Narcissus and Goldmund (34 page)

When Abbot Daniel was finished, he had Erich clean up the workshop. He hid the remaining statues under a cloth and placed only that one figure in the light. Then he went to Narcissus, and when he found that he was busy, he waited patiently until the next day. At the noon hour he took his friend to see the statue.

Narcissus stood and looked. He stood there, taking his time, examining the work with the attention and care of the scholar. Goldmund stood behind him, in silence, trying to dominate the tempest in his heart. “Oh,” he thought, “if one of us does not pass this test, it will be bad. If my work is not good enough, or if he cannot understand it, all my working here will have lost its value. I should have waited longer.”

Minutes felt like hours to him, and he thought of the time when Master Niklaus had held his first drawing in his hands. He pressed his hot humid palms together in the effort of waiting.

Narcissus turned to him, and immediately he felt relieved. In his friend's narrow face he saw flower something that had not flowered there since his boyhood years: a smile, an almost timid smile on that face of mind and will, a smile of love and surrender, a shimmer, as though all its loneliness and pride had been pierced for a second and nothing shone from it but a heart full of joy.

“Goldmund,” Narcissus said very softly, weighing his words even now, “you don't expect me to become an art expert all of a sudden. You know I'm not. I can tell you nothing about your art that you would not find ridiculous. But let me tell you one thing: at first glance I recognized our Abbot Daniel in this evangelist, and not only him, but also all the things he once meant to us: dignity, kindness, simplicity. As blessed Father Daniel stood before our youthful veneration, he stands here before me now and with him everything that was sacred to us then and that makes those years unforgettable to us. You have given me a generous gift, my friend, and not only have you given our Abbot Daniel back to me; you have opened yourself completely to me for the first time. Now I know who you are. Let us speak about it no longer; I cannot. Oh Goldmund, that this hour has been given us!”

It was quiet in the large room. His friend the Abbot was moved to the depth of his heart. Goldmund saw this and embarrassment choked his breathing.

“Yes,” he said curtly, “I am happy. But now it's time to go and eat.”

19

F
OR
two years Goldmund worked on this group and from the second year on he was given Erich as an apprentice. In the balustrade for the staircase he created a small paradise. With ecstasy he carved a graceful wilderness of trees, brush, and herbs, with birds in the branches, and the heads and bodies of animals emerging everywhere. In the midst of this peacefully sprouting primitive garden, he depicted several scenes from the life of the patriarchs. This industrious life was rarely interrupted. There was seldom a day now when working was impossible for him, when restlessness or boredom made him disgusted with his art. But when he did feel bored or restless he'd give his apprentice a chore and walk or ride into the countryside to breathe in the memory-filled perfume of the free and wandering life of the forest, or visit a peasant's daughter, or hunt, or lie for hours in the green staring into the vaulted halls of treetops, into the sprouting wilderness of ferns and juniper. He would always return after a day or two. Then he'd attack his work with renewed passion, greedily carve the luxuriant herbs, gently, tenderly coax human heads from the wood, forcefully cut a mouth, an eye, a pleated beard. Beside Erich only Narcissus knew the statues and he came often to the workshop, which at times was his favorite place in the cloister. He looked on with joy and astonishment. Everything his friend had carried in his restless, stubborn, boyish heart was coming to flower. There it grew and blossomed, a creation, a small surging world: a game perhaps, but certainly no less worthy a game than playing with logic, grammar, and theology.

Pensively he once said: “I'm learning a great deal from you, Goldmund. I'm beginning to understand what art is. Formerly it seemed to me that, compared to thinking and science, it could not be taken altogether seriously. I thought something like this: since man is a dubious mixture of mind and matter, since the mind unlocks recognition of the eternal to him, while matter pulls him down and binds him to the transitory, he should strive away from the senses and toward the mind if he wishes to elevate his life and give it meaning. I did pretend, out of habit, to hold art in high esteem, but actually I was arrogant and looked down upon it. Only now do I realize how many paths there are to knowledge and that the path of the mind is not the only one and perhaps not even the best one. It is my way, of course; and I'll stay on it. But I see that you, on the opposite road, on the road of the senses, have seized the secret of being just as deeply and can express it in a much more lively fashion than most thinkers are able to do.”

“Now you understand,” Goldmund said, “that I can't conceive of thoughts without images?”

“I have long since understood it. Our thinking is a constant process of converting things to abstractions, a looking away from the sensory, an attempt to construct a purely spiritual world. Whereas you take the least constant, the most mortal things to your heart, and in their very mortality show the meaning of the world. You don't look away from the world; you give yourself to it, and by your sacrifice to it raise it to the highest, a parable of eternity. We thinkers try to come closer to God by pulling the mask of the world away from His face. You come closer to Him by loving His creation and re-creating it. Both are human endeavors, and necessarily imperfect, but art is more innocent.”

“I don't know, Narcissus. But in overcoming life, in resisting despair, you thinkers and theologians seem to succeed better. I have long since stopped envying you for your learning, dear friend, but I do envy your calm, your detachment, your peace.”

“You should not envy me, Goldmund. There is no peace of the sort you imagine. Oh, there is peace of course, but not anything that lives within us constantly and never leaves us. There is only the peace that must be won again and again, each new day of our lives. You don't see me fight, you don't know my struggles as Abbot, my struggles in the prayer cell. A good thing that you don't. You only see that I am less subject to moods than you, and you take that for peace. But my life is struggle; it is struggle and sacrifice like every decent life; like yours, too.”

“Let's not quarrel about it, Narcissus. You don't see all my struggles either. And I don't know whether or not you are able to understand how I feel when I think that this work will soon be finished, that it will be taken away and set in its place. Then I will hear a few praises and return to a bare workroom, depressed about all the things that I did not achieve in my work, things you others can't even see, and inside I'll feel as robbed and empty as the workshop.”

“That may be so,” said Narcissus. “Neither of us can ever understand the other completely in such things. But there is one realization all men of good will share: in the end our works make us feel ashamed, we have to start out again, and each time the sacrifice has to be made anew.”

A few weeks later Goldmund's big work was finished and set in its place. An old experience repeated itself: his work became the possession of others, was looked at, judged, praised; and he was lauded, honored, but his heart and his workshop stood empty and he no longer knew whether the work had been worth the sacrifice. On the day of the unveiling he was invited to the fathers' table for a festive meal at which the oldest wine of the house was served. Goldmund enjoyed the excellent fish and venison, and even more than by the old wine was warmed by the interest and joy of Narcissus, who praised him and honored his work.

A new work, which the Abbot had asked for and ordered, was already sketched out, an altar for the Mary chapel in Neuzell, which belonged to the cloister and in which a father from Mariabronn officiated as priest. For this altar Goldmund wanted to make a statue of the madonna, and to eternalize in her one of the unforgettable figures of his youth, beautiful fearful Lydia, the knight's daughter. Otherwise this commission was of little importance to him; it seemed suitable to him for Erich's assistant's project. If Erich did well, he'd have a good permanent partner who could replace him, free him to do those works that alone were still close to his heart. With Erich, he chose the wood for the altar and had him prepare it. Often Goldmund left him alone; he had resumed his roaming, his long walks in the woods. Once he was absent for several days, and Erich notified the Abbot, who also feared that Goldmund might have left for good. But he came back, worked for a week on the statue of Lydia, then began to roam again.

He was troubled. Since the completion of his big work his life had been in disorder. He missed early mass; he was deeply restless and dissatisfied. Now he often thought of Master Niklaus and wondered if he himself would not become soon what Niklaus had been, a hard-working and settled master in his craft, but unfree and unyoung. Recently a small adventure had given him food for thought: on one of his wandering days he had found a young peasant girl named Franziska, whom he liked. He had tried to charm her, had employed all the arts of seduction he knew. The girl listened gladly to his chatting, laughed delighted at his jokes, but she refused his advances, and for the first time he realized that, to a young woman, he seemed an old man. He had not gone back, but he had not forgotten. Franziska was right. He was older; he felt it himself, and it was not because of a few premature gray hairs and a few wrinkles around his eyes, but rather something in his being, in his mind. He found himself old, found that he had become strangely similar to Master Niklaus. With ill humor he observed himself and shrugged. He had grown cautious and tame; he was no longer an eagle or a hare; he had become a domestic animal. When he roamed about now, he was looking for the perfume of the past, for memories of his former adventures rather than for new freedom. Like a dog, he looked longingly and distrustfully for the lost scent. And after he had been away for a day or two, loafed a bit and caroused, something drew him irresistibly back. He had a bad conscience. He felt this workshop waiting for him, felt responsible for the altar he had begun, for the prepared wood, for his assistant Erich. He was no longer free, no longer young. He made a firm resolution: after the Lydia-Mary was finished, he wanted to go on a trip and try wandering once more. It was not good to live in a cloister for so long, with men only. It might be good for monks, but not for him. One could speak intelligently with men, and they understood an artist's work, but all the rest—chatting, tenderness, games, love, pleasure without thought—did not flourish among men, for that one needed women, wandering, freedom, and ever new impressions. Everything around him was a little gray and serious here, a little heavy and manly, and he had become contaminated; it had crept into his blood.

The thought of a trip consoled him. He kept to his work courageously in order to be free sooner. And as Lydia's figure gradually came toward him out of the wood, as he draped the strict folds of her dress over her knees, a deep, painful joy overtook him, a nostalgic falling in love with the image, with the beautiful shy girl figure, with his memory of that time, with his first love, his first travels, his youth. Reverently he worked at the delicate image, felt it one with the best within him, with his youth, with his most tender memories. It was a joy to form her inclined neck, her friendly-sad mouth, her elegant hands, the long fingers, the beautifully arched cups of her fingernails. Erich, too, would stare at the figure with admiration and loving respect whenever he had a free moment.

When she was almost finished, Goldmund showed her to the Abbot. Narcissus said: “That is a beautiful work, my dear friend. We have nothing in the whole cloister that measures up to it. I must confess to you that I worried about you on several occasions during the last months. I saw that you were restless and disturbed, and when you disappeared and stayed away for more than a day, I sometimes thought with sorrow: perhaps he's never coming back. And now you have carved this wonderful statue. I am happy for you and proud of you.”

“Yes,” Goldmund said, “the statue turned out rather well. But now listen to me, Narcissus. In order to make this a good statue, I needed my entire youth, my wandering, my love affairs, my courtship of many women. That is the source at which I have drunk. Soon the well will be empty; I feel dry in my heart. I'll finish this Mary, but then I'll take a good long vacation, I don't know for how long. I'll retrace my youth and all that was once so dear to me. Can you understand that? Well, yes. You know I was your guest, and I've never taken any payment for my work here…”

“I often offered it to you,” interrupted Narcissus.

“Yes, and now I'll accept it. I'll have new clothes made, and when they're ready, I'll ask you for a horse and a few gold pieces and then I'll ride out into the world. Say nothing, Narcissus, and do not be sad. It is not that I don't like it here any more; I couldn't be better off anywhere else. Something else is at stake. Will you fulfill my wish?”

They spoke about it no more. Goldmund had made for himself a plain riding outfit and boots, and as summer drew near, he completed the Mary figure as though it were his last work. With loving care he gave the hands, the face, the hair their finishing touch. It might almost have seemed that he was prolonging his work, that he was quite happy to be slightly delayed again and again by these final delicate touches to the figure. Days passed, and always there was something new for him to arrange. Although Narcissus felt deeply sad about the approaching farewell, he sometimes smiled a little about Goldmund's being in love, about his not being able to tear himself away from the Mary statue.

But one day Goldmund surprised him; suddenly he came to take his leave. He had made up his mind during the night. In his new clothes, with a new cap, he came to Narcissus to say goodbye. He had already confessed and communed some time ago. Now he came to bid farewell and be given the blessing for the road. The leavetaking came hard to both of them, and Goldmund acted with a brusqueness and indifference he did not feel in his heart.