Suddenly he seemed to regret having said so much, and he broke off. Even then I could understand to a certain extent, emotionally, why he felt that way. He may have expressed these ideas in a casual, sociable way, but actually he was sick to death of talking "just for the sake of conversation," as he once put it. He could feel my real interest in these matters, but also too much game-playing, too much enjoyment of clever chit-chat, or something along those lines--in short, my lack of complete seriousness.
*
As I re-read these last words I have written--"complete seriousness"--I suddenly remember another scene, my most vivid experience with Max Demian in that period when I was still half a child.
Our confirmation was approaching, and the final topic we covered in our religion class was the Last Supper. It was an important theme for the pastor and he made a great effort to get through to us; we could feel a certain solemnity of mood in those final sessions. But in just those classes my thoughts were elsewhere--in fact they were on my friend. Confirmation had been explained to us as the ceremonial entrance into the community of the church, but as it approached I could not help thinking that the value for me of this semester of religious instruction lay in not what we had studied but rather the proximity and influence of Demian. I was now prepared to enter not into the church, but into something quite different: an order of thought and of personality that had to exist somewhere on earth. I considered my friend its representative, or ambassador.
I tried to suppress this thought--it meant a lot to me to celebrate my confirmation with a certain dignity, despite everything, and I found it hard to do so with my new ideas. And yet whatever I did, the thought was there, and it gradually became linked in my mind with the upcoming church ceremony. I was ready to celebrate it differently from the others; for me it would signify an entrance into the world of ideas I had come to know through Demian.
It was during that period, right before class one time, that I again got into a vigorous argument with him. My friend didn't say much and did not seem pleased with my speeches, which in truth were probably rather pompous and self-important.
"We're talking too much," he said with unusual seriousness. "There is no point in clever talk, none at all. It only leads you away from yourself. Going away from yourself is a sin. What a person needs to do is crawl entirely into himself, like a turtle."
Just then we entered the schoolroom. Class started, I tried to pay attention, and Demian did not distract me. After a while I began to feel something strange emanating from next to me, where he was sitting: a coldness, or emptiness, or something like that, as though the seat had unexpectedly ceased to be filled. When the feeling became oppressive, I turned my head.
I saw my friend sitting up straight, with his usual good posture. But nonetheless he looked entirely different from how he usually did, and he gave off something, was surrounded by something, that I hadn't ever felt. I thought he had closed his eyes but saw he still had them open. But those eyes didn't look, they were not seeing, they were glassy and directed inward or at something very far away. He sat there completely motionless, appearing not even to breathe; his mouth was as though carved of wood or marble. His face was pale, uniformly pale, like stone, and his brown hair was the most living thing about him. On the desk in front of him lay his hands, lifeless and still like objects, rocks, or fruit, pale and motionless but not limp--like good, sturdy shells around a strong hidden life.
I trembled at the sight. He's dead! I thought, and I almost said it out loud. But I knew he wasn't dead. I stared spellbound at his face, at that pale, marble mask, and I felt: that is Demian! The way he usually was when he walked and talked with me was only half of him--a Demian playing a temporary role, adapting himself to others and going along with things for the sake of politeness. The true Demian, though, looked like this: stony, ancient, like an animal, like marble, beautiful and cold, dead and secretly full of tremendous life. And all around him this silent emptiness, this ether and outer space, this loneliness of death!
He has entirely gone into himself now, I felt with a shudder. I had never felt so abandoned. No part of him had stayed with me; he was unreachable; he was farther away than if he had been on the most remote island in the world.
I could hardly believe no one saw it but me. Surely everyone had to look over at him, everyone should be shuddering at the sight! But no, no one paid any attention to him. He sat rigid as a statue--I could not help but think: as an idol. A fly landed on his forehead and walked slowly across his nose and lips, and he didn't twitch a muscle.
Where was he, where? What was he thinking, what was he feeling? Was he in some kind of Heaven, or a Hell?
There was no way I could ask him about it. When I saw him living and breathing again, at the end of class, when his eyes met mine, it was like before. From where had he returned? Where had he been? He looked tired. His face had color again, his hands moved again, but his brown hair was now dull and seemed tired.
For the next few days I repeatedly tried a new exercise in my bedroom: I sat rigid on a chair, made my eyes glassy, kept completely still, and waited to see how long I could last and what I would feel. All that happened was that I felt tired, and my eyelids itched terribly.
Not long afterward was the confirmation. I have no significant memory of it.
Then everything changed. Childhood fell to pieces around me. My parents looked at me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had turned into totally alien creatures. A kind of disillusionment made all the feelings and joys I was used to seem faded and unreal; the garden no longer smelled sweet, the woods were no longer tempting, the world lay spread out all around me like a clearance sale of old, useless things, boring and unappealing. Books were just paper, music just noise. It was like how an autumn tree sheds its leaves: the tree feels nothing, the rain runs off it, or the sun, or the frost, and the life inside it slowly withdraws into its narrowest, innermost places. It does not die. It waits.
It had been decided that I would be sent to a different school next year and live away from home for the first time. Every so often during that summer, Mother would treat me with special tenderness, saying goodbye in advance, intent on conjuring up love and homesickness in my heart, and unforgettable memories. Demian had left on vacation. I was alone.
CHAPTER FOUR
BEATRICE
When vacation was over, I went to St.-- without having seen my friend again. Both my parents came with me and entrusted me with all possible care to a boy's boarding house run by a teacher at the high school. They would have frozen with horror had they known the kind of life they were letting me wander into.
The question was still whether I would, with time, turn into a good son and useful citizen, or whether my nature was pushing me onto other paths. My last attempt to be happy under the shadow of the parental house and its spirit had lasted a long time--for a while it had almost succeeded, but now it had finally and completely failed.
The strange emptiness and isolation I had come to feel for the first time the summer after my confirmation (and oh, how well I got to know it later--this emptiness, this thin air!) did not pass away so quickly. I found it oddly easy to leave home--I was a little ashamed of not being sadder, in fact; my sisters cried inconsolably, but I couldn't. I was amazed at myself. I had always been a sensitive child who expressed his feelings--a good boy, when it came down to it. Now I had completely changed. I acted with total indifference toward the outside world and spent days at a time attending only to myself, listening to the dark, forbidden, underground currents rushing and roaring inside me. I had shot up very quickly in the past six months and looked lanky, skinny, and immature. Everything boyishly lovable about me had disappeared; I was well aware that it was impossible to love me as I was, and I did not love myself either. I missed Max Demian much of the time, and desperately wished he were there, but I not infrequently hated him too and held him responsible for the impoverishment of my life that I accepted as an ugly disease.
At firs
t I was neither liked nor respected in our student boarding house; the other boys teased me and then left me alone, having decided I was a weird, distant, unpleasant sort. I took pleasure in this identity and even exaggerated it, grumbling my way into a solitude that looked like manly superiority and contempt on the outside while secretly I suffered constant fits of depression and despair. At school I got by for a while on what I had already studied back home--the class was a bit behind where we had been--and I got into the habit of viewing the other students my age with a certain contempt, as children.
It went on like that for over a year. Nothing changed on my first few visits home, and I was always glad to go back to school.
Then it was early November. Whatever the weather, I would take little intellectual walks, which often gave me a kind of pleasure that was full of melancholy, scorn for the world, and contempt for myself as well. That was how I felt one evening as I strolled through the city in the damp, misty twilight. The wide avenue of a public park was completely deserted, and inviting; as I walked down the lane, thickly covered with fallen leaves, I shoveled my feet around in the leaves with a dark, voluptuous desire. It smelled wet and bitter; distant trees loomed up eerily out of the mist, tall and shadowy.
I stopped at the end of the avenue, not knowing what to do next. I stared down at the dark vegetal mass and greedily breathed in the wet smell of death and decay, which something inside me responded to and welcomed. Oh, how insipid the taste of life was!
Someone approached down a side path, his coat billowing in the wind. I wanted to keep walking, but he called my name.
"Hallo, Sinclair!"
He came up to me. It was Alfons Beck, the oldest student at our boarding house. I always enjoyed seeing him and had nothing against him except that he always treated me in an avuncular, ironic way, the same as he did everyone younger than him. He was said to be as strong as a bear, he had the teacher who ran our boarding house under his thumb, and he was the hero of numerous high-school rumors.
"And what brings you here?" he called out affably, in the tone that bigger kids liked to take when they condescended to talk to one of us. "Writing a poem, I bet."
"Never occurred to me," I snapped back.
He laughed out loud and walked next to me, chatting. I had completely forgotten what that felt like.
"Don't think I wouldn't understand, Sinclair. I know how it is, when you're taking a walk like this in the evening mist, with autumn thoughts, you want to write poems, I know. Poems about dying nature, of course, and the lost youth it's a symbol of. Heinrich Heine and all that."
"I'm not that sentimental," I defended myself.
"All right, never mind! Anyway, in weather like this it does you good to find a nice quiet place with a glass of wine or something along those lines. You want to come with me? I happen to be all alone at the moment. -- Or would you rather not? I don't want to lead you astray if you're planning to be a model schoolboy."
Soon we were sitting in a small pub at the edge of town, drinking a dubious wine and clinking our thick glasses together. I didn't like it very much at first, but still it was something new. Soon though, not used to drinking wine, I started talking my head off. It was as though a window had opened inside me, and the world was shining in--how long, how terribly long it had been since I'd said anything I really felt! I started to give my imagination free rein, and before I knew it I was telling Beck the story of Cain and Abel.
Beck listened with delight. Finally, someone to whom I had something to give! He clapped me on the shoulder, he called me a devil of a fellow, and my heart swelled with pleasure: I could finally let myself go, indulge in the need to talk and communicate that had been pent up for so long, and feel acknowledged by someone older, like I was worth something. When he called me a brilliant little bastard, what he said sank into my soul like sweet, strong wine. The world shone in new colors--thoughts came to me from a hundred mischievous sources--wit and fire blazed up within me. We talked about our teachers and classmates, and it seemed to me we understood each other splendidly. We talked about the Greeks, and paganism, and Beck insisted on turning the conversation to confessions of amorous adventures. Here I had nothing to contribute. I had not had any adventures, nothing worth telling. And what I had felt, had built up in my imagination, burned within me but the wine did not free it or enable me to talk about it. Beck knew a lot more about girls than I did, and I listened passionately to his fairy-tale stories. What I learned was unbelievable: things I had never thought possible entered ordinary reality and seemed obvious, normal. Alfons Beck, eighteen years old or so, had already acquired quite a store of experience. Among other things, that girls always want nothing but chivalry and attention, which is fine as far as that goes but not the real thing. You could get farther with women. They were much more reasonable. Frau Jaggelt, for example, who ran the store that sold pencils and notebooks for school--you could really talk to her, and as for what's gone on behind the counter in her store, no book in the world could describe everything.
I sat there in a trance, stupefied. Not that I could ever love Frau Jaggelt--but still, this was incredible news. It seemed that, at least for older people, there were wellsprings of pleasure that I had never dreamed of. At the same time I heard a false note in his stories--it all seemed narrower and pettier than true love would feel, in my opinion--and yet it was reality, it was life and adventure, and sitting right next to me was someone who had lived it, to whom it seemed perfectly natural.
Our conversation had sunk to a lower level somehow; it had lost something. I was no longer the brilliant little fellow either, just a boy listening to a man's stories. But even so--compared to what my life had been for months and months, this was delicious, it was paradise. It was also, I gradually started to feel, very much against the rules: the whole thing, from sitting in a pub to what we were talking about. At least for me it was a real taste of rebellion, of spirit.
I remember that night very clearly. When the two of us started home late, past the dully burning gas lamps in the cool wet night, I was drunk for the first time. It did not feel pleasant--it was excruciating, actually--but still, there was something about it: sweet excitement, rebellion, spirited life. Beck took good care of me, even while griping about what a total beginner I was, and he brought me home, half carrying me, and managed to smuggle us into the house through an open hall window.
But after a short dead sleep, I woke up to a headache, sobriety, and terrible sadness. I sat up in bed, still wearing my shirt from the day before, with my other clothes and shoes lying around on the floor and stinking of smoke and vomit. Between headache, nausea, and unspeakable thirst, an image rose up in my soul that I had not seen for a long time: I saw my parents' house, my hometown, Father and Mother, my sisters, the garden; I saw my quiet, comfortable bedroom, the school and the market square, saw Demian and our confirmation classes--all of it flooded with bright light, radiant, all of it wonderful, godly, and pure, and I now knew that everything, everything, had still belonged to me the day before, just a few hours ago, had been waiting for me for return, but now, only now in this moment, it had sunk forever under the waves, was cursed, was no longer mine. It had thrown me out and now looked upon me with disgust! Everything I had so profoundly loved, everything back to the most distant, golden garden of childhood my parents had given me--every kiss from Mother, every Christmas, every bright, pious Sunday morning at home, every flower in the garden--it was all laid to waste, I had trampled it all under my feet! If a band of henchmen had come at that moment and bound me hand and foot, leading me to the gallows as a scapegoat, a desecrator of the temple, I would have gone uncomplainingly, even gladly, gone and found it only just and right.
So that's how I looked on the inside! I, who went around despising the world, proud in spirit, and pretending to think Demian's thoughts along with him! I was a pig, like scum, drunk and filthy, disgusting and low, a wild animal taken unawares and overpowered by hideous urges. I, who had come from the garden where
everything was purity and radiance and blessed tenderness, who had loved beautiful poetry and Bach, now looked like that inside. I could still hear my laugh ringing in my ears--drunk and out of control, bursting out in idiotic stops and starts--and it filled me with outrage and disgust. That was me!
Despite everything, it was almost pleasurable to suffer these torments. I had crept around blind and numb for so long, my heart cowering poor and miserable in the corner, that even this self-hatred, this horror, this whole horrible feeling in my soul was welcome. At least I felt something! The embers still flickered with some kind of fire, a heart still beat in there! I was confused to feel something like liberation and springtime in the middle of all my misery.
Meanwhile, to the outside world, things went downhill with me in a hurry. My first binge was soon only the first of many. A lot of drinking and running wild went on in our school, and I was one of the very youngest students to join in; before long I was no longer merely a tolerated novice but a ringleader, a star of the scene: a notorious, reckless barfly. Once again I belonged entirely to the dark world--to the devil--and in that world I was considered a splendid fellow.
At the same time, I felt miserable. I was living in a self-destructive riot of sensuality, and while my schoolmates saw me as a leader, a devil of a fellow and a damned sharp and clever guy, deep inside me hid a timid soul fluttering with fear. I can still recall how tears came to my eyes once when I left a bar on a Sunday afternoon and saw children playing in the street, bright and happy, with freshly combed hair, in their Sunday clothes. And the whole time that I was entertaining and often shocking my friends with my monstrous cynicism at the dirty tables of cramped pubs between puddles of beer, in my heart of hearts I still respected what I was mocking. On the inside I kneeled in tears before my soul, before my past and my mother, before God.
I never felt truly one with my companions--I was still lonely when I was with them, and that was why I suffered so. There was good reason for this: I was a barroom hero, a scoffer to satisfy the roughest of the rough; I showed spirit and courage in what I thought and said about our teachers, school, parents, church; I could take the dirtiest jokes and even offer a few of my own--but I never went along with my buddies to see girls. I was alone, and full of a burning longing for love--a hopeless longing even while I talked like a hardened libertine. No one was more fragile, more full of shame, than I was. And every now and then, when I saw the young girls from good families walking down the street, pretty and clean, light and cheerful, they seemed like wonderful, pure dreams, a thousand times too good and pure for me. For a long time I couldn't set foot in Frau Jaggelt's stationery store either, because I turned red when I looked at her and remembered what Alfons Beck had told me.