Narcissus and Goldmund (15 page)

It was his left hand that taught him the truth: while it explored the beautiful, quietly waiting body of Julie, he felt for the first time not only the deep hopelessness of his love for Lydia, but how ridiculous it was. While his lips were with Lydia and his hand with Julie, he felt that he should either force Lydia to give in to him, or he should leave. To love her and yet renounce her had been wrong, had been nonsense.

“My heart,” he whispered into Lydia's ear, “we are suffering unnecessarily. How happy all three of us could be now! Let us do what our blood demands!”

She drew back, shrinking, and his desire fled to the other girl. His hand was doing such pleasing things to Julie that she answered with a long quivering sigh of lust.

Lydia heard the sigh and her heart contracted with jealousy, as though poison had been dropped into it. She sat up abruptly, tore the cover off the bed, jumped to her feet and cried: “Julie, let's leave!”

Julie was startled. The thoughtless violence of Lydia's cry, which might betray them all, showed her the danger. Silently she got up.

But Goldmund, offended and betrayed in all his senses, quickly put his arms around Julie as she sat up, kissed her on each breast, and hotly whispered into her ear: “Tomorrow, Julie, tomorrow!”

Barefoot, in her nightgown, Lydia stood on the stone floor, her feet blue with cold. She picked up Julie's coat and hung it around her sister with a gesture of suffering and submission that did not escape Julie in spite of the darkness; it touched and reconciled her. Softly the sisters vanished from the room. With conflicting emotions, Goldmund listened intently and breathed with relief as the house remained deathly quiet.

The three young people were forced to meditate in solitude over their strange and unnatural association. The two sisters found nothing to say to each other, after they hurried back to their bedroom. They lay awake in their respective beds, each alone, silent, and stubborn. A spirit of grief, contradiction, nonsense, alienation, and innermost confusion seemed to have taken hold of the house. Goldmund did not fall asleep until after midnight; Julie not until the early hours of morning. Lydia lay torturously awake until the pale day rose over the snow. Then she got up, dressed, knelt for a long time in prayer before the small wooden Saviour in her room, and as soon as she heard her father's step on the stairs went out and asked him to hear her. Without trying to distinguish between her fears for Julie's virginity and her own jealousy, she had decided during the night to put an end to the matter. Goldmund and Julie were still asleep when the knight was informed of everything Lydia had decided to tell him. She did not mention Julie's part in the adventure.

When Goldmund appeared in the writing room at the usual hour that morning, he found the knight in boots, vest, and girdled sword, instead of the slippers and housecoat he usually wore while they wrote. At once he knew the meaning of this.

“Put on your cap,” said the knight. “I have a walk to take with you.”

Goldmund took his cap from the nail and followed his master down the stairs, across the courtyard, and out the gate. Their soles made crunching noises on the slightly frozen snow; the sky was still red with dawn. The knight walked ahead in silence; the young man followed. Several times he looked back at the house, at the window of his room, at the steep, snow-covered roof, until all disappeared and there was nothing more to see. He would never see that roof, those windows again, never again the study, the bedroom, the two sisters. He had so often toyed with the thought of sudden departure. Now his heart contracted with pain, and it hurt bitterly to leave this way.

For an hour they walked in this fashion, the master going on ahead. Neither spoke, and Goldmund began to think about his fate. The knight was armed; perhaps he would kill him. But he did not believe that he would. The danger was small; he'd only have to run and the old man would stand there helpless with his sword. No, his life was not in danger. But this silent walking behind the offended, solemn man, this being led away wordlessly pained him more with every step. Finally the knight halted.

“From here on,” he said in a broken voice, “you will continue alone, always in the same direction, you'll lead the wanderer's life you did before. If you ever show your face again in the neighborhood of my house, you will be killed. I have no desire to take revenge on you; I should have been more intelligent than to allow so young a man to live intimately with my daughters. But if you have the audacity to come back, your life is lost. Go now, and may God forgive you!”

As he stood in the sallow light of the snowy morning, his gray-bearded face looked almost dead. Like a ghost he stood there, and did not move until Goldmund had disappeared over the next ridge. The reddish tint in the cloudy sky had faded, the sun did not come out, and snow began to fall in thin, hesitant flakes.

9

G
OLDMUND
knew the area from many previous rides. The knight owned a barn beyond the frozen marsh, and farther on there was a farmhouse where he was known; he'd be able to rest and spend the night in one of those places. Everything else had to wait until tomorrow. Gradually, the feeling of freedom and detachment took hold of him again; he had grown unaccustomed to it. It did not have a pleasant taste on this icy, gloomy winter day; it smelled strongly of hardship, hunger, and want, and yet the vastness of it, its great expanse, its merciless harshness was almost comforting and soothing to his spoiled, confused heart.

He walked until he felt tired. My riding days are over, he thought. Oh, wide world! A little snow was falling. In the distance the edges of the forest fused with gray clouds; infinite silence stretched to the end of the world. What was happening to Lydia, that poor, anguished heart? He felt bitterly sorry for her; he thought of her tenderly as he rested under a bare, lonely ash in the middle of the deserted marshland. Finally the cold drove him on. Stiff-legged, he stood up, forced himself to a brisk pace; the meager light of the drab day already seemed to be dwindling. The slow trot across the bare fields put an end to his musing. It was not a question of thinking now, or of having emotions, no matter how delicate and beautiful; it was now a question of keeping alive, of reaching a spot for the night in time, of getting through this cold, inhospitable world like a marten or a fox, and not giving out too soon, in the open fields. Everything else was unimportant.

He thought he heard the sound of distant hoofs and looked around in surprise. Could anyone be following him? He reached for the small hunting knife in his pocket and slipped off the wooden sheath. The rider became visible; he recognized a horse from the knight's stable; stubbornly it was heading toward him. Fleeing would have been useless. He stopped and waited, without actual fear, but very tense and curious, his heart beating faster. For a second a thought shot through his head: “If I killed this rider, how well off I'd be; I'd have a horse and the world would be mine.” But when he recognized the rider, the young stableboy Hans, with his light-blue, watery eyes and the good, embarrassed boy's face, he had to laugh; to murder this good dear fellow, one would have to have a heart of stone. He greeted Hans with a friendly hand and tenderly patted Hannibal, the horse, on its warm, moist neck; it recognized him immediately.

“Where are you headed, Hans?” he asked.

“To you,” laughed the boy with shining teeth. “You've run a good distance. I can't stay; I'm only here to give you regards and this.”

“Regards from whom?”

“From Lady Lydia. Well, you certainly gave us a nasty day, Master Goldmund, I was glad to get away for a while. But the squire must not know that I've been gone, and with an errand that could cost me my neck. Here!”

He handed him a small package; Goldmund took it.

“I say, Hans, you don't happen to have a piece of bread in one of your pockets that you might give me?”

“Bread? I might find a crust.” He rummaged in his pockets and pulled out a piece of black bread. Then he wanted to ride off again.

“How is the lady?” asked Goldmund. “Didn't she give you any message? No little letter?”

“Nothing. I saw her only for a moment. There's a storm at the house, you know; the squire is pacing like King Saul. She told me to give you these things, and nothing else. I've got to get back now.”

“All right, all right, just a moment more! Say, Hans, you couldn't let me have your hunting knife? I've only a small one. When the wolves come and all that—it would be better if I had something solid in hand.”

But Hans would not hear of that. He'd be very sorry, he said, if something should happen to Master Goldmund. But he could not part with his jackknife, no, never, not for money, nor a swap either, no, no, not even if Saint Genevieve in person asked him for it. There, and now he had to get a move on, and he did wish him well, and he did feel sorry about everything.

They shook hands and the boy rode off. Goldmund looked after him with a strange pain in his heart. Then he unpacked the things, happy to have the strong calf's-leather cord that held them together. Inside he found a knitted undervest of thick gray wool, which apparently Lydia had made for him herself, and there was also something hard, well wrapped in the wool, a piece of ham: a small slit had been cut into the ham and a shiny gold piece had been stuck into the slit. There was no written message. He stood in the snow, undecided, holding Lydia's gifts in his hands. Then he took off his jacket and slipped into the knitted vest; it felt pleasantly warm. Quickly he put his jacket back on, hid the gold piece in his safest pocket, wound the cord around his waist, and continued his walk across the fields. It was time he reached a place to rest; he had grown very tired. But he didn't feel like going to the farmhouse, although it would have been warmer and he'd probably also have found some milk there; he didn't feel like chatting and being asked questions. He spent the night in the barn, continued on his way early the next morning, in frost and sharp wind, driven to long marches by the cold. For many nights he dreamed of the knight with his sword and of the two sisters; for many days loneliness and melancholy weighed on his heart.

The following evening he found a place for the night in a village, where the peasants were so poor they had no bread, only gruel. Here, new adventures awaited him. During the night, the peasant woman whose guest he was gave birth to a child. Goldmund was present while it happened; they had waked him in the straw to come and help, although there was nothing for him to do finally, except hold the light while the midwife went about her business. For the first time he witnessed a birth. With astonished, burning eyes he gazed at the face of the woman in labor, richer suddenly by this new experience. At any rate the expression in the woman's face seemed most remarkable to him. In the light of the torch, as he stared with great curiosity into the face of the screaming woman, lying there in pain, he was struck by something unexpected: the lines in the screaming woman's distorted face were little different from those he had seen in other women's faces during the moment of love's ecstasy. True, the expression of great pain was more violent and disfiguring than the expression of ultimate passion—but essentially it was not different, it was the same slightly grinning contraction, the same sudden glow and extinction. Miraculously, without understanding why, he was surprised by the realization that pain and joy could resemble each other so closely.

And yet another experience awaited him in that village. The morning after the birth, he ran into the neighbor's wife, who soon replied to the amorous questioning of his eyes. He stayed a second night and made the woman very happy since it was the first time in many weeks of excitation and disappointment that his desires were finally stilled. This delay led to a new experience: he found a companion on that second day in the village, a lanky, daring fellow named Viktor, who looked half like a priest and half like a highway robber.

Viktor greeted him with scraps of Latin, claiming to be a traveling student, although he was long past his student years. He wore a pointed beard and treated Goldmund with a certain heartiness and highway humor that quickly won the younger man.

To Goldmund's questions, where he had studied and where he was headed, this strange fellow replied: “By my destitute soul, I have visited enough places of high learning. I've been to Cologne and to Paris, and few scholars have expressed deeper thoughts on the metaphysics of liverwurst than I in my dissertation at Leyden. Since then,
amicus,
I, poor bastard that I am, have crossed and recrossed the German Empire in all directions, my dear soul tortured by immeasurable hunger and thirst. Viktor, the peasant terror, they call me. My profession is teaching Latin to young wives and tricking sausages out of chimneys and into my belly. My goal is the bed of the mayor's wife, and if the crows don't chew me up beforehand, I'll hardly be able to avoid the obligation of dedicating myself to the tiresome profession of archbishop. It is better, my dear young colleague, to live from hand to mouth than the other way round, and, after all, a roasted hare has never felt better than in my humble stomach. The king of Bohemia is my brother, and our father in heaven feeds him as he does me, although he insists that I lend him a hand, and the day before yesterday this father, hardhearted as fathers are, tried to misuse me in order to save the life of a half-starved wolf. If I hadn't killed the beast, you, my dear colleague, would not have the honor of making my fascinating acquaintance.
In saecula saeculorum, amen.
”

Goldmund was still unfamiliar with the gallows humor and wayfaring Latin of this wanderer. He felt a bit scared of the lanky, bristly rascal and the rasping laughter with which he applauded his own jokes, yet there was something about this hard-boiled vagrant that did please him, and he readily let himself be persuaded to continue the journey with him, because, whether the vanquished wolf was boasting or the truth, two were indisputably stronger than one and had less to fear. But before continuing the journey, brother Viktor wanted to speak a bit of Latin to the people, as he called it, and installed himself in the house of one of the poorer peasants. He did not follow the practice Goldmund had so far applied on the road, wherever he had been the guest of a farmhouse or a village; Viktor went from hut to hut, chatted with every woman, stuck his nose into every stable and kitchen, and did not seem willing to leave before each house had paid him a toll and a tribute. He told the peasants about the war in Italy and sang, beside their hearths, the song of the battle of Pavia. He recommended remedies for arthritis and loose teeth to the grandmothers; he seemed to know everything, to have been everywhere. He stuffed his shirt above the belt full to bursting with the pieces of bread, nuts, and dried pears the peasants had given him. With surprise Goldmund watched him wage his campaign, listened to him now frighten, now flatter the people, boast and win their admiration, speak broken Latin and play the scholar, and the next moment impress them with brash, colorful thieves' slang, saw how, in the middle of a tale or learned talk his sharp, watchful eyes recorded every face, every table drawer that was pulled open, every dish, every loaf of bread. He saw that this was a seasoned adventurer who had been exposed to all walks of life, who had seen and lived through much, who had starved a good deal, and shivered, and grown shrewd and impudent in the bitter struggle for a meager, dangerous existence. So this was what became of people who led a wanderer's life for a long time! Would he, too, be like that one day?