B007P4V3G4 EBOK (38 page)

A sheen of comfort had passed over her face.

Yes, my Reinout! she had sobbed, you shall be with me: you
shall be with me for ever. No God nor devil can separate us, for
we have become one, one flesh and one desire, one mind, one quest
and one meaning, in everything, in Oh, a wild joy,
my beloved, arises in my soul, joy over the pains of hell. It was
terrible! I feel the flames even now, still their glow scorches me.
But better, oh, a thousand times better this than
We shall burn, Reinout! But I rejoice, I rejoice in that torture! For,
even then we shall not cease to be for one another: we shall be
together, together for eternity!

Exhausted, she had sunk down; tremors jerked the course of her
slender body, beautiful even in the throes of death: the end seemed to have come. In time, though, these spasms had abated; the fever
relaxed its grip and a merciful slumber settled on the feeble eyelids.
Already he believed her to be spared; already the hope of rescue
coursed like drunkenness to his temples. Woe is him! This calm
was but the sign that life had given up the struggle with death.
The wrecker had completed his work on, this young body; now, he
left it there and set off to strike down fresh victims.

When Olga now opened her eyes one more time, the peace of
resignation rested upon her being. Yet, to him who regarded her
with the glitter of the happiest of expectations, she, barely noticeably, shook her chill bespangled head. Then he knew everything.
Like a bird, pierced in high flight by the hunter's arrow, he
thudded down into the dust, convulsed.

All pain has passed away, she murmured, and the fire is put out
... Reinout! you were right: that was a false vision, yes, the one of
those flames and that sulphurous pool. That was not the truth ... I
now see green around me, green everywhere. I hear the rustling of
the leaves. I hear the rushing of a brook. The air is cool and smells
of fresh herbs. .-. Farewell, my sweet, farewell!

Olga, Olga, do not leave me!

I await you, Reinout, my own! Seek me, seek, and you shall find
me.

Then that smile had come, with that look of leave-taking from
which one more time everything shone out to him, everything he
had loved in her and had idolised, what had enchanted and moved
him in her, that which had rendered him blissful: her mildness and
her care, her beauty and her glowing sensuousness, her undivided
sympathy, for his failings too, her boundless devotion, even to his
faults - in short, her warm, mild femininity giving itself away to
him and which was his, entire and without reservation; to him, and
to him alone. Thus she had rounded the edges of his angular
character and sated his timid passion; thus, as a friend and a lover,
as a walking companion and as a mistress, making his lonely soul
clamp tightly to her love for all eternity.

And now ...

He bent over her and drank from her lips her final breath. Then
he sat staring rigidly at her, how she did not speak any longer, did
not look up, did no longer move. And suddenly, in a weeping
groan, he had fallen face down and had slammed his teeth into his
fist, and he had beaten his head against the floor boards until his
sensibilities failed him.

Seek me, seek me and you-shall-find me!

These words were the first that his consciousness summoned up
once he had returned to life out of his stupor of days' duration -
solely to die, he had thought - but now, after all, precisely because
of these words, to life proper. For they gained ascendancy over
him, these last words of the one loved above all. At first, they had
been but lisped murmurs, murmurs he sensed when falling into
slumber and on awaking; at night while he gave free rein to his
despair and by day, too, when, in order to not to lose his reason,
he sought to escape himself for a moment, into the sound and fury
of the world. They whispered in differing tones: pleading, jubilant,
wailing and threatening in turn. Now they would be close by, then
they would be distant; now inside him, then out: in the wind that
touched him in passing, or in the throbbing of his temples; at times
as if coming from heaven on high, then again as from the depths
of an abyss. Often, when he, lonely, was taking a walk, they
appeared to assume an intangible and indescribable presence which
hovered out ahead of him and signalled him to follow - yet when
he pursued them, there was nothing. At first, this made him fearful;
later, it filled him with a vague, half-fearful, half-hopeful expectation
- until, finally, it had gripped him like a storm, a hurricane of
desire, driving him on.

Seek me, seek me, and you shall find me!

And there was another dying word of hers that would not leave
him, that time and again rang out at him from his innermost depths
like the solemn booming of bells from the darkness of a forest:

We have become one, one flesh and one desire, one mind, one
quest and one meaning: no God nor Devil can separate us!

If he made a connection between those two utterances, then
hazy light would loom in the night of his distraction - a hazy light
of reunion. Like the dawning of a revelation, it loomed up in front
of him, him, the unbeliever. He no longer weighed up and rejected,
he no longer fathomed and denied; he solely felt that it was. The
stumbling words of his beloved had assured him of it. Yes, yes,
this is how it must be! There is a law of reunion, a law like that of
decomposition. Of the deceased human being an essentia remains: a
distillation, purely spiritual, of that which he has felt and loved
most intensely. According to the nature of that essence, the extent
to which it is either strong or feeble, ethereal or earth-bound, all
who have lived do find a place again in the life of nature; and as
between the chemical elements on earth, likewise between the hearts of mankind, thus there can be a choice relationship between
these essentiae, powerful enough to attract them to one another, at
times so powerful that it operates through the curtain which still
separates life from death. Therefore, those who here on earth have
belonged to each other entirely and uniquely, and have been one
in everything and faithful to the end, these the grave cannot keep
apart and their love, stronger than death, carves out a path to one
another. For, between their beings there is an affinity which
continues to act in nature even after the decomposition of their
earthly life.

Seek me, seek me! the voice repeated once again. Then he readied
himself and went. His body threatened to fail, incapacitated through
fasting and fretting: but that sacred desire clamped wings to
him - and he went, as if carried by spirit-feet.

Whither? - Would he, with his own fingers, tear down the
thread which still bound him to the clay: with his own hand rend
asunder the veil hanging there in folds between him and her? -
This would have been a short path to take, yet not the right one.
No! No act of violence would lead him to her, for she would
have had no part in that act and only unity, unity in everything,
in what were the things of life and of death, would be able to
reunite them in a higher harmony. Thus, no suicide, no effort of
irascible impatience that would alienate her mild spirit from him.
He wished to seek her, patiently, fervently, trustingly, without
her, and seek her - until she let herself be found by
him.

Onward, then! A last pilgrimage to her grave.

Over the bed of green sod with which he cloaked her, he bent his
head down to earth. A long time did he remain like this. The
scarlet of sundown melted into night; the dew, pearling on the
flowers, soaked his clothes and the chill wetness from the leaves of
grass sprayed into his face. He, however, remained, his forehead on
the earth as if his hearing wished to penetrate the silence of that
which was below, yet to catch a panting of her breath or beating
of her breast.

Olga! he whispered, do you still repose here, close to your poor
body which my heart and senses have loved so dearly? Tell me,
Olga! Here I am. Come to me! Come!

There was no answer in the garden of the dead.

And more densely did darkness make its quarters on earth: a
pale mist extinguished the twinkling of the constellations which set
out after each other, circling heaven's pivot. Then came the night
wind, suddenly, with a sad, wild sigh; and the trees, in their sleep,
shivered at its touch; and it stirred about in the mist and shredded
it into whirling figures that chased one another across the heath.
And in the moaning of the gusts across the tombstones, Reinout's
ear thought to perceive the sobs of souls who sought and sought
one another, yet could not find; for, though they had loved each
other in life, they had not loved enough, not entirely and uniquely,
not in everything ... Thus, the night passed. The wind inclined, to
sleep among the shrubs; the mist melted away and with it the
swarm of shades, fleeing the morning which, ahead of Hesperus,
had already arisen with joyous glitter. He, however, was still
sitting there and awaited a sign.

Olga! he cried, if you are not here, where then must I seek you?
Tell me, show me, oh, my darling!

Then he heard, from far in the distance, he did not detect from
where, the sweet note of a bird, so soft and yet so clear, so alluring
and yet so chaste. A shudder coursed through his limbs. No
nightingale fluted thus, no blackbird ever sang like this. There was
no mistaking it: that note was hers. Jubilant, he jumped up:

She lives, she knows me, she has heard me and calls me to her!
Olga! Olga!

Seek! the voice resounded. Not on the graves. Higher, further
away. Seek her, seek her, and you shall find her!

Wings sprout from his shoulderblades so that he rises up like the
lark toward the dawn. For that sweet call came from above, he
now believed. There, up above, he would greet her, glad and
sweet as though she was already on earth, a singing spirit in the
eternal light-blue.

He rises - higher than the highest mountain colossus, higher
than ever a thing of clay has penetrated the unknown, boundless
expanse. Earth, beneath him, becomes like a garden in which sea
straits are the glinting paths and islands the flower plots while the
ocean lies stretched out like a green meadow across which the
white clouds move slowly, like grazing sheep.

But above and around him is the realm of emptiness. In vain, he
looks out for the dwellings of the blessed spirits; in vain he is
abroad to hear at close quarters the sweet tone that called him. Soon the night will enshroud him again. Moon and stars bulge
from the dark vault of the spheres, lighting with swollen size and
a shine not seen before; meteors hurtle past him, barely at hair'sbreadth, searing hot - a wild chase of heavenly vagabonds, as
though slung into space to annihilate the bold one who dared to
hazard as far as this on to the racecourse of the planets. That
which he seeks, however, is not here. Here no wind blows, no
shade's wing rustles here. This is where the beingless void begins.

And when morning dawns, ashen, rises higher still. Even higher
does he wish to search for them, those glorious dwellings of the
beings-volatile. He rises up, but he does not find them. The more
he now wishes to approach the source of light, the further it draws
away from his yearning striving. Alarmed, he shrinks back. He has
reached the limit where the light is present no longer, solely the
darkness. The sun is but a dull-glowing disc, the stars but golden
foliage: atoms, glimmering specks, as though lost in immeasurable
space; and that space itself - that space into which the children of
earth look up in faith when they dream of their blue and warm and
blessed Heavenly paradise - that space itself, night: black, eternal,
beingless night.

Will he penetrate even further? - How, were this hollow
darkness but a Styx which he must cleave through in order to end
up in the fields of But no boatman offers him passage;
Nothingness stares him in the face and a terrible fear strikes him
with paralysis. Imagine he cannot find the way back? Imagine he
must remain here, hovering like one doomed and lonely, in
punishment for his self-seeking and his seclusion on earth? ... His
wing-beat becomes impotent; the cold makes him rigid; a grievous
oppression threatens to stifle the spark of life in him; already, he
believes himself to be dragged along by one of those cosmic
currents which will make him roam the tides here in everlasting
peregrination. Suddenly, life seethes upward inside him at full
strength, for in the icy dead-silence he has perceived a note, a note
arisen, barely audible, from the bottomless deep: the bird-note of
the beloved one, now lamentatious and afraid, as a quail's that,
mid-sea above the water, cannot find a resting place for his
exhausted wings. And the voice, too, he heard calling out, inside
himself:

Reinout, Reinout! Whither do you roam? Why do you seek
outside the earth that which was born out of the earth and must
belong to her for ever? - Leave heaven to the stars! Descend, Reinout! Seek me still, loyal and awake, with all that is in you -
and you shall find me!

So shrill and frightened had that note sounde%i now, and so
fathomless, it seemed, from the deep: - the note of a soul in pain:
wailings for salvation de profundis. Oh, God! could it be that she
yet must suffer punishment for her sweet sins? Could hell be a
truth while Heaven was nothing but lies? ... Zounds! He wished
to go to her. Dizzyingly quickly he shoots down and coursing
for a pillar of smoke that twists up towards him from earth, he
plummets down into the blazing crater of Mount Etna.

Glow and flames, smoke and ash. Rivers of molten ores; seething
lakes of lava that sink and rise up again in waves upon the breath
of a subterranean high tide; rocks that splash down in a bubbling
pool, pulverised on its foundations by the black-searing fire; walls
that burst apart with a thunderous bang; blue-flamed sulphur pits;
hissing spurts of boiling moisture; shafts which open themselves
out into even deeper, even hotter a glow. Verily, as Heaven is
to be found in the expanse of the skies, the location of hell is no
delusion and is to be found, not too far away.