Doctor Faustus (50 page)

We did not know. Slowly the truth tortured its way into us; while the war, a rotting, decaying, misery-creating war, though from time to time flaring up in flattering, deceiving successes, this war, of which I too had said it must not last long, lasted four years. Shall I here and now go into details of that long-drawn-out giving way and giving up, the wearing out of our powers and our equipment, the shabbiness and shortages of life, the undernourishment, the loss of morale from the deprivations, the lapses into dishonesty and the gross luxury of the profiteer? I might well be censured for recklessly overstepping the limits of my purpose, which is personal and biographical. I lived through it all from the beginning to the bitter end in the hinterland, as a man on furlough and at length mustered out, given back to his teaching profession at Freising. For before Arras, during the second period of struggle for that fortified place, which lasted from the beginning of May until far on in July of 1915, the delousing measures were obviously inadequate; an infection took me for weeks to the isolation barracks, then for another month to a convalescent home for the sick and wounded in Taunus. At last I no longer resisted the idea that I had fufilled my duty to my fatherland and would do better to serve in my old place the cause of education.

That I did, and might once more be husband and father in the frugal home, whose walls and their too familiar contents, spared perhaps for destruction by future bombing, today still form the frame of my retired and impoverished life. It should be said once more, certainly not in any boastful sense, but as a mere statement, that I led my own life, without precisely neglecting it, only as it were as an aside, with half my attention, with my left hand; that my real concern and anxiety were centered upon the existence or my childhood friend, to be back in whose nearness made me so rejoice—if the word I use can describe the slight chill, the shiver of dread, the painful lack of response which were my portion from him in the increasingly productive isolation of his life. “To have an eye on him,” to watch over his extraordinary and puzzling course, always seemed to mine its real and pressing task. It made up its true content, and thus it is I speak of the emptiness of my present days.

The place he had elected as his home—“home” in that sense I have spoken of, assimilative and not altogether acceptable—was a relatively fortunate choice. During the years of approaching defeat and ever more gnawing stringency, he was, thank God, on the Schweigestill farm as tolerably cared for as one could wish, without knowledge or appreciation of the state of things, almost unaffected by the slowly corroding changes under which our blockaded and invested country suffered, even while militarily still on the offensive. He took everything as a matter of course, without any words, as something that proceeded from him and lay in his nature, whose power of inertia and fixation on the
semper idem
persisted in the face of outward circumstance. His simple dietary needs the Schweigestill household could always satisfy. More than that, and soon after my return from the field, he came under the care of two females who had approached him quite independently of each other and appointed themselves his devotees. These were the damsels Meta Nackedey and Kunigunde Rosenstiel: one a piano-teacher, the other an active partner in a factory for the production of sausages-cases. It is certainly remarkable: a budding reputation such as had begun to attach itself to Leverkühn’s name is unknown to the general, having its seat in the initiate sphere, on the heights of connoisseurship; from those heights the invitation to Paris had come. But at the same time it may also be reflected in humbler, lowlier regions, in the needy souls of poor creatures who stand out from the masses through some sensibility of loneliness and suffering dressed up as “higher aspirations”; and these may find their happiness in a worship still fittingly paid to the rarest values. That it is women, and unmarried ones, need not surprise us; for human resignation is certainly the source of a prophetic intuition, which is not the less estimable because its origins are humble. There was not the least question that the immediately personal here played a considerable role; indeed, it predominated over the intellectual values; which even so, in both cases, could only be grasped and estimated in vague outline, as a matter of feeling and intuition. I myself, speaking as one who early submitted his own head and heart to the phenomenon of Adrian’s cool and bafflingly self-contained existence, have I the smallest right to mock at the fascination which his aloneness, the nonconformity of his life, exerted upon these women? The Nackedey was a scurrying, deprecating creature, some thirty years old, forever dissolving in blushes and modesty, who speaking or listening blinked spasmodically and appealingly behind the pince-nez she wore, nodding her head and wrinkling up her nose. She, one day, when Adrian was in the city, had found herself beside him on the front platform of a tram, and when she discovered it, had rushed in headless flight through the crowd to the rear platform. Then, having collected herself for a few minutes, she had gone back, to speak to him by name, to tell him, blushing and paling by turns, her own, to add something of her circumstances and to say that she held his music sacred—to all which he had listened and then thanked her. Upon this followed their acquaintance, which Meta had certainly not brought about in order to let it drop. She paid a visit of homage to Pfeiffering, with a bouquet; and cultivated it from then on, in free competition with the Rosenstiel, both sides spurred on by jealousy. The Rosenstiel had begun it differently.

She was a raw-boned Jewess, of about the same age as Nackedey, with thick, unmanageable woolly hair and brown eyes where timeless grief stood written for the daughter of Zion despoiled and her people as a forsaken hearth. A capable business woman in a not very refined line (for the manufacture of sausage-cases has something gross about it, certainly), she had the elegiac habit of beginning all her sentences with “ah.” Ah, yes! Ah, no! Ah, believe me! Ah, why not? Ah, I will go to Nuremburg tomorrow: she would say these things in a deep, harsh, desolate, complaining voice, and even when asked How are you? she would reply: “Ah, very well.” But it was not the same when she wrote, which she uncommonly liked to do. For not only was Kunigunde, as almost all Jews are, very musical, but also she had, though without any extensive reading, much purer and more fastidious relations with the German language than the national average, yes, than most of the learned. She had set in train the acquaintance with Adrian, which of her own motion she always called a friendship (indeed, in time it did become something like that), with an excellent letter, a long, well-turned protestation of devotion, in content not really extraordinary, but stylistically formed on the best models of an older, humanistic Germany. The recipient read it with a certain surprise, and on account of its literary quality it could not possibly be passed over in silence. She kept on writing to him at Pfeiffering, quite aside from her frequent visits: explicitly, not very objectively, in matter not further exciting, but in language very meticulous, clear and readable; not hand-written, moreover, but done on her business typewriter, with an ampersand for “and,” expressing a reverence which more nearly to define or justify she was either too shy or else incapable. It was just reverence, an instinctive reverence and devotion preserved loyally throughout many years; you simply had to respect such a capital person, quite aside from any other capacities she might have. I at least did so, and took pains to pay the same silent respect to the elusive Nackedey; whereas Adrian simply accepted the tributes and devotion of these followers of his with the utter heedlessness of his nature. And was my lot then so different from theirs? I can count it to my credit that I took pains to be benevolent towards them, while they, quite primitively, could not endure each other and when they met measured each other with narrowed eyes. In a certain sense I was of their guild and might have been justified in feeling irritation over this reduced and spinsterish reproduction of my own relation to Adrian.

These two, then, coming always with full hands during the hunger-years, when he was already well taken care of so far as the essentials were concerned, brought him everything imaginable that could be got hold of in underhand ways: sugar, tea, coffee, chocolate, cakes, preserves, tobacco for cigarettes. He could make presents to me, to Schildknapp, and to Rudi Schwerdtfeger, whose assumption of intimacy never wavered; and the names of those devoted women were often called blessed among us! As for the cigarettes, Adrian never gave up smoking except when forced to on the days when the migraine, with its violent attacks like seasickness fell on him, and he kept his bed in a darkened room, as happened two or three times in the month.

Otherwise he could not do without the stimulant and diversion; it had become a habit rather late, during his Leipzig time, and now, at least during his work, he must, so he said, have the interlude of rolling and inhaling else he could not hold out so long. At the time when I returned to civil life he was greatly given to the habit; and my impression was that he practised it not so much for the sake of the
Gesta
, though this was ostensibly the case, as it was because he was trying to put the
Gesta
behind him and be ready for new demands upon his genius. On his horizon, I am sure of it, there was already rising—probably since the outbreak of war, for a power of divination like his must have recognized therein a deep cleft and discontinuity, the opening of a new period of history, crowded with tumult and disruptions, agonies and wild vicissitudes—on the horizon of his creative life, I say, there was already rising the “
Apocalypsis cum figuris
” the work which was to give this life such a dizzying upward surge. Until then, so at least I see the process, he was employing the waiting-time with the brilliant marionette fantasies.

Adrian had learned through Schildknapp of the old book that passes for the source of most of the romantic myths of the Middle Ages. It is a translation from the Latin of the oldest Christian collection of fairy-tales and legends. I am quite willing to give Adrian’s favourite with the like-coloured eyes due credit for the suggestion. They had read it together in the evenings and it appealed to Adrian’s sense of the ridiculous, his craving to laugh, yes, to laugh until he cried. That was a craving which my less suggestible nature never knew how to feed, being hampered as well by an anxious feeling that all this dissolving in mirth had about it something unsuited to a nature I loved even while I feared it. Rüdiger, the like-eyed, shared my apprehensions not a whit. Indeed, I concealed them; they never hindered me from joining sincerely in such moods of abandon when they came about. But in the Silesian one marked a distinct satisfaction, as though he had performed a task, a mission, when he had managed to reduce Adrian to tears of laughter; and certainly he succeeded in a most fruitful and acceptable Avay with the old book of fables and jests.

I am of opinion that the
Gesta
—in their historical uninstructedness, pious Christian didacticism, and moral naivete, with their eccentric casuistry of parricide, adultery, and complicated incest; their undocumented Roman emperors, with daughters whom they fantastically guarded and then offered for sale under the most hair-splitting conditions—it is not to be denied, I say, that all these fables, presented in a solemn Latinizing and indescribably naive style of translation, concerning knights in pilgrimage to the Promised Land, wanton wives, artful procuresses, clerics given to the black arts, do have an extraordinarily diverting effect. They were in the highest degree calculated to stimulate Adrians penchant for parody, and the thought of dramatizing them musically in condensed form for the puppet theatre occupied him from the day he made their acquaintance. There is for instance the fundamentally unmoral fable, anticipating the
Decameron
, “of the godless guile of old women,” wherein an accomplice of guilty passion, under a mask of sanctity succeeds in persuading a noble and even exceptionally decent and honourable wife, while her confiding husband is gone on a journey, that she is sinfully minded to a youth who is consumed with desire for her. The witch makes her little bitch fast for two days, and then gives it bread spread with mustard to eat, which causes the little animal to shed copious tears. Then she takes it to the virtuous lady, who receives her respectfully, since everybody supposes she is a saint. But when the lady looks at the weeping little bitch and asks in surprise what causes its tears, the old woman behaves as though she would rather not answer. When pressed to speak, she confesses that this little dog is actually her own all-too-chaste daughter, who by reason of the unbending denial of her favour to a young man on fire for her had driven him to his death; and now, in punishment therefor, she has been turned into this shape and of course constantly weeps tears of despair over her doggish estate. Telling these deliberate lies, the procuress weeps too, but the lady is horrified at the thought of the similarity of her own case with that of the little dog and tells the old woman of the youth who suffers for her. Thereupon the woman puts it seriously before her what an irretrievable pity it would be if she too were to be turned into a little dog; and is then commissioned to fetch the groaning suitor that in God’s name he may cool his lust, so that the two at the instance of a godless trick celebrate the sweetest adultery.

I still envy Rüdiger for having been the first to read aloud this tale to our friend, in the Abbot’s room; although I confess that if it had been myself the effect might not have been the same. Moreover his contribution to the future work was limited to this first stimulation. When the point was reached of preparing the fables for the puppet stage, the casting of them in dialogue form, he refused his offices, for lack of time, or out of his well-known refractory sense of freedom. Adrian did not take it ill of him, but did what he could by himself for as long as I was away, sketching in the scenarios freely and more or less the dialogue, after which it was I who in my spare time quickly gave them their final form in mixed prose and rhymed lines.