Siddhartha (9 page)

Once he said to her, “You are like me; you are different from most people. You are Kamala, nothing else, and within you there is a stillness and a refuge into which you can withdraw at any moment and be at home within yourself, just as I can. Few people have this, and yet all people could have it.”

“Not all people are clever,” Kamala said.

“No,” Siddhartha said, “that isn’t the reason. Kamaswami is just as clever as I am, but he has no refuge within himself. And there are people who have one whose minds are like those of little children. Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf as it twists and turns its way through the air, lurches and tumbles to the ground. Others, though—a very few—are like stars set on a fixed course; no wind can reach them, and they carry their law and their path within them. Among all the many learned men and Samanas I have known, there was just one who was like this, a perfect man. Never will I forget him: Gautama, the Sublime One, who preached this doctrine. Thousands of disciples hear his doctrine every day and do as he
instructs, but all of them are just falling leaves. Within themselves they have no doctrine and no law.”

Kamala looked at him with a smile. “Again you are speaking of him,” she said. “Again you are having Samana thoughts.”

Siddhartha fell silent, and they played a game of love, one of the thirty or forty different games Kamala knew. Her body was lithe, like that of a jaguar and like a hunter’s bow; he who had learned love from her was adept at many pleasures, many secrets. For a long time she played with Siddhartha, coaxing him, pushing him away, forcing him, clasping him to her, taking pleasure in his mastery, until he was vanquished and lay exhausted at her side.

The hetaera bent over him, gazing long into his face, into his weary eyes.

“In the art of love,” she said thoughtfully, “you are the best I’ve ever seen. You are stronger than others, more agile, more willing. Well have you learned my art, Siddhartha. Some day, when I am older, I wish to bear your child. And yet all this time, beloved, you have remained a Samana. Even now you do not love me; you love no one. Is it not so?”

“It may be so,” Siddhartha said wearily. “I am like you. You, too, do not love—how else could you practice love as an art? Perhaps people of our sort are incapable of love. The child people can love; that is their secret.”

For a long time Siddhartha had been living the worldly life with its pleasures but was not part of it. His senses, which he had suffocated during parched years of Samana existence, had once more awoken—he had tasted great riches, voluptuousness, power—yet in his heart he had remained a Samana for a long time. Kamala, that clever woman, had been right about this. Always the arts of thinking, waiting, and fasting had guided him in his life, and those who lived a worldly existence—the child people—had remained foreign to him, as he was to them.

The years flew by, and Siddhartha, swaddled in well-being, scarcely felt their passing. He had grown rich, he had long since acquired a house of his own, servants of his own, and a garden beside the river outside of town. People liked him, they came to him when they needed money or counsel, but no one was close to him except Kamala.

That noble, bright awakeness he had experienced once, at the height of his youth, in the days following Gautama’s sermon, after his parting from Govinda—that eager expectancy, that proud standing alone without teachers or doctrines, that
supple readiness to hear the divine voice within his own heart—had gradually faded into memory; it had been transitory. Distant and faint was the sound of the holy fountainhead that had once been near, that had once murmured inside him. To be sure, much of what he had learned—from the Samanas, from Gautama, from his father the Brahmin—had remained with him for a long time: moderate living, enjoyment of thought, hours devoted to
samadhi
, secret knowledge of the Self, that eternal being that is neither body nor consciousness. Much of this had remained with him, but one thing after another had settled to the bottom and been covered with dust. Just as a potter’s wheel, once set in motion, will continue to spin for a long time, only slowly wearying and coming to rest, so had the wheel of asceticism, the wheel of thought, and the wheel of differentiation gone on spinning for a long time in Siddhartha’s soul, and they were spinning still, but this spin was growing slow and hesitant; it was coming to a standstill. Slowly, as moisture seeps into the dying tree trunk, slowly filling it up and making it rot, worldliness and lethargy had crept into Siddhartha’s soul, filling it slowly, making it heavy, making it weary, putting it to sleep. At the same time, however, his senses had come to life; they had learned many things, experienced many things.

Siddhartha had learned to conduct business, to wield power over people, to take pleasure with a woman; he had learned to wear nice clothes, give orders to servants, and bathe in sweet-smelling water. He had learned to eat dishes prepared with delicacy and care, even fish, even flesh and fowl, spices and sweets, and to drink wine, which brings lethargy and forgetfulness. He had learned to throw dice and play chess, to be entertained by dancing girls, have himself carried about in a sedan chair, sleep in a soft bed. But still he had felt himself to be different from the others, superior to them, still he had watched them with a certain disdain, a certain
contempt, that very contempt a Samana always feels for the worldly. When Kamaswami was indisposed, when he was cross, when he felt slighted, when he was tortured by his mercantile woes, Siddhartha had always observed this disdainfully Only slowly and imperceptibly, with the coming and going of the harvests and monsoons, had his disdain grown weary, his superiority waned. Only slowly, among his growing riches, had Siddhartha himself taken on some of the characteristics of the child people, something of their childlike manner and fearfulness. And yet he envied them, envying them more the more he came to resemble them. He envied them the one thing they possessed that he was lacking: the importance they were capable of attaching to their lives, their passionate joys and fears, the happiness, uneasy but sweet, of their eternal infatuations. For infatuated they were—with themselves, with women, with their children, with honor or money, with plans or hopes. But this childish joy and childish folly he had not learned from them, this one thing remained unlearned; all he was learning from them were unpleasant things that he himself despised. It happened more and more often now that he remained lying in bed for a long time the day after an evening of conviviality, feeling stupid and weary. It would happen that he became cross and impatient when Kamaswami bored him with his worries. It would happen that he laughed too loudly when he lost at dice. His face was still more clever and spiritual than others, but it seldom smiled, and one after the other it was taking on the traits one so often observes in the faces of the wealthy: that look of dissatisfaction, infirmity, displeasure, lethargy, unkindness. Slowly he was being stricken with the maladies that afflict rich people’s souls.

Like a veil or a thin fog, weariness descended upon Siddhartha, slowly, a bit thicker each day, a bit hazier each month, a bit heavier each year. Just as a new garment gets old with time,
loses its attractive colors, becomes stained, wrinkled, and worn at the seams, and here and there begins to display unfortunate threadbare patches, so too had the new life that Siddhartha began after parting from Govinda gotten old and with the passing of the years begun to lose its color and sheen; wrinkles and stains were collecting on it, and—hidden beneath the surface but already peeking out hideously now and again—disillusionment and nausea lay waiting. This Siddhartha did not notice. He noticed only that the bright and certain inner voice that once had awoken within him and accompanied him unceasingly in his days of glory had fallen silent.

The world had captured him: voluptuousness, lust, lethargy, and in the end even greed, the vice he’d always thought the most foolish and had despised and scorned above all others. Property, ownership, and riches had captured him in the end. No longer were they just games to him, trifles; they had become chains and burdens. A curious and slippery path had led Siddhartha to his latest and vilest form of dependency: dice playing. Ever since he had ceased to be a Samana in his heart, Siddhartha had begun to pursue these games with their stakes of money and precious goods—games he had once participated in offhandedly, dismissing them as a child-people custom—with growing frenzy and passion. He was feared as a player. Few dared to challenge him, for his bets were fierce and reckless. He played this game out of his heart’s distress. Losing and squandering the wretched money was an angry pleasure; in no other way could he have shown his contempt for wealth, the idol of the merchants, more clearly and with more pronounced scorn. And so he bet high and mercilessly. Despising himself, mocking himself, he won thousands and threw thousands away, gambled away money, gambled away jewelry, gambled away a country house, won again, lost again. That fear—that terrible and oppressive fear he felt while rolling the dice, while worrying over his own
high stakes—he loved it. Again and again he sought to renew it, to increase it, to goad it to a higher level of intensity, for only in the grasp of this fear did he still feel something like happiness, something like intoxication, something like exalted life in the midst of his jaded, dull, insipid existence. And after each major loss he dreamed of new wealth, pursued his trading with increased vigor, and put more pressure on his debtors, for he wanted to go on gambling, he wanted to go on squandering all he could so as to continue to show his contempt for wealth. Siddhartha lost the composure with which he had once greeted losses, he lost his patience when others were tardy with their payments, lost his good-naturedness when beggars came to call, lost all desire to give gifts and loan money to supplicants. The one who laughed as he gambled away ten thousand on a single toss of the dice turned intolerant and petty in his business dealings, and at night he sometimes dreamed of money. Whenever he awoke from this hateful spell, whenever he saw his face grown older and uglier in the mirror on his bedroom wall, whenever he was assailed by shame and nausea, he fled further, seeking to escape in more gambling, seeking to numb himself with sensuality and wine, and then hurled himself back into the grind of hoarding and acquisition. In this senseless cycle he ran himself ragged, ran himself old, ran himself sick.

Then one day a dream came to warn him. He had spent the evening hours with Kamala in her beautiful pleasure garden. They had sat beneath the trees, deep in conversation, and Kamala had spoken sober words, words behind which grief and weariness lay hidden. She had asked him to tell her about Gautama and couldn’t get enough of hearing how pure his eyes were, how still and beautiful his mouth, how kind his smile, how peaceful his gait. Having made him go on telling stories of the sublime Buddha for a long time, Kamala had sighed and said, “One day, perhaps soon, I too will follow this
Buddha. I will give him my pleasure garden and take refuge in his doctrine.” But then she aroused him and bound him to her in love play with an anguished passion, biting him and wetting him with tears, as if trying to squeeze the last sweet drop from this vain, transitory pleasure. Never before had it seemed so strangely clear to Siddhartha how closely sensuality was linked to death. He had lain at Kamala’s side with her face close beside his, and beneath her eyes and beside the corners of her mouth he was able to read clearly as never before an anxious script, a writing made of tiny lines, quiet furrows, writing that called to mind autumn and age, just as Siddhartha himself, who was only in his forties, had already noticed gray hairs here and there among the black. Weariness was inscribed in Kamala’s beautiful face, weariness from walking a long path that had no happy goal, weariness and the first signs of withering, and a secret anxiety, not yet uttered, perhaps not yet even recognized: fear of old age, fear of autumn, fear of having to die. Sighing, he had taken leave of her, his soul full of reluctance and secret apprehension.

Siddhartha had spent the night in his home with dancing girls and wine, had made a show of superiority before others of his standing, though he was no longer superior, had drunk a great deal of wine, and had gone to bed long after midnight, weary and yet agitated, close to tears and despair. For a long time he sought sleep in vain, his heart full of a misery he felt he could no longer endure, full of a nausea that coursed through him like the vile, insipid taste of the wine, like the dreary all-too-sweet music, the all-too-soft smiles of the dancers, the all-too-sweet perfume of their hair and breasts. But nothing made the nausea well up in him more bitterly than did he himself He felt nausea at his perfumed hair, the smell of wine on his breath, the weary slackness and reluctance of his skin. Just as someone who has eaten or drunk too much vomits it up again in agony and yet is glad for the relief,
sleepless Siddhartha yearned for a monstrous wave of nausea that would rid him of these pleasures, these habits, this whole meaningless existence and himself along with it. Only with the first rays of morning and with the first stirrings in the street outside his town house had he sunk into slumber and found a few moments of half numbness, a suggestion of sleep. During these moments he had a dream.

Kamala kept a rare little songbird in a golden cage; he dreamed about this bird. He dreamed the bird, which always used to sing at dawn, had fallen silent, and since the silence struck him, he went over to the cage and looked inside; the little bird lay dead and still on the bottom. He took it out, weighed it for a moment in his hand, and then tossed it aside, into the street, and at the same moment he was seized with fear and horror and his heart hurt, as if with this dead bird he had thrust aside everything that had worth and value.

Waking from this dream with a start, he felt himself surrounded by deep sadness. Devoid of value, it seemed to him, devoid of value and meaning was this life he’d been living; nothing that was alive, nothing in any way precious or worthy of keeping, had remained in his hands. Alone he stood, and empty, like a shipwrecked man upon the shore.