After thirty days of misery, at last the doors of my torture-chamber open. I part from my friend—my executioner—without bitterness. He has only been the scourge in the hand of Providence. Behold, blessed is the man whom the Lord chasteneth.
[1] See above, page 38.
[VII]
BEATRICE
In Berlin, I drive from the Stettin to the Anhalt Station. The half-hour's drive becomes a real way of thorns for me, so many are the memories which painfully revive in me. At first we pass through the street in which my friend Popoffsky, as an unknown, but yet misunderstood, man fought his first battles with poverty and passion. Now his wife and child are both dead; they died in this house on the left; and our friendship has turned into bitter hatred.
Here, on the right, are the restaurants frequented by artists and authors, the scenes of so many intellectual and erotic orgies. Here is the Cantina Italiana, where I used to meet with my fiancée three years ago, and where the first honorarium I received from Italy was spent in Chianti. There is the Schiffbauerdamm with the Pension Fulda, which we lived in when a young married pair. Here is my theatre, my book-seller, my tailor, my chemist.
What unhappy instinct leads the cabman to drive me through this via dolorosa full of buried memories, which at this late hour of the night rise again like ghosts? Why does he choose just the street in which is the restaurant, the "Black Pig," well known as a favourite resort of Heine and E.T.A. Hoffmann? The restaurant keeper himself stands on the steps under the grotesque sign-board. He looks at me without recognition. For a second the candelabrum within darts coloured rays through the numerous bottles in the window, and makes me live again a year of my life which abounded in grief and joy, friendship and love. At the same time, I feel keenly that it is all over, and must be buried to make place for something new.
I spent the night in Berlin. The next morning a deep rose-red flush in the East greeted me over the roofs. I remember having seen this rosy colour in Malmö on the evening of my departure. I leave Berlin, my second home, where I have spent my "second spring," that is, my last. At the Anhalt Station, full of these memories, I give up all hope of the renewal of a spring and a love which can never return.