Confusion (5 page)

Yet again, when he suddenly ended with a quotation from Goethe on Shakespeare, our excitement impetuously broke out. Yet again he leaned against the desk exhausted, as he had leaned there yesterday, his face pale but with little runs and trills of the nerves twitching over it, and oddly enough the afterglow of the sensuality of release gleamed in his eyes, as if in a woman who has just left an overpowering embrace. I felt too shy to speak to him now, but by chance his glance fell on me. And obviously he sensed my enthusiastic gratitude, for he smiled at me in a friendly manner, and leaning slightly towards me, hand on my shoulder, reminded me to go to see him that evening as we had agreed.

I was at his door at seven o'clock precisely, and with what trepidation did I, a mere boy as I was, cross that threshold for the first time! Nothing is more passionate than a young man's veneration, nothing more timid, more feminine than its uneasy sense of modesty. I was shown into his study, a semi-twilit room in which the first things I saw, looking through the glass panes over them, were the coloured spines of a large number of books. Over the desk hung Raphael's
School of Athens
, a picture which (as he told me later) he particularly loved, because all kinds of teaching, all forms of the intellect are symbolically united here in perfect synthesis. I was seeing it for the first time, and instinctively I thought I traced a similarity to his own brow in the highly individual face of Socrates. A figure in white marble gleamed behind me, an attractively scaled-down bust of the Paris
Ganymede
, and beside it there was a
St Sebastian
by an old German master, tragic beauty set, probably not by chance, beside its equivalent enjoying life to the full. I waited with my heart beating fast, as breathless as all the nobly silent artistic figures around me; they spoke to me of a new kind of intellectual beauty, a beauty that I had never suspected and that still was not clear to me, although I already felt prepared to turn to it with fraternal emotion. But I had no time to look around me, for at this point the man I was waiting for came in and approached me, once again showing me that softly enveloping gaze, smouldering like a hidden fire, and to my own surprise thawing out the most secret part of me. I immediately spoke as freely to him as to a friend, and when he asked about my studies in Berlin the tale of my father's visit suddenly sprang to my lips—I took fright even as I spoke of it—and I assured this stranger of my secret vow to devote myself to my studies with the utmost application. He looked at me, as if moved. Then he said: “Not just with application, my boy, but above all with passion. If you do not feel impassioned you'll be a schoolmaster at best—one must approach these things from within and always, always with passion.” His voice grew warmer and warmer, the room darker and darker. He told me a great deal about his own youth, how he too had begun foolishly and only later discovered his own inclinations—I must just have courage, he said, and he would help me as far as lay within him; I must not scruple to turn to him with any questions, ask anything I wanted to know. No one had ever before spoken to me with such sympathy, with such deep understanding; I trembled with gratitude, and was glad of the darkness that hid my wet eyes.

I could have spent hours there with him, taking no notice of the time, but there was a soft knock on the door. It opened, and a slender, shadowy figure came in. He rose and introduced the newcomer. “My wife.” The slender shadow came closer in the gloom, placed a delicate hand in mine, and then said, turning to him: “Supper's ready.” “Yes, yes, I know,” he replied hastily and (or so at least it seemed to me) with a touch of irritation. A chilly note suddenly seemed to have entered his voice, and when the electric light came on he was once again the ageing man of that sober lecture hall, bidding me good night with a casual gesture.

I spent the next two weeks in a passionate frenzy of reading and learning. I scarcely left my room, I ate my meals standing up so as not to waste time, I studied unceasingly, without a break, almost without sleep. I was like that prince in the Oriental fairy tale who, removing seal after seal from the doors of locked chambers, finds more and more jewels and precious stones piled in each room and makes his way with increasing avidity through them all, eager to reach the last. In just the same way I left one book to plunge into another, intoxicated by each of them, never sated by any: my impetuosity had moved on to intellectual concerns. I had a first glimmering of the trackless expanses of the world of the mind, which I found as seductive as the adventure of city life had been, but at the same time I felt a boyish fear that I would not be up to it, so I economized on sleep, on pleasures, on conversation and any form of diversion merely so that I could make full use of my time, which I had never felt so valuable before. But what most inflamed my diligence was vanity, a wish to come up to my teacher's expectations, not to disappoint his confidence, to win a smile of approval, I wanted him to be conscious of me as I was conscious of him. Every fleeting occasion was a test; I was constantly spurring my clumsy but now curiously inspired mind on to impress and surprise him; if he mentioned an author with whom I was unfamiliar during a lecture, I would go in search of the writer's works that very afternoon, so that next day I could show off by parading my knowledge in the class discussion. A wish uttered in passing which the others scarcely noticed was transformed in my mind into an order; in this way a casual condemnation of the way students were always smoking was enough for me to throw away my lighted cigarette at once, and give up the habit he deplored immediately and for ever. His words, like an evangelist's, bestowed grace and were binding on me too; I was always on the qui vive, attentive and intent upon greedily snapping up every chance remark he happened to drop. I seized on every word, every gesture, and when I came home I bent my mind entirely to the passionate recapitulation and memorizing of what I had heard; my impatient ardour felt that he alone was my guide, and all the other students merely enemies whom my aspiring will urged itself daily to outstrip and outperform.

Either because he sensed how much he meant to me, or because my impetuosity appealed to him, my teacher soon distinguished me by showing his favour publicly. He gave me advice on what to read, although I was a newcomer to the class he brought me to the fore in general debate in an almost unseemly manner, and I was often permitted to visit him for a confidential talk in the evening. On these occasions he would usually take a book down from the shelf and read aloud in his sonorous voice, which always rose an octave and grew more resonant when he was excited. He read from poems and tragedies, or he explained controversial cruxes; in those first two weeks of exhilaration I learned more of the nature of art than in all my previous nineteen years. We were always alone during this evening hour. Then, about eight o'clock, there would be a soft knock on the door: his wife letting him know that supper was ready. But she never again entered the room, obviously obeying instructions not to interrupt our conversation.

So fourteen days had gone by, days crammed to the full, hot days of early summer, when one morning, like a steel spring stretched too taut, my ability to work deserted me. My teacher had already warned me not to overdo my industry, advising me to set a day aside now and then to go out and about in the open air—and now his prophecy was suddenly fulfilled: I awoke from a stupefied sleep feeling dazed, and when I tried to read I found that the characters on the page flickered and blurred like pinheads. Slavishly obeying every least word my teacher uttered, I immediately decided to follow his advice and take a break from the many days avidly devoted to my education in order to amuse myself. I set out that very morning, for the first time made a thorough exploration of the town, parts of which were very old, climbed the hundreds of steps to the church tower in the cause of physical exercise, and looking out from the viewing platform at the top discovered a little lake in the green spaces just outside town. As a coast-dwelling northerner, I loved to swim, and there on the tower, from which even the dappled meadows looked like shimmering pools of green water, an irresistible longing to throw myself into that beloved element again suddenly overcame me like a gust of wind blowing from my home. No sooner had I made my way to the swimming pool after lunch and begun splashing about in the water than my body began to feel at ease again, the muscles in my arms stretched flexibly and powerfully for the first time in weeks, and within half-an-hour the sun and wind on my bare skin had turned me back into the impetuous lad of the old days who would scuffle vigorously with his friends and venture his life in daredevil exploits. Striking out strongly, exercising my body, I forgot all about books and scholarship. Returning to the passion of which I had been deprived so long, in the obsessive way characteristic of me, I had spent two hours in my rediscovered element, I had dived from the board some ten times to release my strength of feeling as I soared through the air, I had swum right across the lake twice, and my vigour was still not exhausted. Spluttering, with all my tense muscles stretched, I looked around for some new test, impatient to do something notable, bold, high-spirited.

Then I heard the creak of the diving board from the nearby ladies' pool and felt the wood quivering as someone took off with strong impetus. Curving as it dived to form a steely crescent like a Turkish sword, the body of a slender woman rose in the air and came down again head first. For a moment the dive drove a splashing, foaming white whirlpool into the water, and then the taut figure reappeared, striking out vigorously for the island in the middle of the lake. “Chase her! Catch up with her!” An urge for athletic pleasure came over my muscles, and with a sudden movement I dived into the water and followed her trail, stubbornly maintaining my tempo, shoulders forging their way forward. But obviously noticing my pursuit, and ready for a sporting challenge herself, my quarry made good use of her start, and skilfully passed the island at a diagonal angle so that she could make her way straight back. Quickly seeing what she meant to do, I turned as well, swimming so vigorously that my hand, reaching forward, was already in her wake and only a short distance separated us—whereupon my quarry cunningly dived right down all of a sudden, to emerge again a little later close to the barrier marking off the ladies' pool, which prevented further pursuit. Dripping and triumphant, she climbed the steps and had to stop for a moment, one hand to her breast, her breath obviously coming short, but then she turned, and on seeing me with the barrier keeping me away gave a victorious smile, her white teeth gleaming. I could not really see her face against the bright sunlight and underneath her swimming cap, only the bright and mocking smile she flashed at me as her defeated opponent.

I was both annoyed and pleased: this was the first time I had felt a woman's appreciative glance on me since Berlin—perhaps an adventure beckoned. With three strokes I swam back into the men's pool and quickly flung my clothes on, my skin still wet, just so that I could be in time to catch her coming out at the exit. I had to wait ten minutes, and then my high-spirited adversary—there could be no mistaking her boyishly slender form—emerged, stepping lightly and quickening her pace as soon as she saw me waiting there, obviously meaning to deprive me of the chance of speaking to her. She walked with the same muscular agility she had shown in swimming, with a sinewy strength in all her joints as they obeyed that slender, perhaps too slender body, a body like that of an ephebe; I was actually gasping for breath and had difficulty in catching up with her escaping figure as she strode out, without making myself conspicuous. At last I succeeded, swiftly crossed the path ahead of her at a point where the road turned, airily raising my hat in the student manner, and before I had really looked her in the face I asked if I could accompany her. She cast me a mocking sideways glance, and without slowing her rapid pace replied, with almost provocative irony: “Why not, if I don't walk too fast for you? I'm in a great hurry.” Encouraged by her ease of manner, I became more pressing, asked a dozen inquisitive and on the whole rather silly questions, which she none the less answered willingly, and with such surprising freedom that my intentions were confused rather than challenged. For my code of conduct when approaching a woman in my Berlin days was adjusted to expect resistance and mockery rather than frank remarks such as my interlocutor made while she walked rapidly along, and once again I felt I had shown clumsiness in dealing with a superior opponent.

But worse was to come. For when, more indiscreetly importunate than ever, I asked where she lived, two bright and lively hazel eyes were suddenly turned on me, and she shot back, no longer concealing her amusement: “Oh, very close to you indeed.” I stared in surprise. She glanced sideways at me again to see if her Parthian shot had gone home. Sure enough, it had struck me full in the throat. All of a sudden my bold Berlin tone of voice was gone; very uncertainly, indeed humbly, I asked, stammering, whether my company was a nuisance to her. “No, why?” she smiled again. “We have only two more streets to go, we can walk them together.” At that moment my blood was in turmoil, I could scarcely go any further, but what alternative did I have? To walk away would have been even more of an insult, so I had to accompany her to the building where I lodged. Here she suddenly stopped, offered me her hand, and said casually: “Thank you for your company! You'll be seeing my husband at six this evening, I expect.”

I must have turned scarlet with shame. But before I could apologize she had run nimbly upstairs, and there I stood, thinking with horror of the artless remarks I had so foolishly and audaciously made. Boastful idiot that I was, I had invited her to go on a Sunday outing as if she were some little seamstress, I had paid indirect compliments to her physical charm, then launched into sentimental complaints of the life of a lonely student—my self-disgust nauseated me so much that I was retching with shame. And now she was going off to her husband, full of high spirits, to tell him about my foolishness—a man whose opinion meant more to me than anyone's. I felt it would be more painful to appear ridiculous to him than to be whipped round the market square naked in public.