Trouble pressed closer and colder to her as the slow days passed. Not only had she the endless misery of Karl’s isolation and strangeness, and the disorientation of the whole household in consequence, but each day brought ghastly news. Suicides, exiles, emigrations, disappearances—all the sorrowful and terrible things that happen in a nation that is going mad. She had to forget her own wretchedness and grief. She saw mourning households whose doors were painted with the obscene yellow of the Middle Ages. When she passed a man in uniform on the street she still could feel no hatred. At first she felt disgust and disdain, and then sorrow, and finally horror. For she felt that these uniforms were the livery of pestilence, the dread trappings of the carnal house. She was overcome with shame.
Confusion seemed to be growing in the country. There was a sound in the air like the dull subterranean roaring of an earthquake that was shaking the very walls of the world. There was a sound abroad like the sound of a coming whirlwind. And in the puffs of the coming destruction the souls of men were already beginning to stir and leap and shiver and tremble like dried leaves in a rising gale. Therese was still able to secure foreign newspapers, though they were becoming harder to get each day, and she observed, with growing despair, that the whole of mankind was as much bewildered and aghast as herself at this vision of the “new” Germany. It mattered not who the traitors were who had brought this desolation about; she read accusations in American newspapers that the British “ruling-class” were responsible for the overthrow of the German Republic, and had destroyed it because of some craven fear of the spread of Communism among the British working classes. There were some who declared that the munitions manufacturers were creating a “national soul and spirit” in Germany, and arousing militarism and racial pride, for ends too revolting and outrageous for easy belief. Others accused the perpetrators of the Versailles Treaty, and the greediness and mercilessness of France, and the perfidy and avarice of Britain. It did not matter. Perhaps they were all responsible. But that did not matter. What mattered was that doomsday was here and gathering more blackly each moment.
Sometimes she thought: Can it be that outside the affairs of men there are dread insensate tides that sweep over these little affairs, with their painted wooden walls and gilt plaster and spangled solemnities and asinine dignities and childlish pomposities? Can it be that these immense and meaningless tides from the seas of eternity roll over it all, and then recede in a welter of matchsticks and broken dolls and rusted toy-wheels? If so, none is to blame, not even the evil ones, not even the innocent, or the fools. The hater and the hated are alike victims; the good and the wicked are destroyed impartially together. The walls of the brothel go down with the walls of the cathedral, and in the heaps of destruction there is none to tell one from another. Mount Olivet and Vesuvius are alike inundated and lost.
In the universal death and torment, men, in the flood, reached up dying hands to grasp at the garments of One who, they hoped (not believed), walked on the waters. Did they grasp Him? Did they see Him? And if they did, why did they not speak of it to other men? And if He truly were, why had He allowed the tides to make a mockery and a loathsomeness of all good?
Therese’s thoughts, these days, were like hot irons in her mind. She looked in her mirror and thought: I have become old. Sometimes when she saw Karl, on the rare occasions when he dimly emerged, she regarded him with the dispassionate numbness and despair of one regarding a universal symbol. He was a sign on her own door, a sign that appeared on the doors of all men.
A lethargy began to paralyze all her mind and spirit. To overcome this, to struggle up above the thick black waves of it, she called old Doctor Traub who had attended her childhood and girlhood. He was almost as dear to her as her father had been. She trusted him; she knew his understanding and penetration, for all he was not a Herr Professor. He had comprehended the darknesses of the human soul and the strangeness of all life long before Jung had exclaimed over them.
She told him everything without reservation. She looked at him with faintly laughing despair at the end, and pushed back her fair hair with both hands, in a gesture he found infinitely pathetic in the usually serene Therese.
“You see, dear old friend, it is as much for my own sake that I have called you as for Karl’s. His disorientation—Germany’s disorientation—are undermining me—.”
He shook his head with old sorrowfulness. He was a tiny fat little man with beautiful, merciful eyes.
“We—the sane—are all being undermined, dear little Therese. But do not think it is Germany alone! It is all the world. Each people has its own approach to madness. Ours, as you have so subtly said, is by way of our innocence. Others approach madness through a wicked ‘realism.’ Others through belief in a ‘mission,’ by which they will either ‘save’ mankind or murder it for its obstinacy. There are so many ways! Was it not Hamlet who said this is a mad world? But he did not believe it! When he finally did, he went mad himself.
“You, little one, have finally come to believe the world is mad, and so are in danger of madness yourself. For the sake of mankind, we must believe in sanity, in spite of all the evidence against it. We must become fantastic innocents, we realists, and believe in the inherent goodness and progress and divinity of man. Did not Jesus say that only by becoming as little children, innocent believing little children, could we inherit the Kingdom of Heaven? Ah, what a Mind was that! A thousand years is not too long to study a single one of His phrases, and discover the richness and the profoundness of it. The Kingdom of Heaven, unreal, beautiful, strange, peaceful—but the only sanity!
“And now I shall go in to Karl. Do not worry. He will admit me.”
Therese hardly believed this. But to her surprise Karl did admit Doctor Traub to his study. She was guilty of creeping to the door where she could at least hear the sound of voices. She heard Doctor Traub’s gentle genial tones, and then Karl’s reply. Her heart leaped with hope. Karl’s voice was calm, quite pleasant, though faint and tired. She could tell by the intonation of it that he listened and answered coherently.
And then her heart sank again. It was not Karl’s voice she was hearing, but the voice of a stranger speaking carefully from behind a mask made in the image of Karl. It was a cunning impostor, aware that he must be wary for fear of detection. It was like—ah God! it was like hearing the voice of a living body possessed by a disembodied spirit that had taken complete possession, and was grimly afraid of being exorcised.
Therese put her hands to her head again and felt a sick confusion take hold of her mind. She went away, feeling for each step as though her feet were numb. When Doctor Traub rejoined her in the drawing room she was not surprised at the quietness and gravity of his expression. He sat down very slowly, as though he were bidding for time before having to speak to her. When he did finally look at her it was with a sort of helplessness and sorrowful pity.
“Yes, yes!” she said quickly. “I know! You need not tell me!” And burst into tears.
“Therese,” he said, trying for a tone of paternal rebuke, and failing. He let her weep, and as her weeping continued he appeared relieved. When she mopped her face, after some moments, he felt he could speak to her reasonably, for much of the confused distress had disappeared from her eyes.
“Karl,” he said, “is quite mad. I say this to you openly. You already know it. We are not children, and must be frank, if we are to help him.
“But it is a deliberate madness, deliberately induced. It is an escape-madness, evoked by a determination for revenge. Karl knows quite well that he cannot obtain this revenge in a sane state; he must induce madness to accomplish it. Too, there is confusion in his mind. He believes that only by becoming confused can he invoke the powers of madness and evil, and succeed in revenging himself for the rending assault on his mind, when Eric and Gerda died. His brother is only a symbol to him of all the forces that have assaulted him, and have undermined his innocence. Again, I must compliment you upon your subtlety. So, in deliberately creatin
g a confused and chaotic and terrible and insane world about him, he can move horribly and easily in it, and project it into reality, where he can revenge himself on that reality.
“I have heard great musicians play furiously and gloriously and divinely under the influence of drugs. They were able to do this by projecting the insane and chaotic world of their drugs into the world of reality. Do you see? Without drugs, these great musicians were only technicians. Without his madness, Karl knows that he would be only a grief-stricken, mortally wounded, but impotent man, helpless before those who have destroyed his innocence.
“Only one man can save him: himself. And how can he be induced to save himself? I do not know. If I knew, I could save Germany.
“But, my love, you were always wise, even as a child. Perhaps, by watching, you can discern the moment when you can help him. I can only leave that to you. Just as we must leave it to a few wise men in our country to discern the exact moment when they can save the Fatherland.”
Therese meditated upon all this for some time, and though her face became more tired than ever, it also became more resolute. The doctor, watching her, nodded his head a little in grave satisfaction.
She asked, in a normal voice: “Did you see that miserable little doll of his with the nail in its head?”
“Yes, I did. It was on his desk. How strange to see Karl’s desk so shiningly empty of papers! But there the doll lay. The prong was half in.”
“Well, at any rate, Kurt is not having headaches any more,” said Therese, smiling miserably. Then both she and the doctor laughed a little, without much mirth. After a few moments, Doctor Traub resumed:
“Karl was always a very reasonable man, full of clarity and logic. Have you ever found anything in him previously that would indicate any instability?”
“No, except that he never, even during his most wry and quizzical and philosophic moments, was aware of reality. He would listen to the most outrageous things with disgust, but the disgust never struck in at his heart. He could argue the most logically, gently and reasonably of any man, but his reason could operate only when it was detached.” She added, with involuntary bitterness: “Such reason is worthless.”
She paused, and went on in a meditative voice that held a note of strange hardness:
“In these weeks I have read and reread his best books. They are so beautiful, so splendid and lofty. They contain everything that is needed to ennoble man; they project him into a world of divinity and glory and sorrow, of philosophy and peace and adoration. There is violence, too, in his books, and passion and death, and hatred and fury. There is cruelty and bestiality, and despair and greed, and all the other things that make men vile.
“But I dicovered the most curious thing. There is a terrible fault in Karl’s writing, and it seems most peculiar that no one ever discovered it before. He has been mentioned for the Nobel Prize; he has won countless other prizes. He is acclaimed the equal of Thomas Mann. Yet no one has ever discovered the appalling fault in his writing which I have just discovered, and which I would never have discovered—unless all this had happened.
“And the fault is this: there is a sort of balance and coherence and calm, even in all the passion and death and hatred and fury and violence and vileness which he portrays. There is reason in them. There is a sort of juvenile concatenation. There is poise and logic.”
The doctor listened, frowning in thoughtful concentration. But he did not speak.
Therese flung out her hands in despair. “You see! His innocence was guilty of this! There was coherence and reason, because he was unaware of reality. Even his passion was the passion of a man who is asleep and dreaming. Then when he was awakened, and he was confronted with all the chaos, and he saw the broken earth, and the dissolving mountains, and heard the whirlwinds—But I have said all this before. There is nothing left to be said except that Karl, in spite of all that has been printed and spoken of him, is not a great writer.
“He is a great stylist. And the most orderly of writers. But style and order have nothing to do with great writing. In fact, I am becoming convinced that when style and order are so exquisite, so complete, as they are in his work, they prohibit, and inhibit, genius. In his beautiful Grecian temples, with the polished floors and nicely lighted altars, and smooth and calm statues, there is no place for the violent and disorderly and belching gods. There is no place for reality.”
The doctor stood up and walked about the austere but lovely drawing room. He studied the few pieces of enchanting furniture, the flowers in a Ming bowl on the white mantelpiece.
Then he turned back to Therese, who was patting her hair into place with a calm expression but trembling hands.
“Do you still love your husband, and Germany, little Therese?”
She was surprised, and did not answer.
“Then, my dear, if you still love them, these dearest of all things to you, your task is to save Karl for the Fatherland. We need men like him—awakened men, not pusillanimous weaklings fleeing from awareness.”
Therese still did not speak. She waited. The doctor resumed his pacing; now there was an agitated quality in his steps. But he spoke very quietly:
“Hitler has been in power only a short time. But already he has infected the soul of Germany with his monstrous unreality. God knows how long this will go on, and how grave will become the infection. I—I have lost many friends, even in this short while. I have seen the souls of my other friends become glazed and petrified. I have heard them utter violence and obscenity and imbecilities that are unbelievable. The infection, as in the case of all other infections, strikes most murderously at the young.
“We cannot—we dare not—hate what we see and hear. Not only because it is the hater, and not the victim, who is destroyed by hatred, but because, in hating, we become as these others have become. It does not matter the object which is hated; it is sufficient that we hate, for us to be destroyed.”
He regarded Therese piercingly.
“I know, I am sure of it, that when Karl—awakens—he will be a great writer. He will help to save Germany. That is your task.”
Therese’s pale lips parted as though to utter an impulsive and despairing question, then closed again, like the lips of a woman who has become aware, before speaking, of the childishness of her proposed question.
Long after the doctor had left Therese sat and thought, until the room became dark and the street-lamps outside were lighted. Sometimes she moved as if in unbearable agitation and hopelessness; then she would sink back in her chair, immobile, and meditate again. At last she was completely worn out. She had reached no conclusion, no pain. But a mysterious peace and strength had come to her, not unshakable, but fresh.
When she went in to dinner she found Karl already there, silent, waiting. She glanced swiftly at his face and eyes, and felt her new strength waver. But she spoke normally and cheerfully. He replied with quietness and complete orientation. He seemed rational. He even smiled at the sauerbraten and remarked that this was Eric’s favorite dish.
After dinner they listened to the radio. A passionate voice poured out of it—Goebbel’s voice. Therese leaned over impulsively to turn it off, but Karl said quickly and loudly: “No. It is very interesting! I enjoy seeing to what depths we have fallen.”
He listened to the end, smiling. He kept moistening his bitten lips. At the end he made no comment. He gently kissed Therese’s forehead, and left for his own room.
Does he sleep? thought Therese, torn with sorrow.
7
Karl was not sleeping.
He sat in his study, to which he had come from his room. He had waited until he had heard Therese retiring, and had heard the creak of her bed. He had listened. Once he heard her sigh deeply. At that sound something momentarily relaxed in him, and he felt a thrust of pain, and with that pain, sanity. He suddenly had a vision; he recoiled from it, putting up his hands as though defending himself from agonizing attack. It was not for some minutes that the thick confused fo
g closed over his mind again, like water which had mercifully closed over a corpse.
The fog lifted, leaving him in a state usual with him these days. Everything had a bright surface clarity about it, a clarity, however, without edges or substance. His head felt light and giddy; his thoughts were like shining bubbles, but when he tried to seize them they broke in his hands. He was grateful for this, for the mere act of reaching for them exhausted him horribly. Yet he could not help reaching. He was reaching more and more as time went on, and his subconscious mind, in defense, made his body more and more exhausted, made his heart tremble more and more violently.
When he walked about it was as though he floated. He was surprised to find himself colliding with objects, with doors and furniture. He felt the pain numbly, as though under the influence of drugs. When he undressed he discovered large black bruises all over his body. Once he thought: I should be surprised at this, but I am not. The mere effort of thinking this threw him into confusion.
Things fell from his hands; he broke a lamp in his room, dropped a little figurine of ivory, which he cherished. For some seconds he felt actual awareness of distress, then walked away, forgetting. Once he looked into his mirror and thought: Who am I? The face that stared back at him was not his own. It tired and nauseated him to have to look at it. When he shaved he cut himself and cursed aloud at his carelessness, but without much interest.
When he would lie down to sleep it was with the feeling of utter physical prostration. He would drowse away. Then, just on the edge of sleep his heart would awake like a terrified drum, sounding an alarm, and he would be sitting up in his bed, covered with sweat and anguish and absolute terror. He would be horribly awake and alive; it seemed that every pore of his skin had a separate and pulsing life of its own. And yet, with his aliveness, the clarity was without substance. He would get up, light a cigarette, drink a glass of water. He would find himself colliding with a chair, would drop the cigarette or the glass. Yet everything would be dazzlingly clear and throbbing. It hurt his haggard, red-rimmed eyes. He would try to think in this glittering universe, but his mind felt like thick fluffy cotton against which his thoughts smothered and were silenced.