Siddhartha (13 page)

They washed Kamala’s wound, but it was already black and her body swollen; they poured a medicinal drink between her lips. She came to again as she lay on Siddhartha’s bed in the hut, and bending over her stood Siddhartha, who had once loved her. Thinking it all a dream, she gazed, smiling, into the face of her friend; only slowly, as the awareness of her circumstances returned to her, did she remember the bite and call out anxiously for the boy.

“He is here with you, do not worry,” Siddhartha said.

Kamala looked into his eyes. Her tongue was heavy as she spoke, numbed by the poison. “You have grown old, my love,” she said. “You have turned gray. But you resemble the young Samana who once came into my garden with no clothes on and with dust on his feet. You resemble him far more closely now than you did the day you left me, left Kamaswami. In your eyes you resemble him, Siddhartha. Oh, I too have grown old. Were you nonetheless able to recognize me?”

Siddhartha smiled. “I recognized you at once, Kamala, my love.”

Kamala pointed to her boy and said, “Did you recognize him as well? He is your son.”

She glanced about wildly, then her eyes fell shut. The boy began to cry. Siddhartha took him on his lap, let him cry, caressed his hair, and when he looked into the childish face he was reminded of a Brahmin prayer he had once learned when he himself was a small boy. Slowly, in a singsong voice, he began to recite it; the words came flooding back to him from the past, from childhood. And his chanting made the boy grow quiet; he now gave only the occasional sob, and then he fell asleep. Siddhartha laid him upon Vasudeva’s bed. Vasudeva stood at the hearth, cooking rice. Siddhartha threw him a glance that he returned, smiling.

“She is going to die,” Siddhartha said quietly.

Vasudeva nodded, the glow of the fire on the hearth flickering across his kind face.

Kamala regained consciousness one last time. Her face was contorted with pain; Siddhartha’s eyes read the suffering on her lips, on her pallid cheeks. In silence he read it, attentively, waiting, immersed in her suffering. Kamala could feel this; her gaze sought his. Looking at him, she said, “Now I see that even your eyes have changed. They have become completely
different. How am I still able to recognize that you are Siddhartha? You both are and are not.”

Siddhartha did not speak; in silence his eyes met hers.

“Have you reached it?” she asked. “Have you found peace?”

He smiled and laid his hand upon hers.

“I can see you have,” she said, “I can see it. I too will find peace.”

“You have found it,” Siddhartha said in a whisper.

Kamala gazed intently into his eyes. She thought about how she had wanted to make a pilgrimage to see Gautama in order to behold the face of a Perfect One, to breathe in his peace, and now she had found not Gautama but this man, and this was good, just as good as if she had seen the other one. She wanted to tell him this, but her tongue would no longer obey her will. Silently she gazed at him, and he watched as the life ebbed from her eyes. When the final agony had filled them and left them lifeless, when the final shudder had trembled through her body, he ran his fingers down her eyelids to close them.

For a long time he sat there, gazing at her face in its repose. For a long time he regarded her mouth, her old, weary mouth whose lips had grown narrow, and remembered that he had once, in the spring of his years, compared this mouth to a fig split in two. For a long time he sat there, reading this pallid face, these weary wrinkles, filling himself with the sight, and he saw his own face lying there in just the same way, just as white, just as lifeless, and at the same time saw his face and hers young again, with red lips and burning eyes, and the feeling of presence and simultaneity flooded through him, the feeling of eternity. He felt deeply in this hour, more deeply than ever before, the indestructibility of every life, the eternity of every moment.

When he stood up, Vasudeva had prepared rice for him,
but Siddhartha did not eat. In the lean-to where they kept their goat, the two old men spread out straw for themselves, and Vasudeva lay down to sleep. But Siddhartha went out and sat before the hut, listening to the river, with the past eddying around him, touched and enfolded by all the ages of his life at once. Only once, after a little while, did he get up, go to the door of the hut, and listen to make sure the boy was asleep.

Early the next morning, even before the sun had shown itself, Vasudeva emerged from the lean-to and joined his friend.

“You did not sleep,” he said.

“No, Vasudeva. I sat here and listened to the river. It told me many things, filled me deeply with salutary thought, with the thought of Oneness.”

“You have experienced sorrow, Siddhartha, yet I can see that no sadness has entered your heart.”

“No, dear friend, how could I be sad? I, who was already rich and happy, have been made even richer and happier. My son has been given to me.”

“I too welcome your son. But now, Siddhartha, let us set to work; there is much to do. Kamala died on the very bed where my wife died before her. Let us build Kamala’s funeral pyre on the very same hill where I once built the pyre for my wife.”

While the boy was still sleeping, they built the pyre.

The boy had been shy and weeping as he attended his mother’s funeral; he had been sullen and shy as he listened to Siddhartha, who greeted him as his son and bade him welcome in Vasudeva’s hut. Pallid, he sat for days beside the dead woman’s hillock, refused to eat, shut his eyes, and shut his heart, struggling against Fate, resisting it.

Siddhartha was gentle with him and let him do as he wished; he honored his grief. Siddhartha understood that his son did not know him, that he could not love him as a father. Slowly, too, he began to realize that this eleven-year-old was spoiled, a mama’s boy; he had been raised among all the amenities of wealth and was used to fine meals, a soft bed, and giving orders to servants. Siddhartha understood that this spoiled, grief-stricken boy was utterly incapable of resigning himself suddenly and obligingly to an unfamiliar life of poverty, so he did not force him. He performed various chores for him, always saving him the choicest morsels. Slowly, he hoped, he would be able to win him over with kindness and patience.

Rich and happy is what he’d called himself when the boy
had come to him. But when with the passing of time the boy remained a sullen stranger, when he displayed a proud and stubborn heart, refused to work, showed no reverence for his elders, and plundered Vasudeva’s fruit trees, Siddhartha began to understand that it was not happiness and peace that had come to him with his son but, rather, sorrow and worry. But he loved him and preferred the sorrow and worry of love to the happiness and peace he had known without the boy.

Since young Siddhartha’s arrival in the hut, the two old men had split up their work. Vasudeva had once more begun to perform the duties of ferryman on his own, while Siddhartha, wanting to keep his son near him, took over the work in the hut and the field.

For a long time, for long months, Siddhartha waited for his son to understand him, to accept his love and perhaps even return it. For long months Vasudeva waited, observing this: waited and kept his peace. One day, when the boy Siddhartha had yet again tormented his father with his defiance and moods and had broken both rice bowls, Vasudeva took his friend aside in the evening and spoke with him.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I am speaking to you with a friend’s heart. I can see you are suffering, I can see you are troubled. Your son, my friend, is making you worry, and I also worry on his account. This young bird is accustomed to a different life, a different nest. Unlike you, he did not flee from wealth, from the city, out of nausea and surfeit; he was forced to leave them behind against his will. I have asked the river, my friend; many times I have asked it. But the river only laughs—it laughs at me, both at me and at you, shakes with laughter at our foolishness. Water seeks out water; youth seeks out youth. Your son is not in a place where he can flourish. Ask the river and hear its counsel for yourself!”

Distressed, Siddhartha gazed into Vasudeva’s kind face, in whose many furrows a constant gaiety resided.

“Could I bring myself to part with him?” he asked quietly, ashamed. “Give me more time, my friend! I am fighting for him, you see, trying to win his heart and hoping to capture it with loving-kindness and patience. To him too the river must speak someday; he too has a calling.”

Vasudeva’s smile blossomed more warmly. “Indeed, he too has a calling; he too will enjoy eternal life. But do we know, you and I, to what he has been called: to what path, to what deeds, to what sufferings? His sorrows will not be slight, for his heart is proud and hard; those like him must suffer a great deal, commit many errors, do much wrong, pile much sin upon themselves. Tell me, my friend, are you educating your son? Do you force him? Do you strike him? Do you punish him?”

“No, Vasudeva, I do none of these things.”

“This I knew. You do not force him, do not strike him, do not command him because you know that soft is stronger than hard, water stronger than rock, love stronger than violence. Very good, I praise you. But is it not an error for you to think that you are not forcing him, not punishing him? Do you not bind him with the bands of your love? Do you not shame him daily and make things more difficult for him with your kindness and patience? Are you not forcing him, the arrogant and spoiled boy, to live in a hut with two old banana eaters for whom even rice is a delicacy, whose thoughts cannot be his, whose hearts are old and still and beat differently from his? Do all these things not force him, punish him?”

In dismay, Siddhartha cast his eyes down. Softly he asked, “What do you think I should do?”

Vasudeva said, “Take him to the city, to his mother’s house. There will still be servants there; give him to them. And if there is no one left, take him to a teacher, not because of what he will learn but because he will then be among other boys and girls, in the world where he belongs. Have you never thought of this?”

“You have seen into my heart,” Siddhartha said sadly. “Often I have thought of this. But tell me, how can I release him into this world when his heart is so ungentle to begin with? Will he not become a hedonist, will he not lose himself in pleasure and power, will he not repeat all his father’s errors, will he not become perhaps forever lost in Sansara?”

The ferryman’s smile radiated brightness; he touched Siddhartha’s arm gently and said, “Ask the river, my friend! Listen to its laughter! Or do you really believe that you committed your own follies so as to spare your son from committing them? And will you be able to save your son from Sansara? How, with doctrine, with prayer, with admonitions? My friend, have you entirely forgotten that instructive story about Siddhartha, the Brahmin’s son, that you once related to me here in this very spot? Who saved the Samana Siddhartha from Sansara, from sin, from greed, from folly? Were his father’s piety, his teachers’ admonitions, his own knowledge, and his own searching able to protect him? What father, what teacher, was able to protect him from living life himself, soiling himself with life, accumulating guilt, drinking the bitter drink, finding his own path? Do you think then, my friend, that this path might be spared anyone at all? Perhaps your little son, because you love him and would like to spare him sorrow and pain and disillusionment? But even if you died ten times for him, you would not succeed in relieving him of even the smallest fraction of his destiny.”

Never before had Vasudeva spoken so many words at once. Siddhartha thanked him warmly, went into the hut with his heart full of worry, and for a long time could not find sleep. Vasudeva had told him nothing that he himself had not already thought and known. But it was a knowledge he could not act on; stronger than this knowledge was his love for the boy, his tenderness, his fear of losing him. Had he ever given
his heart so completely to anything, had he ever loved another person so deeply, so blindly, with so much suffering, with so little success and yet so happily?

Siddhartha was unable to follow his friend’s advice; he could not give up his son. He allowed the boy to order him about and treat him with contempt. He kept his peace and waited, each day recommencing the silent battle of kindness, the soundless war of patience. Vasudeva also waited and held his peace, in kindness, wisdom, and forbearance. In patience, both of them were masters.

Once when the boy’s face reminded him very much of Kamala, Siddhartha suddenly remembered something Kamala had once said to him a long time before, in the days of their youth. “You cannot love,” she had said, and he had agreed that she was right, comparing himself to a star and the child people to falling leaves; nonetheless, he had felt a reproach in what she’d said. It was true that he had never been able to lose himself entirely in another person, give himself to another, forget himself, commit the follies of love for the sake of another; never had he been able to do this—and this, it had seemed to him at the time, was the great difference separating him from the child people. But now, ever since his son had come, he, Siddhartha, had become a child person in his own right, suffering because of another person, loving another person, lost, a fool, because of love. Now he too felt for once in his life, late as it was, this strongest and strangest of passions, was suffering because of it, suffering terribly, and yet he was blissful; he felt somehow renewed, somehow richer.

He could sense quite distinctly that this blind love for his son was a passion, something very human, that it was Sansara, a muddy spring, dark water. Yet at the same time he felt that it was not without value—it was necessary, it came out of his own being. This too was pleasure that had to be atoned for;
this too, pain to be experienced; these too, follies to be committed.

Meanwhile, his son let him go on committing these follies, let him go on trying to win him over, let him humble himself daily before his moods. There was nothing about this father to delight him, nothing he might have feared. He was a good man, this father, a good, kind, gentle man, very pious perhaps, perhaps a saint—none of these were traits that might have served to win the boy’s heart. What a bore this father was, keeping him trapped in this miserable hut, a bore who received all sorts of bad behavior with a smile, responded to insults with amicability and to wicked deeds with kindness. This was the old hypocrite’s most contemptible trick. The boy would have much preferred to be threatened and mistreated.