Everything up here’s turned into a fossil. But once the storm breaks, these giant fossils will come back to life and smash the city to smithereens … At least,’ her voice sank to a low murmur, ‘that’s what my grandmother used to tell me when I was a girl. Well, I suppose that Stefan Brabetz can smell that there’s something in the air up here on the Hradschin. Something’s going on.’

  Ottokar went pale and gave a shy, involuntary glance at the door. ‘How do you mean? What’s supposed to be going on?’

  Lizzie the Czech stared straight in front of her. ‘Yes, believe me, sonny, you’re mad already. Perhaps you really do want to become Emperor of the World.’ She paused. ‘And why should it not be possible? If there weren’t so many madmen in Prague, how could all the wars start there?! Yes, you stay mad, son. In the end why shouldn’t a madman rule the world? Why, I became the mistress of King Milan Obrenovic, simply by believing it was possible. And how close I was to being Queen of Serbia!’ It was as if she suddenly woke up. ‘Why are you not in the war, son. Oh? A weak heart, is it? Hmm. And why do you think you are not a Borivoj?’ She gave him no time to answer. ‘And where are you off to now, sonny, with your violin?’

  ‘To Countess Zahradka’s. I’m to play to her.’

  The old woman gave him a surprised look and once more subjected his face to a long and detailed scrutiny, then, like someone who is now certain, she said, ‘Hmm. Well. Borivoj. And does she like you, Countess Zahradka?’

  ‘She’s my godmother.’

  Lizzie the Czech laughed out loud. ‘Godmother, hahaha, godmother!’

  Ottokar did not know what to make of her laughter. He would have liked to ask his question about Jan Žižka again, but he saw there was no point.

  He had known the old woman too long not to be aware that her impatient expression meant that she wanted the interview to end. With a shy mumble of thanks, he slipped out of the door.

  He had scarcely caught sight of the old Capuchin Monastery dreaming in the glow of the setting sun, than he heard, just beside him as if in greeting, the ancient bells of the Loretto Church casting their spell over him like a magical orchestra of aeolian harps. The air, vibrant with melody and fragrant with the scent of the flowers in the nearby gardens, enfolded him in the gossamer caress of some invisible, ethereal realm. Enchanted, he stopped and listened, and seemed to hear the tones of an old hymn, sung by a thousand voices. And as he listened, he felt at times that it came from within him, then as if the notes were hovering round his head, to echo and die away in the clouds; sometimes it was so near, he thought he could recognise the Latin words of the psalm, at others, drowned by the sonorous boom of the bronze bells, it sounded like faint chords rising from underground cloisters.

  Deep in thought, he crossed the Hradschin Square with its feast-day decoration of silver-birch twigs, passing in front of the Castle; the noise of the bells crashed in resounding waves against its rock-hewn ramparts, making his violin in its wooden case vibrate, like a body in a coffin coming back to life.

  Then he was standing at the top of the New Castle Steps, looking down the balustrade-girt flight of two hundred granite steps onto a sea of sunlit roofs, from the depths of which, like a gigantic black caterpillar, a procession was crawling slowly up. It seemed to raise a silver head with purple-spotted feelers, searching for its way, as, under the white canopy carried by four priests in albs and stoles, the Prince-Archbishop, with the little red cap on his head, red silk shoes on his feet and gold-embroidered chasuble round his shoulders, led the singing crowd upwards, step by step.

  In the warm, still evening air, the flames over the candles carried by the servers were almost invisible ovals trailing thin black threads of smoke through the bluish clouds from the swinging thuribles. The setting sun lay on the city, streaming over the long bridges in a blaze of crimson and flowing past the piers with the current, gold transformed into blood. It flared up in a thousand windows, as if the houses were on fire.

  Ottokar stared at the scene; he could still hear the old woman’s words, how she had said the Moldau once ran red with blood. And the magnificent spectacle of the procession coming ever closer up the Castle Steps! For a moment
he was in a daze: that was how it would be, when his mad dream of being crowned emperor was fulfilled! He closed his eyes so as not to see the people who were standing beside him to watch the procession; for a few minutes more he wanted to block out the sight of the everyday world.

  Then he turned round and passed through the Castle courtyards, in order to make his way to Thungasse by another, deserted route. As he came round the corner by the Provincial Diet he was surprised to see the huge gates of the Wallenstein Palace wide open. He hurried along, to try and catch a glimpse of the gloomy garden covered in ivy with branches as thick as a man’s arm, and perhaps see the wonderful renaissance hall and the historic grotto behind it. As a child he had seen all these marvels from close to, and the memory was deeply engraved on his soul, as of a visit to a fairy kingdom.

  Lackeys in silver-braided livery and with close-cropped whiskers and clean-shaven upper lips were silently dragging the stuffed horse, that had carried Wallenstein when it was alive, out into the street. He recognised it by the scarlet blanket and its staring yellow eyes, which, he suddenly remembered, had often appeared in his childhood sleep, as a mysterious omen which he had never been able to interpret.

  Now the stallion stood before him in the golden-red rays of the setting sun, its hooves screwed to a dark-green board, like a gigantic toy sent from a dream-world to these prosaic times, to this age which has stolidly accepted the most terrible of all wars: the war of men against demonic machines, compared with which Wallenstein’s battles seem no more than alehouse brawls.