Death in Venice and Other Tales Page 9

  Then, not far from the train station, they turned away from the levees to watch a train puff by in unceremonious haste, idly counting the number of cars and waving to the man who sat wrapped in fur atop of the very last one. And when they arrived at Lindenplatz, they stopped before the timber wholesaler Hansen’s villa, and Hans gave an extensive demonstration of the fun that could be had swinging back and forth on the bottom rail of the iron gate so that its hinges squeaked in that special way. After this he said good-bye.

  “Well, I have to go in now,” he said. “Adieu, Tonio. Next time I’ll walk you home, you can count on it.”

  “Adieu, Hans,” said Tonio. “It was a nice walk.”

  Their hands, as they shook them, were wet and covered with rust from the iron gate. As Hans looked Tonio in the eye, however, something like thoughtful regret came over his handsome face.

  “By the way, I’ll read Don Carlos soon!” he said hastily. “All that about the king in his cabinet sounds fabulous!” Then he tucked his schoolbag under his arm and ran across the front yard. Before disappearing into his house, he turned around and nodded once more.

  Tonio Kröger walked away from that spot thoroughly transfigured and elated. The wind was pushing him from behind, but that was hardly the only reason for the wings on his heels.

  Hans was going to read Don Carlos, and then they would have something to talk about just between the two of them, without Jimmerthal or anyone else! How well they understood each other! Who knew, maybe he could even get Hans to write poems? . . . No, no, he didn’t want that! Hans must never become like Tonio; he should stay as he was, so bright and strong, beloved by all, Tonio more than anyone! But it wouldn’t hurt for him to read Don Carlos . . . And Tonio passed through the squat old city gate, walked along the ships’ landing, up the steep, drafty, damp, gable-lined little street until he reached his family’s house. His heart was alive then; there was longing in it and somber jealousy and a tiny bit of contempt and an utterly innocent sense of bliss.

  2

  Blond Inge—Ingeborg Holm, the daughter of Dr. Holm who lived by the marketplace, near the tall Gothic fountain with its many spires—she was the one whom Tonio Kröger loved at the age of sixteen.

  How did it happen? He had seen her a thousand times; but one evening he saw her lit up a certain way, saw how in conversation with a friend she gave her head a certain exuberant toss sideways as she laughed, and how she lifted her hand—the not especially slender or delicately formed hand of a mere girl—to the back of her head so that her sleeve of white gauze slid up from the elbow. He also heard how she pronounced some word, some meaningless word, so that a certain warm music entered her voice, and his heart was filled with delight far greater than that which he had occasionally felt earlier at the sight of Hans Hansen, back when he had still been a foolish little boy.

  On this particular evening he took away her image—her thick blond ponytail, her long horizontal blue eyes full of laughter and the faintly outlined bridge of freckles at her nose—and was unable to sleep. Still hearing the musical quality in her voice, he tried softly to imitate the way she had pronounced that meaningless word, shuddering as he did. Experience told him that this was love. And although he knew only too well that love would invariably bring him great pain, hardship and humiliation, that it would moreover destroy his peace of mind and flood his heart with melodies, without bringing the composure necessary to form something well-rounded and calmly forge it into a whole, he nonetheless gladly accepted this new love. He abandoned himself to it and nourished it with every strength in his disposition, for he knew that it enriched and inspired, and he longed to be enriched and inspired, instead of calmly forging something whole.

  The site where Tonio fell head over heels for carefree Ingeborg Holm was the empty salon of Mrs. Husteede, the Consul’s wife, whose evening it was to host the dance lessons. It was a private course, attended only by children from the best families, and they assembled in each one of their parents’ houses in turn to receive instruction in dance and etiquette. To these ends Mr. Knaak, the ballet instructor, came every week specially from Hamburg.

  Francois Knaak was his name, and what a man he was! “J’ai l’honneur de me vous representer,” he would say, “mon nom est Knaak . . . This is not to be said as one bows, but rather after one is again standing upright—not too loudly but still audibly. It’s not every day that one is called upon to introduce oneself in French, but if one can do it correctly in that language, one can be sure it will never fail one in German either.” How magnificently his black silk tails clung to his corpulent hips! The soft folds of his trousers tumbled down on his patent leather shoes, which sported wide satin bows, and his brown eyes glanced around with weary satisfaction at their own beauty.

  Everyone was overwhelmed by his more than ample self-assurance and his command of form. He would walk up to the lady of the house—as no one else could walk, nimbly striding and swaying like a king—then bow and wait for her to extend her hand. When he had received it, he would thank her in a soft voice, skip back and turn on his left foot, kicking his right up to the side, tip down, and strutting away with undulating hips.

  Upon taking one’s leave, one walked backwards in an extended bow, and if one brought up a chair, one didn’t grab it by the leg or drag it across the floor but carried it by the back and set it down silently. When standing, one didn’t fold one’s hands over one’s belly and let one’s tongue loll in the corner of one’s mouth—if one did do so, Mr. Knaak had such a talent for mimicry that for the rest of one’s life one couldn’t witness such behavior without feeling slightly ill . . .

  So much for etiquette. In dancing, Mr. Knaak had attained, if possible, an even higher degree of mastery. In a salon emptied of furniture, gaslights burning in the chandelier, candles flickering on the fireplace, the pupils stood around on a floor strewn with talcum powder in a silent semicircle. In the adjoining room, beyond the portières, mothers and aunts sat on upholstered chairs and watched through their lorgnettes as Mr. Knaak, gracefully inclined, took up the ends of his tails between two fingers and skipped about demonstrating the various steps of the mazurka. When he really wanted to impress his audience, he would kick himself suddenly and inexplicably up from the floor, twirl his legs around in the air with blinding speed and trill his lips in time, coming down to earth with a muffled thud that shook everything where it stood . . .

  Look at him, making a monkey of himself, Tonio Kröger thought. He couldn’t help noticing, however, that Inge Holm, carefree Inge, often followed Mr. Knaak’s movements with a faraway smile, and that wasn’t the only reason that such displays of magnificent physical prowess ultimately wrung something like admiration from him. How calm and imperturbable Mr. Knaak’s eyes were! They never penetrated the surface, never reached the point where things became complicated and sad; they knew only that they were brown and beautiful. And that was precisely the reason for his proud demeanor! You had to be stupid in order to strut around like that; you were loved for it because you were indeed loveable. He understood only too well why Inge—sweet, blond Inge—looked at Mr. Knaak the way she did. But did that mean no girl would ever look at him that way?

  Oh, it did happen. There was Magdalena Vermehren, the daughter of Attorney Vermehren, with her gentle lips and large, dark, glassy eyes that were so serious and romantic. She often fell while dancing, and it was she who approached him during the ladies’ choice. She knew that he wrote poems, she had asked him twice if he would show them to her, and she often stared up at him from afar, head held low. But what good was that? He loved Inge Holm—carefree, blond Inge—who surely despised him for writing bits of poetry . . . He stared at her long horizontal blue eyes, which were full of happiness and mockery, and a jealous longing, a bitter and insistent pain at being isolated from her as an eternal stranger, sat in his breast and burned . . .

  “First couple, en avant!” said Mr. Knaak, and words cannot describe how
magnificently the man pronounced these nasal vowels. They were practicing the quadrille, and to Tonio Kröger’s profound horror, he found himself in the same square as Inge Holm. He avoided her as best as he could, yet he was always near her; he refused to let his eyes seek her out, yet his gaze constantly encountered her . . . Here she came, gliding hand in hand with redheaded Ferdinand Matthiessen, running Tonio’s way, where, throwing back her ponytail and panting, she took up position. Mr. Heinzelmann, the pianist, placed his bony hands on the keys, Mr. Knaak issued instructions and the quadrille began.

  She swayed from side to side in front of him, forward and backward, stepping and turning, her hair—or maybe it was the delicate white material of her dress—giving off an aroma that sometimes drifted over to him. Sorrow increasingly clouded his eyes. I love you, dear sweet Inge, he said to himself, putting into these words all the hurt he felt because she was eagerly and happily concentrating on her dance steps and took no notice of him at all. He thought of a beautiful poem by Theodor Storm—”I would sleep, and yet you must dance”—and was tortured by the humiliating senselessness of having to dance when one was in love . . .

  “First couple, en avant!” said Mr. Knaak, as a new figure was begun. “Compliment! Moulinet des dames! Tour de main!” And there were no words for the elegant way he swallowed the silent e in de.

  “Second couple en avant!” Tonio Kröger and his lady were next. “Compliment!” Tonio bowed. “Moulinet des dames!” And Tonio Kröger, head down, countenance dark, touched hands with each of the four ladies, with Inge Holm, and danced the moulinet.

  All around there was giggling and laughter. Mr. Knaak assumed a ballet position of stylized horror. “Oh no!” he cried. “Stop, stop, Kröger has fallen in with the ladies! En arrière, Miss Kröger, get back, fi donc! Everyone has gotten it except you. Be off with you! Away! Back you go!” And he took out a yellow silk handkerchief and waved it at Tonio Kröger, shooing him back to his place.

  Everyone was laughing, the boys, the girls, even the ladies behind the portières, for Mr. Knaak had made something just too comical out of the incident—a vaudeville routine couldn’t have been more entertaining. Only Mr. Heinzelmann maintained a sober, businesslike expression as he waited for the signal to resume playing, for he was immune to Mr. Knaak’s devices.

  Then the quadrille continued. And then there was a break. The serving girl brought in a silver tray full of wine jellies in clinking glasses, and the cook followed in tow with a load of plum cake. Tonio Kröger, however, slipped away unnoticed and stood in the outside hallway before a window with drawn Venetian blinds, his hands behind his back, not considering that since nothing could be seen through the blinds it was ridiculous to stand there pretending to look out.

  He was looking not out, but inside himself, where there was so much grief and longing. Why, oh why was he here? Why wasn’t he in his room, sitting by the window reading Storm’s Immensee, occasionally glancing down into the evening garden where the old walnut tree ponderously creaked? That was his place. The others could dance and get as lively as they wanted while they practiced their skills! . . . No, no, his place was here, in Inge’s vicinity. He was standing alone, apart from the group, trying to distinguish her voice with its musical sound of warm life from the general hum, the tinkling of glasses and the laughter inside, but she was near. Your long horizontal blue eyes full of laughter, blond Inge! No one who has read—not to mention tried to imitate—Immensee could ever be as beautiful and sunny as you! That’s the real tragedy . . .

  She had to come! She had to notice he wasn’t there, had to sense how it stood with him, had to follow him secretly, if only out of pity, had to lay her hand on his shoulder and say: “Come back inside and join us, don’t be sad, I love you.” And he listened for her voice behind him and waited with irrational anticipation for her to come. But she didn’t come, of course. Things like that just don’t happen in reality.

  Had she laughed at him too, like all the others? Yes, of course she had, as much as he would have liked to deny it for her sake and his own. It was only because of her presence distracting him that he had joined in the moulinet des dames. But what did it matter? One day they’d stop laughing! Hadn’t one of his poems recently been accepted by a magazine, albeit one that had folded before his work had had a chance to appear? The day would come when he was famous, when everything he wrote would be published, and then he would see whether Inge Holm would be impressed . . . No, she would not, that was precisely it. Magdalena Vermehren, who was always falling down, sure, she would be impressed. But never Inge Holm, never blue-eyed, carefree Inge. Therefore was it not all in vain? . . .

  Tonio Kröger’s heart shrank painfully at this thought. To feel a miraculous, playful and profound creativity stirring within and yet know that the people whose admiration you most crave will greet it only with cheerful indifference—that causes great pain. Yet even while he stood alone, outcast and hopeless, pretending in his distress that he could see out the drawn Venetian blind, he was happy. For in those days his heart was alive. It beat warmly and sadly for you, Ingeborg Holm, and his soul embraced your blond, bright, ardently normal little existence in blissful self-negation.

  More than once he stood with flushed cheeks in some lonely corner where music, the scent of flowers and the clinking of glasses were only faintly discernible, trying to distinguish the melody of your voice from the festive noises in the distance; more than once he stood suffering in your vicinity and was happy. More than once it grieved him that he was able to talk to Magdalena Vermehren, who was always falling down. It was she who understood him and shared his sense of humor and took him seriously, whereas blond Inge seemed distant, alien and suspicious whenever he sat next to her, for his language was not hers. Yet nonetheless he was happy. For happiness, he told himself, isn’t being loved; that was just a slightly nauseous satisfaction of vanity. Happiness is loving and perhaps seizing a few short illusory moments of intimacy with the object of one’s love. And inwardly he took note of this idea, thought it fully through and plumbed its emotional depths.

  Fidelity! thought Tonio Kröger. I will be faithful and love you, Ingeborg, so long as I live! So good were his intentions. And yet a soft voice of fear and sadness whispered within him that he had utterly forgotten Hans Hansen, even though he saw him on a daily basis. And the ugly, wretched truth was that this quiet, faintly malevolent voice would be proven right, that time passed and days came when Tonio Kröger was no longer so unconditionally prepared to die for carefree Inge as before, for deep within he felt the desire and the ability to achieve, after his own peculiar fashion, a host of things that would attract the world’s attention.

  And he cautiously circled the sacrificial altar where the pure and chaste flame of his love was ablaze; he knelt down before it and did all he could to fan and tend it in his efforts to keep the faith. And yet after a certain interval, imperceptibly, without noise or spectacle, it went out nonetheless.

  Tonio Kröger stood for some while before that cold altar, incredulous and disappointed at the fact that fidelity was impossible on earth. Then he shrugged his shoulders and went on his way.

  3

  He went the way he had to go, a little carelessly and unsteadily, whistling and gazing into the distance, head angled, and if he went astray, it was because for many people a right way just doesn’t exist. When asked what in the world he wanted to become, he gave various answers, for he liked to say (and had already put in writing) that he carried within him a thousand existential possibilities, together with the secret conviction that they were all impossibilities . . .

  Even before he departed the cramped city that was his home, it had quietly released the shackles and ties with which it had held him bound. The ancient Kröger family had little by little succumbed to a state of disintegration and collapse, and people had good reason to count Tonio Kröger himself among its symptoms. His father’s mother, the matriarch of the family, had died, a
nd not long afterward his father—the tall, pensive, meticulously attired gentleman with the wildflower in his buttonhole—had followed her to the grave. The grand house of the Krögers with all its distinguished history was put up for sale, and the firm was liquidated. Tonio’s mother, his beautiful fiery mother, who played such marvelous piano and mandolin and who was so indifferent toward everything, married again immediately after her year of mourning, indeed married a musician, a virtuoso with an Italian name whom she followed into the wild blue yonder. Tonio Kröger found this a bit disreputable; but it was hardly his place to forbid anyone anything. He wrote poems and couldn’t even answer the question about what in the world he wanted to become . . .

  So he left his childhood city with its nooks and crannies and damp wind whistling through the gables, left the fountain and the walnut tree in the garden, those trusty friends of his youth, left the sea, too, which he loved so passionately, and felt no pain as he did. After all, he was grown-up and clever; he understood the reasons behind everything and had nothing but contempt for the crude and primitive existence that had held him so long in its midst.

  He gave himself over entirely to that power he felt to be the most sublime on earth, which he felt himself called to serve and which promised him elevated status and accolades: the power of imagination and word, which gleefully thrones above all unconscious, inarticulate forms of life. With the passion of youth he gave himself over to it, and it rewarded him with everything it has to give and pitilessly took from him everything it habitually demands as compensation.

  It sharpened his eye and allowed him to see through the great-sounding words that inflate people’s chests; it revealed to him the souls of other men, as well as his own, gave him vision, and showed him the world’s interior working and all that ultimately lurks behind word and deed. What he saw, however, was this: comedy and despair—comedy and despair.