The Dedalus Meyrink Reader Page 11

  At such times the Arch-Enemy that we carry inside us — cold, clear reason — would leave me in peace and with it my last doubts as to whether I would find the man I was seeking.

  Then, after walking for a long time, my shadow hurried towards a wide, deep ditch running alongside the road and disappeared into it, leaving me alone, and I knew I had reached my goal. Why else would it have left me?

  My clock in my hand, I was standing in the room of the man whom I knew was the only one who could make it work again.

  He was sitting at a little maple-wood table, motionless, staring through a magnifying glass held in front of his eye by a headband at a tiny glittering object on the light-grained wood. On the white wall behind him, the ornate letters in a circle like a large clock-dial, was the sentence:

  Summa Scientia Nihil Scire.

  I sighed with relief. I had come to the right place. The words were a spell banishing all compulsion to think, all demands for explanations: How did you get in? Through the wall? Across the park?

  On a shelf covered in red velvet are clocks — there must be a hundred, in blue, green, yellow enamel, decorated with jewels, engraved, fluted, smooth or grooved, some flat, some rounded like eggs. I can’t hear them, they’re chirping too softly, but the air above them must be alive from the imperceptible noise they’re producing. Perhaps there’s a storm raging in some dwarf realm there.

  On a stand is a small piece of flesh-coloured felspar, veined, with colourful flowers of semi-precious stones growing on it; in the middle of them, all innocent, the Grim Reaper with his scythe is waiting to cut them down: like a memento mori clock from the romantic Middle Ages. When he mows, the handle of his scythe hits the thin glass bell beside him, a cross between a soap bubble and the cap of a large fairy-tale mushroom.

  The dial underneath it is the entrance to a cavern full of wheels.

  Right up to the ceiling of the room the walls are covered with clocks. Old ones with proudly chased faces, precious and rich; calmly swinging their pendulum, they declaim their soothing tick-tock in a deep bass.

  In the corner there is one in a glass coffin. Snow White, standing up, is pretending she’s asleep, but a quiet, rhythmical twitching together with the minute hand shows she’s keeping her eye on the time. Others, nervous rococo demoiselles — with a beauty spot for the keyhole — are overloaded with decoration and quite out of breath, as they each trip along, trying to take precedence over the others and get ahead of the seconds. Beside them are tiny pages, giggling and urging them on: tick, tick, tick.

  Then a long row, gleaming with steel, silver and gold. Like knights in full armour; they seem to be drunk and asleep, for sometimes they snore loudly or rattle their chains, as if they had a mind to break a lance with Cronos himself once they wake and have sobered up.

  On a windowledge a woodman with mahogany trousers and a glittering copper nose is sawing time to sawdust …

  The old man spoke, rousing me from my contemplation. ‘They’ve all been ill, I’ve made them all well again.’ I had so completely forgotten him that at first I thought it was a clock striking.

  The magnifying glass on the headband had been pushed up and was now in the middle of his forehead — like the third eye of Shiva — with a glow in it, the reflection of the light on the ceiling.

  He nodded to me, keeping his eyes fixed on mine. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they’ve been ill; they thought they could change their destiny by going faster or slower. In their arrogance they saw themselves as the lords of time and that cost them their contentment. I freed them from that delusion and gave their lives its calm again. From time to time on moonlit nights a person will find his way out of the town to me in his sleep, as you have, and bring me his sick clock, lamenting and begging me to mend it. But the next morning it is all forgotten, including my medicine.

  ‘Only those who understand the meaning of my motto,’ he pointed over his shoulder to the words on the wall, ‘only they leave their clocks here for me to look after.’

  I had a vague sense that the words on the wall concealed a further secret. I was going to ask, but the old man raised a warning hand. ‘Do not seek to know. Living knowledge comes of its own accord. The motto has twenty-three letters; they are the numbers on the great dial of the invisible clock, which has one hour less than mortals’ clocks, whose closed circle allows no escape. That is why people who “know” mock me. “Look,” they say, “isn’t it crazy?!” They scoff, they do not see the warning: Do not let yourself be caught in the noose of “time”!’ They let themselves be guided by the insidious clock-hand of “reason”, which is always promising new hours, but only gives them old disappointments.’

  The old man fell silent. With a mute appeal I handed him my dead clock. He took it in his beautiful slim white hand and gave an almost imperceptible smile when he opened it and glanced inside. Cautiously examining the works with a needle, he pulled the magnifying glass down. I felt that a kindly eye was peering into my heart.

  Musing, I observed his reposeful face. How could I have been so afraid of him as a child, I wondered.

  Then I was suddenly gripped by a terrible fear: this man, in whom I have put my trust, my hope, is not real — now — now he’s going to disappear! No, thank goodness. It was just the candle in the lamp flickering and trying to deceive my eyes.

  Again I stared at him, pondering. Is this the first time I’ve seen him? That can’t be true. Surely we’ve known each other since …?

  Then memory struck me like a flash of lightning: I had never run past a white wall as a schoolboy, I had never been afraid of a mad clockmaker who was said to live behind it. It was the word ‘mad’, to me an empty and incomprehensible word, that had frightened me when I was a little child and people had threatened ‘that’ was what I would become if I didn’t listen to reason.

  But this old man, sitting here in front of me, who was he? I thought I knew that as well: an image, just an image, not a person. What else could it be?! An image, a shadow-bud of my soul that had secretly formed inside me; a seed, it had taken root when I was lying in my bed at the beginning of my life, with the old nurse holding my hand and her monotonous murmuring that had carried me over into sleep. What was it she had been saying? What was it she had been saying?

  A bitter taste came up in my throat, the sting of sorrow: so everything around me here was nothing but a shifting illusion! Perhaps in another minute I would be standing outside in the moonlight, a sleepwalker who has woken and must return home to the town, back to the world of the living, busy and obsessed with reason — no, to the dead!

  What was it my nurse had murmured? I was desperate to know … and slowly, slowly it appeared inside me, syllable by syllable:

  If your heart should stop in pain,

  To him it take

  For he can make

  Any clock to go again.

  ‘And she was quite right,’ the clockmaker said calmly, putting down the needle. Immediately my dark thoughts vanished.

  He stood up and held the clock to my ear. I could hear it going with a regular beat, precisely in time with the pulse of my blood.

  I tried to thank him, but could not find the words, so great was my joy — and shame at having doubted him.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said to comfort me, ‘it wasn’t your fault. I’ve taken out a little wheel and put it back again. Clocks like these are very sensitive, sometimes they can’t stand the Second Hour. There you are. Take it back, but don’t tell anyone it’s going. They’ll only mock and try to harm you. It’s belonged to you since you were a child and you believed in the hours it shows, fourteen instead of one to — midnight, seven instead of six, Sunday instead of weekday, pictures instead of dead numbers. Stay true to it, but don’t tell anyone. There’s nothing more stupid than insisting on being a martyr. Keep it hidden by your heart and in your pocket have one of the ordinary watches, the officially calibrated ones with a respectable black-and-white dial, so that you can always see what time it is for othe
r people. And don’t let yourself be poisoned by the miasma of the “Second Hour”. It’s deadly, just like its eleven sisters. It starts off red, like a promising sunrise, but quickly turns red as a blazing fire, red as blood. The “Hour of the Ox” the old people of the East used to call it. The centuries go by and it passes in peace: the ox is ploughing. But suddenly, overnight, the oxen turn into roaring buffaloes, driven by the demon with the bull’s head and trample the fields flat in their blind, animal fury; after that they learn to till the soil again. Ordinary clocks keep going in the same old way, but their hands don’t show the way out of the orbit of humans’ time either. All their hours are pregnant — each with a different ideal — but what they give birth to is an abortion.

  ‘Your clock stopped at two, at the hour of destruction. Fortunately it passed over that. Others die from it and stray into the realm of death, yours found its way to me — to the one whose hands fashioned it. It is you it has to thank for that. It could only do that because you have lovingly guarded it your whole life through and never taken offence because its time is not that of the Earth.

  He showed me to the door, shook my hand and said, ‘A while ago you were in doubt as to whether I am alive. Believe me, I am more alive than you. Now you know the way here, we’ll soon see each other again. Perhaps I can teach you how to make sick clocks well. Then’ — he pointed to his motto on the wall — ‘then the motto may be completed for you:’

  Nihil scire — omnia posse.

  To know nothing — to be able to do everything.

  The City with the Secret Heartbeat

  The city I am talking about is old Prague. Fate, the Pilot, brought me to this strange city from foggy Hamburg forty-five years ago. On the very first day, when I took a long walk through the unknown streets, I was dazzled by the bright, scorching sun brooding over the ancient buildings with its sweltering heat, a sun which seemed quite different from the cheerfully shining skies I remembered from my childhood in bright, carefree Bavaria. …

  Even then, as I walked over the ancient Stone Bridge which crosses the calm waters of the Moldau to the hill with its dark castle exuding the arrogance of ancient generations of Habsburgs, I was overcome with a profound sense of horror, for which I could find no explanation. Since that day this feeling of apprehension never left me for a moment during all the time — the length of a whole generation — I lived in Prague, the city with the secret heartbeat. It has never entirely left me, even today it comes over me when I think back to Prague or dream of it at night. Everything I ever experienced I can call up in my mind’s eye as if it were there before me, bursting with life. If, however, I summon up Prague, it appears more clearly than anything else, so clearly, in fact, that it no longer seems real, but ghostly. Every person I knew there turns into a ghost, an inhabitant of a realm that does not know death.

  Puppets do not die when they leave the stage; and all the beings the city with the secret heartbeat holds together are puppets. Other cities, however old they may be, seem to me to be in the power of their people. Prague, as if disinfected by germicidal acids, shapes and manipulates its inhabitants like a puppeteer from their first to their last breath. Just as volcanoes spew forth fire out of the earth, so this eerie city spews war and revolution out into the world and it may well not be a delusion when the few people who keep their eyes open say that it secretly set off the first sparks of the last war!

  On the Town Hall in the Old Town Square there is a huge astronomical clock with the signs of the zodiac, wreathed in legend. On the stroke of midday a little door opens and the twelve Apostles come out one after the other, only to silently disappear again, as if satisfied that the time for which they have been waiting patiently has not yet come, pursued by a thirteenth figure, Death with hourglass and scythe. He goes as well, with the cock of the far-off resurrection crowing above, like a prophecy of the apocalypse. It gives the sign and the hundred towers of the city join in, howling to drown out the mocking cockcrow that claims to know of the future collapse of all human time. I wonder if the long dead constructor of the clock had such an announcement in mind when he made it? He is supposed to have been mad. Perhaps madmen are closer to the last things than ‘normal’ people with their common sense. And one way or the other most of the puppets in Prague are mad, with a secret and concealed madness. Or obsessed with some bizarre idea.

  Every year on 16 May, thousands — mostly peasant women with colourful headscarves and girls with hot, dark eyes — come in pilgrimage from the villages of Bohemia to the statue of St Nepomuk on the edge of the Stone Bridge. On such spring nights, surrounded by the glow of the five ruby-red lamps, it seems to hang in the air, shimmering in the silvery mist and looking to the south with the face of Jan Hus. In fact it never was St. John Nepomuk, it is the bronze statue of Jan Hus, only the people have forgotten, have swapped the names — the secret heartbeat of the city washes away all names, creating legend upon legend.

  Often, on brightly moonlit nights, I wandered round the Lesser Town — the quarter on the other side of the Moldau, the very heart of Prague — and every time I got lost: an ancient town house where you feel it is impossible anyone can have lived there for decades, so thick are the layers of dust and verdigris on the doorknob; beside it a baroque building with opalescent windows which gleam like the glass of antique Roman tear-bottles; then a fifteen-foot-high wall, stretching out into infinity, with crumbling stucco on which the city’s ghostly hand has drawn fantastic animal heads and staring faces that seem unmoving and yet have changed their expression every time you look at them. An overpowering fragrance of jasmine or elderflowers comes drifting down through the air and you sense: somewhere there are gardens, huge parks where perhaps no one has set foot since time immemorial. A vision steals over you: across the wall is a house where, in a mouldering room, is a dead woman, her worm-eaten body lying in a bed that has long since crumbled to dust. Or is it a monastery, a convent, the wall surrounds? With monks or nuns who prayed and chastised themselves until they were dead to the outside world. But if you look for it in broad daylight, you look in vain. Instead of the wall, there’s a street with a house, three stories high, at the end; you look up at the roof — and there’s another house on top of the first! A hallucination? No, the street takes a sharp turn, like a bent elbow, rising steeply, and high up there’s another house. A queer man lives there, short, beardless, he looks like Napoleon and tells people’s fortunes from a huge tome written in Hebrew letters. I once went to visit him and as I crossed the threshold into his room I heard him saying to a stranger in broken German, ‘The drumming you heard during the night by the wall at the last street-lamp doesn’t come from the soldiers, it comes from Žižka’s drum. Before he died, he gave orders for his skin to be removed after his death and made into a drumskin so that his voice could be heard even though he was dead.’

  ‘What did you mean by that?’ I asked when we were alone. He looked astonished. He genuinely was astonished and denied ever having said anything like that. Some time afterwards I was told that he forgot everything he had said almost immediately after saying it. He was moonstruck, even by daylight.

  Later, when the great war broke out, I was reminded of the drum of Jan Žižka, the one-eyed Hussite leader. I somehow felt there was some kind of shadowy connection. Or was it just coincidence? I don’t think so — the city with the secret heartbeat has a strange way of speaking through the lips of its puppets.

  The Pilot

  Tomorrow is the fortieth anniversary of that day, the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin. I was sitting at my desk in my bachelor apartment in Prague. I had just put my farewell letter to my mother in the envelope and picked up the revolver, which lay in front of me, for I intended to set out on the journey across the Styx, to cast away a life that seemed shallow, worthless and with little promise of consolation in the future.

  At that moment the ‘Pilot wearing the cloak of invisibility’, as I have since called him, boarded my ship of life and turned the helm. I he
ard a rustling at the door leading out into the hallway and when I turned round I saw something white being pushed under the door into the room. It was a printed brochure. The fact that I put my revolver down, picked up the brochure and read the title came neither from a feeling of curiosity nor from a secret desire to put off death — my heart was empty.

  I read: ‘On Life after Death.’

  ‘Strange coincidence!’ was the thought that tried to form inside me, but it hardly managed to get the first word onto my lips. Since then I have never believed in coincidence, I believe in the Pilot.

  With trembling hand — it had not trembled for a moment before, neither when I wrote the farewell letter to my mother, nor when I picked up the revolver — I lit the lamp, for night had fallen, and read the brochure, which had obviously been delivered by my bookseller’s messenger boy, from beginning to end, my pulse racing. It was all about spiritualism, above all describing the experiences the important scientists investigating this area — William Crookes, Professor Zöllner, Professor Fechner and others — had had with the mediums Slade, Eglinstone, Home etc.

  I sat through the whole night until dawn started to break, with burning thoughts, which until then had been alien to me, going round and round inside my head; could such outstanding scholars as these have been mistaken? Hardly imaginable. But then what strange, incomprehensible laws of nature, flying in the face of all known principles of physics, had been at work?