By Stefan Zweig
When the well-known novelist R. returned to Vienna early in the morning from a three-day excursion into the mountains and bought a newspaper at the train station, he was reminded that today was his birthday as soon as he skipped the date. The forty-first, he reflected quickly, and the finding did not do him any good or pain. He flipped through the crackling pages of the newspaper and drove a rental car to his apartment. The servant reported two visits and a few telephone calls from the time he was away, and brought the accumulated mail on a tray. He looked casually at the enema, tore open a couple of envelopes that interested him through their senders; At first he pushed aside a letter that had strange characters and seemed too long. In the meantime the tea had been served, he leaned comfortably in the armchair, leafed through the newspaper and some printed matter again; then he lit a cigar and picked up the letter he had put back.
There were about two dozen hastily written pages in strange, restless women’s handwriting, a manuscript rather than a letter. Involuntarily he touched the envelope again to see if an accompanying letter had not been left in it. But the envelope was empty and, like the papers themselves, had no return address or signature. Strange, he thought, and picked up the letter again. “You who never knew me,” was the call above, as a heading. He paused in amazement: Was it for him, was it for a dreamed person? His curiosity was suddenly awake. And he began to read:
“My child died yesterday – for three days and three nights I struggled with death for this small, tender life, forty hours I sat by his bed while the flu shook his poor, hot body with fever. I put cool things around his glowing forehead, I held his restless little hands day and night. On the third night I collapsed. My eyes could no longer, they closed without my knowing it. I fell asleep on the hard armchair for three hours or four, but death has taken him. Now he lies there, the sweet, poor boy, in his narrow cot, just as he died; only his eyes have been closed, his bright, dark eyes, his hands have been folded over his white shirt, and four candles are burning high on the four ends of the bed. I don’t dare look, I don’t dare move, because when they flicker, the candles, shadows flicker over his face and closed mouth, and it is then as if his features are moving and I might think he is not dead, he would wake up again and say something childishly tender to me in his bright voice. But I know, he’s dead, I don’t want to look any more, in order not to hope again, not to be disappointed again. I know, I know, my child died yesterday – now I only have you in the world, only you, who you know nothing about me, who, however, play unsuspectingly or dabble with things and people. Only you, who you never knew me and whom I always loved.
I have taken the fifth candle and placed it here by the table on which I am writing to you. Because I cannot be alone with my dead child without crying out to my soul, and to whom should I speak at this terrible hour, if not to you, who were everything to me and who are everything! Maybe I can’t speak to you very clearly, maybe you don’t understand me – my head is very dull, it’s twitching and pounding on my temples, my limbs hurt so much. I think I have a fever, maybe already the flu, which is now creeping from door to door, and that would be good, because then I would go with my child and would not have to do anything about myself. Sometimes it gets very dark before my eyes, maybe I can’t even finish this letter – but I want to put all my strength together to speak to you once, just once, my beloved, you who never recognized me.
I want to speak to you alone, tell you everything for the first time; You should know my whole life, that was always yours and that you never knew about. But you should only know my secret when I’m dead, when you no longer have to answer me, when what is now shaking my limbs so cold and hot is really the end. If I have to go on living, I will tear up this letter and continue to be silent, as I was always silent. But if you hold it in your hands, you will know that a dead woman is telling you her life here, her life, which was yours from her first to her last waking hour. Do not be afraid of my words; a dead person doesn’t want anything anymore, she doesn’t want love or compassion or consolation. I only want one thing from you, that you believe everything that my pain, which is fleeing to you, tells you. Believe me everything, I ask you only one thing: one does not lie in the hour of death of a single child.
I want to tell you my whole life, this life that really only began on the day I knew you. Before that there was just something cloudy and confused, into which my memory never plunged again, some cellar of dusty, spider-woven, dull things and people that my heart no longer knows anything about. When you came I was thirteen years old and lived in the same house where you now live, in the same house where you hold this letter, my last breath of life, in your hands, I lived in the same corridor, directly opposite the door of your apartment. You certainly do not remember us, the poor widow of the board of directors (she always went in mourning) and the skinny teenage child – we were very quiet, as it were plunged into our petty bourgeois poverty – you may never have heard our name, because we had no sign on our door and no one came, no one asked about us. It was so long ago, fifteen, sixteen years, no, you certainly don’t know it anymore, my beloved, but I, oh, I remember passionately every detail, I still remember the day today, no, that Hour when I first heard from you, saw you for the first time, and how should I not, because then the world began for me. Tolerate, beloved, that I will tell you everything, everything from the beginning, I ask you not to tire of hearing from me for a quarter of an hour that I never tire of loving you all my life.
Before you moved into our house, ugly, angry, quarrelsome people lived behind your door. Poor as they were, they hated the neighborly poverty most of all, ours, because it wanted nothing in common with their decrepit, proletarian brutality. The man was a drunkard and hit his wife; We often woke up in the night from the din of falling chairs and clattered plates, once she ran up the stairs, beaten blood and with tattered hair, and behind her the drunk roared until people came out the doors and threatened him with the police. My mother had avoided all intercourse with them from the start and forbade me to speak to the children, who would take revenge on me at every opportunity. When they met me on the street, they shouted dirty words after me and once hit me with hard balls of snow that the blood ran from my forehead. The whole house hated these people with a common instinct, and when suddenly something happened – I think the man was locked up for a theft – and they had to move out with their stuff, we all breathed a sigh of relief. The rental slip hung on the front door for a few days, then it was taken down and the caretaker quickly spread the word that a writer, a lone, quiet gentleman, had taken the apartment. It was then that I heard your name for the first time.
After a few days, painters, house painters, room cleaners, upholsterers came to sweep the apartment clean after the greasy previous owners, there was hammering, knocking, cleaning and scratching, but mother was only satisfied with it, she said that now the messy inn was finally over there have an end. Even during the move, I did not see you yourself: Your servant supervised all this work, this small, serious, gray-haired servant who directed everything from above with a quiet, matter-of-fact manner. He impressed us all very much, firstly because a servant was something completely new in our suburban house, and then because he was so extremely polite to everyone without putting himself on the same level as the servants and engaging in friendly conversations. From the first day he greeted my mother as a lady with respect, and he was always trusting and serious, even with grimaces. Whenever he mentioned your name, it was always done with a certain awe, with a special respect – you could see right away that he was attached to you far beyond the usual service. And how I loved him for that, good old Johann, although I envied him that he was always around you and served you.
I’m telling you all of this, beloved, all of these little, almost ridiculous things, so that you can understand how you were able to gain such power over the shy, intimidated child that I was from the start. Before you even stepped into my life, there was already a nimbus around you, a sphere of wealth, curiosity and mystery – we all in the small suburban house (people who have a tight life are always curious about everything new in front of their doors ) were waiting impatiently for you to move in. And this curiosity about you, how it only increased in me when I came home from school one afternoon and the moving van was parked in front of the house. Most of the heavy items had already been carried up by the porters, now smaller items were carried up one at a time; I stopped at the door to be able to marvel at everything, because all your things were so strangely different as I had never seen them; There were Indian idols, Italian sculptures, very bright, large pictures, and then at the end there were books, as many and as beautiful as I never thought possible. At the door they were all piled up, there the servant took them and carefully beat the dust out of each one with a stick and a whisk. I crept curiously around the ever-growing pile; the servant did not turn me away, but neither did he encourage me; so I dared not touch any, although I would have liked to feel the soft leather of some. I only looked shyly sideways at the titles: there were French and English among them, and some in languages I didn’t understand. I think I would have looked at them all for hours: that’s when my mother called me inside.
Then I had to think of you all evening; before I knew you I only owned a dozen cheap books, bound in tattered cardboard, which I loved and read over and over again. And now I was beset by what the person should be like who owned and read all these many wonderful books, who knew all these languages, who was so rich and so learned at the same time. I had a kind of unearthly awe associated with the idea of these many books. I tried to imagine you in a picture: You were an old man with glasses and a long white beard, similar to our geography professor, only much more kind, more beautiful and milder – I don’t know why I was certain then that you must be beautiful Where I thought of you like an old man Back then that night and still without knowing you, I dreamed of you for the first time.
The next day you moved in, but despite all the spying, I couldn’t see you – that only increased my curiosity. Finally, on the third day, I saw you, and how shocking was the surprise for me that you were so different, so completely unrelated to the childlike image of God the Father. I had dreamed of a benevolent, bespectacled old man, and there you came – you, just as you are today, you immutable, on whom the years slip casually! You wore a light brown, delightful sportswear and ran up the stairs in your incomparably light, boyish manner, always taking two steps at a time. When you carried the hat in your hand, I saw your bright, lively face with your young hair with an astonishment that could not be described: really, I was astonished at how young, how pretty, how springy, slender and elegant you were. And isn’t it strange: in that first second I felt very clearly what I and everyone else feel in you as the only one with a kind of surprise over and over again: that you are some twofold person, a hot, easy-going one, completely into the game and A boy devoted to adventure, and at the same time a relentlessly serious, conscientious, infinitely well-read and educated man in your art. I unconsciously felt what everyone then felt in you, that you lead a double life, a life with a light surface openly facing the world, and a very dark one that you only know alone – this deepest duality, the secret of your existence, it I felt, the thirteen-year-old, magically attracted with my first look.
Do you understand now, beloved, what a miracle, what an alluring mystery you must have been for me, the child! A person, of whom one was in awe, because he wrote books, because he was famous in that other big world, suddenly to be discovered as a young, elegant, boyishly cheerful, twenty-five-year-old man! Do I still have to tell you that from that day on in our house, in all of my poor children’s world, nothing interested me but you, that with all the stubbornness, all the piercing persistence of a thirteen-year-old I was only going around your life, your existence. I observed you, I observed your habits, observed the people who came to you, and all this only increased, instead of diminishing it, my curiosity about yourself, because the whole diversity of your being was expressed in the diversity of these visits. There came young people, comrades of yours, with whom you laughed and were high-spirited, torn students, and then again ladies who drove up in cars, once the director of the opera, the great conductor whom I only saw from afar at the desk, then there were little girls who went to business school and scurried through the door, embarrassed, many, very many women. I didn’t think anything special about it, not even when one morning when I was going to school I saw a lady walking away from you completely veiled – after all, I was only thirteen years old, and the passionate curiosity with which I peered around and watched you did not yet know in the child that it was already love.
But I still remember exactly, my beloved, the day and the hour when I was completely and forever lost to you. I had taken a walk with a school friend, we were standing in front of the gate, chatting. Then a car drove up, stopped, and with your impatient, elastic manner, which still pulls me away from you today, you jumped off the step and wanted to go into the door. Involuntarily it forced me to open the door for you, and so I stepped in your way that we almost ran into each other. You looked at me with that warm, soft, enveloping look that was like tenderness, you smiled at me – yes, I can’t say it other than: affectionately and said in a very soft and almost confidential voice: “Thank you very much, Young lady.”
That was all, beloved; but from that second, since I felt that soft, tender look, I fell for you. I found out later, I soon found out, that you give this all-encompassing look that pulls you, this enveloping and at the same time undressing look, that look of the born seducer, every woman who touches you, every shop girl who sells you, everyone Chambermaid who opens the door for you, that you are not even conscious of this look as will and inclination, but that your tenderness towards women quite unconsciously makes your look soft and warm when he turns to them. But I, the thirteen-year-old child, had no idea: I was as if immersed in fire. I believed that the tenderness was only for me, only for me, and in that one second the woman in me, the adolescent, was awakened and this woman was forever addicted to you.
“Who was that?” Asked my friend. I couldn’t answer her right away. It was impossible for me to say your name: in this one, this single second it was sacred to me, it had become my secret. “Oh, some gentleman who lives here in the house,” I stammered awkwardly. “But why did you blush the way he looked at you,” scoffed the friend with all the malice of a curious child. And just because I felt that she was mocking my secret, the blood ran even hotter to my cheeks. I got gross from embarrassment. “Stupid goose,” I said wildly: I would have loved to strangle her. But she only laughed louder and more mockingly until I felt tears welling up in my eyes with impotent anger. I left her and ran up.
From that second on I loved you. I know women have often said this word to you, the spoiled one. But believe me, no one has loved you so slavishly, so doggedly, so devotedly than this being that I was and that I have always remained for you, because nothing on earth is like the unnoticed love of a child from the dark, because it is so hopeless , so serving, so submissive, so lurking and passionate as never is the desiring and unconsciously demanding love of an adult woman. Only lonely children can hold their passion together completely: the other gossip their feelings in sociability, grind it down in confidentiality, they have heard and read a lot about love and know that it is a common fate. They play with it like a toy, they brag like boys with their first cigarette.
But I, after all, I had no one to confide in, was instructed and warned by no one, was inexperienced and clueless: I plunged into my fate as if into an abyss. Everything that grew and broke out in me only knew you, the dream of you as a confidante: my father had long since died, my mother was a stranger to me in her eternally unhappy depression and fearful retirement, the half-spoiled schoolgirls repelled me because they were so frivolous to play with what was my last passion – so I threw everything that otherwise splintered and distributed, I threw my whole compressed and impatiently swelling being towards you. You were me – how should I tell you? every single comparison is too small – you were everything, my whole life. Everything only existed insofar as it was related to you, everything in my existence only made sense if it was connected to you. You changed my whole life. So far, indifferent and mediocre at school, I suddenly became the first, I read a thousand books late into the night, because I knew that you loved books, and to my mother’s astonishment, I suddenly began to practice the piano with almost stubborn persistence Because I thought you loved music. I cleaned and sewed my clothes just to look pleasant and proper in front of you, and I hated the fact that I had an inserted square stain on the left side of my old school apron (it was a tailored house dress for my mother). I was afraid you might notice him and despise me; that’s why I always pressed my school bag on it when I ran up the stairs, trembling with fear that you would see him. But how foolish that was: you never, almost never looked at me again.
And yet: I actually did nothing all day but wait for you and watch you. At our door there was a small brass peephole, through whose circular cutout you could see your door. This peephole – no, don’t smile, beloved, even today, even today I am not ashamed of those hours! – was my eye out into the world, there, in the ice-cold anteroom, shy of my mother’s suspicions, I sat in those months and years, book in hand, lurking for whole afternoons, tense as a string and ringing when Your presence touched her. I was always around you, always in tension and movement; But you couldn’t feel it any more than the tension of the clock spring which you carry in your pocket and which patiently counts and measures your hours in the dark, accompanies your path with an inaudible heartbeat and on which your hasty glance falls only once in a million ticking seconds. I knew everything about you, I knew every one of your habits, every one of your ties, every one of your suits, I knew and soon distinguished your individual acquaintances and divided them into those I loved and those I hated: from my thirteenth to mine For sixteen years I lived in you every hour. Oh, what follies I have committed! I kissed the doorknob that your hand touched, I stole a cigar butt that you threw away before entering, and it was sacred to me because it touched your lips. Hundreds of times in the evenings I ran down into the street under some pretext to see in which of your rooms the light was burning and so to feel your presence, your invisible, knowing ones. And in the weeks when you were away – my heart always stopped with fear when I saw good Johann carry your yellow travel bag down – my life was dead and meaningless during these weeks. I walked around sullen, bored, angry and just had to be careful that my mother didn’t notice my despair in my tearful eyes.
I know these are all grotesque exuberance, childish follies that I am telling you. I should be ashamed of them, but I am not ashamed, because my love for you has never been purer and more passionate than in these childish excesses. For hours, days, I could tell you how I lived with you back then, who you hardly knew me face to face, because when I met you on the stairs and there was no evasion, I ran with my head bowed for fear of your burning gaze past you like someone who falls into the water, only that the fire doesn’t scorch me. For hours, for days, I could tell you about those years that have long since vanished from you, roll up the whole calendar of your life; But I don’t want to bore you, don’t want to torment you. I only want to entrust you with the most beautiful experience of my childhood, and I ask you not to mock, because it is so small, because to me, the child, it was an infinity. It must have been a Sunday, you were away, and your servant dragged the heavy carpets that he had knocked through the open door of the apartment. He was having a hard time, the good guy, and in a fit of boldness I went to him and asked if I could help him. He was astonished, but let me have my own way, and so I saw – if I could only tell you, with what reverent, even pious admiration! – Your apartment from the inside, your world, the desk at which you used to sit and on which there were a few flowers in a blue crystal vase, your cupboards, your pictures, your books. It was only a fleeting, thieving look into your life, because Johann, the faithful, would certainly have given me careful consideration, but with this one look I soaked in the whole atmosphere and had nourishment for my endless dreams of you while awake and asleep.
This, this quick minute, it was the happiest of my childhood. I wanted to tell you about it so that you, who do not know me, would finally begin to sense how a life hung on you and passed away. I wanted to tell you about it and that other one too, the most terrible hour, which unfortunately was so neighborly. I had – I already told you – forgot everything for your sake, I hadn’t paid attention to my mother and didn’t care about anyone. I did not notice that an elderly gentleman, a merchant from Innsbruck, who was related to my mother by marriage, came more often and stayed longer, yes, it was just pleasant for me, because he sometimes took Mama to the theater and I could stay alone to think of you, to lurk for you, which was my highest, my only bliss. One day my mother called me into her room with a certain inconvenience; she should speak to me seriously. I turned pale and suddenly heard my heart pounding: should she have suspected something, guessed something? My first thought was you, the secret that connected me to the world. But the mother was embarrassed herself, she kissed me tenderly once or twice (which she never did before), pulled me onto the sofa and then hesitantly and ashamedly began to tell her that her widower relative had proposed marriage to her made, and she was determined to accept it, mainly for my sake. The blood rose hotter to my heart: only one thought answered from within, the thought of you. “But we’re staying here, won’t we?” I could just stammer. “No, we’re moving to Innsbruck, Ferdinand has a beautiful villa there.” I didn’t hear more. My eyes went black. I found out later that I had passed out; I heard my mother tell the stepfather in a low voice, who had been waiting behind the door, suddenly pulled back with my hands open and then fell like a lump of lead.
What then happened in the next few days, how I, a powerless child, resisted her overwhelming will, I cannot describe to you: my hand is still trembling while I am thinking about it when I write. I couldn’t reveal my real secret, so my resistance seemed to be nothing but stubbornness, malice and defiance. Nobody spoke to me anymore, everything happened from behind. The hours since I was at school were used to encourage the move: when I came home, another piece was always vacated or sold. I saw the apartment and my life fall into disrepair, and once, when I came to lunch, the movers were there and dragged everything away. In the empty rooms there were packed suitcases and two camp beds for my mother and me: we were supposed to sleep one more night, the last, and tomorrow travel to Innsbruck.
On this last day I felt with a sudden determination that I could not live without your presence. I knew of no other salvation than you. How I thought to myself and whether I was even able to think clearly in these hours of desperation, I’ll never be able to say, but suddenly – my mother was gone – I got up in my school dress as I was and went over to you , I did not go: it pushed me with stiff legs, with trembling joints, magnetically towards your door. I already told you, I didn’t really know what I wanted: to fall at your feet and ask you to keep me as a maid, as a slave, and I’m afraid you will smile at this innocent fanaticism of a fifteen-year-old, but, – beloved, You wouldn’t smile any more, if you knew how I stood outside in the ice-cold corridor, rigid with fear and yet pushed forward by an incomprehensible power, and how I tore my arm, the trembling one, from my body, so that it rose and – it was a struggle through the eternity of horrific seconds – pressed the finger on the button on the doorknob. Even today it rings in my ear, that shrill ringing tone, and then the silence afterwards, where my heart stopped, where all my blood stopped and just listened to see if you were coming.
But you didn’t come. Nobody came. You were evidently gone that afternoon and Johann on errand; So I groped back to our destroyed, cleared apartment, the dead tone of the bell in my booming ear, and threw myself exhausted on a plaid, tired from the four steps, as if I had walked for hours through deep snow. But beneath this exhaustion glowed the determination to see you, to speak to you, before they goal me away. It was, I swear to you, no sensual thought involved, I was still ignorant, precisely because I thought of nothing but you: I just wanted to see you, see you again, cling to you. Then, beloved, I waited for you all night, all long, terrible night. No sooner had my mother lay down in her bed and fell asleep than I crept out into the anteroom to hear when you would be home. I waited all night and it was an icy January night. I was tired, my limbs ached, and there was no longer an armchair to sit down: so I lay flat on the cold floor over which the train from the door passed. Only in my thin dress did I lie on the aching cold floor because I did not take a blanket; I didn’t want it to be warm, for fear of falling asleep and not hearing your step. It hurt, my feet cramped together, my arms trembled: I had to get up again and again, it was so cold in the terrible darkness. But I waited, waited, waited for you like my fate.
Finally – it must have been two or three in the morning – I heard the front gate unlock and then footsteps up the stairs. The cold had jumped off me, it flew over me hot, I opened the door quietly to rush towards you, to fall at your feet … Oh, I don’t know what foolish child I would have done back then. The steps came closer, candlelight flickered up. I held the handle, trembling. What it you who came?
Yes, it was you, beloved – but you were not alone. I heard a soft, ticklish laugh, some kind of striped silk dress and softly your voice – you came home with a woman …
I don’t know how I survived that night. The next morning, at eight o’clock, they dragged me to Innsbruck; I no longer had the strength to defend myself.
*
My child died last night – now I’ll be alone again if I really have to go on living. Tomorrow they will come, strange, black, hulking men, and bring a coffin and put it in it, my poor, my only child. Maybe friends will come and bring wreaths, but what are flowers on a coffin? They will comfort me and tell me some words, words, words; but what can you help me? I know I’ll have to be alone again then. And there is nothing more terrible than being alone among people. That was when I found out, in those infinite two years in Innsbruck, those years from my sixteenth to my eighteenth, where I lived like a prisoner, an outcast between my family. The stepfather, a very calm, taciturn man, was good to me, my mother seemed ready to all my wishes, as if to atone for an unconscious injustice, young people took care of me, but I pushed them all back in a passionate defiance. I didn’t want to live happily, not contentedly apart from you, I dug myself into a dark world of self-torment and loneliness. I did not put on the new, brightly colored clothes they bought me, I refused to go to concerts, to the theater, or to go on excursions in good company. Hardly that I ever stepped into the alley: would you believe it, beloved, that I don’t know ten streets from this little town in which I lived for two years? I mourned and I wanted to mourn, I got intoxicated by every privation that I imposed on myself in addition to the sight of you. And then: I didn’t want to be distracted by my passion, just to live in you. I sat at home alone for hours, days, and did nothing but think of you, over and over again, over and over again the hundred little memories of you, every encounter, every wait, to renew myself, to play these little episodes to myself like in the theater . And because I repeated each of the seconds from my past countless times, my entire childhood has remained so fiery in my memory that I feel every minute of those past years so hot and jumping as if it had passed through my blood yesterday.
At that time I only lived in you. I bought all of your books; if your name was in the papers, it was a festive day. Do you want to believe that I know every line from your books by heart, I’ve read them so often? If somebody woke me up from sleep at night and told me a loose line from them, I could continue to speak it today, even today after thirteen years, as in a dream: every word you said was gospel and prayer to me. The whole world, it only existed in relation to you: I read the concerts and premieres in the Viennese newspapers only with the thought of which of them would interest you, and when evening came I accompanied you from afar: now he steps into the hall, now he sits down. I dreamed it a thousand times because I saw you once in a concert.
But why tell all this, this frenzied, self-angry, this tragic, hopeless fanaticism of an abandoned child, why tell it to someone who never suspected it, who never knew it? But was I really still a child then? I was seventeen, turned eighteen – the young people began to look around at me on the street, but they only embittered me. Because love or even just playing with love in the thought of someone other than you, that was so inexplicable to me, so immensely alien, even the temptation would have seemed a crime to me. My passion for you remained the same, only that it became different with my body, with my more alert senses, more ardent, more physical, more womanly. And what the child in his dull, untrained will, the child who rang the bell on your door, could not have suspected, that was now my only thought: to give me to you, to give me to you.
The people around me thought I was shy, called me shy (I had my secret dogged behind my teeth). But an iron will grew in me. All my thoughts and aspirations were tense in one direction: back to Vienna, back to you. And I forced my will, so nonsensical, however incomprehensible it might seem to others. My stepfather was wealthy, he considered me his own child. But I insisted with bitter stubbornness that I wanted to earn my own living and finally managed to get to a relative in Vienna as an employee of a large clothing store.
Do I have to tell you where my first way went when I was on a foggy autumn evening – finally! at last! – arrived in Vienna? I left the suitcases on the train, threw myself on a tram – how slow it seemed to me, every stop angry with me – and ran in front of the house. Your windows were lit, my whole heart sounded. Only now did the city live, which had roared around me so strange, so senselessly, only now did I live again, because I sensed you close, you, my eternal dream. Little did I suspect that in reality I was just as far from your consciousness behind valleys, mountains and rivers as now, when only the thin, shining pane of glass of your window was between you and my radiant gaze. I only looked up and up: there was light, there was the house, there you were, there was my world. I had dreamed of this hour for two years, now it was given to me. I stood in front of your windows that long, soft, overcast evening until the light went out. Then I first looked for my home.
Every evening I stood in front of your house like this. Until six o’clock I was on duty in the shop, hard, exhausting duty, but I was dear to me because this restlessness made my own less painful. And straight ahead, as soon as the iron scroll bars thundered down behind me, I ran to my beloved destination. To see you only once, only to meet you once, that was my only will, only to be able to grasp your face once more from a distance. After about a week it finally happened that I ran into you, at a moment when I didn’t suspect it: while I was looking up at your window, you came across the street. And suddenly I was the child again, the thirteen year old, I felt the blood rush to my cheeks; involuntarily, against my innermost urge, which longed to feel your eyes, I lowered my head and ran past you as if rushed. Afterwards I was ashamed of this schoolgirl-like shy escape, because now my will was clear to me: I wanted to meet you, I was looking for you, I wanted to be recognized by you after all the longingly darkened years, wanted to be noticed by you, wanted to be loved by you be.
But you didn’t notice me for a long time, although I stood in your alley every evening, even when there was a snowstorm and the sharp, cutting Viennese wind. Often I waited for hours in vain, often at last you left home accompanied by acquaintances, I also saw you twice with women, and now I felt my adulthood, felt the new, different feeling about you in the sudden twitch of the heart that gave me Torn across my soul when I saw a strange woman so confidently walking arm in arm with you. I was not surprised, I already knew your eternal visitors from my childhood days, but now it suddenly somehow hurt physically, something was tense in me, at the same time hostile and demanding against this obvious, this carnal familiarity with someone else. For one day I stayed away from your house, childishly proud as I was and perhaps have stayed now: but how dreadful was this empty evening of defiance and rebellion. The next evening I stood waiting again humbly in front of your house, waiting as I stood before your closed life for all my fate.
And finally, one evening you noticed me. I had already seen you coming from afar and tightened my will not to evade you. As luck would have it, the road was narrowed by a car to be unloaded and you had to pass me completely. Your absent-minded gaze passed me involuntarily, and immediately, as soon as it met mine, how terrified the memory in me was! – to become that your woman’s gaze, that tender, enveloping and at the same time revealing, that encompassing and already grasping gaze that awakens me, the child, for the first time to be a woman, a lover. For a second or two this look held mine, who could not and would not tear himself away – then you were past me. My heart was beating: involuntarily I had to slow down my pace, and when I turned around out of an insurmountable curiosity, I saw that you had stopped and looked after me. And from the way you watched me with curiosity, I knew straight away: You didn’t recognize me.
You did not recognize me, not then, never, never did you recognize me. How am I supposed to describe to you, beloved, the disappointment of that second – at that time it was the first time that I suffered this fate of not being recognized by you, that I lived through a life and with whom I die; unrecognized, still unrecognized by you. How should I describe it to you, this disappointment! Because look, in these two years in Innsbruck, where I thought of you every hour and did nothing but think up our first meeting in Vienna, I had dreamed out the wildest possibilities next to the most blissful, depending on the state of my mood. Everything was, if I may say so, dreamed through; I had imagined in dark moments that you would push me back, you would despise me because I was too low, too ugly, too pushy. All forms of your disapproval, your coldness, your indifference, I had gone through them all in passionate visions – but this, this one thing I had not dared to consider in any dark emotion, not in the utmost consciousness of my inferiority, this most terrible: that You hadn’t noticed anything of my existence at all. Today I understand it – oh, you taught me to understand it! – that the face of a girl or a woman must be something immensely changeable for a man, because it is mostly just a mirror, now a passion, now a child, now a tiredness, and melts away as easily as a portrait in a mirror, that is, a Man can more easily lose the face of a woman because age walks through it with shadow and light, because clothes frame it differently from one time to the next. The resigned, they are only the true knowing. But I, the girl from back then, could not yet grasp your forgetfulness, because somehow from my excessive, incessant preoccupation with you the madness had run into me that you too would have to remember me often and wait for me; how could I have breathed with the certainty that I am nothing to you, a memory of me never touches you softly! And this awakening in front of your gaze, which showed me that nothing in you knew me anymore, no spider-thread memory of your life suffices to mine, that was a first fall into reality, a first inkling of my fate.
You didn’t recognize me then. And two days later, when you met me again with a certain familiarity, you did not recognize me as the one who loved you and who you awakened, but only as the pretty eighteen-year-old girl who you met two days ago Faced. You looked at me pleasantly surprised, a slight smile played around your mouth. Again you walked past me and again immediately slowing down your step: I was trembling, I shouted, I prayed that you would speak to me. I felt that for the first time I was alive for you: I also slowed down my pace, I did not avoid you. And suddenly I felt you behind me, without turning around, I knew that for the first time I would hear your beloved voice addressed to me. The expectation in me was like paralysis, I was already afraid of having to stop, so my heart pounded – then you stepped to my side. You spoke to me with your easy, cheerful manner, as if we had been friends for a long time – oh, you didn’t suspect me, you never suspected anything about my life! – You spoke to me in such a magically uninhibited way that I was even able to answer you. We walked down the whole alley together. Then you asked me if we wanted to dine together. I said yes. What would I have dared to deny you?
We dined together in a small restaurant – do you remember where it was? Oh no, you certainly no longer distinguish it from other such evenings, because who was I to you? One among hundreds, an adventure in an everlasting chain. What should remind you of me, too: I said little because it was so infinitely delightful to have you close, to hear you speak to me. I did not want to waste a moment of it with a question or a foolish word. From this hour I will never forget how full you filled my passionate awe, how tender, how light, how tactful you were, without any intrusiveness, without those hasty caressant tenderness, and from the first moment of such sure friendly familiarity that you would have won me too, had I not already been yours with all of my will and being. Oh, you don’t know how tremendous you fulfilled by not disappointing me for five years of childish expectation!
It was getting late and we were leaving. At the door of the restaurant you asked me if I was in a hurry or if I still had time. How could I have kept silent that I was ready for you! I said I still had time. Then you asked, quickly skipping a slight hesitation, whether I would not like to come to you a little longer to chat. “Gladly,” I said out of the naturalness of my feelings and immediately noticed that you were somehow embarrassed or happy by the speed of my acceptance, but at least visibly surprised. Today I understand your astonishment; I know that it is common among women, even if the desire for devotion is burning in one, to deny this willingness, to pretend a shock or an indignation that needs to be appeased through urgent pleading, lies, oaths and promises. I know that perhaps only the professionals of love, the prostitutes, answer such an invitation with such full and joyful approval, or very naive, very teenage children. But in me it was – and how could you have suspected it – only the will that had become word, the concentrated longing that broke out from a thousand individual days. In any case, you were stunned, I began to interest you. I felt that while we were walking you were looking at me from the side during the conversation, somehow astonished. Your feeling, your feeling so magically secure in everything human, immediately smelled something unusual here, a secret in this pretty, sympathetic girl. The curious in you was awake, and I noticed from the circling, sensitive nature of the questions how you wanted to grope for the secret. But I avoided you: I’d rather appear foolish than tell you my secret.
We went up to you. Forgive me, beloved, if I tell you that you cannot understand what this corridor, this staircase was for me, what tumult, what confusion, what a maddening, tormenting, almost fatal happiness. Now I can hardly think of it without tears, and I have none. But just feel that every object there was as it were penetrated by my passion, each a symbol of my childhood, of my longing: the gate in front of which I waited thousands of times for you, the staircase from which I always listen to your step and wherever I saw you for the first time, the peephole from which I peeked my soul, the doorknob in front of your door, on which I kneeled once, the cracking of the key, at which I always jumped up from my ambush. All of my childhood, all of my passion, nested in this few meters of space, here was my whole life, and now it fell on me like a storm, because everything, everything was fulfilled and I went with you, I with you , in your, in our house. Remember – it sounds banal, but I don’t know how to put it differently – that up to your door everything had been reality, the dull daily world for a lifetime, and that is where the child’s magic realm began, Aladdin’s realm, remember that I have a thousand times Staring with burning eyes at this door, which I now stumbled through, and you will suspect – but only suspect, never quite know, my beloved! – what this tumbling minute carried away from my life.
I stayed with you all night back then. Little did you suspect that before that no man had ever touched me, nor had anyone felt or seen my body. But how could you have suspected it, beloved, because I offered you no resistance, I suppressed every hesitation of shame, just so that you could not guess the secret of my love for you, which would certainly have frightened you – because you only love the easy, the end of the game, the weightless, you are afraid to intervene in a fate. You want to waste yourself, you, on everyone, on the world, and you don’t want a sacrifice. If I tell you now, beloved, that I gave myself to you as a virgin, I beg you: do not misunderstand me! I am not accusing you, you have not lured me, you have not lied to me, you have not seduced – I, I myself pushed to you, threw myself to your chest, threw me into my fate. Never, never will I accuse you, no, just always thank you, because how rich, how sparkling of lust, how floating of bliss was for me this night. When I opened my eyes in the dark and felt you by my side, I was amazed that the stars weren’t above me, so much did I feel heaven – no, I have never regretted, my beloved, never for the sake of this hour. I still remember: when you were sleeping, when I heard your breath, felt your body and myself so close to you, I cried for happiness in the dark.
In the morning I pushed away early. I had to go to the shop and wanted to go before the servant came: he shouldn’t see me. When I stood in front of you fully dressed, you took me in your arms and looked at me for a long time; Was it a memory, dark and distant, that swayed inside you, or did I just seem beautiful, happy as I was? Then you kissed me on the mouth. I quietly broke up and wanted to go. You asked: “Don’t you want to take some flowers with you?” I said yes. You took four white roses from the blue crystal vase on the desk (oh, I knew them from that one thieving childhood look) and gave them to me. I kissed her for days.
We had previously arranged to meet another evening. I came and again it was wonderful. You gave me a third night as a present. Then you said you had to travel – oh, how I hated these trips from my childhood! – and promised to contact me immediately after your return. I gave you a Poste restante address – I didn’t want to tell you my name. I was keeping my secret. Again you gave me a couple of roses to say goodbye – goodbye.
Every day for two months I asked … but no, what was the point of describing this agony of expectation and despair to you. I do not accuse you, I love you for who you are, hot and forgetful, devoted and unfaithful, I love you this way, just as you have always been and as you are now. You were back a long time ago, I saw it in your lighted windows, and didn’t write to me. I have not a line from you in my last hours, not a line from you, to whom I gave my life. I’ve been waiting, I’ve been waiting like a desperate man. But you didn’t call me, you didn’t write a line to me … not a line …
*
My child died yesterday – it was your child too. It was your child too, beloved, the child of one of those three nights, I swear to you, and one does not lie in the shadow of death. It was our child, I swear it to you, because no man has touched me from those hours when I gave myself to you to those others when it was wrung out of my body. I was sacred to myself through your touch: how could I have shared with you, who was everything to me, and with others who only gently touched my life? It was our child, beloved, the child of my knowing love and your carefree, wasteful, almost unconscious tenderness, our child, our son, our only child. But you are now asking – perhaps frightened, perhaps just astonished – you are now asking, my beloved, why I have kept this child from you all these long years and only speak of him today, since it lies here sleeping in the dark, sleeping forever, already ready to leave and never to return, never again! But how could I have told you? You would never have believed to me, the stranger, the all too willing three nights, who opened up to you without resistance, yes, desiring, you would never have believed her, the nameless of a fleeting encounter, that she was loyal to you, to you, the unfaithful, – never recognized this child as yours without suspicion! Even if my word offered you a chance, you would never have been able to dismiss the secret suspicion, I tried to blame you, the wealthy, with the child of a strange hour. You would have suspected me, a shadow would have remained, a flying, shy shadow of mistrust between you and me. I did not want. And then, I know you; I know you as well as you hardly know yourself, I know that you, who love the carefree, the easy, the gambler in love, would have been embarrassed, suddenly father, suddenly being responsible for a fate. You would have felt somehow connected to me, you who can only breathe freely. You would have had me – yes, I know that you would have done it, against your own waking will – you would have hated me for this bondage. Perhaps only for hours, perhaps only fleeting minutes, I would have been a nuisance to you if I had been hated by you – but in my pride I wanted you to think of me without worry for a lifetime. I would rather take everything on myself than become a burden to you and be the only one among all your women, whom you always think of with love, with gratitude. But of course, you never thought of me, you forgot me.
I am not accusing you, my beloved, no, I am not accusing you. Forgive me if a drop of bitterness sometimes flows into my pen, forgive me – my child, our child is lying there dead under the flickering candles; I clenched my fists to God and called him a murderer, my senses are dull and confused. Forgive me the complaint, forgive me! I know that you are good and helpful in the deepest heart, you help everyone, also help the stranger who asks you. But your kindness is so strange, it is one that is open to everyone that he can take as much as he can in his hands, it is great, infinitely great, your kindness, but it is – forgive me – it is sluggish. She wants to be reminded, wants to be taken. You help when someone calls you, asks you, you help out of shame, out of weakness and not out of joy. Let me tell you frankly, you do not prefer people in need and agony to your brother in happiness. And people who are like you, even the kindest of them, are difficult to ask. Once, when I was still a child, I saw through the peephole at the door how you were giving something to a beggar who had rang your doorbell. You gave him quickly and even a lot before he asked, but you handed it to him with a certain fear and haste, he just wanted to leave again soon, it was as if you were afraid to look him in the eye. I have never forgotten this restless, shy way of helping, fleeing from gratitude. And that’s why I never turned to you. Certainly, I know you would have stood by me then even without the certainty that it was your child, you would have comforted me, given me money, plenty of money, but always with the secret impatience to push the uncomfortable away from you; yes, I think you would even have persuaded me to dismiss the child prematurely. And this is what I feared above all – because what would I not have done if you wanted it, how could I have been able to refuse you something! But this child was everything to me, it was from you, again you, but now no longer you, the happy, the carefree, whom I could not hold, but you forever – so I thought – given to me, imprisoned in my body, connected in my life. Now I had finally caught you, I could feel you, your life growing in my veins, nourishing you, watering you, caressing you, kissing you when my soul burned for it. You see, beloved, that’s why I was so happy when I knew that I had a child of yours, that’s why I kept it from you: for now you could no longer escape from me.
Of course, beloved, they were not only as blissful months as I felt them beforehand in my thoughts, they were also months full of horror and torment, full of disgust at the humility of men. It wasn’t easy for me. I have not been able to go to the store for the past few months so that the relatives would not notice it and they would not report home. I didn’t want to ask for money from my mother – so by selling the little jewelry I had, I made the time to give birth. A week earlier, the last few crowns were stolen from me by a laundress from a closet, so I had to go to the maternity hospital. There, where only the very poor, the outcast and the forgotten drag themselves in their misery, there, in the middle of the abyss of misery, there the child, your child, was born. It was there to die: alien, alien, alien everything was alien to each other who lay there, lonely and full of hatred one for the other, only from misery, from the same torment in these dull ones, from chloroform and blood, from Screams and moans thrust into the crowded hall. What the poverty has to endure in terms of humiliation, mental and physical disgrace, I suffered there from the get-togethers with prostitutes and with sick people who made a common fate a meanness, from the cynicism of the young doctors who spoke with an ironic Smile of the defenseless, pulling on the sheet and touching it with false scientific knowledge, the greed of the guards – oh, there the shame of a person is crucified with looks and scourged with words. The board with your name on it, that’s only you there, because what lies in bed is just a twitching piece of meat, touched by the curious, an object of observation and study – ah, they don’t know, the women, theirs Man, give children to the tenderly waiting one in his house, what it means to be alone, defenseless, as it were at the experimental table, to give birth to a child! And when I read the word hell in a book today, I suddenly think against my conscious will of that stuffed, steaming room filled with sighs, laughter and bloody screams in which I suffered, of this slaughterhouse of shame.
Forgive me, forgive me for speaking of it. But I’ll only talk about it this once, never again, never again. I kept silent about it for eleven years, and soon I will be mute for all eternity: once I had to cry out, once how dearly I bought it, this child who was my bliss and who now lies there without breath. I had already forgotten these hours, long forgotten in the smile, in the child’s voice, in my bliss; but now that it’s dead, the agony comes back to life, and I had to shout it from my soul, this one time, this one time. But I don’t accuse you, only God, only God, who made it pointless, this torment. I don’t accuse you, I swear it to you, and I never rose up against you in anger. Even in the hour when my body was writhing in labor, when my body burned with shame under the groping gaze of the students, even in the second when the pain tore my soul apart, I did not accuse you before God; I have never regretted those nights, never scolded my love for you, I always loved you, always blessed the hour when you met me. And if I had to go through the hell of those hours again and knew what to expect beforehand, I would do it again, my beloved, again and a thousand times!
*
Our child died yesterday – you never knew it. Never, even in the fleeting encounter of chance, did this blooming, little being, your being, glimpse your gaze in passing. I hid myself from you for a long time as soon as I had this child; my longing for you had become less painful, yes I think I loved you less passionately, at least I haven’t suffered as much from my love since it was given to me. I didn’t want to split myself up between you and him; so I did not give myself to you, the lucky one, who passed me by, but to this child who needed me, who I had to nurture, who I could kiss and embrace. I seemed saved from my unrest after you, my fate, saved by this your other you, but which was truly mine – seldom only more, very seldom my feeling humbly pushed its way to your house. There was only one thing I did: for your birthday I always sent you a bunch of white roses, exactly the same as you gave them to me after our first night of love. In these ten or eleven years have you ever wondered who sent them? Have you perhaps remembered the one to whom you once gave such roses? I don’t know and won’t know your answer. Just hand them out of the dark, to let the memory of that hour blossom once a year – that was enough for me.
You never knew it, our poor child – today I accuse myself of hiding it from you because you would have loved it. You have never known him, the poor boy, never seen him smile when he quietly opened his eyelids and then with his dark, intelligent eyes – your eyes! – a bright, happy light threw over me, over the whole world. Oh, he was so cheerful, so dear: all the lightness of your being was repeated in him like a child, your quick, lively imagination was renewed in him: for hours he could play in love with things, just as you play with life, and then seriously again sitting in front of his books with raised eyebrows. He became more and more of you; that ambiguity of seriousness and play that is yours was already beginning to develop visibly in him, and the more similar he became to you, the more I loved him. He learned well, he chatted French like a little magpie, his exercise books were the cleanest in the class, and how handsome he was, how elegant in his black velvet dress or white sailor’s jacket.
He was always the most elegant of all, wherever he went; in Grado on the beach, when I went with him, the women stopped and stroked his long blond hair; on the Semmering, when he was in the sledge, people turned to him in admiration. He was so pretty, so tender, so caring: when he came to the Theresianum boarding school last year, he wore his uniform and the little sword like a page from the eighteenth century – now he has nothing on but his shirt, poor man, who lies there with pale lips and folded hands.
But you may ask me how I was able to raise the child as luxuriously as I was able to grant him this bright, this cheerful life of the upper world. Dearest, I speak to you from the dark; I am not ashamed, I will tell you, but do not be alarmed, beloved – I have sold myself. I didn’t become what you call a street girl, a whore, but I sold myself. I had rich friends, rich lovers: first I looked for them, then they looked for me, because I was – did you ever notice? – very nice. Everyone I gave myself to loved me, everyone thanked me, everyone was attached to me, everyone loved me – just not you, just not you, my beloved!
Do you despise me now because I told you that I have sold myself? No, I know you don’t despise me, I know you understand everything and you will also understand that I only did it for you, for your other self, for your child. Once in that room of the maternity hospital I touched on the horror of poverty, I knew that in this world the poor are always the stepped, the humiliated, the victim, and I didn’t want your child, your bright one, at any cost , beautiful child should grow up down there in the abyss, in the dull, in the meanness of the alley, in the polluted air of a room in the back of the house. His tender mouth should not know the language of the gutter, his white body should not know the dull, twisted laundry of poverty – your child should have everything, all the wealth, all the lightness of the earth, it should rise again to you, into your sphere of life.
Because of that, just because of that, my beloved, I sold myself. It was not a sacrifice for me, because what is commonly called honor and shame was insubstantial to me: You did not love me, you, the only one to whom my body belonged, so I felt it to be indifferent what else happened to my body. The caresses of men, even their innermost passion, they did not touch me deeply, although I had to respect some of them very much and my pity for their unrequited love in memory of my own fate often shook me. Everyone I knew was good to me, everyone spoiled me, everyone respected me. Above all there was one, an elderly, widowed imperial count, the same one who sore his feet at the doors to get the fatherless child, your child, accepted into the Theresianum – he loved me like a daughter. Three or four times he proposed to me to marry me – today I could be a countess, mistress of a magical castle in Tyrol, could be carefree, because the child would have had a tender father who adored it, and I would have made a quiet one , gracious man by my side – I didn’t do it, so much, no matter how often he urged, as much as I hurt him with my refusal. Perhaps it was folly, because otherwise I was living somewhere quiet and secure, and this beloved child with me, but – why shouldn’t I confess it to you – I didn’t want to commit myself, I wanted to be free to you every hour . In the deepest part of my being, in the unconscious of my being, the old childhood dream still lived, perhaps you would call me to you again, even if it was only for an hour. And for this one possible hour I pushed everything away just to be free for your first call. What has my whole life been since waking up from childhood but waiting, waiting for your will!
And this hour, it really has come. But you do not know it, you do not suspect it, my beloved! You did not recognize me in her either – never, never, never did you recognize me! I had met you many times before, in the theaters, in concerts, in the Prater, on the street – my heart twitched every time, but you looked past me: outwardly I was quite a different person, from whom shy child was made become a woman, beautiful as they said, wrapped in precious clothes, surrounded by admirers: how could you suspect that shy girl in me in the dim light of your bedroom! Sometimes one of the gentlemen I went with greeted you, you thanked you and looked up at me: but your look was polite strangeness, appreciative, but never discerning, strange, terribly strange. Once, I still remember, this failure to recognize, to which I was almost used, turned into burning agony: I was sitting in a box at the opera with a friend and you in the box next to it. The lights went out during the overture, I could no longer see your face, I only felt your breath as close to me as it did that night, and your hand, your delicate, delicate hand, was propped up on the velvet parapet of the section of our boxes. And the longing overcame me infinitely to bend down and humbly kiss this strange hand, this so beloved hand, whose tender embrace I once felt. The music surged stirringly around me, the desire became more and more passionate, I had to convuls myself, pull myself open forcibly, my lips were so violently drawn to your beloved hand. After the first act, I asked my friend to go away with me. I couldn’t bear to have you so strange and so close to me in the dark.
But the hour came, it came again, one last time in my buried life. It was almost exactly a year ago, the day after your birthday. Strange: I had thought of you all the hours, because I always celebrated your birthday like a party. I went out very early in the morning and bought the white roses that I had sent to you every year as a reminder of an hour you had forgotten. In the afternoon I went out with the boy, took him to Demel’s pastry shop and in the evening to the theater; I wanted him, too, to somehow perceive this day as a mystical holiday from his youth, without knowing its meaning. The next day I was with my boyfriend at the time, a young, wealthy manufacturer from Brno, with whom I had lived for two years, who adored me, pampered me and wanted to marry me just like the others and to whom I refused to do so for no apparent reason others, although he showered me and the child with presents and was himself lovable in his somewhat dull, servile goodness. We went to a concert together, met cheerful company there, had dinner in a Ringstrasse restaurant, and there, amidst the laughter and chatter, I made the suggestion to go to another dance hall, the Tabarin. This type of place with its systematic and alcoholic cheerfulness, like any other “drudgery”, was always disgusting to me, and I usually resisted such suggestions, but this time – it was like an unfathomable magical power within me that suddenly and unconsciously surrounded me with the suggestion into the joyful, approving excitement of the others – I suddenly had an inexplicable desire, as if something special was waiting for me there. Accustomed to please me, everyone got up quickly, we went over and drank champagne, and all of a sudden I felt a mad, almost painful, cheerfulness such as I had never known. I drank and drank, sang along with the cheesy songs and was almost forced to dance or cheer. But suddenly – I felt as if something cold or something scorching hot had suddenly settled on my heart – it tore me open: you were sitting at the next table with some friends and looked at me with an admiring and desiring look, with that look that I always have upset the whole body from within. For the first time in ten years you looked at me again with all the unconscious, passionate power of your being. I shiver. The raised glass almost fell out of my hands. Fortunately, the dinner companions did not notice my confusion: it was lost in the roar of laughter and music.
Your gaze became more and more burning and plunged me completely into fire. I didn’t know: did you finally, finally, recognize me, or did you desire me again, as someone else, as a stranger? The blood flew to my cheeks, absent-mindedly I replied to my table companions: You must have noticed how confused I was by your gaze. With a movement of your head, imperceptibly for the rest of you, you made a sign that I would like to come out into the anteroom for a moment. Then you ostentatiously paid, said goodbye to your comrades, and went out, not without having previously indicated that you would wait for me outside. I was trembling as if in a frost, as if in a fever, I could no longer give an answer, no longer control the blood that had been blown up. Coincidentally, at that very moment, a pair of negroes with creaking heels and high-pitched screams began a strange new dance: everyone was staring at them, and I took advantage of this second. I got up, told my friend that I would be back in a moment, and followed you.
Outside in the anteroom in front of the cloakroom you stood waiting for me: Your eyes were bright when I came. You rushed towards me, smiling; I saw immediately, you did not recognize me, did not recognize the child of yore and not the girl, once again you reached for me as a new person, a stranger. “Do you have an hour for me, too,” you asked confidentially – I felt the security of your kind, you took me for one of these women, for one of the evening’s buyers. “Yes,” I said, the same trembling and yet self-evident consenting yes that the girl said to you on the twilight street more than a decade ago. “And when could we see each other?” You asked. “Whenever you want,” I replied – I had no shame in front of you. You looked at me a little puzzled, with the same suspicious and curious astonishment as when you were also astonished by the speed of my agreement. “Could you now?” You asked, a little hesitantly. “Yes,” I said, “let’s go.”
I wanted to go to the cloakroom to get my coat.
Then it occurred to me that my friend had the cloakroom slip for the coats we gave us together. To go back and ask for it would not have been possible without a complicated explanation; on the other hand, I did not want to give up the hour with you that had longed for years. So I didn’t hesitate for a second: I just took the scarf over the evening dress and went out into the damp, foggy night without bothering about the coat, without bothering about the good, affectionate person I had lived on for years I was degraded to the most ridiculous fool in front of his friends, to one whose lover runs away after years at the first whistle of a strange man. Oh, I was fully aware of the baseness, the ingratitude, the shamefulness that I committed against an honest friend, I felt that I was acting ridiculously and that my madness mortally offended a kind person forever, felt that I was my life was torn in half – but what was friendship to me, what was my existence for the impatience to feel your lips once again, to hear your word spoken softly against me. That’s how I loved you, now I can tell you, since everything is over and gone. And I think if you called me from my deathbed, I would suddenly find the strength to get up and walk with you.
A car was standing in front of the entrance, we drove to you. I heard your voice again, I felt your affectionate closeness and was just as stunned, so childishly confused as then. How did I climb the stairs for the first time after more than ten years – no, no, I cannot describe to you, how I always felt everything twice in those seconds, past time and present, and in everything and everything always just you . Little was different in your room, a few more pictures and more books, here and there strange furniture, but everything greeted me familiarly. And at the desk stood the vase with the roses in it – with my roses, which I sent you the day before for your birthday as a reminder of one that you didn’t remember, that you didn’t recognize, even now that she was close to you was, hand in hand and lip to lip. But still: it did me good that you cherished the flowers: there was a breath of my being, a breath of my love around you.
You took me in your arms Again I stayed with you a whole wonderful night. But you did not recognize me in my naked body either. Blessedly I suffered your knowing tenderness and saw that your passion makes no difference between a beloved and a seller, that you give yourself completely to your desire with the careless, lavish fullness of your being. You were so tender and gentle to me, the one fetched from the nightclub, so elegant and so cordial – respectful and yet at the same time so passionate about enjoying women; Again I felt, tumbled from old happiness, this single duality of your being, the knowing, the spiritual passion in the sensual, which the child had already made subservient to you. I have never known in a man such tenderness to the moment, such an eruption and counter-illumination of the deepest being – to be sure to then extinguish into an infinite, almost inhuman forgetfulness. But I too forgot myself: who was I next to you in the dark? Was it me, the burning child of yore, was it me, the mother of your child, was it me, the stranger? Oh, it was so familiar, so experienced everything, and everything again so rustlingly new on this passionate night. And I prayed she wouldn’t want to end.
But the morning came, we got up late, you invited me to have breakfast with you. We drank the tea, which an invisible hand had discreetly placed in the dining room, and chatted. Again you spoke to me with all the open, heartfelt confidentiality of your being and again without any indiscreet questions, without any curiosity about the being that I was. You did not ask for my name, not for my apartment: I was again only the adventure, the nameless, the hot hour that dissolves in the smoke of oblivion without a trace. You said that you wanted to travel far away now, to North Africa for two or three months; I was trembling in the midst of my happiness, because it was already pounding in my ears: over, over and forgotten! I would have loved to fall to your knees and scream: “Take me with you so that you can finally recognize me, finally, finally after so many years!” But I was so shy, so cowardly, so slavish, so weak in front of you I could only say: “What a shame.” You looked at me with a smile: “Are you really sorry?”
Then it seized me like a sudden ferocity. I got up, looked at you, long and hard. Then I said: “The man I loved always left.” I looked at you, right in the star of your eye. “Now, now he will recognize me!” Trembled, pressed everything inside me. But you smiled at me and said comfortingly: “You come back.” “Yes,” I replied, “you come back, but then you have forgotten.”
It must have been something strange, something passionate in the way I told you. Because you got up and looked at me, amazed and very loving. You took me by the shoulders: “What is good will not be forgotten, I will not forget you,” you said, and your gaze fell right into me, as if he wanted to imprint this image on himself. And when I felt this gaze penetrate me, searching, feeling, sucking my whole being, I finally believed that the spell of blindness was finally broken. He will know me, he will know me! My whole soul trembled at the thought.
But you didn’t recognize me No, you did not recognize me, I was never stranger to you than at this second, because otherwise – otherwise you would never have been able to do what you did a few minutes later. You kissed me, kissed me passionately again. I had to straighten my hair, which had become tangled, and while I was standing in front of the mirror, I looked through the mirror – and I thought I had to sink down with shame and horror – then I saw, as you did, a few in a discreet way shoved larger banknotes into my muff. How have I been able not to cry out, not to slap you in the face in this second – me, who I loved you from childhood, the mother of your child, you paid me for this night! I was a prostitute from Tabarin to you, no more – you paid, you paid me! It was not enough for you to forget, I must have been humiliated.
I quickly felt for my things. I wanted to get away, quickly away. It hurt too much. I grabbed my hat, it was on the desk, next to the vase with the white roses, my roses. Then it seized me powerfully, irresistibly: I wanted to try again to remember you. “Wouldn’t you like to give me one of your white roses?” “Sure,” you said and took it immediately. “But maybe they were given to you by a woman, by a woman who loves you?” I said. “Maybe,” you said, “I don’t know. They are given to me and I don’t know by whom; that’s why I love her so much. ”I looked at you. “Maybe they are from someone you forgot!”
You looked astonished. I looked at you firmly. “Know me, finally know me!” Shouted my gaze. But your eye smiled kindly and ignorantly. You kissed me again But you didn’t recognize me
I went quickly to the door because I felt tears welling up in my eyes, and you shouldn’t see that. In the anteroom – I had rushed out so quickly – I almost ran into Johann, your servant. Shy and in a hurry he jumped aside, threw open the front door to let me out, and there – in this one, do you hear? In that one second, when I looked at him with watering eyes, looked at the aged man, suddenly a light flashed into his eyes. In this one second, do you hear? In that one second, the old man recognized me, who hadn’t seen me since I was a child. I could have kneeled down in front of him for this recognition and kissed his hands. So I just tore the banknotes with which you scourged me quickly out of the muff and slipped them over to him. He was trembling, looked up at me, startled – in that second he may have suspected more of me than you did in your entire life. Everyone, everyone spoiled me, everyone was kind to me – only you, only you, you forgot me, only you, only you never recognized me!
My child has died, our child – now I have no one in the world to love him more than you. But who are you to me, you, who you never, never recognize me, who passes me by like water that steps on me like a stone, that always goes and goes on and leaves me waiting forever? Once I thought I was holding you, you, the fugitive, in the child. But it was your child: overnight it was cruel for me to go on a journey, it forgot me and never returns. I am alone again, more alone than ever, I have nothing, nothing from you – no more child, not a word, not a line, no remembering, and if someone would say my name in front of you, you would hear past him as a stranger. Why shouldn’t I like to die because I am dead to you, why not go on because you have left me? No, beloved, I am not complaining against you, I do not want to throw my misery into your cheerful house. Do not be afraid that I will press you further – forgive me, I had to scream my soul out once in this hour, because the child lies there dead and abandoned. I only had to speak to you this once – then I go back to my darkness in silence, as I have always been silently next to you. But you will not hear this scream as long as I live – only when I am dead will you receive this legacy from me, from someone who loved you more than everyone and whom you never recognized, from someone who was always waiting for you and that you never called. Perhaps, perhaps you will then call me, and I will be unfaithful to you for the first time, I will no longer hear you from my death: I leave you no picture and no sign of how you left me nothing; you will never know me, never. It was my fate in life, even if it was in my death. I don’t want to call you to my last hour, I’m going away without you knowing my name and my face. I die easily because you don’t feel it from afar. If it hurt you that I was dying, I could not die.
I can’t write any more … my head is so numb … my limbs hurt, I have a fever … I think I’ll have to lie down in a minute. Perhaps it will soon be over, perhaps fate will be kind to me one day and I no longer have to watch them carry the child away … I can no longer write. Farewell, beloved, farewell, I thank you … It was good as it was, in spite of everything … I want to thank you until the last breath. I feel good: I have told you everything, you now know, no, you only suspect how much I loved you, and yet you have no burden from this love. You will not miss me – that comforts me. Nothing will be different in your beautiful, bright life … I do nothing to you with my death … that comforts me, you beloved.
But who … who will always send you the white roses for your birthday now? Oh, the vase will be empty, the little breath, the little breath of my life that blew around you once a year, it too will blow away! Beloved, listen, I ask you … it is my first and last request to you … do it for my sake, take on every birthday – it’s a day when you think of yourself – take roses and put them in the vase. Do it, beloved, do it like others have a mass read for a loved one once a year. But I don’t believe in God anymore and don’t want mass, I only believe in you, I only love you and just want to continue to live in you … oh, only one day a year, very, very quietly, like me next to you lived … I beg you, do it, beloved … it is my first request to you and the last … I thank you … I love you, I love you … goodbye …
*
He put the letter down from his trembling hands. Then he thought about it for a long time. There was some confused memory of a child next to us, of a girl, of a woman in a nightspot, but a memory, indistinct and confused, like a stone shimmers and trembling shapelessly at the bottom of flowing water. Shadows streamed in and out, but there was no picture. He felt memories of the feeling and yet did not remember. It was as if he had dreamed of all these figures, dreamed often and deeply, but only dreamed.
Then his gaze fell on the blue vase on the desk in front of him. It was empty, empty for the first time in years on his birthday. He gave a start: it was as if a door had suddenly popped open, invisible, and cold drafts were pouring into his resting room from another world. He felt a death and felt immortal love: something broke out inside his soul, and he thought of the invisible, disembodied and passionate as of a distant music.
