With your disposition as one who revealed, a timelessly tragic writer, you were bound of necessity to transform that capillary action at a stroke into the most persuasive gestures, the most commonplace things. So you embarked upon that unprecedented act of violence, your work, which sought in the visible world, ever more impatiently and ever more desperately, for equivalents for what you had seen inside. Hence a rabbit, an attic, a room where a man paced to and fro; hence a tinkle of glass in the next room, hence a fire outside the windows, hence the sun; hence a church, and a rocky valley that was like a church. But that did not suffice: at length, towers had to be brought in, and whole mountain ranges; and the avalanches that bury the countryside covered a stage piled high with tangible things, that the intangible might be grasped as well. And at that, your powers gave out. The two ends that you had bent together sprang apart; your mad strength fled the willowy wand, and it was as if your work had never existed.
What other explanation could there be for your refusing at the end, headstrong as you always were, to quit the window? You wanted to see the passers-by; for the thought had occurred to you that one day something might be made of them, if once one had resolved to make a start.
[27] It was then that it first struck me that one cannot say a thing about a woman; when they spoke of her, I noticed how they left her out, naming and describing other people, places, objects, up to a certain point where it all stopped, coming to a gentle and as it were wary stop on that light and never firmed-in outline that enclosed her. At such times, I would ask what she was like. ‘Blonde, much like yourself,’ they replied, and added all sorts of other details they knew; but in the process she again grew altogether indistinct, and I was quite unable to picture her. I was only properly able to see her when Maman told me the story, which I asked her to do time and again –.
– Every time she came to the scene with the dog, she would close her eyes and touch her hands cold against her temples and fervently hold them up over her rapt face, which everywhere could be seen shining through between her fingers. ‘I saw it, Malte,’ she would declare: ‘I saw it.’ It was in the last years of her life that I heard her say this – in those times when she no longer cared to see anyone and invariably, even when travelling, had with her that small, fine, silver strainer through which she would sieve all her drinks. She no longer ate any solid food, except for sponge cake or bread which, when she was alone, she would crumble and eat up morsel by morsel, as children eat crumbs. At that date, she was already entirely in the grip of her fear of needles. To others she would merely say, by way of apology: ‘I really cannot take anything any more, but you really mustn't let it worry you; I'm absolutely fine.’ To me, however, she might turn abruptly (for I was fairly grown up by then) and say with a smile that cost her a distinct effort: ‘What a lot of needles there are, Malte, lying around everywhere, and if you think how easily they fall out…’ She meant to say it in a jocular tone; but a tremor of horror went through her at the thought of all those poorly secured needles which might fall into something at any moment.
[28] When she spoke of Ingeborg, though, nothing could touch her; she didn't spare herself; she spoke louder, laughing as she remembered Ingeborg's laugh, wanting you to see how beautiful Ingeborg had been. ‘She made us all happy,’ she said, ‘your father too, Malte – literally happy. But then, when they said she was going to die, although she seemed only slightly ill, and we all milled about her, keeping it from her, she sat up suddenly in bed and said out loud, as someone who wants to hear how something sounds might say it: “You needn't be so restrained; we all know what's what, and I can assure you that it will be well if it happens this way. I do not care to carry on.” Just think: that was what she said – “I do not care to carry on” – she who made us all happy. I wonder whether you will understand that some day, Malte, when you are grown up? Think about it, later. Perhaps her words will come back to you. It would be a very good thing if there were someone who understood such matters.’
‘Such matters’ occupied Maman when she was alone; and she was always alone in those last years.
‘It's quite beyond me, Malte,’ she would say at times, with her peculiarly venturesome smile, which was not meant to be seen by anyone and served its purpose wholly in being smiled. ‘But to think that no one feels the wish to get to the bottom of it. If I were a man, yes, if I were a man, I would give it careful thought, in due order and sequence, beginning at the beginning. After all, there must be a beginning, and if one could pinpoint that, it would at least be something. Oh, Malte, we simply pass away from the earth, and I feel that everyone is distracted and preoccupied and no one pays proper attention when we pass away. It is as if a shooting star went utterly unseen and no one made a wish. Never forget to make a wish, Malte. One should never stop making wishes. I do not believe that they come true, but there are wishes that keep, a whole life long, and one couldn't live long enough for them to come true anyway.’
Maman had had Ingeborg's little secretaire brought upstairs and placed in her room, and I often found her sitting at it, for I had her permission to enter without knocking. The carpet completely absorbed my footfall, but she sensed my presence and reached out a hand to me across the other shoulder. This hand was altogether weightless, and kissing it was like kissing the ivory crucifix that was held out to me in the evenings before I went to sleep. At that low bureau, with the desk panel folded down before her, she sat as at a keyboard instrument. ‘There is so much sunlight in it,’ she said, and indeed the inside of it was remarkably bright, with its old yellow lacquer-work on which flowers were painted, a red one and a blue invariably coupled. And wherever there were three, a violet-coloured flower appeared between them, keeping the other two apart. These colours, and the green of the slender tendrils that ran in crosswise arabesques, had darkened quite as much as the ground, while not properly lucent, had remained radiant. The result was a curiously muted interplay of hues that stood in intimate relation without actually speaking to each other.
Maman pulled out the little drawers, all of which were empty.
‘Ah, roses,’ she said, and inclined slightly towards the scent, faded but not wholly spent. At such moments, she always imagined that something might suddenly still be found in a secret compartment which no one had hit upon and which would only open at the touch of a concealed spring-lock. ‘All at once it will shoot open, just you watch,’ she would say, solemn and anxious, hastily pulling at all the drawers. But such papers as had actually been left in the compartments she had carefully folded up and locked away unread. ‘I shouldn't understand it anyway, Malte. It would doubtless be too difficult for me.’ She was convinced that everything was too complicated for her. ‘There are no beginners' classes in life. What is required of you is always the hardest thing, right from the start.’ I was assured that she had become like this only after the terrible demise of her sister, Countess Öllegaard Skeel, who was burned to death when trying to rearrange the flowers in her hair at a candle-lit mirror before a ball. But of late it had been Ingeborg who seemed to her the most difficult of all to understand.
And now I shall write down the story as Maman told it whenever I asked her to.
It was in the middle of summer, on the Thursday after Ingeborg's funeral. From the place on the terrace where we were having tea you could see the gable of the family vault amid the giant elms. The table had been set as though there had never been one more person at it, and we all sat around it taking up plenty of space as well. Every one of us had brought something, too – a book or a work basket – so that in fact we were even rather cramped. Abelone was pouring the tea, and we were all busy passing things round, except for your grandfather, who was looking from his armchair towards the house. At that time of day, the mail was usually expected, and generally it had been Ingeborg who brought it out, as she was kept longer inside, giving instructions for dinner. During the weeks of her illness, we had had ample time to get used to her not coming; after all, we knew very well that she co
uld not come. But that afternoon, Malte, when she really could not come any more – she did come. Perhaps it was our fault; perhaps we called her. For I remember that suddenly I was sitting there trying hard to think what exactly it was that was different now. All at once I found it impossible to say what it was; I had completely forgotten. I looked up and saw that all the others were facing the house, not in any particular manner that might strike you, but perfectly placidly and with an everyday sort of expectancy. And I was just about to (I feel quite cold, Malte, to think of it), but, God help me, I was just about to say, ‘Wherever is –?’ when Cavalier shot out from under the table, as he always did, and ran towards her. He ran towards her, although she was not there; for him, she was there, coming. We grasped that he was running to meet her. Twice he looked round towards us, as if putting a question. Then he raced towards her, as he always did, Malte, just as he always did, and reached her – for he began to frisk right around, Malte, around something that wasn't there, and then jumped up at her to lick her, right up. We heard him whimpering for joy, and to see him jump right up like that, several times in rapid succession, you could really have thought he was concealing her from us by his jumping. But suddenly he howled out, and swung back in mid-air from his own momentum, and plunged to the ground with a remarkable clumsiness and lay there, curiously flat, not making a move. From the far side of the house, a servant emerged with the letters. He hesitated for a moment; evidently it was no entirely easy thing, to walk towards our faces. And besides, your father gestured to him to stay where he was. Your father, Malte, was not fond of animals; but now he walked over, slowly, or so it seemed to me, and bent down over the dog. He said something to the servant, something curt, monosyllabic. I saw the man hurry over to pick up Cavalier. But your father took the creature himself, and, as if he knew exactly where he was going, went into the house.
[29] On one occasion, when it had grown almost dark as she told this story, I was on the brink of telling Maman about the ‘hand’: at that moment, I could have. I had already taken a deep breath to make a start, when I recollected how well I had understood the servant's inability to approach their faces. And, in spite of the dark, I was afraid of what Maman's face would be like, once it saw what I had seen. Hastily I drew another breath, to make it seem that that was all I had meant to do. A few years later, after that memorable evening in the dining hall at Urnekloster, I was on the point, for days on end, of confiding in little Erik. But following our nocturnal talk he had shut himself completely off from me once again: he was avoiding me; I believe he despised me. And for that very reason I wanted to tell him about the ‘hand’. I imagined I would rise in his esteem (which I desperately wanted, for some reason or other) if I could make him understand that it was something I had really experienced. Erik, however, was so good at eluding me that the moment never came. And then we made our departure, shortly after. This is therefore the first time, oddly enough, that I am telling (to myself alone, after all) of an occurrence that is now far back in my childhood.
How small I must still have been at the time I can see from the fact that I was kneeling on the armchair to be within easy reach of the table I was drawing on. It was evening, in winter, if I am not mistaken, in our town flat. The table was in my room, between the windows, and there was no other lamp in the room but the one that shone on my sheets of paper and on Mademoiselle's book; for Mademoiselle was sitting beside me, her chair pushed back a little, and was reading. She was far away when she was reading; I do not know if she was in her book – she could read for hours on end, seldom turning a page, and I had the impression that the pages kept steadily filling beneath her, as if by looking she were adding words, particular words that she needed and which were not there. That is how it seemed to me while I went on drawing. I drew slowly, without any very definite intention, and whenever I did not know how to go on, I would consider the whole thing with my head inclined a little to the right; that way, I always realized fastest what was still missing. The drawing was of officers on horseback, riding into battle, or already in the thick of it, which was much simpler because then almost all you had to draw was the smoke that enveloped everything. It's true that Maman always maintained that what I drew were islands – islands with large trees and a castle and a flight of steps and flowers along the edge that were meant to be reflected in the water. But I think she is making that up, or else it was later.
One thing is certain: that on that evening I was drawing a knight, a solitary and quite unmistakable knight, mounted on a strangely caparisoned steed. He turned out so brightly coloured that I had to change crayons frequently; but it was the red one that I used most of all, and reached for time and again. Now I needed it once again; but it rolled (I still see it) right across the brightened page, to the edge, and fell down, past me, before I could stop it, and was gone. I really did need it urgently, and having to climb down after it was distinctly vexing. Awkward as I was, it was quite a business to get down; my legs seemed far too long, and I couldn't draw them out from under me: remaining too long in a kneeling position had numbed my limbs; I could not tell what was mine and what was the chair's. At length, rather at sixes and sevens, I did make it to the floor, and found myself on an animal fell that extended under the table to the wall. But at this point I was confronted with a fresh difficulty. My eyes, accustomed to the brightness above and still wholly entranced by the colours on the white paper, were unable to make out anything at all below the table, where the blackness seemed so dense that I was afraid of knocking against it; so I fell back on my sense of touch and, kneeling and supporting myself on my left hand, combed through the cool, longhaired, familiar-feeling fell with my other hand. But there was no sign of the crayon. I felt I was wasting a good deal of time, and was about to call Mademoiselle and ask her to hold the lamp for me when I realized that, as my eyes strained involuntarily, the dark was gradually growing more penetrable. Already I could distinguish the wall at the back, at the foot of which a light-coloured skirting-board ran; I took my bearings from the table legs, and in particular made out my own outspread hand, moving all alone down below, a little like some aquatic animal exploring the seabed. I still recall that I watched it almost with curiosity; as it groped about down there with a mind of its own, moving in ways I had never seen it move, it seemed able to do things I had not taught it. I observed it as it pushed onwards; I was interested, and prepared for anything. But how could I have expected another hand suddenly to come towards it from the wall, a larger and unusually thin hand, such as I had never seen before? It was searching in similar fashion, from the other side, and the two outspread hands moved blindly towards each other. My curiosity was not yet satisfied, but all at once it was at an end, and all that remained in its place was horror. I sensed that one of the hands belonged to me and that it was about to enter into something that could never be righted again. Asserting all the rights I had over it, I stopped it and withdrew it, slowly and held flat, never taking my eyes off the other hand as it continued to search. I realized it would not abandon the search. I cannot say how I got up again; I sat back deep down in the armchair, my teeth chattering and so little blood in my face that I felt there could not be any blue left in my eyes. ‘Mademoiselle,’ I tried to say, and found myself unable to; she was alarmed without my alerting her, though, and, throwing aside her book, knelt beside the armchair, called out my name, and I think may have shaken me. But I was perfectly conscious. I swallowed a couple of times; for now I wanted to tell her.
But how? I made an indescribable effort to pull myself together, but it could not be expressed so that someone else would understand. If there were words for what had happened, I was too small to find them. And suddenly I was gripped by the fear that they might all at once be there, those words, in spite of my age, and the most terrible thing of all seemed to me that I would then have to utter them. To have to relive that reality down there once more, with a difference, transmuted, from the very beginning; to hear myself admitting it: I did not have the
strength left for that.
It is of course imagination on my part if I now maintain that at the time I already felt that something had come into my life, mine and none other, that I alone would have to bear with me henceforth, for ever and ever. I see myself lying in my little cot, not sleeping, somehow vaguely foreseeing that that was how life would be: full of special things that are intended for one person only and cannot be put into words. What is certain is that, little by little, a sad and weighty pride uprose within me. I pictured what it would be like to go through life filled with inner experience, in silence. I felt a passionate sympathy for adults; I admired them, and resolved to tell them so. I decided to tell Mademoiselle at the earliest opportunity.