The White Dominican (6 page)

Only then will the point be reached where the long road ends. Then you can look the sun in the face without it burning your eyes. Then you can say, ‘I have found a goal because I sought none.’ Then the saints will be poor in understanding compared with you, for they will not know what you know: that eternity and rest can be the same as the road and the infinite.”

These last words were far beyond my comprehension; it was only much later, when my blood was cool and my body manly, that they reappeared, clear and alive. But that morning I heard them with a deaf ear, I just looked at Baron Jöcher and, in a sudden flash of recognition, I realised what it was that had struck me as different about him, an odd thing, his goitre was on the right side of his neck, instead of the left as usual.

Today it sounds ridiculous, but I was seized with a nameless horror: the room, the Baron, the bust of Dante on the shelf, myself, for one brief second everything was transformed into ghosts, so spectral and unreal that my heart froze in mortal fear.

That was the end of what I experienced that night.

Immediately afterwards I awoke in my bed, trembling with fear. The daylight was bright behind the curtains. I ran to the window: a clear winter’s morning!

I went into the next room; the Baron was sitting at his desk, reading and wearing his usual working clothes.

“You’ve slept in late this morning, my lad”, he called to me with a laugh when he saw me by the door, still in my nightshirt, my teeth chattering with inner cold. “I had to go and put out the lamps in the town instead of you. The first time for many years. But what’s the matter with you?”

A quick glance at his neck and the last drops of fear trickled out of my blood: his goitre was back on its usual left side and the bust of Dante was in the same place as ever.

Another second, and the earth had once more swallowed up the dreamworld; there was an echo fading in my ear, as if the lid of the coffin had fallen to, and then everything was forgotten.

With growing haste, I told my foster-father everything that had happened to me; the only thing I held back was my meeting with the old carpenter, Mutschelknaus. Only at one point I asked, in passing, “Do you know Herr Mutschelknaus?”

“Of course”, he answered cheerfully. “He lives down below. A poor, poor wretch, by the way.”

“And his daughter … Fräulein Ophelia?”

“Yes, I know … Ophelia as well”, said the Baron, with a sudden earnest air. He gave me a long, sad look, “Ophelia as well.”

Quickly I went back to the nightwalk, for I could feel a blush spreading over my cheeks. “Papa, in my dream, why did you have your … your left neck on the other side?”

The Baron thought for a long time. When he began to speak, he kept searching for the right word, as if he found it difficult to adapt what he had to say to my still undeveloped understanding:

“To make that clear to you, my son, I would have to give you an exceptionally complicated lecture lasting a whole week, and even then you wouldn’t understand it. You’ll have to content yourself with the few random thoughts I’ll throw at you. Will you catch them? True teaching can only come from life or, better still, dreams.

Learning to dream is thus the first stage of wisdom. The world can give you cleverness; wisdom flows from your dreaming, whether it is a waking ‘dream’ (in which case we say, ‘something just occurred to me’ or, ‘it has just dawned on me’), or a sleeping dream, in which we are instructed through symbolic images. Likewise all true art comes from the realm of dreams. The gift of invention as well. Men speak in words, dream in living images. The fact that they are taken from the happenings of the day has deceived many into thinking they are meaningless; which they are, of course, if you don’t pay them any attention! In that case, the organ through which we dream will atrophy, just like a limb we do not use, and a valuable guide will fall silent: the bridge to another life, that is of much greater value than earthly life, will collapse in ruins. Dreaming is the footbridge between waking and sleeping; it is also the footbridge between life and death.

You mustn’t take me for a great sage, my boy, just because last night my double told you so much that might seem marvellous to you. I have not yet reached the stage when I can claim that he and I are one and the same person. It is true, however, that I am more at home in that dreamland than many other people. I have become visible over there and lasting, so to speak, but I still always have to shut my eyes here when I want to open them over there, and vice versa. There are people for whom that is no longer necessary, but very, very few.

You remember that you could not see yourself, and had neither body, nor hands, nor eyes, when you lay down in the coffin again on the white road?

But the schoolboy couldn’t see you, either! He walked right through you, as if you were empty air!

Do you know where that came from? You did not take the memory of the form of your earthly body over to the other side. Only someone who can do that – as I have learnt to – is visible to himself on the other side. He will create for himself a second body in dreamland, which will even become visible to others later on, however strange that might sound to you at the moment. In order to achieve that, there are methods” – with a grin he pointed at the print of Leonardo’s
Last Supper –
“which I will teach you when your body is mature and no longer needs to be bound. Anyone who knows them is capable of raising a ghost. With some people this ‘becoming visible in the other realm’ happens of its own accord, completely without method, but almost always only one part of them comes alive, usually the hand. That then often performs the most pointless acts, for the head is absent, and people who observe the effect cross themselves and talk of fiendish phantoms. You are thinking, how can a hand do something without its owner being aware of it? Have you never seen the tail of a lizard break off and writhe in apparent agony while the lizard stands by, in complete indifference? It is something like that.

The realm over there is just as real” (“or unreal”, he added in an aside) “as this earthly realm. Each on its own is only a half, only together do they form a whole. You know the story of Siegfried: his sword was broken in two pieces; the cunning dwarf Alberich could not forge it together, because he was a creature of the earth, but Siegfried could.

Siegfried’s sword is a symbol of that double life: the way to weld it together into one piece is a secret one must know, if one wants to be a knight.

The realm beyond is in fact even more real than this earthly one. The one is a reflection of the other, that is to say the earthly one is a reflection of ‘beyond’, not vice versa. Anything that is on the right over there” – he pointed to his goitre – “is on the left here.

Now do you understand?

That other man was my double. What he said to you I have only just now heard from your lips. It did not come from his knowledge, much less from mine; it came from yours!

Yes, yes, my lad, don’t stare at me like that, it came from yours! Or rather”, he ran his hand caressingly through my hair, “from the knowledge of the Christopher within you! Anything I can tell you, as one human animal to another, comes out of human lips and goes into a human ear, and is forgotten when the brain decays. The only talk you can learn from, is from talking to – yourself! When you were talking to my double, you were talking to yourself! Anything a human being can tell you is, on the one hand, too little, and, on the other, too much. Sometimes it comes too soon, at others too late, and always when your soul is asleep. And now, my son”, he turned back to his desk, “it’s time you got dressed. You’re surely not going to run around in your nightshirt all day?”

The memories of my life have become like precious stones to me; when the time for observing them comes, and I have found a human hand I can bend to my will to write them down, I raise them from the watery depths of the past. Then, when I listen to the string of words as to a story from other lips, I feel as if they are glittering gems running through my fingers, and the past becomes present once more. To my eyes, they all gleam, the dull as well as the shining ones, the dark as well as the bright; I can look on them all with a smile in my heart, for I am for ever ‘dissolved with corpse and sword’.

But there is one jewel among them which I can only raise with trembling hand. I cannot play with it as I can with the others. It gives off the sweet, intoxicating power of Mother Earth which goes straight to my heart.

It is like alexandrite, a precious stone which is dark green by day but suddenly shines with a red glow when you stare into its depths in the still of night.

I carry it with me like a drop of crystallised heart’s-blood, ever fearful that it might dissolve into liquid once more and scorch me, if I should bear it close to my breast for too long.

For that reason I have shut away the memory of that span of time that for me bears the name of Ophelia and is a brief spring followed by a long autumn, as if in a glass ball in which lives the boy I used to be, half child, half youth. I look through the glass sides at myself, but it is like looking at a figure in a waxworks: it has lost all power to ensnare me with its magic.

And just as I see this image before me, awaking, changing, fading, so will I – a reporter who has left this world – describe it.

All the windows of the town are open, their ledges red with the geraniums in bloom; the chestnut trees that line the banks of the river are festooned with living, scented, white spring candles. The air beneath the pale-blue, cloudless sky is mild and still. Over the meadows there is a flutter of colourful butterflies, as if a gentle breeze were playing with a thousand scraps of coloured tissue paper.

In the bright, moonlit nights, the eyes of the cats, spitting and yowling with the pangs of love, glitter from the silvery roofs.

I am sitting on the banisters in the stair-well, listening to the sounds coming from the open window of the third floor across the alley. The curtains are drawn, so I cannot see into the room, but two voices – one a deep, declamatory, man’s voice, that I hate, and the other a soft, shy girl’s voice – are carrying on a conversation which I find incomprehensible:

“To-o be-e or not to-o be-e, that is the question. Nymph, in thy orisons, be a-all my sins remember’d.”

“Good my Lord, how does your honour for this many a day?” breathes the shy voice.

“Get thee-ee to a nunnery, Ophelia.”

I am very eager to hear what will come next, but suddenly, as if the speaker had turned into a clockwork toy, the spring of which is beginning to unwind, the male voice, without any obvious reason, becomes a low, hurried gabble from which all I can fish out are a few meaningless sentences, “Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; if thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, or, if thou needs marry, marry a fool, and quickly too. Farewell.”

To which the girl’s voice shyly replies, “O! what a noble mind is here o’erthrown. O heavenly powers, restore him!”

Then both are silent, and I hear sparse applause. After half an hour of deathly hush, during which the smell of a greasy roast wafts from the window, a well-chewed cigar-butt usually flies, still glowing, out between the curtains, bounces off the wall of our house in a shower of sparks and drops onto the cobbles of the alleyway.

I sit there until late in the afternoon, staring across at the house. My heart gives a joyful start each time the curtains move. Will Ophelia come to the window? And if it is she, should I leave my hiding place and show myself?

I have picked a red rose; will I dare to throw it across to her? I ought to have something to say to her as I do. But what?

It does not come to that, however. The rose begins to droop in my hot hand and there is no sign of life from across the alleyway. Only the smell of the meat has given way to that of roasted coffee.

Ah! At last. A woman’s hands push the curtains apart. For a moment my head spins, then I clench my teeth and force myself to throw the rose through the open window.

A soft cry of surprise, then – Frau Aglaia Mutschelknaus appears at the window.

I cannot duck down quickly enough, she has already seen me.

I feel the blood drain from my cheeks; all is revealed.

But destiny has other ideas. Frau Mutschelknaus simpers, places the rose on her bosom, as if on a plinth, and bashfully lowers her eyes; then, when she raises her soulful gaze once more and realises that it is only me, a shadow flits across her features. But she inclines her head in thanks, and the simper widens to reveal one of her canines.

I feel as if a skull had smiled at me, and yet I am relieved! If she had guessed for whom the flower was intended, it would have all been over. An hour later I am even happy that it turned out the way it did. From now on I can leave a whole bunch of flowers on the window-ledge for Ophelia every morning: her mother will assume they are for herself.

Perhaps she’ll even think they come from my foster-father, Baron Jöcher!

Life certainly teaches you a trick or two.

For a moment I have a nasty taste in my mouth, as if the mean thought had poisoned me, but the next minute it has gone, and I am wondering whether the best plan would not be to go to the cemetery straight away to steal some fresh roses. Later on people come to pray at the graves, and in the evening the gates are locked.

Down in Baker’s Row I meet Herr Paris, the actor, coming out of the alley in his creaky boots.

He knows who I am, I can tell by his look.

He is a fat, old, clean-shaven man with flabby cheeks and an alcoholic nose that quivers at every step. He is wearing a kind of loose velvet beret, his cravat is fastened by a pin with a silver laurel wreath on it, and across his paunch hangs a watch-chain woven from tresses of blond hair. His jacket and waistcoat are of brown velvet, his legs are tightly encased in bottle-green trousers, which are so long that at the bottom they have folds like a concertina.