The Dedalus Meyrink Reader Read online

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the dugpa, not for a long time; thinking back to it, I’m tempted to say that I felt like a child, breathless with horror at the sight of a fearful mask suddenly emerging from the darkness.

  On his head the dugpa had a close-fitting scarlet cap with no brim; otherwise he was entirely clothed in a costly sable fur dyed orange which came down to his ankles.

  There were no words spoken between him and my guide, but I assume they communicated by secret gestures for, without asking what I wanted, the dugpa turned to me and said, unprompted, that he was ready to show me whatever I wanted, but I had to agree to accept all the responsibility, even if I did not know what that entailed.

  I — naturally — immediately expressed my readiness.

  As a token of that he demanded I touch the ground with my left hand.

  I did so.

  Without another word he set off in front of us and we followed for a short distance until he told us to sit down. We squatted by a small mound resembling a table.

  Did I have a white cloth?

  In vain I looked through my pockets, but all I could find was a faded old folding map of Europe in the lining of my coat — it must have been hidden there all the time I was travelling round Asia. I spread it out between us and explained to the dugpa that it showed the place where I came from.

  He exchanged a quick glance with my guide and once more the Tibetan’s face was briefly suffused with the expression full of hatred and malice that had struck me the previous evening.

  Would I like to see cricket magic?

  I nodded. It was immediately clear to me what was to come, a well-known trick, luring insects out of the ground by whistling or something like that.

  And I wasn’t wrong. With a little silver bell these shamans carry hidden about their person the dugpa made a soft, metallic chirping noise and immediately a mass of crickets came swarming out of their holes in the ground and crawled up onto the faded map.

  More and more.

  Countless insects.

  I was starting to get annoyed, having endured a tedious ride for a trivial display I’d seen often enough in China, but then I realised that what I was seeing was ample compensation for all the discomfort: the crickets were not just a hitherto unrecorded species — which was interesting enough in itself — but their behaviour was highly unusual. Scarcely had they crawled onto the map than they started running round and round aimlessly in circles, then they formed into groups which surveyed each other suspiciously. Suddenly a rainbow of light appeared in the middle of the map — it came from a prism the dugpa was holding up to the sun, as I quickly established — and within a few seconds the hitherto peaceful crickets had turned into a mass of insect bodies tearing each other apart in the most horrible way. It was such a revolting sight, I prefer not to describe it. The buzzing of the thousands upon thousands of wings produced a high humming note which went right through me, a shrill mixture of fiendish hatred and mortal anguish I shall never be able to forget.

  I commanded the dugpa to put an end to it immediately. Having already returned the prism to its pocket, he simply shrugged his shoulders.

  In vain I tried to force the crickets apart with a stick; the blind frenzy of killing was unstoppable. New hordes kept arriving and the foul, wriggling mass grew bigger and bigger until it was the height of a man. As far as the eye could see, the ground was teeming with maddened insects. A whitish swarm, squashed together, pressing towards the middle, impelled by just the one thought: kill, kill, kill.

  Some of the crickets that fell off the pile were so seriously maimed they couldn’t crawl back up and tore themselves to pieces with their pincers. At times the humming note was so loud and so horribly shrill that I felt I couldn’t stand it any longer and put my hands over my ears.

  Finally, thank God, the insects grew fewer and fewer, the swarms crawling out of the earth seemed to get thinner and eventually stopped entirely.

  ‘What’s he doing now?’ I asked my guide, when I saw that the dugpa was showing no sign of moving. Instead he seemed to be making great efforts to concentrate his thoughts on something. He had drawn up his top lip so that I could clearly see his sharpened teeth. They were pitch black, presumably from the betel chewing that is customary here.

  ‘He is binding and loosing,’ I heard the Tibetan reply.

  Despite the fact that I kept telling myself that it was only insects that had died there, I felt completely drained and close to fainting, so that his voice sounded as if it came from far away: ‘He is binding and loosing.’

  I didn’t understand what he meant by that and I still don’t understand today. Nothing more worth mentioning happened, but I continued to sit there, perhaps for hours, why I couldn’t say. I had lost the will to stand up, that’s the only way I can describe it.

  Gradually the sun sank and the clouds and countryside all around took on that improbably lurid red and orange colour familiar to all those who have been to Tibet. To give an impression, the only comparison is the crudely painted walls of the menageries of travelling circuses in Europe.

  I could not get the words ‘He is binding and loosing’ out of my mind, little by little they built up into fearful imaginings: the twitching heap of crickets turned into millions of dying soldiers. I was so weighed down with an immense, mysterious feeling of responsibility I could hardly breathe, and what made it all the more tormenting was the fact that I looked in vain for the cause.

  Then it seemed as if the dugpa had suddenly disappeared, to be replaced by a repulsive statue, all scarlet and olive green, of the Tibetan God of War. I fought against it until my eyes could fix on the real world again, but it did not seem real enough to me: the fumes rising from the ground, the jagged icy peaks of the mountains soaring above the distant horizon, the dugpa with his red cap, myself in my half European, half Tibetan clothes, the black tent with the spider’s legs — all that could surely not be real. Reality, imagination, vision? What was truth, what was illusion? And the abyss that kept yawning in my thoughts whenever the choking fear of the incomprehensible, terrible feeling of responsibility welled up inside me once more!

  Later, much later, on the journey back, the incident grew in my memory like some rampant poisonous plant which I couldn’t pull up, try as I would.

  At night, when I can’t get to sleep, a dreadful suspicion of what ‘He is binding and loosing’ might mean slowly starts to dawn on me. I try to stifle it, just as you try to smother a fire that has broken out, to stop it being spelt out explicitly. But it’s no use resisting, in my mind’s eye I can see reddish vapour rising from from the heap of dead crickets and forming banks of cloud which, darkening the sky like the grim harbingers of the monsoon, are pouring westwards.

  And now, as I write this, once more I’m overcome with — with —

  ‘The letter appears to break off at that point,’ Professor Goclenius said. ‘And unfortunately it is now my sad duty to tell you what I learnt at the Chinese embassy about the unexpected death of our dear colleague, so far away in Asia …’ The professor got no farther, he was interrupted by a loud cry: ‘Incredible! The cricket’s still alive! After a whole year! Incredible! Catch it. It’s flying away.’ The men were all shouting at once. The scholar with the flowing locks had opened the little jar and shaken the apparently dead insect out.

  The next moment the cricket had flown out of the window into the garden.

  The entomologists were in such a hurry to catch it, they almost knocked Demetrius, the old museum attendant, flat on his back as he came in to light the lamp.

  Shaking his head, the old man watched them prancing around outside with their butterfly nets. Then he looked up at the evening sky and muttered, ‘What strange shapes the clouds have during these terrible days of war. There’s one there that looks just like a man with a green face and a red cap. If his eyes weren’t so far apart it could almost be a human being. It’s enough to make a man superstitious after all these years.’

  How Dr Job Pau
persum gave his Daughter Red Roses

  Sitting motionless and staring into space late one night in the sumptuous Café Stefanie in Munich was an old man of the most remarkable appearance. The threadbare tie, that had taken on a life of its own, and the massive domed forehead with hair flowing down to the back of his neck indicated a distinguished scholar.

  The old gentleman possessed little in the way of worldly goods, apart from a sparse silver Vandyke, which, from its source among seven warts on his chin, just reached down to that point of his waistcoat where unworldly thinkers generally have a button missing.

  If truth be told, that was the sum total of his worldly possessions. When, therefore, the snappily dressed professional gentleman with the pince-nez and black waxed moustache at the corner table diagonally opposite, who up to that point had devoured a portion of cold salmon, lifting each mouthful to his lips on the point of his knife (each time a diamond the size of a cherry glinted on his elegantly extended little finger) and now and then casting protuberantly searching glances in his direction — when, therefore, this gentleman wiped his lips, stood up, crossed the almost empty café, bowed and said, ‘Would you be interested in a game of chess, sir? At one mark per game, perhaps?’ Paupersum’s reaction was all the more eager.

  Vivid phantasmagoria of all kinds of opulence and indulgence appeared before the scholar’s mind’s eye and even as an inner voice whispered, ‘God must have sent me this chump,’ his lips were already commanding the waiter, who had just come bustling up and set off, as was his wont, a range of faults in the electric light bulbs, ‘Julius! A chessboard. ’

  ‘If I’m not mistaken, it’s Dr Paupersum I have the pleasure of addressing?’ was the opening conversational gambit of the professional gentleman with the waxed moustache.

  ‘Job … yes, er, yes, Job Paupersum,’ the scholar admitted abstractedly, for he was spellbound by the magnificence of the whopping great emerald, in the shape of a car headlamp, on the tie-pin adorning the throat of his opponent. Only the arrival of the chessboard released him from the spell and in no time at all the pieces were set up, the loose knights fixed with spittle and the missing castle replaced by a bent matchstick.

  After his third move the professional gentleman divested himself of his pince-nez, adopted the classical thinker’s pose and fell into brooding lucubration.

  ‘He must be trying to find the most stupid move on the board. I can’t think why else he’s taking so long,’ Paupersum muttered to himself, staring absent-mindedly at the lady in lurid green silk, the only other living being in the room apart from himself and the professional gentleman, who was sitting in solitary splendour on the sofa, like the goddess on the front page of Over Land and Sea, attacking a plate of cream horns, her cool woman’s heart secure behind a hundred pounds of fat.

  ‘I give up,’ the gentleman with the emerald headlamp finally announced, pushed the pieces together, produced a gold case from somewhere inside his jacket, fished out a visiting card and handed it to Paupersum, who read:

  Zenon Savanievski

  Impresario for Freak Shows

  ‘Hmm. Yeees. Hmm — for freaks hmm — for freaks.’ For a while Paupersum kept repeating the word vacuously, then, his mind on building up capital, he raised his voice and asked, ‘But don’t you fancy a few more games?’

  ‘Certainly. Of course. As many as you like,’ the professional gentleman said politely, ‘but shouldn’t we discuss some more lucrative business first?’

  ‘Some more — more lucrative business?’ the scholar exclaimed, faint wrinkles of suspicion appearing at the corners of his eyes.

  ‘I happen to have heard —’ the impresario went on, ordering with graphic gestures a bottle of wine and one glass from the waiter, ‘— quite by chance I happen to have heard that despite your eminence as a scientist you have no position at the moment?’

  ‘Oh yes I have. I spend the day wrapping comforts for the troops and putting stamps on them.’

  ‘And that keeps body and soul together?’

  ‘Only insofar as licking the stamps provides a certain amount of carbohydrates for my organism.’

  ‘But then why don’t you make use of your knowledge of languages instead? As an interpreter in a prisoner-of-war camp, for example?’

  ‘Because I’ve only learnt Old Korean, regional variants of Spanish, Urdu, three Eskimo languages together with a few dozen dialects of Swahili and at the moment we are unfortunately not at war with those peoples.’

  ‘Serves you right for not learning French, Russian, English and Serbian,’ the impresario muttered.

  ‘If I had, it would just mean the war would have broken out with the Eskimos instead of the French,’ the scholar objected.

  ‘Really? Hmm.’

  ‘Yes, my dear sir, there’s no hmm about it, that’s the way things are.’

  ‘Personally, in your situation, Herr Doktor, I’d have tried to place articles on the war with some newspaper or other. All made up, of course, you wouldn’t have to leave your study.’

  ‘I’ve tried that,’ the old man wailed, ‘reports from the front, concise and factual, touchingly simple in tone, but —’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ the impresario broke in. ‘Reports from the front concise and simple in tone?! When you write reports from the front you pull out all the stops. You should have —’

  Dr Paupersum dismissed his advice with a wave of the hand. ‘I’ve tried everything humanly possible. When it was impossible to find a publisher for my book On the Probable Use of Sand for Blotting in Prehistoric China, an exhaustive four-volume treatment of the subject, I turned to chemistry’ — simply watching the other man drink the wine loosened Dr Paupersum’s tongue — ‘and quickly invented a new way of hardening steel…’

  ‘Well that must have brought in the money!’ the impresario exclaimed.

  ‘No. A manufacturer I showed my invention advised me not to bother patenting it (later on he patented it himself). He said you could only earn money with small inventions that didn’t attract your colleagues’ notice and arouse their envy. I took his advice and invented the famous folding confirmation chalice with automatic rising bottom to make it easier for the Methodist missionaries to convert savage tribes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I was sent to prison for two years for blasphemy.’

  ‘Go on, Herr Doktor,’ the impresario said encouragingly, ‘this is all fascinating.’

  ‘Oh, I could go on for days about hopes that came to nothing. For example, in order to get a scholarship a well-known patron of science had announced, I spent several years studying in the Museum of Ethnology. The result was a book that attracted a great deal of attention: How, According to the Shape of the Palate in Peruvian Mummies, the Incas Would Probably have Pronounced the Word Huitzitopochtli, if the Word had been Current in Peru instead of in Mexico.’

  ‘And were you awarded the scholarship?’

  ‘No. The patron of science told me — this was before the war — that at the moment he was short of money. Moreover, he was a pacifist and had to save up because the most important thing was to consolidate Germany’s good relations with France in order to preserve the humanitarian work and ideals that had been established at such great effort.’

  ‘But then when the war broke out you’d have prospects of getting the scholarship?’

  ‘No. He said said that now he had to save more than ever so he could make his own small contribution to making sure the old enemy was vanquished for good.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure your luck’ll be in once the war’s over, Herr Doktor.’

  ‘No. Then he’ll say he really has to save so that all the humanitarian work and ideals, that have been destroyed, can be built up again and good relations between the nations can be re-established once more.’

  The impresario thought for a long while, then asked in sympathetic tones, ‘How is it you’ve never shot yourself?’

  ‘Shot myself? To earn money?’

  ‘No, no. I mean … er,
well … I mean it’s remarkable that you’ve never lost heart, that you keep going back into the fray.’

  At once Paupersum became restless. A fearful flicker animated his expression, which up to that point had been fixed, as if carved from wood. A similar wild glint, a look of agony, of profound, mute hopelessness, can be seen in the eyes of frightened animals on the edge of the cliff, with their pursuers behind them, before they plunge into the abyss so as not to fall into the hands of their tormentors. Twitching, as if with repressed sobs, his skinny fingers scrabbled round on the table, seeming to look for something to hold on to. The crease running from his nose to his mouth suddenly lengthened and stiffened, twisting his lips as if he were fighting against paralysis. He swallowed a few times.

  ‘Ah, now I know,’ — the words came haltingly, as if he had to struggle to stop himself slurring them — ‘now I know, you’re selling insurance. I’ve spent half my life trying to avoid meeting someone like you.’ (In vain the impresario tried to interrupt, and raised both his hands and eyebrows in protest.) ‘You’re implying I should take out insurance and then find some way of killing myself so that — yes, so that my child at least can live and won’t have to starve to death with me. Don’t say anything. Do you think I don’t know that nothing can be kept secret from you people? You’ve dug invisible passages from house to house and you peer, beady-eyed, into the rooms where there’s money to be made, so that you know everything about us: where a child’s been born, how many pennies this or that man has in his purse, whether he’s thinking of getting married or going on a dangerous journey. You keep tabs on us and you sell each other our addresses. And you, you look into my heart and read the thought that has been eating away at me for ten long years. Do you think I’m such a miserable egoist that I wouldn’t have long since taken out insurance and shot myself for my daughter’s sake — off my own bat and without any of you, who intend to cheat us and cheat your own company, who cheat here, there and everywhere, telling me how to do it so that nothing would come out? Do you think I don’t know that when … when the deed’s done you’d be off in a flash to tell them — for another cut, of course: “It’s a case of suicide, you don’t need to pay out.” Do you think I can’t see — as everyone can — my dear daughter’s hands getting whiter and whiter and more transparent with every day that passes, do you think I don’t know what it means when she has dry, feverish lips and coughs during the night? Even if I were a scoundrel like you people, in order to buy medicine and nourishing food I’d have long since… But I know what would happen, the money would never be paid out and… and then… no, no, it doesn’t bear thinking about!’