Steppenwolf (28 page)

With his calm, steady fingers he took hold of my figures, all the old men, youths, children and women, all the cheerful and sad, strong and gentle, agile and clumsy figures, and swiftly arranged them on his board in preparation for a game. Immediately the game started, they reconstituted themselves as a world in miniature, forming groups and families, playing and fighting with each other, making friends and enemies. To my delight, he set this lively but orderly small-scale world in motion for a while before my very eyes. I watched the figures play and fight, form alliances and engage in battles, saw them court one another, marry and multiply. It was indeed a drama, a lively and exciting one with a large cast.

Then, with one serene sweep of his hand across the board, he gently knocked over all the pieces and pushed them together in a heap. With all the thoughtful care and fastidiousness of an artist, he now proceeded to construct a new game from the same pieces, grouping them differently, altering their relationships and interconnections. This second game was not unrelated to the first. It was the same world he was constructing and its materials were the same, but it was a composition in a different key. The tempo had changed, the motifs were given fresh emphasis and the situations were set up differently.

And thus this artist adept at reconstruction assembled one game after another from the figures that were all part of my self.
They all bore a distant resemblance to one another, all recognizably belonged to the same world and shared the same origin, yet each game was totally new.

‘This is the art of living,’ he said, as if lecturing me. ‘In future, you yourself may play out your life’s game in this way, reshaping and enlivening it, making it richer and more complex as you wish. It’s up to you. Just as madness in a higher sense is the beginning of wisdom, schizophrenia is the beginning of all art, all fantasy. Even scholars have already half acknowledged this, as you can tell by reading that delightful book
The Prince’s Magic Horn
,
¹³
in which the painstaking, assiduous research of a scholar is lent nobility by the brilliant works of a large number of deranged artists who collaborated with him while confined in institutions. – Here, why not take your little chessmen with you? You’ll often have the opportunity to enjoy a game in future. Then the figure that spoiled things for you today by his
monstrously intolerable behaviour can be demoted to a minor role. And you can turn the poor, dear little figure that for a while seemed ill starred, dogged by sheer bad luck, into a princess in the next game. Sir, I wish you the greatest of pleasure.’

Expressing my gratitude to this talented chess player with a deep bow, I pocketed the little figures and made my exit through the narrow doorway.

I had actually intended to sit down at once on the floor of the corridor and play with my chess pieces for hours, for an eternity even, but no sooner was I standing there again in that brightly
illuminated passage round the theatre than I was carried away by fresh currents that were stronger than me. My eyes suddenly lit on a garish poster with the wording:

This inscription aroused a lot of different emotions in me. My heart ached as all kinds of anxieties and pressures from my past life, from the reality I had left behind, closed in on me again. With a trembling hand, I opened the door to find myself in a fairground booth. Once inside, I noticed that an iron grating had been installed between me and the makeshift stage. However, I could see an animal-tamer standing up there, a rather vociferous, self-important gentleman who, despite a large moustache, bulging muscles on his upper arms and a clown-like circus costume, resembled me in a manner that I found malicious and truly repulsive. This strongman was strutting around – what a sight for sore eyes! – with a wolf on a lead as if it were a dog: a huge, handsome, but terribly emaciated wolf with a timid, slavish look in its eyes. And to now watch the brutal tamer forcing this noble but so ignominiously compliant beast to perform a
series of tricks and act out sensational scenes was an experience I found as disgusting as it was thrilling, as horrific as it was nonetheless secretly enjoyable.

I have to say that he had done a tremendous job, this damned distorted mirror image of me. The wolf alertly obeyed his every command, reacting slavishly to his every call or crack of the whip. It sank to its knees, played dead, sat up and begged. It obediently fetched a loaf of bread, an egg, a piece of meat, a basket, carrying them all in its mouth like a well-trained dog. It even had to pick up the whip dropped by the tamer and, holding it in its
mouth, follow him while wagging its tail in so abject a fashion that it was unbearable to watch. A rabbit was presented to the wolf, then a white lamb, but although it bared its teeth and salivated over them, trembling with desire, it didn’t touch either of them. Instead, when ordered to, it leaped with one elegant bound over the two animals that cowered there shuddering with fright. Indeed, it lay down between the rabbit and the lamb, embracing each of them with
its front paws and forming a moving family group. What is more, it ate a bar of chocolate from the man’s hand. The degree to which this wolf had learned to deny its natural instincts was just fantastic, and it was agonizing to witness. As I did so, my hair was standing on end.

In the second part of the performance, however, the enraged spectator, and the wolf itself as well, were compensated for this agony. You see, once that sophisticated demonstration of obedience had run its course, and after the tamer, smiling sweetly, had taken a triumphal bow over the group with the lamb and the wolf, the roles were reversed. All of a sudden, the Harry-like animal tamer, bowing low to the wolf, laid his whip at its feet and began to tremble and cower down, looking just as wretched as the animal had done before. The wolf, on the other hand, licked its lips and smiled, abandoning all its earlier forced and false airs. Its eyes beamed and every sinew in its body tightened as its savage self began to thrive again.

Now it was the wolf’s turn to command, and the human being had to obey. When ordered to, the tamer sank to his knees and played the part of the wolf, letting his tongue hang out and using his teeth, which were full of fillings, to tear the clothes from his body. Depending on what the ‘human-tamer’ commanded, he walked upright or crawled on all fours, sat up and begged, played dead, let the wolf ride on him, fetched him his whip. He proved a very gifted dog, highly imaginative in his willingness to submit to every humiliation and perversion. A beautiful girl came on to
the stage and, going up to the tamed man, stroked his chin and rubbed her cheek against his. He, however, stayed on all fours, still an animal. Shaking his head, he began baring his teeth at the good-looking girl, eventually causing her to take flight, so menacing and wolf-like was his behaviour. When offered some chocolate he
sniffed at it contemptuously and pushed it away. Finally, the white lamb and the plump, spotted rabbit were brought on again and the man showed what a willing pupil he was by playing the wolf to the hilt. His performance was breathtaking. Seizing on the screaming little creatures with his fingers and teeth, he tore scraps of skin and flesh from them, grinning as he ate them alive, and closing his eyes in drunken ecstasy as, beside himself, he quaffed their warm blood.

Horrified, I fled, out through the door. I could see that this Magic Theatre was no unalloyed paradise. Under its attractive surface there were all manner of hidden hells. Dear God, was there no salvation to be found here either?

I walked anxiously to and fro, my mouth tasting of blood and chocolate, the one just as nasty as the other. Longing to escape these troubled waters, I struggled inwardly with all my might to conjure up more tolerable, more congenial images. The line ‘O friends, not these tones!’
¹⁴
resounded in my head, and I remembered with horror those appalling photographs taken at the front that one had occasionally glimpsed during the war, those piles of tangled corpses, their faces transformed into devilish gargoyles by their gasmasks. As a humanitarian opponent of war, I had been horrified by such images then. How stupid and naive I still
was! Today I knew better. No animal-tamer, no government minister, no general, no madman was capable of hatching up ideas and images in his head that didn’t already exist within me, and mine were every
bit as appalling, as savage and evil, as coarse and stupid as theirs.

With a sigh of relief I recalled the inscription that, when the theatre performance began, I had seen the handsome youth respond to with such enthusiasm:

All things considered, there actually seemed to be nothing more desirable on offer than this. Pleased to be able to escape the damnable world of the wolf once more, I entered.

Here, strange to say, what greeted me was the sweet fragrance of my youth, the atmosphere of my boyhood and adolescence, and I felt the young blood of those days flowing through my veins. So unbelievable was it and yet at the same time deeply familiar, it sent shivers down my spine. All the things I had done, thought and been only a short time ago sank into oblivion, and I was young once more. Only an hour, only moments ago, I had thought I knew perfectly well what love, what desire, what longing was, but that had been the love and longing of an old man. Now I was young again, and all that I was feeling inside me, this red-hot lava, this powerful tug of yearning, this passion melting the ice like a warm March wind, was young, fresh and genuine. Oh, how the forgotten fires were suddenly rekindled; how the sounds of yesteryear came swelling darkly back! What fresh life was quivering in my pulse, what cries and songs were filling my
soul! I was a boy of fifteen or sixteen, my head was full of Latin and Greek, and beautiful lines of poetry. Effort and ambition dominated my thinking, the dream of becoming an artist my
imagination. But what was burning and flickering at a much deeper level than all these smouldering fires was the flame of love, sexual hunger, an all-consuming premonition of lust.

I was standing on one of the rocky outcrops above my small home town. The scents of a warm spring breeze and the first violets filled the air, and down there in the town I could see the river and the windows of my father’s house glinting in the sun. Everything looked, sounded and smelled so abundant, so bursting with the freshness of creation; everything glowed with such rich colours; the spring breeze made everything it touched seem transfigured and hyperreal. The world was just as I had seen it long ago in the richest, most poetic hours of my first youth. I stood there on the hill, the wind ruffling my long hair. Lost in a daydream and filled with erotic longing, I unconsciously stretched out a hand and tore a half-opened bud from a shrub that was just coming into leaf. Holding it in front of my eyes, I sniffed at it, and its scent alone was enough to rekindle the memories of that time. Then I took this tiny green object
playfully between my lips, lips that had yet to kiss a girl, and began to chew it. The tangy, aromatic, bitter taste of it at once brought home to me what I was experiencing. Everything fell into place again. What I was reliving was a moment from my last year as a schoolboy. One Sunday afternoon in the first days of spring when out walking alone, I had come across Rosa Kreisler, shyly said hello, and fallen head over heels in love.

At the time, I had been full of anxious anticipation as I watched the beautiful young girl, who had not yet spotted me, coming up the hill towards me, alone and deep in reverie. Although she wore her hair tied up in thick plaits, I had still glimpsed some loose strands of it blowing and waving in the breeze on either side of her cheeks. For the first time in my life, I had seen the beauty of the girl, the beautiful and dreamlike effect of the wind playing in her delicate hair, the beautiful and arousing cut of her
thin blue dress as it hung down over her young limbs. And just as the spicy, bitter taste of the bud I was chewing on had imbued me with all the alarmingly sweet joy and anxiety of spring, the sight of the girl now filled me with a deadly premonition of sexual passion, a foretaste of femininity, a deeply shocking presentiment of all the enormous opportunities it promised, all the nameless delights, the
unimaginable entanglements, anxieties and sorrows, the heights of fulfilment and the depths of guilt. Oh, how I could feel the bitter taste of spring burning on my tongue! Oh, how the wind was playing in the loose hair dangling by her red cheeks! Then, arriving close by, she had looked up and recognized me. Blushing slightly for a moment, she had looked away. Then I greeted her, raising the new hat I’d worn at that day’s confirmation service. Her composure soon regained, she lifted her head in a faintly ladylike fashion and greeted me back with a smile before slowly walking on with an air of confidence and superiority. A host of amorous wishes, demands and tributes that I sent after her surrounded her like a nimbus.

That is how it had been one Sunday thirty-five years ago, and it had all come back to me at this moment: hill and town, March wind and scent of buds, Rosa and her brown hair, tumescent desire and sweet, suffocating anxiety. It was all as before, and it seemed to me that in all my life I had never again loved anyone in the way that I loved Rosa. This time, however, I was given the opportunity to welcome her differently. I saw her blush on recognizing me, saw her effort to disguise the fact, and knew at once that she liked me, that this encounter meant as much to her as it did to me. And this time, despite feeling anxious and inhibited, instead of raising my hat and holding it ceremoniously above my head as I stood there waiting until she passed by, I did as my pulsating heart commanded and cried: ‘Rosa! Thank God you’ve come, you lovely lovely lass. I’m so very fond of you.’ It may not have been the
cleverest way of putting it, but this was no time
for being clever, and it was perfectly adequate. Rosa gave me no ladylike look, stopped rather than going on her way, looked at me, blushing even more than before, and said: ‘Hello, Harry. Are you really fond of me?’ As she spoke her brown eyes beamed at me from her vibrant face and I felt that my whole past life and loves had been wrong, confused and full of misfortune since the moment when I allowed Rosa to walk away from me on that Sunday. But now I had put right my mistake and everything was changing, taking a turn for the better.