Narcissus and Goldmund

by Hermann Hesse

  But at the same time he had another feeling: that Narcissus had ceased to be his cautioning, superior guide and awakener. Today he felt he had entered a country in which he must find his own roads, in which no Narcissus could guide him. He was glad that he realized this. As he looked back, the days of his dependence seemed shameful and oppressive to him. Now he had become aware; he was no longer a child, a student. It was good to know this. And yet--how hard it was to say farewell! To know that his friend was kneeling in the church back there and not be able to give him anything, to be of no help, to be nothing to him. And now he would be separated from him for a long time, perhaps forever, and know nothing of him, hear his voice no longer, look into his noble eyes no longer.

  He tore himself away and followed the stony little road. A few hundred steps from the cloister walls he stood still, took a deep breath, and uttered the owl call as best he could. A similar call answered in the distance downstream.

  "Like animals we call to each other," was the thought that came to him as he remembered the hour of love in the afternoon. Only now it occurred to him that no words had been exchanged between him and Lise, except at the very end, after the caresses were over, and then only a few, and they had been insignificant. What long conversations he had had with Narcissus! But now, it seemed, he had entered a wordless world, in which one called to one another like owls, in which words had no meaning. He was ready for it. He had no more need for words today, or for thoughts; only for Lise, only for this wordless, blind, mute groping and searching, this sighing and melting.

  Lise was there; she came out of the forest to meet him. He reached out to feel her, framed her head with tender, groping hands, her hair, her neck and throat, her slender waist, her firm hips. One arm about her, he walked on with her, without speaking, without asking where to. She walked with sure step in the dark forest. He had trouble keeping up with her. Like a fox or a marten, she seemed to see with night eyes, walked without stumbling, without tripping. He let himself be led into the night, into the forest, into the blind secret wordless, thoughtless country. He was no longer thinking: not of the cloister he had left behind, not of Narcissus.

  Like two mutes they moved through the dark forest, sometimes on soft moss upholstery, sometimes on hard root ribs. Sometimes the sky shone light through sparse high treetops; at other times the darkness was complete. Branches slapped his face; brambles held him back. Everywhere she knew her way and found a passage; she seldom stopped, seldom hesitated. After a long time they arrived in a clearing of solitary pines that stood far apart. The pale night sky opened wide before them. The forest had come to an end; a meadow valley welcomed them with a sweet smell of hay. They waded through a small, soundless creek. Out here in the open the silence was still greater than in the forest: no rustling bushes, no startled night beast, no crackling twigs.

  Lise stopped in front of a big haystack.

  "We'll stay here," she said.

  They sat down in the hay, taking deep breaths at first and enjoying the rest; they were both a little tired. They lay back, listening to the silence, feeling their foreheads dry and their faces gradually cool off. Goldmund crouched, pleasantly tired. Playfully he bent his knees and stretched them straight again, took deep breaths of the night air and the smell of hay, and thought neither backward nor forward. Slowly he let himself be drawn and enticed by the scent and warmth of the woman beside him, replied here and there to her caressing hands and felt joy when she began to burn and pushed herself closer and closer to him. No, here neither words nor thoughts were needed. Clearly he felt all that was important and beautiful, the youthful strength, the simple, healthy beauty of the female body, felt it grow warm, felt its desire; he also felt clearly that, this time, she wished to be loved differently from the first time, that she did not want to guide and teach him this time, but wanted to wait for his attack, for his greed. Quietly he let the streams flow through him; happily he felt the boundless fire grow, felt it alive in both of them, turning their little lair into the vital, breathing center of all the quiet night.

  He bent over Lise's face and began to kiss her lips in the darkness. Suddenly he saw her eyes and forehead shine with a gentle light. He looked in surprise, watched the glow grow brighter, more intense. Then he knew and turned his head: the moon was rising over the edge of the long black stretch of forest. He watched the white gentle light miraculously inundate her forehead, her cheeks, slide over her round, limpid throat. Softly, delighted, he said: "How beautiful you are!"

  She smiled as though a present had been made her. He sat up; gently he pulled the gown off her shoulders, helped her out of it, peeled her until her shoulders and breasts shone in the cool light of the moon. Completely enraptured, he followed the delicate shadows with eyes and lips, looking and kissing; she held still as though under a spell, with eyes cast down and a solemn expression as though, even to her, her beauty was being discovered and revealed for the first time.

  7

  IT grew cool over the fields. The moon climbed higher by the hour. The lovers lay on their softly lighted bed, absorbed in their games, dozing off together, turning toward each other anew upon awakening, kindling each other, entangled once more, falling asleep once more. They lay exhausted after their last embrace. Lise had nestled deep into the hay, breathing heavily. Goldmund was stretched out on his back, motionless; for a long time he stared into the moon-pale sky; a deep sadness rose in both, which they escaped in sleep. They slept profoundly, desperately, greedily, as though for the last time, as though they had been condemned to stay awake forever and had to drink in all the sleep in the world during these last hours.

  When Goldmund awoke, he saw Lise busy with her black hair. He watched her for a while, absent-minded, still half asleep.

  "You're awake?" he said finally.

  Her head turned with a start.

  "I've got to go now," she said, embarrassed and somewhat sad. "I didn't want to wake you."

  "Well, I'm awake now. Must we move on so soon? After all, we're homeless."

  "I am," said Lise. "But you belong to the cloister."

  "I no longer belong to the cloister. I'm like you, completely alone, with nowhere to go. But I'll go with you, of course."

  Lise looked away.

  "You can't come with me, Goldmund. I must go to my husband; he'll beat me, because I stayed out all night. I'll say I lost my way. But he won't believe me."

  Goldmund remembered Narcissus's prediction. So that's how it was.

  "I've made a mistake then," he said. "I had thought that you and I would stay together. --Did you really want to let me sleep and run off without saying farewell?"

  "Oh, I was afraid you might get angry and beat me, perhaps. That my husband beats me, well, that's how things are, that's normal. But I didn't want you to beat me, too."

  He held on to her hand.

  "Lise," he said, "I won't beat you, not now, not ever. Wouldn't you rather stay with me than with your husband, since he beats you?"

  She tugged to get her hand free.

  "No, no, no," she said with tears in her voice. And since he could feel that her heart was pulling away from him, that she preferred the other man's blows to his good words, he let go of her hand, and now she really began to cry. At the same time she started to run. Clasping both hands over her streaming eyes, she ran off. He stood silently and watched her go. He felt sorry for her, running off across the mowed meadows, summoned and drawn by who knew what power, an unknown power that set him thinking. He felt sorry for her, and a little sorry for himself as well; he had not been lucky apparently; alone and a little stunned, he sat in the hay, abandoned, deserted. But he was still tired and eager for sleep; never had he felt so exhausted. There was time to be unhappy later. Immediately he went back to sleep and woke only when the sun stood high and made the air hot around him.

  He felt rested now; quickly he got up, ran to the brook, washed, and drank. Memories came gushing forth; love images from the night exhaled their perfume like unkno
wn flowers, evoked many gentle, tender feelings. His thoughts ran after them as he began to walk briskly. Once more he felt, tasted, smelled, touched everything over and over. How many dreams the unknown woman had fulfilled for him, all the buds she had brought to flowering, stilled so many wonderings and longings, roused so many new ones in their place!

  Field and heath lay before him, dry, fallow stretches and dark forest. Beyond it might be farms and mills, a village, a town. For the first time the world lay open before him, wide and waiting, ready to receive him, to do him good or harm. He was no longer a student who saw the world through a window; his walking was no longer a stroll ending with the inevitable return. Now the wide world had become a reality, he was part of it, it contained his fate, its sky was his sky, its weather his weather. He was small in this large world, no bigger than a horse, an insect; he ran through its blue-green infinity. No bell called him out of bed, to mass, to class, to meals.

  Oh, how hungry he was! Half a loaf of corn bread, a bowl of milk, some gruel soup--what delicious memories! His stomach had come awake. He passed a cornfield, with half-ripe ears. He stripped them with fingers and teeth; avidly he chewed the tiny, slimy kernels, plucked more and still more, stuffed his pockets with ears of corn. Later he found hazelnuts. They were still quite green, but he bit into them joyfully, cracked their shells, and put a handful in his pocket.

  As he entered the forest, he saw pines and an occasional oak or ash, and soon he found blueberries in unending abundance. He rested and ate and cooled off. Blue harebells grew in the sparse, hard forest grass; brown, sunny butterflies rose and vanished capriciously in ragged flight. Saint Genevieve had lived in a forest like this; he had always loved her story. How much he would have liked to meet her. Or he might find a hermitage in the forest, with an old, bearded father in a cave or a bark hut. Or perhaps peat diggers lived in the forest; he would have liked to speak to them. Or even robbers; they would probably not harm him. It would be pleasant to meet somebody, anybody. But he was well aware that he could walk in the forest for a long time, today, tomorrow, several days more, without meeting anyone. That, too, had to be accepted, if it was his destiny. It was better not to think too much, to take things as they came.

  He heard a woodpecker tapping and tried to find it. For a long time he tried in vain to catch sight of the bird. At last he succeeded and watched it for a while: the bird glued to the trunk of the tree, all alone, tap-tap-tapping, turning its busy head this way and that. What a pity that one couldn't speak to animals. It would have been pleasant to call a greeting up to the woodpecker, to say a friendly word and learn something about its life in the trees perhaps, about its work and its joys. Oh, if one could only transform oneself!

  He remembered how he used to draw sometimes, during his hours of leisure, how he used to draw figures with the stylus on his writing tablet, and flowers, leaves, trees, animals, people's heads. He'd amuse himself that way for hours. Sometimes he had created creatures of his own imagination, like a small God, had drawn eyes and a mouth into the chalice of a flower, shaped figures into a cluster of leaves sprouting on a branch, placed a head on top of a tree. For whole hours those games had made him happy, spellbound, able to perform magic, drawing lines that often surprised him--a figure he had started suddenly turned into a leaf or a tree, the snout of a fish, a foxtail, someone's eyebrow. That's how one ought to be able to transform oneself, he thought, the way he had been able to transform the playful lines on his tablet. Goldmund longed to become a woodpecker for a day perhaps, or a month; he would have lived in the treetops, would have run up the smooth trunks and pecked at the bark with his strong beak, keeping balance with his tail feathers. He would have spoken woodpecker language and dug good things out of the bark. The woodpecker's hammering sounded sweet and strong among the echoing trees.

  Goldmund met many animals on his way through the forest. There were quite a number of hares; at his approach they'd bound out of the underbrush, stare at him, turn and run off, ears folded back, white under the tail. He found a long snake lying in a clearing. It didn't move; it was not a live snake, only an empty skin. He picked it up and examined it carefully: a beautiful gray and brown pattern ran down the back; the sun shone through it; it was cobweb thin. He saw blackbirds with yellow beaks; frightened, they'd look at him from stiff, narrow eyeballs, fly off close to the ground. There were many red robins and finches. He came to a hole, a puddle filled with thick green water, on which long-legged spiders ran in eager, frenzied confusion, absorbed in an incomprehensible game. Above flew several dragonflies with deep-blue wings. And once, toward nightfall, he saw something--or rather, he saw nothing except frantic leaves, branches breaking, clumps of mud slapping the ground. A large, barely visible animal came bursting through the underbrush with enormous impact--a stag perhaps, or a boar; he couldn't tell. For a long time he stood panting with fright. Terrified, he listened in the direction the animal had taken, was still listening with pounding heart long after everything had grown silent again.

  He couldn't find his way out of the forest; he was forced to spend the night there. He picked a sleeping place and built a bed of moss, trying to imagine what it would be like if he never found his way out of the forest, if he had to stay in it forever. That would surely be a great misfortune. Living on berries was after all not impossible, nor was sleeping on moss. Besides, he would doubtless manage to build a hut for himself eventually, perhaps even to make a fire. But living alone forever and ever, among the quietly sleeping tree trunks, with animals that ran away, with whom one could not speak--that would be unbearably sad. Not to see people, not to say good morning and good night to anyone; no more faces and eyes to look into; no more girls and women to look at, no more kisses; never again to play the lovely secret game of lips and legs, that would be unthinkable! If this were his fate, he thought, he would try to become an animal, a bear or a stag, even if it meant forsaking the salvation of his soul. To be a bear and love a she-bear would not be bad, would at least be much better than to keep one's reason and language and all that, and vegetate alone, sad and unloved.

  Before falling asleep in his bed of moss, he listened to the many incomprehensible, enigmatic night sounds of the forest, with curiosity and fear. They were his companions now. He had to live with them, grow accustomed to them, compete with them, get along with them; he belonged to the foxes and the deer, to pine and fir. He had to live with them, share air and sunshine with them, wait for daybreak with them, starve with them, be their guest.

  Then he fell asleep and dreamed of animals and people, was a bear and devoured Lise amid caresses. In the middle of the night he awoke with a deep fear he couldn't explain, suffered infinite anguish in his heart and lay thinking for a long time, deeply disturbed. He realized that yesterday and today he had gone to sleep without saying his prayers. He got up, knelt beside his moss bed, and said his evening prayer twice, for yesterday and today. Soon he was asleep again.

  In the morning he looked about the forest with surprise; he had forgotten where he was. Now his fear of the forest began to dwindle. With new joy he entrusted himself to the life around him; and all the while he continued to walk, taking his direction from the sun. At one point he came to a completely smooth stretch in the forest--hardly any underbrush, nothing but very thick old straight pines. After he had walked around these columns for a while, they began to remind him of the columns in the main cloister church, the very same church into which he had watched his friend Narcissus disappear through the dark portal the other day--how long ago? Was it really only two days ago?

  It took him two days and two nights to reach the end of the forest. Joyfully he recognized signs of human habitation: cultivated land, strips of field with barley and oats, meadows through which a narrow footpath had been trodden; he could see sections of it here and there. Goldmund pulled out a few stalks of barley and chewed on them. With friendly eyes he looked at the tilled land; everything felt warm and human to him after the long wilderness of the woods: the littl
e footpath, the oats, the wilted, bleached cornflowers. Soon he would meet people. After a short hour he came to a crucifix at the edge of a field; he knelt and prayed to the feet. Coming around the protruding nose of a hill, he suddenly found himself in front of a shady lime tree. Delighted, he heard the music of a well from which water ran through a wooden pipe into a long wooden trough. He drank cold delicious water and noticed with joy a couple of thatched roofs seemingly coming out of the elderberry trees; the berries were already dark. The lowing of a cow touched him still more than all these signs of friendliness; it sounded so pleasantly warm and hospitable, like a greeting that had come to meet him, a welcome.

  He investigated a bit and then approached the hut from which the lowing had come. Outside the door, in the mud, sat a small boy with reddish hair and light-blue eyes. An earthen pot was beside him, filled with water, and with its mud and water he was making a dough. His bare legs were already smeared with it. Happy and earnest, he kneaded the wet mud between his hands, watched it squish through his fingers, made it into balls, used one knee for pressing and shaping.

  "God bless you, little boy," Goldmund said in a very friendly voice. The little boy looked up, saw the stranger, opened his mouth, puckered his plump face, and ran bawling, on all fours, through the door. Goldmund followed him and came into a kitchen; it was so dark after the bright noon glare, he could not see anything at first. He said a Christian greeting, just in case, but there was no reply; but the screaming of the frightened child was finally answered by a thin old voice that comforted the boy. Finally, a tiny old woman stood up in the darkness and came closer; she held a hand to her eyes and looked at the stranger.

  "God bless you, mother," Goldmund cried. "May all the dear saints bless your kind face; I haven't seen a human being in three days."

  The little old woman gaped at him, a bit simple, from farsighted eyes, not understanding.

  "What is it you want?" she asked suspiciously.

  Goldmund took her hand and stroked it lightly.