Confusion (6 page)

I passed dreadful hours until evening came: I imagined, a thousand times over, how he would receive me with his subtle, ironic smile—oh, I knew he was master of the art of making a sardonic comment, and could sharpen a jest to such keen effect that it drew blood. A condemned man could not have climbed the scaffold with a worse sensation of choking than mine as I climbed the stairs, and no sooner did I enter his room, swallowing a large lump in my throat with difficulty, than my confusion became worse than ever, for I thought I had heard the whispering rustle of a woman's dress in the next room. My high-spirited acquaintance must be in there listening, ready to relish my embarrassment and enjoy the discomfiture of a loud-mouthed young man. At last my teacher arrived. “What on earth's the matter with you?” he asked, sounding concerned. “You look so pale today.” I made some non-committal remark, privately waiting for the blow to fall. But the execution I feared never came; he talked of scholarly subjects, just the same as usual: not a word contained any ironic allusion, anxiously as I listened for one. And first amazed, then delighted, I realized that she had said nothing.

At eight o'clock the usual knock on the door came. I said goodnight with my heart in my throat again. As I went out of the doorway she passed me: I greeted her, and her eyes smiled slightly at me. My blood flowing fast, I took this forgiveness on her part as a promise that she would keep silent in the future too.

From then on I became attentive in a new way; hitherto, my boyish veneration of the teacher whom I idolized had seen him so much as a genius from another world that I had entirely omitted to think of his private, down-to-earth life. With the exaggeration inherent in any true enthusiasm, I had imagined his existence as remote from all the daily concerns of our methodically ordered world. And just as, for instance, a man in love for the first time dares not undress the girl he adores in his thoughts, dares not think of her as a natural being like the thousands of others who wear skirts, I was disinclined to venture on any prying into his private life: I knew him only in sublimated form, remote from all that is subjective and ordinary. I saw him as the bearer of the word, the embodiment of the creative spirit. Now that my tragicomic adventure had suddenly brought his wife across my path, I could not help observing his domestic and family life more closely; indeed, although against my will, a restless, spying curiosity was aroused within me. And no sooner did this curiosity awaken than it became confused, for on his own ground his was a strange, an almost alarmingly enigmatic existence. The first time I was invited to a family meal, not long after this encounter, and saw him not alone but with his wife, I began to suspect that they had a strange and unusual relationship, and the further I subsequently made my way into the inner circle of his home, the more confusing did this feeling become. Not that any tension or sense that they were at odds made itself felt in word or gesture: on the contrary, it was the absence of any such thing, the lack of any tension at all between them that enveloped them both so strangely and made their relationship opaque, a heavy silence of the feelings, like the heaviness of the
föhn
wind when it falls still, which made the atmosphere more oppressive than a stormy quarrel or lightning flashes of hidden rancour. Outwardly, there was nothing to betray any irritation or tension, but their personal distance from each other could be felt all the more strongly. In their odd form of conversation, question and answer touched only briefly, as it were, with swift fingertips, and never went wholeheartedly along together hand in hand. Even their remarks to me were hesitant and constrained at mealtimes. And sometimes, until we returned to the subject of work, the conversation froze entirely into a great block of silence which in the end no one dared to break. Its cold weight would lie oppressively on my spirit for hours.

His total isolation horrified me more than anything. This man, with his open, very expansive disposition, had no friends of any kind; his students alone provided him with company and comfort. No relationship but correct civility linked him to his university colleagues, he never attended social occasions; often he did not leave home for days on end to go anywhere but the twenty steps or so it took him to reach the university. He buried everything silently within him, entrusting his thoughts neither to any other human being nor to writing. And now, too, I understood the volcanic, fanatically exuberant nature of his discourse in his circle of students—after being dammed up for days his urge to communicate would break out, all the ideas he carried silently within him rushed forth, with the uncontrollable force known to horsemen when a mount is fresh from the stable, breaking out of the confines of silence into this headlong race of words.

At home he spoke very seldom, least of all to his wife. It was with anxious, almost ashamed surprise that even I, an inexperienced young man, realized that there was some shadow between these two people, in the air and ever present, the shadow of something intangible that none the less cut them off completely from one another, and for the first time I guessed how many secrets a marriage hides from the outside world. As if a pentagram were traced on the threshold, his wife never ventured to enter his study without an explicit invitation, a fact which clearly signalled her complete exclusion from his intellectual world. Nor would my teacher ever allow any discussion of his plans and his work in front of her; indeed, I found it positively embarrassing to hear him abruptly break off his passionate, soaring discourse the moment she came in. There was even something almost insulting and manifestly contemptuous, devoid of civility, in his brusque and open rejection of any interest she showed—but she appeared not to be insulted, or perhaps she was used to it. With her lively, boyish face, light and agile in her movements, supple and lithe, she flew upstairs and downstairs, was always busy yet always had time for herself, went to the theatre, enjoyed all kinds of athletic sports—but this woman aged about thirty-five took no pleasure in books, in the domestic life of the household, in anything abstruse, quiet, thoughtful. She seemed at ease only when—always warbling away, laughing easily, ready for bantering conversation—she could move her limbs in dancing, swimming, running, in some vigorous activity; she never spoke to me seriously, but always teased me as if I were an adolescent boy; at the most, she would accept me as a partner in our high-spirited trials of strength. And this swift and light-hearted manner of hers was in such confusingly stark contrast to my teacher's dark and entirely withdrawn way of life, which could be lightened only by some intellectual stimulus, that I kept wondering in amazement what on earth could have brought these two utterly different natures together. It was true that this striking contrast did me personally nothing but good; if I fell into conversation with her after a strenuous session of work, it was as if a helmet pressing down on my brow had been removed; the ecstatic ardour was gone, life returned to the earthly realm of clear, daylight colours, cheerfulness playfully demanded its dues, and laughter, which I had almost forgotten in my teacher's austere presence, did me good by relieving the overwhelming pressure of my intellectual pursuits. A kind of youthful camaraderie grew up between her and me; and for the very reason that we always spoke casually of unimportant matters, or went to the theatre together, there was no tension at all in our relationship. Only one thing—awkwardly, and always confusing me—interrupted the easy tenor of our conversations, and that was any mention of his name. Here my probing curiosity inevitably met with an edgy silence on her part, or when I talked myself into a frenzy of enthusiasm with a strangely enigmatic smile. But her lips remained closed on the subject: she shut her husband out of her life as he shut her out of his, in a different way but equally firmly. Yet the two of them had lived together for fifteen years under the same secluded roof.

The more impenetrable this mystery, the more it appealed to my passionate and impatient nature. Here was a shadow, a veil, and I felt its touch strangely close in every draught of air; sometimes I thought myself close to catching it, but its baffling fabric would elude me, only to waft past me again next moment, never becoming perceptible in words or taking tangible form. Nothing, however, is more arousing and intriguing to a young man than a teasing set of vague suspicions; the imagination, usually wandering idly, finds its quarry suddenly revealed to it, and is immediately agog with the newly discovered pleasure of the chase. Dull-minded youth that I had been, I developed entirely new senses at this time—a thin-skinned membrane of the auditory system that caught every give-away tone, a spying, avid glance full of keen distrust, a curiosity that groped around in the dark—and my nerves stretched elastically, almost painfully, constantly excited as they apprehended a suspicion which never subsided into a clear feeling.

But I must not be too hard on my breathlessly intent curiosity, for it was pure in nature. What raised all my senses to such a pitch of agitation was the result not of that lustful desire to pry which loves to track down base human instincts in someone superior—on the contrary, that agitation was tinged with secret fear, a puzzled and hesitant sympathy which guessed, with uncertain anxiety, at the suffering of this silent man. For the closer I came to his life the more strongly was I oppressed by the almost three-dimensional deep shadows on my teacher's much-loved face, by that noble melancholy—noble because nobly controlled—which never lowered itself to abrupt sullenness or unthinking anger; if he had attracted me, a stranger, on that first occasion by the volcanic brilliance of his discourse, now that I knew him better I was all the more distressed by his silence and the cloud of sadness resting on his brow. Nothing has such a powerful effect on a youthful mind as a sublime and virile despondency: Michelangelo's
Thinker
staring down into his own abyss, Beethoven's mouth bitterly drawn in, those tragic masks of suffering move the unformed mind more than Mozart's silver melody and the radiant light around Leonardo's figures. Being beautiful in itself, youth needs no transfiguration: in its abundance of strong life it is drawn to the tragic, and is happy to allow melancholy to suck sweetly from its still inexperienced bloom, and the same phenomenon accounts for the eternal readiness of young people to face danger and reach out a fraternal hand to all spiritual suffering.

And it was here that I became acquainted with the face of a man genuinely suffering in such a way. The son of ordinary folk, growing up in safety and bourgeois comfort, I knew sorrow only in its ridiculous everyday forms, disguised as anger, clad in the yellow garment of envy, clinking with trivial financial concerns—but the desolation of that face, I felt at once, derived from a more sacred element. This darkness was truly of the dark; a pitiless pencil, working from within, had traced folds and rifts in cheeks grown old before their time. Sometimes when I entered his study (always with the timidity of a child approaching a house haunted by demons) and found him so deep in thought that he failed to hear my knock, when suddenly, ashamed and dismayed, I stood before his self-forgetful figure, I felt as if it were only Wagner sitting there, a physical shell in Faust's garment, while the spirit roamed mysterious chasms, visiting sinister ceremonies on Walpurgis Night. At such moments his senses were entirely sealed away; he heard neither an approaching footstep nor a timid greeting. Then, suddenly recollecting himself, he would start up and try to cover the awkwardness: he would walk up and down and try to divert my observant glance away from him by asking questions. But the darkness still shadowed his brow for a long time, and only his ardent discourse could disperse those clouds gathering from within.

He must sometimes have felt how much the sight of him moved me, perhaps he saw it in my eyes, my restless hands, perhaps he suspected that a request for his confidence hovered unseen on my lips, or recognized in my tentative attitude a secret longing to take his pain into myself. Yes, surely he must feel it, for he would suddenly interrupt his lively conversation and look at me intently, and indeed the curious warmth of his gaze, darkened by its own depth, would pour over me. Then he would often grasp my hand, holding it restlessly for some time—and I always expected: now, now, now he is going to talk to me. But instead there was usually a brusque gesture, sometimes even a cold, intentionally deflating or ironic remark. He, who was enthusiasm itself, who nourished and aroused it in me, would suddenly strike it away from me as if marking a mistake in a poorly written essay, and the more he saw how receptive to him I was, yearning for his confidence, the more curtly would he make such icy comments as: “You don't see the point,” or: “Don't exaggerate like that,” remarks which angered me and made me despair. How I suffered from this man who moved from hot to cold like a bright flash of lightning, who unknowingly inflamed me, only to pour frosty water over me all of a sudden, whose exuberant mind spurred on my own, only to lash me with irony—I had a terrible feeling that the closer I tried to come to him, the more harshly, even fearfully he repelled me. Nothing could, nothing must approach him and his secret.

For I realized more and more acutely that secrecy strangely, eerily haunted his magically attractive depths. I guessed at something unspoken in his curiously fleeting glance, which would show ardour and then shrink away when I gratefully opened my mind to him; I sensed it from his wife's bitterly compressed lips, from the oddly cold, reserved attitude of the townspeople, who looked almost offended to hear praise of him—I sensed it from a hundred oddities and sudden moments of distress. And what torment it was to believe myself in the inner circle of such a life, and yet to be wandering, lost as if in a labyrinth, unable to find the way to its centre and its heart!

However, it was his sudden absences that I found most inexplicable and agitating of all. One day, when I was going to his lecture, I found a notice hanging up to say that there would be no classes for the next two days. The students did not seem surprised, but having been with him only the day before I hurried home, afraid he might be ill. His wife merely smiled dryly when my impetuous entrance betrayed my agitation. “Oh, this happens quite often,” she said, in a noticeably cold tone. “You just don't know about it yet.” And indeed the other students told me that he did indeed disappear overnight like this quite often, sometimes simply telegraphing an apology; one of them had once met him at four in the morning in a Berlin street, another had seen him in a bar in a strange city. He would rush off all at once like a cork popping out of a bottle, and on his return no one knew where he had been. His abrupt departure upset me like an illness; I went around absent-mindedly, restlessly, nervously for those two days. Suddenly my studies seemed pointlessly empty without his familiar presence, I was consumed by vague and jealous suspicions, indeed I felt something like hatred and anger for his reserve, the way he excluded me so utterly from his real life, leaving me out in the cold like a beggar when I so ardently wished to be close to him. In vain did I tell myself that as a boy, a mere student, I had no right to demand explanations and ask him to account for himself, when he was already kind enough to give me a hundred times more of his confidence than his duty as a university teacher required. But reason had no power over my ardent passion—ten times a day, foolish boy that I was, I asked whether he was back yet, until I began to sense bitterness in his wife's increasingly brusque negatives. I lay awake half the night and listened for his homecoming step, and in the morning I lurked restlessly close to his door, no longer daring to ask. And when at last and unexpectedly he entered my room on the third day I gasped—my surprise must have been excessive, or so at least I saw from its reflection in the embarrassed displeasure with which he asked a few hasty, trivial questions. His glance avoided mine. For the first time our conversation went awkwardly, one comment stumbling over another, and while we both carefully avoided any reference to his absence, the very fact that we were ignoring it prevented any open discussion. When he left me my curiosity flared up like a fire—it came to devour my sleeping and waking hours.