The Goose Man

by Jakob Wassermann

Then he discovered the harp without the strings. He took it to his room; and when he looked at it, he had the feeling that he was looking at a face without flesh.

“Am I too melancholy, too heavy for you?” This was the question that came to him from the irrevocable past. And that other statement: “I will be your mother made young again.” And that other one, too: “I, too, am a living creature.”

He recalled some old letters she had written him and which he had carefully preserved. He read them over with the care and caution he would have exercised in studying an agreement, the disregard or fulfilment of which was a matter of life and death. And there were bits of old embroidery from her girlhood which he acquired in order to lock them up and keep them as if they were sacred relics.

She stood out in his mind and his soul more vividly with each passing hour. If he remembered how she sat and listened when he played or discussed his works, he felt something clutching at his throat. He recalled how she crept up to him once and pressed her forehead against his lips: this picture was enshrouded in the awe of an unfathomable mystery.

It was not a sense of guilt that bound him to his deceased wife. Nor was it contrition or self-reproach or the longing that finds expression in the realisation of accumulated neglect. His fancy warded off all thought of death; in its creative defiance it invested the dead woman with a reality she never possessed while making her pilgrimage in bodily form over this earth.

It was not until now that she really took on form and shape for Daniel. And this is the marvellous and the criminal feature of the musician. Things and people are not his while they are his. He lives with shadows; it is only what he has lost that is his in living form. Dissociated from the moment, he reaches out for the moment that is gone; he longs for yesterday and storms to-morrow with unassimilative impatience. What he has in his hands is withered; what lies behind him is in flower. His thinking is a winter between two springs: the true one that is gone, and the one that is to come of which he dreams, but when it arrives he fails to take it to himself. He does not see; he has seen. He does not love; he has loved. He is not happy; he was happy. Dead, lifeless eyes open in the grave; and the living eyes that look into the grave, see all things, understand all things, and glorify all things, feel as if they are being deceived by death and its duration throughout eternity.

Gertrude was transformed into a melody; everything she had done or said was a melody. Her silence was awakened, her mute hours were made eloquent. Once he had seen her and Eleanore, the one in a brown dress, the other in a blue, minor and major, the two poles of his universe. Now the major arose like the night, spread out over the lonely earth, and enveloped all things in mourning. Grief fed on pictures that had once been daily, commonplace occurrences, but which were illumined at present by the brightness of visions.

He saw her as she lay in bed with the two braids of hair on either side of her face, her face itself looking like a wax figure in an old black frame. He could see her as she carried a dish into the room, threaded a needle, put a glass to her lips to drink, or laced up her shoe. He could see the expression in her eye when she cautioned, besought, was amazed, or smiled. How incomparably star-like this eye had all of a sudden become! It was always lifted up, always bright with inner meaning, always fixed on him. In the vision of this eye he found one evening along toward sunset the motif of a sonata in B minor. A gesture he remembered—it was the time Eleanore stood before the mirror with the myrtle wreath on her head—gave the impulse to the stirring presto in the first movement of a quartette. The twenty-second Psalm, beginning “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” he sketched on awakening from a dream in which Gertrude had appeared before him in perfect repose, as pale as death, her chin resting on her hand.

But it could not be said that he worked. The music he wrote under these conditions simply gushed forth, so to speak, during fits of fever. When the mood came over him, he would scribble the notes on whatever lay nearest him; his haste seemed to betray a sense of guilt. He stole from himself; tones appealed to him as so many crimes. When the gripping melody of the twenty-second Psalm arose in his mind, he trembled from head to foot, and left the house as if lashed by Furies, though it was in the dead of night. The recurring bass figure of the presto sounded to him as though it were a gruesome, awed voice stammering out the fatal words: “Man, hold your breath, Man, hold your breath!” And he did hold his breath, full of unresting discomfort, while his inspiration hacked its way through the ice-locked region into which a passionate spell that was becoming more and more a part of his nature had driven it.

He saw humanity forsaking him; he watched the waves of isolation widening and deepening around him. Since he felt that time did not challenge him to effort of any kind, he took to despising time. It came to the point where he regarded his creations as something that never were intended for the world; he never spoke about them or cherished the remotest desire that men hear of them. The more completely he kept them in secret hiding, the more real they appeared to him. The thought that a man could write a piece of music and sell it for money appealed to him as on a par with the thought of disposing for so much cash of his mother or his sweetheart, of his child or one of his own limbs.