The Other Side Page 21
Hesitantly, as if facing something inescapable, he dragged himself past me towards the blue-eyed folk. They stood up and awaited him, statue-like, in a half-circle by the flaming cresset. One of the elders went up to him and handed him a small vessel, a vase, as far as I could tell, then fell to the ground before the Lord. The others also threw themselves to the ground and hid their faces. I was overcome with a surge of religious awe so powerful I fell to my knees involuntarily and folded my hands.
With heavy legs, Patera made his way round the burning flame and down several steps to a small, arched doorway. Such unutterable radiance shone out of it that I had to cover my eyes with both hands. Compared to it, the cresset bore a dim, smoky light. The Lord turned to face us, who were all prostrate and scarcely daring to look at him because of the radiance. The last traces of eeriness had gone from Patera’s eyes; now those large eyes shone a dark, moist blue, embracing us all in a look of boundless compassion. Once more I saw the pure beauty of his profile standing out against the background in all its bright glory. With a slight movement of his head he threw back his long, luxuriant locks and disappeared, the long train of black gauze slowly trailing behind. The bronze door fell shut.
They all arose and went to the portal. I too left my hiding place. Something extraordinary must have been taking place in the next room. We could hear a noise as if columns of people were on the march. Suddenly the flame in the cresset flared up wildly, turned green and went out. We were in total darkness.
From inside the room uncannily long-drawn-out cries rent the air, so tearing at my heart-strings that I shrank back and had to block up my ears to stop myself falling unconscious.
They were piercing sounds, like the screech of a giant saw cutting into rock. Finally they turned into the deep, husky moaning of a wounded beast of prey. That also gradually grew weaker and weaker, and stopped with a horrific rattle.
When we opened the door we found, in the bluish light, a room in which everything had been destroyed: melted pieces of metal, chewed-up fragments of stone, broken-off bits of rock. And there: the Lord!
He lay in a corner, face down against the wall, like a bundle flung there by some alien force.
His shrunken body seemed surprisingly small and feeble. The Lord and this wizened thing, they could not be the same. It was beyond my understanding. Could this ghastly, pitiful impotence be what had entered the room a few moments ago?
Unimaginable death-throes had crumpled up the body of the most powerful creature. That, even if covered in soot and grime, was the same high forehead of the head we all knew so well.
The old men lifted him up. After the corpse had been washed the rigor slowly relaxed and the contortion left its face. The eyelids could be closed and the grin was replaced by an expression of most sublime peace. In death Patera’s dark blond hair had turned white!
Stretched out on the floor the body seemed considerably longer, but, to my horror, I realised it was still growing, in fits and starts, with a cracking of joints, as if possessed of a surfeit of power. It was some time before this growing stopped. In contrast to the length of the body, the massive head now looked almost dainty with its bright halo of pale hair: cold as marble like the statue of a god from antiquity.
The body was indescribably beautiful. I saw such grace and purity of form I could not understand how it had appeared on our earth. Standing before him, the Lord, in my rags and tatters, I perceived his true majesty for the first and last time. None of the blue-eyed tribe there dared to make the slightest gesture that would violate his silent unapproachability. One after the other they went. Once more I was the last. Holding my breath and walking on tip-toe, I slipped out. The blueeyed people left the mountain. I never saw any of them again.
I sat down on the bottom step.
My body shook as the tears came.
Chapter 5: Conclusion
A scene of devastation far and wide. Piles of rubble, marshy ground, broken bricks: the gigantic garbage tip that was once a city, still all wreathed in bluish morning mist. Only the range of rocky mountains in the background are beginning to catch the gold of the rising sun. The sky, although still fairly dark, is cloudless. A bare-headed man with a large piece of baggage on his shoulder is forcing a way through the detritus with firm but elastic steps. He is wearing a tail-coat with broad velvet lapels and narrow trousers stretched tight over his muscular legs, after the Viennese fashion of the 1860s. But these items of dress-wear are covered in scorch-marks and blood-stains, with many holes. He looks like a burglar taking his swag to a safe place. Now he puts his burden down on a large rock with the flat surface of a table and removes the filthy cover, revealing a brand-new leather suitcase with polished brass fittings. Out of it Hercules Bell takes an elegant suit with modern underwear and starts to change. Then he shaves himself carefully, checks his face in a hand-mirror, pulls out a new, broad-brimmed Panama and lights his pipe. A slim bamboo cane with a gold handle provides the finishing touch.
His jaunty bearing and bronzed complexion give no hint of the trials and hardships he had been through, except for a slight greying of his raven hair at the temples. The American is preparing to meet the advancing Europeans.
Lieutenant-general Rudinov sent an infantry unit on ahead as the advance guard. Using every possible piece of cover, they had crept up to the smoking masonry, but with the best will in the world they could not discover any enemy. When he received their report, the general decided to advance further. Through his field glasses he spotted a small fort built on a rocky projection connected to the mountain. The general had a few artillery units unlimber their guns and aim them at the high stronghold. Then he sent out an envoy with white flags and a trumpeter to present an ultimatum to the enemy demanding they surrender at once to the Russians, hand over all weapons and property and immediately set free any citizens of European states in their custody. However, all the envoy found was abandoned terrain covered in stones, most of which had been crushed to sand. Here and there a few charred and smouldering beams were still sticking up out of the rubble. It did not seem advisable to stay there any longer as the ground was sinking and turning into a morass, the ruins slowly slipping down.
There was no one there to whom they could present the ultimatum.
Their commanding officer was none too happy with this report. They had been looking forward all too confidently to finding a well-filled treasury.
The decision was taken to advance as far as the mountain, observing, of course, the strictest precaution. Some of the staff officers obstinately refused to abandon the idea of an ambush, camouflaged batteries etc.
Thus they found the small gate in the rock and, lying unconscious on the bottom step, me. It is to this fortunate circumstance that I owe the fact that I escaped with my life. I was given an extremely friendly reception. Journalists, who remembered my name from the past, kept wanting to interview me. Various newspapers and magazines also wanted a photograph of me with views of the place where the Dream city had stood. I was too weak to satisfy all the demands being made on me and directed them to Mr. Bell, who had just arrived to join the Europeans.
Nothing was found of the temple inside the mountain. The rock strata had shifted, blocking up all the entrances. When I put forward this idea the geologists present shook their heads and gave me funny looks. I could see they didn’t believe me, especially since the American was boasting that he had put an end to all this Patera nonsense by destroying the waxwork dummy.
We two were not the only ones to survive the catastrophe. Soldiers patrolling the nearby jungle came across a small pack of half-naked creatures sitting in trees talking and gesticulating vigorously to each other. It turned out that they too were Dreanilanders, six Jews, owners of grocer’s shops. I heard later that they recovered surprisingly quickly and made substantial fortunes in the great cities of northern and western Europe.
Digging through a pile of still-warm ashes they also found a desiccated figure. When the dust had been brushed off it was dec
lared to be a mummy. However, a military doctor found there was life left in it and, after intense efforts, succeeded in fanning the spark back into a flame. Everyone clustered round to see the rescued person who, as it soon became apparent, was of the female sex. A high-ranking Russian officer recognised her as his aunt, Princess X. He had her cleaned and done up and took her back home with him.
I went home via Tashkent, accompanied by a doctor. When I reached Germany I had to stay in a clinic at first, to recover and to re-accustom myself to conditions in the outside world, especially the sunlight. It took years before I felt more or less at home in my old environment and could settle back into my profession.
After sending a telegram, ‘Territory of the Dream state completely occupied’, all participants in the expedition maintained the silence proper for Europeans who have made fools of themselves.
The mystery of Patera was never solved. Perhaps the blue-eyed tribe were the real masters and used magic powers to galvanise a lifeless dummy into life, so creating and destroying the Dream Realm as they thought fit.
The American is still living. Everyone knows him.
Epilogue
Man is merely a nothing with self-awareness.
Julius Bahnsen
In the clinic I kept on finding myself compelled to reflect on the spell cast by the grandiose spectacle I had witnessed. Something was clearly wrong with the faculty that controlled my dreams, for they had overrun my mind.
In them I lost my identity. They often went back to historical periods, almost every night brought far-off events. It is my opinion that these dream images were closely tied to things that had affected my ancestors; their traumatic experiences may perhaps have imprinted themselves on the organism and been passed on to future generations. Even deeper levels of dream opened up when I was absorbed into an animal’s lifestream or let my mind wander in some primal element. These dreams were abysses I was powerless to resist. They stopped when the weather improved and we had fine, clear nights.
The days passed in monotony. Now I was tormented by inactivity and boredom. I had hoped to build up my strength and start working again, but I realised I was no use for anything any more. Reality seemed to be an obscene caricature of the Dream Realm.
The only thing to raise my spirits was the thought of passing away, of death, and I embraced it with all the fervour I had left in me. I gave myself up to it ecstatically, as if I were a woman, I was in raptures, and during the following, moondrenched nights I abandoned myself to it entirely, watched it, felt it and tasted joys beyond this world. I was the intimate friend of this most tremendous lord, of this glorious prince of the earth whose beauty is beyond description for all who are open to him. He was my last, my greatest joy. I saw him in every leaf that fell, in the wet grass, even in the soil itself. To submit to his cat-like caresses, to feel his destruction as a passionate embrace made me happy. Typical of this stage was a love of half-withered flowers.
The thought of my own dying was like imagining the most heavenly bliss. It would be the start of an eternal wedding night.
How everything resists him, and yet he only wants the best for us! Eagerly I scrutinised every face for his sign, discovering the trace of his kisses in the wrinkles and furrows of old age. He always seemed different, always new, and how exquisite were his colours! His looks had such a seductive gleam that even the strongest had to submit; then he threw off his cloak and appeared to the dying in a glitter of diamonds, in the reflections of a thousand polished facets.
When I ventured back into the world of the living, I discovered that my god only held half-sway. In everything, both great and small, he had to share with an adversary who wanted life. The forces of repulsion and attraction, the twin poles of the earth with their currents, the alternation of the seasons, day and night, black and white–these are battles.
True hell lies in the fact that this discordant clash continues within us. Even love has its focus ‘between faeces and urine’. The sublime can fall prey to the ridiculous, to derision, irony.
German Literature from Dedalus
Dedalus features German Literature in translation in its programme of contemprary and classic European fiction and in its anthologies.
Undine–Fouque 6.99
Simplicissimus–Grimmelshausen 10.99
The Great Bagarozy–Helmut Krausser 7.99
The Other Side–Alfred Kubin 9.99
The Road-to-Darkness–Paul Leppin 7.99
The Angel of the West Window–Gustav Meyrink 9.99
The Golem–Gustav Meyrink 6.99
The Green Face–Gustav Meyrink 6.99
The Opal (& other stories)–Gustav Meyrink 7.99
- Gustav Meyrink 6.99
- Gustav Meyrink 6.99
The Architect of Ruins–Herbert Rosendorfer 8.99
Letters Back to Ancient China–Herbert Rosendorfer 9.99
Stephanie–Herbert Rosendorfer 7.99
featuring German Literature in translation:
The Book of Austrian Fantasy–editor M. Mitchell 10.99
The Dedalus Book of German Decadence–editor R. Furness 9.99
The Dedalus Book of Surrealism–editor M. Richardson 9.99
Myth of the World: Surrealism 2–editor M. Richardson 9.99
The Dedalus Book of Medieval Literature–editor B. Murdoch 9.99
Forthcoming titles include:
The Book of German Fantasy: the Romantic and Beyond–editor M. Raraty 10.99
The Angel of the West Window–Gustav Meyrink
‘Dedalus has done everyone a favour and published The Angel of the West Window. The narrator believes he is becoming possessed by the spirit of his ancestor John Dee. The adventures of Dee and his disreputable colleague, an earless rogue called Edmund Kelley, form a rollicking 16th century variant on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as they con their way across Europe in a flurry of alchemy and conjured spirits. At one point, Kelley even persuades Dee that the success of an occult enterprise depends on his sleeping with Dee’s wife. Past, present, and assorted supernatural dimensions become intertwined in this odd and thoroughly diverting tale.’
Anne Billson in The Times
Walpurgisnacht–Gustav Meyrink
‘It is 1917. Europe is torn apart by war, Russia in the grip of revolution, the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the brink of collapse. It is Walpurgisnacht, springtime pagan festival of unbridled desire. In this volcanic atmosphere, in a Prague of splendour and decay, the rabble prepare to storm the hilltop castle, and Dr Thaddaeus Halberd, once the court physician, mourns his lost youth. Phantasmagorical prose, energetically translated, marvellously evokes past and present, personal and political, a devastated world.’
The Times
The Golem–Gustav Meyrink
‘Gustav Meyrink uses this legend in a dream-like setting on the Other Side of the Mirror and he has invested it with a horror so palpable that it has remained in my memory all these years.’
Jorge Luis Borges
‘A remarkable work of horror, half-way between DrJekyll and Mr Hyde and Frankenstein.’
The Observer
‘A superbly atmospheric story set in the old Prague ghetto featuring The Golem, a kind of rabbinical Frankenstein’s monster, which manifests every 33 years in a room without a door. Stranger still, it seems to have the same face as the narrator. Made into a film in 1920, this extraordinary book combines the uncanny psychology of doppelganger stories with expressionism and more than a little melodrama … Meyrink’s old Prague–like Dicken’s London–is one of the great creations of city writing, an eerie, claustrophobic and fantastical underworld where anything can happen.’
Phi! Baker in The Sunday Times
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