By Stanislaw Przybyszewski and translated by Joe E Bandel
IX.
They stood at the front door.
Falk opened it. It was so hard to find the keyhole. Finally!
She stepped into the hallway. He followed her. They stopped again. What did he want?
“Good night, Falk.”
He held her hand tightly, his voice trembling.
“It feels like we should part more warmly.”
The door was half-open. The lantern light fell in a broad strip across her face.
She looked at him so strangely, so strangely astonished. He felt shame. “Good night…”
He heard the key rattle from inside. He listened. She climbed the stairs lightly and quickly.
He walked a short distance.
Suddenly, he screamed involuntarily with all his might. What was that?
Did he want to release his strength in human impulsiveness? Splendid! He was a splendid ass. Unpleasant! How clumsy that “warmer farewell” was!
No, how comical, how infinitely comical she must find him.
He, the great, mocking scorner, suddenly in love like a little schoolboy.
God, that was embarrassing, and then that memory, too, which suddenly became so painful.
He was a full thirteen years old when he felt his first erotic impulse. He thought himself so grand! Those deep, witty conversations he had with the girl about Schiller and Lenau. And the yellow kid gloves he got himself…
Then, one evening, the headmaster caught him in a tête-à-tête.
And the next day… marvelous! The bell rang. It was the ten o’clock break. Everyone rushed out.
“Falk, you stay here.” Yes, now it was coming.
“Come here!”
He went to the lectern.
“Take the chair down!” He took it down.
“Lie down!” He lay down.
And then the sturdy cane swished through the air, whirring and whistling, faster and faster, more and more painful…
That hurt!
“Why are you laughing, dear sir! That’s a great tragedy. I’ve rarely suffered so much emotionally as I did then… It’s utterly foolish of you to laugh. Don’t you understand that this is life? The ridiculous beside the tragic, the gold in the filth, the ineffably holy in the trivial—yes, you see, you don’t understand that.”
Hegel, the old Prussian philosopher Hegel, he was a wiser man. Do you even know Hegel? Yes, you see, his entire philosophy is just the question of why nature uses such unaesthetic means for its grandest purposes, like the sexual organ, which serves both for procreation and the excretion of metabolic waste.
Of course, it’s infinitely comical, ridiculously comical, disgustingly comical, but that’s always how the holiest things are.
Falk grew furious.
So let’s make this clear: Love, oh yes, love: First a strangely confused face, then glowing faun’s eyes, then trembling hands as if telegraphing mile-long dispatches… Then: dips and rises in the voice like scanning Horatian odes, now hoarse, now squeaky… Then a host of involuntary movements: grasping and stumbling back, not quite steady on the feet, panting and puffing… isn’t that ridiculous? Isn’t that ridiculously absurd?
And there sits Fräulein Isa across from me with her charming, knowing smile, with her strange gaze, encouraging me.
Well, I’m excellent at playing the mime. Didn’t I mime well today?
Exactly, because I’m a so-called “differentiated” person, everything in me flows together, intention and genuineness, conscious and unconscious, lie and truth, a thousand heavens and a thousand earths merge into one another, but still, I’m ridiculous.
There’s nothing to be done about it, absolutely nothing. It’s an “iron” law, one of the most ironclad, that a man, before he achieves his comical purpose, must be found ridiculous a thousand times by the woman he loves…
He stopped abruptly.
So he felt shame… Yes, yes, just like little schoolboys. They feel embarrassed too when they fall off their horse in front of their flame.
But this woman was a stranger to him, utterly, utterly strange. He knew nothing about her. Not a single line could he penetrate into the mystery of that veiled smile, that knowing, charming essence.
And he had fallen in love with a strange woman, about whom he knew nothing.
Suddenly. With a jolt. In a second.
Hey! A thousand experimental psychologists, come here! You who know everything, you soul anatomists, you pure and dry analysts, come, make this clear to me…
So the fact: I fell in love with a woman in a second, in love for the first time.
“Because my sensual instinct awakened?” You’re mistaken; that was awake long ago.
Because I wanted to tell myself something? I didn’t tell myself anything. My brain had nothing to do with it. I had no time to reflect. By the way, shame on you. You, who wrote a physiology of love, such a splendid physiology, should know that the sexual instinct doesn’t reflect. It’s a dumb, deaf animal. Narrow-minded, boorish, and comical.
Anyway, it’s completely, completely indifferent to me. When you’re about to turn twenty-six in June, you no longer ask for causes, the why doesn’t hurt anymore. You take everything as a given fact. Yes, that’s what you do.
He looked around. He had meanwhile reached a public square he didn’t recognize.
Very nice.
He sat on a bench, his head a bit heavy, probably from drinking too much, but he had no peace.
Something had been working in him all evening. An unspeakably painful thought that he kept pushing back, but it rose more forcefully and now burst out with full strength.
Mikita!
Falk stood up restlessly, walked a little, and sat down again. Look, Mikita, don’t hold it against me, I absolutely can’t help it. Why did you drag me to her? I wanted to drink wine with you and talk with you. I didn’t want to go to her. You don’t drag your friends to your brides.
That’s the most important rule in the code of love.
Absolutely not, no matter how splendid the brides are, like your Isa.
Now, Mikita, don’t be so damn sad. That hurts me terribly. I love you infinitely, you know.
A great tenderness came over Falk.
I really can’t help it. Just imagine. I step into the room. A marvelous red. And that red flows around a woman in a hot wave of surf, around a woman who was so familiar to me, yes, more than you, though I’d never seen her.
Was it the red? You’re a painter, damn it. You must know how such a red affects your soul.
Now comes the respectable pseudo-psychologist Mr. Du Bois-Reymond and says: Red consists of waves making five hundred trillion vibrations per second. The vibrations cause vibrations in the nerves, and so I vibrate.
Do you understand now why I fell in love? Because I vibrate! Well, there you go! Falk stood up and wandered aimlessly forward.
The streets were desolate. Only now and then did he hear a soft, squeaky woman’s voice:
“Hey, darling, coming with me?”
No, he absolutely didn’t want that. What would he do with a woman? He wasn’t a Berlin romance writer who needed discreet petticoat moods to write novels. No, he hated all women, all of them, and most of all her, her who had so cunningly crept into him and now whipped him into this damned unrest.
No, Mikita, you mustn’t hold it against me. No, no… You can’t imagine how I’m suffering. Something choking sits in my throat; all day long… I haven’t eaten anything, just drunk and drunk…
Do you know what I dreamed? I fell from a high mountain. I sat on a glacier that hurtled forward with furious speed; could I do anything about it? Could I resist? The glacier carried me, the glacier was vast, it raced and raced relentlessly…
Can I rearrange the molecules of my nerves? Can I shut off the current in my brain? Huh? Can I do that? Can you?
The glacier carries me—I fall and fall until it spits me into the sea.
That’s the iron law! Falk almost screamed it.
Well, yes; I’m a bit drunk, and control is hard then. No, Mikita, no; you’re so infinitely dear to me. I didn’t do anything, nothing at all. Suddenly, he grew furious.
Didn’t you provoke her, dear Falk, didn’t you stir her curiosity with a thousand tricks?
Splendid, this sudden guilty conscience! Yes, I take my guilt-laden conscience and shake its contents before the Almighty, who didn’t create me like those four-legged beasts without reason, but as a two-legged individual, endowed with mind and reason, so that it may distinguish between good and evil and, by the *quinta essentia*, namely willpower, calculate and guide its actions.
Yes, dear Mikita; *mea maxima culpa*! I have sinned against you! On the way, he saw a night café open.
Oh, he was so terribly tired.
He entered and sat on a sofa off in a corner.
Around him, he heard shouting and screeching, cursing and haggling. He looked to see if a Berlin romance writer was taking notes. A colleague from the same faculty, no doubt.
Disgusting! How much does five minutes of flesh cost per pound?
He leaned back and stared into the large, white electric light lamp.
It flickered in his eyes. Around the white, round light, he clearly saw hot mists trembling.
And faster and faster, he saw the haze circling the lamps, more violently, hotter.
And he felt her in his arms, her cheek pressed to his, her movements gliding up and down his nerves, and he saw the world dancing around him as a red ring of sun.
That was the great problem. He sat up straight.
The problem of his love. Isa was born from him, or he from her. She was the most perfect correlate to him. Her movements were so attuned to his spirit that they sent him into the highest ecstasy, the sound of her voice unleashed something in his soul, something of the mystery where his soul’s secret rested.
Foolish brain, how do you know this so surely? He laughed scornfully.
But suddenly, he paused. He saw himself and her in a strange image.
They sat across from each other, completely indifferent. They looked coldly into each other’s eyes, yes, they were entirely indifferent.
Yes, he was a demoniac, he saw her and himself transparent, and he saw something in him and something in her rise up, how the two subterranean selves drew closer and looked at each other so questioningly, so longingly.
No! They were sitting at the table, indifferent, talking about trivial, meaningless things. But the Other in him and the Other in her were so infinitely close, they embraced, they poured into each other.
The Other, dear Mikita, the thing I don’t know, because it’s suddenly there without reason, loved her before I even noticed.
You see, Mikita, my foolish brain can only at best register that something is happening, at best note a completed fact.
Yes, dear Mikita, it’s a completed fact: I love her!
That I made myself interesting? That I lured her and drew attention to my depths? – But good God, Mikita, be reasonable! The great Agent has set the wheels to run inevitably in this direction and no other.
That you don’t understand!
“Why didn’t Mikita come?”
Oh, gracious Fräulein, you know him poorly! Mikita has instincts with mile-long hands that grasp the intangible: Mikita sees a tone turn into color. He’s painted chords that would drive you mad if you heard them, but the brutal eye, of course, can take anything. Mikita sees the grass grow and the sky scream. Mikita sees all that—Mikita is a genius!
What am I? What have I done? Nonsense, Falk! Are you really drunk?
No, I’m a psychologist, currently busy cleanly dissecting Mikita’s soul.
Hah, Mikita doesn’t let it show, he lets the lye sink into his deepest shafts until everything is dissolved and corroded, then comes the break.
What’s the harm? Good God, a man overboard! He’s not the first.
The screeching and laughter around Falk grew louder and more unbearable.
He stood up furiously and practically roared: “Quiet!”
Then he sat down. The damned gnats that always had to disturb him.
Now he grew very restless.
He had to see Mikita. He absolutely had to see what he was doing now. Yes, he’d go to him: Who’s there? I’m working. – It’s me, Erik Falk. – He opens the door. Looks at me sideways, with, of course, terribly wild eyes.
What do you want?
“What do I want? Well, I want to make it clear that *I* don’t love, but the Other does. I want to explain how it happened. I sat with her at a table—completely cold and indifferent, but while I spoke, the Other acted on its own, tugged at her, lured her until she gave in. No! Not her; she mocks me and finds me comical because my Other wanted a warmer farewell. You see, she’s a stranger to me, absolutely a stranger. But the Others in both of us, they know each other so well, they love each other so infinitely, so powerfully, so inseparably.
Almighty Creator, I thank you for making me a two-legged being, endowed with reason and mind, so that I may distinguish between good and evil, so that I don’t desire Isa when Mikita had the fortune to meet her first.”
And there—there sits the young rascal next to a hundred kilos of flesh, he has no reason, he can’t distinguish between good and evil either.
You see, foolish rascal, what are you compared to me? You reasonless, will-less subject.
Falk laughed heartily.
Now he had to leave the café for improper behavior—the phrase pleased him immensely.
That suited him just fine.
In this pestilent, sweat-and-flesh-reeking dive, a man of the species *Homo sapiens*, gentlemen, couldn’t stand it.
Outside, it was starting to get light.
Above the black rooftops, he saw the deep blue in an inexpressible, quiet, holy majesty.
The majesty of the sky over Berlin… he laughed scornfully—that’s just how nature is…
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