Narcissus and Goldmund (26 page)

He was not afraid. He had first tasted the fear of death during that winter night under the pines when Viktor's fingers clutched at his throat, and later in the cold and hunger of many a hard day. That had been a death which one could fight, against which one could defend oneself, and he had defended himself, with trembling hands and feet, with gaping stomach and exhausted body, had fought, won, and escaped. But no one could fight death by plague; one had to let it rage and give in. Goldmund had given in long ago. He had no fear. It seemed as though he was no longer interested in life, since he had left Lene behind in the burning hut, since his endless journey through a land devastated by death. But enormous curiosity drove him and kept him awake; he was indefatigable, watching the reaper, listening to the song of the transitory. He did not go out of his way. Everywhere he felt the same quiet passion to participate, to walk through hell with wide-open eyes. He ate moldy bread in empty houses, sang and drank at the insane feasts, plucked the fast-wilting flower of lust, looked into the fixed, drunken stares of the women, into the fixed, stupid eyes of the drunk, into the fading eyes of the dying. He loved the desperate, feverish women, helped carry corpses in exchange for a plate of soup, threw earth over naked bodies for two pennies. It had grown dark and wild in the world. Death howled its song, and Goldmund heard it with burning passion.

His goal was Master Niklaus's city; that's where the voice of his heart drew him. The road was long and lined with decay, wilting, and dying. Sadly he journeyed on, intoxicated by the song of death, open to the loudly screaming misery of the world, sad, and yet glowing, with eager senses.

In a cloister he came upon a recently painted fresco. He had to look at it for a long time. A dance of death had been painted on a wall: pale bony death, dancing people out of life, king and bishop, abbot and earl, knight, doctor, peasant, lansquenet—everyone he took along with him, while skeleton musicians played on hollow bones. Goldmund's curious eyes drank in the painting. An unknown colleague had applied the lesson he too had learned from the Black Death, and was screaming the bitter lesson of the inevitable end shrilly into everyone's ear. It was a good picture, and a good sermon; this unknown colleague had seen and painted the subject rather well. A bony, ghastly echo rose from his wild picture. And yet it was not what Goldmund had seen and experienced. It was the obligation to die that was painted here, the stern and merciless end. But Goldmund would have preferred another picture. In him the wild song of death had a completely different sound, not bony and severe, but sweet rather, and seductive, motherly, an enticement to come home. Wherever the hand of death reached into life, the sound was not only shrill and warlike but also deep and loving, autumnal, satiated, the little lamp of life glowed brighter, more intensely at the approach of death. To others death might be a warrior, a judge or hangman, a stern father. To him death was also a mother and a mistress; its call was a mating call, its touch a shudder of love. After looking at the painted death dance, Goldmund felt drawn to the master and to his craft with renewed force. But everywhere there were delays, new sights and experiences. With quivering nostrils he breathed the air of death. Everywhere pity or curiosity claimed an extra hour from him, an extra day. For three days he had a small bawling peasant boy with him. For hours he carried him on his back, a half-starved midget of five or six who caused him much trouble and whom he didn't know how to get rid of. Finally a peat digger's wife took the boy in. Her husband had died, and she wanted to have a little life in the house again. For days a masterless dog accompanied him, ate out of his hand, warmed him while he slept, but one morning it too strayed off. Goldmund was sorry. He had become accustomed to speaking to the dog; for hours he'd have thoughtful conversations with the animal about the evil in people, the existence of God, about art, about the breasts and hips of a knight's very young daughter named Julie, whom he had known in his youth. Goldmund had naturally grown a trifle mad during his death journey: everyone within the plague region was a trifle mad, and many were completely insane. Perhaps young Rebekka was also a trifle insane—a beautiful dark girl with burning eyes, with whom he had spent two days.

He found her outside a small town, crouching in the fields beside a heap of rubble, sobbing, beating her face, tearing her black hair. The hair stirred his pity. It was extremely beautiful, and he caught her furious hands and held them fast and talked to her, noting that her face and figure were also of great beauty. She was mourning her father, who had been burned to ash with fourteen other Jews by order of the town's authorities. She had been able to flee but had now returned in desperation and was accusing herself for not having been burned with the others. Patiently he held on to her twisting hands and talked to her gently, murmured sympathetically, and protectively offered his help. She asked him to help her bury her father. They gathered all the bones from the still warm ashes, carried them into a hiding place farther away in the field, and covered them with earth. In the meantime evening had fallen and Goldmund looked for a place to sleep. In a small oak forest he arranged a bed for the girl and promised to watch over her and listened to her moan and sob after she lay down; finally she fell asleep. Then he, too, slept a little, and in the morning he began his courtship. He told her that she could not stay alone like this, she might be recognized as a Jew and killed, or depraved wayfarers might misuse her, and the forest was full of wolves and gypsies. If he took her along, however, and protected her against wolf and man—because he felt sorry for her and was very fond of her, because he had eyes in his head and knew what beauty was—he would never allow her sweet intelligent eyelids and graceful shoulders to be devoured by animals or burned at the stake. Dark-faced, she listened to him, jumped up, and ran off. He had to chase after her and catch her before he could continue.

“Rebekka,” he said, “can't you see that I don't mean you any harm? You're sad, you're thinking of your father, you don't want to hear about love right now. But tomorrow or the day after, or later, I'll ask you again. Until then I'll protect you and bring you food and I won't touch you. Be sad as long as you must. You shall be able to be sad with me, or happy. You shall always do only what brings you joy.”

But his words were spoken to the wind. She didn't want to do anything that brought joy, she said bitterly and angrily. She wanted to do what brought pain. Never again was she going to think of anything resembling joy, and the sooner the wolf ate her, the better. He should go now, there was nothing he could do, they had already talked too much.

“You,” he said, “don't you see that death is everywhere, that people are dying in every house and every town, that everything is full of misery. The fury of those stupid people who burned your father is nothing but misery; it is the result of too much suffering. Look, soon death will get us too, and we'll rot in the field and the moles will play dice with our bones. Let us live a little before it comes to that and be sweet to each other. Oh, it would be such a pity for your white neck and small feet! Dear beautiful girl, do come with me. I won't touch you. I only want to see you and take care of you.”

He begged for a long time. Suddenly he understood how useless it was to court her with words and arguments. He fell silent and looked at her sadly. Her proud regal face was taut with rejection.

“That's how you are,” she finally said in a voice full of hatred and contempt. “That's how you Christians are! First you help a daughter bury her father whom your people have murdered and whose last fingernail was worth more than all of you together, and as soon as that is done, the daughter must belong to you and go off whoring with you. That's how you are. At first I thought perhaps you were a good man. But how could you be! Oh, you are pigs!”

As she spoke, Goldmund saw glowing in her eyes, behind the hatred, something that touched him and shamed him and went deep to his heart. He saw death in her eyes, not the compulsion to die but the wish to die, the wish to be allowed to die, wordless obedience, abandonment to the call of the universal mother.

“Rebekka,” he said softly, “perhaps you are right. I am not a good person, although I meant well with you. Forgive me. Only now have I understood you.”

He raised his cap and bowed to her deeply as though to a countess, and walked off with heavy heart; he had to let her perish. For a long time he was sad and felt like speaking to no one. As little as they resembled each other, that proud Jewish girl did in some ways remind him of Lydia, the knight's daughter. To love such women brought suffering. But for a while it seemed to him as though he had never loved any other women, only these two, poor fearful Lydia and the shy, bitter Rebekka.

He thought of the black glowing girl for many days and dreamed many nights of the slender-burning beauty of her body that had been destined to joy and flowering and yet was resigned to dying. Oh, that those lips and breasts should fall prey to the “pigs” and rot in the fields! Was there no power or magic to save such precious flowers? Yes, there was such a magic; they continued to live in his soul and would be fashioned and preserved by him. With terror and delight he realized that his soul was filled with images, that this long journey through the land of death had filled him with ideas for drawings and statues. Oh, how this fullness strained at him, how he longed to come to himself quietly, to let them pour out, to convert them to lasting images! He pushed on, more glowing and eager, his eyes still open and his senses still curious, but now filled with a violent longing for paper and crayon, for clay and wood, for workroom and work.

Summer was over. Many people assumed that the epidemic would cease with autumn or the beginning of winter. It was an autumn without gaiety. Goldmund passed regions in which there was no one left to harvest the fruit. It fell off the trees and rotted in the grass. At other places savage hordes from the cities came to pillage, brutally robbing and squandering.

Slowly Goldmund neared his goal, and during the last stretch he was sometimes seized with the fear that he might be caught by the plague before he got there and die in some stable. He no longer wanted to die, not before tasting the joy of standing once more in a workshop and giving himself up to creation. For the first time in his life the world was too wide for him, the German Empire too large. No pretty town could entice him to stay; no pretty peasant girl retain him longer than a night.

At one point he passed a church. On its portal stood many stone figures in deep niches supported by ornamental small columns: very old figures of angels, disciples, and martyrs, like those he had seen many times. In his cloister in Mariabronn there had been a number of figures like this. Before, as an adolescent, he had looked at them, but without passion; they had seemed beautiful and dignified to him, but a little too solemn and stiff and old-fashioned. Later, after he had been moved and delighted by Master Niklaus's sweet sad madonna at the end of his first long journey, he had found these old solemn stone figures too heavy and rigid and foreign. He had looked at them with a certain contempt and had found his master's new type of art much more lively, intense, and animated. Now, returning from a world full of images, his soul marked by the scars and tracks of violent adventures and experiences, filled with painful nostalgia for consciousness and new creation, he was suddenly touched with extraordinary power by these strict, ancient figures. Reverently he stood before the venerable images, in which the heart of long-past days continued to live on, in which, still after centuries, the fears and delights of long-since-vanished generations, frozen to stone, offered resistance to the passage of time. A feeling of admiration rose with a humble shudder in his unwieldy heart, and of horror at his wasted, burned-up life. He did what he had not done for an infinitely long time. He walked up to a confessional to confess and be punished.

There were a number of confessionals in the church, but no priests. They had died, or they lay in the hospital, or they had fled for fear of contamination. The church was empty. Goldmund's steps echoed hollow under the stone vault. He knelt before an empty confessional, closed his eyes, and whispered into the grill: “Dear God, see what has become of me. I have returned from the world. I've become an evil, useless man. I have squandered my youth like a spendthrift and little remains. I have killed, I have stolen, I have whored, I have gone idle and have eaten the bread of others. Dear Lord, why did you create us thus, why do you lead us along such roads? Are we not your children? Did your son not die for us? Are there no saints and angels to guide us? Or are they all pretty, invented stories that we tell to children, at which priests themselves laugh? I have come to doubt you, Lord. You have ill-created the world; you are keeping it in bad order. I have seen houses and streets littered with corpses. I have seen the rich barricade themselves in their houses or flee, and the poor let their brothers lie unburied, each suspicious of the other. They slaughter the Jews like cattle; I have seen many innocent people suffer and die, and many a wicked man swim in prosperity. Have you completely forgotten and abandoned us, are you completely disgusted with your creation, do you want us all to perish?”

With a sigh he stepped out through the high portal and saw the silent statues, angels and saints stand haggard and tall in their stiffly folded gowns, immobile, inaccessible, superhuman and yet created by the hand and mind of man. Strict and deaf they stood there in their narrow niches, inaccessible to any request or question. And yet they were an infinite consolation, a triumphant victory over death and despair as they stood in their dignity and beauty, surviving one dying generation of men after another. Ah, poor beautiful Rebekka should be up there too, and poor Lene who had burned with their hut, and graceful Lydia, and Master Niklaus! One day they would stand up there and endure forever. He would put them there. These figures that meant love and torture to him today, fear and passion, would stand before later generations, nameless, without history, silent symbols of human life.