‘Ottokar?’
‘Yes? Should I close the window?’
‘Ottokar! Ottokar, I know you’re not going to the inn. You’re going in the Tower, aren’t you?’
‘Yes … well … later. It … it’s the best place for practising. Goodnight.’
‘Is she coming to the Tower again tonight?’
‘Božena? Who knows. She might. If she’s free she sometimes comes and we have a chat. Is there any message for father?’
The voice became even sadder, ‘Do you think I don’t know it’s someone else? I can tell by her tread. No one who has been working hard all day would step so lightly and so quickly.’
‘You do get funny ideas, mother!’ He tried to laugh.
‘Well, I’ve said my piece. And you’re right, you’d better close the window. It’s better like that, then I won’t be able to hear those awful songs you always play when she’s with you. I … I wish I could help you, Ottokar.’
Ottokar held his hands over his ears, then he put the violin case under his arm, hurried across to the gap in the wall and ran up the crumbling stone steps and across the little wooden footbridge into the top floor of the Tower. The semicircular room where he was standing had a narrow window, really no more than an enlarged slit for bowmen to shoot through, in the three-foot thick wall; it looked out to the south and in it the silhouette of the cathedral hovered over the ancient castle. For the visitors who came to visit the Dalibor Tower during the day there were a few rough wooden chairs, a table with a jug of water on it and an old, faded sofa. In the darkness, they looked as if they were rooted to the ground. A small iron door with a crucifix on it led into the adjoining chamber where, two hundred years ago, a Countess Lambua, Polyxena’s great-great-grandmother, had been imprisoned. She had poisoned her husband and before she died, in her madness she had bitten open the arteries of her wrist and painted his portrait in blood on the wall.
Behind it was a dark cell, scarcely six foot square, where, with a piece of iron, a prisoner had scratched a cavity in the stone blocks of the wall, deep enough for a man to squat inside. He had scraped away for thirty years; a handsbreadth more and he would have been free — free to throw himself into the Stag Moat below. But he had been discovered in time and moved to the middle of the tower, where he had starved to death.
Restless, Ottokar paced up and down, sat in the window, stood up again; one minute he was certain Polyxena would come, the next he was convinced he would never see her again; each possibility seemed more dreadful than the other, each contained his hopes and fears together.
Every night Polyxena’s image accompanied him in his dreams, waking and sleeping it filled his life. He thought of her when he played the violin, when he was alone he held imaginary conversations with her. He had built the most fantastic castles in the air for her, but what did the future hold? In the boundless despair of youth, such as only a heart of nineteen years can feel, he saw it as an airless, lightless dungeon.
The idea that he might ever play on his violin again seemed an utter impossibility. There was a faint, scarcely audible voice inside him, telling him that everything would turn out quite differently from his imaginings, but he did not listen, refused to listen to it. Often pain can be so overpowering that comfort, even if it comes from within, only makes it burn all the more.
The gathering darkness in the deserted room only increased his agitation until it was unbearable. He kept on imagining he heard soft noises outside, and his heart stood still at the thought that it must be ‘her’. Then he would count the seconds until, according to his calculation, she should have found her way in through the darkness, but every time his expectation was disappointed, and the thought that she might have turned back on the threshold drove him almost to distraction.
He had become acquainted with her only a few months ago. It seemed to him like a fairytale come true when he thought back to it. Two years before that he had seen her, but as a picture, as the portrait of a lady from the Rococo period with ash-blond hair, narrow, almost transparent cheeks and a strange, cruelly lascivious expression round her half-open lips, behind which glistened the white of tiny, bloodthirsty teeth. The picture hung in the portrait gallery of Elsenwanger House, and one evening, when he had been sent to play to the guests there, he had seen it looking down at him from that wall, and it had branded itself on his mind so that whenever he closed his eyes and thought of it, it appeared clearly before him. Gradually it had come to dominate his youthful yearning and so captured his whole being that it had gradually come to life, so that in the evenings, when he sat on the bench beneath the limes dreaming of her, he could feel it nestling against his breast like a creature of flesh and blood.
It was the portrait of a Countess Lambua, he had been told, and her first name was Polyxena.
From then on he invested that name with all the beauty, joy, glory, happiness and sensuality his youthful imagination could dream up, until it became a magic word, which he only needed to whisper for him to feel the presence of its bearer like a caress which scorched him to the marrow. In spite of his age, and the fact that until then he had enjoyed perfect health, he sensed that the heart condition that suddenly began to trouble him was incurable and that he was doomed to die young, a feeling that never filled him with sadness, but was more like a foretaste of the sweetness of death.
From his childhood on, the strange, unworldly setting of the Dalibor Tower with its gloomy stories and legends had encouraged him to build castles in the air, in contrast to which the world around, with its poverty and oppressive narrowness, seemed a hostile dungeon. It never occurred to him to try to connect his dreams and longings with his everyday reality. Time stretched ahead of him, empty of plans for the future.
He had had very little to do with children of his own age. For a long time his world had been bounded by the Dalibor Tower with its lonely courtyard, his taciturn foster-parents and the old tutor, who had taught him until well past childhood because the Countess, who paid for his upbringing, did not want him to attend school.
His cheerless existence, and his separation from the world of ambition, the race for fame and fortune, would probably have turned him, before his time, into one of those solitary eccentrics wrapped up in their own daydreams who were so common on the Hradschin, had not something happened which had turned his soul upside down, something so uncanny and yet at the same time so real, that with one blow it had demolished the wall separating his inner life from the world outside, turning him into a man who had moments of ecstasy in which even his wildest fantasies seemed within easy grasp.
It had happened in the cathedral. He was sitting among old women saying their rosaries; he had been staring at the tabernacle, oblivious to his surroundings, not noticing their comings and goings, until all at once he realised the church was empty apart from someone sitting beside him — the very image of Polyxena. It was the very same face he had been dreaming of all this time, right down to her delicately chiselled nostrils and the curve of her lips.
For a moment, the gap between dream and reality closed, but only for a moment; a second later he was fully aware that it was a living girl he could see beside him on the bench. But that single moment was enough to give fate the purchase it needs to prize a person’s destiny for ever off its predetermined path of rational decision and to send it careering into that boundless world where faith can move mountains.
In the confused, sensual ecstasy of one who finds himself face to face with the idol of his yearning, he had flung his arms wide and thrown himself down before the physical incarnation of all his dreams, he had called out her name, embraced her knees, covered her hands with kisses; trembling with excitement, he had told her, in a tumbling cascade of words, what she meant to him, that he had known her for a long time, without ever having seen her in the flesh.
And there in the church, surrounded by the golden statues of the saints, they had both been seized by a wild, unnatural love, which had carried them away like a hellish whirlwind, r
aised by the sudden stirring of a ghostly line of depraved ancestors, who for centuries had been confined to the portrait gallery.
As if by some satanic miracle, the young girl, who entered the cathedral an innocent virgin, had, by the time she left, also been transformed into the spiritual likeness of her ancestress, who had borne the same name of Polyxena and whose portrait now hung in Baron Elsenwanger’s town house.
Since that day, they had met whenever they had the opportunity, without prior arrangement and without ever not finding the other. It was as if there were some magic attraction in their passion that drew them together; they acted instinctively, like dumb animals on heat who do not need understanding, because they understand the call of the blood. Neither of them found it at all surprising when chance led to their paths crossing at the very moment when their lust for the other was at its strongest. For Ottokar, each time he saw that it was Polyxena, and not merely her image, in his arms, it was the constant renewal of a miracle, such as had been repeated but an hour ago.
When he heard her steps approaching the tower — this time it really was her — his torment had already disappeared, had faded away like the memory of some illness he had long since recovered from. When they were in each others’ arms he was never sure: had she come through the door, or through the wall, like some apparition? She was with him and that was all that he knew, or wanted to know; anything that had happened before had been swallowed up in the abyss of time.
And that was how it was now.
He saw her straw hat with the pale-blue ribbon appear in the darkness of the room, then it was thrown carelessly into a corner, and everything else followed; her white dress was like a cloud of mist on the table, the rest of her clothes were scattered around the chairs; he felt her hot skin, her teeth biting into his neck, heard her groans of pleasure: everything happened too quickly for him to grasp, like a series of lightning images, each one displacing the last, each one more overwhelming. He was in an ecstasy of voluptuousness which blotted out all sense of time. Had she asked him to play his violin for her? He had no idea, could not recall her saying so.
All he knew was that he was standing upright before her, her arms embracing his loins; he could feel Death sucking the blood from his veins, could feel his hair stand on end, his skin freeze, his knees tremble. He was incapable of rational thought, at times he felt he was about to fall backwards, then, at that very moment, he would wake, as if she were holding him up, and hear a song from the strings that his bow and his hand must have been playing, but that also came from her, from her soul and not from his, a song in which lascivious desire was mingled with fear and horror.
Half unconscious, unable to resist, he listened to the story the music told: everything Polyxena imagined, in order to whip herself up into an even greater frenzy of lust, he saw as a series of vivid images; he felt her thoughts pass into his mind, watched them come to life and then read them in elaborate letters on a stone slab: it was the extract from an old chronicle on which the picture ‘The Man Impaled’ was based, just as it is inscribed in the Little Chapel on the Hradschin, in memory of the gruesome end of one who tried to seize the crown of Bohemia:
‘Now one of the knights who had been impaled went by the name of Borivoj Chlavec, and his stake had come out by the pit of his arm, leaving his head unharmed. This Sir Borivoj prayed most fervently until the evening, and during the night his stake broke off at his backside and he went, with the rest of the stake still inside him, up to the Hradschin and lay down upon a dung-heap. In the morning he went straight to the house that stands beside the Church of St. Benedict and sent for a priest from the castle clergy, in whose presence he most fervently confessed his sins before the Lord our God and told him that without confession and receipt of the Holy Sacrament of one kind, as ordered by the Church, he could not die; it had been his custom every day to say a short prayer in honour of Almighty God and an Ave Maria in honour of the Blessed Virgin, and it had ever been his assurance that through the power of this prayer and the intercession of the Blessed Virgin he would never die without first receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion.
The priest spake, “My son, tell me that prayer,” and he began, saying, “Almighty God, I beseech Thee, grant me the intercession of Thy most holy martyr, Saint Barbara, that I shall not die a speedy death but shall receive the Holy Sacrament before mine end, that, protected from all enemies, both visible and invisible, and preserved from evil spirits, I may at the last be brought to eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, amen.”
After these words, the priest administered the Holy Sacrament, and he died the same day, and there was much wailing among the people when he was buried in the Church of St. Benedict.’
Polyxena had gone, and the tower lay lifeless and grey beneath the glittering stars of the night sky; but in its stony breast beat a tiny human heart that was full to bursting with the oath it had sworn not to rest and rather to share a thousandfold the cruel torture of the impaled knight than to die before he had laid at his lover’s feet the highest prize that human will can aspire to.
The White Dominican
Set in a symbolic version of the Bavarian town of Wasserburg am Inn, The White Dominican, first published in 1921, focuses on Christopher Dovecote, the last scion of a noble house, whose destiny is to ward off the threats of the Medusa and achieve transfiguration; he is then united with his love, Ophelia, the daughter of a theatrical couple who commits suicide rather than go on the stage as her parents want.
Extract from Chapter 3 of The White Dominican: The Nightwalk
The Nightwalk
That night I had a strange experience. Others would call it a dream, for men have only that one, inadequate word to describe everything that happens to them when their body is asleep.
As always before I went to sleep, I had folded my hands so that, as the Baron put it, ‘the left lay on the right’. It was only through experience over several years that I came to realise what the purpose of this measure was. It could be that any other position of the hands would serve the same purpose as long as they result in the feeling that ‘the body is bound’.
Every time since that first evening in the Baron’s house I had lain down to sleep in this manner, and every morning I had woken feeling as if I had walked a long way in my sleep, and every time I was relieved to see that I was undressed and not wearing dusty boots in bed and need not fear being beaten for it, as had happened in the orphanage. But in the light of day I had never been able to remember where I had walked in my dream. That night was the first time the blindfold was taken from my eyes. The fact that earlier in the evening Mutschelknaus had treated me in such a remarkable way, like a grown-up, was probably the hidden reason why a self — perhaps my ‘Christopher’ — which had until then slept within me, now awoke to full consciousness and began to see and to hear.
I began by dreaming I had been buried alive and could not move my hands or my feet; but then I filled my lungs with mighty breaths and thus burst open the lid of the coffin; and I was walking along a white, lonely country road, which was more terrible than the grave I had escaped from, for I knew it would never come to an end. I longed to be back in my coffin, and there it was, lying across the road.
It felt soft, like flesh, and had arms and legs, hands and feet, like a corpse. As I climbed in, I noticed that I did not cast a shadow, and when I looked down to check, I had no body; then I felt for my eyes, but I had no eyes; when I tried to look at the hands that were feeling for them, I could see no hands. As the lid of the coffin slowly closed over me, I felt as if all my thoughts and feelings as I was wandering along the white road had been those of a very old, if still unbowed, man; then when the coffin lid closed, they disappeared, just as steam evaporates, leaving behind as a deposit the half blind, half unconscious thoughts which normally filled the head of the half- grown youth that I was, standing like a stranger in life.
As the lid snapped shut, I woke in my bed. That is, I thought I had woken up.<
br />
It was still dark, but I could tell by the intoxicating scent of elderflowers that came streaming in through the open window, that the earth was giving off the first breath of the coming morning and that it was high time for me to put out the lamps in the town.
I picked up my pole and felt my way down the stairs. When I had completed my task, I crossed the wooden bridge and climbed up a mountain; every stone on the path seemed familiar, and yet I could not remember ever having been there before. In the high meadows, still dark green in the glowing half-light and heavy with dew, alpine flowers were growing, snowy cotton grass and pungent spikenard.
Then the farthest edge of the sky split open, and the invigorating blood of the dawn poured into the clouds. Blue, shimmering beetles and huge flies with glassy wings suddenly rose from the earth with a buzzing sound and hovered motionless in the air at about head height, all with their heads turned towards the awakening sun.
When I saw, felt and comprehended this grandiose act of prayer from mute creation, a shiver of deepest emotion ran through my every limb. I turned round and went back towards the town. My shadow preceded me, gigantic, its feet inseparably attached to mine. Our shadow, the bond that ties us to the earth, the black ghost that emanates from us, revealing the death within us, when light strikes our bodies!
The streets were blindingly bright when I entered them. The children were making their noisy way to school.
‘Why aren’t they chanting, “Doo’cot, doo’cot, diddlediddle doo’cot” at me as usual?’ was the thought that awoke in my mind. ‘Can they not see me? Have I become such a stranger to them that they don’t know me any more? I have always been a stranger to them,’ I suddenly realised with a startlingly new awareness. ‘I have never been a child! Not even in the orphanage when I was small. I have never played games as they do. At least whenever I did, it was only a mechanical motion of my body without my desire ever being involved; there is an old, old man living inside me and only my body seems to be young. The carpenter probably felt that yesterday, when he spoke to me as to a grown-up.’
The Dedalus Meyrink Reader Page 26