Right beside her, a train was racing past with a roaring noise. Its bright windows fluttered like butterfly wings. Suddenly night enveloped the strange train, swallowed it up again, and the roaring rolled softly away into the distance. Franziska’s heart went its own way, as usual. No, not as usual. It was still trembling with the happy amazement that had woken her from sleep in the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy when La Constanza played it. Yet it was not La Constanza that gladdened her. Like a newborn child, who finds only the first breath difficult, her happiness lived and breathed for itself.
She knew that this shining, quiet hour would have gone next day. Her small hands, her small, hard, implacably hard reason would not be able to grasp it again. Her happiness had no reason, it was the bliss of a created and beyond understanding, but she rejoiced as she entered into the moment.
As a human being, she now longed for human company. She forgot the evening, her meeting with La Constanza, her future, forgot her ever-hungry heart that was always hurrying on. For the first time she felt it was sweet just to live among others, close to living, speaking, happy, suffering people.
She felt it was sweet to live, breathe, be still, give herself to something, follow strange ways pointed out by a stranger’s hand.
The train climbed a last incline. There lay the little town in the mountains. Dark, deep grey, it clung to the wooded hills. All the people there were asleep, she alone was bringing her happy, eager heart closer to her birthplace, and a wild sense of life arose in her. Memory, hope, that dismal afternoon in the rain, Minna’s kindness, warm as rough fabric, the disappointing evening … her own hands lying there wearily in the light of the four candles on the piano after all that playing, after the boundless magnificence of Beethoven. And then, the last moment, the here and now, the memory of Erwin’s dark, beautiful, shadowed face in the church, warmly lit by the golden lights on the altar, shattered by living pain, bounded by an endless succession of human beings. That here and now, that last blissful second, so unexpected, with no reason and no aim—it hovered over her soul like the reflection of light butterfly wings, bringing her joy.
Ruthless to the point of severity with herself, Franziska had never yet known human emotion. She had been driven on by an iron will that knew only success or failure, power or idleness. Now she lost herself to hope; she, always so masculine, gave way to emotion.
On this day, the first she had willingly spent among other human beings, she understood the diversity, the richness, the intoxication of life. With the whole conquering power of a will not yet worn down, she scorned what she had achieved, saw in the success she had fought for so hard, in La Constanza’s praise, only the beginning of a new life. A finer, truer life. A good life.
Only now could she feel disappointment, for only now did she feel longing. She longed for an unpredictable world as rich in stars as reality was not. But it was fine to love the unreal, to believe fervently in the unattainable, to conquer a whole realm from the vantage point of her nineteen years.
It was a great moment. The last moment of her second youth.
The day just past had barely let her out of its stern hands, and now reality awaited her at home in the shape of Henriette’s old weatherproof cape as she waited for her sister at the station, freezing, in Henriette’s tired eyes, in her ageing schoolmistress’s brow where care lay like dust.
ERWIN HAD LOST HIS FATHER very suddenly when he was seventeen. At the age of about forty-five, the man had killed himself with a lethal poison while his son was out at work in an mechanics’ workshop.
He left Erwin in despair. At seventeen, the boy was as weary of life as his father had been at forty-five. But the son survived that first terrible day, and could thus be said to have outlived himself. Something in him pulled itself together, talked, ate and drank, signed forms and other documents, kept his clothes in order, packed suitcases, drew his father’s remaining salary and paid small debts, and with silent determination put his mind to getting away from the small town, which seemed to him a place imbued with a threat of death.
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