During the holidays I once went to the house where Max Demian had lived with his mother years ago. An old woman was walking in the garden, I spoke to her and found out that the house belonged to her. I asked about the Demian family. She remembered them well. But she didn’t know where they lived now. Sensing my interest, she took me into the house, found a leather album and showed me a photograph of Demian’s mother. I could barely remember her. But when I saw the little portrait, my heart stopped. — That was my dream image! That was her, the tall, almost masculine female figure, similar to her son, with features of motherhood, features of severity, features of deep passion, beautiful and tempting, beautiful and aloof, demon and mother, fate and lover. That was her!
It was like a wild miracle when I found out that my dream image lived on earth! There was a woman who looked like that, who bore the traits of my destiny! Where was she? Where? — And she was Demian’s mother!
Soon afterwards I began my journey. A strange journey! I drove restlessly from place to place, following every idea, always looking for this woman. There were days when I met a lot of figures who reminded me of her, who echoed her, who resembled her, who lured me through alleys of foreign cities, through train stations, onto trains, as if in complicated dreams. There were other days when I realized how useless my searching was; then I sat idly somewhere in a park, in a hotel garden, in a waiting room, and looked into myself and tried to bring the image to life in me. But it had now become shy and fleeting. I was never able to sleep; I only dozed off for fifteen minutes on train journeys through unknown landscapes. Once, in Zurich, a woman, a pretty, somewhat cheeky woman, stalked me. I barely saw her and kept walking as if she were air. I would rather have died immediately than give another woman even an hour’s worth of sympathy.
I felt that my fate was pulling me, I felt that fulfillment was near, and I was mad with impatience that I couldn’t do anything about it. Once at a train station, I think it was in Innsbruck, I saw a figure in the window of a train that was just leaving that reminded me of her, and I was unhappy for days. And suddenly the figure appeared to me again at night in a dream, I woke up with an ashamed and desolate feeling about the futility of my hunt, and drove straight back home.
A few weeks later I enrolled at the University of H. Everything disappointed me. The course on the history of philosophy that I heard was just as insubstantial and factory-like as the activities of the young people studying. Everything was so standard, everyone acted like the other, and the heated happiness on the boyish faces looked so sadly empty and bought-in! But I was free, I had my whole day to myself, lived quietly and beautifully in old walls outside the city and had a few volumes of Nietzsche on my table. I lived with him, felt the loneliness of his soul, sensed the fate that drove him inexorably, suffered with him and was happy that it there had been someone who had gone his way so relentlessly.
Late in the evening I once strolled through the city in the blowing autumn wind and heard the student clubs singing from the taverns. Tobacco smoke came out in clouds from the open windows, and the singing came in thick torrents, loud and taut, yet lively and lifelessly uniform.
I stood on a street corner and listened, the punctual cheerfulness of youth emanating from two bars into the night. Togetherness everywhere, crouching together everywhere, unloading fate everywhere and escaping into the warmth of the herd!
Behind me two men walked slowly past. I heard a bit of their conversation.
“Isn’t it just like the young men’s house in a Negro village?” said one. “Everything is true, even tattooing is still fashionable. You see, this is young Europe.”
The voice sounded strangely admonishing to me – familiar. I followed the two of them in the dark alley. One was a Japanese man, small and elegant. I saw his yellow, smiling face shining under a lantern.
Then the other spoke again.
“Well, things won’t be any better for you in Japan. People who don’t follow the herd are rare everywhere. There are some here too.”
Every word filled me with joyful terror. I knew the speaker. It was Demian.
In the windy night I followed him and the Japanese through the dark alleys, listening to their conversations and enjoying the sound of Demian’s voice. She had the old tone, she had the old, beautiful security and calm, and she had the old power over me. Now everything was fine. I had found him.
At the end of a suburban street, the Japanese man said goodbye and unlocked a front door. Demian went back the way, I had stopped and was waiting for him in the middle of the street. With my heart pounding, I saw him coming towards me, upright and elastic, in a brown rubber coat, with a thin stick hanging from his arm. Without changing his steady pace, he came close to me, took off his hat and showed me his old, fair face with the determined mouth and the peculiar brightness of his broad forehead.
He held out his hand to me.
“So there you are, Sinclair! I was expecting you.”
“Did you know I was here?”
“I didn’t exactly know, but I certainly hoped so. I only saw you this evening, you’ve been following us the whole time.”
“So you knew me right away?”
“Naturally. You have changed though. But you have the mark.”
“The sign? What sign?”
“We used to call it the Mark of Cain, if you remember. It is our sign. You’ve always had it, that’s why I became your friend. But now it’s become clearer.”
“I did not know it. Or actually. I once painted a picture of you, Demian, and was amazed that it was similar to me. Was that the sign?”
“That was it. It’s good that you’re here now! My mother will be happy too.”
I was frightened.
“Your mother? Is she here? She doesn’t even know me.”
“Oh, she knows about you. She will know you even without me telling her who you are. — You haven’t let anyone hear from you for a long time.”
“Oh, I often wanted to write, but I couldn’t. For some time I have felt that I had to find you soon. I waited for this every day.”
He slipped his arm into mine and continued walking with me. Peace emanated from him and moved into me. We were soon chatting like we used to. We thought about our school days, our confirmation classes, and also that unfortunate get-together during the holidays – but there was no mention of the earliest and closest bond between us, the story with Franz Kromer.
Suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of strange and foreboding conversations. Reminiscent of Demian’s conversation with the Japanese, we had talked about student life and from there we had moved on to something else that seemed far away; but in Demian’s words it came together to form an intimate connection.
He spoke of the spirit of Europe and the signature of this time. Everywhere, he said, there was unity and herd formation, but nowhere Freedom and love. All of this commonality, from the student association and the choir to the states, is a forced education, it is a community out of fear Fear, out of embarrassment, and she was lazy and old inside and close to collapse.
“Togetherness,” said Demian, “is a beautiful thing. But what we see blooming everywhere isn’t anything at all. It will emerge anew, from each individual’s knowledge of one another, and it will reshape the world for a while. What commonality there is now is just herd formation. People flee to each other because they are afraid of each other – the masters for themselves, the workers for themselves, the scholars for themselves! And why are they afraid? You’re only afraid when you don’t agree with yourself. They are afraid because they have never acknowledged themselves. A community of people who are afraid of the unknown within themselves! They all feel that their laws of life are no longer correct, that they live according to old rules, neither their religions nor their morals, none of which is adequate to what we need. For a hundred and more years, Europe just studied and built factories! You know exactly how much Grams of powder it takes to kill a man, but they don’t know how to pray to God, they don’t even know how to be happy for an hour. Just look at a student bar! Or even a place of entertainment where rich people come! Hopeless! — Dear Sinclair, nothing cheerful can come from all this. These people who come together so fearfully are full of fear and full of malice, no one trusts the other. They cling to ideals that no longer exist and stone anyone who sets up a new one. I sense that there are arguments. They will come, believe me, they will come soon! Of course they won’t ‘improve’ the world. Whether the workers kill their factory owners, or whether Russia or Germany shoot at each other, only owners are exchanged. But it won’t be free. It will demonstrate the worthlessness of today’s ideals, there will be a clearing out of Stone Age gods. This world, as it is now, wants to die, it wants to perish, and it will.”
“And what will happen to us?” I asked.
“From us? Oh, maybe we’ll perish too. You can kill us too. Except we’re not done with it. The will of the future will gather around what remains of us, or around those of us who survive. The will of humanity will become apparent, which our Europe has for a while exceeded with its fair of technology and science. And then it will become clear that the will of humanity is never and nowhere the same as that of today’s communities, states and peoples, associations and churches. What nature wants with people is written in each individual, in you and me. It was in Jesus, it was in Nietzsche. There will be room for these alone important currents – which of course can look different every day – when today’s communities collapse.
We stopped late in front of a garden by the river.
“This is where we live,” said Demian. “Come to us soon! We are waiting for you very much.”
I joyfully walked my long way home through the cool night. Here and there returning students made noise and swayed through the city. I often had the contrast between her strange kind of happiness and my lonely one Life is experienced, often with a feeling of deprivation, often with ridicule. But never before had I felt as calmly and secretly as I did today how little it concerned me, how far away and lost this world was to me. I remembered officials from my hometown, old worthy gentlemen who clung to the memories of their bar-roomed semesters like souvenirs of a blessed paradise and who practiced a cult with the lost “freedom” of their student years that poets or other romantics usually devote to childhood. Same everywhere! Everywhere they looked for “freedom” and “happiness” somewhere behind them, out of sheer fear that they would be reminded of their own responsibility and reminded of their own path. You drank and cheered for a few years, and then you crawled into hiding and became a serious gentleman in the civil service.
However, when I arrived at my remote apartment and looked for my bed, all these thoughts were gone and my whole mind clung to the great promise that this day had given me. As soon as I I wanted to see Demian’s mother tomorrow. If the students held their pubs and tattooed their faces, if the world was lazy and waited for its downfall, what did it matter to me! I was just waiting for my fate to appear before me in a new image.
I slept soundly until late in the morning. The new day dawned for me as a day of celebration, the likes of which I had not experienced since the Christmas parties of my boyhood. I was full of innermost restlessness, but without any fear. I felt that an important day had dawned for me, I saw and felt the world around me transformed, waiting, relational and solemn, even the gently flowing autumn rain was beautiful, quiet and festive, full of serious, happy music. For the first time, the external world resonated with my internal one – then it is a holiday for the soul, then it is worth living. No house, no shop window, no face in the street bothered me, everything was as it should be, but did not have the empty face of the everyday and familiar, but was a waiting nature, standing reverently ready for fate. and at Easter. I didn’t know that this world could still be so beautiful. I had gotten used to living within myself and coming to terms with the fact that I had just lost the sense of what was out there, that the loss of the brilliant colors was inevitably linked to the loss of childhood and that, in a sense, one lost the freedom and manhood of the soul I have to pay by giving up this lovely shimmer. Now I saw with delight that all of this had only been buried and obscured and that it was possible, even as someone who had become free and had renounced the joy of children, to see the world shine and to taste the heartfelt thrills of childlike vision.
The hour came when I found the suburban garden again where I had said goodbye to Max Demian that night. Hidden behind tall, rain-gray trees stood a small house, bright and homely, tall flower bushes behind a large glass wall, and dark room walls with pictures and rows of books behind blank windows. The front door led directly into a small, warm hall. A mute old maid, black, with a white apron, led me in and took my coat.
She left me alone in the hall. I looked around and immediately found myself in the middle of my dream. At the top of the dark wooden wall, above a door, there was a well-known picture hanging under glass in a black frame, my bird with the golden-yellow sparrowhawk head swinging out of the world bowl. I stood still, moved – my heart felt so happy and aching, as if at that moment everything I had ever done and experienced was returning to me as an answer and fulfillment. In a flash I saw a multitude of images flash past my soul: my father’s house with the old stone coat of arms over the archway, the boy Demian who drew the coat of arms, myself as a boy, fearfully entangled in the evil spell of my enemy Kromer, myself as a youth , painting the bird of my longing at the quiet table in my student room,
With wet eyes, I stared at my picture and read within myself. Then my gaze fell: under the picture of a bird in the open door stood a tall woman in a dark dress. It was her. I couldn’t say a word. The beautiful, venerable woman smiled kindly at me with a face like that of her son, without time or age and full of animated will. Her look was fulfillment, her greeting meant homecoming. I silently held out my hands to her. She grasped them both with firm, warm hands.
“You are Sinclair. I knew you straight away. Be welcome!”
Her voice was deep and warm, I drank it like sweet wine. And now I looked up and into her silent face, into the black, fathomless eyes, at the fresh, ripe mouth, at the free, princely forehead that bore the mark.
“How glad I am!” I said to her and kissed her hands. “I think I’ve been on the road my whole life — and now I’ve come home.”
She smiled motherly.
“You never come home,” she said kindly. “But where friendly paths converge, the whole world looks like home for an hour.”
She expressed what I had felt on the way to her. Her voice and hers too Words were very similar to her son’s, and yet very different. Everything was more mature, warmer, more natural. But just as Max had never given anyone the impression of a boy before, his mother looked nothing like the mother of a grown son, so young and sweet was the air on her face and hair, so firm and wrinkle-free was her golden skin , so blooming the mouth. She stood before me even more regal than in my dream, and her presence was the joy of love, her look was fulfillment.
This was the new picture in which my fate presented itself to me, no longer strict, no longer lonely, no longer ripe and lustful! I made no decisions, made no vows – I had come to a destination, to a high place from where the further path appeared wide and splendid, striving towards lands of promise, overshadowed by treetops of nearby happiness, cooled by nearby gardens of every pleasure . Whatever it was, I was happy to know this woman in the world, to drink in her voice and breathe in her closeness. May she be my mother, my lover, my goddess – if only she were there! if only my path was close to theirs!
She pointed up to my sparrowhawk picture.
“You have never given our Max greater joy than with this picture,” she said thoughtfully. “And me too. We waited for you, and when the picture came, we knew you were on your way to us. When you were a little boy, Sinclair, my son came home from school one day and said: There is a boy with the mark on his forehead who must be my friend. That was you. It wasn’t easy for you, but we trusted you. Once, when you were home on vacation, you met Max again. You were about sixteen years old at the time. Max told me about it—”
I interrupted: “Oh, that he told you that! It was my most miserable time back then!”
“Yes, Max said to me: now Sinclair has the hardest part ahead of him. He makes another attempt to escape into the community; he has even become a brother in the inn; but he won’t succeed. His mark is veiled, but it secretly burns him. — Wasn’t it like that?”
“Oh yes, that’s how it was, exactly like that. Then I found Beatrice, and then finally a guide came again to me. His name was Pistorius. Only then did I realize why my boyhood was so tied to Max, why I couldn’t get away from him. Dear woman – dear mother, back then I often believed that I would have to take my own life. Is the path so difficult for everyone?”
She ran her hand through my hair, light as air.
“It is always difficult to be born. You know the bird is having trouble getting out of the egg. Think back and ask yourself: was the journey so difficult? – just difficult? Wasn’t he beautiful too? Would you have known a nicer one, an easier one?”
I shook my head.
“It was hard,” I said as if in my sleep, “it was hard until the dream came.”
She nodded and looked at me intently.
“Yes, you have to find your dream, then the path will be easy. But there is no everlasting dream, each one is replaced by a new one, and you shouldn’t want to hold on to any of them.”
I was deeply shocked. Was that a warning? Was that already defense? But regardless, I was willing to let her guide me and not ask about the destination.
“I don’t know,” I said, “how long my dream will last. I wish it was eternal. Under the image of the bird my fate welcomed me, like a mother and like a lover. He owns me and no one else.”
“As long as the dream is your destiny, you should remain faithful to it,” she confirmed seriously.
A sadness seized me and the ardent wish to die in this enchanted hour. I felt the tears – how long it had been since I cried! — unstoppably swell up within me and overwhelm me. I turned violently away from her, went to the window and looked over the potted flowers with blind eyes.
I heard her voice behind me, it sounded calm and yet was as full of tenderness as a cup filled to the brim with wine.
“Sinclair, you are a child! Your fate loves you. One day it will be all yours, just as you dream, if you remain faithful.”
I had conquered myself and turned my face back to her. She shook my hand.
“I have a few friends,” she said with a smile, “a few very few, very close friends Ms. Eva says to me. You can call me that too if you want.”
She led me to the door, opened it and pointed into the garden. “You’ll find Max out there.”
I stood under the tall trees, stunned and shaken, more awake or more dreamy than ever, I didn’t know. Rain dripped gently from the branches. I walked slowly into the garden, which stretched far along the river bank. I finally found Demian. He was standing in an open garden shed, bare-chested, doing boxing exercises in front of a hanging sandbag.
I stopped in surprise. Demian looked magnificent, the broad chest, the firm masculine head, the raised arms with toned muscles were strong and capable, the movements came from the hips, shoulders and arm joints like playing springs.
“Demian!” I shouted. “What are you doing there?”
He laughed happily.
“I’m practicing. I promised the little Japanese a wrestling match, the guy is as quick as a cat and of course just as tricky. But he won’t be able to handle me. It’s a very small humiliation that I owe him.”
He put on his shirt and skirt.
“You’ve already been to my mother?” he asked.
“Yes. Demian, what a wonderful mother you have! Ms. Eva! The name suits her perfectly, she is like the mother of all beings.”
He looked thoughtfully into my face for a moment.
“You already know the name? You can be proud, boy! You’re the first person she told it to in the first lesson.”
From that day on I went in and out of the house like a son and brother, but also like a lover. When I closed the gate behind me, even when I saw the tall trees of the garden appear from afar, I was rich and happy. Outside was “reality”, outside there were streets and houses, people and institutions, libraries and classrooms – but inside here was love and soul, here lived the fairy tale and the dream. And yet we lived by no means isolated from the world, we often lived in the middle of it in our thoughts and conversations, just in a different field, we were not separated from the majority of people by borders, but only by a different way of seeing. Our task was to be one in the world To represent an island, perhaps a role model, but at least the announcement of another way of living. As someone who has been lonely for a long time, I learned to know the community that is possible between people who have tasted complete aloneness. I never again longed to go back to the tables of the happy, to the parties of the merry; I was never again struck by envy or homesickness when I saw what others had in common. And slowly I was initiated into the secret of those who carried “the mark” on themselves.
We, those with the symbol, might rightly be considered strange, even crazy and dangerous by the world. We were awakened people, or awakening people, and our striving was towards ever more complete wakefulness, while the striving and search for happiness of the others was towards tying their opinions, their ideals and duties, their lives and happiness ever more closely to that of the herd. There was striving there too, there was strength and greatness there too. But while, in our opinion, we who were drawn represented nature’s will to the new, to the isolated and future, the others lived in a will of perseverance. For them, humanity – which they loved like we do – was something finished and preserved and had to be protected. For us, humanity was a distant future towards which we were all traveling, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written.
In addition to Ms. Eva, Max and I, there were also many seekers of very different types in our circle, closer or further away. Some of them followed special paths, had set themselves separate goals and were attached to special opinions and duties, among them were astrologers and Kabbalists , also a follower of Count Tolstoy, and all sorts of delicate, shy, vulnerable people, followers of new sects, practitioners of Indian exercises, plant eaters and others. We actually had nothing spiritual in common with all of them other than the respect that each gave to the other’s secret life-dream. Others were closer to us who followed humanity’s search for gods and new ideals in the past and whose studies often reminded me of those of my Pistorius. They brought books with them, translated texts from ancient languages for us, which humanity tentatively pursued the inklings of its future possibilities. So we passed through the wonderful, thousand-headed knot of gods of the old world until the dawn of Christian conversion. The confessions of the lonely pious became known to us, and the changes in religion from people to people. And from everything we collected, we came up with a criticism of our time and of today’s Europe, which had made enormous efforts to create powerful new weapons for humanity, but had finally fallen into a deep and ultimately blatant desolation of the spirit. For it had gained the whole world only to lose its soul over it.
Here, too, there were believers and professers of certain hopes and doctrines of salvation. There were Buddhists who wanted to convert Europe, and Tolstoy disciples, and other denominations. We in the inner circle listened and did not accept any of these teachings other than as symbols. We, those marked, had no concern about shaping the future. To us, every confession, every doctrine of salvation seemed dead and useless in advance. And we only felt this as a duty and fate: that each of us should become completely himself, so completely do justice to the germ of nature that is active within him and live to the will that the uncertain future finds us ready for anything and everything it wants to bring.
For this, said and unsaid, was clear to all of us in the feeling that a new birth and a collapse of the present was near and already noticeable. Demian sometimes told me: “What is to come is unthinkable. The soul of Europe is an animal that lay bound indefinitely. When it becomes free, its first impulses will not be the sweetest. But the paths and detours are irrelevant if only the true distress of the soul comes to light, which has been lied away and numbed over and over again for so long. Then our day will come, then we will be needed, not as leaders or new legislators – we will no longer experience the new laws – rather as willing people, as those who are ready to go along and stand where fate calls. See, all people are willing to do the incredible when their ideals are threatened. But no one is there when a new ideal, a new, perhaps dangerous and scary impulse of growth comes knocking. The few who are there and go with us will be us. We are marked for this – like Cain was marked for this was to arouse fear and hatred and to drive humanity from a narrow idyll into dangerous expanses. All people who have influenced the course of humanity, all without distinction, were only capable and effective because they were ready for fate. That fits Moses and Buddha, it fits Napoleon and Bismarck. Which wave a person serves, from which pole he is governed, is not his choice. If Bismarck had understood the Social Democrats and aligned themselves with them, he would have been a clever gentleman, but not a man of fate. That’s how it was with Napoleon, with Caesar, with Loyola, with everyone! You always have to think about it from a biological and evolutionary perspective! When the upheavals on the earth’s surface threw the aquatic animals onto the land and land animals into the water, these were the specimens ready for fate, who were able to do the new and unheard of and save their species through new adaptations. We don’t know whether they were the same specimens that previously stood out as conservatives and preservers, or rather the oddballs and revolutionaries. They were ready, and that is why they were able to save their species into new developments. We know this. That’s why we want to be ready.”
Ms. Eva was often present at such conversations, but she herself did not participate in this way. She was a listener and an echo to each of us who expressed her thoughts, full of trust, full of understanding, it seemed as if the thoughts all came from her and returned to her. Sitting near her, hearing her voice at times and sharing in the atmosphere of maturity and soul that surrounded her was happiness for me.
She sensed it immediately when there was any change, a clouding or renewal going on within me. It seemed to me that the dreams I had in my sleep were inspirations from her. I often told them to her, and they were understandable and natural to her; there were no oddities that she couldn’t follow with clear feeling. For a while I had dreams that were like replicas of our daily conversations. I dreamed that the whole world was in turmoil and that I, alone or with Demian, was anxiously awaiting the great fate. The fate remained hidden, but somehow bore the characteristics of the woman Eve – to be chosen or rejected by her, that was fate.
Sometimes she would say with a smile, “Your dream “It’s not quite, Sinclair, you’ve forgotten the best part -” and it could happen that it came back to me and I couldn’t understand how I could have forgotten it.
At times I became dissatisfied and tormented by desire. I didn’t think I could bear to see her next to me anymore without holding her in my arms. She noticed that immediately too. When I once stayed away for several days and then came back distraught, she took me aside and said: “You shouldn’t give in to desires you don’t believe in. I know what you want. You must be able to give up these desires, or desire them fully and correctly. Once you are able to ask in such a way that you are absolutely certain that it will be fulfilled, then the fulfillment will be there. But you wish, and regret it again, and are afraid. All of this must be overcome. I want to tell you a fairy tale.”
And she told me about a young man who was in love with a star. He stood by the sea, stretched out his hands and worshiped the star, he dreamed of it and directed his thoughts towards it. But he knew, or thought he knew, that a star was not made by a person could be embraced. He considered it his fate to love a star without hope of fulfillment, and from this idea he built a whole life-poem of renunciation and silent, faithful suffering that was supposed to improve and purify him. But his dreams all went to the star. Once again he stood at night by the sea, on the high cliff, and looked at the star and burned with love for it. And in a moment of great longing he took the leap and threw himself into the void towards the star. But at the moment he was about to jump, he thought very quickly: it’s impossible! There he lay down on the beach and was shattered. He didn’t know how to love. If at the moment he jumped he had had the strength of soul to firmly and confidently believe in fulfillment, he would have flown upwards and been united with the star.
“Love doesn’t have to ask,” she said, “nor demand. Love must have the power to achieve certainty within itself. Then it is no longer pulled, but rather pulls. Sinclair, your love is drawn from me. If she pulls me once, I’ll come. I don’t want to give gifts, I want to be won.”
But another time she told me something else Fairy tale. It was a lover who loved without hope. He withdrew completely into his soul and thought he would burn with love. The world was lost to him, he no longer saw the blue sky and the green forest, the stream no longer roared to him, the harp did not sound to him, everything had disappeared and he had become poor and miserable. But his love grew, and he would much rather die and degenerate than give up possession of the beautiful woman he loved. Then he felt how his love had burned everything else in him, and it became powerful and pulled and pulled, and the beautiful woman had to follow, she came, he stood with his arms outstretched to pull her to him. But when she stood before him, she was completely transformed, and with a shudder he felt and saw that he had drawn the entire lost world towards him. She stood before him and surrendered to him, sky and forest and stream, everything came to him in new colors, fresh and wonderful, belonged to him, spoke his language. And instead of just winning a wife, he had the whole world at heart, and every star in the sky glowed within him and sparkled lust through his soul. — He had loved and found himself in the process. But most people love in order to lose themselves in the process.
My love for my wife Eva seemed to be the only content of my life. But every day she looked different. Sometimes I thought I definitely felt that it was not her person that my being was drawn to, but that she was just a symbol of my inner self and only wanted to lead me deeper into myself. I often heard words from her that sounded like answers from my unconscious to burning questions that moved me. Then there were moments when I was burning with sensual desire next to her, kissing objects she had touched. And gradually sensual and non-sensual love, reality and symbol, pushed each other on top of each other. Then it happened that I was thinking about her in my room at home, in quiet intimacy, and I thought I could feel her hand in mine and her lips on mine. Or I was with her, looked into her face, spoke to her and heard her voice, and yet didn’t know whether she was real and not a dream. I began to sense how a love can be possessed permanently and immortally. I had a new insight while reading a book, and it was the same feeling as a kiss from Mrs. Eva. She stroked my hair and smiled at me with her ripe, fragrant face Warmth and I had the same feeling as if I had made progress within myself. Everything that was important and fate for me could take her form. She could transform into any of my thoughts, and anyone into her.
I was dreading the Christmas holidays when I was with my parents because I thought it must be torture to live away from Mrs. Eva for two weeks. But it wasn’t torture, it was wonderful to be home and think of her. When I returned to H., I stayed away from her house for two more days in order to enjoy this security and independence from her sensual presence. I also had dreams in which my union with her took place in new, metaphorical ways. She was a sea into which I flowed. She was a star, and I myself was traveling to her as a star, and we met and felt drawn to each other, stayed together and blissfully revolved around each other in close, ringing circles for all time.
I told her this dream when I first visited her again.
“The dream is beautiful,” she said quietly. “Make it happen!”
In early spring there came a day that I have never forgotten. I stepped into the hall, a window was open and a gentle current of air carried the heavy smell of hyacinths through the room. Since there was no one in sight, I went upstairs to Max Demian’s study. I knocked lightly on the door and entered without waiting for a call, as I was used to.
The room was dark, the curtains were all drawn. The door to a small side room was open where Max had set up a chemical laboratory. From there came the bright white light of the spring sun shining through rain clouds. Thinking there was no one there, I pulled back one of the curtains.
Then I saw Max Demian sitting on a stool near the curtained window, huddled and strangely changed, and like a flash of lightning a feeling ran through me: you’ve experienced this before! He had his arms hanging motionless, his hands in his lap, his slightly bent forward face with open eyes, sightless and dead, a small, bright reflection of light flashing dead in the star of his eye, as if in a piece of glass. The pale face was absorbed and had no expression other than that of immense rigidity, it looked like an ancient animal mask on the portal of a temple. He didn’t seem to be breathing.
Memory overwhelmed me – I had seen him like that before, many years ago, when I was a little boy. His eyes were staring inwards, his hands were lying lifelessly next to each other, a fly had wandered over his face. And back then, maybe six years ago, he had looked so old and so timeless, no wrinkle on his face was different today.
Overtaken by fear, I quietly went out of the room and down the stairs. I met Ms. Eva in the hall. She was pale and seemed tired, something I didn’t recognize about her, a shadow flew through the window, the bright white sun had suddenly disappeared.
“I was with Max,” I whispered quickly. “Did something happen? He’s asleep, or sunk, I don’t know, I’ve seen him like that before.”
“You didn’t wake him up?” she asked quickly.
“No. He didn’t hear me. I went straight back out. Ms. Eva, tell me, what’s wrong with him?”
She rubbed the back of her hand over her forehead.
“Be calm, Sinclair, nothing will happen to him. He has withdrawn. It will not take long.”
She got up and went out into the garden, even though it was just starting to rain. I felt that I shouldn’t come with you. So I walked up and down the hall, smelled the intoxicatingly scented hyacinths, stared at my picture of a bird above the door and breathed with anxiety at the strange shadow that filled the house that morning. What was this? What happened?
Mrs. Eva soon returned. Raindrops hung in her dark hair. She sat down in her armchair. Tiredness was upon her. I came next to her, leaned over her and kissed the drops of her hair. Her eyes were bright and still, but the drops tasted like tears to me.
“Should I check on him?” I asked in a whisper.
She smiled weakly.
“Don’t be a little boy, Sinclair!” she admonished loudly, as if to break a spell within herself. “Leave now and come back later, I can’t talk to you now.”
I walked and ran away from the house and the city towards the mountains, the slanting thin rain came towards me, the clouds drifted low under heavy pressure as if in fear. There was hardly any wind below, it seemed to be storming above, and several times the sun broke out of the steely gray clouds, pale and bright, for a few moments.
Then a loose yellow cloud came drifting across the sky, it piled up against the gray wall and in a few seconds the wind formed an image out of the yellow and the blue, a huge bird that broke away from the blue confusion and flew in with wide flaps of its wings disappeared into the sky. Then the storm became audible and rain mixed with hail pelted down. A short, improbable and frightening sounding thunder cracked over the battered landscape, immediately afterwards a glimpse of sunshine broke through again and on the nearby mountains above the brown forest the pale snow shone pale and unreal.
When I returned hours later, wet and exhausted, Demian opened the front door for me himself.
He took me up to his room, there was a gas flame burning in the laboratory, there was paper lying around, he seemed to have been working.
“Sit down,” he invited, “you’ll be tired, it was terrible weather, it shows that you’ve been outside well. Tea is coming soon.”
“There’s something going on today,” I began hesitantly, “it can’t just be a little thunderstorm.”
He looked at me searchingly.
“Did you see anything?”
“Yes. For a moment I clearly saw an image in the clouds.”
“What a picture?”
“It was a bird.”
“The sparrowhawk? Was it him? Your dream bird?”
“Yes, it was my sparrowhawk. It was yellow and huge and flew into the blue-black sky.”
Demian breathed deeply.
There was a knock. The old servant brought tea.
“Take it, Sinclair, please. — I don’t think you saw the bird by chance?”
“Randomly? Do you happen to see things like this?”
“Well, no. He means something. You know what?”
“No. I just feel that it means a shock, a step in fate. I think it concerns all of us.”
He paced violently.
“One step in fate!” he shouted loudly.
“I dreamed the same thing last night, and my mother had a premonition yesterday that said the same thing. — I dreamed that I was climbing a ladder, on a tree trunk or a tower. When I was at the top, I saw the whole country, it was a great plain, with cities and villages burning. I can’t tell you everything yet, it’s not all clear to me yet.”
“Are you interpreting the dream as yourself?” I asked.
“On me? Naturally. Nobody dreams what doesn’t concern them. But it’s not just me, you’re right. I distinguish quite precisely between the dreams that show me movements in my own soul and the other, very rare ones in which the entire human fate is revealed. I have rarely had such dreams, and never one that I could say was a prophecy and came true. The interpretations are too uncertain. But I know this for sure, I dreamed something that didn’t concern me alone. The dream belongs to other, earlier ones that I had and which he continues. It is these dreams, Sinclair, that give me the premonitions I told you about. We know that our world is quite rotten, but that would not be a reason for its downfall or anything like that to prophesy. But I have had dreams for several years from which I conclude, or feel, or whatever you like – from which I feel that the collapse of an old world is approaching. At first they were very faint, distant premonitions, but they have become clearer and stronger. All I know yet is that something big and terrible is coming that will affect me. Sinclair, we will experience what we have sometimes spoken of! The world wants to renew itself. It smells like death. Nothing new comes without death. “It’s more terrible than I thought.” I stared at him in shock.
“Can’t you tell me the rest of your dream?” I asked shyly.
He shook his head.
“No.”
The door opened and Mrs. Eva came in.
“There you sit together! Children, you won’t be sad?”
She looked fresh and no longer tired. Demian smiled at her, she came to us like a mother to frightened children.
“We’re not sad, mother, we just puzzled a little about these new signs. But it doesn’t matter. Suddenly that becomes what If you want to come, be there, and then we will find out what we need to know.”
But I was in a bad mood, and when I said goodbye and walked through the hall alone, I found the scent of hyacinths to be wilted, bland and corpse-like. A shadow had fallen over us.