The White Dominican (10 page)

“Why were you so sad just now, my love? Why did you say you wanted to say farewell to the bench? Tell me you’ll never leave me.”

“Sometime or other it must be, my own, dear child. And the time is coming nearer. No, no, there’s no need to be sad. It might still be a long time. Let’s not think about it.”

“I know what you are talking about, Ophelia.” My eyes are brimming with tears and my throat is burning. “You mean when you will go to the capital to be an actress, and we won’t see each other any more. Do you imagine I haven’t been thinking of it, dreading it day and night? I am certain I won’t be able to bear the separation. But you said yourself that it will be a year before you have to leave?”

“Yes, a year … at least.”

“And by that time I will be sure to have found a reason for going to the capital myself, so that we can be together. I will keep on asking my father, pleading with him until he lets me study there. Then when I have a profession and can support myself, we will get married and never part again … You’re not saying anything, Ophelia, don’t you love me any more?” I ask anxiously.

From her silence I can read her thoughts, and they wound me to the heart. She is thinking how much younger than her I am, and that I am building castles in the air. I know that too, but I refuse to … to think that we might ever have to part. I want us to intoxicate ourselves with the belief that miracles are possible.

“Ophelia, listen –”

“Please, please, don’t say anything”, she pleads. “Let me dream.”

We snuggle up close to each other and sit there for a long time in silence. It is as if the boat were motionless and the steep, white sandy banks were slowly gliding past in the bright moonlight.

Suddenly she gives a start, as if she were awaking from sleep. I give her hand a comforting squeeze, for I think some noise has frightened her. Then she says, “Will you promise me something, Christl?”

I search for words of reassurance, I want to tell her that I would go through torture for her, if it were necessary.

“Will you promise me that you will … that you will bury me under the seat in the garden, when I am dead?”

“Ophelia!”

“Only you alone may bury me, and only in that spot. Do you hear? No one else must be there, and no one must know where my grave is. Do you hear? I love the old bench so much. Then I will always feel as if I am waiting for you.”

“Ophelia, don’t say such things! Why are you thinking about death just now? When you die, I will die with you, you know that. Can’t you feel –”

She stops me before I can finish. “Christl, my own, don’t ask me why, just promise me what I ask.”

“I promise, Ophelia, I give you my solemn promise, even if I cannot understand what you mean.”

“Thank you, thank you my dear, dear child. Now I know you will keep it.”

She presses her cheek against mine, and I can feel her tears falling on my face.

“You’re crying, Ophelia. Won’t you confide in me, tell me why you are so unhappy? Are they tormenting you at home? Please, please, tell me, Ophelia. I get so miserable when you are silent like this, that I don’t know what to do.”

“Yes, you’re right, I will stop crying. It’s so beautiful here, so quiet, so magically still. I am so unutterably happy that you are with me, my own.”

And we kiss, wildly, passionately, until we almost faint with love.

All at once I feel full of a confident optimism about the future. It will surely turn out the way I pictured it to myself during those quiet nights. It must!

“Do you think”, I ask, full of a secret jealousy, “you will enjoy being an actress? Do you imagine it will really be so wonderful when people applaud you and throw flowers onto the stage?” I kneel down before her, she has her hands clasped in her lap and is looking thoughtfully out across the surface of the water into the distance.

“I have never thought about how it will be, not even once … It seems to me repulsive and ugly to stand up in front of people and act out delight or mental torment before them. It will be ugly if it is all feigned, and obscene if I really feel it and then a moment later throw off the mask to accept their thanks as reward. And to do that evening after evening, and always at the same time! I feel that I am being asked to prostitute my soul.”

“Then you must not do it!” I exclaim, every muscle taut with determination. “Tomorrow, as soon as it is light, I will speak with my father. I know that he will help you; I’m sure of it! He is so immeasurably good and tender-hearted. He will not allow them to compel you –”

“No, Christl, you will not do that!” she interrupts in a calm, firm voice. “It is not for my mother’s sake that I am asking you not to do it; it would destroy all her vain plans, but I don’t … I don’t love her. I can’t help it, I’m ashamed of her”, she continues in low voice, her face turned away from me, “but I love my … my … foster-father. Why should I not say openly that he is not my real father? You know, don’t you, even though we have never spoken about it? No one told me, but I know; even as a child I felt it, felt it even more clearly than one can know something. He has not the faintest idea that I am not his daughter. I would be happier if he did know. Then perhaps he would not love me so much and would stop torturing himself to death for my sake.

Oh, you have no idea how often, even as a child, I was close to telling him. But there is a dreadful wall between him and me. It was my mother who raised it. Ever since I can remember I have never been allowed to speak more than a few words with him alone, as a little girl I was never allowed to sit on his knee or kiss him. ‘Don’t touch him, you’ll make yourself dirty’, she always used to say. I was always the shining princess and he was the grubby, despised slave. It is a miracle that horrible, poisonous seed has not taken root in my heart. I thank God that He has not allowed it … Sometimes, on the other hand, I think that if I really had turned into such an unfeeling, arrogant monster, then I would not feel torn apart by this indescribable pity for him, and I rail at destiny for not having let me be like that.

Often I choke on every bite I take at the thought that he has worked till his hands bled to put it on the table. Only yesterday I jumped up from the table and ran down to him. My heart was so full, that I thought that this time I would tell him everything. I wanted to say, ‘Drive us from your door like stray dogs, my mother and I, for that is all we are worth. And him, ‘him’, that cruel, despicable bloodsucker, who is probably my real father! Throttle him! Take your honest carpenter’s tools and strike him dead!’ I wanted to scream at him, ‘Hate me, with a hatred beyond forgiveness’, so that I should be finally freed from this terrible, burning pity.

How many thousand times have I prayed to God, ‘Send hatred into his heart.’ But I think it is more likely that this river should flow back upstream than that his heart should harbour hatred …

My hand was already on the latch of the workshop door, when I looked in through the window. He was standing at the table, writing my name on it with a piece of chalk. The only word he can write! At that, my resolution left me. For ever.

I know what was bound to happen, if I had gone in to confront him: either he would not have listened to a word I was saying, but just stood there stammering, “Fräulein Ophelia, my daughter, what an honour!”, as he does every time he sees me, or he would have understood and … and … gone mad.

You see, my own, that’s why you cannot, must not help me.

Could I destroy the only hope he has? Could I be the one to make his mind lose what grip on reality it has? No, there is only one course left open to me: to become that for which he slaves away day and night, a shining star; only, it is true, in his eyes, in my own I will be a spiritual prostitute.

Don’t cry, my child, my own dear child, don’t cry now. Have I caused you pain? Come here and dry your tears. Would you love me more if I thought differently? I gave you a shock, that’s all, dear, dear Christl. Look, perhaps it’s not as bad as I portrayed it. Perhaps I’m just being sentimental and seeing everything distorted and out of perspective. If you spend all day declaiming ‘Ophelia’, then some of it sticks. That is the horrid thing about this wretched acting business, it starts to infect your soul.

Look, perhaps a marvellous miracle will happen and I’ll be a resounding failure in the capital, then everything will turn out fine.”

She laughed, loud and long, and kissed away my tears, but it was only a pretence she put on to comfort me, and I sensed it too clearly to join in her laughter. Mingled with my deep sadness for her is a feeling that almost crushes me. Sorrowfully I realise that it is not just in years that she is older than me, no, compared with her I am a child. All the time since we have known each other, she has concealed all her grief and torment from me. And I? I have taken every opportunity to pour out my trifling boyish worries to her.

It is as if this cruel recognition, that her soul is older and more mature than mine, were secretly sawing off the roots of all my hopes. She must be feeling something similar, for, however passionate and tender her embrace and her repeated kisses, her caresses suddenly seem to me to be those of a mother.

My lips pour out all the ardent words I can think of, but the wildest, most reckless thoughts are racing round my mind. ‘There must be something I can do! Deeds alone can make me her equal. How can I help her? How can I save her?’

I feel an awful, black shadow rising up within me, a shapeless something reaching for my heart; I hear the whisper of a hundred hissing voices in my ear, ‘Her father, that moronic carpenter, is the barrier! Tear it down! Get rid of him. Who will see it? What are you afraid of, you coward?’

Ophelia lets go of my hand. She shivers. I can see that it is a shudder of fear.

Has she guessed my thoughts? I wait for her to say something, anything that will give me a hint as to what I should do. Everything inside me is waiting: my mind, my heart and my blood; the whispers in my ear have stopped and are waiting, waiting and listening in expectation of victory.

Then she says – I can hear her teeth chattering with inner cold, and she murmurs as much as she speaks, “Perhaps the Angel of Death will have mercy on him.”

The black shadow within me suddenly flares up into a terrible white blaze, filling me from head to foot. I jump up and grasp the oars. As if it is the sign it had been waiting for, the boat accelerates of its own accord, and we shoot out into midstream, towards the bank where Baker’s Row runs.

The glowing eyes of the houses are shining out into the darkness once more.

The swift current is sweeping us towards the weir where it leaves the town. I row for all I am worth across it towards our house, white foam creaming along the sides of the boat.

Every stroke strengthens my wild determination. The leather straps in the rowlocks creak a rhythmical, ‘Murder, murder, murder’.

Then I am making fast at a post on the embankment and lifting Ophelia out of the boat. She seems light as a feather in my arms. The feeling that, at a stroke, I have become a man in body and soul fills me with an unbounded, animal joy; quickly I carry Ophelia past the light of the lamp into the darkness of the alleyway.

We stay there for a long time, embracing each other in an all-consuming rage of passion. She is no longer a tender mother, once more she is my lover.

A noise behind us! I ignore it; what is it to me?!

Then she has vanished into the doorway of the house.

The light is still on in the carpenter’s workshop. There is a gleam from the dusty window-panes; the lathe is humming.

I put my hand on the latch and cautiously push it down. A thin pencil of light shines and then disappears as I softly close the door again. I creep up to the window to see where the old man is. He is bent over the lathe, holding a glittering steel chisel in his hand; white, paper-thin wood shavings curl up between his fingers and drop into the murk of the room, piling up round the coffin like so many dead snakes.

I suddenly feel weak at the knees. I can hear my breath whistling in my throat. I have to lean against the wall to stop myself from falling forward through the glass of the window.

‘Can I really become a murderer?’ The piteous cry tears at my breast. ‘Can I fall on him from behind and strike him dead, this poor, old man who has worn himself out in the service of my Ophelia?’

Then: a jolt, and the lathe is still. The humming stops. A sudden deathly hush snaps at my throat.

Mutschelknaus has straightened up; his head on one side, he seems to be listening. Then he puts the chisel down and comes, hesitantly, over toward the window. Closer and closer. His eyes fixed on mine.

I know that he cannot see me as I am standing in darkness and he is in the light; but even if I knew that he could see me, I would still be unable to flee, for all the strength has drained out of me.

He has slowly come right up to the window and is staring out into the blackness. There is only a hand’s-breadth between our eyes, and I can see every wrinkle in his face. It has an expression of boundless exhaustion. Then he passes his hand slowly over his forehead and looks at his fingers, half in astonishment, half musing, as if he had seen blood on them and did not know how it came to be there.

Suddenly his features are suffused with a faint ray of hope and joy, and he bows his head, patient and resigned, like a martyr awaiting the death-blow.

I can understand what his spirit is saying to me!

His dull wits do not know why they let him do all this. His body is merely the outward expression of his soul, which is whispering, ‘Release me for the sake of my dear daughter.’

Now I realise that it must be. It is merciful death itself that will guide my hand. Can my love for Ophelia be less than his? Only now do I feel, in the deepest recesses of my soul, what Ophelia has to suffer daily, eaten away by the torment of her pity for him, the most pitiful of all the wretched. It burns into me, like the shirt of Nessus.

Will I be able to carry out the deed? It is impossible for me to imagine it.

Could I smash his skull with that cold chisel there?