Steppenwolf

by Hermann Hesse

  In the second part of the performance, however, the enraged spectator, and the wolf itself as well, were compensated for this agony. You see, once that sophisticated demonstration of obedience had run its course, and after the tamer, smiling sweetly, had taken a triumphal bow over the group with the lamb and the wolf, the roles were reversed. All of a sudden, the Harry-like animal tamer, bowing low to the wolf, laid his whip at its feet and began to tremble and cower down, looking just as wretched as the animal had done before. The wolf, on the other hand, licked its lips and smiled, abandoning all its earlier forced and false airs. Its eyes beamed and every sinew in its body tightened as its savage self began to thrive again.

  Now it was the wolf's turn to command, and the human being had to obey. When ordered to, the tamer sank to his knees and played the part of the wolf, letting his tongue hang out and using his teeth, which were full of fillings, to tear the clothes from his body. Depending on what the 'human-tamer' commanded, he walked upright or crawled on all fours, sat up and begged, played dead, let the wolf ride on him, fetched him his whip. He proved a very gifted dog, highly imaginative in his willingness to submit to every humiliation and perversion. A beautiful girl came on to the stage and, going up to the tamed man, stroked his chin and rubbed her cheek against his. He, however, stayed on all fours, still an animal. Shaking his head, he began baring his teeth at the good-looking girl, eventually causing her to take flight, so menacing and wolf-like was his behaviour. When offered some chocolate he sniffed at it contemptuously and pushed it away. Finally, the white lamb and the plump, spotted rabbit were brought on again and the man showed what a willing pupil he was by playing the wolf to the hilt. His performance was breathtaking. Seizing on the screaming little creatures with his fingers and teeth, he tore scraps of skin and flesh from them, grinning as he ate them alive, and closing his eyes in drunken ecstasy as, beside himself, he quaffed their warm blood.

  Horrified, I fled, out through the door. I could see that this Magic Theatre was no unalloyed paradise. Under its attractive surface there were all manner of hidden hells. Dear God, was there no salvation to be found here either?

  I walked anxiously to and fro, my mouth tasting of blood and chocolate, the one just as nasty as the other. Longing to escape these troubled waters, I struggled inwardly with all my might to conjure up more tolerable, more congenial images. The line 'O friends, not these tones!'14 resounded in my head, and I remembered with horror those appalling photographs taken at the front that one had occasionally glimpsed during the war, those piles of tangled corpses, their faces transformed into devilish gargoyles by their gasmasks. As a humanitarian opponent of war, I had been horrified by such images then. How stupid and naive I still was! Today I knew better. No animal-tamer, no government minister, no general, no madman was capable of hatching up ideas and images in his head that didn't already exist within me, and mine were every bit as appalling, as savage and evil, as coarse and stupid as theirs.

  With a sigh of relief I recalled the inscription that, when the theatre performance began, I had seen the handsome youth respond to with such enthusiasm:

  ALL GIRLS ARE YOURS

  All things considered, there actually seemed to be nothing more desirable on offer than this. Pleased to be able to escape the damnable world of the wolf once more, I entered.

  Here, strange to say, what greeted me was the sweet fragrance of my youth, the atmosphere of my boyhood and adolescence, and I felt the young blood of those days flowing through my veins. So unbelievable was it and yet at the same time deeply familiar, it sent shivers down my spine. All the things I had done, thought and been only a short time ago sank into oblivion, and I was young once more. Only an hour, only moments ago, I had thought I knew perfectly well what love, what desire, what longing was, but that had been the love and longing of an old man. Now I was young again, and all that I was feeling inside me, this red-hot lava, this powerful tug of yearning, this passion melting the ice like a warm March wind, was young, fresh and genuine. Oh, how the forgotten fires were suddenly rekindled; how the sounds of yesteryear came swelling darkly back! What fresh life was quivering in my pulse, what cries and songs were filling my soul! I was a boy of fifteen or sixteen, my head was full of Latin and Greek, and beautiful lines of poetry. Effort and ambition dominated my thinking, the dream of becoming an artist my imagination. But what was burning and flickering at a much deeper level than all these smouldering fires was the flame of love, sexual hunger, an all-consuming premonition of lust.

  I was standing on one of the rocky outcrops above my small home town. The scents of a warm spring breeze and the first violets filled the air, and down there in the town I could see the river and the windows of my father's house glinting in the sun. Everything looked, sounded and smelled so abundant, so bursting with the freshness of creation; everything glowed with such rich colours; the spring breeze made everything it touched seem transfigured and hyperreal. The world was just as I had seen it long ago in the richest, most poetic hours of my first youth. I stood there on the hill, the wind ruffling my long hair. Lost in a daydream and filled with erotic longing, I unconsciously stretched out a hand and tore a half-opened bud from a shrub that was just coming into leaf. Holding it in front of my eyes, I sniffed at it, and its scent alone was enough to rekindle the memories of that time. Then I took this tiny green object playfully between my lips, lips that had yet to kiss a girl, and began to chew it. The tangy, aromatic, bitter taste of it at once brought home to me what I was experiencing. Everything fell into place again. What I was reliving was a moment from my last year as a schoolboy. One Sunday afternoon in the first days of spring when out walking alone, I had come across Rosa Kreisler, shyly said hello, and fallen head over heels in love.

  At the time, I had been full of anxious anticipation as I watched the beautiful young girl, who had not yet spotted me, coming up the hill towards me, alone and deep in reverie. Although she wore her hair tied up in thick plaits, I had still glimpsed some loose strands of it blowing and waving in the breeze on either side of her cheeks. For the first time in my life, I had seen the beauty of the girl, the beautiful and dreamlike effect of the wind playing in her delicate hair, the beautiful and arousing cut of her thin blue dress as it hung down over her young limbs. And just as the spicy, bitter taste of the bud I was chewing on had imbued me with all the alarmingly sweet joy and anxiety of spring, the sight of the girl now filled me with a deadly premonition of sexual passion, a foretaste of femininity, a deeply shocking presentiment of all the enormous opportunities it promised, all the nameless delights, the unimaginable entanglements, anxieties and sorrows, the heights of fulfilment and the depths of guilt. Oh, how I could feel the bitter taste of spring burning on my tongue! Oh, how the wind was playing in the loose hair dangling by her red cheeks! Then, arriving close by, she had looked up and recognized me. Blushing slightly for a moment, she had looked away. Then I greeted her, raising the new hat I'd worn at that day's confirmation service. Her composure soon regained, she lifted her head in a faintly ladylike fashion and greeted me back with a smile before slowly walking on with an air of confidence and superiority. A host of amorous wishes, demands and tributes that I sent after her surrounded her like a nimbus.

  That is how it had been one Sunday thirty-five years ago, and it had all come back to me at this moment: hill and town, March wind and scent of buds, Rosa and her brown hair, tumescent desire and sweet, suffocating anxiety. It was all as before, and it seemed to me that in all my life I had never again loved anyone in the way that I loved Rosa. This time, however, I was given the opportunity to welcome her differently. I saw her blush on recognizing me, saw her effort to disguise the fact, and knew at once that she liked me, that this encounter meant as much to her as it did to me. And this time, despite feeling anxious and inhibited, instead of raising my hat and holding it ceremoniously above my head as I stood there waiting until she passed by, I did as my pulsating heart commanded and cried: 'Rosa! Thank God you've come,
you lovely lovely lass. I'm so very fond of you.' It may not have been the cleverest way of putting it, but this was no time for being clever, and it was perfectly adequate. Rosa gave me no ladylike look, stopped rather than going on her way, looked at me, blushing even more than before, and said: 'Hello, Harry. Are you really fond of me?' As she spoke her brown eyes beamed at me from her vibrant face and I felt that my whole past life and loves had been wrong, confused and full of misfortune since the moment when I allowed Rosa to walk away from me on that Sunday. But now I had put right my mistake and everything was changing, taking a turn for the better.

  Clasping hands, we walked slowly on, both happy beyond words. We were very embarrassed, so unsure what to say or do that in our embarrassment we started to walk faster, breaking into a trot and ending up out of breath and having to stop, though still holding hands. Both children still, we were at a loss to know how to initiate things. That Sunday we didn't even get as far as a first kiss, but we were enormously happy. We stood there gasping for breath, then sat down on the grass. I stroked her hand, she shyly ran the other hand over my hair, then we stood up again and tried to measure which one of us was the taller. I was actually taller by the breadth of a finger, but instead of conceding the fact I insisted that we were exactly the same height. God had destined us for one another, I said, and one day we would marry. Then Rosa said she could smell violets and we kneeled down on the short grass of springtime to look for them. Each finding a few with tiny short stems, we made a present of them to one another. When it grew cooler and the sunlight was already falling at a sharp angle across the rocks Rosa said she must be getting back home. Since it was out of the question for me to accompany her we both felt sad, but we now had a secret we could share, and that was our most precious possession. Remaining up there among the rocks, I smelled Rosa's violets and lay face down on the ground overlooking a steep drop. I gazed down at the town, keeping watch until I spotted her sweet little figure appearing deep below me as she walked by the well and across the bridge. Now I knew she was back home in her father's house and passing through its cosy rooms while I was lying far away from her up here. But there was a bond uniting us, a current running from me to her, a secret carried on the air that separated us.

  Throughout that spring, we saw each other again, here and there, up in the rocks, by garden fences, and when the lilac began to blossom we gave each other our first timid kiss. What we children were capable of giving one another wasn't much. Our kiss lacked passion and plenitude, and I only dared give the hair that curled around her ears the gentlest of caresses. Yet all that we were capable of in the way of love and joy was ours, and with every shy touch, with every immature expression of affection, with every anxious moment spent waiting for one another, we were discovering fresh happiness, climbing one small rung on the ladder of love.

  In this way, starting with Rosa and the violets, I was able to relive my whole love life under happier auspices. Rosa was lost sight of and Irmgard appeared. The sun grew hotter, the stars giddier, but neither Rosa nor Irmgard became mine. I had to climb the ladder rung by rung, had to experience and learn a great deal, had to lose Irmgard, and after her Anna. Every girl I had loved once upon a time in my youth I was now permitted to love again, but this time I was able to inspire love in them, to give something to each one of them and to receive something in return. Wishes, dreams and possibilities that had once existed solely in my imagination were now made lived realities. Oh, Ida and Lore and all you other beautiful flowers that I once loved for a whole summer, for a month or just for a day!

  Realizing that I was now that handsome, passionate little youth that I had earlier seen running so eagerly towards love's doorway, I understood that I was presently living to the full this part of my being and life, only a tenth - no, a thousandth of which had previously achieved fulfilment. It was now being allowed to flourish, unhampered by all the other figures that constituted my self, neither disturbed by the thinker, plagued by Steppenwolf, nor restricted in scope by the writer, the dreamer, the moralist in me. On the contrary, I was now the lover and nothing but the lover. Love was the sole air I breathed, in happiness and in sorrow. I had already learned to dance with Irmgard, to kiss with Ida, before, one autumn evening under the wind-blown leaves of an elm, Emma, the most beautiful of them all, became the first to let me kiss her brownish breasts and invite me to drink from the cup of desire.

  I experienced a great deal in Pablo's little theatre, a thousand things more than can be put into words. All the girls I had ever loved were now mine. Each gave me what was hers alone to give and I gave to each of them what only she knew how to take from me. I got to sample much love, much happiness, much lust, and a great deal of confusion and sorrow too. In the space of this one dreamlike hour, all the love I had missed out on during my life returned magically to fill my garden with a variety of blooms: flowers that were chaste and delicate, garish flowers blazing with colour, dark flowers that swiftly faded. I ran the gamut of flickering desire, intense reverie, feverish melancholy, the anguish of death and the joyful radiance of rebirth. I found women who could only be won in haste, taken by storm; others it was a joy to woo at length and with utmost solicitude. Light was cast on every dim corner of my life in which I had once, if only for a minute, heard the voice of sex calling me, a look from a woman had aroused me, or I had been attracted by the glimpse of a girl's shimmering white skin. And now every previously missed opportunity was made up for, every woman becoming mine, each in her own way. There was the woman with the remarkably deep brown eyes under her flaxen hair that I had once stood next to for a quarter of an hour by the window in the corridor of an express train and who had later appeared to me several times in dreams. She didn't utter a word, but she taught me some things about lovemaking I never imagined existed, frightening, deadly arts. And then there was that sleek, calm Chinese woman from the dockside in Marseille with her glassy smile, smooth jet-black hair and swimming eyes. She too knew some outrageous things. Each of them had her secrets, each the perfume of her homeland. All of them kissed and laughed differently; all were bashful - and shameless too - in their own distinctive ways. The women came and went with the current. Either it bore them to me or I was washed towards them, then away again. To float like this on a wave of sexuality was like a childhood game, full of charm, full of danger, full of surprise. And I was amazed to discover how rich my ostensibly barren and loveless Steppenwolf existence had been in episodes of infatuation, sexual opportunities and temptations. I had let almost all of them slip by or had run away from them. Stumbling upon them, I had forgotten them as fast as I could, but here they were all stored up in their hundreds, every single one of them. Now I could see them, surrender to them, open myself to them and descend into the rosy half-light of their underworld. Even the orgy Pablo had once tempted me to indulge in recurred, along with other, earlier proposals I hadn't even understood at the time, to join in fantastic threesomes and foursomes. Now I was welcomed into such revels with a smile. Lots of things took place, lots of games were played, all of them unmentionable.

  From this unending current of temptations, vices and entanglements I resurfaced calmly and silently. I was now well equipped, full of knowledge, wise, deeply experienced, ripe for Hermione. For it was she, Hermione, who emerged as the final figure in my mythical cast of a thousand. In the endless series of names, hers was the last to appear, and its appearance coincided with my return to consciousness. It also marked the end of my erotic fairy tale, because I had no desire to encounter her here in the half-light of a magic mirror. Only the whole Harry would suffice for her, and I was now oh so determined to reconfigure all my chess pieces solely with her and her fulfilment in mind.

  The current had washed me up on dry land. I was again standing in the silent corridor behind the theatre's boxes. What now? I felt for the little chessmen in my pocket, but the urge to rearrange them had already lost its force. All around me I was confronted by this inexhaustible world of doors, inscript
ions and magic mirrors. Mechanically my eyes lit on the next notice and I shuddered to see that it read:

  HOW TO KILL THE ONE YOU LOVE

  I had a rapid flash of memory, lasting no more than a second. It was of Hermione at a restaurant table. Looking frighteningly serious, the food and wine forgotten, she was absorbed in profound conversation, telling me that she would make me fall in love with her only so that she could die by my hand. I felt a heavy wave of fear and gloom surge across my heart. Everything was suddenly confronting me again. Suddenly, deep down inside me, I could again sense fate pressing in on me. In my despair I felt for the figures in my pocket, meaning to take them out and work a little magic by rearranging them on my chessboard. But the figures had gone. Instead, what I took from my pocket was a knife. Frightened to death, I ran along the corridor, past all the doors, and suddenly found myself in front of the gigantic mirror. Looking into it, I saw a huge, handsome wolf, as tall as me. It was standing there motionless, its nervous, restless eyes flashing. Then, one eye glinting, it winked at me and laughed a little, its lips parting for an instant to reveal a red tongue.

  Where was Pablo? Where was Hermione? What had become of that clever chap with all his fine talk of reconstructing one's personality?

  I took another look in the mirror. I must have been mad. There was no wolf there rolling its tongue in its mouth behind the tall looking glass. What I saw in the mirror was me, Harry, my face ashen now, showing no trace of all those games I'd been playing. I looked terribly pale, exhausted by all the vices I'd indulged in, but at least I was a human being, someone you could talk to.

  'Harry,' I said, 'what are you doing there?'

  'Nothing,' said the figure in the mirror. 'I'm just waiting. I'm waiting for death.'

  'Where is death, then?' I asked.