The Woman and the Landscape

By Stefan Zweig

It was that hot summer that caused catastrophic poor harvests in the whole country due to the rain and drought and which remained feared in the memory of the population for many years to come. Already in the months of June and July only a few fleeting showers had brushed the thirsty fields, but since the calendar turned over to August, not a drop has fallen at all, and even up here, in the high valley of Tyrol, where I, like many others, cool down the air glowed saffron-colored with fire and dust. Early in the morning the sun was staring yellow and dull like the eye of a feverish man from the empty sky at the extinct landscape, and with the rising hours a whitish, oppressive steam gradually gushed out of the brass cauldron at noon and flooded the valley. Somewhere in the distance, of course, the Dolomites rose mightily, and snow shone from them, pure and clear, but only the eye was reminded of this glimmer of coolness, and it hurt to look at them languidly and to think of the wind that was blowing them maybe at the same hour rushing around, while here in the valley basin a greedy warmth crowded in at night and day and sucked the moisture away from one with a thousand lips. Gradually, in this sinking world of withering plants, languishing leaves and dwindling streams, all living movement also died inside, the hours became idle and sluggish. I, like the others, spent these endless days almost exclusively in the room, half undressed, with darkened windows, in a willless waiting for change, for cooling, in a dull, powerless dream of rain and thunderstorms. And soon this wish too wilted, brooding, dull and willless like that of the panting grass and the sultry dream of the motionless, mist-covered forest.

But it was only getting hotter every day, and the rain still wouldn’t come. The sun burned down from dawn to dusk, and her yellow, torturous gaze was gradually taking on something of the dull persistence of a madman. It was as if all life wanted to end, everything stood still, the animals were no longer noisy, from the white fields came no other voice than the softly singing sound of the swaying heat, the whirring boiling of the boiling world. I had wanted to go out into the forest, where shades of blue trembled between the trees, to lie there, just to avoid that yellow, insistent gaze of the sun; but even these few steps became too much for me.

So I sat on a cane chair in front of the hotel entrance for an hour or two, pressed into the narrow shadow that the shielding edge of the roof drew into the gravel. Once I moved further when the thin square of shadow was shortening and the sun was already creeping up to my hands, then I stayed leaning again, dull brooding in the dull light, without a sense of time, without desire, without will. Time had melted away in this terrible sultriness, the hours boiled away, melted away in hot, senseless daydreaming. I felt nothing but the burning rush of air outside my pores and inside the hasty hammer blow of the feverish throbbing blood.

Suddenly I felt as if a breath was going through nature, softly, very softly, as if a hot, wistful sigh was rising from somewhere. I pulled myself up. Wasn’t that wind?

I had already forgotten what it was like, the withering lungs hadn’t drunk this coolness for too long, and I still couldn’t feel it pulling up to me, pressed into my corner of the shade of the roof; but the trees over there on the slope must have suspected a strange presence, for suddenly they began to sway very softly, as if they were leaning towards each other in a whisper. The shadows between them grew restless. They flitted back and forth like something alive and excited, and suddenly it was lifted, somewhere far away, a deep, vibrating sound. Really: wind came over the world, a whisper, a waving and weaving, a deep, organ roar and now a stronger, more powerful thrust. As if driven by a sudden fear, smoky clouds of dust suddenly ran across the street, all in the same direction, the birds that had camped somewhere in the dark suddenly hissed black through the air, the horses sniffed the foam from their nostrils, and far in the valley the cattle bleated. Something enormous had woken up and must be near, the earth already knew it, the forest and the animals, and a light pile of gray was now pushing across the sky as well.

I was trembling with excitement. My blood was irritated by the fine spikes of the heat, my nerves crackled and tensed, I had never suspected the lust of the wind as now, the blissful lust of the thunderstorm. And it came, it drew near, it swelled and announced itself. Slowly the wind pushed soft balls of clouds over, it gasped and snorted behind the mountains, as if someone was rolling an enormous load. Sometimes those snorting, panting puffs stopped as if tired.

Then the fir trees trembled slowly and quietly, as if to listen, and my heart trembled with them. Everywhere I looked there was the same expectation as in me, the earth had stretched its cracks: they were torn open like small, thirsty mouths, and so I felt it on my own body that pore after pore was opening and tensing, coolness closed seek and the cold, shuddering pleasure of the rain. Involuntarily my fingers cramped, as if they could grasp the clouds and drag them more quickly into the languishing world.

But already they came, pushed by an invisible hand, lazily darkened, round, bulging sacks, and one saw: they were heavy and black with rain, because they rumbled grumbling like solid, massive things when they bumped together, and sometimes a quieter one Lightning over its black surface like a crackling match.

Then they flared up blue and dangerous, and it pressed closer and closer, they grew blacker and blacker in their own fullness. Gradually, like the iron curtain of a theater, the leaden sky fell and fell. Now the whole room was covered in black, the warm, restrained air was compressed, and now there was a final pause in expectation, mute and horrific. Everything was strangled by the black weight that sank over the depths, the birds no longer chirped, the trees stood breathless, and even the small grasses no longer dared to tremble; a metal coffin, the sky encircled the hot world in which everything was frozen in anticipation after the first lightning. I stood breathless, my hands clasped, and tensed in a wonderful sweet fear that made me motionless. I heard people rushing around behind me, they came out of the forest, out the door of the hotel, they fled from all sides, the maids lowered the shutters and closed the windows with a crash. Everything was suddenly active and excited, stirred, prepared, crowded. Only I stood motionless, feverish, mute, for everything in me was compressed to the scream that I felt in my throat, the scream of pleasure at the first lightning bolt.

Suddenly I heard a sigh just behind me, breaking out strongly from a tormented chest and the wistful word merged with him pleadingly: “If only it wanted to rain!” This voice was so wild, so elementary, this thrust from one oppressed feeling, as if the thirsty earth had said it itself with its cracked lips, the tortured, strangled landscape under the lead pressure of the sky. I turned around. Behind me stood a girl who apparently said the words, because her lips, the pale and finely curved, were still panting, and her arm, which was holding on to the door, trembled slightly. She hadn’t spoken to me or to anyone. As if over an abyss, she bent into the landscape, and her gaze stared mirrorlessly out into the darkness that hung over the fir trees. It was black and empty, that look, turned rigidly as a baseless depth against the deep sky. His greed only reached upwards, reached deep into the clenched clouds, into the overhanging thunderstorm, and he didn’t touch me.

So I could look at the stranger undisturbed and saw how her breast rose, how something shook upwards with a choke, how now around the throat, which was tenderly detached from the open dress, there was a tremor, until finally the lips also trembled, thirsty opened up and said again: “If only it wanted to rain.” And again it was my sigh from the whole swamped world. There was something nightwalking and dreamlike in her statue-like form, in her relaxed gaze. And as she stood there, white in her light dress against the lead-colored sky, she seemed to me the thirst, the expectation of all languishing nature.

Something hissed softly on the grass next to me. Something pecked hard on the cornice. Something crunched softly in the hot gravel. Suddenly there was this soft, whirring sound everywhere. And suddenly I understood, I felt, that these were drops that fell heavily, the first evaporating drops, the blissful messengers of the great, rustling, cooling rain. Oh it started! It had started. An oblivion, a blissful drunkenness came over me. I was awake like never before. I jumped forward and caught a drop in my hand. He clapped my fingers heavy and cold. I tore my cap off to feel the wet lust on my hair and forehead more strongly, I was already trembling with impatience to let the rain rush around me, to feel it on me, on the warm, crackling skin, in the open pores, deep down into the excited blood.

They were still sparse, the splashing drops, but I already felt their sinking fullness ahead, I could already hear them streaming and rustling, the open locks, I could already feel the blissful collapse of the sky over the forest, over the sultriness of the burning world.

But strange: the drops didn’t fall any faster. You could count them. One, one, one, one, they fell down, it crackled, it hissed, it rushed softly to the right and left, but it did not want to merge to the great rustling music of the rain. Timidly it dripped down, and instead of getting faster, the beat became slower and slower and then suddenly stopped. It was as if the ticking of a minute hand in a clock suddenly stopped and time froze. My heart, which was already glowing with impatience, suddenly went cold. I waited, waited, but nothing happened. The sky looked down black and rigid with a gloomy forehead, it remained dead silent for minutes, but then it seemed as if a faint, sneering glow went over his face. From the west the height brightened, the wall of clouds gradually loosened, they rolled on with a soft rumble. Their black, unfathomable became shallower and shallower, and the listening landscape lay beneath the gleaming horizon in impotent, unsatisfied disappointment. As if from anger, a last, faint tremor ran through the trees, they bent and doubled over, but then the leafy hands, which were greedily stretched, fell back limply, as if dead over the defenseless world. Nothing had happened. The thunderstorm had passed.

My whole body is shaking. It was anger what I felt, a senseless indignation of powerlessness, disappointment, betrayal. I could have screamed or rushed, I had a desire to smash something, a desire for evil and dangerous things, a senseless need for revenge. I felt in me the torment of the whole betrayed nature, the thirst of the little grasses was in me, the heat of the streets, the smoke of the forest, the sharp embers of the limestone, the thirst of the whole deceived world. My nerves burned like wires: I felt them flicker from electrical tension far into the charged air, like many fine flames they glowed under my tense skin. Everything hurt me, all the noises had spikes, everything was as if it were flickering with little flames, and whatever eyes it caught, it burned itself. The deepest being in me was excited, I felt how many senses, which otherwise slept dumb and dead in my dull brain, opened up like many small nostrils, and with each one I felt embers.

I no longer knew what of it was my excitement and what that of the world; the thin membrane of feeling between her and me was torn, all the only excited community of disappointment, and as I stared feverishly down into the valley, which was gradually filling with lights, I felt that every single little light flickered into me, every star burned to my blood. It was the same immense, feverish excitement outside and inside, and in a painful magic I felt everything that swelled around me, as it were pressed into me and growing and glowing there. It seemed to me as if the mysterious, living core, which is indented in all diversity, burned from my innermost being, I felt everything, in a magical alertness of the senses, the anger of every single leaf, the dull gaze of the dog, the one with bowed tail now crept around the doors, I felt everything, and everything I felt hurt me. This fire began to become almost physical in me, and when I reached for the wood of the door with my fingers, it crackled softly under them like tinder, burnish and dry.

The gong made a noise at evening meal. The copper sound struck me deeply, painful it too. I turned around. Where were the people who used to hurry by in fear and excitement? Where was she, who stood here as a tormenting world and which I completely forgot in the confused minutes of disappointment?

Everything was gone. I stood alone in the silent nature. Once again, my gaze encompassed height and distance. The sky was completely empty now, but not pure. A veil lay over the stars, a tense greenish one, and the evil glow of a cat’s eye glittered from the rising moon. Everything up there was pale, scornful and dangerous, deep down below this uncertain sphere the night dawned dark, phosphorescent like a tropical sea and with the tortured voluptuous breath of a disappointed woman. Above stood a last light, sneering, and below, tired and burdensome, a sultry darkness, one hostile to the other, an uncanny, silent struggle between heaven and earth. I took a deep breath and just drank arousal. I reached into the grass. It was dry as wood and crackled blue in my fingers.

The gong called again. The dead sound was disgusting to me. I wasn’t hungry, or craving for people, but this lonely sultriness out here was too dreadful. The whole heavy sky weighed silently on my chest, and I felt that I could no longer bear its leaden pressure. I went into the dining room. The people were already sitting at their little tables. They spoke softly, but yes, it was too loud for me. Because everything that touched my excited nerves was tortured for me: the soft lisp of the lips, the clink of the cutlery, the rattle of the plates, every single gesture, every breath, every look. Everything twitched inside me and hurt me. I had to master myself in order not to do something senseless, because I felt it on my pulse: all my senses were feverish. I had to look at each and every one of these people, and I felt hatred for each of them when I saw them sitting there so peacefully, voracious and leisurely, while I was glowing. Some envy came over me that they rested so well and securely within themselves, without part of the torment of a world, without feeling for the quiet frenzy that stirred in the breast of the dying earth. I attacked everyone with a look to see if there wasn’t someone who sympathized with them, but everyone seemed dull and unconcerned. There were only those who were resting and breathing, the leisurely, awake, callous, healthy, and I was the only sick person, the only one with the fever in the world. The waiter brought me the food. I tried a bite but couldn’t choke it down. I was opposed to anything that was touch. I was too full of the sultriness, the haze, the breath of the suffering, sick, tortured nature.

A chair moved up next to me. I started up. Every sound now brushed against me like hot iron. I looked. Strangers sat there, new neighbors I didn’t know yet. An elderly gentleman and his wife, middle-class, calm people with round, serene eyes and chewing cheeks. But across from them, half with her back to me, a young girl, obviously her daughter. I only saw the nape of the neck, white and narrow, and over it like a steel helmet, black and almost blue, my full hair. She sat motionless, and by her stiffness I recognized her as the same one who used to stand on the terrace, panting and open in front of the rain like a white, thirsty flower. Her little, sickly narrow fingers played restlessly with the cutlery, but still without it clinking; and this silence around her was good for me. She didn’t touch a bite either, only once did her hand hastily and greedily grab the glass. Oh, she feels it too, the fever of the world, I felt happily at this thirsty grip, and a friendly sympathy put my gaze softly on her neck. I now felt a person, a single one, who was not completely separated from nature, who also glowed with the blaze of a world, and I wanted her to know about our brotherhood. I should have liked to yell at her: “Feel me! Feel me! I too am awake like you, I am suffering too! Feel me! Feel me! ”I surrounded her with the glowing magnetics of desire. I stared into her back, caressed her hair from afar, bored my eyes, called her with my lips, I pressed her to her, I stared and stared, threw out all my fever so that she would feel like a sister. But she didn’t turn around. She remained rigid, a statue, seated, cool and strange. Nobody helped me. She didn’t feel me either. The world was not in her either. I burned alone.

Oh, this sultriness inside and out, I couldn’t take it anymore. The haze of the hot dishes, fatty and sweet, tormented me, every noise bored into my nerves. I felt my blood rush and knew I was close to a purple faint. Everything in me longed for coolness and distance, and this closeness, the dull, people overwhelmed me. There was a window next to me. I pushed it open, wide open. And wonderful: there it was again very mysterious, this restless flickering in my blood, only dissolved in the unlimitedness of a night sky. The moon flickered white-yellow above like an inflamed eye in a red ring of haze, and a pale bread crept like a ghost across the fields. The crickets chirped feverishly; the air seemed to be stretched with metal strings that shrieked and yelled. In between, a cry of doom sometimes squeaked softly and senselessly, dogs struck, howling and loud; somewhere in the distance the animals roared, and I remembered that on nights like this the fever poisoned the milk of the cows. Nature was sick, there too, this quiet frenzy of bitterness, and I stared out the window as if into a mirror of emotion. My whole being bent outwards, my sultriness and that of the landscape flowed into one another in a mute, wet embrace.

Again the armchairs moved next to me, and again I gave a start. Dinner was over, people got up noisily: my neighbors got up too and walked past me. The father first, leisurely and full, with a friendly, smiling look, then the mother and finally the daughter. Only now did I see her face. It was pale yellow, of the same dull, sick color as the moon outside, the lips were still half open as before. She walked silently and yet not easily. There was something limp and dull about her that reminded me strangely of my own feelings. I felt her approach and was irritable. Something in me wanted a confidentiality with her, she would like to touch me with her white dress, or that I could feel the scent of her hair in passing. At that moment she looked at me. Rigid and black, her gaze penetrated me and remained hooked, deep and sucking, so that I only felt him, her bright face disappeared above it and I only felt this gloomy darkness before me, into which I fell like an abyss. She took another step forward, but the gaze never let go of me, it stayed bored into me like a black lance, and I felt its penetration deeper and deeper. Now its tip touched my heart and it stood still. For a moment or two she held my gaze and I held my breath, seconds during which I felt powerless torn away by the black magnet of this pupil. Then she was past me. And immediately I felt my blood rush forward as if from a wound and go through my whole body excitedly.

What – what was that? I woke up as if from a death. Was that my fever that made me so confused that in the passing glimpse of a passerby I lost myself completely? But it seemed to me as if I had sensed the same silent frenzy in looking at it, the languishing, senseless, dying of thirst greed that now opened up to me in everything, in the gaze of the red moon, in the thirsting lips of the earth, in the screaming agony of the animals, the same one that sparkled and trembled in me. Oh, how confused everything went on this fantastic sultry night, how everything had melted into this feeling of expectation and impatience! Was it my madness, was it that of the world? I was excited and wanted to know the answer, so I followed her into the hall. She had sat down there next to her parents and was leaning quietly in an armchair. Invisible was the dangerous look under the curtained lids. She was reading a book, but I didn’t believe her reading. I was certain that when she felt as I did, when she suffered with the senseless agony of the swollen world, that she could not rest in quiet contemplation, that this was a hiding, a hiding from strange curiosity. I sat down opposite and stared at her, I waited feverishly for the look that had charmed me, whether he would not come back and solve his mystery for me. But she didn’t move. The hand slapped leaf after leaf in the book indifferently, the eyes remained obscured. And I waited opposite, waited hotter and hotter, some puzzling power of will tensed, muscularly strong, very physically, to break this pretense. A silent struggle began between all the people who were talking, smoking and playing cards there. I felt that she refused, that she refused to look up, but the more she resisted, the more my defiance wanted it, and I was strong, for within me was the expectation of the whole aching earth and the thirsting glow of the disappointed World.

And just as the damp sultriness of the night still touches my pores, so my will pressed against hers, and I knew she would soon have to give me a look, she had to. Back in the hall someone began to play the piano. The tones pearled over softly, up and down in fleeting scales, a society over there was laughing noisily at some silly joke, I heard everything, felt everything that was happening, but without letting go for a minute. I now counted the seconds aloud to myself, while I pulled and sucked at her lids, while I wanted to lift her stubbornly bowed head from afar through the hypnosis of will. Minute after minute rolled by – the tones from over there kept pearly in between – and already I felt that my strength was slacking – then suddenly she lifted herself up with a jerk and looked at me, straight at me. Again it was the same look that never ended, a black, terrible, sucking nothingness, a thirst that sucked me in, without resistance. I stared into these pupils like into the black cavity of a photographic apparatus and felt that it first pulled my face inward into the strange blood and I fell away from myself; the ground disappeared under my feet and I felt all the sweetness of the dizzy fall.

High above me I could still hear the tinkling scales rolling up and down, but already I no longer knew where this was happening to me. My blood had flowed away, my breath caught. I already felt myself choking, this minute or hour or eternity – then her eyelids closed again. I emerged like a drowning man from the water, freezing, shaking with fever and danger.

I looked around. Across from me sat among the people, hunched over a book, just a slim young girl, motionless, pictorial, her knee bobbing softly under her thin robe. My hands were shaking too. I knew that this voluptuous game of expectation and resistance was about to begin again, that I would have to ask for minutes tense, only to be suddenly plunged into black flames again by one look. My temples were damp, the blood boiled in me. I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up without turning and went out.

The night before the shining house was far away. The valley seemed sunken, and the sky was damp and black as wet moss. Here, too, there was no cooling, still not, everywhere here, too, the same dangerous consort of thirst and drunkenness that I felt in my blood. Something unhealthy and damp, like the exhalation of someone who was feverish, lay over the fields that brewed milk-white haze, distant fires flickered and haunted the heavy air, and around the moon lay a yellow ring that made his eyes angry. I felt more tired than ever. A wicker chair, forgotten from the day before, stood there: I threw myself into it.

My limbs fell off me, and I stretched out motionless. And there, just clinging to the soft pipe, I suddenly felt the sultriness as wonderful. She no longer tormented, she just huddled, tenderly and voluptuously, and I didn’t stop her. I only kept my eyes closed so as not to see anything, to feel nature more strongly, the living things that surrounded me. Like a polyp, a soft, smooth, sucking creature now surrounded me, touched me with a thousand lips the night. I lay and felt myself giving in, surrendering to something that embraced, cuddled, surrounded, drank my blood, and for the first time in this sultry embrace I felt sensual like a woman who dissolves in the gentle ecstasy of devotion. It was a sweet horror for me suddenly to be without resistance and completely surrender my body only to the world, it was wonderful how this invisible touched my skin tenderly and gradually penetrated under it, loosening my joints more loosely, and I did not defend myself against it this letting go of the senses. I let myself slide into the new feeling, and dark, dreamlike, I only felt that this: the night and that look from before, the woman and the landscape, that this was one thing in which it was sweet to be lost.

Sometimes it seemed to me that this darkness was just her, and that warmth that touched my limbs, her own body, dissolved in night like mine, and still feeling it in my dream, I vanished in this black, warm wave of voluptuous forlornness .

Something startled me. I reached around with all my senses without finding myself. And then I saw it, I realized that I had leaned there with my eyes closed and fell asleep. I must have slumbered, perhaps an hour or hours, because the light in the hotel lobby had already gone out and everything had long since ceased to be quiet. My hair was damp stuck to my temples, like a hot dew this dreamless slumber seemed to have fallen over me. I got up, confused, to find my way back into the house. I felt dull, but this confusion was around me too. Something bellowed in the distance, and sometimes a glow of weather sparkled dangerously across the sky. The air tasted of fire and sparks, telltale lightning flashes behind the mountains, and memory and anticipation phosphoresced in me. I would have liked to have stayed calm, enjoying the mysterious state of affairs: but the hour was late, and I went inside.

The hall was already empty, the armchairs were still randomly jumbled together in the pale glow of a single light. Their inanimate emptiness was ghostly, and involuntarily I molded into one of them the delicate figure of the strange being, whose looks made me so confused. Her gaze in the depths of my being was still alive. He stirred, and I felt how he gleamed at me from the darkness, a mysterious foreboding scented him somewhere awake in these walls, and his promise wandered in my blood. And it was still so humid! As soon as I closed my eyes I felt purple sparks behind my lids. The white, glowing day still shone in me, this shimmering, damp, sparkling, fantastic night still fevered in me!

But I couldn’t stay here in the hallway, everything was dark and deserted. So I went up the stairs and still didn’t want to.

There was some resistance in me that I did not know how to tame. I was tired and yet I felt too early to sleep. Some mysterious, clairvoyant weather promised me something more adventurous, and my senses stretched out to see something alive and warm. As if with fine, articulated feelers, it penetrated the stairwell, touched all the rooms, and as before out into nature, I now threw all my feelings into the house, and I felt the sleep, the leisurely breathing of many people in it , the heavy, dreamless waves of their thick black blood, their simple-minded calm and stillness, but also the magnetic pull of some kind of force. I sensed something that was awake like me. Was it that look, was it the landscape, that brought this fine purple madness into me? I thought I felt something soft through wall and wall, a small flame of unrest within me trembled and lured in the blood and did not burn out. Reluctantly I went up the stairs and yet always stopped at every step and listened from within; not only with the ear, but with all of the senses. Nothing would have been strange to me, everything in me was still lurking for something unheard of, strange, because I knew that the night could not end without something wonderful, that this sultriness could not end without lightning.

Once again, as I stood on the banister, listening, I was the whole world outside, stretching itself in its faint and screaming for the thunderstorm. But nothing moved. Only a slight breath passed through the windless house. Tired and disappointed, I went up the last steps and dreaded my lonely room like a coffin.

The handle shimmered uncertainly out of the dark, moist and warm to grasp. I opened the door. At the back the window stood open and opened a black square in the night, crowded pine-tops over by the forest and in between a piece of the cloudy sky. Everything outside and inside was dark, the world and the room, only – strange and inexplicable – something narrow and upright gleamed on the window frame like a lost streak of moonlight. I stepped closer, amazed, to see what was shimmering so brightly in the moon-overcast night. I stepped closer and it stirred.

I was astonished: but yes, I wasn’t frightened, because that night something was strangely ready for the most fantastic in me, everything had been thought out beforehand and was dream-conscious. No encounter would have been strange to me, and this least of all, because really: it was she who stood there, she who I thought of unconsciously, at every step, at every step in the sleeping house, and her wakefulness my senses flared through the hallway and felt door. I saw her face only as a glimmer, and the white nightgown lay around her like a mist. She leaned against the window, and as she stood there, her being turned out into the landscape, mysteriously drawn into her fate by the shimmering mirror of the depths, she seemed like a fairy tale, Ophelia over the pond.

I stepped closer, shy and excited at the same time. The noise must have reached her, she turned around. Her face was in shadow. I didn’t know whether she really saw me, whether she heard me, because there was nothing sudden in her movement, no fright, no resistance. Everything was very quiet around us. A small clock was ticking on the wall. It remained very quiet, and then suddenly she said quietly and unexpectedly: “I’m so scared.”

Who was she talking to? Did she recognize me? Did she mean me Was she talking from her sleep? It was the same voice, the same trembling tone that shuddered outside against the nearby clouds this afternoon, because her gaze does not even notice me. This was strange, and yet I was not astonished or confused. I stepped up to calm her down and took her hand. It felt like tinder, hot and dry, and the grip of my fingers crumbled softly in my embrace. Silently she let my hand go. Everything about her was limp, defenseless, dead. And only from the lips it whispered again, as if from a distance: “I’m so scared! I’m so scared. ”And then dying in a sigh as if from suffocation:“ Oh, how humid it is! ”That sounded from afar and was whispered quietly like a secret between the two of us. But I still felt that she was not speaking to me.

I took her arm. She only trembled softly like the trees in the afternoon before the thunderstorm, but she did not fight back. I gripped her more tightly: she gave way. Weak, with no resistance, a warm, tumbling wave, her shoulders fell against me. Now I had her very close to me so that I could breathe the sultriness of her skin and the damp scent of her hair. I didn’t move and she was silent. All this was strange, and my curiosity began to sparkle. Gradually my impatience grew. I touched her hair with my lips – she didn’t stop them. Then I took her lips. They were dry and hot, and when I kissed them they suddenly opened up to drink from mine, not thirsty and passionately, but with the quiet, slack, lustful sucking of a child. I felt her faint, and like her lips, her slender body, swaying warm through the thin robe, sucked into me just as it did in the night outside, without strength, but full of a quiet, drunken greed. And there, as I held it – my senses were still sparkling brightly – I felt the warm, damp earth on me as it lay there today, thirsting for the shower of relaxation, the hot, powerless, glowing landscape. I kissed and kissed her and felt as if I were enjoying the great, sultry, waiting world in her, as if this warmth that glowed from her cheeks were the breath of the fields, as if the shivering land breathed from her soft, warm breasts.

But when my wandering lips wanted to up to her lids, to the eyes whose black flames I felt so shuddering that I rose to look at her face and to enjoy looking more deeply, I was surprised to see that her lids were tightly closed . A Greek mask made of stone, eyeless, unconscious, she lay there, Ophelia now, the dead one, floating on the water, pale, the unfeeling face lifted from the dark flood. I was frightened. For the first time I felt reality in the fantastic event. I shuddered at the realization that I was taking an unconscious, holding a drunk, a sick person, a sleepwalker of her senses in my arms, who only drove the sultriness of the night like a dangerous red moon, a being who did not know what it did that might not want me I was frightened and she felt heavy in my arms.

I wanted to let the willless slip quietly onto the armchair, onto the bed, so as not to steal pleasure from a tumult, not to take something that she might not want herself, but only that demon in her who was master of her blood. But as soon as she felt that I was slacking off, she began to moan softly: “Don’t leave me! Don’t let me! ”She pleaded, and hotter sucking her lips, her body pressed against it. Her face was painfully tense with her closed eyes, and with a shudder I felt that she wanted to wake up and couldn’t, that her drunken senses screamed out of the prison of this derangement and wanted to become knowing. But it was precisely this fact, that something was struggling under this leaden mask of sleep, that wanted out of its enchantment, was a dangerous temptation for me to awaken her. My nerves burned with impatience, she was awake, she spoke, to see her as a real being, not just as a dream-walker, and at all costs I wanted to force this alertness out of her dull, indulging body. I grabbed her, I shook her, I clamped my teeth in her lips and my fingers in her arms, so that she would finally open her eyes and do what was only dull urge in her now. But she just arched and moaned under the painful embrace. “More! More! ”She stammered with an ardor, with a senseless ardor that excited me and made me senseless. I sensed that the guard was already close within her, that it was about to break open under the closed lids, for they were already twitching restlessly. I took it closer, dug deeper into it, and suddenly I felt a tear roll down my cheek, which I was drinking salty.

The more I squeezed her, the more I squeezed her, it swayed terribly in her chest, she groaned, her limbs cramped as if they were about to burst something monstrous, a hoop that surrounded her with sleep, and suddenly – it was like lightning through the thunderstorm world – broke it in two. Suddenly she became a heavy, heavy weight in my arms again, her lips let me down, her hands sank, and when I leaned her back on the bed she lay there like a dead person. I was frightened. Involuntarily I felt her and felt her arms and her cheeks. They were very cold, frozen, stone. Only at the temples above did the blood tick softly in trembling beats. Marble, a statue, she lay there, her cheeks damp with tears, her breath gently playing around her tense nostrils. Sometimes a quiet twitch ran over her, an ebbing wave of the excited blood, but the chest swayed ever quieter and quieter. It seemed more and more to become a picture. Her features became more and more human and childlike, brighter and more relaxed. The cramp was gone. She fell asleep. She was sleeping.

I sat on the edge of the bed, leaning over her trembling. A peaceful child she lay there, her eyes closed and her mouth smiling softly, animated by an inner dream. I bent very close so that I saw every line of her face individually and felt the breath of her breath on my cheek, and the closer I looked at her, the more distant and mysterious she became. For where was she now with her senses, which lay stony, carried by the hot currents of a sultry night, to me, the stranger, and now washed up on the beach as if dead? Who was it that was lying on my hands, where did it come from, who did it belong to? I didn’t know anything about her and just always felt that nothing connected me to her. I looked at her, lonely minutes, while only the clock ticked hastily from above, and tried to read her speechless face, and yet nothing of her was trusted. I wanted to wake her up from this strange sleep here near me, in my room, hard on my life, and at the same time I was afraid of waking up, of the first glimpse of her waking senses. So I sat there, mute, bent over the sleep of this strange being for an hour or two, and gradually it became as if it were no longer a woman, not a person, who approached me adventurously, but the night itself, the secret of the panting, tormented nature that opened up to me. I felt as if the whole hot world with its purged senses lay here under my hands, as if the earth had reared itself in its torment and sent it as a messenger from this strange, fantastic night.

Something clinked behind me. I started like a criminal. The window rattled again, as if a giant fist was shaking it. I jumped up. Something strange stood in front of the window: a transformed night, new and dangerous, sparkling black and full of wild activity. There was a roar there, a terrible rustling, and it was already building up to the black tower of the sky, and it was already throwing itself out of the night, cold, damp and with a wild thrust: the wind. He jumped out of the darkness, mighty and strong, his fists tore at the windows, pounded on the house. The dark was opened like a terrible gorge, clouds came up and built black walls in a mad rush, and something rushed violently between heaven and world. The persistent sultriness was torn away by this wild current, everything flooded, stretched, stirred, a frenzied flight was from one end to the other of the sky, and the trees, firmly rooted in the earth, groaned under the invisible, whistling, whistling whip of the Storm. And suddenly this tore in two white: a lightning bolt, splitting the sky down to the earth. And behind him the thunder crackled as if the whole cloud had crashed into the depths. It stirred behind me. She was up. The lightning had ripped the sleep from her eyes. She stared around in confusion. “What is it,” she said, “where am I?” And the voice was completely different from before. Fear still trembled in it, but the tone sounded clear now, it was sharp and pure as the freshly fermented air. Another lightning bolt tore open the frame of the landscape: in flight I saw the lighted outline of the fir trees, shaken by the storm, the clouds that ran across the sky like raging animals, the room lit up as white as chalk and whiter than everything, her pale face. She jumped up. Suddenly her movements were free as I had never seen them in her. She stared at me in the dark. I felt her gaze blacker than the night.

“Who are you … Where am I?” She stammered and, frightened, gathered the open robe over her chest. I stepped closer to reassure her, but she backed away. “What do you want from me?” She shouted at full speed as I got close to her. I wanted to look for a word to reassure her, to speak to her, but only then did I realize that I didn’t know her name. Another flash threw light across the room. The walls dazzled as if coated with phosphor, white she stood before me, her arms braced against me in terror, and in her now alert gaze there was boundless hatred. In vain I wanted to take hold of her in the darkness that fell on us with the thunder, calm her down, explain something to her, but she tore herself free, pushed open the door that a new lightning bolt showed her, and rushed out. And with the door that closed, the thunder crashed down as if all the heavens had fallen to earth.

And then there was a rustling, brooks tumbled from infinite heights like waterfalls, and the storm swung them back and forth as wet ropes pattering. Sometimes he would throw tufts of ice-cold water and sweet, flavored air in to the window frame, where I stood looking until my hair was wet and I dripped in the cold showers. But I was blessed to feel the pure element, I felt as if my sultriness was now loosening in the lightning, and I would have liked to scream with pleasure.

I forgot everything in the ecstatic feeling that I could breathe again and that I was fresh, and I sucked this coolness into myself like the earth, like the land: I felt the blissful shiver of being shaken like the trees that swayed hissing under the wet one Rod of the rain. The voluptuous fight between heaven and earth was demonically beautiful, a gigantic bridal night whose lust I sympathetically enjoyed. The sky reached down with lightning, with thunder it fell on the trembling woman, and in this groaning darkness there was a frenzied sinking into one another of height and depth, as from sex to sex. The trees groaned with lust, and the distance interwoven with ever more glowing lightning, you could see the hot veins of the sky standing open, they sprayed and mingled with the wet rivulets of the paths. Everything broke apart and collapsed, night and world – a wonderful new breath, in which the scent of the fields mingled with the fiery breath of the sky, penetrated me coolly. Three weeks of restrained embers freaked out in this fight, and I felt the relaxation in me too. It seemed to me as if the rain rushed into my pores, as if the wind purged my chest through and through, and I felt myself and my experience no longer individual and animated, I was just the world, hurricane, shower, creature and night in the exuberance of nature . And then, when everything was gradually quieter, the lightning just blue and harmless roamed the horizon, the thunder only rumbled like a fatherly admonition and the rustling of the rain became rhythmic in the weary wind, then I felt quieter and tired.

I felt my vibrating nerves resound like music, and a gentle relaxation sank into my limbs. Oh, sleep with nature now and then wake up with it! I threw off my clothes and went to bed. There were still soft, strange shapes in it. I felt it dully, the strange adventure wanted to reconsider, but I no longer understood it. The rain outside rushed and rushed and washed my thoughts away. I just felt everything more as a dream. I always wanted to think back a little bit about what had happened to me, but the rain rustled and rustled, the soft, ringing night was a wonderful cradle, and I sank into it, dozing in its slumber.

The next morning, when I went to the window, I saw a changed world. Clear, with firm outlines, the land lay serene in a safe, sunny glow, and high above it, a shining mirror of this silence, the horizon arched blue and distant. The boundaries were clearly drawn, the sky, which yesterday dug deep into the fields and made them fertile, was infinitely far away. But now he was far away, world-wide and unrelated, nowhere did he touch her anymore, the fragrant, breathing, still earth, his wife. A blue abyss shimmered coolly between him and the depths, they looked at each other and strangely, the sky and the landscape.

I went down to the hall. The people were already together. Her nature was also different than in those horrible weeks of sultriness. Everything stirred and moved. Their laughter sounded bright, their voices melodious, metallic, the dullness that hindered them had flown away, the sultry band that was woven around them had sunk. I sat down between them, without any hostility whatsoever, and some kind of curiosity was now looking for the other, whose image my sleep had almost wiped out. And really, she was sitting there between my father and mother at the next table, whom I was looking for. She was serene, her shoulders light, and I heard her laugh, sounding and unconcerned. I looked around her curiously. She didn’t notice me. She said something that made her happy, and between the words a childlike laugh pearled into it. Finally she looked over at me now and then, and at the fleeting touch her laugh involuntarily stopped. She looked at me more sharply. Something seemed strange to her, her eyebrows rose, her eye questioned me sternly and tensely, and gradually her face took on a strained, tortured look, as if she wanted to remember something and couldn’t do it. I kept looking expectantly with her eyes to see whether a sign of excitement or embarrassment would greet me, but then she looked away again. After a minute her gaze came back to make sure. He checked my face one more time. For just a second, a long tense second, I felt his hard, stabbing, metal probe penetrate deep into me, but then her eye let go of me calmly, and I felt the uninhibited brightness of her gaze, the slight, almost happy turn of her head that when she was awake she no longer knew anything about me, that our community had sunk with the magical darkness. Strange and far we were again like heaven and earth. She spoke to her parents, swaying her slender, virginal shoulders carefree, and smiling cheerfully with her teeth gleaming beneath the narrow lips, from which I still drank the thirst and sultriness of a whole world hours ago.