Death in Venice and Other Stories (15 page)

And with a number of encouraging gestures, he led Tonio to the rear of the lobby. There indeed stood Mr. Seehaase—Tonio Kröger recognized him from the old days. He was short, fat and bowlegged. His closely cropped whiskers had turned white, but as always he wore a wide-cut frock coat and a little velvet cap embroidered with green. What's more, he wasn't alone. Next to him, behind a small lectern attached to the wall, stood a helmeted policeman, his gloved right hand resting before him on a document covered with various notations, his honest soldier's face peering at Tonio Kröger as if he expected the traveler to sink into the ground under his stare.

Tonio Kröger glanced from one to the other and decided to wait for them to begin conversation.

“You come from Munich?” the policeman finally asked in an amiable, if coarse, voice.

Tonio Kröger reaffirmed this.

“You're on your way to Copenhagen?”

“Yes, I'm taking my vacation at a resort on the Danish coast.”

“Coast?—Yes, well, you must have some identification you can produce,” said the policeman, pronouncing the word with special satisfaction.

“Identification . . .” He had no identification. He took out his billfold and looked through it, but there was nothing inside except some banknotes and the proofs of a short story he had planned to check over once he'd
reached his ultimate goal. He disliked all contact with postmasters and had never been issued a passport . . .

“I'm very sorry,” he said, “but I don't have any identification with me.”

“Is that so?” said the policeman . . . “None at all?—What's your name?”

Tonio Kröger answered him.

“Is that your real name?” asked the policeman, who straightened up and suddenly flared his nostrils as wide as he could . . .

“Certainly,” answered Tonio Kröger.

“What are you then?”

Tonio Kröger swallowed and stated his occupation in a firm voice. — Mr. Seehaase raised his head and looked up at him with curiosity.

“Hm!” said the policeman. “So you claim that you are not the same person as a certain indivigial named—” He pronounced the word “indivigial,” spelling out from the document with the various notations a bewilderingly exotic name, which seemed to be an experimental syllabic compound of various national languages and which Tonio Kröger would have been hard pressed to reconstruct a second later. “—an indivigial,” the policeman continued, “of unknown origin and no fixed address who is sought by the Munich police in connection with a number of frauds and other offenses and is believed to have taken flight for Denmark?”

“I don't just claim it,” said Tonio Kröger with a nervous motion of his shoulders. — That made a definite impression.

“What? Oh yes, I see, sure!” said the policeman. “But you can't produce anything to confirm it!”

Attempting to disarm the situation, Mr. Seehaase interposed.

“The whole thing is just a formality,” he said, “nothing more! You must realize that the officer is just doing his duty. If you could only prove somehow that you are who you say. A single piece of identification . . .”

No one said a word. Should he put an end to the matter by introducing himself, by revealing to Mr. Seehaase
that he was not some con artist with no known address, not some gypsy in a green wagon by birth, but the son of Consul Kröger, of the Kröger family. No, he had no desire to do that. And weren't they right in a way, these representatives of bourgeois law and order? In one sense he completely agreed with them . . . He shrugged and said nothing.

“What do you have there then?” asked the policeman. “There in the portfoolio?”

“Here? Nothing. Just a proof,” answered Tonio Kröger.

“Proof? Huh? Let me see.”

And Tonio Kröger handed him his work. The policeman spread it out on the surface of the desk and began to read through it. Mr. Seehaase walked over and joined him in this activity. Tonio Kröger looked over their shoulders to see where they were in the story. It was a good passage, one he had successfully worked through, a moment of real epiphany and literary effect. He felt satisfied with himself.

“Look,” he said. “There's my name. I wrote this, and now it's going to be published, you understand?”

“Well, that's good enough!” said Mr. Seehaase emphatically, scooping up the pages, folding them and giving them back. “That must be good enough, Petersen!” he repeated curtly as he surreptitiously shut his eyes and shook his head to close the issue. “We must not cause the gentleman any further delay. His cab is waiting. Please forgive this little interruption, sir. The officer was just doing his duty, though I told him right off that he was on the wrong track . . .”

Is that so? thought Tonio Kröger.

The policeman didn't seem fully satisfied; he objected, saying something about “indivigial” and “identification.” But with repeated expressions of regret Mr. Seehaase led his guest back through the lobby, escorted him through the two lions to his cab and insisted with profuse displays of respect on personally closing the door behind him. And then the ridiculously disproportionate brougham cab began to roll, shaking, rattling and raising a din, down the steep narrow streets to the landing . . .

Thus ended Tonio Kröger's odd visit to his hometown.

7

Night had fallen with a swimming silvery glow, and the moon was on the rise as Tonio Kröger's ship gained open sea. He stood at the bow, wrapped in his overcoat against the gathering wind, and stared down into the dark drifting and rolling of the smooth muscular bodies below, as they circled one another, slapped together, then sprang back in unexpected directions with a sudden glimmer of froth . . .

He was suffused with swaying, silent bliss. He had been somewhat dejected at the thought of being mistaken for a con man in his own hometown—although in one sense he could only second the thought. But later, on board, he had watched the cargo being loaded, just as he and his father had done when he was a boy, had heard the men shouting out in a mix of Danish and Lowland German dialects while filling the ship's deep hold and had also seen them lowering down, along with the usual bales and crates, two thick-barred cages containing a polar bear and a king tiger, which had no doubt been shipped up from Hamburg, to be forwarded on to some Danish zoo. This had taken his mind off his sadness. By the time the ship had begun to glide downstream along the flat embankments, he had forgotten his interrogation by Officer Petersen, and everything that had come before—the sweet, sad, regretful dreams of the previous night, his walk, the sight of the walnut tree—once again grew strong within his soul. And in the distance, now that the banks were opening up, he recognized the beach where as a boy he had been permitted to listen in on the sea's summer dreams, saw the shine of the lighthouse and the lamps of the resort in which he had stayed with his parents . . . The Baltic Sea! He bent his head against the strong salt wind that blew in free and unobstructed, that whipped around his ears and produced
a gentle vertigo, a vague numbness, which submerged the memory of everything bad—pain and confusion, desire and ambition—in lethargic bliss. And amidst the whistling, slapping, frothing and sighing all around him, he thought he could make out the rustling and creaking of the old walnut tree, the squeaking of a garden gate . . . It was getting darker and darker.

“The staahs, Lord, just look at the staahs,” a voice said suddenly in a Northern accent and a ponderous singsong rhythm that might have issued from a large, empty barrel. He recognized it immediately. It belonged to a reddish blond, plainly dressed man with red eyelids who looked damp and cold, as if he had just come in from a swim. At dinner in the ship's mess he had sat next to Tonio Kröger, where, with a series of modest, unassuming maneuvers, he had consumed an extraordinary quantity of lobster omelet. Now he stood beside him, leaning on the railing and looking up at the heavens, his chin pinched between his thumb and index finger. No doubt he found himself in one of those extraordinary, solemnly tranquil moods in which the barriers between people are lowered, in which the heart opens up to strangers and the mouth utters sentiments it would otherwise find embarrassing . . .

“Look, sir, just look at the staahs. All aglitter, by god, the whole sky's full of them. Let me ask you: looking up at the sky, knowing that many of these staahs are supposedly a hundred times bigger than the earth, how does it make you feel? We human beings have invented the telegraph and the telephone and so many newfangled scientific wonders, to be sure, we've done that. But when we look up at the sky, we are forced to recognize and understaand that we are still worms, pathetic little worms and nothing more—am I right or am I wrong, sir? Indeed, we're nothing but worms!” he said, answering himself as he nodded, humble and contrite, at the firmament above.

Oh please . . . no, this man doesn't have an ounce of literature in him, thought Tonio Kröger. And in that instant he was reminded of something he'd recently read,
an essay by a famous French writer comparing cosmology and psychology. That had been a really fancy bit of palaver.

He gave the young man something resembling an answer to his heartfelt remark, and then they continued their conversation, leaning out over the railing and staring into the uneasy evening, lit by turbulent waves. It turned out that his companion was a young businessman from Hamburg, who was using this cruise as a vacation . . .

“You should take a little steamaah trip to Copenhagen,” he said. “No sooner do I think this than I'm standing here. So far, so good. But lobstaah omelet, that was a mistake, you wait and see, sir: this will be a staahmy night, the captain said it himself, and with such heavy food in your staamach, it's not going to be an easy trip . . .”

Tonio Kröger listened to all this solicitous nonsense with concealed affection.

“That's true,” he said. “The food up here is altogether too heavy. It makes one listless and depressed.”

“Depressed?” the young man repeated, giving him a dumbfounded look . . . “You're a stranger here then?” he asked suddenly . . .

“Oh yes, I come from a long way off!” Tonio Kröger answered with a vague, evasive arm motion.

“Anyway you're right,” said the young man. “God knows, what you said about depressed is exactly right. I'm almost always depressed, but especially on nights like this when the staahs are in the sky.” And he rested his chin once more on his thumb and index finger.

Surely he writes poems, thought Tonio Kröger, honest, heartfelt businessman's poems.

It was getting late and the wind had now grown so powerful that it impeded further conversation. Therefore they decided to catch a bit of sleep and wished each other good night.

In his berth Tonio Kröger stretched out on the narrow bunk but couldn't drift off. The strong wind and its sharp aftertaste had left him extremely flushed, and his
heart was restless, as though he were anxiously awaiting something sweet. Moreover, the vibrations from the ship sliding down a steep ocean swell and the propeller as it emerged sputtering from the water made him terribly queasy. He got dressed again and climbed up onto the open deck.

Clouds raced past the moon. The sea was dancing. No longer were smooth, even waves rolling at regular intervals; instead, at some distance in the pale, flickering light, the sea was torn, whipped, churned into a frenzy. Gigantic, sharp-crested tongues licked up like flames, leaping skyward, hurling spray and spitting out jagged, unlikely shapes between froth-filled chasms, as though somewhere below monstrous tentacles were playing some crazy game. The ship's passage was slow. Pounding, swaying and sighing, it worked its way through the tumult, and at times the polar bear and the tiger could be heard growling in the hold, for the ship's motion made them ill. A man in a slicker, his hood pulled up over his head and his lantern strapped around his waist, walked back and forth on deck. His feet were set wide as he struggled to maintain his balance. There in back, bent far over the ship's side, was the young man from Hamburg getting sick. “Lord,” he said in a hollow, trembling voice, as he spotted Tonio Kröger, “just look at the elements. All in an uproar, sir!” But then he was interrupted and hastily turned away.

Tonio Kröger held tight to the nearest taut line and gazed out into the unfettered exuberance. A cry of jubilation gathered inside him that almost felt strong enough to drown out the wind and the waves. A hymn to the sea, inspired by love, began to sound in his soul. Untamed friend from when I was young, now again we are as one . . . but that was as far as it went. The poem had never been finished, never been roundly formed or calmly forged into a whole. His heart was alive . . .

For a long time he stood there like that; then he stretched out on a bench beside the small ship's housing and gazed up at the sky, where the stars flickered. He even dozed off a bit. And when the cold froth
occasionally sprayed in his face, it seemed, in his half-sleep, like a caress.

Vertical limestone cliffs, ghostly in the moonlight, came into view and approached; that was Moen Island. And again he dozed off, roused periodically by salty showers of spray that stung at his face and numbed his features . . . By the time he was completely awake, it was already morning, a light gray, refreshing morning, and the green sea had calmed down. At breakfast he again saw the young businessman, who turned quite red, apparently embarrassed at having uttered, under the cover of darkness, such shamefully poetic sentiments. He brushed his small red mustache with upward strokes of all five fingers and barked out a brisk morning greeting, like a soldier, only to avoid his companion anxiously thereafter.

And so Tonio Kröger landed in Denmark. He arrived in Copenhagen, giving a tip to anyone who acted as if he had a claim to one, and explored the city from his hotel for three days, holding his guidebook open before him and behaving like a genteel foreigner wishing to enhance his knowledge. He took in the Kongens Nytorv with the horse in the center, gazed respectfully at the pillars of the Fruekirke, stood for a long time before Thorwaldsen's noble and charming sculptures, climbed to the top of the Circular Tower, visited castles and spent two lively evenings in the Tivoli. But this was not really what he saw.