Narcissus and Goldmund

  Tota pulchra es, Maria,

  et macula originalis non est in te.

  Tu laetitia Israel,

  tu advocata peccatorum!

  With its soft music the song sank into his soul, but at the same time the wind sang outside, a song of strife and wandering, of wood, autumn, of the life of the homeless. He thought of Lydia and of Narcissus and of his mother. Full and heavy was his restless heart.

  Suddenly he started and stared, not believing. The door of his room had opened, in the dark a figure in a long white gown came in; soundlessly Lydia came walking on bare feet across the stone floor, gently closed the door, and sat down on his bed.

  "Lydia," he whispered, "my little doe, my white flower! Lydia, what are you doing?"

  "I've come to you only for an instant," she said. "Just once I wanted to see my Goldmund in his bed, my gold-heart."

  She lay down beside him, they didn't move, their hearts were beating heavily. She let him kiss her, let his admiring hands play with her body, but more was not permitted. After a short while she gently pushed his hands away, kissed him on the eyes, got up soundlessly, and vanished. The door creaked, the wind tinkled and thumped in the attic. Everything was under a spell, full of secrecy and anguish, promise and menace. Goldmund did not know what he was thinking, what he was doing. When he woke again after a troubled slumber, his pillow was wet with tears.

  A few nights later she came back, the sweet white ghost, lay down beside him for fifteen minutes, as she had the last time. In whispers she spoke into his ear as she lay folded in his arms. She had much to tell, much to complain about. Tenderly he listened; she was lying on his left arm; his right hand caressed her knees.

  "Little Goldmouth," she said in a completely muffled voice near his cheek, "it is so sad that I may never belong to you. Our small happiness won't last much longer, our small secret. Julie is already suspicious; soon she'll force me to tell her. Or my father will notice. If he found me here in your bed, my little golden bird, your Lydia would fare ill; with tear-swollen eyes she would stand and look up to the trees to see her lover hang high up there, swaying in the wind. Oh, you had better run away, right now would be best, rather than let my father have you bound and hanged. I saw a man hanged once, a thief. I could not bear to see you hanged. You had better run away and forget me; I don't want you to die, my golden one, I don't want the birds to hack out your blue eyes! Oh no, my treasure, you must not go away. Ah, what am I to do if you leave me all alone?"

  "Won't you come with me, Lydia? We'll flee together, the world is wide!"

  "That would be wonderful," she sighed, "oh, so wonderful to wander into the world with you! But I can't. I can't sleep in the forest and be homeless and have straw in my hair, I can't do that. Nor can I bring such shame upon my father. No, don't speak, that's not just my imagination. I can't. I couldn't do it any more than eat off a dirty plate or sleep in a leper's bed. Ah, everything good and beautiful is forbidden us, we were both born for sadness. My golden one, my poor little boy, I shall have to see you hanged after all. And I, I'll be locked up in my room and later sent to a convent. You must leave me, sweetheart, and sleep with the gypsies again and the peasant women. Oh, leave, go before they catch you and bind you! We'll never be happy, never!"

  Softly he stroked her knee, touched her sex very delicately, and begged: "My little flower, we could be so very happy. Won't you let me?"

  Not angrily but firmly she pushed his hand aside and drew away slightly.

  "No," she said, "no, I won't let you. It is forbidden me. Perhaps you can't understand that, you little gypsy. I am doing wrong, I'm a bad girl, I'm bringing shame upon the whole house. But somewhere inside my soul I still have pride, and nobody may enter there. You must let me keep that, or else I can never again come to your room."

  He would never have ignored an interdiction, a wish, a hint from her. He himself was surprised that she had so much power over him. But he was suffering. His senses remained stirred up, often his heart fought violently against his dependence. Sometimes he made efforts to free himself. Sometimes he'd court little Julie with elaborate flattery, and it was indeed most important to remain on good terms with this powerful person and to dupe her if possible. He had a strange relationship with this little Julie, who often behaved like a child and often seemed omniscient. She really had more beauty than Lydia, an extraordinary beauty which, combined with her somewhat precocious child-innocence, was a great attraction for Goldmund; he was often deeply in love with Julie. In this strong attraction he felt for the little sister, he recognized with surprise the difference between loving and desiring. In the beginning he had looked at both sisters with the same eyes, had found both desirable, but Julie more beautiful and seductive, had courted both equally, always kept an eye on both. And now Lydia had gained this power over him! Now he loved her so much that he had even renounced full possession of her, out of love. Her soul had become familiar and dear to him. In its childlike tenderness and inclination to sadness it seemed similar to his own. He was often deeply astonished and delighted to see how much her soul corresponded to her body; she'd do something, say something, express a wish or an opinion, and her words and the attitude of her soul were molded in the same shape as the slant of her eyes and the form of her fingers.

  These instants during which he thought he recognized the basic forms and laws that constituted her being, her soul as well as her body, had more than once roused in Goldmund the desire to retain something of this form and to re-create it. On a few sheets of paper that he kept most secret, he had made several attempts to draw from memory the outline of her head with the strokes of a pen--the line of her eyebrows, her hand, her knee.

  With young Julie the situation was becoming rather difficult. She obviously sensed the wave of love in which her older sister was swimming, and her senses turned toward this paradise with curiosity and greed, while her stubborn mind refused to admit it. She treated Goldmund with exaggerated coolness and dislike. Yet, during moments of forgetfulness, she'd watch him with admiration and desiring curiosity. With Lydia she was often most tender, and occasionally even came to visit her in her bed, to breathe in the atmosphere of love and sex with wordless greed, purposely brushing against the forbidden and longed-for secret. Then again she'd make clear with almost offensive brusqueness that she knew of Lydia's secret transgression and felt contempt for it.

  Attractive and disturbing, the beautiful, capricious child flittered between the two lovers, tasted of love's secrecy in thirsty dreams, played innocent, and then again dangerously knowing. The child rapidly gained a kind of power over them. Lydia suffered from it more than Goldmund, who rarely saw the younger sister except during meals. And Lydia also realized that Goldmund was not insensitive to Julie's charms; sometimes she'd see his appreciative, delighted eyes gazing at her. She could not say anything about it, everything was so complicated, so filled with danger. Julie must especially not be offended or angered; alas, any day, any hour the secret of her love could be discovered and an end put to her heavy, anguished bliss, perhaps a dreadful end.

  Sometimes Goldmund asked himself why he had not left long ago. It was difficult to live the way he was now living: loved, but without hope for either a sanctioned, lasting happiness, or the easy fulfillments to which his love desires had been accustomed until now. His senses were constantly excited and hungry, never stilled; moreover, he lived in permanent danger. Why was he staying and accepting it all, all these entanglements and confused emotions? These were experiences, emotions, and states of mind for the sedentary, the lawful, for people in heated rooms. Had he not the right of the homeless, of the non-possessing, to extricate himself from these delicate complications and to laugh at them? Yes, he had that right, and he was a fool to look for a kind of home here and to be paying for it with so much suffering, so much embarrassment. And yet he did. He not only put up with it, but was secretly happy to do so. It was foolish, difficult, a strain to live this way, but it was also wonderful. The darkly beautiful sad
ness of his love was wonderful, in its foolishness and hopelessness; his sleepless, thought-filled nights were beautiful; it was all as beautiful and delectable as the fold of suffering on Lydia's lips, or like the lost, resigned tone of her voice when she spoke of her love and sorrow. In a few weeks, lines of suffering had appeared on Lydia's young face. It seemed so beautiful and so important to him to retrace the lines of this face with a pen, and he felt he himself had become another person in these few weeks: much older; not more intelligent, yet more experienced; not happier, yet much more mature, much richer in his soul. He was no longer a boy.

  In her gentle, lost voice Lydia said to him: "You mustn't be sad, not because of me; I want to bring you only joy, to see you happy. Forgive me, I've made you sad, I've infected you with my fears and my grief. I have such strange dreams at night: I'm always walking in a desert, it is vast and dark, I can't tell you how vast and dark, and I walk there, looking for you, but you're not there and I know that I have lost you and that I will have to walk like that forever and ever, alone like that. Then I wake up and think: oh, how good, how wonderful that he's still here, that I'll see him, perhaps for many weeks more, or days, it doesn't matter, it only matters that he's still here!"

  One morning Goldmund awoke shortly after dawn and continued to lie in his bed for a while, musing. Images from a dream hovered about him, disconnected. He had dreamed of his mother and of Narcissus; he could still see both figures clearly. As he extricated himself from the strands of the dream, a peculiar light caught his attention, a strange kind of brightness was filtering through the small window. He jumped up, ran to the window, and saw that the windowsill, the roof of the stable, the gate to the courtyard, the entire landscape beyond was shimmering bluish-white, covered by the first snow of winter. He was struck by the contrast between his agitated heart and the quiet, resigned winter landscape: how quiet, how gracefully and piously field and forest, hill and heath gave in to sun, wind, rain, draft and snow, how beautifully and gently maple and ash bore the burden of winter! Could one not become as they, could one learn nothing from them? Deep in thought, he walked out to the courtyard, waded in the snow, touched it with his hands, went into the garden and looked over the high, snow-covered fence at the snow-bent rose branches.

  As they ate their gruel for breakfast, everybody mentioned the first snow. Everyone--even the girls--had already been outside. Snow had come late this year, Christmas was not far off. The knight spoke about the lands to the south that were strangers to snow. But the event that made this first winter day unforgettable for Goldmund occurred long after nightfall.

  The two sisters had quarreled during the day, but Goldmund knew nothing of it. At night, after the house had grown quiet and dark, Lydia came to his room in accord with her custom. Wordlessly she lay down beside him, leaned her head against his chest to hear his heartbeat and to console herself with his nearness. She was sad and full of apprehension; she feared that Julie might betray her; yet she could not make up her mind to speak to her lover about it and to cause him sorrow. She was lying quietly against his heart, listening to the tender words he whispered to her from time to time, feeling his hand in her hair.

  But suddenly--she had not been lying there for very long--she had a terrible shock and sat up, her eyes growing wide. Goldmund was also greatly frightened when he saw the door of his room open and a figure enter. His shock kept him from recognizing immediately who it was. Only when the apparition stood close beside his bed and bent over it did he recognize with anguish in his heart that it was Julie. She slipped out of the coat she had thrown over her nightgown and let it drop to the floor. With a cry of pain, as though cut by a knife, Lydia sank back and clung to Goldmund.

  In a mocking, triumphant, though shaking voice Julie said: "I don't enjoy being in my room by myself all the time. Either you take me in with you, and we lie together all three of us, or I go and wake father."

  "Well, come in then," said Goldmund, folding back the cover. "You'll freeze your feet off there." She climbed in and he had trouble making room for her in the narrow bed, because Lydia had buried her face in the pillow and was lying motionless. Finally, all three were in the bed, a girl on each side of Goldmund. For a second he could not resist the thought that not so long ago this situation corresponded to his most secret wishes. With strange anguish and secret delight, he felt Julie's hip against his side.

  "I just had to see," she began again, "how it feels to lie in your bed, since my sister enjoys coming here so much."

  In order to calm her, Goldmund softly rubbed his cheek against her hair and caressed her hip and knee with a quiet hand, the way one caresses a cat. Silent and curious she surrendered to his probing hand, felt the magic with curious reverence, offered no resistance. But while he cast his spell, he also took pains to comfort Lydia, hummed soft, familiar love sounds into her ear and finally made her lift her face and turn it toward him. Soundlessly he kissed her mouth and eyes, while his hand kept her sister spellbound on the other side. He was aware how embarrassing and grotesque the whole situation was; it was becoming almost unbearable.

  It was his left hand that taught him the truth: while it explored the beautiful, quietly waiting body of Julie, he felt for the first time not only the deep hopelessness of his love for Lydia, but how ridiculous it was. While his lips were with Lydia and his hand with Julie, he felt that he should either force Lydia to give in to him, or he should leave. To love her and yet renounce her had been wrong, had been nonsense.

  "My heart," he whispered into Lydia's ear, "we are suffering unnecessarily. How happy all three of us could be now! Let us do what our blood demands!"

  She drew back, shrinking, and his desire fled to the other girl. His hand was doing such pleasing things to Julie that she answered with a long quivering sigh of lust.

  Lydia heard the sigh and her heart contracted with jealousy, as though poison had been dropped into it. She sat up abruptly, tore the cover off the bed, jumped to her feet and cried: "Julie, let's leave!"

  Julie was startled. The thoughtless violence of Lydia's cry, which might betray them all, showed her the danger. Silently she got up.

  But Goldmund, offended and betrayed in all his senses, quickly put his arms around Julie as she sat up, kissed her on each breast, and hotly whispered into her ear: "Tomorrow, Julie, tomorrow!"

  Barefoot, in her nightgown, Lydia stood on the stone floor, her feet blue with cold. She picked up Julie's coat and hung it around her sister with a gesture of suffering and submission that did not escape Julie in spite of the darkness; it touched and reconciled her. Softly the sisters vanished from the room. With conflicting emotions, Goldmund listened intently and breathed with relief as the house remained deathly quiet.

  The three young people were forced to meditate in solitude over their strange and unnatural association. The two sisters found nothing to say to each other, after they hurried back to their bedroom. They lay awake in their respective beds, each alone, silent, and stubborn. A spirit of grief, contradiction, nonsense, alienation, and innermost confusion seemed to have taken hold of the house. Goldmund did not fall asleep until after midnight; Julie not until the early hours of morning. Lydia lay torturously awake until the pale day rose over the snow. Then she got up, dressed, knelt for a long time in prayer before the small wooden Saviour in her room, and as soon as she heard her father's step on the stairs went out and asked him to hear her. Without trying to distinguish between her fears for Julie's virginity and her own jealousy, she had decided during the night to put an end to the matter. Goldmund and Julie were still asleep when the knight was informed of everything Lydia had decided to tell him. She did not mention Julie's part in the adventure.

  When Goldmund appeared in the writing room at the usual hour that morning, he found the knight in boots, vest, and girdled sword, instead of the slippers and housecoat he usually wore while they wrote. At once he knew the meaning of this.

  "Put on your cap," said the knight. "I have a walk to take with you."
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  Goldmund took his cap from the nail and followed his master down the stairs, across the courtyard, and out the gate. Their soles made crunching noises on the slightly frozen snow; the sky was still red with dawn. The knight walked ahead in silence; the young man followed. Several times he looked back at the house, at the window of his room, at the steep, snow-covered roof, until all disappeared and there was nothing more to see. He would never see that roof, those windows again, never again the study, the bedroom, the two sisters. He had so often toyed with the thought of sudden departure. Now his heart contracted with pain, and it hurt bitterly to leave this way.

  For an hour they walked in this fashion, the master going on ahead. Neither spoke, and Goldmund began to think about his fate. The knight was armed; perhaps he would kill him. But he did not believe that he would. The danger was small; he'd only have to run and the old man would stand there helpless with his sword. No, his life was not in danger. But this silent walking behind the offended, solemn man, this being led away wordlessly pained him more with every step. Finally the knight halted.

  "From here on," he said in a broken voice, "you will continue alone, always in the same direction, you'll lead the wanderer's life you did before. If you ever show your face again in the neighborhood of my house, you will be killed. I have no desire to take revenge on you; I should have been more intelligent than to allow so young a man to live intimately with my daughters. But if you have the audacity to come back, your life is lost. Go now, and may God forgive you!"

  As he stood in the sallow light of the snowy morning, his gray-bearded face looked almost dead. Like a ghost he stood there, and did not move until Goldmund had disappeared over the next ridge. The reddish tint in the cloudy sky had faded, the sun did not come out, and snow began to fall in thin, hesitant flakes.

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