Doctor Faustus (25 page)

He had always had to ring at the door of the apartment, which was up three steep flights of stairs in a gloomy building in the old city, and wait for a maid to open. But this time he found both outer and inner doors open, that to the waiting—room, the consulting-room, and facing him a door into the living-room, the so-called “best room” with two windows. Yes, there the windows were wide open too, and all four curtains blew in and out in the draught. In the middle of the room lay Dr. Erasmi, with his beard sticking up, his eyes fast shut, in a white shirt with cuffs, lying on a tufted cushion in an open coffin on two trestles.

What was going on, why the dead man lay there so alone and open to the wind, where the maid and Frau Dr. Erasmi were, whether perhaps the people from the undertaking establishment were waiting to screw on the lid, or were coming back at once—at what singular moment the visitor had been brought to the spot, was never made clear. When I came to Leipzig, Adrian could only describe to me the bewilderment in which he, after staring for a moment, had gone down the stairs again. He seems not to have inquired further into the doctor’s sudden death, seems not to have been interested. He merely thought that the man’s constant puffing and blowing had always been a bad sign.

With secret repugnance, struggling against unreasoning horror, I must now relate that Adrian’s second choice also stood under an unlucky star. He took two days to recover from the shock. Then he again had recourse to the Leipzig directory, chose another name, and put himself in the care of a certain Dr. Zimbalist, in one of the business streets off the Marktplatz. On the ground floor was a restaurant, then a piano warehouse; the doctor’s house occupied part of the upper storey, a porcelain shield with his name on it being downstairs in the lobby. The dermatologist’s two waiting-rooms, one reserved for female patients, were adorned with growing plants, palms and house trees in pots. Medical books and magazines lay about, for instance an illustrated history of morals, in the room where Adrian for the first and the second time awaited his treatment.

Dr. Zimbalist was a small man with horn spectacles, an oval bald spot running from the brow to the back of the head between two growths of reddish hair, and a moustache left growing only immediately under the nostrils, as was then the fashion in the upper classes and would later become the attribute of a world-famous face. His speech was slovenly and he inclined to bad masculine jokes. But one had not the impression that he felt very jolly. One side of his cheek was drawn up in a sort of tic, the corner of the mouth as well, and the eye winked in sympathy; the whole expression was crabbed and craven to a degree; he looked no-good, he looked odious. Thus Adrian described him to me and thus I see him.

Now this is what happened: Adrian had gone twice for treatment; he went a third time. As he mounted the stairs he met, between the first and second storeys, the physician coming down between two sturdy men wearing stiff hats on the backs of their heads. Dr. Zimbalist’s eyes were cast down like those of a man taking heed to his steps on the stairs. One of his wrists was linked with the wrist of one of his companions by a bracelet and little chain. Looking up and recognizing his patient, he twitched his cheek sourly, nodded at him, and said: “Another time!” Adrian, his back to the wall, disconcerted, faced the three and let them pass; looked after them awhile as they descended and then followed them down. lie saw them mount a waiting car and drive off at a fast pace. Thus ended the continuation of Adrian’s cure by Dr. Zimbalist, after its earlier interruption. I must add that he troubled himself as little about the circumstances of his second bad shot as about the extraordinary atmosphere of his first one. Why Zimbalist had been taken away, and at the very hour for which an appointment had been made—he let that rest. But as though frightened off, he never took up the cure again after that and went to no other doctor. He did so the less in that the local affection healed itself without further treatment and disappeared, and as I can confirm and would sustain against any professional doubts, there were no manifest secondary symptoms. Adrian suffered once, in Wendell Kretschmar’s lodgings, where he had just presented some studies in composition, a violent attack of giddiness, which made him stagger and forced him to lie down. It passed into a two days’ migraine, which except for its severity was not different from other earlier attacks of the same kind. When I came back to Leipzig, once more a civilian, I found my friend unchanged in his walks and ways.

CHAPTER XX

O
r was he? If during our year of separation he had not become a different person, at least he was now more definitely that which he was, and this was enough to impress me, especially since I had probably a little forgotten what he had been. I have described the coolness of our parting in Halle. Our reunion, at the thought of which I had so rejoiced, was not lacking in the same quality, so that I, put off, both amused and dismayed, had to swallow my feelings and suppress whatever surged upwards into my consciousness. That he would fetch me from the station I had not expected. I had even not let him know the hour. I simply sought him out in his lodgings, before I had looked out any for myself. His landlady announced me, and I entered the room, calling him in a loud and joyful shout.

He sat at his desk, an old-fashioned one with a roll top and cabinet, writing down notes. “Hallo!” said he, not looking up. “Just a minute, we can talk.” And went on for some minutes with his work, leaving it to me to remain standing or to make myself comfortable. The reader must not misinterpret this, any more than I did. It was evidence of oldestablished intimacy, a life in common which could not be in the least affected by a year’s separation. It was simply as though we had parted the day before. Even so I was a little dashed, if at the same time amused, as the characteristic does amuse us. I had long since let myself down in one of the armless upholstered chairs flanking the book-table, when he screwed the top on his fountain-pen and approached me, without particularly looking me in the face.

“You’ve come just at the right time,” he said, and sat down on the other side of the table. “The Schaff-Gosch quartet is playing Op .132 tonight. You’ll come along?”

I understood that he meant Beethoven’s late work, the A-minor String Quartet.

“Since I’m here,” I replied, “I’ll come with you. It will be good to hear the Lydian movement, the ‘Thanksgiving for Recovery’; I’ve not heard it for a long time.”

“That beaker,” he said, “I drain at every feast. My eyes run over. ” And he began to talk about the Church modes and the Ptolemaic or “natural” system, whose six different modes were reduced by the tempered, i. e. the false system to two, major and minor; and about superiority in modulation of the “pure” scale over the tempered one. This he called a compromise for home use, as also the tempered piano was a thing precisely for domestic consumption, a transient peace-pact, not a hundred and fifty years old, which had brought to pass all sorts of considerable things, oh, very considerable, but about which we should not imagine that everything was settled for eternity. He expressed great pleasure over the fact that it was an astronomer and mathematician named Ptolemy, a man from Upper Egypt, living in Alexandria, who had established the best of all known scales, the natural or right one. That proved again, he said, the relation between music and astronomy, as it had been shown already by Pythagoras’ cosmic theory of harmony. Now and then he came back to the quartet and its third movement, referring to its strange character, its suggestion of a moon-landscape, and the enormous difficulty of performing it.

“At bottom,” said he, “every one of the four players has to be a Paganini and would have to know not only his own part but the three others’ as well, else it’s no use. Thank God, one can depend on the Schaff-Gosch. Today it can be done, but it is only just playable, and in his time it was simply not. The ruthless indifference of one who has risen above it towards the sheer earthly difficulties of technique is to me the most colossally entertaining thing in life. ‘What do I care about your damned fiddle?’ he said to somebody who complained.”

We laughed—and the odd thing was, simply that we had never even said how do you do.

“Besides,” he said, “there is the fourth movement, the incomparable finale, with the short, marchlike introduction and that noble recitative of the first violin, with which as suitably as possible the theme is prepared. Only it is vexatious, if you don’t want to call it gratifying, that in music, at least in this music, there are things for which one cannot scare up, out of the whole rich realm of language, do what you like, any properly characterizing epithet or combination of epithets. I have been tormenting myself over that these days: you cannot find any adequate term for the spirit, the attitude, the behaviour of this theme. For there is a lot of behaviour there. Tragic? Bold? Defiant, emphatic, full of elan, the height of nobility? None of them good. And ‘glorious’ is of course only throwing in your hand. You finally land at the objective direction, the name:
Allegro appassionato
. That is the best after all.”

I agreed. “Perhaps,” I thought, “this evening we might think of something else.”

“You must see Kretschmar soon,” it occurred to him to say. “Where do you live?”

I told him I would go to a hotel for the night and look out something suitable in the morning.

“I understand,” he said, “your not asking me to find something. One cannot leave it to anyone else. I have,” he added, “told the people in Cafe Central about you and your arrival. I must take you there soon.”

By the people he meant the group of young intellectuals whose acquaintance he had made through Kretschmar. I was convinced that his attitude towards them was very like what it had been towards the Winfried brethren in Halle, and when I said it was good to hear that he had quickly found suitable contacts in Leipzig he answered:

“Well, contacts… “

Schildknapp, the poet and translator, he added, was the most satisfactory. But even he had a way, out of a sort of not precisely superior self-confidence, of always refusing, as soon as he saw anyone wanted anything of him or needed or tried to claim him. A man with a very strong—or perhaps on the other hand not so strong—feeling of independence, he said. But sympathetic, entertaining, and besides so short of money that he himself had to help out.

What he had wanted of Schildknapp, who as a translator lived intimately with the English language and was altogether a warm admirer of everything English, emerged as we continued to talk. I learned that Adrian was looking for a theme for an opera and, years before he seriously approached the task, had had
Love’s Labour’s Lost
in mind. What he wanted of Schildknapp, who was musically equipped as well, was the preparation of the libretto. But the other, partly on account of his own work, and partly, I surmise, because Adrian would hardly have been able to pay him in advance, would not hear to it. Well, later I myself did my friend this service. I like to think back to our first groping talk about it, on this very evening. And I found my idea confirmed: the tendency to marriage with the word, to vocal articulation, more and more possessed him. He was practising almost exclusively the composition of lieder, short and long songs, even epic fragments, taking his material from a Mediterranean anthology, which in a fairly happy German version included Provencal and Catalan lyrics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Italian poetry, the loftiest visions of the
Divina Commedia
, and some Spanish and Portuguese things. It was, at that musical time of day and at the young adept’s age, almost inevitable that here and there the influence of Gustav Mahler should be perceptible. But then would come a tone, a mood, a glimpse, a something lone-wandering and unique: it stood strange and firm on its own feet; and in such things we recognize today the master of the grotesque
Vision of the Apocalypse.

This was clearest in the songs of the series taken from the
Purgatorio and the Paradiso
, chosen with a shrewd sense of their affinity with music. Thus in the piece which especially took me, and Kretschmar too had called very good, where the poet in the light of the planet Venus sees the smaller lights—they are the spirits of the blessed—some more quickly, the others more slowly, “according to the kind of their regard of God” drawing their circles, and compares this to the sparks that one distinguishes in the flame, the voices that one distinguishes in the song “when the one twines round the other.” I was surprised and enchanted at the reproduction of the sparks in the fire, of the entwining voices. And still I did not know whether I should give the preference to these fantasies on the light in light or to the introspective, more—thought-than-seen pieces—those where all is rejected questioning, wrestling with the unfathomable, where “doubt springs at the foot of truth” and even the cherub who looks into God’s depths measures not the gulf of the everlasting resolve. Adrian had here chosen the frightfully stern sequence of verses which speak of the condemnation of innocence and ignorance, and incomprehensible justice is questioned which delivers over to hell the good and pure but not baptized, not reached by faith. He had persuaded himself to put the thundering response in tones which announce the powerlessness of the creaturely good before Good in itself: the latter, being itself the source of justice, cannot give way before anything that our human understanding is tempted to call unjust. This rejection of the human in favour of an unattainable absolute foreordination angered me. And altogether, though I acknowledge Dante’s greatness as a poet, I always feel put off by his tendency to cruelty and scenes of martyrdom. I recall that I scolded Adrian for choosing this almost intolerable passage as his theme. It was then that I met a look from his eye which I had not seen before; it had made me question whether I was quite right in asserting that I found him unchanged after our year’s separation. This look was something new, and it remained peculiar to him, even though one encountered it only from time to time and indeed without especial occasion. Mute, veiled, musing, aloof to the point of offensiveness, full of a chilling melancholy, it ended in a smile with closed lips, not unfriendly, yet mocking, and with that gesture of turning away, so habitual, so long familiar to me.