“I’m late!” I cried. “Sorry, but –”
“Wait for me outside, I’ve forgotten something,” she replied and carried on up the stairs, while I continued downward. But as soon as the outdoor air struck my face, I asked myself, Did she really forget something, or did she only come back for my sake? And I had to struggle with myself with all my might not to creep back up the stairs and listen to whether she went inside to ask for something, or would come back after me anyway after a while.
When we were at last side by side on the street, she said with enthusiasm, “It was so interesting at the lunch table today!”
But somehow I couldn’t share her enthusiasm, and that was painful to me. For how great could my love for her be if her enthusiasm didn’t become mine as well? So I walked almost sadly, my breast full of tingling pain, and not knowing what to say. But she didn’t even notice it, she was glad that just for once they had been talking about things that were new to her and could help her to mature. She even wanted to tell her grandfather what had been discussed today at lunch, but she would have to wait a little, because Erika had already spun a great long lie about why she had to stay out longer today.
“I lied in a way that I can use again in the future,” she told me. “But I’m not going to explain it to you, I‘m keeping it to myself. It’s my sin alone, you have no part in it.”
“Our first sin, our first crime,” I said.
“How terrible that what is beautiful turns straight into a sin!” she cried. “Grandfather is always repeating to me that whatever I do, I shouldn’t lie to him, and now it’s happened anyway, as if it were meant to.”
“If you lied for love, then your sin will be forgiven you,” I said, as if taking her confession.
“But if it was for forbidden love?” she asked. “I’ve heard so often about forbidden love.”
“Then you are doubly forgiven, because forbidden love is great love,” I explained, without really knowing whether that explanation was right or whether it made any sense at all. But she asked with great interest, “Is forbidden love really great love?“ And since I didn’t answer straight away, she carried on: “What really is forbidden love? What kind of love is forbidden?”
“For instance, if a king’s daughter fell in love with the son of a fisherman or a peasant,” I answered.
“But if the fisherman’s or peasant’s son loved the king’s daughter, would that be forbidden?” she enquired.
“No, that wouldn’t be,” I explained. “A small person may love a greater one, a lower may love a higher, not the other way round. A wolf may howl at the moon, but the moon has to this day never howled at a wolf; that is the order of things.”
“That was a joke, about the wolf and the moon, wasn’t it?” she said. “You said that because the moon suddenly happened to shine on us.”
“That’s why,” I replied. “I suddenly had a feeling that I’m also a wolf howling at the moon.”
“Why?” she wondered. “I don’t understand, because…”
“It’s best that way,” I said, and asked, “shall we go to the seaside?”
“I’m afraid of going there, I might be recognised in the moonlight and grandfather might find out that…”
“… that the moon is walking with a howling wolf,” I laughed.
“You mean you thought of me as the moon?” she asked, amazed.
“No, I was thinking of a king’s daughter.”
“No, you were thinking of me, and I’m so embarrassed.”
“Why are you embarrassed, if I thought of you?”
“I can’t tell you that,” she replied in a voice as if she had to blush.
“But who can you tell it to?” I asked.
“If I had a mother, then to her,” she didn’t hesitate to reply.
“So what would you tell her?”
“I’d say that someone compared me to the moon, but…”
“But?” I asked, when she stopped.
“Now we come to what I can’t say any more,” she explained.
“To your mother, you could.”
“But I don’t have a mother,” she said. “I don’t even remember my mother, or only something white as if through a fog, and auntie says that must be a memory of my mother, because she loved to dress in white – white silk with a red rose. Last year there was a reception at the German Embassy, and there I saw a lady in white silk with an enormously big red rose, and I asked auntie, might my mother have been like that lady, but auntie said, ‘Ah, phooey! Not at all! Your mother was a fine lady.’ So I don’t know what my mother was really like, I only remember from auntie’s answer that that lady there at the embassy was not fine enough, she thought, to be my mother.”
She went on talking for a while about the German Embassy reception, her auntie and the lady in white with the big red rose, who she only remembered dimly memory as something white. It was nice that she talked and I could be silent. I too was thinking of my own mother, among other things, I thought that if she had died in my early childhood, what sort of memory would I have of her? At any rate not white, because my mother was one of those, as I recall her, who thought that you can’t wear white, because it gets soiled too easily and it always has to be washed. That was the difference between my mother and Erika’s, and somehow that difference had been carried over to us, I thought. And as Erika spoke, I was walking silently beside her and imagining her dressed in white, and I felt that I was starting to love that white as a distant memory or enchantment, entirely different to my love up to now. Suddenly it seemed to me that what had gone before was not love at all, but only a sort of mental stupor, which had come over me and everyone of my age who grew up in the period after the Great War and the Revolution. We had heard of love only as desire, nothing more, because anything beyond that belonged in the realm of Platonic ideal, or romance divorced from time and sense, both of them ridiculous. I was taught that by the life around me, I was taught it by the talk I heard about love, I read about it in books. Even in the hands of poets, love became only a tickle or an obscenity, and since hymns didn’t contain either the one or the other, it wasn’t worth reading them. But what happened with me must have happened with so many youths: when we had tickled ourselves enough or told enough dirty jokes, and satisfied our desires, then little by little the moment would arrive when we were overcome by a strange restlessness. And then we dreamed of some distant white thing that walks, a red rose on its breast, and sings of something great and beautiful, something like our mother in the flesh, who has left us an orphan at an early age. At any rate I have had that feeling so many times – I can’t answer for others – but I have never had the courage to admit it either to myself or to others. It’s possible that I couldn’t have admitted it, because that distant and beautiful dream was only a dim surmise, not a deep feeling giving rise to ideas. Only today in the moonlight, walking like this, did I understand really what for so long I had been longing for: I had been yearning for a great love, one I’d never heard of in all my life, the very thought of which might make a person ridiculous. But today I was no longer afraid of ridicule, not today, while Erika talked about her mother as if she were that great white something.
“Your memory of your mother is like that building there in the moonlight,” I said, pointing to the castle, which shimmered vaguely through the foliage thinned by the autumn storms.
“Not like that,” she said, when she had surveyed the front of the moonlit castle for a little while, “nothing is like the white memory of my mother.”
“Only the memory of a great lost love can be like that,” I said, as if to myself, because it didn’t matter what I said or did, I was still thinking of my great love and wanted to touch it in words, somehow make it audible.
“So is the memory of a great lost love easy to bear?” she asked.
“So is your memory of your mother easy?” I responded.