Death in Venice and Other Stories (11 page)

“First couple,
en avant!
” said Mr. Knaak, as a new figure was begun.
“Compliment! Moulinet des dames! Tour de main!”
And there were no words for the elegant way he swallowed the silent
e
in
de
.

“Second couple
en avant!
” Tonio Kröger and his lady were next.
“Compliment!”
Tonio bowed.
“Moulinet des dames!”
And Tonio Kröger, head down, countenance dark, touched hands with each of the four ladies, with Inge Holm, and danced the
moulinet
.

All around there was giggling and laughter. Mr. Knaak assumed a ballet position of stylized horror. “Oh no!” he cried. “Stop, stop, Kröger has fallen in with the ladies!
En arrière
, Miss Kröger, get back,
fi donc!
Everyone has gotten it except you. Be off with you! Away! Back you go!” And he took out a yellow silk handkerchief and waved it at Tonio Kröger, shooing him back to his place.

Everyone was laughing, the boys, the girls, even the ladies behind the
portières
, for Mr. Knaak had made something just too comical out of the incident—a vaudeville routine couldn't have been more entertaining. Only Mr. Heinzelmann maintained a sober, businesslike expression as he waited for the signal to resume playing, for he was immune to Mr. Knaak's devices.

Then the quadrille continued. And then there was a break. The serving girl brought in a silver tray full of wine jellies in clinking glasses, and the cook followed in tow with a load of plum cake. Tonio Kröger, however, slipped away unnoticed and stood in the outside hallway before a window with drawn Venetian blinds, his hands behind his back, not considering that since nothing could be seen through the blinds it was ridiculous to stand there pretending to look out.

He was looking not out, but inside himself, where there was so much grief and longing. Why, oh why was he here? Why wasn't he in his room, sitting by the
window reading Storm's
Immensee
, occasionally glancing down into the evening garden where the old walnut tree ponderously creaked? That was his place. The others could dance and get as lively as they wanted while they practiced their skills! . . . No, no, his place was here, in Inge's vicinity. He was standing alone, apart from the group, trying to distinguish her voice with its musical sound of warm life from the general hum, the tinkling of glasses and the laughter inside, but she was near. Your long horizontal blue eyes full of laughter, blond Inge! No one who has read—not to mention tried to imitate
—Immensee
could ever be as beautiful and sunny as you! That's the real tragedy . . .

She had to come! She had to notice he wasn't there, had to sense how it stood with him, had to follow him secretly, if only out of pity, had to lay her hand on his shoulder and say: “Come back inside and join us, don't be sad, I love you.” And he listened for her voice behind him and waited with irrational anticipation for her to come. But she didn't come, of course. Things like that just don't happen in reality.

Had she laughed at him too, like all the others? Yes, of course she had, as much as he would have liked to deny it for her sake and his own. It was only because of her presence distracting him that he had joined in the
moulinet des dames
. But what did it matter? One day they'd stop laughing! Hadn't one of his poems recently been accepted by a magazine, albeit one that had folded before his work had had a chance to appear? The day would come when he was famous, when everything he wrote would be published, and then he would see whether Inge Holm would be impressed . . . No, she would
not
, that was precisely it. Magdalena Vermehren, who was always falling down, sure, she would be impressed. But never Inge Holm, never blue-eyed, carefree Inge. Therefore was it not all in vain? . . .

Tonio Kröger's heart shrank painfully at this thought. To feel a miraculous, playful and profound creativity stirring within and yet know that the people whose admiration you most crave will greet it only with cheerful
indifference—that causes great pain. Yet even while he stood alone, outcast and hopeless, pretending in his distress that he could see out the drawn Venetian blind, he was happy. For in those days his heart was alive. It beat warmly and sadly for you, Ingeborg Holm, and his soul embraced your blond, bright, ardently normal little existence in blissful self-negation.

More than once he stood with flushed cheeks in some lonely corner where music, the scent of flowers and the clinking of glasses were only faintly discernible, trying to distinguish the melody of your voice from the festive noises in the distance; more than once he stood suffering in your vicinity and was happy. More than once it grieved him that he was able to talk to Magdalena Vermehren, who was always falling down. It was she who understood him and shared his sense of humor and took him seriously, whereas blond Inge seemed distant, alien and suspicious whenever he sat next to her, for his language was not hers. Yet nonetheless he was happy. For happiness, he told himself, isn't being loved; that was just a slightly nauseous satisfaction of vanity. Happiness is loving and perhaps seizing a few short illusory moments of intimacy with the object of one's love. And inwardly he took note of this idea, thought it fully through and plumbed its emotional depths.

Fidelity!
thought Tonio Kröger. I will be faithful and love you, Ingeborg, so long as I live! So good were his intentions. And yet a soft voice of fear and sadness whispered within him that he had utterly forgotten Hans Hansen, even though he saw him on a daily basis. And the ugly, wretched truth was that this quiet, faintly malevolent voice would be proven right, that time passed and days came when Tonio Kröger was no longer so unconditionally prepared to die for carefree Inge as before, for deep within he felt the desire and the ability to achieve, after his own peculiar fashion, a host of things that would attract the world's attention.

And he cautiously circled the sacrificial altar where the pure and chaste flame of his love was ablaze; he knelt down before it and did all he could to fan and tend
it in his efforts to keep the faith. And yet after a certain interval, imperceptibly, without noise or spectacle, it went out nonetheless.

Tonio Kröger stood for some while before that cold altar, incredulous and disappointed at the fact that fidelity was impossible on earth. Then he shrugged his shoulders and went on his way.

3

He went the way he had to go, a little carelessly and unsteadily, whistling and gazing into the distance, head angled, and if he went astray, it was because for many people a right way just doesn't exist. When asked what in the world he wanted to become, he gave various answers, for he liked to say (and had already put in writing) that he carried within him a thousand existential possibilities, together with the secret conviction that they were all impossibilities . . .

Even before he departed the cramped city that was his home, it had quietly released the shackles and ties with which it had held him bound. The ancient Kröger family had little by little succumbed to a state of disintegration and collapse, and people had good reason to count Tonio Kröger himself among its symptoms. His father's mother, the matriarch of the family, had died, and not long afterward his father—the tall, pensive, meticulously attired gentleman with the wildflower in his buttonhole—had followed her to the grave. The grand house of the Krögers with all its distinguished history was put up for sale, and the firm was liquidated. Tonio's mother, his beautiful fiery mother, who played such marvelous piano and mandolin and who was so indifferent toward everything, married again immediately after her year of mourning, indeed married a musician, a virtuoso with an Italian name whom she followed into the wild blue yonder. Tonio Kröger found this a bit disreputable; but it was hardly
his
place to forbid anyone anything. He wrote poems and couldn't even answer the
question about what in the world he wanted to become . . .

So he left his childhood city with its nooks and crannies and damp wind whistling through the gables, left the fountain and the walnut tree in the garden, those trusty friends of his youth, left the sea, too, which he loved so passionately, and felt no pain as he did. After all, he was grown-up and clever; he understood the reasons behind everything and had nothing but contempt for the crude and primitive existence that had held him so long in its midst.

He gave himself over entirely to that power he felt to be the most sublime on earth, which he felt himself called to serve and which promised him elevated status and accolades: the power of imagination and word, which gleefully thrones above all unconscious, inarticulate forms of life. With the passion of youth he gave himself over to it, and it rewarded him with everything it has to give and pitilessly took from him everything it habitually demands as compensation.

It sharpened his eye and allowed him to see through the great-sounding words that inflate people's chests; it revealed to him the souls of other men, as well as his own, gave him vision, and showed him the world's interior working and all that ultimately lurks behind word and deed. What he saw, however, was this: comedy and despair—comedy and despair.

And along with the trials and exhilaration of such insight came solitude, for he could not endure the company of harmless people with their cheerfully dim minds, and, conversely, the mark upon his forehead always set them on edge. But his delight in word and form grew sweeter and sweeter, for he liked to say (and had already put in writing) that deep acquaintance with the soul, by itself, would invariably lead to depression, if the pleasures of the well-turned phrase didn't entertain and lift our spirits . . .

He lived in large cities and throughout Southern Europe, where he hoped the sun would more fully ripen his art; perhaps it was his mother's blood that drew him
there. But because his heart was dead and loveless, he succumbed to pursuits of the flesh, plunging deep into lust and carnal sin, suffering unspeakably because of it. Perhaps it was an inheritance from his father—the tall, pensive, spotlessly attired man with the wildflower in his buttonhole—that caused him to suffer so down south and occasionally stirred a weak, nostalgic memory in him of a desire of the soul that he had once known and never found again amidst all his other desires.

A disgust for, a hatred of the senses took hold of him, along with a thirst for purity and respectable peace of mind, yet he continued to inhale the air of art, the mild, sweet fragrant air of eternal blissful spring, in which fertility is ever at work, secretly fermenting and germinating. Thus it came about that he was ceaselessly thrown back and forth between crass extremes, between icy intellectualism and the all-consuming fever of the senses, causing him to lead an exhausting life, tormented by conscience, an exemplary, extravagant, extraordinary life, which he himself, Tonio Kröger, ultimately detested. How very astray! he would sometimes think. How is it that I have fallen into all these eccentric adventures? I'm not some gypsy in a green wagon, not by birth . . .

But just as his health weakened, his artistic talent increased, becoming selective, discriminating, sumptuous, refined, impatient with all banality and hypersensitive in matters of tact and taste. When he was first published, applause and cries of joy went up from the
cognoscenti
, for it was a worthy and well-wrought thing he had produced, full of humor and intimately known sorrow. And rapidly his name—the same one his teachers had called out in tones of opprobrium, the same one with which he had signed his first verses in honor of the walnut tree, the fountain and the sea, this combination of Mediterranean and Nordic sounds, this exotically tinged bourgeois name—became a synonym for excellence, for the painful clarity of his vision was augmented by an unusual, bitterly unremitting and ambitious work ethic, which in its struggles with the discriminating impatience of his
aesthetic judgment gave rise, under great torment, to works of remarkable quality.

He worked, not like someone working in order to live, but like someone who, because he places no value on himself as a living person, wants only to work, someone who seeks recognition solely as a creative artist and otherwise goes around gray and anonymous, akin to an actor without makeup, who is nothing so long as he has nothing to act out. He worked in silence, isolated, invisible and contemptuous of those insignificant rivals for whom talent was a social ornament, who, whether rich or poor, whether they went about wild and dishevelled or in monogrammed-tie luxury, were basically concerned with living happy, loveable, bohemian lives, not seeing that good work only arises under the strain of a miserable life, that he who lives cannot work, and that only after having undergone death can one completely become a creator.

4

“Am I intruding?” Tonio Kröger asked in the doorway of the atelier. He held his hat in his hands and even bowed slightly, although Lizaveta Ivanovna was a friend of his, from whom he had no secrets.

“Spare the formalities, Tonio Kröger, and come inside!” she answered in her skipping accent. “It's common knowledge that you had a proper upbringing and know what's proper form.” In the process, she laid her brush on the palette, which she held in her left hand, extended her right and looked up at him, laughing and shaking her head.

“Yes, but you're working,” he said. “Let me see . . . Oh, you're making progress.” And he examined by turns the colorful sketches leaning against the stools on either side of the easel and the large canvas with its square-lined drafting grid on which the first patches of color were beginning to appear within a crude, indefinite charcoal outline.

It was in Munich, in a courtyard building on
Schellingstraße
, several floors up. Outside, beyond the wide north-facing windows, the sky was blue, birds were chirping and the sun was shining. Newly arrived spring's sweet breath streamed in through an open casement and mingled with the smell of bonding agent and oil paints that filled the spacious studio. Unobstructed, the golden light of the bright afternoon flooded the expansive emptiness of the atelier, boldly illuminating the rather uneven floor, the unvarnished windowside table with its little bottles, tubes and brushes, the unframed studies on the bare walls, the torn silk tapestry cordoning off a small, stylishly furnished living and relaxation area near the door, the nascent work on the easel, and the painter and author before it.