CHAPTER EIGHT

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

I had managed to get permission to stay in H— during the summer semester as well. We spent almost all our time not in the house but in the garden by the river. The Japanese man (who, incidentally, had lost decisively in the boxing match) was gone, the Tolstoyan too. Demian kept a horse and took long rides every day. I was often left alone with his mother.

I marveled sometimes at how peaceful my life was. I had spent so long in the habit of solitude, self-denial, and self-flagellation that those months in H— were like an enchanted dream island where I could live in comfort, and surrounded by nothing but beautiful, pleasant things and feelings. I could tell that this was a foretaste of the new, higher community we were imagining. Occasionally I would be seized with mourning for this happiness, since I knew full well it could not last. I was unable to breathe in an atmosphere of comfort and fullness—I needed torment and frenzy. I could feel that one day I would wake up out of this beautiful picture of love and happiness and stand alone once more, completely alone, in the cold world of other people, where my only choices were solitude or struggle—no peace, no shared life.

At these moments I would nestle up close to Eve with redoubled affection, glad that my destiny still wore this lovely, quiet face.

The summer weeks passed quickly and easily; the fall semester was already near. I was about to leave, I couldn’t think about it—and I didn’t think about it, instead I clung to these beautiful days like a butterfly to the honey clover. This had been my time of happiness, the first time in my life I had found fulfillment and been welcomed into a group of like-minded individuals. What would come next? I would carry on struggling, longing, dreaming, being alone.

I felt this premonition so strongly one day that my love for Eve suddenly flared up with painful intensity. My God, such a short time and then I would no longer see her, hear her firm, good footsteps walking through the house, find flowers from her on my table! And what had I accomplished? I had dreamed and wallowed in contentment instead of winning her, instead of fighting for her and making her mine forever! Everything she had ever told me about true love came rushing back to my mind—a hundred delicate warnings, a hundred gentle encouragements, maybe even promises—and what had I done with them? Nothing! Nothing!

I stood in the middle of my room, gathered all my mental energy, and thought about Eve. I wanted to summon up all the powers in my soul so that she would feel my love and be drawn to me. She had to come to me, had to long for my embrace; my kisses had to burrow insatiably into her ripe, loving lips.

I stood there and concentrated until my feet and fingers started to turn cold. I felt power radiating from me. For several moments something contracted inside me, firm and tight, something bright and cool: I felt for a second that I carried a crystal in my heart, and I knew that it was my Self. The coldness reached my chest.

When I emerged from this awful strain, I could feel that something was coming. I was dead tired, but ready to see Eve walk into the room, burning with rapture.

I heard hooves pounding up the long street, near and hard, and suddenly stopping. I sprang to the window. Demian was dismounting his horse downstairs. I ran down.

“What is it, Demian? Nothing’s happened to your mother, has it?”

He did not seem to hear me. He was very pale and sweat ran down his forehead over both cheeks; the horse was hot with effort too. Demian tied the reins to the garden fence, took my arm, and walked down the street with me.

“You’ve already heard?”

I hadn’t heard anything.

Demian gripped my arm and turned his face to mine with a strange, dark, pitying look in his eyes.

“Yes, my boy, it’s starting. You knew about the strained relations with Russia. . . .”

“What? Is it war? I never thought it would really—”

He spoke softly, even though no one was near: “It’s not declared yet. But it’s war. You can be sure of it. I didn’t want to worry you since the last time, but I’ve seen three more signs since then. So it won’t be an apocalypse, an earthquake, a revolution. It’s war. And will it ever be popular! You’ll see, Sinclair, it will be like a kind of mass insanity, already no one can wait to start fighting. Their lives have become so meaningless to them. . . . But you’ll see, this is just the beginning. This may be a big war, a gigantic war, but even that is just the beginning. The new world is coming, horrific to anyone who clings to the old. — What are you going to do?”

I was confused, but it all still sounded so distant and improbable.

“I don’t know. . . . You?”

He shrugged.

“I’ll report for duty as soon as the mobilization comes. I’m a lieutenant.”

“You? I had no idea!”

“Yes, it was one of the ways I conformed. You know how I don’t like to stand out; I always preferred to go too far in the other direction, to seem proper. I’ll be at the front by next week, I should think. . . .”

“For God’s sake—”

“Well, my boy, don’t be too sentimental about it. It won’t be much fun to order artillery fire against other living human beings, but that’s beside the point. Every one of us will be sucked into the system now. You too. You’ll definitely be drafted.”

“And your mother, Demian?”

Only then did I remember what had happened just a few minutes before. How the world had changed! I had exerted all my strength to summon up the sweetest of images, and now my destiny suddenly faced me in new form, wearing a threatening, horrific mask.

“My mother? Oh, you don’t have to worry about her. She is safe, safer than anyone else in the world today. — Do you really love her that much?”

“You knew, Demian?”

He laughed a bright, free laugh.

“My dear boy! Of course I knew. No one has ever called my mother Eve without being in love with her. By the way, what just happened? You called her today, or me, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I called — — I was calling Eve.”

“She felt it. She abruptly sent me away and told me I had to go see you. I had just told her the news about Russia.”

We turned back, talked a little more, then he untied his horse and mounted it.

Only when I got back upstairs to my room did I feel how exhausted I was, from Demian’s news and much more from the effort that had come before. But Eve had heard me! I had reached her heart with my thoughts. She would have come herself, if not for — — How strange it all was, and, at bottom, how beautiful! So there would be war. Everything we had talked about so often was starting to happen. And Demian had foreseen so much of it. How strange, that the current of the world would no longer pass us by, somewhere else . . . instead it was suddenly running right through our hearts, adventures and wild fates were calling to us, and now, or soon, the moment would arrive when the world needed us, when it would be transformed. Demian was right: we shouldn’t be sentimental about it. The only remarkable thing was that my “destiny,” this private and solitary thing, would now be shared with so many other people, with the whole world, and that we would experience it together. Good!

I was ready. When I walked through the city that night, there was a buzz of great excitement on every corner. Wherever I turned, the word: “War”!

I went to Eve’s house, and we ate in the summer house. I was the only guest that night. Neither of us said a word about the war. Only later, just before I left, did Eve say: “My dear Sinclair, you called me today. You know why I didn’t come to you myself. But don’t forget: Now you know the call, and whenever you need someone who bears the mark, use it again!”

She stood up and preceded me into the twilit garden. Tall and regal, full of mystery, she strode between the silent trees, and all the many stars shone tiny and delicate above her head.

•   •   •

I am coming to the end. Everything happened quite fast. The war started, and Demian, strangely unfamiliar in his uniform with the silver-gray overcoat, set out. I took his mother back to her house. Soon I said goodbye to her too; she kissed me on the mouth and hugged me to her breast for a moment, her large eyes blazing up close straight into mine.

And all people were as brothers. They thought it was the Fatherland, and Honor, but it was Fate whose unconcealed face they beheld for a moment. Young men emerged from their barracks and boarded trains, and on many of their faces I saw a sign—not ours, but a beautiful, dignified sign that meant love and death. I too was embraced by people I had never seen before, and I understood why, and happily responded in kind. It was a kind of intoxication that made them do it, not the will of their destiny, but that intoxication was holy too—it came from that short, thrilling look in the eye they had all given Fate.

It was almost winter when I arrived at the battlefield.

At first, despite all the excitement of gunfire, everything disappointed me. Earlier I had given much thought to why people were so rarely capable of living for an ideal; now I saw that many, indeed all people were capable of dying for one. Only it could not be a personal ideal, freely chosen; it had to be a common one, taken from someone else.

With time, though, I realized I had not given people enough credit. No matter how much their service and common danger made them all alike, I still saw many, many people, living and dying, who approached the will of fate with great dignity. They had the steady, distant, almost possessed look of those who have completely surrendered to the unimaginable, who care nothing about the goal—and this not only while launching an attack, but all the time. Whatever they might think or believe, they were ready—they were of use—a future would grow from them. And the more fixated the world was on war, heroism, honor, and all the other old ideals, the more distant and improbable any voice of apparent humanity might sound, it was all on the surface, the same way the question of the external and political objectives of the war remained on the surface. Underneath, something was in the process of becoming. Something like a new humanity. For I saw many men, some of them dying at my side, who had arrived at the deeply felt insight that hate and anger, killing and destruction, were not connected to the objects of these actions and emotions. These objects, like the war’s objectives, were entirely accidental. Primal emotions, even the most violent, were not intended for the enemy: their bloody work was merely an emanation from inside, a manifestation of the self-divided soul that wanted to rampage and kill, destroy and die, in order to be reborn. A giant bird was fighting its way out of the egg, and the egg was the world, and the world had to shatter to pieces.

One early spring night I was standing guard in front of a farmstead we had occupied. A listless wind blew in fitful gusts; armies of clouds rode high across the Flemish sky with somewhere behind them a hint of the moon. I had felt uneasy that whole day; something was worrying me. Now, at my dark post, I thought deeply about the images from my life thus far: about Eve, about Demian. I stood leaning against a poplar tree, and I gazed into the turbulent sky, where mysteriously shifting bright spots soon formed a large, surging series of images. From the strange weakness in my pulse, my skin’s insensitivity to wind and rain, and my sparks of inner wakefulness, I could feel that a guide was near me.

I could see a giant city in the clouds, with millions of people streaming out of it and swarming across the vast countryside. In their midst a powerful goddess-figure appeared, as large as a mountain range, with glittering stars in her hair and with Eve’s features. The streams of people vanished into it as though into an enormous pit, and were gone. The goddess crouched on the ground and the mark on her brow glowed bright. She seemed in the grip of a dream: she closed her eyes, her huge face twisted in pain. Suddenly she shrieked, and stars leaped out of her brow, thousands of shining stars hurtling in magnificent arcs and semicircles across the black sky.

One of the stars shot straight at me with a shriek; it seemed to be trying to find me. . . . Then it burst apart, screaming, into a thousand sparks, flinging me up and then throwing me back to the ground. The world collapsed in thunder above me.

They found me near the poplar, covered with earth and with many wounds.

I was in a cellar with shots whizzing overhead. I was lying in a wagon, bumping across empty fields. Most of the time I was asleep, or unconscious. But the deeper into my sleep I went, the more violently I felt something drawing me on—that I was obeying a power that was my master.

I was lying in a stable, on straw. It was dark and someone had stepped on my hand. But something inside me wanted me to keep going, and pulled me more strongly than ever. Again I was in a wagon, later on a stretcher or ladder. I felt summoned somewhere more and more powerfully, felt nothing but the need to finally get there.

Then I had arrived. It was night, I was fully conscious, and I had just felt the pull and need inside me with extra force. Now I was lying in a large room, bedded down on the floor, and I felt I was where I had been summoned to. I looked around. Another mattress lay right next to mine with someone on it, who leaned over and looked at me. He had the mark on his forehead. It was Max Demian.

I couldn’t speak, and he couldn’t either, or didn’t want to. He just looked at me. The light from a bulb hanging on the wall above him shone on his face. He smiled at me.

He kept looking into my eyes for an endless length of time. Then he slowly brought his face closer to me until we almost touched.

“Sinclair!” he said in a whisper.

I signaled with my eyes that I could hear him.

He smiled again, almost as though in pity.

“Little friend!” he said, smiling.

His mouth was now very close to mine. He softly went on: “Do you still remember Franz Kromer?” he asked.

I blinked at him and managed to smile too.

“Listen, little Sinclair! I have to go away. You may need me again someday, against Kromer or something else. The next time you call me, I won’t come so obviously on horseback or by train. You will have to listen inside yourself, and then you’ll realize I’m in you. Do you understand? . . . One more thing! Eve said if you’re ever in trouble, I should give you the kiss from her she sent with me. Close your eyes, Sinclair!”

I obediently closed my eyes and felt a light kiss on my lips, where I still had a little blood that refused to ever go away. Then I fell asleep.

Someone woke me up the next morning to be bandaged. When at last I was fully awake, I turned quickly to the neighboring mattress. On it was lying a stranger I had never seen before.

The bandaging hurt. Everything that has happened to me since has hurt. But sometimes, when I find the key and climb fully down into myself, where the images of destiny slumber in their dark mirror, I need only bend down over the black mirror and I see my own image, which now looks exactly like Him, Him, my friend and my guide.