Ingo, what an idiot you've been.
Worse than that: you've been a sucker. You've bought into the oldest spiel in the book. So be it—now you know the truth. About this blue flower, and a few other things as well. Too bad you had to learn it the hard way. But really, isn't it about time?
The sad thing is, it wasn't that much of a secret. Novalis himself, who thought up the blaue Blume in the first place, fairly spells it out.
I live through the day
Full of courage and trust,
And die every night,
Seared by soul-burning lust.
Which pretty much explains what kind of metaphor you're messing around with.
Emblem of poetic longing—what a laugh. It's an emblem, all right. It's an emblem because it pops up at the least expected times and the most unwelcome places. It unfurls and stands proudly and declines to wilt. It may not be the biggest thing in the forest but it sure calls attention to itself. My, what a striking color!— and you'll turn blue yourself if you try to ignore it. No use hoping it will go away: like the rankest weed, the blue flower needs to be… plucked. And plucked. And plucked again. Before you know it, you've got pollen all over the place. Any moment now somebody will notice, and you'll die of shame. Your death will come not as a blessed release but as a stupid and vulgar joke.
Lately he'd not been sleeping well, what with one thing and another. He lay open-eyed much of the night, reviewing certain scenes, imagining others, while a thousand more swam darkly in the shadows of his mind. He thought sometimes—thought quite hard, actually—about an archery contest and naked swimmers and two boys kissing in a meadow. He thought about a particular blond body that lay in a condition of despicable inviolacy only a few steps away. More than anything he thought about Anton. Sometimes his thoughts resembled ordinary memories (though what does “ordinary” mean, in this context?), but often they were more vividly colored, strangely paced, racing and slowing and occasionally locking on a single frame until the film caught fire. Images and sounds and textures and other unnameable sensations teemed so thickly in his mind that he experienced a sort of mental suffocation. It was like being caught, swarmed-over, in an especially violent dream, a dream that arose not in the mind but in the body itself. And Ingo would languish on whatever that night's bed might be—the forest floor, a stiff cot at a youth hostel or, once only, a decent mattress at a wayside inn, it made no difference to his transfigured flesh—damp with sweat, cool in the night air, burning with need, unable to keep still or to move, to think clearly or to surrender himself to oblivion. He had found the blue flower, he had devoured its seed, and now it was growing inside him, drawing nourishment from his gut.
He was a horrid, sticky mess. Everything, every feeling and mood and memory, clung to him. Nevermore will you come out of this wood—they had tried to warn him about that, too.
On the other hand… did he really want to leave? Ever, ever again?
* * *
The odd thing about these thoughts, or dreams, or agonized visions, where Anton was concerned, was their incompleteness. They resembled some modern school of painting—Cubism or the Blaue Reiter, Ingo knew little about such things—in which the central image is distorted or broken into pieces, changed from a three-dimensional object into a purely intuitive representation, as though you were being shown not the thing itself but a certain feeling about that thing. If the artist hated what he was painting, it would look one way; if he loved it, another. When Ingo thought of Anton, or tried to, he succeeded only in calling up certain aspects, isolated impressions: a flashing smile; a long leg, and how it flexed at the knee; the specific temperature of breath moving across his stomach; a string of words that played and replayed itself with no particular meaning, serving simply as a medium for that wonderful, throaty voice.
Where had he gone—the actual, warm, breathing, fully formed Anton? How had Ingo lost hold of him? And why could he not bring him back now, alive and whole, if only for a sliver of a second?
They had had so little time together. That was one thing. But even so— those days had been the most intensely felt, the most deeply experienced of Ingo's life. Of course they had ended, but did that mean, of necessity, that they were just… gone? Beyond his grasp, sliding deeper into the past at every moment? Is that how it worked? So much for comforting nostrums like I'll always be with you, or You'll live in my heart forever.
Another thing, though. What exactly had it been? Ingo had assumed it was love—and if it wasn't, for God's sake, what more was required? But he wasn't sure. He knew there'd been more to it than you could measure by just tallying up the things they'd done, the physical things. (Even now, in his fallen and gooey state, Ingo shied from the frank language of sexuality.) Yet how much more? More in what way? For all he knew, anyone who'd ever done such things with another person felt like this. But no—he didn't believe that either.
The fact remained, irreducibly: he could not remember Anton as he felt he ought to. Somehow, in more than just a literal sense, they had parted. Some crucial aspect of Anton, the person he had been, the things he had meant, now had dropped into the past. In one respect this was a blessing; it marginally decreased Ingo's nightly torment. But on the whole it made him feel more miserably alone than ever.
* * *
Then the sun would rise and the nighttime ordeal would seem stranger still, because it would have no place in the glaring world of daytime. Here people would move and talk and laugh and quarrel as though Ingo were simply one of them, not a broken, half-ghostly being, disfigured by the fires of lust and never made whole again. And he would pass among them like a visitor from another realm of being, scarcely able to understand the native tongue, let alone grasp the finer points of social comportment. I feel the breeze of another planet—Stefan George, as usual, getting here before him. And the queer thing was, nobody seemed to notice.
Now and then Martina threw him a certain kind of look: inquisitive, perhaps concerned or sympathetic. God forbid, not pitying, please. But she never pressed it further than that—she had, mind you, her own wild garden to tend—and for the most part Ingo was content simply to be left alone.
The journey east did not require much of his attention; it proceeded and it carried him along and on a certain level he even took an active role in it. He joined in with Hagen's hiking songs, and gathered firewood, and hefted his share of the supplies. He tossed in his two cents on the question of which path to take—the nature of woodland trails is such that you never can really be sure. He ate and drank and relieved himself behind bushes and bathed in cold mountain streams and even tried once to scrub the dirt out of his clothes. But that was less than a success and he found, rather to his surprise, that he still felt embarrassed undressing in front of others.
Ingo, he thought, you are a fool. But a singular fool, at least, ein eigener Narr: a fool of your own creation.
And then, once upon a time…
Es war einmal, that had been the Grimms' formula. A ritual phrase, an incantation to blur the boundaries of time and cast the listener back—or perhaps sideways—into another world with its own strictures and possibilities. At any moment along the path you might encounter a giant, a wolf, a crone, a tricky fellow dressed in rags—but whether woman or youth, elf or ogre, it surely would not be who or what it seemed at a hasty glance. You need to bear this in mind, because in this world—as perhaps in others—when opportunity presents itself, you have but a single chance to grasp it. Likewise when danger arises you have only an instant to step clear. Hesitate too long, or misjudge the situation, and you are lost.
Once upon a time, then, Ingo woke at an indefinite hour in a wood that was not quite silent and not quite dark. A pale glow seemed to emanate from rocks and leaves and moss, and tree trunks stood flat as shadows, and the sky held a memory of moonlight but no moon. From somewhere— neither far nor near—came a soft rustling amid the undergrowth, maybe tiny creatures venturing abroad, maybe restless spirits trudging on their endless journey
. Maybe a monster closing in. Maybe a lithe-limbed, pretty sprite with mischief in his eyes.
Ingo could not guess what time it was. He remembered tossing on his bedroll until quite late, but after that he must have dropped into a deep, if not necessarily long, slumber. His thoughts were dulled as though by a sleeping draught, and his limbs felt so heavy they might have been paralyzed. He tried to recall his last dream but found only unconnected impressions that ran together like watery paint. More of the usual, he supposed. Lurid fantasies, memories spun into fantastic lies, emotions he had no name for. The insanity of sleep meets the panic of waking. He lay on his cushion of fallen needles like a man trapped between the last world and the next, a citizen of neither.
Suddenly, Isaac loomed above him—as if he were floating there, weightless and ghostly pale. Ingo's heart slammed a couple of times, then calmed with recognition. Only Isaac.
“Shh,” the boy admonished him, “get up,” though he seemed to make no sound. He motioned with a flick of the head or the casting of an eye; for some reason the precise gesture was hard to focus on, yet its meaning was clear. Come on—let's get out of here before anyone else wakes up.
Ingo could find no reason to refuse. In his bleary state the idea made good sense. He sat up and rubbed his eyes and soon was stumbling away from the camp, which that night had been pitched on a broad ledge in the foothills of northwest Carpathia: he wasn't entirely sure which country they were in. Ahead of him, Isaac ducked through a scrim of black-leaved laurel that edged the old forest road, and they stepped out onto a north-facing slope formed mostly of naked, rain-smoothed rock and hence easy to walk on, even in semi-darkness. They proceeded obliquely downhill. Ingo tried to catch up with the smaller, more quick-footed boy, but he could not.
By increments, like a ticking watch, the landscape grew brighter: dawn could not be far away. Now all the questions Ingo ought to have asked pressed down on him. What was Isaac up to? Where he was taking them; why did Ingo have to come along? As if overhearing, Isaac looked back across one scrawny shoulder. You might, had you been so disposed, have read his quirky, corner-of-the-mouth smile any number of ways.
The ground leveled off and the sky took on a faint blush of magenta. A sound of moving water came from someplace ahead. In crevices between rocks appeared tufts of blue-eyed grass, Sisyrinchium, a dwarfish cousin of the lily clan, whose lavender six-pointed flowers wilt in the evening but open again in the warmth of afternoon. Ingo would not have recognized it, would never even have seen it, a couple of weeks ago. To have loved, he thought— even for an hour, imperfectly—is to have glimpsed the world through a different set of eyes. And through those eyes, to have perceived a whole new dimension, a secret plane of reality, hidden from ordinary sight. So much he had learned from Anton, so much. He lurched onward dumbly, feeling something like bereavement. His feet met the rugged concavity of a draw with the easy familiarity of old neighbors whom time has turned into friends. The air smelled of mountains, of autumn, of heartbreak.
Isaac at last stopped, but Ingo, overfilled with his own thoughts, didn't notice in time and the two nearly collided. Isaac laughed, intercepting him with a stiff, sinewy arm. There was no guile in his laughter or in the clear, faceted sparkle of his eyes.
“I've got something to show you,” he said—practically the first words either of them had spoken all morning. “Only we're a little early, we've got to wait till just the right time. Okay?”
His voice, his entire outward manner, had a surface impenetrable as concrete. Ingo couldn't fathom what, if anything, lay underneath. He supposed this was a useful survival trait for an undersized kid in tough surroundings. Isaac squatted down on the irregular ground and he followed suit. There seemed no need to talk about anything. The day came on rapidly now; the sky lost its rosy flush, and a rope of gray cloud stretched across the eastern horizon, backlit in yellow. Ingo rubbed his hands together, anticipating the pleasure of sunrise.
“Okay, let's go,” Isaac said suddenly. Quickly he was up and moving away, lower into the mouth of the gully. The footing was difficult here, and sharp-pointed rocks, having tumbled from someplace above, lay all around; it would be quite easy to trip and land on one. Nonetheless Ingo struggled to keep pace, steadying himself by using scrappy little fir trees as handholds. Soon his fingers were black with resin and smelled of Christmas. Ahead, the hill reared up in a promontory, deeply cleft down the center and dark except for a thin silvery line, like a spider thread, that ran down its face and disappeared among a jumble of boulders. The sound of water grew more distinct.
“It's a waterfall!” Ingo said, understanding at last. “Wait, I want to look at this.”
Isaac shook his head. “Not from here. Come on. The sun's almost up.”
He led them on a roundabout path, deeper into the draw and through a copse of quivering birch. A narrow stream darted along a groove in the rock, making quiet, somewhat musical noises almost like giggling. The first rays of dawn—pink-tinged gold, like amber with a smidgen of blood inside—struck the slope above them. Then they stepped clear of the trees and the waterfall stood before them, tumbling perhaps three stories into a little chasm it seemed to have churned out for itself. Numerous protrusions from the cliff face shattered the silver column and sent water jetting and splashing and streaming in every possible direction, in patterns that altered continually. Glittering skeins dangled and waved like gonfalons, and through them, at just this instant, blazed the sunrise—the light breaking into a thousand colors, each droplet becoming a minuscule prism, and the water in turn dissolving the sun into its molten essence.
Ingo drew his breath. It was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen, and he was no stranger to beauty. He stared for a minute or two—the vision never ceased changing, like a highly advanced type of kaleidoscope—until after a while he became aware that Isaac was looking at him. Bemused, he looked back.
“I knew you'd like it,” said Isaac, sounding pleased with himself. “I'm not much for nature, myself. But I thought, you know—I bet Ingo would go for it.”
“But…”
But why—the question was too obvious to ask.
“I owe you,” the kid said with a shrug. “Like I told you. I owe you one bigger than this, actually. But hey. It's pretty, right?”
“That it is.”
They stood and admired it a while longer, though the magical effect diminished rapidly with the onset of full daylight. A particular combination of circumstances seemed to be required for the full effect: sun, water, season, observer, each needed to be in precise alignment. Ingo had no intention of upsetting it by asking how the hell Isaac had known about this place. Certain things are best regarded as eternal mysteries, and he was quite sure this was one of them.
Afterward, there was no thought of going straight back to the campsite. Something must have come loose in Ingo's brain, like a broken electrical coupling, because all he wanted to do was lie on the rock in the morning sun. He wasn't really drowsy; to the contrary he felt unusually alive and alert, though in a languid, catlike fashion. He was worn out from days of hiking; just to sit still was an indescribable pleasure. More profoundly, he was exhausted from the nightly onslaught of The Sorrows of Young Ingo— insomnia, doubt, aloneness, desire—which were not lessened by the knowledge that they were not his alone. He was hardly the only citizen of Secret Germany, after all. There was a whole underground nation of people like himself, unconfined by borders or language. That realization had been thrilling at first, but after a while the strain of it began to wear at you. You hankered for normality. You wished things could get boring again, if only for a day or two.
That morning, sprawled in the sunlight, Ingo felt bored in the nicest possible way. The chortle of water slipping invisibly among the rocks seemed to poke gentle fun at his self-absorption, his Gothic melancholia. Had the others been around—Butler, Hagen, Martina—he might have found it difficult to just let go, to lie there unself-consciously, doing nothing, planning nothing,
regretting nothing. With Isaac, somehow, it was different. With Isaac, you could just say to hell with it all.
Speaking of Isaac, though—where was he, what was he doing, while Ingo lay there enjoying his short-lived truce with the world? Was he okay? Happy, angry, apathetic, impatient to grow up, nostalgic for his childhood? Was he thinking of his family, his lost home across the sea? Or cooking up some fresh scheme to torment Hagen and thwart the frowning fates?
It would be as useful to ask, What do foxes dream of? Where does the fire go when you blow out a candle? The only thing Ingo cared to know was that when he turned his head sometime around mid-morning, Isaac was perched next to him on the rock, upright and frisky, red hair lying in tufts around his elf-ears, raring to go. Which was more or less exactly how he would always remember him.
Isaac declared he was starving to death, and Ingo—despite having left his appetite somewhere around the Leuchtenburg, and shedding a few pounds to prove it—decided he must be starving, too. Maybe the idea of food touched some nostalgic chord in him: Remember the good old days when we used to eat? Life was so much simpler then.
Again, the campsite would never do. No, our food must be cooked up in a proper kitchen, served on proper plates at a proper table. We must on the side have a satisfying beverage—thank you, but no more of Frau Möhring's dandelion-root “coffee.” Above all we must have only pleasant company, which means present company, because things become complicated if we toss in any one of our trailmates, don't they? There would then be debates, differences, misunderstandings. Whereas with just the two of us, old comrades from the Battle of Frau-Holle-Quell, everything's right out in the open—right, pal?
Another Green World Page 36
