Doctor Glas

by Hjalmar Söderberg

THE PASTOR: his face pursues me, too, pursues me with just the expression it had during our last meeting when I brought the conversation around to sexual matters. How can I describe this expression? It was the expression of someone who smells something rotten and secretly finds the smell pleasing.

  AUGUST 2

  THE MOON IS OUT. All my windows are open. In my study the lamp is burning; I’ve put it on the leaf of the secretary out of reach of the night wind that gently fills the curtain like a sail. I pace back and forth in the room, stopping now and then at the secretary to set down a line. I stood for a long time at one of the windows in the parlor, looking out and listening for all the strange sounds of the night. But tonight it’s quiet down there under the dark trees. Only a solitary woman is sitting on a bench, and she’s been there a long time. And the moon shines.

  *

  When I came home at noon there was a book on my desk, and when I opened it a visiting card fell out: Eva Mertens.

  I remember she mentioned this book the other day and I said, without really thinking, that I’d like to read it. I said this out of courtesy, so I wouldn’t be guilty of dismissing something that interested her. Since then I haven’t given it a thought.

  But clearly she has.

  Am I being terribly foolish if I draw the conclusion that she’s a bit taken by me? I can tell she’s in love. But if she loves someone else, then why does she have so much interest left for me?

  Her eyes are clear and honest and she has rich brown hair. Her nose is slightly crooked. Her mouth—her mouth I can’t recall. Well, yes, it’s red and somewhat large, but I can’t quite conjure it up. And one really knows only a mouth one has kissed, or very much wanted to kiss. —I know such a mouth.

  I sit looking at the small, simple, correct visiting card with the name printed in pale letters. But I see more than the name. There’s a certain kind of writing that becomes visible only when exposed to strong heat. I don’t know if I have this heat, but I can read the invisible writing anyway: “Kiss me, be my husband, give me children, let me love. I long to be able to love.”

  “Here there are many virgins, as yet untouched by any man, who do not thrive on sleeping alone. Therefore shall they have good men for husbands.”

  Thus, more or less, spoke Zarathustra, the real Zarathustra, the old one, not the one with the whip.

  Am I a “good man”? Would I be able to be a good husband to her?

  I wonder what sort of image she has of me. She doesn’t know me. In her untroubled heart, which contains merely a few kind, tender thoughts about her nearest and dearest, and perhaps a little nonsense as well, an image has been created that has some of my external characteristics, but which isn’t me, and that image is pleasing to her, apparently—God knows why, perhaps primarily because I’m unmarried. But if she knew me—if, for instance, by chance she should happen to read what I write on these pieces of paper in the evening—then I think her instinct would caution her to shy away from me. I think the chasm between our souls is too wide. Or who knows: when it comes to marriage, perhaps it’s actually an advantage if the chasm is wide—if it were smaller, I might be tempted to try to bridge it, and that could never end well. The woman I could reveal myself to doesn’t exist. But still: to live by her side and never give her access to my true self, my real concerns—could I treat a woman that way? Let her embrace a stranger believing it’s me—could I do that?

  Yes, I suppose I could. That’s probably what always happens. We know so little about each other. We embrace a shadow and love a dream. For that matter, what do I know about her?

  But I’m alone, the moon is shining, and I long for a woman. I almost feel like going over to the window and inviting her up, the woman sitting alone on the bench down there, waiting for someone who doesn’t come. I have port wine and schnapps and beer and good food and a comfortable bed. It would be heaven for her.

  *

  I sit here thinking about Markel’s words the other night about me and happiness. I feel a strong urge to get married and be happy as can be, just to provoke him.

  AUGUST 3

  YES, THE MOON. It’s back again. I remember so many moons. The earliest one was behind the windowpane on winter evenings when I was a little boy. It was always over a white roof. Once my mother read Viktor Rydberg’s poem, “The Christmas Elf,” aloud to us children, and I recognized it right away. But it didn’t yet have any of the qualities it later acquired—it was neither mild and sentimental nor cold and horrible. It was just huge and bright. It belonged with the window, and the window belonged with the room. It lived with us.

  Later, when people noticed I was musical and let me take piano lessons and I could pick out a little Chopin, then the moon took on new meaning for me. I remember one night when I was about twelve I lay awake and couldn’t sleep because Chopin’s twelfth nocturne kept running through my head, and because the moon was shining. This was in the country; we’d just moved out there, and as yet there was no shade in my bedroom. The moonlight flowed like a huge white river into the room and across the bed and the headboard. I sat upright in bed and sang. I had to sing this wonderful melody without words, I couldn’t escape it. It became part of the moonlight and in both was a promise of something extraordinary that one day would come my way, I don’t know what, a restless happiness or a misfortune that was worth more than all the happiness in the world, something burning and blissful and enormous that awaited me. And I sang until my father appeared in the door and bellowed at me to sleep.

  That was Chopin’s moon. And it was the same moon that later shimmered and shone above the water on August evenings when Alice sang. I loved her.

  I remember my Uppsala moon, too. Never have I seen a moon with such a cold, distant face. Uppsala has a completely different climate than Stockholm; it’s in the interior, with drier, clearer air. One winter night I was walking with an older friend along the white, snow-covered streets with their gray buildings and black shadows. We were discussing philosophy. At seventeen, I scarcely believed in God, but I refused to accept Darwinism: to me it made everything seem meaningless, stupid, insignificant. We went under a black arch and up a few steps and were standing next to the walls of the cathedral. Because of the scaffolding it looked like the skeleton of a giant prehistoric animal. My friend was explaining the way we were related to our fellow creatures, the animals; he bombarded me with proofs and shouted in a shrill and uncultured voice that echoed between the walls, and he had a provincial accent. I didn’t say much in response, but I thought to myself: you’re wrong, but I haven’t yet read and thought enough to be able to disprove you. But wait—wait just a year, and I’ll be walking with you at this very place, in the moonlight, just as now, and I’ll show you how wrong, how stupid you were. For what you’re saying cannot, must not under any circumstances be true; if it is, then I don’t want to be part of it any longer—I want nothing to do with such a world. But my friend went on talking, waving a little German pamphlet that had provided him with his arguments. Suddenly he stopped right there in the moonlight, opened the book to some illustrations in the text, and handed it to me. The moon was shining so brightly that I could see what they represented and read the captions as well. There were pictures of three quite similar craniums: the skull of an orangutan, an Australian aborigine, and Immanuel Kant. In disgust I flung away the book. My friend was infuriated and threw himself on top of me. We scuffled and fought in the moonlight, but he was stronger and held me to the ground and like a schoolboy “washed” my face with snow.

  A year passed, and several more, but I never felt ready to disprove him; I found I had to let the matter drop. And although I didn’t understand my true purpose in the world, I went on living in it anyway.

  And I’ve seen many moons since then. A mild, sentimental moon between the birches at the side of a lake . . . The moon scuttling through broken autumn clouds . . . The moon of love that shone on Gretchen’s garden window and Juliet’s balcony . . . A girl, no longer young, who wanted to get married onc
e told me that she wept when she saw the moon shine over a small cottage in the woods . . . The moon is lewd and lascivious, says a poet. Another tries to attribute an ethical-religious significance to the moonbeams and compares them to threads spun by our dearly departed into a net to capture a lost soul . . . To young people, the moon represents the promise of everything wonderful that lies ahead, for their elders it’s a sign of promises broken, a reminder of everything that ruptured and fell apart.

  And what is moonlight?

  Secondhand sunshine. Feeble, counterfeit.

  *

  The moon that now comes out from behind the steeple has an unhappy face. It seems to me that the features are distorted, dissolved, corroded by a nameless suffering. Poor man, why do you sit there? Are you condemned as a counterfeiter—have you counterfeited the sunshine?

  In truth, that’s no small crime. If only one could be certain of never committing it.

  AUGUST 7

  LIGHT!

  . . . I sat up in bed and lit the lamp on the night table. I was drenched in sweat, my hair stuck to my forehead . . . What had I dreamt?

  Once again the same thing. That I killed the pastor. That he had to die because he already stank like a corpse, and that it was my duty as a doctor to do it . . . I found it difficult and unpleasant; it was something that had never before occurred in my practice, so I wanted to consult a colleague, didn’t want to bear sole responsibility in such a serious matter . . . But Mrs. Gregorius was standing naked far away in a corner in the semi-darkness, trying to cover herself with a small black veil. And when she heard me say “colleague” such a terrified and desperate expression came into her eyes that I realized it had to happen right away, that otherwise she was lost in some way I couldn’t figure out, and that I had to do it alone so no one else would ever know. So I did it, with my head turned away. How did it happen? I don’t know. All I know is that I held my nose and turned away, saying to myself, “There now, now it’s over. Now he doesn’t smell any longer.” And I wanted to explain to Mrs. Gregorius that this was a very strange and unusual case: most people start to smell only after they’re dead, and then you bury them, but if someone smells while still alive, then he has to be killed—given the present state of our scientific knowledge, there’s no alternative. But Mrs. Gregorius was gone; there was only a great emptiness around me in which everything seemed to pull back and flee from me . . . The darkness gradually let up and turned into an ashen moonlight . . . And I was sitting up in bed completely awake, listening to my own voice.

  I got up, put on some clothes, lit lamps in all the rooms. I paced back and forth, regular as clockwork, for I don’t know how long. Finally I stopped in front of the mirror in the parlor and stared at my pale, contorted face as if it were a stranger’s. But fearing I’d give in to the impulse to break the old mirror that has seen my childhood and nearly my entire life and much of what happened before I was born, I went over and stood by an open window. The moon was no longer out; it was raining, and the rain blew straight into my face. It felt good.

  “Dreams flow like streams . . .” I remember the old saying. And it’s true, most of what we dream is actually not worth a second thought—loose fragments of our experiences, often the most indifferent and silly ones, that our conscious minds haven’t bothered to preserve but which still lead a shadow life of their own off in some junk room of the brain. But there are other dreams, too. I remember how once, as a boy, I sat for an entire afternoon puzzling over a geometry problem and had to go to bed without solving it. While I was asleep my brain kept working on its own and gave me the answer in a dream. And it was correct. There are also dreams that are bubbles from the deep. And when I think it over, many times a dream has taught me something about myself. Many times a dream has revealed wishes I didn’t want to acknowledge, desires I wanted to deny in the daylight. Those wishes and desires I’ve later weighed and tested in full sun. But they could seldom stand the light, and usually I forced them back into the dim recesses where they belonged. In my nocturnal dreams they might return, but I recognized them and smiled scornfully at them even in the dream until they gave up all claim of emerging and living in the light of reality.

  But this is something different. And I want to know what it is; I want to weigh and test it. It’s one of my primary instincts not to tolerate something half-conscious and half-clear about myself if it’s in my power to take it out, hold it up in the light, and see what it is.

  All right, then, let’s consider:

  A woman came to me in her need, and I promised to help her. Help her, well—what that meant or might come to mean was something neither of us had thought through then. What she asked of me was so simple and straightforward. It cost me neither effort nor a bad conscience, it was more a pleasure: I could do this beautiful young woman a favor of a delicate nature and at the same time play a nasty trick on the despicable pastor, and in my deep-seated, gray ennui this episode seemed like a bright spark from a world that was closed to me . . . And for her it meant happiness and life—as she saw it, and as she made me see it. So I promised to help her and did so, did what then needed to be done.

  But since then the whole matter has taken on another aspect, and this time I must manage to get to the bottom of the affair before continuing.

  I promised to help her, but I don’t like doing things by half measures. And now I realize, and have for a long time, that she’s not really helped unless she’s set free.

  In a few days the pastor will be back—then it will be the same story all over again. I know him now. But that’s not all; that she would eventually have to get over on her own, no matter how difficult it might be and though it might tear her to pieces and ruin her life. But something tells me with great certainty, as if it had already happened, that soon she will carry a child under her heart. The way she loves now she’s not likely to be spared, and perhaps doesn’t even want to be. And then, if this happens—when this happens—what then? Then the pastor must go. Completely.

  True, if this happens, it’s possible she might come to me and ask me to “help” her in the same way so many others have begged for in vain, and if she does—well, then I suppose I’ll do as she asks, for I don’t know how I could oppose her wishes in anything. But then I’d be weary of the whole business and my part in the story would be over.

  But I sense, I feel certain this isn’t what will happen. She isn’t like the others, she’ll never ask me for that kind of help.

  So the pastor must go.

  No matter how I ponder I can see no other solution. Bring him to his senses? Make him see that he no longer has any right to sully her life, that he must set her free? Nonsense. She’s his wife; he’s her husband. Everything—the world, God, his own conscience—supports him against her. To him, of course, love is what it was for Luther, a natural urge that God has given him permission to satisfy, once and for all, with this particular woman. That she responds to his desire coldly, with aversion, could never for an instant make him doubt his “right.” For that matter he may imagine that at those moments she secretly feels just as he does, but he finds it entirely fitting that a Christian woman, a minister’s wife, doesn’t admit this, even to herself. Even on his own behalf he doesn’t really like calling this a pleasure, he’d rather refer to it as “duty” and “God’s will” . . . No, away with such a person, away with him, away!

  How was it, now? I longed for an action, I begged for one. Is this the action, then, my action? Something that must be done, that I alone see must be done and that no one can or dares do but me?

  One might say it seems a bit strange. But that’s no argument, either for or against. The greatness or beauty in an action is the reflection of its effect on the public, but since naturally it’s my humble intention to keep the general public ignorant of the matter, that point of view doesn’t apply. It’s entirely up to me. I want to examine my deed up close; I want to see what it looks like from within.

  First and foremost: do I seriously will the p
astor’s death? “Will”—now what does that mean? Human will isn’t a unified whole; it’s a synthesis of a hundred conflicting impulses. But we need fictions, and no fiction is more necessary to us than the notion of will. So: do you will this?

  I do, and I don’t.

  I hear conflicting voices. I must interrogate them; I must find out why one says I do and the other I don’t.

  You first, the one who says I do. Why? Answer!

  “I want to act. Life is action. When I see something that distresses me I want to intervene. I don’t intervene every time I see a fly in a spider web, since the world of flies and spiders isn’t my own world, and I know one can’t respond to everything, and I don’t like flies. But if I see a lovely little insect with shimmering golden wings caught in the web, then I tear the web apart and if need be kill the spider, for I don’t believe it’s wrong to kill spiders. I’m walking in the woods and I hear cries for help; I run in the direction of the cries and find a man about to rape a woman. Naturally I do what I can to rescue her, and if necessary I kill the man. The law doesn’t grant me this right—it only gives me the right to kill in self-defense, by which the law means only if my own life is at stake. The law doesn’t allow me to kill someone to save my father or my son or my best friend, or to protect my beloved from assault or rape. The law is absurd, in other words, and no decent person chooses a course of action because of it.”

  “But unwritten law? Morality?”

  “My dear friend, morality, as you know just as well as I, is in a state of flux. It’s undergone significant change even in the brief blink of an eye the two of us have been around. Morality is like a circle of chalk drawn to hypnotize a hen—it’s binding if you believe in it. Morality is what other people consider right. But here it’s a question of what I think! True, in many, perhaps most cases, run-of-the-mill ones, my belief about what is right corresponds more or less with what others believe, with ‘morality,’ and in a number of other cases I don’t find the discrepancy between my beliefs and morality worth the risk a divergence would entail, and act accordingly. Thus, to me morality is consciously what in practice it is for everyone, though not everyone acknowledges this: not a fixed, binding law, above all else, but a modus vivendi that can be applied in daily life in the continual warfare between the self and the world. I recognize and acknowledge that our generally accepted moral standards as well as our secular laws express a perception of right and wrong that is the product of an inherited, slowly augmented and evolving awareness, passed on from generation to generation since time immemorial, of the conditions necessary for human beings to coexist with each other. I know that by and large these laws must be respected by everyone if life on earth is to be lived at all by creatures like us, creatures who cannot exist without an organized society and everything that entails: libraries, museums, police, water pipes, street lights, garbage collection, changings of the guard, sermons, ballet, and so forth. But I also know that anyone who is anyone has refused to interpret these laws pedantically. Morality is part of the furniture, not a household god. It should be used, it shouldn’t rule, and it should be used with a grain of salt. It’s wise to follow local custom; it’s foolish to do so with conviction. On my way through the world, I see the customs of human beings and borrow what I need. And ‘morality’ comes from ‘mores,’ custom. It rests entirely on custom and habit; it has no other source. And that I, by killing the pastor, commit an act that is contrary to custom is nothing you need to remind me of. Morality—surely you jest!”