CHAPTER TWO

CAIN

Salvation from my torments came from an entirely unexpected direction, and along with salvation something new came into my life whose effects have continued to this day.

A new student had recently appeared in our Latin school. He was the son of a well-to-do widow who had moved to our city; he wore a black ribbon of mourning on his sleeve. He entered a higher grade than mine and was several years older than me, but before long I noticed him, just as everyone else did. This remarkable student seemed to be much older than he looked—he didn’t come across as a schoolboy to anyone. He moved like a man among us children, a man from a different world—actually, like a lord. He was not liked; he never took part in our games, much less any rough-housing. The only thing anyone liked about him was the firm and confident tone he took with the teacher. His name was Max Demian.

One day, as sometimes happened in our school for whatever reason, a different grade had classes in our own grade’s large schoolroom. It was Demian’s class. We younger students had Bible class that day; the older students had to write an essay. While the teacher drummed the story of Cain and Abel into our heads, I kept looking over at Demian, whose face strangely fascinated me: I saw his bright, unusually determined and intelligent face bent attentively over his work, looking nothing at all like a student doing an assignment, but rather like a scholar or scientist conducting his own research. I did not actually find it pleasant to look at him—on the contrary I felt resistant to him, he was too superior and cool for me, too provocatively sure of himself, and his eyes had the expression of a grown-up (something children never like), slightly sad, with flashes of mockery within them. Still I could not stop looking at him, whether I liked him or not; whenever he glanced back at me, though, I quickly looked away in alarm. Today when I think back to what he looked like as a student, I can say that he was different in every way from anyone else: he was utterly stamped with his own individual personality, and stood out for that very reason, even though he did everything he could not to stand out. He carried himself like a prince in disguise, living among peasant children and making every effort to seem like them.

He walked behind me on the way home from school. After the other boys went their own ways, he caught up to me and said hello. His greeting, too, was adult and polite, even though he imitated our schoolboy tone when he said it.

“Should we walk a bit together?” was his friendly question. I was flattered, and nodded. Then I told him where I lived.

“Oh, you live there?” he said with a smile. “I know that house. There’s something unusual over your front door, it interested me right away.”

At first I had no idea what he meant, and was amazed that he seemed to know our house better than I did. There was probably a kind of coat of arms on the keystone over the arch of the doorway, but it had been worn flat over the years and painted and repainted over many times; it had nothing to do with us or our family, as far as I knew.

“I don’t know anything about it,” I said timidly. “It’s a bird or something like that. It must be very old. They say the house used to be part of the monastery.”

“That may be,” he nodded. “Take a closer look! Things like that can often be very interesting. I think it’s a sparrow hawk.”

We kept walking, and I was very shy and awkward. Suddenly Demian laughed, as though he had just thought of something funny.

“I was there in your class today,” he said in a lively voice. “The story of Cain, with the mark on his forehead. Did you like it?”

No, I rarely liked any of what we had to study, but I didn’t dare say that to him—it was like a grown-up was quizzing me. I said I liked it very much.

Demian clapped me on the shoulder.

“You don’t need to pretend with me, my friend! But the story is really quite strange, I think, much stranger than most of the things they tell us about in school. The teacher didn’t say much about it, of course, just the usual stuff about God and sin and so on. But I think—” He interrupted himself, smiled, and said: “But are you interested?”

He went on: “Yes, well, I think this story of Cain can be interpreted in a totally different way. Most of the things they teach us are no doubt perfectly true and right, but you can see them differently from how the teachers do, and they usually make much more sense when you do that. This Cain with the mark on his forehead, for example, they haven’t really explained him to us in a satisfactory way, don’t you agree? Someone kills his brother in an argument, that could happen, and then he gets scared and acts innocent, that’s plausible too. But for him to be rewarded for his cowardice with a special distinction that protects him and frightens everyone else, that really is very strange.”

“You’re right!” I said. The topic was starting to get interesting now. “But how else would you interpret the story?”

He slapped me on the shoulder.

“It’s simple! The mark came first: that’s where the story started. There once was a man with something in his face that frightened people. They were afraid to lay a hand on him, or his children; they were awed. But maybe—in fact, I’m sure of it—there wasn’t literally a sign on his forehead like a postmark. Things in life are rarely that obvious. No, it must have been something uncanny, almost imperceptible: a little more spirit, a little more daring in his look than people were used to. This man had power, and others were afraid of that power. He was ‘marked.’ They could explain it however they wanted, and ‘they’ always want what’s easy and comforting and puts them in the right. They were scared of Cain’s children, so the children had ‘marks’ too. In other words, they explained the mark not as what it really was—a special distinction—but as the opposite. They said that the people with this mark were sinister and unnerving—and so they were. Anyone with courage and character always seems unnerving to others. They felt very uncomfortable having this tribe of fearless, sinister people running around, and so they put a label on them, hung a story around their necks, to get back at them and get some compensation for all the times they had been scared. — You understand?”

“Yes—so you mean—Cain wasn’t evil at all? And the whole story in the Bible is actually not true?”

“Yes and no. Ancient stories like that are always true, but they’re not always recorded and passed down in the right way. What I think is that Cain was a fine fellow, and they told this story about him because they were scared of him. It was just a rumor, idle gossip. But it was perfectly true, insofar as Cain and his children really did bear a kind of mark and were different from most people.”

I was dumbfounded.

“And you think the part about killing his brother isn’t all true either?” I asked, gripped with curiosity.

“Oh, that part is definitely true. The stronger one murdered the weaker one. There’s no way to know if it was really his brother, but that doesn’t really matter, in the end all men are brothers. So, a stronger man killed a weaker man. Maybe it was heroic, maybe not. But in any case the other weaklings were now full of fear, they moaned and complained, and if anyone asked them, ‘Why don’t you just kill him?’ they didn’t say: ‘Because we’re cowards,’ they said: ‘No one can kill him, he bears a mark. God has marked him!’ The lie must have started something like that. — Well, I’m keeping you. Good bye!”

He turned the corner onto Altgasse and left me standing alone, more astounded than I had ever been in my life. Almost as soon as he left, everything he’d said seemed entirely unbelievable to me. Cain a noble person and Abel a coward! The mark of Cain as a badge of honor! It was absurd, it was wicked blasphemy! Where did that leave our Lord? He had accepted Abel’s sacrifice, had He not? Did He not love Abel? — No, it was all stupid. And I had the feeling that Demian was just making fun of me and trying to trip me up. He was a damned clever fellow, and he sure knew how to talk, but—no—

At the same time I had never in my life thought so deeply about any Bible story, or indeed about any story. And I forgot about Franz Kromer for longer than I had been able to for some time—I forgot about him for several hours, a whole evening. I reread the story at home, as it was written in the Bible: it was short and clear; to try to look for a special secret meaning in it was crazy. If Demian was right, every murderer could claim to be God’s chosen one! No, it was nonsense. What I had liked was just Demian’s way of saying these things, so simple and easy, as though it were all clear and obvious—and with those eyes of his too!

Of course my own life was not exactly on the right track—in fact it was on a terribly wrong track. I had lived in a bright, clean world of light, I was a kind of Abel myself, and now here I was, stuck fast in the “other” world—I had fallen so far, sunk so deep, and at the same time there was basically nothing I could do about it! What was I supposed to make of that? Then, at that moment, a memory flashed up within me that almost took my breath away: on that ill-starred evening when my misery had begun, that moment with my father when I had, so to speak, seen right through him and his bright clean world and wisdom, and despised them! Yes, I had imagined on my own that I was Cain and bore the mark, and that the mark was not a disgrace but a badge of honor; I had felt that my wicked misdeed made me superior to my father, higher than the good and pious people in his world.

It’s not that I had thought it all through, clearly and analytically, at the time; it was just an emotion flaring up, strange stirrings that hurt me but at the same time filled me with pride. Yet all these ideas were contained in the feeling I’d had.

When I thought about how oddly Demian had spoken of the fearless tribe and the cowards, how strange his interpretation was of the mark on Cain’s forehead, and how marvelously his eyes, his peculiar, grown-up eyes, had lit up when he spoke, the vague thought passed through my mind: This Demian, is he not himself a kind of Cain? Why else would he defend Cain, if he didn’t feel like him? Why does he have such power in his eyes, and why does he speak so scornfully about the “others,” the fearful ones, who after all are actually pious and pleasing to God?

I couldn’t bring these thoughts to any conclusion, but a stone had fallen into the well, and the well was my young soul. For a long time, a very long time, this whole topic of Cain and the murder and the mark was the starting point for all my efforts at knowledge, all my criticism and doubt.

•   •   •

I noticed that the other students also paid a lot of attention to Demian. I had not breathed a word to anyone about the Cain story and what Demian had said, but he seemed to interest other people too. At least there were a lot of rumors that started circulating about the “new kid.” If only I still remembered them now: every one of those rumors would shed some light on him, every one could be interpreted. I remember the first piece of gossip was that Demian’s mother was very rich. It was also said that neither she nor her son ever went to church. They were Jewish, someone claimed to know, but then again maybe they were secretly Muslim. In addition, wild tales were told about Max Demian’s physical strength. It was a fact that he had horribly humiliated the strongest boy in his class, who had challenged him and called him a coward when he refused to fight. The boys who saw it said Demian had just put one hand on the boy’s neck and squeezed until he turned pale; afterward the boy had crept away and not been able to use his arm for days. In fact, word went around one night that the boy was dead. Everything was insisted on as the truth for a while, everything was believed, it was all marvelously exciting. Then, for a while, everyone had had enough. Not long afterward though, new rumors started up—that Demian had had intimate relations with girls and “knew everything.”

•   •   •

Meanwhile the situation with Franz Kromer continued on its inevitable course. I could not get free of him; even if he left me alone for days at a time every now and then, I was still tied to him. He was with me in my dreams, like my shadow, and whatever he didn’t do to me in real life my imagination had him do to me in these dreams. I was absolutely and completely his slave. I lived more in these dreams than in real life—I had always had powerful dreams—and I lost my strength and life to this shadow. One frequent dream was that Kromer was mistreating me, he spit on me and kneeled on top of me and, what was worse, tempted me into worse and worse crimes—or, rather, he didn’t tempt me, he simply compelled me by exerting his powerful influence. The most horrible nightmare, from which I would wake up half insane, involved murdering my father. Kromer sharpened a knife and put it into my hand, we were standing behind the trees on a boulevard and waiting for someone, I didn’t know who, and someone came walking by and Kromer squeezed my arm to tell me that this was the person I had to stab, it was my father. Then I woke up.

Although I did think about Cain and Abel in this context, I didn’t think much about Demian. The first time he made contact with me again, it was also, strangely, in a dream. Again I was suffering mistreatments and violations in my dream, but this time, instead of Kromer, it was Demian kneeling on me. Also—and this was entirely new, and made a deep impression on me—everything I suffered from and loathed when Kromer did it, I accepted happily from Demian, with a feeling as much of rapture as of terror. I had that dream twice, then Kromer was back again.

It has been a long time since I could separate exactly what I lived through in these dreams from what I experienced in real life. In any case, my bad relations with Kromer took their course, and naturally did not end when I had finally committed enough little thefts to pay off the full amount he said I owed him. Now he knew about all those thefts too, since he always asked me where I had gotten the money from, and so now I was more in his clutches than ever. He threatened again and again to tell my father everything, and almost as great as my fear was the deep regret I felt over not having told my father everything myself, from the beginning. At the same time, however miserable I felt, I wasn’t sorry about everything, at least not all the time; sometimes I even thought I felt that everything was the way it must be. A dark fate hung over my head and it was pointless to try to get free of it.

The situation was presumably not a little painful for my parents too. A strange new spirit had come over me; I no longer fit into our group, formerly so warm and intimate, which I often felt a burning desire to return to as though to a paradise lost. I was treated more like a sick child than like an evildoer, by my mother at least, but my true situation could best be seen in how my two sisters acted. Their behavior, extremely considerate and nonetheless utterly upsetting to me, made it very clear that I was some kind of possessed person, more to be pitied than blamed for his condition, but still someone in whom evil had taken up residence. I knew they were praying for me, differently than before, and I felt how useless their prayers were. I often felt a fierce longing for relief and a yearning to confess the whole truth, but I also could tell in advance that I wouldn’t be able to explain everything properly, to either my father or my mother. I knew they would accept what I said with love and affection, they would be very gentle with me, even feel sorry for me, but they wouldn’t fully understand me and would see the whole thing as a kind of mistake or lapse, when in fact it was destiny.

I know that some people might have a hard time believing that a child, not even eleven years old, could feel such things. My story is not for them. It is meant for people who better understand the human heart. Adults, who have learned to transmute some of their feelings into thoughts, do not see such thoughts in children, so they conclude that the experiences are not there either. But there are very few times in my life that I have lived and suffered as deeply as I did then.

•   •   •

One rainy day, my tormentor had ordered me to come to the Burgplatz. I was standing there, waiting and rooting around with my foot in the wet chestnut leaves that were still falling every now and then from the black, dripping-wet trees. I didn’t have any money but had set aside two slices of cake and brought them with me so that at least I could give Kromer something. I had long since gotten used to standing on a corner somewhere, waiting for him, often for a long time. I accepted it the way one always accepts the inevitable.

Finally Kromer arrived. He didn’t stay long. He nudged me in the ribs a couple times, laughed, took the cake, even offered me a wet cigarette (which I didn’t take), and was friendlier than usual.

“Right,” he said when he was leaving, “I almost forgot—next time you can bring your sister with you, the older one. What’s her name again?”

I didn’t understand him at all and said nothing. I just stared at him in amazement.

“Don’t you get it? Your sister, bring her with you.”

“Yes, Kromer, but that’s impossible. I can’t, and she wouldn’t come anyway.”

I thought this must be another one of his bullying tricks. He used to do that a lot: demand something impossible, scare me, humiliate me, and eventually strike some kind of deal. I had to pay some kind of penalty, money or another offering, for not doing whatever it was.

This time it was different. When I refused, he almost didn’t get mad at all.

“Well,” he said casually, “you’ll think it over. I’d like to meet that sister of yours. It’s not hard, you can just take her with you on a little walk, and then I’ll show up. I’ll whistle for you tomorrow and we’ll discuss it again then.”

After he left, an idea of what he wanted suddenly dawned on me. I was still a complete child, but I had heard hints and rumors that when boys and girls were a little older they could do some kind of mysterious, indecent, forbidden things with each other. And so now I was supposed to—all of a sudden it was crystal clear to me how monstrous it was! I immediately knew that I would never do it. But what would happen next, how Kromer would take revenge on me—I hardly dared think about it. A new anguish had begun, as if I had not yet been through enough!

I was inconsolable and walked off across the empty square, hands in my pockets. New tortures, new enslavements!

Then a lively, deep voice called my name. I was startled, and set off at a run. Someone ran after me, and a hand grabbed me gently from behind. It was Max Demian.

I let myself be caught.

“It’s you?” I said, unsure of myself. “You scared me!”

He looked at me, and never before was his gaze more like that of an adult, a superior being who could see right through me. We had not talked to each other for a long time by that point.

“Sorry,” he said in his polite but at the same time firm way. “But you shouldn’t get scared like that.”

“Yes, well, it happens sometimes.”

“Apparently it does. But look: If you flinch like that at someone who hasn’t done anything to you, he’ll start to think. He’ll be surprised; it’ll make him curious. This person will think it’s strange how jumpy you are, and then he’ll think: People are like that only when they’re afraid. Cowards are scared of everything. But I don’t actually think you’re a coward. Are you? Oh, I know, you’re not a hero either. There are things you’re afraid of; there are people you’re scared of too. But that’s not right. We should never be scared of anyone. You’re not scared of me, are you? Or are you?”

“Oh, no, not at all.”

“There, you see. But there are people you’re scared of?”

•   •   •

“I don’t know. . . . Leave me alone, what do you want from me?”

He kept pace with me—I had started walking faster, thinking I might get away—and I felt him give me a sidelong look.

He started again: “You can assume I mean well. Either way, there’s no reason for you to be scared of me. I want to try an experiment with you, it’s fun and you might learn something very useful from it. Listen closely! — I sometimes try to do something that people call mind-reading. There’s nothing magic about it, but if you don’t know how it’s done it can seem very mysterious. People sometimes find it quite a shock. — Okay, let’s try it. I like you, or I find you interesting, and so I want to bring to the surface your inner way of seeing things. I’ve taken the first step already: I scared you, which means you’re jumpy. So there must be things and people you are afraid of. Now why? There’s no reason to be afraid of anyone. If someone is afraid of another person, it’s because he has given this person some kind of power over him. For example, maybe he’s done something bad, and the other person knows it—then he has power over you. You follow? That’s perfectly clear, right?”

I looked him in the face, helpless. His face was as serious and intelligent as ever, and also well-meaning, but without the slightest gentleness—if anything, it was severe. Justice, or something similar, lay in that face. I didn’t understand what was happening to me; he stood there like a magician.

“Do you follow?” he asked again.

I nodded. I couldn’t say a word.

“I told you it seems mysterious, this ‘mind-reading,’ but it’s perfectly natural. I could also tell you pretty precisely what you thought about me when I told you about Cain and Abel, for example, but that’s another topic. I also think you might have dreamed about me once or twice. But enough of that! You’re a clever boy, most of them are so stupid—I like to talk to a clever boy once in a while, someone I trust. That’s all right with you, isn’t it?”

“Oh yes. But, I don’t understand how—”

“Let’s stay with our fun experiment. So, we’ve discovered that young S. is jumpy—he is scared of someone—and this someone probably knows an uncomfortable secret about him. Is that more or less right?”

It was like in my dream: I was under his influence, overpowered by his voice. I only nodded. Wasn’t he speaking in a voice that could just as well have come from within myself? That knew everything, better and more clearly that I knew it myself?

Demian gave me a sturdy clap on the shoulder.

•   •   •

“So, that’s how it is. I thought so. Now just one question: do you know the name of the boy who left the square here before you?”

I was startled and shaken; he had touched on my secret. It shriveled up painfully inside me, not wanting to come out into the light.

“What boy? There wasn’t anyone else, just me.”

He laughed.

“Just say it!” he laughed. “What’s his name?”

I whispered: “You mean Franz Kromer?”

He gave me a satisfied nod.

“Bravo! You’re a quick one, we’ll be good friends yet. But now I have something to tell you: This Kromer, or whatever his name is, is a bad person. I can tell from his face that he’s a scoundrel. What do you think?”

I heaved a sigh: “Oh yes, he is bad, he is the devil! But he can’t find out anything about this! For God’s sake, he can’t find out! Do you know him? Does he know you?”

“Calm down. He’s gone, and he doesn’t know me—not yet. But I would very much like to meet him. He goes to the public school?”

“Yes.”

“Which grade?”

“Fifth grade. — But don’t tell him anything! Please, please, don’t say anything!”

“Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you. I presume you don’t feel like telling me a little about this Kromer?”

“I can’t, no, leave me alone!”

He was silent for a while.

“Too bad,” he said. “We could have taken our experiment a little further. But I don’t want to upset you. But you already know this fear of him isn’t right, don’t you? Such fear just destroys us, we have to break free of it. You have to break free of it or you will never be all right. Do you understand that?”

“Of course, you’re totally right . . . but it’s impossible. You don’t know. . . .”

“You’ve seen that I know some things, more than you would have thought. — Do you owe him money?”

•   •   •

“Yes, that too, but that’s not the main thing. I can’t say it, I can’t!”

“So it wouldn’t help if I gave you the money you owe him? — I could easily do that.”

“No, no, it’s not that. And please: don’t tell anyone! Not a word! That would be the worst thing that could happen to me!”

“Trust me, Sinclair. Eventually you will tell me the secret you share with him—”

“Never, never!” I shouted.

“As you wish. I only mean that maybe you will decide on your own to tell me someday. Of your own free will, obviously! You don’t think I would act like Kromer does?”

“Oh, no—but, you don’t know anything about how he acts!”

“Not a thing. I’m just thinking it through. And I’ll never do the kind of thing Kromer does, believe me. And you don’t owe me anything anyway.”

We were quiet for a long time, and I calmed down. But Demian’s knowledge grew more and more mysterious to me.

“I’m going home now,” he said, and he pulled his loden coat tighter around him to keep out the rain. “There’s only one thing I want to tell you, since we’ve already come this far: You need to break free of him! If there’s nothing else you can do, then kill him! I would be impressed if you did, and happy. I’d even help you.”

I felt scared again. I suddenly remembered the story of Cain. It was all too sinister for me, and I started to whimper. There was too much uncanniness everywhere around me.

“All right,” Max Demian smiled. “Just go home! We’ll take care of it. Killing him would be simplest, though, and in situations like this, the simplest thing is always the best. You are not in good hands with your friend Kromer.”

I arrived back home, and it felt like I had been away for a year. Everything looked different. There was something standing between me and Kromer now: something like a future, like hope. I was no longer alone! Only then did I realize how terribly alone I had been with my secret for all those weeks and weeks. Right away, what I had thought about so many times before came to mind again: what a relief it would be to confess to my parents, but that it would not resolve everything. Now I had practically confessed to someone else, to an outsider, and a sense of relief came over me like a sweet, strong breeze.

All the same, I was far from overcoming my fear and was still prepared for long and terrible confrontations with my enemy. That made it all the more remarkable that everything proceeded so peacefully, in complete secrecy and calm.

•   •   •

Kromer’s whistle in front of our house simply failed to materialize—for a day, then for two days, three days, a week. I couldn’t believe it, and secretly I was waiting for him to suddenly show up again after all, just when I least expected it. But he was gone, once and for all! I didn’t trust this new freedom and still did not truly believe it, until finally I ran into Franz Kromer himself. He was walking down Seilergasse, straight toward me. When he saw me he flinched, twisted his face into a wild grimace, and turned around on the spot to avoid me.

That was an incredible moment. My enemy fleeing from me! My Satan afraid of me! Surprise and joy flooded through my heart.

Demian turned up again. He was waiting for me in front of the school.

“Hello,” I said.

“Good morning, Sinclair. I wanted to hear how you’re doing. Kromer’s leaving you alone now, isn’t he?”

“Did you do it? But how? How?! I don’t understand. He’s totally gone.”

“That’s good. If he ever comes back—I don’t think he will, but he is quite a scoundrel—then just tell him to remember Demian.”

“But what’s the connection? Did you start a fight and beat him up?”

“No, I don’t like to do that. I just talked to him, the same way I talked to you. I was able to make him see that leaving you alone was to his own advantage.”

“Oh, you didn’t give him any money, did you?”

“No, my boy. You already tried that approach yourself.”

He dodged the question no matter how hard I tried to find out what had happened. I was left with the same awkward feeling toward him, a strange mix of gratitude and shyness, admiration and fear, affection and inner resistance.

I decided to see him again soon; I wanted to talk more with him about everything, including Cain.

It didn’t happen.

Gratitude in general is not a virtue I believe in, and it seems wrong to me to demand it from a child. So the complete lack of gratitude I showed to Max Demian does not surprise me all that much. I am absolutely certain today that if he hadn’t freed me from Kromer’s clutches, my health and in fact my whole life would have been ruined. Even at the time, I felt that this liberation was the greatest event of my young life—but I completely ignored the liberator himself as soon as he had performed the miracle.

Ingratitude, as I said, is not something that needs explaining as far as I am concerned. The only thing I find hard to understand is the lack of curiosity I showed. How could I let a single day go by without trying to learn the secret of how Demian had saved me? How could I rein in my craving to hear more about Cain, more about Kromer, more about mind-reading?

It is almost impossible to believe, and yet it was so. I suddenly found myself freed from a demonic net, and saw the world bright and joyous before me; I no longer suffered from panic attacks and a pounding heart that almost made me throw up. The spell had been broken; I was not a tormented soul in Hell but just a schoolboy again, like before. My nature wanted to regain its equilibrium as quickly as it could, which more than anything meant turning away from all the ugliness and danger I had been through and trying to forget it. With marvelous speed the whole long tale of guilt and terror slipped from my mind, without leaving behind any apparent scars or traces.

The fact that I tried to forget my helper and savior just as quickly makes sense to me now too. I was fleeing, with all the force and might of my damaged soul, from my vale of tears and damnation, from Kromer’s terrible enslavement, back to where I had earlier been happy and content: the paradise lost that had opened its gates to me once more, the bright world of Father and Mother, of my sisters—back to the scent of purity, to Abel pleasing in the sight of God.

The very day after my short conversation with Demian, before I was fully convinced my freedom had been won back at last and I did not need to fear any relapse, I did what I had longed so desperately and so often to do: I confessed. I went to my mother and showed her the little money box with the broken lock, filled with play money instead of real coins, and I told her how my own guilt had put me in an evil tormentor’s clutches for so long. She did not understand everything I said, but she saw the box and saw my changed look, heard my changed voice, and felt that the trial was over, that I had been returned to her.

Then began the emotional celebration of my coming back into the fold—the return of the prodigal son. Mother took me to see Father, the story was repeated, questions and cries of amazement poured forth, both my parents stroked my head and sighed deeply, free at last of their long dejection. Everything was wonderful, just like in the stories; everything was resolved into magnificent harmony.

I fled into that harmony with true passion. I could not get enough of enjoying my peace and the trust of my parents once more. I was a model child around the house, played more with my sisters than ever before, and felt redeemed as I sang the dear, old hymns during prayer with all the fervor of a convert. All these feelings came from the heart—there was no deception involved.

And yet everything wasn’t all right, not at all! This is the only true explanation for why I forgot Demian. I should have confessed to him! That confession would have been less ornamental and moving but more fruitful for me. Instead I was clinging with all my might to the paradisiacal world where I had once belonged; I had come home and been received with mercy. But Demian did not belong to that world in any way, and he could not be made to fit into it. He too—differently from Kromer, but nonetheless—was a tempter; he too was a link between me and the other world, wicked and bad, which I now wanted nothing more ever to do with. I could not and did not want to renounce Abel and glorify Cain, now that I had just turned back into an Abel again myself.

That was my external situation. The inner circumstances, though, were these: I had been redeemed from Kromer’s and the devil’s hands, but not through any power or act of my own. I had tried to walk along the paths of the world, and they had proven too slippery for me. And now that a friendly hand had reached out and saved me, I ran straight back, without looking left or right, into Mother’s lap, back to the safety of a pious, sheltered childhood world. I made myself younger, more dependent, and more childish than I really was. I had to replace my dependence on Kromer with a new one, because I was unable to walk alone, so I chose, in my blind heart, dependence on Father and Mother, on the old beloved “world of light,” even though I already knew it was not the only one. If I hadn’t made that choice, I would have had to cling to Demian and put my faith in him. At the time I thought I was unwilling to do so out of a justified mistrust of his outlandish ideas; in truth it was out of nothing but fear. For Demian would have asked more of me than my parents did, much more. He would have tried to make me more independent, with provocations and warnings, mockery and irony. Alas, I now know only too well that there is nothing in the world more hateful to a person than walking the path that leads to himself!

Still, six months or so later I could not resist temptation, and on a walk with my father I asked him what to make of the fact that some people thought Cain was better than Abel.

He was very surprised by the question. He explained to me that this interpretation was in no way new; it had emerged already in the earliest centuries of Christianity and been taught in various sects, one of which called itself the “Cainites.” But obviously, he said, this insane teaching was nothing but the devil’s attempt to destroy our faith. For if you believe that Cain was in the right and Abel in the wrong, then it follows that God was in error, or in other words that the God of the Bible is not the one true god but a false god. The Cainites and similar sects did in fact teach and preach such a doctrine, but this heresy had long since vanished from the earth. The only thing that puzzled him was that a schoolmate of mine had heard something about it. In any case, he warned me in grave earnest to refrain from all such thoughts.