A dull, bronze double call booms out from the great tower of the gothic cathedral and floats on vibrating wings through the damp chill of the dead night air, waking the bells of the other churches from their benumbed sleep so that, after an initial shudder under the impact of the wave of sound, they each join in like an echo with a ‘Yeees — yeees’ — quiet, loud, deep, high, distant, close.
The second hour after midnight, the witching hour of the Orientals.
Then the silent waiting starts up again: expectation, hope, fear: what will time bring?
Noiselessly, with white, glowing eyes shining afar, a monster, a dolphin head with almost no body, sweeps past the line of lamps up the hill: a limousine, streamlined, with the alien shape of some mythical antediluvian beast. In each side of the grotesque head is a row of little lighted windows with white silk curtains showing the shadow of a woman’s head in hazy outline, like a puff of black smoke.
In the front of the dragon’s head is a large, ungainly figure with huge paws, which seem to come straight out of its chest, as if it had no arms, holding a wheel: the chauffeur in the driver’s seat, wrapped up in shaggy furs.
The car turns off through a small, winter-dead wood with abandoned crow’s nests in the bare branches, heading for Salnitergasse. The harsh light from its nostrils floods the road with a blinding glare before swallowing up the shimmering ribbon in its maw.
The massive dark cube of the house ‘At the Sign of the Peacock’ looms up.
Needles of fire are sticking out of the cracks in the wooden shutters, as if it were burning inside.
Dull, phosphorescent smoke is pouring up out of the glass roof into the sea of mist.
Slowly the car creeps round the house. It has lowered its two eyes; suddenly it opens a third, much brighter even than the two others were. It pierces the darkness, moves along the wall, up, down — jumps back from the abrupt glitter of the mosaic door, briefly knocks the mask of night from the peacock’s grinning demon face, continues its search for an entrance.
Bare walls, no door, no window. The car goes round the corner.
The door of the clockmaker’s shop is closed but a glimmer of light behind its opaque glass pane shows that the occupants are still awake.
The chauffeur, wrapped up like a grizzly bear, gets out and knocks. Frau Petronella comes to the door, her full, white hair gleaming like snow in the light of the peaceful glow of the car’s headlamps.
Gustenhöver, the clockmaker, is sitting quietly at a little maplewood table, he doesn’t even look up when he hears the question: ‘Where is the entrance to Dr Steen’s apartment?’
He is holding a magnifying glass up to his eye in his beautiful slim fingers and examining a small gold object, glittering with precious stones, with close attention and sympathy, as if it were a sick living being whose heartbeats he had to count. The expression on his face is one of childlike compassion: poor little thing, has your pulse not been able to keep up with the pitiless rush of time?
On a shelf covered in red velvet are clocks — there must be a hundred, in blue, green, yellow enamel, decorated with jewels, engraved, fluted, smooth or grooved, some flat, some rounded like eggs. They can’t be heard, they’re chirping too softly, but they can be sensed, the air above them must be alive from the imperceptible noise they’re producing. Perhaps there’s a storm raging in some dwarf realm there.
On a stand is a small piece of flesh-coloured felspar, veined, with colourful flowers of semi-precious stones growing on it; in the middle of them, all innocent, the Grim Reaper with his scythe is waiting to cut them down: like a memento mori clock from the romantic Middle Ages. The dial is the entrance to a cavern full of wheels. No hands, no numbers for the hours, just mysterious signs arranged in a circle: Death has his own time, he doesn’t want us to know in advance when the harvest will begin. When he mows, the handle of his scythe hits the thin glass bell beside him, a cross between a soap bubble and the cap of a large fairy-tale mushroom.
Right up to the ceiling of the room the walls are covered with clocks. Old ones with proudly chased faces, precious and rich; calmly swinging their pendulums, they declaim their soothing ticktock in a deep bass.
In the corner is one in a glass coffin. Snow White, standing up, is pretending she’s asleep, but a quiet, rhythmical twitching together with the minute hand shows she’s keeping her eye on the time. Others, nervous Rococo demoiselles — with a beauty spot for the keyhole — are overloaded with decoration and quite out of breath as they each trip along, trying to take precedence over the others and get ahead of the seconds. Beside them are tiny pages, giggling and urging them on: tick, tick, tick.
Then a long row, gleaming with steel, silver and gold. Like knights in full armour; they seem to be drunk and asleep, for sometimes they snore loudly or rattle their chains, as if they had a mind to break a lance with Cronos himself once they wake and have sobered up.
On a windowledge a woodman with mahogany trousers and a glittering copper nose is sawing time to sawdust.
Once they were ill, all of them. Hieronymus, the clock doctor, patient, concerned, has made them well again. And now they can once more make sure, each in his or her own way, that not a minute gets lost, that the present cannot slip away unobserved.
Just one — it’s hanging close by the devoted doctor — an old maid from the days of the Baroque, her cheeks powdered pink, has stopped — oh God! — at one second to seven.
‘She’s dead,’ the others think, but they’re wrong. ‘I’m right once a day,’ she thinks to herself, ‘but no one notices and I can’t say it myself.’ Secretly she hopes Professor Gustenhöver will take pity on her. ‘He’s not like other men, he’ll examine me when no one’s there, he’ll take me by the hand and say, “Stand up and walk, my girl.” Then I’ll be like a bride and I’ll be able to dance, dance, dance again.’
The chauffeur repeats his question: ‘Excuse me, but where is the entrance to Dr Steen’s apartment?’
‘You have to drive to the eastern façade of the house,’ — Frau Petronella points in that direction — ‘and lift the latch of the garden gate, then the gatekeeper will open it.’
The chauffeur thanks her and leaves.
Hardly has he closed the door, than the Grim Reaper comes to life. He mows and mows, hitting the thin glass bell so that it sounds swift and soft, like the distant twittering of coal tits: singsingsingsingsingsing-sing.
The clockmaker raises his head and looks at his wife and she looks at him. It hasn’t made a sound since it’s been here and now it’s striking, he thinks. ‘Could it be for him?’ Frau Petronella asks after a while, glancing at the door.
The old man thinks, the expression on his face looking as if he were listening inside himself. He rocks his head from side to side uncertainly. ‘Perhaps — perhaps for his employer,’ he says softly and hesitantly.
A light comes swaying through the little avenue of yews, along the gravel path from the entrance to Dr Steen’s apartment to the garden gate.
The Copt, Markus, unlocks the gilded grille, lifts up his lantern to light the face of the lady who, wearing a veil and a long fur coat, is out of the car before the chauffeur can help her.
She grasps the Copt’s wrist and jerks it vigorously round so that the light is falling on him while she is in shadow. There is something brusque, imperious about her action. Perhaps it is intended as a rebuke, or is she accustomed to treat servants like slaves?
She has not given the chauffeur any instructions whether to wait or not.
The Copt raises his lip, makes his tiger face and bares his gleaming black teeth. It is something which frightens everyone the first time they see it, no one knows what it is meant to express: anger, fury, astonishment, surprise, defence, attack? Or does it not come from his psyche at all? Is it just a remnant, an unconscious memory in the inherited body cells from those times millions of years ago when primaeval man still faced beasts of prey without weapons.
His olive-yellow complexion and overlarge onyx eyes make the Copt seem even more alien and unreal than by day.
‘What a strange racial type!’ any other visitor would probably have thought. The lady pays him not the least attention, striding past him with the arrogant words, spoken to no one in particular, ‘This is where Dr Steen lives.’ The Copt asks no questions and follows in silence.
The arched entrance to the house is suddenly brightly lit, revealing a small vestibule with an inlay of colourful marble. An old valet in black silk knee-breeches bends low into the darkness.
The lady lifts her veil. ‘I wish to speak to my… I wish to speak to Dr Steen.’
The old man’s expression shows a brief flicker of surprise and delight. For a moment he raises his hands, as if he were about to clap them together in astonishment, but then, when he registers the indifferent tone in which she has spoken, he lowers them again and his expression hardens as something like sadness and disappointment flits across it.
He helps the lady out of her fur coat and ushers her up a narrow staircase to a cramped vestibule. Kirgiz weapons on the walls.
He opens the door to a room and, when the lady has entered, remains on the threshold, head bowed.
The lady looks slowly round the room. Her previous swift, decisive manner has given way to a strange, almost rigid calm which there is nothing to explain. It is a calm that has a disconcerting effect, since it is in stark contrast to her youthfully slim figure, her strikingly beautiful face and wonderfully slim, restless hands.
There is a delicate, unusual smell in the air coming from the many — it must be thirty-six — wax candles diffusing their gentle light from a chandelier in the form of peacock heads of fragile old gold set on the rim of a shallow, amaranth-blue bowl.
The lady drops her white kid gloves on the wall-to-wall silk carpet of a thousand iridescent colours. The servant remains motionless, makes no attempt to pick them up. He seems to know from previous occasions that he is not allowed to; that he is not allowed to do anything unless it is expressly indicated or ordered.
The walls are covered in purple antique damask silk, places where it has worn thin with age only emphasising how precious it is. Inlaid chests of drawers from the time of Augustus the Strong, marked by use, stand below tapestries with scenes from the Old Testament — the Fall of Man.
In a corner niche, violently disrupting the calm elegance of the room, is a mother-of-pearl pedestal covered with crude silver objects — barbaric Russian art — and in the middle, like a focal point of Slav vulgarity, is an emerald the size of a child’s fist, with a hole drilled through and a silk thread. It is in front of a gaudily painted earthenware bust of a Mongol with a drooping moustache and slit eyes, representing Genghis Khan.
In the middle of the room is a long desk with the strangest objects on it: little Japanese Shinto shrines, Chinese jade figures, a tiny monkey skull, Egyptian statuettes of Horus and Osiris, covered in a white, chalky substance and with inserted sapphire eyes, ancient Mongolian river deities made from the mud of the River Peiho, the carved wooden death mask of a samurai with hideously contorted features, horn corals growing out of a stone that look like wonderfully delicate, six-inch high bushes ruffled by the wind, thin, opalescent ancient Greek tear bottles, boxes of rock crystal, ivory, horn and jasper in the most peculiar shapes and, standing upright on a little column of smoky quartz, a red-gold coin almost the size of a man’s hand with a gleaming inscription:
By Gustenhofere’s Powder redde
To Gold I was transformed from Ledde.
above it, as a coat of arms, a peacock.
Along the edge of the table is a row of those bizarre Javanese marionettes, made of buffalo leather and painted red, green, black and gold, representing demons with quadruple-jointed spider’s arms, pointed noses, star-shaped pupils and receding foreheads, crowned with golden flames that the Malays call wayang purwa.
‘Dr Steen is not at home,’ the lady suddenly says to a much-darkened picture by Velasquez.
Her words sound neither as if she is impatient, nor talking to herself, nor asking a question; they are completely expressionless.
‘Herr Dr Steen…… is on the way, in his aeroplane,’ the servant replies, pausing after the first part, as if he is required to ascertain first of all that he is allowed to reply.
When the lady says nothing, he goes on, ‘Herr Dr Steen has been away for five hours.’
‘Dr Steen is unavailable during the day?’
‘Dr Steen is unavailable during the day.’
‘Is Dr Steen here at that time?’
‘Dr Steen is here at that time.’
‘Always?’
‘Always.’
‘What is that babble of voices in the next room?’
‘The babble of voices in the next room is caused by a band of dervishes; Dr Steen… wants them…’ A questioning pause, then the servant immediately stops, since the lady gives no indication that she wishes to hear any more.
‘When my — when Dr Steen arrives, it will not be necessary to announce me.’
The servant takes one step backwards, waits for a few seconds, closes the door and leaves.
Above the house a rattle and roar of engines, which abruptly stops — the giant steel bird has settled on its nest. Minutes pass, a brief jolt runs across the glass roof, continuing as a quiver down the walls, and Dr Steen’s piercing voice can be heard: ‘Markus, will you help the pilot to fasten the hawsers, please.’
From the film studio comes the dull sound of Arabic drums murmuring a greeting.
A crash of heavy bolts, the clatter of an iron trapdoor and cold air sinks into the room; the candles of the chandelier in the purple room flicker, making the face of Genghis Khan come alive with little twitching shadows.
The rungs of a ladder groan under the weight of rapid steps, the trapdoor slams shut: Dr Steen has gone down through the glass roof into his dressing room.
The lady waits.
‘Thank God you’re back, sir,’ she hears the old servant say and a shadow of displeasure crosses her face.
‘We were afraid something might have happened to you,’ — a woman’s voice with a foreign accent that sounds like the cooing of a dove.
‘There’s no need to worry about me, Leila,’ Dr Steen replies.
The lady raises her eyebrows in distaste.
‘Anything new, old fellow?’
His valet’s reply is halting but swift: ‘The sheikh has arrived with the dervishes, sir…’ In compliance with her command, he doesn’t mention that the lady is waiting.
The next moment Dr Steen enters the purple room, stops short when he sees the lady and slaps his forehead in astonishment.
‘What? Is that you, Ismene? How can it be? Where did you come from? I didn’t get a letter. I assumed you were God knows where in the Far East.’
The lady remains seated, leaning back in the armchair, smiles, even if it is a slightly forced smile, and holds out her hand to him.
‘I arrived just a few hours ago. In our house down there they told me you were living up here now and hadn’t been seen in the town for months. I expect to be setting off on my travels soon and since I heard you were only available in the evening, I drove straight up. Anyway, it’s Sunday tomorrow and one doesn’t go out on a Sunday. How you’ve changed, Ismael.’
‘Twelve years is a long time, Ismene —’ He is about to compliment her on her beauty, she realises and quickly interrupts him. ‘You’ve become a great scholar since we last saw each other. There’s hardly a newspaper you read abroad that doesn’t have whole pages about you and your new theories. I only glanced at them, of course. I’m sorry, but these things don’t interest me. Nor can I agree with your view that Bolshevism and other great movements of recent years do not have their origin in men themselves but —’
‘But in a realm of “ghosts”, to put it briefly,’ Dr Steen breaks in with mild mockery.
‘Yes, that’s more or less how I was going to put it, Ismael. It’s an idea that shocks me. There’s something irreligious about it that I find outrageous. Among the English too this theory generally meets with opposition, if not vehement disapproval.’
‘Among the English? Don’t you mean among English women?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Because they instinctively sense that they would have to look a little more closely at their Liberty-silk views of the dear Lord, if they were to think the matter through. That doesn’t suit them because it might lead to their approving of the most outrageous atrocities, for example being allowed to play cards on Sundays, the mornings of which should be reserved for prayer, the afternoons for procreation. And to think something through? For heaven’s sake, what would happen to the sacrosanct tradition of narrow-mindedness! But let’s change the subject,’ he added quickly when he saw Ismene flush with almost uncontrollable anger. ‘Forgive me, I wasn’t getting at you. I completely forgot that your mother was a hundred per cent English.’
‘As was our father,’ Ismene broke in, a sharp tone in her voice.
Dr Steen gives her a long, hard look, then an ironic smile, but remains silent as he turns to look at the statue of Genghis Khan.
Ismene follows his look. ‘I know what you are going to say, Ismael. That you’re proud that…’
‘— that my mother was of Mongolian descent and could follow it back to the great destroyer, Genghis Khan, and that I am her true son,’ Dr Steen says quickly, ‘and…’ He suddenly falls silent, closes his thin lips tight and bites back what he was going to say: ‘want to wipe these white rats off the face of the earth.’
‘Well?’ Ismene asks, ready to pounce. ‘And…?’
‘Well… nothing more.’ Dr Steen is a master at repressing his emotions, even the fury that now blazes up in his heart. His face suddenly has such a soft, affectionate expression that Ismene forgets her distrust, even though she has been observing him closely.
He takes her hand, almost tenderly. ‘No, you tell me what you’ve been doing all this time. Your letters were so infrequent — and so short! Whenever I read them I automatically thought of that pretty, charming young girl that you were before they separated us and sent you to boarding school in England. One forgets that others also grow up and, as in your case, turn into a beautiful woman, a beauty who has no equal anywhere in the world. You cannot imagine how surprised I was just now.’
Ismene indignantly dismisses his compliments with a wave of the hand. She puts on an angry expression, but Dr Steen’s sharp eyes see at once that the poisoned arrow has made its mark, if only a graze. ‘And now I know how thick I can lay it on,’ he tells himself and starts to think hard, though nothing in his expression gives the slightest clue as to what is going on inside him. He appears to be concentrating fully on what his stepsister is telling him.
Urged on by his eloquent gestures, Ismene becomes more and more lively in her account; she has no idea that in reality he is not listening at all and only looks up now and then to throw in an expression of agreement or an astonished-sounding question.
‘Basically my life is empty, Ismael, unspeakably empty, despite all my interesting, often almost adventurous journeys to distant parts of the world; eventually it was just a haphazard rush from place to place. As if I were being chased by something I don’t know, something that behaves as if it wanted to catch me but never tries to grab me and takes malicious pleasure in the fact that I can’t find peace. That compels me to search, even though I don’t want to search, don’t want to find anything. Wherever I go I sense hatred. No car is fast enough for me; when I’m travelling, everything inside me keeps shouting, “Keep going, keep going!” No destination I’m heading for, the destination is always behind me. Wherever I’ve been, Ismael, and whatever I’ve seen — or not seen. Pity, I should have kept a diary. But what would there be in it today apart from the eternal “Keep going, keep going!” ’
Dr Steen pricks up his ears and forces himself to pay attention. From the way she is starting to speak more slowly, he senses that she is coming to the end.
‘Now I long to be back in England. I want to see people again.’ She twists and tugs at her handkerchief. ‘To see people and no more niggers, niggers, niggers. The whole world consists of niggers. Even Germany. Even if they look like Europeans, for me the Germans are niggers. I’d like to slash them all across the face with a whip, these niggers of all colours and races. Oh, I can sense their insolent arrogance. When will they finally realise that we are the master race of the world!’ She has worked herself up into such a blind fury that she does not see the expression of quite diabolical hatred that flashes up in her stepbrother’s eyes of for a second.
She falls silent, almost breathless. Dr Steen nods and smiles, as if he agreed whole-heartedly, and says in a quiet voice, with a sigh, ‘I can understand you, Ismene. I wish I could go to England with you, with all my heart I wish I could. But there will come a time when… I will… be able… to have a good look… at the place.’ At these last words such a mysterious, incomprehensible tremor comes into his voice that Ismene looks up in surprise, almost fright.
The eerie quality of what he is saying is intensified by a wild, howling crescendo from the dervish drums that suddenly rips through the calm of the room and equally suddenly dies away.
Dr Steen quickly has himself under control again and goes on in a steady, friendly voice: ‘Unfortunately — most unfortunately — I have no time for travel at the moment. First I must bring a great project to completion. I could almost say that my mission is not yet ripe. And then, you know Ismene, I do not like to see sad scenes. As I hear, people in England are suffering very much. What a tragic fate! Out of the most profound sympathy with the French, despite the fact that they are only niggers, as you so rightly said, England declares war on Germany! And now? Now they’re suffering for it. Oh, it’s enough to make you doubt the dear Lord, if such a thing were possible.’
Ismene grows suspicious. Was that mockery in his voice?
But he is looking at her with such enthusiasm, almost radiance, and he stretches out his hands in a gesture so overflowing with warmth that she dismisses her distrust, feeling deeply ashamed. It is his father’s blood speaking in him, she tells herself, delighted.
‘How beautiful he is!’ it suddenly occurs to her. ‘What a fascinating, eerie beauty. A kind of beauty I’ve never seen in a man before.’ She shudders, a chill suddenly runs down her spine, she couldn’t say why, and she involuntarily looks up to the ceiling to see if the candles are flickering again. A thought leaps out at her from the depths of her soul: ‘That’s what Lucifer must look like,’ and she recalls stories of witches coupling with the devil which she once heard when still almost a child. She tries to drive the thought away. As a diversion she stares at Gustenhöver’s gold coin with the inscription and the peacock coat of arms. The light on it blinds her like a burning-glass and the thought refuses to go away, grows into the question, ‘Who, who was it who told me the story of witches coupling with the devil?’ and the answer comes with frightening clarity: ‘Ismael told it to me down in the garden one spring night when there was a full moon; we weren’t much more than children!’ She can see the scene in her mind’s eye, tiny because it is so far in the past, yet she feels it as present, immense and overpoweringly bright, so fearfully alive in the vivid light of her awakened imagination that she thinks she can see the scene with her open eyes as the focal point in the glittering gold of the coin. A memory of the sweet scent of daphne comes over her, she feels once more the intoxicating vibrations in her blood, the secret gnawing of forbidden desire. In that night she was not clear what it meant, she had merely sensed it.
Now she is in no doubt, but she still does not suspect the true poison it conceals. Her cheeks grow hot with the flush of shame at herself, for with the memory a dream also unfolds in her mind, a dream she had that same night in which Ismael was the devil and she the witch.
She lives through it again with such devastating clarity that she asks herself, horrified, ‘Did I really only dream it that one time? Have I not dreamt it night after night since then and just forgotten it when I woke up? Is that what is driving me when by day I dash from place to place? Is that the reason for the emptiness in my heart? For the dreariness all round me?’
Now she also remembers that she had told Ismael her dream the next morning — she must have been lured into telling him by sultry, smouldering urges — and once more the same feeling sets her senses on fire, her whole being in turmoil. She fans herself with her handkerchief, as if the room were too hot and tries — in vain — to force her thoughts out of the maelstrom inside her, out of the vague fear they might be transferred to Ismael. And yet — that is what she secretly desires, however much she resists — or thinks she resists — the desire.
‘He’ll have forgotten it ages ago,’ she tries to reassure herself. ‘Hadn’t I long since forgotten it myself.’ But the torment continues. ‘Then why did everything come back to mind so clearly just now? Am I perhaps the receiver? Was it the image in his memory that woke mine?’
Clenching her teeth, she tries to put on a distracted, bored air; she does it too quickly for it not to strike her stepbrother at once. She can tell by the way he gently bites his upper lip, turning his gaze inward as if he were pondering abstractedly, like someone racking their brains to find the solution to a mystery.
She vaguely remembers something connected with his theories that she read somewhere a few weeks ago: ‘If you want to find out other people’s thoughts, you only have to look inside yourself. There you will see them as images.’ And then, ‘If the other person senses that and fears it might happen, it is already too late.’
And immediately she fears ‘it might happen’. She tries to curb her fear, but it would have been easier to hold back a wild horse. A chill running through her veins, a shock of terror that numbs her limbs, tells her, ‘It’s all over. He knows everything. Even worse, he has guessed that I’m sensing that he knows everything. Now I am at his mercy.’
Weary and forlorn, she drops her hand. But however much she at first tries to fight it, the hot, searing feeling the dream sparked off in her after that spring night smoulders up again. She is horrified, but then the cage of false horror is torn apart by the other person inside her, the person she is herself without knowing, the unbridled primal urge of the human animal to do what is forbidden, which rears its head again and again, and all the more wildly the longer it has been dormant.
Her eyes have been fixed on the tapestry on the wall, but only now does she realise what she has been staring at: the Fall of Man.
The picture is hanging on the wall in dead, faded colours, but it is going round and round in her blood, more vibrant, more alive than life itself; her whole soul is transformed in it.
She turns her gaze on the bust of Genghis Khan in order to draw strength against her brother from the insult to her good taste. Her hatred of ‘niggers’ must help her recover her Anglo-Saxon pride. In vain. The primal beast is stronger than everything once it has woken.
‘If only he would speak, just one word,’ she wails to herself, ‘perhaps that would break the spell.’ As she thinks that, she senses that she has no desire to quench the fire of lust.
Ismael looks up, a harmless look, remarkably harmless.
‘I was mistaken, thank God, it was just my imagination.’ She gives a sigh of relief. ‘No, no, I don’t want to be mistaken.’
Dr Steen slowly gets up out of his chair. ‘Would you mind if I lit a cigarette, Ismene? Oh? So you smoke as well?’
The words sound trivial, banal, but her heart misses a beat when she hears them. She is gripped by an undefined fear, as if a huge bird of prey were circling high, high above her, just waiting to swoop down. She is so afraid, it makes her gasp for breath, yet she longs for it too. Lust and fear at the same time.
He goes to a little wall-cupboard, opens the doors, takes out a cigarette box and — putting it down where Ismene can’t see it — one of the many crystal scent bottles. Then he lights Ismene’s cigarette and one for himself, letting a few drops from the bottle fall on the floor.
For a while both are silent, lost in thought as they listen to the soft murmur of the drums coming from outside the room.
‘I never dream,’ Dr Steen suddenly says in a loud, piercing voice. Ismene starts, immediately sensing that he’s aiming at something. What is he after? Again she shivers at a strange chill.
‘I never dream — never,’ he repeats and there’s something rhythmical about his words, as if they were in time with the drumbeats.
She says, ‘I remember now; even as a child you never dreamt,’ but then quickly breaks off as she realises — too late — that she is taking the conversation in a dangerous direction, that she acted against her will. ‘Can he guide my thoughts,’ she wonders with horror.
He nods, a look of vicious satisfaction in his eyes. ‘No, I’ve never dreamt. I imagine there are very few people who can say that of themselves. I’m glad I’m one of them.’
She forces herself to adopt a mocking tone: ‘You look on that as a piece of good fortune?’
‘Certainly!There are two forces to which you must never submit, they are as dangerous as vipers, you have to draw their fangs. Only then can you make them dance to your own tune. One is called fear, the other dream.’
‘Yet dreams are the most wonderful thing I…’ quickly she shuts her lips tight.
He remains silent. As a ploy, or so it seems to her.
‘Yes, yes, you’re right, fear…’ she goes on in a forced, overloud tone. ‘Fear! That’s the worst thing of all…’ She’s trying to steer the conversation into innocuous waters and only succeeds in falling into one trap after the other.
‘… for it forces us to do things we want to avoid,’ he says, taking up where she broke off. ‘Fear inverts our will; it is an independent force in nature, one could almost say it was a being. Anyone who understands it can direct it, can project it outwards, can use it as a weapon, like a flame-thrower, can — if they know the magic gesture that all such forces obey — set both men and animals wailing and gnashing their teeth. People think fear comes uncalled; no, I say, nothing comes if it is not called, only people don’t realise they’re calling. And this ‘calling’ without intending to is something that people learn in dreams. Learn without intending. The great monster that rules the world and that people falsely think of as the dear Lord teaches it in our dreams, pours its poison into the sleeper’s ear. It slumbers in our psyche, ready to awake at once, as the inexorable enemy of the self, when the call comes. And this call is: ‘Help’. Anyone who calls for help — loudly, softly or so deep in their heart that they do not realise they are doing it — calls fear, goes down on their knees before it and worships it. Anyone who is afraid of falling ill has already sown the seed of illness; anyone who is afraid of vertigo will fall off; anyone who is afraid of the devil will couple with him —’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’ Ismene breaks in hastily. She feels a slight hope dawning that he could be a helpful doctor. A doctor even though she feels with dreadful certainty that his last words injected a poison that is eating away at her, a poison that means ecstasy and death. It takes a great effort to stop herself grasping his hand.
He leans back, away from her. ‘Why am I telling you? You will come to understand that yourself, perhaps sooner, perhaps later, perhaps never. So to continue: anyone who fears memories will find they attach themselves to their heels like red-hot chains until they have burnt to ashes everything inside the person that is weaker than fire. A scent that is smelt can arouse such memories. Women in particular are often so sensitive that sometimes they think they can smell the scent of, say, a flower which arouses memories in them of which they are secretly afraid. Then the second viper I spoke of — dream — pounces and memory and dream and fear join to form a magic circle from which there is no escape, unless,’ Dr Steen points to the alchemist’s coin ‘they are called to true life.’
Ismene has to fight to stop herself fainting: he spoke of the scent of a flower — alluding to the spring night, there’s no doubt about that now — and the room is suddenly filled with the scent of daphne. ‘He evoked an illusion and made it reality!’ Even while he was speaking she thought she could smell the scent of flowers, as if it were rising from the carpet; now it has become so distinct that she presses her handkerchief to her face in horror, overcome with a terrified fear: ‘My senses are no longer obeying me, the past has become present, I’ve lost control over myself! What is going to happen now?’
He pretends he cannot see what is going on inside her. He puts the scent bottle unobtrusively down on the table and calmly continues his explanations:
‘Before, you said you weren’t interested in my theories. Forgive me if, despite that, I start talking in abstractions. Please do stop me if what I have to say bores you. I can’t get what you said earlier about ‘niggers’ out of my head. The conviction of the English that all other races are ‘niggers’ and only exist to serve them — in one form or another — appears to be a peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon blood. I can understand that, after all, half the blood in my veins is English, the other half — ‘nigger blood’. No, no need to apologise, Ismene, there’s no point in politeness. I have clearly inherited from our English father the feeling that I am justified in treating creatures of any race which I regard as alien, as an inferior race according to English standards, in the way I see fit. The difference is that I act on this feeling not by trying to subjugate people whom I regard as inferior, but by exposing them, to put it in alchemical terms, to the magic influence of a psychological process of transmutation. To put it more clearly and in a way that will be more comprehensible for you: I am trying to make ‘lead people’ into ‘gold people’.
‘If I am successful, I will have done them a great service, I will have raised them from the status of creatures in thrall to death to candidates for eternal life. If I fail and they are destroyed in the experiment, then they weren’t worth anything better, they were mere lead that had no seeds of gold in it. You could ask me how I can presume to decide over the life or death of others. Now I am not conceited enough to think that we humans possess free will. I leave it to the philosophers to defend such figments of the imagination. I feel too much as an Oriental to imagine I am an independent unit separate from the great cosmos. That man,’ Dr Steen points to the statue of Genghis Khan, ‘had the mission of sweeping across the face of the earth like a ravaging storm. He did it, but his soul remained free of the blot of self-willed action. What is said in the Bhagavadgita, in that greatest of hymns to the freedom from all guilt, applies to him:
Every deed that happens here, happens through nature’s law.
‘I am the doer of this deed,’ is vain and idle prattle.
And because there is Asian blood in my body, I do nothing, I remain free from the recoil that comes from any action; I am the executor and nothing more. And because I do what I must do, I also know what will happen. I have overcome the English blood in me and its delusion that it can do or not do things of its own free will. For centuries the English have been lords of the world; they have fulfilled a mission, there is no doubt about that, but they did not know it was a mission. They say it was — it lets them play the innocent — but they never believed it, otherwise they would never have coined the word ‘nigger’. The mission suited their purpose. Anyone who does not know that they have been assigned a mission, does not know it from the very beginning even before they have taken the first step, brands themself as the doer and all the guilt falls on them.’
‘So you believe the decline of England is imminent?’ Ismene has composed herself. On the one hand she is glad that he has gone on to another subject, on the other she is overcome with patriotic outrage. ‘Since when have you felt you were German? What you are expressing is clearly German hatred. Is your hope that England is on the wane not the pious hope of the Germans in general which they keep prophesying in the newspapers? “May God punish England,” oh yes,’ she adds scornfully.
He raises his hand. ‘What are the Germans to me? I don’t hate them and I don’t love them. I don’t hate the English, either, though it might sound like that to you. What I do hate is this hypocritical white rabble, whichever nation they claim to belong to. Please don’t interrupt. I know what you’re going to say. You think Asians are no better than the whites. Of course they aren’t. But the Asian soul is ready to ignite. The European soul is burnt out, what they call love is the heat of the rut, what they call hate is a flicker of anger, revenge or covert lust for money. They do not know that hate is something metaphysical. How could they know that hate is something sacred, an immortal force which makes those immortal who are consumed by it; that it is more than a force, it is a being who is no longer tied to a solid form. ‘Hate is detestable’ say those who are on the side of love. As if love were anything other than feeble, impotent hate! A load of nonsense. If there really were something like love, then it could only reveal itself if the flame of hate cannot burn it up or transform it into ashes. And when, since time began, did that ever happen? Since the very beginning the angel of hate, the great spiritual alchemist of the cosmos, has been searching for that mysterious elixir that bears the name of love and yet cannot be found. The whirlwind of his wingbeats fans the sparks of hate gleaming in the hearts of men into fire and the blaze is called destruction.
‘Ismene’ is the third of the three chapters Meyrink completed for his novel The Alchemist’s House (also sometimes referred to as ‘The Peacock’ or ‘At the Sign of the Peacock’). The first two are devoted to setting the scene and are of little interest in themselves. Meyrink also wrote a lengthy synopsis of the plot.
The main character is Dr Steen, ‘an extremely elegant, very rich man’ who, ‘on a whim, has set up a film company… the various actresses are his harem. (The description of these episodes is kept free of very erotic touches!) His main field of interest is so-called psychoanalysis, only he does not use his knowledge for the benefit of his fellow men but, on the contrary, to arouse complexes in his victims. He is blasé to such a terrible degree that there is only one thing that excites him: thinking up more and more new, spiritually sadistic methods of sending people’s souls plunging into the “void”. That is the elixir of life for him. Women simply surrender to him without knowing why. He “dissolves” them, just as an alchemist would dissolve metals in nitric acid.’
Ismene is not mentioned in the synopsis. Her function is probably that of the Steen’s lover who is called Irene there: ‘Further passages show Irene, as the “complexes” that have been injected into her develop, committing crime after crime and, out of her insane love for Dr Steen, confessing to things which not she but he has done.’
Through the Persian, Mohammad Daryashkoh, another inhabitant of the House at the Sign of the Peacock who also appears in some of Meyrink’s early stories,13 he learns of a sect called the Yazidi who ‘do not worship God as the creator of the world, but the “fallen angel Malak Ta’us”14 who in a certain sense is the devil. But, contrary to the Christian and Jewish view, this “devil” will reunite with God at some point.’
Dr Steen sees a secret image of Malak Ta’us and discovers a remarkable similarity to himself. He then plans to produce a film with himself in the leading role as the fallen angel Malak. His aim is: ‘To open up the “abyss” so that it will devour the soul of humanity… He wants to arouse a magic “psycho-analytical” complex in the whole of humanity by showing them in the cinema the face of the angel Malak, that until then had only been seen by initiated Yazidi. He hopes that, as a cinema image, it will impress itself on sensitive minds and make them accessible to demonic “promptings”.’
The final chapter is the filming of the last scene. At the crucial moment Dr Steen is struck dumb, apparently dead. But ‘the end of the novel hints that Dr Steen remains alive.’ The importance of the clockmaker, Gustenhöver, as a secondary figure and the fact that Dr Steen gave him an old watch to repair, suggests Dr Steen will be ‘cured’ in the same way as the protagonist in ‘The Clockmaker’. This is backed up by parallels such as the description of the clocks in Gustenhöver’s workshop which is almost word-for-word the same as that in ‘The Clockmaker’.
Notes
13 See, for example, ‘The Man on the Bottle’, ‘The Preparation’, and ‘The Waxworks’ in The Opal (and other stories), tr. Maurice Raraty, Dedalus, 1994.
14 Peacock Angel.