Death in Venice and Other Tales Read online

  Both dinner and the small evening supper were served earlier than usual, the latter in the parlor, since preparations for the dance were already underway in the dining room itself. In this festive way the normal order of things was disrupted. Then, after it had gotten dark and Tonio Kröger had returned to his room, there was activity once more on the road and in the lobby. The day guests were returning from their excursion; in fact, new visitors were arriving by bicycle and carriage from the direction of Elsinore, and downstairs one could already hear a violin being tuned and a clarinet running through its nasal-toned exercises . . .

  From all indications it was going to be a splendid ball.

  The small orchestra now struck up a march: though muted, the music with its steady tempo drifted upstairs. Dancing was commenced with a polonaise. Tonio Kröger sat quietly for a while and listened. But as soon as the march rhythm gave way to a waltz, he got up and slipped silently from his room.

  From the hallway on which it was located, a second flight of stairs led to the side entrance of the hotel where, without passing through any of the ground-floor rooms, one could reach the glass veranda. This was the route he took, quietly and surreptitiously, as if traveling down forbidden paths, feeling his way carefully through the darkness, irresistibly attracted by the unthinking, divinely swaying rhythm of the music, whose tones already sounded loud and distinct in his ears.

  The veranda was empty and unlit, but the glass door was open to the dining room, where the two large paraffin lamps with the polished mirrors cast a bright glare. He crept forward on tiptoe, and his skin prickled with furtive thrill at standing there in the dark observing the people as they danced in the light. He glanced all around frantically, his greedy eyes searching out the two of them . . .

  Although the ball was only a half an hour underway, it was already in full swing. The ice had been broken, no doubt, and the guests’ communal enthusiasm whipped up, even before they arrived, by a whole day spent, carefree and happy, in one another’s company. In the parlor, which Tonio Kröger was able to survey whenever he ventured forward a little, several older gentlemen had taken their drinks and cigarettes and had gotten up a game of cards. Other men sat with their wives on upholstered chairs in front and along the dining-room walls and watched the dancing. They rested their hands on outspread knees and puffed out their cheeks in well-being, while their female counterparts stared with folded arms into the whirling mass of young people, their bonnets high on their angled heads. A platform had been set up along one of the side walls, and on it the musicians were giving their best. There was even a trumpet, which sounded undeniably hesitant and wary, as though the instrument were afraid of its own constantly breaking and cracking voice . . . Couples were swaying and spinning, circling each other, while others promenaded through the room, arm in arm. The company wasn’t formally attired, but rather dressed for a summer Sunday outing in the country: the gentlemen in suits of rustic cut obviously reserved for weekends, the young ladies in bright, thin dresses with wildflower garlands on their bodices. There were also a few children present, dancing amongst themselves in their own way even when the music stopped. A long-legged fellow in a sparrow-tailed evening jacket—some provincial bigwig with a monocle and sun-bleached hair, a junior postmaster or something similar, not unlike a stock comic figure from a Danish novel come to life—seemed to be the master of ceremonies and the king of the ball. Assiduous, perspiring and wholeheartedly on the job, he was everywhere at once. He scurried with an excess of industry throughout the room with the most elaborate of walks—putting his weight first on the toes, then on the balls of the feet, which were encased in polished military half-boots with pointed tips and which he set down one outside the other in crisscross pattern. He waved his arms in the air, issued orders, called for music and clapped his hands, with the ribbons of a large, colorful sash fluttering in his wake. It had been pinned to his shoulder as a sign of his special office, and he often turned his head to gaze at it lovingly.

  And they were there, the couple who had passed by Tonio Kröger earlier that day in the sunlight. He saw them again and trembled with delight as he took them both in with almost one gaze. Here stood Hans Hansen, quite nearby, beside the door. With his body inclined slightly forward and his legs apart, he was methodically tearing off bites from a large piece of sponge cake, holding one hand cupped under his chin to catch the crumbs. And over there along the wall sat Ingeborg Holm—blond Inge—who was at that very moment being asked to dance by the junior postmaster, who skipped up to her with a cultivated bow, placing one hand behind his back and clutching the other gracefully to his breast. She shook her head, however, indicating that she was too short of breath and would have to rest for a bit, whereupon the junior postmaster sat down beside her.

  Tonio Kröger stared at them, at the two people for whom in olden days he had suffered love: Hans and Ingeborg. It was them—not so much because they possessed certain individual characteristics or wore similar clothing as because they belonged to the identical breed and species, that bright species of steel blue eyes and blond hair, which automatically called to mind purity, unspoilt innocence, good cheer and a simultaneously proud and simple, ultimately unapproachable superiority . . . He watched them, watched Hans Hansen stand there as smart and handsome as ever in his sailor suit, broad in the shoulders and thin at the waist, watched Ingeborg toss her head sideways in a particular exuberant way as she laughed and then characteristically lift her hand—the not especially slender or delicately formed hand of a mere girl—to the back of her head so that her thin sleeve slid up from the elbow. And suddenly his heart trembled with such intense homesickness that he instinctively retreated a bit into the darkness to hide his twitching face.

  Had I forgotten you two? he asked himself. No, never! Not you, Hans, nor you, blond Inge! You were the ones for whom I labored, and whenever I received applause, I always looked around discreetly to see if you were among my admirers . . . Have you read Don Carlos yet, Hans Hansen, as you promised by your garden gate? Don’t bother! I no longer require it of you. What do you have to do with the lonely, tearful king? Don’t dull your bright eyes. Don’t cloud them with dreams by staring at melancholy poems . . . Oh, to be like you! To start again and grow up as you did, upright, happy and simple, correct, ordinary and in harmony with God and the world. To be loved by harmless, happy people, to make you my wife, Ingeborg Holm, to have a son like you, Hans Hansen—to live untouched by the curse of knowledge and the torment of creativity, to live and love and laud in blessed ordinariness! . . . Start over? It wouldn’t help. It would still be the same—everything would turn out just the same. Many people go astray because, for them, there is no right way.

  The music stopped. There was a break, and then refreshments were served. The junior postmaster himself scurried around with a tea tray full of herring salad, offering it to the ladies. When he got around to Ingeborg Holm, however, he also sank to one knee as he extended the dish, causing her to blush with delight.

  Those in the dining room had begun by now to notice the observer by the glass door, and he was met by alienated looks from their handsome, flushed faces. Nevertheless, he held his ground. Ingeborg and Hans glanced briefly over at him too, almost simultaneously, with that attitude of absolute indifference which almost has the appearance of contempt. Suddenly, however, he became aware of another gaze from somewhere else that had searched him out and was now upon him . . . He turned his head, and immediately his eyes encountered those whose contact he had sensed. Standing not far away was a young girl with a pale, narrow, fragile face, whom he had already noticed before. She had hardly danced, the gentlemen hadn’t paid her much attention, and he had watched her sit alone against the wall, her lips pressed bitterly together. She stood alone now too. She wore a bright, frilly dress like the others, but beneath its transparent material, her bare shoulders stood out miserably and bony, and her scrawny neck was sunk so deep between these pathetic shoulders that the quiet
girl almost seemed slightly deformed. She held her hands in their thin short gloves before her flat chest so that their fingertips gently touched. Her head bowed, she looked up at Tonio Kröger with dark, watery eyes. He turned away . . .

  Here, quite near him, were Hans and Ingeborg, together. He had sat down next to her—she was probably his sister—and surrounded by the other rosy-cheeked youngsters, they ate and drank, chatted and joked, teased each other and laughed out loud in bright peals. Could he not approach them briefly? Could he not address one or the other with a spontaneous witty remark, which would require at least a smile in answer? It would thrill him, and he longed for it. He could then return to his room with greater satisfaction, happy in the knowledge that he had established a bit of common ground with them. He thought of something he could say, but he didn’t have the courage to say it. Here too it was the same as ever: they wouldn’t understand him, they would only listen to what he had to say in embarrassed silence. For their language was not his.

  The dancing seemed ready to resume. The junior postmaster was in full industrious swing. He scurried around, made everyone present choose a partner, helped the waiter clear away chairs and glasses, issued instructions to the musicians and pushed at the backs of several greenhorns who didn’t know where to go. What were they planning? Every four couples formed a square . . . A horrible memory made Tonio Kröger blush. They were dancing the quadrille.

  The music commenced, and the couples bowed, advanced and swapped partners. The junior postmaster called out instructions. Good heavens! He called them out in French, pronouncing the nasal vowels with peerless sophistication. Ingeborg Holm was dancing right in front of Tonio Kröger in the square beside the glass door. She was swaying side to side before him, stepping and turning, forward and backward. Her hair—or maybe it was the delicate white material of her dress—gave off an aroma that occasionally reached him, and he closed his eyes to savor an emotion he knew so well from the past, whose scent and sharp aftertaste he had for many a day now been vaguely able to sense. It flooded him again in this moment with all its sweet duress. What was it? Longing? Tenderness? Envy? Self-contempt? . . . Moulinet des dames! Did you laugh, blond Inge, did you laugh at me when I danced the moulinet and made such a wretched fool of myself? And would you still laugh today, now that I’ve become something of a famous man? Indeed you would, and it would be entirely right of you to do so! Even if I had composed the Nine Symphonies, written The World as Will and Representation and painted The Last Judgment—you would be eternally right to laugh . . . He stared at her, and a line of poetry occurred to him, which he hadn’t thought of in a long time yet which remained so familiar and close to his heart: “I would sleep and yet you must dance.” He knew it so well, the Nordic melancholy, the introverted and awkward depression that spoke from this line. To sleep . . . To long for the possibility of living simply, wholly according to the feelings that lay sweet and idle within one’s heart, not responsible for transforming them into action, into dance. And yet being forced to dance, to perform, nimbly and quickwittedly, the ever-so-difficult sword dance of art, never entirely forgetting the humiliating senselessness of having to dance when one was in love . . .

  All of a sudden everything began to speed up, becoming pure movement, giddy and reckless. The squares had dissolved, and everyone was running in leaps and bounds: the quadrille was to be concluded with a gallopade. The pairs raced past Tonio Kröger to the music’s frantic tempo, sashaying, rushing, tripping over each other’s heels with gasps of breathless laughter. One pair was coming his way, swept along by the whole chase, spinning and howling forward. The girl had a pale, delicate face and bony protruding shoulders. And suddenly, right in front of him, someone stumbled, slipped, then dropped . . . The pale girl fell down. She fell with a hard, heavy thud that almost looked dangerous, and the gentleman came down with her. The latter must have suffered such serious injury that he forgot all about his partner, since after getting halfway up he began to grimace and rub his knee, leaving the girl still lying on the floor, seemingly quite stunned from her fall. At this point Tonio Kröger stepped forward, grasped her gently under the arms and helped her up. Exhausted from the chase, confused and distraught, she looked up at him, and suddenly a dull red blush spread across her cheeks.

  “Tak! O mange Tak!” she said, head down, staring up at him with dark, watery eyes.

  “You should take a break from dancing, Miss,” he said gently. Then he looked around once more for them, for Hans and Ingeborg, and departed, quitting the veranda and the ball and going upstairs to his room.

  He was euphoric from the festivities, in which he had taken no part, and exhausted with jealousy. It had been like before, just like before! He had stood in the shadows with a flushed face, suffering because of you—you blond, vivacious, happy types—and then had left, alone and lonely. Someone had to come. Ingeborg had to come now, had to notice that he wasn’t there, had to follow him secretly, lay her hand on his shoulder and say: “Come back inside and join us, don’t be sad, I love you!” But she didn’t come, of course. Things like that just don’t happen in reality. Yes, it was like before, and he was happy like before. For his heart was alive. What had been going on the whole time he’d spent becoming who he now was? — Petrifaction, desolation, ice and imagination! And art! . . .

  He got undressed, lay down in bed and turned off the light. He whispered the two names into his pillows, those few chaste Nordic syllables which signified for him his own particular innate form of loving, suffering and being happy—signified life itself, simple heartfelt emotion, the feeling of home. He looked back on all the years leading up to this day. He considered the barren adventure of sense, nerve and thought he had undergone, watched himself being eaten away by irony and imagination, stultified and hobbled by knowledge, erased in part by the fevers and frosts of creativity, helplessly beset by crises of conscience and tossed back and forth between crass extremes, between saintliness and lust, overrefined, impoverished and exhausted by cold, arbitrary moments of ecstasy, lost, ravaged, martyred, ill—and he sobbed with regret and homesickness.

  All around him it was quiet and dark. But from downstairs the sweet, banal waltz of life drifted up to him, muffled and lilting.

  9

  Tonio Kröger sat up north writing, as promised, to his friend Lizaveta Ivanovna.

  “Dear Lizaveta, down there in Arcadia, to which I shall soon be returning,” he wrote. “Here is something resembling a letter, one that will no doubt disappoint you, for I intend to keep it on the general side. Not that I don’t have anything to tell or haven’t had a few experiences in my own way. Back where I come from, in my hometown, they even tried to place me under arrest . . . but you should hear about that from me in person. I have days now when I prefer to speak in well-chosen generalities than to tell stories.

  “Do you still recall how you once called me a bourgeois, a bourgeois gone astray? You called me that at a time when, carried away by other confessions that I had let slip, I told you of my love for what I call ‘life.’ I wonder whether you knew then how right you were. My bourgeois nature and my love of life are indeed one and the same—this trip has given me the opportunity to reflect on that fact . . .

  “My father, you know, was of Nordic temperament: deliberate, thorough, puritanically correct and inclined toward melancholy. My mother was of indefinite exotic blood, beautiful, sensuous, naive, at once reckless and passionate, capable of impulsive, disreputable behavior. Without doubt this was a combination that harbored extraordinary possibilities—and also extraordinary dangers. What came out of it was a bourgeois gone astray in art, a bohemian homesick for his boyhood room, an artist with a bad conscience. For it is my bourgeois conscience that makes me see in everything artistic, extraordinary and brilliant something deeply ambivalent, suspicious and dubious. It is that which fills me with love-smitten weakness for the simple, faithful and pleasantly normal, for the uninspired and the respectable.


  “I stand between two worlds, feel at home in neither and as a result face great difficulties. You artists accuse me of being a bourgeois, and the bourgeois would just as soon put me under arrest . . . I don’t know which hurts worse. The bourgeois may be stupid; but you devotees of beauty who dub me phlegmatic and passionless should consider that there is a form of artistic talent so profound, so innately and inalterably fated, that no longing seems sweeter and more worthy than that for the joys of an ordinary existence.

  “I admire those proud, cold adventurers who wander the paths of magnificent, demonic beauty and despise ‘humanity’—but I don’t envy them. For if there is anything capable of turning a writer into a poet, it is this bourgeois love of mine for the ordinary, the life-affirming, the human. It is the wellspring of all warmth, all goodness and all humor; I even fancy that it is that very love, without which, it is written, one can speak with the tongues of angels and men and still be nothing more than a sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.

  “What I have done so far is nothing, not much, next to nothing. I will do better, Lizaveta—that’s a promise. As I write, the sea rushes up to me and I shut my eyes. I gaze into an unborn, as yet sketchy world that longs to be organized and shaped. I look upon a great mass of shadows with human form that motion for me to capture them and set them free. Some are tragic, some comic, some are both at once—and it’s to these I’m greatly drawn. But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the blond-haired and blue-eyed, the bright life-affirming ones, the happy, the likeable and the ordinary.