AFTER CHRISTMAS
In the days after the Christmas festivities, I uneasily eyed a few packages that were lying around on top of my chest of drawers and causing me to worry. These were things I received as gifts but for which I had no need and that now had to be exchanged. This is how it’s always done, and it’s astonishing that after the Christmas rush the saleswomen in nice shops manage to spare so much good cheer for the days of gift returns. Nonetheless, I don’t like doing these errands. Shopping is difficult enough for me, and I tend to put it off—and now to make exchanges, to go into the stores, to deal with people, and once again take an interest in matters that have already been dealt with! No, I can’t stand it, and if it were left solely up to me, I would simply put the unusable gifts in a drawer, and leave them there forever.
Luckily my lady friend understands these things quite well, and I asked her to accompany me to three shops. She did so happily, not just to please me, but also because it was fun for her, it was a kind of sport, a kind of art that gave her joy. So we went together to the glove shop, where we greeted everyone, unwrapped my Christmas gloves, and I, fidgeting nervously with my hat in my hand, sought just the right manner of speech with which one customarily undertakes such transactions, but I didn’t quite succeed and so let my helper do the talking. And sure enough, the magic flowed, they smiled, they took back—thank God—the gloves, and suddenly I stood before an array of colorful shirts and was allowed to choose one of them. That suited me, so I played the expert, recalling after some thought my collar size, and soon, carrying a new package, we left the shop, where in the aftermath of celebrating the Savior’s birth one can now spend an entire day exchanging walking sticks, gloves, and hats.
It went equally well with the new fountain pen. I had to press into a crowded store, perch in front of a pleasant young woman, receive writing paper and several pens to select from, and while seated there I wrote and drew flowers, stars, and initials on a page until it was full. I left with one of the pens I had tried out, and then if writing were to still prove tiresome for me, it could not be the fault of the pen; it’s a golden pen from America, one fills it with a golden lever, and golden words stream joyfully forth. But I need it more for drawing. Gratefully I put the small golden creation with its golden tip into my bag and went on, trudged to the optician, to whom I had to confess that my new reading glasses didn’t serve me well and that he should take them back and make a new pair. Shielded by my lady friend, emboldened by my success with the shirt and the pen, I entered purposefully into this glazed realm, was listened to, and indeed the good man took back my glasses. I never would have believed it. I myself wouldn’t have done it in his place.
The victory lap through the three dreaded stores, the trek in the cold winter wind with my friend, the transformation of three embarrassing packages into three delightful ones was reason enough to render me chipper and grateful. As part of the exchange of the gloves, I even managed to obtain a compact pocket mirror that I was able to present as a gift to my escort.
On the way home I was very pleased and wanted to get back to work, to deal with all the unread letters that had piled up over the last days. I recalled my childhood and how the days after Christmas were so beautiful, with every morning’s awakening and every return home involving the reward of new gifts and rejoicing in their possession. Once I received a violin, and even woke up in the middle of the night to touch it and gently pluck the strings. Once I was given Don Quixote, and every stroll or walk to church, even every meal was an unpleasant interruption from my blissful reading.
This time I hadn’t received such thrilling things. The violin, the book, the toy, the skates no longer offer such splendor and magic to old people. Three boxes of good cigars stood there—that was reassuring—and some wine and cognac with which I could while away the evening. The new fountain pen was nice, but it was ill-suited for holding close to my heart and indulging in the delight of ownership.
There was however one thing, one gift, that was truly worth celebrating, truly extraordinary and magical, that one could take out in quiet moments, rapturously inspect, that you could look at and fall in love with. I took it out and sat by the window. It was, beautifully mounted under glass, a splendid exotic butterfly that went by the name of Urania and came from Madagascar. The beautifully built creature with slender, powerful wings and a rich scalloped pattern underneath floated gently on a branch, its upper body striped green and black and with rust-red hairs below and its tiny head gleaming golden green. The upper wings were patterned in green-and-black, and on the visible side a splendid warm and golden glowing green, but on the back side a very cool, tender silver sprinkled Veronese green, in which the crystalline wing ribs shimmered nobly. The underwing, however, fantastically jagged, displayed aside from the green and black pattern, a large gleaming field of deep gold, that in the light seemed almost copper red, even scarlet, whimsically covered with dark black patches, and at the bottom, the butterfly was, like the hem of a woman’s gown, trimmed with a fine blend of short blond-and-black fur. Besides this the underwing had another special quality and characteristic: it was traversed by a short, dreamy zigzag line of pure white that dissolved to some extent into the entire wing, and made it into a loose play of air and gold dust and appeared to forcefully repel fantastic beam-like rays. There was something splendidly mysterious and kindly about this Madagascan butterfly, this airy African dream of green, black, and gold that could not be found on Christmas tables anywhere else in the city. To return to this was a joy, to immerse oneself in its presence a celebration.
For a long time, I sat bent over this stranger from Madagascar and let it enchant me. In many ways it reminded me, in many ways it admonished me, it spoke to me of many things. It was the image of beauty, the image of fortune, the image of art. Its form was a victory over death, its play of colors a smile of superiority over impermanence. It was a unique, beaming smile, this preserved dead butterfly under glass, a smile of many sorts, appearing variously as childish to me, then ancient and wise, soon combatively shaking, then painfully mocking—beauty always smiles this way, so smile all creations in which life appears to have permanently curdled, the beauty that has become a perpetually flowing form, whether it be a flower or an animal, an Egyptian head or the death mask of a genius. It was superior and eternal, this smile, and it was, when one lost oneself in it, suddenly ghostly wild and crazy, it was beautiful and cruel, tender and dangerous, full of paramount reason and full of the wildest folly. Wherever life for an instant appears to be fully formed, it has this contradictory aspect. There is no great music that doesn’t at times seem to us like childish laughter and then at others like the deepest grief. Beauty is always like that everywhere: a lovely mirrored surface beneath which chaos lies in wait. Fortune is always like that everywhere: gleaming for a magical instant and then fading again, blown away by the breath of the death imperative. This is high art, the lofty wisdom of the select forever and everywhere: smiling knowingly into the abyss, assenting to suffering, and the play of harmony amid the eternal death throes of contradictions.
The fleeting purple could be sweetly glanced amid the golden splendor, the dark black-and-green marks tautly stretched over the wing ribs, with the slender spikes of color playfully sending out sparks. You lovely guest, you enchanting alien! Did you fly from Madagascar specially to fill my winter evening with a colorful dream? Did you run away from the paint box of the eternal mother just to sing me an old song of wisdom about the unity of contradictions, to teach me again what I already so often knew and have so often forgotten? Did a patient human hand so neatly preserve you and glue you on your branch, so that for a lonely hour a sick man would be enchanted with your sparkling playfulness, to console himself with your silent dreams? Were you killed and put under glass so that your eternal suffering and dying could console us, so the immortal suffering and dying of the great sufferer, curiously beloved and comforting to the true artist, could instead lift our souls from their desperation?
Evening light plays palely over your shimmering golden wings, slowly the red gold dissolves and soon all the magic, enveloped by darkness, can no longer be seen. But still the game of eternity is continually playing itself out, the brave artist’s game of the endurance of beauty—the song plays on in my soul, in my thoughts the colorful rays continue to flicker with life. The poor beautiful butterfly didn’t die in vain in Madagascar, the anxious hand didn’t preserve its wing and antennae so carefully and lastingly for nothing. This tiny embalmed pharaoh will bear witness to me about its empire of the sun for a long time to come, and when it has long since disintegrated and I too am long gone, then somewhere in some soul something of its blissful play and wise smile will flourish and continue to be passed along, just as the gold of Tutankhamun still gleams today, and the blood of the Savior still flows in our time.
1928