He rode up to her in an open cast-iron elevator. It was like a wondrous cage, like a pierced parrot house. Upstairs there was a little white hall with white lacquered walls. The hall wafted with the scent of fine women’s garments and Violette de Parme.
The woman stood there in a very small room which was rather warm.
“It really is a little cage—,” she said to the man. “Make yourself comfortable. Feel free to smoke—.”
“What are you looking at?” she said. “Oh, back into my youth. That one there on the wall is a picture of the room in which I grew up. It’s a big homeland, even if it looks very small.”
“A big homeland?!” remarked the tattered Tartar.
“That’s right. My guardian loved me—. So did his son. His wife’s name was Evelyn and she always sat in an easy chair under fruit trees that didn’t give off much shade. She only really needed the sun, and the shade of the fruit trees was superfluous. One time she said to me: ‘Anita—.’ And then she paused. Then she said: ‘My husband loves you and my son loves you and I love you. I’ve never read novels. What’s the use of novels? But I’m reading one now and I can’t quite get the hang of it.’ She expressed herself so sensitively about these complicated matters that were tearing her up inside. No one can explain what happened next. Do you find this boring?! I fled from my guardian, my guiding star, whom I loved, that’s right, I fled, even though he wanted to share his life with me. But I held back my life and fled from his.”
Pause.
“Are you comfortable in that chair?” said the woman to the tattered Tartar. “You can fetch yourself a pillow. Go ahead, take these white silken ones. It makes no difference.”
Then she continued: “After that, the bank director said to me: ‘Anita, I love you, I’d like to take care of you—.’ ‘What for, am I sick—?!’ I said. ‘Just about—,’ he said. So I accepted my gentle caretaker. He protected my somewhat fragile body like a holy thing, so that a soul could blossom in it, a soul that did not always sing his chosen hymns—. The noble man!”
Pause.
“And Evelyn and the son?” asked the Tartar.
“They shriveled up, I think. It may be that they both betook themselves to the fruit trees in the sun and let the dappled shade and sun spots do them in.”
“And did the beloved guardian never kiss you?!”
“Of course he did. That’s what it was. A guiding star that starts burning instead of glowing! Why did he reject Evelyn, the guardian of us all, our guiding star?!”
The tattered Tartar thought: “Your love sank down to your waistline, Anita, splendid gazelle! You were the very incarnation of my notion of those souls that slip down to the waistline and have to stop here. The soul does not endure the ‘sacred transformation’ to the bodily, it does not release itself unto the ‘blessed delirium,’ but, rather, grows and grows into itself and never comes to an end. And finally it transforms you into an impassioned poet who is always enamored of someone, sings sweet hymns and has wondrous dreams. Love is never condensed into the ‘physical act,’ there is no physical mode of expression, no instrument for the music of living on which the soul could cry itself out, sing its heart out, set itself free! The mystery of ‘sexual release’ plays no role in the love of the sonorous, self-expressive, self-redemptive soul! Just as the word formed in the throat of the carnal, the sonorous, the revelatory, in the love that flows in bodily release, is a loose translation of the redemptive thought!
“Everything stayed inside you, Anita, and grew inward into the source of mysterious deeds! Of such love a symphony is born, an external score as with the man Beethoven, an internal score for the child-virgin. Never does a little baby blossom from such love, never can you expel it from your tired loins and set it out on your lap as a whole little person. It will always keep welling up and cooling back down again in you in luminous clouds. Woman, you’re like a fantastic protoplasm, without the ‘holy becoming’ and the peace! You’re like an artist’s soul in perpetual motion, like Beethoven and the sea!”
This is how he expounded upon Anita, traced her back to that place where she came from, her youth!
The woman stood leaning, actually pressing against the white lacquered door, and a faint glimmer of what she had once been hovered over her brown golden hair.
She spoke. She stopped speaking. He spoke. He stopped speaking. She spoke. She stopped speaking—.
It was the second day of the fairy tale of the “stranger who becomes known.” The tartar lay in the heap of white pillows and smoked.
Then the woman spoke at greater length, with an exceptionally soft voice, saying: “What are we?! Firewood. Somebody sets us afire, we burn, we give warmth—. But actually we’re something that no one knows——trees!We’re a quiet entity unto ourselves, without any real purpose, like trees in the forest that nobody needs, adorned with leaves and blossoms—. We’re something that grows out into the world, into a forest no man has ever tread, a silent wood. The tree had to bend to attain the height that man requires of it, to make little cords of wood cut up for the fireplace. But later, at another time of life, we start to stand upright again and grow, like trees with rustling leaves and stirring branches. Nobody says ‘bravo.’ It’s a forest solitude. Something similar happens on that perfidious night on which nature, that frightful slaphappy force, twists us into a woman. Big, tall, upright, reaching to the heavens, we rear up in childhood and then again much later. Like forest trees that nobody needs with rustling leaves and blossoms—.”
She stopped speaking—. They stopped speaking.
And a hundred days went by—. The hundredth day dawned.
He stood up and gave her his hand: “Adieu—.”
“Adieu—,” said the woman.
She thought: “He looks just like a noble Tartar—.
I revealed my youth to him—! What for?! I made my confession before the fire goes out—.”
The little white lacquered hall wafted with the scent of women’s garments. The Tartar stood still. He peered down the curl of the black cast-iron stairway and saw at the bottom the wondrous pierced black cast-iron elevator cage, to which three black coils of wire were attached dangling down into an abyss.
He felt: “Anita—.” And again he became a mirror for his fellow man, soaking it all up and beaming it back!
And then he thought of the trees in a forest that nobody needs, that grow down into the earth and up into the sky with rustling leaves and blossoms.
And he thought of the people who are not somebody’s “pretty object,” but rather, like forest trees, great free entities unto themselves with rustling souls and spirit blossoms! And they wilt and sag, like forest trees, and collapse in upon themselves and become humus for the spring. This is how they beget — offspring, life springing off of them! They, the fall that feeds the spring. The tall freewheeling trees in the human forest, the sturdy trunks that won’t become chopped firewood, but grow down into the earth and up into the sky! Amen—.