The Dedalus Book of German Decadence (23 page)

If I should tear you to my breast with lascivious arms, if your hair were streaming like a mane, and your lips were sucking my blood, if I should whip your desires into an abyss of lust so that the world disappeared before your eyes, and eternity shrinks to one second of time, and you should sink upon me like a daffodil stem, beaten by hail, do you love me then?’

She was laughing in a strange, demented, boundless joy, she seized his body and rubbed her silken hair against his breast and gazed at him for a long time: then she poured herself into his eyes; it seemed to him that she was gliding into the very depths of his soul, beating hot about his heart, draining into every pore  …  He no longer had her before him, she was in him, in his blood, dissolving into him in long, throbbing convulsions, drunk with eternity  …

‘I love you, love you, love you!’

*        *        *        *

He felt in a dream that she was quietly, gently, slipping from his arms, he felt in the dream that the blood was flowing from his heart, that something was detaching itself from his soul.

But that was only a dream  …

He heard eyes shrieking in fearful torment, twitching in the fire of febrile stars, then, suddenly, were extinguished; a distant gleaming, and then the terrifying silence of the dark  …

But that was only a dream  …

And suddenly he found himself in a fearful night, a night which was rigid, petrified in the air, and he knew that no gleam of light could penetrate the sombre vault of darkness. He leapt out of bed and looked for her in terror, but she was not there.

For a moment he was paralysed, a hideous terror gripped his heart  …  He pulled himself together and looked for her, horror-struck.

The light of dawn poured blue streams of light into the room, he was seeking, seeking, he could see her quite plainly in front of him, he felt her arms, and gazed into her eyes, overwhelmed by bliss and happiness, he was kissing her hair  …

She was not there!

He staggered, sat down, got up again and groped his way into the other room.

A posy of red poppies was lying on a white sheet of paper on his writing desk.

He gazed at it for a long time, at this piece of paper and the red posy, and stroked it with his fingers to reassure himself that he was not dreaming, and was now awake.

He read the following:

‘I am going away, a long way away. I am entering the holy realm of torment, to my cross, the cross to which you nailed me. The wondrous hour is now fulfilled. Do not seek me out, you will not find me. Do not wait for me, it would be in vain. I am going without you, but I shall not be alone. I am with you and at your side for all eternity and my soul will be sad until the end  …’

He read no further. He crumpled up the paper and pushed the red posy away from him. He walked endlessly up and down the room until finally he collapsed exhausted into the arm-chair.

Above him the black vault of night and within his heart the horror and the terror of ghostly hours  …

It was already evening when he awoke.

He read her letter once more and knew that the hour of the miracle had come and would never return.

Now he knew that he would no longer find her and that he need not wait for her.

All in vain!

He knew this with a certainty which bored into his brain with glowing needles; he felt a senseless sadness and, at the same time, the bright, unspeakable majesty of death.

And with head held high he walked a long, long way, far beyond the city.

He was walking behind something in which his whole world lay buried, his whole happiness concealed, his past and his future incarcerated.

He was walking behind someone who was leading him, dragging him, crushing him, he was tottering, staggering and falling to the ground  …  but he would get up, for somebody was dragging him by force, and whenever he fell a cruel hand gripped his hair and pulled him upwards.

And then he was walking in long, painful strides as though he were petrified with pain, his heart heavy with great, stony tears.

He could see nothing more, and could only hear his own, booming footsteps; it was a though he were clad in iron, and a heavy, bronze visor had closed over his face.

He looked round, astonished.

He must have been a powerful leader, for he could hear his booming footsteps multiplied a thousand times, for a thousand armoured knights were following him.

He was leading them all through dark forests, and behind him came the knights with their blood red torches.

He felt no more pain, no more longing; he only heard her words, incessantly, the words which she had spoken to him previously, in the miraculous hour, as he had pressed her against himself in an even greater ecstasy:

‘You are holy for me, for you created me within myself, you have heard the deepest, most naked mystery of my soul, and you have interpreted the deepest, most tremendous mysteries unto me. You are radiance, light and revelation to me, you are the sun in whose radiance my heart has melted.’

He repeated these words incessantly. And these words became her small white hands, those hands in which his face once rested, and he felt upon his skin the impression of the intricate pattern of the lines of these hands.

Her words became the silken sheen of her body, ah, with what fathomless joy did it shine in his breast, and how white did her body gleam against his dark skin!

And each word was living and trembling, he held them in his hand, they were beating, throbbing  …  He could feel the words in his veins, dissolving into his blood stream, he heard them beating around him, pouring themselves into fiery rings.

His heart grew heavy, and a dumb cry was choking him.

Mother of mercy!

But there was no pity for him.

And again the pain broke forth, and again he heard her words, the words she had uttered to him at the hour of the miracle, when her eyes had flamed in a ghostly light and flickered crazily over the mirror of his soul. She was speaking:

‘A dark destiny broods over me, hell and damnation yawn at my feet. My soul is bleeding in the longing for the lost paradise.’

He was standing at the peak of a jagged rock which reared into the skies. Suddenly her small white hand touched him, and he fell from one spiked rock, gashing his body against the sharp stones  …  he slid deeper and deeper down the glacier, his whole life flashing past in the thousandth of a second, he plunged like an avalanche into the darkest pit of hell till he felt delight, a delight in plunging thus and mutilating himself on the jagged fangs.

He felt her power, her torment and her impotent beginning for it was another force, a different one, which had caused her to push him into the abyss.

And for the third time he heard her voice, but this time within his heart: a scream of hot fingers, burrowing in his hair, and the beseeching embrace of her arms, the gasping desperation of her body, rubbing itself sore against his own:

‘I am going, see, I am going, the hour of the miracle is at hand.’

It became dark before his eyes, his knees buckled as though he had been hit in the back by a spear, and he fell to earth with a dreadful scream.

Would he wake again?

Yes, he was riding on a wild black stallion across the sun-dried steppes. The fearful heat had devoured everything, dried up streams and rivulets, and there was nothing behind him, nothing before him except the vengeful, gleaming sun and a sky consumed in a white heat. The air was a hot, boiling mist, this was what he was breathing, and the burned earth scorched the hoofs of his stallion. His helmet burned itself into his brow with burning weals; his brazen breast-plate crushed his body.

He was riding in impotent desperation, for she was dying of thirst in his arms, she to whom he had given his own blood to drink.

The stallion grew slower and weaker  …  it staggered, collapsed and pulled itself to its feet, its neck hanging like a crippled branch, it would die at the next step.

And suddenly it whinnied loud, joyfully.

For in this hell, in this scorched and searing heat, this mist of fire, there appeared a well.

And he was lifting her high, lowering her on to the earth and moistening her brow with the water, but suddenly, as though risen from the earth, a black knight was standing before him in such divine, majestic omnipotence, and his voice thundered like the trumpet of the day of judgement.

‘I am the one who determines the confines of all that is joyful, all that is happy on earth.’

I am he who was before all things and who outlives the end of all.

God, Satan, Destiny!

And the ghostly apparition dissolved  …

He gazed down into the depths, at the heaving sea of roofs, breathing gas and electric light  …  It was a town, but a strange town, not his.

No! This was not his town!

And suddenly he saw quite clearly before his eyes a city carved into strange rocks, shot through with a tangled mesh of ditches, the town of death and desolation, left to him by his ancestors, him, the last of the race.

And again he felt the great, holy sun within his breast.

He would find her here in this city of death.

There! There!

His heart swelled in an unknown power, he grew into the skies, stretched out his arms and spoke to her:

‘I am going to you, but why should I seek you, you who suffuse my blood, you who are the breath of my soul, the thrust of my longing, the magic of my dreams: you are I.’

And again he looked down at the town which was strange to him.

It was there then that the miracle was fulfilled.

But the town was strange to him.

And again he spoke to her and himself:

‘You are a sun which has poured itself into me. You will stand before me and be mine, as often as I will. But not here. A greater miracle will happen, there, where my city climbs the wild rocks, where the holy river rages and roars in the granite abyss and where, in subterranean caves, cascades of stalactites pour forth frozen moonlight.’

A great green star was gleaming above his head, a star that would lead him to the new Zion, to the new Jerush-Halaim, the eternal Alcazar of his ancestors – there, where, in the mysterious enchantment of a glooming death an even greater miracle should occur  …

*        *        *        *

He was standing at the window of the Alcazar and gazing down at that strange city which his ancestors had built for him, millennia ago.

There was a moon, and the shapes and contours of the town took on a ghostly appearance, a strangely crenellated pattern of roofs at his feet.

It was as though the earth had shuddered, as though the smooth, rocky terrain had bent and split, heaving up massive slivers of rock, one above the other, or locked into each other, rearing to pyramids or grinding into the land in jagged convulsions.

It looked like a miniature mountain range, condensed into a small area with a thousand peaks, valleys, reefs, slopes, precipitous chasms and sudden elevations, and high up upon the highest peak reared the mighty castle, the ancient Alcazar.

He gazed for a long time at the town beneath him. He saw the sharp, black pattern of the streets, curiously enmeshed and stamping a strange reticulation on to the habitations beneath.

The white mass of roofs looked like a holy, arcane ornament, forming a tangle of mysterious arabesques.

It looked as though the hand of a mighty hierophant had inscribed the holy runes of his wisdom into the white surface of the massive rock.

From the height of the Alcazar the town did not look as though it had been built, but somehow created from the erosion of the rock.

The town lay spread before him, an enormous catacomb, above which reared the Alcazar, proud, remote and stern, with slim towers reaching heavenwards.

He shuddered when he thought how one day he would have to descend into these catacombs.

He knew all the lanes, all the alleys, all the secret hiding places, the labyrinths, the streets which crossed and ended in culs-de-sac; he knew that he could not get lost in this maze, this tangle of alley-ways and yet he felt a secret dread at being lost in this labyrinth and never finding his way out.

And there was no one who could show him the way out, for the town was dead.

With unspeakable misery he gazed at this city which could only inspire dread and horror.

And yet a great miracle was to come to pass here.

Here he was to form from himself that which was the resonance of his thought, the expression of his feeling, the form of his will.

Here, for his heart had promised him this, he was to win again the lost beloved, to create her again from the precious treasure of his most secret beauty, his deepest being.

But he had waited in vain, tormented his will with sick fantasies, all in vain.

He was not able to create her out of himself.

And why, then, these splendid Alcazars, these miracles and wonders, this fearful necropolis before him?

He was suddenly seized with a terrible fear of this monstrous, midnight ghostliness at his feet, and longed with all his heart to be back home, in the town in the deep valley, breathing the precious air at night; he longed for the dark avenues in which he used to wander for days on end, seeking her; he longed for the dim-lit churches and the dark green slopes whose forests of chestnuts poured their heavy, damascene splendour into the town beneath.

And the unspeakable magic of this holy earth burst forth in majestic waves, the heavy fields of corn, rocking dreamily back and forth, the fallow fields in the fever of hot summer nights, the secret, ghostly dance of the will o’ the wisp over the dark swamps, oh, and this sky which was bedded in the depths of the lake, from whose waters the magic of light conjured forth pallid stars, and over the still countenance of the dead, still waters there spread the dark memory of sunken churches.

And again he gazed down at the dead town beneath him and at the raging river which embraced it, like a holy omega.

In deep, rocky chasms it plunged from one cataract to another, crashing into eddies and whirlpools; it hurled steaming, spraying masses of water into measureless depths, flinging them upwards against the jagged spikes of rock, like Cleopatra’s needles rearing from its bed; it forced the water into the crannies and fissures which lacerated the granite banks; it boiled, seethed and roared and hurled itself with hellish haste into monstrous geysers and vortices.