The Dedalus Meyrink Reader Read online

  Dedalus would like to thank The Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture for its assistance in producing this book.

  Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Foreword

  The Editor

  Part 1 (Previously untranslated works)

  SHORT STORIES

  1. Cricket Magic

  2. How Dr Job Paupersum Gave his Daughter Red Roses

  3. Amadeus Knödlseder, the Incorrigible Bearded Vulture

  4. J. H. Obereit’s Visit to the Time-Leeches

  5. Cardinal Napellus

  6. The Four Moon Brethren

  7. My Torments and Delights in the World Beyond

  8. Herr Kuno Hinrichsen, Businessman, and the Penitent, Lala Lajpat-Rai

  9. The Clockmaker

  AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ARTICLES

  10. The City with the Secret Heartbeat

  11. The Pilot

  12. The Transformation of the Blood

  UNFINISHED NOVEL

  13. The Alchemist’s House — Chapter 3 ‘Ismene’

  Part 2 (Extracts from previously translated works)

  NOVELS

  14. The Golem — extract from the chapter ‘Ghosts’

  15. The Green Face — ‘Conclusion’

  16. Walpurgisnacht — Chapter 3: ‘The Dalibor Tower’

  17. The White Dominican — Chapter 3: ‘The Nightwalk’

  18. The Angel of the West Window — ‘The Conjuration of the Angel of the West Window’

  STORIES* (Translated by Maurice Raraty)

  19. Petroleum, Petroleum

  20. Blamol

  21. Dr Cinderella’s Plants

  22. The Ring of Saturn

  BIOGRAPHY

  23. Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink — ‘The Duel Affair’

                    ‘Prison’

  24. Editor’s Notes

  Copyright

  *All translations are by Mike Mitchell unless otherwise stated.

  The Editor

  For many years an academic with a special interest in Austrian literature and culture, Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995. He is one of Dedalus’s editorial directors and is responsible for the Dedalus translation programme.

  He has published over fifty translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink’s five novels and The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy. His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink.

  His translations have been shortlisted three times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize: Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000 and The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008.

  His biography of Gustav Meyrink: Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink was published by Dedalus in November 2008. He has recently edited and translated The Dedalus Meyrink Reader.

  Foreword

  The Dedalus Meyrink Reader contains both material that has not previously been published in English and extracts from works that have already appeared in English. The new material comprises the stories from the anthology Fledermäuse (Bats), apart from ‘Meister Leonhard’, which is contained in The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: 1890-2000, ‘The Clockmaker’, a chapter from the unfinished novel The Alchemist’s House and three autobiographical articles. Fledermäuse, published in 1916, signifies a move away from the style of Meyrink’s early stories, with their emphasis on the satirical, the grotesque and the macabre, to a more intense engagement with the occult; some also reflect his response to the horrors of the First World War.

  The autobiographical articles were written in the later 1920s, though ‘The Pilot’, unpublished in Meyrink’s lifetime, was probably written in 1930/31. The longest of these pieces, ‘The Transformation of the Blood’ goes into great detail about Meyrink’s lifelong preoccupation with esoteric knowledge, especially yoga.

  These articles are followed by extracts from Meyrink’s five novels, as well as four stories from his earlier period, which were collected in Des deutschen Spießers Wunderhorn (The German Bourgeois’ Magic Horn, 1913).

  Part 1

  Cricket Magic

  ‘Well?’ the men asked with one voice when Professor Goclenius entered, walking faster than usual and looking noticeably distraught, ‘Well, did they release the letters? — Is Skoper already on his way back to Europe? — How is he? — Have his collections come as well?’ The questions all came at once.

  ‘Only this here,’ the Professor said. Beside the bundle of letters he put on the table, he placed a small jar containing a whitish dead insect the size of a stag beetle. ‘The Chinese ambassador himself handed it over. He said it had arrived today, having for some reason come via Denmark.’

  ‘I fear he’s heard bad news about poor old Skoper,’ a clean-shaven man whispered behind his hand to the man sitting next to him, an elderly scholar with flowing locks who — both prepared specimens for the Science Museum — had pushed his spectacles up onto his forehead and was examining the insect with keen interest.

  It was a strange room where the six men, all specialists in entomology, were sitting. There was a musty smell of camphor and sandalwood, which only served to intensify the exotically macabre atmosphere created by the porcupine fish hanging from the ceiling — goggle-eyed, like the cut-off heads of a ghostly audience — by the garishly painted red and white demon masks of savage island tribes, by the ostrich eggs, hyraxes, narwhal tusks, contorted monkeys’ bodies and all the other grotesque shapes from distant zones.

  Hanging on the walls above worm-eaten brown cupboards that had a somewhat monastic look, in the putrid evening light pouring in from the overgrown museum garden through the potbellied barred window, were faded, larger-than-life pictures of bark beetles and mole crickets, lovingly framed in gold like revered ancestral portraits.

  Crooking its arm invitingly, an embarrassed smile playing round its goitrous nose and circular, glassy eyes, the museum assistant’s top hat on its head and dry snakeskins dangling round it, a sloth leant forward from its corner, perfectly aping an ancient village schoolmaster being photographed for the first time.

  Its tail disappearing in the distant shadows of the corridor and its vital parts, following a request from the minister of education, in the course of being varnished, the pride of the institute, a forty-foot-long crocodile, stared in through the connecting door with its perfidious feline gaze.

  Professor Goclenius had sat down, untied the string round the bundle of letters and glanced through the first lines, muttering to himself.

  ‘It’s dated from Bhutan, 1 July 1914 — that is four weeks before the war broke out — so it must have taken more than a year to get here,’ he said to the assembled group. ‘Our old colleague, Johannes Skoper, writes:

  I will give a full account of the wealth of specimens I have found on my long journey from the Chinese border, through Assam, to the so far unexplored country of Bhutan in my next report. Today I just want to describe briefly the bizarre circumstances surrounding the discovery of a hitherto unknown white cricket — Professor Goclenius pointed to the insect in the jar — which the shamans use for their superstitious practices. It is called Phak, which is also an insulting name for anything resembling a European or other person of white race.

  One morning I heard from some Lamaist pilgrims, who were heading for Lhasa, that not far from my campsite was a very high dugpa — one of those satanic priests feared throughout Tibet. They can be recognise
d by their scarlet caps and claim to be direct descendants of the demon of the fly agaric. However that may be, the dugpas are said to belong to the ancient Tibetan religion of the Bhons, of which we know as good as nothing, and to be descended from a foreign race, the origins of which are lost in the mists of time. This dugpa, the pilgrims told me, whirling their little prayer wheels in superstitious awe, was a Samtsheh Mitshebat, that is a being that can no longer be described as human with the power to ‘bind and loose’, a being, to put it briefly, with the capacity to see time and space for the illusions they are and for whom, therefore, nothing was impossible here on earth. There were, I was told, two ways to climb the steps leading beyond humanity: one, the ‘path of light’, leading to union with the Buddha, and a second one taking the opposite direction, the ‘path of the left hand’, to which only a born dugpa knew the entrance, a spiritual path full of horror and dread. Although very infrequent, they went on, such ‘born’ dugpas were to be found in all parts of the world and, strangely enough, were almost always the children of especially pious people.

  ‘It is as if the Lord of Darkness had grafted a scion onto the tree of saintliness,’ the pilgrim who told me this said. ‘There is only one way by which one can tell that a child is spiritually part of the clan of dugpas: if the whorl of hair on the crown of its head goes from left to right instead of from right to left.’

  I immediately expressed the wish — purely out of curiosity — to meet this dugpa, but my guide, himself from East Tibet, resisted the idea stubbornly. It was all nonsense, there were no dugpas at all in Bhutan, he kept shouting, and anyway a dugpa, especially a Samtsheh Mitshebat, would never reveal his arts to a white man.

  The man’s dogged resistance made me all the more suspicious and after hours of argument that went to and fro I got him to admit that he was a member of the Bhon religion himself and knew very well — from the reddish colour of the fumes the soil gave off, he tried to tell me — that there was an ‘initiate’ dugpa living in the vicinity.

  ‘But he’ll never reveal his arts to you,’ was his constant refrain.

  ‘Why ever not?’ I finally asked.

  ‘Because he will refuse to accept responsibility.’

  ‘What responsibility?” I insisted.

  ‘The disruption he created in the realm of causes would mean he would once more be caught up in the maelstrom of reincarnation, if not something even worse.’

  I was keen to learn more about the mysterious Bhon religion, so I asked, ‘According to your faith, does a human have a soul?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  In answer the Tibetan plucked a blade of grass and made a knot in it. ‘Has the blade of grass a knot now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He undid the knot. ‘And now?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘In just the same way a human has a soul and has no soul,’ he said simply.

  I tried a different way of getting a clear idea of his views. ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘let’s assume you fell off that narrow mountain pass we crossed recently’ — it wasn’t more than a foot wide — ‘would your soul have lived on or not?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have fallen off.’

  Trying another tack, I pointed at my revolver and said, ‘If I were to shoot you dead, would you live on or not?’

  ‘You can’t shoot me dead.’

  ‘Yes I can.’

  ‘Try it, then.’

  I’ll do nothing of the sort, I thought, a fine mess that would leave me in, wandering round these boundless highlands without a guide. He seemed to be able to read my thoughts and gave a scornful grin. I remained silent for a while.

  He suddenly went on: ‘It’s just that you can’t “will” anything to happen,’ he said. ‘Behind your will there are wishes, some you’re aware of and others you’re not, but both are stronger than you are.’

  ‘So what is the soul according to your faith,’ I asked, irritated. ‘Have I a soul, for example?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And will my soul live on after I die?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you think yours will live on after you die?’

  ‘Yes. Because I have a name.’

  ‘What do you mean, a name? I’ve got a name too.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t know your true name, so you don’t possess it. What you think of as your name is just an empty word that your parents thought up. You forget it when you sleep. I don’t forget my name when I sleep.’

  ‘But when you’re dead you won’t know it any more,’ I objected.

  ‘No. But the Master will know it and not forget it, and when he calls it, I will rise again. But only me, not anyone else, for only I have my name, no one else has it. What you call your name you share with many others — just like dogs,’ he muttered contemptuously to himself. I could understand what he said, but didn’t show it.

  ‘What do you understand by the “Master”?’ I asked with apparent casualness.

  ‘The Samtsheh Mitshebat.’

  ‘The one near here?’

  ‘Yes, but the one nearby is only his reflection. The one he really is, is everywhere. He can also be nowhere if he wills it.’

  ‘So he can make himself invisible?’ I couldn’t repress a smile. ‘You mean now he’s inside the universe, now outside? Now he’s there, now he isn’t?’

  ‘But a name’s only there when it’s spoken and not there when it’s not spoken,’ the Tibetan countered.

  ‘And can you, for example, become a “Master” as well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So then there’ll be two Masters, eh?’

  Inwardly I was jubilant. To be honest I was fed up with the fellow’s intellectual arrogance and now I’d caught him out, I thought my next question would have been: if one of the masters wants to make the sun shine and the other wants it to rain, who’ll win? I was, therefore, all the more nonplussed by his strange answer: ‘If I am the Master, then I am the Samtsheh Mitshebat. Or do you think there can be two things that are completely alike, without them being one and the same thing?’

  ‘But there would still be two of you, not just the one. If I were to meet the pair of you, I would meet two people, not one,’ I objected.

  The Tibetan bent down and searched among the piles of calcspar crystals lying around until he found a particularly transparent one and handed it to me, saying mockingly, ‘Hold that in front of your eye and look at the tree over there. You can see two of them, can’t you? But does that mean it’s two trees?’

  I couldn’t think of an immediate answer and, anyway, I would have found it difficult to pursue a reasoned discussion of such a complex subject in Mongolian, which we were speaking, so I let him enjoy his little victory. Inwardly, however, I could not overcome my astonishment at the mental agility of this semi-savage with his slanting Mongol eyes and filthy sheepskin coat. There is something strange about these highland Asians, outwardly they look like animals, but once they open up their minds to you, a philosopher appears.

  I returned to the starting point of our whole conversation. ‘So you think the dugpa wouldn’t reveal his arts to me because he refuses to accept the responsibility?’

  ‘That’s right, he wouldn’t.’

  ‘But what if I were to accept the responsibility?’

  For the first time since I’d known him, the Tibetan lost his composure. He could scarcely control the agitation which animated his features. His expression wavered between inexplicable, savage cruelty and gloating malice. During our many months together we had confronted all kinds of extreme danger, we had traversed terrifying abysses on swaying bridges of bamboo not more than a foot wide that froze the blood in my veins, we had almost died of thirst crossing deserts, but never had he lost his inner calm, not even for a moment. And now? What could it be that had sent him into such turmoil? I could almost see the thoughts buzzing round and round in his head.

  ‘Take me to the dugpa,’ I said insistently, ‘you’ll be
well rewarded.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ he answered after some reflection.

  In the middle of the night he woke me in my tent. He was ready to do it, he said.

  He’d saddled two of our shaggy Mongol horses, that aren’t much bigger than large dogs, and we rode off into the dark. The men in my caravan were lying, fast asleep, round the glowing embers of the fire.

  Hours passed without a word being said between us. The characteristic musky smell given off by the Tibetan steppes on July nights and the monotonous swish of the broom as the horses’ legs swept through it was almost overpowering; to stay awake I had to keep my eyes fixed on the stars which, in these savage highlands, have a blazing, flickering quality, like burning scraps of paper. They have a disturbing influence, filling one with unease.

  When dawn crept over the mountain tops, I noticed that the Tibetan’s eyes were wide open and permanently fixed, without blinking, on a point in the sky. He was, I could tell, in a trance.

  Did he know the place where the dugpa was staying so well that he didn’t need to look where he was going? I asked several times without getting a reply. Finally he spoke, his voice slurred, as if he were asleep: ‘He draws me to him, just as a lodestone attracts iron.’

  We didn’t even stop for lunch, without a word he kept spurring his horse on. I had to eat the few pieces of dried goat’s meat I had with me in the saddle.

  Towards evening we came round the foot of a bare hill and stopped by one of those fantastic tents that are sometimes to be seen in Bhutan. They are black, pointed at the top, hexagonal below, with the sides curled up at the bottom. Supported by tall poles, they look like giant spiders with their bellies on the ground.

  I had expected to meet a grubby shaman with matted hair and beard, one of those crazy or epileptic creatures that are frequently to be found among the Mongols and Tungus. They drug themselves with a decoction of the fly agaric mushroom and see imaginary spirits or utter incomprehensible prophecies. Instead, the man standing before me — motionless — was a good six foot tall, strikingly slender in build, clean shaven, with an olive-greenish sheen to his complexion, a colour I’ve never previously seen on the face of a living man, and eyes that were slanting and unnaturally far apart — a racial type completely unknown to me. His lips, like the skin of his face perfectly smooth as if made of porcelain, were bright red, razor-thin and so curved, especially where they rose up high at the corners in what seemed like a pitiless frozen smile, that they looked as if they’d been painted on.