Glorious Nemesis

by Klima, Ladislav

  “Shameful thoughts be gone!” he called out, and tossed aside the journal and hurried away from the place as quickly as he could, employing all his strength to regain his former sublime mood. He succeeded. “But,” he still felt, “grim battles surely await me up there! Yet – so be it! all the better for it! Shameful it is to wish to achieve anything great on the cheap, without the sublime final Victory.”

  He walked through the garden of the restaurant, quickly made his way up through the forest. He found himself in a clearing. A cottage stood there. A debt collector was just leading a cow through the gate, a young woman surrounded by children was kissing its muzzle, wetting it with her tears.

  “What does the debt come to?” – He paid it and gave the woman everything he had down to the last heller; it still amounted to several thousand ducats. He ran upwards so fast the woman receiving his gift could only reach him with her cries –

  “May the Lord endow the kind gentleman with another hundred years of life –”

  “Perhaps I did this to demolish even this tiny financial bridge behind me! . . . No. If everything in the end does turn out to be a farce, nothing’s easier than managing to get out of here somehow, and once home, because I’m no longer viewed by people as a villain, I have enough real estate assets ... No, I do not want ‘life,’ I want Eternity. One hundred years of life she wished me, ha ha! How modest people are! If I cannot have Eternity, I don’t want anything!” –

  He came out of the forest onto rocky ground. And again he saw at a great height above him the monstrous dots, now considerably larger, just like before. For the first time he rested, but there was no need: the majesty of the soul gives the body wings; woe to today’s airplane obsessed, crutch-reliant humanity that does not understand this.

  He climbed higher and higher. The dots drew nearer – vanished – then appeared again, – in exactly the same way as before. “Have I fallen through time to fifteen years ago? I read a fairy tale like that once, what is this reality? ... I am really curious if the one in red will come charging down again.”

  Once again he saw them resting not far from the glacier. He also rested. Then all three once more began their ascent.

  Everything down in the valley was becoming smaller and punier. Cortona transformed into several crisscrossing lines as if drawn by a stick in sand. Along with his body – Sider’s spirit rose higher and higher above the ground. He felt he was the Sublime itself and Eternal Enchantment, as though the otherworld – the World-Miracle, to which he was drawing near, as he was to the sun, was already irradiating his soul with its thundering refulgences.

  At the fork he turned left. He was glancing to the side all the time now, in case he saw the scarpering woman ... Then he heard steps directly above him – charging right at him – – Errata.

  He was only slightly startled. She was already standing before him, young and beautiful, just like then – she, who was decomposing far away in the burial mound beneath the cliff in a small coffin of leather ... And – she fell into his arms and – kissed him ...

  Yet it was as if all his strength had been sapped all at once ...

  She withdrew. “Go, dearest, go even higher! and then down! and then to – the Supreme Heights! Have strength! The pain will be short, and the joy eternal. Above all, gloriously purify yourself from earthly mud! This mud was the only thing that sinned in You. Only it sins. Do not yield, be strong and have ultimate courage! Until we meet again – presently – already now –”

  “Wait!” he grabbed her by the arm, even though a sublime and yet frightful chill was burning all the strength from his body. “Where are you now? In radiance or in darkness? In hell or in heaven?”

  “Soon, soon you will know!” and commandingly motioning him upwards she hurried down ... When Sider’s torpid eyes glanced after her after a few moments, she could no longer be seen ...

  “Appallingly sublime ...” his teeth chattered. “Beyond human strength ... Suddenly I feel so weak – as if the majesty of the past few days has dropped off me like mere garments – leaving a wretched, naked worm slithering along the ground. The Divine is but alien attire, mercifully fallen from on high, oversized for the small soul. How good it is that after the grace that has trickled down to me, unworthy though I be, through your kiss, Orea, – I will promptly leave this body and this measly soul of mine before it is again engulfed by the old mud of humanity ... ‘Promptly?’ Is it not – already too late? ... I am now so very weak, so exhausted, so scorched by the fire you have set ablaze within me ... Oh, give strength to this weakling for the final step, the final divine Leap! ...”

  Slowly he came to the summit, ruthlessly struggling with himself. “But – maybe that good little swine was right yesterday after all. Even this Errata may be nothing more than a noxious concoction of hallucinations, an unknown, diabolically fraudulent force that has inoculated my soul ... Even Orea herself ... Hopefully, the denouement of this farce approaches.”

  “Ugh, ugh! Nothing matters, save heroism! To hold You close, Orea, up there, at any cost, at the cost of death’s purchase! Nothing else must cloud my mind now! Oh how ridiculous everything earthly is . . .”

  He calmed down considerably and again became lucid once he was standing on the glacial plateau. The sky remained cloudless, the air still and soundless, everything glorious Death.

  And there, hardly two hundred metres away – She stood –by the foot of that towering, awful cone of rock, blue like the sky. She opened her arms – and disappeared behind the surrounding boulders.

  “There again, there again,” he whispered to himself, white as chalk. “But I’ve known since time immemorial this is how it would be. So – the main battle of my life begins! To victory! Only, only victory for all eternity!”

  He glanced up at the sky and with sure steps reached the ghastly cone of rock.

  He started climbing up, but after just a few steps he felt his legs suddenly shaking noticeably and growing weak. “Naturally, after the tremendous exertions they’ve made today ...” In a moment he realised, after a stark, dreadful quivering, rippling, buffeting of thoughts, that the cause was elsewhere: that it was a mysterious storm in the subconscious rapidly approaching over the horizon, having initially announced its arrival by manifesting itself physically. He had to sit down, and at that moment came the volcanic eruption. An awful Dread: dread of the abyss, dread of death, dread before the Ghastliness of All, dread of Orea, dread of – the Abyss gushed out from the depths and flooded his entire soul ...

  “This is the end ... ; I’m not going to go through with it,” he felt and groaned in the grip of the blackest despair. “I cannot. But I must. But I cannot. But I must ... Is there anything more horrible?”

  He looked up at the sky in supplication. High up above him the blue figure appeared for a brief moment before vanishing behind a rock.

  “I shall go there – just up to that point, and then – we’ll see,” he decided and laboriously climbed higher and higher ... It took an eternity. “I’m going to my own execution, execution by my own hand. How unfathomably shameful and dishonourable! To have to carry out a death sentence on oneself – can anything be more ignominious? What sort of unfathomable wretch must I be to allow this! What sort of wretch is a world where it is even possible to commit – suicide!” These words droned in his soul. “But,” he pulled himself together, “what if it were not suicide – what if the leap were successful – what if the path has been repaired – what if the leap weren’t even necessary – what if at the place where before gaped a rift the cursed Madame Cagliostro were to embrace me with laughter –”

  He reached the awful cliff before the precipice, drew breath, hesitated for one more moment – then walked around it.

  The rift had not disappeared, on the contrary, it had widened ... Although leaping over it was not absolutely impossible, the chances of success versus the chances of death were 1:99 ... Unwittingly Sider’s eyes glanced down, and if he hadn’t clutched the rock he would have plummet
ed.

  He stood there for a long time, not daring to let go of the rock. And then on the other side of the chasm he saw – Her. She stood not more than twenty steps before him, her arms open. She was naked. Her body glistened brilliantly in the radiant light of the high mountains – it was shining more and more brightly, like a magnesium flame, now radiating its own light until it was ablaze like a second sun. –

  Sider did not, and could not, know what was happening with him at that moment ... Blindly and numbly he backed up several steps and started running –

  But before he reached the edge of the precipice, he came to a halt and embraced the cliff.

  “I cannot, I cannot, forgive me, Orea!”

  “And I could –” boomed.

  “I don’t understand ... Help me!”

  “You must do it on your own now!”

  “I cannot. Have mercy!”

  “You have mercy! Liberate me!”

  “Where are You? Are You – in damnation?”

  “I am damned in all those places where you are absent.”

  “What am I to do?”

  “Free yourself!”

  “From what?”

  “From yourself – Yourself! From humanity – God!”

  “Oh – oh – Orea – so –”

  He took a few steps towards the precipice – – he staggered and grabbed hold of the crag again. “I cannot, I cannot –”

  He heard a long wail, resembling more the sharp lament of Melusine, the sudden howling of a midnight gale, than the sound of a human voice. And like an extinguished flame the solar figure disappeared. –

  Half-conscious, Sider sat down on the path ... He remained like that for a long time. Very quietly, almost inaudibly, as in a dream, the silvery sound of plangent midday bells came from Cortona ...

  “It’s decided,” Sider whispered finally. “I will not die. Oh, what a burden has fallen from me ... All of a sudden I feel so light and so brave again ... – But – what is this other burden that now weighs on me! I feel so heavy and so wretched ... I have escaped death, more deadly than death is to be my future. – – But – perhaps not. It might only be my delusion. Away with it! ... Beautiful nature, life, though lowly you may be, only you are certain, I embrace you!”

  He stretched out his arms and felt as though all the distant rocky waves of the Alpine sea had risen up and were tumbling towards him. By escaping death there arose in him an animalistic joy of life that drove away his late low spirits and all the horrors, bringing a physical relief of equal consequence ...

  Yet, how often do all the things in this world lead to their very – opposite! ...

  “Looking at all this now,” he continued his soliloquy, “it’s all so comical to the point of being disgusting. The leap over this void for example – what childishness! What could possibly be its sole profound meaning?: throwing off earthliness, death, suicide. But the leap might very well have succeeded. Only a half-hearted suicide, only a half-hearted heroism. A comedy! Not a leap over to the other side of the path – a leap directly into the abyss – that would be uncompromising – – or rather that would have been uncompromising –”

  He shuddered slightly: he felt the cowardice of this adjustment, he felt the ghastly thing he’d sloughed off knocking at his door once more ... “Even that is comedy! Go away! To live, to live!”

  “To die, to die!” he heard echoed from the closest of the horns on Stag’s Head.

  It was only natural that the Sublimity that had overfilled his soul the past few days could not completely vanish from it, and it was now swiftly rushing back into his soul, again refreshed and open ...

  “To die, to die ...” he whispered to himself after a moment. “How beautiful and heroic ... and how repulsive and trivial and low it is to live ... Every measly insect is alive. To have the power by Divine Free Will to die at any time in glory – that is the greatest gift of the gods to humanity. To live – dishonoured before oneself – to die in madness over a period of many years ... like Errata . . . sweet Errata – your words: The pain will be short, the joy eternal ... do not yield, be strong and have ultimate courage ... Ooh!”

  He jumped up, his eyes burning wildly. “Am I a dog?” he cried. “How shameful it was – but it can be washed away, thank God my old strength has returned to me!”

  The ringing of the bells from the depths had just faded away. Sider advanced towards the precipice. Once more he shuddered a little, and took a step back – –

  “Sider! Be God!” an inhuman voice resounded from below.

  He looked down. In the depths, at the bottom of the chasm, the naked figure with open arms aflame radiated once more like a fragment of the sun – –

  Sider’s soul transformed into the final charge of a dying tiger. “How base, foul-smelling everything earthly is! What bottomless shame of shame it is to fear anything! Now is the moment to show that I am more than a mere atom of dung –”

  The muscles in his legs tensed for the leap – a final brief squirming of vanquished animality – and then immediately the lightning-quick tensing of the Will commanding: “Become!” – whoever is capable of Will is capable of every act and all things.

  And the hero threw himself into the abyss –

  – – all at once – – flying through the air, it was as if his soul were swept clean of all the residue of earthly slime! There was no parade in his soul of all the events of the life now ending, as is usually the case with those plunging to their deaths –: all the radiances of imminent eternity blazed within it. He felt nothing as his ribs hit a rock ledge about fifteen metres down; falling to the ground another fifteen metres, he did not feel his legs breaking and the terrible blow to his head. Radiance prevented him from seeing how he rolled for several more metres down the steep slope into a fissure in the rock. – Then the Radiance suddenly expired. –

  •

  He was shown the Grace of regaining earthly consciousness once more.

  He saw rock walls all around him almost at arms’ reach, only to the side above him a strip of blue. He was lying in a dim, narrow hollow.

  He hardly felt any pain, just as if he had been drugged. It merely seemed to him that everything, everything should indeed hurt, that in fact he did feel pain, but somewhere outside of him where He did not feel it. He looked at his arms, his legs: blood, even on the tip of his nose – blood. He felt as though amidst a steady drone he were running away from his self : “The only reason I have awoken from Death,” he sensed, “is to observe it properly, and not through Its eyes, but still through earthly eyes. Thanks to You, Thanatos! The only thing interesting in life is death. Come, my companion, I will welcome You with jubilation: for I have lived well: for I am dying well, heroically.”

  He waited and very nearly became bored. “A pity if Divine Indifference is – boredom. No: this is only the child of human wretchedness. Indifference – that on high – what is it? Only Divine Radiance.”

  He saw something amid the rocks around him that didn’t seem to be of stone. “Bones, almost decayed,” he said to himself and had to labour to reach for one. “The remains of a skull – human – by all indications female. Little of it left, even though this crevice is protected from rain, snow, heat, wind, the sun. It’s probably been here for quite some time ...” He kissed it. “Why in the world did I do that? It was so natural, – I just knew ... but it has receded into darkness. – Here is another skull, larger, certainly male ...” He reached for it and let go immediately. “Something most strange, demented, eternally horrific has shaken me, Indifferent, what could it be? ... Ah! ... I know: I felt as though I were holding my own skull in my fingers! ... Most horrid thought – only one dying would not be driven mad by it ... All of it nonsense, only comic associations of ideas in the throes of agony – – What is that yellow object sparkling among the bones?” He picked up a golden, glass-fronted locket with a miniature portrait. “Oh Orea! Exactly the same as the larger one I keep here next to my heart. I can even make out the tiny lett
ers: My Orea. – My handwriting –what was that again –it has floated off once more ... Aaaah –”

  His pathetic consciousness flew off to the place where all things are known. –

  When it returned, he suddenly knew everything. It hadn’t actually returned – how absurd all human expressions and thoughts are! –, but He, the mysterious Self, by a miracle that only blossoms once in a hundred years, flew into the realm of another consciousness, Another Self ... Humankind, despite all its manifold metaphysical speculations, does not have an inkling about this, the most important thing – as is often the case: just as it does not think about death and the Sublime and Beauty and Lightness and Immanence ... The main purpose of humanity was: fear of awakening the terrible dragon on which it sleeps, who in reality is the only Archangel of salvation.

  What in Dream and Death is inherently known he now knew through the terrible connecting of what’s disconnected in the waking state. And in Dream and Death it is known what existed before “birth,” what existed Yesterday, but humans know only what existed yesterday, and not even that. – Sider’s life of yesterday merged magically with his life of today into one whole, into a single Day of Life, and death’s pitchblende iron screen between the two became transparent.

  He saw himself as a young, handsome, well-to-do gentleman, who fell in love with an enchanting girl from an aristocratic family, eighteen-year-old Orea. And she fell for him with a love that burnt ten times stronger. Never did a woman love someone more intensely. Her passion was so great it completely altered her, turning a tigress into an obedient little doggy. She absconded with him from her father’s house. They wandered the earth together. But his love for her soon went cold. He felt he could love her with all his heart were it not for his selfishness, all manner of passions and vices, feckless whims, the licentiousness of his polluted soul thwarting any real depth of feeling ... He tormented Orea constantly. At first it was only from the sadism of love, later from a hatred of love, then from pure cruelty, then from pure hatred, and in the end it was just meanness and out of habit. Right up till the end she poignantly viewed all this as nothing but an expression of his love, and being, like all women for that matter, a masochist at heart, she more or less endured it with delight: the imprecations and insults, the beatings and imprisonments, the burnings and even more sophisticated forms of torture. – Finally, after three years, they took up residence in Cortona, in the cottage of Barbora, who was thirty-nine at the time, Orea’s former wet nurse who loved her like a daughter. Living with them was also Orea’s sister, likewise beautiful and intriguing, even though in all respects she was merely a diluted version of Orea. She fell madly, wildly in love with Sider as well, and she had run after him, and all her efforts were directed at seducing him away from her sister. And Sider did fall in love with her, too, as he did with every seductress. Together they concocted a plan to get rid of Orea – for they feared her tiger’s rage if she were to realise she was no longer loved and wanted. Yet for Sider this was more than mere self-interest: it was sadism to the highest degree, a romantic desire to murder, to murder what had been dearest to him in the depths of his soul, a so-called perversity, base and spinelessly ferocious. – He knew that a boulder was poised directly above the house, and it would be possible to work it free with little effort. On one black night this is indeed what he did, so that all it would take now was to lean firmly against the boulder – – The deed was soon consummated, at midnight, having earlier told Errata to spend the night elsewhere. The roof caved in, as did the first-floor ceiling. Running down, he found Orea unconscious in a pool of blood, her legs injured, her face mutilated. But she was still alive, with a deformed nose. He felt great compassion for her, his revulsion even greater. “What fails at first must eventually succeed, come what may!” was what he decided – and he devised a plan, as certain to produce the desired outcome as it was safe for him, a plan so cowardly and low, so ghastly. He knew that Orea obeyed him unconditionally, especially since her face had been disfigured, believing incessantly in his love. On 18 June he instructed her to accompany him to the summit of Stag’s Head. He also had Errata come along so that if worse came to worse he would have a witness to back up his story. By beating her, he managed to get Orea all the way to the plateau of the glacier, even though she had yet to fully recover and was hobbling – and he drove her on to the highest of Stag Head’s horns. He leapt over the place where the path was severed – back then the gap was not as wide – and he commanded: “Follow me!”